The Death of Plato
The town was on edge that fateful day when stepped from the train a frightening sight. Qualities had arrived without a man for they were traveling fast and light. Intelligent and diligent, steadfast and true, successful and loyal, honest and brave, they were every good how but not quite a who. A form without substance, a clear-eyed knave.
[Attributed to a youngish man enduring the early stages of a spiritual conversion, circa 1990. An older man still suffering from a spiritual conversion has only begun to understand how such a creature as he described, such “a frightening sight,” could come into existence.]
Earlier this year, I published an essay about the general intellectual, but specifically philosophical, incoherence of modern Christian thought: From A Stage Lower than Hypocrisy, I used a quote from The End of the Twentieth Century, a pessimistic evaluation of our current situation by the Hungarian-American—and devoutly Catholic—historian John Lukacs. The quote is:
[A]t the end of the twentieth century, many people respect religion as well as science, together; but the respect is faint. (This has to do with the fact that we have descended to a stage lower than hypocrisy, the problem being no longer the difference between what people say and what they believe; now the difference seems to be between what people think they believe and what they really believe.) [page 224]
This “difference between what people think they believe and what they really believe” is a still more general phenomenon than discussed in the above quote. It is a problem affecting more than the relationship between religion and science. I’m beginning to think this phenomenon is masking something deeper, something discussed by Jacques Barzun in House of Intellect. I discussed this something deeper in Intelligence vs. Intellect where I quoted Professor Barzun:
We [in the United States] have in fact intelligence in plenty and we use it perhaps more widely than other nations, for we apply it with praiseworthy innocence to parts of life elsewhere ruled by custom or routine. [page 4]
He also noted:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
From all this, I concluded:
As a country, we’ve utterly failed to develop an intellect, that is a morally well-ordered understanding of our world. We don’t really even seem to have done much to take the small, educational steps of developing a rational understanding of our relationships to Mexico or Cuba or even Canada. We’re too smart and too proud to admit we’re poorly educated adolescents—at best. In the sense of individual intelligence, we’re as smart as we think we are, but we’re pretty dumb and very ignorant in the sense of that intellect, that capitalized and communal intelligence, so important to being morally responsible members of these modern communities, so large and complex.
We’ve created those large and complex communities in various realms of human life, political and economic and cultural, but those communities are poorly founded—which is, at least for this discussion, the same as saying we haven’t developed any understanding, any intellect or communal and capitalized intelligence adequate to the tasks of running such complex communities.
Much of our knowledge, much of our disciplined feeling, much of our proper behavior, is communal and not individual and must be developed at the communal level into which we must partially merge our individual selves. We prefer to imagine ourselves to be true individuals with our communal relationships being more contracts than parts of our being. As a consequence, we’ve lost most of our intellect while retaining a dangerously active individual intelligence. Similar statements can be made about our individual feelings and our communal feelings, our individual behavior and our communal behavior. For more than two decades, I’ve been bothered by a vague and unfocused version of this idea. For example, I wrote a conversion novel 20 years ago which was initially accepted for publication by a Catholic press and then turned down because a literary consultant advised them there is no market for serious literature in the American Catholic community. Over the years, I’ve met no more than a handful of seemingly devout Catholics who have any idea who Georges Bernanos or J.F. Powers or Flannery O’Connor were. You have to search hard to find any who’ve read any of the novels or short stories of such serious Catholic writers. Many of those same Catholics, some even trumpeting triumphalistic opinions have read all the books of Robert Ludlum, love the James Bond movies, and don’t have a clue A Christmas Carol should be titled An Xmas Carol.
So far as I can tell, this is also painfully true for the entirety of the American citizenry, not just the Catholics amongst that citizenry. Note the shift in my language. Unlike that literary expert who had recommended my book not be published, I don’t consider there to be such a thing as `an American Catholic community’. We Americans are a the contents of a melting pot which continues to boil and continues to be stirred by forces set in motion by the explosion of too many individuals and small, unstable communities into the vastness of North America. For both good and bad we had become the people described by Wallace Stegner in his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain which presented the more energetic of Americans as being restless, on the move, always in search of the poorly seen and seemingly undescribable big break which would bring us to that Mountain, paradise on earth. We trek out toward by paths which seem to be those of great individualistic opportunities. We are alive in many of the parts and aspects of our human natures which are individualistic, but we’re greatly deficient in our intellects, our communal and capitalized live minds and also in the communal and capitalized parts of our emotional lives and our active physical lives.
We end up as strange creatures, many of us being seemingly mature men and women of active minds, disciplined emotions, and well-ordered habits and behaviors. All of this apparent moral order is individualistic and has a surprisingly weak influence on our communities. Something is terribly wrong with Americans and other Westerners in the 20th and 21st centuries, some deep lack of order, some hints of chaos which lie under the surface of our relationships with each other, with our communities, with Creation, and with our Creator. The simplest statement of the underlying problem, which is in fact quite difficult to state clearly, is: we form pseudo-communities bound together by easily breakable relationships, contractual relationships.
All of my novels have dealt with these issues, with one in particular being focused upon the problems of pulling our human selves together into a state of personhood, unity and coherence and completeness, in the modern West: A Man for Every Purpose. It’s interesting, at least to me, that in my novels I was able to deal 20 years ago with this general problem of the fragmentation of our individual selves due to our communal problems. It’s taken these 20 years or so for me to rise to a more explicit awareness of these problems and the resulting damage to our own selves, most noticeably our inability to achieve that state of personhood to even the small extent possible in this mortal realm.
The problem isn’t with us as individuals but rather with our relationships, our communal selves. Without proper communities, we develop into very badly damaged creatures.