Kenneth B. McIntyre’s review of the book, Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan, was published at the website of the magazine The American Conservative. I’ve not read that book but my comments deal with basic lines of thought found in Oakeshott’s major writings. In McIntyre’s review, Oakeshott vs. America, we can read:
So what is rationalism, in the Oakeshottian sense of the term? First, it involves the claim that the only adequate type of knowledge is that which can be reduced to a series of rules, principles, or methods—and thus it is also a claim that “knowing how” to do something is nothing more than “knowing that” the rules are such and such. Second, because of this denigration of practical knowledge, it is a claim that rational action can only take place following the creation of a theoretical model. As Oakeshott once observed, modern rationalism is literally “preposterous” because theoretical reflection can only occur after a practice already has made itself distinct and more or less concrete.
Finally, as Callahan points out, since rationalism is a mistaken description of human knowledge and its relation to human activity, it is also an impossible way of acting, politically or in any other sphere. Human action, including political action, is inherently an engagement of practical reason working within a particular tradition or and attempting to follow through on some of the inchoate suggestions that the vagueness of the practice offers. The opposite of rationalism for Oakeshott is not irrationalism but authentic practical reasonableness. Thus, and contrary to many of his reading-impaired critics, his critique of rationalism is not a critique of reason but a defense of it against a false modern conception of it.
To use one of Oakeshott’s favorite examples, if one has no knowledge of cookery, a cookbook is useless. If, on the other hand, one is an experienced chef, a cookbook is superfluous. The cookbook is relevant only in a situation where either the great majority of cooks are relatively inexperienced and there is a dearth of connoisseurs or in a situation in which the traditions of cookery are in a state of confusion and a reminder is needed of some of the tradition’s neglected resources.
Oakeshott used the term “ideology” to describe the attempted application of this rationalistic style to political activity. The rationalist’s or ideologist’s desire is to solve permanently the problems of political life and leave everything else to administration. Yet politics isn’t concerned with the search for truth. Instead, as Oakeshott noted, “it is concerned with the cultivation of what from time to time are accepted as the peaceable decencies of conduct among men who do not suffer from the Puritan-Jacobin illusion that in practical affairs there is an attainable condition of things called `truth’ or `perfection.'”
In 2011, I published an essay, Predators, Producers, Sheep, and the Love of Liberty, in which I wrote:
Libertarians are not really homogeneous in their doctrines, though it would seem to me that they have a shared belief in something called ‘liberty’ which is alleged to be a metaphysical right of man. Liberty is more than just a sum of particular freedoms; it’s a general freedom from past repressions which are assumed representative of the ways in which human beings can be enslaved if only partially. Libertarian versions of liberty seem, by a naive analysis of historical timing, to be founded upon what I’d call a semi-metaphysical principle sufficient to ground their pessimistic attitude towards government, which attitude seems to be a reaction against the strange monsters which arose in early efforts of predators and idealists and realists and simple folk to develop governments suited to the needs of modern complex societies.
Obviously, I’m closer to the views of Michael Oakeshott than to those of Ludwig von Mises. Oakeshott was one of the very few true conservative intellectuals in the 20th century. Amongst his other peculiarities, he considered the claims of the Declaration of Independence to be mere silliness, the stuff of delusions. It wasn’t the case that Oakeshott had no principles and no respect for rights of some substantial sort. It was the case that he grounded his beloved Englishman’s freedoms in flesh-and-blood, dirt, and history.
History is an interesting part of the puzzle. I believe that human history is a part of the story God is telling which we know as the world which I define as the universe viewed in light of God’s purposes.
I can’t take seriously many claims about human needs or rights unless they can be seen in concrete men and in human history. This is a problem to be sure since history, as Lord Acton noted sadly, seems to be greatly influenced by evil men. Some of my recent efforts are directed towards writing a human version of God’s story in which those gangsters also play a role. I’m learning, as a child-like author, to imitate my Maker as He goes about His tasks in Creation. The actions of those evil men, some of them prominent in recent American history, are mildly described as despicable, but this is God’s world, God’s story. The Almighty did what He did and we should try to understand what He did and not what we imagine He should have done.
For now, it’s most important that I claim man is an empirical being in an empirical world. Again I don’t ‘reduce’ man and his world to a simple empiricist chaos, but there is much work needed to be done before we can have a modern Christian view with the contextual explanatory power of the view St. Augustine developed 1500 years ago, a view which largely held until the early modern period and a view I’ll partly—and only partly—revive as part of my effort to contribute to a modern Christian understanding of Creation.
From this viewpoint, we can see how a proper form of abstract reasoning can help in concrete reasoning. In my essay, The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding, I claim with respect to King Phillip’s War, a war waged by some of the Indian tribes of New England against the European settlers and some Indian allies, that:
Instead of moving towards a proper abstraction that would have allowed a defense of their own culture but also an understanding of the human good in a different way of life, the European settlers raised their particular way of life to a self-righteous ideal. A conflict of cultures was seen as a war between God’s servants, the White settlers, and Satan’s slaves, the Indians. This stream, which may have been nascent in Puritan thought from the time they first stepped into that wilderness region of the New World, developed fully during the lead-up to the war as the Puritan leaders dealt with the growing resistance of the Indians to the expansion of settled ways of life.
Those European settlers in New England were guilty of the mistake of ideology discussed by Oakeshott, but the mistake was fixable not by a retreat from abstract thought but rather by a better abstract thought. This better abstract thought would be generally invisible to politicians and others working in practical fields; it would be embedded in the ways of thought which are part of a better-formed civilization, one we can form if we have the will. Human life has become so complex that even practical thought has a lot of abstract thought buried in it.
In the realms of politics and history, Oakeshott takes the same common-sense position that I take: schematic knowledge is largely false knowledge. I’ve written against this idea that schematic knowledge is true knowledge. For example, we most certainly can’t rebuild someone else’s country: see Why We Can’t Build or Rebuild the Countries of Other Peoples. For pretty much the same reason, we can’t really build a good country for our own selves. We can put up infrastructure, gradually and a little bit ahead of need is best. We can build education systems and hope, if we are wise, for a great deal of flexibility, to allow response to the needs of individual students and also to new needs of the entire body of students as the world changes around us. Those responses should be experiments at the level of concrete human beings, particular teachers interacting with specific students in the case of education. We don’t need educational theorists with half-baked doctorates nor do we need new ideas in education from marketing people at electronics companies or even publishing firms. Similar comments can be made about our medical systems, factories, and many other components of our country including most especially the military.
We should avoid too much design. Most certainly should we avoid designs which tightly constrain the options of future generations as I pointed out in Progressives Kill Progress in Future Generations. Development that even allows for outright evolution, and the necessary death to specific institutions which are no longer needed, is ideal though perhaps beyond our current capabilities. In one of my early blog essays, Ways of Thought in the Modern West, I drew some insights from the historian Carroll Quigley:
The Evolution of Civilizations covers the content of an introductory course he taught at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University where diplomats and other foreign affairs professionals were educated. Professor Quigley has many interesting comments upon the processes by which a full-blown civilization develops and then decays—there have only been about 24 verifiable civilizations in history. He speaks of Western Civilization as beginning about 750AD when Europe was pulling out of the Dark Age which followed the collapse of Rome. He goes on to speak of the West going through three stages of expansion (very unusual for a civilization which usually expands once and then moves towards its death by prolonged stages). He labels the three resulting phases of the West as feudalism, commercial capitalism, and industrial capitalism—names carrying political as well as economic meaning. Each of those first two systems began to decay into a static state, foreboding stagnation but the West went on to new creative efforts as new ‘instruments’ (such as insurance brokerages to allow British fleet-owners to trade far and wide) developed to replace older instruments—such as the feudal systems local production of nearly all goods. In Quigley’s analysis, creative ‘instruments’ decay eventually to self-serving institutions. He claimed our industrial capitalist instruments had become such self-serving institutions by 1930 or so. If true, this means our current task would be to develop new instruments, if we wish the West to recover once more and move forward, but we can’t really do that consciously though we can aid the process by being flexible and letting go of ways that no longer meet our general needs. The problem, of course, is that current ways provide prestige and wealth to the vested interests, those instruments become stagnant and self-serving institutions.
For now, I’m only going to pull from Professor Quigley’s book one idea, the fundamental idea of what he calls the outlook of Western Civilization—which he dates from about 750AD when Europe was pulling out of the Dark Age which followed the collapse of Rome. Its domination of the human mind was perhaps short-lived, he indicates perhaps the 50 years following the death of Aquinas, say 1275-1325 or so. And, yet, as I’ll explain later, moderate realism survived as what might be labeled the principle of modern science, in which category I’d place all disciplined ways of thought which accept reality. In the words of Professor Quigley, moderate realism is the outlook defined (loosely) by: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.”
This worldview was, and is, diametrically opposed to various forms of idealism and dualism, views which can be illustrated by Platonism and Pythagorism and the early thoughts of Aristotle. There are various modern ism’s that are idealistic and dualistic. In fact, nearly all organized systems of thought are idealistic and dualistic. Moderate realism is unique in its basic willingness to be shaped by responses to reality and Thomism reached a highpoint of sorts by the teachings of Aquinas on the importance of the act-of-being, his existentialism, and by his teachings on the formation of the human mind and moral nature by way of responses to environments. Under Thomism, or even less complete systems of moderate realism, philosophers and even theologians to some extent pay at least as much attention to sensory perception, to empirical data, as does a farmer or a road-builder. Under Thomism, there is no clear divide between theologians and philosophers and physicists, not because theologians or philosophers can dictate to physicists, but because they each have important ways of dealing with empirical data and penetrating more deeply into being and into the meaning of Creation and its various phases and parts. In this unified way of approaching God’s unified Creation, we can see the truth of one of the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas: “We know even God through His effects in Creation.”
Practical politicians in a complex setting, such as the Founding Fathers when they were doing something rather than spewing forth the occasional metaphysical gibberish, hold some understanding of reality. In the countries of Western Civilization, politicians dealing with very complex settings will hold a more elaborate view of reality than, say, Genghis Khan, but the worldview of even Winston Churchill was largely held in a subconscious way. More recent politicians in the West don’t act as if they even hold any coherent view of reality, but that’s a complex situation not yet well-described by historians.
I’ll now try to explain how we can start the process of rebuilding a Christian civilization in the West or perhaps on the Pacific Rim or some other place. We need first to have a plausible, in fact—powerful, understanding of Creation, of created being—stuff and relationships and narratives. We need to have some good understanding of the story God is telling. Most likely, the proper understanding of this story will be a revised and greatly expanded version of the Augustinian understanding of human history.
We need first of all to pay proper respect to created being. Placing knowledge first, modern thinkers also place mind ahead of created being, where mind is considered to be something with existence independent of created being. In my way of thinking, more plausible in Christian terms and also in terms of modern empirical knowledge, the mind is the immaterial aspects, relational aspects of that extremely complex and flexible organ, the brain. Those immaterial aspects come from two processes. First are the evolutionary processes which shaped that brain and also inclined it toward developing, more or less naturally, some very basic ways of thinking and learning. That brain and mind are then shaped by responses to created being, that of our own bodies and also that which lies outside of us. The reader wishing to explore this issue in terms of modern science could read such books as:
- How Brains Make Up Their Minds by Walter J. Freeman who is both brain-scientist and philosopher and an admirer of St. Thomas Aquinas,
- Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind by Gerald M. Edelman, and
- Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World by Gerd Gigerenzer.
Under the illusion that we have some sort of `mind-stuff’ independent of reality, minds capable of evaluating sense impressions and turning them into knowledge, we tend toward the view that we have schematic knowledge we can use to filter those impressions and to enforce some sort of order upon created being. This schematic knowledge seemingly comes from transcendental regions of pure truths. There is no evidence that we have minds independent in any way of the stuff and relationships around us. The assumption that we have those sorts of minds came from the efforts of ancient and Medieval thinkers to deal with a mystery they couldn’t explore: the formation of the mind in an entity seeming no more than flesh and blood, including a brain which seemed too well-formed to, for example, learn how to turn concrete examples, often quite disparate in appearance, into abstract categories such as `dog’ or `cat’. In recent decades, scientists have developed instruments and techniques to explore the ways in which human minds form and we can see mind embodied in brain connections and activities. These modern empirical results tell us mind is the same sort of embodied entity as human moral nature as discussed by Aquinas—see the above referenced How Brains Make Up Their Minds for a very good discussion of the Thomistic theory of intention, that is, of the formation of human moral nature by way of a goal-directed growth process.
We can ascend to more abstract realms of being, we can receive revelations from God, but even this knowledge of abstract being and of revelations come through the stuff of our bodies or the stuff around us. We have brains inclined to develop in certain ways which were shaped by evolutionary forces over millions of years and those `preliminary minds’, in a manner of speaking, are more fully shaped by our active responses to reality. Modern politicians and Christian leaders and men of the West in general prefer to believe they can shape reality to the minds they imagine themselves to have.