I was inspired and frustrated by a discussion by Claes G Ryn of the traditional Western views of human moral nature: The Moral Path to Peace. I was inspired by such statements as: “In the end, only moral character, supported by general culture, can fortify the self in man that wants openness to argument and respect for others.” I was frustrated by still another effort to counter the wrongheaded teachings which have arisen and spread in the modern world by way of arguing against those wrongheaded teachings (Ryn concentrates upon Rousseau) instead of making the far more important effort to deal with the knowledge gained by modern men as they explored empirical reality; the failure to take on a task not so different from that of Augustine of Hippo: to build a new understanding of God’s Creation by dealing with knowledge both wondrous and dangerous.
In upcoming essays, I’ll deal a little more with some specifics of what is good and what is lacking in the efforts of serious and learned conservative thinkers such as Claes Ryn. In this essay, I’ll deal with some foundational matters about Creation as it can be understood in light of modern empirical knowledge. In particular, I’ll be dealing with some general aspects of man, individual and communal, as a result of evolutionary and development processes rather than man who came to be at one time with a stable and well-determined nature. I’ll be dealing with man as a creature whose substance and characteristics and aspects arise from relationships rather than a creature who is born with well-formed substance and characteristics and aspects and then enters into relationships. I don’t know enough of intellectual history to understand how it might have happened, but modern conservatives have an understanding of being not so much different from that which underlies the false teaching of libertarians that we are freestanding creatures who enter into relationships on a voluntary, or even `contractual’, basis.
Modern conservatives tend to avoid certain problems by assuming that men are born with well-determined moral and other social characteristics but somehow those characteristics allow the same man to be a villager in a tribal society or a citizen of a great civilization such as the one we’re destroying in the West. Man is seen as an all-purpose social creature, having appeared on the earth in a final state, whereas the evidence is growing that man has actually been evolving and developing rapidly over the past 50,000 years or so, evolving and developing so that he has the brain regions proper to develop minds capable of the abstract reasoning processes needed to live in a modern university community which is part of the United States, itself a somewhat reluctant part of Western, Christian Civilization. That this Civilization has at least one foot in the grave doesn’t matter in one sense—it lives in the minds of those such as Ryn who wish to keep alive what is good from the traditions and those such as I who wish that but also to rebuild Christian Civilization, the Body of Christ in this mortal realm, so that it corresponds more faithfully to God’s Creation as we can now understand it. And I contend that Civilization is fundamentally a great understanding of man and Creation, an understanding provisional in this mortal realm, but one which seems to have included some important core truths from its beginning thousands of years ago and seems to be adding more core truths as well as refining those we inherited.
The traditions of Western Civilization were magnificent. With a simplistic—but largely true—view, we can see Western Civilization as a grand synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens/Rome. There is also much truth in the related simplification by which we see Western Civilization as beginning with Augustine of Hippo, Pope Gregory the Great, and Benedict of Nursia and developing as Europe was invaded by barbarian peoples from mostly Indo-European stock—peoples closely related to the Latins and others already in Europe. Those Goths and Franks and Gaels and Britons joined the Latins and other Italians, the various peoples of the Middle East and the Near East—including North Africa, in an initially chaotic and always unplanned effort to make something of Hammurabi and Moses, Plato and Archimedes, Augustus Caesar and Virgil, as brought into the Christian cosmology constructed by Augustine of Hippo and many others. It is this effort I’m encouraging, an effort mounted with barbarian energies, to make the tradition as new as Augustine did.
Western Civilization looms larger if one accepts the view of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) that Western Civilization was the house built for the Church by generations of Christians.
It looms still larger with my major extrapolation of that view: Christian Civilization, encompassing many cultures and a huge number of individuals, is the true Body of Christ with the Church being the central organ of the Body. Western Civilization is that Body in its most advanced stage to date.
The Body of Christ as I envision, in light of modern empirical knowledge—history as well as sociobiology, literature as well physics—is a bit different from Western Civilization as understood by Joseph Ratzinger; that Body of Christ as I envision it is a living dynamic being rather than structures built by individual dynamic beings and that Body develops in response to environments of contingent circumstances and random, or factual, events. As such, that Body is far more different from Western Civilization as understood by modern academicians in general—even those of Christian beliefs; that Body of Christ as I envision it is headed by Jesus Christ and Christian Civilization, most recently of the West but perhaps not for long, is the mortal manifestation of the true Body which exists in a completed and perfected form in the world of the resurrected.
Remember always that individual human being is also evolving and developing as well as communal human being.
Empirical knowledge, in the sense of structures built from facts, can’t get us to anything like my understanding of Creation, nor to the lesser cosmologies which have been the foundations of Western Civilization as well as the cosmologies of the Semitic and Greek and Roman civilizations, and others, from which Western Civilization has descended. On top of that sort of factual empirical knowledge, scientific and practical, we need speculative knowledge—often metaphysical reasoning disciplined by and abstracted from the best of mathematical reasoning in any given age.
Yet, we Christians are still not done, for all of this empirical knowledge and speculative knowledge has yet to be disciplined to the truths revealed to Moses and Isaiah and by Jesus Christ, true God born as the man Jesus of Nazareth.
This structure of human knowledge is developed in more detail in my freely downloadable book, Four Kinds of Knowledge.
Let me move on to discuss a matter of some sensitivity. Western Civilization has been starved to a state approaching death. As matters stand, Western Civilization is not likely to survive as the dominant part of Christian Civilization—if it survives at all. Yet, there is a certain magnificence to the frightening old boy. After all, he trekked through the Sinai with Moses, sailed the Mediterranean with Odysseus, watched Christ die alongside the Virgin Mother and St John the Apostle and not many others; he rode alongside the literate and noble St Alfred in the war to drive Vikings from England, traveled through Hell and Purgatory and Heaven with Dante and Virgil, and fought alongside Galileo to re-establish a respect for God’s Creation in light of what might be called a neo-Augustinian theology and reading of the Bible.
Grand old boy that Western Civilization, but he was never for real but rather a human understanding of the real Body of Christ as he develops in the story being told by God, a telling and a story in which men participate in such a way as to help shape that Body and, thus, their own future lives as shared with the Son of God in the world of the resurrected. The real Body of Christ, as he is in this mortal realm contains a lot more than Western Civilization, a lot more than the Christian churches and realms traditionally in union of some sort with Rome. And that Body is certainly a bit different than would appear to mortal eyes.
We can’t predict the future development of the Body of Christ with any confidence because it is a living entity, having its own communal being apart from the individual human being which exists inside the Body in a multitude. (This communal being isn’t really apart from individual human being but the converse is also true.) As is true of any living creature, it will grow and develop and even evolve in response to the contingencies it encounters; those contingencies include at least the events of the physical world. The individual human beings in this Body of Christ will also be growing and developing and, as a species, evolving. This is a view which can’t be handled by currently existing ways of understanding man as an individual or as community. New forms of thought are needed and I claim that at least a beginning in thinking afresh can be drawn from abstractions of modern knowledge of created being in its material form—including that form of knowledge we call mathematics.
We’ve traveled into realms where sophisticated thought is needed. Despite what determinists might think, `randomness’ (or unpredictable facts emerging) occurs at the interfaces where two or more systems interact even if those systems are fully deterministic in their internal events. The current environments of man, social and also `natural’, are made of some very complex systems indeed and there are very complex, `fact-ridden’, interactions at the interfaces of these systems.
Human being has changed and is currently changing rapidly. Geneticists and paleoanthropologists say that anatomically modern man came into existence more than 100,000 years ago, but cognitively and socially modern man seems to have come into existence over the past 40,000-60,000 years—we see more complex societies and technology developing slowly by the standards of a man’s life but showing clearly by 10,000 years ago or so. [Take the exact years with a small grain of salt; they might well change but a shift of decades of millenia wouldn’t affect my arguments.]
What happened? Why was it that there were human beings 100,000 years ago little different from us in matters such as bone structure and perhaps soft flesh but not forming complex human communities nor even developing more sophisticated tools than those of primitive hominids from a million years ago or more?
There are some emerging answers, and good reason to believe these will cause deep problems in modern societies increasingly committed to the proposition that there are no significant differences between the races or the smaller ethnic groups. Those anatomically modern human beings seem to have reached their final brain development at the beginning of adolescence—this because the genes for brain development during adolescence can be traced back to the populations which left Africa 40,000-60,000 years ago though some of those development genes flowed back into Africa and some might prove to have developed independently in Africa. In my terms—to which some scientists might object, abstract reasoning tends to develop during adolescence and those creatures which looked so much like us were practical-minded creatures able to handle small-group life and primitive technology but not capable of understanding even high school physics nor capable of reading a complex novel. They couldn’t develop, probably couldn’t have dealt with, the complexities of the relationships we think so natural—social, political, economic, and so forth.
Much happened after the human brain began to develop regions adapted for, or adaptable for, abstract reasoning. Human beings had lived for hundreds of thousands of years in relatively small groups, extended families to a large extent but not exclusively; so far as I understand matters, those groups were semi-nomadic and lived by both hunting and foraging. By 10,000 years ago or so, they seem to have formed larger communities which mostly made their living by agriculture including animal husbandry and supplemented by manufacturing of tools for internal use and perhaps external trading.
Over the next six or seven thousand years, progress continued and probably accelerated so that larger-scale manufacturing and truly dense communities developed, first in the Middle and Near East and then elsewhere. These people achieved high levels of accomplishment in such areas as architecture and organization of complex endeavors such as building and operating large-scale irrigation systems.
As I’ve noted in prior writings, we see signs that of truly abstract reasoning, and not just high levels of practical reasoning working its way out through trial and error, by the sixth century or so before the birth of Jesus Christ. This is the age of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, the later prophets of Israel and likely those who put the more ancient works of the Bible in more or less final form, and the founders of Hinduism.
I would contend that history, that of human thought as well as that of politics and that of technology, gives us no reason to think these processes of evolution and development have slowed down; in fact, it’s likely that human sociobiological evolution has accelerated. History speaks of the increased and increasing rate of interesting events and we can all see the ongoing emergence of more complex relationships and tools in our various communities right up to the global level.
To look into matters more deeply or to try to see the world more clearly leads to dangers to our personal selves and our communal selves.
That is where I’ll pick up in the next essay in this series.