Once the thought of Plato and Aristotle had a home — the Greek city-state. Once the thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had a home — Western Civilization. The two situations were different because the Greek philosophers struggled to find the best way to inhabit a home built by their predecessors while the Christian Fathers and their successors built a home for Western Christianity. In both cases, there was a rooting of philosophical form in the social and political context and a weaker tie between philosophical substance and that same context — this is to say that all human thought has such a context but may also contain truths from a level of abstraction above that context. We understand Creation as best we can in each generation and such general understandings affect the way we perceive and think about the most human of efforts which are, after all, directed to some purpose in our world as we understand it.
In recent centuries, in the United States in particular, we’ve lived in the house while treating it as the most natural and most permanent of structures. As if we were children not knowing what our grandparents and parents had done to make our home and to put bread on the table, we accepted a warm bed as something natural and to be expected, we came to the dinner-table with no real understanding of our need to be grateful for what had been done for us, we had no need to focus our thoughts and our playtime upon our duty to someday take care of the house and to fill the pantry. Lord knows we had little reason to believe that the electrical wires and water pipes were anything but part of the natural world. When homeowners think and act this way, they’ll awake ten years into their ownership to find themselves with inadequate wiring, badly corroded water-pipes, siding that needs a lot of repairs at once, and so forth. In an extreme case, the house might need to be torn down and rebuilt from foundation up. And suppose the foundation itself has decayed? And what to do when the breadwinner realizes he has not the skills or the tools to do any such thing — the bank accounts inherited from Daddy and Grandma are emptied and that nice, soft office-job has disappeared.
To a Christian, that metaphoric house is a mixed mess of sorts, containing the altars attended by the priests who serve the imperfect Body of Christ — the Church however defined — and also containing the workrooms and kitchens attended by farmers and merchants and politicians who serve the imperfect Body of Christ — the secular kingdoms and marketplaces of mankind. I’ll not even try to develop that metaphor properly at this time because a muddle is likely to result, but the point is that, to a Christian, the ecclesiastical and political realms are both part of the Body of Christ and neither has complete dominance over the other though they each have some rightful authority over the other. I’ll skip those problems for now and maybe for the entirety of my life.
The home built by much earlier generations of Western Christians and left to us has decayed so badly that substantial new construction is necessary. Christians, who failed to enrich and maintain their culture, have only themselves to blame but they’re plenty ready to blame others. Far too many Christians have taken to berating the pagans for not maintaining the Christian Civilization of the West. If your plumbing started to leak in the shower, under the kitchen sink, at the outdoor spigot, would you blame your neighbor for not taking proper care of your house? Yet, when our children talk in barbaric jargon or blast out rap music, we do blame schools and movie producers and all the others who perhaps were most guilty of filling a vacuum left by the sorry descendants of Dante and Fra Angelica and Rembrandt and Milton, the vacuum sustained against the occasional efforts of a Graham Greene or a Flannery O’Connor to bring a sophisticated Christian sensibility to the modern world. Jacques Barzun said it truly in the title to a collection of his essays: The Culture We Deserve. I could add: The Politics We Deserve, The Science We Deserve, The Sports We Deserve, and so forth, but I’m sure Professor Barzun was considering all of those in his more general title.
I’ll move on and produce at least some general ideas about a plausible Christian civilization which we could build using the vast resources available in the modern world, resources that Christian thinkers seem to think part only of some anti-Christian realm. For example, as I noted a number of times, those bones dug out of the sands of Africa weren’t planted there by demons from Hell, they were left by creatures who were part of a complex story. A later part of that story involves chapters on Babylon and Egypt, the Roman Empire and the succeeding Germanic empires, the accidental development of somewhat universal suffrage in the Anglo-American territories and the ongoing loss of much that was gained by those accidental developments as mediated by the best sorts of opportunists (such as George Washington and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson). Is it possible the West has decayed so badly because our human world became more complex in synch with our more complex understanding of our greater world and we didn’t learn the requisite lessons?
There are a number of aspects to this situation we and our ancestors have allowed to develop by our passiveness caused by lack of courage and by lack of faith in God as Creator. This is the sin of sloth in Medieval Christian thought. More than just pointing this out, I wish to raise a larger point: at each stage of history, serious thinkers can make interesting and important contributions to our understanding of Creation, but a failure to move on will leave even the valid insights intertwined with errors. In the case of moral nature, spectrums of behaviors were split into categories of vices and virtues which were themselves treated as the basic building blocks of human moral nature. The insights of Medieval thinkers can be lost because it’s not so easy to reconcile systems of vices and virtues to the realities of the embodied human being as described by modern biology.
I’ll propose a model of important aspects of this world, a model which is far from original in its pieces, but I’m aiming at a more complete worldview which covers human politics as well as theology, physics, and philosophy. At some level of abstraction, being is unified, so I can claim:
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The components of thing-like being arise by local processes which allow the possibility of some substantial freedom.
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In this world, certain patterns exist at a global level, including the fundamental structure of space-time. Local entities will respond to those global aspects of this world as they — so to speak — grow up into the world. The local entities will change themselves to somewhat encapsulate what they respond to. Over time, some entities will achieve some sort of success by a combination of proper responses and luck. Other entities will fail. Over time, complex environments will also develop.
I’m trying to reach a proper level of abstraction so that I can speak of the evolution of both galaxies and gorillas and I’m trying to do it in a way that allows a coherent discussion of moral freedom — which of course leads to social and political issues. My preferred, and admittedly sparse — for now — understanding of the aspects of reality described by modern physics is a slight variation on the view expressed above:
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Locally, we have the components of things coming into being by processes described by quantum mechanics (speaking simply for summary purposes).
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Globally, we have the structures, space-time at the least, which force those components to respond in ways that produce simple and complex things.
As creatures of a world which is the free-will creation of an all-powerful God (theology), a world which has some fundamental aspects explorable and describable by empirical knowledge-gathering efforts of men, a world which is understandable in a quite contingent and time-bound manner by speculative thought, we would be doing well to shape our minds to encompass what we know of the Creator and His Creation and we would be doing well to also shape our ways of organizing our communities to those same two bodies of knowledge, of God in His transcendent and necessary Being and of His freely chosen acts as Creator — to see my understanding of human knowledge, download Four Kinds of Knowledge where I explain why there are really only two kinds of knowledge.
How can I make such a claim about politics, a realm of human moral action, of human freedom? How can I claim that politics is somehow deeply tied to astrophysics? What is the sort of politics implied by my understanding of Creation?
Let me first state my claim in the form of a description of biological evolution:
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Organisms arise by way of somatic and genetic inheritance and, in a manner of speaking propose responses to the demands of their environments. Failures occur due to luck or inadequacy of the proposal. The form of success which counts most in biological terms is to have lots of descendants, that is, those who carry your genes and not necessarily those who resulted from your own acts of reproduction.
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Over time, family lines of organisms are shaped to the realities of a particular locality and also to the larger-scale realities of the world . Social mammals have added new levels of complexity by developing what might be called cultures, so that new responses to environments arise through community behaviors. Human beings have developed very complex cultures supplemented by technology. These advances also lead to new ways to fail.
We speak of self-organizing systems in the modern world but we should remember that a system developing from below will reach some sort of stability only by properly responding to the local environments, including the locally manifested structures of space-time in our world. Christians can place this sort of understanding in a greater context by way of an explicit recognition that we, our minds and our social relationships, are best shaped in response to the Creator’s will as given in Holy Scripture and in Creation itself including our own bodies and our natural forms of interacting with our fellow humans, with other creatures, and with the non-living parts of Creation.
Such a general principle gives us little help in structuring a government, or a way of choosing leaders, but perhaps at least helps us to filter out wrongful forms of government and might help us to eliminate leaders who fail to properly respond to Creator and Creation. This is what we should expect if the world is as I claim it to be, at least from the viewpoint of a developing creature. We freely seek what is proper but we know if it truly is proper only when we test it in our environments or against what we know of the world. All existing complex entities or communities in an evolutionary world are the result of a number of generations of experience and responses, indicating the need for a proper conservatism recognizing the value of that embodied experience. At the same time, a system which is the product of any sort of historical development, Anglo-American court systems or the great white shark, needs to be open to further development when its responses are no longer proper to its situation. Experimentation can be as important as adherence to tradition. I speak known truths, but my goal is to speak them in a way that allows human politics, in fact, all of human social and moral interaction to be discussed in terms of the created being as we know it from the best of modern knowledge.
Let me raise the political question which is primary from a Christian viewpoint: Why did the Lord Jesus Christ accept humiliation, torture, and death rather than use His divine power to conquer those who opposed Him? The first general answer I’ll propose is that God’s ultimate power is that of the supreme Act-of-being, He who is His own Act-of-being. This is to say, He is the source of all being, His own Being as well as that of every creature. He worked to create in the beginning and He’s working still. He’s not a Jovian god who conquers a creation which is possibly co-eternal with him, but rather the God of Jesus Christ who creates and sustains from a fundamental level of being which we can’t even directly perceive though 2500 years of intellectual struggle from the pre-Socratics to now have allowed us to deal with such abstractions.
I’ll return to the question:
Why did the Lord Jesus Christ accept humiliation, torture, and death rather than use His divine power to conquer those who opposed Him?
Rather than using His power to conquer the Romans, the Lord Jesus laid down His life and then picked it up again. Having learned obedience through His suffering in human flesh, Christ reached perfection in His resurrected human body by responding freely to Creation and Creator. This is a bit strange to human perceptions since He was responding to His own Creation. He was creature, recipient of the divine gift of existence, and also Creator, giver of existence. He had created the possibility of creaturely perfection and then He achieved it.
The ultimate power is the power over being, a power denied to creatures. We must accept the world as God gives it to us but we have some freedom to participate in the creation of new things — that is, things that can be made from components already created by God. We have a little bit more freedom to shape ourselves and the things around us in response to the world as it truly is. If we fail to do so, those new things will fall out of existence or else revert to some form more consistent with this world. If we try to bring into being some things or some new relationships between men which can’t be generated from the basic stuff of this world, then those things or relationships will fail to come into being for even the shortest of times. If we fail to shape new things to the higher structures of this world, then they will fall out of existence. This will be true also of things that need to change in response to our dynamic world or to man’s deeper understanding of this world. If we fail to change our social or political structures, or even our own thoughts, then alienation sets in and can work to destroy what exists without being true to the world.
The view of politics I’ve advanced in a very tentative form in this article is but a baby-step towards that important goal of achieving a unified understanding of created being, a goal I’ve argued for in various writings including that book I’ve made available for free download: Four Kinds of Knowledge.