We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his truer disciples, an insight discovered independently by modern brain-scientists, that the human mind is formed by active responses to its environments. It can even be formed in response to some serious knowledge of a vast array of environments, of the universe, or of Creation in its entirety.
I’ve said this often but I wish to emphasize an aspect of this claim I’m just starting to explore as I wander through the streets of my town and also through the pages of biographies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, tales of the American Constitutional Convention of 1789, political discussions by W.E.H. Lecky and Albert Jay Nock, and various works on particle physics and the history of thought in geometry. I should be, and soon will be, concentrating on matters of physical science, mathematics, and ontology as I prepare to get back to work on an enhanced summary of the worldview I’ve developed over the past 20 years or so. I hope that my thoughts on these political and social and moral aspects of created being will start maturing in the back of my mind so that I’ll be able to move smoothly into these aspects after writing the summary of my views on the nature of the fundamental aspects of created being, largely concentrating on what we label as ‘physics’ and ‘mathematics’.
So it is that I’ll not provide for now even so much as a serious sketch of how we can move forward in understanding our own political and social and moral natures — as they evolve under the environments we are ourselves changing rapidly though not in ways we can anticipate with any great accuracy. That is, we can understand what has happened and somewhat what is happening but we can’t understand what the opportunities and problems will be for our grandchildren because we can’t understand how they’ll be living as individuals and as members of families, what technologies will be available to them, how they will understand their relationship to Creation and Creator, and so forth. True it is that we have to act in ways that will respond properly to our own circumstances without unduly constraining future generations, but I’m not yet ready to even speculate on real-world actions until I can better understand where we stand.
When trying to understand the vast changes in human life and human possibilities over the past few centuries, I find it hard to believe that so many think that our political possibilities are limited to a small catalog of political systems which can be be readily controlled by perhaps a king or a small body of wealthy men, by a group of intellectuals gathered to write a constitution for the ages or by cigar-smoking big-cogs in political machines. I can well believe that men gather to conspire to some goal in their selfish interests but I can’t believe they can do so effectively — though I agree with the conspiracy theorists to the extent of recognizing immense damage done by bankers who would control governments and or intelligence agencies murdering leaders in their own countries or around the world. The CIA, or a cabal within in it acting with perhaps the support of Texas oilmen and weapons manufacturers as well as key senators, might well have murdered President John Kennedy. The Council for Foreign Relations and similar gatherings of bankers and intellectuals and politicians might well have played a major role in shaping American policy. In general, they’ve exercised some large degree of influence over the past 50 years, a period in which a country, the United States, blessed with every bit of historical luck and natural resources a patriot could dream of, has been driven through a very short time of immense power and wealth to near collapse. In the end, the United States might well have been the most powerful country in the world for not much longer than tiny, low-population and low-resource, Portugal back in the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet, on its own, the American government seems not more competent than these bloody-handed professors with their theories about controlling the world by controlling central Asia — an idea actually tracing back to the brilliant lunatic Brooks Adams, brother of Henry Adams and great-grandson of John Adams.
Without going into details, without being able to go into details, I’ll say for now only that I think we have to move towards a political system analogous to a self-organizing society, more weakly analogous to a free-marketplace. More accurately if less specifically, we should think in terms of organisms, of the evolution of family-lines and the development of specific organisms.
The errors of traditional political thought, from Plato to Madison and beyond, come at their most fundamental level from their wrongful understanding of metaphysics or — equivalently — their wrongful understanding of how the human mind forms. The political philosopher isn’t born with a knowledge of absolute truths of human political and social natures any more than a physicist is born with a knowledge of absolute truths of time and space and matter. We are born with certain brain responses that assume adults will help us when we whimper in need or distress and we are born with certain brain responses which assume objects continue in existence. Neither set of brain responses correspond to more than highly qualified truths, though there are usually ways in which such qualified truths can be understood in terms of more abstract forms of being which are reflective of less qualified truths, but that’s not my main line of argument for now.
What are the basic forms of political organization? Are those forms truly limited to republic, monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy? Is democracy little more than disorder waiting to happen? Are we forced to go with hierarchical systems which are designed by men? Is there really an ideal catalog of such forms any more than there is such a catalog for forms of life?
In terms of computers, our modern political systems, and most of our social systems, are rigidly hard-wired computers with a central processing unit which does all the thinking for the entire system, at least all the important thinking. Certainly, we can note that the types of men who are attracted to being part of that central unit are rarely those who could be trusted holding power, but I’m not writing with an intention of attacking any specific governments or individuals. Rather am I writing to speak of the strange and perverse results of building a governmental machine and attaching it to a social organism with the intention of having the machine control that organism. It’s particularly strange when that organism is changing rapidly.
In the United States, we have a constitution written by men who were definitely above average at least in moral courage and intellectual talent. After all, they had risked all, life and property, in the interests of something akin to a deep love of political freedom. They applied deep and broad knowledge of the history of political thought and of the practice of law and legislation to the task of forming a new government. Why, then, did they think that political freedom could be served by a set of rules and overarching legal principles which formed a sort of machine? Some, such as Jefferson, apparently didn’t think that, though Jefferson couldn’t do much but express a vaguer view of politics which is at least more consistent with the view I’m advocating. The others? They were taught to analyze political systems as machines by the traditions of political thought in the West. The organistic analogies of Plato and Hobbes strike me as machine-like, non-evolving, and non-developing. Plato’s republic doesn’t grow from the actions of its members but rather fits its members into tightly defined roles. True it is that the Founding Fathers of the United States had England’s example before them, but they seemed to think that the evolutionary and developmental processes of English history had worked to produce something like a machine, which they rejected in the interests of forming a similar but different sort of machine.
(In fact, as I’ve written before, the efforts to shape a part of an organism into a well-structured machine has resulted in something more akin to a cancer or a rapidly devoluting parasitical organism, but I’m arguing against mainstream political ways of thought and only incidentally discussing the counter-intuitive, and mostly destructive, results of the implementations of their schemes. Political activists and theorists build political machines in their acts or their minds and don’t set out to deliberately design parasites to suck the life out of the body public.)
It is clear that we have passed through a period in which we achieved extraordinary progress in understanding the universe by way of science and yet there was no planning. Individuals began to respond to Creation, forming their minds to be able to grasp what was concretely perceivable that abstractions might be derived. Early on, monasteries and eventually various other sorts of corporate bodies organized to tackle problems which had arisen, such as the need for some sort of time-keeping as the choir monks separated themselves from work in the natural environment or the construction of more elaborate buildings or the cultivation of very large fields. I’m not advocating a minimalist or non-existent government but rather a government which is part of the organism and develops to serve certain needs and responds to the rest of the organism in such a way as to change with it. In fact, there is reason to believe that science has perhaps been going off-track since since it began shaping itself to the needs of funds-granting governments and corporations of various sorts rather than shaping itself in response to the world. Yes, I’m claiming human science is no more and no less than the human mind applied to exploring Creation in certain ways. Science as a body of knowledge and techniques isn’t separate from the minds and acts of its practitioners, a specific example of a great truth about the human mind in general. Similarly, we would do well to consider political thought and political action in analogy to scientific thought and scientific action, even scientific experimentation.
We don’t know even what the true human political and social possibilities are at our current state of dense populations, advanced technological development, somewhat retarded intellectual development in the humanities and philosophy and theology, and so forth. We aren’t even thinking on those lines, instead seeming to believe that our new wine can be put in old wineskins. No, the problem is worse than that because we’re squeezing growing and developing organisms, from lines of evolving organisms, into hides from more primitive ancestors. We might as well squeeze our individual selves into the hide of an ancient ancestor of apes and monkeys. This is exactly what our governments do, trying to force individual human beings and human societies into a shape appropriate for that particular government but not much appropriate for any other entity in the known universe. The result isn’t generally pretty and becomes downright ugly under rapidly changing conditions even for a government that evolved before rigidifying into a machine, such as that of England, or for a government which was formed by a group of men of greater than normal moral integrity and intelligence, such as the American constitutional government.
I don’t know where to go with this entire line of thought for now. I’m going to contemplate the issue, in the back of my mind and sometimes in the front, sometimes even writing about small pieces of the problem. I’m going to try to shape my political and social thoughts in response to the best knowledge available on these topics, or at least an eclectic sampling of such knowledge. I’ll be under no illusion that I can anticipate what the answer will be but my real goal is to try to define processes we should be nurturing in order that we might develop political systems appropriate for our modern selves and our modern societies. I have faith and hope that we can help along the formation of the Body of Christ by doing so.