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The Garrison of Moral Reason:
Lofty Citadel or Lonely Outpost?
John R. Harris
John R. Harris, President of
The Center for Literate Values, has three
degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. in English, M.A. in
Classics, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature). Between stints of
graduate school, he taught briefly at every level from fifth grade to high
school to junior college; yet he spent most of his academic career in
various universities throughout the South, an adventure which endured for
fifteen years altogether. Though he earned teaching awards and
published widely, he at last decided to attempt a new career in publishing
when (as the essay below implies) the triumph of PC rhetoric, marketing,
and careerism over substance poisoned the academic atmosphere beyond his
level of tolerance.
Verum, Quirites, antea singuli cives in
pluribus,
non in uno cuncti praesidia habebatis.1
Sallust
Diese Moralität und nicht der Verstand
ist des also,
was den Menschen erst zum Menschen macht.2
Immanuel Kant
La pire tentation pour l’humanité,
dans les époques de ténèbres
et de bouleversement général,
est de renoncer à la Raison morale.3
Jacques Maritain
Several fairly steady readers of Arcturus have
suggested to me that something called The Center for Moral Reason might
turn away the right sort of interest in our endeavor and attract the wrong
sort. A few others have politely sidled away, not wanting to offer their
reservations for the record but clearly bemused. For my part, I may say
that I understand both the well-meaning advice and the uncommunicative
evasion. These people are connected to the academy, and they know that
academics will smell some kind of fascist coup in the air (in the academy,
such odors are detected with extreme finesse). The former Arcturus
may well be regarded as veering dangerously toward the Right, where it
will find few friends and no thinking public from which to draw an
audience.
While I consider the alarm of these supporters to be
rather exaggerated, I have had first-hand experience of rude receptions
from the right side of the political spectrum. One publisher of a
conservative religious organ where I attempted to place an ad for a book (in the
early days, I attempted to place ads just about everywhere) simply lowered
the portcullis, heaved up the drawbridge, and refused to acknowledge any
of my queries. I had the distinct impression that, to her practiced eye,
some word or expression in the modest hyperbole of my tendered copy bore
the mark of the Devil. The one response I could ever ferret out over the
phone was a curious question about why my company's FAX number featured
four sixes in a conspiratorial row. Academe isn’t the only venue where you find
watchdogs sniffing at your shoes to verify whose grass you’ve been
walking on.
I vowed then and there to waste no more time trying to
anticipate how words might resonate with this or that constituency when
wrenched out of context: someone will always cry foul, and most of the
time you won’t know why. I prefer to spend my effort in struggling to
say what I mean. The phrase "moral reason" captures the
objectives of this journal’s architects better than any two words I can
imagine. (Thanks to the persistent prodding of our Web advisor, I have
lately acquired a certain skill at crunching my ideas into "keyword
phrases".) What could possibly be more important to a human being
than the good? In goodness lies whatever convincing destiny we have, as
individuals if not as a species. Indeed, without a concept of the good, we
are left with nothing but the evolutionary trajectory of our
species. We have no more individuality, no more free will. We simply do
what science tells us we were made to do—and when I say "we",
I mean the statistical majority, the mean, the norm. The greatest common
denominator.
Talk of valorizing our ethnic and cultural diversity is
in such manifest bad faith that I can no longer view intelligent people
who churn it out as anything short of liars. At the same time as they
praise an oppressed culture, they enjoin mainstream culture to change or
be damned (with a quasi-religious fervor fully equal to that editor’s
who excised—or rather exorcised—my ad). They plainly understand that
culture is skin-deep and ever subject to erosion, mutation, or utter
evaporation. Marginal cultures are defended only against the forcible
homogenizing of bourgeois taste: over all cultures broods a supreme
relativity—at least in cultural terms. Now, biology is quite another
matter. There we are to take our bearings. Hunger, sex, play, health,
longevity, a certain animal joy in the day (as Homer ascribes to the
witless Paris through the "untethered horse" metaphor at Iliad
6’s closing)… these are our common objective, our point of convergence
as human beings. No wonder the animal rights crowd is gaining credibility:
a dog, a cat, or a rat has most of the same ambitions.
It is because my friends on the Left can do no better
than this that I feel compelled to insist that something better can indeed
be done. Some of them, I know, are nervous only because the word
"moral" has been salted into so many political campaigns where
values are fitted to circumstances like guests to Procrustes’ bed. The
"do this or be damned" mentality again… what thoughtful person
doesn’t have a few stories to tell about such anti-intellectual
encounters? But because I prize reflective thought, I am unwilling
to give up a word merely for its having been assaulted and battered beyond
recognition by propagandists. And I’m not entirely sure that what some
on the Left hold against "moral" is its undeserved but defacing
bruises. Some of them, I think, realize full well that the word properly
designates a communion aspiring to universality. Biologically based drives
and urges they will tolerate—even celebrate, apparently—as
definitively human; but the duty to rise above self-serving impulse in
procuring food or sex or even bare survival… they will have none of it.
Such talk makes them claustrophobic. Beyond the tyranny of genes and
hormones, they must be granted unqualified freedom to "be who they
are" (though what could possibly be free of genes and hormones to a
materialist, or what that materialist could ever hope to be beyond a
biologically determined machine, I’ve never been able to figure out).
The phrase "moral reason", if anything, becomes still more
provocative at this level, since it implies that the brain power so
proudly advertised by the intelligentsia should actually lead us away from
anarchic self-indulgence. These left-wing libertarians may not know it,
but the Bible-thumping Moral Majority type was really the best ally they
had. In his anti-intellectualism rested their most convincing
justification.
For if the self-styled Religious Right is infatuated
with the word "moral", the phrase "moral reason" draws
from this crowd the tight-jawed silence that a counterfeit coin’s dull
clank would inspire in a miser. Moral reason? But morality has
nothing to do with reason! It is entirely based upon God’s word (or The
Word) as transmitted in the Bible. You don’t reason anything out: you
just obey. That these words and not others should be in the Bible to begin
with because they appeal to the human heart of hearts—or that the
million or so words in the Bible should need translating, interpreting,
and sometimes reconciling or prioritizing with the help of resonances they
stir deep within us—is sheer blasphemy. It belongs to the outrage which
(I have lately learned) is called "natural theology". Something
of God knowable through human nature, through the structure of the human
faculties? Why, man, haven’t you heard? Our nature is so corrupt that we
would be better off always doing exactly the opposite of where our will is
pulling us! Of course, those who are God’s chosen people no longer
endure this tug-of-war. God has entirely taken over their will. No more do
they will anything whatever: all that they do is God’s doing.
As I say, this is enough to make anyone paint a red
hammer and sickle on his front door—but that would be a most unfortunate
response. It would be impulsive, juvenile, and sterile. It would be, in
short, the same order of non-thinking as we find on the Far Right. The
Left has indeed become the mirror image of its beloved antagonist,
especially in the academy, as it counters every bourgeois lunge at decency
(strip-searches of students, the Ten Commandments brandished over
entrances in Orwellian menace) with gaudy gestures designed for maximal
shock. Everyone, everything in the middle—and it is an increasingly
broad middle as we are all crowded to the polarities—gets shot down in
the crossfire. Your grammar is sub-standard, said the Right once upon a
time, and your tie is crooked, too. Oh yeah? countered the campus
protesters, well your canon is full of dead white guys: blow ’em to
hell! The Old Guard is dead, observes today’s Far Right, but the Left
still hates its traditions, so let’s sing their praise. Sing all you
want, smirks today’s Left, we have the keys to the store now and you’re
not getting back in!
This from a pair of adversaries who could not identify
Statius or Marie de France with a "lifeline" to anyone on either
side! For the Left, literature begins with the Romantics, just about the
time that common sense and social consensus end. For the Far Right (or the
New Right), literature would or might begin at the beginning…
but everything before Calvin is Papist propaganda or heathen raving. The
Right’s new canon is the Left’s anti-canon with Shakespeare preserved
and Milton promoted. And both sides, if it has escaped your attention,
pick up about where empiricism goes into full swing. No wonder Darwinian
evolution is such a sore spot! Since both believe that the truth must be
wholly, visibly, immediately material, science’s version of history is a
battleground where they are destined to fight it out forever—not to the
finish, for there can be none on these terms, but as interminably as the
tortures of Dante’s lower hell.
In the citation from Sallust with which I opened this
essay, the speaker reflects upon the meaning of a praesidium—a
garrison or safeguarding bastion. I shall return to the word later. Here I
note only that a healthy society is capable of working out what the vast
majority of its members have in common, and is heavily invested in doing
so through ordinary cultural activities. A diseased society, ironically,
is one which inclines to crowd around charismatic leaders in
mock-coherence. Insisting upon its individual differences, incapable of
working through them to find deep points of accord, it generates
spontaneous mobs of special interest as it dances on the edge of chaos.
People who routinely exchange insults, deriding each other’s tastes,
labors, and gods, will suddenly strap on the same armband or chant the
same slogan because a demagogue unites them against the neighborhood down
the road in the most inane of causes: a tree cut down or a dog run over,
perhaps. Such are the culture wars of Right and Left over the already
stiffening corpse of Western tradition.
I for one (and I believe I also speak for the Board of
Directors) am tired of being pressured to abandon reason by extremists of
either camp. I love the Western tradition, not because I have some ethnic
stake in it, but because it is, above all, the rational tradition. More
than any other, it has been fueled by literacy. (Various Eastern
traditions were heavily dependent upon writing, to be sure: but it was the
static writing of sacred history and dynastic chronicle, not the
meditative writing of creative analysis.) For twenty-five hundred years—with
several backslides and lacunae—Western culture has endeavored to map out
God’s voice in our hearts. Above all, it has been moral mapping;
for the founders of the tradition among the Greeks and Romans recognized
that The Voice, The Word, must speak quintessentially of goodness to touch
the vitals of all human beings everywhere. Was that Word sometimes
reported too narrowly—were there those, sometimes, who wanted to stop
the reporting and dwell mindlessly upon received text? Of course! The
natural reverence we feel (notice, I said natural) for the source
of all goodness constantly seeks to pay its respects by crystallizing the
message, by insisting that it is more abstinence than orgy. Yet such
centripety is just as constantly opposed by a centrifugal flight from
grossly human caricatures of the divine, and that, too, is fully and
wonderfully natural. Reason understands that logic is not enough; or
rather, reason ultimately senses that the Word which founded reason itself
was—and is—beyond thinking about.
But if beyond syllogism, how much more must this spirit
within the letter live beyond blunt, blind, mute, and stupid impulse? It
is the love, not of a buck who dies of wounds during the spring rut, but
of a stranger who dies for the children of strangers. It is reason in
full, fully circumscribed: logic and also sentiment, number and also
nuance—the whole paradoxical system harmonized with itself in the fewest
strokes and leaving the fewest stresses.
I called this tradition a stiffening corpse a moment
ago. I was somewhat misled by my metaphor. The tradition itself is very
nearly lost, no doubt—but the truth which it orbited, ever approaching
and missing slightly and once again approaching, is not culturally
conditioned. We will all be dead, and all our cultures forgotten, long
before one beam of that star goes out. So we need not despair of
resuscitating the corpse, or even of bringing forth new life. What else
have we to do with our time in the present’s post-cultural rubble? It is
never too late to begin to live.
I am convinced, furthermore, that new life would revive
old life. As soon as we resume investigating our humanity, we will
discover that much of the work was already done long ago. Sallust is but
an infinitesimal piece of the puzzle, and often not a very eloquent one.
The present controversy between Right and Left, cast in its most
flattering form, is over living up to certain basic rules versus resisting
the idolatry of man-made rule books; and, of course, the bone of
contention here is far more ancient even than Christendom. It is as old as
the human race. I happened to be rereading Plato’s Protagoras
recently (partly as a result of seeing it cited in the last edition of Arcturus)
when I stumbled upon the subject of a graduate research paper I wrote two
decades ago. That paper was to become the second article I would ever
publish in a scholarly journal, so the issue obviously stirred me to
surpass myself. At the root of the debate lies a fragmentary poem by
Simonides which the master sophist Protagoras accuses of patent
self-contradiction. Socrates, perhaps more to twit his adversary than to
defend the poet, decides to champion the incoherent lines. They go like
this, at the crucial points:
It’s hard truly to become a good man
In hands and feet and mind
Forged four-square, without flaw….
But the saying of Pittacus rings false to me,
Though said by a wise mortal.
For he says that it’s hard to be good,
That only a god could have such skill, but man
Cannot possibly not be bad
When circumstances conspire against him.
Come now! Any good man can do right!4
Naturally, the original Greek was not italicized. In
fact, the main reason scholars and translators make a point of
distinguishing between become and be is that Socrates does
so. Otherwise, the ingenious ploy would probably occur to few of them, for
genesthai and emmenai are used almost interchangeably
throughout antiquity. There’s something counter-intuitive about this
defense, too, as Protagoras suggests. Surely being good is harder
than becoming good. Becoming implies a work in progress, which
nobody would expect to be "four-square, without flaw". Socrates’s
reversal of the proposition strikes me as faintly Buddhist (or, I should
say, as mystical in a way already explored by Buddhism). He argues that being
good will have grown second nature to the true sage: what’s hard is
graduating from mere right-mindedness to that sublime plateau of
"right-mindlessness". This confidence in the ability of true
wisdom to transcend human weakness, both incidental and congenital, would
emerge as a central plank of Greek Stoicism, which rightly (as we see
here) claimed Socrates for its grandsire. It would also represent a major
point of friction with the essential Judaeo-Christian doctrine of original
sin.
But Socrates, I must say, seems to be using the poem as
a springboard (even though he knew all of it and we have only a part) to
pounce upon Protagoras with both feet. His quasi-mystical exegesis goes
well beyond the case we observe Simonides making—which is, after all,
quite pragmatic. "Hard to be good? Bosh and blather!" the
poet bursts out. "If I say keep off the grass, you can keep off the
grass, can’t you? If I say don’t pull your sword on fellow citizens,
don’t you think you can manage that? Now, going from not breaking the
law to becoming a true sage whose spirit the letter of the law is always
chasing after… that is hard." Simonides never lets on that
such true wisdom is actually attainable, or not that we can tell. He
apparently emphasizes far less the beatitude of the wise man’s perfect
moral poise than he does the simplicity of doing what typical codes and
rules require. What is easy to Socrates is being a four-square sage: what
is easy to Simonides is doing your merest duty.
Karl Barth, who grandfathered the movement called
neo-orthodoxy at least as much as Socrates did Stoicism, was able to wax
eloquent about such basic acts of obedience. He saw them as a sure sign
that God had taken control of one’s life; for the believer is entrusted
with very specific instructions about how to do the exact and utterly
right thing in all but the most irregular circumstances. Barth explains:
The command of God as it is given for us at each
moment… wills us precisely the one thing and nothing else [sic], and
measures and judges us precisely by whether we do or do not do with the
same precision the one thing that he so precisely wills.5
Barth and Simonides may appear to be in agreement,
since both dismiss the position (held by the poet Pittacus, among others)
that doing the right thing is just not possible sometimes when
circumstances (symphora) leave you no good options. In a way, I
believe the parallel is valid. Simonides might well speak up for the
right-of-center view today that we spend too much time sympathizing with
criminals. There’s the law in black and white—now do it! In a more
profound respect, however, the two are diametrically opposed. Simonides
says that obeying the rules is easy: anyone can satisfy the requirement
with half an effort. Barth takes a position so extravagant that it lands
him in the Socratic/Stoic claim of transcendence for the wise man. Only
the sage is good, and he always… except that now, of course, you must
read "true believer" for "true sage". The believer
sins no more: he is above sinning, having surrendered his will to God’s.
On the other hand, the ordinary bloke whom Simonides exhorts to do his
duty is no longer capable of getting the simplest thing right. If he
happened to make the correct choice in a certain case, it would be blind
luck (symphora again).
The sparring which goes on among these ancient
moralists, I suggest, is of the very same sort which we see disrupting the
contemporary scene: that’s why I slipped Barth into the ring. The
difference between then and now is that our self-styled intellectuals are
so busy trying to stay head-on opposite to their adversary that they don’t
notice the fancy footwork which keeps the pair of them dancing in circles.
Neo-orthodoxy, like so much Protestant revivalism, stressed that God’s
grace alone, and not man’s works, brings salvation. It was something of
a reaction to the "social gospel" of the previous century, and
to the spirit of progressivism generally which two world wars had pretty
well exhausted. Yet the "fundamentalists", as they soon came to
be labeled generically (though that term also haled back to the turn of
the century), were a civil, orderly community despite their low opinion of
social engineering. The campus anarchists and peaceniks of the sixties
were not necessarily their children, for college was more of a "high
church" practice back then—but organized religion nonetheless posed
an irresistible target for the "rebellion" against bourgeois
decorum. As the academy climbed on board the liberal juggernaut, bag and
baggage, those alarmed by the chaos of the intelligentsia fled to
fundamentalism in droves, which now became a force to be reckoned with. If
the students were going to play Pittacus, subverting all moral standards
as unrealistic, then they would take up Simonides’s part—"No
shoes or shirt, no service"—even though this implied a retreat from
salvation by faith alone. Indeed, the Religious Right would soon concoct
strategies of social engineering which were quite as ambitious as
social-gospel progressivism, if rather more exclusive.
At this instant in our generation’s dubious
intellectual history, we find the combatants shifting to yet another
sequence of feints and jabs. Rightist taxpayer and leftist intellectual
alike have grown comparatively prosperous over the last decade or so.
Fundamentalist churches are less willing now to condemn sexual
impropriety, drinking of alcohol, or even skipping Sunday service, for
their members are discovering the joys of affluent leisure. Academics and
other would-be revolutionaries are less willing now to tolerate high crime
rates and smorgasbord curricula, for they are discovering the tensions of
owning mutual funds and rearing adolescents. Watch closely. The Right is
adopting a suspiciously libertarian look, not just about economic matters
but also about certain social issues. Pittacus is delivering Sunday
sermons all over the country on how it’s okay to screw up, and the new
lyrics of old hymns echo the sentiments of Beatles songs. Meanwhile, the
Left has had enough of certain bad words and certain "bang-bang"
playground games. If Simonides were around to read some of the
zero-tolerance speech and behavior codes being crafted by our avant-garde
intellectuals, he might wish to say that doing the right thing should be
just a little bit harder than this. Moral endeavor has never been defined
down to a level so near to full automation.
Though this dance around the maypole is perhaps
inevitable, I hardly regard its contemporary staging as a quaint little
bit of kabuki theater. Epochs have always lurched from greater to lesser
formalism in art and manners, yes—but the alternations should be, and
usually have been, a series of corrective fine-tunings. That’s how a
tradition is created. It seems that our constant counter-positioning, in
contrast, intends to annihilate itself as each side savages the other.
There is nothing remotely fine-tuned about the process. In my own
lifetime, which has not yet achieved half a century, I have been
"privileged" to witness the dilution of liberal and conservative
sacred causes alike to a degree of thinness which cannot sustain life. The
high vocations of novel-writing and composing music, the visual arts,
education in the classroom, religious orders of worship, forms of physical
recreation, filmmaking, political debate, professional ethics—pick any
area not governed by technology (whose praise is always self-supporting)
and you can see for yourself how we have degenerated. We are drowning at
the shallow end of the pool. Either pole, Left as well as Right, defines
itself in its periodic triumphal returns to power a little more
imbecilically. Now I am reduced to tendering an apology for the phrase
"moral reason" to both sides of the aisle!
But then, that’s not really what I’m doing. An
apology in the Greek sense of the word, perhaps—an answer, a defense:
but for those who prefer to judge our project on the basis of some
discordant echo between our nomenclature and their slogans, I say,
"Go your way." Can anything be more transparent than that moral
reason is exactly what we require to bring peace between Pittacus and
Simonides, Protagoras and Socrates, Calvin and Aquinas? We need to think
about what is good, and why it is good. When we are resisted from certain
quarters, we need to consider whether our critics may not have perceived a
crack in our edifice, or at least have revealed to us unwittingly that our
door jambs are too high for easy entry.
For if both Left and Right seem to me to share the
blame for not addressing our cultural crisis, both sides in the dispute
about being good and becoming good—about grace and works, in Christian
terms—possess a large measure of the truth. Doing the right thing is
usually not all that hard, nor is the right thing difficult to identify in
most circumstances. Yet there is a lot more to being a good person than
doing the right thing—infinitely more. The worst of people may do a
commendable act, or the best a damnable one, unless we consider the motive
behind the deed. To ignore motive is to subscribe to behaviorism or some
other form of material utilitarianism. And here our current Left and Right
"polarities" meet: for they are one in aspiring to evaluate
behavior solely on the basis of how far it advances their cause. Both look
for material results: in neither is there so much as a possible foundation
for morality.
Let us return to the polarized Mr. Barth, a man divided
against himself if ever there was one. You shouldn’t cheat on your
taxes, you shouldn’t toss trash in the street, and you shouldn’t throw
things at your mate. He’s right about that. Such strictures are neither
hard to recognize nor hard to honor. But precisely because he is
right, he’s wrong to add that the unsaved cannot fulfill these standards—and,
by the way, he’s also wrong to claim that the law-abiding satisfy God in
fulfilling them. You can honestly report your taxes while still refusing a
dollar to a starving child. You can never lift a hand against your mate
and still engage in verbal intimidation. That someone who observes the
most minimal demands of civilized conduct should be said thereby to
manifest God’s infallible will is positively ludicrous. Simply because
these are minimally civilized standards, a person might abide by them for
no better reason than to keep a good name in the community.
Not that being the truly good person is
susceptible to the simplistic "social gospel" arithmetic of how
many starving children you’ve fed, how many compassionate exhortations
you’ve delivered. The vain pride possibly hidden in these deeds of mercy
is fully equal to the merciless, sanctimonious alderman’s who wants his
child sent to the reformatory for shoplifting. The way out of such
self-idolatry is not Habitat for Humanity, worthy though that cause may
be. You may devote your life ostentatiously, even spectacularly to others
and still be a thorough-going narcissist. Particularly if you are
extroverted by nature, your crusading social work might be far less
painful to you than staying home with a book. You will certainly be
lavished with the community’s praise, even though your soup kitchen is
chronically underfunded. You have your reward… don’t you?
What are your true motives? Social activists are highly
sensitive on the subject. "Some become engrossed in spiritual
egotism," sneers John Dewey, taking the offensive. "They are
preoccupied with the state of their character, concerned for the purity of
their motives and the goodness of their souls."6
And yet, the Dewey man-of-action clearly wants to motivate—or to
manipulate—by removing motive from the determining ground of goodness.
If you can so readily descry hypocrisy in the modest checks which your
stay-at-home brethren make out to your hospice, maybe your own hypocrisy
is no less. Maybe you are a little too in love with yourself, like someone
who fancies that he is truly wise or does only and always God’s work.
For Pittacus eventually meets Simonides unless becoming
can somehow remain becoming. People who insist upon the difficulty of
right conduct (as opposed to its impossibility) end up simply giving us a
different version of right conduct. If a person can indeed become truly
good—can be the sage or the saint—then moral complacency is the
only spiritual reality to be "born again". Moral reason
warns us that true goodness is humanly approachable at best, not humanly
attainable. If perfection lay in action, then goodness would consist
entirely of right behaviors; and if this were so, then motive would be
irrelevant (as so many progressives like Dewey have said it is), and what
is good would be fully observable—the healthy, the sensually pleasant,
the efficient. And if this were so… why then, the very word
"morality" would be redundant. For we should more properly be
using words like "healthy", "delectable", and
"efficient".
But if moral goodness designates something invisible
within men and women, then the ultimate end of goodness is asymptotic,
more nearly approached but never reached. For the perfectly good deed must
now be accompanied by a morally perfected will; in fact, good deeds will
be properly understood as no more than the inevitable shadow of that will
upon the practical world of oppressively finite choices. Of course
it’s better to swerve your car and miss a stray dog than to plow over
it! Of course it’s better to hold your tongue than to vent your
full impatience upon a procrastinating friend! Saint and sinner alike can
achieve such successes, and achieve them without any discernable
difference of tone or gesture. What matters is what’s within: the outer
moral measure provided by "works" is but a crude gauge of the
heart’s intent, though nonetheless a major one. (Symphora is
indeed the primary cause of this gauge’s crudity: what if the saint were
thinking about a sermon when he ran over the dog—shouldn’t he have
been concentrating on the road? Bad luck, holy one!)
Since all our intentions can never be utterly purged of
selfishness in every variety—egotism, cowardice, envy, anger, lust—it
follows that there are no truly good persons; for goodness is born in
intent and inspires act only secondarily.
And it also follows, from moral reason, that
goodness has metaphysical origins. There must be a supreme moral being who
knows us intimately—more so than we know ourselves—and who draws us
toward his higher reality. How else but in this belief could we ever be
reconciled to our shortcomings? Rather, we should simply give up the good
fight in despair. Or how else but in this belief could we ever be
dissuaded from claiming moral perfection, and thence plunging into the
gravest kind of moral disease? We should end up strutting about in search
of opportunities to display our peerless wisdom and virtue before others,
even as we sought hiding places dark enough to fool our own eyes as well
as the world’s.
In its cultural projection, this ongoing adventure in
moral reason is best represented by the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Again,
Eastern traditions share many of its insights—how could they not, since
reason is available to all human beings? Thanks to the popularization of
literacy in the West, however, our Mediterranean-based tradition has been
immensely more accessible to the rank and file in its details and fine
points, many of which have been further refined by the uncertified and
unordained. There is little of the Mandarin or the exclusivist about
Christianity, in particular, which early on rejected the formidable
efforts of gnosticism to make it yet another mystery cult. It is fair
enough, no doubt, to argue that the Christian faith grew altogether too
accessible to the improperly prepared, a case made well by the likes of
Jacques Maritain, Jacques Barzun, and Thomas Molnar (recently published in
Arcturus). Our present shoot-out between liberal progressivism and
what Joe Barnhardt has aptly called Christian hedonism would be
inconceivable on either side without the lubricating ministrations of a
certain Calvinist empiricism…
But enough of the –isms. I merely observe that
accessibility carries its costs. The heaviest cost is that common sense
arises only from thought, which is introspective, quiet, time-consuming,
painstaking, and—in short—ever less common. We need more reason to
correct reason’s blunders, yet we have falsely reasoned ourselves now
into a system which doesn’t tolerate reasoning.
I see even such scholars as Huston Smith, for whose
work I have the utmost respect, claiming (on a Net interview) that the
Western tradition locates the divine outside of the human heart, in
contrast to Buddhism.7 Well, Christianity
can certainly be misrepresented in this way, and has been so more and more
by its most vocal "proponents"… but Smith draws no distinction
between the huckster and his wares. Immanuel Kant (if I may use a
Protestant rationalist to prove a point which some assume to belong to
Catholic mysticism) was most insistent that the supreme moral being must
be known from within, and that the Christian god is this being. Writes
Kant, "Christendom is the idea of a religion primarily grounded in
reason and, to that extent, must be viewed as natural." (Cf.
Tertullian’s remark in Apologetic 17 that the soul is naturally
Christian.) Later in the same work, he elaborates:
Thus they [the scriptures] are truly authentic—that
is, the God within us is their author—because we can comprehend no
voice except one which speaks to us through our own understanding and
our own reason. Hence the godliness of a teacher long before our time
can be known only through the concepts of our reason, inasmuch as they
are purely moral and therefore not fraudulent.8
Granted, phrases like "the God within us"
instantly make stalwarts of the Religious Right smell relativism, and even
solipsism. (How they handle John 10.34-35 I do not know: in my experience,
they ignore it.) This is another occasion calling for refinement, for
better choice of words, rather than for drawing lines in the sand. Kant
was plainly not an eloquent writer, and I personally would wish that he
had emphasized more the dependency of moral reason upon the concept of a
metaphysical wellspring. He talks about it, but he does not insist—almost
as though reason is willfully deluding itself to make its clock run on
time. Such is not at all his intention, I think. To be sure,
"critique" is all about making reason’s clock run on time—about
Ockham’s Razor applied with full regard for all the human mentality’s
registers. Yet to call the assuming of an imperceptible reality a
self-delusion would be to favor the patently false assumption that reason
might somehow analyze itself reasoning. Kant’s thesis moves precisely in
the opposite direction.
I have observed throughout my scholarly career that
nobody cares much anymore about Kant’s intent, or about that of the
other "great dead guys". It’s the boxing match again:
left-right-left-right. The New Right loathes Kant because he revered the
spirit which inspired the Bible more than the Bible. The New Left
condescends to him because he cast into doubt the supreme importance of
material reality. He is worked over between the two of them like a Jesus
between two Sanhedrins: "Did you say this? Just answer ‘yes’ or
‘no’! If you did, you’re dead." Professor Smith himself has not
read beyond The Critique of Pure Reason, as far as I can tell (one
of the few foibles he shares with the infinitely less studious Jacques
Derrida). They overturn a few crates to make a tribunal, these Kafkaesque
sages, then they either send you back to the factory or ship you out to
the penal colony. How utterly tiresome.
And the proliferation of tinpot Hitlers and Stalins, I
stress, is a direct consequence of the metaphysical vacuum left by the
suppression of moral reason. Why should it matter whether or not you
believe in anything beyond yourself, or whether that something demands
goodness, first and last? Because without that belief, you have
Hitlers and Stalins—a society full of both, a society of nothing else. A
race of people who babble, "Works don’t matter, nobody can really
be good, so I’m not losing sleep over the lie on my résumé… but
anybody can be good enough to stay off my lawn… but even at your best,
you’re not good enough, because you don’t see that my vision of things
is better. At least I have the courage to stand by things as I see them,
which is what any really good person does. What, then, is truth?"
Apologize for dedicating a journal to sorting through
these sorry, sickly clichés, buzzwords, and keyword phrases? Next thing
we know, we’ll be getting ticketed for walking along in quiet thought
without a boom box or a head-set. No, I think I’ll keep my apologies
today.
***
But wasn’t Arcturus supposed to be a literary
journal? Whatever Praesidium is presiding over in tutelary concern,
wouldn’t it have been better off sustaining Arcturus’s interest
in belles lettres?
And so it shall. The major cause behind the change on
this journal’s cover is… well, superficial. Few know what the name
"Arcturus" signifies, to begin with: even those who recognize
the name of a prominent yellow star can’t figure out what heavenly
bodies have to do with literary journals. Now that Arcturus Press and the
journal are being severed, the time often lavished upon explanation seems
wasted.
Let me be more forthright, however. Faithful readers
will know that we have aired out far more than literary issues right from
the start. Praesidium is subtitled (as was Arcturus before
it) A Journal of Literate and Literary Analysis. I have already
devoted a few words to the connection between literacy and moral analysis.
The appearance of an ethics of conscience, valorizing individual freedom
and exacting individual responsibility, occurred in Athens and spread
throughout the Mediterranean world side by side with alphabetic literacy:
not obscure hieroglyphs, that is, but the technique of writing which just
about any bright person of any station could soak up quickly. Even those
who never acquired the new learning were privy to a new spirit of inquiry,
a new direction—to newness itself. The oral-traditional world had
suppressed change even when it rarely happened, whereas the literate world
now insisted that all things may change, and that all people should.
Enter the morality of self-improvement. Read Eric Havelock and Fr. Ong on
the subject.
Writing makes you think things out more profoundly, and
it makes you more aware of yourself as an originator of behavior—an
individual distinct from the group—as you chew upon your quill and sort
through your options. In states like Pennsylvania where the Quaker
influence was once strong, prison inmates used to be placed in solitary
confinement and told to write. I often think we should revive that
rehabilitative strategy. Writing is confessional. The blank sheet of paper
soon becomes a mirror.
To take the morality out of writing would be to remove
writing’s aloneness, its meditation, its confession. We would emerge
with what we’re getting right now, more and more often: narratives put
together from televised clichés the way a child’s "lego" toy
snaps together from various blocks. The blocks can make different
patterns, up to a point; but the point is reached after only three or four
divertissements on the theme, for creativity has been rigidly
circumscribed by the triumph of parts over whole. The post-literate world
is a world of such building blocks. Prefabricated for our convenience (to
spare us the "inconvenience" of living, I suppose), they are
always marketed as liberating in their plasticity, their virtuosity: yet
they only form the resilient bars of an agonizing prison. So many streets
that your car can follow to so many places… except back to towns where
you used to be able to walk, to meet people, to have curbside
conversations. So many "matches" on Yahoo that you can click to
find so many good deals… except the serendipitously retrieved jewel
which you used to stumble upon in casually rummaging through the stock of
a little specialty shop, not really knowing what you wanted.
Discovering good short stories for Arcturus was
always a chore, for this reason among others. That is, I have learned that
people simply don’t write creatively—especially young people—at the
rate they once did, and that what little they do write is hackneyed almost
beyond belief. I have sometimes dared to slip my own nugatory efforts
between the covers (as I have this time). I’m sure that my
self-selection has the appearance of gross vanity: but if you could only
have seen the paucity and the poverty of what I had to choose from early
on…. I recall, for instance (the young man in question will never read
these words), a story about an unwashed "bag lady" whom the
narrator’s family took to church for years. As a Sunday school exercise,
the narrator gives the woman of unholy odors a textile of some kind, and…
I don’t want to draw this out. Let’s just say that the bag lady
renders the narrator locally famous by making and distributing quilts all
over town with the young benefactor’s name stitched into them. Gee whiz.
During my final stint of teaching, I had to judge
dozens of such submissions for an annual contest. Most of them featured
lurid murders. No quilts stuffed down the vic’s windpipe, as I remember—but
equally improbable send-offs which would strike you as familiar even if
(like me) your closest approach to a movie theater is the fifteen-second
ad between the news and weather.
Moral? The parable of the malodorous bag lady at least
gestured at an instructive insight—but the insight came first, and then
the lego blocks were snapped around its edges in an attempt to provide
support. No doubt, a tale of horror and mayhem can be inspired without
offering any apparent instruction whatever… but the present generation
of bloodletting hacks must be torturing poor Edgar Allan Poe’s soul with
their incoherent tomato-paste canvases. Their prepackaged grotesquerie has
no psychology behind it, no motivation. It’s a special-effects
extravaganza without setting or dialogue. Again, no visible support—just
a sparkling chunk of cabaret floating clear of drama’s sunken ship.
This brings me to two points with which I shall
conclude my desultory defense: that story-telling shares the structure
of moral reflection, and that it also, and necessarily, implies a theory
of human conduct which has moral implications.
We have seen (following Simonides) that moral conduct
lends itself to some considerable degree of codification, but also that
insistence upon any code’s adequacy is suffocating to the ultimate end
of goodness (Simonides notwithstanding). The values which respond to this
mysterious gravitational field both converge upon a clear, distinct
form and struggle to surpass that form; and they do so concurrently
and productively—one might well say harmoniously. The word is fully
appropriate in art, at any rate, where the same fertile tension labors
with the same ceaseless intensity. Art constantly tends toward form as it
organizes chaos into purposive motion; and, with equal constancy, it frays
and strains and overpowers existing forms in search of the form that got
away. In literature, specifically, we are all aware that the measure of
words (meter in Greek) insinuates a message. This is especially
true in clusters of words where similar measures persist. Short words
arranged in short phrases can communicate a sense of the hasty, the giddy,
the terse, or of a few other moods (among which we make a more confident
choice largely because of clues within the words’ meaning). Long words
arranged in long clusters can suggest weariness, complexity, confusion,
and so on. You can speak about the phenomena of meter and rhythm with a
mathematical precision: these qualities are about as objective a measure
of aesthetic performance as throwing a brick or not throwing it is of
moral performance. Yet precisely which mood the telegraphic style or the
run-on style finally evokes is always open to debate. In the hands of some
creators, one style may evoke two or more moods, sometimes in a highly
ironic paradox.
Or take the much-extolled quality of plot structure.
Even in this age of postmodern free-for-all, young authors probably have
their stories rejected for sins against plot structure (if they’re given
the grace of an explanation) more than for any other single failure. A
good story is supposed to begin with a problem, which then proceeds to
grow more and more complicated until at last, in a stroke both credible
and unforeseeable (so sayeth Aristotle), the major tension is somehow
resolved. The mind loves order, apparently. Such a triumph of orderliness
can be entertaining even when the story has no reference to any tensions
present in one’s own life (perhaps especially then: the pleasure of
harmony is most "pure" when personal anxieties do not corrupt a
"disinterested" experience, if I may use Kantian language). Yet
a conclusion which ties together every last strand (or which unties every
last knot, if you prefer the metaphor implicit in dénouement) is
viewed with a certain suspicion. The more popular genres of novel—detective
mystery, Harlequin romance, etc.—are disparaged for the simplistic
tidiness of their finales as much as for anything else. You may call this
a moral reservation if you like: it would obviously be an
appropriate objection from someone who felt strongly that goodness cannot
be summed up in a short list of do’s and don’t’s. At
the same time, though, it may betoken a fine aesthetic sense. The one or
two threads left dangling are as much a welcome intrigue to the playful
imagination as they are an honest admission to the mature moralist.
I see no reason to press the question further. Instead,
I believe the truth lies within a slight confusion of aesthetic and moral
values, so intricately are both involved with the complementary labors of
creating new form and dissolving it to explore still newer form. To be
blunt, I suspect that moral reason is somehow sharpened up by the practice
of story-telling and story-reading, while I also suspect that the best
story-tellers are those who puzzle over complex moral issues. A journal
which advertises its interest in literature can therefore not help but
have an interest, as well, in moral questions, at least if it is in
earnest. I could name one or two journals right now (but will not, out of
charity) which have loudly protested the politicizing of literature and
have put themselves forward as the real thing, l’art pour l’art…
yet they fall to pieces in any given issue precisely because they have no
moral backbone, no sense of purpose or even of convergence. They are stray
snippets of de-politicized ruminations about literature.
I have already entered my second point through the
kitchen door. I found it impossible to discuss the strictly formal
similarities of aesthetic and moral thought without declaring that the
former necessarily absorbs some of the latter’s content simply by
resembling it in form. For this is exactly what happens. A story which
opts to be more "poetic" and leave its tensions as unfettered as
a vague metaphor projects a morally alarming picture of life, at the very
least. The open-endedness may be nuanced in a soothing direction: a main
character’s newly discovered strength, for instance, may cause all
tension to shrink to the Lilliputian proportions of a comic dance.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, though—let us be honest—the
unresolved plot was usually a sign of encroaching pessimism. The central
wrong in the story which wasn’t righted implied that wrongs generally
are not righted in our world; the central characters who left our ken
clinging to hopes of transparent futility implied that our own fondest
hopes, too, are mere pipe-dreams. A story with no clear end is
frustrating: but the good stories without clear end transform an
aesthetic frustration into a moral one. They do not remain isolated in
some fanciful universe which makes up its own right and wrong or simply
suspends all right and wrong. They cannot; for if they are good
stories, their unresolved structure would have to be motivated—and the
only thing which can motivate a portrait of human events not brought to
some kind of closure would be an abundance of human choices against
closure. That, my fellow story-lovers, constitutes a statement of
moral belief.
As a matter of fact, it seems to me that the final
decade of the late, nearly fatal twentieth century saw a resurgence in
"closed" narratives—a purely aesthetic resurgence, however,
which outraged moral sense. I have already mentioned the piles of short
stories which crossed my desk in such visions of blood and guts that I
wanted to hose my mail with Lysol. The minimalist fictions which Raymond
Carver at his worst represents (his best was much better) indicate the
degree of respectability this vein of fiction has achieved. Nothing is
more final than death—but "typical" death can be vexingly
incoherent for the raconteur: a car wreck, a heart attack, a slip in the
bath tub. Murder, on the other hand, puts the end of life right back in
the center of the painter’s canvas, since it requires a choice and is
thus a culmination of motivating events… yes? Well, not necessarily, it
would appear. Murder and mayhem are as unexplained, as out-of-the-blue, in
today’s short fiction as chest pains or a slip down the staircase. The
sadism just happens: it springs from the created environment with the
spontaneity of a Heisenberg electron. And once a central character is
killed off, the story has to end: no Dickens or Tolstoy could tie a
tighter knot around the last period. The completed form, however, is
woefully deficient—some would call it aesthetically so; but we are on
much firmer ground, surely, to say that its weakness is moral. If
our taste for completed pattern has not been satisfied, we must recognize
that what’s incomplete is the inner portrait of human choice, not the
external reporting of a "news" item. We need to know the motive.
We cannot accept that ordinary people relieve an urge to kill or maim with
the same complacency they show on a trip to the lavatory. We consider such
a degree of "aestheticization" extremely unhealthy and, frankly,
not at all pleasant to behold. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we
insist that well-crafted stories provide insight into the moral
calculations behind events.
Or do we? Just who are "we"? Stanley Fish and
Richard Rorty have us wondering if any "we" is ever more than a
clique of the similarly prejudiced or a claque of well-paid flunkies. All
I can say is that their proposition leaves me morally indignant:
they may be right, but shame on us all if they are. In any case, Fish’s
championing of non-canonical authors reveals that he has hopped aboard one
or more social crusades. He clearly doesn’t believe in his own
relativism—and so it goes with the other "living white guys".
They may always be relied upon to demand righteous action with a
Simonidean stridency if you only press the politically sanctioned button.
The choice, then, is not really between literature with
a moral dimension and literature without one: it is between analyzing that
dimension, for inherent moral soundness as well as artfulness of delivery,
and practicing no analysis at all. The post-structural forces that raged
across the critical landscape for decades have now abated, but it isn’t
at all clear that they are being succeeded by fair weather. As I said
earlier, every time one polarity does its best to annihilate the other,
the eventual reincarnation of the other (for the effort to annihilate
always exhausts the aggressor) brings us a sadder, more degenerate animal.
To be sure, scholars are back to studying what Jane Austen had for
breakfast as she conceived Pride and Prejudice and what Emily
Dickinson scribbled on the flip side of her laundry list. It’s almost
like those tedious days when, as a wee bairn, I was sent off to write a
research paper on Shakespeare which ended up being about Queen Elizabeth.
The difference is that now I would ferret out evidence of the bard’s
racist indoctrination or repressive toilet training or closet
homosexuality. The academy is still not guided by anything approaching
literary criteria in its treatment of literature. By revealing the degree
of bias in history-writing, it appears merely to have licensed the ascent
of less favored biases over mainstream ones. Heaven forbid that we should
back away from historical causality altogether and assess our common
humanity!
That, however, is precisely what I and my most capable
Board of Directors aspire to do in Praesidium. Our endeavor is
intended to be a defense of Western culture’s beleaguered citadel: hence
the image of a garrison in a stronghold. And in the heart of that
stronghold’s arsenal… moral reason, the faculty of sorting out our
duties and callings with every particle of intelligence, imagination, and
humility at our disposal: telling true stories, sifting through false
ones, mining fantastical ones for a gem of revelation. I like to flatter
myself that we were doing that all along in Arcturus.
But I would be less than forthright if I did not admit
that this position seems much more like a lonely outpost than a
pendant-strewn turret. The barbarian army is no longer attacking: it has
filled its belly, stuffed its carts, and moved on. It never fought its way
to the inner sanctum—it never intended to, perhaps. The effort required
was no doubt judged excessive. Now a blind beggar or a sickly jackal
occasionally limps through the main gate, creaking in the wind on rusty
hinges, in hopes that some rifled larder yet conceals a moldy crust of
bread. Who is there for us to fight off? Sabres drawn, standing at full
alert, our posture often strikes us as positively ludicrous.
But it isn’t. The barbarians will be back. One by one, they will come
staggering in more parched than a desert jackal—because, after all, they
are people. And a person cannot live indefinitely on nights of drunkenness
and dreams of revenge. When they do come back, one by one, we shall be
waiting to open up the stronghold and give them the water of life. For
this is what moral reason demands of us.
NOTES
1 "The
truth, fellow Romans, is that, though isolated individuals, you used to
find safety in the community’s good will. Now all of you look to one man
for protection." Oratio Macri 24. With one exception (noted),
translations in this essay are mine.
2 "This
morality [founded upon the assumption of free will] and not mere
understanding is thus primarily what makes human beings human." From
p. 72 of Der Streit der
Facultäten in Kants Werke, vol. 7
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 1-116.
3 "The
worst temptation for humanity in periods of dark-ness and general upheaval
is to renounce moral reason." From L’Homme et l’État
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 68.
4 This
fragment is numbered 370 in the Oxford anthology, Lyrica Graeca Selecta
(ed. Denys Page), 542 in other sources. The extent verses beyond what I
have translated are so fragmentary that one can only guess at their
relation to the whole.
5 I
cannot vouch for the translation from German here, which I drew from Louis
B. Smedes, Mere Morality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 9. Smedes,
by the way, is the kind of biblical inerrantist typical of Barth’s many
admirers.
6 From
Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New
York: Henry Holt, 1922), 7.
7 I
admit that interviews are a poor source of carefully deliberated thought,
and the Internet an undiscriminating source even for interviews. I find
the following reflection by Smith immensely more fair-minded: "I was not myself conscious of the loss in this
‘updated’ Christianity [i.e., process theology] until, seeking to
expand my horizons through the study of world religions, I came (first) on
the Vedanta, whereupon I found that my interest in process theology
dropped markedly, and with it my interest in Christianity until I
discovered that its classical expressions include everything of importance
I had discovered in the Upanishads." From Beyond the Post-Modern
Mind (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1989), 158.
8 From
p. 48 of Der Streit der
Facultäten in Kants Werke, vol. 7
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 1-116. The previous citation was drawn
from p. 44; and the translation from the German, this time, is mine.
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