What We Love is What We Get

The Sohrab Amarhi/David French debate calls attention to my recent blog post as to Why I Am Not a Libertarian. I acknowledged in that post that liberty should be a means and not an ends since without a telos toward the Good, liberty will eventually undermine itself. In the past, the Good in our nation was informed by a culture that was predominantly Christian prior to the 1960’s. But today, we have become more secular and are becoming more so by the day.

My heart sides with Amarhi more than French in this regard, although I would prefer less state-sponsored guardrails (or God forbid, state-sponsored activism) than he implies. I am more inclined towards cultural determinism, meaning that I believe our politics are guided by how we engage in both the private and public sphere. I would even go so far to say I really align with metaphysical determinism. What we believe to be most important in Reality is what truly guides us. We are what we love. And policies can’t form (or force) lovers. 

So maybe from a practical standpoint, I am more of a French-like classical liberal. French makes a good point when he says “I do want neutral spaces where Christians and pagans can work side by side. I’ve helped create those spaces, and lived in them alongside Christians and atheists, traditionalists and LGBT Americans alike. In fact, those spaces are the rule, not the exception, everywhere in this nation, and thank God for that.”

The issue is spaces rarely stay neutral. What we do in those spaces can close them in over time. 

Today those spaces are used to build on a modern notion of freedom: the ability to do what we want when we want. We are free to configure the world in whatever we want it be. And there is no ordering principle to anything but some abstract notion of diversity and tolerance that has no limit or proper ends. The end of this is utter chaos, and a loss of moral order, spiritual depth, and agape love.

With that being said, we shouldn't isolate ourselves from the postmodern culture we reside in. There is much Beauty can emerge even when the intent is not there. Maimonides said “Accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” And these sources can come from anywhere, because there is something within our conscious that will always be drawn to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. This is not simply subjective, but objective in the way that draws us in beyond our own predilections. 

I came across a passage in this terrific book I'm reading that summed up much for me: The soul knows creatures through God and not God through creatures. 

We can probably add the soul knows creation through God as well. 

We will see transcendence in many places, but we must see the Transcendent first. Otherwise we become pantheists without any ordering principle. And that’s what is interesting about today’s culture: we have lost God via religion, but there is impulse to find Him in other ways. But those ways do not have deep roots. They are also playfully disordered, full of intoxication without the sobriety of Reality.

It may be that a cultural revival will emerge through what all this pagan transcendence is pointing towards, or from the loss of what unifies it from all the disorder. But I'm not overly optimistic.

Liberty is amazing, but what we are doing with it is less so. We are (and get) what we love. And from there, it all comes together or it falls apart.

Sustaining, but Not Evolving

Whether or not you believe in God, we can all acknowledge many secular treasures, such as nature, culture, friends, family, music, art, etc. I just recently saw the film, Life Itself, which celebrated just that. It was recommended by Paul VanderKlay who agreed it was a masterpiece from a secular perspective. The film showed how meaning can come from our stories and how they connect us. These stories may have ebbs and flows, but they ripple with each us, and our resilience to keep them going is what gives life meaning.

But it seems these mini-stories are not truly connected to a meta-story. Can we really find meaning by a bunch of disconnected stories, by our plurality alone? It would seem at some point the ripples lose steam, we have to deal with our own demise, or even the demise of the cosmos. In other words, the story does come to an end in the finite sense. I’m not being apocalyptic here, just realistic. Whether we look down 100 years, or 100,000,000 years, there is an end coming. 

End of story.

But the secularist can’t deal with this, so he/she needs to come up with some long term purpose. In a post-Christian age, the secularist invents their version of Revelations of a coming doom that man can potentially solve. Today’s story usually revolves an apocalypse through climate change or some other environmental catastrophe.

With this came the ideological tool of sustainability, which sees human beings as the core problem to the earth and that this problem could be curtailed by state using regulation to control human behavior. The common good is for a collective impulse to preserve nature at the cost of individual liberties and the goods we have for our human purposes. 

As James Schall says,

“The root of the sustainability mission, I suspect, is the practical denial of eternal life. Sustainability, in effect, is an alternative to lost transcendence. It is what happens when suddenly no future but the present one exists. The only future of mankind comes to be seen as an ongoing planet orbiting down the ages. It always does the exact same boring thing. This view is actually a form of despair. Our end is the preservation of the race down the ages as long as possible; it is not personal eternal life. Sustainability implies strict population control, usually set at about two or three billion. Excessive numbers must be eliminated for the good of future generations. Sin and evil imply misusing the earth, not our wills in our relation to ourselves and each other.”

He adds, “Is there not something terribly dangerous about the assumption of responsibility over future generations?”

Do we even know what the future needs? Let’s not forget many of resource concerns we had about energy in the 1970’s have since been resolved through ingenuity. Imagine had we rationed energy resources during those years instead of innovating?  

Of course, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have other ideas, which would require us to explore a new home in space. They may have a point: let’s move these problematic humans to other places and screw up things there.

But when are we to evolve (and not sustain) as people in our true home? 

We can control things only so far. The finite end is coming no matter what our Pelagian attempts. So maybe best to prepare for that, than kicking the secular can down the road. “The garden does not exist for its own sake but for what goes in it” (Schall).