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    The Primer on “Critical Race Theory”

    by

    Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic: Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Third edition.

     

    The authors begin with an everyday occurrence: When race “seems to play a part” in getting snubbed or ignored, this is a “microaggression.” The claim raises a question of knowing the mind of another. As a critically suspect white male (I observe the convention of introducing an observation with the approved formula, “As a…”), I am sometimes subjected to rude behavior. If the offender is a fellow white male, I may take this as an indication of bad behavior, a bad mood, a grudge, or some other such thing. But what if the offender is a member of some other race? Shall I suspect racism—wait, sorry, non-white persons cannot be racists in the United States or Europe, because racism is a prejudice of the dominant, so I shouldn’t say ‘racism,’ unless maybe I’m in a neighborhood where whites are not dominant, or is that itself a racist thought?—or rather racial prejudice? Similarly, if I behave boorishly towards a person of color, am I a racist or simply (as I rather suspect) a boor? These things can be complicated, although not in the minds of many of my fellow citizens, who prefer to cut such Gordian, or goading, knots in rhetorically advantageous ways. (Cutting the Gordian knot: a microaggression calling up images of nooses, lynchings? Mental note: stay away from metaphors.)

    They continue with another example, a child who doesn’t want to tell the teacher where she’s “from” because she and her parents are “undocumented entrants [to the United States] who fear of being discovered and deported.” Notice “undocumented,” a judicious substitute for “illegal.” (Mental note: stay away from words.) The authors are law school professors, and it must be said that they are formidable at ‘arguing like lawyers’ on behalf of Critical Race Theory and “the critical race theory movement,” the latter “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” In this process of transformation, seen in such words as “microaggression” and “undocumented,” “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Critical, indeed, then.

    The doctrine “sprang up in the 1970s” among “lawyers, activists and legal scholars” in the United States, persons dissatisfied with the moral and legal advances won by the civil rights activists of the 1960; some of these reforms “had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back,” thanks to “subtler forms of racism” (see “microaggression,” above) that now prevailed. Delgado, along with Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman, “put their minds to the task.” Their minds were already steeped in the thought of Gramsci, Foucault, and Derrida, stalwarts of the European Left, and, as adepts in legal reasoning, they also borrowed from the field of “critical legal studies,” which pushes the Progressivist claim that laws may be ‘interpreted’ broadly, especially if that interpretation serves the interpreter’s moral and political intention, toward the further claim that cases in law may be handled that way, too, “by emphasizing one line of authority over another or interpreting one fact differently from the way one’s adversary does.” This dovetailed well with “feminism’s insights into the relationship between power and the construction of social roles, as well as the unseen, largely invisible collection of patterns and habits that make up patriarchy and other types of domination.” Unseen! So much the better. Let political discourse ‘lawyer up’! Further, CRT borrowed from “the conventional civil rights” movement its “notions of community and group empowerment”—in a word, socialism—and from “ethnic studies” its notions of “cultural nationalism, group cohesion, and the need to develop ideas and texts centered around each group and its situation”—in two words, national socialism, although thankfully not of the Hitlerite strain.

    The “basic tenets of CRT” are: racism is normal, not aberrational, but largely unacknowledged in American law, which treats everyone equally and “can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination,” but surely not anything so subtle as unseen microaggression; “interest convergence” among the dominant race, as for example when racism “advances both white elites (materially) and working-class whites (psychically)”; “social construction,” meaning that “race and races are products of social thought and relations,” not nature; “differential racism,” the practice whereby “the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market”; “intersectionality,” the observation that “no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity” but instead embodies “potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances”; and finally, “voice,” the way in which writers in minority communities “may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know.” But the overarching tenet of CRT, framing all the others, is socialism. “Something inherent in the nature of our capitalist system ineluctably produces poverty and class segregation,” and that “something” is competition, with its “idea of winners and losers.” 

    Not that CRT activist-transformer-thinkers do not compete with one another. There is “an issue that squarely divides critical race theory thinkers”—roughly the one that divides thinkers generally, namely the divide between ‘idealism’ and ‘realism.’ The idealists hold “that racism and discrimination are matters of thinking, mental categorization, attitude, and discourse.” As such, it is made and can therefore be unmade “by changing the system of images, words, attitudes, unconscious feelings, scripts, and social teachings by which we convey to one another that certain people are less intelligent, reliable, hardworking, virtuous, and American than others.” The realists “or economic determinists,” evidently Marxists, regard racism as “much more than a collection of unfavorable impressions of members of other groups” but “a means by which society allocates privilege and status.” So, for example, “antiblack prejudice sprang up with slavery and capitalists’ need for labor,” whereas “before then, educated Europeans held a generally positive attitude toward Africans, recognizing that African civilizations”—well, actually, “North Africans,” a.k.a. Egyptians—were “highly advanced,” having “pioneered mathematics, medicine, and astronomy long before Europeans had much knowledge of these disciplines.” Aside from the fact that Egyptians made considerable use of slave labor, they were never regarded as “blacks,” and so could not be subject to “antiblack prejudice,” but no matter, CRT theorist are entitled to argue like lawyers, sure in the goodness of their cause. 

    Realist/materialist thinkers further “point out that conquering nations universally demonize their subjects to feel better about exploiting them” (surely a calumny against Genghis Khan, who rather delighted in forced sexual congress with women whose men he had conquered, but the authors seldom trouble themselves with counter-examples), and that material/historical “circumstances change so that one group finds it possible to seize advantage or to exploit another,” in the process “form[ing] appropriate collective attitudes to rationalize what was done.” This might raise the question of whether the same thing might be said about realist/materialists or indeed CRT folk generally, given the circumstance of ruling that they so ardently wish for themselves.

    Then again, one might well charge the Great Khan with self-interest, indeed self-indulgence, and that is another complaint. Citing research by the Emory University law professor Mary Dudziak, they charge that the celebrated ruling in the civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education merely expressed the self-interest of whites during the Cold War: “When the Justice Department intervened on the side of the NAACP for the first time in a major school-desegregation case, it was responding to a flood of secret cables and memos outlining the United States’ interest in improving its image in the eyes of the Third World.” But if so, does that mean the Supreme Court justices were thinking along the same lines, ignoring the text of the Constitution in order to further U.S. foreign policy?  Such a claim falls in line with the techniques of “revisionist history,” which, in the hands of the “Crits” (as they fondly call themselves), “often strive[s] to unearth little-known chapters of racial struggle, sometimes in ways that reinforce current reform efforts.” Sometimes, indeed.

    Not that Crits are entirely satisfied with the arguments in such decisions as Brown. “Admirable” at times, “color blindness” in the law can also be “perverse,” as when it “stands in the way of taking account of difference in order to help people in need.” Working on a case-by-case basis, this is usually what judicial equity is for, but the Crits are impatient with bourgeois individualism, demanding instead that groups be addressed. “Only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery.” Indeed, “crits are suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely rights.” Rights are usually procedural, not “substantive” (meaning, a right to concrete things); they may give everyone “equality of opportunity” but fail to “assure equality of results”—another socialist aspiration against that nasty competitiveness capitalism breeds. What is more, rights “are almost cut back when they conflict with the interests of the powerful,” as when the First Amendment right to free speech is denied someone who “insults a judge or other authority figure” (order in a capitalist court being unjust at its root), or someone who “defames a wealthy and well-regarded person” (a right decidedly not curtailed when it came to former president Trump), or “divulges a government secret” (sometimes known as treason, but for the Crits there can be no treason against the capitalist state). Worst of all, rights are “alienating” in that “they separate people from each other,” saying “stay away, I’ve got my rights,” instead of “encouraging them to form close, respectful communities,” as socialists assure us they will do. But why would close, respectful communities organized along racial lines respect other communities, so organized? If social systems are constructed, then group rights are, too, and, as the authors have already advised us, what is constructed can be deconstructed. Why would one constructed community not move to deconstruct another? Or itself?

    The authors quite rightly say that laws derive from a “system” or, as Plato and Aristotle have said before them, a regime. From this insight flow four criticisms of American law. First, it is based on the writings of William Blackstone, a Lockean upholder of capitalism in whom such notions as intersectionality, interest convergence, microaggressions, anti-essentialism, hegemony, hate speech language rights, black-white binary, and jury nullification (about which more, later) hold no place. Second, American law exhibits the “empathetic fallacy,” that is, “the belief that one can use words to undo the meanings that others attach to these very same words,” when prejudicial stereotypes “are embedded in the minds of one’s fellow citizens and, indeed, the national psyche.” (“Try explaining to someone who has never seen a Mexican, except for cartoon figures wearing sombreros and serapes, that most Mexicans wear business suits.” [If so, they dress better than most Anglos.]) Third, the lawyers within the American legal system often serve two masters, (for example, a civil rights lawyer may not have the same ‘agenda’ as his client, wanting to set a precedent when the client only wants to secure a benefit). Finally, the legal system moves too deliberately, with “all deliberate speed,” as the phrase goes, because it is designed to serve as a homeostatic device, “ensur[ing] racial progress occurs at just the right slow pace”—one convenient for the oppressors. 

    How to counter such enormities? “Critical race theorists have built on everyday experiences with perspective, viewpoint, and the power of stories and persuasion”—sometimes known as ‘rhetorical devices.’ These devices will induce “a greater understanding of how Americans see race,” an understanding in accordance with socialist regime change, one begins to suspect. The sentiment animating socialism, probably the psychological agent that (the Crits hope) will prevent the dissolution of the newly constructed regimes of the future into a war of all against all, is “empathy.” “Engaging stories can help us understand what life is like for others and invite the reader into a new and unfamiliar world.” Possibly so, but can’t tyrants tell stories, too—socialist realism, and all that? Stories also serve “a valid destructive function,” dissolving beliefs that are “ridiculous, self-serving, or cruel” but “not perceived to be so at the time.” But cannot narrative destruction work against empathy as easily as it can work for it? “If race is not real or objective but constructed, racism and prejudice should be capable of deconstruction”; if it should be, will it be, or will it only be reconstructed with the former bottom rail now on top? “Even the conservative judge Richard Posner has conceded that major reforms in law often come through a conversion process or paradigm shift” of the sort described in Thomas Kuhn’s famous book. (Even a conservative! Russell Kirk would nod in concurrence.) In politics, a “paradigm shift” is a regime change, a revolution. Currently, under the capitalism system or regime, a person deemed guilty of a crime before a judge may “not subscribe to the foundational views of the regime that is sitting in judgment of him or her.” Quite so, but what criterion, beyond “empathy”—itself an undirected sentiment, as easily directed at a Nazi as at a Communist as at a liberal—will the foundational views of the regime themselves be judged? The authors do not say. They are reduced to a historicism ungrounded by any Absolute Spirit: “law has been slowly moving in the direction of recognizing the legitimacy and power of narrative.” By their own admission, however, neither lawfulness nor power amounts to a moral principle.

    Morality inheres in persons, and “because politics has a personal dimension, it should come as no surprise that critical race theorists have turned critique inward, examining the interplay of power and authority within minority communities, movements, and even selves.” The authors begin with “intersectionality,” “the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation and how their combination plays out in various settings.” If politics has a personal dimension, and since the examiners in this case are the Crits themselves, it is obvious that tensions between or among those several elements (or rather “sites of oppression”) will trouble communitarians more than they trouble liberals, although any regime will regard the more extreme forms of factionalism threatening. (In some respects, the problem presents itself in its truly ineluctable form for a person of mixed race.) Crits hope that “perspectivalism,” defined as “the insistence on examining how things look from the perspective of individual actors,” will aid in understanding “the predicament of intersectional actors,” e.g., a person who is both black and a woman, Native American and homosexual. This, along with the empathy mentioned earlier, “can enable us to frame approaches that may do justice to a broad range of people and avoid oversimplifying human experience.” “Justice” remains undefined.

    “Intersectionality” points to the question of “essentialism and anti-essentialism,” specifically, “Do all oppressed people have something in common,” other than their oppression? The forms of oppression vary, requiring a variety of political strategies. “This tension seems inherent in our mode of existence,” the authors wisely observe. They complain that “classical liberalism also has been criticized as being overly caught up in universals,” although they too have had recourse to (let’s call it what it is) prudential reasoning in order to act better in accordance with those “universals.” It must be said that in general “liberals” have done a better job at that than Leftists, but presumably this book is an attempt to smarten up social-change activists and theorists alike.

    In their self-examination, Crits also wrestle with the question of nationalism versus assimilationism: Should minority persons work for integration within American civil society or hold themselves apart—insisting on, for example, “all-black inner-city schools, sometimes just for males, on the grounds that boys of color need strong role models and cannot easily find them in the public schools”? Nationalists “question the majoritarian assumption that northern European culture is superior,” while (it should be noted) demanding rights and benefits that look suspiciously like what northern Europeans enjoy. Nationalists often describe themselves as “a nation within a nation,” insisting “that the loyalty and identification of black people, for example, should lie with that community and only secondarily”—if at all—with “the United States.” The authors prefer “a middle position”: “minorities of color should not try to fit into a flawed economic and political system but transform it” into some form of socialism. 

    In the effort to revolutionize the American regime, the authors eschew what they call the “Black-White Binary,” the claim of some black activists and academics that the experience of African Americans is the paradigmatic form of oppression in the country, “so distinctive that placing it at the center of analysis is, in fact, warranted.” Other minority groups should “compare their treatment to that of African Americans to redress their grievances.” Mexican Americans and Indians have suffered in ways not identical to those in which blacks have suffered and, more to the political point, “pitting one minority group against another” will result in the rule of whites over a divided set of victims. It can also “induce a minority group to identify with whites in exaggerated fashion at the expense of other groups,” as when the League of United Latin American Citizens “reacted to rampant discrimination against their members by insisting that society treat Latinos as whites.” Not nationalism and its corollary, “binary thinking” must be “put aside” if minorities will “work together to confront the forces that suppress them all”—a variation of the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s, revived also by some contemporary white socialists. [1] 

    A further danger to socialist regime change might come from whites. After all, Critical Race Theory might inspire “Critical White Studies”—studies undertaken by whites, for whites. Whites, too, can pursue a Popular Front strategy, and indeed have done so, as such ethnic groups as the Irish, Jews, and Italians, once classified by whites as non-whites, have long been brought into the tribe. “Whiteness, it turns out, is not only valuable; it is shifting and malleable.” But “white solidarity presents problems and dangers that black solidarity does not,” inasmuch as it inclines to support the regime the authors want to get rid of. Whites are “privileged”; for example, “store clerks won’t follow them around” and “people will not cross the street to avoid them at night” (your reviewer inexplicably being an exception to those practices). Just as bad, “whites do not see themselves as having a race but as being, simply people”—another surprising revelation to this writer, who has extensive experience with whites who “see themselves” as members of both categories. 

    In their final chapters, the authors shift to the question, ‘What is to be done?’ With respect to CRT itself, they find that it “has yet to develop a comprehensive theory of class” as a supplement to its racial analysis—yet another of their efforts to emphasize a socialist program. After all, the number of whites on public assistance exceeds the number of “people of color.” Socialists should continue to press for such “redistributive measures” as the progressive income tax, public education, and “a welfare safety net,” all now “command[ing] much less support than they did formerly” among Americans. Being advocates of a regime and not only an economic system, socialists also will address the criminal justice system, in which a substantial percentage of minority men are “enmeshed.” One way to counteract “the disproportionate incarceration of young black men” is jury nullification, ignoring the instructions of a judge at trial and acquitting a young man whom jury members consider “of more use to the community free than behind bars.” If the rule of law derives from the regime, and the regime is bad, then use to the community ought to trump the rule of law—this, despite the fact that utilitarianism is a doctrine formulated by white and indeed Anglo-Saxon males in the late seventeenth century.) But utilitarianism alone may not suffice; “one scholar, Paul Butler, proposes that the values of hip-hop music and culture could serve as a basis for reconstructing the criminal justice system so that it is more humane and responsive to the concerns of the black community.” 

    After delving into laws against “hate speech”—that notoriously ‘malleable’ new crime—and laws favoring the use of “non-English speakers to use their native languages in the workplace, voting booth, schoolhouse, and government offices” (nationalism being okay, if rightly, that is, Leftishly, applied) the authors take up “CRT’s critique of merit.” Merit “is far from the neutral standard that its supporters imagine it to be,” inasmuch as scores on standardized school admissions tests “are coachable and reward people from high socioeconomic levels” who can pay coaches. Such tests “do not measure other important qualities such as empathy, achievement orientation, or communication skills”—which may be why schools seldom use them as the sole criterion for admission. It may be that the elimination of standardized tests altogether in favor of immeasurable moral virtues may help to elevate budding socialists to more prestigious schools. After all, “if one defines the objective of a law school as turning out glib lawyers who excel at a certain type of verbal reasoning, then one group would appear to have a virtual corner on merit”—a sentence that appeals to the antisemitic stereotyping to which the contemporary Left has not been entirely resistant. With empathy firmly in hand, “lawyering skills” might be redefined to include “the ability to craft an original argument for law reform”—quite likely, along the regime lines the authors prefer.

    Since Crits “will need to marshal every conceivable argument, exploit every chink, crack and glimmer of interest convergence to make these reforms palatable to a majority that only at a few times in its history has seen fit to tolerate them,” one such glimmer that may be exploited in the effort to form One Big Left is globalization, which “removes manufacturing jobs from inner cities (often to other countries), creates technology and information industry jobs for which many minorities have little training, and concentrates capital in the pockets of an elite class, which seems little inclined to share it”; this “offers opportunities for minorities to form coalitions with American blue-collar workers and unions,” as “the materialist wing”—the Marxists—of CRT would predict. 

    CRT Socialists face a political problem. Not only do “aggressive policing and incarceration create”—a fascinating verb selection—large numbers of “civilians who are ex-cons and unable to vote,” but minorities are, well, minorities and thus disadvantaged in democracies. Therefore, “efforts must continue to counter minority underrepresentation” in government by instituting cumulative voting, whereby voters faced with a slate of ten candidates for one office would have not one but ten votes, all of which he could “place” on one candidate. “If one of the candidates is, say, an African American whose record and positions are attractive to that community, that candidate should be able to win election.” But why? Why would those race-prejudiced, mean old white voters not do the same thing for a candidate who attracts them—unless, of course, only the black citizen gets ten votes, and the white citizen is restricted to one.

    The authors conclude by confirming their intention to effect regime change in the United States toward socialism or, as they prefer to call it, “economic democracy.” They are well aware that a regime consists not only of rulers, ruling offices or institutions, and purposes, but of a way of life, aiming at “assuring that minority viewpoints and interests are taken into account, as though by second nature, in every major policy decision the nation makes.” In this, they have already achieved a substantial victory. Critical Legal Studies, CRT’s legal arm, has “embedded itself so thoroughly in academic scholarship and teaching that its precepts became commonplace, part of the conventional wisdom.” Moreover, “consider how in many [academic] disciplines scholars, teachers, and courses profess, almost incidentally, to embrace critical race theory.” “Might critical race theory one day diffuse into the atmosphere, like air, so that we are hardly aware of it anymore?” Or might it come to resemble shadow-images projected on the walls of the sociopolitical cave? Beware of metaphors.

     

    Note

    1. See “The Popular Front Reconstituted?”, a review of Harvey J. Kaye: The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (2016), on this website in the “American Regime” section.

     

     

     

    C. S. Lewis’s Defense of the Miraculous

    by

    C. S. Lewis: Miracles. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001 [1947].

     

    If I see something I take to be miraculous, my seeing doesn’t prove that it’s a miracle. “Seeing is not believing,” Lewis writes, inasmuch as “our senses are not infallible.” “What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience”—’philosophy’ here meaning ‘assumptions.’ Lewis uses the word ‘philosophy’ because he wants to interrogate not ordinary beliefs or ‘common sense’ but the kinds of philosophy, especially modern philosophies of naturalism, that preclude the miraculous a priori.

    A miracle is “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” Philosophic naturalism maintains that Being is nothing but nature, while supernaturalism maintains that Being is not limited to nature. By the natural, Lewis means “what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord, the given, what is there already: the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited.” He also implies, but does not exactly state, that natural causation is ‘deterministic,’ that nature cannot include free will, that naturalism holds human beings to have no “power of doing more or other than what was involved by the total series of events.” According to naturalism as Lewis defines it, no “such separate power of originating events” can exist.

    This obviously depends on what nature’s nature is. Aristotle, for example, is unquestionably a ‘naturalist,’ but he also upholds the human capacity to reason and to make choices founded upon reasoning. Was Aristotle mistaken, or perhaps prevaricating? Lewis does not ask, and so does not answer. By ‘naturalism’ he evidently means most especially modern naturalism, although he may deny naturalism’s claim to comprehensive validity in all its forms.

    Both naturalists and supernaturalists agree that “there must be something that exists in its own right, “some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations.” The controverted point is, what or who this Fact is. Eternal nature or eternal God? This Fact is “the one basic Thing [that] has caused all the other things to be”; “they exist because it exists.” More, “If it ceases to maintain them in existence, they will cease to exist,” and if it is altered, they too will be altered. This is not necessarily true, however. If a First Cause ceases to exist, what it has caused might continue, if the First Cause endowed them with the capacity to endure; a child may survive the deaths of his parents. Only if, say, the energies that generated the things produced by the First Cause also perpetuate those things will they cease to be, or change, if the First Cause disappears.

    Lewis further maintains that naturalism “gives us a democratic” picture of reality, supernatural a “monarchical” one. Possibly, although either might also provide an aristocratic view, as in philosophic pluralism or a theology of polytheism. But Lewis is thinking here not so much of metaphysics as of dismissals of metaphysics on political grounds: If naturalists charge that supernaturalism merely reflects assumptions congenial to monarchic regimes, supernaturalists can as easily charge that naturalism tends to appeal to democrats. And neither claim speaks logically to the question of whether the ‘democratic’ or ‘monarchic’ metaphysic itself is true.

     Lewis cautions that the distinction between naturalism and supernatural “is not exactly” the distinction between atheism and theism. “Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling ‘God’ arising from the whole process”—the doctrine of pantheism. “Such a God would not stand outside Nature or the total system, would not be existing ‘on his own.'” It would not be a Creator-God. It might be Spinoza’s ‘God’ or Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit.’ Conversely, a supernaturalist can admit that the One Cause might not have generated only one nature; it (or He, or She) might have caused other natures not spatially or temporally related to the one we know. Nor does supernaturalism imply that miracles occur; “God (the primary thing) may never in fact interfere with the natural system He has created”—the claim of Deism. Supernaturalism admits the possibility of miracles, whereas naturalism rules them out altogether.

    “Our first choice, then, must be between Naturalism and Supernaturalism.” True, although naturalism may amount to more than Lewis, evidently following the definition provided by modern philosophers, is said to be. Lewis remarks that if there is a thing that cannot be explained in general within a naturalist system, then the system itself must be flawed. “If any one thing exists which is of such a kind that we see in advance the impossibility of even giving it that kind of explanation,” as distinguished from making an adjustment to the system itself, then that kind of explanation cannot be comprehensive of Being.

    Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Lewis begins his explanation of explanations by observing that everything we know beyond our immediate sensation we infer from those sensations. “Since I am presented with colors, sounds, shapes, pleasures and pains which I cannot perfectly predict or control, and since the more I investigate them the more regular their behavior appears, therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic.” The “therefore” thought I have is an inference, an act of reasoning or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The inference I draw from my sensations, that there is a world out there, does not contradict itself. I proceed accordingly, albeit with caution, testing my evident knowledge of what’s out there against my sensations, or more accurately against my interpretations of my sensations. A given interpretation may prove illogical, and therefore false. But “unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true,” inasmuch as ‘science’ means knowledge.

    More, “no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight”; any theory that denied this “would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.” Lewis then makes his crucial claim: that naturalism “involve[s] the same difficulty” because it “discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself.” To show this, he distinguishes two types of logic; cause-effect logic and ground-consequent logic. His example of cause-effect logic is, ‘X is ill because he ate Y.’ His example of ground-consequent logic is, ‘X must be ill because he is behaving out of character.’ Ground-consequent logic appeals to evidence of X’s condition; cause-effect logic identifies the cause of that condition. 

    The question of causation’s relation to logic is unavoidable for Lewis because he wants to show that some causes can be miracles, supernatural.

    His next point is that one cannot get to cause-effect logic without first ascertaining the accuracy of our ground-consequent logic. Before saying what caused X’s illness one must first establish that X is ill. Otherwise, my cause-effect syllogism will be based on a false premise. Once I have established a reasonable ground-consequent observation, one free of contradiction, I can then perform a different logical exercise, namely, discovering the cause of the effect I have established. “To be caused is not to be proved.” That is, my thought may be caused by any number of things: “wishful thinkings, prejudices, and the delusions of madness.” These are caused but “they are ungrounded”; I wishfully (perhaps in this case maliciously), prejudicially, or crazily suppose that you are ill. Naturalism supposes that “causes fully account for a belief” (emphasis added), that “the belief would have had to arise whether it had grounds or not.” 

    The problem with this ironclad naturalistic determinism, Lewis argues, is that while acts of thinking are events, “they are a very special sort of events.” Most events “are not ‘about’ anything and cannot be true or false.” To say that an event alleged to have happened never did happen is to say the allegation is false. ‘Fake news’ is a false account of an event. Acts of inference are indeed “subjective events, items in somebody’s psychological history,” but they are also “insights into, or knowings of, something other than themselves.” It is one thing to say, “B followed A in my thoughts,” quite another to say “B follows from A.” We cannot infer the latter, logical inference from the former subjective event “without discrediting all human knowledge, including the knowledge-claim that our subjective sensations do not open us to knowledge of anything beyond ourselves. To say, instead, that our inferences from our sensations do open us to knowledge about things beyond ourselves is to say that the content of our knowledge is to some important degree determined by those things, that world. If knowledge of the world were determined in no way by the world itself, “it would cease to be knowledge.”

    “Any thing which professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what is known, is really a theory that there is no reasoning.” What Lewis calls naturalism does exactly that, offering “what professes to be a full account of our mental behavior” as entirely determined by non-rational causes, “leav[ing] no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.” No matter how our sensations were improved, they would never be “anything more than responses,” never insights or even perceptions. ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ but only “when you have discovered what smoke is” can you make a genuine logical inference, basing your causal claim on your knowledge of what smoke is, and what fire is—have a true thought about cause and effect. When Thomas Jefferson, following John Locke, infers equal natural right from the equal humanity of all human beings, that all men are created equal, he isn’t basing the latter claim on the fact that he’s never seen a person ‘morph’ into an owl. He is “see[ing] that it ‘must’ be so,” as a matter of logic. The ground of his logical consequence is an observation about the nature of human beings; it can be falsified only if someone could show that human beings do not exist. It must be said that this leaves open the meaning of “created” in the sentence.

    Modern naturalism entails evolutionism. It offers “an account, in Cause and Effect terms, of how people came to think the way they do.” This doesn’t answer “the quite different question of how they could possibly be justified in so thinking.” How can human beings, the effect of a series of causes, attain the power of logical insight? If you can’t prove that there are no proofs, then neither can you prove that there are proofs. “Reason is our starting point”; treated as “a mere phenomenon,” it makes every ‘phenomenology,’ including naturalism, evaporate.

    A theist entangles himself in no such dilemma. If God is the Creator of nature, and God is rational, then reason is older than nature. For a theist, “the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine nature,” free “in the measure required” for arriving at truths, “from the huge nexus of non-rational causation.”  The human act of knowing “must break sufficiently free from that universal chain” of natural causation “in order to be determined by what it knows.” Our very “concept of Nature” depends upon reasoning. We find ‘reasons for,’ causes that have effects, by virtue of reasoning about those causes, initially by ascertaining effects registered by our sensations. “This is the prime reality, on which the attribution of reality to anything else rests.”

    “Knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing’s parts. In this sense [emphasis added] something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason.” Fair enough, but what is nature operating in some other sense? Reasoning appears to be a natural capacity of human beings. It may have been caused by forces other natural entities, but the thoughts it generates are caused by itself and experienced as an ineluctable way of understanding entities and events outside of myself. That understanding must be tolerably accurate; if it were not, I would not survive for very long—just as sensory handicaps (blindness, deafness) reduce my chances of survival. Although Lewis maintains that nature is powerless to produce natural thought, that is true only if nature is either entirely irrational or irrational but capable of producing, by some chance combination of its elements, including its energies, of producing a being that can perceive it by reasoning about it. It is of course true to say that divine Creation more readily explains this capacity than evolution or some other natural process does, but that is true of everything. Child: “Mother, why is the sky blue?” Mother: “Because God made it that way.” 

    Moreover, while (according to naturalists) nature may be irrational in the sense that reason has not produced it (although of course the Bible says that Logos has done exactly that, but I am following the naturalist premise, here), it cannot be shown to be irrational in itself. That is, if human reason is indeed ‘about’ nature, and it finds that nature and the objects and forces that form its parts or aspects are definable in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction—that black is not white, round is not square—then there must be some connection between human knowledge and the things it knows. If nature were entirely chaotic, then there could be no knowledge of that, and human beings, beings that know by reasoning, could not exist.

    Lewis does address something along these lines by considering philosophic claims of an “emergent” God, a “cosmic consciousness” not present at the origin of nature but which somehow develops over time. Hegelian historicism exemplifies this sort of doctrine. Lewis replies that “the cosmic mind will help us only if we put it at the beginning, if we suppose it to be, not the product of the total system, but the basic, self-originating Fact which exists in its own right.” Having already denied immanentist doctrines, Lewis therefore rejects cosmic consciousness as a product of nature rather than its origin. “Reason saves and strengthens the whole system,” even as God not only creates but saves His creation, “whereas the whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason and itself.” It is surely true that an utterly irrational cosmos would not be a cosmos at all but a chaos. But again, is to what extent is ‘the irrational’ thoroughly irrational? [1]

    For example, anger is irrational in one sense. If sufficiently powerful in a human soul, it will result in the rage of Achilles, destroying others and finally careening to its own demise—Achilles being only half-superhuman, with a human mother by nature incapable of dipping him into immortalizing water without gripping his body and preventing the water from touching his heel. But human reason can nonetheless see that anger has a definable nature. Anger is tumultuous; tumult is the opposite of calm; a soul cannot be at the same time in tumult and calm. The human soul obeys the law of noncontradiction even when it is ruled by irrational passion. It is part of a system that, by being rationally discernible, its parts partaking of rational order even if they themselves do not think. One might claim that human reason is illusory, that it imagines order where there is none, but that cannot be the case, for the reasons Lewis has already given. As Lewis writes, “Nature, though not apparently intelligent, is intelligible,” apparently obeying “the laws of rational thought,” in particular the law of non-contradiction. 

    In this, and following from all his preceding arguments, Lewis finds evidence for God, a reasoning being Who, unlike His merely human creations, can and has created nature. “I do not maintain that God’s creation of Nature can be proved as rigorously as God’s existence, but it seems to me overwhelmingly probable.” And the Biblical story of creation, even if told in the manner of a folk tale (as St. Jerome said), makes a lot more sense than the “delightful absurdities” of competing ‘creation narratives’ in other religions. No argument, there!

    Turning to moral arguments, Lewis admits that “you can if you wish regard all human ideals as illusions and all human loves as biological by-products” without “running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense.” Lewis does doubt that many people really believe that that is so. “I believe that the primary moral principles on which others depend are rationally conceived.” But naturalists (in theory if not in practice) take moral judgments to be “statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else.” Practice—there’s the rub. No one can get by without making choices about what is better or worse to do. No one is entirely impulsive. If my apparently reasonable choices are driven by passions, they can, will, and must be judged by myself and by others, however ‘non-judgmental’ I or they claim to be. (And the adjuration thou-shalt-not-judge itself implies a moral judgment about good and bad.) And again, generally, “Reason is something more than cerebral biochemistry,” and once one understands that to think that it is, is to engage in that is not a “merely natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists,” one acknowledges the existence of the Supernatural.” “The Supernatural,” therefore, “is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.” This must be so, if “Nature” means only the collection of such physical phenomena as biochemical reactions. Lewis avers, on the contrary, that “Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural; God created her.” And if so, He might well be able to intervene in His Creation, performing acts that are miraculous, that is, not in conformity with the usual run of the Laws of Nature He established.

    Can nature be known “to be of such a kind that supernatural interferences with her are impossible”? Lewis lists three definitions of natural law: natural laws “are mere brute facts, known only by observation, with no discoverable rhyme or reason about them”; natural laws are “applications of the law of averages”; natural laws are similar to “the truths of mathematics”—logically necessary. Neither the first nor the second definition precludes the possibility of miracles. (For example, as some rabbis teach, God does indeed play dice with the universe, but the dice are ‘loaded’.) The third definition would seem to convict the believer in miracles of self-contradiction. But this charge assumes that no interferences can occur between cause A and effect B. If so (and it is obviously so in the physical world), the only question “is whether Supernatural power might be one of the new factors.” The Bible clearly teaches that it does: God comes like a thief in the night, Lewis quotes. “If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not break any laws. The laws at once take over,” as pregnancy and childbirth follow. “The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern” and by so doing indicating “the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level,” a reality that as it were frames nature but also intervenes in it.

    This raises the question of why, if God does indeed intervene in the ordinary course of events, He does not do so more often, alleviating the sometimes-horrendous suffering of His creatures. Or indeed, why has He permitted nature to feature suffering in the first place? Lewis replies that “Nature is a creature, a created thing,” a being “partly good and partly evil,” as indeed are such fascinating creatures as ourselves. “It is no more baffling that the creature called Nature should be both fair and cruel than that the first man you meet in the train should be a dishonest grocer and a kind husband.” Nature isn’t God. “She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her.” Like humanity, someday she will be redeemed, but in God’s own time, not ours.

    Lewis next invites us not only to meet nature but to meet the Bible, and on its own terms. He recapitulates three “guiding principles”: thought is distinct from “the imagination which accompanies it”; a thought “may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones”; to speak about things that cannot be perceived sensually “must inevitably talk as if they could be” so perceived. By this latter claim he means that even abstract language has sensual content, as when one speaks of the ‘growth’ of institutions. Turning to the Bible, one finds many images, “crude mental pictures which so horrify the skeptic,” as when Christ is described as the “Son” of the “Father.” Those who seek to rid religion of such anthropomorphic images, however, “merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds”—talking, for example of “spiritual force,” thereby invoking images of “winds and tides and electricity and gravitation,” or, rejecting the idea of a personal God, tells us of one all-pervading Being, thereby “exchang[ing] the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.” And so, in considering the Trinity, Lewis reminds his readers that the “Son” is also called the Logos, meaning reason and word, eternally with God and indeed being God. “He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion of cohesion whereby the universe holds together. All things, and specially Life, arose within Him, and within Him all things will reach their conclusion.” That, Lewis says, is it means to call Christ the “Son” of the Father God. “The reason why the modern literalist is puzzled is that he is trying to get out of the old writers something which is not there,” namely, the strict separation of literal and metaphorical meanings. “The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science.” One might intervene, quite unmiraculously, to question Lewis’s selection of the term “even” in that sentence, but the point is nonetheless well taken. The Bible describes the “uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be” by means of “the doctrine of the Trinity,” showing that “this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce,” bring about “a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality.”

    Returning to the political dispute among theologians concerning monarchy and democracy, “with Hegel” pantheism, a democratic notion of God, “became almost the agreed philosophy of highly educated people.” Pantheism in some form “is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind.” Only “Platonism and Judaism, and Christianity (which has incorporated both) have proved…capable of resisting it.” The Monarch who brings Himself to our attention in the Bible says, in contradiction to pantheism, not only that He is but that He is the LORD (the capital letters used in the written version of His Word being quite appropriate to His status). Democratic man thinks what the college freshman said out loud: “The problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He’s got this holier-than-thou attitude.” Here is where revelation puts its limit on reasoning. If you restrict your reasoning to nature, you will find yourself tending toward pantheism, even in your most exalted moments, as when a Disney cartoon character croons his invitation to wish upon a star, rather than praying to God. Pantheists have hated the traditional imagery of the living God not “because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king or even as warrior,” whereas “the Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing,” being “there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf.” But “if the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God,” He “might do things,” work miracles in order to realize His own thoughts, not ours. God’s mind is not the human mind; it may plan miracles that register “the highest consistency,” but not the one to which we are accustomed, or to which we desire to conform. This notwithstanding, Christian theology “offers you a working arrangement which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian free to continue his prayers.”

    Lewis next presents “the three central miracles of the Christian faith”—the Incarnation, the Immaculate Conception, and the Resurrection—in light of what he calls human beings’ “innate sense of the fitness of things,” exemplified by our expectation of order rather than chaos in the world around us.

    With his claim that reasoning is distinct from nature, he can assert that “our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be, but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation.” The Biblical God being “not a nature-God but the God of Nature,” and given the charity, the agapic love, of the Biblical God, surely that God’s power can effect His own incarnation in a human body, and surely His love for his once good, now fallen, creation, makes the Incarnation quite reasonable, however initially stunning to our sensibilities. Just as “a brain does not become less a brain by being used for rational thought” (although one might well say that an unreasoning human brain is indeed ‘less’ a brain, failing to perform to its best nature), so a man is no less a man for being used by the divine Logos. In this sense, Jesus in His incarnate form was fully God, fully Man, engaged in the rational purpose of bringing human beings at least part of the way back to their intended rational nature. “The whole Miracle” of the Incarnation, “far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the comment which makes that crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary.”

    The miracle of the Immaculate Conception equally points to the character of God’s interventions. Unlike the stories told by Ovid and the brothers Grimm, where metamorphosis is catastrophic to the nature of the person metamorphosed, the God of nature changes existing, defective nature for the better. He alters to perfect, “com[ing] to Nature in no anti-Natural spirit.” Lewis contrasts Jesus’ multiplication of one loaf of bread into many loaves, for the purpose of feeding the many who have gathered to his refusal of Satan’s challenge to turn a stone into a loaf of bread. In the Incarnation, God “was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew,” the perfect Man. “The whole soiled and weary universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life—direct, uncontaminated, not drained through all the crowded history of Nature,” a “foretaste of a Nature that is still in the future,” when Jesus will return to create a new Heaven and a new Earth.

    “The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts”—that is, the supreme act for Christians to know. It showed the many witnesses to it the possibility of life after death and provided them with “a picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general.” It is the opposite of a magical act, which “arises from the spirit’s longing to get that power” without paying the ‘wage of sin,’ which is death. Left to itself, nature as it exists now is indeed entropic; only a miracle can reverse its course. The Resurrection confirms the possibility of the Christian promise, that one can be ‘born again.’ The spirituality of Christianity does not simply mean ‘not-bodily,’ immaterial, since “immaterial things may, like material things, be good or bad or indifferent.” Rather, spirituality means “the life which arises in such rational beings [i.e., human beings] when they voluntarily surrender to Divine grace and become sons of the Heavenly Father in Christ.” In “this sense alone…the ‘spiritual’ is always good.”

    These final chapters show Lewis at his strongest, probably the most able defender of Christian faith in the English language since Chesterton. 

     

    Note

    1. For a ‘professional’ philosopher’s commentary on Lewis’s argument, see Elizabeth Anscombe: “C. S. Lewis’s Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles,” lecture delivered at Oxford University, 1985.