Irving Howe: The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, February 4, 1987.

 

A “mist, a cloud, a climate” envelops American culture; Irving Howe calls it “Emersonian.” This cloud does not envelop American politics—or, at least, not so completely. Howe wants to understand what the Emersonians intended to do, what their unconscious motives were and, “pieties apart,” what they can “still mean to us,” a century and a half since Emerson published his seminal essay, “Nature.”

The appeal to nature replaces the appeal to a personal Creator-God—in Emerson’s case, the God of Christianity. By the 1830s, when Emerson resigned from the ministry and began his extraordinary career as a preacher without religion, New England Calvinism had declined, leaving nothing very plausible in its place among its former adherents. Emerson’s own sect, Unitarianism, with its incoherent compromises between revelation and reason, exemplified the implausibility of Puritanism’s successors. Any man of intellectual probity would reject them, but to reject them publicly took social courage as well, and Emerson had that.

Among these spiritual confusions, New Englanders of that time also felt a countervailing self-confidence. In defiance of Europeans’ expectations, the American republic was well established. In Howe’s insightful phrase, that republic “balances limited allotments of power against subterranean yearning for utopia,” with both its moderation and its extremism combining to make people “think they can act to determine their own fate.” “The newness,” as it was called, overbore spiritual anxiety with practical optimism.

Howe understands that Emerson intended to replace the various Christian sects with a new doctrine of his own making. But Howe does not sufficiently consider the significance of the doctrine itself. Emerson would “create himself afresh,” and urge others to do so, “in a perpetual motion of spirit.” How inexplicably finds Emerson’s appeal to be anti-historicist. But Emersonian “Nature” or “God” (he often uses the terms synonymously) is nothing other than Hegel’s Absolute Spirit without dialectic, or, if you prefer, Christian Holy Spirit without personality, and without the other two faces of the Trinity (and therefore without holiness in any recognizable sense). Emerson is anti-historical in his refusal to abide by the dictates of tradition; he respectfully rejects conservatism. But historicism—the belief that each epoch has its own truth, superseding that of previous epochs and to be superseded by that of epochs subsequent to it—frequently appeals to some notion of a ‘spirit’ which, although absoluter, perpetually moves, providing a new ‘absolute’ to each generation. Doctrines of stable essences, such as Platonic ideas, or stable presences, such as the God of the Bible, resist this extreme relativism. Emerson does not—predicting, for example, that Jesus will be superseded (“The Poet,” Essays, Second Series). Howe calls this “a permanent revolution of the spirit,” and reminds us of Marx and Trotsky. Precisely: and they too were historicists. If anything, Emerson was more radically historicist than they, more than Hegel himself, as he anticipated no eschaton, no ‘end of history’ wherein humanity would come to rest.

Howe sees that Emerson “collapsed the distinction between religious and secular, so that the exaltations of the one might be summoned for the needs of the other,” an act Howe wisely finds “more luminous than substantial.” But he wrongly claims that this evidences a “religious” mind, when of course it reveals just the opposite—the utopian mind of a mystagogue of secularism. Howe prefers Emerson’s social and political criticism to his metaphysical doctrine, overlooking the way Emerson’s criticism comes out of the metaphysics, suffering the marks of its origin. Without the metaphysics, which is at least interesting, the criticism would amount to little more than what have become standard ‘progressive’ complaints about private property and military preparedness, seasoned with the heavy spice of moralistic cheerleading when a politically congenial war occurs. Between the metaphysician and the social/political critic is Emerson the moralist, author of “Self-Reliance,” the writer Nietzsche called “the richest in ideas in this century so far.” Howe fails to show why Emerson would interest Nietzsche, and this is no small failing.

Howe writes that Emerson would extend the American Revolution to “the sphere of the spirit.” Yet he criticizes Emerson’s utopianism, his assumption that politics somehow can be bypassed or transcended. This shows that Emerson does not really adhere to the principles of the Revolution. In his appeals to moral sentiment (“self-evident” truths) and to liberty from old forms of oppression, Emerson does resemble Thomas Jefferson, but he lacks Jefferson’s toughness, his political realism. Jefferson never imagines that the moral example of a disarmed country could prove a practical defense against would-be invaders. Emerson did.

The self-reliant Emersonian individualist, turning inward and shedding social claims, unifies himself with the ever-changing Absolute, that is, with a radically non-individualist force. Howe portrays Emerson as being forced reluctantly from this unusual individualism by moral anxiety over slavery. Emerson had always conceived of the Absolute as not only true and good, but as morally good, with immediate, practical guidance for each person. This utopian assumption rounded on itself by forcing Emerson “into the commonplace world of politics, reform, compromise.” “Insofar as Emerson was becoming a reformer pretty much like other reformers, his essential project, the glory of his younger years, had to dwindle.” Further, the rise of industrial society, wherein self-reliance had to give way to collective action, made Emerson increasingly irrelevant; “the factory worker could assert himself as a man,” Howe contends, “only by joining in common action with his fellow workers.” Emerson, then, both succumbed to politics and failed to become political enough.

With all due suspicion of the partisan socialist edge on this critique, one ought nonetheless to acknowledge Howe’s acuteness here. Still, it must be said that Absolutism did very little to cause Emerson to compromise. His speeches on the Fugitive Slave Law and on John Brown typify what would become standard intellectual-in-politics fare, moralism unrelieved by prudence. Of Lincoln’s brilliant alternation of temporizing and intransigence, Emerson understands very little, and then only after the fact. In a sense, of course, Emerson could only welcome his so-to-speak obsolescence. Historicism must admit the passing of everything, excepting only historicism itself.

“In Emerson we have lost a philosopher,” Nietzsche wrote, lamenting “that such a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit,” had not “gone through some strict discipline, a really scientific education.” There may be something more to it than that. In a very ‘Nietzschean’ passage in “Experience,” Emerson asks, “What help from thought? Nature is not dialectic.” Life’s “chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without questioning.” But any philosopher, including Nietzsche, enjoys what he finds, with questioning. Emerson remains an intellectual (America’s first) and not a philosopher because he knows and questions too little. He affirms and negates, preacher-like. The ‘divinity’ this preacher/prophet reveals resembles the ‘god’ of the philosophers, or nature; it the Hegelian/historicist revision, nature then becomes evolutionary, an instantiation of the Absolute Spirit. But in Emerson it comes to light unphilosophically, that is, in a manner distorted by caprice.

The part of American culture our intellectuals represent habitually arrays itself against American politics. Its absolutist moralizing rests on neither divine revelation nor reason, and therefore veers between vehement assertion and relativist lassitude. Arbitrary strictures, most of them merely fashionable, have too little reality about them to effect much serious political change or conservatism. At most (and therefore at worst) they unhinge the minds of practical men from practical realities, while obscuring principles from almost everyone.

J. A. Leo Lemay, ed.: Benjamin Franklin: Writings. New York: Library of America, 1987.
Esmond Wright: Franklin of Philadelphia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

This essay combines two reviews, the first published originally in the Washington Times, the second published originally in the New York City Tribune, August 12, 1987.

 

While pioneering the Sisyphean task of explaining Americans to the French, Benjamin Franklin wrote that, given “the most general Mediocrity of Fortune that prevails in America, obliging its People to follow some Business for Subsistence, those Vices that arise usually from Idleness are in a great Measure prevented. Industry and constant Employment are great Preservatives of the Morals and Virtue of a Nation.” In addition, he observed, “serious religion under its various Denominations, is not only tolerated but respected and practiced,” so that “persons may live to a great Age in that Country without having their Piety shock’d by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel.”

Serious work and serious religion, both associated with middling economic and social conditions reinforced by a sameness of opinions (called ‘cohesiveness’ by friends, ‘conformity’ by critics)—these traits still persist in what we now call ‘Middle America,’ despite some noticeable softening in the last twenty-five years. The softening of the middling virtues, the ones that ‘made America great,’ as orators used to say, weakens the political regime, in turning threatening the civil, intellectual, and religious liberties protected by the regime.

Love and fear soften the middling virtues. Work and religion rechannel these passions, but the very success of hard work brings idleness, which brings back love and fear: In America sexual liberation and the fear of war, equal components of ‘Sixties radicalism, brought first disorder, then inertia. Benjamin Franklin saw that love and war pose the challenges to the good ordering of human life as he conceived it.

“Neither a Fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley,” says the eponymous narrator of “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” collected in this handsome new Library of America collection of Franklin’s writings. The regime of liberty depends upon protecting certain areas from public discussion and therefore from popular action. “The proof of gold is fire; the proof of woman, gold; the proof of man, a woman.” No other American Founder would have said that, but Poor Richard does. Although celebrated for his humorous defense of amours with older women (“in the dark all cats are grey,” but older ones purr more), Franklin consistently defends marriage, “the Cause of all good Order in the World.”

But he does not defend it as an institutional embodiment of love. No, love is a notion he surely would regard as chimerical in all but odd cases. Marriage at best is a friendship, defined unambitiously by Poor Richard: “There are three faithful friends, an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.” Marriage requires prudence, not passion (“Keep your eyes open before marriage, half shut afterwards”). It seems that “One good Husband is worth two Wives; for the scarcer things are the more they’re valued,” and thus successful marriages usually depend upon the forbearance of women.

One of the newly attributed writings of Franklin appearing in this volume is “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness,” written in 1730. Women are its intended audience, but the deferential wife commended therein (“study his Temper and command your own”; “avoid, both before and after Marriage, all Thoughts of managing your Husband”) could not survive, intact, either the libertarian or the egalitarian thrusts of liberal democracy. The famous twinkle in Franklin’s eye may have reflected some intimation of this, but he did not think it through.

He did, however, think through the problem of war. He never fought in one, preferring to parley. “In my opinion,” he once wrote, “there never was a good War, or a bad Peace.” Franklin’s strong anti-war sentiments are well-known, and they comport with his fondness for commerce, religious toleration, and above all for “philosophy”—the quiet practice of useful science, including “The Science of Virtue,” as he called it in the one Socratic dialogue he wrote. But he never ran to the extreme of pacifism. He spent much of his early political career opposing the Quakers of the Pennsylvania Assembly. As Poor Richard advises, “Love your Neighbour; yet don’t pull down your hedge.”

One of the most brilliant (and prescient) of Franklin’s essays is entitled “The Jesuit Campanella’s Means of Disposing the Enemy to Peace.” Here Franklin outlines how an enemy may be divided and conquered by a “warre of words” in which the target nation’s own writers, clergy, “rich men,” academics, women, and “great Statesmen whose natural spirits be exhausted by much feasting,” will gull “the simple and undiscerning many” with cries of “Peace, Peace, Peace.” Franklin would use the realism, and particularly the suspiciousness of the commercial mind, ever alert to swindle, to toughen it against its own tendency to compromise on everything, to talk itself into abandoning its fortresses.

Christianity, that grand synthesis of the spirit of love and the spirit of war, attracts Franklin’s judicious attention. He praises Christianity while artfully rechanneling its energies toward less volatile practices. (Poor Richard bursts into song: “To lead a virtuous Life, my Friends, and get to Heaven in Season,/You’ve just so much more need of Faith, as you have less of Reason.“)  Much more than we his inheritors do, Franklin saw that love and war must be conceived in a new way in order to support the regime of liberty. Only then does a certain piety make sense: “God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my Country.” Absent this universal love and knowledge, prudent men must keep up their defenses, in private life and public.

In view of Franklin’s art of defense, who and what was he? Considering Edmond Wright’s biographical account, Franklin comes to light as a self-made man who invited everyone he met, personally or through his writings, to lend a hand in the making. This accounts for some of the fascination with him, and some of the disagreements about him.

He managed both uniqueness and typicality, to be individual and to the individualist. Tell me your feelings about him, and I will know what you feel about the bourgeoisie—businesslike, affable, adaptable to and adaptive of circumstances, shrewd, patriotic but given to internationalist dreams, respectful of religion but undevout, inventive, of middling morals, surer of means than of ends, somewhat libertarian, ambitious, sincerely aspiring to virtue and even more to the respectability the reputation for virtue brings.

Franklin pushed embourgeoisement to the point of genius. But as genius is not itself bourgeois, we do not exhaust him by saying, as Wright does, “He as completely and avowedly bourgeois.” Wright himself produces contrary evidence: “son-in-law Richard Bache’s memory of him was that life seemed always—at least on the surface—to be a great joke”; yet he could write to his sister Jane, “this world is the true Hell.” Neither the irony nor the pessimism add up to the Compleat Bourgeois taking this life seriously but not desperately. They suggest rather a man with insights transcending the limits of social class.

An Epicurean, then? One who glimpses chaos beneath the surface, sees the horrors of it, and prudently steps back to enjoy the surface with as much refinement as he can cultivate? But Franklin was no Epicurean in the classic sense, and not exactly one in the vulgar sense. As Wright observes, he lacked “the aesthetic sense,” preferring utility to the beautiful and the speculative. (Franklin on Deism: “I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho’ it might be true, was not very useful”). As for vulgar Epicureanism, Wright admits the man enjoyed his squab and madeira, but suspects his “venery” to have been exaggerated: “Probably it was the words and not the deeds that were bold.” More, a distinguished public career precludes any serious Epicureanism, however defined.

“Was there,” Wright asks, “a ‘real’ Franklin?” There was, but he was a man more readily captured by the historian’s narrative than by philosophic definition. He moved prudently with shifting circumstances.

His trade, printing, enabled him to educate himself by reading widely and writing voluminously. Like all editorialists, he “began as a moralist, concerned with good conduct”; works instead of faith, action instead of thought, “the mastery of books as tools and weapons” not guides and teachers, interested him from the beginning. The morality he derived from Boston of the 1710s was a decidedly secularized Puritanism—more at home, it transpired, in tolerant, polyglot Philadelphia, where taverns outnumbered churches by ten to one.

Franklin established America’s first circulating library in 1731: “there were more titles by [John] Locke than by any other author.” That is a revealing datum. A materialist of dubious faith but with a prudent regard for pious opinion, Locke formulated a modern, that is to say among other things active, Epicureanism—one encased insobriety and even some public spiritedness. “Utility for Franklin was never forgotten,” and in this he followed Locke. To Franklin, “philosophy” meant applied, useful, science. “For him politics was not cajolery but construction, not the placating of people but the carrying through of plans.” Politics was the place where useful morality and useful knowledge meet.

“He that drinketh his Cyder alone, let him catch his horse alone,” said Poor Richard. For Franklin there is not real tension between individual and society; they need one another. Both his individualism and his sociality inclined Franklin toward independence for the American colonies, but both inclined him in that direction slowly. During his long stay in England as what we today would call a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin’s individualism brought him to prefer the company of “writers and scientists, Scots and Dissenters,” not the British establishment. Parliamentary imperialism, whereby the House of Commons asserted the right to rule the colonists by law, “especially irritated” Franklin the individualist, enthusiast of self-help and self-rule for persons and peoples.

Franklin’s social nature undoubtedly resented the snubs of English ‘great men,’ but delighted in rumored praise from King George III, to whom Franklin tried to remain loyal while defending colonial independence from Parliament. Wright accurately calls Franklin’s conception, “a commonwealth of equal members,” not a “mother country with subservient dependencies,” and plausibly argues that a Parliament that had so recently wrested power from the throne would never permit the king to become the final arbiter of colonial affairs.” Franklin’s sociality also made any revolutionary doctrinairism as repellant to him as it was to his friendly acquaintance Edmund Burke. A born conciliator, he only began to speak in favor of American independence and republicanism in 1774. In the end, “a touch of Puritan iron” in his soul put an end to Franklin’s temporizing.

This led to the most useful political deed of a life devoted to utility: persuading France to give what in today’s terms were some 80 million dollars of aid to the American revolutionaries during the early, hard years of the war. “Without this, America might not have been able to maintain its independence after 1778.” While the French sought revenge for their defeat at British hands in the French and Indian War, some twenty years earlier, they also shrewdly and secretly proposed to the British a territorial settlement that would have blocked American westward expansion, and they were privately shocked at Britain’s eventual concessions in the peace treaty. Franklin’s diplomacy in France was aided by his charm, but abetted by the interests of his hosts, and also delimited by those interests. Utility is a game for any number of players.

Utilitarians may play well, as long as others are utilitarians. Franklin sometimes recognized that they are not, always. He predicted peace with the American Indian tribes, but only after their defeat. And on Quaker pacifists he noted: “I had some cause to believe that the defense of the country was not disagreeable to them, provided they were not requir’d to assist in it.” Still, he almost wistfully hoped for the adoption by rulers of some more utilitarian calculus than was usual. “An army is a devouring monster,” and “if statesmen had a little more arithmetic… wars would be less frequent.” He imagined that the existence of hot air balloons might render all countries defenseless, and thus pacific.

More seriously, when he commended thirteen virtues to the readers of his Autobiography, he omitted courage. He had Poor Richard say, “There are three great destroyers of mankind, Plague, Famine, and Hero.” As did Locke, he hoped peaceful commerce would replace war as the chief mode of international relations. And also like that great philosopher, he did not sufficiently anticipate or guard against the re-clothing of fanaticism in secular garb.

What he did see was the central part that what we now call ‘the media’ would play in modern politics. Not only did he use his printer’s apprenticeship to begin his self-education in political thought, he also understood how mastery of publicity via the printed page, distributed to masses of people, could serve not only as a catalyst for debate and a vehicle for conveying information, but as a means of shaping the reputation of a writer-politician. We talk today about those who ‘invent themselves’ or construct a ‘public image’; Franklin knew all about that, and did it better than almost any American, before or since. He made this second self into the face of the nation whose regime he helped to conceive and design.

Originally published in This World: A Journal of Religion and Public Life, Number 16, Winter 1987.

 

2017 Note

In 1987, Professor Robert H. Horwitz brought out the third edition of The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, a collection of essays on the American founding by scholars including William Carey McWilliams, Martin Diamond, Joseph Cropsey, Walter Berns, and Benjamin Barber. Professor Horwitz kindly asked me to write the introduction to the volume.

The prolific Hungarian émigré scholar Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) took strong exception to the very notion that America had moral foundations, and this led to an exchange with me in This World. The following essay was my contribution to the debate.

Very briefly, in his opening statement Professor Molnar denied that the United States has a moral foundation on the grounds that states are never moral; rather, they are the “cold monsters” Nietzsche called them. A genuine ‘throne-and-altar’ Catholic, Molnar located the foundation of morality in the Church, dismissing both the philosophic and Protestant-religious dimensions of American moral doctrine as mere “ideologies.” To this he opposed what he called “Catholic Realism,” glancing at a well-known book by the Protestant writer Paul Ramsey on “Christian Realism” in foreign policy. This was consistent with his admiration for the French Catholic conservatives Charles Maurras and Georges Bernanos. On a personal level, Molnar had become disillusioned with American politics after what he regarded as the Eisenhower Administration’s weak reaction to the Soviet quelling of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Around the time of this exchange, Molnar invited me to visit him at the apartment he maintained in Manhattan; he had a house in New Jersey, but preferred not to commute very far during the school year, while he taught at Brooklyn College. He had a reputation as a curmudgeonly sort, but I found him to be quite the opposite: courtly, gracious, and witty—old-fashioned and thoroughly European in manner and in thought. Our shared interest in French things probably helped, although as a Maurrasien he could not have entirely approved of my admiration for Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux. We sipped tea, continued to disagree politely, and never saw  one another again.

 

Public Morality, and Public Moralism

If some new Daumier sketched an American group-portrait, I would admit the truth in every figure but mine. Vanity precludes confession, except by those proud of their sins. But so, at times, does self-knowledge, knowledge ‘from the inside.’ Daumier means to make the interior external, and he does, partially. Yet after overcoming indignation, shame, wounded amusement—in a word, one’s mortification—could not the dissected-but-unmurdered subject finally see more than Daumier sees? Freed (stripped?) of certain comforting illusions, could the subject rightly insist on some decent truths omitted from the portrait?

Thomas Molnar portrays Americans as they are, partially inside-out. Naïve, utopian, materialistic, self-righteous, hypocritical—those are Americans, all right, the very Puritan/Lockean vulgus itself, confusing moralism with morality as only a nation of ideologues can do. But, I want to ask, is this really me? Unlovable neighbor that I am, do I deserve barely more than a touch of Christian charity, if that? Have I survived, as a type, for some two centuries only by the grace of God or the whim of Fortune” Is there really no balm in Gilead, no there in Oakland?

Professor Molnar properly refers us to the foundations of the American republic, called moral by their admirers, immoral by detractors. Whereas Soviet Marxists employ their stupendously flexible ‘dialectics’ to lure or to whip masses into ideological pens, Americans proclaim “self-evident truths,” which, according to Molnar, prove rigid in practice and questionable in fact. Soviet mythology at least proves workable for the purpose of pretending to justify actions taken for raisons d’état; American mythology is not noble, is not true, and is not even very useful, except for the promotion of commerce. Enunciated by the Founders, “men of serious deliberation, politically free and morally disciplined,” and defended by statesmen (of whom Lincoln remains the highest example), the fragile “truths of the eighteenth century” must eventually fall prey to “new formulators”—unwise, tyrannical, and immoral—who will bury these so-called truths as far from Enlightenment sunshine as are the mortal remains of Jimmy Hoffa.

Professor Molnar’s critique presents us with two paradoxes: first, that men of moral and intellectual virtue could build, then defend, such a flimsy structure; second, that the structure could survive so long—particularly in view of Madison’s accurate prediction, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” A period of two hundred years exceeds the lifetime of the ‘thousand-year’ Nazi Reich, of any Greek democracy, or of any political regime governed by the body of Thomistic theory and practice Molnar names, strikingly, “Catholic realism.” Does the relative longevity of the American republic evidence merely the tenaciousness of ideology and the good fortune of geographical isolation? Possibly it does both. But the thought stubbornly persists, that some considerable, realistic (if not Catholic-realist) perception must have been at work in the founding and perpetuation of the American republic. To find out, one must try to look at the founding ‘from the inside,’ that is, in light of the carefully documented intentions of the Founders themselves, while measuring those intentions against the world we know and the criticisms Molnar advances. For I think Professor Molnar is substantially right but not entirely so, and in matters of this nature the degree of an argument’s rightness decides whether certain evils are sufferable or insufferable, tolerable or intolerable.

Nature Has Written Her Moral Laws

In the Declaration of Independence, men of serious deliberation asserted the seemingly naïve doctrine of self-evident truths. That all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, and that those governments derive their just powers from consent—a proposition that also posits the people’s right to alter or abolish unrightful governments and establish new ones intended to secure unalienable rights: these “truths” had been declared by John Locke in the second chapter of An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government. As Professor Harry V. Jaffa reminds, us, Locke teaches that “nothing [is] more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all, should by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted Right to Dominion and Sovereignty” (II, 4, emphasis added). This scrupulously limited proposition of human equality is evident to natural reason (identical to the “law of nature” [II, 6]), which commands respect for the fundamental moral equality of all human beings and perceives such equality insofar as all men would preserve their lives, and therefore their health, liberty, and possessions.

Two details distinguish the Declaration’s argument from Locke’s. First, the Declaration calls the truths it enumerates “self-evident,” a very different concept to Locke than the inductive reasoning seen above. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke associates self-evidence almost exclusively with what he calls “simple ideas,” such sense perceptions as ‘White is not black’ and ‘A square is not a circle’ (I, ii. 18). Locke clearly distinguishes intuitive from demonstrative knowledge, teaching that there are no self-evident propositions about another being, including another human being. He does not claim that knowledge of natural law is self-evident (IV, 19). This effectively denies the cognitive status of conscience, with obvious implications for Christian doctrine. Whether Locke’s impolitic teaching in the Understanding can be reconciled with the apparent fideism and modern natural law doctrine of the Civil Government (and indeed of some passages in the Understanding itself), may be reasonably doubted by any careful reader. Although Locke occasionally seems to regard moral laws to be as demonstrable as geometric theorems, he never actually demonstrates any; when his friend William Molyneux urged him to produce a system of demonstrated morality, Locke temporized and finally demurred. For our purposes it suffices to remark the extraordinary concision with which the American Founders promulgate a public morality while subtly pointing to the philosophic difficulties, for the benefit of those who know their Locke, by melding Lockean intuition with Lockean demonstration. Whether sincere or merely judicious, this alteration of Locke’s teaching results in a version of Christian conscience.

For Jefferson, “the true fountains of evidence [are] the head and heart of every rational and honest man,” wherein “nature has written her moral laws.” A Christian or Jew can read the Declaration more literally, without Jefferson’s naturalistic assumptions. This moral foundation enables the American Founders to construct a regime that both appeals to and moderates the diverse convictions of a large and heterogeneous people. The foundation is no more a mere “product” of the eighteenth century than is the religious doctrine to which it appeals a mere “product” of the epoch in which it was first inaugurated.

The Founders’ politic understanding of natural conscience provides the ground for the Declaration’s second departure from Locke, the assertion of an unalienable right to pursue happiness. For Jefferson this does not mean the acquisition and enjoyment of possessions. Rather, “good acts give us pleasure,” he writes, tacitly rebuking Locke’s contention that men are naturally asocial. In the Civil Government, Locke emphasizes the moral and political dangers of the pursuit of happiness, piously affirming that human beings are made by God “to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure,” and that each must preserve not only himself but ,”as much as he can,” act to preserve the rest of mankind (II,6). The pursuit of happiness more often will tempt men to suppress the natural rights of others than to affirm them. In the Understanding Locke does associate goodness with pleasure, but in a manner opposite to Jefferson’s. “Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these are indeed innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions… but these are inclinations of the appetite to good, not impressions of truth on the understanding” (I, 2). Human custom, “a greater power than nature,” establishes a system of rewards and punishments, preferably by means of laws, which socializes men by causing them pleasure and pain. Jefferson finds man to be naturally social if not political. For him, moral acts are intrinsically pleasurable.

Although more “optimistic” than Locke, the Declaration does not lack sobriety with respect to the persuasive power of self-evident truths. On the contrary, after the second paragraph’s long first sentence enumerating these truths, the first word of the next sentence is “Prudence.” Prudence counsels no change of long established governments for “light and transient Causes,” a formulation that adds precisely the virtue of prudence to Locke’s earlier version: “People are not so easily got out of their old Forms, as some are apt to suggest…. [Only] a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people” (Civil Government, XIX, 223). In the bulk of the Declaration, the signers enumerate “repeated Injuries and Usurpations” by the British king against the colonies, a list formulated as proof of his despotic intent. Every one of these “Facts… submitted to a candid world”—from the king’s refusal to recognize good laws to his use of “merciless Indian savages” against American frontiersmen—exemplifies Locke’s argument concerning the “State of Nature,” wherein the foundations of human morality may be seen most clearly, but which foundations require subsequent political artifice for their defense. The Declaration does not lack realism, nor does it obstruct political action by moralistic demands. On the contrary, the moral requirements of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and of the Creator-God who instills unalienable rights, cohere with national self-preservation and the defense of political liberty. Morality neither takes the place of politics nor succumbs to so-called Realpolitik.

Not subterfuge and hypocrisy but candor, a stated reliance on divine Providence, and a public pledge among statesmen of their lives, fortunes, and “sacred honor” results from this balanced theory. As for practice, any honest historian can present a dozen failures by the Founders to live up to their pledge, as well as admirable incidents in which they did. Neither the failures nor the successes should astonish any but the naïve. Among the last to be astonished by anyone’s moral shortcomings would be such men as the American Founders, today more generally faulted for esteeming human virtue too little. Theirs is not Catholic realism to be sure, but it is principled realism, despite its acknowledged shortcomings in theory and practice, many of which sharply scrutinized by Professor Molnar. It is neither utopian nor ideological—except insofar as any doctrine other than Catholic realism must be termed utopian and ideological, a thought no intelligent reader of Professor Molnar’s insightful books can lightly dismiss. In this connection, it is perhaps important to note that the great critic of excessive moralism in politics, a moralism said to result in a mixture of utopianism and hypocrisy, is that prominent unfaithful Catholic, Niccolò Machiavelli, in the course of his sometimes bold, sometimes attack on Christianity—Catholic Christianity most immediately.

In his Utopia, the Perennial Heresy, Professor Molnar criticizes Calvinists, including the American Puritans, for confusing arrogant self-divinization with the pious man’s imitation Christi. Politicized, such arrogance yields that worship of the state seen today in “two ideological empires”—American and Soviet—which “resemble each other increasingly in the techniques they utilize and even in some fundamental thinking.” This critique initially of Puritanism, and ultimately of Protestantism generally, stands behind the seemingly contradictory assertion in his present essay, that the Puritan “New Zion” of “newly born innocence” resists “the fact that the state is a necessity rooted in human nature.” The link between statism and the denial of man’s political nature becomes clear in the consequent attempt to idealize, moralize, the state our nature makes necessary. This idealized state—a state animated by moralism—soon becomes intrusive, then totalitarian. The American republic’s Lockean component only “reinforces” or complements this, because the commercial republic depends upon religious, moral, and social “controls” imposed by Puritanism. This incipient state-worship may be seen in Americans’ confusion of a particular form of the state, the republican form, with virtue; Americans falsely believe the republican regime “a fount of morality.”

Because Men Are Not Angels

Whatever Americans may believe, the Founders did not imagine the republican regime to be a source of morality. In the central number of The Federalist, Madison defends the new government’s Constitutional obligation to pay debts incurred by the Confederation, by condemning “the pretended doctrine that a change in the political form of civil society has the magical effect of dissolving its moral obligations.” Unalienable rights may be better or worse secured under a given regime, but they do not originate in that regime, which is a product of human artifice. The claim that unalienable right originate in a regime exemplifies not a doctrine of natural or God-endowed rights but a doctrine of conventionalism. Following Tocqueville, Molnar acutely remarks the commercial republic’s dependence upon the moral constraints religion provides, but the Founders saw as clearly as did Tocqueville the difficulties in “grafting” the natural necessity of government onto the remnants of Puritanism: perhaps the most famous sentence in The Federalist reads, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The corollary might read, “Because men are not angels, and governments consist of men, no government presents us with a paragon of virtue, an ideal-on-earth.” Secularized Puritanism or utopian ideology remains strong in America, but the regime survives because ideology remains subordinate to the realism of the Founders, embodied in their regime. Without such realism, we would have had more than one civil war, with the Union eventually disintegrating mercurially into irreconcilable factions obedient to the laws of ideological chemistry. This has happened to republic in France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Spain, as none of them contained sufficient anti-toxins to ideology. Although its fever at times rises dangerously high, the American republic survives. Professor Molnar has observed that “all utopians follow the same pattern: the liberation of man from heteronomy, from the guidance and providence of a personal God, in the name of autonomy, of moral self-government.” With no guide but himself, eventually “nothing remains in reference to which [man] might say ‘no.'” So far at least, Americans have said ‘no’—’no’ to slavery in the last century and to totalitarianism in this one. As regards fascism and communism, they stood and stand firmer than many European republicans, who more often confuse appeasement with peacemaking.

Professor Molnar identifies an especially virulent strain of ideology when he criticizes Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hans Kelsen for dismissing natural law and for “mak[ing] our laws,” including the Constitution, “hardly more than summations of societal fashions.” This “consensual morality” or rule by “the manipulators of public opinion” derives from Locke, as we have seen but from the Locke of the Understanding, not the Locke of the Civil Government whom the Founders ennobled. That a Supreme Court Justice would abandon natural law for Lockean conventionalism, and that “most people” today do not regard the state as moral because it respects the laws of nature of nature’s God and secures unalienable rights, but because it “pays lip service to the general utopian expectations shared by contemporary western men” who demand such nullities as “permanent peace, guaranteed prosperity, and a vague unification of the planet,” should disquiet any friend of American republicanism. Nonetheless, the latter riposte deserves a response. First, peace and prosperity, and the hop for their perpetuation, rarely fail to please the average citizen of any regime. Even in many bellicose countries, l’homme moyen sensuel hopes the next war will bring him greater security and treasure. Second, few Americans I know expect permanent peace or guaranteed prosperity, although they do hope for them; also, any unification of the planet would need to be very vague indeed to please Americans, many of whom don’t much like foreigners. Third, insofar as utopianism does infect Americans generally, they have departed from the principled realism of the Declaration and the Constitution, by exaggerating the principles and forgetting the realism, rather as all human beings everywhere do.

To this Professor Molnar would reply that modernity makes inevitable the popular discovery of its immoral foundations. Materialism plus ‘Enlightenment’ yield ideology or “state theology,” as the elites who understand modernity’s nihilist foundations lose the prudence of the Founders and corrupt the people with flattery and baubles. Americans see this clearly when they watch contemporary totalitarianism exalt History and Party. They have thus far failed to see, but perhaps will begin to see, that individual freedom and pluralism have much the same character. If you liberate people politically, you set in motion forces that ‘liberate’ them spiritually. The people eventually “determine their own morality” without reference to God or nature. They finally worship themselves. More precisely, they worship their own appetites, abandoning their true self-government, rule by the better angels of their nature. Talmon’s “totalitarian democracy” came to France almost immediately after the Revolution, but even the sober Anglo-Saxon regimes will succumb to it, sooner or later. Perhaps they have already, without knowing it. While totalitarians force men to be ‘free’ of spirituality, republics seduce them. Even a man of Solzhenitsyn’s stature only plays Jeremiah to a nation that has “chosen death rather than life,” imagining all the while it preserves life and pursues happiness. But unlike the ancient Jews, the inhabitants of the New Zion have no place to go.

Qualifying the Argument

For comfort’s sake, it would be easy to dismiss Molnar’s argument. One need only shut one’s eyes to the world around us. Refuting his argument is another matter. I should rather say it must be qualified, beginning with his proferred remedy, which requires a spiritually renewed and politically prudent Catholic Church.

Molnar does not complacently imagine the prompt advent of such a renaissance within the Church. Egalitarian sentiment infects it, too. For example, the “God” of such slogans as “God is love,” “is hardly more than a human artifact,” a product of Lockean consensus-morality operating within the Church itself. “The task of American Catholics is to penetrate the Church with a political sense,” requiring a more-than-political foundation, namely, respect for the hierarchical character of natural and divine law. Only then will the Church be able to act in the secular realm with a sense of orderly spirituality, and of the limits of politics. Professor Molnar might agree that in the meantime, given the surreal character of the American bishops’ recent pronouncements on economics and nuclear strategy, a wall of separation between Church and state does more good than harm except in one major respect, the issue of abortion.

Molnar sees possibilities in the Church’s Catholicity, not in its Americanness. Here we part company. To penetrate the Church with much-needed political sense, American Catholics must draw chiefly upon the political character of their native country, in my opinion. For they have experienced no other. To set any doctrine, even one so cogent as “Catholic realism,” against experience—particularly a seductive experience—will nearly guarantee defeat. Nor is the American character so entirely closed to political sense and even to spiritual deference as Professor Molnar contends. At the beginning of his essay he asks two questions: Is there such a thing as a moral nation? May Americans claim such status? To each he answers with a resounding ‘No.’ But in the two most authoritative statements they composed, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the American founders never claim to represent a morally superior nation. The laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle this people to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth—no less, but no more. The Founders act, it is true, “by the authority of the good people of these Colonies,” but they appeal not to those people and not even to a “candid World” for the rectitude of their intentions; they appeal only to the “Supreme Judge” of that world.

The Constitution they wrote eleven years later does not ignore the need for public and private virtue in the commercial republic, but neither does it depend entirely upon such virtue: Madison established that point in the tenth Federalist. The most prudent American Founders never imagined Americans to be more virtuous than anybody else intrinsically, although some of them (Jefferson and Adams, for example) detested the corruption of European courts and cities. Professor Molnar rightly observes the defects of our people and our statesmen, but he does not give sufficient consideration to our institutions, in whose construction the Founders expended much of their considerable prudence so as to mitigate the admitted defects of the American character. Here they followed Montesquieu’s observation: “In a free nation it is very often a matter of indifference whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason: hence springs that liberty which is a security from the effects of these reasonings” (L’Esprit des lois, I, XIX, 27). American institutions consistently thwart the worst schemes of ideologues, ambitieux, fools, and fanatics—types no less common in America than in other countries, but somewhat less successful here than in many of the others. These institutions give moderate citizens and prudent statesmen the chance to survive, deliberate, and act.

Catholic Realism Today

A Church establishment to guide American government would of course require a Constitutional amendment, and probably an altogether new form of government. Republics animated by religiosity require a spiritually homogeneous population. In practice this means a small population, a small territory. In a country the size of the United States, with its extraordinarily heterogeneous population, a religious establishment would probably require monarchy, or perhaps aristocracy. Such a prospect may well be more Catholic than realistic in the near future. Catholic realism will do better to build on the American foundations, observing St. Thomas Aquinas’s wise teaching, “the purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually.” Even John Calvin recognizes that political government properly instructs citizens in duties of humanity and civility, not in such spiritual objects as piety and service to God. On such common sense foundations alliances with America’s Protestant majority might also be built. The American regime provides the necessary structures and ethos for such alliances.

Modern republics rarely if eve go to war with one another. They were designed that way, conceived by political philosophers and founded by statesmen reacting to the bloody civil wars of seventeenth-century Britain. Those wars formed part of a larger ‘civil war’ within Christendom itself. The Catholic realism of St. Thomas Aquinas might have healed those wounds, had it been heeded. But then as now, realism enjoyed less than unanimous applause. Once well-established, modern republics do resist civil war; the threats to them come primarily from totalitarianism and from their own inclination to complacency toward their enemies. Those who would return to a stronger, perhaps sovereign, Church establishment must weigh the spiritual and political benefits of an end to such complacency against the political and indeed spiritual dangers of the Christian tendency toward faction. Christian realism may have reason to heed James Madison, even as Madison’s heirs have reason to heed Christian realism.

 

2017 Postscript

In his brief answer, Professor Molnar made several main points:

1. Private associations such as the non-established churches in the United States cannot “fill the moral gap” when the state is “deprived of a spiritual authority.”
2. Insofar as the United States has indeed avoided the worst of Europe’s convulsions, this should be credited to “the Anglo-Saxon spirit of compromise” and to “a salutary lack of political imagination”—that is, to non-institutional habits of the mind and heart.
3. “Not men but souls are created equal, and only in the eyes of God.”
4. “Nor did I suggest the establishment of a particular Church….”
5. Nothing can be done to remedy the situation, and “the United States is now torn apart” by “vicious ideologies.”

Taking the central, and crucial, claim first, I reply that Molnar’s argument is incoherent. “Not men but souls”? But what is man, if not an ‘ensouled’ being? Furthermore, it doesn’t take a God’s-eye view to concur, with Locke and every other philosopher before him, that human beings are equal in the sense that they are all of the same species; they are not apes, pigs, or platypuses. As Lincoln pointed out, my fellow human being may be my inferior in intelligence, virtue, and looks, but she has the same right to keep the bread she bakes with her own hands as I do, or as any other man does. Molnar wants to pretend that nature is morally irrelevant, but if God created nature that may well not be so. He treats Adam and Eve quite differently than He treats the trees in the Garden of Eden.

On the importance of ethos in addition to institutions, who denies it? Molnar attributes to me the view that institutions are the only bulwark against moral rot, but that’s not what I claimed.

On the matter of spiritual authority and Molnar’s denial that he suggests “the establishment of a particular Church,” I can only raise an eyebrow. If states need a spiritual authority to prevent them from turning into Leviathans, and if non-‘established,’ civil-associational church institutions will not suffice, what is left other than an established church? It may of course be that Molnar expects no remedy short of the return of the Lord and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth—a view all Christians share. But I rather suspect that a proponent of “Catholic realism” who insists on the necessity of an spiritual authority above the states most likely desires the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in Christendom.

On the observation that America is being torn apart by vicious ideologies, this now thirty-year-old observation could as easily be repeated today, as indeed it could have been repeated in many decades of American life. Our eras of good feeling have been few and far between. And yet here we still are. Can the “Anglo-American” inclination to compromise and lack of political imagination really be the core of such longevity, especially since the United States hasn’t been all that “Anglo-Saxon” for more than a century?