Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

 

“Ethics is inescapable” because human beings “find it impossible to prevent ourselves inwardly classifying actions as right or wrong,” no matter how hard some of us may try. This admitted, problems remain in “understanding the nature and origin” of ethical standards. Objective or subjective? Natural or conventional? Universal or ‘relative’ (to individuals, families, civil societies, regimes)? 

Singer rejects God as the origin of ethical standards. If I say murder is wrong “only because God” said it is, the “God might just as easily have said: ‘Thou shalt kill.'” And if He did, “Would killing then have been right?” If you concur, that “makes morality too arbitrary; but to deny that it would have been right is to assume that there are standards of right and wrong independent of God’s will.” And if you say God is good, I reply that this “implies a standard of goodness that is independent of God’s decision.” Ah, but not so fast, Professor Singer. If one says God is good, and God is God—that is, the ultimate cause of all things, beyond human conventions, human nature and the whole of His creation—then His command is good. His will issues from His goodness and His goodness inheres in His being. Another way of putting this is to observe that every set of ethics has some source of what ‘the good’ is. It might be God, nature, ‘history,’ custom, but whatever it is, it is. If God is God, then if He’d said ‘Thou shalt kill,’ that would indeed have made it right. Indeed, He did indeed sentence all human beings to death.

But Singer wants to philosophize about ethics, to address ethical questions with reasonings ‘unaided’ by divine revelation, not to engage seriously in theology. More specifically, he wants to philosophize about the ethical claims made by the entomologist E. O. Wilson on behalf of ‘sociobiology,’ a subsection of biology that attempts to show the biological bases of human societies, in contradiction to the claim that human societies are entirely conventional. Against this, Singer proposes a rationalist ethics founded on historicist premises. His enterprise overlaps with Wilson’s insofar as both endorse evolutionism, the principal means of ‘historicizing’ nature. In order to do that, he needs (so to speak) to clear God and His revelation out of the way, however implausibly. So, then, what will his rationalist ethics be, and how will it answer the challenge of a biologist who denies that reason amounts to much when it comes to ethics?

Wilson rejects social contract theory, which holds that “our rules of right and wrong sprang from some distant Foundation Day on which previously independent rational human beings came together to hammer out a basis for setting up the first human society.” Supposedly, “we now know that we have lived in groups longer than we have been rational human beings.” This assumes that we were not social and rational at the same time, but Singer is willing to walk with Wilson this far, presumably on the further assumption that ‘we’ began as sub-rational but social hominids. (If ‘we’ began that way, then ‘we’ were not ‘us,’ yet, not real human beings, but again let that pass.)

“So what does sociobiology offer us in place of the historical myth of the social contract?” Since sociobiology accepts the survival of the fittest as the driving force of evolution, it must explain certain forms of social behavior that have endured and even advanced over time as fitter than others. The most obvious problem is altruism. Genes are passed from two individuals to one; only “if a gene leads individuals,” not groups or the species as a whole, “to have some feature which enhances their prospect of surviving and producing, that gene will itself survive into the next generation.” Would this not make individuals with ‘selfish’ genes much more likely to survive than individuals with unselfish, altruistic, especially self-sacrificing genes? (Not necessarily, one might think, inasmuch as heroes who survive their battles might be more attractive mates than cowards who survive those battles, but neither Wilson nor Singer takes that line.)

Sociobiologists explain altruism in natural-selection terms by examining kin altruism and reciprocal altruism. Kin altruism is seen in the fact that parents rate the protection and flourishing of their children higher than the protection and flourishing of other people’s children. (No doubt professors Wilson and Singer have seen this in the parents of their students.) Kin altruism is limited to the love of one’s own. A “genetically based tendency to help one’s relatives” makes evolutionary sense if parental self-sacrifice, and a lesser but still noticeable degree of self-sacrifice on behalf of more distant relatives, protects more individuals than the family loses as a result of self-sacrificial protective behavior. This doesn’t mean that kin altruism is rational or even intentional, only that animals “act roughly as if they were aware of these relationships.” 

Reciprocal altruism, too, may well have evolutionary benefits. We see it in apes, who groom one another, relieving not only kin but members of their small societies of parasites. This gives an advantage to a group that engages in reciprocal grooming “over other groups who do not have any way of ridding themselves of parasites.” In periods of extraordinary stress on all the groups, the healthier and stronger group will more likely survive and prosper. Admittedly, “a group would have to keep itself distinct from other groups for group altruism to work”; indeed, it “would work best when coupled with a degree of hostility to outsiders,” which is exactly what we see in many kinds of social animals. 

Why does any of this matter ethically? For starters, biological evidence shows that Hobbes was wrong about the state of nature as simply a condition of the war of all against all. Human social nature derives from pre-human ancestors. So does logos, or at least the potential for it; apes can learn words in sign language, and dogs can reason (the latter claim awaits a definition of ‘reason’). Although anthropologists correctly observe that ethical codes vary widely from one human society to the next, sociobiologists rejoin that “there are common elements underlying this diversity.” Kinship altruism in the form of mothers caring for children and fathers supporting and protecting families are universal, and attempts to abolish the family, Marxist or other, have failed. Such behavior means that human beings “are led by bonds of natural affection to do what would otherwise fall on the community itself and either would not be done at all or would require labor unmotivated by natural impulses”—an “expensive and impersonal bureaucracy,” in the instance of the modern state. And “the bond of reciprocity is almost as universal” among human beings as the kinship bond, also for reasons evolution can explain. I trust those who help me, and those who help me trust me if I reciprocate; such bonds strengthen the society in which we live, giving it an advantage over any society that fails to establish such bonds. Individuals who violate the bond of mutual trust and (in speaking, reasoning humans) “the concept of fairness” or justice that arises from it will incur revenge, and “personal resentment becomes moral indignation when it is shared by other members of a group and brought under a general principle.” Tribal blood feuds give way to impartial judicature—the theme of a Greek tragedy or two. And logos not only enables human beings to judge impartially but to honor and dishonor their fellows. “If I can talk…I can tell everyone else in the group what sort of person you are.” 

Some of this isn’t altruism but “enlightened self-interest.” But some of it really is altruistic, “behavior which benefits others at some material cost to oneself” and “motivated by the desire to benefit others.” Still, “if one is more likely to be selected as a partner if one has genuine concern for others”—the ‘heroism’ example mentioned earlier, but not only heroism—then “there is an evolutionary advantage in having genuine concern for others,” although of course human beings will still need to separate false altruists from true, a task their ability to speak and to reason will sharpen on both sides of the ethical divide. 

Finally, altruism in families and in social groups can rise to the level of political societies. “The group bias of our ethics in respect to loyalty to the group as a whole shows itself in the high praise we give to patriotism.” Some, including Diogenes the Cynic and some of the Stoics deprecate patriotism as “group selfishness,” avowing loyalty to “the world community.” “Yet patriotism has proved difficult to dislodge from its high place among the conventionally accepted virtues,” which may or may not (sociobiologists allow) mean it has a biological basis. 

Singer cautions that “no ethical conclusions flow from these speculations” about “the origins of human ethics.” ‘Universal’ doesn’t mean ‘good’ and biological fact does not justify itself. There are many biological facts, many ills that flesh is heir to, that we seek to remediate or eliminate. He turns to an examination of Wilson’s claim that “sociobiological theories have great significance for ethics.” 

Wilson argues that human self-knowledge “is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain.” Philosophers in fact “consult” their own emotions when they “wish to intuit the standards of good and evil.” In Singer’s paraphrase, “only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the [ethical] canons be deciphered,” according to sociobiologists. These standards do change as human societies change—a family hut calls for different behaviors than an urban apartment complex—and thus “no single set of moral standards is applicable either to all human populations” or even “to all the different age and sex groups within each population.” Wilson derives three moral conclusions from this mixture of biology and varying social circumstances: the natural law teaching about sexual behavior is wrong because reproduction isn’t “the primary role of sexual activity” and thus homosexuality and the use of contraceptives are licit; attempt to reform behaviors that are really natural (families, for example) will come at the cost of heavy regulation and cost; and a future sociobiologically-based ethics will promote the survival of the species by the preservation of human genes, diversity of the gene pool to avoid the ill effects of inbreeding, and promotion of the universal human rights, which supports the group membership human survival requires. Sociobiology can assist in the achievement of these ruling principles and practices by advancing “new knowledge about the consequences of our actions” (especially their evolutionary consequences), by undermining ethical beliefs that are unnatural, and possibly by “provid[ing] us with a new set of ethical premises or a reinterpretation of old ethical premises” that will replace evolutionarily harmful prejudices.

Singer demurs. “Philosophers working in ethics take little notice of genetics or evolutionary theory,” and rightly so, inasmuch as “the important philosophical questions—like ‘What is good?’—have to be answered before we can use information about the consequences of our actions in deciding what we ought to do.” “Information about the consequences of our actions does not tell us which consequences to value.” Is the human good utility? Liberty? Happiness? Or is Kant right in holding that morality has nothing to do with consequences at all? As an ethical ‘consequentialist’ himself, Singer rejects Kant’s categorical imperative and admits the need for gathering “the best information available” when one considers the means to achieve moral ends. But that doesn’t justify sociobiology’s “dramatic claims about explaining ethics ‘at all depths’ or fashioning a biology of ethics which will do away with the need for ethical philosophers.” (Perish that thought.) 

If biology could discover a natural law undergirding ethics, that would have “an important effect” on philosophy. But “natural law systems of ethics are not widely held outside religious, and especially Roman Catholic circles,” and even if, say, homosexuality could be proved to be unnatural, “obviously there are many things, from curing diseases to using saccharin, that are unnatural but not therefore wrong.” Moreover, “far from justifying principles that are shown to be ‘natural,’ a biological explanation is often a way of debunking the lofty status of what seemed a self-evident moral law.” [1] Singer will return to the latter claim, which is based upon Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ but one might well linger on the slap at religion. Surely no philosopher could claim that ‘widely held’ claims somehow refute claims not widely held, simply because majority rule ought to prevail? Where would that leave ethical philosophers, whose direct influence on public opinion seems slight? 

Concerning the pretension that science might itself provide a new or substantially reformed set of ethical principles, Singer appeals to Hume’s critique of what he calls “the naturalistic fallacy,” the attempt to “defin[e] values in terms of facts.” I can’t “convince people that, say, the survival of the human gene pool is a cardinal value” unless I give them a reason for thinking that it is. Science can’t tell me that. “Facts, by themselves, do not provide us reasons for actions,” although they do “tell me what my options are.” “No science is ever going to discover ethical premises inherent in our biological nature, because ethical premises are not the kind of thing discovered by scientific investigation.” Such premises are chosen, not discovered. “I, and not my genes, am making the decision.” “The mistake made by sociobiologists who think that their explanation of ethics can tell us what we ought to do parallels that of anthropologists who thought that the diversity of morals between societies implies that people ought to follow the moral code of their own society” or, one might add, that no moral code has any basis other than in what anthropologists call ‘culture.’

If so, then on what basis do I choose? It is undoubtedly true that modern science, which describes nature as non-teleological, can find no ethical commands in nature. But even if it cannot find commands in nature might nature not still provide moral guidance? If philosophic inquiry into ethics seeks the good for human beings, would human nature not indicate that good, even as it would tell us what the good is for a dog or for a plant? That is, if I say, ‘Good dog!’ I might mean that the dog is following my command; I would be commanding the dog in a way that might or might be naturally good for the dog. But I might rather be saying that the dog is a good specimen of a dog—healthy, evidently contented under ordinary conditions. Whether the dog ‘wants’ to be healthy and contented is irrelevant to determining whether it is a good dog, although I suppose one might argue that a dog that sought illness and discontent would be one sick puppy. 

Singer makes a further argument about ethical choice itself. “Our ability to be a participant in a decision-making process, to reflect and to choose, is as much a fact about human nature as the effect of the limbic system on our emotions.” This does not imply that we “believe in a mysterious entity known as ‘I’ or ‘the self’ or ‘the will.'” Even if we had “a complete causal account of our behavior,” if “an observer could predict how we would choose,” we nonetheless “would be making genuine choices” because “the distinction between the standpoint of the observer and the standpoint of the participant is ineliminable.” That does not, however, authorize Heidegger and other ‘existentialist’ philosophers to claim that “our choice of ultimate values is simply a commitment, a ‘leap of faith,’ which is beyond any rational assessment, and thus ultimately arbitrary.” Otherwise, Heidegger’s leap of faith to Nazism would be no less justifiable than Sartre’s leap of faith when he resisted the Nazis or (one might well add) that Sartre’s leap of faith to socialist fellow-traveling with French Communism was as justifiable as some other existentialist’s leap of faith in opposing Communism. Leaps of faith might contradict one another, a point which brings the principle of noncontradiction, and therefore reasoning, into the picture. “Unless there is a rational component to ethics that we can use to defend at least one of our fundamental ethical principles, the free use of biological and cultural explanations would leave us in a state of deep moral subjectivism.” Whereas “Wilson’s statements about ethics leave him with no escape from ethical subjectivism, once the impossibility of deriving ethics from biology has been admitted,” it may be that ethical judgments do (might we say, ‘in fact’?) have “a rational component.” “The fact that we choose our ethical premises does not in itself imply that the choice is arbitrary.” 

Unfortunately, Singer does not define reason as thought guided by the principle of noncontradiction. Instead, he defines it as a set of thoughts leading to unpredictable consequences—a process exemplified by the way counting leads to arithmetic. Nature ‘counts,’ in the other sense of the word: “Ethics starts with social animals prompted by their genes to help, and to refrain from injuring, selected other animals. On this base we must now superimpose the capacity to reason.” Kin and reciprocal altruism, discovered to be natural in human beings, becomes refined as language develops and “consciousness” strengthens and is refined. This brings “tremendous advantages in the evolutionary competition for survival” but it also, and crucially, brings with it “something which has not existed, so far as we can tell in any non-human society: the transformation of our evolved, genetically-based social practices into a system of rules and precepts guiding our conduct toward one another, supported by widely shared judgments of approval for those who do as the rules and precepts require, and disapproval for those who do not”—a “system of ethics or morality,” a standard “acceptable to the group as a whole.” Singer carefully refrains from saying that this acceptance itself makes the system right. Indeed, there can be “oppressive customs.” The “readiness with which we bring particular events under a general rule may be the most important difference between human and animal nature.” This suggests that reason, like emotions, is natural to human beings, and it further suggests, although Singer doesn’t say so, that there is such a thing as natural right, even if there is no natural law in the sense of a cosmic order from which human beings ought to take their ethical bearings. 

Socrates shows how ethical reasoning can progress beyond custom. “By the standards of customary morality Socrates was corrupting the youth.” Guilty as charged. “Customary morality cannot stand the scrutiny of rational inquiry which questions the customary standards themselves,” assuming that the customary standards are self-contradictory. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates says, because such a life coherently seeks the good only by accident, and therefore seldom finds or even seeks coherence. “Few of us examine our lives in the Socratic manner.” Socratic questioning requires “a leap into the unknown,” but—and here it differs from existentialism—ever-reasoning Socrates looks before he leaps. This is why Singer defines reason as a set of thoughts leading to unpredictable consequences. He wants to preserve the freedom that choice implies, to allow choice to remain invulnerable to prediction, while also keeping it reasonable. Here is where a historicist or quasi-historicist element enters into his theory. “Reasoning is inherently expansionist” in the sense that “it seeks universal application,” gaining territory, so to speak, from unexamined moral customs from one generation to the next, so long as there is no substantial interruption in the process of transition between generations. Reasoning, then, is ‘evolutionary’ in its own way, whether or not it follows the path of Hegelian dialectic. “Once the limits [of conventional beliefs] become the subject of rational inquiry and are found wanting, custom has to retreat and reasoning can operate within broader bounds, which then in turn will eventually be questioned.” This amounts to a more ambitious form of Socratism, an earnest Socratism, or a more modest form of Hegelianism, one that does not claim to have arrived at the end of ethical reasoning. 

It is reminiscent also of Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. [2] “We can progress toward rational settlement of disputes over ethics by making the element of disinterestedness inherent in the idea of justifying one’s conduct to society as a whole, and extending this into the principle that to be ethical, a decision must give equal weight to the interests of all affected by it,” “disregard[ing] my knowledge of whether I gain or lose by the action I am contemplating.” In this formulation, the problem lies in “interests.” To count ethically, must they not be exclusively good interests—begging the question of natural right, once again.

Singer emphasizes the social character of his ethical system, resisting the notion that “values” (as he calls them, deciding the question in advance) have “objective” standing, by which he means “something in the universe, existing entirely independently of us and of our aims, desires, and interests, which provides us with reasons for acting in certain ways”—whether divine or natural. As to God, He exists independently, all right, but according to the Bible has linked Himself to us first by the act of creation and then by his continued love for us, seen in His care for our well-being. As to nature, if ethical reasoning is part of human nature, and human nature part of nature as a whole, then there must be ethics “built into the very nature of things,” the things that include human beings, that produced human beings, that continue to support human beings (at least for now). Singer is right to say that “values” are “inherently practical,” but the fact that practical reasoning differs from theoretical reasoning does not preclude any connection between the discoveries of practical reasoning and the discoveries of theoretical reasoning. The theoretical discovery of human sociality, for example, evidently “requires me to take a perspective from which my own interests count no more, simply because they are my own, than the similar interests of others.” The nature of things other than human beings would presumably continue to exist if human beings perished, but it would be a somewhat different nature. Would that nature not continue to have the potential to produce human beings, if the right ‘local’ conditions prevailed? This is what Leo Strauss may mean when he writes that the earth provides a “home” for man.

Singer contents himself by adjuring us to “cling to the simpler idea that ethics evolved out of our social instincts and our capacity to reason,” and that the result of that evolution is “the principle of equal consideration of interests,” which depends upon “nothing but the fact that we have interests, and the fact that we are rational enough to take a broader point of view from which our own interests are no more important than the interests of others.” This indicates the influence of democracy or egalitarianism on Singer’s thought, suggesting that his thought inclines in the direction of the regime in which he has lived. Singer recognizes that his thought is democratic, while insisting that democracy is an innate property of reason itself, that “the feeling of need for consistency” or avoidance of self-contradiction universalizes conduct, if left to work itself out unimpeded by force or fraud. 

“Where does this process end?” he quite reasonably asks. It ends not only with liberty and equality but fraternity. The French revolutionaries were right. And so, for example, “there can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard-of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine,” or if the more complex animals are not seen to have rights (“from an impartial point of view, the pleasures and pains of non-human animals are no less significant because the animals are not members of the species Homo sapiens“). To claim otherwise is to commit the sin of ‘speciesism.’ This consideration does not extend to plants, however, as they lack sentience; “there is nothing we can do that matters to them.” In his own egalitarian way, Singer respects the Aristotelian definition of distributive justice: equal things to equals. We may kill and eat oysters and insects, but not cows or deer, which are our equals when it comes to feeling, and fearing, pain. The universalizing process of rational thought ends with rationally perceived distinctions among beings.

Hume would say that such concerns are impotent, that reason is “the slave of the passions.” Speciesism or no speciesism, I am unlikely to forgo filet mignon, topped with mushrooms, my taste clarified by sips of a good Cabernet and topped off with a slice of chocolate mousse cake. Singer prudently takes on a lesser challenge: “the growth of modern contraceptive techniques is a splendid example of the use of reason to overcome the normal consequences of our evolved behavior,” showing “that reason can master our genes.” That is, “there is no reason to believe that we always do what is in our own interest,” defined as satisfying our emotions. “We can therefore go on to consider with an open mind the possibility of rational based altruism,” although the use of contraceptives may not always be the best example of that. “Once reason is admitted to have a role to play in ethics, however, there is nothing at all surprising in the fact that, despite immense cultural differences, outstanding thinkers in different periods and places should extrapolate beyond more limited forms of altruism to what is essentially the same fundamental principle of an impartial ethic.” Doing unto others what you would have others do unto you: God and His revelation are looking better and better.

How, then, do we explain the fact that so many of us act as if the reasons for taking “an objective point of view” do not apply to them? Because Hume wasn’t entirely wrong to say reason is the slave of the passions. “Alone and unaided, reason cannot give rise to action,” as “there must be some desire, some want or aversion, some pro or con feeling with which reason can combine to generate an action.” That might lead to Socrates’ proposed alliance between logos and thumos, ruling the appetites and thereby achieving justice within the soul and the city. But Singer takes the ‘modern’ stance; reason is the slave (Hume) or the scout (Hobbes) of the passions, “a tool for obtaining what one wants.” Nonetheless, “tools have a way of influencing the purpose for which they are used,” as seen in the automobile, invented for transportation from one place to another but also used for recreational driving and exploration. “In the case of ethical reasoning, we begin to reason impartially in order to justify our conduct to others, and then discover that we prefer to act in accordance with the conclusions of impartial reasoning.” There is human nature, but it evolves because we ‘feel better’ if we act consistently. (Well, unless we are Walt Whitman, untroubled by ‘cognitive dissonance,’ otherwise known as self-contradiction.) Socrates would tell Walt that his soul is wrongly ordered and insofar as wrongly ordered, unnatural. Singer cannot bring himself to say such a thing, only going so far as to suggest that Walt would feel better about himself if he gave logical self-examination a good try. Indeed, “the lives of those who have nothing to do but enjoy themselves are much less happy than we would expect them to be if human nature were suited to the unalloyed pursuit of personal pleasure…. Perhaps the boredom and loss of interest in life observable in many of those with no purposes beyond their own pleasure are the result of neglecting this aspect of our nature.” Perhaps so, perhaps so.

Singer concludes by giving sociobiology its due. “It enables us to see ethics as a mode of human reasoning which develops in a group context, building on more limited, biologically based forms of altruism”—evidently by deploying the equally natural human capacity to reason. “The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings,” and “the fact that our ethical judgments are not dictated to us by an external authority does not mean that any ethical judgment is as good as any other,” as we choose “what we are going to do,” even as “we do not choose the way the world is.” It then transpires that “emphasizing the rational element in ethical choice…narrows the gap between facts and values,” as “facts may be relevant” to ethical reasoning, even if they do not determine it. But of course even as Singer resists the thought, the fact of human nature does indeed turn out to be the basis of such reasonable choice.

Another Aristotelian notion occurs to him in the last chapter. What ought to be the ethical code not only of individuals but for human society? The ‘impartial spectator’ standard is important but too abstract to give the specific ethical guidance we need as individuals and as members of civil societies. At the same time, any guidance should remain cognizant of “the realities of human nature.” “Just as city life does not fit into the abstract rational patterns of town planners, so a code of ethics for human beings will not fit the abstract imperative of impartial reason,” as “we cannot pretend that human nature is so fluid that moral educators can make it flow wherever they wish.” On the other hand, although “human nature is not free-flowing…its course is not eternally fixed.” The impartial spectator needs allies among the emotions, and these should be “rules” or (in civil societies) laws designed to foster family bonds, to encourage reciprocity, and to discourage cheating. Such an “ethic of rules builds on our feelings for others as individuals rather than on an impersonal concern for all,” a concern which remains the standard but cannot be said to be self-enforcing. Such rules shore us up, especially when under stress. Singer quotes the American foreign-policy expert Chester Bowles: the Bay of Pigs fiasco showed “how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.” “A social code of ethics needs moral rules for several reasons: to limit our obligations, to make them more personal, to educate the young, to reduce the need for intricate calculations of gains and losses, to control the temptation to bend ethical calculations in our own favor, and to build the commitment to truthfulness which is essential for communication.”

Singer also appreciates the opposite point about rules or laws: just as they helpfully stiffen our adherence to the abstract standard of right, so they can stiffen us too much. The well-known example Socrates mentions in the Republic is entirely valid. Lying is usually wrong, but if an enraged man demands to know where you keep your weapons, you’ll do well to mislead him. “The rules of ethics are not moral absolutes or unchallengeable intuitions” because “human nature and human life are too complex for that.” Here is where Singer should recall Aristotle’s emphasis on prudential reasoning as indispensable for ethics. Prudence or practical reason takes account of the circumstances of time and place. It may ‘tell’ us to violate a law but never the ‘spirit’ of the law, the purpose of the law as set down in observance of the abstract ethical standard or set of standards. 

In sum, “ethics is a morass, but a morass with a definite and explicable shape.” 

 

Notes

1. Singer adds that in addition to biology, historical study can also debunk “accepted ethical practices,” which may be as much “relics of our culture history” as “relics of our evolutionary history.”
2. Oddly, Singer associates the opposite principle to Smith—the principle of egoism, that everything should follow his self-interest. This confuses Smith’s theory of moral sentiments with his theory of economics and its attendant law of unintended (often good) consequences that result from motives that are anything but good, on Smith’s own terms as well as by Singer’s.

 

 

Daniel J. Mahoney: Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022.

 

Mahoney begins by writing, “There is no more fundamental task that lies before us than a self-conscious effort to recover the meaning of politics, civilization, and the soul for this (or any other) time.” By politics he means what Aristotle means: ruling and being ruled in turn, made possible by speech and reasoning about “the advantageous and the just.” Although politics so understood does not reduce to morality, “it is an essentially moral enterprise.” Civilization is “that state of human flourishing where ordered liberty is tied to law and self-limitation, and where progress in the arts and sciences, and in economic productivity more broadly, is accompanied by a sober appreciation of human imperfection and the fragility of all human achievements.” Taken together, ordered liberty, law, and self-limitation amount to self-government, necessary given “the sempiternal drama of good and evil in every heart and soul, and even of the fragility of civilization itself.” As to the soul, neither metaphor nor poetic fiction, nor even (only) the self, that mode of self-awareness or self-consciousness introduced to us by Montaigne, convey its full meaning; the soul is the person within us, the one who “exercises the virtues, moral and intellectual, and that experiences remorse when we human beings act or choose poorly or event inexcusably,” expressions seen outwardly in our face and our speech when “we encounter other human beings in familial, social, and political settings.” “Inseparable from logos,” from speech and reason, it makes both political and philosophic life possible. Each soul forms a character over time, “endur[ing] as we physically age and endlessly metabolize.”

“Why do modern intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers take such pride and pleasure in explaining away their own powers of ratiocination?” As ‘personalists’ not ‘reductionists,’ Scruton and Manent have both resisted this tendency, which rests on the “dogma” that “the Good is absolutely unsupported in the nature of things.” Against that presupposition, they start with the world around us and the need for choiceworthy action that world imposes upon us—the necessity for choice, as Henry Kissinger puts it. Both thinkers agree that care of the soul is “the great imperative”; that to guard the soul’s capacity to govern itself one must (among other things) guard the capacity of one’s political community to govern itself against the forces of ‘globalism’; that this entails a concomitant need to “defend sound practice against bad theory”; that the philosophic thought needed to do that is neither immoral nor amoral; and that, finally, “the wisdom inherent in the Christian religion” remains relevant to the quest for both sound practice and accurate theorizing. 

They differ not so much in principle as in their emphases. “Scruton is more concerned with saving the residues of high culture and civilization and our inherited tradition; Manent with renewing the possibilities of human action and practical reason.” Accordingly, while Scruton titles one of his books Beauty, ranging widely and knowledgeably over the visual arts and (even more impressively) music, Manent titles one of his books Seeing Things Politically. Scruton reads Kant and Burke, Manent reads Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Tocqueville, and Leo Strauss. One is English, the other French (“in this case, an American,” Professor Mahoney, “will do the mediation”). To these distinctions, one should add that Scruton, who thought so seriously about the Cold War and the oppression of nations within the Soviet empire, usually addresses politics in terms of regimes, whereas Manent, who thinks more about the international, not to say imperial, bureaucracy called the European Union, usually addresses politics in terms of what he calls “political forms” or states, political communities as defined in terms of their size and degree of centralization—the small and centralized ancient polis, the large and sprawling ancient empire, the middle-sized and decentralized feudal state, the (usually) middle-sized and centralized modern state, and the federation, which under modern conditions has combined a degree of centralized ‘sovereignty’ with substantial self-government within its provinces. 

No mean personalist himself, Mahoney readily insists that this book is “no merely scholarly study,” as “these two men and thinkers have been very important to me in my own search for a true understanding of politics, civilization, and the soul.” The eminent literary scholar Hugh Kenner advised his students to go and “meet the great men of your time.” Although he never met Kenner, Mahoney has done just that. “I am blessed to count them among my friends.” This is indeed his most personal book, although all of his books have centered on persons, from de Gaulle to de Jouvenel. 

He introduces Scruton as a real Englishman, a man of oikosophia, of the “principled love of home,” albeit with an appreciation of “other peoples and civilizations.” (“I once commented to him that he cited de Gaulle far more than he mentioned or praised another candidate for conservative hero, Winston Churchill.”) He took the trouble not only to meet the Czech dissidents who established what they called their “parallel polis” under Communist rule, and not only to assist them, but to write a novel with the Dostoevskian title Notes from Underground, in which he “got to the heart of totalitarian mendacity” by getting to the hearts of the dissidents committed to living in the truth. Truth is finally what a genuine conservative intends to conserve, whether in his own soul or in his actions, whether individual, social, or political. 

The metaphysical side of Scruton’s conservatism consisted of “reject[ing] every form of materialistic and scientistic reductionism,” taking instead as “the center of his thought” the “life world, the world of concrete experiences where humans came to sight as persons.” Human beings do not present themselves, either to themselves or to one another, as mechanisms determined by physical matter and physical force. It takes some fairly elaborate argumentation to persuade oneself of any thoroughgoing materialism. Rather, at least initially we understand ourselves and others as free and responsible beings—if not “free of all natural and external limitations” nonetheless as incarnate persons. Not for Scruton the “philosophies of freedom” which attempt to liberate humanity from responsibility for themselves and for others. He “affirmed legitimate authority—moral, intellectual, and political—that is the other side of human freedom.” Throughout the circumstances of the Cold War and after the Soviet empire collapsed, he retained a Burkean suspicion for assertions of “human rights” abstracted from the concrete conditions of political life whereby such rights can be secured. This means that a philosopher doesn’t only think. He has his own regime, his own way of life, carrying “a duty to come to the defense of the home and starting point of all incarnate persons.” Mahoney doubts that Scruton’s esteem for freedom conceived in the spirit of Kantian ‘noumenalism’ added much to his own thought, remarking that “unlike Kant…for Scruton there is no absolute and impassable divide between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the metaphysical and the physical.” Scruton consistently held that “human beings are neither matter in motion, brains that are compelled to act independent of human agency, nor noumenal selves who need not respect the requirements of the world around them.” For him, what guides, but does not compel, the human soul is conscience, what he called “a light shining from the center” of each human being, the “‘I’ that does the knowing.”

Pierre Manent, Mahoney writes, “is not only an old and dear friend, but he is arguably the thinker who has had the greatest influence on my own intellectual itinerary.” As for Manent himself, he takes his orientation from Tocqueville and Pascal, coincidentally but aptly the philosophic guides of the late Peter Lawler, another among the trusted ‘friends of Mahoney.’ Add their mutual elective affinities for the thought of Raymond Aron, Leo Strauss, and Catholic political philosophy, and the Mahoney-Manent bond quickly became well established. 

Manent’s conversion to Catholicism had nothing to do with mysticism or emotionalism, but from the reasoned realization that Christianity, in his words, “knew the truth about man,” providing the best account of human nature and of nature tout court, to use a favorite Mahoneyan expression; Pascal really did understand himself, and the rest of us. To “the Christian proposition,” to reasoning about the human spirit, Manent soon added the “political reason,” the practical or prudential reason seen in the writings of Cicero and, under modern circumstances, Raymond Aron. Finally, Manent encountered Leo Strauss’s analysis of politics, political philosophy, and revealed religion, ‘Athens and Jerusalem,’ finding in Strauss not so much a guide as a dialogic partner along his own more Thomistic walk. Manent “sees himself as inside the triangle formed by politics, philosophy, and religion, refusing ‘complete devotion’ to any one of the poles,” motivated as he is by “fidelity to experience in all its amplitude”—a fidelity he shares with Scruton. He finds his own mediator between Athens and Jerusalem not only in Aquinas but Augustine, who offers a vision of “the unity of man, under the God-man Christ.” Christianity “can preserve separations,” against the modern “religion of humanity” which baptizes itself in the “indiscriminate egalitarianism” that makes that unity into a homogeneous blob, obliterating the discriminate affinities between the philosopher and the prophet, the Jewish man of Law and the Christian man of agape. Finally, Manent never despises modern philosophy and its science, including elements of its political science. Christians should resist the temptation Christianity seems to offer, the temptation to “despise the temporal,” as Charles Péguy phrased it—exactly the point of Machiavelli’s attack. But instead of succumbing to Machiavelli’s blandishments, and more in the manner of Strauss, Manent avails himself of “the pagan virtues—honor, courage, confidence in the human capacity to govern oneself in freedom—[which] have been distrusted by Christians who are tempted to see the natural order as already having been definitively transformed by grace” (or, it should be added, polluted by sin). If Christianity supplements itself with adequately defined and refined virtues that uphold political life it can meet the Machiavellian critique. “In Manent’s view, there is a ‘noble risk’ in accepting our liberal ‘temporal order'”—our inheritance from the more modern ‘Machiavellians,’ Locke and Montesquieu) “and bringing Christian conscience and classical wisdom to bear in humanizing and elevating it.” 

After all, the Bible itself reconciles piety and experience. It was a future king of Israel who wrote the Psalms. In them, “Manent finds ‘an experience of something radically different from all human experience but which does not prevent this experience from being lived and described in its whole truth, in its nakedness,'” an achievement Manent considers itself “an argument for the Bible’s ‘revealed character.'” The will of God does not eclipse the will of human beings; it sets loving limits upon it, in the manner of an Aristotelian king, who rules his people for their good, event self-sacrificially. It is not Christianity but the religion of humanity, with “its self-deification of man,” that threatens “republican liberty, with its confidence in man’s ability to govern himself,” by refusing to recognize the natural limits, the definition, of man as man. “The dialectic of magnanimity,” of the finite greatness of the human soul, with humility before the infinite greatness of God, “has marked the West from the beginning and continues to operate, however dimly, within our liberal dispensation.” “The liberal state allows human beings to govern themselves better than they were governed during the long Middle Ages, not to mention under the authoritarian corporatist states in Austria or Portugal upon which the Catholic Church looked with some favor in the year before World War II.” In that effort at self-government, “the Church has something to say about the nature and needs of human beings and ends and purposes of human freedom” guided by conscience. “Modern rights cannot…easily escape the demands or requirements of Christian conscience or the moral authority of heroes and saints.”

Which political form, as distinguished from regime, best enables human virtues scope to form and to act in the modern world? Manent recommends the nation-state, opposing the European project as an attempt to replace politics, ruling and being ruled, “with a non-negotiable règle—a rule-based society dominated by administrative or bureaucratic dictates—that always and everywhere have priority over the will of the people as expressed in democratic election or in referenda about the future of the European community.” Called ‘democratic,’ the European Union does have a kratos but elides the demos. The EU amounts to a pseudo-republic ruling a pseudo-state animated by a pseudo-religion, the Comtian “religion of humanity.” Manent “soberly warns his fellow Europeans that if they completely break the tissue of national time, of national belonging, these longings will take the form of illiberal separatist and religious movements that will be tempted to put ‘communion before democracy.'” Even more immediately, the religion of humanity’s combination of universalism with individual self-assertion, reinforced by the administrative state, weakens the nation-state, which has served as “the great mediator between the universal and the particular, the faraway and the local.” Thinking globally and acting locally cannot satisfy the political nature of human being, any more than a religion without God can satisfy the human need for reverence. Europeans of previous centuries had found themselves “torn by the conflicting claims and authority of the city, empire, and Church,” a quarrel about political forms that required them to make serious choices about “the human type that ought to inspire European life.” Should human beings imitate Christ’s way of life or the Roman way, and if the Roman way, Cato’s or Caesar’s? The principal attempts to resolve this quarrel were the Reformation and Machiavellianism. Mahoney intervenes to suggest that the quarrel itself arose for the reason Tocqueville proposed: that “democracy” or civil-social equality had issued from the Christian dispensation, gradually widening its influence to political and intellectual life. In any event, the question remains: How shall Europeans recover the political practices that best express their nature as political beings?

In the lifetimes of Scruton and Manent, the most radical European radicalization of democracy was attempted in France during the Évènements of 1968. Scruton identified its source in the Paris “nonsense machine,” which reproduced the less-than-thoughtful opinions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. At the time, Malraux classified the ideological passions of the moment as “Freudo-Marxism” and the Évènements themselves not only as an attack on the French republican regime but as a “crisis of civilization”; its longer-standing legacy may be seen in the “obscurantist mix” served up by such subsequent writers as Deleuze and Lacan. Scruton calls this the “culture of repudiation,” really an anti-culture which “transformed [thought] into an instrument of pure destruction” in an attempt “to destroy the remnants of the natural moral law and all authoritative institutions necessary to free and civilized life.” This “sophisticated nihilism”—which, among other things, lauded Mao Zedong’s “violent discourses during the murderous Cultural Revolution”—has been “lauded by academics and literati throughout the world.” [1]

Scruton was not alone in his principled opposition to the New Left. Several distinguished French intellectuals have concurred in his judgment. In his book The Elusive Revolution, Raymond Aron saw the danger to the universities in particular, as students and many of their teachers alike attempted to institutionalize “the new morality” along with “a liberty that has little place for robust non-relativist moral judgment.” Aron’s daughter, Dominique Schnapper, has continued both her father’s critique of this “moral anarchism and facile antinomianism” along with his call for renewed democratic citizenship within “a vigorous and self-respecting nation-state,” bringing “classical moderation to bear on modern liberty.” For his part, Philippe Bénéton addresses the theoretical dimension of the matter, arguing “that we have literally theorized ourselves out of good sense and human decency,” leaving ourselves in need of re-grounding morality in “the human world before us” instead of succumbing to doctrines of moral subjectivism. “The new morality masquerades as a project of emancipation even as it makes its adherents slaves of the passions and of a new, unforgiving intellectual conformism” of ‘political correctness,’ “what Pope Benedict XVI famously called ‘the dictatorship of relativism.'” Or, as Chantal Delsol observes, “we do not rationally establish the moral order,” nor do we establish it irrationally: “Instead, we participate in it.” But it is Manent who sees most clearly what Machiavelli could not foresee. Christianity may have de-politicized the West (although it is more accurate to say that it put politics within a new metaphysical framework). The de-Christianizing of the West that Machiavelli undertook has not finally yielded re-politicization. It has rather accelerated de-politicization, whether in the form of ‘totalitarian’ modern tyranny, the soft despotism of the administrative state, or the dictatorial practices of the ‘post-modern’ Left. Today, the New Left program already begins to weaken itself. Manent tellingly charges that “the French and European political and intellectual class, in its dominant form, will be satisfied with nothing less than ‘an empty world without nations or religions,'” finding itself not only helpless before the advances of Islam but applauding its increased presence in Europe as “a sign that Europeans are truly leaving behind a recognizably Christian world.” Yes, but for a far more rigorous religiosity that rather frowns upon sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. [2]

Scruton responds to this crisis of Western civilization with a good dose of Burke, “defend[ing] a regime of liberty that is conscious of its debts to a civilization that is not reducible to contract and consent alone”—especially, one might add, a ‘consent’ that means mere assent, not reasoned choice. For this defense, libertarianism or (as it calls itself) ‘classical liberalism’ (although far removed from Roman libertas) will not do. He warns, “Like much of the cultural Left, many on the Right have mistakenly come to identify politics with power and domination,” putting themselves “in danger of capitulating to one of” the counter-cultural New Left’s “most destructive philosophical presuppositions.” Against this, “Scruton sets out to recover an older and richer conception of liberty that owes much to conservativism properly understood,” the conservatism which understood “that government is natural to the human condition and reflects ‘extended loyalties’ that connect the living to the dead as well as to the yet to be born,” a set of institutions that can serve as “the indispensable vehicle for mutual commitment and public spirit among human beings who are accountable to each other”—accountable precisely for the enforcement of the abstract rights ‘we moderns’ so prize, rights held both by individual persons against the depredations of government and against one another against mutual depredations—choose one or the other. “In social and political life we are obliged to give an account of ourselves, even as government is obliged to give an account of its doings to citizens.” Nor does real conservatism neglect to guard the well-being of the poor, even as the poor must be held “accountable as citizens and moral agents.” It is this “mutual accountability”—the moral foundation of politics, of ruling and being ruled—which forms “the heart of civil society,” the meaning of what it is to be “civil.” Although Scruton emphasizes the secular dimension of the modern state more than Manent, he agrees that “we must combine a spirited defense of liberty with the spirit of love and forgiveness taught by Christ,” never reducing “our civilization to the defense of a formless liberty that sits complacently over a moral abyss”—a sort of soft Heideggerianism that imagines some inner truth and equality in bureaucratism. 

Against that reduction, Manent argues in “defense of political reason” and on behalf of “the truth of our political nature.” In his 2004 book, A World Beyond Politics? he engages in exactly such political reasoning of the highest kind, political philosophy, doing so politically, reciprocally, by entering into dialogue with Rousseau, Marx, Tocqueville, Aron, and others—thinkers who disagree with one another, making his book “the furthest thing from doctrinaire” because it mimics political discourse itself. [3] He disagrees with many but ‘cancels’ none.

As a Socratic political philosopher will do, he begins where Europeans are, within regimes of liberal democracy. “It is our fate to live in a world framed and transformed by the presuppositions of modern liberty,” with its “foundation of individual consent” where “free and equal individuals…affirm their collective sovereignty and individual rights.” While “emancipat[ing] human beings from old constraints and injustices, even from the idea of an order of command” (“or such is its pretension”), late-modern liberalism especially has “separate[d] human beings, undermining institutions and attachments that gave stability and meaning to human life,” bringing civil societies dangerously close to the state of nature the liberal social contract was intended to get us out of. “The Achilles’ heel of the modern order is its failure to appreciate its dependence on moral contents that predate the formation of the liberal state and society,” including religious principles and nation-states under the rule of law, including laws that ‘constitute’ them, giving them institutional form. “Manent insists that the logic of modern freedom is essentially antipolitical or individualistic,” a logic that necessarily undermines the willingness to be ruled and sometimes (as seen in libertarianism) the willingness to rule, to take responsibility for civil society. Self-government atrophies, even though self-government was one of the principal aims of modern liberalism. Tocqueville had hoped that the remaining aristocrats, men and women who retained a sense of the political, could guide democracy, fearing that instead democrats might find themselves guided, indeed ruled outright, by oligarchs corporate and bureaucratic. The latter, dystopic outcome has prevailed.

To recover, more than ‘reform’ is needed. “For Manent, a serious engagement with the history of political philosophy is indispensable for self-knowledge” for ‘we moderns,’ “since the liberal world was shaped by the modern philosophical solution to Europe’s ‘theological-political problem,'” whereby religion separated from politics “and more fundamentally” private opinion separated from political power, blocking my and your ideas “about the human good” from direct expression in government policy, which limits itself to the defense of “human rights.” In much of this, he follows Strauss, but always refusing “to treat the contemporary world as a mere epiphenomalization of the modern project,” since it also featured, and even today continues to feature, ‘unmodern’ elements, such as the classical and Christian virtues. 

European internationalism has “undermin[ed] the capacity and will of European peoples to make war on each other,” which is good, but it has also undermined their capacity and will to govern themselves within nation-states altogether. Modern Europeans want economic prosperity, humanitarianism, and peace without the trouble of political life, wrongly “perceiv[ing] politics as an external and oppressive imposition” instead of the indispensable means of securing liberty under law. This is a humanitarianism that undermines the human—a point Scruton, too, would expect, given his own distaste for abstractions. “Only in a political order can the different experiences of life learn to communicate with each other and fruitfully overcome their tendency to become ‘the sole immediate and absolute’ criteria of human existence.” In other words, ‘diversity,’ the shibboleth of bureaucrats, cannot be imposed from above—that is, by bureaucrats. Only an inhuman diversity, a diversity limited to such subhuman categories as ‘race’ and ‘gender,’ can be imposed without talking things over. “Liberal humanitarianism promises access to human unity without the intercession of politics,” even as modern ‘totalitarian’ tyranny “promised to restore the political unity of the human race through a ‘superpoliticization’ or overpoliticization.” Manent rejects both extremes.

Morally, in the name of this false diversity, liberal humanitarianism seeks to enforce moral relativism in the name of ‘human rights,’ incoherently attempting to set a no-standard standard. All with no ‘back-talk,’ with none of the “political reason [that] is indispensable for resisting the totalitarian and humanitarian subversion of free political life.” “The emphasis on rights creates an increasingly homogenous world—a world where every institution and claim is beholden to the consent of the individual,” while taking care to limit that consent to the ‘politically correct’ menu of the day. This inclines ‘we moderns’ to esteem choice, but it is a ‘choice’ freed of reasoning, animated by mere will and/or desire, seeking to levitate individuals above “the nature of things,” the reality of our own human being. Manent sees that this intended levitation is in fact a debasement of human nature, with its capacity for reasoned judgment.

Here is where Manent turns from political forms to political regimes. Political forms have their requirements—ruling an empire requires a different sort of ruler or rulers than does ruling a polis—but it is the regime that truly shapes the character of citizens and subjects. When thinking of modernity, “Manent follows both Leo Strauss and Raymond Aron in arguing for the primacy of the political regime,” a primacy readily seen in the twentieth century, with its “triangular conflict between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist regimes and ideologies” making war on each other for geopolitical mastery. Just as each political reform requires a regime, so each regime requires a form. The characteristic modern form has been the nation-state, but Machiavelli’s invention as instantiated by the state’s men suffered from “a crippling ambiguity that led it to repeat the oscillation between liberty and war” that had undermined the polis or city-state. “The nation indeed provided the crucial framework for citizenship or democratic self-government,” seriously compromised by empires and feudal forms alike, “but it was also open to nationalist self-assertion” at the expense of human rights. The twentieth century saw the culmination of such self-assertion, “discredit[ing] the nation” and leading Europeans to suppose that they could end warlike nationalism by constructing “a merely social and economic community.” If nothing else, Mr. Putin has disabused them of that supposition, however temporarily. “Quasi-pacifist, humanitarian Europe remains a prisoner of its fear of war and therefore a victim of its history” as a result of its “irresponsible display of wishful thinking.”

Such a realization might drive them to the opposite illusion, to succumb to the “totalitarian temptation,” in the manner of their grandfathers. Here, Manent draws upon the arguments of Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aron, and Besançon (a longtime friend), all of whom “have emphasized the ideological roots of both Nazi and communist totalitarianism,” roots that readily thrive in the soil of social egalitarianism. Totalitarianism taps into the same passion for economic, political, and social equality as liberal humanitarianism does; if the latter fails, then the former may not hesitate to replace it (with the Chinese communist regime eagerly waiting to do exactly that). The failure of Soviet communism in Europe left “the structural problem of democracy wholly intact.” On the Right, in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Nietzche, Jünger, Heidegger, and their epigoni conspicuously despised the ‘Last Man’ of bourgeois democracy, but often with violent intent; on the Left, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and their epigoni also conspicuously despised the bourgeoisie, but in the name of egalitarianism. This made, and continues to make, the Leftist ideologies “a much more dangerous spiritual temptation for democratic intellectuals,” as consistently seen in their fondness for ‘popular fronts’ with radicals on the Left, their excoriation of radicals and even moderates on the Right—readily forgiving the sins of ex-communists while hounding ex-fascists, American Confederates and other such malefactors beyond their graves. 

Scruton knew the oppression of modern tyranny from the inside, an experience unusual for a citizen of a prominent commercial republic, the one that stood alone for months against Nazi bombardment. He visited Czech dissidents frequently during the last years of the Cold War, writing his novel, Notes from Underground, “to convey the surreality of an ideological regime founded on lies that are simultaneously ontological, metaphysical, human and political (or, more precisely, anti-political).” Famously Vaclav Havel and his friends determined to “live in truth,” standing as witnesses to and against totalitarianism. Scruton’s main character begins his conversion against the false religion when he discovers his late father’s copy of Dostoevsky’s Notes, which enables him “to diagnose his own alienation.” Underground man, Jan, meets underground woman, Betka, and their love affair forms the heart of the story, which includes a clueless U.S. embassy press attaché (“a perfect representative of limitless Western incomprehension about communist totalitarianism”), a dissident organizer of a clandestine reading group who introduces Jan to the writings Czech philosopher and regime critic Jan Patoçka, and a sharp-eyed satirist who mocks Communism as “a new kind of kitsch: kitsch with teeth,” and a priest who makes Patoçka’s teaching, “care of the soul,” real and immediate.

As it happens, Betka’s opposition to the regime is compromised. The regime knows that her grandfather stole the family home in Sudetenland from its original owners at the end of the Second World War; the invading Soviets and their puppets in Prague rewarded him with it because he’d been part of “a brutal and chaotic band of partisans” who had aided the Red Army in addition to plundering the countryside. The episode reminds Mahoney that “finding and sustaining a home worthy of free and responsible persons is perhaps the Scrutonian theme par excellence,” and Betka will never find one; the nearest she comes to having one, the tainted one, is also the nearest thing that any of these victims of modern tyranny find.

There is the home on earth and the home in Heaven. The underground priest “lived by the truth of Christ’s light that is paradoxically revealed in his freely chosen suffering and death” at the hands of the regime. He embodies Scruton’s “three great transcendental features of human experience”: person, freedom, and the sacred. Pavel is especially disgusted by a New York University professor (“with more than passing resemblance to the legal theorist Ronald Dworkin”) whose conception of human rights includes “marginalized groups” with the notable exception of unborn children. The professor’s “soulless conception of human rights, informed by ideological clichés, and bereft of serious moral content, is a portent of a future” in liberated Czechoslovakia, “where human rights are more or less severed from perennial human obligations, from the experiences that give rise to moral and civic responsibility and a truly common world.” At the conclusion of the novel, the narrator remarks, “The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons,” as “democratic mediocrity replaced soulless totalitarianism, an improvement no doubt, but no true ascent of the soul.” Need the ‘open society’ always prove a vacuous society?

Betka turns out to have been a collaborator with the regime who had protected Jan and his mother because she had unexpectedly fallen in love with him. With this, Mahoney turns to his final chapters, on the nature of the human soul.

“Scruton ultimately saw in the face of man an intimation of the face of God.” It has been the effort of twentieth century nihilism to efface God and thereby unwittingly to efface the personhood of human beings. Without God, he argues, the soul’s freedom and concurrent responsibility lose their rightful recognition in public life and souls fall into “a nihilistic voluntarism,” some iteration of ‘the will to power,’ “at the service of fanatical politics.” “To resist this perverse assault on the prerogatives of God, Scruton turned his attention to the imago dei, the incarnate person, who is indeed an animal, a part of the natural order, but in ‘whom the light of reason shines, and looks at us from eyes that tell of freedom,'” however doggedly scientistic theorizers try to talk him out of it. But the scientistic attempt to (in Scruton’s words) “forbid the experience of the sacred” falls short when contrasted with the ineluctable look into the eyes of another, the knowledge of whom no learned description of DNA or evolutionary theory can really capture. Science requires precision and forgives no one who fails to achieve it; the personhood of God and man admits, indeed requires, a touch of forgiveness.

Manent finds in Montaigne the philosopher who shifted the self-understanding of Europeans from the soul to the modern ‘self,’ with profound consequences for political life. For Montaigne, human beings should “take their bearing neither from great models of heroism or sanctity or wisdom, nor from natural and divine law.” “Montaigne asks his readers to eschew self-transcending admiration for others, no matter how exemplary great souls may seem to be,” to eschew also the requirement to repent for sins before any personal or even abstract standard beyond oneself, and instead “to bow before the demands and requirements of one’s unique self, what he calls” (very much in an attempt to wreck Platonism) “one’s ‘master-form.” For Plato’s Socrates, the forms exist outside the soul, which yearns for them; for Montaigne, the ‘self’ is its own form, which may long for material things but rejects the Platonic forms or ideas as fictions. Adjurations to find your own passion, to march to your own drummer (this, from a supposed ‘Transcendentalist’), to sing your own song or at least to take someone else’s song and ‘make it your own,’ all bear the stamp of Montaigne’s “turn to the authority of the self in place of the classical Christian demand to put order in one’s soul in light of the requirements of the Good itself,” deferring “neither to the Word of God, nor to the temptation of a glory-seeking republican political life” while walking “the path of private, idiosyncratic, and this-worldly contentment” according to a sort of post-Christian, post-Machiavellian Epicureanism. Manent judges Pascal to have been right: “Montaigne talked far too much about himself, the only authority he treated as genuinely authoritative,” succumbing to a “deeply solipsistic and even unnaturally antinomian” internal regime which no longer allows “reform, repentance, or conversion” as “sincere or authentic human possibilities.” For his part, Manent rather doubts that Montaigne’s soul, in telling itself that it was only a self, ever quite freed itself “from the drama of good and evil that it constitutive of every human soul.” To Manent, “Montaigne’s account of the self, his self, is, strictly speaking, unbelievable,” his “alluring humanism…far less humane than it [seems] at an initial glance” into his merry eyes. His famous essay, “Of Cannibals,” its lesson of moral/cultural relativism, finally “commands us in the name of autonomy and authenticity to disregard all law, all command, all moral authority,” thus disconnected rights “from any appreciation of the ends and purposes that are inherent in moral judgment and prudential choice.”

For the Christian, the human soul’s natural moral guide, receptive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, is conscience. In his 2019 collection of essays, Against the Tide, Scruton presents an “ample and persuasive (non- or extra-theological) defense of the soul.” “When we respond to another human being, we are responding to an ensouled person and not just a conglomeration of matter-in-motion.” I was talking with a materialist one time, a man who took modern science to have disproved the existence of God. I didn’t attempt to deny his denial, but instead asked him to consider his daughter. Your daughter (she was about ten) couldn’t say much about your biochemical chemical composition, but it would be very odd to claim that she didn’t know you. This means that analysis doesn’t exhaust knowledge, and that makes materialist reductionism inadequate for a full understanding of human nature and of human life. “And how are philosophy or science even possible if the human person as philosopher or scientist doesn’t even exist” in a way explicable by his materialism? Marx’s attempt to enliven materialism with dialectics only “led to a cruel despotism, a systematic assault on the human soul, and a social condition marked by” what Scruton calls “absolute enmity and distrust,” rendering his intended socialism, let alone his communism, unsocial, self-contradictory. 

Manent takes care not to “take his political bearings from theological categories or from revelation per se,” since political forms and regimes have an integrity of their own, as indeed do the human beings who found and perpetuate them. Accordingly, he remains “a philosopher who takes his bearings from reason, from the natural order of things, while being fully attentive to the workings of grace and conscience on the souls and free will of human beings.” Even the comprehensive theology of most Thomists isn’t quite comprehensive enough, as they “read Aristotle’s Ethics in complete abstraction from his Politics.” What is needed is what Manent calls a “productive disequilibrium” among philosophy, politics, and religion, refusing “to let either philosophical reflection or religious devotion get in the way of allowing the ‘simply human perspective’ receiving its full due,” the perspective that forces reason and faith to respond to the concrete situation, the realities of us, now. “Christianity and political philosophy must both begin by maintaining scrupulous fidelity to the ‘real’ as it first comes to sight in human experience,” since “nature necessarily precedes grace in the human experience of things,” even if Creation necessarily preceded what God created—a point we learn not from experience or even reasoning but from revelation. Humanly speaking, “to begin with grace, or the ‘sacred,’ or the transcendent, is to risk obscuring the real.” In this, Manent follows Charles Péguy and Pierre Corneille, who never “pull down the world in order to elevate religion” any more than they pull down religion to elevate the world.

This means that Aristotle’s consummate moral virtue, magnanimity or greatness of soul, can indeed coexist with the Hebrew and Christian virtue of humility before God. A magnanimous soul resents no one, not even the God Who is infinitely greater-souled than any man. Manent aims at “mediation, attentive to the capacious balancing of the genuine goods of life, the city, and the soul and of reason and the Christian proposition more broadly.” In so doing, he understands Strauss’s distinction between the life devoted to reason and the life devoted to the teachings of revelation but does not consider them mutually exclusive if rightly understood. For Manent, “a due respect for the cardinal virtues—courage, temperance, justice, and prudence—must precede every effort to sanctify the world.” He nonetheless shares with Strauss the insistence that “no historical process or ideological constructions can free us from our natural and supernatural responsibilities and obligations.” 

Manent finds “a real, if complicated and somewhat tenuous, relationship to political freedom,” a relationship suggested by Christianity’s character as “anti-totalitarian to the core.” Christ demands that the obligations to God and to ‘Caesar’ run on parallel tracks, not crossing one another but keeping human souls going in the right direction. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church has too often rejected “the pride and self-assertion associated with liberal and national movements,” deprecating the “virile virtues” of “virile citizens” commended by Aristotle and Tocqueville in favor of “the relatively quiescent” subjection seen in “clerical and authoritarian regimes.” Manent nonetheless warns that Christianity has its own distinctive ‘marker’ in our souls. While the Greeks understood how our souls move, he writes, “they knew nothing of conscience.” The virtues of the great citizens of antiquity made themselves visible in their actions, but we cannot see, but only hear, the voice of conscience. The absence of that voice in the ancient regimes “was a defect of real importance,” as it speaks to us “in ways crucial to human self-understanding and to the exercise of moral and political agency” with “a powerful, if indirect relevance to political life.” It might be replied that the nature of the soul itself is invisible, made so only by speech and action, or by a look in the eyes, and that at least one ‘ancient’ philosopher, Socrates, listened to his “daemon,” a being that acted very much like a guardian angel. 

Be this as it may—and Manent’s emphasis remains generally true—he is right to hold that the founders of modern philosophy intended to “expel from their emerging science of politics both Aristotelian prudence or reflective choice and the free will and conscience that ’emerged from the context of Christianity.'” But this attempted turn to realism, to political life as it really is, left human nature, and therefore real politics, far behind. With the dismissal of prudence, free will, and conscience, “human beings lose the tools to understand themselves and the human world.” To reverse this impoverishment of human choice—done in the name of freedom—Manent makes a ‘phenomenological’ recommendation: “a lived engagement with the requirements of reflective choice itself.” Those requirements are, as they have always been, “common sense and common experience.” In republican politics, this means that alert citizens will see, and appreciate, “men of talent and virtue aim[ing] to emulate each other in service to the common good,” putting their “honorable ambition” at “the service of the self-governing city.” Well-designed ruling institutions in that regime will make ambition counteract ambition with ordinary citizens as judges of the ambitious. The problem is that modern republics “have largely severed freedom from action informed by practical reason and civic and moral virtue” by erecting substantial oligarchic institutions in the form of bureaucracies. “It is not a question of statism or collectivism, as some classical liberals and libertarians mistakenly think, but rather the self-government that animates, energizes, and renews a truly free society.” In his later writings, then, Manent comes to adopt the regime emphasis of Aristotelian political science, even as Scruton had done throughout his career.

Against the New Left, inclined to “despise civic loyalty as evil” and to adopt “an ideological Manicheism reminiscent of twentieth-century totalitarianism,” a Manicheism that “is becoming more coercive, more censorious, with each passing year,” Manent and Scruton “reaffirm that authority is not authoritarianism” if aimed at the good of those ruled, and that “the structure of reality” is “not closed to the possibilities of the Good.” Freedom doesn’t justify itself, morally or politically. And the philosophy of freedom is insufficient because it doesn’t love wisdom.

 

Notes

1. For a cogent analysis of an earlier form of nihilism, see Leo Strauss’s 1941 lecture, “German Nihilism” (Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Spring 1999, Volume 26, Number 3. See also George Friedman: The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School, reviewed on this website: “Origins of the ‘New Left'” (in the “Philosophy” section).
2. On this website, the reader may find reviews of The Companion to Raymond Aron, José Colon and Elisabeth Dutertre-Michael, eds. (“Aron Companion,” in “Philosophy” section); Dominique Schnapper: The Democratic Spirit of Law (“The Spirit of Democratic Laws,” in “Philosophy” section); Chantal Delsol: Unjust Justice: Against the Tyranny of International Law (“Is International Law Tyrannical?” in the “Nations” section). 
3. Mahoney points to “Manent’s masterly use” of what the writer Paul Thibauld calls “the art of citation,” whereby he guides his readers to writings that will further their thoughts on the character and merit of political life. It should be added that Mahoney himself is a noteworthy practitioner of that art. On this website, one may find a review of Manent’s Seeing Things Politically (“Manent on Thinking Politically,” in “Philosophy” section) and his La Loi Naturelle et les Drois des Hommes (“Natural Law and the Rights of Man,” in “Philosophy” section).