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    C. S. Lewis’s Defense of the Miraculous

    by

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Note

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

    The Debacle of the French Intellectuals

    by

    Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals. Terence Kilmartin translation. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001 [1955].

     

    In his introduction to this “great polemic,” Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. sets its political context. In 1955, when the book was first published, Paris was “the central battlefield” in the “Cold War of words” between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Second World War had left Germany, home of many of the defining ideas that sparked the war, politically divided and morally discredited. Not intellectually discredited, however; arguably, Americans, Russians, and the peoples who aligned or refused to align with either of them had been decisively influenced by German philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre was the most famous intellectual luminary in the City of Light, combining Germany’s Marxism with his own doctrine of Existentialism, which he had forged from shards of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Then as now, it took civic courage to go against the prevailing fashions, and it was a good thing Aron had it, since “however minor the consequences may seem to be of what intellectuals in Paris happen to believe,” “the good sense of non-philosophers needs to be protected against bad philosophy even when it goes over their heads, for there are many, especially among the young, who will be impressed with such high-sounding doctrines as existentialism and phenomenology, especially when combined with the moral content and fueled by the passionate hatred characteristic of Marxism”—hatred of the way of life the Soviet Union intended to ruin and replace with its own. The book was still timely when reissued, more than three decades later, and remains timely today because although no one but historians and students of French literature read Sartre, anymore, American intellectual life has become increasingly Frenchified. Marxian ‘consciousness’ has been replaced with ‘wokeness,’ which sounds a lot less clunky to citizens of the great democracy, but the dogmatism of egalitarian grievance remains, and Aron’s devastating critique of it remains, as the American Left once liked to say, relevant. As Mansfield notes, “In this book Raymond Aron revealed the nature of the thinker in this century and, probably, the next one, too.”

    In his foreword, Aron explains that he writes “not so much against the Communists as against the communisants, those who do not belong to the party but whose sympathies are with the Soviet world.” Given the postwar economic recovery, “why has Marxism come back into fashion?”—as it has, in altered form, in the United States of the twenty-first century. Then and there, just as here and now, this fashion “is due more to the unhappy state of the Western conscience than to reasoning about the concepts of class and dialectic” found in Marx. Persuading one’s opponents to feel guilty has always been an effective way of disarming them morally, and thus politically, since political rule stands and falls on moral authority as much as on force. Egalitarianism, mutual ‘recognition,’ ‘intersubjectivity’—much of the jargon remains the same, arguably not despite but because of the ruin of the Soviet empire. What Aron calls “the myth of the Left” remains: “the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction, of evolution toward a state of affairs in harmony with an ideal.” Sartre “continues to see no other road to salvation” for humankind “but that of Socialism,” even when confronted with the mass murders committed by Lenin and Stalin. Similarly, a decade later, the American New Left would idolize Mao, Fidel, Che. Today, having learned from those mistakes on the rhetorical level, Leftists lift up no foreign heroes, preferring to be admired themselves.

    Since the last quarter of the eighteenth century, French politics had been regime politics, that is, a series of struggles not simply over what policies a given regime might pursue but over what regime should rule France, beginning with the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy by the French republicans. The United States has seen such struggles, too: Tories against Patriots, Confederates against Unionists and, less violently, conservatives against progressives. But the French struggles were more frequent, indeed chronic. Indeed, “France is generally considered to be the ancestral home of the antagonism between Right and Left,” an antagonism centered for a long time over religion (the Left being anti-clerical and indeed animated by an atheist form of rationalism) and over the social order (the Left being anti-aristocratic and urban, anti-rural). “The one invokes family, authority, religion, the other equality, reason, liberty.” Nor was the Left itself united. Just when the Third Republic had ended the “internal quarrels of the bourgeois Left” by firmly replacing both liberal monarchism and Bonapartism with a regime of liberal republicanism, it faced a challenge from “the anti-capitalist Left,” the proletariat and its putative spokesmen. Now, in 1955, the Left drinks “a kind of watered-down Marxism,” the effects of which makes them believe that the “disparity between the capabilities of constitutional regimes and the problems they have to face in governing industrial mass societies” can only be met by “sacrific[ing] political liberties for the sake of vigorous action.” In this, Aron observes, Communism and fascism “meet one another in totalitarianism.” Although the communisants themselves shrink from such violence, they hope that the Soviets “will draw nearer to democratic socialism in proportion as ideological skepticism and bourgeois values develop inside it”—what later became known as ‘convergence theory.’ 

    What this means in practice is easy to understand but hard to see when one’s mind is intoxicated by ideology and wishful thinking. In the countries where democratic socialism triumphed, it brought “not liberty against authority or the people against the privileged few, but one power against another, one privileged class against another”; while nationalization or socialization of capitalist industries “eliminates the political which the industrial bosses were alleged to have exercised sub rosa” over czars and elected representatives alike, “the powers which they have been forced to surrender revert to the rulers of the State.” A new ruling class, a new oligarchy, takes over, unrestrained by the supposedly feeble apparatus of ‘bourgeois democracy,’ in those nations where it existed. More, “the reforms of the Left end up by achieving a redistribution of power without either raising up the poor and the humble or casting down the rich and the powerful.” If extended to the Western democracies of the mid-1950s, “the extension of the techno-bureaucratic hierarchy would mean the liquidation” of the complex structures of modern civil societies and their replacement with a state apparatus controlled by the new oligarchs. “The day when society as a whole becomes comparable to a single gigantic enterprise must surely bring an irresistible temptation for the men at the top to be totally indifferent to the approval or disapproval of the masses below.” This has been less so in Great Britain, where the Left is moderate, “born of a secularized Christianity”; “discussion is still possible between Right and Left in Britain.” Not so in France, where Left and Right both indulge in the illusion that something called ‘History’ is ‘on their side.’ Increasingly not so in the United States of this century, although the American Right is far less optimistic, and more closely associated with Christianity, than the mid-twentieth century French Right had become.

    The myth of the Left includes the idea of progress, of ‘History’ defined as the course of events which, like a stream, heads somewhere. In its more radical forms, the idea of progress takes on the violence of rapids and waterfalls, “foster[ing] the expectation of a break with the normal trend of human affairs.” Progress then means revolution, regime change. In fact, “regimes which fall victim to popular uprisings or coups d’état have proved themselves guilty not of moral vices (they are often more humane than their conquerors) but of political errors”; by contrast, “regimes such as those of Great Britain or the United Staes which have survived the onrush of historical change have given proof of the supreme virtue, which is a mixture of steadfastness and flexibility.” As for the socialist revolutions, “like all the revolutions of the past,” they “merely entail the violent replacement of one elite by another,” presenting “no special characteristic which would justify their being hailed as ‘the end of history.'” This hasn’t much damaged the myth of the revolution, partly because it “benefited from the prestige of aesthetic modernism,” which runs on a similar contempt for bourgeois sensibilities. But once again, the appearance is deceptive; the Soviets in reality demand of their artists ‘socialist realism,’ not modernism, whatever Picasso may have wished. Indeed, “there are obvious similarities between the bad taste of the Victorian bourgeoisie and that of the Soviet bourgeoisie of today, equally proud of their material success.” 

    It is true that “the opposition to conventional morality served as a link between the political and the literary avant-garde,” but “there again, I think, the Revolution has been accorded an undeserved prestige: it is wrongly considered to be the inevitable offspring of humanism.” Marx typified the atheism of many nineteenth-century intellectuals, claiming that “Man ‘alienates’ himself by projecting on to God the perfections to which he aspires,” that disillusioned, scientific men “must seek to attain on this earth the perfection which their imaginations have conceived but which still eludes them.” But atheism itself need not revolutionize; it might as easily keep to itself. What leads to revolution is progressivist historicism, Marx’s particular claim about the “dialectic of history.” Sartre retains some of this, but no longer on a rationalist basis. He takes from the writings of ‘the young Marx,’ the Marx who had not yet conceived of Das Kapital, “the criticism of formal democracy, the analysis of ‘alienation,’ and the affirmation of the urgency of destroying the capitalist order.” This non-rationalist neo-Marxism appeals to the France of the dreary Fourth Republic, wherein “a stagnant society and an ideologically-minded intelligentsia” play off one another, inasmuch as “the less attractive the reality, the more the intellectual dreams of revolution” will appeal none-too-prudent minds. “The myth of the Revolution serves as a refuge for utopian intellectuals,” becoming “the mysterious, unpredictable intercessor between the real and the ideal.” 

    To this myth of the Revolution, the Left adds the myth of the proletariat, which it “cast[s] in the role of collective savior” in its imitation-Bible eschatology of the chosen people “elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity.” “The resurrection, in seemingly scientific form, of age-old beliefs has a natural appeal for minds weaned on faith.” Aron respects the origin of the myth without endorsing its novel iteration, asking, “How can the millions of factory workers, dispersed among thousands of enterprises, be the instruments of such an undertaking?” According to the young Marx, it is the severe repression of the workers, their alienation from bourgeois society, that makes their sufferings universal, “makes them men pure and simple,” stripped of the accoutrements, including the illusions, of the bourgeoisie. The problem is obvious: whatever the workers may have suffered in Marx’s time, their mid-twentieth century counterparts now enjoy middle-class wages and ways of life. Today’s worker “is not at all like a universal man but like a citizen of one nation or the member of one party,” and not usually a revolutionary party, at that. To remedy this embarrassment, Sartre follows Lenin. Revolution will require a revolutionary political party to enact it. From this, however, the dilemma of oligarchy once more arises. “The level of salaries in the West depends, one knows, on productivity, on the division of the national income between investments, military expenditure, and consumption, and the distribution of incomes among the various classes. This distribution is no more egalitarian in a regime such as that of Soviet Russia than in a capitalist or semi-capitalist regime.” Worse still, in the Soviet bloc “economic expansion has contributed to the growth of [political] power rather than to raising the standard of living” for the workers, “since the new ruling classes probably do not consume any less of the national wealth than the old.” And the proletariat “has not been freed from the risk of deportation, or from the tyranny of the labor permit” (workers in the Communist regimes could not work at a particular job without State permission), “or from the authority of the managers.” “It is through a kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand that the regime whose authority derives from Marxist ideology has been baptized proletarian.”

    “Finally, in the last resort, the philosophy of the existentialists is morally inspired. Sartre is obsessed by the desire for authenticity, for communication, for freedom.” His is a “verbal revolutionism,” a revolutionism of the head and the tongue, not of the hand. One might say that he has fallen into an atheist version of Machiavelli’s caricature of Christianity, supposedly a religion that distracts the mind from material reality, rendering its followers helpless before any realist. Marx’s denigration of religion as the opium of the people actually applies to the Marxo-existentialism of the French intellectuals. There is even a segment of the French Catholic Church that hopes for a return to Christianity by socialist proletarians; they range their own Church against the intellectuals’ churchiness, one set of priests against another, in the race down the course of events toward socialism. What has actually happened, intolerable to souls in search of drama, is “the dullness of real emancipation,” the rise in living standards produced by ‘bourgeois’ social reformers, whereby “the workers of the West have merely swelled the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie” under the mild if stultifying rule of the administrative state which has swelled thanks to progress, all right: the progress of technology. “The manual worker remains at the foot of the social ladder, not through the fault of capitalism or socialism but through the determinism of science applied to industry.” After Aron and Sartre’s time, it only remained for technical knowledge itself to become a sort of industry, at which point the new ‘post-industrial’ civil society emerged, with its ever more sophisticated techniques of rule. In any event, considering both rulers and ruled, Aron takes a leaf from the book of James Madison: “At the risk of being accused of cynicism, I refuse to believe that any social order can be based on the virtue and disinterestedness of citizens,” whether or not they style themselves as ‘experts.’ While “planning and collective ownership eliminate certain forms of profit,” they do not eliminate “the greed for the thins of this world, in short the desire for money.” This more than suggests that “human nature is not very amenable to the wishes of the ideologists.” And again, as Madison would say: “the division of powers is the prerequisite of liberty,” an instance of ‘formal’ or ‘bourgeois’ democracy the Soviets deprecate. “The suppression of a hereditary aristocracy or a capitalist oligarch still does not change the social order,” fails to bring civil-social equality, “because it does not change the essence of homo politicus.“

    If suffering is the criterion for qualifying for a noble revolutionary destiny, why are “victims of racial, ideological, and religious persecution” not “the chosen of today,” instead of the proletarians? An excellent question, and a generation or two later, the Left would tap some of those grievances, although the races, ideologies, and religions to be liberated, and those to be repressed, needed to be carefully selected for the purposes of socialist strategy. Now as when Aron was writing, “the free societies of the West, where powers are divided, where the State is undenominational, are the real oddities of history. Revolutionaries who dream of a total liberation are heralding the return to the outworn ideas of despotism.” The myth of progressivist historicism stands refuted by its own success and will continue to be refuted whenever and wherever a regime in its thrall gets organized.

    Refutation suggests reason, logic. Unfortunately, the supposed logic or dialectic of history, although demonstrably illogical, appeals less to reason than to sentiment—a quasi-religious sentiment spurring a secularist eschatology which is “more attractive than logical.” As with so many eschatologies, failure is no bar to optimism; indeed, in the minds of the faithful, “catastrophes are transfigured into means of salvation” and the priests of the new religion are deemed infallible, especially by themselves. If capitalism refuses to self-destruct, why, then, the Party will lead the proletarians to victory. “The history of the Party is the sacred history which will lead to the redemption of humanity”; “it cannot and must not make a mistake, since it is the mouthpiece and the instrument of historical truth”; dissenters are heretics, apostates, deviants from the “secular theology.” In Paris, where the Party’s grip extends only so far, Sartre can appeal to the young Marx, who “speculated on the possibility of eliminating the distinction between subject and object, existence and essence, Nature and Man.” But in this he “leaves the realm of rational thought and simply translates into philosophical language the dreams of the millennium or the religious yearning for the end of the world.” In answer to this apocalypticism without God, Aron asks, “Why should not the ‘humanization’ of society be the common aim and task, never fully achieved, of a humanity incapable of eliminating the gap between the real and the ideal, but also incapable of resigning itself to it?” He answers himself: “In vain will logicians remind” the communisants “that a theory which eludes refutation is outside the category of truth.” They have descended into what “I propose to call historicist doctrinairism.” Strictly speaking, one cannot even ‘have faith’ in a self-contradictory claim. I may tell you that I am now holding a round square in my closed hand; you may believe that I am holding something in my hand that I sincerely believe to be a round square, but unless you fail to see that nothing that is logically impossible can be true, you cannot share my belief. Hence the need for the French intellectuals to eschew rationalism, even as they embrace ‘the young Marx.’

    The “idolatry of History” rests on two errors, logically contradictory but psychologically seductive: absolutism and relativism. Absolutism prevails in the faith in “an imaginary moment” in the future in which the ‘classless society,’ and/or the mutual recognition of every person of and by every other person has given “a meaning to the whole” of the course of events. That is, all persons and events now and in the past are relativized to the imagined absolute, the ‘end of History.’  Real history “brings into conflict individuals, groups and nations for the defense of incompatible interests or ideas,” and no one really knows what the outcome will be—only that “every historical cause carries its shares of iniquities.” No one can “discover the meaning of the whole.” To understand history as it is, one first needs to look at the what the persons at the time knew and the regime[s] in which they acted. (“Even if power were the sole aim in politics, it would still be necessary to ascertain the kind of power to which the ambitious politician aspires”: does he want to be the Sun King or the Speaker of the House? One also needs to understand that human conduct “is never strictly utilitarian” but always defined by “a conception of the good life,” a way of life that reflects “an attitude towards the cosmos, the commonwealth or God.” “No society has ever reduced values to a common denominator—wealth or power.” It is rather that enemies of a given conception of the good life find it tactically useful to ascribe venal motives to their opponents. Finally, genuine realism requires some consideration not only of ignorance, injustice, and human motivation, but also of circumstances, of the “education and environment” human beings act within. “The interdependence of the social sectors of or human activities is incontrovertible,” whatever economic or social determinists may contend. “How can it be affirmed a priori or a posteriori that a man’s view of the world is determined by the form of his labor, but that the latter is not affected by the idea of the world which man has formed for himself?” Yet that is what Marx tried to do. This is why “philosophies of history,” whether Hegelian, Marxist, or some other kind, “are secularized theologies.” They assume the eventual ‘rationalization’ of societies at the end of History, but “societies are never rational in the sense in which technology, deduced from science, is rational,” and as long as human beings remain human, they never will be. “Unfortunately, the growth of collective resources and the reduction of inequalities do not change the nature of men and societies: the former remain unstable, the latter hierarchical.” It might be added that even a ‘transhuman’ society would be founded by persons, who conceived of the beings they invented to supersede the mere humans.

    Such an enterprise can succeed only by the implementation of a vision blind to reality itself. We engage in disagreement, in dialogue, argumentation because we sometimes find, sometimes only ascribe a “plurality of meanings” to the same act. This “reveals not our incapacity but the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of reality.” The world itself is “essentially equivocal”; “our understanding is not incomplete because we lack omniscience,” although we surely do, “but because the plurality of meanings is implicit in the object of our understanding.” A duck is a mother of ducklings, an example of a biological species, a main course in a Paris restaurant, and any number of other things. Even if realized, would the “universal State” of Hegel or Marx “solve the riddle of history”? “Yes, in the eyes of those who see no other end but the rationale exploitation of the planet. No, in the eyes of those who decline to confuse existence in society with the salvation of the soul.”

    Does historical success prove what historical determinists say it proves? Not even that. A thriving empire might suffer defeat, a “flourishing civilization” might succumb to foreign invasion. To claim otherwise is to claim the authority of the retrospective view. By what intellectual warrant do I “think up after the event a predestination which the living know nothing of?” Marxian ‘science’ has thus far proven to have known not nearly enough to pronounce such judgments, much less to prophecy so confidently. By 1955, it was obvious that European imperialism was nearly finished, but “does the death of capitalism necessarily follow from this?” In fact, Adam Smith himself regarded imperialism not as the last stage of capitalism but as a departure from it. How is it that “the British working class has a higher standard of living than before the war, in spite of the fact that Britain’s Indian Empire no longer exists”? And was not the Soviet Union one of the last of the European empires? “No one but a crystal-gazer could possibly claim to be able to decipher the riddle of the future.” Insofar as the Western republics themselves subscribe to historicism, they “give some credit to the idea of the inevitable advent of socialism and thus…allow the enemy the conviction that he is somehow in collusion with destiny.” To this day, one hears the Leftist clerisy warn skeptics not to put themselves on ‘the wrong side of History.’ But “on the plane of events, there is no automatic selection which conforms with our moral requirements.” Christians have the sense to expect salvation from God; atheists expect themselves to deliver it. Fanatical in their own kind of religiosity, “the revolutionaries continue to ratiocinate about an inevitable future—a future that they are incapable of describing but which they claim to be able to foretell.” Some of them remain sure enough in their faith to suppose that “the liquidation of the kulaks or the deportation of minorities become mere episodes, painful but unimportant, in a policy aimed at the realization of Reason in History.” “Reason teaches us precisely the opposite—that politics will always remain the art of the irrevocable choice by fallible men in unforeseen circumstances and semi-ignorance. Every impulse towards global planning is doomed to end in tyranny.”

    This being so, Aron concludes by considering the intellectuals themselves, with their much-bruited alienation. Ancient regimes had scribes, artists, and experts—usually jurists or “scientists” or would-be decipherers of nature. In Christendom, artists and experts were often part of, or ruled by, the Church. ‘Intellectuals’ derive from the experts, but they now wield the powers of modern science. “The term intelligentsia seems to have been used for the first time in Russia during the nineteenth century” as a term for university-educated young men who had “acquired a culture which was for the most part of Western origin,” as intended by the reformist eighteenth-century czar, Peter the Great. Their ‘Westernization’ and ‘modernization’ detached them, alienated them, from traditional Russia. At the same time, “they felt themselves united b the knowledge they shared and by the attitude they adopted towards the established order,” making some of them incline toward revolution. The modern intellectual, “the man of ideas and the man of science,” asserts his belief “in Man and in Reason.” As such, he might make “technical” criticisms—recommending reformist policies or new laws—criticisms that can jar against human nature and “the intractable necessities of communal life.” He might make “moral criticisms,” denouncing injustices—criticisms that challenge not only “present society” but “any conceivable society.” And he might make “ideological or historical criticism, which attacks the present society in the name of a society to come” and “sketches out the blueprint of a radically different order,” a stance that tempts him to see no evil in his allies and no good in his enemies, for whom “repression is never too excessive.” In all of this, the modern intellectual can become a rationalist without doing enough reasoning, conforming instead to “the logic of human passions.” As in Russia, so in modern societies generally, “revolutionary situations will always crop up wherever there are frustrated unemployed ex-students.”

    So it is in France, where bright young men proliferate, find themselves the objects of “uncritical admiration,” but are never allowed to wield real power, whether political or economic. The United States goes to the opposite extreme, with the “militant anti-intellectualism” of “American pragmatism.” (“The Soviet Union purges and subjugates the intellectuals, but at least it takes them seriously.”) “Of all Western countries, Great Britain is probably the one which has treated its intellectuals in the most sensible way”—neither valorizing them like the French, despising them like the Americans, or persecuting them like the Soviets. In Asian countries, breaking free from European imperialism, intellectuals nonetheless lean toward Marxism, since Asian capitalists had yet to accede to the humanizing workplace reforms seen in the West and where Western capitalists themselves acted more like the ones Marx saw than they had come to do in their home countries. They often dislike the Soviet Union as much as they dislike America, but ideologically their sympathies lean Left. Insofar as French influence is felt in Asia and in the rest of the ‘Third World,’ it “breeds revolutionaries,” “encourag[ing] the impatience born of the contrast between what is and what should be” to which high-minded, somewhat pampered yet deracinated men so easily succumb. By the mid-1950s, India was attempting to combine the regime of democratic and parliamentary republicanism, which requires patience, with the forward-march mentality seen in Soviet-style ‘five-year plans’ for economic development. China, by contrast, has “reconstituted a hierarchy at the summit of which scholars sit enthroned,” but Marxist-Leninist scholars, “warriors as well as scholars”—again, vocations that evince patience and impatience, under a regime of tyranny. Modern Western intellectualism destabilizes old regimes without the capacity to stabilize the new ones.

    The churches now mirror this political instability. So long as they maintained a strict separation from modernity, they could hold their vocation on earth as holy, as transcending the things of this world. “The ideologies of the Right and the Left, Fascism as well as Communism, are inspired by the modern philosophy of immanence”—of Hegel’s ‘absolute’ rather than holy Spirit. “They are atheist even when they do not deny the existence of God, to the extent that they conceive the human world without reference to the transcendental.” In that spirit, Marxism combines prophetism with its materialism. It has “show[n] us the Party/Church stiffening doctrine into dogma and elaborating an interpretative scholasticism.” Faith has been transferred from the holy God to the supposedly infallible Party; hope inheres no longer in divine intervention but human violence; charity for all sinful humanity has metamorphosed into “indifference towards classes or individuals condemned by the dialectic” (and very often towards much worse than indifference). “Can a durable religion be based on affirmations which are contrary to the facts and to common sense?” As of 1955, Aron could only answer that “the answer to such a question, I fear, is far from being established.” 

    France had already seen a home-grown secular religion, devised by Auguste Comte. Claiming that “theology and metaphysics are incompatible with positive knowledge” and that “the religions of the past [were] losing their vitality because science no longer permits one to believe what the Church teaches,” Comte saw that “the death of God leaves a void in the human soul,” as “the needs of the heart remain and must be satisfied by a new Christianity,” one that “only the intellectuals are capable of inventing, and possibly preaching.” In the gospel according to Auguste, “laws established by science reflect a cosmic order, a permanent order of human societies and an order of historical development.” Within this religion, men will not love the God they no longer accept but the future society that will “open the road to Progress without revolution” and “accomplish Humanity.” Comte thus echoed Rousseau’s call for a new civil religion, aped by the Jacobins’ worship of the ‘Goddess of Reason’—and with little more success, at least in Europe. One might suspect that a similar doctrine got more traction in America, through the influence of John Dewey on public education.

    In Europe, where the triumph of Marxism-Leninism impressed intellectuals more than it did their American counterparts, Communism’s “political attempt to find a substitute for religion in an ideology erected into a State orthodoxy” has enjoyed substantial prestige. Unlike Catholicism, which could adjust to modern scientific discoveries without abandoning its adherence to “unprovable affirmations relating to subjects which are beyond the grasp of human reason”—i.e., divine revelation—the “Communist faith” has not so readily adjusted itself to such discoveries that contradict its dogmas, precisely because its dogmas are said to be scientific. That is, the authority that any political rule entails, but especially modern-tyrannical or ‘totalitarian’ rule, cannot withstand discoveries that contradict the supposed truths upon which that authority is founded. “If the Russian Communist Party sticks to its claim to represent and embody the cause of the world proletariat, it must plunge ever deeper into the mysteries of the esoteric scholasticism,” but “if it renounces this claim, it abdicates completely,” making itself as “bourgeois and boring as the British Labour Party.” This was already beginning to happen in the wake of Stalin’s death, and it turns intellectuals, “sophists rather than philosophers,” into Khruschevs, Brezhnevs—educated men ruling decisively in the name of the incoherent. In Christendom, the Church may have served as an opiate for the people, “help[ing] men to support and to forget their ills instead of curing them,” but being holy, separating itself in principle from the rulers, it “has never given the rulers a free hand.” Scientistic immanence permits so such separation under Communism; the opium of the intellectuals pervades everyone. 

    What should intellectuals not content to be sophists do? Aron recommends taking a stand on the side of the regimes in the Cold War which appear “to offer humanity the best chance—a historical choice which involves the risk of error which is inseparable from the historical condition,” while “try[ing] never to forge the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of his own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere.” Otherwise, “the part of Europe which is still free” might “continue to feel alienated to the point of welcoming its own enslavement.” Most immediately, that enslavement would come at the hands of the Soviets. But in the longer run, “the victory of Communism in China is probably the most significant fact of the twentieth century; the destruction of the family, the building of a heavy industry and a powerful army and a strong State market the beginning of a new era in the history of Asia.” Although Maoism hardly provides a plausible regime model for France, “the climate of the Western universities has rendered students from all over the world susceptible to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine which is not the logical fulfilment but the dogmatic hardening of the progressivist philosophy.” 

    How long will progressivist philosophy remain ascendant? “Perhaps the intellectual will lose interest in politics as soon as he discovers its limitations,” but perhaps not, inasmuch as “men, unfortunately, have not yet reached the point where they have no further occasion or motive for killing one another.” Let us then “prey for the advent of the skeptics.” Skepticism among recovering fanatics might bring them not to nihilism or to its weak sister, moral relativism, but to prudence. ‘Humanism,’ yes, but a humanism that recognizes both the grandeur and the misery of humanness. For Aron, then, ni Marx, ni Jesus, ni Sartre, mais Montesquieu.

    An American who read The Opium of the Intellectuals when first published would have seen the future, and that it didn’t work.

     

     

     

    Corruption and the Constitution

    by

    This essay was originally published on the Constituting America website, August 7, 2023.

     

    Corruption means rottenness—disintegration caused not by external pressure but by some inner flaw. Political corruption occurs when a ruler, responsible for the country’s good, the good of the citizens, instead uses his authority to obtain a private benefit—something that seems good for himself, his family, his friends. Distrust and faction then weaken the body politic.

    There is also a form of corruption that can occur not for private gain but for the aggrandizement of political power. The accumulation of executive, legislative, and judicial power in the hands of one person, or of one set of persons acting with a unitary will is, as Thomas Jefferson once wrote, the condition of tyranny—in effective, the privatization of public authority.

    At the Constitutional Convention, the American Founders knew what corruption was. They had read the Bible, which had taught them that corruption begins with the human heart, that sin persisted in each of them, however they might succeed in suppressing it. Each man was properly wary of the American people, his colleagues, and himself.

    They had declared independence from the British Empire, a monarchic regime which had elevated political corruption to a routine practice, a way in which government ran. British monarchs exerted control over Parliament, the supposedly separate legislative branch, by offering key members positions within the royal administration, positions members could hold while continuing to sit in Parliament. The Founders saw a similar form of corruption in George III’s rule over the American colonies. Amongst the “the long train of Abuses and Usurpations” designed to reduce the colonists to the status of subjects under an “absolute Despotism,” we find: “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries,” and “He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.” Such patronage bound public officials to the monarch, putting them at his service, turning them against governing for the good of the people governed.

    George III was no anomaly. “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree,” James Madison warned, at the Convention. Corruption being ingrained in every human heart, the Framers of the Constitution never supposed it to be limited to regimes in which one person or a few persons ruled. Elected representatives in a democratic republic might engage in corrupt or tyrannical rule as readily as tyrants who call themselves kings or oligarchs who call themselves aristocrats. The small republics, the states whose people they represented at the Constitutional Convention had seen any number of such incidences. And the states, delegates agreed, were highly “democratical.”

    In late June, the delegates were considering the legislative branch—instantiated by law in what would become Article I of the Constitution. How shall the members of the House of Representatives be paid? And will they be eligible for appointment to the executive branch? Money and power: indispensable to any government, the purpose of which is to secure the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also potentially the means of corruption, whereby the instruments of public good might be diverted to the acquisition of private wealth and aggrandizement.

    When it came to paying Congressional representatives, all agreed that they should receive, in the words of one delegate, “adequate compensation for their services.” But who should pay them? To avoid the corruption that might creep in if they set their own salaries, some delegates argued that the states should determine them. Edmund Randolph of Virginia disagreed, arguing, “If the States were to pay the members of the National Legislature, a dependence [upon the States] would vitiate the whole system.” More specifically, Madison observed, this would make Senators “mere Agents and Advocates of State interests and views instead of being the impartial umpires and Guardians of justice and the general Good.” Alexander Hamilton concurred, distinguishing between “the feelings and views of the people” and “the Governments of the States,” as the latter might well be unfriendly to “the General Government.” Since “the science of policy is the knowledge of human nature” as it is seen in ruling and being ruled, and since such knowledge tells us that “all political bodies love power, and it will often be improperly attained,” state legislatures ought not be “the pay masters” of federal officials.

    These arguments prevailed. Indeed, the state legislatures were to select the members of the United States Senate anyway, giving the state governments substantial influence on Congressional conduct. Control over pay would have extended states’ control to the House of Representatives. Article I, section 6 stipulates that “Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertain by Law—federal law—and “paid out of the Treasury of the United States.”

    George Mason of Virginia expressed no concern about corruption in the form of salaries, but corruption itself worried and disgusted him. He had also become increasingly concerned about the ability of the states to defend themselves against encroachments by a newly empowered federal government, which, he worried, might ruin the states by corrupt means. When the question of making Congressional representatives ineligible for executive branch offices during their terms, and perhaps for a year after leaving office, he rose to say, “I admire many parts of the British constitution and government, but I detest their corruption.” Citing “the venality and abuses” of the British regime, he described the disqualification of Congressmen from executive offices as “a cornerstone of the fabric of the Constitution” and “the cornerstone on which our liberties depend.” Though mixed, the metaphor was ardently raised, for, whether offices are filled by the executive, as in Great Britain, or by the legislature, as in Virginia (“many of their appointments are most shameful”), “it is necessary to shut the door against corruption.” If legislators are allowed to take executive offices, “they [might] make or multiply offices, in order to fill them”—precisely what George III had done in North America. Mason identified ambassadorial post as a rich field for such bestowals, as there are many small and obscure countries where a Congressman might find himself and his wife elevated to high and remunerative positions in exchange for a few votes on important national matters. Exactly this practice explains why “the power of the [British] crown has so remarkably increased in the last century.”

    Against this, proponents of dual officeholding—in particular, James Wilson of Pennsylvania—maintained that disqualification would prevent good men from serving their country to the fullest extent of their abilities. Elected representatives are likely seen by their fellow citizens as men of virtue and ability. “This is truly a republican principle. Shall talents, which entitle a man to public reward, operate as a punishment?” In reply, Mason deprecated the thought. Can such men not be found outside Congress? Or, if Congressmen leave Congress for executive branch positions, are no good men available to replace them? “If we do not provide against corruption, our government will soon be at an end, nor would I wish to put a man of virtue in the way of temptation.”

    Although he opposed Mason on the larger question of empowering the federal government, Hamilton sided with him here. “Our great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.” But “our prevailing passions are ambition and interest.” Therefore, “when a member [of Congress] takes his seat, he should vacate every other office,” whether in the state or the federal government.

    For his part, Madison disagreed with his future collaborator on The Federalist. Without the possibility of dual officeholding, he claimed, it will be hard to recruit qualified men for Congress. Further, disqualifying members won’t disqualify their cronies, so corruption will occur, anyway.

    The majority of delegates found Mason and Hamilton persuasive. Article I, section 6 thus reads, “no Person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House during his Continuance in Office.” To prevent legislators from creating new federal offices or raising the salaries of new ones and then quitting Congress to occupy one of them, “no Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which is elected,” be appointed to any such office (emphasis added).

    But who shall appoint executive officeholders? If not the legislators or the president, and surely not the Supreme Court justice, then—who? Mason did not say. But his argument leaves only the states to perform this task. Mason had earlier argued that state legislatures’ election of U.S. Senators provided one means of self-defense for the states. In his mind, state legislative control of executive branch appointment might have been another, even as control of salaries had been, in the eyes of delegates who later joined him in becoming Anti-Federalists. If so, the notion went nowhere, and the delegates eventually split the power between presidential appointment and Senatorial approval.

    The argument over political corruption thus went well beyond the moral objection to corruption itself—ingrained in human nature, to be sure, but also susceptible to rational discipline and tempering. Corruption raised the overall question the delegates addressed, the question of the structure of the American regime. A republic, if you can keep it, Mr. Franklin famously said. But how to keep it? In shaping a government strong enough both to represent and to rule the people, to secure their unalienable rights and not to undercut them, the Framers sought to set down institutional barriers that would impede corruption, without pretending to remove it from the human heart.