THE QUEST FOR A CHRISTIAN RES PUBLICA

First, a word of thanks to Nato for this helpful correction:

First, I want to mention that I think Nathanael meant “Foundationalism” instead of “fundamentalism.”

Yes, the epistemological position I was describing is "foundationalism," not "fundamentalism"-- and I was just thinking how unfortunate it was that the term for the position that we "just know" certain things (which I subscribe to) was the same as what often describes the Biblical literalist attitude (which I do not subscribe to). What a relief!

On free will, I wanted to add that my position on free will-- "free will is real, we just know it"-- may seem to cut off debate, but actually, for better or worse, does nothing of the kind. To what extent, and how, can we control our thoughts and feelings? Is forgetting things voluntary or involuntary? Can we break a bad habit just by choosing to? Can we believe something by choosing to, e.g. that there is no free will? (Here my position is paradoxical: I don't think anyone can really succeed in believing this; I might put my view in a deliberately perverse way by saying that we have no free will over whether we believe in free will.) Freud (among others no doubt) exposed that "free association" (e.g. "Name the first thing that comes into your head when you see this picture") is an illusion, and I have seen these impressively illustrated by a hypnotist, who tore a piece of newspaper repeatedly in two, letting a volunteer pick which he would throw away, until there was only one word left. The volunteer read the word, and then he showed a card written beforehand: he knew what the word would be! He knew how to induce in a predictable way what appeared to be freely made choices. This doesn't refute the idea of free will (in morally significant cases) but it certainly problematizes it. "Introspection," as a source of knowledge, is not gratis: it demands care, rigor, and reasoning.

Also, about cognition, Nato claims:

When a computer moves electrons around to calculate 2+2=4, there’s no Platonic “two” or “four” made physical in the computer; all that has occurred is the modeling of logical relationships using physical processes. Nonetheless, the calculation got done, and the logic of 2+2=4 has been successfully reflected in the material world. When huge neural associations cooperatively reflect the same logic, the mind of which these calculations are a part has “thought” of this immaterial mathematical relationship.

I'd substitute the abacus as an example. By moving beads back and forth, an abacus can help a human being to perform calculations. A human looks at the beads on strings and forms a belief concerning numbers. In this sense, arithmetic logic has been reflected in the physical world, but it's easy to understand that the interaction of numerical ideas occurs only in the human's brain. There are no ideas in an abacus. A computer tends to create the illusion of being like a person because 1) we cannot normally observe the physical processes taking place, and 2) whereas patterns-of-beads-on-strings is a different symbolic language than what people use, computers use the same symbolic language people use, namely, shapes (12345) representing numbers. But conceptually, the computer is no different from the abacus: pixel patterns on a monitor contain no ideas, except in the sense that they were created by a person (who does contain ideas) to be read by other people (in whom ideas will be inspired). For that matter, the computer is (for our purposes) no different from the air which transmits sound waves from my mouth to your ear: the air assists physically in the transmission of an idea from me to you, but itself has no mind, no imagination, no reason, in short, none of the features associated with idea-content. We can carry this further. If the air does not contain an idea, do my tongue, my lips, my mouth, my saliva and vocal cords contain ideas when I speak? If not, if they only transmit an idea and do not contain it, do my nerves contain the idea? If not the nerves, what about the brain, the "neural associations?" Or are they, too, like the abacus?

Suppose you walk into Burger King one day and order a Whopper. The person behind the counter takes your money, and then slaps down on the counter a huge, dusty tome, thousands of pages thick.

"What's that?" you ask.

"It's an exhaustive scientific description of the complete contents of the Whopper. It describes the chemical composition of all the ingredients, the direction and velocity of motion of all the molecules in the Whopper, reflecting the different temperatures of different parts, the exact shape of a Whopper in geometrically precise terms down to the last nanometer, the microstructural features of the meat, bread, lettuce, and tomatoes..."

Nato's description of an idea reminds me of this imaginary transaction. Just as the scientific tome is not a Whopper, no matter what's going on in the brain, that is not an idea. Ideas are what you think, and you experience them by thinking them, and learn about them by thinking about them, and neural laboratories and brain-molecules, though possibly interesting in the same way computer science and abacus-study might be, cannot throw any light on what ideas are. None of this is mysterious unless you trip yourself up by insisting on viewing non-material things through a materialist lens. It's a bit like someone who goes to a symphony and insists on imagining that it's a baseball game, and asks "Did they score a home run?" when people applaud after the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth.

But now to the main point I wanted to address. In my first post on Enlightenment morality, I claimed that:

the theories of Kant, Bentham, Mill and other moral philosophers were articulated and disseminated in societies that remained, and which were able to hold together because they were, largely Christian. In the mid-19th century, Christianity was beginning to be eclipsed in the intellectual sphere, but at the level of the populace, the actual rules that motivated the decisions of the masses in their daily lives, Christianity still held sway. When Enlightenment morality began to reach the masses in the late 19th century, the flaws and incompleteness that an intelligent person can rapidly recognize in reading Bentham or Kant were translated into social catastrophes. In the Soviet state, meddling in every detail of life and liquidating all opposition for the sake of the communist utopia in which the greatest happiness of the greatest number would come to pass, we see Bentham's errors writ large. In the Nazi soldier, braving death and suppressing all kind feeling for the sake of Fatherland and Fuehrer, never mind the consequences, we see Kant's categorical imperative discredited through being realized.

to which Nato supplies this apt and welcome counter-point, which I would have supplied myself (or something like it) but for time constraints:

The most parsimonious return volley here is to ask how often actions taken in the name of and ostensibly directed by Christian teachings have turned out to be awful moral catastrophes. The Crusades are a much-ballyhooed member of that vast set (and frequently overstated), but I would also like to point out that people have attempted to justify monarchy, slavery, female thralldom, numerous wars, and even, yes, Naziism in Christian terms. At least frequently these involved distorted simplifications of Christian theology and biblical reasoning, but nonetheless, the people doing the arguing presumably considered themselves to be faithful to Christian truth.

I put my intended opposition to Nathanael’s conclusion more plainly: Soviet socialism is at best a misapplication of utilitarian principles and I reject the claim Immanuel Kant has more connection with Naziism than does Jesus Christ. Nathanael does, however, demonstrate how demagogues can repackage and repurpose originally subtle positions to serve their own ends.

Yes, but. First, the Soviet quest for proletarian general happiness, and the Nazi heroic will, were not just "awful moral catastrophes." They were comprehensive catastrophes-- moral, social, economic, demographic, military, geopolitical, you name it. The "awful moral catastrophes" that have occurred in the name of Christianity do little to undermine Christianity's peerless success as a credal foundation for society, in terms of the major criteria the worlds finds desirable. The saga of the effort to create a Christian res publica has lasted for 2,000 years, and has been a civilizing force of incredible potency.

The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity after (so legend says) he saw, before a battle, a Cross in the heavens, with the words, "In hoc signo vinces." "In this sign you shall conquer." He believed, won the battle, and converted, and converted the empire, to Christianity, but a century later Rome fell after generations of triumphs: the vindication of the words Constantine saw in the heavens was transient. Long afterwards, people debated why Rome fell, and some, such as Machiavelli and Gibbon, blamed Christianity, which raised a lot of hackles since Europeans were all Christians by then. Arnold Toynbee, an Anglo-Catholic historian, seems a bit defensive in his insistence that the roots of the fall of Rome went back to civilizational weaknesses starting long before the Christians took over.

Toynbee needn't have exercised himself so much for Christianity's sake, for by his day there was a raft of ultra-successful Christian states to offset the unimpressive fate of Christian Rome. In modern times, the great empires and nations-- Spain, France, Germany, Britain, Russia, and the United States-- have all been Christian in a sense stronger than merely that their populace is majority-Christian. At a critical formative stage in their history, each of these nations has had a "chosen people" complex, has taken shape in the ecstasy of imagining itself as the
emerging Christian res publica.

For the British, this came in the 1500s, the age of Elizabeth, amidst the enthusiasms of the Reformation and the pressure of defying "papism;" the idea took another form in the Puritan Revolution before dissipating in the later 17th century. Muscovite Russia suddenly began to conceive of itself as "the Third Rome," heir of holy Byzantium as universal Christian monarch, after the Turks took Byzantium in 1453, and this sense lingered for centuries as a "shadow ideology" for the empire. In Spain, religious fervor gradually intensified in the course of the Reconquista; they began to feel themselves the leaders of Christendom in the years after 1492, as the conquest of the New World provided the Spanish monarchs with vast new territories and resources, and the expulsion of the Moors from Granada gave them new security and wholeness at home, just when heresy had appeared in Germany in 1517 that had to be stamped out. France and Germany both inherited the legacy of Charlemagne's coronation as successor of Constantine in 800 (Charlemagne was "Frankish," i.e. sort of proto-French, but the "Holy Roman Empire" shifted to Germany). The French, leaders of crusades, most beloved allies of the papacy, paragons of chivalry, founders of the Gothic school of paintings, source of many monastic movements, formed as a nation in the High Middle Ages; for the Germans, in the time of Martin Luther, when they rose in defiance against the papal anti-Christ in favor of a new Jerusalem.

It is in its moment of maximum religious enthusiasm that each of these nations (except maybe Germany) took shape as nations (i.e. as "imagined communities.") Before the late 15th century, there was no Spain but rather "Spains," Aragon and Castile; France was consolidated in the medieval Albigensian Crusade; in Russia, Moscow was only first among many cities under the Tartar yoke until Ivan the Great and his "Third Rome" ideology; England tended to be one of several holdings of (French-speaking) Angevin kings until the Reformation and the Tudors forged England as a single cohesive realm. The experience of trying to "build Jerusalem" was usually not remembered very well as such, but the national solidarity that emerged from it lingered aftewards. For each nation (except maybe Spain), there is a gap between the climax of the "chosen people" complex and the peak of national power. The British thought they were the chosen people in the 1500s but reached the peak of their power in the 1800s. The Russians imagined themselves "Third Rome" in the late 1400s, and the Schism and Westernization had largely obviated that idea by the time Russia reached the peak of its power in the late 18th century (or, of course, the mid-20th century). The French piety of the High Middle Ages had been compromised by cynical realpolitik alliances with Turks and Protestants by the time France became, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe's leading great power. And by the time Germany was in a position to bid for first economic, then military, hegemony over Europe, vestigial Protestantism was valued in Weberian terms for its effect on work ethic, but no one was trying to build Jerusalem.

The pattern here may be stated: governmental efforts to build a Christian res publica do not succeed but succumb to doubt and disillusionment, but in the process they create nations with the solidarity and dynamism to achieve tremendous power and empire, as no other historical process does.

But of course they fail to establish the Christian res publica a certain kind of critic might answer because states are based on coercion, which Christ disavows. Christianity calls for a very different kind of res publica, not based on coercion, not a state, but based on free will and love.

Good point, and people have thought of it before, not only thought of it, but acted on it. Monasticism became a mass movement in the time after Constantine, in part because many were disillusioned with the way "the world" embodied Christianity, and sought a purer Christianity by fleeing from it. Among the resulting communities was that of St. Benedict, which formed the model for hundreds of "Benedictine" monasteries that spread across Europe. They preserved the classics, scribbling away documents that otherwise would have been lost to history. They preserved literacy at a time when it was really jeopardized. By the 9th century, the Benedictines were almost the only learned men left. They invented the "Carolingian miniscule," which we all use now. They became advisors to kings and emperors, court scholars. Many of the popes came from the Benedictines. They helped keep the structure of the church intact. They achieved much, but their "flight from the world" proved strangely abortive. The Cistercians were an even starker case. The Benedictines had grown wealthy by the 12th century, and men like St. Bernard were disillusioned, and set off for true wildernesses to live simply. As it turned out, this was an excellent method for breaking new grounds. The Cistercians also proved successful agricultural innovators. They fueled a demographic expansion, led a movement of internal colonization, but grew very wealthy, undermining their initial purpose. They fled from the world, but the world followed. In Russia, too, monasticism preserved culture and learning through an age of barbarian conquest, and proved the spearhead for internal colonization, rather more impressively in fact, for the monks played a big role in colonizing Siberia and making Russia the world's largest country today.

Monastic and community attempts to create the Christian res publica have, in short, been extremely successful in extending civilization, but not much in freeing people from the world's cares and corruption.

America is the climax of both trends: we are at once the last and most remote refuge for Christian communitarians seeking to flee the world; and we are the last and greatest of Christian empires forged in the experience of a "chosen people" complex. The Puritans, the Quakers, the Amish, the Mormons, have all played key roles in colonizing new geographic regions; by contrast, commercial attempts to open up such regions have tended to either fail or have much more partial success. Jamestown and Boston tell the story in miniature; Jamestown, founded for profit, is now an archeological site; Boston, founded for faith, is a huge metropolis and a state capital. Later this effort to build the Christian res publica by withdrawal took a political form. The Founders were admittedly not very Christian, but the populace certainly was, and the Revolution came in the wake of the First Great Awakening. As with the others, Christians who fled the world prospered but ended up drawing the world with them; and the political Christian res publica became ultra-powerful but in the process lost much of its Christian character.

A third kind of Christian res publica deserves mention: the Church. As a transformative agent for social morality over the centuries, the Church has been highly successful, with corruption surveys today (Christian countries tend to be less corrupt) serving as only one bit of evidence.

Does the huge success of Christianity as a credal foundation for society, in contrast with Enlightenment morality which leads to comprehensive catastrophe, show that Christianity is true? No, and moreover if all this is a compliment to Christianity, it is an extremely back-handed one. For while these Christian res publicae have achieved tremendous success in the world's terms, whether they have achieved anything in Christianity's own terms is not at all clear. The world values wealth, and Christian societies have proved massively successful in generating it, but Jesus condemned the rich and told his disciples to lay up treasures only in heaven. The world values military power, and Christian societies continue to surpass non-Christian societies militarily by a huge margin, yet Christ said "do not resist the wicked man" and "turn the other cheek." The world values great intellectual achievements and knowledge, and Christian societies surpass all others in scientific achievement, art, philosophy, historical discovery, etc., but Christ said "I thank you, Lord, that you have hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes." The world values outward morality, and Christian societies have proved the best at controling corruption and crime and instilling sexual restraint, yet Christ emphasized an inward morality of intention and good will. So what we are left with is an almost unbearable irony. As a Christian, I'm not sure whether to be pleased with this or not.