How does a Conservative differ from a Secularist? – Part 5 (Order and Mystery)

American conservatives are, generally speaking, interested in conserving the American institutions of secular democracy. As such, there are some similarities between conservatism and secularism. There are also differences aplenty, as I’ve covered in the prior four posts.

While not all conservatives are religious, conservatism does defend the religious tradition as more than just an interesting relic that ought to be preserved for its historical significance; conservatism views the sacred to be just as relevant to society and Truth as the secular. To the conservative, what is sacred and what is secular are not inherently in conflict but are both essential ingredients to human flourishing. The previous posts have largely centered around the insufficiency of a secular worldview. In this final post I’d like to turn to two ways in which sound religion enriches society: namely, a structure for ordered liberty and a dash of mystery.

Ordered Liberty

As was discussed at length in the Can America Survive without Christianity? Saving Elephants podcast episode, secular institutions are not self-sustaining. It is true that the Founding Fathers developed the American system of government to operate independently of religious supervision or intertwining. But they (apart from Jefferson) did so recognizing that the American public was largely religious and entrusted that we would carefully balance the secular enterprise with our sacred traditions.

Ordered liberty—a system that respects the rights of the individual while possessing enough authority to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak—provides us with many benefits. But it does not provide for every human longing. For, while secular liberalism makes societies rich with material goods and physical safety, it cannot give us a higher sense of purpose. And humans are purpose-seeking beings.

“As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality,” wrote the twentieth century’s prominent poet T. S. Eliot, “The term ‘democracy,’ as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike—it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

Conservatives are sometimes accused of possessing a sort of alarmist attitude about society’s inclination towards the extremes of fascism or communism. Yet even a cursory study of the history of the last century would suggest that people living in liberal democracies are oddly susceptible to the sort of radicalism that leads to these evils. Conservative thinker Russell Kirk foretold the resurgence of such extremism with the loss of religious tradition in the last century:

“Now it appears to be that twentieth-century collectivism is in part a reaction against doctrinaire liberalism, and in part the natural consequence of that system of thought. The spiritual isolation and the decay of a sense of community which accompanied the triumph of liberalism cannot be endured long by any people. Love lacking, compulsion is employed to hold society together. And the materialism of the Marxist is only the logical culmination of the materialism of the doctrinaire liberal.”

Liberalism—which seeks to liberate the individual from all constraints—may ultimately undo associations of family, faith, and community that individuals need to flourish. And when all that’s left are the individual or the collective, the majority will choose the collective. A free society, meanwhile, demands order. But where does society get its sense of order? “Religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort,” wrote British statesman Edmund Burke, who is largely regarded as the father of modern conservatism. But how is religion the basis of order? G. K. Chesterton—yet another British thinker—provides us with an explanation of how this came to be:

“The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, ‘I will not hit you if you do not hit me’; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, ‘We must not hit each other in the holy place.’ They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean.”

“Men’s passions are held in check only by the punishments of divine wrath and the tender affections of piety,” argued Russell Kirk, “The sovereignty of God, far from repressing liberty, establishes and guarantees freedom; authority is not the antagonist of liberty, but its vindicator.” It is certainly true that much evil has been done in the name of religion. And it is true that not all religious doctrines are of equal value or soundness. Yet the absence of religion has yet to produce a society of ordered liberty. And a free society that rids itself of religion will soon rid itself of order and liberty.

The Transcendence of Mystery

Russell Kirk scoffed at the systems of rational ideologies of the past century. He firmly believed that something greater than reason was necessary to hold any human construct together: “All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided.” The utilitarian ethic of the greatest good for the greatest number may sound appealing enough in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice; because human beings are creatures with not only a body and mind, but also a soul that demands nourishment.

What feeds the soul? Creeds, community, religious tradition, cult, and the like. We have a need for the mysterious—something that transcends our mortal circumstances. Kirk believed in the importance of myth. “We live by myth. ‘Myth’ is not falsehood; on the contrary, the great and ancient myths are profoundly true…A myth may grow out of an actual event almost lost in the remote past, but it comes to transcend the particular circumstances of its origin, assuming a significance universal and abiding.” A myth may be sacred or secular. The history of most nations—and America is no exception—are steeped in both religious and secular lore. Yet, here again, we do not have lasting, compelling examples of a purely secular myth sustaining a civilization. It often can’t even sustain an individual.

While some have found solace in some variation of secular humanism or stoicism, most humans—across cultures, around the world, and in every moment in history—have pointed to their religious faith as the true source of comfort in times of suffering. Indeed, the secular worldview is particularly vulnerable to suffering. “In a society without religion, we see emerging a kind of contagious hardness of heart, an assumption on every side that there is no tragedy, no grief, no mourning, for there is nothing to mourn. There is neither love nor happiness—only fun,” observed British philosophy Roger Scruton, “In such circumstance, the loss of religion is the loss of loss. But for conservatives that is not the end of the matter. Western civilization has provided us with another resource, through which our losses can be understood and accepted. This resource is beauty. The features of Western civilization that have made loss such a central feature of our experience have also placed tragedy at the center of our literature. Our greatest works of art are meditations on loss—every kind of loss, including that of God himself.”

Beauty, like myth, is a form of mystery; something that transcends the here and now. As a specialist in the field of aesthetics, Scruton knows a thing or two about the mystery of beauty. “The haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry—these things have made the pure encounter with beauty a rarer, more fragile and more unpredictable thing for us,” he laments, “Still, we all know what it is, suddenly to be transported by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation.” This transporting—this transcendent experience—is woefully lacking in the secular realm but is bountiful in the sacred.

And it’s not just beauty that’s hard to spot in a world scrubbed of the sacred. “Knowledge, love, and beauty cannot endure in a world that acknowledges only Nature,” insisted Kirk, “They have both their roots and their consummation in God, and people who deny God must lose both the definition and the appreciation of knowledge, love, and beauty…Men who endeavor to reduce religion to matter-of-fact morality, or elevate science to the estate of a dogmatic creed, have shut their eyes to the sources of wisdom that distinguish civilized men from primitive beings.” Those who haughtily rely on their own wisdom to learn all they need to know are bereft of the enriching power of mystery.

“Culture arises from the cult; and that when belief in the cult has been wretchedly enfeebled, the culture will decay swiftly. The material order rests upon the spiritual order,” taught Russell Kirk. We have no record of a stable, free society that arose from purely secular means—of a society whose myths and lore excluded the sacred in exchange for the secular. “What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society’s affliction is the decay of religious belief. If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose. The high necessity of reflective men and women, then, is to labor for the restoration of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine.”

Looking Behind as We Press Ahead

In all this talk of the importance of religion to society (to say nothing of the individual) I don’t want the reader to mistakenly assume that the mere belief in the importance of religion is sufficient. The religious tenants must be believed in themselves. For any religion that is followed chiefly out of some sense of what benefits it might provide is no religion at all. I cover this in detail in my How Valuable are Your Values? series, so I won’t belabor the point here.

While the conservative and secularist have some things in common, the conservative—religious or not—will always go at least one step beyond where the secularist is comfortable in insisting on the importance of religion for the individual and society. For this reason, the secularist is ill prepared to address our root problems. When you reflect on the state of our culture—our entire civilization—do you see us as ascending or descending? Do you see our continuous secularization resulting in a restoration of beauty and hope and purpose and altruistic generosity? Do you feel that American communities—be they communities in general or your own community—is doing better in this enlightened age than they faired only a few generations prior?

The secularist may rightly recognize that America is heading in the wrong direction but have little more to say beyond the tired ideological prescriptions. The conservative spirit looks back as it presses forward. Not back to a place of regression and oldfangled superstitions, but back to the answers we’ve inherited from our ancestors’ ancient secular and sacred wisdom.

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Gov Mike Huckabee and Pathetic Millennial Weaklings

A recent study claiming 3 in 5 Millennials believe life to be more stressful than ever before has garnered no small amount of attention this week. This is the sort of clickbaity study that often serves to perpetuate small-minded prejudices instead of illuminate. That’s to be expected of the ill-informed that infest social media. It shouldn’t be expected of our national leaders. But, alas, we live in increasingly stupid times. Former governor of Arkansas and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reacted to the study over Twitter by sharing the following with the world:

Let me say right off that I bear Huckabee no ill will. I had not heard that his wife was battling spinal cancer when he was twenty and attempting to pay his way through college. That’s terrible. But his comments display a certain level of generational bigotry that’s unbecoming of a former governor and aspiring national leader. Unless Huckabee has joined the Get Off My Damn Lawn party, he’d do well to remember no one generation is inherently any better or worse than any other—it’s what they make of the circumstances they’re born into. Now, on its surface, both Huckabee’s comments and the survey seem to suggest that Millennials are a bunch of pathetic weaklings whose lives are so unbelievably privileged that they’ve had to invent reasons they’re stressed out.

I have no doubt this is true of some Millennials—just as it could probably be said of some people in all generations. But when large swaths of a generation (3 out of 5, if the survey is to be believed) report that their lives are unduly stressful, might it warrant some deeper reflection than to merely dismiss the entire lot of us as crybabies? Is it at all possible there’s something more going on here than an inexplicable increase in the number of spineless wimps roaming amok?

What’s Wrong with the Survey

In my humble opinion, the survey does a disservice by attempting to chart Millennial stressors on some kind of peculiar top-twenty listing (which includes such laughable entries as “arriving late” and “washing dishes”). Those aren’t the causes of stress so much as various factors that can exasperate a person who is already exhausted. I can imagine a young Mike Huckabee being very stressed over arriving late to class because he had to stay behind to wash the dishes if he were also caring for a wife with cancer. The dishes aren’t the problem, it’s how they pile on to the problem.

This approach is also unlikely to provide any insight into unique circumstances that cause much stress. For example, if one of the respondents said their stress was mostly due to losing their car keys and taking care of a dying loved one, which of those two things do you suppose would most likely be paired up with another respondent’s answers? The list of (seemingly) trivial complaints are things we might all have in common and, therefore, make it appear these are the only worries Millennials are facing.

What the survey gets right—perhaps unintentionally—is found in the opening paragraphs:

“The survey also pointed to numerous causes of the frustration for this young segment. Many feel their overall stress level is caused by the accumulation of daily micro-stressors—seemingly trivial experiences—such as being stuck in traffic, waiting for appointments, or various smartphone issues.”

To truly diagnose the root causes of Millennial stressors we need a sociologist, or a social commentator, or a mental health professional, not a top-twenty stressors survey. I am none of the above. And, doubtless, there are numerous and complex reasons for a reported increase in stress that I am unqualified to explain. With those qualifiers in mind, however, I’d like to offer a few suggestions.

Do We Have It Better Than Prior Generations?

Millennials have come of age at a remarkably paradoxical time in our nation’s history. In some ways America has never had it so good—the world’s only superpower with an economy and military that rivals all others. In other ways, not so much.

Noah Rothman—who I had the pleasure of interviewing for the podcast earlier today—wrote about the oddity of political violence in the United States in his recent book Unjust. “Those who engaged in violence in 2016 and 2017 were born in the most fortunate period in the safest and most stable country mankind has ever known. They were born into stability and relative prosperity, regardless of their personal circumstances. Unless they have migrated from elsewhere, most have never known organized, state-supported political terror. But they have nevertheless romanticized political violence and, to some extent, welcomed it.”

This is hardly descriptive of Millennials as a whole, but it begs the question why do some born in conditions so good turned to violence? Much like the question of why our generation is reporting more stress than ever when our elders scoff because we’ve never had it so good.

I believe at the root of much of this lies the unprecedented alienation, loneliness, and loss of genuine community. Never before have the institutions of faith, family, and community been as shattered and maligned as they are today. Our material capital may be doing well, if we overlook the fact we’re buried in debt—another great source of stress. But our social capital has depleted considerably more than any generation past. And that matters.

Huckabee’s Social Capital

Huckabee pointed out the stressors in his life when he was our age—having to pay his way through college while taking care of a loved one with a life-threatening illness. But what part of that has anything to do with the generation he was born into? Do Millennials not have to pay for college? Do they not care for sick loved ones? I’ve done both—and those pesky dishes have been a great source of stress during the ordeal.

I hope—for Huckabee’s sake—that he had plenty of social capital to draw on in those dark days. I hope he had friends and family willing to drop by and help where they could by lending financial support or taking care of the little things so that he could get a break or just by being a listening ear. I hope he found peace and comfort in his faith tradition where likeminded worshipers came together. I’d like to think he went into that crisis with a thick layer of institutional fortitude.

But these are luxuries unattainable to far too many Millennials. And, even if they have a network of family and friends to fall back on in times of trouble, there is still a powerful sense of alienation that accompanies our cold, digital world.

The Loneliness Epidemic

The evidence of a growing loneliness epidemic and the beginnings of societal upheaval have been well documented in recent years in books such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, Timothy Carney’s Alienated America, Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West, Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, or Senator Ben Sasse’s Them. In their own way, each work tells the sad tale of a world of growing social tension and animosity caused by societal, cultural, technological, and spiritual alienation. It’s perfectly understandable Millennials would feel stressed—even if they have trouble identifying the roots of their stress.

None of this is meant to be an excuse for weakmindedness. Each generation has its unique challenges—some greater than others. Each individual within their respective generation must learn how to deal with those challenges. The challenges that face us may be more nebulous than the challenges that faced prior generations—which makes it all the easier for people like Huckabee to dismiss us as lazy, spoiled whiners. And, in many ways, we have the misfortune of welcoming in a new age of digital transformation that will likely exacerbate these conditions—making it hard to put into words on the front end what exactly the true source of our stress is or what to do about it; not to mention the added bonus of our elders’ unwillingness or inability to understand our plight.

But we shouldn’t dismiss so easily those 3 in 5 Millennials who report their lives to be more stressful than ever before. Even if this is an exaggeration, it’s also an indication that there’s something there. The conservative views all generations as linked and equally valuable. We have much to learn from our elders, even as we forgive them for their lack of patience with us.

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Episode 26 - What's so Positive about Negative Rights?

Is healthcare a right or a privilege? As the Democratic party swings Left, more and more Americans—Millennials in particular—are growing comfortable with the idea that we have a right to healthcare. Not to mention free education, food, shelter, and a host of other things.

But before we can even hope to have a productive conversation about these things, we must first address some fundamentals: What is a right? How do rights differ from privileges? Where do rights come from? What is the basis of a right?

Traditional conservatism has long distinguished between what we might call negative rights and positive rights. In its most basic form, a negative right is the right to enjoy things that are yours by virtue of you being born or earning property. They are called “negative”, not because they are somehow pessimistic, but because no one has to do anything for you to enjoy these rights. Your right to exist and do what you will with the things you’ve earned and possess requires no government bureau. Nothing is required of anyone save that we leave each other well enough alone.

A positive right, on the other hand, is a claim to something such as access to healthcare, food, or shelter. A positive right requires that someone give you something. Your “right” to healthcare means someone else must pay for your healthcare and provide you whatever services your “right” entitles you to.

But what is the basis for our rights? Do negative and positive rights share the same basis and are they equally valid? Are they simply favors doled out by a benevolent government that wishes its citizens to enjoy good things? What happens if negative and positive rights conflict? Who should win out? And who gets to decide? Joining Josh once more is frequent Saving Elephants guest Bob Burch to discuss these very important issues.

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How does a Conservative differ from a Secularist? – Part 4 (The Age of Reason)

Secularism has historically put science on a lofty pedestal. Indeed, some secularists go so far as to ascribe to scientism—the belief that genuine knowledge of reality can be obtained through the scientific method of observation and experimentation only. I dealt with scientism in Part 2 and Part 3. But not all secularists believe in scientism. Many secularists would rightly say that science alone is not the only window we have to genuine knowledge. Personal introspection, reasoning, logic, and philosophical inquiry can also do the trick. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to reduce these alternative methods to one word: Reason.

Are reason and science sufficient for acquiring knowledge? Can they sustain a society of ordered liberty? Can they provide us with a moral code rivaling religious doctrine? Can they fulfil humanity’s desire for the transcendent? Can they answer our deepest questions? The secularist says “yes” the conservative says “no”.

The Age of Reason

In the eighteenth-century, the Western world began questioning the mysticism and religious superstitions that were a hallmark of much of the Middle Ages. This new Age of Reason is much celebrated as a turning point in Western advancement. And it certainly is true that the Age of Reason brought much welcome progress.

But it has also brought new maladies on humanity. The Age of Reason brought forth an explosion in human innovation and discovery from penicillin to the microchip. New developments in political and social thought led to the rise of the free market, the Industrial Revolution, and the American Revolution. But the Age of Reason also spawned the French Revolution and a plague of ideologies from fascism to communism. Where reason was tethered to a cultural backdrop of sound religious faith and respect for tradition it tended to do well. Where it was divorced from those things it radicalized. For reason alone is a terrible thing indeed.

“Reason does not impel our impressions and our actions; it follows them,” wrote Russell Kirk. What then compels us? C. S. Lewis taught in The Abolition of Man that it was either the belly (our appetite) or the chest (our conscience). In fact, the proper role for reason was to govern our base appetite or—as Lewis put it—"the head rules the belly through the chest”. Our capacity to reason isn’t what makes us human. Rather, are capacity to reign in our appetite (which may require reasoning) is what makes us more than animals. Reason alone makes us nothing more than clever beasts. Reason alone is a vice without the virtues of faith, morality, humility, and imagination to go with it. Let’s examine each of these four:

Reason without Faith

These days, the notions of faith and reason are often pitted against one another, as some sort of cosmic cage-match between competing ideas of Truth. Some are careful about providing too many reasons for their faith just as others are cautious about putting too much faith in their reason. This was not always so. “The very concept of ‘faith’ has been redefined and has now replaced reason,” explained philosopher and theologian J. P. Moreland. “Today, faith is choosing to believe something in the absence of evidence or reasons for the choice. Faith used to mean a confidence or trust based on what one knows.”

Faith is not the enemy or opposite of reason. Faith is the foundation for reason. We might know that science can teach us about reality. But that knowledge is only good if the mechanisms of science (observation and experimentation) actually comport to reality. Logic is no better, because logic can only tell us about the rules within a system and not whether the system itself is true. “You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it,” observed English writer G. K. Chesterton.

The rules of logic work just as well with fantasy as with facts. It is not certain beyond all doubt that logic is “true” any more than it is certain reason is “true”. Chesterton contended that where religion was gone, reason would soon be going. For both religion and reason were made of the same basic material: That is, they are both means of proof that cannot themselves be proven (without appealing to religion or reason).

The point here is that there is a grave temptation to believe that one is capable of fully relying upon reason without having to acknowledge that what we are actually doing is taking a leap of faith that there is any connection whatsoever between our thoughts and reality. There is a connection between our thoughts and reality; but that connection is something we believe in as a matter of faith and not as some brute fact. Denying this, we risk denying the very ground that supports reason in the first place.

Reason without Morality

“It was assumed that since modern individuals were rational moral agents, rational philosophy could be relied on to come up with a code that, if not identical with religion’s, would be sufficiently congruent with it that the practical moral effect would be the same,” wrote Irving Kristol in describing this secularist mindset. “From Immanuel Kant to John Dewey, that had been the basic assumption of secular rationalism, and it gave rise to the modern quasi-religion of secular humanism. Such a philosophical enterprise, it was believed, would converge on what John Dewey called ‘a common faith’—a faith in the ability of reason to solve all of our human problems, including our human need for moral guidance.”

Despite this faith in reason alone, secular efforts have yet to produce a moral guide that can hold a candle to many religious traditions. For, while some have successfully applied philosophy alone to bolster a virtuous life, philosophy has yet to produce a moral code that’s had the same mass appeal as religion. “Philosophy can analyze moral codes in interesting ways, but it cannot create them,” continued Kristol. “And with this failure, the whole enterprise of secular humanism—the idea that man can define his humanity and shape the human future by reason and will alone—begins to lose its legitimacy.”

It’s not that those who have endeavored to provide for a “common faith” or a moral guide using reason alone have had nothing of value to say. Rather, it’s that the fruits of their labor do not reach human beings in the same way a machine does not benefit from reading Shakespeare. “Practical knowledge leaves man in torment,” wrote Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind. “The heart is not reached through the reason.” A moral guide based purely on reason cannot have lasting effects because morality is chiefly about what we ought to do or not do; and reason doesn’t compel us, we compel reason. While reason plays a role in answering questions such as is this morally right?, answering the question isn’t the same as obeying the answer.

Reason without Humility

“Liberals postulate the supremacy of human reason…and hold Christian humility in contempt; they believe fatuously in the natural goodness and infinite improvability of man,” wrote Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind. Humility is hardly a teaching unique to the Christian faith. But Christianity does caution against the belief that we can get by without it.

In the Bible, the Book of Proverbs—a compilation of ancient Hebrew wisdom—frequently and forcefully weds humility to wisdom and pride to folly. Reason alone may make you knowledgeable, but it will not make you wise. And knowledge without wisdom is about as useful as a currency without a market. Knowledge is of little use without the discretion of knowing when or how to use it.

Before the Age of Reason people may have had less knowledge about the natural world, but that does not mean they had less wisdom. It was not that it simply never occurred to our ancestors to give reasoning a try as opposed to conspiratorial groupthink or blind faith in the local priest. Rather, our ancestors recognized an inherent weakness in reason divorced from ancient wisdom that may not be readily or practically “testable”. As Irving Kristol put it:

“Modern conservatism found it necessary to argue what had always been previously assumed by all reasonable men: that institutions which have existed over a long period of time have a reason and a purpose inherent in them, a collective wisdom incarnate in them, and the fact that we don’t perfectly understand or cannot perfectly explain why they ‘work’ is no defect in them but merely a limitation in us.”

Yet the Age of Reason would soon turn appeals to ancient customs and religious teachings on their heads in place of a more enlightened approach. It is true religion can lead people to do and believe many foolish and terrible things. But so can reason. And reason divorced of sound religious doctrine stretching from ancient times until today is in greater danger of leading to folly. Without the humility to recognize our own limitations—by which I mean both the limitation of the individual and of an entire generation—we are in danger of ignoring the guardrails left to us. As British philosophy Roger Scruton put it:

“In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions…those who adopt them are not necessarily able to explain them, still less to justify them. Hence Burke described them as ‘prejudices’ and defended them on the ground that, though the stock of reason in each individual is small, there is an accumulation of reason in society that we question and reject at our peril.”

Reason without Imagination

As was noted above with Russell Kirk, liberals are prone to elevate humanity’s capacity for reasoning. Conservatives look to imagination. “[Conservatives] trust in the controlling power of the imagination,” wrote journalist Paul Elmer More, “These, as I analyze the matter—the instinctive distrust of uncontrolled human nature and the instinctive reliance on the imagination—are the very roots of the conservative temper, the lack of imagination, if any distinction is to be made, being the chief factor of liberalism and confidence in human nature being the main impulse of radicalism.”

In Part 2 I noted that it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that adding one and one gets you two and that an apple tree only grows apples. But imagination points us to an even higher truth. For it tells us that one and one can never get us seven, but that pears or even unicorns could grow from an apple tree. Imagination allows us to see where reason is limited, and where faith begins.

“Our world drowns in information, facts, bites, noise, opinions, and other particulars,” wrote professor Bradley J. Birzer, co-founder of and senior contributor to the apply named The Imaginative Conservative. “Yet, even the best of our students have the most difficult time connecting one thing to another. It is myth that allows us to transcend the immediate and the ephemeral. Just as the chest connects the head and the heart, myth connects the immediate fact with the eternal. Myth gives the eternal immediacy and the immediate context.”

Lockean liberalism—the system of government bequeathed to Americans by our Founding Fathers—is a secular enterprise. But it was not given to a secular people—at least not initially. Some secularists may claim to have found solace for their spiritual yearnings outside of religion. Since I cannot know for certain what is in their heart and minds, I won’t argue that they are mistaken. But it has not been demonstrated that an entire society or nation/state or culture can find the same once they’ve departed from their religious heritage.

The cult cannot be divorced from the culture without devastating effects. The benefits—the necessities—of religion on a culture are paramount yet subtle. And those benefits are where we’ll pick things up in our fifth and final post in the series.

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Episode 26 - Urban Conservatism with Avi Woolf

Conservative thinkers from Russell Kirk to Irving Kristol to the Founding Fathers have, at best, cast a wary eye towards cities. And across the country today, Leftist safe havens are often found in dense, urban areas. Does conservatism only thrive in small towns? And, if so, what does conservatism have to say for city life? Should conservatives abandon cities in hopes of a renewal of rural America? Or might there be a way to forge a path that both respects cities as cities and cultivates traditional virtues?

Joining us from Israel is Saving Elephant’s first international guest, Avi Woolf. Avi is a translator and editor whose work has been published in Arc Digital, Commentary, National Review, and The Bulwark. He is chief editor of the online Medium publication Conservative Pathways, and hopes to help forge a path for a conservatism which is relevant for the 21st century while not abandoning the best of past wisdom.

In a four-part series appearing in Arc Digital, Avi laid out a detailed blueprint for how conservatism might be applied to cities. A true conservative, Avi cautions that, while a “thin” understanding of conservatism might provide some value to cities, what’s sorely needed is a robust conservatism that seeks to restore institutions and communities in our urban centers. To do this, Avi recommends focusing on four broad conservative principles:

Opportunity –Removing regulations and increasing opportunity for all city residents to live where they want, work how they want, learn where they want, and thrive as they wish.Social Pluralism – Embracing real diversity, of the sort conservatives fight for in universities, where atheists and fundamentalists, family values people and social libertines, and Americans of all kinds live together, find ways to get along, learn from each other, and work for the common good.Community – The approach of conservatives in city government should simply be this: Get out of the way. No forced development lumped on people unequally, but also no to zoning barriers and rules that prevent people from moving around. Let—and even encourage—people to find ways to move around, to form bonds, and to create community. If they need some material assistance, that’s fine—but at their request, not top down.Tradition – For too long, we have effectively given up on the idea of cities as places with a “sense of the sacred” and the eternal, in every sense from customs to silly jokes and accents to history. We need to change that. Instead of places mired in presentism and opportunity solely for this generation’s residents or visitors, we need to think more carefully about creating cities which truly embody the covenant between the dead, the living, and the unborn that Burke spoke so highly about.

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How does a Conservative differ from a Secularist? – Part 3 (Cogito Ergo Sum)

In Part 2 I began to argue why scientism—a belief generally associated with secularism—is unreasonable. Scientism is the view that genuine knowledge of reality can be obtained through the scientific method of observation and experimentation only. While I listed several reasons why we should be suspicious of this view in Part 2, I will tackle one of the most compelling reasons in this post: your self-awareness.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Cogito Ergo Sum (“I think, therefore I am”) may well be the most recognizable phrases from the field of philosophy. The idea behind cogito ergo sum is that it would be impossible for us to doubt our own existence because the act of doubting implies we exist. And, while musings on whether or not we can doubt our own existence might strike you as reason enough to never get into a conversation with a philosopher, this bit of seemingly useless trivia carries with it an important corollary: if we know we exist because we cannot doubt our own existence, then we have managed to obtain some knowledge using something other than science.

While the phrase itself was popularized by French philosopher René Descartes, he was hardly the first to come to the realization that our self-awareness provides special insight into the nature of reality. Nearly 1,200 years before Descartes, St. Augustine employed a similar argument:

"But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubts come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ought not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything."

Personally, I prefer Descartes’ concise “Cogito Ergo Sum”.

Knowing Requires a Knower

While the scientific method can provide us knowledge, there is some knowledge it cannot provide. How do you know you exist? Philosopher and theologian J. P. Moreland offers a thorough explanation in his book Scientism and Secularism:

“Whereas a description of a physical object (state, process, property, relation) must be completely relayed from within a third-person perspective, using commonsense language (e.g., being solid, large, located near the door, at rest) or the language of the hard sciences (has negative charge, has mass, is a neuron, is a synapse, is a calcium ion), descriptions of a state of consciousness require an approach from within the first-person point of view, and the nature of these states cannot be captured using physical language. How do you know what consciousness is and what its various states are? You know this by having those states (e.g., being in pain) and by simply attending to them through first-person introspection.”

In order for us to know there must be a knower. The statement “something that does not exist is thinking” is meaningless because the act of thinking implies existence. “Brain states can occur without conscious states occurring as they do in us,” continues Moreland, “But mental states necessarily have an owner, a self that has them. Since something is true of mental states that is not true of physical states, they aren’t the same thing.”

Your self-awareness isn’t limited to a physical state. Science can give us powerful insight into what is happening in our brains but not what is happening in our minds. The brain is physical, the mind is not. And, as we covered in Part 2, science isn’t equipped to guide us in the nonphysical. Science can tell us all sorts of interesting things about certain sensations (such as pain) and how it impacts our bodies and brains, but it cannot sufficiently explain what pain is. That knowledge comes through experience only. A machine may be designed to mimic these sensations to such an infinitesimal degree that no human could tell the difference, but that doesn’t mean the machine would be capable of feeling pain. The most important element of pain is what it is, not what it does.

Even if we were plugged into a Matrix-style reality where everything around us—from inanimate objects to other people—were nothing more than a figment of our programed imagination, that doesn’t take away from the fact that we exist, that we are aware of our existence and ability to experience sensations such as pleasure or pain, and that we arrived at this particular knowledge through nothing more than self-reflection.

I’ll Take My Reality without Religion, Please

Many theologians have taken our self-awareness to the next level to suggest that it demands an explanation beyond the limitations of a purely materialistic reality. “The emergence of consciousness seems to be a case of getting something from nothing,” Moreland argues, “Space and consciousness sit oddly together. How did spatially arranged matter conspire to produce nonspatial mental states?”

While theists often use this line of reasoning to argue for the existence of a Creator, that is a diversion too ambitious for this short series. What I hope to have demonstrated so far is that the claims of scientism—that genuine knowledge of reality can be obtained through the scientific method of observation and experimentation only—is most assuredly false. Personal introspection, reasoning, logic, philosophical inquiry, and even religious tradition or divine revelation are non-scientific means of obtaining knowledge about the reality in which we exist.

I should stress that while I have been attributing scientism to the secularist worldview, not all secularists would hold this view—or at least not in the way I’ve described it. I have many secular, non-religious friends who reject religious revelation as a means of obtaining truth, but they nonetheless are quite happy to keep introspection, reasoning, logic, and philosophical inquiry in their toolkit. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’m going to reduce these tools to one word: Reason.

To many secularists, reason and the scientific method are all we need. In fact, many would describe religious truth claims as not only nonsensical, but destructive to the form of modern, Western society we live in today. The conservative staunchly disagrees with this notion. For, while conservatism isn’t a religion, it is interested in conserving things of value in our culture (among which are certain religious traditions). That is, the conservative defends religious convictions not out of some sense of loyalty or nostalgia, but because the conservative believes religious convictions play an important role in the formation of culture and—even more importantly—comport to reality.

But before we turn to how religion and divine revelation are important tools in the quest for genuine knowledge, we must first address the secularist’s assertion that reason and science are all one needs to get on. And that is where we’ll turn in Part 4.

from savingelephantsblog
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