Dalrymple On Virtue

(Via Dale Light) Theodore Dalrymple:

The assault on freedom in Britain in the name of social welfare is an illustration of something that the American founding fathers understood, but that is not very congenial to the temper of our times: that in the long run, only a population that strives for virtue (with at least a degree of success) will be able to maintain its freedom. A nation whose individuals choose vice rather than virtue as the guiding principle of their lives will not long remain free, because it will need rescuing from the consequences of its own vices.

....

One of the destructive consequences of the spread of sociological modes of thought is that it has transferred the notion of virtue from individuals to social structures, and in so doing has made personal striving for virtue (as against happiness) not merely unnecessary but ridiculous and even bad, insofar as it diverted attention from the real task at hand, that of creating the perfect society: the society so perfect, as T S Eliot put it, that no one will have to be good.

Meacham: Is God Real?

John Meacham in NEWSWEEK:

"If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning," said Saint Augustine, "this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly. It is not the meaning of Scripture which is opposed to the truth but the meaning which he has wanted to give to it." Augustine's point allows Christians to take advantage of scientific and social advances without surrendering the ultimate authority of revelation. The Christian intellectual tradition, in other words, enables believers to negotiate just about anything short of the critical contention of the faith, that Jesus is Lord and salvation is on offer through belief in him. Still, there are many Christians who hew to a literal interpretation of Scripture, and say with sincerity and conviction that any one who does not accept Jesus as his personal savior will be cast into the fires of hell.

Ah, say the atheists, see, we told you exclusivist faiths like Christianity are forces for evil. So let's get rid of faith, replace it with rationality and science, and all shall be well, or at least vastly better. But the atheist solution has its own problems. In "Letter to a Christian Nation," Harris likens himself to an abolitionist and religion to slavery, but who is to say that a wholly scientific world would not itself soon produce dogma and strife over the findings, interpretations and applications of experiments and research? It is possible, even probable, that science would become a kind of religion, with creeds and convictions and arguments over the nature of reality. Labs would replace cathedrals, brain scans holy books. It would be different, but would it necessarily be better?

Enlightenment Gone Mad

Philip Trower enlightens on the Enlightenment.

MercatorNet: Do you sense a danger of people accepting the ideas of leading Enlightenment figures as having quasi-Scriptural authority? Should students be taught a more critical and detached view of Enlightenment values, do you think?

Trower: Again my answer is a double Yes -- if by quasi-Scriptural authority you mean treating the leading figures as if they had been recipients of a divine revelation. Since they were not, and to be fair did not claim to be, it is of the highest importance that those ideas should be looked at critically, which is what I have tried to do in the first seven chapters of my recent book. Looking at them critically does not mean denying the elements of truth but freeing the elements of truth from distortions, exaggerations, or downright errors.

Let me give some examples. If there is no God, where do human rights come from? The State? But a State which gives them can withdraw them. How do we know what is right and wrong? By majority vote? Who would seriously maintain that? Through conscience? Yes, but what is conscience and how does it fit into a materialistic or crudely Darwinian picture of world history? Why do many people, even if only implicitly, believe in perpetual progress? There is no evidence for it. That history is going to come to a climax in a kingdom of justice, love and peace is simply a Judaeo-Christian idea removed from the other side of the Last Day into this.

Trower also explains:

However it would be a mistake to overlook the fact that these ideas have not come down to us with a single meaning about which everyone agrees. Collectively, they are more like a religion with different denominations. Right from the start, which we can place in the second half of the 17th century, we can see a difference between what I will call the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment and the French or Continental Enlightenment.

The former has always had a looser more pragmatic approach to ideas and situations, resembling an ethos or attitude of mind more than a creed. The chief emphasis has been on individual liberty and freedom of expression with room being made for the incorporation of Christian and other beliefs.

The French or Continental variety on the other hand, has invariably been highly dogmatic and anti-religious, with Christianity as its main target. What makes the situation particularly confusing is that since the end of the Napoleonic wars the adherents of both forms have usually referred to themselves as liberals.

Today, I would say, it is more accurate and meaningful to describe modern adherents of the French school as secularists, since they are increasingly bent on forcing other people to submit to their principles whether they agree with them or not -- a very illiberal standpoint -- and keep the name liberals for genuine adherents of the Anglo-Saxon form in so far as they survive. A notable feature of the English scene over the last ten years had been the decline of Anglo-Saxon liberalism and the growth of the French secularist form. Today, one can fairly, I believe, describe secularism and political correctness as "liberal fundamentalism".

Post-Modernism and The Bible

James Arlandson:

Postmodernism is leveling multiple challenges at longstanding interpretations of the Bible and at the sacred text itself. There is nothing wrong with reinterpreting a text. But here are some questions that postmodern practitioners and theorists ask about the Bible. Are there such things as facts, specifically historical ones? Can we distinguish between the historical and the fictional? Are there any objective interpretations? How do we decide? Does that even matter? What would happen to the plain meaning of a passage if a psychoanalytical reading were applied? Would God the Father come out like a tyrannical father of a Freudian nightmare? Is God abusive?

Ben Franklin Balanced Reason and Religion

Jerry Weinberger writes that Franklin strove for an "artful balance" between reason and religion. But what did he believe?:

Franklin concluded that rationalistic science could never prove the believers wrong. He also concluded that the rationalists were unlikely to admit to this fact. They turned out to believe in their rationalism as fervently as the believers believed in their miracles, especially the miracle of conscience, or of the voice and spirit of God moving within. Moreover, if one were to push this fact in the rationalists’ faces, they could get just as angry as believers about challenges to their faith. Franklin, it turns out, was a freethinking critic of Enlightenment freethinking.

The conventional and current take on Franklin—that he was a pragmatic moralist and serious Enlightenment Deist and eventually an American patriot—is flat wrong...Franklin was no Deist. He was no pragmatic moralist. And he wasn’t really “The First American.” Franklin was, rather, the first American Baconian. He was also a profound philosopher, deeply skeptical of religion (especially the metaphysical conceits of Deists) and of our everyday moral intuitions. He was also profoundly skeptical of the intellectual foundations of rationalism and the Enlightenment. And he was, to put his politics in a nutshell, a political constructivist and libertarian. Franklin was not as American as apple pie, but he was as American as the corndog.

Mansfield: "Democracy and Greatness"

Harvey Mansfield:

The desire for distinction in a great man represents a threat to the established institutions of a democratic republic. Yet it is not likely that a democracy is going to express its gratitude to such a person for not overthrowing it--any more than a man will thank his guest for not raping his wife. Thus the great man in a democracy must show his modesty in noble condescension to his fellow citizens, as he must consider them. Lincoln did this, and so did George Washington, whose name Lincoln recommended to be revered "to the last."

Post-Post Modern = Pseudomodern

Alan Kirby at Philosophy Now buries post-modernism and replaces it with pseudo-modernism. For instance:

pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity" and "the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless.