One stark difference between modern liberalism and classic conservatism is what to think about humans.  Modern liberals are idealists, Utopians on some level.  They believe that humans are naturally good, or at least inclined towards being good, and that the bad ones are just bad seeds, corrupted by evil social institutions like the Church or Society.  These utopians believe that we can educate ourselves toward heaven on earth, if we’d only try harder.  Classic conservatives, contrariwise, are anything but Utopian.  They believe that humans, while possessing of an inherent dignity (bestowed by Nature, by God, or by something else), are naturally inclined toward evil, or at least self-serving, ends.  These realists, which is what I’d like to consider them, believe that humans are capable of many great things, but that they will never work their way towards heaven on earth.  And in fact, they believe that the gravest evils on Earth happen precisely when we try to build paradise here.  These classic conservatives believe society can move in the right direction, but only by checking human nature, not by giving it free reign.  This is one fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives, and really between all people and all other people.

In some ways, this was the subject of my Monday post on a liberal writer who’s slowly turning conservative.  Here’s yet another writer, Laurie Fendrich of The Chronicle Review, who says episodes like the Spitzer Sex Scandal are slowly disabusing her of the notion that humans are naturally good.

On the one hand, I subscribe to a pragmatic liberal optimism which posits that while humans are unlikely to ever end up all singing Kumbaya together - where we share and share alike - we are slowly thinking our way toward becoming generally better. On the other hand, I suspect (along with like the likes of Thomas Hobbes and a few other political philosophers) that “human nature” is a rather homely constant.

I suppose that in some way, all of us are Utopians.  The only difference is where and how we think we’ll get there.  But if you think Utopia is possible on Earth, then you’re probably not conservative.  Or if you are, then you must be a pre-millennialist.

The blog at First Things writes, “They say Americans don’t care about ideas. Well, that’s nonsense. We take ideas VERY seriously in this country. Where else would you see something like this?”  I would have to agree.

A tradition I observe this time of the year is re-reading a book by Howard Fast, My Glorious Brothers, which is a fictionalized account of the Second Century B.C. Maccabean revolt in Israel, celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Last week Harrison posted on Christopher Hitchens’ latest anti-religion screed bemoaning Hanukkah and the 30 year Jewish resistance against Greek tyranny for its rejection of Greek “rationality” and indirectly giving birth to Christianity, which Hitchens deems equally “irrational”.

But is Greek “rationality” all that it is cracked up to be? (more…)

Here’s a great article about experiments and experimentation.  Chemists and biologists and physicists and engineers do it.  But not philosophers.  Never philosophers.  Philosophers observe humankind, yes, but they usually do more reading and thinking than observing.  Until now.  And I can’t decide if this is a ridiculous joke or for real.

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See if you can follow this argument by American philosopher Thomas Nagel: 

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In a culture proud of its tolerance, it’s old news to say we are afraid of meaningful words like good and evil.  Daphne Merkin asks in the Times:

What does evil - a term that came into general use only in the 15th century, originally referring to the overstepping of proper limits - look like these days, when so many of us are wary of reductive terms, unsure of our own convictions and easily persuaded of the moral relativism of our values? (The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word is “little used in modern colloquial English.”) Does it have a particular smell, like teen spirit? Does it come wearing a hood, as in the movies? Or, again, does it look like you and me, sitting over dinner and enjoying a glass of vintage Bordeaux?

This is a sad question.  She asks it like a little girl asking her agnostic daddy where grandma’s going after she’s buried.  It’s a question that looks visionary to many, but comes off like some courtier asking Queen Isabella, upon Columbus’s return, “What if the world is round?”

Next week, The King’s College is hosting a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza, whose new book, What’s So Great About Christianity?is out this week.  Hitchens is doing a lot of these debates, and it’s promising to see something like the rebirth of the Lyceum around the United States.  I like the idea of anyone traveling around debating things with people: it evidences an ability to discuss ideas in public, an appetite for it in the culture, a belief that there’s a thing called Truth that’s hard to get at but still there.  In short, there’s a lot of good coming out of Hitchens’s road show this past year. 

Some enterprising young seminary or PhD student ought to catalog and chronicle the debates into book form: like the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  It’d make a good contemporary primer for the atheist argument and the theistic answer.  The arguments are not new, but the fervor is.

D’Souza writes today in the Christian Science Monitor about one fundamental atheistic argument and its counter by Kant: namely, the argument that the material world is All That Exists and/or All We Can Know.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, namely sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient? What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?

While Kant’s counterargument is murky and walks dangerously close to the precipice of agnosticism and postmodernism (those guys love Kant), he’s just saying what Believers have been saying for a far longer time: If material reality is all that exists, then what is love but chemicals, and what are you but a compost heap?