Last weekend, I went to the Culture 11 website, and discovered an article with the rather-intriguing headline, “Yale Brought Me to Conservatism."
As someone who is interested in what causes people to gravitate toward certain political beliefs, I read the article and re-read it a second time. The article – which was written by a Yale student named Nicola Karras – was certainly interesting, but not very convincing. I think a full-depth review of her article can shed some light as to how young people – and indeed people of all ages– can get caught in philosophical traps that can generate great unhappiness and an unfulfilled existence.
In her article, Nicola describes herself as someone who, at an early age, “believed with all my heart in Man’s ability to understand the world by reason alone. I was an Enlightenment fundamentalist.” Sounds reasonable enough. “The first big shock of my life,” she continues, “came when I arrived at Yale.” There, she realized, “the things I believed didn’t make sense.” Still, she stubbornly pressed on. After all, “I couldn’t give up my faith in reason. If not, what then would life be but despair?” Again, sounds reasonable enough. But eventually she decides to embrace the despair. She becomes a fan of a philosopher called Godel who, in her words, “proved that, except for the most trivial, no system of axioms could be both consistent and complete.” From there, Nicola concludes that “reason couldn’t establish a purpose for my life…The only rational thing to do was to become a nihilist.”
Let’s take a break here, and review Ms. Karras’ case. She starts off with faith in reason. She is happy with that faith. And then she abandons it…why? Because of Mr. Godel, who supposedly has “proved that, except for the most trivial, no system of axioms could be both consistent and complete.” What is this mind-blowing proof? And would this proof, even if it existed, have any practical effect on our lives? Let’s quote Heather Manning in Chapter 9 of The Mustard Seed…
“According to postmodernism, Reality is an illusion, our minds are feeble, our senses are futile, and we can never truly be sure of anything. This is the conventional wisdom across most university campuses, and is the view of most ‘educated people’ today.“However, I strongly resist these opinions – and I feel no need to explain it further than a single analogy: Imagine that you and I are in a room with a table. We see the table with our eyes. We touch it with our fingers. We smell it with our nose. If we wish, we can even taste it. Now, if I suddenly ran towards that table, I will trip and fall down– even if I prayed for the table to disappear. If you ran toward the table, the same thing would happen to you. The consequences are always the same. There is a ‘Reality’ out there whether we like it or not.”
In contrast to Mr. Godel, I personally believe that Reality exists, and reason – and only reason – is the faculty to discover, interpret, and master it. Furthermore, if Mr. Godel is correct that “no system of axioms could be both consistent and complete,” then isn’t Mr. Godel’s own axiom – by definition – “inconsistent” and “incomplete?” Why is Mr. Godel’s philosophy fundamentally better than Heather Manning’s – especially when you consider that Heather’s is certainly more practical for living on Planet Earth? Couldn’t the practicality of Heather’s philosophy be evidence enough of its value?
OK, back to the article. According to Nicola, “every morning I asked myself why I existed, since there was no rational purpose for it and the universe at large was utterly indifferent.” Then she relates an amusing tale…
“At one point I called my mother and told her I was having an existential crisis. ‘Oh no!’ she cried. ‘What’s wrong?’ I explained that I was stricken with doubt about the possibility of knowledge and whether my life had any meaning. ‘Oh,’ she said, sounding a little relieved. ‘An actual existential crisis. I can’t help with that.’
That reminds me of another Heather Manning story…
“Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t relieve the grief of a child who had lost her mother, nor could I shake my own fear that the loss of this person, was, in the grand scheme of things, utterly and totally meaningless.
“However, like any common prisoner, I still held some vague hope that I could escape the jail cell of my mind. I still believed that I could find a philosophical loophole, and walk through it into a lifetime of bliss.
“At one point, I met with one of Duke’s most famous philosophy professors, and I practically begged him for any insights he could offer. After several hours of conversation, do you know what he told me? ‘Try not to think so much.’ Yep, this was the grand summation of twenty centuries of human philosophy: ‘Try not to think so much.’ It was enough to drive any decent person to despair.”
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. In any case, inspired by a T.S. Eliot poem called The Waste-Land (whose meaning was admittedly lost on me), she has an “epiphany:” “There was no reason to exist. But I did: not because I could prove it, or because I knew, but because in that utterly human moment of terror and sacrifice that gave meaning, I recognized that it didn’t matter.”
Ah, there’s the key phrase we’ve been waiting for: “it didn’t matter.” At least Nicola is honest: the rejection of reason leads to a philosophical dead-end. Eventually, we’re all doomed to say, “it doesn’t matter.” Apparently, Nicola takes some solace in this conclusion, but I’ll venture to guess that she won’t find it satisfying in the long-run. Like Troy Dawkins in The Mustard Seed, she can hide from the ramifications of that thought system for quite a while, but eventually it’ll catch up with her.
But let’s take a break from that sermonizing. Let’s return to Nicola’s article itself. Finally, about halfway through the article, Nicola returns to the supposed theme of her article – how Yale “brought me to conservatism.” Before coming to Yale, she claims that she had “been liberal in the classical sense: I had considered Man as an atomized, self-complete individual, engaged through choice and rational thought…The entire edifice of my beliefs had rested on that rationalist Weltanschauung….When the framework for that conceptual system fell apart, so too did its results.”
Let me start by agreeing with Nicola that a “rationalist” conceptual system supports the integrity of the “self-complete individual” and is consistent with being a “liberal in the classical sense.” Think Edmund Burke or Adam Smith or any of the Founding Fathers. And I agree with Nicola that when the “rationalist” conceptual system “falls apart” so must this classically liberal political philosophy.
Nicola continues, “I know that in my rejection of rationalism, I considered duty and community as alternate sources of meaning.” Once again, I agree with Nicola. With the rejection of rationalism, the quest for meaning doesn’t die; it just becomes hideously distorted. In Nicola’s case, “alternative sources of meaning” include “duty and community.” As Mark amply demonstrates in The Mustard Seed, “duty and community” – rather than reason and self-esteem - are appropriate convictions in an irrational life. So Nicola wouldn’t be the first person in history to respond to intellectual and spiritual confusion by “sacrificing herself” to the great “community” of humanity.
Nicola elaborates on her new spiritual philosophy:
“If we cannot understand ourselves as meaningful participants in something, we regard ourselves as fundamentally other; if all we can truly establish is our own existence as ‘things that think,’ we have nothing to do with our fellows. Language and logic are not enough to bridge those gaps: it requires something more. In opposition to that liberal, rights-based worldview, I looked to love and to tradition.”
Personally, I don’t agree with any of this. While I certainly appreciate the human hunger to be “meaningful participants in something,” I don’t see why “language and logic” are handicaps to that participation. Why is love and logic inherently in conflict? Nicola doesn’t say – probably because there is no conflict.
Nicola continues…
“I understood my own struggle with rationalism and meaning as a symptom of a far greater cultural crisis. It was Man’s isolation in the face of an increasingly alienating world, and his commitment to Enlightenment rationality as the only means of explaining that world, that created the problems of modernity.”
This is just plain wrong. According to Nicola, the Enlightenment “created the problems of modernity.” Really? So everything the Enlightenment created – freedom, democracy, science, technology, religious tolerance, equal rights for women - is wrong? I know Nicola doesn’t mean that, per se, but she needs to see the consequences of her logic. Oh wait, she doesn’t believe in logic, so never mind! In any case, I would bet that the pre-Enlightenment world with political tyranny, religious persecution, and short lives of physical toil was a lot more “alienating” than life in the twenty-first century. So any way you look at it, Nicola’s assertion is wrong.
Back to the article…Nicola says, “If a man is drowning in his own nihilism, he’ll cling to some – any – ideology as though his life depends on it.” Personally, I agree with that. This gets back to the human hunger for “meaning” which we discussed earlier. Then Nicola continues, “In my longing for certainty, I might have latched on to some murderous ideology. It was only by luck, or by that awful daring of a moment’s surrender, that I’d sacrificed the logical consistency of ideology for compassion.”
Once again, ironically, I agree with Nicola. The “longing for certainty” is a major ingredient in “murderous ideology.” But instead of making Nicola question her new “certainty,” she sees no problem with it. As for me, I have a major problem with it. If it’s only through “luck” that she avoided a “murderous ideology,” isn’t that a tenuous foundation to support her new “ideology for compassion?”
I know I’ve used up my quota of Heather Manning quotes, but here’s another one that I think is relevant:
“In my life, when I saw the ethic of self-sacrifice in action, I saw Buddhist monks walking around, literally sweeping the ground in front of them, in order to avoid hurting bugs. On the other extreme, I saw Nazis hurtling Jews into ovens – in service to the collective ‘Fatherland.’ Despite this obvious insanity, even today, we are still scolded to ‘live for others,’ and we’re reprimanded whenever we question that slogan. But from my perspective, everything worked better when people lived for themselves.”
Back to the article…According to Nicola, her “two intellectual priorities led neatly into conservatism: first, I was concerned with creating meaning through community and human connection, as I saw in Eliot and Arendt; second, I felt strongly about human virtue…The human race is not, at it’s core, nice…Society’s job then is to teach us to be better.”
I’m not sure what Nicola’s talking about, but it’s certainly not conservatism. Conservatism is a philosophy of freedom (and all that freedom entails – individual rights, democracy, limited government, etc.). No conservative –at least no true conservative – would claim that “society’s job is to teach us to be better.” That is a recipe for tyranny. While Nicola later states that “state intervention is dangerous,” her underlying belief about “society’s job” makes that intervention inevitable.
In my favorite sentence of the whole article, Nicola writes, “We need a set of values that makes us feel guilty about wanting to do the things we should not do; we need a culture that sanctifies those urges and channels them into something beautiful.” Read that sentence again. According to Nicola, “we need a set of values that makes us feel guilty.” Really? Guilty? Are you sure? What human being would voluntarily sign up for such a value system?
For the last time, Heather Manning…
“I find it sad that people are forced to choose between self-interest and morality, because that is a false choice they should never have to make. Is it any wonder that an early age, people see morality as the enemy, and seek to avoid it? After all, what does morality have to offer them, beyond pain and misery? The most important rules of ethics have been the least practiced because they have never been wedded to the logic of self-interest.”
Clearly, I am quite hostile to Nicola’s new moral philosophy, but to her credit, she concludes her piece by writing, “I’m still reading, still thinking, still arguing, and I know that meaning comes not from the certainty of truth but from the struggle for it.” I appreciate her open mind, and I am confident that her mind will change as gets older. I presume that Nicola is somewhere between the ages of 19-22. God knows I wouldn’t have done much better at her age. So I wish her luck as she continues to grapple with the struggle for truth.
-Todd
**UPDATE, JUL. 8, 2009**
The Culture 11 website is now defunct. I've changed the link accordingly.
-Todd
No comments:
Post a Comment