conservatives can learn — Banno

Well thank you for throwing me such a nice bone from such a high table.

we can talk about our differences and reach an accomodation — Banno

I'm not sure reaching an "accommodation" is the point.

After all, if both of us are understood by the other, wouldn't that automatically transform our horizons?

“To understand is to be transformed by what we understand.”

Violence is implicit in that approach. — Banno

That's sounds a little hysterical. Reasonable people can disagree. Isn't that what you advocate? That everyone living in a state can adhere to their own traditions, but nevertheless thrive?

you conclude that there fore we cannot choose between traditions. That doesn't follow. The choice may not be objective - what choice is? - but we can so choose... — Banno

Reason is dialogical and historical. It is never "abstract". Reason is indeed a dialog, a back and forth. It requires an opnnness to being addressed and a willingness to be changed - providing real understanding can indeed be reached.

So reason is like Hegel's dialectic, it is the capacity to listen and respond meaningfully - in a dialog.

To that extent, we don't "obtain" understanding, we "undergo" it. We "stand under" something. In a dialog, that something is the (temporarily) fused horizons of two persons. Thus understanding is an “event”, not an act of control. It happens to us - through language, history, and tradition.

We are always already participants in the ongoing dialog, never outside of it. Thus reason, since it is the same as dialog, is participatory.

Rather than, that is, instrumental, which is the Enlightenment or positivistic type of reason. That is, participatory reason does not calculate or "choose" a means to an end. It does not operate by control or deduction.

That form of reason is far more prone to your "violence". That form of "choice" is a way of dominating nature.

You speak as though understanding were an act of choice, but every understanding arises from your own historical horizon.

You do not “choose” beliefs like consumer goods.

I may indeed find yourself drawn toward Islam, or away from faith - but this will not be a choice made from nowhere.

It will be an event of understanding, in which my horizon is transformed.

yet it is clear that you could become a Muslim, or an Atheist. — Banno

Yes, I could. But if I did it would not be because of some isolated “choices,” but in terms of understanding, tradition, and belonging.

We always begin within a historically effected consciousness: our language, culture, and inherited prejudices shape how we encounter possibilities like Islam or atheism.

You cannot step outside your horizon and objectively choose between belief systems as if you were shopping for one. You can only encounter them through the horizon of your own tradition

instead of by waving a gun — Banno

You seem a little fixated on this whole violence thing.

Any ideology, including your conservatism, is ideologically and normatively loaded. — Banno

That is indeed the whole point.

Always, already, loaded and situated. Always immanent, never transcendent.

Reason is immanent in tradition.

It can never be "transcendent".

you slide into the ought of loyalty. — Banno

"Ought" appears nowhere whatsoever in the list. Point it out.

The list simply describes the way things are, not the way things "ought" to be.

All human understanding is historically effected. We cannot step outside our historical and linguistic horizons.

There is no absolute or neutral standpoint outside tradition.

Neither are prejudices necessarily distortions - they can be enabling conditions of understanding.

As for "leaning on violence", I think you are drifting into a straw man.

We can also build democracy and cooperation. Which ought we do? — Banno

Understanding through tradition can be sufficient for emancipation and truth.

Real understanding always takes place within history, language, and culture; there is no pure, ideology-free space from which to critique.

You are not a realist, but an ideologue. — Banno

Those are the options?

Can I be a "hermeneutical" ideologue, at least?

Yeah, we can. And do. — Banno

Gadamer and MacIntyre, for example, seem to say otherwise.

How are we to decide between conflicting traditions?

Violence or conversation? — Banno

We cannot decide between any traditions, we remain situated within our own.

Diplomacy is always preferred at first, but if we are attacked first, then we must decide if we are to engage in a just war, or not.

Again, that is simply the realist, not utopian, position.

Well that's the first time I've encountered someone presenting a book including "spiritual" exercises in order to become more liberal.

Anyway I'd point out the obvious which is that his "17 reasons to be liberal" are mostly all modern updates of the Christian virtues. He even includes "gratitude", "avoidance of hypocrisy", "humility", "gracefulness" and "redemption"!

So instead of trying to be a liberal Ignatius de Loyola and convert us all to "liberalism", the real question is why is he not literate enough to convert himself to Christianity?

But why? Why not test Zionism against Mohism? How do you move from "This is what we do" to "this is what we ought do?" without falling to the Naturalistic fallacy? — Banno

Why do we have to choose just one? The idea of a state (at least an imperial one) is that it can contain and include many nations thriving within it.

Anyway, all of this remains mere speculation.

The fact remains that I believe that we cannot become un-situated outside of our family, tribe, congregation, community, nation.

We are unable to achieve an Enlightenment "view from nowhere" or u-topos, "no-place".

We have to work with what we have been given.

It's not as if there is but one worthy tradition. Which tradition are we to say has shown its worth by its longevity? If longevity is a mark of value, then The Dao and the Vedas ought have some weight...

So again, beyond the mere chauvinism of "my country right or wrong", what is the justification for adherence to a tradition? Has it been put to the test? — Banno

Hey, I'll take the Vedas and Upanishads any day, for sure.

I used to be quite a serious student of a Swami in the line of Sri Swami Dayananda Saraswati.

I don't have the words to describe how highly I regard that body of literature and learning.

To be honest, I almost answered your question "which one?" with this:

At this point I'll take any one.

I literally think Enlightenment liberalism has produced so many abortions at this point that following any of the world's ancient teachings would be better.

But then, extreme examples come to mind, and I don't want to mention them, because I don't want to disturb anyone or ruffle any feathers.

But which one? This question, asked multiple times, remains unaddressed. — Banno

Your own, of course. By which I mean the one shaped by you, your family, your community, and your nation.

Or, if you prefer, we could discuss the pros and cons of various traditions.

But I have a feeling if I do that I'd just be accused of living in an echo chamber.

For now, I can safely say that I'm confident you would prefer to live in certain environments and would prefer not to live in others.

It is that blacks and women occupied lower rungs in the social ladder then, and still should today. — hypericin

Please present evidence that American conservatives believe this.

I have a feeling this is the very definition of a "straw man".

And why ought we follow tradition? There's a naturalistic fallacy lurking here - "we've always done it this way, therefore we ought do it this way". — Banno

Re: naturalistic fallacy:

The historical existence of a practice is evidence of its utility, not the source of a moral obligation in itself.

Given human fallibility and the difficulty of creating social institutions from scratch, the safest path is to follow practices that have been validated over centuries.

Tradition is not sacred because it is old; it is valuable because it is tested, functional, and morally formative.

Yes, in modern liberalism, the end is freedom itself, conceived negatively (freedom from constraint), not positively (freedom for the good).

Without a substantive paradigm of the good, “freedom” devolves into the freedom to consume or to satisfy preference - what Plato or Augustine would call license, not liberty.

The liberal state produces slaves of appetite, not citizens of reason.

The massive bureaucratic state arises because many people, like all children, don’t want to be responsible for their own livelihoods and decisions. We shoot each other when in a debate, and then do not come together to rebuke the shooter, for instance. We behave like spoiled brats. — Fire Ologist

Deneen is next on my list I think his book is very a propos of this discussion as the Count mentioned.

↪Colo Millz I'd suggest re-reading Rawls. Is consistency a moral principle, and not a rational one? — Banno

Anyway If grounded in consent, deliberation, and procedural protections (as Rawls tries to do), universal moral principles are not authoritarian in practice and can coexist with liberal pluralism.

I’d argue that consistency is not merely a matter of reason; it carries a moral weight.

Without consistency, principles like fairness or justice become hollow, and commitments lose integrity.

Rational coherence alone doesn’t obligate anyone to act justly - moral accountability does.

What about liberté, égalité, fraternité?

Not universal?

What about the Declaration, which says that rights are self-evident and inalienable?

How is this any less a rational scheme than the one put forward by the progressives? — ucarr

The difference Hazony intends is not that conservatism avoids reason altogether, but that it distrusts abstract reason detached from inherited practices.

In his view, progressivism begins from universal principles (e.g., equality, autonomy) and tries to fit society to them, while conservatism begins from existing norms and asks how they can be prudently adapted.

Thus a deeper question isn’t whether we use reason, but rather what kind of reason - abstract or prudential - best sustains moral order.

Why do you present the debate in such a rigidly binary structure? — ucarr

This statement is actually something Burke might point out.

Burke, who was a Whig, himself said

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the Constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.

https://philolibrary.crc.nd.edu/article/change-from-within/

So the purpose of presenting the binary is not meant as an ontological division but as an epistemological one.

It is a contrast of starting points rather than exclusive camps.

Fascinating OP.

By coincidence I have just finished reading Hart's The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology, which presents much of the same theme from the perspective of Christology, not anthropology. However much of what Hart concludes about Christ and the Trinity (and the Council of Chalcedon) can be translated into your comments above pertaining to human nature.

For example, for Hart, in the Incarnation, Christ does not merely "inhabit" a human body but rather reveals - as a kind of theophany - what humanity has always been, which is a unified reality in which the material and spiritual are not two substances but two modes of participation in the divine Logos - which means the creature is also a kind of theophany. In that sense, Christ’s resurrected body is the transfiguration of matter itself - the unveiling of its true, glorified form.

For Hart, divinity and humanity are not two disparate substances which are somehow glued together arbitrarily, as in dualism. They are one reality, one act of divine self-disclosure. Humanity is not composed of separable “parts” (body and soul) but is a single, dynamic participation in the divine Logos. The soul is not a detachable immaterial entity; it is the form of the body, the living unity of the person. Resurrection, therefore, is not the reanimation of a corpse or the liberation of the soul, but the transformation of the whole person into glory - the completion of what creation already is in its divine ground.

This aligns with the Jewish-Christian monism discussed in the post you shared: the nephesh as “living being,” the resurrection of the whole person, and the affirmation of the body as integral to salvation.

Now, what interests me here is the difference of this view with the Catholic metaphysics, and whether there really is any. According to Aquinas, for example, the divine essence cannot become visible as though it were a color or a form. Visibility belongs to created being, which receives and manifests divine light according to its capacity. For Aquinas we do participate in the divine realm but it is a participation by analogy, not by identity. If we say creature and Creator are one in substance, we dissolve the contingency of creation and, in a way, make the Incarnation meaningless. After all, if there is identity without difference, why would we have needed an Incarnation? The creature’s finitude is therefore not an illusion to be dispelled but a perfection to be fulfilled.

Having said this Aquinas himself comes very close to your own view when it comes to anthropology, not Christology - he does seem to state explicitly that the human person is not two things (soul and body) but one substance, and that the soul is the form of the body, and he bases his argument on Aristotle. ST I.76.1 is where he does this. It is an extremely long Article so I should not post it.

In that Article, he states that the human being is a single substantial unity, composed of body and soul. The soul is the form that gives life and identity to the body. Although the soul has an immaterial, subsistent nature, it does not use the body like a tool - rather, it informs it from within. Thus, human nature is neither purely material nor purely spiritual, but a single composite of both.

The problem with interpreting the OT from the lens of our post-Enlightenment modernity is that it completely misses the context of the particular passages in the Bible.

We are, for example, no more meant to question whether there were children killed in the Flood than we are meant to question whether Gandalf should not have converted the Orcs in Lord of the Rings to the side of good.

Or whether we are meant to obsess over whether Lady MacBeth had children ("I have given suck").

Or whether the film's "message" of "Million Dollar Baby" is "pro-suicide".

Or whether, for that matter, whether Romeo and Juliet is "pro-suicide".

That simply is not what the story is about.

As far as the conquest of Canaan is concerned it must be read from the point of view of the norms of that time and place - where the conquest and utter destruction of one's enemies was a completely glorious event, worthy of song and worship.

If we ignore these contexts, we will judge the God of the OT from the post-Enlightenment perspective of the Blind Watchmaker - and miss the point.

PS: Reading the Bible from this post-Enlightenment perspective is akin to claiming that the "days" of Genesis were literal 24 hour days or asking whether the Devil put the dinosaur fossils there.

It seems hard to thank God when this same God is someone who could make you suffer forever. — baker

I am a fan of David Bentley Hart's book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation.

Hart quotes St. Isaac of Nineveh:

It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which he knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them—and whom nonetheless he created. (64)

Christians must not simply hope for universal salvation but radically affirm it (66, 102-103, 149).

https://christianscholars.com/shall-all-be-saved-david-bentley-harts-vision-of-universal-reconciliation-an-extended-review/

Of course Universal Reconciliation is an official heresy but what can you do.

I am also a fan of Karl Barth's view:

“We may not say that all will be saved, but we may confidently hope that all will be saved in Jesus Christ.”

Then finally there is C.S. Lewis' famous phrase from The Great Divorce - "The doors of Hell are locked from the inside".

PS: There is also this:

If others go to hell, then I will too. But I do not believe that; on the contrary I believe that all will be saved, myself with them—something which arouses my deepest amazement.
— SØREN KIERKEGAARD,
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL JOURNALS

Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (p. 198). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

There are so many great quotes from DBH's book I'll see if I can find good ones.

noesis/intellectus, or the role of any sort of "contemplative knowledge" in valid epistemology — Count Timothy von Icarus

So you are proposing that this capacity is the only "ordering principle" which is valid - or the fullest expression of one anyway.

Likewise:

What is truly most worth knowing and doing is not limited to wholly discursive, instrumental reason and techne. Episteme is not the terminus of knowledge and in a way it is less sure than noesis / gnosis. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I need to explore this capacity because I don't quite know what it is.

I mean I know the philosophical definition, it is a non-discursive insight into truth, a kind of intellectual "seeing".

It's just so unfamiliar to me, living in an Enlightenment environment that I need to picture what it even could be as a human capacity.

The limits of "discursive" reasoning after Kant are so absolute for someone like me, I have a hard time imagining there can be some other capacity which is non-discursive, or that that kind of insight can have any validity at all.

Wow thank you. I had actually read The Brothers Karamazov but not for a long time, and needed to be reminded of what you were getting at in your first post, which is Christ's

way to transcend the finitude of the self through sacrificial love — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have also read DBH's The Doors of the Sea it's super.

However I have not thought about these things in the way you are presenting here it is going to take me some time and reading to digest this perspective.

I guess my initial response is to echo the conservative skepticism re: any "u-topia", i.e. "no-place".

Thus even if we say

"utopia" is extremely fraught without some ordering principle — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am in some doubt if any such "ordering principle" has yet been discovered by Enlightenment thought.

As you are proposing, perhaps Christ really is the only valid such "ordering principle", as it was for Dostoyevsky.

To whom should I be grateful for these things? To whom could I be grateful for these things? — baker

This is why I believe it is important to have someone or something to thank.

Gratitude by its nature seeks relationship; it wants to move outward, to acknowledge a giver.

Otherwise gratitude becomes diffuse.

Theism transforms gratitude from a mere mood into a relationship.

And by the way this is why I believe theists tend to be happier than a-theists. Gratitude is the mother of happiness.

To tie this into the OP, this is also why I believe that theistic practices are just as much a method as they are a system of beliefs.

They are gratitude-creating methods, or should be, at their best.

Have you read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Definitely on the list

His answer here is very different from that of Western conservatives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you elaborate this, this is an interesting thought and I am v interested in Dostoyevsky.

which will bring our civilization to a grinding halt rapidly. Not instantenously obviously, but it is the key, critical point that effects everything we do in our world. You don't need to be a visionary to see what will happen when the energy runs out. — Martijn

It's ok, we can go nuke.

Plus we are on the verge of discovering fusion.

Am I literally the only one left on the planet who is an AI optimist?

The Creator must join with V'Ger.

People have had enough time to become smart and create something great, but apparently, the way we live now (including both the good and the bad, the struggle of ideas and the struggle of meanings) is the smartest possible way. — Astorre

I think the conservative view is at its heart tragic.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, p.110.

It is tragic because it views the attempt to reach absolutes via human reason to be a doomed project of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel.

Instead of a project of absolutes, we should therefore constrain ourselves to a system of trade-offs and compromises, in the style of Adam Smith.

We each are, at times, conservative, and at times, liberal. (That is what western “democracy” is really made of to me - the unification of liberal and conservative impulses under law in a republic.). — Fire Ologist

Yes I think this is the key - the grownups recognize that both poles are required - it's just a question of where the Vital Center is located, relative to the current Overton Window

the US Declaration of Independence — Fire Ologist

Now to the language of the Declaration itself, it holds that rights are "inalienable" and this indeed suggests that they are clear to all men and women by virtue of reason - they are universals regardless of whatever tradition we encounter.

And I am sympathetic to this idea, I think much more than Hazony is.

Are you saying you are more conservative than the US Declaration of Independence? That’s like “yes kings” conservative — Fire Ologist

So Hazony has got a whole chapter on the American Revolution and Constitution where he argues that the eventual result was a "restoration" of the original Anglo-American tradition, rather than a radical Enlightenment break from it in the style of the French Revolution.

In this argument he portrays Hamilton as the traditionalist and Jefferson as the Enlightenment radicalist, with Hamilton the eventual winner (Constitution) and Jefferson the runner-up (Declaration of Independence).

The Federalists of the 1780s and 1790s were not radicals who considered America a clean slate on which they could try out new schemes devised by the philosophers of the “Age of Reason.” They came to abhor Jefferson and others who favored such schemes, especially after 1789, when these were increasingly identified with the murderous policies of the French Revolution. The Federalists understood that the freedom of Americans was a gift of the British constitutional tradition and the English common law, which had been incorporated into American colonial law, often formally so in the constitutions of the colonies. Indeed, it is telling that in the four years prior to independence, no fewer than twenty-one editions of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England had been published in America. And when the thirteen newly independent states turned to writing their own constitutions after 1776, these were to a significant extent designed on the pattern of the English system of dispersed power, with a strong executive balanced by a bicameral legislature and an independent court system.

Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (pp. 46-47). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

So he would argue that the American Revolution was really not at its heart an Enlightenment project at all.

For example:

It is an assumption of Enlightenment liberalism that "all men are free and equal by nature".

But this is neither empirically true nor self-evidently true.

I think the series of premises is a far more accurate social paradigm than any similar premises of Enlightenment liberalism.

Is there more here than mere inertia? — Banno

1. Men are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by ties of mutual loyalty.

2. Individuals, families, tribes, and nations compete for honor, importance, and influence, until a threat or a common endeavor recalls them to the mutual loyalties that bind them to one another.

3. Families, tribes, and nations are hierarchically structured, their members having importance and influence to the degree they are honored within the hierarchy.

4. Language, religion, law, and the forms of government and economic activity are traditional institutions, developed by families, tribes, and nations as they seek to strengthen their material prosperity, internal integrity, and cultural inheritance and to propagate themselves through future generations.

5. Political obligation is a consequence of membership in families, tribes, and nations.

6. These premises are derived from experience, and may be challenged and improved upon in light of experience.

Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (pp. 100-101). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

it's not the same as asserting that your traditions are the best, or the right ones. — Banno

Is there some cultural smorgasbord we can all choose from, as if we are autonomous individuals with the leisure and expertise required?

Are you overlooking the possibility that some traditions are morally better or worse than others? I would give some examples but I don't want anyone to accuse me of being extreme.

Would "We've always done it that way" be enough for you to die in a ditch for? — Banno

Thought Experiment:

Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look—it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions—good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide—be a bore?

Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.

Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?

Explain.

Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book . Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

So we accept reason as not being neutral, and ask, "What's the alternative?" Do we wish, then, to be unreasonable? — Banno

Reasoning is always situated. it is always already shaped by language, history, and moral tradition.

This means that all reasoning proceeds from within a perspective.

So - to appeal to reason to negotiate different perspectives is impossible, there is no neutral reason which can be an arbiter of different perspectives.

So, you ask, what's the alternative?

You say that if reason cannot be neutral the only alternative is unreason but this is a false choice.

The alternative therefore is that we must base our reasoning on our own traditional virtues.

Reason divorced from virtue can err disastrously, just as unpracticed moral intuition can. Thus, a human being guided by prudence, justice, temperance, and courage can reason well within both moral and social life, even knowing that reason is limited.

Furthermore enlightenment rationalism breeds hubris.

This hubris manifests in the recurring modern impulse to replace evolved moral orders with ideological “systems,” each promising universal justice and ending in tyranny.