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.

progressives might see themselves not as relying on an authority, but as offering a way to negotiate between conflicting authorities. — Banno

In this view Enlightenment reason represents not rebellion but the establishment of a procedural means of adjudicating moral disagreement, where no authority is immune from scrutiny.

The conservative would say, however, that there is no such thing as a universal rational standpoint, to stand outside the competing views and adjudicate between them.

Reason always operates within inherited languages, moral frameworks, and social practices that give it meaning.

Thus reason in the Enlightenment becomes less of a neutral arbiter and more of an explicit paradigm in its own right.

Isn't traditional liberalism about how we get along despite differences in those supposed moral authorities, that I can believe whatever I like, so long as I don't interfere in your freedoms? — Banno

I suppose Enlightenment liberalism is not itself monolithic, we need to define our terms.

What you are describing sounds more like a libertarian position, for example.

But for Hazony in his book, what he is calling Enlightenment "liberalism" is the paradigm of abstract reason, rather than tradition, providing the best method for uncovering certain universal political truths.

This author is skeptical of this method, especially in the political sphere:

Enlightenment rationalism doesn’t see reason realistically in this way. The confusion of nature with reason results from the belief that reason is a power that permits every human being directly to access eternal and unchanging “nature.” And since unchanging “nature” is assumed to dictate the political and moral principles that hold good for all mankind and for all time, the belief that reason gives every human being direct access to nature means that every human being also has direct access to the political and moral principles that hold good for all mankind and for all time. In this way, Enlightenment rationalism removes us from the biblical framework, in which there is a chasm separating what is right in God’s eyes from what is right in men’s eyes—a chasm that forces us to acknowledge that we are not God, and to treat the deliverances of our own reasoning minds with great caution, humility, and skepticism. In the new world announced by Enlightenment rationalism, there is no such chasm between the reasoning individual and knowledge of the true character of reality. Each reasoning individual suddenly discovers that he is himself the source of reliable knowledge of what nature commands, and therefore of the political and moral principles that hold good for all mankind and for all time.

Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (p. 203). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

I am actually very sympathetic to the role of reason in all political discourse probably more so than the Hazony, the author of the quote in the OP.

After all there is not much sense in developing, or uncovering, rights against slavery and in favor of the equality of women, for example, if those rights are not meant to be "inalienable", that is, universal. And if they are universal, then surely what that means is that our abstract reason, rather than tradition, requires this to be so.

tradition is not so monolithic as the account supposes, but varies from group to group, leaving a need for consistency between traditions — Banno

There is actually a strange relativism within conservatism I think - if we appeal to tradition in one society that tradition is going to differ - sometimes widely - from traditions in other societies, and now how do we converse with each other, unless we again appeal to a faculty of reason which can appeal to universals?

isn’t slow, steady empirical analysis at the heart of Enlightenment Liberalism? — T Clark

I think it goes back to Aquinas and then from him back to Aristotle.

Hack yourself to pieces, and then put yourself back together. — punos

I would say this approach is completely impossible.

It is not possible to view oneself from the "View from Nowhere", completely devoid of everything except one's rational faculties.

We are placed in systems of hierarchies and traditions into which we are "thrown", which are "givens", to us, and with which we have to deal.

They must be reviewed, repaired, sometimes challenged, but they cannot be escaped, as if we can place ourselves in sterile laboratories of reason.

The rationalism of enlightenment liberalism has produced nothing but monsters.

The only surefire way to proceed is through slow, steady empirical analysis, review and repair of traditional structures.

Tell that to your fellow militants. I'm a colonel and you're a sergeant and I shout "attention", you must comply. Same with principles and actions. — Copernicus

Aquinas would say that principles are not like commands shouted by a superior - they are expressions of reason itself.

Whatever that may be, it's not categorical morality (adherence to rigid principles). — Copernicus

I begin to suspect that you are arguing against a strawman here.

I don't think any deontological theorist would define "categorical morality" in the way you are doing.

For Aquinas, for example, all three of: intention, object and circumstances; must align with right reason, in order for the act to be moral.

Even Kant, the ultimate deontologist, elevated Aquinas' "intention" into a categorical "duty".

Much like the chain of command in the military. — Copernicus

If the soldiers don't intend to follow orders there's not much point being in the army.

Since when did categorical morality depend on intentions? — Copernicus

Since Aquinas.

Summa Theologiae I–II, q.18, a.4.

Morality depends on what the will chooses as an end.

I can't verify moral truths. — ProtagoranSocratist

Moral truths may be “verifiable” in principle if one adopts rationalist, consequentialist, or intuitionist frameworks.

But even a cultural relativist would say that moral truths can be verified simply by referring to the norms of the societies in question.

In a material sense perpetual economic growth is not possible simply because of the laws of thermodynamics - eventually you reach a state where ethe finite physical inputs of the system are reached.

In an immaterial sense I am not so sure - items such as software and services for example are not constrained by finite physical inputs is exactly the same way.

the Trolley Dilemma — Copernicus

Since the intention is to save five, not to kill one, then in this case the utilitarian solution is the same as the deontological one.

Problem solved.

... it was rhetorical in the sense that i do not believe it, or think it's possible. Christian fundamentalists are not the only people who evoke a morality that "should" apply to strangers, and it's pretty much impossible to avoid talking about the scope of moral ideas when trying to lay a code of ethics or impose "right and wrong". — ProtagoranSocratist

What's wrong with saying that moral truths exist independently of human opinion.

It seems to me that there are moral facts (e.g., “torturing children for fun is wrong”) that are true regardless of what anyone thinks.

Am I literally the only person left on earth who thinks it is going to be awesome?

incontinence of the void

Erm ... what?

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.

Beings are not separate from being, and being is not separate from beings. Sure, we can draw a conceptual distinction between being and beings, but it doesn't seem to follow that being can be without beings or that beings can be without being. — Janus

They are separate in the same sense that a true fact, 2+2=4, is "separate from" truth.