Natural Law Philosophy Convinces Almost No One--and So What?

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Natural law thinking is a hard sell at present for at least three reasons: 1) it is philosophical, and being so requires a bit of hard study of the basic metaphysics even to begin to grasp it; 2) it gives answers that contemporary Westerners have been programmed to reject out of hand; 3) it is part of a particular cultural order's approach to truth and ascertaining it, and that cultural order is now utterly lost and foreign.

I think this last is the deepest of the challenges. Ever since Aristotle's summary demotion in the early modern period, Aristotelian causality (especially final causality) just doesn't make sense to people who live in a mechanistic/emotivist universe, and whose very idea of learning and study is grounded in a very different theory of causality--provided they even have any respect for learning or study.

But of course our modern distance from natural law theory doesn't at all mean it is wrong or somehow "primitive”. The recognition that moderns have iPhones and Thomas Aquinas didn't, which decides the matter for a lot of folks, is clearly lame. Edward Feser has been good at underlining just how many of the "serious problems" of contemporary philosophy and science arise directly from the modern refusal to recognize Aristotelian causality. In the ethical realm, Alasdair MacIntyre musters an even more decisive army of arguments, and comes to the same conclusion: Back to Aristotle. Natural law arguments, pace the iPhone wielders, are philosophically very strong.

So although natural law thinking is a hard sell for us, still I think Rod Dreher, in his recent reply to a piece by Paul DeHart, shows a bit too much of the shall we say practical approach when he suggests that natural law isn't the way to go because "It will convince almost nobody." Serious philosophy, for most of history, has been a matter of convincing almost nobody. By definition. Thinkers, writers or teachers who dedicate themselves to teaching Aristotle or Thomas are doing very important work--whether what they say and write will be popular or not. And I mean this also in terms of what their work can do for the Church. Sure, given where we're headed, such Catholic scholars might have to drink the hemlock eventually, but in that they'll be in good company, and hopefully their teachings will survive, if only in a small group of disciples. Isn't this in any case, speaking of Rod Dreher, also part of the ethos of The Benedict Option--to keep and maintain a core of the faithful in the face of opposition from all sides?

We can continue to use more biblical and immediately existential approaches to waking people up to the Gospel, all the while offering hearty support to others who struggle on the more arcane natural law philosophical ground. Why not?

DeHart's article and Dreher’s response were both hard-hitting and worth careful reading. Yes, DeHart seems a bit too motivated to search out and debate Leo Strauss, and so may be finding Strauss under every rock, including Dreher's Rock. But although that might weaken his piece a bit, I don't think he's wrong to raise his dissent to Dreher’s brief outline of history, if only to remind us of the strong continuity between the Enlightenment order and the more properly Christian era. I'm not sure how many dozens of times I've tried to make similar arguments to "progressive" liberals: namely, that their bitter anti-Christianity is intellectually weak stuff, given that their own notions of rights and individual dignity were basically derived in the West and are part of the West's Christian inheritance. I've yet to have a single progressive liberal agree with me, or even get so far as recognize my point. Which has finally convinced me of something: it's generally a waste of time to discuss history with progressive liberals, who in terms of historical range seem to have been hatched from eggs last Tuesday. I mean--these people think of the 1950s as the Middle Ages.

DeHart:

While Christianity appropriates ideas from classical antiquity, it also fundamentally transforms them. By contrast, even though modernity rejects classical Christianity, it does so by and large within a frame bequeathed to it by Christianity. Indeed, the notions that human beings are by nature equal, that by nature they are free from political subjection, that political order is created by human will and choice, that the community or commonwealth is authoritative or sovereign over government, that there are natural rights that government ought not infringe, that there should be separate jurisdictions of church and government and those who exercise political power should have no authority in religious matters, that human persons transcend and are not defined entirely by political association (be it the kingdom, the polis, or the empire) . . . These all are Christian ideas--or, at least, ideas that were first articulated by classical Christian thinkers.

I hold these truths to be self-evident. But trying to get people, especially coastal people, to acknowledge any of them is like trying to build a snowman out of rain.

The problems of periodization raised by DeHart and Dreher in their brief back and forth are some of the most important problems we can be wrestling with. Because how we solve them will largely determine how we orient ourselves in terms of making historical arguments. And we need to make strong, well-evidenced historical arguments, at least to those who are open to listening. Re: our current malaise, I suspect Dreher is right that the real worm in our apple began its growth with 13th century nominalism. Sadly, we now don't face an apple with a fat worm in it, but rather a worm and a few remaining apple skins.

NB: 1) Edward Feser has penned the best short introduction to Thomas Aquinas for those unfamiliar with Aristotle, Aquinas and natural law philosophy. The perplexed could do much worse than start with this little book. 2) Dreher quotes from a 2013 debate between Feser and David Bentley Hart over natural law. Relevant links can be found here. I'd say Feser wins this one.

E.M.

Check my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com.

Zombies and the Great Cursive Debate

I can’t remember when I first heard about the heated debate going on over cursive back in the US. I do however remember my reaction: “Figures.”

Living as an expat and teacher in Asia, I’ve watched my country from overseas since the mid-1990s, and have learned to expect that if a policy represents dumbing down, most Americans will be cheering it on.

Reading the debate in the press, I found the usual predictable points made by the anti-cursive camp--"It will save classroom time!” key among them, of course. But was more depressed by the often misguided counterpoints made by the pro-cursive camp--"How will kids read their grandparents' old letters?" etc.

Given the lame level of this debate and the generally bad pedagogy in vogue, I could see the pro-cursive camp was fated to lose.

And they did. Cursive is now federally frowned upon. Yet another card pulled from the teetering house of cards.

The pro-cursive camp, I think, would have done better if they'd just stuck to basic truths in this debate, like reminding their adversaries: “You’re all fucking MORONS! Remove handwriting from education? You're fucking IDIOTS! We're going to SECEDE!”

I'm actually convinced this is the only way to deal with these people. Debating them is impossible. Just call a spade a spade.

Then we'll set up an alternative state somewhere else on the globe where watching reality TV is a punishable offense and kids learn not just cursive but also classics and manners and also that there are two genders, male and female, rather than seventeen.

Jump to this month, August. A few days ago a high school friend of mine, I’ll call him Steve, who graduated from the University of Chicago no less, and who, as a technophile, considered himself in the anti-cursive camp, posted on Facebook a New York Times editorial by one Anne Trubek opining that cursive was unnecessary and that “the kids will be alright.” This bit of offensive NYT blather is titled “Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter”. And the kids aren’t alright. They already aren’t alright, never mind what they “will be” after a dozen more years of the anomie we’re raising them into.

I should point out that Steve and I have both just turned fifty, that we remain good friends since we left high school in the 1980s, and that we tend to disagree strongly on what are called "hot button" issues. The caption Steve added to his posting of Ms. Trubek's article showed his typical approach of cool optimism whenever such questions come up:

Soon the conspiracy theorists will be claiming that this is yet another example of turning our children into brainwashed automatons. Change is tough. Especially on the old.

For Steve, anyone who points to educational decline and sees the culture going to hell is just being “alarmist”. I’ve written him before about his scary inability, as a University of Chicago graduate, to differentiate between its and it’s and compliment and complement and suchlike things, but carping on English usage to Steve is counterproductive. He replies with an emoticon with its tongue stuck out. If he’s forced to use actual words, they are: “Lighten up dude. Its not important.”

For Steve, people who even use words like civilization are being alarmist by definition. Because, don’t you know, civilization grows on trees. And there are trees all over, dude.

The first two of Steve’s friends to comment in the thread were also in the “Civilization? Who cares?” camp. They wrote:

MARY S.: Oh thank you thank you thank you for posting this article, Steve! I feel like I am shouting into the wilderness when I say that cursive offers no special cognitive advantages over printing, no special ability to "read historical documents" (as someone who actually has read handwritten historical documents, I can assure everyone that older styles of penmanship are so different from our own that knowing cursive is no help--plus, why waste millions of precious learning hours teaching something that only the tiny minority of kids who go on to be academic historians will ever use?), no special fine motor skills that couldn't be better taught by learning to cook or sew a button back on. Change is hard, except for those of us who remember sitting inside on a beautiful day, hunching over our desks for hours a week, papers at a perfect 45-degree angle, meticulously drawing little parallel lines. My son is old enough to have had some cursive in school, while my daughter didn't have it at all. Let cursive go the way of button-hooks, itchy starched collars, and other anachronisms!

ALANIA C.: YES! I hurt my wrist and write like crap and then this. Well played universe, well played.

I couldn’t let all this slide. The Pokemon Go phenomenon already has me in a bad state this summer, and seeing all this on a friend’s wall, I had to deliver a few punches. The thread went on as you see below. What surprised me, this time, is that in the end I actually won Steve over. That is a rarity. In fact I'm not sure I’d ever before convinced Steve of anything.

ERIC MADER: The end of cursive handwriting would be a great cultural loss. The decline of writing on paper is already a serious loss. For many reasons. One of the most basic reasons being cognitive. Studies have shown it.

In general you’re a geek about these things, Steve. But get something in your head: You and your friend Mary and the others in your camp will eventually be devoured by cyborg zombies. And in my mind, the worst thing about this is that you'll probably all enjoy it. Hell, you’re half-devoured already.

I ain’t even gonna debate this with you it's so fucking obvious. I live in a culture where kids, just in order to READ, have to learn three thousand different handwritten characters. We're talking thousands upon thousands of hours of practice. And this basic hard work of learning the writing system deepens their respect for the content they learn and sharpens their skills in so many ways. So that in most other subjects, often even including the foreign language ENGLISH, they could outperform their American peers who over there in the States can graduate high school by learning to wipe their asses and spell their names. I've seen this happen over and over--kids leaving Taipei and going to school in the US and realizing it's a joke. I have kids, in regular public schools here, who study English no more than an hour or two a day and have larger ENGLISH vocabulary and better spelling and grammar than the majority of American kids their age.

“Millions of precious learning hours wasted" on cursive? It’s a fucking joke. Many of my pre-teen students TEACH THEMSELVES English cursive just for fun. They do it in a couple afternoons. After which they'll often hand me homework and essays in English in perfectly functional cursive.

SHAME on America. “Hours wasted” indeed!

STEVE L.: I didnt write the article man. And I guess you didnt read it, because according to the article (and I dont have an opinion on this actually as I dont know enough about cognitive brain functions) what you say is not true when it comes to learning. But hey, take it up with the author. And as for being a zombie, you too will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

ERIC MADER: You posted the article man. And I did read it and have read into the positions of the two sides in this debate. And this NYT piece, in the spectrum of this debate, is simply DAFT. Its arguments are shallow. It's typical of a new strain at the NYT, a paper growing DAFTER and DAFTER every year. Along with the whole country.

When we all hit 70 or so, if we're still around, we're going to see just what kind of culture our "reforms" and “advances" have brought about. The key difference is that you, muttering "Holy shit", are going to be surprised. I'm not.

Resistance will continue.

BRIAN D.: Steve, I don't need cursive to write this: I will wrestle you for food. Cursive is just one stop on the road to anarchy. And no, I don’t need to read the article to register my desire to wrestle you for food. THAT should be a given.

LOUISE B.: Aside from the arguments made in the article, my gut (a pretty accurate scientific barometer, if I do say so myself) dislikes the loss of any learning opportunity. My sisters were forced to conform their writing through hours of repetition. Though I learned cursive, it wasn't perfected at their level. I believe we should throw cursive at the kids just to expose them to the art of written language. Cave drawings, the development of written language around the world, evolution of cursive, etc. Let kids play with it: feather quills, calligraphic nibs, roller balls, the speed of texting and typing--let them play with all of it.

STEVE L.: I would be happy to say the jury is still out. I can also say this: I haven't actually written in cursive in any extended way, save my signature, in years. I also don't think that the merits of learning cursive have ever equalled the seeming abuse left handed writers have faced in American schools. But who knows, maybe learning cursive, just like riding horses (animal empathy) or chopping wood for fire (connection to environment) has/does make us better people. I simply don't know. Apparently you do, on the cursive issue anyway.

ERIC MADER: I haven't done algebra in 30-some years, or much of any other math other than calculating percentages. I haven't worked through a geometric proof either. That doesn't mean I would subscribe to arguments that we should get rid of these basic elements of education just because they aren't "the skills needed for the job market".

That you personally haven't written in cursive doesn't mean much. I write almost everything important that I write on paper, in CURSIVE, and many writers of the books published every year do the same. If I didn't know how to write cursive, my handwriting would be slowed considerably, and I'd need a digital device of some kind to keep recording words at the pace of my thoughts. I'd be seriously hampered if for some reason a digital device wasn't at hand. I short, you take away cursive skills, and you take away a huge swathe of important cultural work, journal writing, personally handwritten notes, novels, poetry, etc., that is better done, according to many professional writers, on paper first. And you permanently link that very crucial cultural process called writing to access to digital devices. Are you sure you want to do all this?

I would have to say that yes, on this issue, I do know the right side.

STEVE L.: Excellent points. Consider me converted. Not kidding. Reason. It is a great thing.

ERIC MADER: Glad to hear. You’ve proven yourself an honest man. But that has a downside. When those cyborg zombies come to finish you off a couple decades from now, if you’re still an honest man, you won't actually enjoy it like I thought.

The arguments of mine that convinced you are really only a small part of the question of what is at stake in this kind of debate.

Anthropologists GET the fact that societies or civilizations hold together in myriad complex ways, often in ways that nobody in the society itself understands or knows consciously. Anthropologists have documented in case after case how pulling out only a couple little rivets is all it takes to cause the whole culture to fall into decline. Pulling out this or that rivet, especially in a practice as central to us as reading or writing, is going to have complex interactions with the whole of the structure. It’s going to have repercussions that we can't foresee. Any change, however reasonable or practical it may look at the moment, may play a role in ushering in things we really don't want.

All advanced civilizations that we know of have taught the young to write by making marks or characters on some surface. Forming these written marks BY HAND. We don't know of any advanced civilization that HASN'T included this practice. The upshot: We simply can't know much about what a civilization based on typing, texting or voice input (which is where it will lead) will be like. Going that direction as a pedagogical norm or goal, we may very well be undermining a whole host of other things in ways we can't even predict. Again: for a certain kind of cognitive development alone I strongly suspect handwriting is crucial.

Yes, resistance may be futile given the fast-growing cyborg zombie demographic. But I would still say: Resist!

Eric Mader

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.