West on the American Founding (7): Zuckert and the Evolutionary State of Nature

West and Zuckert agree that the fundamental idea for the natural rights philosophy of the American founders was the state of nature.  West writes: "The state of nature is the basis of the founders' understanding of politics.  If human beings are born free and equal in a natural state, subject only to the laws of nature, then government is a product of human making to secure the equal natural rights of the citizens" (409).  Zuckert sees the Declaration of Independence structured as a syllogism, in which the second paragraph states the major premises arranged in a temporal sequence corresponding to the history of human political experience, which begins with the pre-political condition in the state of nature, where all men are free and equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights (18-19).  If that is not true, the Declaration's syllogism fails.

Many critics of social contract theory and of the Declaration of Independence have denied the historical reality of this state of nature.  After all, all human beings have been born into societies, subjected to the authority of their parents and others in their society.  Human infants living a solitary life would soon die.

Although this criticism might apply to Rousseau's account of the state of nature as an utterly asocial condition of solitary individuals, it does not apply to Locke's account of the state of nature as human beings living in social bands of hunter-gatherers without formal government or laws but with customary norms of conduct that constitute a law of nature.  For Locke, the historical reality of this state of nature is evident in the life of the American Indians, who lived the sort of hunting-gathering way of life that must have characterized our ancient human ancestors: "In the beginning, all the world was America."

As I have indicated in some other posts, Locke studied the reports of the American Indians living in foraging bands as evidence of how human beings originally lived in a state of nature prior to the turn to agriculture and the establishment of government, and most of what Locke inferred has been confirmed by modern research in evolutionary anthropology. 

Here Locke was following the lead of ancient authors like Lucretius and Dicaearchus, who saw that the first human beings must have lived as hunter-gatherers, which Dicaearchus called "the state of nature."  Although the Declaration of Independence does not use the term "state of nature," the idea is implied in the claim that human beings are naturally equal in their liberty until "governments are instituted among men."

Remarkably, however, Zuckert argues that "the Declaration does not present literal or empirical history, but moral history." "The Declaration is not speaking of some primordial prepolitical condition in which human beings wander the forests 'lonely as a cloud'" (23).  The Declaration's history is actually "mythic history" (145). But then he seems to contradict this when he says that the Declaration is exploring "the primeval human condition, the condition prior to the establishment of government and prior to all humanly established laws and rights" (102).

Moreover, Zuckert recognizes that Jefferson, like Locke, thought that the American Indians showed the historical reality of the state of nature (68-69).  According to Jefferson, the Indians manifest "the circumstance of their having never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government.  Their only controls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling, in every man makes a part of his nature.  An offense against these is punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the case is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it concerns" (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XI). 

Jefferson's insight here into the evolution of the moral sense in foraging bands has been confirmed by the evidence gathered and analyzed by evolutionary anthropologists like Christopher Boehm, who see the evolution of morality through indirect reciprocity, or what Locke called "the law of reputation," which has been the subject of a post.

From the evolutionary anthropology of the 18th century Scottish philosophers and historians, Jefferson adopted the "four stages theory" of human evolutionary progress--hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial (see Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, Jan. 30, 1787; Letter to William Ludlow, Sept. 6, 1824; and Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 1976).

West quotes a remark by John Adams that West takes as expressing a "view shared by all the founders" (103):

"Men, in their primitive conditions, however savage, were undoubtedly gregarious; and they continue to be social, not only in every stage of civilization, but in every possible situation in which they can be placed.  As nature intended them for society, she has furnished them with passions, appetites, and propensities, as well as a variety of faculties, calculated both for their individual enjoyment, and to render them useful to each other in their social connections.  There is none among them more essential or remarkable, then the passion for distinction. A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows, is one of the earliest, as well as keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man" (Discourses on Davila, II).

The natural sociality of human beings, even in the primitive state of nature without government, and the evolution of a natural moral law from the natural social concern for praise and blame have been corroborated by modern research in evolutionary anthropology.

West argues that the American founders did not see the state of nature as something found only in the distant primeval past, because they thought it was an ever present reality.  So, for example, when the Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, they momentarily entered the state of nature until they instituted a new government over them.  Moreover, in affirming the natural right to revolution, the Americans understood that people could enter the state of nature at any time in the future when they might judge that their government was not securing their natural rights, and that they must invoke their natural right to alter or abolish their government, and institute new government that might seem to them most likely to effect their safety and happiness by securing their natural rights.

I agree with this, but I also believe that Locke was correct in thinking that the only way to explain how these natural rights are really natural for human beings is to see how they express the primordial human nature shaped in the original state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

West on the American Founding (6): Zuckert and the Amalgam Thesis

Thomas West recognizes that his account of the American founding as based on the theory of natural rights resembles Michael Zuckert's interpretation of the founding as establishing a "natural rights republic" (Zuckert 1996).  And yet West insists that he rejects Zuckert's "amalgam thesis"--the idea that while the theory of natural rights is the primary element in the political thought of the founding, the tradition of natural rights thinking is combined with other traditions--such as civic republicanism, Protestant Christianity, British constitutionalism, and perhaps others--that are in tension with the tradition of natural rights. 

In recent decades, West observes, this idea of the political thought of the founding as mixture of different and sometimes conflicting intellectual traditions has become the predominant scholarly consensus, which Zuckert shares with scholars like William Galston, Thomas Pangle, and Paul Rahe.  But West complains that this makes the founders appear to be confused or incoherent in their thinking.  Against this, he proposes to explain the natural rights theory of the founders as a theoretically coherent understanding of politics without any tension or contradictions.

Nonetheless, a careful reading and comparison of West's and Zuckert's books will show, I think, that West's explicit rejection of Zuckert's "amalgam thesis" is contradicted by West's implicit acceptance of Zuckert's argument.  Although this might seem to be a trivial scholarly quibble, it points to some of the fundamental questions about the American political regime and about the theory of natural rights as applied to that regime.

Zuckert explains:

". . . what made America was the way these four elements--Old Whig constitutionalism, political religion, republicanism, and the natural rights philosophy--come together.  The amalgamation that occurred in America was unique in the world, and led America to a unique path of political development and to a particularly tense existence as these four different and, in some dimensions, incompatible elements fell in and out of harmony with each other.  In that amalgam, however, the four elements did not all enjoy an equal status; the natural rights philosophy remains America's deepest and so far most abiding commitment, and the others could enter the amalgam only so far as they were compatible, or could be made so, with natural rights.  The truly remarkable thing is the demonstrated capacity of the natural rights philosophy to assimilate the other three and hold them all together in a coherent if not always easily subsisting whole" (Zuckert 1996, 95).

West quotes some of this language--"tense existence . . . incompatible elements"--as suggesting that the political thought of the founders was an incoherent mixture of contradictory elements; and against that idea, West claims that he can show that the natural rights philosophy of the founders was fully coherent and free from any tense contradictions (West 2017, 46).

But notice that Zuckert sees this American amalgam of different elements as rendered coherent by the preeminence of natural rights as the ruling element, so that the other elements can enter the amalgam only in so far as they can be made compatible with natural rights.  Thus, Zuckert can describe this as "an amalgamation in which the natural rights commitment has remained senior partner but has brought into its political orbit English Whig historical commitments, Protestant political theology, and premodern political republicanism" (240-41).

West seems to agree with this, because he says that the success of the American Revolution required a combination of natural rights thinking with the "distinctive ethnic character, religion, and legal heritage" of America, and to that extent, he concedes, "the amalgam thesis is correct: natural rights are not enough."  But just as Zuckert speaks of natural rights as the "senior partner" in the amalgam, West speaks of natural rights as taking the "leading role" (West 2017, 52). 

So here West and Zuckert agree on the amalgam thesis: that the political thought of the founding was a mixture of historical, religious, and political traditions, but that the natural rights philosophy was the preeminent element in that mixture, so that all the other elements had to be somehow assimilated into that natural rights thinking.

West also recognizes, at least implicitly, some of the same "tension" that Zuckert sees between natural rights thinking and some of the other elements of the American amalgam.  For example, Zuckert shows how the Lockeanization of New England Puritan thought required the rejection of the Puritan theocracy that prevailed in the colonial period.  Similarly, West shows how the theory of natural rights required moving away from the governmental enforcement of Mosaic theocracy towards a separation of church and state, so that "government is no longer in the business of defining the one true religion," and "individuals are free to live their lives independently of religious faith" (407).  The tension between Protestant Christian theocracy and Lockean religious toleration was softened if not overcome by deciding that Roger Williams was right that Protestant Christianity required a "wall of separation" between "spiritual things" and "civil things."


REFERENCES

West, Thomas G. 2017. The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zuckert, Michael. 1996. The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

"The Lord of the Rings" Films Refute Tolkien's Anti-Modernity

"He disliked the modern world."  So said Christopher Tolkien about his father. 

Tolkien's disgust with the modern world began in his childhood.  From the age of 4 to 8 (1896 to 1900), Tolkien lived with his widowed mother in the hamlet of Sarehole, a mile south of Birmingham, England.  This rural English village had a rustic life unlike the industrialized life of Birmingham.  Later in life, Tolkien said that he remembered those four years as his time living in the Shire, when he became a young Hobbit.

His mother converted to Catholicism, despite the fierce opposition of her family, who ostracized her.  He then became a child convert at 8, and for his whole life he was a devout traditionalist Catholic, with a love for the Middle Ages and a scorn for the modern world shaped by the Protestant Reformation, which had turned away from the only True Church.

His mother was forced to move to central Birmingham in a small house overlooking a busy, noisy street with ugly buildings and a view in the distance of smoking factory chimneys.  He later said that his life in Birmingham, dominated by modern mechanization and industrialism, was "dreadful."  The contrast between Sarehole and Birmingham is echoed in the contrast between the Shire and Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings and most of Tolkien's other writing can be read as a criticism of the technological, materialistic, and capitalistic civilization of the modern world, and as expressing a longing for the rustic simplicity and communal life of premodern English villages.  John Clute has described The Lord of the Rings as "a comprehensive counter-myth to the story of the twentieth century," because "what had happened to life in the twentieth century was profoundly inhuman."  Tolkien's counter-myth, Clute claimed, was "a description of a universe that feels right--another reality that the soul requires in this waste-land century."

But is this really true--that life in the twentieth century was profoundly inhuman?  And that a more truly human life would have required a return to the village life of medieval England?

It is easy to understand how the first half of the twentieth century--particularly, the brutality and violence of the two world wars--created a scorn for modernity in people like Tolkien.  But the triumph of modern liberalism in the second half of the century--with growing freedom and prosperity around the world--makes it easier to see moral progress in modern life.  (I have written a series of posts on human progress in November and December of 2016.)

After all, doesn't Tolkien's own life show the moral and intellectual benefits of living in modern liberal societies? 

Tolkien became a professor at Oxford University who was a member of a community of Christian scholars and writers--the Inklings--that included C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams.  They met at least twice a week as philosophic friends for conversations about the philosophic, theological, and literary topics that concerned them. 

Every time that I am in Oxford, I go to the Eagle and the Child pub where the Inklings met for beer and conversation every Thursday.  They called it "The Bird and the Baby."

Tolkien helped to convert Lewis to Christianity, but Tolkien was deeply disappointed that Lewis joined the Anglican Church and refused to convert to Catholicism.  Lewis had grown up in the world of Ulster Protestants in Northern Ireland, and Tolkien thought that Lewis never abandoned the anti-Catholic prejudices of the Ulster Protestants.  But since they lived in early twentieth century England, when the modern liberal culture of religious toleration and freedom was beginning to flourish, Tolkien and Lewis could be good friends.  Tolkien said that without Lewis's help and encouragement, he might never have finished writing The Lord of the Rings.   This would not have been possible in a premodern village dominated by the authority of the Catholic Church.

And if the twentieth century was such an inhuman wasteland, how does one explain the popularity of Tolkien's books and the movies based on the books?  His books have had tens of millions of readers, and the movies have had even larger audiences.

The Lord of the Rings movies have become one of the highest-grossing film series in the history of cinema--almost $6 billion.  The average per film is exceeded only by the Harry Potter movies.  So it seems that modern capitalist profit-seeking can support high literary and cinematic art.  Moreover, cinema is an artistic invention of the twentieth century arising from modern technology.

As I suggested in my previous post, the artistry of The Lord of the Rings movies is particularly evident in the music for the movies composed, orchestrated, conducted, and produced by Howard Shore.  One can see this by reading the Wikipedia article on Shore's music for the films, which is based mostly on the magnificent book by Doug Adams, The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films (2010).

I believe that a good case can be made that the movies actually improve on Tolkien's books, mostly because of the music, which comes from Shore's careful study of the books and the scripts and his Wagnerian artistry in turning the books into an opera.

One of many examples of this musical deepening of Tolkien's writing is the song that is sung at the end of The Return of the King during the closing credits--"Into the West," which was composed by Annie Lennox and Shore and sung by Lennox.  It won the Academy Award for best song in 2003.

Here are the lyrics:

Into the West

Lay down
Your sweet and weary head
The night is falling
You have come to journey's end
Sleep now
And dream of the ones who came before
They are calling
From across the distant shore

Why do you weep?
What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see
All of your fears will pass away
Safe in my arms
You're only sleeping

What can you see
On the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?
Across the sea
A pale moon rises
The ships have come to carry you home

And all will turn
To silver glass
A light on the water
All Souls pass

Hope fades
Into the world of night
Through shadows falling
Out of memory and time
Don't say
We have come now to the end
White shores are calling
You and I will meet again
And you'll be here in my arms
Just sleeping

And all will turn
To silver glass
A light on the water
Grey ships pass
Into the West

The imagery and some of the phrases here are taken from the last chapter ("The Grey Havens") of Tolkien's Return of the King.  People have debated whether The Lord of the Rings conveys Catholic Christian themes, as Tolkien said it did.  Part of that debate is whether there is any suggestion in the book of immortality in an afterlife.  The last chapter is ambiguous about this.  Frodo is sailing away on a white ship, leaving Sam, Merry, and Pippin behind in the Shire.  One can see some intimation of immortality, but it's unclear, and some readers can infer that the only human life is the mortal life of the people in the Shire.  The song has this same ambiguity, and it conveys it in a way that is deeply moving.  (I have written a series of posts on immortality, in October and November of 2013, and on Heaven and Hell, in April and May of 2010.)

Sunday night, this will conclude the Ravinia Festival's showing of the three movies with live music.  Many of the people in the pavilion and on the lawn will be moved to tears.

The modern world of the twentieth century, and now the twenty-first century, can't be as morally, intellectually, and spiritually impoverished as Tolkien thought it was if we can be moved in such a way by Tolkien's myth of Middle-earth.

Of course, for Augustinian Christians like Tolkien, no matter how good life on Earth might become, living in the "City of Man" must always be unsatisfying, as the soul longs for that fullness of joy--for that ultimate Happy Ending--that can only be found in the "City of God" in Heaven.

The Storytelling Instinct in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"--Christian? Pagan? Wagnerian?

Next week (August 18-20), the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, will have three nights devoted to Peter Jackson's film trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.  The movies will be projected on large screens, and the Academy Award winning music by Howard Shore will be played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a chorus of singers.  My family and I have pavilion seats for all three nights.  A few years ago, we were at Ravinia for the third movie--The Return of the King.

This will give me a good opportunity to think about the powerful appeal of Tolkien's story, and what this might reveal about storytelling as an evolved instinct of human nature.

In the run up to the year 2000, several major polls asking people "What was the greatest book of the twentieth century?" found that first place went to The Lord of the Rings.  This irritated many literary critics who dismissed Tolkien's fantasy story of Middle Earth as a bad fairytale for children that has become a low form of escapist fantasy for some adults.  And yet many people have found this to be one of the most powerful works of fiction they have ever read.  Jackson's film versions of the book--beginning with the Fellowship of the Ring in 2001--have become some of the most popular films of all time.

So what is it about Tolkien's story that makes it so attractive and so moving for so many people?  Does it show us, as Jonathan Gottschall has argued in The Storytelling Animal, that stories make us human, that storytelling is unique to human beings as part of their evolved nature?  If so, is there something about Tolkien's story that satisfies that storytelling instinct better than most other stories?  Or are the critics correct in dismissing this as a childish fantasy story?

Many Christians have seen The Lord of the Rings as a profoundly Christian book, or more particularly as a profoundly Catholic Christian book.  Tolkien was a devout English Catholic.  And in 1955, one year after the publication of the book, he wrote to the English Jesuit Robert Murray: "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.  That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion,' to cults or practices, in the imaginary world.  The religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."

But notice the strange manner in which he speaks here.  "Of course" it is "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," and that is "why" the book has almost no references to religion!  In fact, when the book was first published, many readers were surprised that there were no overt indications of any religious practices or beliefs in Tolkien's fictional world.  Some readers have found Tolkien's "of course" to be an implausible effort by Tolkien to turn this into a Catholic Christian book, even though it is completely silent about religion.

Some Christian readers have responded by defending Tolkien's claim that "the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism," by pointing to what Tolkien said in his essay "On Fairy Stories," which can be found online. 

Tolkien sees fairy stories as the highest expression of the innate human capacity for fantasy--the uniquely human capacity for using language to create a "secondary world" of narrative fiction beyond the "primary world" of our ordinary experience.  In creative fantasy, Tolkien claims, we act as "sub-creators."  We are makers of art because we were made in the image and likeness of a Maker.  Our Creator, who created everything from nothing, created us to be sub-creators.   As storytellers, we manifest a storytelling instinct that belongs to us as part of God's Cosmic Story.

Darwinian scientists like Gottschall can explain this human storytelling instinct as the product of a purely natural process of human evolution:  we evolved to tell stories that help us navigate the complex social problems that we face as human beings, just as flight simulators help pilots to anticipate the problems they will face as pilots, and this social intelligence that we gain from stories that simulate social life enhances our chances for survival and reproduction in complex human societies. 

Some people will see this Darwinian story about the origin and function of storytelling as an alternative to Tolkien's Christian story about storytelling as part of our being created in God's image.  The theistic evolutionist, however, will see the Darwinian story and the Christian story as compatible:  the Creator could have used the evolutionary process to create the human storytelling instinct.

According to Tolkien, in "On Fairy Stories," the highest function of fairy-stories is the "Consolation of the Happy Ending"--the joy of deliverance from evil and suffering, a deliverance that comes from the sudden turn to the "good catastrophe," a sudden and miraculous grace that denies the pervasive evidence for universal final defeat.

Tolkien suggests that we might explain this joy that comes from a true fairy-story as "a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth," as "a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world."  The joy of the consolation of the happy ending that comes from a fairy-story might echo the joy that comes from the Christian Story. 

After all, Tolkien claims, "the Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories," because the Gospels give us the most complete "good catastrophe"--the birth, death by crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ and the prophecy of the Second Coming of Christ, so that human beings can be redeemed and resurrected to eternal life at the end of history, which gives human beings the deepest joy of knowing that the history of everything has a happy ending.  (Oddly, Tolkien says nothing about the eternal punishment of those in Hell.  Where's the happy ending for them?)

Tolkien told C. S. Lewis that Christianity was a myth, but a true myth.  What are the signs of a true myth as opposed to a false myth?

Tolkien's Christian readers might say that even though The Lord of the Rings says nothing overtly about religion or Christianity, it can still be a Christian story in so far as it shows "a gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world." 

But that "gleam or echo" of the Christian Story seems very dim to those many readers of The Lord of the Rings who see that Tolkien's story draws much more from the pagan traditions of Nordic Europe and the folklore of fairy-tales than it does from Christian traditions of thought.  Tolkien's world of wizards, elves, dragons, magic, witchcraft, and reincarnation, a world of dark fatalism and death with no prospect of final redemption and immortality, seems very far from a Christian world.  Indeed, many, maybe most, of those readers who think this book is the "greatest book of the twentieth century" are not Christians, and they see no Christian message in the book.  Even many Christian parents don't see this as a good book for teaching Christian lessons to their children.

Moreover, the anti-Christian paganism of this book becomes even more evident as soon as one notices the influence of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle of four operas--The Ring of the Nibelung.  Both Tolkien and Wagner drew deeply from Nordic mythology in their storytelling. 

The Christian scholars of Tolkien have dismissed this idea by quoting his response to the Swedish translator of The Lord of the Rings who suggested parallels between Tolkien's book and Wagner's Ring cycle: "Both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases."  The Christian scholars can also point to the obvious differences between the men: Wagner was an atheist socialist anarchist, and Tolkien was a Catholic traditionalist monarchist!

But if one lays Tolkein's book next to Wagner's libretto for the Ring cycle, the similarities are striking, as indicated in some articles by Alex Ross, James McGregor, and Stefan Arvidsson.   

"The lord of the ring is the slave of the ring."  Since that line states one of the the fundamental themes of The Lord of the Rings, one might assume that it's a line from the book.  Actually, it's a line from Alberich's curse on the ring in scene four of Wagner's Rhinegold .  Arvidsson observes: "The fundamental idea of a ring endowed with power, a ring that confers power and wealth upon its bearer, while it also entices those who come in contact with it to evil deeds and breaks them down, is not found in the medieval sources. Rather, Tolkien must have borrowed it straight from Wagner."  Moreover, as Arvidsson indicates, the ten steps in Wagner's narrative history of the ring correspond in some manner to Tolkien's narration of the ring.

We know that Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis was an avid student of Wagner's operas, that Lewis took Tolkien to a London performance of The Valkyrie, and that at one point the two of them set out to write a translation of that opera, the second in the cycle of four Ring operas.

We also know, however, that Tolkien detested what he saw as Adolf Hitler's vicious distortion of Nordic mythology, and that Hitler's appropriation of Nordic mythology as providing a mythic frame for his German racist nationalism was deeply influenced by his experience of Wagner's operas.  So, one possibility, as Arvidsson suggests, is that Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings to correct the Wagnerian interpretation of Nordic mythology that shaped the mythic nationalism of Hitler and others.

In 1941, while he was writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote in a letter: "Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge--which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will).  Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."

The Lord of the Rings could be seen as Tolkien's effort to present "that noble northern spirit . . . in its true light" against the evil distortions of Hitler and Wagner.

I have written about the Hitler-Wagner connection in some previous posts (here and here).  I will think more about this in November, when I will see the new production of Wagner's Valkyrie by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which is part of Lyric's new production of the entire Ring cycle.

I also want to think about how Wagner's operatic storytelling, which combines music, singing, and theatrical drama, compares with Tolkien's storytelling through language alone.  In "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien argues that storytelling is done best through words alone.

Jackson's movie trilogy--and also his movie version of The Hobbit--turns Tolkien's purely literary work into something like an opera.  This raises the question of whether Jackson's movies are better or worse than Tolkien's books.  Some people--Alex Ross, for example--argue that the movies are better than the books, because Shore's music employs Wagnerian musical artistry that deepens the emotional impact of the storytelling of Tolkien's words.

Shore deliberately composed his music to employ Wagner's operatic techniques in the Ring cycle: Shore's musical score includes over 100 leitmotifs (short musical phrases associated with particular people, places, or ideas) and singing by choir and soloists.  It's the most elaborate musical score in the history of cinema.  That's why the three performances at Ravinia, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, choir, and soloists, will be such a treat.

Shore evokes Wagner at the very end of the trilogy by echoing Wagner's final music closing the Ring.  Doug Adams (in The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films) describes it this way: "After a suite of musical highlights from The Return of the King, the orchestra introduces a new line, a series of lilting arpeggios climbing high over lapping chords.  This is Shore's nod to Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung, the final opera in his Ring des Nibelungen."

West on the American Founding (5): The Philosophic Life in America

As West indicates, his Straussian colleagues will object to his claim that the American founders wanted government to promote the virtues by arguing that they did not promote the highest virtues, which are the intellectual virtues of the philosophic life (298-306).

In "Ethics and Politics: The American Way," Diamond anticipates this Straussian objection.  He answers with one sentence: "Finally, and with a brevity disproportionate  to importance, one should also note gratefully that the American political order, with its heterogeneous and fluctuating majorities and with its principle of liberty, supplies a not inhospitable home to the love of learning" (363).  He offers no elaboration or evidence to support this.

West concedes that when the founders spoke about public education, they saw it as directed towards "useful" knowledge (such as science that could improve agriculture and manufacturing) and the formation of good citizens and statesmen; and they said nothing about the possibility of public education that would lead those of superior intellect to live a philosophic life.  They certainly did not recommend anything like what Plato's Socrates proposed in The Republic for the public education of philosophers.

And yet some of the founders did occasionally express respect for the life of the mind.  In particular, West quotes remarks by George Washington, John Adams, James Wilson, and Benjamin Franklin that suggest that a life of intellectual inquiry might be one of the highest human goods. 

At the Constitutional Convention in 1987, it is reported in Madison's notes that Wilson remarked: "he could not agree that property was the sole or the primary object of government and society.  The cultivation and improvement of the human mind was the most noble object" (July 13).  This statement is somewhat vague, however.  And West quotes Thomas Pangle's observation that Wilson's statement "betrays no awareness of any possible tension or gulf between the philosophic and the political life, and bespeaks no classical notion of the superiority of the former to the latter."  Here Pangle expresses the distinctively Straussian claim about "the ultimate superiority of the contemplative life to that of the citizen or statesman, and the gulf between the two ways of life" (West, 306).  And in pointing to the "tension or gulf between the philosophic and the political life," Pangle brings up the famous Straussian teaching about the irresolvable conflict between philosophy and politics, which makes esoteric writing necessary to protect philosophers from persecution and to protect politics from subversion by philosophy.

This Straussian view of the philosophic life suggests three questions about the American founders.  Did they see the natural goodness of philosophizing?  Did they see that a life of philosophizing is naturally superior to any other life?  Did they see that the conflict between philosophy and politics makes the liberal freedom of speech and thought for philosophers impossible or dangerous? 

I would answer yes to the first question, but no to the second and third questions.  West clearly answers yes to the first question, and he also answers yes, although not so clearly, to the second and third questions.

Of all the founders, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson show most clearly a love of philosophical thought and conversation.  West thinks that Kevin Slack, in an article in American Political Thought (Spring 2013), has made a good case for seeing Franklin as a philosopher.  In some previous posts (here and here), I have agreed with Steven Smith, in his book Modernity and Its Discontents, that Franklin's promotion of philosophic clubs for conversation and debate and his scientific research in natural philosophy show that he was an "American Socrates" living "a life uniquely devoted to the pleasures of the mind."  But then I criticize Smith for ignoring this in the rest of his book, where he embraces the Straussian scorn for the bourgeois life as flat and boring in failing to aspire to the higher human excellences, and thus ignoring how the bourgeois virtues of Franklin include the highest moral and intellectual virtues.  I have indicated in a previous post (here) how Deirdre McCloskey tries to present Franklin's bourgeois virtues as encompassing all of the traditional moral and intellectual virtues.

As West indicates, Adams as a young man identified Xenophon as his favorite author.  Adams also reported that he had read all of Plato's dialogues, reading them in English, Latin, and French translations and then checking the Greek for important passages.  He was a careful and thoughtful reader of many other philosophers. 

West quotes from a letter that Adams wrote to his wife in 1780: "It is not indeed the fine arts which our country requires.  The useful, the mechanic arts, are those which we have occasion for in a young country. . . . I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.  My sons ought to study mathematics, and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." 

West observes: "Adams emphasizes the cultivation of useful studies for the sake of ultimately transcending the whole dimension of the practical for the sake of contemplating that which is beautiful but useless" (305).

Well, perhaps, but isn't there also a tone of irony as Adams moves down his list--from politics to philosophy to tapestry and porcelain?

One of the clearest manifestations of intellectual intensity in the discussion of the deepest philosophic questions is in the letters between Adams and Jefferson, particularly in the last 14 years of their lives before they both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 

The correspondence of Adams and Jefferson is conveniently available at the Founders Online website of the National Archives.  Lester Cappon edited the complete correspondence between Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, published by the University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

There had been no correspondence between Adams and Jefferson between 1801 and 1812, although there was some correspondence between Abigail Adams and Jefferson in 1804.  Of course, Adams and Jefferson had become vehement political adversaries in the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans.  Dr. Benjamin Rush, their mutual friend, began in 1809 trying to bring a reconciliation between these former friends.  In 1811, Adams told someone "I always loved Jefferson, and still love him."  Finally, in January of 1812, their correspondence resumed.  Adams remarked: "You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other" (July 15, 1813).

Jefferson began by recalling all the trials during the Revolution and Founding period, when "we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government."  He wrote: "politics, of which I have taken final leave I think little of them, & say less.  I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; and I find myself much happier" (January 21, 1812).  Adams responded: "you and I are weary of Politicks" (February 10, 1812).

And while they do discuss politics a great deal in their letters, most of their discussion is about the books they are reading and the philosophical and theological questions raised by those books.  For example, they agree in rejecting Platonic metaphysics and theology as well as the corruption of Christianity by Platonic ideas.  Jefferson hopes "to prepare this euthanasia for Platonic Christianity, and its restoration to the primitive simplicity of its founder" (October 13, 1813).  After a serious reading of Plato's Republic, Jefferson asserts that "the doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them" (April 5, 1814).  Adams agrees that Platonic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, has prevailed for 1500 years.  It must finally die, but it might take centuries for this to happen (July 16, 1814).

Jefferson and Adams agree that "the human understanding is a revelation from its maker" (October 13, 1813), and therefore human beings should rely on their own natural reasoning about religion rather than submitting to the authority of those priests and kings who claim to have received some miraculous revelation from God.  Adams declares: "The question before the human race is, Whether the God of nature shall govern the World by his own laws, or Whether Priests and Kings shall rule it by fictitious Miracles? Or, in other Words, whether Authority is originally in the People?  or whether it has descended for 1800 years in a succession of Popes and Bishops" (June 20, 1815).

For Jefferson an originally materialist Christianity has been corrupted by the influence of Platonic dualist metaphysics--separating Matter and Spirit--that created a spiritualist Christianity.  Jefferson thought that primitive Christianity was purely materialist in believing that both man and God were purely corporeal, and that even immortality required a resurrection of bodies, so that there was no immortality of the soul separated from body (August 15, 1820).  (John Colman has written a good article on this that has been published in American Political Thought, summer 2017.)

Adams thought there was no utility in reviving the controversy between the Spiritualists, who thought that mind shows the action of spirit upon matter, and the Materialists, who thought that matter alone exists, because the relation between Spirit and Matter is a riddle that is forever beyond human understanding (May 26, 1817).  Jefferson, however, thought that it was reasonable to think that only Matter exists, and that thought arises as an activity or conformation of matter.  He admitted that this puzzle was ultimately incomprehensible to the human mind.  But "I confess I should, with Mr. Locke, prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two.  It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought: and two to believe, 1st. that of an existence called Spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then 2ndly. how that spirit which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion" (March 14, 1820).

Jefferson thought he had found scientific proof for materialism in 1825, when he read a paper by Jean Pierre Flourens--Recherches experimentales sur les proprieties et les fonctions du systeme nerveux dans les animaux vertebres (Experimental Researches on the Properties and the Functions of the Nervous System in Vertebrate Animals).  Flourens was one of the founders of experimental brain science.  By surgically cutting out parts of the brain in living rabbits and pigeons, and then observing their effects on motor activity, sensitivity, and behavior, he showed that different parts of the brain had different functions.  By removing the cerebral hemispheres, all perception and judgment were lost.  By removing the cerebellum, the animal lost motor coordination.  Removing the brainstem caused death. 

Over the past two centuries, ever more precise experiments of this sort has demonstrated the modular structure of the brain with localized functions.  As I have argued in some previous posts (here, here, and here)., this suggests how we can explain the mind through the emergent evolution of the brain.

Jefferson explained to Adams: "Flourens proves that the cerebrum is the thinking organ, and that life and health may continue, and the animal be entirely without thought, if deprived of that organ.  I wish to see what the spirtualists will say to this.  Whether, in this state, the soul remains in the body deprived of its essence of thought, or whether it leaves it as in death and where it goes?" (January 8, 1825).

Adams was not convinced: "As to the decision of your Author, though I wish to see the Book, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin Incision knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not, that there is an active principle of power in the Universe is apparent--but in what substance that active principle of power resides, is past our investigation, the faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the Universe, let us do our duty which is to do as we would be done by, and that one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it" (January 22, 1825).

Regardless of which side we might take in this debate, we can see here two of the most prominent of the American founders engaged in a friendly discussion of one of the deepest questions in philosophy, which manifests their love of the life of the mind.

But even if this shows that Adams and Jefferson recognized intellectual inquiry to be a human good, it doesn't necessarily show that they thought this was the highest good, and that the philosophic life should be ranked as naturally the best life for human beings.  After all, they had devoted most of their lives to politics and the pursuit of political glory.  They were moved by the love of fame, which, Hamilton said in The Federalist, is "the ruling passion of the noblest minds."  After he was defeated by Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800, Adams fell into deep depression, and he wrote many letters to Benjamin Rush complaining that Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton had robbed him of the glory that was rightfully his.  (Douglass Adair's "Fame and the Founding Fathers" studied this pervasive love of political fame among the founders.)

For the Straussians, the philosophic life is the only naturally highest good--summum bonum--for human beings.  But, remarkably, as I have argued in some previous posts (here, here, and here), Strauss and the Straussians have never offered any rational proof for this claim.  They often point to Book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as presenting the arguments for why the philosophic life is naturally higher than the moral or political life.  But they never acknowledge the remarkable implausibility and strangeness of those arguments.  In fact, those arguments are so strange and so contradictory to what Aristotle says elsewhere in the Ethics, that one might suspect that Aristotle is being ironical.

Rather than there being a single dominant summum bonum for all beings, Aristotle in his books on friendship in the Ethics suggests an inclusive end conception of the human good: there might be diverse generic human goods that are rightly ranked in different ways for different individuals with different propensities and talents.  As I have noted in a previous post (here), West has seen this idea in Locke: in the natural pursuit of happiness, there is a summum bonum, but it differs for each individual, so that there is no single summum bonum for all human beings.

We could say, then, that the founders rightly saw that intellectual understanding is naturally desirable for human beings, and thus is one of the generic goods of life.  But only a few people, like Socrates, will have the natural propensities and talents that incline them to rank intellectual understanding above all the other naturally desirable goods of life.  Those like the founders will rank the human goods differently, with political glory at the top, although they can also show a love of intellectual inquiry, as did Adams and Jefferson, in their private lives and when they are retired from political life.

We must still wonder whether the founders would agree with Pangle and other Straussians about the "tension or gulf between the philosophic and the political life," so that all societies must persecute philosophers who speak and write openly about what they believe to be true, and philosophers must learn to speak and write esoterically to conceal what they really think to avoid persecution.  West seems to say that the founders would agree with this, but what he says about this is somewhat ambiguous and confusing.

He suggests that the founders would have agreed with what Strauss wrote in "Persecution and the Art of Writing" about the "limits of Enlightenment" (198-201).  West says that "some of the founders (and perhaps all the preeminent ones) accept the view, attributed by Leo Strauss to premodern philosophers, 'that the gulf separating 'the wise' and 'the vulgar' was a basic fact of human nature which could not be influenced by any progress of popular education: philosophy, or science, was essentially a privilege of the few'" (201).  Strauss also said that those premodern philosophers who believed this thought that "public communication of the philosophic or scientific truth was impossible or undesirable, not only for the time being but for all times" (Strauss, 34).  Strauss seemed to endorse this premodern view.

"Most founders," West believes, "were aware of the limits of popular enlightenment."  West speaks of "some" or "most" of the founders as rejecting the modern conception of popular enlightenment, because some of them--particularly Jefferson--"did at times express strong hopes for a more general diffusion of knowledge" (198).

In their correspondence, Jefferson and Adams agreed that the 18th century "certainly witnessed the sciences and arts, manners and morals, advanced to a higher degree than the world had ever seen," and that "the arts and sciences . . . advanced gradually thro' all the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, softening and correcting the manners and morals of man," and "to the great honor of science and the arts, . . . their natural effect is, by illuminating public opinion, to erect it into a Censor, before which the most exalted tremble for their future, as well as present fame" (Jefferson to Adams, January 11, 1816).  So it seems that both Jefferson and Adams embraced the modern idea of popular enlightenment.

West indicates that most of the founders rejected what Strauss described in the following passage of "Persecution and the Art of Writing" as the view of "modern philosophers":

"They believed that suppression of free inquiry, and of publication of the results of free inquiry, was accidental, an outcome of the faulty construction of the body politic, and that the kingdom of general darkness could be replaced by the republic of universal light.  They looked forward to a time when, as a result of the progress of popular education, practically complete freedom of speech would be possible, or--to exaggerate for purposes of clarification--to a time when no one would suffer any harm from any truth" (Strauss 34).

West is silent, however, about Strauss's observation at the beginning of his essay that since the middle of the 19th century, many countries "have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of public discussion" (Strauss, 22).  This contradicts Strauss's premodern view that such practically complete freedom of speech is "impossible or undesirable."  Or is Strauss suggesting that while the success of modern liberal freedom of speech shows that it is possible, it is still undesirable?  If Strauss thought a modern liberal open society was undesirable, should we infer that he taught esoterically the need to overturn liberal societies like America and replace them with illiberal societies?  Since Strauss himself fled from the illiberal society of Nazi Germany and settled in a liberal America where he could live and teach the philosophic life without persecution, does that show that Strauss recognized the superiority of the modern liberal social order to any illiberal social order?  If so, was Strauss a Midwest Straussian?

West says that the founders would agree with James Kent's claim that freedom of speech in America includes "free and decent discussions on any religious opinion," which is illustrated by the free circulation in America of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, published in 1796, which was a scholarly critique of the Bible (209). But if so, does this show that the founders did not agree with the premodern view that practically complete freedom of speech was "impossible or undesirable"?

Arthur Melzer's book Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing helps us to think through these questions as they arise in the study of the history of esoteric writing.  In my series of posts on this (here, here, here, and here), I have suggested that Melzer's book points to a contradiction in Strauss's account of esoteric writing.  On the one hand, Strauss seems to agree with the pre-modern view that esoteric writing is necessary and desirable because of the natural conflict between the philosophic life of the few and the moral, religious, or political life of the many.  On the other hand, Strauss seems to agree with the modern view that in a liberal or open society, there is no natural conflict between the philosophic life and the practical life, and therefore esoteric writing is unnecessary and undesirable.

I see a similar contradiction in West's account of the founders understanding of popular enlightenment.  On the one hand, he indicates that the founders--or at least most of them--agreed with what Strauss identified as the premodern view that the natural and necessary conflict between philosophy and politics makes complete freedom of speech and thought impossible or undesirable.  On the other hand, West indicates that the founders wanted to protect "free and decent discussions" on any subject, and that many of the founders showed a love of philosophy.

If West is claiming that the founders were on the side of the modern liberal philosophers in striving for a complete freedom of speech and thought that includes the freedom to live the philosophic life, and if West is at least implicitly claiming that this has proven to be both possible and desirable, then he is following the path of Martin Diamond in arguing for Midwest Straussianism.

West on the American Founding (4): Character Formation in Voluntary Associations without Governmental Coercion

I have argued that Martin Diamond's Midwest Straussian interpretation of the American founding is superior to Tom West's interpretation, because Diamond rightly saw that the founders recognized that the virtuous character of the people was best formed by civil society--by families and voluntary associations in private life--without legal coercion by government.  In a liberal regime like that favored by the founders, the purpose of government is liberty, while the purpose of society is virtue.

Throughout much of his book, West rejects this separation of government as promoting liberty and society as promoting virtue, because he argues "that according to the founders, virtue is necessary for freedom, and that government cannot rely solely on private institutions such as families and churches to sustain it" (270).  "Enforcement of moral law," he insists, is "the purpose of government" (177-81).  In some parts of his book, however, West seems to agree with Diamond that the founders thought the purpose of government was liberty rather than virtue, and that the cultivation of virtue was the concern of private society (405-10).

The importance of voluntary associations in forming the moral, religious, and intellectual character of Americans was noticed by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, and recently scholars like Kevin Butterfield--in The Making of Tocqueville's America: Law and Association in the Early United States (2015)--have written the history of this.  Butterfield shows how these voluntary associations were extensions into private society of the social compact theory of government: people organized themselves into societies by writing and consenting to constitutions that became the supreme law for securing the ends that they wanted to promote. 

As one of many examples of what he calls "everyday constitutionalism," Butterfield tells the story of the Ladies Literary Society of Norwich, Connecticut that was founded in 1800 when a small group of women wrote a constitution declaring: "we the undersigned do agree to form ourselves into a Society, by the name of the Ladies Literary Society for the special purpose of Enlightening our understandings, expanding our Ideas, and promoting useful knowledge among our Sex; to this end we propose we assemble ev'ry other Wednesday eve, or ev'ry Wednesday from the first of October, to the first of March from 7 Oclock till 9" (93-94).  Following this same pattern of constitutional founding, associations were established for every conceivable social purpose--including moral and religious reform, as in the temperance societies and the anti-slavery societies.

West cites Butterfield's book with approval (West, 255).  But West is silent about Butterfield's emphasis on the "voluntary principle" in these associations, which denied the need or the right of government to coercively enforce morality or religion.  For example, West defends the establishment of religion by state governments as a necessary way for government to promote religion.  But Butterfield argues that the disestablishment of religion in the states after the Revolution--with Massachusetts in 1833 being the last state to terminate its state religious establishment--showed the trend toward "fully voluntary religious societies."  And as a consequence of this, church membership increased dramatically in the first half of the 19th century, which demonstrated that religious belief was promoted by a total separation of church and state (Butterfield, 29-37).  This vindicated Roger Williams' argument for a "wall of separation" between "civil" matters supervised by government and "spiritual" matters left to the conscience of private individuals.

What one sees here in these voluntary associations--churches, schools, clubs, moral reform societies, business firms, mutual aid societies, and utopian communities--is what we might call "private lawmaking" or "private governance," which has been the subject of a previous post (here).  We could also see this as showing what is required in what Douglass North and his colleagues have called the "open access" society (the subject of a post here).