Conservatives need Charles Darwin.
That was the first sentence of my article in the November 2000 issue of First Things. I argued that conservatives need Darwin because a Darwinian science of human nature supports conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectability and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence. In his response to my article in the same issue of the journal, Michael Behe (a biologist known for his advocacy of "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian science) complained: "I'm sorry to be blunt, but the notion that Darwinism supports conservatism is absurd."
I elaborated my argument in my book Darwinian Conservatism (2005), and in a second edition of that book with eight critical responses and my replies (2009). In the fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review, I wrote about "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." I have defended that article against three critics in a post (here).
Over this weekend, I have been thinking about this debate as I pondered the presentations at a conference in Grand Rapids sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal: "Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton." Although neither Kirk nor Scruton ever moved toward anything like Darwinian conservatism, I see nothing in their defense of traditionalist conservatism that would refute my argument for Darwinian conservatism. Previously, I have written about some of my points of agreement and disagreement with Kirk and Scruton. Here I will respond to some of the presentations at the conference.
THE METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM OF CHRISTIAN PLATONISM
James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston) spoke about "The Conservative Defense of Christian Platonism" in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and in the writings of Roger Scruton. He saw both Burke and Scruton as trying to preserve the Christian-Platonic tradition of Christendom that had dominated Western Civilization until it was overturned by the French Revolution. While praising both of them for what they tried to do, Wilson thought their undertakings were weakened by their drawing on modern thought that subverted Christian-Platonist thought. Burke appealed to the sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment when he invoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the foundation of moral experience. Scruton appealed to Immanuel Kant's Idealism as teaching that while the Ideas of Reason, God, Freedom, and Immortality cannot be proven true by pure reason, we must act "as if" they were true as a necessity of practical reason: these are conscious fictions of the mind.
I believe that Wilson was drawing material from his book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017). But since I have not read that book, I might not have rightly understood his presentation.
As I have argued in some previous posts, Plato's moral cosmology--particularly in the Republic, the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and The Laws--is so implausible as to be ridiculous, and it's not even clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates meant us to take this seriously. I have suggested that while Plato might have thought that a teleological cosmology of divinely intelligent design could be a salutary belief for many people, it could not be a rational account of the cosmos for natural philosophers. Aristotle suggested this in observing that such cosmic myths were little more than traditional folk tales (On the Heavens, 270b1-25, 283b26-284b5, 291b24-292a20, 298b6-299a2; The Movement of Animals, 699b12-31; Metaphysics, 1050b20-25, 1074b1-14). But perhaps Wilson in his book has answered my objections.
Although much of Burke's Reflections seems to defend a Christian Platonic metaphysics, Wilson observed, this is in tension with Burke's empiricist ethics of moral sentiments that shows the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment. As I indicated in my Intercollegiate Review article, I agree with this reading of Burke's Reflections, because I see there a tension between the metaphysical conservatism of Burke's moral cosmology of eternal right and wrong and the evolutionary conservatism of his moral anthropology of the moral sentiments.
But unlike Wilson, I don't see Burke's sentimentalism as weakening his argument for Christian Platonism. In fact, Burke wrote his Reflections as a refutation of Reverend Richard Price's Christian Platonism. Price contended that moral knowledge was a purely rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God's mind, and that the French Revolution was the historical fulfillment of those eternal truths. Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke rightly appealed to the natural moral sentiments as the empirical foundation of moral experience. Later, Darwin adopted this moral sentimentalism as part of his evolutionary account of morality, which was then elaborated by evolutionary psychologists like Edward Westermarck and Darwinian conservatives like James Q. Wilson.
By contrast, James Matthew Wilson scorned moral sentimentalism as mere emotionalism, in which morality is reduced to emotive expressions without any rational apprehension of the human good. But this ignores the fact that the moral sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment--particularly in the work of Hume and Smith--was a reflective sentimentalism. As I have indicated, the Scottish sentimentalists did not argue for enslaving reason to emotion, because they actually argued for moral autonomy as the activity of the whole human mind (reason and emotion), in which the mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable. We can reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether they rest on true or false judgments about the world, and whether they promote or impede our happiness.
SCRUTON'S CONSERVATISM OF RELIGIOUS ATHEISM
Wilson also criticized Scruton for embracing Kant's Idealism because this modern Idealism contradicts the premodern Idealism of Christian Platonism. While Kant's ideas are fictional creations of the human mind that do not correspond to any objective reality in the world, Plato's ideas are meant to be intellectual perceptions of what exists in objective reality independently of the human mind.
As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that Plato believed his Eternal Ideas to be anything more than a noble lie. After all, in Plato's Parmenides, Plato has Parmenides refute Socrates' theory of the Forms, and Socrates cannot defend his theory against the criticisms; and in fact, nowhere in the Platonic dialogues does anyone satisfactorily reply to the criticisms.
I do agree with Wilson, however, that Scruton does not really affirm the objective truth of Christian Platonist metaphysics, because for Scruton this religious metaphysics is only a fictional creation of the human mind to satisfy a human longing for the divine. As I have said previously, Scruton makes this clear in his praise for the atheistic religiosity of Richard Wagner's operatic art in the Ring cycle. Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it." "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols. Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine. Art reveals that truth through symbols." In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions. Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics." Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology. Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning. And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption.
The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating. How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?
Darwinian conservatism offers a better account of the religious longings of the human animal. As I have argued previously, Darwin was a zetetic philosophic scientist who recognized that the natural desire for religious transcendence was part of evolved human nature; and while Darwin himself took the side of reason in the reason/revelation debate, he knew that reason could not refute revelation. He knew that the "mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us." In the search for ultimate explanation, the philosophic scientist must assume that nature is the uncaused cause of everything; and yet he cannot refute the claim of the religious believer that God is the uncaused cause of nature. Darwin conceded this in accepting the principle of dual causality, which recognizes natural evolution as the "secondary cause" of everything, while admitting that behind or above nature there might be a Divine First Cause. Thus, Darwin saw that he had to remain open to the possibility of theistic evolution: God does not have to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create every species, because God can choose to act through natural evolution to carry out his creative plan.
This supports a conservative view of religion. The Darwinian scientist respects religious belief in revelation as satisfying the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence. But the Darwinian scientist must also insist that since neither side in the reason/revelation debate can refute the other, and since the disagreement among believers in their interpretations of revelation make it impossible to identify the one true religion, the best regime must secure the freedom of thought and speech that promotes the reason/revelation debate and respects religious pluralism.
To be continued . . .
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