A friend just sent me a link to the NYT's report on the recent gathering of the Christian right in NYC. I have to say it renewed the sick feeling in the stomach which permanently accompanies my residency in the US. I realized what a bliss it is to have the chance to spend an intellectually comfortable time in a European population among whom not even the dullest and least educated believe that the world was created in seven days. Not to be confronted with the discourse on the unnaturalness of homosexuality, the badness of sex outside marital bonds, the prohibition of abortion and stem-cell research felt like a breath of fresh air, like being in a normal, contemporary world. This NYT article struck me as a sinister welcome back from an enlightened world to the dark, nightmarish caves, where all knowledge about the condition of humanity brought to us by enormous efforts of science and development of social consciousness has to be abandoned again. To have to start arguing the basic case for the Enlightenment from scratch feels like intellectual rape: incredibly boring, annoying, painful. Robert P. George, the Princeton professor, makes the Christian Right's cause even more sinister because in his case it can't be blamed on ignorance. His is the pure joy of the pursuit of human unhappiness, reminding me of the eerie pastor and his house from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. I have encountered only one German Christian fundamentalist, and he was a researcher on the Georgia Tech campus, a miserable creature who had to go to Georgia, US to find the audience that eluded him in his praise-worthy home country.
The newspaper report gave no sign of surprise or controversy attending Professor George's promotion of a few local prejudices to the status of “reason” and “nature,” either, but seemed to take this as a serious intellectual move. When Aquinas did it, he was operating with a framework established by Aristotle. We don't use the words “reason” and “nature” in the way Aristotle used them any more; to make a pre-emptive move that attributes a goal to nature or an omniscient subject of reason is simply to blind oneself to the fact that the life of the mind didn't stop in the year 1275. (And Aquinas was not so simple-minded either! He knew there were other ways to account for the world and tried to answer them; he didn't just clap his hands over his ears and shout.) As a guide to the human condition, the experimentally-minded Hume wins my trust over Prof George's mummified Thomianism any day. — But the NYT's attitude seems to be, “gosh, here is a professor and he's read books, so his ideas must be respectable”-- treatment that they haven't meted out to a centrist or leftist academic since Hannah Arendt was still smoking Pall Malls.
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