Rethink.

Too much blather, not enough specifics. Memo to all con­ser­v­a­tive writ­ers and blog­gers: until you treat peo­ple like they’re intel­li­gent, we’re doomed. Here’s what you need to get started if you’re inter­ested in what the Founders and those who influ­enced them knew. I’m stick­ing to con­trasts, because I want you to see how dif­fer­ent this stuff is:

• A dif­fer­ent view of rea­son. For Aris­to­tle, a rea­son was some­thing that a per­son stated because it was good for him and peo­ple like him (from Har­vey Mans­field, “A Student’s Guide to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy.”) Notice how this is extra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fer­ent from what we con­sider a “rea­son:” we want “truths” that mir­ror sci­en­tific truth in cer­tainty (cf. Descartes) and that apply uni­ver­sally, regard­less of the sit­u­a­tion. We don’t really make room for states­men to have “pru­dence:” we instead shove them into a mech­a­nism, i.e. 3 branches of gov­ern­ment that spend more time attack­ing each other than gov­ern­ing, and the “sci­ence” behind that mech­a­nism is sup­posed to keep us free.
• The ques­tion of the soul. Cf. Plato Repub­lic, Phae­drus; Vir­gil, Aeneid. A per­son has his appetites, the “epithu­mos,” that which the “thu­mos” (heart) sits upon: the stom­ach and the gen­i­tals. Then there’s the “thu­mos,” the heart, the “spir­ited” ele­ment. Heroes, with their courage, are “thu­motic.” The Greeks didn’t quite con­sider the brain the seat of rea­son: it was what sat imme­di­ately above the “thu­mos,” the “phron,” from where we get our word “diaphragm,” which was where speech/reason — also known as “logos” — made itself known. Obvi­ously this has been dis­pensed with entirely in favor of mod­ern psy­chol­ogy, and the ques­tion of the “self.” If Freud is con­sid­ered the ori­gin of mod­ern psy­chol­ogy, you can take a pretty good guess at which ele­ment of the “soul” the “self” is.
• A human­is­tic piety: I don’t know what we can learn from wor­ship­ping pagan gods directly, as some nowa­days do. I do know that we can learn much from read­ing how the more advanced authors such as Homer, Euripi­des, Plato treated the sto­ries about the gods. It looks like for Homer espe­cially, the gods are rea­son sim­ply. To con­tem­plate the sto­ries about them is to won­der about how rule in the most basic sense exists — mind over the body. Also, note that the idea soci­ety could be wholly sec­u­lar, an idea the mod­ern acad­emy and many anar­chists, social­ists, lib­er­tar­i­ans, elites enter­tain, would be laugh­able to any ancient peo­ple. The objec­tion “you’d find a new way of wor­ship­ping your­self” would just be the begin­ning of the argu­ment — most peo­ple today would be unaware how wor­ship­ful they are of “free­dom” and “rights,” to the degree they injure free­dom and rights unknow­ingly very often. “Know thy­self” was what the ora­cle at Del­phi instructed: we’d rather be fun­da­men­tal­ists and put that ques­tion off the table.

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