Contemporary Political Problems

okay so for this last chapter on maritan in the person in the common good we're going to actually zero in now on applying the political principles that we've established along these kind of to mytic personalist lines to uh apply applying them to actual specific contemporary problems that we see in the political landscape uh today which I don't think have have changed really all that much from uh Marian's own time of course circumstances have changed but but the forms and the problems that he was addressing in his own time I think are still alive and with

us today so um his views on these things remain relevant to us so let's start with uh page 90 at the beginning of chapter 5 we hold that every materialistic philosophy of man in society is drawn in spite of itself in virtue of the real aspirations of its followers who after all are men by the values and goods proper to personality even when ignoring them such doctrines obscurely desire these values and goods so that in practice they can act upon men only by invoking Justice Liberty and the goods of the person this is very interesting

uh I think this is very true but this is one of the Silver Linings let's say of uh the various movements that we have today uh these various ethical ethical systems and political systems that uh in the secular realm are um are kind of mainstream Alternatives so the problems of liberalism and uh let's say Pagan nationalism communism and so on uh these kind of materialistic political philosophies even though on the one hand they deny the spiritual nevertheless they still have this Instinct of man as a person and uh still use some of this language and

this kind of carryover so it's it's like it it betrays itself in this sense but it does so very naturally because of this kind of almost you know self-evident aspect of our personhood which I think is due to our knowledge by connaturality so it's be hard to deny that as we experience ourselves um to say that we're not different from bees in a beehive or something like that effectively which is what you would get I think with materialism that we would simply be reduced to just a more advanced brute animal um and yet we do

have the sense that there's more to the story than that and uh even those who are materialists effectively will desire the Transcendent good whether they realize it or acknowledge it or not now uh maritan is going to start by criticizing uh the problem of of liberalism so he does this he starts at the bottom of 91 and I think that a lot of these are are worth really taking the time and uh reading through some of these parts in full it has been frequently noted that bgea liberalism with its ambition to ground everything in the

unchecked initiative of the individual conceived as a little God and the absolute Liberty of property business and pleasure inevitably ends in statism the rule of the number produces the omnipotence of the state the indispensable condition for building a city out of Liberties beholden only to themselves is that each me member surrender his personal will to the general will in a contract which according to rouso gives birth to society this is very platonic of course but I think it's very true and I think that this is something that we see today uh more than any other

time um I think that given the way that uh secular democracies have played out it does seem today that what we have in secular democracies is an illusion of freedom but uh or let's say an illusion of Liberty uh that's not really there and well it presents itself as different from uh these staus dictatorial counterparts uh it is just as statist as those and just as absolute although the the matter is presented differently and that's uh the problem that we face today now this is platonic because if you go back to the to the Republic

uh Plato shows us there how democracy is the last step before uh tyranny and what you you develop is this tyranny of the majority but by way of this tyranny of appetites and this failure to distinguish between a a proper hierarchy of ends that you can no longer distinguish between uh what is let's say the bonam monum and what is not and so everyone simply has the Liberty to follow their own or the license to follow their own fancies um but the flip side of this is that if if one were to try to introduce

the proper hierar of goods and ends they would be suppressed so you're free to have your own conception of it but you can't uh seek that for your fellow man even if in your conception You're simply working to the common good and working for their good just as much as you are with yours but um that's not tolerated in this kind of uh liberal system that steps away from the common good in this sense and loses that sense entirely of the transcendent so uh let's keep going on uh this is Page 92 still but since

man in his material indivi individuality is a part not a whole and since further in this system the state takes the place of the genuine Community the individual is forced ultimately to transfer both his responsibilities and the care of his Destiny to the artificial hole which has been superimposed upon him and to which he has bound mechanically of course his Liberty will remain complete and unhampered but in an illusory fashion and in a world of the of Dreams at the same time he will exact from the state the satisfaction of his or helplessness the very

notion of the common good and the common work disappears what I find interesting about this is I can definitely see this in our own time but uh I find it interesting and alarming that maritan uh writing this several decades ago could see it in his own time already happening and in my perspective uh looking back it doesn't it seems to me that this was much more easily concealed then and that illusion of Freedom was certainly uh much more convincing in the past it certainly didn't seem to be that case I I think uh whereas now

I think that that illusion has largely been broken perhaps not completely in the minds of everybody but I think the problems that we Face especially in American society uh that people are feeling does get to that sense that this illusion has been broken and that we are not properly living as promised in uh the state that we would expect uh of Liberty but uh but again I find it very interesting and Illuminating that uh maritan could see this coming not just for um you know our own particular country but he's speaking about the West as

a whole and uh Western democracies as a whole that you know you could see this on the horizon all right now moving on to Communism then uh this is on page 93 communism can be considered considered a reaction against such individualism it claims to be directed towards the absolute emancipation of man destined in the system to become the god of history at its very origin we find a desperate protest against the dehumanization of the person but the person which it strives to liberate is conceived as purely imminent in the group uh what I think is

important about this is and maritan is going to say more here of course but um notice how the impulse that communism takes advantage of is this recognition that liberalism is not enough that liberalism does not go far enough uh and has this very reductive vision of man that loses the Transcendent that loses the ambition there's no heroism in bgea liberalism uh whereas in communism it at least tries to present itself as heroic and emancipatory and in focusing on the person but as a materialist philosophy it can't so uh even though it it speaks in those

terms nevertheless the person is still purely conceived of in in uh his material relations reduced to the economic and that's all that you're going to get but it's very interesting nonetheless that communism will still at least speak to these uh these forces and speak this kind of language that um I think we would hold let's say you you can draw it's like an inversion of what we would have as Christians which maritan is going to get into as well but um but there's there's an overlap let's say with our critique there of uh the liberal

with um the Communist but of course we're going to divert um in how we actually address that and how we see the resolution play out okay so uh let's keep going hence the only emancipation which it could in reality achieve would be that of the collective man not at all that of the individual idual person further if the political state is to be abolished in the end as Marx held society as the economic community in the broadest sense would subordinate the whole life of the person to itself a radical prejudice against all Transcendence has from

its Inception Force communism to disregard the person as person and as a consequence the proper functions of civil society as a society of human persons this function is to procure an essentially human common good which includes as its principal value the free expansion of the individual persons together with all the guarantees required by this Freedom under the pretext of substituting for the government of men the administration of things communism has made of this Administration which Embraces the productivity of the mind as well as that of the manual labor the principal work of Civil Society by

an inescapable law Civil Society Marshals for its own work the human life of the persons where the primary aim of the marshalling is no longer to procure the freedom of expansion of the persons but simply the good and maximum production of the economic whole this life inevitably finds itself referred in its entirety to that production and the society which procures it so uh this is a a very important critique of course and one thing that stands out to me that I I think of is um in the debate between the right and the left so

to speak so let's say we have uh in our own context more uh communist leaning ideologies on the left and bgea liberalism on the right uh in that tension between these two polls uh the boua liberal will always point out to the the the Communists that their system is practically unfeasible which is true and they'll emphasize how in their system at least there is productivity and uh a kind of Baseline of practical um let's say uh functioning so at least in the boua liberal capitalist system uh there's at least a baseline of competent functioning in

the government itself and in the state where you can at least live a a relatively Norm noral life um whereas in in a communist system you'll run into uh all these problems of suppression repression uh starvation I mean all of these different things that don't work uh in the Communist system not just in terms of the human rights abuses but even in just the economic relations themselves which fall apart and so you'll have these very poor countries next to very affluent countries of bgea liberalism so that will be the argument let's say coming from the

boua liberal side just focusing on the material good that you have in in that system which you will lack practically speaking in a communist system but interestingly the Communists will address this by saying that even if you grant that yes perhaps our system may not be perfect or it's has these problems or challenges but the difference is at least ours is trying it it's good or it's moral that's really the counterpart to it and while obviously I don't think that communism is moral uh what I acknowledge though is nevertheless the Marxist aspiration that we would

hold in common toward the good uh now of course this is where we divert as far as what that good consistent but nevertheless they are correct in that critique of the bgea liberal who refuses to take this ultimate stand on the good and refuses to dive into that aspect of it and to have that ambition toward the Transcendent the problem of course with the Communists is that rather than Transcendence it's all immanentizing Transcendent Beyond matter or understand in that form uh for the Marxist all of that is swallowed up into the material reality because that's

all that will exist for them so they won't deny um these Transcendent Goods but rather than attributing them to God and to this realm Beyond matter and to the immaterial to the spiritual uh since none of that will exist they have to subsume these things and redefine these things in material terms but again uh while this is a serious error at least there is that sense of a kind of absolute good which the liberal bgea will wholly lack and that's the tension that will remain unresolved um neither side will be able to convince the other

even though they're they're both looking at this as Mater materialists they have these different orientations which prevent them from finding a proper resolution um whereas the Catholic position as a Third Way against both of them uh let's say will perhaps par or overlap with certain aspects of each while not really taking them in fully so uh like I said we can let's say sympathize with the uh aspirations of the Marxist toward the the absolute but we understand that it's not all material we we have a completely different way of framing this and likewise uh let's

say with the the de the democratic system and uh the free market system there's aspects of this that um we would also uphold uh for example subsidiarity Liberty uh human rights you know there these aspects that go along with Western democracies but um but of course we couch them into this deeper context that does take a stand on a proper hierarchy of Good and Evil and uh understanding um essentially what the true common good is or or trying to uh as subordinated to the absolute there is no subordination in that way in uh the secular

liberal system and so going down that direction uh because they refuse to do it uh practically speaking then it ends up being the most fragile it ends up being the most susceptible to uh tyrannical takeover um which again uh this goes back to Plato now let's look at the the last uh the last option uh which is fringed today but it still exists of course uh I think that it's misunderstood and and overstated but it is it is nevertheless on the fringes uh this kind of neopagan fascism uh that makes a cult out of the

race or the nation or whatever um again this is not mainstream but this reaction remains it it is something that exists it's not something that has that has really gone away I mean you don't have I don't think that you have a system as you would have in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy that were you know you can point to this country and say ah this is you know this is the country that represents that today fully but um nevertheless uh certainly you can you can find Defenders of this position in the kind of political

chaos that we have today uh with bgea liberalism on the one hand and uh Marxism on the other hand so uh this is how maritan criticized this other position anti-communism of a multitude of material individualities rather than true persons they seek this in the name of the state's Sovereign dignity the spirit of the people or the race and blood rather than in the name of the social community and the liberty of the collective man here the multitude becomes conscious of itself and symbolizes its omnipotence unto itself in the person of a master the only person

after all in the political life above the organized aggregate of material individualities it cannot be said said in such a system the emancipation of the person is sought along a wrong track it is squarely rejected and abominated the person as person is the enemy so again this this is uh in reference to this kind of neopagan Empire uh this is how meritan will understand um let's say the the fascist side uh as opposed to the Communist both of which are species of totalitarianism now against all three let's see uh let's see how he concludes this

part um page 95 we note in all three cases a conflict between the whole and the part at one time social life is destroyed by the individual whose selfishness looks to the state machinery for everything now it swallows up the individual's hopes now it annihilates his Liberty and dignity by crushing him thus in different ways all all that is proper to the human person as person and to society as a city of persons is eliminated so we have a problem of course as Catholics and as toomas here that in all three of these main uh

contemporary modern political philosophies that we're dealing with so uh liberal bgea democracy uh on the one hand of individualism and then on the other hand of totalitarianism these two species of communist M and fasc or and fascism uh not any one of these three effectively gives us the proper resolution all three of these end up in alienation to put it in voa's terms uh all three of these does not give us a properly let's say uh full understanding of the human being and the human person all three will betray the human person in different ways

but to the same extent that all three will effectively fail in this regard so as Christians then we're we're going to have to seek something substantially different and uh and this is of course the the postmodern aspect of it in the proper sense of that word so uh I I thought this was worth noting as well if you look on on page 97 how these various uh political philosophies um stand up to Christianity a final remark relative to the attitude of these political philosophies toward Christianity is appropriate at this point of the three the most

irreligious is bgea liberalism Christian in appearance it has been atheistic in fact too skeptical to persecute except for a tangible profit rather than defy religion which it deemed an invention of the priesthood and gradually dispossessed by reason it used it as a police force to watch over property or as a bank where anyone could be insured while making money here below against the UN undiscovered risks of the Hereafter after all one never knows the other two defied Christianity but the metaphysical positions in this defiance disclose altogether different roots and meanings the national totalitarian States whose

ideology lives after them Heirs of the ancient antagonism of the Pagan Empire against the gospel represented an external Force AR raay against Christianity to enslave or to annihilate it in the name of the divinized political power communism on the contrary in spite of of the materialistic philosophy in which it finds its its conceptual expression and which blinds to it its own essential content belongs to the historical trend of modern rationalism a trend of anthropocentric humanism of democratic aspirations regulated by an imminst dogmas and engaged in an ideological struggle with their own Christian Origins now uh

the Christian aspect of this is is is in the humanist aspect so humanism began originally inspired by uh Christianity so it stems from an appreciation of man as imod day uh that's and of course also an appreciation for Christ as God incarnate as man so God taking the form of man um this is where humanism began as Christian humanism uh in the Renaissance at the end of The Middle ages but over time this was taken forward in an anthropocentric atheistic secular Direction that's what we have now and that's where uh Marxism really came from ultimately

uh was from that that kind of misplaced humanism uh now conceived in this rejection of the logos of Christ and uh trying to effectively have both I guess it's that saying to have your cake and eat it too so uh they wanted the promises of Christianity while rejecting Christianity at the same time uh and so this is the unresolvable tension that's at the root of Communism and at the root of all of all of Marxism really um that you'll have Okay so let's keep going from there I'm on page uh 98 communism is the final

episode or of this historical Trend communism is the final episode in reality then it must be counted as a Christian heresy the ultimate and altogether radical Christian heresy like the church it is Universalist in its militance it stirs energies which though now entirely secularized remain Christian in origin the transformation of man which Christianity seeks in an interior Grace renewing the person for both Time and Eternity communism seeks in the colle Ive Revolution renewing history and Society only for the life here below its atheism is an ethical and religious ranor against the Divine Transcendence it fights

its own battle on the very ground upon which Christianity has its foundations and it carries on this battle which consists in a process of substitution and supersession rather than aggression from within Christian civilization as though in its own secret estimate of itself the only true Christians here below and delivered from the Transcendent God were the Communists as a result Communists and Christians in their Mutual relations have a bad conscience even when they sincerely offer the outstretched hand to the Catholics the Communists feel obscurely that their vocation is to supplant them in political life and civilization

Catholics however know very well that they risk being replaced and that the outstretched hand lures them into a land which is not that of their their own faith now this is important because it it explains I think why you have these kind of marxist inspired movement uh within the Catholic church and this kind of necessarily subversive element of them uh where there's let's say this kind of pseudo Common Ground between them given the origins but because of that kind of unresolvable tension and that inherent material ISM uh the Communists will use or the marxists will

use these things to lure the Christian away from the Transcendent and away from Christianity itself because you can't engage in Marxism without that constant state of Revolution against Christ uh it fundamentally rejects Christ at the principle so um it's uh it's a it's a very diabolical in version of Christianity when you think of it in the sense that it it tries to present all of these Goods of Christianity but uh in a completely inverted way that again zeros in on man at the center and the material reality at the center wholly rejecting God and the

Transcendent the spiritual all of that has to go away but uh what the Communists will do that is so Insidious is um exploiting that kind of thirst for justice and uh these the recognition of these problems especially in a bgea liberal Society um it prays upon these Tendencies uh to lure us away from Christianity itself uh which is actually the the true answer and not Marxism of course so uh let's look at the very end here I have uh I think a couple more a few more of these marked out but just to to finish

up uh the work uh let's look at the bottom of page 100 real quick materialist conceptions of the world and life philosophies which do not recognize the spiritual and eternal element in man cannot Escape error in their efforts to construct a truly Human Society because they cannot satisfy the requirements of the person and by that very fact they cannot grasp the nature of society whoever recognizes the spiritual and eternal element in man recognizes also the aspiration imminent in the person to transcend by reason of that which is most Sublime in it the life and conditions

of temporal societies and so this is the problem that we have with all three of course that all three that we've discussed are these reductive materialist political philosophies that because they reduce man in such a way because they lack this full understanding of the human person can only end up uh producing inhuman political regimes since they don't have a proper understanding of the human being so of course it's going to be inhuman from the start that's where those errors will lead so how uh how do we resolve this and this is I think where we'll

end and uh I think in this work at least maritan leaves us on a little bit of a cliffhanger but if you were interested uh there are a lot of Works where he he's going to dive into this further I think probably integral humanism would be the one to really look at but um in this work uh he's at least beginning the problem uh or or pointing it out and giving us the principles and uh you know pointing us to a further study to take this on uh let's say in its more practical details all

right let's look at 103 to the end here but for this solution to be practical there must be full recognition in the city of the true nature of the common work and at the same time recognition also of the importance and political worth so nicely perceived by Aristotle of the virtue of Amity such an historical ideal responds to the most profound aspirations of human nature and the rational requirements of a sound political philosophy it is difficult not to think that its realization powerfully opposed by the lower forces of our nature and the difficulties which reason

Encounters in its Endeavor to establish its rule Among Us would be the consequence and terrestrial projection as it were of that awareness of the Dignity of the human person and the Eternal vocation in every man which the gospel has imprinted in the heart of Humanity on the other hand there are grounds for believing that in the historical development of civilization there is in fact produced a slow spontaneous activation of the mass of humanity and its secular conscience which tends to orientate man's desires toward just such an ideal through the failures which seemed to give it

the lie and the counterfeits which like the individualistic liberalism of the 19 Century threatened to arouse Mighty reactions against it at any rate how can we fail to see that it cannot be realized apart from that elevation which nature and civilizations receive in their own order from the energies of the Christian Life in this light the tendency towards the materialism and Atheism inherent in the city of the individual appears as one of the absurdities by which it destroys itself in the political order the internal dialectic of this tendency by similar absurdity drags it toward dictatorship

which is its proper negation these reflection Reflections lead us to believe that the the drama of the modern democracies has consisted in the unwitting quest of something good the city of the person's masked by the air of the city of the individual which by Nature leads to Dreadful liquidations it is not for the philosopher to forecast whether they can yet reorientate themselves decisively in the direction of the truth which they seek by disengaging the parasitical errors from their Quest such a reorientation would presuppose a radical transformation and a vast return toward the spirit now this

of course is Marian's ultimate goal and this is his final answer of course in how we have to uh let's say uh he he says this elsewhere to enter into a new Middle Ages effectively and this is not a return to the Middle Ages rather it's a recovery of the spiritual and the Transcendent that was lost and you could think of this kind of in hegelian Terms I mean I don't think that we have to be hegelian to kind of see this sort of pattern play out in history but um let's say thinking about this

more traditionally uh this is the hand of God bringing good out of evil and this is also the the just nature of human reason itself to be able in the Long View in long term uh to let's say be somewhat Progressive uh not linearly I mean we have our es and flows but basically Marian's point is that while right now we're caught in this kind of trifect of errors that we've discovered so or that we've we've talked about uh between individualism and totalitarianism with totalitarianism ISM coming in those two forms uh of fasc fascism and

communism um and with individualism the liberal bgea uh that's the the three-part problem that we have this kind of revolving door between these three none of these three are stable uh none of these three are proper they all have fundamental errors at the at the onset um but with all that being said the proper there is a proper resolution and that's with let's say this integral understanding of man that is given through Christianity and so if we were to find ourselves in a truly Christian culture recognizing that Having learned from these erors that we're living

out right now then we could conceive of this kind of radical substantial change and transformation where we could have a truly just Society built on top of that now I say that without finality because I understand that in this Fallen World uh even if we uh manage to do that and I and I think let's say well I I shouldn't say that we have good reason to suppose that we will because I think the alternative is if we keep moving away from that we're simply moving toward the end times perhaps but assuming that we're not

assuming that we bounce back then we can conceive of the next postmodern age if uh if this happens that it will be let's say the most Christian age yet and uh the most advanced and that's that's really what maritan is looking ahead toward that's what we should hope for anyway that's what we should be working toward um and this is something that could happen sooner rather than later but we don't know and this is where he ends by saying that it's not for the philosopher to forecast uh when or if but uh what we can

say as as a as philosophers in this in this regard is this is kind of this is the logical conclusion right The Logical conclusion is that the three systems that we've discussed so far have already shown themselves practically and philosophically to effectively be dead ends and we can keep redoing it over and over again but we're just kind of caught in this cycle of failure and the only way out of it is to completely exit that into this rediscovery of the spirit now if we do that then it's not that we'll have a perfect Society

but we'll have at least we'll have a better one for sure and of course there will be Temptations and uh problems um within the Fallen World uh it could dissolve just as the Middle Ages dissolved uh even in spite of itself but nevertheless that's that's the Practical answer and this is what we know of philosophically we can say philosophically that a uh assist a political system built on a proper uh Christian culture that understands the full truth about man will be the one that bears uh the let's say properly just fruits and uh we're conceiving

of this in the abstract but as far as when again when or if this will happen and what it will exactly look like and so on that's not something that we can know as philosophers that's only something that um we can experience as time plays out effectively so uh let's say if you were a politician you could talk about maybe what that might look like or what the work toward that may look like in the in this moment in the here and now in your own context but even then you you know you have a

limited Vision but that's not what we're after as philosophers because uh that's not our business our business is not in the particular but in the Universal and so that that's what he's trying to speak toward here um while giving you at least a little bit of a taste of the particular problems of the age but again in this philosophical mode uh treating them in uh in terms of the universal so anyway I think that'll do it for uh this one uh I know this one was a little bit on the on the longer end of

things but uh I think this is a really important work and a very interesting topic it's one of my favorite topics uh and uh I hope that uh I hope you find it as interesting as I do at any rate but um as always I look forward to our discussion and uh I'll see you on the message board there God bless