One Culture, After All
If we deny to ourselves both the capacity to judge and its legitimacy, we have implicitly defined ourselves out of existence.

By James V. Schall, S. J., a professor of government at Georgetown University
June 2-3, 2001

e live in a nominalist time. That is, we think that our experience is so unique and so particular that it cannot have any meaning for anyone else. Nor is it capable of receiving anything from earlier times and other places except insofar as what is received is refashioned into the image of yesterday afternoon, into the image of our time and our town. No universal intelligibility is said to exist, even if the very statement of this principle implies its contradiction. This lack of some standard against which we examine our own actions and thoughts, as we cagily recognize, protects our undisturbed will by allowing it to do what it wants without fear of "outside" interference, as it is called.

We are all cultural relativists now. We are just individuals who do what we want, whatever it may be. We can "justify" anything we will, just because we "will" it. It is reality that is wrong when it does not conform to what we want. Our relativism is so absolute that we can hardly recognize our neighbor as belonging to the same level of being that we do. Indeed, we deny the very idea of "levels of being." We see little difference between human "rights" and plant or animal "rights"; both are merely "will-rights." According to our new and modern principles, moreover, our neighbor can, by "right," choose and do the most lethal or outlandish things and not be called at all "abnormal." The only thing to be said about abnormality is that it is "normal."

Our neighbor, like us, is merely odd, never wrong. The "odd fellows" have ceased to be "odd" because we have no criterion of "oddness." Not only are all men created "equal," as a famous document tells us, but all virtue and vice are declared to be likewise equal; that is to say, no intelligible distinction divides virtue and vice. We still recognize that our neighbor exists, of course, but we cannot give a reason for his similarity to ourselves. We do not have the same origins because there is no "nature," much less "nature's God." The same absolutely unique and different being next door, however, is like unto us in too many things to be accidental. This worries us considerably about the validity of our theories.

Each human being is said to have no limits except his own "right" to an unlimited freedom to "choose," as it is quaintly put. This latter statement sounds uncomfortably like a "universal" principle, but we are not terribly concerned about it. We save our thesis with one unexamined proposition. Contrary to Socrates, the "unexamined life" is indeed worth living, provided what is unexamined is our first principle. We do not even have a "right to be wrong," for that would imply that something could be wrong, or "right," for that matter. Implications of wrongness and rightness get us too close to the edge. Modern choice has no object but itself. The only thing, unfortunately, that choice cannot really have as an object of its making is a being with the power of choice. The latter is already and always a given, in no way related to human choice.

Yet, all actions that we produce out of ourselves are in fact particular. No one, strictly speaking, ever does something that someone else did in exactly in the same way, the same time, in the same circumstances. A strict cyclic theory of history in which all that ever happens is exactly the same is untenable. We are each unique and each unrepeatable. To acknowledge this simple fact of experience, however, is not necessarily to lock us into complete silence about what something else is. The great tradition of universal ideas did not deny that actions are always in the singular and are always unrepeatable. Our current thoughts were anticipated by our most ancient sages. Time out of time.

Clearly, we are culturally eager to deny any norms or measures whereby we judge anything or anyone or, better, whereby someone judges us. Even that denial of norms implies some criterion by which such judgments are made. The rule that there is no rule is a rigid universal rule. We are told, "Judge not lest you shall be judged." But that latter aphorism itself indicates a norm of our judging not. The norm is: "lest we be judged." But by whom? By what rule? The aphorism does not really tell us not to judge but not to judge falsely. The very notion of judgment indicates something the mind, to be a mind, should be about — judging things, affirming what they are and what they are not — "to say of what is, that it is, to say of what is not, that it is not," as Plato said.

If we deny to ourselves both the capacity to judge and its legitimacy, we have implicitly defined ourselves, what we are, out of existence. We use our reason to deny reason. The fact is, we judge; we praise and blame all the time. If I suggest that many things should be judged, that is, identified as what they are in objective reality, I am suggesting that identifying and judging things is what the mind does. The mind that refuses to judge is not a functioning mind. The person who refuses to have his thoughts and deeds judged by the standard of reason refuses his humanity. But he will still be judged, so he will remain within the human realm, even though he may be the worst of tyrants. He will be identified for what he is. In denying reason, he affirms it, and claims that his position is rational and therefore subject to the test of reason.

The reason why we find so many people are loathe to judge others is because they see that once admitted, the principle of judgment on a universal basis will require that the things that they do should fall under scrutiny. The only time we do not want our acts to be so judged, of course, is when we think that there might be something wrong with our singular actions in which all right or wrong exists. We always want our acts and thoughts to be praised, sometimes even unworthily. We complain when they are not praised, in fact.

The universal culture means that no Earthly corner, no special spot, exists that is not open to examination, to the test of reason: not China, not Brazil, not the upper class, not the poor, not even the academic "rationally" denying reason, his own above all. And it is not a question of "whose" reason, that old sophomoric retort, but rather of reason, of anyone's reason who can and will think. If we hear that something is "reasonable" in one place but not another, we do not and cannot simply say, "wonderful, how nice the diversity." Diversity might indeed be nice, but again, absolute diversity means that nothing in common exists. In what is diverse we will always find something similar.

Just because some things are handled in different ways in various times and places does not mean that nothing common is going on. If folks drive on the right-hand of the road in much of the world, and on the left in the rest, it does not follow that nothing universal is going on. Everyone is doing exactly the same thing in principle. Each is following a known order, an order that must be established for a reason. Each belongs to the same universal order. Diversity implies unity.

The universal culture is not a time or a place. It is an active mind actually thinking, wherever and whenever it thinks. It exists where the thinking mind exists examining what is, what goes on. "We hold these truths to be self-evident" was never intended to apply to one time or one place, though it did apply to the time and place in which it was initially written. It was an American version of a universal statement. It applies to every time and every place, including this time and this place. The only thing we can do before such a principle is to refuse to apply it, a refusal that itself needs to stand the test of reason. The only reason we refuse to apply it is because we suspect that its statement, on examination, will lead to where we are not willing to go, that is, to the existence of a principle, a measure.

When Cicero, that noble Roman, wrote the following famous lines, the fact that he was Roman had nothing to do with the validity or invalidity of what he remarked. He, like the American Founding Fathers who knew these lines, thought that what was proposed was self-evident to the orderly mind:

True law is Reason, right and natural, commanding people to fulfill their obligations and prohibiting and deterring them from doing wrong. Its validity is universal; it is immutable and eternal. Its commands and prohibitions apply effectively to good men, and those uninfluenced by them are bad. Any attempt to supersede this law, to repeal any part of it, is sinful; to cancel it entirely is impossible. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly can exempt us from its demands; we need no interpreter or expounder. There will not be one law at Rome, one at Athens, or one now and one later, but all nations will be subject all the time to this one changeless and everlasting law (De Re Publica, III, 33).

The principle has never been better stated. These are not the words of either Justice Blackmun or Justice Brennan, for whom law is will, but they are words that do judge them and their principles.

But this does not mean that Rome needs to look like Athens, or Washington like London, for all four cities to stand under the same rule, a rule that transcends and includes Athens and Rome, London and Washington. What it does mean is that no autarchic will or "sovereignty" stands above a rule of reason so that the will can make what is right wrong, or what is wrong right. The sovereign will can and does attempt to do so, but this attempt itself is subject to the same rule wherever or whenever a mind remains to think about what is proposed.

The only thing that can keep us free, ultimately, is the universal culture. If it is not being taught, if we are not observing it, if we refuse to acknowledge it, it remains to judge us and our kind. What makes us actively free is not the power of free will itself (granted that we need that very power.) That we have this power of free will is not for us to give ourselves. We simply have it from nature, not from culture. Nothing is clearer. What makes us free is whether what we choose is right, true, and reasonable. We can, if we decide, choose what is wrong, what is false, what is silly.

That we are becoming swamped in the unreasonable, the distorted, the perverse, the violent, the disordered, is not a question of theory. It is a question of fact. What is a question of theory — universal theory in the universal culture — however, is what it is we do in the face of accurately describing these things when judged by the norms of reason. By those universal standards we can well be in rapid decline yet choose to call our condition "liberty." We can perform this inversion because we can choose to deceive ourselves about ourselves. But the universal culture remains. "There will not be one law at Rome and another at Athens, one now and one later, but all nations will be subject to this one changeless and everlasting law." This is indeed well said. On examination, all reasonable men, created equal in the universal culture, know it.