So you will be worried about my prospects for personal redemption a lot when I tell you that my text this Sunday morning is something posted on Facebook by George Dunn:
At the recent Colloquium on Violence & Religion conference in St. Louis, I asked Peter Thiel what connections, if any, he saw between the work of René Girard and Leo Strauss. [H]e noted the obvious fact that Girard is a Christian, while Strauss was not. But Thiel also suggested that for Strauss “history” was in effect a code word for Christianity, the latter being the tradition that first taught people to conceive of time in terms of historical progress, as opposed to interminable cycles of civilizational rise and fall. Strauss’s polemics against historicism should therefore be read as a covert attack on Christianity.
Well, for one thing, that explains why Thiel thinks of himself as a Christian. Historical progress is basically technological progress, and it’s about the person’s escape from his natural or biological fate. Just as modern biology seems to have broken the life cycle by extending the length of the average life far longer than a Darwinian can explain, there is now one global civilization on the way to fully detaching personal being from nature — or making, as the Christians say, personal being “supernatural.” It’s the premise of all modern or Historical thinking that personal being is what’s supernatural about each of us, and, thanks to technology, the modern idea of the person is becoming a whole, real entity, as opposed to a Kantian postulate. Certainly, one foundation of the modern idea of personal freedom is that pushing back the effect of the cruel randomness of nature (a fact that tortures all species but especially the self-conscious one) enhances personal being.
Before you say Thiel is, well, just another one of those wacky Silicon Valley nerds, consider that there are other Straussians who come close to beomg transhumanists or buy into pretty much the whole Baconian project of the conquest of nature. Those Straussians don’t think of themselves as Christians in any sense, and they talk instead about “modern rationalism.” But someone might say that there’s nothing particularly reasonable about modern rationalism’s personal focus on and personal obsession with rational control. It’s true that “modern personalism” is anti-Augustinian in the sense that there’s a denial that it’s enough to be happy in hope in a personal, loving God who sees each of us just as we are and who can give us what we can’t give ourselves. Still, there’s the agreement that the deepest hope of personal being is to escape ephemeral biological contingency. And Thiel says, quite honestly, that the modern impetus is not be diverted from or fatalistic about the trauma that is self-conscious mortality.
Thiel also explains why Strauss’s “text” is that the modern doctrine of natural rights owes nothing to Christianity except as a rebellion against Christianity. But his “subtext” is that as a rebellion against nature (and its cycles) in the direction of indefinite progress toward indefinite longevity of the life of each particular person, it’s Christian. It’s also Christian in the “bottom line” status it accords the particular being or individual. A project of some Straussians is to somehow detach “the Founders” as much as possible from Christianity, and the same with the American idea of nature. Some of the best of them get, well, a bit anxious about the impending fall of our civilization. What obsesses them barely bothers our transhumanists and libertarians, fixed as they are on the arc of techno-historical progress. We have to assume that said Straussians are obsessed only on the surface, insofar as they must have Epicurean philosophical serenity deep down. No matter what we do, our civilization, our species, and all personal being are all toast — and maybe much sooner than we imagine.
Some Straussians obsess as much about the extinction of our civilization as do some ecologists about our species and others about life itself on our planet. Or as much as Peter Thiel does about Peter Thiel. It’s easy to see that all those obsessions could or should become interdependent, but who could worry that much on all fronts?
For the Straussians, civilization is more fragile and nature far more resilient than the transhumanists, techno-libertarians and most ecologists think. So they come close to the Catholic view that “natural ecology” depends on “social ecology.” But maybe not that close, insofar as “social ecology” for them has an indispensably republican or civic dimension, as war will always be with us and we can’t opt out of its spirited demands. That makes it possible to join those who imagine that eventually our species will eventually escape the confines on this planet, although not the confines of nature.
Now in the Cold War sense of “natural right versus history,” the Christians allied with Straussians and secular Lockeans against History understood as totalitarianism. The Nazis and the Communists understood particular persons to be fodder for the progress of History, for a glorious future that will come into being after they’re dead. Virtually no one believes in History in that sense anymore. The Lockeans and the Thomists united in defense of freedom under God against the Marxists and the anti-civilizational nihilists or vulgar Nietzscheans.
When we write about being on the right side of History now, we mean behind the times when it comes to the full realization of “human rights” understood as fleshing out all the privileges of personal autonomy. It means keeping up with the detachment of personal being from biological imperatives. History these days isn’t about collective action on behalf of the party or the class or the nation or the race or whatever, it’s about the liberation of me. History derailed, you might say, when it became impersonal, and it’s back on track — if far from completely coherently — now. Part of being on track is getting pretty serene about the inevitable progress of the arc of liberty, justice, and technology and dismissing “natural” or “traditional” reservations about progress as reactionary bigotry, as thoughts that made sense at an earlier time. That means also thinking that most of the world, for now, is the thrall of reactionary bigotry, although it will be transformed soon by market forces, globalization, and technological imperatives.
The fact that there’s no civilization in the past allowed same-sex marriage, from this view, is no argument against it. That fact that it’s unprecedented is evidence for it. Love and marriage have been detached from from what was wrongly thought to be their invincible natural context. So Justice Kennedy said, in effect, that the Historical “insight” of our time is that love and marriage have nothing necessarily to do with procreation or even sex. Why is no one talking about Kennedy’s highly unerotic — while, yes, also highly idealistic — understanding of what marriage is? Nothing is more Historical that un- or anti-erotic idealism. The liberation of sex from marriage seems, to some, to be anti-Christian because anti-Puritanical. Well, the Puritans were heretics too. But the detachment of animalistic sexual enjoyment from transformative human unions is Kantian too. And transhumanist as well. The marriage Justice Kennedy describes is, in fact, “supernatural,” saving us from our natural fate of dying alone or, in a way, of dying at all (insofar as he presents marriage as persisting beyond biological demise) without even what might seem to be the yuccky duty of consummating the marriage..
For Strauss and Thiel, it might be that History is the effectual truth of Christianity. For Thiel the Christian, Strauss is unempirically and unhelpfully fatalistic. For Strauss, Thiel might be more deluded and more irresponsible than even Christians in general.
For orthodox Christians, History in any strong sense is a heresy, and Justice Kennedy, for example, writes like a heretical (or liberal) Catholic. The way to counter heresy is not with a doctrine about nature that denies unique irreplaceability of every human person, although that doctrine might help out in getting us to remember who we are: natural beings born to know, love, die, and be replaced in this world. That doctrine doesn’t help, however, in reviving the truthful “feminist” egalitarianism in the Christian idea of marriage. The rejection of polygamy and divorce and the requirements of fidelity and chastity for both men and women were all for the benefit of women as equal partners with equal privileges and responsibilities. They were also for the benefit of the security and formation of children. The American innovation that Tocqueville describes of the right of both men and women to marry someone he or she loves really has a Christian background, and it’s something that emerges against every form of patriarchy or aristocracy — Greek, Roman, or medieval. The close thing, maybe, to its precursor in classical thought is Aristotle’s rather countercultural description of the high friendship between husband and wife, rooted in the sharing of common responsibilities. But that’s not marrying for love. Aristotle or Saint Augustine still agree that there’s a difference between marrying for love and thinking that marriage is all about the love of one person for another. Nietzsche, remember, understood modern democracy to be the (Historical) stupidity of Christianity without Christ (maybe that’s what all History is!), and one of the stupidest forms of that stupidity is to think that love alone could sustain the institution of marriage.
I realize I haven’t really given an argument here for or against same-sex marriage as such. I’m not saying that it’s either the end of or the perfection of civilization or nature. I’ve only wondered about how it could have been a gift of History.
So, to repeat, I had these random thoughts on Sunday, although I’m posting them on Monday. It’s hard to adjust personal thinking to the spirit of the times.