Practical Action in an Age of Decadence – Religion & Liberty Online

Roger Scruton often wrote of oikophobia, the phenomenon, so prevalent in the modern West, of distrusting one’s own home, society, and cultural inheritance. The culture of repudiation is one-directional, however, valorizing “the other” at the expense of ourselves—we can do no right while they can do no wrong.

This dynamic is obviously at play in the victim culture of much political discourse. Confronted by the victim, “the other,” the right-thinking person is quick to sacrifice his own commitments and beliefs in service of the victim, an emptying of the self in order to recognize and affirm the self-identity of the victim, whatever those identity claims happen to be. We must jettison our vision of the good to their claims of identity, and the only “good” remaining is an empty, contentless act of sacrifice in obeisance to any and all identity claims, even those that conflict or contradict. Consequently, the dynamic of sacrifice for the victim, understood in this way, is fundamentally hostile to visions of the good possessing content or commitment.

Such a morality, empty as it is, mandates a form of self-transcendence, but its transcendence lacks direction or intentionality; it is not aiming for any real good. It insists on openness, to be sure, but accepts only “everything that denies intrinsic elevation or superiority.” It is firmly closed to “any concrete, particular claims of effective access to transcendence.”

With these reflections, Ralph C. Hancock, professor of political science at Brigham Young University, begins his new book, Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. It’s a bracing text, as evidenced by the opening sentences: “I suffer, therefore I am. I am as a victim. I am that I am a victim. This is the implicit fundamental creed of late Western humanity, the last feeble cry of modern (post-Christian) humanity’s search for meaning.”

Hancock draws on an array of thinkers for his argument, including Martin Heidegger, Yuval Levin, Pascal, Erich Przywara, and Leo Strauss, but especially Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre Manent, also drawing significantly on Daniel J. Mahoney’s Manent-inspired reflections.

Hancock agrees with Manent that “we suffer from a ‘hypertrophy of theory’ that obscures the essential goods of practical human existence.” Modern reductionism has its theoretical origins in Machiavelli and Hobbes but ends in the emptiness of human rights that is “purely negative,” knowing only what it is against (limits, substantive accounts of the good, comprehensive viewpoints) while promising the universal egalitarianism of “humanity.” Humanity is valued for its own sake, and liberating humanity from older strictures is the sole meaning of self-transcendence. All the sound and fury lacks content, for the moment content is ascribed to the human, some views are privileged and others devalued, which is unacceptable to the modern view.

According to Hancock, Christianity is not immune to the charms of empty humanitarianism either; in fact, Christianity’s universalism—neither Jew nor Greek—plays a historically significant function in the development of equal dignity of all people, which, if not positioned within the political particularism of the Greeks and covenantal particularism of the Jews, tends towards a theological hypertrophy severed from concrete human action and the love of particular institutions. That is, the Church can easily turn into a wan imitator of the United Nations, praising itself for Christian love while neglecting its actual duties and beliefs. In a telling passage, Hancock suggests that the Parable of the Good Samaritan is not an invitation for us to become the Good Samaritan and view all neighbors without distinction, as if everyone is the same to us, since it is Christ who is the Good Samaritan and Christ who brings the healing of grace and charity to humans in need. 

In its egalitarian and levelling excess, humanitarianism overlooks the need for nobility, although Hancock, echoing Manent, persuasively argues for the need of practical, political wisdom and action to become noble. To act meaningfully is to aim for a concrete good, that for-the-sake-of-which we act, but this is no theoretical teleology. It is the good and truth of action, and such action, especially in the domain of political reasoning, allows for particular institutions and the mediation of human virtue, excellence, and nobility. (In a provocative and fascinating conclusion, Hancock defends Tocqueville’s articulation of the task of “natural, prideful virtue” to undo “democratic, post-Christian pseudohumility.”)

A certain kind of Christian, those of the humanitarian bent—Hancock thinks Protestantism is more inclined to this error than Catholicism with its defense of analogy, but notes the feeble, humanitarian tendencies of current Catholicism—recoils at the idea of pride, the worst of the vices; Hancock, of course, is not praising vice so much as insisting on the place of nature. His Thomism is especially Aristotelian in emphasis: If grace perfects nature, then nature must have its proper place, not relegated to the dustbin of the irrelevant or the irredeemably fallen. As natural, we are capable of acting; capable of acting, we are capable of virtuous action; capable of virtuous action, we are capable of nobility, a natural nobility open to the perfections of grace.

Theological hypertrophy forgets that Providence includes space for human action, that natural law is a participation in eternal law rather than instinctual obedience or God’s direct governance of human affairs. Certainly, and Hancock is clear on this, there is an objective moral order beyond the whims of human will or control of human reason, but that moral order is such that human action is the intermediary of Providence itself. God governs humans largely through humans governing themselves. God is transcendent, other than us, and yet the moral order sustained by God is “not divorced from the practical experience or performance of meaning in the actual human world.”

Hancock defends a “philosophical deference to the practical point of view,” with all the limits, frailties, and concreteness of the practical. Certain accounts of natural law tend to abstraction, to theoretical and thereby vague accounts of the human good as-if from the viewpoint of God. However, we do not have this viewpoint. The viewpoint of God we enjoy is the practical viewpoint of action. According to Hancock, this is both a sign of humility, claiming no more than what humans can access, and nobility, for we are genuinely capable of action in service of the concrete common good.

It is the perspective of the practical then, of action, which serves as a necessary corrective to the abject ignobility of contemporary oikophobia and its repudiation of what is ours. This repudiation is not merely a rejection of jingoism or chauvinism, however, so much as a rejection of the nobility of the human being as we actually are and could be if we acted as we ought.

Love and Virtue in a Secular Age is an ambitious book. At times perhaps slightly over-ambitious, as, for example, when using Przywara, Pascal, and Tocqueville in an explanation of analogy that could be book on its own, but it is ambitious in the most noble of ways as well. Hancock here provides a compelling and coherent explanation of the loss of vitality in modern Western theory and practice, all while the West praises its loss in the most glowing (but empty) humanitarian terms, and explains the humble dignity God allows humanity, through both nature and grace, to exercise the responsibility of sober, deliberative action. A book to be read, marked, and contemplated.