Dr. Hadley Arkes
On The Novelty Of The Tradition
Dr. Hadley Arkes is Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions
at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author
of five books, including First Things (1986), An
Inquiry Into The Principles Of Moral Judgment (1988), Beyond
the Constitution (1990), and The Return of George Sutherland:
Restoring A Jurisprudence Of Natural Rights (1994). He
writes a monthly column for Crisis Magazine, and his articles
regularly appear in the Wall Street Journal, National Review,
and First Things, which took its name from his book. Following
is our abridged version of a lecture he gave at the College
in commemoration of President's Day on February 19, 1999,
"On The Novelty Of The Tradition."
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the Catholic Church
saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of
his own age. He also observed once that the purpose of education
was to make young people old, to instruct them in the wisdom
cultivated by the ages. Before they had arrived on the scene,
he might equally have made the contrary point, expressed by
Harry Truman, that the only new thing is the history we haven't
read yet. Chesterton might have said, quite as aptly, that
education makes us new, or renews us, when we discover in
something old something quite strikingly novel. It may be
something we haven't read before, or it may be in our politics
that we are suddenly struck with the implications which spring
from an old constitution. We encounter implications we haven't
expected, or you might say, principles we had thought to be
settled suddenly beget some unsettling surprises.
To borrow from Chesterton again, the world, especially the
modern world, has reached the curious condition in which one
might almost say that it's wrong, even when it's right. It
continues to a great extent to do many sensible things, but
it's rapidly ceasing to have any sensible reasons for doing
them. It's always lecturing to us on the deadness of tradition,
it's always living entirely off that tradition, it's always
denouncing us for superstition; and it's own principal virtues
these days seem to be entirely superstitious. And so, as Chesterton
argued in this vein, modern people express a revulsion from
cannibalism, but they no longer seem able to explain the reason
behind the revulsion. The modern man is more likely to say,
"Well, we just don't do that here. Not in our club. You
know, not in Park Avenue; maybe New Jersey, but not here!"
The matter could be explained more readily with Aristotle
by the critical differences that separated human beings from
other animals. This understanding was fortified by the religious
conviction that human beings are made in the image of something
higher. But as Chesterton remarks, "the modern theorist
will defend his own sanity with a prejudice. I don't know
why we do it, we just do it!" The medieval theologian
could have given you a reason. Now, yet again, the language
persists. I have friends in the Academy at Amherst who've
taken as their own reigning aphorism that line of Nietzsche's,
that 'God is dead, and therefore everything is permitted.'
But these are men and women of large social sympathies, and
those sympathies encompass even those vagrants in the gutter,
those homeless people. Yet, my friends look at those people
in the gutter and say there's a certain sanctity about those
people. And we say, "Sanctity? Sanctity? Well, that seems
to be a word that's kind of redolent of, um, the sacred? That
seems to be a word that's rather anchored in a religious tradition
that seems to have been obscure to you."
Now, my friends in the Academy, as I say, are people of large
social sympathies, but I simply point out there is no way
they can give the same account of the wrong of slavery and
the wrong of the Holocaust. And though they may be people,
as I say, of the widest social sympathy, they may be hard-pressed
to explain why that torpid thing who walks on two legs and
conjugates verbs is anyone who claims any special sanctity
for his life and any claim, then, to be the bearer of rights.
Now, I disclose here nothing novel, but if we follow out
this path of reflection, the recognitions may be jarring.
For we realize again that even people who use the language
cast up by a tradition may be utterly cut off from the premises,
or the understanding that explain the rituals that they're
practicing. For example, does anyone think that most American
students could answer this question: Why do we have in America,
government by the consent of the governed, a regime of free
elections? Is it because: (A) It is the form of government
that most people happen to prefer; or (B) That there's something
good in nature, something good in principle, about this form
of government that makes it the only rightful form of government
over human beings? If this form is good only because most
people prefer it, does it cease to be good when most people
cease to prefer it?
Our students seem inclined to say it's good because most
people prefer it, but then they realize that they would rather
say that there's something good in principle about it. Human
beings do not deserve to be ruled in the way that we rule
dogs and horses, but they can no longer say, or no longer
know how to say, as the founding generation knew how to say,
just why this form of government was, in principle, good.
Or, what principle? And how do we know it? When it comes to
giving an account of that principle, our students, and even
our best students, are betrayed by their own language.
As the Founders and Lincoln understood, the right of human
beings to be governed by their own consent sprung from that
proposition, as Lincoln called it, with which this country
was conceived and dedicated, and that was the truth proclaimed
in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created
equal. The students say, "The Founders believed that
all men are created equal." The same students would never
say, in fact they'd think it rather queer if anyone said,
"I believe that the square on the hypotenuse is equal
to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides."
The Founders would have thought it just as queer to say that
they "believed all men are created equal" because
they had spoken of that proposition as a self-evident truth,
meaning, of course, not a truth evident to every self-happening
down the street, but a truth of what Aquinas called a truth
that was "per se nota" - something that had to be
grasped in itself as a ground for grasping any other explanation
or demonstration.
We see the same point from a different angle if we recall
John Courtney Murray's argument that the atheist and the theist
agree on the problem. The atheist doesn't mean to reject the
existence of God in New Jersey. He's not saying, "It's
not there for me but it may be there for you." He means
to deny the presence of God everywhere, to deny it absolutely,
deny it as a necessary and universal proposition, to appeal
to a transcendent standard and to the logic of a necessary
truth. But to speak in that way is to back into the sense
of what Aristotle had identified with the capacity to know
universals. And, as Aristotle suggested, that kind of understanding
marks something that was nearer to the divine in reason itself.
But just consider, to know a necessary truth was to know a
proposition not bounded by space and time. And, of course,
there was nothing material about a proposition, it had no
moving parts, it was not subject to decomposition. And so,
there's no reason to think that the Pythagorean theorem would
decompose with the death of Pythagoras, who first called it
forth. But to speak of things that are changeless through
time is to point us to the distinction between the things
that always are, and the things that are ephemeral; between
the things that are permanent and the things that are shifting
or contingent.
Lincoln remarked in a famous passage, "All honor to
Jefferson, who took the occasion of a revolutionary moment,
the Declaration of Independence, to articulate an abstract
truth applicable to all men and all times." That is the
critical difference between our age and that of either Lincoln
or Jefferson. The conviction seems to have fled from the understanding
of the educated classes in this country that there are indeed
permanent things in the domain of morals and law, things applicable
to all times and all places. Remember, the Declaration of
Independence proclaimed the right of a people to change their
form of government as it suits their interests or their safety.
This right of a people to alter their form of government becomes
compelling in those instances when a government becomes destructive
of the ends for which governments were instituted in the first
place. But, one thing in this arrangement was never contingent
and never changeable: The right of a people to change their
government would itself never be subject to change.
That is a secret that does not comfortably speak its name.
That the students who come to understand Hamilton or Aquinas
or Lincoln would be made, in that education, just a bit smarter
and better, and by better we don't mean merely verbally acute
or analytically quick.
People can be quick without being good. As Samuel Johnson
recognized, all education must turn itself into moral education.
And, as Johnson said, "You can be with a man for years
without knowing how good he is at hydrostatics; you can't
be with him for minutes without forming some estimate of his
character." We can train people in the principles of
engineering, but they might employ their arts in the style
of Hitler's engineers, in transporting people to gas chambers.
And so, apart from instructing people in the principles of
engineering, their education should encompass some instruction
in the principles of judgment, which is to say, the principles
that tell them of the regimes or the ends for which it would
be indecent to employ their arts as engineers.
With that sense of things, we still treasure the hope. As
a friend and colleague once put it, we can produce, through
an urbane education, people who cannot be bought and cannot
be fooled. And we think we have taken a long step towards
people who cannot be bought when we produce people who cannot
be fooled; and they're not fooled, they're not taken in, even
by their own arguments when they're less than compelling.
And one way of cultivating that disposition, I suppose, is
to cultivate a sense of respect for the integrity of argument,
regardless of who is making it. And we do that when we show
our willingness to defend the integrity of certain arguments,
even when their authors are no longer here to defend themselves.
Plato put forth a fetching argument in the Meno, that learning
is mainly a matter of unlocking what was already within us.
What we used to call the laws of reason and nature are part
of those permanent things, the things that are always with
us, and when we speak of restoring that sense of the natural
law, we mean that we would try to recover in our own understanding
those traditions of moral and natural reasoning that were
once the staples of the literate in this country and in Europe.
It would be for us a task of remembering, as a people, the
things we once used to know.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 1999
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