Nurture and Nurture's God

Talk about rude: that silly title just now broke into my head and demanded that I honor it with a post! I don't like to reward bad behavior, but my head is otherwise empty this morning, so might as well.

Nor are we in the habit of quoting John Paul... Sartre around here, but he was surely right about one thing: that there is no such thing as human nature, because God doesn't exist.

Except God does exist. As they say in France, T'oh!

via GIPHY

Thus, score one for our perspicacious Founders, who acknowledged that we are indeed endowed by our Creator with, you know, the thing. No Creator, no human nature, no natural law, no unalienable rights, yada yada. France may roll that way, but we don't. Except for the left, which would like for us to roll over like the French army.

This goes to the most fundamental principle distinguishing the left from reality, bearing in mind that it necessarily takes numerous forms. It does so necessarily because reality -- obviously -- is one, while alternatives to it are literally infinite.

For example, in reality you are either a man or a woman (with a handful of tragic exceptions that prove the rule). Deny this reality and you have LGB... then QT... followed by IA... and let's not forget U and C... not to mention 2, P, O, and the controversial SA. We might just say QWERTY as a synecdoche for the entire alphabet, but this unjustly excludes the numbers, to say nothing of the symbols... Let's just go straight to nominalism and say that every person is zir own gender. (If the Incarnation is the Best Idea Ever, then nominalism must be among the Worst.)

If human beings have no nature, this is not "liberating," but rather, the opposite, for it means we are so many bags of wet cement to be shaped in the manner seen fit by the state.

Marriage, for example, is quintessentially in the nature of things. Not so, says the Supreme Court: marriage is between any two -- for now -- people -- for now -- who love the state! But if anyone is free to marry, then no one is. Which is the whole point: to destroy the institution of the family, because the state is a jealous god and frowns upon the existence of mediating institutions between it and its subjects.

Now, back when I was growing up, words were still used to describe reality. This was before they were used to create, distort, and redefine reality.

Reality. You will have noticed that there is an exterior (objective) reality and an interior (subjective) reality; and if you notice a bit more deeply, that there is a relationship between these two.

In fact, there is always a relationship, such that we can never identify either pole without the other. If you don't believe me, try imagining what the world looks like with no one there to see it; or, at the other end, imagine what consciousness is like with no object or content. Apart from its complement, each is just nothing, and nothing doesn't exist.

Therefore, we must regard the categories of subject and object as arrows that point to and define one another without ever reaching that to which they point. Human existence always takes place, and can only take place, in the dynamic and generative space between these two poles.

If this sounds suspiciously subjectivist, well, it is and it isn't. It would be if there were no such thing as human nature -- or, at the other end, if there were no such thing as the laws of nature. In other words, there is objectivity at both ends; but there is also subjectivity (or interiority) at both ends, and these interpenetrate one another in the act of knowing.

Let's crank down the abstraction or put down the bong for a moment, and apply this to plain old reality. In his A Government of Laws, Sandoz writes that "whatever the political order may be, the fundamental requirement is that [it] be a fit habitation for human beings."

Again, if there is no such thing as human nature (because no God), then there is no proper political order and no necessary habitation for our flourishing: representative democracy and free markets are no better than fascism and communism.

How did that work out?

Yes, but why did it not work out? And show your work!

Speaking of which, A Government of Laws is all about showing the work of the founders, in that the subtitle is Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding. Let's consider some of their work, the better to understand how and why the left rejects it in favor of an alternative metaphysic.

Let's start with Aristotle, who understood that

if we are to devise an optimal, or at least a moderately satisfactory order for men, we must understand who it is that will occupy this habitation so as to be able to judge its fitness for human occupancy (Sandoz).

Obvious, no? Indeed, one must have an advanced degree in political science in order to not understand this on a metaphysical level, or in other words, to be fundamentally wrong in principle. For the rest of us, we want a political order that reflects human nature.

Which is precisely what Madison rhetorically asked: "what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"

(Not "of" but "on," which is to say, based on a consideration of who and what man is; no government could be a literal reflection of man, since he is reflected in art, religion, science, and countless other activities, so the state would have to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnicompetent. Which, incidentally, touches on why "the notion of saving mankind through politics is, indeed, not only mistaken but ultimately disastrous.")

So, the political order isn't exactly "man writ large." Rather, it's more like a structure that permits man to WRITE and LIVE LARGE, or to become who he is: "the nature of man is displayed in the man who fulfills his potential as a human being and lives as a mature man.... This discloses the horizon for human endeavor and human actualization" (ibid.).

Ever wonder why the left infantilizes citizens and encourages immaturity, dependency, and emotionality? Well, wonder no more. It's all bound up with their initial assumptions about a de-divinized world and the absence of human nature. In reality, human beings are hierarchically structured such that there is a

series of grades from the bottom (so to speak) up to the point where he participates in the divine being as his own true self. Noetic participation in divine being distinguishes man from all other beings, insofar as man thereby has something of the divine in him (ibid.).

We're god-paddling in rather deep waters at the very edge of the subjective horizon, at the limits of our capacity to remain buoyant, so we apologize for any lack of clarity and/or linearity. We'll take another dive into the same waters in the next post...