Religion & The Commonweal
Weekend listening: Michael Millerman, a Straussian scholar who has set up his own school to teach philosophy (tagline, “teaching tomorrow’s philosopher-kings”), especially Plato, Nietzsche, & Heidegger, has done us all a service by publishing a version of this Strauss lecture with clean audio. (You can also read it here.)
Strauss argues in this lecture that the core issue in our political troubles concerns the status of religion (the theologico-political problem). Any community requires, if it is to cohere, to come together in fellowship, the teaching & enforcement of core beliefs. Without them, there’s no way for people even to recognize each other as acting together. Underneath all politics, with its conflict, there is something held in common, religion, since our desire for justice & our belief in justice cannot be the effect, but must be the cause of the laws, of the way of life. In short, it’s not the police that prevents crime, it’s our belief in the law—that is the cause of the police as well; otherwise, there would be crime all the time, everywhere & there would be no trust, no fellowship. Our modern establishment has led to the opinion that you can have atheist societies, that is political communities with no authority regarding what to believe, so long as the various sects, as well as the atheists, don’t commit crimes. Indeed, the extreme form of the argument is now popular: Only atheist societies can be legitimate, everything else is, to the extent it is different, tyranny. But does that make sense?
As he usually did in his lectures, Strauss gives an account of the major thinkers who articulated the problem of the conflict between reason & revelation, as both cognitive, clarifying political conflicts—& causal, as influencing political opinion & therefore political action. Strauss outlines (his “ancients & moderns” theme) two different attempts to rationalize religion, one in Plato & Aristotle, the other in Hobbes & his heirs (notice the funny Pierre Bayle reference). There’s a lot to learn besides—pay attention to his remarks about Thomas More & Thomas Aquinas on the character of natural religion, civil religion, & revealed religion.
One would have had to be unusually astute or unusually sensitive to the problem to take Strauss seriously in 1963. 60 years later, everyone of ordinary intelligence can see that our basic agreement about justice is lost & therefore we hate each other, feeling betrayed & worrying there’s no future ahead. Why? Because we cannot agree on what can be done & what cannot be done, for example when it comes to castrating children. We cannot agree on what is desirable even for something as ordinary as the family. We have a party of science & a party of religion, the elites & the ordinary people, those who control the institutions of the modern state & those who suffer at their hands.
To understand what this conflict means at its core, we cannot leave it at saying that we, although we are routed, are right, & our adversaries, who spit in our faces daily, are wrong. One must ask, right about what & in what way? It is not enough to say, we have urgent problems &, besides, our adversaries or enemies would not listen anyway! We have to think about the standards of right that not only make sense of our demands, but which also teach us how to think through our political problems, if we are to solve them. In short, we need to figure out as best we can the problem of natural right, which of course is foundational in America, in a specific modern form, as natural rights. In that sense, this Strauss lecture is a perfect introduction to his most famous book, Natural Right & History. I recommend it!