The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) by Anthony Esolen Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) by Anthony Esolen Read Free Book Online
Authors: Anthony Esolen
good of the intellect . It consists in contemplating what is good, and developing the habit of action in accordance with it. This is a conclusion of tremendous significance for medieval Christianity, as we shall see. And of all the good things we can behold with the mind, the intellect’s highest object of contemplation is what does not change. It is what Aristotle calls the Prime Mover, the (impersonal) unmoved mover or uncaused cause of the world, without which there could be neither motion nor cause. This too is a conclusion of tremendous significance. 23
     
    Both Plato and Aristotle, then, are deeply theological thinkers. Aristotle’s ideal State must be one wherein man stands at least a fair chance of achieving the fullness of his intellectual growth, both contemplatively and practically. Those who are capable of contemplation must have some opportunity for calm reflection, while everyone else, capable of exercising the practical good, must have a free field for developing and displaying the moral virtues of temperance, courage, justice, and wisdom.
     
    Note what such a State cannot be. It cannot be an empire, because empires steal from men the opportunity to govern themselves. It cannot be anarchy, because lawlessness makes one’s life too uncertain for the leisure to pursue the good of the intellect. It must somehow take into account human nature as we find it. The family , that schoolhouse of virtues, cannot be abolished, says Aristotle. 24 The State cannot be so vast that we fall into anonymity, and government is imposed upon us rather than created by us and for our purposes. Thus the modern “democracy,” neither republican nor democratic but bureaucratic, distant, imperial in its all-encompassing demands, leaving little for the common people of a Colonus or Corinth to determine, is poor soil too for man’s thriving. That is, unless we believe in the Oliver Twist model of citizenship, wherein each of us must timidly approach the great fat beadle the State, and mumble, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
     
 
    Human Nature
     
    T he very first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics would earn him an instant F from a college professor today: “All men, by nature, yearn for knowledge.” Positing a human nature would make him closed-minded today—but it also made possible some of the best philosophy the world has ever seen.
     
 
     
    What then? “Man is a political animal,” says Aristotle. He thrives in a community of families and clans who govern themselves freely and well, providing for more than a basic subsistence. What they mainly provide is freedom : free time, leisure for conversation, an arena for debate, for struggles that have consequences, for reading and arguing, for sport, for contemplation, for honing all the practical and intellectual virtues. True civility has more to do with a well-ordered fight than with the bonds of niceness.
     
    Both philosophers saw that if freedom means “being free to take what you like, within the law,” then no nobler faculty of the soul beyond the appetite will be developed. People whose votes are bought by enticements of appetite are not free, regardless of how often they throng the assemblies, or the academies. For man in a corrupted democracy, says Plato,
     
    goes in for politics and bounces up and says whatever enters his head. And if military men excite his emulation, thither he rushes, and if moneyed men, to that he turns, and there is no order or compulsion in his existence, but he calls this life of his the life of pleasure and freedom and happiness and cleaves to it to the end. ( Republic , 8.561d)
     
     
    The disorder penetrates into the family:
    The father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner

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