Robert Royal recently referenced a line from Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution that delighted me, especially as I warm up for another semester teaching Rhetoric to my freshmen. Royal’s point is as follows:

The radical Enlightenment–the part that Edmund Burke discerned in the French Revolution as operating “with the metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman”–is with us still and often provides the background music to our lives. We see it in public figures who seem to believe that there are known remedies for all social ills, which have been “blocked” because of the ill will of the privileged or the ignorance of the underprivileged, both of whom it’s okay to ignore and perhaps even to eliminate from the conversation.

I think Royal is not only right, but is pointing us in the right direction, when he refers to this passage from Burke. “The metaphysics of an undergraduate” is an important jibe; it signifies far beyond mere detraction. I think something very similar is at work in passages Greg has posted recently in two different articles:

Across both these broken relationships (with God and with family) the appeal of pornography is the illusion of power. It is not primarily the physical senses that pornography stimulates, but the imagination. Pornography helps the user enter and remain within an illusion of his own creation. Within that illusory world, he is all-powerful. Everything bends to his will; even the most outrageously implausible scenarios become easy.

(source: Pornography and Power | Greg Forster | First Things)
and

Few people improve their behavior much strictly on their own initiative, through self-awareness and self-discipline. Our moral development comes much more from our response to other people’s prompting, encouraging and restraining us. While the basic principle here is ancient wisdom, Haidt backs it up with an impressive collection of empirical data, and shows that to some degree this social basis of morality is hard-wired in human physiology.

(source: They Know Not What They Do | TGC | The Gospel Coalition)

What all of these seem to be suggesting is that humans today have a reality problem. Describing that problem philosophically pretty surely won’t solve it, but it may well help us devise correctives that are more useful. To that end, I urge you to read the entire passage from Burke (below), but to note especially the argument he makes about bad metaphysics, here.  

The collapse from ten basic categories to two that Burke mentions is the basic movement of Ockham’s nominalism, over against the synthesis Aquinas forged from Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian doctrine. The Thomistic synthesis permitted an elaboration of theology as knowledge that was assumed during the Patristic age but which could not be elaborated and defended adequately on the basis of Augustinian doctrine alone. Ockham, with his urge to reduce all things to divine will, insisted that all universal qualities were only in our minds and not also and first in the creation, and that relations were determined occasionally by God rather than ordered by God to final causes chosen by God. In so doing, Ockham inserted a wedge between knowledge and faith, one which communicates down to this day–to the day when “freedom of worship” is sacrosanct, provided that no facts known to religion are permitted to interfere with any claims or principles generated by the secular maelstrom.

What to do? Well, first, form your own thought on richer models, ones that admit that real differences exist within creation.  Read and consider the works of those who reach beyond Enlightenment reasoning in order to re-evaluate our order and its principles (here’s one I’d like to hear more about). Resist the “culpable levelling” intrinsic to democracy precisely as such, pointing out that eliminating differences in order to create “equality” ignores almost everything important about humanity and civil society (and even the meaning of the word “equal”). Insist that your teaching, in your church and in your home, be richer and more realistic than mere “social statics” can account for; that nothing really matters spiritually unless it is manifest physically, in the religious and relational and cultural and economic conditions that really constitute devotion.

I hope to return to that term “devotion,” and to an understanding of literature that I think is essential to this vision, in the future.

For now, though: can you recognize the basic rejection of truth about Creation that makes it impossible for us to have a coherent conversation about first principles in our culture? What can you do about it?

Quoth Burke:

The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself, all which rendered them as it were so many different species of animals. From hence they thought themselves obliged to dispose their citizens into such classes, and to place them in such situations in the state, as their peculiar habits might qualify them to fill, and to allot to them such appropriated privileges as might secure to them what their specific occasions required, and which might furnish to each description such force as might protect it in the conflict caused by the diversity of interests, that must exist, and must contend, in all complex society: for the legislator would have been ashamed, that the coarse husbandman should well know how to assort and to use his sheep, horses, and oxen, and should have enough of common sense, not to abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment; whilst he, the economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in general. It is for this reason that Montesquieu observed very justly, that in their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even soared above themselves. It is here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative series, and sunk even below their own nothing. As the first sort of legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens, and combined them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical and alchemistical legislators, have taken the direct contrary course. They have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens, as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided this their amalgama into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to loose counters, merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to figures whose power is to arise from their place in the table. The elements of their own metaphysics might have taught them better lessons. The troll of their categorical table might have informed them that there was something else in the intellectual world besides substance and quantity. They might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that there were eight heads more, in every complex deliberation, which they have never thought of; though these, of all the ten, are the subjects on which the skill of man can operate anything at all.

(source: Paras. 300-324. Burke, Edmund. 1909-14. Reflections on the French Revolution. The Harvard Classics)

For more on the categories, see Aristotle.