This reminds me of one of the footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s “Datum Centurio,” a short story in the form of an imaginary dictionary entry (for the word “date”) from the future: “Cf. Catholic dogma, perverse vindication of.”
I have long been aware of the way that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction tends, whatever effort to the contrary folks tend to exert, to reinforce the stable understanding of humanity that has remained largely unchanged, fads and fictions in popular philosophy notwithstanding, as long as humans have had leisure to reflect on their nature. It is no accident that Aristotle and Aquinas largely agree on what humans are, or that they agree with Augustine and Avicenna, or again with Anselm–and on and on, and A to Z of the epochal thinkers of human nature come down to certain basics.
Those who try to re-invent humanity invariably have to re-invent the same features of humanity with different names, under some preferred mode of control that “fixes” their preferred distortions in place. These built-in features, whose relationship to our biological existence and spiritual significance I describe as “thinking in brains,” mean that we have definite capacities and limitations, definite possibilities of thought and existence and definite boundaries to what conceivable things we can realize. We can often strike a pose, in our minds or in our most ephemeral fictions, that nobody could possibly hold while actively working and living in the complex web of relationships that define our actual existence, the creaturely being of humans.
And because we are often trying to hold a pose that is not well-fitted to our creaturely being, we find ourselves exposed to certain threats, certain horrors, that we must keep at bay in controllable fictions and in “morality plays” whose theme is our power to finally change humanity, to force all our neighbors into the mold that makes us happiest. And these fictions, when they are compelling, spell out our fear of what we cannot actually redesign, our fear of what is too real for us to control leaks out in the nervous laughter that turns into farce whenever we try to “repeat an act” of horror. Horror, it turns out, is “conservative” in its essential underpinnings: It reflects human nature’s reality beneath the level of our social and technological manipulation, the reality that doesn’t go away when we tell civil lies about it.
This idea, both in my days as a radical occasionalist, voluntarist species of nominalist who believed that post-structuralism offered me the best textual strategy for radically relativizing all human authority to the divine Author’s written Word, and in my recovering sanity as a metaphysical realist who believes that only a concretely realized coordination of the Word written and the sacramental Real Presence of the Word Incarnate suffices to ground us in Creation and nourish us in the grace of Redemption, animates my interest in the way that culture changes, often without regard to our stated intentions, as we compete in our efforts to defend and institutionalize our preferred lies and popular errors.
And so I have been interested to watch the following exchange unfold. First, Jeremy Neill with an article that I commented on casually when it came out, arguing that eventually the self-destructive forces of inhumane ideology must give way to a consensus on what humanity actually is, but doing so with some assumptions many of us will find ill-considered: Continue reading
