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Deliberation, Inc.
Human & Divine Societies Require Careful Thought & Discourse
"Be not conformed to this world," St. Paul warns the church at Rome, "but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" (12:2). In our time, that warning bears not only upon what we think, but also upon how we think, or that we think at all. For insofar as we regard everything, including matters of theology and church discipline, to be "political" as we employ that adjective now, we destroy what is political properly speaking, and we ensure that no pragmatic problem will be solved, no point of the faith will be clarified, and no truth will be granted the leisure of slow and organic development.
The Need to Deliberate
If we are to be prudent, we must deliberate. Given the kinds of creatures we are, in the world God created rather than in the far simpler worlds of our imagining, we cannot see the whole of a thing at once, or its many and intricate relations with other things. We have not with any reliability the instantaneous intuitions of angels, supposing that we ever have them at all. Discursive reason is ours, often slow and plodding, or we learn by slow experience, seldom forgiving and ever requiring to be affirmed anew in every generation, lest we condemn ourselves to barbarism and the reinvention of stone knives and pointed sticks.
It is unlikely that the conditions of our political conversations—not conversations really, but one-liners, simplisms, shouting matches, and slapping surprise cards on the table—will in the near future allow for much deliberation. The personal and social virtue of tolerance, putting up with something you acknowledge as bad because not doing so would make things worse, grows harder to find, as people grow more certain of the evil of their enemies and less aware of their own evil.
We still make examinations of conscience—the consciences of other people. It's an enjoyable pastime, since, unless we are quite honest with ourselves, we are apt to cast those other consciences in one easy dimension of our choosing, knowing beforehand what the result will be. Always the worst sins are those that other people commit, as we enjoy the convenience of not happening to be tempted to commit them or of not being capable of committing them if we wanted to.
The corresponding intellectual virtues are honesty and fairness: the habit of holding judgment in abeyance, attempting to see matters from another point of view, putting the best case forward for the opposition. These are not practiced, and in our schools they are usually held in scorn. The personal is the political, people say, or to teach is to engage in politics. That is as much as to confess that everything we do is part of a quick-hand shell game. "I am a scoundrel," we are encouraged to tell the world, though not in those words.
The United States Senate used to be known as the world's greatest deliberative body. I do not believe it is now a deliberative body at all. The more we conform ourselves to the mode of current politics, or, what is almost the same thing, the mode of current salesmanship, the less we will deliberate and the more foolish we will become, in a kind of folly that the world has hardly known before, because it is a folly intensified in degree and warped in kind by all of the engines of un-deliberation and of un-wisdom that blaze and blare at us at every pass. Authors of satire cannot keep pace.
Treating Society as a Machine
How do the impatience and folly touch the Church? "Prove all things," says Paul; "hold fast that which is good" (1 Thess. 5:21). We are to put things to the test, in the mind, in the heart, in action. Our criterion for judgment is truth—what else should it be? What else can it be? When we utter the word amen, we should remember that we are not saying anything about ourselves or our intentions, but about God and his works. The amen is an affirmation of truth, emeth, as weighty and solid as rock. There is nothing flighty, jittery, sudden, shape-shifting, slippery, about that rock. The mountain does not drift with the clouds about its peak. We do not rely upon a reed in the wind.
But we do not have that habit of slow, sober examination. I am often struck by discussions of social matters that strangely never address the reality of a society at all—a complex and living organism, spanning the generations, extending beyond the bounds of death, necessarily cultural if it is a genuine society and not a collective or a wraith, a web of relations among beings who are each of them more baffling and fascinating than the largest pinwheel of stellar dust in the universe.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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