English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Today I was responding to a Facebook post regarding same-sex marriage. As usual, I was irenic, I presented the classic natural law arguments against that practice, and since the person to whom I was responding was Christian, I presented the arguments from Holy Scripture and from Catholic tradition. Instead of engaging in a reasonable discussion over an important societal issue, my respondent (who is homosexual) proceeded to say I was demeaning her, that made her feel less than a person, that she despised people like me. In other words, she resorted to an abusive ad hominem attack instead of rationally responding to my arguments.
The homosexual rights movement is one of many ideologies that came out of the 1960s and early 1970s. Feminism is another and womanism still another. All these ideologies shared a Marxist interpretation of reality in which the group advocates represented was the oppressed and society at large was the oppressor. Recently, homosexual advocates have begun labeling those who disagree with their lifestyle “haters.” Now this is a characteristic of an ideology–no matter how much compassion I show for homosexuals who are “advocates” (note that not all homosexuals agree with their “representatives”), I am, by definition, labeled as a “hater.” It does not matter that I do not hate homosexuals–the ideology accepts the following syllogism:
All persons who believe that homosexual activity is morally wrong are haters.
This person holds that homosexual activity is morally wrong.
Therefore, this person is a hater.
Given my respondent’s ideology, she had no other way to respond.
All ideologies are Platonic in the sense that they propose overarching visions of reality and apply them from at top-down perspective. That is, like rationalism in general, they do not look to sense experience for justification. The only justification is in terms of the axioms of their system, which are taken to be self-evident. Thus if one axiom says that “Anyone who believes that homosexuality is morally wrong hates homosexuals,” then that axiom applies by definition to all people in that class and cannot be questioned. As is the case with Plato’s transcendent Forms, Descartes’ Cogito, or Leibniz’s monads, reality is forced into the mold of theory instead of the theory being checked by reality.
Some versions (not all) of feminism function the same way. If, by definition, all classic literary works reflect male dominance, then scholars needing publications for tenure can search through texts for code words and sentences that reflect such male domination. In the case of Marxist ideology concerning the economic system, those who are in the bourgeois are, by definition, exploiting the proletariat. Mr. Obama’s use of class warfare recognizes the power of such a position (even though he has been more of a Chinese-style “state capitalist” than a dogmatic Communist). Envy is a powerful emotion, and if it can be justified by definition, then government should “make the rich pay their fair share” (whatever that might be).
Platonic political philosophy supports a top-down view of government–the same government is best for all people–the rule of philosopher kings (and queens). Such a position is held by Neoconservative and social democratic ideologues who desire to “spread democracy to the entire world.” The geography, history, and culture of a particular state is ignored in a naive attempt to mold the state into the pattern preferred by the Neocons or social democratic hawks.
Ideology has a convenient way of resorting to ad hominem arguments when its basic principles are attacked. After all, if they are self-evident, the person who does not recognize them is, at the very least, ignorant–and possibly reprobate as well. This position cuts the ground from under rational discussion of important societal issues and dangerously divides people into hostile groups. Ideology is, as Nietzsche recognized, a form of the “will to power,” and in a society only filled with ideologues the fundamental ethic becomes “might makes right.” This is a prescription for societal chaos. If people feel forced into a corner because of ideological labeling, and rational discussion is out of the question, what is left but assertion of raw physical force?
Aristotle recognized, in theory at least, that understanding the world requires a bottom-up approach. While all observation is “theory laden,” this does not abrogate the fact that knowledge of reality arises from the senses. Thus, unlike Plato, Aristotle placed forms in things, and held that states should follow the system that best suits their history and culture.
As Alasdair MacIntyre recognized, the only way for communities with different values can rationally discuss issues is by having the person in one community “put himself in the shoes” of someone in another community to understand that community’s values. Once that occurs (and it must be a mutual process), then rational discussion can take place. Agreement may not be reached, but there should remain a feeling of mutual respect.
Russell Kirk famously said that conservatism is not an ideology, meaning that the form that conservatism takes in a particular state will depend on the history and culture of that state. Conserving key societal values is not a matter of imposing them, Platonic-Formlike, from above–most likely one will only come up with one’s own a priori values to apply to everyone. Rather, conservatism should have a deep respect for the way things are in the actual world. There may be need for change, but this is done slowly and with appropriate concern for the history of a people.
God forbid that American society melt into a soup of competing ideologies. The end of the United States as we currently know it (what’s left of it, at least) will most likely result.
Jul 05, 2012 @ 23:15:01
I think Plato deserves a bit more respect and Aristotle a bit less. Of the two philosophers Plato is easily the deepest. And the most artistic. In any case your article is associating things you do not like with Plato which simply causes those who know you to assume that there is something wrong with Plato whereas Aristotle is a kind of philosophic hero–dull though he might be and no doubt quite knowledgeable of homosexuality from personal experience. .
Clearly the Church has been among other things the ideology you condemn. Top down government for the most part and very authoritarian. No friend of experiment or research that might infringe on dogmas. Personally there are so many serious problems besetting this society I have little time for homosexuality.
The key problem for this country is incompetence. It is everywhere: business as well as government and religion. Once something made in America was nearly perfect–now it is hard to find anything made in America. If one has dealings with Apple for example it does not take long to determine that the company is one of thieves.
Quite possibly homosexuality is a form of birth control that occurs when things are too unsettled or there are too many people. Because Christianity is quite dogmatic and rigid this could not be seriously investigated by a Christian. So one would need to be a Buddhist, Even a compassionate Christian has to come across as intellectually intolerant when this subject is brought up.
Based on some serious research I have come to the conclusion that some persons simply are born that way. It is not just a psychological problem. To condemn these people seems to me both harmful and pointless. We are not short of people; and their behavior should not be treated as criminal. On the other hand I do not find many Christians who are outspoken about America’s terrible civil rights record, its needless and cruel wars decorated as humanitarian interventions, the colossal greed and destructive money behavior of Wall Street . . . etc. Sex has always been Christianity’s favorite target. It is aimed at the young and not at the powerful and wealthy whom the Church needs. So easy when it comes to avarice!
No, in the hierarchy of things I would put sex down towards the bottom; it has always taken on exaggerated importance for lovers as well as for religions. I really can not see either Jesus or a saint giving this girl a hard time. Maybe she knows something that neither you nor I know. In any case I do not believe we have any evidence of what Jesus would say. But surely she would not go away feeling demeaned.
Finally it would be hard for me to say which was worse the tyrant or the Church since both have resorted to torture and cruel and unusual punishments. To buy into all that the Church has put out one has to have a dangerous faith in human nature–for the most part the Church has been the work of intellectuals and not of the deeply devout who would have given all the wealth away and done all sorts of impractical things.
Jul 05, 2012 @ 23:29:31
As a footnote: my fears in life are like this–my large dog getting loose and causing some trouble by running past someone on his way to visit his girl friend up the street; my computer breaking down, etc. I don’t fear the Muslims. I am not threatened by lesbians and homosexuals. I don’t fear death or the after life. I don’t fear myself or other people. I am very interested in what is true. I don’t fear finding some awful thing out about anything. But it seems most people live with lots of fear. Who are these folks that fear terrorism? Who worry about hell? Who apparently spend their lives looking forward to the next big fear in their lives? And whom are loved by the gov and business since they are so easily manipulated.
Sins of the body are minor compared to those of the mind. The people who push dangerous vaccines and kill and harm children are the sorts we need to corral. The people who have arranged the mental health world to fill their pockets with gold are another such group. The list in a long one.
Jul 06, 2012 @ 14:35:44
The problem with all the ideologies you’ve mentioned in your article stem from both naïvé understanding and naïvé application of theory. Simply put, people act/behave then justify their actions/behavior. Behavior rationalization should not be taken to mean that people have not internalized some fragmented concepts of a theory as prescriptive ideals. Instead they act on the shorthand set of prescriptions, which have proven useful in the past (like bookmarks). Like an old computer with little RAM, the full paradigm of these vast prescriptive theories cannot be uploaded into memory all at once or very quickly. Furthermore, these prescriptive paradigms are permeated with holes from corrupted or incomplete files. So, in the moment of decision making the mind uploads not a complete paradigm but the table of contents and a few article abstracts.
I could go on and suggest that the problem of feminism, Marxism, and critical theory is the lack of self-reflective application, but I’ve given up hope with hypocrites.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 02:39:35
J. Sperry, you make a great point about the human tendency to justify one’s behavior. I remember that as an undergraduate I was a member of a class that visited the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville. We sat across from a man who had killed two people in two different incidents–convicted two times of murder one. He claimed that both killings were done in self-defense–and perhaps he really believed that. Few people are like W. H. Auden, who did not try to justify his behavior when it was wrong. He was an honest man (and one hec of a poet). Few people today have such integrity.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 02:44:55
John, my preference is clearly for Aristotle. I admire Plato in many ways–I enjoy his dialogues, and his attacks on the relativism of the Sophists are well-argued. Even my own religion kept enough of Platonism to place the forms in three modes of being: in the mind as concepts in the thing as informational structures, and in the mind of God as exemplars. Aristotle rightly criticized Plato’s version of Forms as overly transcendent. My point about Plato is that I believe he tried to force a system onto the world instead of trying to look at the world and develop a system from experience–but again Plato was a rationalist. My own bias is empiricism, but of a Thomistic variety, not a Lockean or post-Lockean variety.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 16:20:11
It would never have occurred to me that Plato was a rationalist though it makes a certain sense. Perhaps like Spinoza though it is more appearance than reality as neither philosopher makes sense if reason is their highest function. The core of Plato’s philosophy is derived from Orphism; and the Allegory of the Cave speaks clearly of real experiences. The Forms are not just mental constructs. They come from a kind of knowing the transcends reason and of course sense experience. [ see INITIATION INTO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLATO -Raphael] In the case of Spinoza Paul Wienpah (THE RADICAL SPINOZA) wonders if he had contact with missionaries to the Orient as there is such a distinct Buddhist element in his thought. I would consider both Plato and Spinoza intuitive types who were adept at using reason but were certainly viewing it as subordinate to this third type of knowing. I agree with Plato that sense experience is always to some extent misleading. It is nearly impossible not be a naive realist in many senses–the world is just as I see it!! But of course once one begins to peal away the illusions soon there is nothing at all. And reason or rationalism is not a good deal better–it offers much and delivers little.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 17:48:13
Of course Plato believed the Forms were actual entities existing in a world transcending space and time. The empirical world is illusory (which is not the same as saying it is an illusion), and the Forms are ultimately real. The Form of the Good is at the top of Plato’s hierarchy. The soul functions as a kind of via media between the world of the Forms and the world of sense experience. The soul can know the lower, mathematical Forms as well as Forms of “Treeness,” “Dogness,” etc. by dialectic. The higher Forms–truth, beauty, justice, and especially the Form of the Good, are known by “Nous,” which seems to be a kind of intellectual intuition, or in THE SYMPOSIUM, an intellectual mysticism. Plato was trying to avoid relativism by noting that dogs were not dogs because they say “woof, woof” but because they participate in the Form of Dogness, which accounts for the essential nature of dogs. The problem with Plato is that by limiting reality to the Forms (with the empirical world only sharing in reality and a matter of opinion [about art] and belief [sensory claims]), he separated himself too far from the world of our experience and tended to impose an ideal vision on things. Yes, he believed that a Form (eidos) or Idea (idea) is real, but by limiting a Form to a transcendent world he creates a tendency to impose a postulated idea on the world rather than to respect the reality of the empirical world. You are correct about the Orphic connection, and it is difficult from Plato’s extant writings to know how much of his philosophy was rationalist and how much was religiously based. One that is definitely true–Plato was not an empiricist.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 18:48:49
Assume just for a moment that you begin to have what I claim is a higher and more direct form of knowing. Now it is not that language can not convey this experience but only to someone else who is having it or has had it a few times. Someone who has not (perhaps our friend Aristotle) might really get very confused by what is said about various matters seen sort of sub specie aeternitatis. Franklin Merrell-Woff who was both a mathematicians and philosopher does an excellent job of discussing this mid point between no words apply and the everyday discourse. I believe I know what Plato was getting at–a definite experience; and the sheer difficulty of making it sound plausible. Some people who have used psychedelics have this problem as well. Once the experience is over one can not even make sense of it oneself. My impression is that Aristotle was a bit of a sober cautious guy who worked hard and was really tired of hanging out with Plato and his friends and wanted to do his own thing. But it made his philosophy a bit dull and tedious for me. I guess it is artist versus scientist.
In the East they say that only when the masculine energy and feminine are in balance does this third energy of knowing arise. People who suffer some kind of nerve damage have a great advantage over those who have not. Suddenly what was supposed to be a part of a fixed world changes radically. [see books by Oliver Sachs] They have to accept that the world was part them and part It. But just where the one begins and the other ends is never clear. There is nothing like a good but temporary illness to illustrate this strikingly for one interested in truth and reality.
Here is a simple experiment. Sit comfortably for a minute or so and try to set consciousness/awareness aside. Then relax a bit and try to set the objects of consciousness aside. While the former is soon realized to be impossible; the latter might be possible if one only knew how. In the East for thousands of years part two of the experiment has been done successfully by those with competent teachers and sufficient desire. In fact it is the essence of Yoga, Buddhism, and various Hindu sects. Also of Taoism. This “feat” once accomplished changes everything and reveals the world as bathed in divine love–so those who have done it have claimed for millennia. It seems clear that Orphism offered this experience or non-experience to Plato and a number of other Greek luminaries as well as persons we have never heard of. And if I am correct the Church took steps to prevent this “insidious influence” from infecting its flocks. Institutions usually end up destroying the purpose for which they were fashioned. [USA has now just about eliminated freedom.]
Jul 07, 2012 @ 22:27:47
Even if the church in the past was antsy about mystics, the Roman Catholic Church today seems more open, as the rehabilitation of Eckhardt shows. They are surprisingly open to paranormal investigations as well, with Pope Pius XII openly encouraging research on electronic voice phenomena. Anglicans have historically been open to mysticism, perhaps because of the Platonist emphasis in much Anglican thought. Most Protestants, with a few exceptions, have been more hostile than Catholics to mysticism. Really, the church’s record is a mixed bag.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 23:16:09
Readers here will I believe enjoy this finely done video by Mike Adams as it addresses much that has been recently written here.
The God Within (FULL) from DivinityNow.com – Mike Adams
Jul 07, 2012 @ 02:46:45
John, I agree that the church has overemphasized sexual sin without focusing on more serious sins. That does not mean its teachings on sexual sin are wrong, but that the church needs to incorporate Jesus’ attitude to the woman taken in adultery and be harder on people who are filled with envy, hatred, jealousy, who split churches, and who support the mass murder of war and the mass murder of abortion.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 05:39:40
I must concede my ignorance of a diverse array of sin, but what sins are more dire than sexual sin? I know that murder is more grave, and I know that a denial of the Holy Ghost is the most severe, but I can not think of any others more serious than adultery. Presuming that adultery is the third most heinous sin, where then should other sexual sin rank in severity?
These questions are not meant as a pronouncement of condemning judgment on the sexual sinner. The Lord said unto the woman taken in adultery by the Pharisees, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” Clearly the Lord gave her a mandate to cease her sinning, but did so with compassion. It is interesting to note that unlike other situations wherein He said unto certain individuals that their sin were forgiven, He excluded that phrase under these circumstances, suggesting that further repentance was necessary before full forgiveness could be offered to this woman. Numerous times the Lord had reiterated that he came to save mankind from their sins, not in their sins. While such words may sound harsh, it is only because the wicked take the “Truth” to be hard. It is their hubris that is offended; the Lord warned his disciples of pride. Nonetheless, the Lord allows the sun to rise on all Man’s children and lengthens their state of probation so that they may repent and come into Him.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 12:10:41
I was thinking in terms of the traditional Catholic position as embodied in Dante. Of course all sin is serious, and sexual sin can have terrible consequences for people’s lives. The Roman Catholic Church, while holding adultery to be a mortal sin, considered sins like jealously and hatred to be more serious–thus, Dante placed adulterers in a “higher” level of hell than those in the other categories (those who was just promiscuous were at a much lower level). From the Protestant side, Philip Yancey has some interesting things to say in a recent book (the title escapes me right now). In no way was I denying that sexual sin is serious; the church is correct to condemn it. But the church focusing on it to the neglect of other sins, such as the spitefulness that leads to splits in churches (something I’ve seen three times personally), reveals a lack of balance.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 17:00:19
I would certainly counsel people to avoid adultery. But it is not the end of the world. Personally I would like to see someone successfully prove that Jesus was anti-gay. Or even just use the New Testament alone to do that though unless we have something from Jesus himself I would remain very skeptical. While adultery can harm a spouse and children–and generally does; I am not aware of how people who are gay do any more harm than their heterosexual counterparts.
I would certainly have balked at being forced to use my left hand to write, etc. but my daughter would have done just the reverse as she is left handed–something that was once viewed unfavorably. If there were only men for men for sex I would have found being celibate easy. Based partly on the work of a fine Dutch psychologist I am convinced that some if not all gays are born that way. And going against nature leads to mental illness. I think Christians make a serious mistake even taking up the subject. Live and let live is wisdom here.
While we may have inherent resistances to incest, I doubt that for humans monogamy is an instinct but rather something cultivated. Perhaps for the higher type individual it is best. But in general sexual morality seems more a social cultural matter than something that has transcendental guidelines. Obviously rape and the molesting of children is wickedness.
As for dire sins I would say that Christians who are Zionists have stepped into the midst of one. Christians who despise Muslims based on talk radio and the immature babbling of certain Congress people have done likewise. Christians who support illegal wars of aggression, drone attacks that kill civilians, and even the so called humanitarian interventions need to get busy and think for a change about what they are actually doing. Idolatry of Israel rates high as both craziness and sin in my mind. The exploitation of third world countries under the guise of foreign aid (usually to dictators pockets) which the majority of white prosperous Americans went along with and chose to ignore in order to be even more prosperous should rate high on a list of dire sins, The average thinking Christian should be so busy opposing this nightmare behavior that he would have no time to pay attention to gays and their sometimes silly behavior. He would be too busy to look at other women and even contemplate adultery. Just doing one’s social and political duty would use up his extra energy.
There is absolutely no reason why Christianity should be viewed as it generally is as a intolerant, rigid, narrow minded and violent religion. No good reason that is. There are plenty of bad reasons for everything bad. Part of the problem is the belief that simply believing is all that is involved and that practicing takes too much effort and is just good for some women, monks, nuns, priests and ministers. Go to church on Sunday, donate a bit of money and go home, have some beer and watch football will do it! Anyway since God is omnipotent he can do without my help. I am sure you have noted how little attention love your enemy gets from Christians–and by contrast how certain people are that only Christianity offers salvation. Is this just a random preference or do people like the idea of being the best and only? Well, most religious persons are pick and chose types, aren’t they? At some point we learn that other people’s mothers are just as good as ours only they are other people’s mothers–and ours is best for us.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 17:12:49
I’m afraid I’m rather ignorant on the insights of both Aristotle and Plato, yet this was an interesting post. Thank you.
Jul 07, 2012 @ 17:28:46
Thank you, Chila. Don’t get me wrong–Plato was a great philosopher–as another philosopher named Whitehead said, “All philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.”