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A Review of The
Responsibility of Reason by Ralph C. Hancock
Carson Holloway
Modern societies lack
confidence in the moral competence of reason. Americans agree, for example,
in deploring a sexually exploitative culture that corrupts the young and
the greed that contributed to the financial collapse of 2008. What, though,
are the purposes of sexual desire or of the acquisitive impulse? No one can
produce a widely persuasive account that provides a rational basis for
condemning the ills that most people deplore.
This crisis of
confidence in reason’s ability to make a persuasive case for moral norms,
Ralph Hancock contends in The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice
in a Liberal-Democratic Age, is rooted in democratic modernity’s
understanding of reason’s role in seeking truth and guiding human affairs.
While promiscuously boasting that it is ruled by reason, democratic
modernity drains reason of all positive ethical content. It wants to
liberate reason from the authority of inherited moral traditions, but moral
reason needs some authoritative ground from which to begin its inquiry.
Pure autonomous reason
cannot lead us to the good, so the effort to follow it leads to an
amorality from which new kinds of despotism emerge. Modern reason’s
conquest of nature is inseparable from man’s subjection to the power of
technology; its debunking of tradition goes hand in hand with man’s
submission to the tyrannical sway of public opinion.
In his effort to
understand and overcome these difficulties, Hancock, who teaches political
science at Brigham Young University, takes for his primary guide Alexis de
Tocqueville. However, before settling on the Frenchman as the necessary
physician for our times, he considers the responses of two of the twentieth
century’s great philosophic critics of modern rationalism, both commonly
believed to be more profound than Tocqueville: Martin Heidegger and his
student and critic Leo Strauss.
Heidegger saw more
clearly than most of his contemporaries the dehumanizing effects of modern
reason. Seeking to subjugate nature to human mastery through technology,
reason drains nature of all inherent meaning, leaving man adrift in a
meaningless universe. What’s more, since man is part of nature, he too is
deprived of inherent meaning. But without an account of what man is, there
is also no account of what he cannot be. Man himself, Heidegger recognized,
can thus be rendered mere material for technological manipulation.
Nevertheless, Hancock
argues, Heidegger’s diagnosis of these symptoms was wildly erroneous and
his prescription dangerous. Like Nietzsche, he erred in attributing this
corrosive power not to the modern perversions of reason but to reason
itself, leading to a radical renunciation of the role of reason in human
affairs. This misstep is inseparable from Heidegger’s redefinition of
freedom as submission to the dispensations of fate rather than as taking
responsibility for events in light of reason’s ethical perceptions. This
philosophical view explains, perhaps, his rather shocking political
judgment, specifically his dalliance, never really repudiated, with Nazism.
Turning to Strauss,
Hancock finds his a more responsible but still unsatisfactory response to
democratic modernity. Strauss saw that modern democratic societies suffer
from a moral emptiness that makes them vulnerable to violently irrational
ideologies like Nazism. Modern democracy understands reason to be
ministerial to, and hence less important than, animal desires for mere life
and comfort. Because of its agnosticism about the good and the noble, such
a society cannot give a morally compelling defense of itself. Nor, for that
matter, can it offer any politically and morally wholesome version of
nobility to high-spirited souls otherwise tempted by the romantic allure of
fanatical projects of political redemption.
To remedy these
vulnerabilities, Strauss turned to the Greek philosophers’ belief that the
highest human possibilities are realized outside and above the political
realm, in the philosopher’s serene contemplation of the eternal order of
the cosmos. Awareness of this path to transcendence, he hoped, would
moderate democratic modernity’s restless strivings by establishing a
greater good that cannot be attained through endless technological progress
or limitless liberation from traditional morality.
Hancock finds Strauss’
solution defective both theoretically and practically. Philosophy cannot
attain the complete transcendence of the political realm he desired. Even
as it ascends from the political realm, reason remains dependent on
pre-philosophic intimations of nobility learned in the political realm. For
example, the sense that the philosopher’s pursuit of truth involves a
“higher” activity than politics is already a development of the belief,
common to the aristocratic context in which philosophy first arose, that
the concerns of the ruling gentlemen are higher than those of ordinary men.
His solution is practicably inadequate because his exaggerated praise of
the transcendence of pure theory tends to foster an elitist indifference to
human affairs ill suited to improving politics.
In Tocqueville, Hancock
finds what he understands to be the most adequate response to democratic
modernity’s destruction of belief in the moral competence of reason. The
problem with democratic modernity is the loss of our capacity for what he
called “moral analogy,” the sense that our practical, political lives can
and should be understood and lived in light of higher spiritual
possibilities that reason can clarify and approach by reflecting on the
traditions of existing political societies.
This sense of moral
analogy imbues the ordinary obligations of our human state with cosmic
significance: Our relationships to our children and parents, friends and
fellow citizens inform our understanding of the orderly whole of the cosmos.
Conversely, our opinions about the cosmos can inform our understanding of
our daily moral duties. This understanding is implicit in the inherited
beliefs of traditional societies, but it is also capable of philosophic
clarification as the human mind seeks rational knowledge of the cosmos.
Aristocracy, according
to Tocqueville, naturally sustains a sense of moral analogy by habituating
us to the idea that we are under the authority of something higher than
ourselves. In contrast, democracy seeks an equality among men that
dramatically changes the moral imagination. Reason is no longer deployed to
justify and elaborate conceptions of what is “higher” but put to the
service of democracy’s ruling class: ordinary men with ordinary concerns
for self-preservation and prosperity. Thus democratic reason turns out to
be primarily utilitarian, a tool in the service of materialistic ends,
devoid of elevated (and elevating) moral content.
Tocqueville regarded
this tendency of democratic culture toward the instrumentalization of
reason, and the accompanying flattening of human aspiration, as the great
threat to human dignity. In response, he exhorted those responsible for
democratic societies to do all in their power to sustain the influence of
Christianity, which provides a vision of a spiritual aristocracy, as it
were, a salutary counterweight to democracy’s naturally materialistic and
utilitarian tendencies.
Some might regard this
conclusion as pedestrian. After all, countless conservative critics of the
modern world have trumpeted the idea that Christianity encourages civic
virtues and is a wholesome leaven to democratic culture. Hancock
demonstrates, however, that Tocqueville’s grasp of the problem was more
sophisticated. Tocqueville was well aware that by teaching the dignity of
ordinary men, Christianity first initiated the egalitarian impulse that
ultimately made modern democracy possible. It is therefore a cause of the
very condition for which it is a remedy.
Christianity
nevertheless contains within itself the medicine to treat the democratic
pathologies it fosters. For Christians who take seriously the gospel’s
admonishment to corporal works of mercy, the development of technology to
ease the material conditions of all men will seem a morally compelling project.
But the gospel teaches with equal insistence that improving the material
conditions we face on earth is not the final purpose to which all else may
be subordinated.
Drawing on Augustine,
Hancock observes that all men are made for something beyond and above the
political communities in which they happen to live. All men, not just
philosophers, seek a transcendence that cannot be satisfied by any material
goods. In the simple language of the Baltimore Catechism: Men are made to
“know, love, and serve” God. This is the foundation of Western
civilization’s sense of the dignity and worth of all human beings, and
hence the belief that none may rightly be treated as mere tools of
society’s purposes. With this understanding of what men are for we can
again reason with confidence about moral norms.
Hancock suggests that a
humanly responsible reason depends on a renewed respect for Christian
morality instead of a continued pursuit of an ultimately destructive
autonomy. He echoes (knowingly or unknowingly) a paradoxical theme
emphasized by the two most recent popes: Reason achieves its full
stature—judging the goodness of the ends we pursue, not merely calculating
the means to achieve whatever we happen to want—only when it is united with
faith. While those captivated by the secular rationalism that dominates so
much of our elite culture will surely resist Hancock’s conclusion, his
valuable book shows the only way to overcome democratic modernity’s loss of
confidence in moral reason.
Carson Holloway is an
associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at
Omaha.
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