Tag Archives: philosophy

October 13, 2025 · 4:49 pm

Whispers Of Another Kind

It appeared to me that there were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both” Father George Lemaître (from a NYT’s interview[i])

Father George Lemaître’s “Big Bang” theory predicted a cosmic whisper proven to exist a few decades later, a Cosmic Microwave Background radiation that changed our model of how the universe came to be.

Road Not Taken, Heather Millenaar

Within us all is another sort of whisper that is analogous to the cosmic whisper that points to creation. An uneasiness, an anxiety that we may deny, ignore if possible, and it is unique to human beings, unknown to other animals as far as we know. We work hard to distract ourselves from it. Linked to self-awareness and foreknowledge of our own mortality, there are three certainties that buzz in the background of our existence. Our mortality – finitude as biological life, our contingency every moment of every day, and the nagging unavoidable question that something greater than and outside of ourselves exists and resists understanding.

This inner voice is incessant, yet just a whisper most often overwhelmed by our favorite loud distractions, diversions, entertainments, screens, busyness, and noise either discordant or pleasant.  When on those rare occasions we pay heed to Blaise Pascal’s warning and spend an hour alone in a room by ourselves in silence, the whisper comes a calling, and it is a gentle murmur, the faint echo of the hole in our hearts.

All of us have sensed the soft insistent voice as a disquieting – a background restlessness. Many have defined it from different perspectives. Philosophers and psychologists, saints[ii] and sinners, and the incredulous and the curious have wondered at this unease, this whisper. The nineteenth and twentieth century produced many minds who sought to understand it. Georg Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, Edmund Hurrserl, Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein[iii] and many others speculated about the source of this Anxiety, this hum, this unavoidable “inquietem” when the finite encounters the infinite. Most of us, too, have our own evasions or explanations through philosophy, psychology, or some spiritual path.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood….”  The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

Since the topic is unwieldy, and I’m trying to write about it, I get to define the borders of the inquiry. All complaints about half-baked abridgement and sophomoric errors, please direct them to the author or editor with kindness and look past the gaps in the landscape.

Edmund Husserl was the creator of a branch study of philosophy he named phenomenology. He was troubled that philosophy (and science too) had accrued so many abstractions, theories, and inherited concepts that obscured the raw experience of things. He conceived phenomenology to attempt to bracket assumptions and preconceptions to recognize “the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst!). In “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,” he wrote, “The exclusiveness with which the total worldview of modern man let itself be determined by the positive sciences and blinded itself to all the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity signifies an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.” When we use and value terms like “authenticity” or “intentionality” or “lived experience,” the soil in which those ideas developed were phenomenology, and Edmund Husserl planted the seeds.  His influence on the twentieth century and subsequent streams of thought cannot be overstated.

As it happens, what starts as speculation in the faculty lounge, a century later diffuses through to social media and common understanding. Ideas do indeed have consequences, oftentimes unintended.[iv]

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5).

To keep things tightly abridged, we’ll limit this inquiry to two of Husserl’s most brilliant students, Martin Heiddeger and Edith Stein, who contrast in their conclusions and their lives. They illustrate two of the three prevalent responses to the whispered, insistent invitation. The third, and most common, we experience every day on our screens.  Postmodern people put whispers on ignore, and we are all often complicit. Politics, sports, celebrities, “death scrolling,” entertainment, convincing ourselves that our frantic busy-ness is urgent are among our devices of avoidance. This response works effectively for most of us most of the time. For a while.

Take a brief excursion with me to examine the other two paths followed by Husserl’s prize pupils who acknowledge what we hear in silence.  Stein was Husserl’s research assistant (1916–1918), and Heidegger was Husserl’s star student who eventually succeeded him as professor. Stein and Heidegger met through their shared connection to Husserl. While not close coworkers, they were part of the same phenomenological school. Both believed the scientific and cultural inclinations for abstraction endangered the meaning of our direct perceptions unbracketed by preconceptions. Each acknowledged some form of the whispers but were sharply divergent in their answer.

Martin Heidegger, 1933

Heidegger named ‘Angst’ as our unspecific fear of being finite in an inescapable abyss and inherent in ‘Dasein,’ our personal experience of human existence.  Angst is the unease that grips us when the everyday meanings of life fall away and we face the raw fact that we exist — alone, free, and finite. Heidegger’s proposed response to nothingness is authenticity. Face the great emptiness honestly. Don’t flee into distractions or comforting illusions. Let Angst strip away false securities so you see life as it really is — fragile and contingent. Accept our finitude and that we are “being-toward-death.” Our mortality gives us urgency and depth to existence. Live it with lucid courage. Live deliberately, aware that our choices define who we are in the face of the void.[v]   From this and Nietzsche’s ‘will-to-power’ emerged our culture of celebrity worship, self-obsession, and self-invention in all its manifestations like a slime creature from the bog.

“Angst reveals in Dasein its being toward its own most potentiality-for-being—that is, being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.”  [vi] In a slightly updated synopsis, “Suck it up, buttercup!”

Edith Stein thought that Heidegger was vivid and right in “Being and Time” as far as he went, and he succeeded in defining our existence as finite, temporal, and oriented toward death. But she thought he was incomplete. She acknowledged the whispers but knew we needed something beyond our inadequate self to reply to them.

Without transcendence, Heidegger’s descriptions of human existence are truncated.  Stein believed this leaves a “half-truth”: man is finite but as a person is also open to the infinite. For her, his analysis ends “at the gate of eternity,” but refuses to step through. Each human being is an irreducible person with individuality, vocation, and the capacity for communion with God. Where Heidegger stresses “being-towards-death,” Stein perceives being called to life eternal. Where Stein saw what Augustine wrote in his ‘Confessions’ about the longing and hole in the human heart, Heidegger saw only the hole, and his solution was insufficient. His was a work of great force, but in the end it left the reader in darkness. The soul longs for light, and he shows us only the night.

Their lives could not have ended more differently. Heidegger followed the logic of his convictions and became enamored himself of the German Volk and eventually with its leader. He never repudiated his involvement with the National Socialist movement in Germany. He became the Rector of Freiburg University and in his notorious “Rectoral Address,” he said these things, again with a bit of Nietzschean influence: “The spiritual mission of the German people is to find and preserve its truth in its fate.” And “The Führer himself and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” Not much else needs to be added to that.

Stein’s conversion from atheism was a miracle story. She read St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography, and a light came on within her. “This is the truth,” she marveled. Edith Stein did nothing halfway. She became first a Catholic, then a professed Carmelite nun. She fell in love with her Creator. In April of 1933, she wrote to Pope Pius XI about the rise of Nazism. “For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. … As a child of the Jewish people who, by the grace of God, for the past eleven years has also been a child of the Catholic Church, I dare to speak to the Father of Christendom about that which oppresses millions of Germans…. Everything that happened and continues to happen daily comes from a government that calls itself ‘Christian.’ … The responsibility must fall, also, on those who brought this government to power and still seek to justify it. I am convinced that this is a general disaster for humanity.”  Historians believe her letter influenced the pope’s encyclical in 1937, Mit brennender Sorge (With burning Concern), which condemned Nazi racism. Later, to her prioress she said, “I understood the cross as the destiny of God’s people, which was beginning to be laid upon them then.”[vii]

Heidegger died in bed of an infection at eighty six in 1976. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) was murdered in 1942, gassed in a Nazi gas chamber at Auschwitz together with her sister, Rose, who also became a Carmelite.  St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was canonized as a Catholic martyr on October 11, 1998, by St. Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

“Begin now to be what you will be hereafter,” wrote St. Jerome. He encapsulates what it means to hear the whispers, and like St. Augustine who understood that we were made for union with our Creator, Jerome knew it begins here and now. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross knew that a life without listening and responding to the whispers of God was a life truncated, a half-life, a life that falls short of what it could be, what it is intended to be. Or as St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Each of us in moments of reflection knows that we are called and created to be something more than randomly evolved ambulatory meat destined only for annihilation. Heeding the whispers is how we begin. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

   I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

   Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.” “Hound of Heaven” Francis Thompson

[i] Duncan Aikman, “Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth,” The New York Times, February 19, 1933, p. 3.
Shareable reproduced copy available via the Vatican Observatory archives: Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth (PDF)

[ii] One of the earliest commentators on record is St. Augustine. In his Confessions, he wrote about this undeniable underlying whisper, which he understood as a hole in our heart as creatures made in Imago Dei. His most famous and oft used quote spoke of it. He recognized this unease when the finite confronts the infinite. “Oh God, You made us for Yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

[iii] Since there are more than a few professors who occasionally read this and a couple who teach philosophy at good universities, I won’t embarrass myself by pretending to know a lot more than I do about the details and texts of these great minds.

[iv] A seminal book for me a few decades back was Richard Weaver’s “Ideas Have Consequences.” Written in 1948, I still recommend it to your attention. The line can be followed from Husserl either as an extension of or in opposition to his work as varied as the Existentialism of Satre, the Absurdist resignation and nobility of Camus, and the personalism of St. John Paul II. Nietzsche, Descartes, Hume, Foucault, so many others have contributed to and formed the radical “culture of self-invention” that so amplifies and distorts our understanding of human longing in these post Christian times.  All of this is well beyond the scope of these humble musings.

[v]An echo of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ in this and a foretaste of our culture of self-invention.

[vi] Being and Time”, Martin Heidegger, 1927

[vii] Heidegger and St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross illustrations from two articles. Heidegger from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/books/heideggers-notebooks-renew-focus-on-anti-semitism.html

St Teresa from https://www.ncregister.com/blog/edith-stein-this-is-the-truth

1 Comment

Filed under Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 6, 2024 · 7:51 pm

The Music of the Spheres

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”  Ludwig van Beethoven

Harmonies-of-the-spheres from History of PhilosophyThe relationship between music and mathematics and the universe is mysterious.  We can start with an ancient theory and wander around a bit. Bear with me, and we’ll see where this goes.

Pythagoras intuited that musical harmony is related to mathematical ratios. He became curious about the relationship of sound to ratios when he noted the varying tones of different size hammers on an anvil as he walked by a metal forging shop.

The ordered harmonic series (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc.) describe how vibrating strings of differing lengths or columns of air with dissimilar spacing from the end of a flute to the holes can produce sounds that are pleasing to the human ear when the increments of the strings or spacing are in simple ratios. Math in this curious way affects responses in the human brain and interpretation of sounds; harmony is pleasing to a human mind. Thus, ratios are pleasing to the mind in a not immediately obvious way.

Later, Pythagoras named his related theory the “Music of the Spheres” based on the ratios he observed in the period of the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets. Perhaps, he surmised, like musical instruments, these ratios create a form of music, although this music is beyond normal hearing.

Pythagoras concluded that numerical relationships governed the movements of the cosmos and thus created harmonies. He theorized that the regular motions and the predictable periods of the celestial bodies corresponded to specific musical notes or harmonies, forming a grand cosmic symphony, reflecting the harmony and order in the universe. Because this celestial music is everywhere all the time, this “music” is not a sound that can be heard or distinguished.

“Music of the Spheres” influenced both scientific and philosophical thought for centuries, blending ideas from astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics; the universe functions according to rational principles, connecting the structure of the universe to music, beauty and order through mathematical harmony.

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift, which we neither understand nor deserve.”……”The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious.” Eugene Wigner’s[i] “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”  

In his 1960 essay, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” physicist Eugene Wigner wondered why mathematics is so successful in describing physical reality, even in areas when there is no obvious reason for it to apply so precisely. The unexpected effectiveness of mathematics to the natural sciences suggests something profound about the nature of the universe. Applicable in physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, and even biology, this inexplicable precision of math to explain the workings of nature indicates that the universe is structured toward a mathematical order and contains a relationship somehow open to human cognition and suggests a metaphysical truth.

 In his book, “Is God a Mathematician,” [ii]Mario Livio reasoned that mathematics has a dual nature. Mathematical concepts are devised by humans (e.g. the development of the calculus or complex numbers), but because these concepts appear to describe the universe so accurately, he asked if we are discovering pre-existing truths? He speculated about a both/and understanding – both invention and discovery: humans devised mathematical language to communicate the ideas, but the uncanny applicability of these concepts to describe the universe suggests they tap into something deeper and fundamental about the universe itself.

Many books, articles, and essays followed to the present day[iii], and an ongoing debate ensued.  Is the language of advanced mathematics, beyond most of us, and the esoteric domain of brilliant knowledgeable physicists and mathematicians, the key to understanding and explaining the universe we observe? Is math a very clever invention of human beings or is the language of mathematics discovered as a deeper truth about how preexisting reality is ordered?

When (and if) we move into a next level of understanding, will the universe be understood in a “theory of everything” that can only be described mathematically in arcane terms, unserviceable to the intuitive natural understanding of almost all of us, including me?

Is math a genius language humans invented to communicate a sublime reality we have yet to discover fully?

“Music’, said Arkady, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.”  Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

In Bruce Chatwin’s gifted hybrid non-fiction novel,” The Songlines”, he chronicles what he discovered during his time with a Russian friend and the aboriginal people in the trackless outback of Australia. He learned to sing the songs they have used for centuries that create a map of their environment they can navigate. But “Songlines” are more than that.

Aboriginal people of Australia use these songs to map their environment and navigate vast landscapes, however “Songlines” or “dreaming tracks,” are also infused with the aboriginal spirituality. Their myths teach that the land was sung into existence by ancestral beings during the Dreamtime. We were all sung into being, what a marvelous image!

 Each song corresponds to a specific journey taken by one of these ancestors, describing the geographical features, flora, fauna, and waterholes along the way. By singing the song, an aboriginal person walks the land spiritually and historically as well, retracing the steps of their ancestors. The song encodes and preserves vital information about the landscape that allows the singer to find their way across otherwise featureless terrain.

The land is not only a physical place; it’s alive with history, legend, and meaning. A “Songline” connects the singer to the land, the people, and their ancestral history. As Chatwin presents it, the songs are more than maps—they are a way of experiencing and interacting with the world, where the act of singing creates a profound connection to the earth and its stories.

Just as Pythagoras understood in ancient Greece, music is imbued mysteriously with the innermost workings of the universe; he could describe music with math for pitch, harmony, rhythmic patterns, and tempo. And as the aboriginal people understand, music connects us to our universe with innate, mysterious, intuitive bonds that open wide mind, imagination, spirit, and soul.

~NASA Hubble Galaxy 240 light years awayMusic, too like math, is a wonderous alchemy of human cognition and the universe. In a sense, the universe only exists because someone is there to perceive it. Human creativity and genius took the stuff of the universe – wood, metal, reeds, strings, felt hammers, and more – fashioned and refined and tuned a vast diversity of instruments which enhanced and added complexity to the marvel of human voice and created sound images that reflect our universe with inexhaustible variety.

As we wonder how the abstractions of math are a profound bridge between the capabilities of the human spirit and the nature of this miracle of a universe we inhabit, may we ask the same question about music? Is music invented or discovered? Is there some magical mixture made possible by the nature of the universe and the nature of the human being perceiving and imagining it, who then communicates in astonishing ways? And does music itself describe the universe in mysterious ways that we intuit, but struggle to articulate?

Is music a genius language humans invented to communicate a sublime reality we have yet to discover fully?

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”  Friedrich Neitzche

One regular Wednesday in 1273 Naples, a priest was saying his customary daily Mass. However, he was not only a priest, although that was central to all he thought and did.[iv] Thomas Aquinas has been called the ‘bridge between antiquity and modernity’ who integrated the wisdom of ancient philosophy with Christianity, arguably the preeminent mind of the 13th century, and one of the greatest minds in history. His unfinished Summa Theologiae alone would have secured his place in Western history, but he wrote many volumes more. He read widely and studied the Church fathers, Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers, Jewish rabbinic writers like Maimonides, and Islamic scholars like Averroes. His works are considered formational to Western civilization and of surpassing clarity and beauty.

He is renowned for his practice of stating the position of his interlocutors most coherently; Thomas answered after summarizing an opposing argument in its strongest terms and reasoning, oftentimes better than proponents articulated their ideas. [v]Aquinas’s works and methods are studied carefully and marveled at seven hundred years later concerning a wide range of topics including the existence of God, the nature of faith, and natural law as an objective foundation for morality. His brilliance on these inquiries and many other topics is unequaled to this day.

That Wednesday, however, as he sometimes became awed during the Consecration of the Blessed Sacrament and unique presence of God, St. Thomas Aquinas was moved to tears and struck dumb for a considerable time with a mystical vision. At the conclusion of Mass that day, he was asked by his secretary Reginald if he was going to return to his writing in the afternoon as was his custom. “No,” he replied. “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me,” Thomas said.

He never wrote another word and died a few months later, perfectly at peace. Many have speculated on his vision that day. Was it Jesus Himself speaking? Some have said it was a beatific vision of heaven.

Thomas loved music as an expression of worship and his love of God[vi]. I like to think his vision was heard as well as seen. Perhaps it was a music that conveyed the Beatific Vision and a mystical full comprehension of Creation and God. We will never know, but my hope and whimsical belief is that such a vision entailed music. Whether Gregorian chant or Bach or Beethoven or Chopin or Coldplay or Coltrain or more likely something beyond our imagination will never be known this side of the eschaton, but I happily imagine beautiful music, music that conveys perfect joy, hope, peace, understanding, and Love without any lack or further longing.

“Give thanks to the LORD on the harp;

with the ten stringed lyre chant his praises.

Sing to him a new song;

pluck the strings skillfully, with shouts of gladness.”

Psalm 33: 2-3

Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_ProjectThe human person has a curious capacity for wonder. The universe is filled with persistent, unexplainable beauty, but why are we capable of noticing and being awestruck by this chain of astonishment? Chaotic, yet ordered; incomprehensible, yet intelligible, we seem to be created, our brains seemingly wired to appreciate it all. How marvelous is our capacity to wonder and to be in wonder. To be amazed and deeply longing simultaneously for a fulfillment unknown. Why is this so?

We are often overwhelmed with loud modern discordant cacophony, but we hear best in silence. The small quiet voice Eijah heard in the cave, God not in fire or earthquake or wind, but a “light, silent sound.”[vii]

Silence, but not complete silence. A whisper. Pythagoras’s “Music of the Spheres” – omnipresent, but unheard until we do hear it, and it has nothing to do with natural acuity of hearing. The beatific vision of complete and sudden insight that is perhaps what Thomas Aquinas heard – peace and joy with all made clear through a new music previously unimagined, but immediately recognized, discovered, as if we had been expecting that ineffable beauty all our lives.  [viii]

Why when we in hope discover this music in which we answer all our questions, have we been expecting this Music of the Spheres all our lives – this Beatific Vision heard best as a whisper in silence, a vision, a moment that changes everything? Robert Cardinal Sarah in his book ‘The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise” suggests that we will find and hear this vision into the infinite because we are created Imago Dei – In the Image of God. Thus, this expectation found in silence that is not quite silent is in the human heart from its creation. “I am speaking…about an interior state. It is not enough to be quiet either. It is necessary to become silence. For, even before the desert, the solitude, and the silence, God is already in man. The true desert is within us, in our soul….The Father waits for his children in their own hearts.” [ix]

So, dear readers, this music, this vision found in silence is within each of our hearts, waiting to be discovered. I wish us all fair winds and following seas as we set sail to find it, and we don’t have to leave our homes for the journey.

“At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.”  1 Corinthians 13:12

[i] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

[ii] “Is God a Mathematician?” Mario Livio, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2009

[iii] Full disclosure. A quick survey, all beyond my math and physics knowledge. If you are curious, here are a few more:

Roger Penrose’s “The Road to Reality” (2004): Penrose, a renowned physicist and mathematician, explores the deep connection between mathematics and the physical universe. He discusses how mathematics seems to have a unique status in physics, suggesting that mathematical truths exist in a Platonic realm of reality and that the physical universe somehow “taps into” this realm. The book is over a thousand pages long with over 10,000 formulas to support his hypothesis. Good luck.

In his book “Our Mathematical Universe” (2014), cosmologist Max Tegmark proposes that the universe itself is mathematics. Is everything in the universe, including matter and consciousness, describable by mathematical structures? According to this view, the universe’s deep mathematical nature is not just a coincidence but a fundamental aspect of reality.

Carlo Rovelli’s “Reality is Not What It Seems” (2016): Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, explores quantum gravity and the nature of space and time. Rovelli touches on how our understanding of reality has increasingly become a question of mathematical description, especially in the context of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

[iv] St. Thomas Aquinas

[v] Unlike so much of what we read today as reasoned debate is trivial and merely mocking strawman positions not actually held by their proponents. Much as employed in what the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have written about God and their version of theology and faith. Thomas Aquinas stated the opposition better than they did and addressed the strongest arguments.

[vi] Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote five Eucharistic hymns, and four of them are included among the liturgical texts for the Feast of Corpus Christi.

[vii] Kings 19: 11-12

[viii][viii] All images are public domain: Harmony of the Spheres from Thomas Stanley’s “History of Philosophy” 1655;

NASA Hubble image of a galaxy 240 million light years away;

Starry Night Over the Rhone  (La Nuit étoilée) by Vincent van Gogh, 1888 [Musée d’Orsay, Paris]

[ix] “The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” Robert  Cardinal Sarah with Nicolas Diat, 2017, Ignatius Press

2 Comments

Filed under Background Perspective, Faith and Reason

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

July 7, 2024 · 7:08 pm

Sagging Bridges

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” C.S. Lewis, “The Case for Christianity”

 

When we first moved to Aquidneck Island[i] in Narragansett Bay, a local carpenter working with me on home renovations told me he had not been off the island for ten years-he had everything he needed here, why waste his time going over bridges? Having lived in four states and traveled in at least forty others, I thought that was ridiculous. After seven years in this beautiful place, I gradually have become more empathic with his perspective. Indeed, why waste my finite time? However, we occasionally really do need to get to other places.

Absent a seaworthy boat or some flying lessons that leaves three avenues: the Mount Hope Bridge into Bristol, the Sakonnet River Bridge into Tiverton, and the Newport Pell Bridge into Jamestown. Our tiny state of Rhode Island is only thirty-seven miles wide and forty-eight miles long, but it has four hundred miles of seashore with its many inlets, islands, and bays small and large.  Surrounded by the Tohu wa-bohu,[ii] bridges are not a trivial concern.

Late last year, Providence and all of Rhode Island suffered some of the worst traffic snarls in my memory when the cantilevered Washington Bridge on I 195 was first shut down and then severely restricted after a young engineer making a routine inspection discovered that one of its supports was rusting out, separating, and shifting each time a load hit it. Our forty-five-minute trip to Heritage Ballet with granddaughters became a dispiriting hour to an hour and a half without notice, and life changed around here. Only the diligence, then alarm, of a single engineer averted structural failure with dozens of cars dumped into the Providence River on the main access to the city from the southeast, and a terrible body count. Years of desultory inspections and shoddy practices led to the failure of a few large bolts and imminent collapse. Or was the original design with its vulnerability to a few bolts rusting out the underlying cause of the misery and potential tragedy?

Panorama of Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse

Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse  James Rajda  IStock

[iii]A few months later in March, a giant cargo ship lost power and the ability to turn in Baltimore Harbor and drifted at around 8 mph into one of the supports of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Underlying that immediate cause was a faulty design concept that neglected to protect against an inadvertent collision.

I asked my friend ChatGPT about the power of a ninety-five-ton vessel loaded with an additional 4,700 twenty-foot ten-ton containers. It quickly came back with the calculations confirming the Dali struck one of the bridge’s supports with a kinetic energy impact of about 16.3 billion foot pounds. How would that compare to a fully loaded 18-wheeler at 80,000 pounds, I asked. Comparable, indeed, Chat told me, if the truck was travelling at 436 miles per hour.  That would do it, I said. Chat agreed with its customary understated lack of humor. A major link to the city was destroyed, and the whole necessary commerce of the harbor was lost for months. Six men were killed who were maintaining the bridge. Some of the bodies were ever recovered. Only good fortune timed the collision to occur during the predawn and not when hundreds of commuters were crossing it.

Was the electrical fault cursing the Dali with a total loss of control the sole proximate cause of the crisis, or was the design and structure of the bridge built in 1977 the true source of the collapse? Federal standards were put in place in 1991 requiring fenders or “dolphins” be built to divert and protect bridge supports from errant giant cargo ships. Existing bridges were ‘grandfathered’ in. Only 34% of bridges in use over American navigable rivers and harbors under which commercial seagoing vessels travel every day protect the structural supports that hold them up.

The Newport Pell Bridge, which is the heavily travelled only bridge on the south end of our island with access to Route 95 south to New York and beyond, is one of them, and of a similar design to the now destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge. Every day we see the large container ships, tankers, and cruise ships in Newport navigating under the bridge.

There are far more critical bridges than those spanning rivers. Some connect us along more profound ways. Or don’t. We can look at how they are supported and how the supports are holding up.

“If you see somebody, would you send ’em over my way?

I could use some help here with a can of pork and beans.”  John Prine, “Knockin’ on Your Screen Door.

 

Slowly, inexorably, the unkempt premises of our youth develop into how we think, and the murky waters of the fishbowl in which we swim limits what we see. What we know. What we think we know. Our assumptions about what is real. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”  Thus, it is for us all, and it is beneficial for all to squint through the walls of the bowl from time to time.

 Recent polls confirm that 25% of voters hate and distrust both major candidates in this year’s elections, the highest “double hater” rate in forty years. How ever did we come to this? What divides us is embedded more deeply than two unlikeable politicians. And far less amenable to a quick fix or the next election or better candidates.

 MAGA vs wokeism in our hardened silos. Both sides regularly post memes of their opposition depicted as ignorant, compliant sheep. Can we all be ruminating, cud chewing, herbivores in adjoining pastures suffering through a drought?  Maybe.

Both the MAGA true believers and the woke minions arose from the assumptions and ideas of Enlightenment philosophers and classical liberalism. The same soil raised both grain and weeds, with the weeds stipulated by the other side. When the liberal ideology of democracy, individualism, and liberty seemingly triumphed over the other more baleful ‘isms’ of the twentieth century, our assumptions and premises hardened. We determined that liberalism[iv] and liberal democracy were not only the most just expression of government and philosophy yet devised by human beings, but the only just one, the ultimate end of progress, what we all should and must aspire to. Coloring outside those lines is unrealistic and traitorous. The water in our fishbowl. To think otherwise is to question our most fundamental assumptions.

Consider that both MAGA advocates and the wokeism cancel culture may seem like the basic divide in our culture but have both arisen from the same premises. The definition of the terms of those premises have rusted out from when they were conceived. Liberty and individualism as the basis of human happiness have evolved, moved on, remade themselves predetermined by their headwaters.

Happiness is no longer understood in the context of the preliberal Aristotelian concept of discovering and learning an objective and common goodness and virtue, then living our lives congruent with that. The closer we get to the ideal, the happier we are due to our unchangeable nature. No, happiness has become the unfettered freedom to do what we want to do, our emotional and ephemeral and shifting desires.

Liberty has ceased to be the freedom to do what we ought. “Ought” is no longer a broadly accepted concept – what C.S. Lewis named the “Tao,” the vestigial collective conscience of commonly held beliefs about the good, the true, and the beautiful: what it means to be good wired into our nature. No, liberty has devolved into the absolute freedom to do what we want, when we want  – with the one provision that we don’t harm anyone else. What quickly is exposed as a fantasy of impossible harmlessness is fated to be a perpetual struggle of conflicting wills, leaving us atomized and alone, bewildered and hostile. Without a common ground of what we should be, how do we negotiate a just solution? Or any solutions?

The leftward interpretation of that new definition of freedom tends to be limited to all things pleasurable, especially relating to sexual expression and to avoidance of pain. For those on the right, while paying minimal homage to something called “family values,” the new understanding of freedom tends toward all things economic and unrestricted capitalism resulting in ever more disparity between those that got it, and those that don’t. Freedom means financial freedom. But left and right are merely different interpretations of where classical liberalism led us.

The philosophical supports of liberal democracy and classical liberalism have rusted out from the vulner-abilities of their model. The fenders and dolphins that would protect them have been neglected. Or forgotten entirely.

“When he woke she was leaning against his shoulder. He thought she was asleep but she was looking out the plane window. We can do whatever we want, she said.    

 No, he said. We can’t.”           Cormac McCarthy, “The Passenger”

The authors of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution understood that the sustainability of our whole project of a democratic republic would succeed or fail on the common beliefs and shared values of its citizens, and if those shared values evanesced, it would collapse.[v] Yet, those common beliefs and shared values are not passed along by government; they are learned in organized or informal associations, churches, and most importantly in families. Passed down in a thousand conversations and experiences one person at a time. All of these fenders and protections of associations, faith, and family have degraded in an accelerated fashion over our lifetimes due to the same foundational principles of individualism, materialism, and the primacy of will.

The evidence of that change is all around us and was exposed clearly in a 2023 Wall Street Journal poll that compared the highest values of our citizenry in 1998 and where they shifted in twenty five years. To recap the key findings:

Patriotism: The importance of patriotism has decreased significantly, with only 38% of respondents in 2023 considering it very important, down from 70% in 1998.

Religion: The value placed on religion has also diminished, with 39% of respondents in 2023 viewing it as very important, compared to 62% in 1998.

Community Involvement: The significance of community involvement fell dramatically, with only 27% considering it very important in 2023, compared to 47% in 1998.

Having Children: The importance of having children dropped from 59% in 1998 to 30% in 2023. That is reflected in a birth rate well below replacement, a potential demographic winter, a still prevalent popular misbelief of overpopulation, and the difficulty of funding the social safety net of things like social security and Medicare because of an aging population and not enough workers contributing to keep them solvent.

The family is in such a crisis that over 50% of kids are raised by single parents or unmarried parents with the least affluent and educated among us suffering the most loss. Having children should be seen as an indicator of hope and confidence in the future. No kids indicates a debilitating skepticism about where we are headed.

Money: Conversely, the importance of money increased from 31% in 1998 to 43% in 2023. When hope is lost, financial security is perceived as more important.

The sacrifice and common vision of the founders of our country have given away to subjective and fungible aspirations that find little reason to cohere, and many reasons to pursue their own indulgence.

“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted….but to weigh and consider.”

 Francis Bacon[vi]

Six years ago, Dr. Patrick Deneen, political philosopher and political science professor at Notre Dame, published a book of powerful and disturbing insight, “Why Liberalism Failed.”  It has been positively and thoughtfully reviewed by such diverse thinkers as Barack Obama and  Rod Dreher as ideas well worth considering. He pleased and distressed readers from both sides of the aisle, sometimes both in the same reader. A great debate ensued across many platforms.  Summarizing it in a blog post is nigh on impossible, but for this some relevant points give us plenty to think about.

To summarize the many ideas worth your attention, a reductionist, and inadequate summary of complex ideas follows below. Much better if it tempts you into buying the book or taking a trip to the library. The footnotes in this post that contain quotes that are worth your scrutiny. Better yet, read the book and some of the abundant commentary with a quick search.

Patrick Deneen critically examined the liberal political philosophy that has dominated Western societies for centuries. Deneen argues that liberalism, both in its classical and progressive forms, is inherently flawed and has led to many of the social, political, and economic crises we face today.

Liberalism contains internal contradictions that make it unsustainable in the long run. While it promotes individual freedom, that same perceived freedom simultaneously undermines the communal bonds and social structures necessary for maintaining that freedom.  The emphasis on individual autonomy and rights has eroded traditional communities and institutions. This has led to social fragmentation, weakening the societal fabric that supports a functioning democracy.

Liberalism’s promotion of market-based economies has resulted in significant economic disparities. The focus on individual success has led to a concentration of wealth and power, exacerbating social inequalities. The liberal pursuit of endless economic growth and consumption also has contributed to environmental degradation. The prioritization of human dominion over nature has led to ecological crises that threaten the planet.

Liberalism’s emphasis on personal choice and freedom has led to political polarization and a breakdown in civil discourse. The lack of a shared moral framework has complicated attempts to address collective challenges effectively, leading to many impasses, obstructing civil discourse, and mutual understanding across ideological lines.  We have busily been building our own tower of Babel for decades.

Does anyone doubt that is the situation we find ourselves in?

The liberal embrace of technological advancement, without sufficient ethical thinking, has resulted in technology dominating human life. We face concerns about privacy, autonomy, and the role of technology in shaping human values.

And most troubling of all, the focus on individualism has led to a loss of shared purpose and meaning. As traditional sources of identity and community have weakened, people have struggled to find a sense of belonging. Deneen calls for a rethinking of political philosophy that goes beyond liberalism. He advocates for a return to more localized, community-oriented ways of life that prioritize human relationships, ethical considerations, and environmental stewardship.

Deneen’s book argues that the very principles that undergird liberalism have sown the seeds of its failure, leading to widespread social, economic, and environmental issues. He urges a reconsideration of our political and social structures to foster a more sustainable and cohesive society. A longer quote from the book is included in the footnotes and expands the basic concepts of the book.[vii] I recommend them to you.

“Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability. …. Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” Patrick Deneen, “Why Liberalism Failed”

We drive over our sagging bridges without hesitation or any concern that they may collapse into the water. Roman culture lasted for well over a thousand years, and her citizenry had little cause to think it wouldn’t last for another thousand. Her citizens had no fears that it would crumble under its own internal contradictions, flaws, hedonism, complacency, and hubris. But collapse it did. There are lessons there.

The ideas to think about here are that perhaps the central supports of liberalism have rusted out since the founding of the American republic. Reflecting on that potential for collapse under its own weight, what adjustments or profound changes need to be thought about as we move into the twenty first century after its first twenty five years. Changes in society; changes in our local support social groups; changes in ourselves.

Changes that may fall upon us whether we are prepared to understand or deal with them. Like the gravity against which bridges struggle to withstand, they have their own inevitability.[viii]

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”  St. Augustine

[i] Aquidneck Island consists of the original settlements of Portsmouth, where we live. It was founded in 1638, and Newport was founded in 1639 to our south. After many territorial disputes between the busy port city of Newport and more rural Portsmouth, a permanent resolution was agreed upon by founding the appropriately named Middletown in 1743. The island is only five miles wide and fifteen long, but sometimes it’s just hard to get along. Separate governments still exist for all three – two towns and a small city of long distinction.

[ii] The Tohu wa-bohu is the ancient Hebrew term for the sea and symbol of the formless and terrifying emptiness and confusion, the chaos without God before He formed the earth. When Jesus calmed the sea for the terrified disciples in the New Testament, it told of both a literal event and a symbol for God’s power and providence.

[iii] Image copyright from IStock and photographer James Rajda with permission

[iv] In this context, liberalism refers to classical liberalism as expressed by John Locke, not liberalism as restricted to the progressivism it connotes for the most part in contemporary understanding.

[v] Founding Fathers and the Concept of Virtue:

John Adams famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”. He believed that the success of the American republic depended on the virtue of its citizens.

Thomas Jefferson also emphasized the importance of education and the cultivation of virtue. He believed that an informed and virtuous citizenry was essential for the functioning of a democratic society. He was a Deist, not a Christian like Adams, but he believed that natural rights were given by God, however he defined that, and not subject to denial by men or law: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

James Madison acknowledged the need for checks and balances within government to mitigate the effects of human frailty but also stressed the importance of civic virtue.

Thus, citizens being formed in the virtues like prudence, self-sacrifice even to giving their lives and fortunes, temperance, right judgment, and a commonly held understanding of objective good were essential to the sustainability of a democratic society.

[vi] Saw this quote posted by a dear friend, Father Joe McKenna. Francis Bacon is considered the inventor of the scientific method.

[vii]  Some quotes from the book, “Why Liberalism Failed:”

“A main result of the widespread view that liberalism’s triumph is complete and uncontested—indeed, that rival claims are no longer regarded as worthy of consideration—is a conclusion within the liberal order that various ills that infect the body politic as well as the civil and private spheres are either remnants of insufficiently realized liberalism or happenstance problems that are subject to policy or technological fix within the liberal horizon. Liberalism’s own success makes it difficult to sustain reflection on the likelihood that the greatest current threat to liberalism lies not outside and beyond liberalism but within it. The potency of this threat arises from the fundamental nature of liberalism, from what are thought to be its very strengths—especially its faith in its ability of self-correction and its belief in progress and continual improvement—which make it largely impervious to discerning its deepest weaknesses and even self-inflicted decline. No matter our contemporary malady, there is no challenge that can’t be fixed by a more perfect application of liberal solutions.

      These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue. Not only is this malady increasingly manifest in all social interactions and institutions, but it infiltrates liberal politics. Undermining any appeal to common good, it induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized polarization for a citizenry that is increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns. Similarly, the “cure” by which individuals could be liberated from authoritative cultures generates social anomie that requires expansion of legal redress, police proscriptions, and expanded surveillance. For instance, because social norms and decencies have deteriorated and an emphasis on character was rejected as paternalistic and oppressive, a growing number of the nation’s school districts now deploy surveillance cameras in schools, anonymous oversight triggering post-facto punishment. The cure of human mastery of nature is producing consequences that suggest such mastery is at best temporary and finally illusory: ecological costs of burning of fossil fuels, limits of unlimited application of antibiotics, political fallout from displacement of workforce by technology, and so forth. Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.

      Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability. The increased focus upon, and intensifying political battles over the role of centralized national and even international governments is at once the consequence of liberalism’s move toward homogenization and one of the indications of its fragility.”

[viii] I enthusiastically recommend a more recent Substack post by N.C. Lyons on a different aspect of the same issues.

“Autonomy and the Automaton”   Here’s a quote to get your attention:

“The paradox is this: we subsist under an increasingly totalizing and oppressive managerial regime, in which a vast impersonal hive-mind of officious bureaucrats and ideological programmers aims to surveil, constrain, and manage every aspect of our lives, from our behavior to our associations and even our language and beliefs. This rule-by-scowling-HR manager could hardly feel more collectivist – we’re trapped in a “longhouse” ruled over by controlling, emasculating, spirit-sapping, safety-obsessed nannies. Naturally, our instinct is to sound a barbaric yawp of revolt in favor of unrestrained individual freedom. And yet, as I’ve endeavored to explain several times before, it is also a kind of blind lust for unrestrained individualism that got us stuck here in the first place.

The paradox is that the more individuals are liberated from the restraints imposed on them by others (e.g. relational bonds, communal duties, morals and norms) and by themselves (moral conscience and self-discipline), the more directionless and atomized they become; and the more atomized they become, the more vulnerable and reliant they are on the safety offered by some greater collective. Alone in his “independence,” the individual finds himself dependent on a larger power to protect his safety and the equality of his proliferating “rights” (desires) from the impositions of others, and today it is the state that answers this demand. Yet the more the state protects his right to consume and “be himself” without restraint, the less independently capable and differentiated he becomes, even as his private affairs increasingly become the business of the expanding state.”

3 Comments

Filed under Culture views

Tagged as , , , , , ,