by Nathaniel Gotcher

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Society exists for the common good, the shared happiness of humans. The modern city, however, is characterized not by happiness but violence and there is a sharp political divide between urban and rural citizens. The way we have organized our residential and commercial developments reinforces this reality: the city is in one place, the countryside in another, divided by “suburbs” developed with huge swaths of unproductive land. If the modern polis is fractured, is it any wonder our politics are just as fractured? If we are to make the common good central to our politics, we could do worse than look at how our cities are organized.

Cities have traditionally been organized to facilitate the everyday activities of the community. These activities include worship, exchange of goods, study, and recreation. Markets, where the exchange of goods took place, were often centrally located so that they were available to all. Temples (and later the church) were given prominent locations near the center of the city, making the worship of the gods (and later the one God) central to the lives of the citizens, both symbolically and practically. Those buildings and areas used most often were given greater attention and those buildings which symbolized the community, and its identity were given places of honor. These material features of traditional cities were promoted out of necessity. Without the common sharing of space and resources, the economy would fail and so too would the city. This practical and public good of urban design is linked to the common good of a community, beneficial activity and happiness shared by all.

Cities in our day are so tied into the global economy that it is unlikely that they will fail. Resources can be shared across oceans and continents in a matter of days; funds can be allotted instantly through the internet. While this can and does lead to a very many good things (not least among them is the ease with which we can aid those starving or experiencing violence around the world), it has also all but abolished the necessity for citizens to share with each other the practical goods which promote a truly common good. Families (and even individuals) can survive and even thrive separately from those who live near them, as long as they have the funds to support their way of life. With enough personal wealth or property, we do not need the others in our community, at least not materially, as humans have in the past.

If traditional urbanism promoted the common good in addressing the practical necessities of city life, how should cities approach urbanism where those necessities no longer pertain? Cities, generally speaking, are made up of buildings and roads. Urban design focuses on where buildings and other destinations should be built and how best to get to them. Before proposing principles of urbanism that support the common good, we must know which buildings and spaces encourage the common life. The citizens of the modern world need, as humans always have, security and sustenance. To support this need, a community must have certain building types and appropriate infrastructure. What this means will vary greatly between countries and even between neighboring cities, but the types remain the same.

The first and most fundamental type is housing. Houses provide immediate security to the citizens and give families a place in which to organize their personal lives so as to better participate in the common life of the city. Secondly, farm buildings and other buildings where food is grown, prepared and stored for the sustenance of the citizens. All further urban development is built on this foundation. The production of tools for the everyday needs of the city’s households and other manufactured goods requires workshops. Storage buildings are necessary to keep these goods safe, and markets provide a place where these goods can be distributed and exchanged. These building types make up the basic layer of urban development; however, these building types only address the ordinary material needs of the citizens. The common good ultimately concerns the whole person, spiritual as well as material. The material needs provided by these buildings are essential to maintain a city, but without buildings which address the spiritual goods of the community, the city remains incomplete.

The human spirit must first of all be formed. To this end, a city should have schools where children are educated “in the arts and sciences for the advantage and prosperity of civil society.” (Divini Illius Magistri 77). This education allows the citizens to determine just and prudent action in the face of political uncertainty. A city thus needs a place set aside for careful political deliberation. Furthermore, a city needs places for artistic and scientific endeavors so that the human spirit might be elevated by the contemplation of truth and beauty. Finally, the city requires houses of worship so that the final end of the human person, union with God, is given a place of honor in society.

The arrangement of these buildings is the second half of urban design. There are three aspects of urban arrangement: number, proximity, and hierarchy. There must be a sufficient number of each building type so that every citizen is able to participate in the life of the city. Some needs, such as the storage and distribution of goods, are related and so their respective buildings should be built near each other. Also, the buildings which provide the daily needs of the citizens ought to be close to their houses so that travel does not dominate their lives. Those buildings which concern the human spirit should be given special attention in the design of the city. Streets, bridges, lighting and other infrastructure aid in the effective arrangement of a city.

All urban design decisions should weigh these considerations carefully. The arrangement of the parts of the city is an essential aid in the pursuit of the common good. The buildings and infrastructure of a city provide the necessary support for the security and sustenance of the citizens. Furthermore, they designate places for the pursuits of the human spirit. Scientific progress has brought us many things: new and more efficient ways to grow food, faster transportation, and global trade among others. New urban forms are possible, and the organization of communities is more varied than ever. Despite this, human nature is the same, and cities should be designed to fulfill the common good, both material and spiritual.

by HHG

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The state-sanctioned murder of millions of infants over the past half century is a moral outrage difficult to fathom; worse still, it is an outrage which continues. It must be stopped.  Because advocating for violence against the perpetrators or against the state perpetuating these crimes would only magnify the problem, we do not advocate such violence. Nonetheless, we encourage everyone who recognizes the gravity of the evil being perpetrated in our communities to take action against abortion and all the social evils which contribute to it.  The Catholic political movement in opposition to these enormities is stronger now than ever.  We offer the following suggestions as ways each of us individually can advance the pro-life apostolate—not merely by focusing on abortion, but by working to build up the kind of community in which abortion is once again unthinkable. Continue reading “15 Ways to be a More Effective Pro-Life Advocate”

by Gabriel Sanchez

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Recently a pseudonymous author wrote a reply to E. M. Milco’s two recent critiques of liberalism (see here and here). It’s a bit of a queer piece, what with the author’s insistence that Catholic Action is a “neo-Catholic strategy” of relatively recent vintage. Moreover, the author seems to misunderstand “traditionalism” (and by this I assume he means traditional Catholicism) as an alternative to Catholic Action as opposed to its continuation. No traditional Catholic worth his salt should set aside lightly that the principles of Catholic Action are part of the authentic magisterium of the Church and arguably received their fullest explication during the reign of St. Pius X. Here is an extended excerpt on the matter, lifted from Papa Sarto’s 1905 encyclical Il Fermo Proposito:

6. This fact, however, is no reason to lose courage. The Church well knows that the gates of hell will not prevail against her. Furthermore, she knows that she will be sorely afflicted; that her apostles are sent as lambs among wolves; that her followers will always bear the brunt of hatred and contempt, just as her Divine Founder received hatred and contempt. So the Church advances unafraid, spreading the Kingdom of God wherever she preaches and studying every possible means she can use in regaining the losses in the kingdom already conquered. “To restore all things in Christ” has always been the Church’s motto, and it is especially Our Own during these fearful moments through which we are now passing. “To restore all things” — not in any haphazard fashion, but “in Christ”; and the Apostle adds, “both those in the heavens and those on the earth.” “To restore all things in Christ” includes not only what properly pertains to the divine mission of the Church, namely, leading souls to God, but also what We have already explained as flowing from that divine mission, namely, Christian civilization in each and every one of the elements composing it.

7. Since We particularly dwell on this last part of the desired restoration, you clearly see, Venerable Brethren, the services rendered to the Church by those chosen bands of Catholics who aim to unite all their forces in combating anti-Christian civilization by every just and lawful means. They use every means in repairing the serious disorders caused by it. They seek to restore Jesus Christ to the family, the school and society by re-establishing the principle that human authority represents the authority of God. They take to heart the interests of the people, especially those of the working and agricultural classes, not only by inculcating in the hearts of everybody a true religious spirit (the only true fount of consolation among the troubles of this life) but also by endeavoring to dry their tears, to alleviate their sufferings, and to improve their economic condition by wise measures. They strive, in a word, to make public laws conformable to justice and amend or suppress those which are not so. Finally, they defend and support in a true Catholic spirit the rights of God in all things and the no less sacred rights of the Church.

8. All these works, sustained and promoted chiefly by lay Catholics and whose form varies according to the needs of each country, constitute what is generally known by a distinctive and surely a very noble name: “Catholic Action,” or the “Action of Catholics.” At all times it came to the aid of the Church, and the Church has always cherished and blessed such help, using it in many ways according to the exigencies of the age.

Two years earlier, in his motu proprio Fin Dalla Prima Nostra, Pius X set forth “the fundamental plan” of Catholic Action. No Catholic should feel entitled to deviate from these and other core principles of the Church’s social magisterium. Rather they should invest the time to learn what these principles are and, from there, devise the means to put them into practice. This is easier said than done, of course, especially at a time in global history where liberalism has managed to box-out almost every other competing ideology on the planet to become absolutely normative (or nearly so). But there are small ways that arise in the course of everyday life to help “restore all things in Christ.” They include—but are certainly not limited to—keeping a small icon or crucifix at one’s desk at work; praying before meals, even when in public; correcting in charity those who besmirch the Faith; showing love toward the poor and less fortunate; taking time out during the day to pray; etc. All of these acts are, by today’s lights, quite radical; but they also have the benefit of conforming to the desires of a great pope and, more importantly, Christ the King of all peoples.

This post originally appeared at Opus Publicum.

by Petrus Hispanus

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At Opus Publicum, the always suggestive Gabriel Sánchez has posted a brief critique of my own brief reply to E. M. Milco’s essays on liberalism (here and here). Sánchez claims I have proposed a “deviation” from the principles of Catholic Action, and even that I have fundamentally misunderstood traditionalism by placing it in opposition to Catholic Action rather than seeing it as its continuation. He ends by suggesting concrete steps we may take in our daily lives in order to bring about the kingdom of Christ on earth, and which I cannot but wholeheartedly endorse.

From a purely historical point of view, however, it is worthwhile to note that Sánchez’s account of the relationship between traditionalism and Catholic Action is at least incomplete. Not all Catholic traditionalist movements espoused the strategy of Catholic Action. The clearest example is Carlism, possibly the most politically efficacious and doctrinally articulate of these movements in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. This is not to say Carlism rejected the ends for which Catholic Action was created—inasmuch as they were the same ends of traditional Catholic political thought, they differed in nothing. Rather, Carlism rejected the strategic assumptions Catholic Action was based upon, assumptions which, for better or worse, meant transforming traditional Catholic politics into just another political party attempting to win it out in the game of liberal democracy. It is enough to read Juan Vázquez de Mella’s forceful critique of the liberal idea of a political party (e.g. here, pp. 275-282), or Fr. Félix Sardá y Salvani’s Liberalism Is a Sin, to see the Carlist rejection of this strategy, based mostly on the reasons suggested by Milco and which I attempted to re-elaborate in my reply to him. 

Leo XIII and St. Pius X favored the strategy of Catholic Action because they came to believe, as a matter of strategy, that still-dominant Catholic majorities in many countries could be rallied under a single party in order to use democracy as a weapon against liberalism. The faithful majorities, it was hoped, would vote liberalism out of existence under the leadership of Catholic Action parties. From this miscalculation, possibly brought on by the success of German Catholics against Bismarck, would ultimately come that spectacle of progressive alignment of Catholic politicians with liberalism that was “Christian democracy.”

All of this, of course, is not to impugn on the many excellent things done by Catholic Action in many countries, or to judge the motives these saintly and venerable Popes had in favoring it. Indeed, under the circumstances they faced, it is difficult to imagine what alternative they had in most cases, seeing as the political links with the ancien régime had almost entirely vanished and a new way of “doing Catholic politics” needed to be implemented seriously, one to which the example of Germany and others gave true practical plausibility.  

In my brief piece, I wished to suggest that the reasons this strategy failed are similar to those articulated by Milco in his two essays. By reducing all political positions to a plane of procedural neutrality, where they are all forced to play by the same aseptic rules, liberalism tends inevitably to relativize the public significance (and even intelligibility) of those positions, finally leaving the principles those rules embody (fairness, tolerance, etc.) as the only acceptable political creed. There is no reason to believe Catholic political thought and action are not subject to the same rule of liberal self-radicalization, and indeed the story not only of Catholic Action, but of all forms of Christian democracy, amply bear this out.

The fact is that as a political strategy to save Christian civilization, the well-meaning attempt that was Catholic Action did not manage to recognize the threat involved in buying into the praxis of liberalism, even when done with a clear rejection of its theory. Obviously, this danger is much graver when the attempt does not even involve a clear rejection of the theory of liberalism, as has happened in the post-Vatican II Church, but the point is that the reason why both these strategies fail is the same: they subject Catholic politics and life to the pernicious liberal praxis, and in so far as they do, they manifest only the continuation and radicalization of the same error.

In his critique of my brief note, Sánchez seems to commit a bit of the same miscalculation. The political principles of traditionalism are one thing, another, the particular political strategy Catholic Action and Vatican II used to attain them. I admit the use of the term “neo-Catholic” in reference to both may have been misleading, because the Vatican II mistake is not only practical, but theoretical, but inasmuch as they both espouse the practical delusion that traditionalism can defeat liberalism from within, their failures may be analyzed together. 

by Petrus Hispanus

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The two essays recently published here by E. M. Milco—one on liberalism in government and one on liberalism in education—are both excellent. I think they are good prolegomena for posing the biggest political question of them all, about the relation between truth and politics (Strauss’s “natural right and history” obsession). Milco hints at this question in both posts when he talks about how Humean balancing tecnhiques are good (as far as they go) and how it’s good for us to understand and be conversant with the many divergent intellectual systems out there. Granting both of these claims (and I do, more or less), the question remains: How must a Catholic traditionalist (or, if you want to refer to him with the aseptic terminology of liberalism: a person making truth-claims) face liberalism?

It seems that the neo-Catholic strategy (that is, the “Catholic Action” and “Vatican II” strategy) of attempting to duke it out in the liberal marketplace of ideas, relying on liberalism’s principles of procedural fairness to ensure we have a place at the table, is proving to be a failure. (The only difference between Catholic Action and the Vatican II strategy is that the former is based on the creation of an official Catholic face in practical politics, while the latter is based on the more difficult idea of Catholic laity soaking the social structure with Christian values from within. All of this, however, accepting the liberal procedural principles as a fair playing ground.)

I think Milco is right: there is a self-radicalizing principle in liberalism that explains why and how these strategies are doomed to fail. The procedural principles liberal strategies are based on, being the only common ground, the only language anyone can use in public, quickly become the only acceptable creed. I think this is evident, though it hasn’t stopped many good and knowledgeable Catholics from thinking that a kind of even more covert strategy is the way to go, one that is still based on the delusion that, if we are good liberals and don’t “force” ourselves onto others (i.e., speak clearly in terms of truth), we can still evangelize them from within.

This suggests that a traditionalist’s political strategy should be even more radical than that of something like Catholic Action: it should begin with an unqualified rejection of liberalism from its very principles, with the sole and clear objective of evangelization (including political evangelization). In this endeavor, both an acceptance of Hume’s fairness principles and a working understanding of today’s cultural and intellectual fads (i.e., a good grasp and a good practice in how liberalism works and speaks) are good instruments to count on, so that our words are intelligible.

The Carlist movement in Spain is based on this kind of idea (their analysis of the liberal predicament is very similar). But they add the necessity of an explicitly political principle (in their case, the legitimist cause), because they fear that without it, we will lose our link to Christendom, making our labors and our thoughts into a purely intellectual project. I think the reason for this, ultimately, is the importance they give to the virtue of piety in traditionalism. It is piety to our ancient fatherlands, forebears, even our ancient kings, that provides the political justification for traditionalism as a movement with the explicit objective of bringing for the real, down-to-earth, factual reign of Christ the King. Thus, their commitments to monarchy, to old customs, etc.

In a country like the United States, this may not be so easily done, or even thought (and the same is true, though perhaps to a lesser degree, in Latin America). The point, in any case, is that in order to be a true alternative to liberalism that is capable of escaping its self-radicalizing ideologization, traditionalism must also have a working alternative to the liberal state, a political “incarnation”, if you will, even if it is only in aspirational form. Without this, it is almost impossible to prevent traditionalism from becoming, as time passes, another fad within the vacuum of liberal ideology.

by Peter Kwasniewski

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When I was in my twenties and thirties and becoming more of a traditionalist by the year, one of the most frequent refrains I heard from my friends and acquaintances had to be: “It’s a scandal how few bishops excommunicate the heretics [insert specification: abortionists, Democrats, modernists, proponents of women’s ordination, etc.] in their dioceses. If only they would flex their episcopal muscles and do something about the problems, our troubles would eventually go away.”

Through my involvement with a papal institute in Austria, I got to know several bishops and cardinals and even had the opportunity to talk at some length with a high-ranking member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. These and other experiences prompted me to think about how much more is required to keep the Church on course than anathematizing heretical propositions and excommunicating heretics, and, in particular, how feeble such penalties are in isolation from a larger Catholic culture and from those profound Catholic instincts and intuitions that give penalties their meaning.

The very notions of law, discipline, and duty no longer have much presence or significance among churchmen and laity. Cardinal Burke has spoken of the crisis of antinomianism that prevents Canon Law from being studied, followed, and implemented. Today, when the CDF sanctions theologians or bishops, the response is often complete contempt. What does one do then? Excommunicate more and more vehemently, in broad swathes? But how will that solve any problem? Authority and obedience are correlative. If you don’t have obedience, authority means nothing; it cannot function in a vacuum.

The problem in the Church is not a failure of papal commands but a failure of Catholics to obey clear instructions already given, clear duties established by Scripture and Tradition. In the solemn language of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, to take one vivid example, John Paul II reaffirmed the constant teaching of the Church that women cannot be ordained priests, and excommunicated several women who went through with an “ordination” ceremony. Will this kind of action get to the roots of the problem? All that the pope can do is to make the Church’s teaching clear, and then to follow through with the appropriate canonical sanctions.[i] Christ and His Church speak above all to consciences. If people (including priests) do not want to obey, the Church cannot make them obey, nor will any amount of disciplining, as such, improve the situation. What is necessary is conversion of heart and of culture, and this is what we should spend our time praying for, exemplifying, and promoting as best we can.

I can make my point with an analogy: why did Paul VI get rid of the Index of Forbidden Books? Most certainly not because he thought no books were bad and there could no longer be any danger of reading harmful literature in this enlightened age. It was because the Index was out of date the moment it hit the press. In fact, for hundreds of years it had sorely lagged behind the spread of evil literature. A truly accurate and reliable Index would have to be twenty or thirty volumes of tiny print, like the Oxford English Dictionary.

Let us pleasantly imagine the Vatican producing such a comprehensive Index, and then condemning everyone who, without explicit permission, reads any book listed in it. What would happen? Would the world become more Catholic, or would the Vatican look like a bunch of raving lunatics? The Index, like the Inquisition, functioned well in a different cultural setting, but it would not work today. The Church is a free society, free with the gifts of grace, and it invites men and women freely to listen to Christ, the one true teacher and ruler of mankind. One might welcome the shift that has occurred in this regard, or one might (with equal or better reason) lament that certain truly intolerable abuses, such as the flagrant disobedience of bishops in matters liturgical, continue to be tolerated by the Vatican. In any case, one must recognize the practical and theoretical conditions necessary for the very concepts of law, discipline, and duty to be intelligible and efficacious.

It may be that someday the culture of a given country will shift so decisively back towards Catholicism that things like an Index, bookburning, excommunications, and even corporal punishments, frequently recommended by popes of ages past, will all find their rightful places once again. The Lord in heaven knows how desperately we need them all. For now, however, it seems we must be content with moral suasion and the slow work of rebuilding a coherent culture of faith, worship, and life.

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NOTE

[i] Certainly some hierarches have been deficient in doing the latter, which cannot be omitted, but its effectiveness (both short-term and long-term) presupposes a consistency, clarity, and boldness of teaching and preaching, and a receptive and supportive Catholic culture, that are often woefully absent.

A Philosophical Bagatelle

by Peter A. Kwasniewski

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I wrote this little piece in 1997, when reading an article on parasites that had appeared in National Geographic.

 

There can be a philosophy of error—a “love of wisdom” in regard to error—only per accidens. As Aristotle says, a true explanation will at the same time refute the objections or opposed positions. So, too, it may be said that an understanding of how error works, the way error grafts itself onto truth, is implicitly present in understanding what truth is and how it presents itself.

Perhaps the most elegant example is Aristotle’s refutation of Parmenides and Melissus in Book I of the Physics. When he has laid out his own explanation, he returns to the difficulties and shows why the partial truths contained in the erroneous theories can be saved only when they are integrated into the whole he has set forth. There is thus a kind of wisdom attained about the errors, if wisdom signifies a knowledge in reference to the end of a given genus, which is always some whole. The man who is “wise about war” is one who understands the particulars of warfare in reference to the end of victory. There can thus be a “wisdom” about error insofar as one is studying the manner in which wisdom offers the pattern according to which a deceiver or an ignoramus could approximate the truth by a likeness yet not attain it. Without the pattern, there could not be a bad copy; without the whole there could not be a rebellious part.

A theory or philosophy of error has to begin from the fact that error is a parasite which lives by attaching itself to some truth, or host-organism, from which it derives its sustenance, that is, its credibility. The host organism is a larger body of truth which contains enough superfluity, so to speak, to permit an error to be drawn off of it. In other words, if one starts with a very simple truth, like the principle of non-contradiction or the principle of identity, it is rather difficult to generate an error from it immediately. The principle is in itself so clear, and so “thin” as a proposition, that it has no fatness from which a falsehood could derive nourishment. Alhough Hegel’s comment that the concept of being is the emptiest of concepts is false, he is pointing out a truth: when speaking of “being in general,” one has already committed the error of making being a genus. “Being” that is applicable to all things is a logical abstraction. When we say that the principle of non-contradiction is “thin” we mean that its truth is so transparent as to admit of no unclarity, no possibility of mistaking the meaning. At the level of the undressed principle of non-contradiction, no one who was capable of thought or perception could fail to embrace it. Related to this inherent transparency is the principle of non-contradiction’s infinite fertility as a principle, its “thickness” in applicability or extension.

Accordingly, while it is true to say that the principle of non-contradiction contains within itself the truth, or truth-value, of all possible particular propositions, nevertheless it must also be admitted that the universal is the emptiest, as far as its concretion or application is concerned. Its power only becomes apparent when it is “fleshed out,” as the phrase goes; and the more fleshed out it is, the more food it affords for error. As Aristotle observes, we are rarely mistaken about the universals which can be gathered easily from experience (e.g., the whole is greater than any of its parts), but we frequently err in applying what we know in general to what we encounter in particulars. For example, we may know that all mules are sterile, but we may not know that this particular animal is sterile if we do not identify it as a mule. As long as we stick to the simplest axioms and theorems of geometry, we are not likely to fall into error; but the further we go in drawing conclusions, the more complex the proofs become and greater room opens up for making a mistake in reasoning. Room for error becomes broader still when thought shifts from reasoning in the strict sense (i.e., in a manner reducible to syllogism) to reasoning on the basis of probabilities—as when we reason about natural events which are “for the most part,” or about ethics, where tight logical inference is weakened by the factors of free will and custom—or on the basis of likenesses, as when we draw arguments from features common to man and other animals, or properties analogously predicable of God and man.

A superfluity of expanded truth, an unfolded system, a fully-formed and well-nourished body of observations, inferences, or deductions, affords opportunities for a parasite, which is not equal to the task of appropriating the whole, to seize some part of the whole and maintain its independent life by removing and transforming that part into its own life-system. Superfluity, as suggestive of useless excess, may be the wrong term; but I wish to convey the notion of a sort of “padding” around a system of truth, portions of which can be stolen from it without destroying the fundamental truths of the system itself. Without these truths, the parasites can no longer live; paradoxically, their survival depend on the health of the principles and many of the conclusions as well.

Some elements of an “organic” theory of error would be as follows.

1. The connection of error and truth, or more accurately, the necessary subordination of falsehood to the truth from which it derives its sole means of subsistence. Error is intelligible to the extent that it still contains in its stomach the digestibilia of truth.
2. The dependence of the parasite idea upon the host idea which precontains the segment used by the parasite; precontains it, moreover, in a holistic way whereby it serves as a part that benefits the greater organism. It is precisely this holistic function of the particular truth that the parasite directly counteracts by isolating a part and taking it out of the whole. The truth is only a “full” or “functional” truth within the organism of which it constitutes an element; when removed, it is dead, like the hand severed from the body which is called a hand only equivocally. Thus, the truth taken by the parasite becomes, in isolation, a falsehood because it is taken out of or away from the context, the body, in which it has a purposeful place in the entire organic structure. The particular truth or element is teleological, in that it contributes to the good of the entire organism; an organism is in fact an “organized body,” a multiplicity governed by the soul for the sake of some end or hierarchy of ends (nutrition, sensation, cognition, volition).[i]
3. The Mystical Body of Christ can be parasitized; that is the essence of heresy. Heresy is in the theological realm what intellectual error is in the philosophical realm. Protestantism lives to the extent that Catholicity remains within it, as digestibilia. When a Protestantism which has cut itself off definitively from the Body thoroughly digests what it has taken, it dies for want of nourishment, as can be seen clearly in the liberal Protestantism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries which has now metamorphosed into agnostic social activism, usually with a diabolical twist.
4. Error cannot be understood independently of truth, as though it were an isolated item that could be placed in a separate category or box. The very being of a falsehood is relative to a truth to which it must remain somehow attached, even if in an attitude of antagonism or hostility, or minimally, in an attitude of selfish utility. Thus, for example, the early modern philosophers cannot develop their systems except in contradistinction and opposition to the ancients and medievals[ii]; the modern systems are in fact parasitical in nature, in so far as they start from a rejection of the old whole and carve out whatever portions of it they wish to maintain for their own sub-holistic purposes. They can exist only to the extent that the old whole still exists and provides nourishment to their errors and a whole to which their systems (which are really “sub-systems,” in that they result from a constriction of the prior whole, and not from a separation and independent development) can be opposed.
5. Biological parasitology can teach us this, too: by far the greater number of animal species in existence, perhaps as much as three-quarters of known species, are parasitical.[iii] By analogy, one would expect error mingled with truth to outweigh pure truth—and so it does, as we can see from looking around us at the errors in which most of mankind is embroiled. The fall of man is a fall from friendship with God, where there is mutual cooperation, to a kind of parasitism off of God’s creation. This is also the essence of capitalism: a mechanism of preying off of other members of the social body for the benefit of the predator.

The truth of the theory of error presented here is confirmed by the simple fact that there could never be a philoplanē or philosphalma—that is, a “love of error” analogous to “love of wisdom”—for the simple reason that the mind of its very nature is borne towards the true and cannot accept anything false except because it has first persuaded itself that the false is true.[iv] A “thought-experiment,” for example, means a situation where one adopts a certain thesis as true, even if it is false strictly speaking, and proceeds to deduce the consequences, as in Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidean geometry. Moreover, if an opponent of non-Euclidean geometry grants that it “works” when applied to curved surfaces, he is admitting precisely that the geometry is true so far as curved surfaces are concerned, but not with plane surfaces where the straight line has an unbending definition.

It seems only fitting to let that great truth-lover St. Augustine have the final word:

People have such a love for truth that when they happen to love something else, they want it to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be proven wrong, they refuse to be shown their mistake. And so, they end up hating the truth for the sake of the object which they have come to love instead of the truth.

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NOTES

[i] The term “system” in its original etymology should be examined more carefully along the lines sketched here.

[ii] Gabriel Marcel says that Sartre’s ethical position can exist, as a position, only when there is a contrary understanding of freedom and truth for it to oppose. (The same is true, one might point out, of James Madison’s understanding of man and political community.) One might say that an error only exists as a position, that is, something posited or placed against something else. Truth has a kind of independent or self-sufficient being, which does not stand in need of something extraneous in order to stand; not so with error.

[iii] See National Geographic, October 1997.

[iv] Vincent McCabe argues this point exceptionally well in his book The Catholic Church and Philosophy.