The roots of American disorder

released 9/6/2024

Michael Hanby’s essay from the Fall 2021 issue of Communio reveals 20th-century philosopher Augusto Del Noce’s prophetic genius in foreseeing that the root of the crisis in the West is metaphysical and theological, not political. Hanby connects some of Del Noce’s central ideas with insights about American intellectual and spiritual history from other thinkers, such as George Parkin Grant, Daniel Boorstin, Hannah Arendt, and others. His description of the current crisis in America as — to use Del Noce’s terms — a “totalitarianism of disintegration” and a “rebellion against being” is based on an examination of the long-standing antipathy in American intellectual life to metaphysical realism. He explains why Del Noce’s concept of the interrelatedness of revolution, scientism, and eroticism (the sexual revolution) is essential in understanding the “new totalitarianism” that is the air we all now breathe.

This essay is presented courtesy of Communio and is read by Ken Myers. To download a PDF of this essay from Communio, click here.

79 minutes

PREVIEW

To augment this recorded reading of Dr. Hanby’s article, we provide the following key footnotes from the essay, with their associated audio timestamps.

2:42 — 1. Carlo Lancellotti’s translations of Del Noce’s essays into English: The two volumes, edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti (with a third on the way), are Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2014); and The Age of Secularization (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2017). All citations of Del Noce come from these two volumes, hereafter referred to as CM and AS, respectively.

5:02 — 4. Del Noce’s description of sociologism places its metaphysical and anthropological underpinnings in sharp relief to that of the tradition, revealing what is at stake in its contest for primacy with philosophy: “The true clash is between two conceptions of life. One could be described in terms of the religious dimension or the presence of the divine in us; it certainly achieves fullness in Christian thought, or in fact Catholic thought, though per se it is not specifically Christian in the proper sense. Rather, it is the precondition that makes it possible for the act of faith to germinate in man, inasmuch as it is man’s natural aptitude to apprehend the sacred. . . . The other is the conception that ultimately can be called sociologistic, in the sense that contemporary sociologism reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, as expressions of the historical situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures of forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life. So that the progress of the human sciences is supposed to lead to social science as the full extension of scientific reason to the human world, achieving a complete replacement of philosophical discourse by scientific discourse, and thus clarifying the worldly, social, and historical origin of metaphysical thought,” (AS, 219).

14:45 — 26. This led to an interesting, and ironic, observation in 1970 on the difference between Russia and the West: “Anyway, it is unquestionably true that Russia constitutes the last bastion of the sacral mindset in the field of politics. Can this defence be delimited to the political field? Or, instead, is this the reason why in Russia religiosity has made a comeback, as attested by many observers? Is this why the Orthodox Church has been affected the least (or not at all) by the new Modernism, the theology of secularization and of the death of God has impacted it very little, and Russian theology schools are the most traditional and (I have heard) the most rigorous in their teaching? On the contrary, Europe thought that it could renew itself by adopting the ways of the civilization of well-being, in which well-being is the only political-social goal—and then whoever wishes to believe that this well-being will continue or increase in another life is free to do so (but, in fact, who thinks about that any longer?)” (CM, 120). 

21:28 — 33. The remark from the appendix to Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense is as follows: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.” See Barnard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

23:25 — 38. CM, 133. On this point Grant writes, “The conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies we may have some sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery” (Technology and Empire, 17). 

29:41 — 45. Suffice it to say I dissent from Del Noce’s assessment of Descartes as an “‘accident’ in the history of the new science,” but adjudicating this dispute is beyond the scope of this essay. See CM, 14. For more on my position, see Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107–49; and Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), 134–77.

30:04 — 46. This is especially clear in Descartes’s short treatise, “The World,” written before the Meditations or the Discourse but published posthumously. Descartes declined to publish the essay during his lifetime after learning of the condemnation of Galileo. In “The World,” the mechanical philosophy of the Meditations and the Discourse is laid bare, without any of the skeptical apparatus Descartes would later build as a path of induction toward it. See René Descartes, “The World,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham et al., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 81–98. 

34:29 — 50. Arendt continues, “Long before the modern age developed its unprecedented historical consciousness and the concept of history became dominant in modern philosophy, the natural sciences had developed into historical disciplines, until in the nineteenth century they added to the older disciplines of physics and chemistry, of zoology and botany, the new natural sciences of geology or history of the earth, and, generally, natural history. In all these instances, development, the key concept of the historical sciences, became the central concept of the physical sciences as well. Nature, because it could be known only in processes which human ingenuity, the ingeniousness of homo faber, could repeat and remake in the experiment, became a process, and all particular natural things derived their significance and meaning solely from their functions in the over-all process. In the place of the concept of Being we now find the concept of Process” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 256). 

40:49 — 59. To illustrate the concrete relation between the organized pursuit of technical conquest and metaphysical possibility, I refer again to the observation of Stephen Ambrose that, in George Washington’s world, the sense of time and space relative to the capacity and velocity of travel resembled that of Julius Caesar. But in less than a century after the American Revolution, the continental empire of liberty would be essentially complete. It was technology such as the railroad—but also the telegraph and later the wireless—that made this possible. The creation of a “unified” American culture, in other words, coincides with the advent of a technology that made a “culture industry” possible for the first time. But the railroad was the sine qua non of this development. As Ambrose puts it, “America was riper than anywhere else for the railroad. It gave Americans ‘the confidence to expand and take in land far in excess of what any European nation or ancient civilization had been able successfully to control,’ as historian Sarah Gordon points out. The railroad promised Americans ‘that towns, cities, and industries could be put down anywhere as long as they were tied to the rest of the Union by rail’” (Nothing Like It in the World, 25).

41:05 — 60. I will sometimes refer to the “American project” or “the American experiment” rather than American thought both because these more encompassing terms capture the essence of America not only philosophically but in its historical, political, and institutional aspects, and because, as we are in the process of unfolding, the latent metaphysics of this project provides philosophical justification for the operational primacy of a mode of action that is largely unthinking. 

46:54 — 66. Lancellotti describes Marx’s “postulatory” and “positive” atheism: “God is not denied on the basis of some newly acquired scientific knowledge or metaphysical argument; rather, God cannot exist, because if he existed man could not be free. However, Marx operates within a post-Christian framework, and so he inevitably thinks of man as transcending the natural world. Thus, his rejection of God cannot take the form of a reabsorption of humanity into the cosmos, à la ancient paganism; instead, it must coincide with a deification of man, or, to be more precise, with a reclaiming by man of the attributes that he previously ‘alienated’ to God. As a result, Marxism is also the first fully developed form of positive atheism” (Lancellotti, “Augusto Del Noce on Marx’s Abolition of Human Nature,” 571). He contrasts this with earlier forms of “negative” atheism, which, because it is pessimistic and potentially nihilistic, according to Del Noce, “‘goes through a cycle that leads it to shed progressively its atheistic character, and to reconcile with religious thought’” (Augusto Del Noce, Il problema dell’ateismo [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964], 375, as cited in Lancellotti, “Augusto Del Noce on Marx’s Abolition of Human Nature,” 571).

51:59 — 73.  This prompts Leon Kass to say that “the American Republic is, to my knowledge, the first regime explicitly to embrace scientific and technical progress and officially to claim its importance for the public good.” He goes on to say that “the entire Constitution is a deliberate embodiment of balanced tensions between science and law and between stability and novelty, inasmuch as the Founders self-consciously sought to institutionalize the improvements of the new ‘science of politics,’ and in such a way that would stably perpetuate openness to further change” (Leon R. Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs [New York: The Free Press, 1985], 133–34). 

1:01:56 — 90. We might see this more clearly by altering somewhat the terms of Lancellotti’s question, bringing it to bear on the advent of that “Catholic Progressivism” that Del Noce so ably demolishes (AS, 217–66). How is it, we might ask, that after a century of “brick and mortar” Catholicism in the United States and the massive assimilation of Catholics into Protestant American society culminating in the election of President Kennedy in 1960, the entire edifice of American religious life, priestly vocations, etc., could suddenly collapse in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council? Notwithstanding the diffusion of Marxist thought among Jesuits in the latter half of the twentieth century, does the “decomposition of Marxism” have sufficient metaphysical and cultural “firepower” to explain this catastrophe? Or is there something in the process of the “Americanization” of Catholicism that had already hollowed out the tree from the inside? 

1:02:39 — 92. Marx said of Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species was first published eight years before the first edition of Das Kapital, “Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to have my name linked to Darwin’s. His wonderful work makes my own absolutely impregnable. Darwin may not know it, but he belongs to the Social Revolution” (Runkle, “Marxism and Charles Darwin,” 108). We might propose alternatively, in light of Marxism’s subsequent absorption into technological society, that ‘“the Social Revolution” belongs to the still more comprehensive scientific revolution we have been discussing. Darwin the Whig, who gives no evidence of having read Marx, would have been uncomfortable with the association and declined Marx’s wish to dedicate the first volume of Das Kapital to him. 

1:09:56 — 103. The Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College London, for example, became the Galton Chair of Genetics; genetic hygiene became genetic counseling, and so on. On the history of eugenics, see Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Heredity (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998). The term “new eugenics” was coined to describe biotechnical developments after World War II and the discovery of the double-helix. On this, see Robert Sinsheimer, “The Prospect of Designed Genetic Change,” Engineering and Science 32, no. 7 (1969): 8–13, as cited in Evelyn Fox Keller, “Nature, Nurture, and the Human Genome Project,” in Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, eds., The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992), 281–99. For considerations of its long-range implications, see The President’s Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 1–100. See also Brendan P. Foht, “While Bioethics Fiddles,” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society 57 (Winter 2019): 26–35. 

1:11:36 — 106. This relation is undoubtedly complex, and I want to be clear that I am not contending for another “philosophy of praxis.” I would wish to distinguish between two kinds of priority, mirroring the old Aristotelian distinction between the order of being and the noetic, historic, and intentional orders. All praxis is inherently responsive to whatever exigencies the structures of being may impose upon it, and it depends for its intelligibility upon theoretical judgments about these structures entailed in its self-understanding, which may be more or less (usually less) conscious. So I would maintain that theoria is first in itself, that is, first in the order of being, and that the truth of being is to some degree operative within praxis itself irrespective of whether the agent is aware of it. At the same time, praxis may be first in the historical order of operations by which we come to think about a given matter. To say, then, that technological praxis may precede theory in the sexual revolution is not to deny theoria its absolute priority but to speak of the way that our thought at any given instance is shaped by the practical consequences of technological interventions in history that are themselves the vehicle of prior metaphysical judgments. 

1:12:02 — 107. This is certainly true in the United States. However much the movement to redefine marriage may have initially depended upon severing the relation between marriage and procreation and advancing a “companionate” definition of marriage, so-called “marriage equality” could not be achieved without granting homosexual couples a right to children that adoption, as dependent upon the sexual activity of married couples, could not provide. Thus, in theory and in fact, the conceivability of same-sex marriage depends upon the possibilities created by assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), and, conversely, the normalization of same sex-marriage means the elevation of ARTs to a normative form of reproduction and the archetypal redefinition of the human realities of man, woman, mother, father, child, and sibling. The work of Courtney Megan Cahill, Douglas Nejaime, and others shows how deeply these implications are insinuating themselves into American legal theory.