The Solution of Teleology

thomas_william_issac

Few people have heard of William Issac Thomas, a native Virginian who is the innovator of the long standing and well remembered Thomas Theorem:

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

— William Issac Thomas, “The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs” (1928)

There are a few examples of this in modern society.  The “toilet paper crisis” of 1973 where a rumor of a mass shortage drove folks to the supermarkets.  Any modern buzz about the latest gadget or next smartphone.  In more catastrophic terms, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a remarkable example of the extraordinary popular delusions and madness of crowds:

The credibility of official ideology, which in Yakovlev’s words, held the entire Soviet political and economic system together “like hoops of steel,” was quickly weakening. New perceptions contributed to a change in attitudes toward the regime and “a shift in values.” Gradually, the legitimacy of the political arrangements began to be questioned. In an instance of Robert K. Merton’s immortal “Thomas theorem” — “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequence” — the actual deterioration of the Soviet economy became consequential only after and because of a fundamental shift in how the regime’s performance was perceived and evaluated.

How did the Soviet Union — which seemed capable of co-existing with the United States after the “malaise” of the Carter administration — go from detente to collapse in just one decade?

Very simple.  People stopped believing in it.

We’ve opined in these pages about the crisis of existentialism in the wake of the Obergefell and King rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, and a great deal about the significance of the Confederate flag and what it means to Southerners — white, black, born-heres and come-heres.

CNN just released a poll showing that even after the Charleston shootings and a solid week of shaming, the Confederate flag remains as popular as it did 15 years ago.

The poll shows that 57% of Americans see the flag more as a symbol of Southern pride than as a symbol of racism, about the same as in 2000 when 59% said they viewed it as a symbol of pride. Opinions of the flag are sharply divided by race, and among whites, views are split by education.

Among African-Americans, 72% see the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism, just 25% of whites agree. In the South, the racial divide is even broader. While 75% of Southern whites describe the flag as a symbol of pride and 18% call it a symbol of racism, those figures are almost exactly reversed among Southern African-Americans, with just 11% seeing it as a sign of pride and 75% viewing it as a symbol of racism.

In other words, 57% of all Americans see the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern heritage, while 72% of blacks see the Confederate flag as a huge wagging middle finger right in their face.

…tough to have a conversation that way.

Which brings us back full circle to Mr. Schwartz’s essay last week and the dangers of the existentialist mindset:

This attitude so prevalent in America’s popular culture is absolutely antithetical to classical philosophy, upon which the concepts of American liberty, sovereignty, and life itself were founded. American history has traditionally been a history of essence — What is the “American-ness” that defines us as a people? But that question has no value to an existential history.

I am convinced more than ever that the polarization in America is not between those who adopt one party moniker vs. another; but rather there are two segments of this culture at polar opposites based on the priority of essence vs. existence: the ontologists vs. the existentialists.

Enter the teleologists.

In the battle between reality and perception, there is often a missing element of ends (telos).  The question “quo vadis?” is rarely if ever raised.  To what ends?  Where are we going?

Perceptions often translate into reality, as one who has ever stared down a mob can realize and appreciate quickly.  The Thomas theorem demonstrates this rather succinctly, for no matter how irrational the foundation one might base an existential belief or perception, the consequences are most certainly ontological.  Burn the witches, denounce the Jews, shoot the communist, slay the jihadist, cut the head off the kaffir, kill Louis XVI, send to Siberia for “improvement” — the sins against liberty are countless.

This is the tough thing for the ontologist to confess at the end of the day, but it needs to be admitted: it doesn’t matter, emotion trumps logic.

Always has, and so long as the “I wants” of the world conflict with the “I haves” without any dialogue, it doesn’t matter how the argument is ultimately caged.  Existentialists will always best the ontologists, existence will always trump essence, the hand will always trump the head.  For as much as we would like to think we have transcended our barbarian beginnings in the West, we are at our root a pack of primates seeking out a living at the expense of others… cast out from an Eden we never deserved.

And yet…

Roger Scruton is perhaps one of the best philosophers alive today.  His essays on beauty, on splendor, on truth are well worth the read:

In Why Beauty Matters I talked a bit about art, but I was more concerned to draw attention to the place of beauty in everyday life — in manners, clothes, interior decoration, and ordinary vernacular buildings. I criticized both the functional concrete and glass architecture that has destroyed cities all over the world and the self-centered manners that have done the same to domestic life. I tried to explain why the philosophers of the Enlightenment followed Shaftesbury in placing beauty at the center of the new code of secular values. For Shaftesbury, Burke, Kant, Schiller, and their followers, I suggested, beauty was the path back to the world that they were losing in losing the Christian God — the world of meaning, order, and transcendence, which we must be constantly emulating in this world if our lives are to be truly human and truly meaningful. And I went on to argue that, since the puerile jokes of Marcel Duchamp, repeated again and again in every art-school graduate exhibition in Britain, a habit of sarcasm and desecration had overcome the practice of visual art.

The entire artcle in The American Spectator is worth printing and taking with you to lunch (or over coffee one morning this weekend).  The following video, if you are so inclined after reading Scruton’s scribblings, is an hour that will do you good (which you will unfortunately have to watch on the Vimeo site… because they frown upon embedding video for one reason or the other):

St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Five Proofs (Quinque Viae) for the existence of God, argues as follows:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

Human beings are designed to excel.  We seek the perfect, though we are imperfect.  Those things that we seek — truth, beauty, and love — all have their root in what might be described in some Platonic ideal of capital-t Truth, capital-b Beauty, and capital-l Love if these things were not personified in the being of God.

Consider two tyrannies.  The ontological tyranny of Man-become-God of science and modernism, where emotions and interpretation yields to raw automatons and precision.  The existentialist crisis we are enmeshed in today is one of men-become-gods where emotions and interpretations bend science and modernism to their own wills.

Indeed, one can say with a high degree of confidence that the 20th century was a rejection of the former, eventually reaching its crescendo in the 1989 Velvet Revolution and the triumph of Polish Solidarity.  The history of the 21st will be a rejection of the latter.  How it will reach the tipping point remains for us to decide — and act.

The crisis of existentialism — thankfully — is a crisis of love, of beauty, of truth.  If one believes that the Christian West is rooted in the ends of such emotions, then the deck is already stacked; the dice are already loaded.  What remains for us is to endure, to live by example, and reduce the dictatorship of relativism in the moment of the presence.  In short, it is not in ontos where we win, but in the telos of human existence and the fulfillment of the existentialist chase.

Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist of the late 19th century, and he touched on the concept of God and Love.  When we as finite human beings fail to link or identify with the infinite, the end result is despair.  When an entire culture fails to make this link, cultural despair is so often the result.  Is this not today’s world?  Is this not the challenge of our generation of thinkers, writers, politicians, mothers, fathers, pastors, and priests?

So much of this reminds me of Pope Saint John Paul the Great’s admonishment to his friends in Poland during the 1980s: “You must be tough… you must be very tough!  But you cannot hate, and you must not kill.”  There is also a reminder in here from St. Francis of Assisi, one that equally resonates in today’s times:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The challenge for us with our existentialist friends is to remind them that the search and experience of love, beauty, and truth are not ends of themselves.   If one reads the writings of Pope Francis, of the great ocean of Christian thought that exists in Europe and America, if one reflects on the experience of our missions and charities, the teleologists are already staking out the claims the ontologists are seeking for — and ironically, the ones the existentialists are grasping for in their despair.

We live in a world where emotion trumps reality, and always have.  Yet the good news here is that existentialist emotive is, perhaps ironically, a good and healthy sign of a West that — perhaps in our collective despair with modern culture — hasn’t given up on the things that matter: Beauty, Love, and Truth.

The dice are loaded, folks.  Go forth and be awesome.

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