Faith and natural law

Now we can't but wait for Wednesday 7 to know the result of the elections. Where my preference goes should be well known. Not because I am more "republican" than "democrat", but because of what I said in the last post of more than a month ago: the total failure of the incumbent president to be as he promised post-partisan and post-racial. Which also means his incapability to respect the nature of the USA, which is to be democratic because it is Christian: not meaning by this that everybody has to be Christian (Romney, strictly speaking, isn't), but that only to Christianity is due the extension of human representation to any single individual, which makes the only acceptable sense of democracy. While they plead to be for the poor, liberal democrats look at them with a sort of condescending benevolence, more as people needing help than as people to be promoted in their humanity. Because it waned from their outlook any normative notion of humanity: of what used to be called natural law.

I'd like therefore to insert here this couple of pages on faith and natural law which I wrote for another occasion.

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Pope Benedict opened the year of faith together with the Synod of bishops dedicated to "the new evangelization". The theme in both cases is faith, but the Pope himself remarks that faith is in need to be explained again to people to whose culture it has become alien.

One reason of today’s difficulties in speaking of faith is that we tend to identify it too directly with Christian faith. By so doing we deprive ourselves of the universal cultural background to which “faith” is natural. When saint Paul, for example, spoke to the Greeks of faith (pistis in Greek), he didn’t give to the word any special meaning different from the current one. So we need to recover such a meaning.

One way of doing it, is to notice that the concept of faith had a role of mediation between “natural” and “culture”. In other words it belongs to the realm of what we traditionally call natural law. It is an ancient notion originating in Greece and Rome to express the cosmic rooting of human things: in the totality of all things that we still call in a generic sense nature.

Today’s “sciences of nature” don’t give the sense of what nature was for ancient and non-modern people: to use the Greek word, a cosmos, an ordered whole, endowed with beauty (that’s why we call “cosmetics” the products for the care of beauty). The word cosmos refers then to the common human experience of knowing the world in such a way to be able to orient ourselves in it. Thus, when we describe something, we also prescribe what to do about it: how to do the right thing. Not so with the modern descriptions of “nature”, to which the prescriptive sense of “culture” is extraneous.

This makes the notion of natural law extraneous to the current understanding of law, as being essentially man made. It makes us unable to see in the law the enunciation of a pre-legal right. What is lacking is a nexus between the description of how things are and the prescription of what to do about them.

What is lacking is essentially a reflection on faith. A description is in any case included in a discourse by which the speaker claims to be speaking for everybody. Let’s call it a claim of authority. Before the distinction of sciences there is the ordinary experience of language, even previous to our perfected adult capability of speaking. We observe in the way children learn how to speak, how the world take shape for them, thanks to their reliance on those who educate them. But reliance is another word for confidence, confiding in somebody, having faith in him. Hence “faith” has its correlation in “authority”.

Therefore the blessed Antonio Rosmini called faith “a voluntary assent given to the revealing authority of God, in whatever way this authority be known”. Such is the root also of the tendency immanent to human reason to fill the gaps of perception, like when I see somebody as a friend by the signs he gives me.

In English we have a happy distinction between “belief” and “faith”, even though we tend to confuse them. It corresponds to the distinction theologians make in Latin between fides quae creditur e fides qua creditur. Belief (fides quae) concerns the doctrines or theories we hold as true, faith (fides qua) concerns the relation between listeners and speakers, teachers and pupils, in general among people in their reciprocal doings.

It would be a worthy effort to see how different languages equally recognize and name what is peculiar of such relations, making them possible. I spoke of “reliance”; another word in English is trust. However far it might be etymologically from faith, the meaning of the two words is very close. The sense of trust, in fact, is embraced by the two words which have originally entered into the shaping of Christian theology: the Greek pistis  and the Latin fides.

In Greek pistis belongs to the vocabulary of “persuasion”: the corresponding verb means “to be persuaded”, or, in an active form, “to persuade”. But the first thing of which one has to be persuaded is the trustworthiness of the one who addresses him and hence solicits his faith. This falls therefore in the realm of what used to be called “rhetoric”, or “art of persuasion”. The persuasion depends on the things said and on the quality of the speaker, both included, at the same time, in the reflection which gives a theory of this art. Such was ancient philosophy and also theology, in their dealing truth and truthfulness. We recognize here the universal validity of the mentioned distinction of fides quae and fides qua.

We come so now to the Latin fides, in which the personal sense of faith is still more evident. The Latin construction of “to have faith” is such that it takes us to the realm of human interrelations: it shows that the original Latin meaning of the word is something like “credit”. So fidem habere (“to have faith”) didn’t mean my subjective stance toward something or somebody, but rather that somebody has or enjoys credit with me.

We say currently that faith is a gift, “God’s gift”, that some have and some don’t: a way of saying that becomes an alibi for those who negates their assent to God’ authority. Indeed, it is right to say that faith is a gift, if we keep in mind the Latin construction of the word fides. One has credit with somebody else because of what he has given him.

Everywhere, in all times and places, we find witnessed a distinction of contractual exchange and gift exchange. In a contractual exchange people have something that others might want, and for which they are ready to pay. In gift exchange we define by what we give the relation in which we stand with each other: if I give something to somebody who is a friend or whose friendship I want to solicit, he feels obliged to reciprocate if he does consider himself my friend or wants to accept my offer of friendship. Such is the meaning of faith-credit: what is given is capability of participation in friendship. Furthermore giving is a sign of authority enabling us to enter in the friendship circle of exchange by giving in turn.

With gift comparative anthropology takes us onto the sense of justice universally present in human relation, however articulated in different societies. Justice is the measure of things immanent in human relations: let’s call it natural right. But the measure has to be enunciated as a rule: let’s call it natural law. The great question which differentiates societies is: what authorizes somebody to speak and act for all, by enunciating the measure and the rule?

The answer is: he who gives more, everything, his own life. Such is ideally the figure of the king, actually realized in Christ the king. It is Christ himself who enunciates this as the criterion of authority: “whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”. The “for my sake” concretizes what is otherwise a wisdom maxim with reference to the one who represents in his own life what the maxim says. In this way “Christian faith” meets the universal natural law.

If such is the evidence witnessed by anthropological comparison, we couldn’t recover by it the full meaning of natural law, i.e. the cosmic rooting of human things, if we leave the sciences of nature out of comparison. This means that we have to take also these sciences for what they are: expressions of human understanding and knowledge, i.e. human sciences. Not easy undertaking, on which it floundered and went under great part of modern philosophical, and even theological, thought. I cannot enter into it, except to remark that perhaps no one else, besides Antonio Rosmini, offered suggestions able to integrate the witness of contemporary natural sciences with that of history and anthropology: to account for the universal experience in which the order of the world is given as ordered, which is also the experience of faith in the Orderer. 

HP

To be post-partisan

Anybody, with the ambition to be like Obama in 2008 presented himself as being, i.e. post-partisan and post-racial, can't but hope for his defeat in November.

I know of course that, to be elected, most of the time candidates show themselves to be better than they are, and promise more than they can maintain. Rarely, though, the way they present themselves has been as in the case of Obama so far from reality.

He has revealed himself strongly partisan and racially biased toward the father side of his being.

His supporters will object that it was his opponents' fault, forcing him into partisanship. And I will answer that this is a partisan way of reasoning.

To be post-partisan means to be able to assuage partisan contrasts, and so it goes for being post-racial. It requires to be utterly partisan not to see that the failure to do so means a lack of capability, or, worse, of will. In one way or the other such a lack made Obama's self-presentation in 2008 a total lie.

HP

Choosing a king: science and politics

Well, it looks like the challenger for November to the incumbent president is pretty much decided. He can be found more or less exciting, but now this is irrelevant. I have another question for you, and whoever wants may venture an answer.

Are there scientific reasons for wishing the election as president of a candidate instead of another?

What the heck are you talking about? you may ask. What has the election of a president to do with science?

Should I say everything? Ok, perhaps “everything” is too much. There are interests at stake, concrete worries of people, like the state of the economy, by which it depends having work, with all that follows: salary, home, a decent life to live, in short the “pursuit of happiness”. Even ancient Aristotle recognized that it’s hard, as a matter of fact, to pursue the good life, fully consonant to a complete man (like himself, I might say, or his teacher Plato, devoted to theory, the fulfilling contemplation of the order of things, in which one might forget himself), rather it is impossible if one has to worry about the chores of life. Over against an aristocratic ethos, as this, that disdained busying oneself in work, today it might be enough for us having work, such, though, to leave us time free from worries: like the Christian Sunday.

I see that I am letting myself be taken astray by the thread of discourse. Back to the point, then. The practical matters which are of president’s concern, do not exhaust who he is. The president is also a representative figure: as Michael Novak aptly said, a chosen king. Chosen, because he’s able to represent something people recognize themselves in. But representation may be effective for some, and fail for others. Here politics takes me to epistemology: theory of knowledge, which, when it appears to us well grounded, we consider deserving the Latin name for what is indeed knowing, i.e. scientia.

Why so?

Because someone, say a president (chosen king), represents people in something else. Should we say, not just their interests, but the knowledgeable understanding of the nature of things they may think (feel?) theirs?

Ok, let’s talk about epistemology then.

I wish it were possible. But we need to take it in an roundabout way. We can’t rush to epistemology. See how people take a stance on science and an usually corresponding stance on politics. How come?

Oh, come on. You must be kidding us. Before you say one thing, and next moment you say the opposite. You had almost convinced us: we must go from politics to epistemology. We may grant it: after all, what else do we have to go about but science? And now you turn things around, asking to look at politics first. Either you don’t know what you are talking about, or you want to play some trick on us.

No trick. Just an invitation to look at the way the epistemological question of science plays in politics.

Speaking of this, I’d like to recollect that when I came for a doctorate to the United States in 1971, and stayed there for a few years feigning myself as a sort of field anthropologist, I was hit by the difference in American politics with respect to Italy, my home country, or, let’s say more generally, to Europe. It still seemed then, at least to my at the time rather naïve eye, that political discussions in the States turned primarily around those practical matters and morality. Nothing like what we used to call “political” at home: meaning something that involved the overall understanding of the nature of society. One could translate that impression, by saying that politics in the States appeared to me much less ideological than at home. Or perhaps the fact is that ideology took a different garb. 

However it was then, I should add now that the difference has vanished.

Some authors have indulged in saying that we had in the meantime the “end of ideology”, but it is more right to say that the garb of ideology was changed by what happened in the last forty years along similar lines: on both sides of the Atlantic, it became a matter of conforming or not conforming to that funny kind of moral stance which has been called, starting from the States, political correctness. What this is, could be briefly described as the assumption of a biological and psychological standard, presumed scientific, in assessing human affairs, with the exclusion of everything that smacks of cultural (or, worse, religious), presumed non scientific. But, are we speaking here of science, or of ideology?

Here you are! This is because you promised not to play tricks! And what is it that you are doing, with that presumed of yours? We were to talk about science and politics, but it looks like that you want to smuggle back in religion.

No, I can’t smuggle on you something I don’t know what it is; or, to be plain about it, of which I think that simply doesn’t exist. But you are right, by saying so I am playing some kind of trick, the one represented by the quotation marks with which “religion” is here to be taken, to mean that we so currently call something we’d like to keep separate from “science”, and thus from “politics”. Well, I know nothing of the kind. I only know different people who claim to have a knowledgeable understanding of the world, in the name of which they claim to be authorized to govern the world. Call advancing this second claim politics, then you have that it is advanced through the first, you may call it a claim to science. Here you have what is at stake in the pro o con the political correctness so called, in America as well as in Europe.

The previous POTUS, George W. Bush, was loathed by the American intelligentsia, made of university professors, main stream media operators, Hollywood actors, etc.. By the time of the end of his second mandate, his popularity was measured by polls down to a scanty 30% or thereabout, being charged for all the dissatisfaction that the course of events (internal and foreign) was creating in the country. That’s why the son of an American caucasian woman and of a Kenya man was hailed by many as a kind of savior, come to free the country from the oppressive Bush atmosphere. But actually it wasn’t what he did that made Bush loathsome to them.

Conservative commentators have always lamented the double standard of the left in assessing facts, e.g. actions by man in power. Actually, there might be some reasons for assessing differently the same acts: after all, their meaning depends on the circumstances (let’s think, now days, of a caress given to a child). The trouble is, though, that such difference is passed under silence, which justifies scathing remarks as these of Victor Davies Hanson:

“In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without utility. But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished, or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.”

Those actions were denounced as evil because done by Bush. Why? is my question. To which I expect an answer that, in whatever fashion, would essentially mean this: Bush wasn’t one of us.

You see? You are biased. I also expect to be told. You take sides with conservatives. No, I reply; or yes, if you like, but for a reason: that I want a reason given for the difference of assessment.

Who is then the “us” who resounded to me as excluding Bush from their rank? This question takes us back to the original question: the capability of giving reasons for whatever it is stated should be the mark of what we call “science”. Instead of reasons, though, if I ask what is science, I receive replies that take the answer for granted; like: “science” is what scientists do, and it excludes any God talk, which belongs to “religion”.

Really? I say. Then the great Isaac Newton wasn’t a scientist.

Of course not! We mean, of course he was a scientist, of the greatest. It’s is enough to keep distinct in his work science and religion, as we do.

There is the point. We should judge a president by his capability of representing a knowledgeable understanding of the world. This in turn is to be judged, by giving reasons. But these cannot consist in appealing to the current distinctions – of science, religion, culture, etcetera. Taken for granted, they become no more than factors of identification, defining the “us” to which one has to belong to be politically correct.

I know that with this I haven’t said much about what is science. But perhaps I have suggested that, whatever it is, it cannot be an affirmation of unreasoned tribal superiority. Whichever tribe has its knowledgeable understanding of the world – call it, if you like, culture and religion – and science, to be such, cannot explain it away, without accounting for the experience anywhere so represented, lest it becomes itself a tribal manifestation. 

You may surmize, however, which party on the public scene I judge less tribal.

 

HP

A president against the constitution?

I was planning to comment on the two excerpts from Pope Benedict’s Mexican and Cuban homilies, when I run into a piece of news that made me jump.

Some Mr. President must be quite desperate to belie the whole Constitution of the United States. Perhaps because he is afraid that he already did it. I read in fact that Barack Obama made a scathing remark against the possibility that a “non elected group” of people might revoke a law legitimately made and voted by a solid majority of the Congress “democratically elected”.

It looks like that he was thus expressing his worry about the possible destiny of his much debated Obamacare. Or was he warning the Supreme Court from erasing it?

However we interpret it, this remark shows how little such Mr. President understands the ground of the USA constitution as defined by the Constitution.

The only excuse for him is that the same mistake is widespread: the belief that democracy essentially consists in determining governance by way of elections. Well, elections are undoubtedly important to decide who in turn enjoys the favor of the majority, to govern and make laws. But it isn’t enough the rule of the majority to make democracy – if we want to keep to the name an acceptable meaning!

What is needed is the rule of law: a law that no majority can make or change. That’s why sovereign is the Supreme Court, the non elected Justices in charge of reviewing the laws the Congress makes. Neither it is them, however, who by their decisions make the law: above them is the Constitution, before the Constitution the Declaration of Independence, and still before this a tradition of natural law that informed it.

This takes me back to the excerpts from Pope Benedict’s homilies I wanted to comment upon.

The freedom of which Benedict spoke in Cuba is now at danger: in America, as well as in Europe, where it might be already gone.

In Europe we are playing ostrich, and hide our head under the sand, feigning that religion does not concern the public space. The sand I speak of is that of willful ignorance, not wanting to know the facts of history, which show that religion always defined the public space, so that people recognized themselves as true men by belonging to a certain kingdom. Only a King who declared that his kingdom was not of this world, made them free to recognize their same humanity beyond all borders.

By choosing to ignore that King, we tend to idolatrize the kingdom that, literally, de-fines our humanity: call it, if you like, EU, or USA – if these were to be plied to the desires of the intellectual class that made the President. For all its pretence to be utterly open to anybody, whichever his/hers religion and culture and sexual preferences, it fails to understand anybody who declares that such things do actually make a difference with regard to the recognition of a common humanity. So, we could even have laws made (against, say, “omophobia” or “islamophobia”, or deciding what is good for you) to silence people who don’t agree with the undifferentiated view of man held as normative for democracy.

HP

True liberalism

I am sure I detest the man O as much as the liberal press and academicians and show biz detested the man B. But, if it is so, what sense there would be for me to speak? Just to express my irrational dislikes as they express theirs? They saw in the man B a sort of tyrannical figure, and because of this they promoted the man O with all the means possible, making themselves believe in the humbug of his messiah like act as liberator. Of course, this kind of liberation was perceived by the other side as tyranny.

The LD has done a good job in the previous posts in sketching the reasons why this is really the case. The questions unsolved of European history, to which America wanted to represent the solution, regurgitate again in America: I mean the questions concerning the relation of politics and religion, in which the man O, and the liberal press and academicians and show biz that created him as a public persona, want to realize a total return to Europe. As if there had never been an American experiment worthy of notice.

In the (quite vain) hope to establish a dialogue with the liberal friends, I could say that America has been an experiment in “liberalism”. But I would need immediately to make them notice that liberalism isn’t an univocal word.

I take, to explain what I mean, this line from an article by an Italian university professor, who ranged from his teaching of history of math to more general questions of education and politics:

“The United States are by now torn by the schizophrenia between liberal tradition and authoritarian social control.”

How did that schizophrenia between “liberal” and “authoritarian” came to be? asks himself the author of this line. Because, it is the answer he gives himself, of another factor, besides liberalism, determining American culture: the idea that everything can be dealt with scientifically, measuring it by quantifiable factors.

This might even be true, but, leaving aside the fact that it is not peculiar to American culture, because you find the same idea in Europe, it doesn’t take into account that, in the States, the will to ensure democracy by exercising a control from on high upon society it is precisely what has come to be identified by the name of liberalism.

So, in the European continental (or perhaps mainly Italian) use, it is called liberal someone who is against state invasiveness in people’s life, while in the American use it is so called someone who is favorable to state intervention in it. Which makes embarrassing any time I speak of liberalism to Americans, having to explain in which way I mean it. While talking of this with the LD, he remarked that the ambiguity is avoided by speaking in the continental sense of “classical liberalism”. If that was the classical, pristine sense of the word, what then needs to be accounted for, to explain the said schizophrenia, is how liberal aversion to state intervention turned into favoring it.

In the States, often those who refuse state invasiveness into people’s life also like to call themselves libertarian. Now, “libertarians”, over against “liberals”, are ranked among “conservatives”. But here again there is an ambiguity, because conservative embraces also communitarians. And libertarians and communitarians are not necessarily the same thing.

Liberal, libertarian, are cognate words, both having to do with liberty. Communitarian, instead, has to do with community. Beautiful things, community and liberty, together they make up what in the Christian inheritance we call love: that reciprocity of eros (the desire of the good that can only come from someone else’ graciousness) and agape (the disposition to be so gracious toward someone else) that represents the common law of society, prior to any state legislation.

I have to recall these things, be it in short strokes, because, even though they should be known to all, they are no longer part of our public education. Being hidden behind the all but clear distinction of politics and religion on which European as well as American public debate rests.

Of course Christianity didn’t invent love. Peculiar to it, when it enjoins to love one’s “enemies” as well as one’s “friends”, meaning the out-group as well as the in-group, it’s the extension it gave to it. In as far as it joins people together, within its bounds the body politic is in any case religious; by the commandment to love “enemies”, Christianity doesn’t actually tear down group boundaries, but makes them all permeable, universalizes the religious bond and potentially makes of humanity as such one body politic. As a matter of fact it introduces, by so doing, a distinction of church and state elsewhere absent: with the church, as representative of universal humanity, and the state of its local concretions. Following the modern crisis of Christendom culminating with the protestant reformation, the European states declared themselves sovereign, superiorem non recognoscens, absolute representative of the humanity of their people, more subjects than citizens. This meant that the states declared themselves the supreme legislators within their boundaries.

Liberals and sheer libertarians, as distinguished from communitarians, share then this common assumption: that it is the state to make the law. Once this is granted, the fact that the ones favor the law maker’s invasiveness into peoples’ lives and the others abhor it becomes secondary. The turning of classical liberalism into now days liberalism becomes then understandable. And the strife between the two a matter of taste. Unless we take from communitarians a rejection of that assumption, as inherently tyrannical.

To escape such a tyranny peoples emigrated to the new world, and the founding fathers made of America that experiment at which authors like Alexis de Toqueville could look at as a paradigm. If a risk De Toqueville saw in it was that of the tyranny of majority, but kept at bay by the religion of the people, that preserved the States from becoming a state in the absolute, totalitarian European way. But today the risk, in a European fashion, is rather the opposite, that of a self-declared enlightened elite, that despises the majority, when, with its culture and religion, doesn’t follow its lead. Thus putting an end to the experiment.

I called it an experiment in liberalism, to maintain the appeal to the “liberal tradition”, when it doesn’t succumb to the temptation of authoritarian control. If we recall that from the same root it comes also the word liberality (largess in giving), we can recognize in America an experiment in holding together community and liberty.
HP

Christmas spirit for the whole year

I had an unfinished little Christmas meditation left in my draft page. Christmas is passed, and just started the new year. So, the best I can do is to wish that something of the Christmas spirit is going to endure in the new year, and to ask, to resume that meditation, what that spirit is.

No much good to say about the past year. The financial crisis keeps on plaguing us, and an incompetent man sits in the White House, incapable of promoting in people that hope on which he based the campaign that led to his election (rarely the promises of the electoral campaign have been more belied by the reality of the person and of his administration: he presented himself as post partisan, and acted in a way that more partisan could hardly be; he presented himself as post racial, and with him racial tensions came back to the fore in America). Not many reasons of hope seem to be looming at the horizon. In this moment of lack of American leadership, exploded the so called “Arab spring”: the revolt against autocrats that appeared as a promise for democracy in Arab countries, but out of which are emerging to power the only organized groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood, which only promise an increase of the tension between the Islamic world and the rest of us. Not to speak of Iran.

I won’t keep on going listing the evils that threaten our world, East and West so called. As far as the Western side of the world I’d number in the first place the failure of confidence: word that includes the root fid of fides, faith and trust together.

At the end of the Christmas and New Year holidays there is for the Catholic tradition the Epiphany: the manifestation of what happened at Christmas, when the Magi hail in a baby the “new born king”, which marks the turning into a new year.

Here you have the Christmas spirit: it’s a spirit of hope, the hope coming from a birth. In Italian it is called Natale, in Spanish, Natividad: a birthday, that we celebrate.

What is it then that we do celebrate when we remember somebody’s birthday, and may be throw a party for him or her? Pretty simple: the joy that he or she brought into our life.

A beautiful Hollywood movie of 1946 by Frank Capra, It’s a wonderful life, best illustrate this sense of the celebration represented by Christmas. Here is the story: on Christmas Eve a man meditates suicide, because of the bankrupt that threatens his life work, which makes him think that better were not to be born; the miraculous intervention of his guardian angel makes him see how things would have been if he really had not been born: that is, because of all the good that he did, much worse; he asks for his life back, and finds all the friends he made, knowing his difficulties, bringing in thanks more than he needed to be saved from bankrupt. The moral is that the good one does is the difference that makes his being born worthy, for others to celebrate.

The more the good done, the larger the circle of the people celebrating the birth. The good one does, however, doesn’t extent itself only in space, but also in time, and gives therefore to celebration its character of recurrence: the good brought of old to life by someone gives reason to celebrate, with his birth, birth itself as the coming to life.

Should someone find what I just said not clear enough as illustration of the meaning of the Christmas epiphany, he might think of what happens today, when the reasons for celebrating are, if not erased, at least hidden. Birth is surrounded by expectations and recollections of renewal of life which make of it a social, public affair. Stripped, instead, of the expectations and recollections of communal life, it doesn’t remain but a biological event. Uselessly we confer to the newborn inherent rights, these are not enough to make of him a public person: one is and remains private – word coming from the same root of “deprived”, lacking of something essential, that makes him appear to others as a promise of good, and, by seeing himself through others’ eyes, makes him feel his being born a worthy thing.

When the good reaches the whole community, we have the kind of person traditionally called king. But they are telling us that in our democratic society there are no longer kings, only experts, qualified as such by the mainstream culture passed over by universities and media, not to inspire us to the good, but to direct our lives in a way politically correct.

Hence despair and partisanship. Over against which it stands the Christmas spirit of celebration of birth.

HD

Finding as founding

Some days ago I started jotting down a few lines prompted by a statement the Pope made during his recent journey to Africa, saying that Christianity breaks all borders and so unifies all peoples. But I was taken by writing other things, and so those lines staid there unfinished.

I want to come back to it, remarking that there are two sides in what the Pope says on this regard, which seems irreconcilable among them: the one I just mentioned about Christianity breaking all borders, and the other he so strongly stressed in the Reichstag speech we reported, that Christianity never appealed to a God revealed law, but developed the idea of natural law of the Greek and Romans.

I hope the reader sees the problem in keeping these two statements together. If not, I’ll try to clarify it for him.

To breaks all borders means to make people capable of living under one law. Now, if it is Christianity that does this breaking, how can it be said that it doesn’t bring the one law under which to live?

Let’s take the case of the United States of America. I think I read somewhere –but I can’t be sure, because I don’t remember where – that the present POTUS said that America cannot be called a Christian nation. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that he said it, I’d like to ask him: If not, what is it then?

To which I could be retorted: if it is such, i.e. a Christian nation, how can it make so many peoples of different religion live in her peacefully?

The intelligent reader should see now that we have here the general question raised by the Pope’s statements set in a concrete case. And, being so concretely put, also the answer I’ll try to give will spring from the concreteness of my own personal experience.

I like to call it my experience of the “discovery of America”. A prominent American philosophy professor, nowhere less than at Harvard (actually a philosopher for real, but, being that such a qualification is given to dogs and pigs, I don’t want to insult him with it) gave some years ago two lectures by the general title of “This new yet unapproachable America”, one of which was: “Finding as founding”. How beautiful! America is something in whose founding anyone can share, if he just finds her.

And it is not enough for that to be born in the United States. I recall, by the way, that there were some questions raised about the present POTUS being born in the US. Originally it was a way to exclude him from the race, and now to disqualify him as president. But it doesn’t work. There are plenty of people who are undoubtedly born in the US, who don’t sound as Americans at all: one could say the great part of the MSM.

Why, what do they sound like then? Well, like today Europeans: people just born there, who don’t show signs of any discovery: as if there was nothing worthy of finding-founding.

As far as myself is concerned, there is no question, I was not born in the Sates, and I lived there just a few years. But that real philosopher whom I mentioned, by the name of Stanley Cavell, authorizes me to consider myself a founder, because I did find something.

When in my intellectual pursuit – of the true, the good and the beautiful – I came to study in the States, I made a discovery that turned studying into an experience of finding-founding. I realized that, except for the so called Indians, no one is native in America. Even the people who have been in the USA for generations, came in a traceable past from somewhere else. A discovery of hot water, one could say. But it is not so. To realize the obvious has a great import in the “search of the ordinary” – to say it again with Cavell –, which otherwise escapes our attention.

If everybody in the States is an immigrant, it means that America is the place where we can converge in our “pursuit of happiness”. Where happiness can be found, and then America founded, is suggested by Cavell by taking that beautiful expression of the Declaration of Independence (a stroke of genius of the otherwise ambiguous Jefferson) as title for a book of his on the Hollywood comedies of the first decades of talkies, all turning around the theme of marriage: love broken and refounded.

This means that coming to America makes a common story in which everyone can recognize himself. In a way no one is born in America, because, even if born in the US, still has to make that movement of convergence. Otherwise …: here, in the “otherwise” is another side of my discovery.

I realized that either people communicate in a story they share, or, when such a story is lacking, nothing else is left through which to communicate but, speaking of the US, green paper notes: better known as dollars.

Don’t take me wrong, I have no grudge against money. I only think that you cannot build just on it a political union, as it was tried in Europe, with what consequences we are now seeing. But, as I said, also the US is dangerously coming to resemble Europe, with a dropping therefore of the A.

To be short in a very complex matter: without money, you have just small communities, closed in borders defined by an exclusive cultural consensus. Just with money, you have large societies of a multicultural kind, made by individuals having among other options that of the religion to which consent, all equally included in a financial empire that knows no borders.

Perhaps the reader will see now the answer to the questions asked at the beginning.

The US, if it doesn’t want to drop the A, is a Christian nation, which doesn’t run counter anybody’s cultural and religious tradition, as long as he obeys to the natural law that everywhere requires that crossing of borders universalized in Christianity. Because, to say that Christianity breaks all borders means that it allows to cross them all; but borders there must be to be crossed. Out of which , there aren’t but outlaws or tyranny.

Anybody can come through this discovery in America: the finding that in ordinary experience founds everywhere human relations.

HP