The End of Western Thinking - Part 2
Extending questions of liberalism through Benedict XVI, Fukuyama & Rawls
The original conversation (which I am trying to have more with actual commenters here) that I had with Claude is extended as I am now reading:
Liberalism And Its Discontents — Francis Fukuyama
Plutarch’s Lives — Plutarch
and plan to read up on James Madison and what it took to write a constitution the first time around.
It is in Fukuyama that I am looking to find threads of philosophical and political thought consonant with what I am hearing from ARC, one of the smartest groups around. While I’m at it, I should let you all know that I’m also finding Iain McGilchrist interesting in this regard, as I am finding those people who have done their comparative theology homework investigating some inconsistencies in Islam. That thread goes way back to the new to me concept of a radically transcendent God, which the Christian theologies reject, posed by Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensberg lecture. Because now I’m starting to have a deep understanding of what John Rawls hath wrought over Progressive thought.
At any rate Fukuyama (aligned with Bloom) is helping me to distinguish the aegis of Liberalism as distinct from Left Progressive politics and Right MAGA populist politics. And I think I’m going to understand neoliberalism a bit better when I finish reading (rather than listening) to his book. As well he helps me reconcile Hobbes’ authoritarian streak with Liberalism. So as I’ve been saying we’re headed to a technofeudal future, that can actually still exist under a Liberal order.
Dateline September 2006
To Act Against Reason
OK now I’m going to revert. The reason is because in about 90 seconds, on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Father Richard John Neuhaus has not only clarified the entire context of Benedict’s Regensberg Lecture, but demolished a fallacy I thought Christians in America have obsessed over for years.
The kernel of this axiom asserted by the Pope is this:
To act against reason is to act against the nature of God.
And Neuhaus continues..
That religion and particularly Christianity presents itself on the basis of reasonable truth claims that are to be engaged and to be presented as persuasively as possible in a reasonable manner. His lecture at the Regensberg University was directed chiefly against ideological secularists on the one hand who want to radically divide faith and reason and directed against Christian thinkers who want to assert a kind of pure Biblical Christianity against the great achievement which is the synthesis of Greek philosophy and revealed truth. So those were the primary audiences. Along the way, and this is what got all the news attention, he asked the question whether or not there is not a fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam on precisely this point. Whether Islam’s understanding of God who is a god who is disengaged from what we mean by reason. A god who is radically sovereign, radically transcendent and whose will is exactly what he declares his will to be no matter how arbitrary or capricious. That Allah could even command that you worship idols and you would be obliged to worship idols.
So he is asking a question whether there is a difference and is it an insurmountable difference...between the Christian understanding, that as the first verse of the prologue to the Gospel of John says: *en arche en logos* in the Greek. In the beginning was the logos, in the beginning was the word, and logos means also reason, and therefore there could be no place in religion, in authentic religion, Christian, Islamic or other for the use of violence.
That was the question he was posing. And of course unfortunately, the response, the reaction of much of the Islamic world simply confirmed the worst of the possible answers to that question. Namely, you say we’re violent and we’ll kill you for saying we’re violent. This I think means that this statement in Regensberg, will in retrospect be looked back upon as a benchmark in which certainly in the most important statement by a world figure since 9/11 with regard to what may be the biggest single question facing Western civilization in the next century. And it turns out finally to be a theological and philosophical question about the nature of God.
Just wow. I came out of college as one of those ideological secularists (thanks to Ayn Rand), which I remained until I came to understand religion as a fundamental civilizing pedagogy thanks to Ishmael Reed. At that point I claimed polytheism in order to embrace the multiple sources of moral agency across human history. I did so not realizing that the theology of Christianity had resolved this (or even addressed it). Nevertheless, later in reading Cornel West’s “American Evasion of Philosophy”, I came to recognize the nexus of what he calls ‘Emersonian Theocidy’ and agreed that some very fundamental ideas about God and America were self-reinforcing, and thus began a new level of patriotism. But Neuhaus cites the opening of the Gospel of John, one of the only passages of the Bible that I’ve ever really made an attempt to memorize. And yet in all that memorization, I failed to understand the implications. I have to say this is truly a remarkable day for me in faith because for so many years I have been engaged in debate about faith vs reason.
This is fabulous and timely. I wonder what it is I need to do to be able to get to this kind of theology on a regular basis. I’m completely jazzed. For me it goes back to what I’ve been asserting, and by doing so thinking I have been angling away from Christianity as preached here. Here’s the best way I put it before:
The priesthood has a very difficult task, which is to reconcile their interpretations of the divine with their understanding of human needs. How do you dumb down the Infinite and put human beings into the middle of it such that their core moral values are lined up with what any priest or Church says is God’s Will? Very difficult indeed, especially when human knowledge ebbs and flows.
If you take it as a given that God is indeed Infinite, then you have embodied in the mind of God, all the laws of the Universe - the very order of everything, whether or not we humans are able to understand it. God is purpose. God is the purpose of the universe. God is the source of human capacity to understand the Universe, such as we can, such as it is. So loving God is a difficult proposition. Unless you anthropomorphize God, you cannot ‘love’ God in anyway like you would love a human being.
Of all the jobs the priesthood has, invoking God’s name to call the people to worship seems like the easiest. What is entailed in worship... ah there’s the rub. If one worships God by serving his purposes, there are certainly different abilities of humans to do so which other humans (and presumeably God) is aware. If God’s purpose, as described by The New Covenant of Jesus, is transparent to humanity, then it is very unlikely that you could fool humans and decieve God at the same time. In other words, since we are commanded to love our neighbor, we could not love them falsely. Our neighbors would be able to correctly percieve our love with the same facility as God would judge our love of them. This is a very key thing. If love was embodied in the gift of a red rose, then it is important that God gave us all equal facilities to see that the rose was indeed red. Otherwise how could we spread the Gospel? My entire point here is that I am asserting that human beings must have the same facility for interpretation of love and good and evil as God would have. We couldn’t arrive at different conclusions; this is utterly fundamental and the meaning of the Tree of Knowledge which kicks off Genesis. We do know.
Dateline July 2026
In which I continue my convo with gentle Claudio.
MDCB: I want to revisit this conversation and stretch it a bit. I just started reading Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents, and I found something useful in his review of the philosophy of John Rawls and his notion of the deontological subject. I have a gut instinct that I don’t like Rawls in that he abstracts human logic from the self and thus cannot account for the historical influence of actual human actions that may seem logically inconsistent yet are instinctively true. So I put Rawls in opposition to Hobbes and to Machiavelli. Furthermore, I sense that the Effective Altruists contemporarily are too apt to consider AI machinery to be equivalent to the left brain’s logic and that thus it would be game theoretically capable of Rawls’ type of Theory of Justice. I say without an actual body, the AIs and the Rawlsian self strips too much of human thought in its assessment of the good.
Opus 4.6: This is a genuinely powerful intuition, and I think you’re onto something that connects back to the entire arc of our prior conversation in a way that sharpens the stakes considerably.
Let me take it in stages, because there are actually several claims nested inside your provocation and they deserve to be separated before being reconnected.
Rawls and the disembodied subject. Your instinct about the deontological subject is well-placed, and it echoes a critique that has a serious philosophical pedigree — most notably from Michael Sandel, whose Liberalism and the Limits of Justice argued exactly this point in 1982. Rawls asks us to imagine ourselves behind a veil of ignorance, stripped of knowledge about our talents, social position, conception of the good, even our temperament — and then to choose principles of justice from that position. The question is: what’s left? Who is doing the choosing? Rawls needs a subject thin enough to be impartial but thick enough to reason. Sandel’s objection, which I think is close to yours, is that you can’t have both. A self shorn of all its constitutive attachments — its history, its body, its loyalties, its embedded moral intuitions — isn’t a purified reasoner. It’s nothing at all. Or more precisely, it’s an abstraction that smuggles in a very particular (and very Protestant, very Kantian) conception of rationality while pretending to be universal.
The Hobbes and Machiavelli opposition. This is where your instinct becomes really interesting. Both Hobbes and Machiavelli ground their political thought in what you might call the thickness of human experience. For Hobbes, it’s the body — fear of violent death is the foundation of political order, and fear is irreducibly somatic. You can’t get to the Hobbesian commonwealth through pure reason; you need the gut-level aversion to your own extinction. For Machiavelli, it’s historical action — the accumulated record of what men actually do under pressure, which resists systematization precisely because human motivation is tangled, contradictory, and situational. Both thinkers insist that if you abstract away the body and its history, you lose the very material that political thought is supposed to work with.
Rawls, by contrast, treats those features as noise to be filtered out rather than signal to be attended to. The veil of ignorance is explicitly designed to prevent your embodied, historically situated self from contaminating the purity of your moral reasoning. And here’s the connection to Oakeshott that should be obvious: this is precisely the rationalist error Oakeshott spent his career identifying. Rawls is arguably the most sophisticated rationalist in the entire liberal tradition — he doesn’t just propose a political program derived from principles, he constructs an entire thought experiment designed to guarantee that only principled reasoning operates, with all practical, traditional, and embodied knowledge excluded by design.
Now, the AI and Effective Altruism point. This is where your argument gets genuinely provocative, and I think largely right, though it needs some careful handling.
The EA movement, particularly in its more philosophically ambitious wing, does tend to treat moral reasoning as a computational problem — aggregate utility, calculate expected value, optimize across possible futures. The affinity with Rawls isn’t accidental. Both frameworks assume that the ideal moral reasoner is one maximally stripped of parochial attachments: Rawls strips away social position and conception of the good; EA strips away temporal proximity, species membership, and emotional salience. Both trust that what remains after the stripping is the genuinely rational core of moral thought.
The enthusiasm some EAs have for AI as a moral reasoner follows directly. If good moral reasoning is really about impartial calculation over outcomes — if the embodied, historical, emotionally saturated aspects of human thought are biases to be corrected rather than perceptions to be trusted — then of course a sufficiently powerful AI would be better at ethics than we are. It wouldn’t suffer from scope insensitivity, status quo bias, in-group preference, or any of the other “defects” that behavioral economics has catalogued. It would be the veil of ignorance made operational.
Your objection, if I’m hearing it right, is that this gets the relationship between reason and embodiment exactly backwards. The things that the veil of ignorance strips away and that AI lacks aren’t contaminants in an otherwise pure rational process. They’re constitutive of the kind of reasoning that actually produces moral knowledge. The fear of death that Hobbes placed at the foundation of political order isn’t an irrational bias — it’s an authentic perception of something real about the human condition. The instinctive judgments Machiavelli trusted over philosophical systems aren’t logical errors — they’re condensed wisdom about how human beings actually work, purchased at the price of lived experience. When you remove the body, you don’t get purer thought. You get thinner thought — thought that has lost contact with the very phenomena it’s supposed to be about.
There’s a way to put this in terms borrowed from the phenomenological tradition, particularly Merleau-Ponty: the body is not a vessel that carries the mind around; it is the medium through which the mind encounters and understands the world. Perception, emotion, proprioception, fatigue, pleasure, pain — these aren’t obstacles to understanding; they’re modes of understanding. A disembodied reasoner doesn’t see more clearly; it sees less, because it has lost the perceptual apparatus through which certain truths become available.
Where I’d push back slightly is on whether this critique is total. There are domains — formal logic, mathematics, certain kinds of institutional design — where abstraction from embodiment genuinely does improve reasoning. The question is whether justice is that kind of domain. Rawls assumed it was. Your instinct, and I think Hobbes’s and Machiavelli’s and Oakeshott’s, is that it isn’t — that justice is more like statecraft or cooking than like mathematics, and that the attempt to treat it as a formal problem produces elegant structures that float free of human reality.
The deepest version of your critique might be this: Rawls and the EA-aligned AI optimists share a common error, which is to mistake the left hemisphere’s model of reasoning for reasoning itself. They identify rationality with the explicit, propositional, systematizing, context-stripping operations that happen to be the kind AI can replicate — and then conclude that AI can therefore replicate rationality. But if Iain McGilchrist is right (and I suspect you’d find The Master and His Emissary sympathetic to your instincts), that’s only half of cognition. The other half — contextual, embodied, attentive to particulars, comfortable with ambiguity, resistant to formalization — is precisely what gets lost when you put a mind behind a veil or inside a machine.
The question this leaves open is whether there’s a principled way to integrate both — to have the rigor of systematic moral thinking without losing contact with the embodied, historical, instinctive knowledge that Hobbes and Machiavelli and Oakeshott insisted we cannot do without. Or whether the two modes are genuinely in tension, and political philosophy must ultimately choose which one to trust.
Well I guess I agree with Claudio’s interpretation of what I’m saying, but I’m also trusting its interpretation of Rawls, McGilchrist and everything else. So I’m somewhere closer to understanding though I know it can be annoyingly wrong in the details.
Nevertheless, an operant practical question to take up are those things that we have managed to understand through evolutionary psychology, like why do women prefer taller men? It’s certainly not a stupid or impractical question. I think it gets to the heart of the fault of Rawls’ veil and decidedly left brain rationality. We’re not completely rational actors and very often our irrationality is predictable to the wise. The Good, as can be determined by fully emotional judgement is very often demonstrably accessible to children incapable of logic as well as the mentally handicapped. Hell, we know our dogs love us and that’s a good that we reasonably defend.
One of the reasons that Plutarch’s Lives is such a great book is that (for me) it tells the story of Antony and Cleopatra in a dramatic level of detail that feels even more engaging that any film or Shakespearian dramatization I’ve ever seen. And we feel these stories and they change us. They unpredictably change our actions and behaviors and we need to understand the substance of that, and it’s not all logic.
I recognize what it’s like to be a videogamer, and to a significant extent, we are able to adjust to the rules of the game and even apply game theory to hack our way to success. This is why I distrust law to a certain extent. Law can produce logical reasons and incentives to game the systems of government and of justice in ways we recognize to be unfair. So can markets. That’s what we need to watch out for. I think Rawls is handicapping us. I think Fukuyama knows how.
How is Rawls handicapping us? Fukuyama says:
Rawls would argue that one’s character—for example whether one was public-spirited or narrowly selfish—was not intrinsic to the autonomous inner self, but a contingent attribute determined by one’s cultural or genetic inheritance, no different from skin color or religious upbringing. He, like Kant, would argue that the desire to be educated, or to live in a society with other educated people, was a vision of the good that had no particular priority over other visions or the requirements of justice. (Kant, in fact, has been blamed for inconsistency on this issue, since he elsewhere argues in favor of an educated citizenry.8)
Fukuyama, Francis. Liberalism and Its Discontents (p. 58). (Function). Kindle Edition.
So to my mind, to be brief, I think we know logically, Progressives enable the radical justification of the autonomous inner logical self, and how judgements against things like character ought not to count in matters of justice. This is a philosophical prior to the more surface aspects of what Katharine Birbalsingh is saying about how accusations of racism generate deep fears in youth. They equate being judged by the content of their character as invasive as being judged by the color of their skin. Because Rawls’ philosophy owns the Humanities being taught in the West.
I love the questions you're asking here. In particular, I'd never heard of Oakeshot before, of whom I'm an immediate fan. I'm guessing this might have to do with both of us having backgrounds in computational pipelines and data systems - we see their limits!
The idea of God as Logos is how I tend to talk to non-religious persons about my faith. You have get around the 'null pointer exception' their brain throws when you mention the word God, so I say, "what's really being claimed is that you can trust the laws of physics, you have to start there."
I think when people rejected the idea of a _personal_ god and replaced with a mechanistic universe, we ended up creating politic structures that mimicked what we believed was the logos. If God isn't in charge of reality, we need to steer reality ourselves. But in the end we created closed systems that are subject to entropic decay because the're closed to grace.
The lack of a body messing up reasoning: Yes, 100%! I think the veil of ignorance asks us to do something impossible, and the end result is people who _think_ they're doing this are lying to themselves about who capable they really are of separating their identity from their reasoning process.
There's an old saw that says, Judaism rejects the resurrection and thus lacks hope, Islam rejects the crucifixion and thus lacks humility. I think we could extend this to say that Buddhists reject the incarnation, and thus lack the notion of embodiment as being divine pedagogy rather than a kind of psychic cage. EA's are just Buddhists with spreadsheets.
Let me know if you'd like to have a voice conversation on this - I think we'd get somewhere very interesting!