“An idea is a putting truth in checkmate.” 
—Ortega y Gasset

Philosophy in the 20th century has shared the fate of other high arts whose audiences are increasingly limited to an inner circle of adepts. This is partly the fault of a culture that aims at mass production and mass communication, but a good part of the blame must be laid at the door of the practitioners themselves. Most professional philosophers, like so many poets and painters, have deliberately withdrawn from the language of public debate and taken refuge in technical terminology, self reflective linguistic analysis, and mathematical formulas that have little or nothing to do with the human material that forms the subject of most branches of philosophy. The result is that the middle-brow readers who once turned for enlightenment to Russell or Hume, the Emperor Marcus or Francis Bacon, now take their cues from cracker-barrel pundits like Eric Hoffer or out-and-out humbugs like L. Ron Hubbard, Leo “Dr. Love” Buscaglia, and Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s philosophical beach boy turned self-help promoter.

The one philosophical discipline to experience a revival in the past 25 years has been political ethics. While comparatively few people have actually read John Rawls, or Robert Nozick, or Bruce Ackerman, their ideas have been used to justify a variety of political programs and strategies. Many libertarian philosophers have exerted a more direct influence. Ayn Rand, who did have a serious side in an era of collectivism, succeeded in starting a cult, while every month the Laissez Faire catalogue reviews a broad range of books by such individualists and anarchists as Murray Rothbard, Tibor Machan, and Michael Taylor, among many others. What the Rawlsians and the libertarians share is an almost obsessive concern with the language of rights (and occasionally duties) and a willingness to apply their systems to current political questions. 

But if the subject of political rights remains hot, enthusiasm for the liberal gurus-Rawls, Nozick, and Ackerman—has cooled in recent years. This is partly a matter of style, since none of them seems able to put together a coherent paragraph, much less an entire essay or book, but Alasdair MacIntyre, whose style is very uneven in tone and quality, has displaced the liberals from their thrones by arguing against every thing they take for granted.

Although Nozick, Rawls, and Acker man differ on many basic points Rawls being a statist redistributionist and contractarian, Ackerman a “space ship-earth” globalist, and Nozick an individualist/libertarian—they are bound together by a quasi-religious faith in the power of reason and in the universal applicability of moral principles and by their insistence upon analyzing all political problems exclusively in terms of individuals and states. Of the three, Nozick has been the most consistently interesting, if only because he had the courage to stand up against the collectivist fantasies of his Harvard col league, Professor Rawls. 

Unfortunately, Nozick has proved to be yet another victim of tenure and early fame. His most recent book, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, is a string of clichés and often contradictory platitudes that has disappointed his libertarian fans and should embarrass his publisher. The book is billed as “accessible to the general reader,” but it is hard to think of anyone reading very far into this book who has not first had his senses hardened and his taste dulled by graduate study in philosophy. 

Nozick has gone through a number of phases in his career-libertarian and Buddhist, for example-and it would take more patience than I possess to decide which belief system has struck his fancy this time. He is still interested in religious questions, al though his interest does not extend to any serious study of theology or religious doctrine. This is how he address es the problem of evil: it is not enough to assume that the “divine being” has given us a good universe in which we are left free to do evil, and “he or she is just proceeding merrily along.” No, “for an explanation to be satisfying, at least one concerning the traumatic evils that occur, it has in some way to show that flaw reflected up in the divine realm.” 

What a theodicy! Philosophers and theologians all over the globe struggle with the question of evil for thousands of years, but it took Nozick to reveal that if evil is done, it is because God is evil. One might as well follow the advice of Job’s wife. But Nozick is even more original when it comes to concrete problems. Taking his cue from every television show on the Holocaust, he declares that the sufferings of the Jews pose a unique challenge to theology: “The Holocaust constitutes some kind of rift in the universe.” He can’t accept Christianity, it seems, be cause Jesus was supposed to have saved us, and the Nazis prove we’re still bad: “Whatever changed situation or possibility the crucifixion and resurrection were supposed to bring about has now ended; the Holocaust has shut the door that Christ opened.” Oh sure it is true that billions of other people have died unjustly, but “Jewish tradition . . . holds that the Jewish people stand in a special relationship with the divine being.” After such a statement, it comes as no surprise when Nozick declares that an impartial observer from another galaxy (a god perhaps?) would conclude that our “species deserves to be destroyed.”

No one should wish to trivialize the sufferings of European Jews in the 1940’s, but someone should take the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy aside and teach him some thing of history, of the tender mercies of the Assyrians, of Cromwell’s kind ness to the Irish, of the extermination of the Tasmanians, of the quaint cus toms of the Aztecs and Carthaginians, and of the Christians martyred for their faith. But Nozick, whose contempt for ordinary people who “live on automat ic pilot” is revealed on every page, has no concern for any profession or people with which he has not identified himself. Like some primitive in the bush, he would tell us, “But all those are other people. When my house is burnt or my people die, it means the human race has forfeited its right to live, and god (in whom I do not of course believe) is evil.” So much for the consolations of philosophy. 

If Nozick no longer takes libertarian ideas seriously, the “chirping sectaries” should take comfort from the ac cession of a much better philosophical mind, Henry B. Veatch. Veatch has been for many years a proponent of the older natural law tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, and in Human Rights: Fact or Fancy?, he tries to show that natural law is the only possible justification for rights.

Veatch’s book is, by and large, an admirable survey of the question and provides telling rebuttals both to the liberals (and such distinguished predecessors as Locke and Kant) and to more recent natural law theorists, e.g., Finnis and Grisez, who might better be termed neo-natural lawyers. He writes clearly and with dignity, and the reader has a sense of taking part in an important debate across the centuries. In fact, Human Rights could do very well as an introduction to political ethics.

Veatch can be long-winded at times, and his style of arguing hypothetical points with himself grows tedious after thirty pages, but he moves step by lucid step towards his ultimate goal, which is to prove that “without natural ends there can be no basis or justification for natural law in ethics,” and that law must be based in ethics, which in turn must be rooted in the facts of nature.

All of this is welcome, and welcome too is Veatch’s serious consideration of libertarian arguments. The book’s deficiencies are common to all natural law discussions, namely, the refusal to specify the content of human nature or to make any effort to search it out, using the record of human history and the scientific disciplines devoted to the study of human behavior. When Veatch does, occasionally, descend from the realm of theory to everyday politics (as in his discussion of the welfare state), his limited knowledge proves to be a stumbling block. Worse, he implicitly accepts one of the liberals’ primary assumptions, that human ethical and political decision-making is a matter of individuals and nation-states, when we all know in fact that our ethical life is lived almost entirely with out reference to debates in Washing ton.

The same mistake has been made by British and American political philosophers since the time of Hobbes; so it is more of a shock to come across a book that takes into account the “domestic net” and the “little platoon.” Each of Stephen Clark’s books has come as a surprise (if not always as a revelation), and in the past he has argued for animal rights, vegetarianism, and the existence of demons.

In Civil Peace and Sacred Order: Limits and Renewals I, he has turned his attention more directly to political ethics and, sad to relate, speaks the language of conservatism. In this first of three proposed volumes, Clark sketches the outlines of man and his place in the universe. He begins the last chapter with a forceful summary of his argument:

I have been laboriously pointing out that we all live within networks of familial and friendly relationships, that states gain such authority as they have only by embodying moral and sacred values that transcend the merely economic and contractual, that businesses, sects, and nations all have a part to play in a civilized world order whose lineaments are visible in times of war as well as in times of peace. I have also insisted that we human beings live within and upon a world whose ecosystemic health is essential to any purposes we might have for the future, that the beauty of the whole earth is a sacred value, something that any world order must recognize and serve if it is to deserve our loyalty. That order is itself a pluralistic, uncentralized “cosmic democracy.” What I have sought to describe is the tangled web of our fundamental loyalties and worship . . . 

Clark almost always writes well, often brilliantly, and if it were not for his habit (ingrained in his first book, Aristotle’s Man) of filling every page with quotations, his book could be read with pro fit by any intelligent twenty-year-old. However, the quotations provide a sub text, since it is to Yeats and to Kipling that he turns most often.

The most arresting of Professor Clark’s arguments is his insistence that the state, as a purely political and economic entity, has no more powers than those assigned by libertarians and minimalists, unless it embodies and upholds transcendent principles. Rejecting theocracy, Clark insists upon a sacral vision of politics, but one that still does not justify the brigandage of dispossession and the war upon local and familial institutions upon which the modem ideological state depends.

“Sure to stimulate discussion” is the academic reviewer’s cliché, but in this case it is undoubtedly true. Once again, Clark has managed to include something to offend everyone. Secularist liberal politicians are treated as robber barons, but Christians were wrong to suppress the ancient pagan gods who still might play an important role. War is and can be justified, but never nuclear weapons. South African apartheid is the evil side of the localism he advocates, and South Africa is guilty of abusing the law and of refusing “to recognize the common humanity of its black subjects,” but “organizers of boycotts and supporters of armed revolution show just the same traits.” And if the government of South Africa is illegitimate, “so also would be a government of the ANC.”

Clark sides with no political faction, Whig or Tory, liberal or conservative. He is very much his own man, and this sort of independence is what we once expected of a philosopher, but it is a quality as scarce as decent prose in our own philosophy departments.

 

[Civil Peace and Sacred Order: Limits and Renewals I, by Stephen R.L. Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 198 pp., $32.50]

[The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, by Robert Nozick (New York: Simon and Schuster) 308 pp., $21.95]

[Human Rights: Fact or Fancy?, by Henry B. Veatch (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press) 258 pp., $30.00]