Show notes
Richard Reinsch:Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today we’re talking with long-time Law & Liberty contributor Graham McAleer about the natural law. He’s the author of a new book, called Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law. We’ll talk about who that thinker is and also postmodern natural law in this discussion. Graham has contributed dozens of pieces to Law & Liberty over the past few years on the ethics of fashion. He’s written on burkinis, he’s written on offshore trusts and family values, the Scottish Enlightenment. He’s explored the nature of classical liberalism, and defended it on the site. And has also written on numerous thinkers that you wouldn’t necessarily think could be conservative or have a classical liberal connection, like Lacan. But Graham’s done it and he’s done it very well. Glad to have you for the first time on Liberty Law Talk. Graham McAleer:Great. Thank you, Richard. Thank you so much. Richard Reinsch:And our listeners, I know many of them have thought about and read about natural law. In the title, as I said, Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law, what is postmodern natural law? Graham McAleer:Well, if we begin with postmodern, so postmodernism more or less grows up in the 1960s. It’s incubating before that, but it’s a reaction to the failing, it’s a very much a European, originally a European movement reacting to the failings of the European ideas. Obviously, not only with Nazis, but with the communists. So many people on left and right, have the sense that not all is well with the world. Not all is well with modernity and, most glaringly, the promise of the Enlightenment, right? The Enlightenment was supposed to make us more calm, more generous, more thoughtful. But the 20th century was a certain kind of repudiation of that idea. So postmodernism begins more or less in the 60s, and is a whole bunch of things, especially in France. They’re trying to work out what went wrong and what the future might look like. But at the same time, they’re not nostalgic. They’re not believers. They don’t want to go back to the middle ages. They’re not Christian, so they want, without a return to God, they want to try to find what is still good about the human being after the atrocities of the 20th century. So postmodernism, it’s a whole bunch of different thinkers. It sometimes gets very complex, sometimes they’re very interested in psychoanalysis, sometimes in the nature of language. But it all sort of boils down to an effort to try to think about how to have good communities, good politics, in the light of what happened in the 20th century. Richard Reinsch:But now postmodern natural law, because it is an interesting idea, I think of another close friend of mine who passed away, Peter Lawler in 2017, who had this idea of postmodern conservatism. Peter’s idea was that postmodernism signaled the end of the modern world and all of its aspirations and hopes of making us at home within the world and that its techniques and concepts had failed, as you’ve articulated. And that conservatism or the ability to look back to the full breadth of the humanistic tradition, including religion in the West, was needed. So your idea of postmodern natural law, I guess let’s talk about how does that alter natural law and maybe we need just a baseline. Natural law itself is very complex and rich. But maybe talk more about that. Graham McAleer:So natural law, it’s primarily associated with St. Thomas Aquinas in the high Middle Ages. He died around 1274, he taught primarily in Paris. So it’s a kind of a culmination. It had been a long time gestating, but it was culminating in the high Middle Ages. The idea of natural law is that the law is in its rudiments trans-political. So it was an effort not to get caught up in national passion. Now, from Thomas Aquinas you can see, of course, he’s a priest, he’s a monk. He, of course, favored the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church, of course, was in a struggle with the Holy Roman Emperor, with national kings. It was all about power, assertions of power. So natural law came to be this idea about how to think about the law in isolation simply from national passion. Then later on, the natural world became very important with the Age of Discovery. When the Europeans started to move out into the world, they encountered radically different kinds of lifestyles, politics, and this really sends through the shock waves. So then it became natural law was a way to have a communication among very different people when important things were at stake. Not only things like property, but things like human sacrifice. So natural law was an effort to think about what is it that humans are obligated to living in common, but also to try to generate a great deal of flexibility. To take seriously the idea of different geographical, cultural, historical dispositions. My own idea of the postmodern, and a little bit maybe like Lawler, was to then try to think about, well, how to update an idea that when most people think of natural law, they think of something very medieval, very old-fashioned. They think of it as very constraining. They think of it as very, to use a word from this guy Przywara that I’m interested in, very univocal. That it’s one size fits all. That’s often the worry in the modern legal academy of natural law is its extremely dogmatic and tending toward some sort of tyranny. But there’s a way, I think, to think about natural law. Natural law concerns our basic appetites and it posits this idea. Aquinas says there are four things basically going on with humans. We want to preserve our existence. We want to continue in existence. We want to have family. We want to enjoy society. And then there is also the problem of God, that there are no civilizations that haven’t grown up in and around the problem of God, the afterlife. If you even look at the most early human burial sites that we have, dating back 35,000- 40,000 years ago, people are buried with grave goods, with beautiful ornamented spears, necklaces. So there’s something weird about us, says Aquinas, right? That there’s always this problem of God that has to be confronted. Those are the basic dynamics of the human being and those need to be articulated more, and they are, if you just think about what is it that legislatures dwell on. Well, they dwell on problems of self-care, how to raise children, how to protect children, what are the conditions for good human community, how to avoid hatred. Of course, but maybe more controversially, the problem of God is always do you exclude God, do you include God? How do you keep God contained in some way or do you become a kind of theocratic Iran? I mean, Aquinas, I think, is quite astute when he thinks about what is it that politics is about. It appears to revolve around these four basic dynamics. Richard Reinsch:Because you said we want to preserve our existence. I’m thinking about the modern West. Is there any country in what we would think is in the modern West that even has a reproduction birth rate above or even with what’s called a stable population rate rather than a declining rate or an increasing population rate? I don’t think there is. What do you think of that? You say in the first chapter that natural law can remedy our failing humanism. Is that evidence of a failing humanism that we need to remedy? Graham McAleer:I mean, as you probably know, there’s certain European states which are offering tax incentives to have children. France, famously is doing this because rates are becoming very low, right? Which if you’re not replicating, you don’t actually have a good, dynamic economy. So you see those arguing about why Japan is so advanced on robotics is that they have one of the worst birth rates on the planet. Indeed there are these, and I’m no expert on Japan, but you see these reports where there’s huge numbers of young adults who have never even been on a date with somebody of the opposite sex, right? There seems to be this weird, almost death spiral fascination that’s going on. But natural law would say, well, look, the law here can be a remedy. So if the law insists that you do need to replicate and even Darwinism would be making this argument, then actually you can do things around the nature of law that’s going to encourage it. Now, because, of course, can nations go off the boil, so to speak? Can they depart? This is kind of what happened with the Age of Discovery, right? The Europeans go out and they discover cultures which seem so very different, so seemingly strange. So the idea was to try to find all of these underlying dynamics thatI mean, could one correct a culture? Could one correct a civilization? It’s actually pretty interesting. People like Francisco di Vitoria, who was a Thomist around the 1500s, he was the first person to articulate the idea of regime change on the basis of natural law. He said you could meet a population that was so departed from natural law that for their own good, you could actually change their rulers. This actually is an argument that he had for the Spanish defeating the Aztecs. Now, of course, there’s all sorts of controversies and historical problems with that. But the idea that nations can go off the rails, well, we know their records. We know that’s what happened also in the 20th century. So natural law in this case then, would be a kind of an educational model in some sense, a way to help us get back to what is the highest good of a human being. Richard Reinsch:Thinking about this failing humanism problem. Is the failing humanism that we don’t actually take ourselves seriously as embodied creatures? Or take nature seriously? You have a interesting discussion about metaphysics and decapitation. It makes me wonder, is it the case that late-modern man or post-modern man or however you want to characterize this, that we don’t, in fact, take nature seriously? I mean, we’re all about the environment and nature and all that. I understand. But that we don’t think through the complexity of who we are as human beings, because I think that you think we’re kind of lost in that regard. Maybe that’s a reason why we have birth rates of 1.2, and are, as Pierre Manent would say, post-familial, post-religious, and post-political. Graham McAleer:I would say that we, and I do get from this Jesuit theologian, Erich Przywara, we also struggle between thinking of ourselves as mere bodies and at other times as angels. So it’s extremely common. In fact, one even might say a standard person deeply interested in environmentalism is also somebody who wants a radical assertion of their own autonomy. So on the one hand, the very same person who’s deeply interested in environmental stewardship might also be a big, big fan of trangenderism, which seems to be a contradiction. That a deep respect for the nature that we are gifted with versus then a sort of radical assertion of autonomy and technological transformation. This would be what I call decapitation. Sometimes we think of ourselves as angels. Richard Reinsch:Would another instance of that be the same people will tell you, “I’m an autonomous individual with natural rights, or I have so many rights, rights everywhere. But I’m fully explainable by evolution.” I’m a materialistic being. That’s who I am, a clever animal. That’s it, and then not really thinking through how does that all work. Graham McAleer: And that’s the other side of it, right? So you hear all the time people say that you shouldn’t go around repressing. What’s the problem with morality? What’s the problem with moral earnestness? Well, it’s just a repression of the powerful desires that you had better let release, otherwise you’ll become perverted and twisted. It’s a kind of a classic argument against the Catholic priesthood, that it’s ignoring this radical vitalism. So sometimes we’re these angel beings and sometimes we’re these thoroughly materialistic beings. The weird thing is, says Przywara, is that we flit rapidly between the two. So we’re not consistently one or the other. This then leads to this idea of mistaking what’s in the middle, this idea that we are bodies that can be articulated through civilization or values. Richard Reinsch:So the body is, I guess, maybe help us understand the unifying aspect there. That would help us make sense of this wild metaphysical … How should we approach that? Graham McAleer:Well, so in a classical, Aristotelian ethics, you have your desires and you need the virtues. You need the virtues to perfect your desires. For example, the problem of fear. Fear is natural enough. But there’s a right time to be fearful and there’s a wrong time to be fearful. You can overly compensate by becoming reckless. This is highly dangerous, both to yourself and to people around you. Or, of course, you can sort of undercook it and you can indeed exhibit a kind of cowardice when, in fact, you need to be strong for others. This is, for example, very frequent, we found, in the problem of parenting. Sometimes you have to be the strong one to say to the family, to a child, “Look, this just is not okay. This is going to be damaging.” A lot a parents, obviously, and especially in a more liberal society, can often evade those responsibilities. So we have this idea, inherited at least from Aristotle and also found in natural law, that we need a rational, virtuous articulation of our appetites and our bodily inclinations. Inclinations for food, safety, security, et cetera. In the book, I talk about this strange idea we find with our relationship to the embryo. On the one hand, the embryo is seen as a source of great medical potential. But on the other hand, it’s seen as something that we can be completely cavalier about. So we have this weird, schizophrenic relationship to early life. Sometimes it’s the most valuable thing in the world, so you think about all the parties celebrating the pregnancy. And sometimes it’s a thing most casually cast off and put into laboratories and spliced and diced. So sometimes the baby is sort of angelic and sometimes it’s a kind of resource. That’s even the way that people often think about their own children. The way they think about the way that sometimes parents will foster a certain kind of attitude in their children, which is that demanding of them is just far too much. We kind of ricochet between these two options of what Przywara calls vitalism on the one hand, connected with the body, and angelism, connected with the mind. But what you need to do is somehow try to hold the two in tension. Richard Reinsch:On that analogy, you have this idea, liturgy of morals and value tones as well. I want to talk about that through this great example you give, which I think our listeners will enjoy, of James Bond. How does James Bond help us understand those concepts and explicate for us post-modern natural law? Graham McAleer:Yeah, so Bond, I think, is an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a huge marketing, economic business. And if we think a little bit about, well, what is James Bond? Well, he’s a kind of powerful human physique wedded to very strong sense of justice, care of the other. Of course, this is then fed through ideas of the British establishment. He is for Queen and country. But this is the thing that I was interested in, was trying to find examples where the body is linked to establishment, where the body is linked to civilizational values. You see this, right? You see this with the way that Bond dresses, his interest in clothes, his interest in sports, his interest in cars, and, of course, his interest in games. So one of the ideas that I had was to try to think about how the natural law is linked to games and the liturgies in games. On the one hand, you hear people say, “Look, cultural relativism goes all the way down. Humans are just radically different from one another by history and by civilization.” This isn’t quite true, because one of the assured things…
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