The "Bridge to Being" Blog

ADDENDUM

 

My two pieces, The New Social Compact and Dialogic Imperative (see the immediately preceding post) have already produced interesting and revealing responses among friends, family and correspondents.

 

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Here is one sample from the thoughtful left-of-center:

 

Ayn Rand is a "visionary" for the Anti Democratic forces of Darkness.  What have you read lately?

 

MY REPLY:

 

I quoted from Ms. Rand’s speech to a West Point Graduating Academy because her commonsense and passionate defense of philosophy was the best ever made, in my opinion.  Your question deserves a longer and more complicated answer, but this will have to do.

 

I admire Ayn Rand’s eloquent and accessible defense of philosophy as such, (as in Philosophy, Who Needs it?), and her defense of romantic literature, carefully and intelligently defined (in The Romantic Manifesto), and her fine tuned rationality - reminiscent of Bertrand Russell (with whom I also disagreed on many issues). 

 

Her powers of analysis were particularly admirable in An Objectivist Epistemology.  And I still agree strongly with her defense of creative freedom in The Fountainhead.  

 

In all, with warts acknowledged, Ayn Rand made valuable contributions to the ongoing dialogic.  

 

For my part, I depart from her resolute uncharitable ethos, her narrow atheism and her flashes of unreasonable arrogance.   But the same sorts of things can be said of Sartre and many of the other intellectual heroes of the left, many of who were poseurs who left no lasting philosophical legacy –not in her league.  

 

The “forces of Darkness” - in my universe anyway - gestate in the overheated minds that are self-disabled by ideology.  These minds are incapable of dialogue in the sense that any authentic dialogic requires deep listening by each participant.  Jacob Needleman's Why Can't We Be Good contains important insights into this.  I was privileged to see him (sharp as a needle in his 80's) when he described the deep conversations between students holding polar opposite views that he conducted in his philosophy classes.  Listening long and attentively enough to the “other” eventually pierces the ideologically self-inflicted mindset and allows for creative breakthroughs.  

 

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From an academic on the right of center:

 

“You're preaching to the converted. Conservatives and Christians already believe what you urge.”

 

MY REPLY:

Many of my conservative friends who are religious hate Ayn Rand, while others disdain philosophy and still others reject dialogue with anyone who fundamentally disagrees with the right. 

 

Many members of the “choir/converted/comfortably complacent” are unable to defend their positions except by reference to their ideological catechisms, much as the liberals for whom the contemporary left/progressive doctrine is itself a secular religion. 

 

They suffer from a malady that Ayn Rand has aptly described – the inability to think in principles.

 

Few on either side of the ideological chasms have a clue just how much danger threatens the very survival of contemporary Western civilization, or just how FRAGILE any liberty-friendly zone is, or just how much heavy lifting the whole business of keeping civilization alive and well is required, and just how close we really are to a new Dark Age. 

This is one of those tipping points in history.

 

Recently I reread Thomas Cahill's little masterpiece (How the Irish Saved Civilization), and I was impressed at how tellingly his concise, several-page summary of the fall of Rome echoed growing elements in the deterioration of the Western model of civilization.

 

But it does little good to sound an apocalyptic alarm unless you are also proposing a prescription, one that – in this case – can be heard across several growing chasms.  

 

MY ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:

 

Set aside the “bad empire got what it deserved” question.  Rome was a decaying bureaucratic state whose core elites had lost resolution, purpose and moral integrity.  They had formed the first attempt at an almost-modern civilization, but weren’t up to the moral, practical and political challenges.  Something new under the sun was needed.

 

But when any large swath of civilization goes under, as the Roman Imperium did, the effect on everyone else is like being in a rowboat far from land when a huge nearby ocean going vessel suddenly capsizes.  Being sucked under far from shore is typically fatal.  I am personally persuaded that the submergence of Western civilization would usher in a new Dark Age.  Empires come and go, but whole civilizations do not dissolve without lasting malign consequences, especially now in this culturally fragmented and interlinked age of ours.

 

A true dialogic is our bridge for survival.  But the very term has been confused with the therapeutic model, those superficial chats among New Age types, or trivialized as the occasional pragmatic discussions than can fleetingly unite left and right neighbors (“How about that leaking sewer?”), all without scratching the surface.

 

We need locate the underlying universal principles; we need allow them to center the discussion and then we need move into a dialogic that has one overriding purpose: Saving, preserving and growing a creative civilization.

 

Another article of mine, LAMB, Legal And Moral Boundaries as Civilization’s Life Support is posted at this LINK:

http://www.jaygaskill.com/ProjectLamb.htm 

A downloadable version of this article, in pdf format with graphics, is available on request.

JBG