When Scientism Meets Humanism

Anthony Kronman is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, and his latest book, True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age, offers a fresh conservative theory. The argument starts from his conviction that the Enlightenment’s ideals of equality, toleration, and scientific rationality define “the civilization we call home.” He believes there is “wide and stable agreement” about the worth of these liberal principles, so our political problem is that of the classical humanist: how best to cultivate the soul morally and aesthetically.

True Conservatism insightfully poses a double challenge. On the one hand, it forces conservatives to lay their cards on the table. Is their anti-modernism really a dissent from the high ideals of the Enlightenment? For instance, post-liberal conservatism argues that liberalism incubates massive and recalcitrant inequalities between city and countryside, white- and blue-collar workers, and the oligarchs of the contemporary means of communication and users. The core complaint is a shortfall in equality, confirming Kronman’s observation that “we are all progressives by default.” If conservatism is to resonate, it must make an honest peace with modernity. 

On the other hand, Kronman challenges progressives. Are we wise to junk a tradition that taught the West how learning and beauty train the proud to gloriously manage their passions? Are we edified by immodestly mocking an inheritance that has made us more cultured? If conservatism must reconcile with modernity, progressivism must embrace the humanist’s cultivation of excellence and piety. 

Kronman superbly frames politics between Enlightenment rule of law and the humanist’s refined liberty. He is a syncretic thinker—which I admire—but has he done enough to show how Enlightenment rationalism sits comfortably with humanism?

False Conservatisms 

Descartes kicked off modernity with the epistemological problem of whether we ever know the world around us, and Kronman holds fast to verifiable knowledge: “the truth is preeminently what science declares it to be.” Much of Kronman’s conservatism stems from his love of the Great Books, but nowhere does he dwell on the varieties of evidence and proof that humanism employs. The humanist’s broad theory of truth haunts Kronman’s treatment of allegiance, specifically his struggle to find a stable place for love within his reason-based political order. 

Kronman argues that the progressive’s skepticism towards love of family, nation, and God mutilates the spirit. Historically, conservative allegiance follows the ordo amoris. A recent controversy in American politics, the order of charity depicts love expanding from self to family, then community and country, and finally cresting in love of God. Metaphysically, these ordered loves cascade from the font of God’s love. Kronman’s anxiety over the voluntarism in Christianity’s cosmology of love makes Kronman privilege the God of the arch rationalist, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a deity that does not love. Kronman’s appeasement of scientific progressivism triggers a theoretical incongruity that ill suits humanist elegance. The incongruity is that Spinoza’s God does not ground the ordo amoris. We love and sacrifice; God does not. 

True Conservatism opens: “The rich and enlightened societies of the modern West are the most prosperous, tolerant and democratic the world has ever known … a sober observer may be forgiven for thinking that ours is the most brilliant civilization that has ever existed—because it is.” An echo of the famous End of History thesis by Francis Fukuyama is clearly heard, and Kronman believes the achievement of the Enlightenment emboldens progressives to further enshrine liberal ideals in our institutions and mores. After all, liberal nations have been, he believes, “the leading edge of a global revolution,” one that has defeated “the great reactionary movements.” 

Churlishly discounting this great achievement, “the conservative cause has lost its way,” concludes Kronman. His resources are the Great Books, and so recent conservative theorists are not highlighted—there is no mention of Roger Scruton or Patrick Deneen, and Alasdair MacIntyre only gets brief mention in a footnote. Enough is said, however, to help us place Kronman’s theory amongst contemporary options. 

Libertarians, he argues, exaggerate equality since they validate any consumer choice, even if it offends “beauty and truth.” Neutral about value preferences, libertarianism undermines “the Ciceronian ideal of connoisseurship,” where the arts and sciences build character. Amongst other false conservatisms presented, Scruton likely qualifies as a Humean. In David Hume’s political thought, custom orients us politically. With its emphasis on history, Kronman concludes that Hume’s politics is an irrationalism, of a piece with his skepticism towards science as hard truth.

In Kronman’s telling, even an Aristotelian-Thomist like MacIntyre is ultimately wedded to Christian voluntarism, obedient to mysteries that cannot be rationally explained. Deneen’s post-liberal political theology similarly falls foul of the same irrationalism. 

Delusional Progressivism

Contemporary conservatism fails because it either undermines human grandeur or is irrational. Progressivism also has deep problems, however. Riding the coattails of scientific progress, progressivism is a “destructive illusion,” victim to arrogant self-sufficiency. Our “ruling prejudices” maintain that God is merely a private belief, nation an accidental attachment, and forebearers worthy only of criticism, not care. This lack of humility is not a recipe for ennoblement. Historically, Western achievement has built on the legacy of classical humanism.

Bedeviling our age is “the demotion of excellence,” the product of “a spirit of plebiscitarian rule.” Contrasting with our egalitarian self-congratulation, “judgements of rank are pervasive in classical literature and philosophy.” Kronman credits Augustine with moderating “Cicero’s aristocratic hauteur,” but after egalitarian exaggeration, Christian beneficence itself needs tempering by the cut and thrust of Attic competition. 

Christianity softened ancient aggression by proposing that all humans are created in the image of God, an image of love between persons. Since Christian conservatism is unworkable, a better foundation for equality is needed. The imago dei is, Kronman cleverly proposes, merely “an interpretative gloss on a more primitive duty,” one better captured by Heidegger’s idea of the clearing. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) excavated the early Greek astonishment at the sheer fact of human intellect. Of a piece with his rationalism, Kronman believes that intellection provides better protection of human worth than the capacity of persons for love: moral consideration is owed to “all who share the experience of standing out from the world in the ecstatic awareness of time that is the root of every human endeavor.” Appreciating that persons are “companions of the clearing” secures equality, thinks Kronman, and in addition, empowers liberty to act again on the humanist’s appreciation that “excellence is sovereign among values.” 

Tying dignity to intellectualism comes with a cost, however, and undermines Kronman’s account of friendship. 

To the equality, toleration, and scientific rationality that define us, Kronman should have added commerce. Our civilization is the product of an Industrial Enlightenment, and I wish Kronman had spent time on Adam Smith, specifically his portrait of a true friend. The amiable man, says Smith, is someone of “the most exquisite sensibility” who through sympathetic restraint aligns his sentiments with those around him: “When we bring home to ourselves the situation of his companions, we enter into their gratitude, and feel what consolation they must derive from the tender sympathy of so affectionate a friend.” 

Equating God with an eternal cosmos, Spinoza rejected the idea of creation ex nihilo. He did so, because orthodox Christianity must finally fold into the act of an “unfathomable will.”

The political problem of law and liberty requires the balance of sense and sensibility. Alert to the debt all owe to family, country, and the divine, conservatism reasonably adds humility to liberal self-assertion. This necessary supplement regards sentiment, not axioms. Humanist modesty is less about judgement and more about trust, less about propositions and more about gratitude. Hence, Aristotle’s wide definition of reasonableness in Poetics: “Under reasoning fall those effects which must be produced by language; these include proof and refutation, the production of emotions (e.g. pity, fear, anger, etc.), and also establishing importance and unimportance.”

Consistent with his rationalism, Kronman employs a cognitive account of friendship. His model is biography. “Who are we, really? We wonder but never know. Only our successors are in a position to say.” A biographer, Kronman argues, makes a person better known—but not necessarily better loved. Family members and ancestors, says Kronman, “deserve the honest afterlife that only their successors can give them.” The same turn to honest appraisal of friends figures in Kronman’s patriotism. 

“A life without patriotism is as incomplete in human terms as a life without friends and for the same reason.” All have need of roots, he believes, and the peculiarities of geography and history are inescapable. “The goal of American life is to make it possible for each of us to be proud of our accidental inheritance.” Lest he go back into Hume, however, Kronman emphasizes judgment: even more than a friend under a searching biographical lens, country is “more properly subject to moral review.” Once under judgment, loyalty “to the good in an inheritance” can be calibrated. We are far from Smith’s idea of amiable friendship. Rather, a rational probing of allegiance is the first emphasis, not gratitude for, and taking consolation in, familial and national inheritance.

Reason and Roses

The progressive’s marginalization of the divine is a losing wicket, says Kronman, for “every religion is a response to the universal human longing for a connection to eternity.” However, progressives are right to be suspicious of Christianity. If Spinoza is the hero of the argument, Augustine is its villain. To be modern, conservatism must separate itself from the irrationalism of Augustine’s voluntaristic cosmology of love. About good political order, Kronman says, “the post-Augustinian answer is, only an order that has been freely willed by the individual or community whose order it is.” This voluntaristic construction was unknown to the ancients, and only with Spinoza is a complete rationalism reintroduced into the West. 

Spinoza offers, Kronman relates, “a God that is nothing but explanation and necessity, from whose nature the orthodox Christian attributes of freedom and will have been completely expunged” (emphasis original). Equating God with an eternal cosmos, Spinoza rejected the idea of creation ex nihilo. He did so because orthodox Christianity must finally fold into the act of an “unfathomable will.” To the mystery of uncaused action, Spinoza opposed “implacable logic,” and only the latter is compatible with scientific positivism, believes Kronman. 

Kronman’s presentation of Spinoza makes explicit the tension that dogs his effort to reconcile scientism and humanism. Quoting Spinoza, Kronman relays that God is “a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essence.” There is thus an “infinite gap”—and not an analogy—between God and humans. By contrast, the long humanist tradition—ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern—relies on congruity (convenientia) for the link between God, cosmos, and persons. In humanism, congruity connotes a comely and harmonious connection rather than strict implication. 

Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric gives an example of congruity. He argues that in addition to science there are proofs of character that persuade: “Proofs from character are produced, whenever speech is given in such a way as to render the speaker worthy of credence—we more readily and sooner believe reasonable men on all matters in general and absolutely where precision is impossible and two views can be maintained.” In appealing to the person of Jesus, Christian humanism dwells on a person’s character to convey the difficult truth that friendship involves sacrifice (John 21:15-25). The life of Jesus is a reasonable proof that love and sacrifice are the height of humility and grandeur. 

An example of an incongruity is Spinoza’s God of necessity and implacability, which is not an example of divine friendship and sacrifice in sympathy with our friendship and sacrifice. Dante’s rose explains. True Conservatism closes by reflecting on Spinoza’s signet ring engraved with a rose along with the Latin Caute, meaning caution. The lesson of the ring, proposes Kronman, is the conservative truth that wariness must attend endeavor. In contrast, the humanist Dante depicts cosmic order as a comely rose. In the rose, the world of spirits coheres with humans, the petals and the Trinity, the ovary (Paradiso XXXI). In a congruous conservative humanism, Dante has the angels flitting around like bees “inflowering” the people with the divine sacrificial love of which human dignity is worthy.