In honor of the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas) yesterday, this quote:
The new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. . . . [W]ith each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before. If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living among equals.
--Hannah Arendt, THE HUMAN CONDITION
And something very similar is true for the will, which neither reason nor desire can move. “Nothing other than the Will is the total cause of volition” (“nihil aliud a voluntate est causa totalis volitionis in voluntate”), in the striking formula of Duns Scotus, or “voluntas vult se velle” (“the will wills itself to will”), as even Thomas, the least voluntaristic of those who thought about this faculty, had to admit.
Democratic society as a living reality is threatened at the very moment that democracy becomes a “cause,” because then actions are likely to be judged and opinions evaluated in terms of ultimate ends and not on their inherent merits. The democratic way of life can be threatened only by people who see everything as a means to an end, i.e., in some necessary chain of motives and consequences, and who are prone to judge actions “objectively,” independent of the conscious motives of the doer, or to deduce certain consequences from opinions of which the holder is unaware.
Holling asks: “Is the reserve and insurance that the resilience of nature has given us going to be the very attribute that blocks people’s abilities to perceive and adapt to abrupt change on planetary scales?”
Reason may (as Hobbes and his liberal followers argued) instruct us in virtue, but this is likely to be effective only for philosophers. The rest of us need stronger medicine. Without such medicine, the sentiment that keeps individuals law-abiding even in the absence of positive law is fated to grow ever weaker as reason succumbs to passion.
Mores are a matter not of rational calculation but of heartfelt conviction.
“For most of history, life has been hierarchical. A few have enjoyed the privileges that come from monopolizing violence. Everyone else has dug.”
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