When Trump ran for president, the party of Free America collapsed into its own hollowness. The mass of Republicans were not constitutional originalists, libertarian free traders, members of the Federalist Society, or devout readers of The Wall Street Journal. They wanted government to do things that benefited them—not the undeserving classes below and above them. Party elites were too remote from Trump’s supporters and lulled by their own stale rhetoric to grasp what was happening.
Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human.
“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity,” [William] James wrote, “loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.”
What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.
"The determining factor in the self is consciousness; i.e., self – consciousness. The more consciousness the more self; the more consciousness the more will, the more will the more self. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of the limited and the unlimited which is related to itself and the task of which is to become a self, a task which can be realized only in relation to God. To become a self means to become concrete. But to become concrete means to be neither limited nor unlimited, for that which must becomes concrete is a synthesis. Therefore development consists in this: that in the eternalization of the self one escapes the self endlessly and in the temporization of the self one endlessly returns to the self."
Kierkegaard, quoted in Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: Vol. 1 Human Nature.
[T]he nation is a corporate unity held together much more by force and emotion than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without self-criticism and no self-criticism without the rational capacity for self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 88.
