Aristotle was not much of an empiricist. He observed but he did not experiment. Both Aristotle and Socrates based their pursuit of the truth on rational argumentation, not experimentation. . Aristotle thought you had to go out and look at the world but the testing of the conclusions one drew from such observation was left to logic. Testing the results of ones logical process by comparing its predictions to the real world was an alien idea. Indeed, we know of early greek empiricist like Democritis (who demonstrated the particulate nature of air) only through mocking references made by Aristotle to him. The idea of using nature as the tester of truth and not the reason of man flourished only briefly among the Ionians and disappeared almost entirely until Roger Bacon (the monk) and then Galileo.

The philosophical or proto-scientific methods of inquiry in the West did not differ much from those used in other regions such as China, India or the Islamic world until the Renaissance. I think it was the application of empirical testing, done consciously in the sciences and unconsciously in economics and politics that caused the explosion in Western power at that time.

“I suspect [the terrorists’ resentment] is also an unwillingness to concede the order that lies within our chaos, to concede that man, innately sinful perhaps, but also capable of great virtues, is in the end capable of ordering a communal life of freedom and liberty, choice and responsibility.”

With this, Ginny comes to the heart of our war with OBL and his ilk. America was founded on the proposition that sinful human beings can govern themselves and produce a state in which genuine freedom and liberty coexist with genuine order and responsibility. How have, up until now at least, Americans been able to pull this off? In a famous passage Alexis de Tocqueville provides an answer: “The revolutionists of America are obliged to profess an ostensible respect for Christian morality and equity, which does not permit them to violate wantonly the laws that oppose their desires; nor would they find it easy to surmount the scruples of their partisans even if they were able to get over their own. Hitherto, none in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible for the interests of society, an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all future tyrants. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving and forbids them to commit what is rash or unjust.” (DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, Volume 1, Chapter 17, Section 5)

In his WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS: CATHOLIC REFLECTIONS ON THE AMERICAN PROPOSITION, the late great America Jesuit, Father John Courtney Murray, develops an argument along Tocquevillean lines: “In any phase, civil society demands order. In its highest phase of freedom, it demands that order should not be imposed from the top down, as it were, but should spontaneously flower outward from the free obedience to the restraints and imperatives that stem from inwardly possessed moral principle. In this sense democracy is more than a political experiment; it is a spiritual and moral enterprise, and its success depends upon the virtue of the people who undertake it. Men who would be politically free must discipline themselves . . . . Political freedom is endangered in its foundations as soon as the universal moral values, upon whose shared possession the self-discipline of a free society depends, are no longer vigorous enough to restrain the passions and shatter the selfish inertia of men. The American ideal of freedom as ordered freedom, and, therefore, an ethical ideal, has traditionally reckoned with these truths, these truisms.” (WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS, p. 37)

Father Murray also observed that “[America] has never known organized militant atheism on the Jacobin, doctrinaire socialist or communist model; it has rejected parties and theories which erect atheism into a political principle.” (WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS, p. 29) What Father Murray maintains here may have been true when he wrote it in 1960. It’s an open question whether it’s still true today. Thus, while we certainly don’t seek a Taliban style theocracy, neither should we seek models that “erect atheism into a political principle.” Rather we should seek models that allow order to “spontaneously flower outward from the free obedience to the restraints and imperatives that stem from inwardly possessed moral principle.” In other words, we should seek a model similar to the one de Tocqueville found in the America of 1831.

AM Link Roundup

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This represents a near complete reversal of the tenets of pre-Enlightenment cultures where unchallenged ideas were considered the best. To such cultures, the empirical West looks like a culture without either order or truth. Even worse, the West is so much more powerful and prosperous than those cultures. The mere existence of the West threatens their entire world model. It implies that everything they believe about morality maybe wrong.