How is it that the United States and the West have come to embrace so many views which would have been recognized by our ancestors as – individually and culturally- immoral, and suicidal? Once upon a time – the Church was the agency from whence the culture garnered direction for organization; the Church produced – an organic process – both the worldview Christendom (i.e., a rational worldview whereby God Created and intelligently organized existence; conferring upon Man the capacity to understand God’s Creation) and the University; the University organically promulgated Christendom from inception through the mid-19th Century. The University taught society’s agents-of-organization i.e., Kings, Clergy, Merchants, Law-makers, Jurists, as well as other sundry Academics… The University was a product of the worldview of Christendom and was – at one time – one of Christendom’s chief proponents in promulgating the view.
The Founding Fathers in drafting the Constitution of the United States of America presuppose an objective reality (to which an objective morality attends) a.k.a. Christendom, still the dominant University worldview – in 1789, the year the Constitution was ratified; although Kant’s 1st Critique – the Critiques of Pure Reason – had been published, in 1781. Kant’s Critique did to Christendom – more or less – what Nietzsche¹ claims: ‘I stand Plato on his head!’ to have done to Plato’s ordering of the “just man’s” soul²…
¹ Nietzsche wished (argued) to re-instate pre-Socratic virtue; unfortunately, human nobility looks much better in the epic tales Iliad and Odyssey than in real life, up close and personal…
² In The Republic of Plato, Socrates (Plato’s teacher, and surrogate and principle interlocutor throughout all of Plato’s dialogues; exception: The Laws) through the 10 books (chapters) of The Republic analogizes the ‘polis’ (city-state) to the human soul; the polis is utilized by Socrates because the soul – being too small to see – has organizing functions (parts) similar to the polis; Socrates claims 3 functions/parts, viz: the rational, the willing and the desiring parts. The three functions may be organized so as to form one of five types of Government to wit: Aristocracy, Timocracy, Democracy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny and attributes orderings to the city-state, so as to hope to come to understand what is the ordering of a human soul ordered in justice… We truncate the discussion of the Republic and cut-to-the-chase; Plato’s “just-man” soul is ordered as an Aristocracy. An aristocracy is composed with the rational-part ruling (which determines which actions ought to be chosen), and having formed a pact with the soul’s willing-part (which ensures the paths chosen by the rational part, are followed), to keep the desiring-part in check; such is the order of a soul ordered justly… “Standing Plato on his Head” places the desiring part of the soul in charge, and desire forms a pact with the willing-part to enslave reason (i.e., the rational part of the soul) so as to enable desire to most efficaciously obtain desires’ object or satiation; the inverted Plato is a tyranny…
As the Kantian critiques were gradually – to varying degrees – assimilated and synthesized by University and its educators reducing objective reality and God to agnostic principles (Kant happily understood and anticipated this; he celebrated a faith devoid of a philosophical grounding ala Martin Luther; Kant wanted things religious reduced to faith alone… Problem: faith – separated from reason – generally becomes irrational; witness Islam…); eventually, gradually – via an organic intellectual synthesis – the erstwhile intellectual-citadel (University), promulgator and disseminator or universal truths became an institute of ideology (note: We’ll define ideology, thusly: “a systematic characterization of existence, which has been ascribed its character as a product and contingency of the subjective mind/consciousness…”). As the University was: ‘turned-on-its-head,’ the erstwhile dominant rational weltanschauung Christendom, was replaced by irrational worldviews (note plurality) – given they are subjective (contingencies of the subjective mind of individuals); there is as many possible worldviews as there are minds…
Now – as Christendom was a rational³ worldview and society – its antithesis is ever increasingly irrational… And where a rational worldview produces sane, moral beings – beings which seek to conform/align their actions/choices to the positive law, wherein the positive law reflects the natural law, which was written into Nature, by Nature’s God – an irrational worldview produces irrational, insane, lawless individuals – individuals enslaved by their passions; incontinent creatures who more-and-more are incapable of subordinating their immediate interests/desires to the general-welfare – or any of remaining 5 goals of the U. S. Constitution’s Preamble, or to any principle of morality whatsoever… All of this follows from a gradual synthesis and inversion of the University (Kant’s Copernican Revolution) which has led to a gradual general rejection of the remnants of institutionalized Christendom as society gradually and generally as a society “turned-Plato-on-the-head” vis-à-vis millions upon millions of individuals souls not being given the moral (rational) measure (restraint) which formerly animated us citizens of Western Culture (Christendom)… So as we return to consider Plato’s “just-man” – realizing such is the disposition – anticipated by the Constitution of the United States – a disposition which has largely been nearly universally vacated; this while souls inversely disposed – possessed by a tyrannical mien – are now more-and-more becoming the order-of-the-day… God, help us all!
³For simplicity let us state rational is the worldview, is one in which existents have been given a definitive measure – called a “nature” or “essence” – by God. As existents i.e., “things” – have natures, they have obligatory accommodations which attend to those natures; these obligatory accommodations are also known as aspects of the natural law…
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