The View From Nowhere

• 3 years ago

By JUDE DOUGHERTY

“The view from nowhere” is a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel in a book he published in 1986 by that name. Nagel spoke of the negative effect of reporting that claimed to be neutral, where opposing views, or persons are granted equal validly or deemed equally of a hearing. Supposed impartiality is believed to give the “balanced” report universal or moral legitimacy, denied to anyone who dares to defend a particular point of view.

Failure to recognize truth in the pursuit of impartiality is particularly egregious in discussions of sexual morality. Pretending that a homosexual union is morally equivalent with a procreative union prevents one from addressing the question of the good or purpose of sexual activity.

Aristotle stands to remind us, to promote good conduct is to explain its purpose. To judge is normally regarded as an assessment made from a perspective. Judged in terms of purpose, the value of homosexual activity, like other forms of hedonism, is suspect. Purpose, it can be said, is written into the laws of nature.

Viewed from an historical perspective, the sanctions which the nation once habitually acknowledged have long been eroded by the acid of modernity. As any social observer is likely to report, an authoritative code of morals has force and effect only when it expresses the settled customs of a stable society.

It is a Christian perspective — specifically, a Catholic perspective — that I wish to talk about. The Ten Commandments, which used to be displayed prominently in primary schools throughout the nation, antedates Christianity and is rightly a component of Catholic moral teaching; so too is much of Stoic moral teaching.

The Church, it may be said, has not so much produced a common morality as it has endorsed the highest moral principles acknowledged by mankind. That morality, suffused with the teachings of Christ, is expressed in His words: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light.”

In speaking of a Christian point of view, I am reminded of Dorothy Sayers magnificent 1947 Oxford University address, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” available in several sites on the Internet. In this address she speaks of the order in which education in the important things should be advanced. Children at an early age should be taught Greek and Latin. “At a grammatical age we [they] should become acquainted with the story of God and Man in outline — i.e., the Old and New Testaments presented as parts of a single narrative of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption — and also the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. At this stage it does not matter so much that these things should be fully understood as that they should be known and remembered.”

The grammatical stage is followed by the second and third parts of the trivium, that of logic and rhetoric. It is in the logical stage that the pupil learns algebra, geometry, and the more advanced form of mathematics. Logic, Sayers notes, has been discredited partly because we have come to suppose that we are conditioned by the intuitive and the unconscious. At the rhetorical stage the student will find that logic is the art of correctly organizing an argument.

An egregious example of the failure to place things is a proper perspective is found in the recent action of the curators of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as reported by Eric Gibson in The Wall Street Journal (November 5, 2020). Under the title, “An Icon Museum at the Cross Roads” Gibson tells us that a visitor to the museum will now read at the entrance to a celebratory exhibit — “Making the Met, 1817 to 2020”: “The museum’s founders hailed from white Protestant and New York society” as if that were an important factor.

Gibson comments: “Ominous are indications that the Met’s leadership has bought the notion of museums as dens of inequity in need of makeover and plans to replace the old universalist’s model with an ideological, sectarian approach to its collections and exhibitions.”

Whether that proves to be so or not remains to be seen. The point I am making is that the Met’s collection did not arise from nowhere, but developed in a cultural context beautifully described by Dorothy Sayers. Toward the end of her essay, Sayers makes another well-known observation worth repeating:

“Many people today who were atheist or agnostic and religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it. But one cannot live on capital for ever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies.”