Religion of Humanity
We can’t help it, we’re human, we necessarily have worldviews. Everybody does. The Resistance does too, rough hewn, in the aggregate, and tacit as it may be. Now it is time to take a look squarely at the Resistance’s main object of concern: Humanity itself. The Resistance declares itself “inclusive” and it hates “exclusion.” Its vision and its concern encompass all of humanity. But not all “humanisms” are created equal. But what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Who is to say that Resistance humanism is unquestionable?
Progressivism in the Resistance
In a first installment (“Resistance, in the light of 1776”), following the lead of Pierre Manent, the Resistance came to sight as a way of looking at things characterized by 1) a binary view of legitimate and illegitimate views (in keeping with Hilary Clinton’s “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it” litany); 2) a quasi-religious cast (“political orthodoxy” and “heresy,” observed Manent); and 3) a novel form of democracy characterized by terms such as “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” and “inclusion,” but with its own blind spots and exclusions. As I put it: it is “rather exclusive in its inclusivity and monolithic in its view of diversity.”
Pierre Manent’s Defense of the Nation-State
"The nation-state extended civic life, the condition of ‘living free’—which until then had been the privilege of only a small number."
Palais Bourbon (seat of the National Assembly) in Paris at dusk.Responses
One could hardly agree more with Paul Seaton when he writes, in the June Liberty Forum essay, that the elegant voice of Pierre Manent is one that we should listen to carefully these days, as our liberal democracies are on the defensive on both sides of the Atlantic, threatened by the rise of populism and…
In the wake of the rubble and death left strewn across Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga after two brutal wars in the space of 30 years, it was understandable that many Europeans wanted to severely tame the nation-state in 1945. What a stark domestication could portend, though, was hardly thought about. That supranational…
It has been a great pleasure for me to read Paul Seaton’s stimulating Liberty Forum essay dedicated to the political thought of Pierre Manent. With chagrin, I can report to Law and Liberty’s readers that Manent is better known and more read by American scholars than by French ones. Let this response to Seaton be an…
Perhaps the nascent Manent fan club can meet in Paris at the Café de Flore later this summer? There we could raise un verre or two to Manent, expound on our views, and hash out whatever differences we might have. Who knows, perhaps the man himself could join us? Pending that reunion, a brief response…
In my response to Paul Seaton’s Liberty Forum essay, I mentioned once the phrase “religion of humanity” that can be found in Manent’s works. As Professor Seaton points out, this is an important concept that the French philosopher uses to explain the current trend toward homogeneity in the world. Seaton claims that the term was…
The Impotence of the Kantian Republic
People lay flowers and messages in St Ann's Square in Manchester, England, placed in tribute to the victims of the May 22 terror attack at the Manchester Arena. (BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images)When a young man such as Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, blows himself up, killing as many others as he can take with him, it is only natural for us to ask why he acted as he did. His behavior is so extraordinary, as well as evil, and so far beyond the range of normal, that we are inclined to seek for an answer in his personal psychopathology. Only the mad would do such a thing; and since he did it, we conclude that he must have been mad.
On the Pleasures of Humanitarian Anger
I never see the International Herald Tribune except in airport lounges or in the lobbies of hotel where it seems to be given away like improving literature or left as missionaries were once said to leave tracts on trains in the hope of converts. And thus it was, the other day, that I happened upon a copy and, having a few minutes to wait, read it.
The cartoon in the paper was what mainly sparked my interest. It showed Pope Francis, arms outstretched in a gesture of ecumenical welcome, his face beaming with self-approbation, denying that he was one to judge a homosexual. To his side and slightly behind him was a woman demanding to know about his attitude to women.
If cartoons are supposed to raise a laugh this one failed by quite a wide margin but there was nevertheless a certain amount of irony in it, though I suspect that it was unintended. For the woman was dressed in a T-short, her body was pear-shaped and her countenance, framed by a pudding-bowl coiffure of black hair, was that of an angry, belligerent and above all self-righteous termagant.
