miercuri, 1 iulie 2015

Elita interesată, creştinul interesant şi dispariţia normalităţii



“Decent, morally serious men and women, and Christians above all, must resist normalization of the abnormal with all their resources,” îndeamnă R. V. Young într-un eseu publicat recent în Touchstone Magazine (“Of Bicycles, Sex, & Natural Law, Touchstone Magazine, May/June, 2015, http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=28-03-038-f ). Un eseu pe care ortodocşii români de astăzi care citesc şi altceva în afară de Visul Maicii Domnului nu au cum să-l citească, captivaţi cum sunt de eseurile intelectualilor creştini ocupaţi cu anormalizarea normalului de la catedra Dilemei Vechi la amvonul Ziarului Lumina, şi ale căror prelegeri/predici sunt ulterior multiplicate şi difuzate de nenumăraţii asistenţi şi studenţi devotaţi. Nu-i de mirare aşadar că normalizarea anormalului s-a aşternut peste noi pe nesimţite, denunţarea ei devenind practic ininteligibilă.  
David Bentley Hart este un autor introdus în România de Mihail Neamţu, mai întâi în paginile revistei Idei în Dialog, apoi prin studiul introductiv la cartea lui Hart, Frumuseţea infinitului. Estetica adevărului creştin (Polirom, 2013, traducere de Vlad (Nectarie) Daraban, studiu introductiv deVlad (Nectarie) Daraban şi Mihail Neamţu, http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/frumusetea-infinitului-estetica-adevarului-cresti-5209/). O carte în care autorul “incearca o regasire a intelesului crestin clasic al frumosului si sublimului si a relatiei lor cu fiinta.”
La vremea apariţiei cărţii sale în România, Hart tocmai lucra la justificarea desprinderii gândirii (creştine) de legea morală; gândirea şi comportamentul uman ar găsi ordine mai degrabă în domeniul frumuseţii decât în cel al naturii. Concret, o suită pentru violoncel ne-ar putea ajuta să descoperim binele mai degrabă decât propria inimă. Şi, în orice caz, chiar dacă am rata binele, tot ar rămâne ceva – am rămâne cultivaţi şi, cum bine subliniază R. V. Young, „interesanţi”.
Să fii interesant compensează cumva limitarea pe care ţi-o aduce statutul de fiinţă creată: unul îşi face un tatuaj, altul îl citează pe Pleşu. Te simţi puţin nesigur, te ia o uşoară ameţeală, iată euforia rezervată oamenilor interesanţi. Mă întreb dacă nu cumva, în momentul scrierii acestor rânduri, cineva tocmai îşi tatuează un citat din Pleşu. Sau din Lavric. Sau din Neamţu. Sau din Baconschi. Sau din Patapievici. Sau din oricare alt intelectual interesat să ne vadă pe toţi interesanţi.
Declinul legii morale nu este determinat, aşa cum vrea David Bentley Hart, de o „înţelegere inadecvată a realităţilor vieţii omeneşti”, ci este, după cum se poate vedea din eseul lui Young, „rezultatul răzvrătirii elitei culturale contemporane împotriva statutului omului de fiinţă creată.” David Bentley Hart face parte din tabăra celor care „urăsc logosul”, refuză realitatea şi se ocupă cu „demontarea temeliilor morale” (intertitluri din studiul lui R. V. Young); care susţin, împreună cu filozoful (şi regizorul) Woody Allen, celebrat cu ceva timp în urmă de teologul Teodor Baconschi în paginile Dilemei, dreptul fiecărui om de a face orice voieşte şi de a fi orice voieşte.  

Iată în continuare un fragment lămuritor din eseul menţionat:

A neo-conservative shrug of the shoulders about so frivolous a worry as "just another step in the decline of the West" is hardly surprising. More troubling is the view of the Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, eminent foe of the "new atheists" and the scientism generally regnant among our cultural elite. Writing in First Things in March 2013, he maintained that contemporary invocations of natural law as a rhetorical strategy in moral discourse must inevitably fail, because "in an age that has been shaped by a mechanistic understanding of the physical world, a neo-Darwinian view of life, and a voluntarist understanding of the self, nature's 'laws' must appear to be anything but moral." Besides, even if one can perceive an order and purpose in nature, modern men and women will be swayed by the eighteenth-century skepticism of David Hume, who argued that an "ought" cannot logically be derived from an "is."
Two issues later, in the wake of a predictable torrent of dismay in the magazine's "letters to the editor" section, Dr. Hart took up the issue again, defending himself against misunderstandings (e.g., he is not himself a follower of Hume) and against the "two-tier Thomism" of Edward Feser, and insisting that natural law theorizing is an inadequate form of moral reasoning, because there is no clear line between the natural and supernatural and hence no way that philosophy, using natural reason, can "achieve definitive moral demonstrations": "There is no single master discourse here, for the good can be known, only by being seen, before and beyond all words."
Now I shan't enter into an argument about the intricacies of natural law and the debates among natural law philosophers over whose version is preferable. I am curious, however, about what might be an effective apologia for traditional morality in view of the presumptive failure of natural-law reasoning to be persuasive. Here is what Dr. Hart offers at the conclusion of his second commentary on the subject:

Certain fundamental moral truths . . . may necessarily remain unintelligible to someone incapable of appreciating Bach's fifth Unaccompanied Cello Suite. For some it may seem an outrageous notion that, rather than a collection of purportedly incontrovertible proofs, the correct rhetoric of moral truth consists in a richer but more unmasterable appeal to the full range of human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual. I, however, see it as rather glorious: a confirmation that our whole being, in all its dimensions, is a single gracious vocation out of nonexistence to the station of created gods.

Let us proceed on the surmise that Dr. Hart's grand peroration means that it is incumbent upon upholders of traditional morality to be far more cultivated, imaginative, and interesting.
First, there is the is/ought problem: Does this problem, in fact, fatally undermine the rudimentary grasp of natural law among men and women who would be hard-pressed to identify an instrument as a cello if they heard one playing "Turkey in the Straw"? C. S. Lewis did not think so. In The Abolition of Man, he not only concedes but even urges the proposition that an ought cannot be derived from an is. At least, not at first. The basic moral norms, accepted by all men and women in virtually all societies and civilizations must first be recognized and acknowledged intuitively, or they will not be known at all. Natural law is not a means of proving the basic principles of right and wrong, good and evil, but rather a way of explaining what most of us, in fact, have already realized.
Precisely in order to avoid the kind of hair-splitting about the nuances of natural law in which Dr. Hart indulges, Lewis called the self-evident principles of natural law the Tao—the "Way" in Asian teaching. "You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao," Lewis writes. "Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined." Similarly, you must not demand that upholders of the moral law be perfect in their practice and winsomely engaging in their demeanor in order to grant the traditional teaching credibility.
[...] Aesthetic awareness is clearly no guarantee of moral clarity. Natural law arguments, David Bentley Hart to the contrary notwithstanding, do not fail to convince dissenters against traditional morality because the dissenters have devised or encountered more effective arguments. They refuse to be convinced because they are what Socrates in the Phaedo calls misologists—haters of argument. Socrates' point is that we really cannot do without argument, without logos—or in Hamlet's phrase, "discourse of reason."
We should also remember that a hater of logos, or human reason, is inevitably going to reject the term with a capital letter, Logos, the Word of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. For our grasp of the rudimentary precepts of natural law, before we have a theory about it, is simply our awareness, in keeping with our individual capacity, of the moral meaning inherent in our humanity.
[...] Natural law has not failed because it is an inadequate understanding of the realities of human life. Insofar as it has "failed," this is the result of rebellion against the limited creaturely status of human beings on the part of the contemporary cultural elite, provoked by many factors, including, no doubt, a large dose of technological hubris. But there is no alternative to something like natural law, because, whether formulated well or poorly, it is simply a recognition of the reality of what men and women are and of their actual situation in this world."
(R. V. Young, “Of Bicycles, Sex, & Natural Law”, Touchstone Magazine, http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=28-03-038-f ).