After the Flight 93 Election

The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose

Michael Anton

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781641770613
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In September 2016, the provocative essay "The Flight 93 Election" galvanized many voters by spotlighting the stakes ahead in November and reproaching complacent elements of the Right. It also drew disparagement from many who judged it too apocalyptic in its assessment of the options facing the electorate.Its author, Michael Anton—writing as "Publius Decius Mus"—addressed the main criticisms of his argument soon afterward in a "Restatement on Flight 93." A new criticism emerged later on: that he had painted a dire scenario to be averted, but no positive vision.Here, Anton presents the positive ideal that inspired him—a distillation of his thinking on Americanism and the West, refined over decades. He lays out the foundational principles of the American and Western traditions, examines the biggest threats to their survival, and underscores the necessity of continuing to defend them.

PRE-STATEMENT ON FLIGHT 93

What follows is not a philosophical treatise; it is a political argument. My aim is to outline the essences of conservatism, Americanism, and Western civilization, and to review the main threats to their survival. I make no claim to philosophic or scholarly definitiveness, much less originality. My goal is to proffer a rallying point for the American Right by summarizing the main ideas and institutions that it should devote itself to preserving and defending. Of necessity, I resort to a not inconsiderable amount of summary, elision, corner-cutting, question-begging, problem-dodging, and oversimplification. Politics goes on whether or not we resolve every – or any – complex philosophical debate. Some of those debates, indeed, are unresolvable.

But human beings are always forced to act in the here and now. Acting well requires a basis for evaluating options. In the political realm, that basis for evaluation is more properly termed a theory of justice. The Left, as I will try to demonstrate, has such a theory. The Right, as I tried to explain in both “The Flight 93 Election” and the “Restatement on Flight 93,” thinks it does but does not.

But we need one. We cannot win either the intellectual argument or the political struggle without one. While the need for something is no guarantee of its availability, I am optimistic that this particular need can be met. There is under our very noses a theory of justice that is both logically coherent and distinctively American. This theory helped to build and sustain the greatness of our nation over centuries. Upon it we can rebuild a conservatism that is actually conservative, that seeks to – and that can – conserve America, its people, its communities, its ideas, its traditions, and what is best and truest in Western civilization.

The ideas I here lay out may seem familiar and obvious to many readers. But they require restatement because, in my estimation, the errors and failures of conservativism nearly all arise from forgetting, insufficiently understanding, never knowing, or denying the claims to truth that I shall assert.

Political and Moral Epistemology

Aristotle begins both his Politics and his Nicomachean Ethics with the sensible and true observation that all human activity aims at some good. Our activity therefore presupposes that the good exists and that it is knowable. Most men, most of the time, simply assume they know what is good. Mostly this comes down to knowing what they want and assuming it is good, or assuming that their own particular ways and habits are good.

Political philosophy was born when some men, instead of simply identifying the good with the objects of human desire or with their own customs and traditions, began an inquiry to discover the true human good. That inquiry presumes that human nature and the human good can be discovered and known – or at least better known, if perhaps never fully and finally known – through reasoned analysis.

It is important to understand that any account of good and bad, right and wrong, justice and injustice that does not begin from these premises is ipso facto nonrational. Reject this starting point and one is left with only two alternatives: either take guidance from a revealed account of the good and what it commands, or assert that justice is simply a matter of human will – i.e., assert that justice does not exist independent of preference and choice but is simply whatever this or that people in this or that time says it is. Tradition offers no reassurance because tradition without a rational basis is, in the last analysis, just an unconscious resort to will.

But “nonrational” does not necessarily mean “irrational.” A rational account of justice is not inherently incommensurable with a revealed account. It is true that philosophy at the highest level refuses to submit to any authority and insists on independently investigating every claim to truth. Revelation, by contrast, holds that the true account of the human good begins from God’s Word, which reason is incapable of fully understanding and which it is impious to question. Yet it would be strange if the Creator’s commandments did not accord with rationally discoverable moral principles. It would be equally strange if the reasoned investigation of morality in a created world could discern no rational moral principle at all. Modern natural science has shown that the physical world is governed by discoverable laws that accurately predict the behavior of much in and of that world. Why cannot something similar be true for the human world, and more specifically the moral world?

One might object by noting that moral philosophy – which lacks the methodology, controlled experiments, and mathematical tools of natural science – is inherently inexact and surmise from this that its conclusions are questionable at best, invented at worst. But this difference in precision does not require that moral philosophy be dismissed as untrue, as merely a matter of opinion, relative to time and place or particular to a certain people. To justify such a dismissal, one would first have to establish that natural science and moral philosophy share an essential epistemological commonality requiring that they be investigated in the same way. One must further prove that the methodology of natural science is the only valid way to investigate moral and political things. To say the least, this has not been demonstrated. To the contrary, two millennia of deep inquiry have shown that an account of justice need not rest on the modern scientific method in order to be fully rational. Aristotle, indeed, admonishes that for all inquiries we should “seek out precision in each genus to the extent that the nature of the matter allows” and makes clear that the proper way to investigate ethics and politics is dialectically, and not what we today would term “scientifically.”

By contrast, any account of justice based on human will is inherently irrational. One might be tempted to say that the very decision to will into being “justice” in the face of moral nihilism is itself rational, because something is better than nothing. But this assertion is problematic for two reasons. First, that decision would be rational only if it were known that justice does not exist apart from will. But this has not been proved. Second, even – or especially – in the face of such certainty, one must wonder why it would be good to will “justice” into being. If moral nothingness were known to be true, then any moral “something” that is merely a creation of human will would be not merely false but known to be false. Indeed, by what standard could one even assert a true difference between better and worse? The choice for a willed “justice” over nihilism, for something over nothing, would therefore itself be merely an act of will.

Much more plausible – and therefore rational, if not “scientifically” provable – is an account of the human good that begins from what we can observe about man and draws provisional conclusions, investing increasing confidence in those conclusions as they are continually subjected to dialectical and empirical critique and revision.

Human Nature, Mere Life, and the Good Life

A cursory glance at humanity finds a multiplicity of different peoples living according to a wide variety of distinct laws, customs, traditions, religions, and so on. From this diversity some suppose that – apart from the biological similarity of human bodies – there is nothing essentially human at all, certainly nothing that might enable one to deduce standards of good and bad or right and wrong from human nature.

In fact, however, scant reflection suffices to discern commonalities across all human populations. All human beings are driven by a mixture of appetites, passions, and reason, in varying degrees and relative combinations. Some of these – e.g., appetites for food and sex – we share with the other animals. Others – e.g., desire for glory and envy of others’ successes – are distinctly human. But the essentially human characteristics, the ones that most separate man from all the other known beings, are the capacity for speech and reasoning, and the sociability that flows therefrom.

This difference is one of kind and not merely degree: man is not just a clever ape. He is something distinct from and above the apes, and indeed all animals. He is a natural being but also the source of all in the world that is not natural: laws, customs, traditions, and the arts (understood both as the means of providing useful things – clothing, tools, etc. – and as expressions of man’s creativity, such as poetry and music). Man is furthermore the only known part of nature that is aware of nature, that can recognize the distinction between nature and non-nature, that can wonder about the existence of the universe and his own place within the whole. He is the only natural being that can ask the questions “What is good for me?” and “How should I live?”

The first and most obvious answer to these questions is that one must preserve and sustain life itself, since the good life presupposes mere life. If there is a good life, then life itself must be good, for the good life could not exist without mere life. For the same reason, the things that protect and sustain life must also be good. The human good therefore begins with the protection of our bodily life from external dangers: from natural predators and cataclysms, from drought, famine, and flood, and also from the depredations of other humans. Those depredations may occur absent political society, in a “war of all against all” in which men lack any effective machinery to govern behavior and to deter and punish injustice; they may happen within a political society, the more so when the government is too weak or incompetent to prevent some from doing injury to others; or they may happen to a political society in the form of foreign conquest, raids, and the like.

Human life is not sustainable without a modicum of material goods. And for man to live as man, as distinct from beast, these material needs extend beyond food and water to include things such as shelter, clothing, and medicine. These in turn require the development and flourishing of basic arts and sciences.

Such are the conditions for mere life, but what are the conditions for the good life? Indeed, what is the good life? What are its content and contours? How are these to be discovered? Despite the multiplicity of human customs and ways of life, man qua man (to repeat) is characterized by certain passions and faculties, above all by reason or speech. Reason enables him to raise the question of the good life and to investigate and evaluate possible answers.

Some of man’s passions and appetites not only threaten mere life; they undermine the emergence and flourishing of the good life. The overindulgence of those appetites and passions that tend toward bodily degradation or destruction are to be shunned. Man should not, for example, eat too much, or eat things that are bad for him. For the same reason, neither should he indulge a misguided sense of honor in any act of violence not strictly necessary for his defense or the defense of those close to him or of his community.

Beyond mere life and safety, the good life is defined by happiness or felicity. One source of felicity is the development of the higher faculties through education to realize the potential of our innate capabilities. Education in turn requires not just the “safe harbor” of security but also the cultivation of the higher arts and sciences that can only flourish within, and are characteristic of, civilization.

Education is not simply the study of theoretical science, technical facts, or useful arts, although these are necessary and good. Education is concerned above all with the virtues: particularly moderation, justice, courage, and wisdom. The virtues are, in a sense, reason made manifest – the qualities and behaviors that flower when man is at his best, his most human and most rational. Nor is education simply a matter of formal schooling. Virtue is inculcated at many levels of society – in schools, of course, but also in the family, in religious and civic institutions, in the workplace, and within friendships.

Virtue, law, government, education, the arts and sciences – in short, civilization – must be cultivated, but they are also natural to man in that man cannot be fully or essentially man without them. What is “natural” to man includes those things that make man who he really is: a being that is by nature social, political, and (at least potentially) rational. In other words, civilization is ontologically natural to man, even though he must build and maintain it himself.

Nature itself, or human nature, thus sets the standard for how man should live. That standard is not self-evident in the sense of its every contour being immediately obvious to all. But it is discoverable and teachable by philosophers; it can be popularized and disseminated by poets, playwrights, novelists, and teachers; and it can be approximated by political men in the crafting of laws. Indeed, we may judge the goodness of a law by how closely it conforms to the natural standard, or by how well it conduces to that standard for a given people at a given time.

Human nature has a goal or end: the completion or perfection of those traits which are uniquely characteristic of man. Clearly, “perfection” is a standard more to be striven for than actually achieved. Just as clearly, human beings vary in their capacity to acquire and develop the virtues. Not all are equally able to develop the virtues to the same degree, and some may be incapable of participating in certain virtues at all. It would be absurd, for instance, to expect everyone to be equally courageous, or to be equally capable of achieving wisdom.

Yet all human beings are capable of practicing justice and moderation, and perhaps a modicum of many other virtues as well. The goal for any individual, therefore, is to cultivate those virtues within reach to the greatest extent possible. This, again, requires law, education, the family, civil and religious institutions, arts and sciences, etc. – i.e., civilization. Maintaining and preserving these must therefore be a part of man’s duty. As Aristotle says, man is the best of animals when completed, but the worst of all when separated from law and the judicial order.

The American Solution

This view of human nature and the morality arising therefrom was shared, more or less, by philosophers and political men for more than two thousand years. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• A Note on “Decius”
• Pre-Statement on Flight 93
• The Flight 93 Election: September 5, 2016
• Restatement on Flight 93: September 13, 2016
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright