Jul 8
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“Asked some years ago if he believed in “American exceptionalism,” the French political scholar Pierre Manent said, “It’s difficult not to, because it is the only political experiment that succeeded … the only successful political foundation” made through choice and design. “[I]f you are not able to treat the United States for the great political-civic achievement it is, you miss something huge in the political landscape.”(3)
The good in our history is real. America’s “exceptional” nature, however, doesn’t imply superiority. It doesn’t even suggest excellence. It implies difference. It involves something new in governance and liberty, rooted in the equality of persons, natural rights, and reverence for the law. And it’s sustained—or was intended to be—by national traits of industriousness, religious faith, and volunteerism.”
-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World
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(3) Alexander Kazam, “By Design and Choice: French Political Theorist Pierre Manent Reflects on Europe and the American Founding,” National Review Online, August 21, 2012.
“The great danger of contemporary humanitarianism is of habituating peoples to despise political reflection, even politics itself and its concrete conditions of existence, as if the affirmation of humanity was sufficient in itself.
Each epoch knows some temptations. The revolutionary temptation persisted for a long time in the West. Today, we experience the humanitarian temptation, which appears more sympathetic. But, in a certain manner, these two temptations are in continuity, and belong to the very same project: to abolish the political existence of men which separates human beings into nations and classes.”
— Pierre Manent, quoted in Daniel J. Mahoney: The Idol of Our Age
"WHAT DO WE REALLY mean when we use the word man today? Whom are we speaking of when we defend human rights or engage in the human sciences?" These are the first words of Pierre Manent's provocative work The City of Man—its title a nod to Augustine's great masterpiece City of God. One of our era's best political thinkers, Manent notes that "Our speech is obsessed with man and sings his praises without inquiring who he is ... Man commands humanity's attention everywhere today, yet never perhaps since the time of Homer has the question embodied in the word man" been so little explored or understood.(15)
The reason for the confusion isn't a mystery. The identity of man cannot be separated from the God who made him. And who is that God? For the Christian, God is not a "Supreme Being" within reality, but the Author of reality itself, outside the envelope of time and space, transcendent and utterly omnipotent and unknowable-except insofar as he chooses to show himself. He does that through creation, reason, his revealed Word, the community of believers we know as the Church-and above all, through his Word made flesh in his son.
What he shows us in Jesus Christ is not simply his own divine nature, but the face of man fully alive, the face of true freedom and love.
Humanity in its fullness-the complementarity of man and woman-shows its glory in lives of free will, self-awareness, and intellect, subordinated to love. We humans can choose ourselves, but at our best, we choose others. We humans can choose ourselves, but at our best, we choose to love. Love, even more than intelligence, is the genius of man. It's the way we share in the furnace of love that is the Trinitarian God himself. And as long and as well as we love, faith grows stronger by our actions, and hope has the soil in which to thrive.”
-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World
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(15) Pierre Manent, The City of Man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 1.
Theatrical shows are a very serious matter. In the spectacles it applauds, a people represents itself, shows how it relates to the world and how it formulates for itself the human problem."
Pierre Manet - Metamorphoses of the City
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As French political philosopher Pierre Manent explains in an important interview translated in First Things, European elite culture is committed to a view of the world that abstracts from particular attachments — national attachments, ethnic attachments, religious attachments — and treats individuals as perfectly equal and interchangeable exemplars of capital-H Humanity. A Catholic Frenchman is just a human being. A secular German is just a human being. A devout Muslim refugee from the Syrian civil war is just a human being. Place of origin is politically irrelevant. So is religious affiliation. And age. And gender. The only form of belonging that matters is to the placeless human species. Judged by that standard, Merkel is a secular saint who has done her solemn Kantian duty, treating every refugee as an end and never simply as a means, conforming her actions to the austere demands of an absolute, unconditional moral imperative, refusing to take concrete worldly consequences into account in determining What Must Be Done.
(x)
Human things are complex, obscure, and legitimately give rise to uncertainty and doubt, but if there is one thesis on human things that has no chance of being true, it is Constant's theory of war.
Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, 48.
XXIII : La societe de la pitie
Bon, un dernier petit post de ce livre, promis après j’arrête. Il n’est qu’à regarder le moindre JT pour s’assurer de la vérité de ce qu’il décrit ci-dessous.
« Selon l’analyse de Rousseau, la compassion est un sentiment altruiste qui a deux motifs, ou deux composants égoïstes : la peur de souffrir soi-même, et le plaisir de ne pas souffrir soi-même. Fonder une morale sociale sur la pitié n’a donc rien d’idéaliste, d’utopique. Si la société moderne veut surmonter l’isolement et la séparation des sociétaires, l’individualisme qui la caractérisent, pense Rousseau, alors elle doit cultiver la pitié, la compassion, et encore une fois cela n’a rien d’une entreprise héroïque puisque les ressorts de la pitié sont dans l’égoïsme de chacun. Rousseau nous donnait là la formule qui a effectivement prévalu dans la société démocratique libérale, dans la société bourgeoise, dans notre société, comme on voudra dire. C’est la société des « Resto du cœur ».
Cette formule a beaucoup d’avantages politiques, sociaux, psychiques. Tirant l’altruisme de l’égoïsme, elle est économique moralement : elle exige peu de nous. Elle a cependant au moins un inconvénient. Comme toujours dans les choses humaines, c’est le revers de ses avantages. La pitié sur laquelle Rousseau veut construire s’adresse au corps souffrant ; elle n’est donc pas par elle-même un sentiment essentiellement, ou spécifiquement humain. Elle s’adresse à l’animal en nous, et elle est le fait de l’animal en nous Si notre pitié s’adresse au corps souffrant, elle peut prendre pour objet la souffrance des animaux tout autant que celle des corps humain.
(…) La tendance naturelle d’une société fondée sur la pitié sensible sera donc d’accorder des droits aux animaux comme aux hommes et finalement les mêmes droits, ou plutôt le même droit, celui de ne pas souffrir. (…) Mais on continue de les tuer, direz-vous. Oui, mais cela n’est pas très important puisque, dans une telle société, le mal n’est pas tant la mort que la souffrance physique. (…) Aux yeux de certains, cette obsession de la souffrance physique conduit à la perte du sentiment du propre de l’homme, de la différence humaine : à la perte du sentiment de la dignité humaine. »
Source : in Pierre Manent, Cours familier de philosophie politique, collection Tel chez Gallimard, p 316-317.