These are bad times.

Principalities and powers are everywhere victorious. Wickedness flourishes in high places.

There is a clearer and more present danger, however. . . .

—Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

Bad times generate bad solutions, as any observer of contemporary politics knows. In Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (1971), Dr. Tom More lives in bad times, in “dread latter days.” [1] Fearing a fallout of noxious particles which somehow “inflame and worsen the secret ills of the spirit and rive the very self from itself,” More has invented an ontological lapsometer in hopes of restoring unity and integration. [2] As might be predicted, the technology of a new Eden tempts misuse by various technocrats who believe that scientific knowledge is “neutral morally, abstractive and godlike” in social planning and societal cures. [3]

More’s biological ancestor is Thomas More, famed author of Utopia, but he inherits belief in technique as means to Eden from his spiritual progenitor, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Bacon lived in bad times, or so he perceived them. Human endeavor was stuck in quagmire, he thought, with little progress, and the dominant Aristotelian tradition impeded truth’s discovery and the advance of humanity. Furthermore, humans were doomed to illusions caused by the fourfold idolatry of the human intellect: the idols of the tribe, the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, and the idols of the theatre. Human nature, the tribe, had wanton disregard for truth and a perverse propensity to distort and err. In addition to the flaw of our nature were idols of our own creation—namely, the cave of individual fantasies and biases, the marketplace of human custom with its irrationalities and prejudices, and the theatre of fantastic theories and bizarre philosophies. The old maxim states, and Bacon would agree, that there is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not taught it or so evil that some custom or law has not demanded it. Humanity is in desperation, and Aristotelian education only worsens things.

The longing for salvation, for the new Eden, is inconsolable, and Bacon had such longings. His Great Instauration (1620), the great restoration, promised a recovery of Edenic humanity and permanent banishment of idols through proper methodology. Given the flaws of human nature, one could not trust reason—the great mistake of the past—but needed rather to control and direct the mind with a method which was itself immune to error. Such method could not rely upon the supposed virtues of the practitioner, let alone their loves, erratic as they were. Method demanded a certain sort of disinterestedness—that is, a de-personalization of the inquirer. Whatever sins or virtues, doubts or beliefs of the person, the method was objective, immune to the vagaries of human character and conduct. Method would bring all things under human dominion and cause human flourishing through the techniques of the new organon.

Such objectivity left little room for the quality of the person judging. Compare this to Aristotle’s belief that in some matters, certainly those of ethics and politics, the best judge was the person with practical wisdom, itself a combination of moral and intellectual virtue. In fact, so important was the personhood of the judge that one could argue, as did political philosopher Eric Voegelin, that the good judge, or serious person, does not just know the moral standard best, his judgments are the moral standard. Voegelin writes:

The spoudaios is the mature man who desires what is in truth desirable, and who judges everything right. All men desire what is good, but their judgment of what is good in truth is obscured by lust. If we tried to find out what is truly good by taking a poll in any given collectivity of men, we would get as many answers as the characters of those we have asked . . . for each character considers that good what he desires. Hence we must ask the spoudaios. . . . Appeal is made, therefore, not from the action to an immutably correct principle but to the existentially right order of man. [4]

Notice Voegelin’s emphasis on love or desire: “each character considers that good what he desires.” All desire what they take to be good, but the desires of some are vicious and thus their judgments cannot be trusted. But surely this must mean that the “existentially right order” implies something of a right order of desires or loves—and an organon, contrary to any pretense of objectivity, prescribes an order of love.

Bacon’s was not the first organon. While Aristotle had never understood himself to be creating such a thing, to Bacon’s readers the organon could mean nothing other than the logical and grammatical works of Aristotle, a tool of investigation, modeled after the hunt, but where the hunt uses terms, propositions, and syllogisms. The organon was an instrument of mind for the hunt of inquiry. But one hunts—inquires—what one desires. And while any person, say a sophist, could use the tools of inquiry, intellectual tools were nonetheless understood by Aristotle in the context of living well. Tools could be used by many, but not many could use the tools well, as they ought to be used, for the tools were themselves caught up into a drama of the good life. Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics with a reminder that every action, every art, and every inquiry (methodos) seeks some good, and, further, does so in a nexus of subordinate and ultimate goods. The tools of bridle making do not ultimately serve horsemanship but rather the ultimate good which is the goal or hunt of politics. Thus, like all tools, the instruments of intellect, the organon, exist in a context of desired goods, in this case the good desired by inquiry or method.

But now we are in the domain of desires, of loves, rather than the pure objectivity of technique. One could thus describe the organon, as has Frederick Crowe, not just as an assemblage of neutral instruments but “a mentality, a formation of incarnate spirit, a way of structuring our conscious activities.” [5] Kenneth Schmitz highlights the same when he states, “method (met’hodos) is not simply a mental exercise but a way of life seeking the human and the universal good.” [6] Schmitz contends that method is fidelity to the real, an openness to the things that are, a “disposition on our part to receive what things have to tell us.” [7] No surprise, then, that philosophy was preceded by wonder, the open delight in the real; indeed, wonder, as Aristotle reminds us at the beginning of the Metaphysics, is the mark of the human. And so it is that in Greek thought a variety of symbols express the aspirations of philosophers to live a life of ordered love. Plato provides the symbol of the spiritual man (daimonios an­­­­­er), and Aristotle the symbols of the serious man (spoudaios) and the theoretical life (bios thêoretikos).

The commitment to ordered loves does not end with the Greeks, however, and I can think of no better thinker on intellectual love than the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), who places the full weight of his philosophy on love’s shoulders. He writes:

Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain. Just what is wanted has many names. In what precisely it consists is a matter of dispute. But the matter of inquiry is beyond doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his laboratory. It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration. It can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures. [8]

More than a factual claim that humans desire to know, Fr. Lonergan bases his account of objectivity on love. Those persons who desire to know and thus allow the exigencies of that desire to flourish are the persons who ask questions, pay attention to data, and revisit hypotheses; in other words, those who desire to know, tend to know. This indicates that genuine objectivity cannot be reduced to a universal technique. Certainly sane thinkers may discover patterns and canons of rationality especially appropriate to particular domains of inquiry, but such procedural apparatus is the result of objectivity and not the test thereof, and, moreover, is not a universal test which each and every inquiry must meet. Rather, as Lonergan puts it, objectivity results from “authentic subjectivity.” The existential order of the spoudaios, consequently, involves the proper ordering of loves, especially intellectual desire toward reality.

Of course there are many ways to interfere with the desire to know—laziness, ideology, rashness, carelessness, plain stupidity—but most of those interferences are failures of love. We are not angelic intellects but succumb to lusts, biases, errors, blind spots, and downright foolishness. Additionally, disordered social dynamics interfere with intellectual desire and foster great oversights in cultural and civilizational matters—groups are no more immune to madness than individuals. Undoubtedly personal and social failures result in unintelligent and unreasonable beliefs, actions, mores, and so on, at times to catastrophe and collapse, but Lonergan reserves his greatest concern for what he terms general bias and its resulting longer pattern of decline. General bias is not simply the lusts of a person or the prejudices of a group interfering with the desire to know, but rather an obsessive privileging of common sense, the tyranny of concrete and immediately practical questions at the expense of the desire to understand. General bias, then, is a contraction and deformation of the full range of human loves, a suppression of the natural exigency and finality of our loves in the name of practicality.

What then to make of a method, like Bacon’s, which purports indifference to the quality of loves in its quest for human flourishing? Of course technocratic desire to bend nature to human purposes posits a vision of love, one actually quite noble, the bettering of the human condition. There is nothing new in wanting to better the human lot, but revolution lurks in the notion that the theoretical life should be subservient to the practical or productive life. What then to make of the revolution of love?

In light of Lonergan’s account of the desire to know, Bacon falls captive to general bias and to scotosis, a blindness caused by a repression of the full range of questions. Now, many defenders of the liberal arts evoke contemplation and leisure against the domination of total work and the servile arts, but Lonergan further explains the implications of servility. Ignoring the full range of questions goes beyond consequences for the individual, for now intelligence and reasonability themselves are ignored. The range of questions dealing with first principles, theoretical difficulties, and long-range problems of intelligibility are ignored, sometimes precluded, at the insistence of “common sense.” Why would anyone bother with useless abstractions with no immediate practical payoff? Data is overlooked, hypotheses not formulated, questions unasked, policies undiscovered, and correction refused in an ever-worsening cycle of decline. Just as Plato’s ideal city would become better over time as the laws formed virtue and then the virtuous followed the law, with general bias the policies are formed unintelligently as the unintelligent then become further constricted by those very policies before succumbing to the incredible upheaval and oscillation of last-ditch desperations.

It is a very grand irony, then, that the method of practicality which was to ensure objectivity and better the human lot in the grand restoration not only fails but worsens affairs. Bad times prompt bad solutions, which intensify the problems. Demanding an end to scholastic speculation and “useless” abstraction so as to get busy improving the world brings diminishing returns, as Lonergan predicted when he criticized his own Jesuit order for obsessing over social activism rather than the patient study of first principles. A paradox: genuine leisure allows human beings to develop in existentially and materiallyordered ways as individuals and societies, whereas frenetic practicality risks both the authenticity and the material good of human beings.

I take it as almost too obvious to mention that our society and its forms of education are enmeshed in general bias—love is in the ruins. And of course my target is not so much Bacon as his progeny. While lapsometers are the product of Walker Percy’s wickedly satirical mind, Percy is correct in noting that our authorities would rather an ontological lapsometer than a coherent ontology. Eden tantalizes them, the paradise always beyond grasp but always within reach of a new technique, program, apparatus, or pill, and always beyond grasp because their very method of reaching closes off the loves which save us from hell on earth.

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1. Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (New York: Ivy Books, 1971), 3.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. Ibid., 181.
4. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 65.
5. Frederick E. Crowe, Method in Theology: An Organon for Our Time (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 11.
6. Kenneth Schmitz, The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 14.
7. Ibid., 24.
8. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 11.