Between Obedience and Obedience

     A blogger at Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con site, commenting on my recent post regarding Russell Kirk, took issue with the idea that some hierarchies are natural and ought to be respected.  "We have matured beyond thinking hierarchically," she said.

     She might as well have said, "We have matured beyond thinking," because it is absolutely impossible to reason without ordering principles, and ordering principles imply hierarchy.  The blonde in question (I speak of blondes here not materially, but essentially) gives evidence of it.  Had she said, "We have matured beyond drawing conclusions," she'd have been not a whit less absurd.  Her statement implies hierarchical order, of a confused and inverted sort.  She believes that mankind evidently is "maturing," meaning that it is advancing towards a more finished or fulfilled intellectual state, for which the past, at best, was prologue.  She believes that to believe in hierarchy is inferior to the vast intellectual and social leveling which she believes she favors.

     But reasoning is in itself the discovery of order, and order in nature as in abstract thought is inconceivable without rule or law or principle.  Ockham's famous razor -- useful in a limited way, but dangerous for the childish and the silly to handle -- is a principle to order principles that order.  Of two explanations -- that is to say, of two sets of ordering principles set forth to define what you are talking about or explain its operation -- that one is to be favored, is superior, which avoids multiplying assumptions.  Or take mathematics.  When my homeschooled daughter and I went over the first couple of books of Euclid some years ago, I saw for the first time the deep identity of simple algebra and simple geometry; we saw it, because it all flows from a few fundamental definitions, whose implications are drawn out as the ramifications of trunk and branches and leaves from the acorn.

     "Perhaps," you will say, "she was thinking about social hierarchies and not intellectual structures."  If so, the more fool she.  First, it is simply impossible to get anything done without hierarchy.  Teaching, for instance -- implies that there is a thing to be learned, that learning is good and ignorance bad, that there is somebody called a teacher who knows the thing, and somebody called a student who doesn't.  Even moral and epistemological relativists, those nihilists in sheepish clothing, demand hierarchy in the classroom.  "All definitions of good and evil are socially constructed," says the professor, and "All definitions of good and evil are socially constructed" write the students, and God help them if they don't remember it for the exam.  Can you fight a war without hierarchy?  You can't even lay a sewer pipe without it.

     But hierarchy is not only, in its place, a good thing.  It is an inevitable thing, and that is something we'd better attend to.  Consider the case of a judiciary deciding for us all what kind of society we are going to have -- because that's what it has done, in seizing for itself the supposed authority to determine what shall count as a marriage.  That is supposed to be an example of the leveling of hierarchy?  Really?  A handful of overschooled well-to-do smooth-handed secularist snobs, looking down upon the traditional beliefs of a large majority of their countrymen, looking down upon what everybody has said about marriage from the ancient Romans to the current Pope, looking down even upon those limping and halting sociological studies that get around to discovering that the sun rises in the east and that children really do need mother and father, decide that we are past all that now, and we will have what the court determines, and will eat our peas, too.  Yes, master, yes, missus.  To hear is to obey.

    Which reminds me of one of the most important functions of the true and good and noble hierarchy.  It makes an excellent bulwark against the bogus, vicious, and contemptible one.  So reading and revering the great works of our heritage -- which is not the same thing as bowing and scraping before them, thank you -- helps to set you free from the inanities of the day.  I feel myself bound in reverence to read Dante, for example; somebody else considers himself free of all that old-fashioned stuff, and reads Cosmopolitan or Men's Health, and is easy prey for the marketers.  That's progress for you.  A peasant in old Scotland might give a tithe of his income to the laird, and then the laird would leave him and his villagers to order their own affairs and not come whining to him all the time for every little thing.  I'm not saying that that old landed hierarchy was a good thing, but we sure are beyond it now.  Now the middle class peasant in Scotland gives one half of his income to the government, and the government leaves him practically no civic responsibility at all; indeed, encourages him to seek out the Department of Nose Wiping, for dependency is an industry too.

     You obey, or you obey.  On earth there is no third choice.  The only question, ultimately, is whom.  Christians are called to obey the God whose very commands set us free.  The alternative is to heed somebody else, enjoy a petty and temporary license, and clap yourself in irons. 

Comments

[Tim Drake]

Excellent points, Anthony.

Call it a case of terminal obedience.

Hierarchy, patriarchy, fraternity, authority - they're all being thrown out as so much as old furniture, to be replaced with what?

Yet, old furniture, properly cared for and restored, fetches high prices in antique stores. We need to boldly reclaim and repropose these terms, restoring their proper understanding.

It reminds me of Diana West's quote from "The Death of the Grown-Up"... "As the situation in Holland reveals, the West is now at the point where enforcing "openness" trumps preserving "tolerance." In other words, better to be "open" to intolerance than "closed" to anything - including intolerance. There must be some rich, ripe irony in the fact, according to this mind-set, that tolerating the intolerant becomes the ultimate act of openness - literally "ulitmate," as Popper tells us, since tolerance of the intolerant leads to the destruction of the tolerant. Call it terminal tolerance."

[Tim Drake]

A case of terminal lack of obedience I meant to say.

[dr pence]

Joining the Esolen-Drake well crafted notes with a further reflection.
"Anarchy"- abscence of "archos" without rule. Monarchy-- rule of the one. "Demos" "archos" democracy-the rule of the people. So what of "hierarchy"? Does it mean simply an ordered rule as opposed to the abscence of rule in anarchy. It has come to mean that and for many people the very word hierarchy implies "higher" so it is simply defined as a system which recognizes some kind of higher being, authority or ordered rule. That is a fine common usage but not really the root meaning of the word. "Heiros" means priest or sacred. So heirarchy implies that in the basic nature of things there is an order because there is a sacred and a profane. It really means the rule of the sacred. The system is ordered because there is a transcendental reality by which all of its internal workings are ordered. This necessarily implies there is sacred arena which demmands reverence and forbidden outskirts which must be condemned. The world without hierarchy is a horribly flat wasteland where a man's seed and a woman's womb are no longer considered the sacred potency and precinct of life. Flags in the wasteland can be burnt, G-d's name is taken in common and soldiers' graves are untended. In the flattened land where there is no rule of the sacred there is also the inability to condemn and forbid at the outskirts--even the rape of children cannot be punished with death.

[Bill R]

"But hierarchy is not only, in its place, a good thing. It is an inevitable thing, and that is something we'd better attend to."

With one exception, Tony. Death is where hierarchy is lost. Death is stasis, the ultimate stasis. It is the only refuge for those who long to escape hierarchy, for the latter is life: life is all its abundance, form, variety, and joy. Life is distinction, and if you'll have no distinctions in your world, your only choice is to have no choice, or (in other words) to die.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

"We have matured beyond thinking hierarchically," she said.

Ai-yi-yi-yi. Secular and Religious feminists are against biblical patriarchy.

This post could easily become a thread about whether there should be a distinction in allowable roles between what a man or a woman can do in the spheres of church and home. I.e., feminists would object to the hierarchy that biblical tradition has established.

[Baus]

C'mon. Give Dylan some credit:
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/serve.html

[Ken Peirce]

I haven't seen that nasty inflammatory Biblical word, "submit" in this thread yet. It meant in Greek to place yourself (voluntarily because we have free will) into your right place in that hierarchy/order, confessing your primary sin of pride and becoming a servant of that order. Maybe a little easier in your relationship to God, "the Natural Order," less so with your imperfect fellow men. These are not popular concepts these days of rights and freedoms and liberties.

I also think it had less to do with one position being "above" or "below" another and more to agreeing to the order because you were best suited for that role. It was jealousy and envy and covetousness that made one higher or lower than the next position. Even the disciples wanted to be right there on the throne with Christ.

I have also understood that we may have different "standings" in various hierarchies, in the universe, in the state, at work, at home, at play. Failure to understand and respect this change in order leads to rebellion (anarchy) and destruction because you have no position unless everyone else respects the same order, i.e., submits also.

In death I assume there will be at least a simplified hierarchy with human souls all being "equal" but still "below" God.

[Tony Esolen]

David,

Thanks for that reminder about the inner meaning of hierarchy, and the relationship between all natural hierarchies and a sense of the holy. I will be blogging about that too, soon.

Ken,

Death is in fact, according to Dante and Aquinas and Augustine and most of the western theologians, the great unequalizer. In my father's house there are many mansions....

[David Koyzis]

I have posted comments on this thread here. I generally agree with you, with two qualifications.