So when Dr. Ryn, a so-called traditionalist teaching politics at the Catholic University of America, keeps asking us to accept the truth of his novel doctrines, especially as published in 2003, I feel somewhat justified in arguing from the authority of a fundamental part of western tradition that holds human beings can really and truly know stuff. ~Matthew Peterson

I don’t know what’s more frustrating: that Mr. Peterson believes he has successfully overturned something by calling it “novel” (or better yet, “radically modern”), or that he seems to think that unless we accept his genuinely bizarre rationalism that neither Aristotle nor Aquinas (to take the two authorities he is invoking at the moment) would have endorsed we have abandoned the possibility of knowing things. Or perhaps it is the frequent recourse to invoking self-evident truths, by which the people at Claremont seem to mean axioms (I would continue to insist that truth is never really self-evident in the way that Mr. Peterson means it), that experience routinely shows us to be false.

Very few generations have held it to be “self-evident” or even true that “all men are created equal,” for example, which must throw some doubt on the universality of that particular truth-claim, and historical experience shows that this claim is not really true, either. That there should be equality before the law is a guard that men have created because they had seen only too well that all men were not created equal in any practical respect. Law established an equality that was singularly lacking among men. To say that all men are equally human is to say that they are all men, which is to say nothing about the political equality to which the Declaration is very clearly referring. It was men in time who created the idea of political equality.

This idea happened to catch on in certain western European countries until it became established and entered into the common sense of a few European nations and their colonial cousins. It became “self-evident” by dint of becoming widely accepted among men of a certain philosophical persuasion. To the extent that Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration was representative of the British political tradition, it was an attempt to demonstrate the common assumptions that the colonists as Englishmen had with their cousins in the home country; it was a rhetorical claim as well as a claim of truth, and the willingness of those at Claremont to put such incredible weight on a piece of political rhetoric is more than a little amazing.

As is often the case with those who repudiate history as a guide and who approach their inheritance with the mind of mass man, not terribly interested in how things were made but very satisfied with the finished product, Mr. Peterson does not seem quite willing to grant that there was a time when his “self-evident truth” that “all men are created equal” did not exist and no one had ever heard of such a thing. How could this be, if it were self-evident? How could it be that, before that time, it seemed obvious to most everyone that the exact opposite was true, and that it seemed clear that each person had a proper place in a hierarchically arranged universe? Of course, one of these, or still another claim, could very well be true, regardless of whether everyone in a given society takes its opposite as axiomatic, and we do discern the truth of these claims through reason and experience in the light of our traditions and informed by the remembered past, but it will hardly do to declare your own axioms to be the only possible axioms because you have already accepted them and to denounce those who don’t accept them as enemies of reason, truth and God knows what else.

But that is what Mr. Peterson does time and again. Then he becomes flustered when someone suggests that this is a rather odd way to think about things. Imagine how annoyed he will be when I cite this:

Certain forms of argument from self-evidence are considered fallacious or abusive in debate. For example, if a proposition is claimed to be self-evident, it is an argumentative fallacy to assert that disagreement with the proposition indicates misunderstanding of it.

That axioms are an unavoidable part of how we reason is clear. What is not clear is why the necessity of axioms should lead us to accept the axioms that Mr. Peterson accepts. Particularly when those axioms seem to contradict our historical experience. What is axiomatic for people of a certain frame of mind will not necessarily be axiomatic for others. We must test them against experience, and what is a more considerable source of human experience than the witness of history and the wisdom of tradition?

An axiom is fundamentally something that is taken as given, something that needs no proof. But if we encounter proof that overthrows the axiom, we surely don’t keep harping on about the truth of the axiom, do we? We have made an assumption that has proven to be false, and so we scrap the assumption. Furthermore, men formulate axioms according to what seems to them to be given and is not in need of any proof, but it is hardly a secret that what was readily apparent to men of the 13th century will not necessarily be the same as it is to us today. That is not because there is no absolute truth and that is not because human nature changes, as some of the more ridiculous criticisms of Prof. Ryn and myself have had it, but because men’s perceptions and understanding are contingent on their time, place and all the complexities of their particular condition through which they view eternal verities.

When we find claims that do endure and stand the frequent tests and criticisms of generations, we have some reason to believe that these claims have some real merit and truth that have made them to endure for so long. That is not the only test, but it is a surprisingly reliable guide. But we must always, always use discernment and not shout slogans about universal freedom or universal equality like an apparatchik when we encounter a reality that does not conform to what we imagined it ought to be. How much less should we embark on policies premised on decontextualised abstractions that pay no attention to circumstance, condition or history.

The radical contingency of human experience is part of our condition, it is part of the reality of human existence, and any philosophical view that cannot or will not take account of it has relatively little to teach us. In the end, whether Mr. Peterson finds Prof. Ryn’s philosophy worthwhile or compelling or not is beside the point if his alternative is to approach history simply as a gallery for moral edification. Whatever the problems with Prof. Ryn’s conception of “value-centered historicism” (and I am being kind when I say that Mr. Peterson’s very-long awaited response does not remotely begin to demonstrate what those problems are), Mr. Peterson offers us nothing that would be more convincing.

To engage in “virtue-centered history” is not to think about political problems historically, which is vital and sorely lacking in contemporary politics, but to think about history in a moralistic fashion according to classical archetypes. This habit has produced more than its fair share of bad history writing and not a small amount of atrocious policy. This is fundamentally not to understand history at all (and so not to understand human nature particularly well either), and it is not to be engaged in genuine inquiry (historia), but to take refuge among the poets. History, after all, is concerned primarily with the particular, and poetry primarily with the universal. It is more than a little ironic that Mr. Peterson would define his alternative as “virtue-centered history,” when it is this preoccupation with political virtue that Prof. Ryn locates as the essence of the new Jacobinism in America the Virtuous (hence the title).