If the American constitutional system emerged through an evolutionary process, why not see the human nature it is designed around emergent as well? And once we’ve granted that, why not just evolve it out of its own human problems through the power of an administrative state? “Human nature” is at the heart of the Neo-Jacobin problem anyway; if we’ve disregarded that and hung everything on history and experience, why not traditionalize ourselves into angels instead? ~K.M. Walker, Many Things

Via Matthew Peterson

What does one say to such statements? One might point out that history is, by definition, a process of change and development (that dreaded evolution!), and that one of the fundamental continuities of all historical experience is a common human nature that makes it at all possible to interpret past human experience. Neo-Jacobins, like many such ideologues, tend to view human nature as a universal to which they can reduce every man in all his contingency, complexity and diversity (the role of the administrative state in making this happen is fairly noticeable). This is one reason why, gentle reader, they are not conservative.

Oh, they believe in some kind of human nature in the sense of some constant or model they can measure everyone else against, I suppose, but it is not any human nature anyone has ever actually encountered in the real world. The Jacobin and neo-Jacobin urge is to eradicate distinction, diversity and anything that deviates from the archetype. But this Mr. Walker cannot even recognise that there is an alternative to this abstract Man other than some Heraclitean flux. Mr. Walker’s last sentence is ludicrous, but it reveals everything we need to know about the contempt for tradition that abides at Claremont.

Of course, there are religious traditions that propose that God makes it possible for man not only to be angelic (the monastic life) but also to become like God (deification). But that’s all very regressive and traditional and so very, very Christian. Let’s talk about the Founding instead, because that’s where the meaning of life resides.