Voting One's (Catholic) Conscience
Bernard G. Prusak
August 4, 2016 - 11:02am
“The owl of Minerva,” the philosopher Hegel famously wrote, “takes flight only with the coming of dusk.” In other words, wisdom comes after the fact—in John Henry Newman’s lovely words, when the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over. The upshot is that philosophy, to quote Hegel again, “always comes too late” to change the world.
Marx disagreed. If, though, the wisdom we’re talking about is perfect apprehension of the “logic” of history by us mere mortals—reading, as it were, the mind of God—then for what it’s worth I’m more than willing to agree with Hegel’s claim. What’s more, I’m even anxious to do so! But make the wisdom humbler; separate it, that is, from Hegel’s philosophical system, or Marx’s. Say it consists of apprehension of the springs of the natural and social worlds and of the principles of a properly human life, plus of course (to sweeten the pot) the insight to realize those principles in practice. This wisdom, to say the least, does not appear any easier to come by. In fact, in the middle of things, as we find ourselves, I’d venture the best we can do is to approach it obliquely, through a glass darkly. From this perspective, even the putatively wise among us look to be but the blind, or nearly the blind, leading the blind.
These dark thoughts were inspired by—how could you have guessed it?—Donald Trump. I have now collected so many thoroughly-considered, well-written denunciations of him as patently unfit for the office of the presidency that my cup runneth over. Like so many others, Democrats and Republicans alike, I am daily scandalized by some or other comment of his. The latest that comes to mind is his claim that, should he lose in November, it will be because the election was rigged. What candidate of a major party says that in our democracy? What candidate of a major party would contemplate saying that without the gravest evidence?
One thought that the Trump phenomenon has inspired in me in calmer moments is that, while in retrospect it might appear clear just when a nation toppled into authoritarianism (take the collapse of the Weimar Republic with the Nazi seizure of power), or just what a historic decision portended, in the middle of things the stakes are so much harder to judge. Come at the thought this way. Just what does our nation risk with the election of Trump? Does the Trump phenomenon truly give reason to worry that dictatorship “can happen here”? Is the U.S. “at a moral crossroads,” as Peter Steinfels claims in one of the more valuable articles in my collection of denunciations? I tend to share these worries and others, but again I’ve been impressed by how difficult it is to grasp the stakes, see through the fog and murk, see otherwise than through a glass darkly. It’s interesting in this regard that W.B. Yeats’s all-too-oft-quoted poem “The Second Coming” was written in the aftermath of World War I, in 1919. The best among us must not lack all conviction, and to me the passionate intensity of many of Trump’s supporters is a terror to behold. I’m lately of the mind, however, that the best among us ought also to feel some measure of sympathy for those before us who did not judge historical events aright—who failed to realize that some “rough beast” was about to be born. Humility compels us to acknowledge that, in the middle of things, whether the center will or will not hold can be, sometimes and in some ways, obscure.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/voting-ones-catholic-conscience
