The Sometimes Bad Origins of Good Ideas

Finally, in the eleventh chapter Simon articulates a crucial and often misunderstood principle of political morality in a discussion of international law, one that has far-reaching implications. 

Many on the French right seemed to oppose the specific sanctions against Italy also out of contempt for the League itself as an attempt to extend the rule of law internationally. For some this was rooted in the memory of left-wing pacifism before World War I as well as associations between the project of internationalism and ideological currents like anarchism and freemasonry. 

Many on the right took what was in some respects the suspicious historical origins of the project on extending international order in recent times to exhaust its possibilities: their arguments against it were related to bad arguments for it, as if there were no others. They were guilty of a kind of genetic fallacy, which could be exposed only by pointing to better justifications. 

What this required was the intellectual “purification” of what Simon called “captive truths” (72).  Simon describes the problem and his solution:

[T]he inability to guide an idea that has arisen historically in the midst of a complex of error to the purity of truth is an indication of weakness and servitude, an index of an insufficient strengthening of the mind in truth, which is power and freedom. 

 

There are open and spiritual societies whose readiness to accept anything condemns them to dissolution; there are closed spiritual societies who assure their survival by making a desert around them; there are open spiritual societies that have conquered in welcoming, and it is ever their proper life, the life of their very idea that endures and progresses by incorporating ideas conceived in another’s heart. (73)

The circumstances in which an idea emerges does not necessarily define it and ideas that have dubious origins can yet be reinterpreted as important truths. Here Simon was concerned with the project of international order, which he, like Maritain thought could receive a far superior intellectual ground from Thomism, one that should be available to and welcomed especially by Catholics. The same logic can be applied to, for example, the idea of universal human rights, which continues to attract criticism from Christian thinkers of both a conservative and more radical cast of mind. 

Simon’s Thomism here takes a nuanced and philosophical–practical and principled–as distinct from a simply negative approach to modernity and is therefore a paradigm of the entry of philosophy into political judgment.

I have tried to suggest then that while The Ethiopian Campaign certainly is a kind of pamphlet directed to a specific time and place, it retains great significance as a model of how a philosopher engages in political controversy. 

The idea was well explained by Maritain in his 1960 lecture, “The Philosopher in Society” (in On the Use of Philosophy: Three Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), but The Ethiopian Campaign presents a memorable and still-instructive paradigm, much of the relevance of which is retained given recent events in North Africa and the Middle East. 

It can be compared also with Eric Voegelin’s own critiques of Nazi race theory also published in the 1930s.  At a time when philosophy has become hyper-specialized and often inaccessible to the public and public discussion is often dominated by glib and superficial instant punditry, it is well to be reminded that something better is possible.        

V. Bradley Lewis is associate professor in the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, Washington.D.C. He also serves as associate editor of the American Journal of Jurisprudence.