SELF-ELECTION AND THE ELITE

...They tend to be people of economic means, social position, or mental capacities beyond the average...

...This unrelenting Calvinist, who believed, if the famous sermon is anything to go by, that God despised the non-Elect, nevertheless could perform the act of True Virtue that The Nature of True Virtue is, and give to the Damned the credit for the greater part of the moral action of the world...

...It's too easy to forget (as Calvinists often did forget) that Calvinism is not a class doctrine...

...The common sense that belongs to the self you love so dearly can tell you that if you steal you are liable to be stolen from, and be left no grounds for objecting...

...I can imagine someone protesting, as I would: Does the present writer think that he is one of the Inspired...

...This is what Edwards too means by the phrase...

...How else could the doctrines of Election and Damnation be translated into political terms...

...some equality and -proportion in things of a similar nature...

...It may be hard for you to control your greed and aggression...

...A stable polity could be built upon their exercise...

...It's difficult, for instance, to speak of innate goodness without thinking of the phrase "innate depravity...

...It has only incidentally to do with a particular other or with any benefits accruing to the self, except insofar as the other is a part of the all toward which the Truly Virtuous is well disposed...

...It's well to remind ourselves what "natural" meant to the Calvinist Edwards: the state of the man who is not Elect...

...some adaptedness of the agent to the object...

...Natural instincts...

...Acts or feelings motivated by sense of proportion, by natural conscience, or by natural instinct are actuated in various degrees by self-love or selfinterest...

...Love and consideration of one's partner or one's children is clearly admirable...

...I haven't any doubt that Edwards assumed himself Elect, but he didn't give up as easily as Calvin did what a Catholic scholar has called "Augustine's agnosticism about the souls of others," and thus could manage some humility and sympathy...

...One doesn't have to profess Calvinism to ponder the cogency of the words Damned and Elect —for in some fundamental way they are right...

...The Elect may be a hidden member of that mass society...

...Read Calvin, and then read Edwards...

...Elites have ruled us in politics as often as in fashion...

...Well, few of us are Calvinists today, but many fragments of Calvinist doctrine lie submerged in the assumptions and rhetoric of many of us all the same...

...Now, considering all this, Edwards's treatise may seem after all a remarkable gesture of benevolence...

...The religious term is so much the more elegant...

...A man does ill, and has ill done to him...

...Nonetheless, the ideas carry polemical weight: applying one or the other, one can make one's opponent seem naive and oneself realistic, or oneself respectful of human nature and one's opponent insulting—with consequent denigration of the policies the other proposes...

...2) You can simply settle for an Elite...

...It is the difference between an icy moralism relieved only by the technical requirements of Christian mercy, and a warmth deriving from sympathetic closeness to those who will feel the flames, or, as Robert Lowell put it in his magnificent poem on Edwards, those whose souls "full of burning . . . will whistle on a brick...

...True Virtue belongs only to the Elect, God's chosen, the minuscule number seized by Grace...

...The principles of conduct behind these selective and representative examples, Kant (who wrote his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime about the same time) would have called "adoptive virtues...

...It's as if Edwards had said: Let us be truthful, see what we have, and judge what is required...

...I cannot think it unfortunate if the popularity or notoriety of this sermon reminds us that at the bottom of Edwards's thought is an image of man as a poor forked thing, life as a terrifying trial, and the chance of something graceful being done with it as hedged by risk and uncertainty...

...Such virtues although praiseworthy and even beautiful are not sublime ("True virtue alone is sublime"), because while they may accord with true virtue they do so only incidentally and indeed may—as Edwards's example of pity suggests—"conflict with the general rules of virtue...

...What Edwards calls "True Virtue" in The Nature of True Virtue he calls by other names in other works...

...When Calvin proposed in his Institutio Christianae Religionis that among those to whom God assigns Election there are a few to whom he "assigns it in such a manner that the certainty of the effect is liable to no suspense or doubt," one cannot help thinking that his proposition was really a selfinterested self-compliment...

...or a man "promotes the good of another [and] has his good promoted by the other...

...Elect implies the singular, as does Inspired...

...Such self-assurance, self-election, is rarely conducive to respect for others whom one suspects to be of a lesser condition...

...An approbation of justice in human dealings is indisputably a fine thing...

...it is the excellency that "is in the sacred scriptures called by the name of light, knowledge, understanding...

...It is a 127 matter of "natural conscience," as Edwards calls it, which is a disposition against being inconsistent with oneself, such inconsistency occurring when one treats another a way he would not want to be treated himself, or demands from another a behavior he would not be willing to practice himself...

...For you don't say "to elect" in Basel, where Calvin wrote his Institutio, or in Geneva, where he ruled, but "elire"—from which we get "elite...

...An observer can appreciate "some natural agreement of one thing to another...

...The self-love inherent in those natural instincts for human preservation and the self-union inherent in that natural conscience for personal consistency obviously have a social function...

...That's an icy word as adapted into English, "elite...

...Edwards admired Hutcheson, but not to the point of saying that the rare gift of a few was the innate propensity of all...

...And Calvinism—which achieved its grandest philosophic expression in America—does seem to imply an attitude toward human nature that qualifies any political faith calling for the wider distribution of political power and economic reward among a population, instead of keeping power and reward in the hands of those relative few of inspired condition...

...I sincerely don't think that I am...

...If a person feels sympathy for a particular fellow because of that particular fellow, the virtue is "adoptive...

...Most of us are not inspired people—whether inspiration is read as a religious state of being or as some secular quality of moral and aesthetic excellence...

...The Elect is chosen by no one: he simply is...

...But the work of Edwards that here concerns me most is his posthumously published The Nature of True Virtue (1765), the leading statement of his moral philosophy...

...But may there not be a sense in which the adoptive virtues are enough...

...It's not an explicit consideration in Edwards's dissertation (he's not writing a Politics), but the pleasure he finds men taking in "a beauty of order in society" is the work of just such a sense of proportion...

...141...

...Adoptive virtues are meant to pale in comparison...

...Nor is pity for the suffering of a fellow necessarily Truly Virtuous, being another natural instinct implanted for the same purpose...

...And so does its obverse, that a profound skepticism about the loveliness of human nature compels a conservative political faith...

...or, rather, only three ways it can inform unspoken assumptions within the polls: (1) You can long for an oligarchy of the Elect...

...I (says Edwards) do not pretend that social comity is easy—I of all people, who have preached man's distance from the angelic—but I note a certain intellectual clarity of alternatives...

...But that's no adequate answer...

...128 TRUE VIRTUE, disinterested benevolence to being in general, cannot be understood simply as a high, transcendent mode of the ethical...

...You may be cursed with depravity...

...Elite is always plural, a collective phenomenon...

...And in fact pity "may consist with true malevolence," as when a person hates another and wishes him ill, but his hatred not being infinite, he begins to pity the other when the other is "in misery far beyond his ill will...

...Nature...

...The Elite are visible and obvious, possessing whatever qualities a society admires and likes to reward, or possessing whatever power a society will heel to...

...It's the possession of the self-assured, those as alien to humility as Calvin was when he overruled his own Augustinian doctrine (as the better Calvinist Edwards didn't) that the mystery of Election and Damnation took place in God's "secret counsel" and supposed himself privy to the divine knowledge...

...If one treats one's neighbor with respect and sympathy because one is Graced with respect and sympathy toward being in general, it is the latter disposition that marks one as Truly Virtuous, not the specific act, which could be performed from lesser motives, the adoptive virtues...

...What follows is not intended only for readers interested in Calvinism, but readers open to seeing how much of the cultural heritage of the West fails to translate into political imperatives as it may seem plausible that it would...

...True Virtue is "benevolence to being in general . . that consent, propensity and union of heart to being in general...

...The self-love of natural man is a mark of his fallenness, but a social polity, even a just one, does not depend upon an innate benevolence...

...But in any case, Elite and Elect have no relation beyond the coincidences of etymology...

...but that it is to your advantage to do so, and to applaud the other for doing so, is easily within your mental grasp...

...There is nothing so mysterious, so defiant of human comprehension, about right action...

...Natural conscience...

...If he feels sympathy for the particular because he has a universal sympathy, the virtue is "true...

...The idea—I think it's fairly common—that a profession of liberal or social democratic politics implies a profession of faith in the innate and prior goodness of human nature strikes me as a beggarly question...

...allow me to appropriate it even in a secular context...

...The Elect tends to be invisible, for his virtues are not so cashable...

...In A Divine and Supernatural Light Edwards pursues the understanding of "a spiritual and divine light, immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means"—that is, not the natural instincts and conscience, but True Virtue, the gift of Grace...

...Elites choose, or are allowed to choose, themselves...

...And all those adoptive virtues that Edwards approves, while finding them to fall short of True Virtue, inform the social psychology of the Damned—although he's kind enough not to put it that way...

...But True Virtue is absolutely benevolent...

...So one will have to judge the author's argument, not guess at his possible delusions...

...For Edwards put ethics in its place—a high place, yes, but not so difficult to climb to...

...Or, (3) You can accept a sort of democracy of the Damned, and a few hidden Elect, and feel at least a little complimented that even so demanding a man as Jonathan Edwards knew that ordinary people, with their fractured motives and adoptive virtues, were responsible for the greater part of the moral action of the world...

...What functions instead is a conventional sense of symmetry not different in kind from what leads us to appreciate proportion in physical things...

...Elitism is a compromise between autocratic impulses and the reality of mass society...

...THE RICHEST, SUBTLEST, and most rewarding thinker ever to grace America, William James just possibly excepted, was Jonathan Edwards...

...you are also blessed with reason and some instincts of preservation...

...It's often thought unfortunate that the reading public knows him primarily through his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, instead of the kindlier mood of A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections or Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World, which show him as psychologist and metaphysician, or Images or Shadows of Divine Things, brief poetic essays in analogy...

...But, as Edwards argues, it is no evidence in itself of True Virtue, because there is no benevolence necessarily involved...

...Edwards was in part speaking to the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, like Francis Hutcheson, who argued, in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, for a native sense of communal benevolence...

...Not a class doctrine—and, as a matter of fact, of remarkably little political significance, in spite of the fact that "Elect" and "Damned" in a secular context do have a suspiciously political sound, the first especially...

...it "must chiefly consist in love to God, the Being of beings...

...for if I did I'd probably for diplomatic reasons not wish to admit I did...

...some answerableness of the act to the occasion...

...But the search committee would have to be divinely wise, and would most certainly be swamped by confident applicants...

...But the older religious faiths nonetheless inform many unspoken assumptions and even spoken rhetoric...

...And it seems to me there are many among us who think their own inspired state, their election so to speak, "is liable to no suspense or doubt...

...But the Elect never has (although Plato wished it...

...A man may do ill to another and suffer pangs of conscience...

...But I recognize the justice of suspicion here—so universal is the habit of "selfelection...

...But in itself it is no evidence of True Virtue...

...This point is essential...

...But whatever he calls it, it is the possession only of the one who is Elect...

...But this again is no evidence of True Virtue, no mark of an innate moral sense...

...The inspired among us are as few as the Elect in Edwards's reckoning, in which "of so vast and innumerable a multitude of blossoms that appear on a tree, so few come to ripe fruit . . . but one in a great multitude ever bringing forth anything" (Images or Shadows...

...This inclination is also a "natural instinct" implanted by the "Author of Nature" for "the preservation or continuation of the world of mankind...

...Well . . . in quite other ways, it seems to me...

...The state of the Damned...

...I am reminded of Edwards's caveat in A Divine and Supernatural Light that special condition knows no distinctions of rank and intellect, may belong to "persons of mean capacities and advantages, as well as those that are of the greatest parts and learning...

...But the poet is revealed in Sinners . . . as well: "The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood...

...He's of no direct political consequence: you can never find him to crown him...

...There are only three ways the doctrine of Election and Damnation can be translated into politics...

...We may live in a secular age, especially here in the States, where we've had no established church to give a definite stamp to social life, but only various competitors, mostly Protestant, and splintering even yet...

...In an earthly kingdom, men have to make do with the natural capacities of the majority of mankind, and trust the apparent concern for others that is actually a reflected solicitude for one's own pains and pleasures...