About Wikidworld
A primitive species with a small brain can only wreak so much havoc. A primitive species with a large brain? Well, that's another story.
Welcome to Wikidworld, a philosophical and historical reimagination of Western Civilization. Leveraging unique tools and insights, the Wikidworld project delivers an urgent account of the fraught relationship between the two master narratives of the last millennium: the philosophies of agent-based morality and systems-based complexity.
What’s at stake? Let’s call it the end of morality. Let's call it after virtue. Let's call it everything.
Religion, Law and Politics
As you’ll soon learn, Wikidworld is very much about the law, and how the law mediates and shapes the relationship between religion and politics. And between culture and politics (which is often the same thing). If we needed any reminding, the most aggressively reactionary Supreme Court majority this nation has ever seen has recently been more than happy to drive home the point.
In a nation where probably no more than 10 percent of the adult population would consider themselves “conservative” Catholics, two-thirds (or 67 percent) of the Supreme Court justices are politically (and theologically) conservative Catholics. The 233-year history of the Court has witnessed the lifetime appointment of only 115 justices. In the first century of the national government there was one Catholic justice (fittingly, this was Roger Taney of Dred Scott fame). The century that followed (give or take) witnessed the appointment of 6 more Catholic justices. Since 1986, 9 of the 12 appointments to the Court have been Catholic (compared to 7 of the prior 103 appointments).
Does this matter? It absolutely matters. Do ideas matter? Does ideology matter? Do organizations and money matter? Does political virtuosity matter? Does an ethos of punishment and brutalization matter? The media focuses on the political impact of evangelical Protestantism (and not without reason). However, the dark cloud hovering upon the nation has been raised by right-wing Catholic intellectuals for whom religion, law, and politics are pretty much indistinguishable.
Why hasn’t this nexus received more attention from the media and from liberal pundits and politicians? I’ve been tracking the ideas and activities of conservative Catholic philosophers, lawyers, and politicians for nearly ten years. I know from experience that anything perceived as criticism or slander of American Catholicism elicits an immediate, unified and outraged response from savvy religious conservatives, who are more than happy to shed crocodile tears and wave the bloody shirt of anti-Catholic bigotry, discrimination and hatred.
Given the actual ascendance of Catholics in all realms of intellectual, economic, legal and political life in this country (even as their demographic numbers shrink), these charges are of course laughable. As those who voice the most outrage are of course fully aware. We remember the mayhem that ensued when Dianne Feinstein told Amy Coney Barrett during her 2017 appeals court judicial confirmation hearing that “the dogma lives loudly in you.” Critical perspectives on conservative culture-war Catholicism have become a 3rd rail of American politics (and so also a 3rd rail for journalists), a measure of culture-war Catholicism’s strength, not its weakness.
There is another angle to this liberal miasma about the role in contemporary politics of conservative Catholic ideas, which Louis Hartz memorably wrote about nearly 70 years ago in The Liberal Tradition in America. In essence, Hartz told us, our national vision, our national cosmology, lacks depth because our history as a nation lacks depth. With no feudal past to constrain us, with Protestantism and the Enlightenment in many ways the beginning of our history, we simply cannot interpret political activity within our own nation that does not conform to the precepts and practices of procedural liberal democracy. But the intellectual roots of conservative culture-war Catholicism are theological and medieval, the product of a cosmology organized around hierarchy, inequality, authority and power.
We do not see conservative Catholics. But conservative Catholics see us.
This focus on the outsized (some might say metastasized) political influence of conservative Catholicism in the United States underscores the relationship between religion, law, and politics in our nation. That relationship is the key to connecting the millennium-long history of Western civilization to the crises of our own time.
The Clash of Civilizations
We’ve heard much talk in recent years about the Huntingtonian “Clash of Civilizations,” which formally refers to the inevitable conflict between what we know as Western civilization and pretty much any other competing “civilization,” and which more specifically can mean end-times conflict between Christianity and Islam, or Christianity and “Godless Liberalism,” or “Nationalists” and “Globalists,” or “the West” against “the Rest.”
In reality, the axis of conflict in the next century will be the struggle to hold on to and define conceptions of humanity in an unprecedented era of technological imperialism and environmental, ecosystem, and nation-state collapse. At the most fundamental level, efforts to save our planet, and ourselves, will force us to abandon conventional thinking – the “architecture of assumptions” – about what it means to be human.
We are already witnessing this battle play out as a cage match between the two pillars of Western civilization – the creator-centered Abrahamic faiths and creation-centered post-Newtonian science – which is, in essence, a contest between two competing, colliding cosmologies. Participation in this struggle requires attunement to non-linear narratives of origins, epistemologies, forces, transitions, and relationships in the universe, and on our planet, as these are the factors that frame and control all perspectives on politics and power.
Natural Law Moral Philosophy
So here is the thesis of Wikidworld: In a period marked by the unprecedented unraveling of the geological and biological premises of our existence, normal political talking points, policy wonkery, and electoral shenanigans are not sufficient tools for the job. To understand this cultural and political inversion, and to grasp the sources of our emotional dislocation, we must travel deep into Western thought and engage a broad sweep of Western history.
Wikidworld thus takes as its starting point an irony. We need to filter the political impact and significance of Donald Trump, a crude and simple man with crude and simple ideas (and those like Ron DeSantis spawned in Trump’s shadow), by embracing new frontiers on thought and action that emerging theories and studies of complexity science and of complex systems have made available to us. Wikidworld applies this literature on complexity to the ways in which we think about, inhabit, imagine, and use “history,” those grand narratives we create to explain and justify ourselves.
Wikidworld examines how the Catholic philosophy of natural law has intersected and sustained the very idea of Western civilization. The defense of this idea – that the West represents the highest and most profound expression of a Christian God’s scrivened plan for the human species created in his image – has buttressed, justified, and provided political cover for nearly every significant moment and movement of European and American history in the past millennium.
The newsletter will specifically focus on the 800-year influence of the Catholic natural law moral philosophy first associated with Thomas Aquinas, which positions humans between God and Nature in philosophically and historically interesting ways that prefigure the era of the Anthropocene and that, as a complex systems lens discloses, continue to press down upon, and deform us, as a species.
My argument is that we must begin with this synthetic (Aristotelian-Augustinian) intellectual superstructure Aquinas built on top of the idea of “natural law” (which is only concerned with human nature) — and not the Enlightenment, which constructs its philosophical foundation upon “laws of nature” (that apply to all forms of life, including humans) — to trace the origins of the ideas of Western civilization and modernity.
Five Stages of History
Wikidworld frames this cosmological drama across five stages of history.
We begin in Part 1 with the challenge since the 1970s of a Catholic brand of legal conservatism to the post-war landscape of American politics and American liberalism.
In Part 2, we journey to Europe during the Middle Ages where, despite the universal aspirations of the Thomist natural law synthesis, the medieval Church between the 12th and 16th centuries spawned vast "subduction zones" throughout Europe, a source of enduring tensions in the subsequent history of the West.
In Part 3 of the Wikidworld project, we focus on the period of "emergence" in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries, in which engineering and scientific progress spawned developments in spiritual, legal, and material technologies that launched the era of the Anthropocene.
Part 4 of Wikidworld returns us to the American strand, with a focus on the interactions between law and myth in American politics and jurisprudence, and the technical, "brutalist" ends they typically have served in the effort to tame and exploit this vast continent.
We close in Part 5 of Wikidworld by peering into the future, with a focus on environmental death and the end of natural law.
