Ralph Hancock introduces his Cwic Show Series, "The City and The Soul." There is no better voice on the intersection of the Restored Gospel, Politics, and Philosophy. Ralph is also a contributor to our Substack, "Alive and Intelligent.'
Ralph is a professor of political philosophy at Brigham Young University and is an accomplished author.
something a little different here this
is going to be a separate series for our
channel this series is called The City
and the Soul and the episodes are done
by my good friend Professor Ralph
Hancock from Brigham Y Young University
this series is going to cover his
expertise which is an intersection
between faith politics and philosophy
this episode is the introduction to this
series ralph is a good friend of mine he
is brilliant and if you can keep up with
him you're going to get a lot out of
this ralph is also the source for the
homeschooling curriculum Fathom the Good
that you've heard me talk about before
which actually helps teenagers to think
critically and to position the question
of the good right in front of them
there's nothing like it to find out more
about it or to get a free sample course
you can go to fathomthegood.com
here's Ralph hello I'm Ralph Hancock and
this is the city and the soul the city
and the soul that's what we're going to
call this program or this uh series of
contributions to thinking thinking about
as we'll see about religion about
politics and about philosophy and how
how these three
relate together
uh I look forward to
speaking to you and I hope to hear from
you and I hope that uh I can generate a
kind of uh conversation from which we
can all learn i'm eager to hear feedback
and to know what questions uh may have
come up what objections uh to things I
have said and what areas uh would be of
particular interest to you that we might
explore
together
the city and the soul that suggests the
city I'm using in the using the term in
the uh ancient sense the
uh the polus the civic association
the city was thought by the ancient
Greeks the first philosophers and the
first political philosophers the polus
was thought to be the
primary the comprehensive the most
important the Aristotle used the word
architectonic that's to say the the
master the encompassing
uh human community and Aristotle
would also write you've probably heard
this that human beings are by nature
political animals aristotle defined us
human beings as at once rational animals
and political animals this may surprise
us because we might think that uh well
rational and political those are two
very different even opposite opposite
things but the the key here is to see
how these are necessarily
linked uh to to reason is um inherently
in a primordial sense to reason is
linked up with our status as uh civic as
communal beings
social beings but but political says a
little more than social
uh we certainly are by nature social
beings but we're political beings
because we live in
uh
authoritative communities
that's how a city or a polus is
different from let's say society in the
abstract a human community ultimately
any human society really depends upon
some
authority some political legal even
police and military authority
but uh more deeply more generally some
authority that is moral and even
religious
so here we come to the point that we see
the uh inherent connection and it's a
problematic one it's not it's it's not
all uh peace and love it's not it
doesn't always by any mean by any means
go smoothly the connection between the
city and the soul between religion and
politics
and that's that's sort of the nexus from
which we will uh begin and uh my
proposition to you is that um
practically everything can be clarified
by taking seriously
this uh nexus
of concern for our individual even
eternal well-being that's the soul and
concerned for the common good and
therefore
deference to the authority
uh that speaks for the common good uh
the city and the soul i I'm proposing to
you that uh
much uh that is political but much that
uh does not seem to us immediately as
political much that is moral or much
that simply touches upon human meaning
and the human condition
can be illuminated by just a careful
reflection on this uh critical nexus
between the city and the soul between
religion and politics and I'll add
philosophy to that triangle religion
philosophy and politics now that I'm
talking about the the triangle I brought
a few visual aids to start with here uh
my my friend uh uh Pierre Manant whose
book uh actually a uh a collection of
very uh deep and interesting interviews
seeing things politically
uh I was honored to translate I see it's
uh introduced by my good friend Daniel J
Mahoney who will certainly be invited to
participate in this city in the soul
project uh we probably should give the
publisher some credit that is uh it
doesn't say does it uh it's uh St
augustine's Press
uh that book uh came to mind it's it's a
good one for you to know about i
recommend it to you highly as an
introduction to I think the most uh
important uh living political
philosopher who I'm happy to say is also
a personal friend of mine and who
retired from the uh uh school of
advanced studies in social sciences in
Paris a few years ago but I brought up
Pier Manant I'll be bringing up uh more
than once uh but I brought him up just
now because uh he himself describes his
career as uh in a way contained within
this triangle of religion politics
and philosophy and I do think it's a
it's a vital uh triangle we be we've
begun talking about uh religion and
politics
um
about uh philosophy let me just say this
philosophy can be uh a scary word uh
sometimes we think of philosophers and
not necessarily wrongly as um
bogged down in
very very arcane abstract
uh difficult to understand
conceptions
difficult to see often what the
practical point of these conceptions is
uh philosophy can easil easily veer off
into pointless abstractions
but when I talk about philosophy I'm
just thinking about uh I'm just talking
about thinking as carefully and
rigorously as possible and with as open
a mind as possible
open including openness but we don't
always mean this today when we talk
about openness including openness
to God openness to revealed truth
openness to a realm of things that we
cannot that reason alone cannot master
so I I would consider that rigorous
openness to what goes beyond it to what
exceeds it part of uh true philosophy or
philosophy rightly understood so uh this
is the triangulation that u reminded me
of uh pier manant's formulation in
seeing things politically the
triangulation religion philosophy and
politics that will sort of define uh the
concentration of our uh contributions in
this uh city and the soul uh series now
some of you are already thinking and I
sympathize with you in advance can we
leave politics out of it politics is a
nuisance politics is ugly politics is uh
we hear uh polarizing politics brings
out the worst in people politics is
univil
uh yes I sympathize with you um
but uh yeah sorry we can't because
uh politics in the broadest sense the
the ideas
and moral
principles even moral uh feelings moral
instincts
that
are the glue
of our community or maybe I should say
of our communities
this moral political glue
leaks into
everything we think at least everything
that bears on uh human meaning what it
means to live a a good and satisfying
and ultimately uh happy or blessed human
life i would even go further and say
that uh the less
we think about politics or the less we
philosophize
that is think rigorously about politics
uh the more alas
the moral authority the moral concepts
uh the let's we can use the term the
politically correct
um principles
that tend to reign in our political
community the more these affect us
so we're not exempt from being involved
in politics by trying to ignore it uh um
even if we don't want politics uh I'd be
tempted to say politics wants us
so uh you might accuse me eventually of
seeing uh questions of politics or
questions of political philosophy
everywhere uh I suppose I am at risk of
a kind of uh professional
deformationation having uh taught uh and
written about political philosophy for
more than 40 years now and having
studied it obviously longer than that
yeah I'm very very attuned very
sensitized to political dimensions of of
problems that we confront every day but
uh cut me a little slack here and um be
prepared to see whether it's not true
that there is a political philosophical
dimension
to so much of what grips us as human
beings
political moral
but more vitally let's say uh just
existential
are very
Self-standing as human beings
is shaped by
the political environment in which we
live and breathe and have our being
uh an example comes to mind and it's one
I wanted to come to today anyway the
example is
freedom
we're all in favor of freedom who could
be against freedom i'm certainly
uh I want to be on this bandwagon we
think freedom is a good thing what does
it mean
we uh Latter-day Saints and I am a
member uh of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints uh nicknamed
sometimes Mormon or called simply LDS
uh I am a Latter-day Saint uh loyal
committed and believing and I will be
speaking from that point of view
but I draw upon a much broader
philosophical and Christian tradition
and many of my references as many of my
friends including Pierre Manant and Dan
Mahoney already mentioned uh are Roman
Catholics deeply steeped in a tradition
going back through Thomas Aquinas let's
say and St augustine and from them back
to
uh Aristotle and to Plato uh ancient
Greek founders of political philosophy
and political science these
this is the tradition I will be
addressing but I will be addressing it
uh as a faithful Latter-day Saint and
often with uh particular uh uh
applications and uh twists uh of
interest especially uh to Latter-day
Saints but I hope not uh exclusively of
interest to us uh Latter-day Saints oh
but I was going to say something about
freedom because freedom calls up the the
fundamental Latter Day Saint concept of
agency
uh free agency or moral agency plays a
huge part in Latter-day Saint belief and
is deeply grounded in Latter-day Saint
uh scripture
uh
notably
uh second Nephi chapter 2 is a great
discourse
uh including the con conception of the
necessity of opposition in all things
that that bears on the very meaning of
uh of human freedom so agency is a very
important moral and religious concept
but it uh overlaps with or or tends to
be
um
tends to fuse with or to be confused
with or at least to be colored by not to
say tainted by
uh what we mean by freedom in the
political world
uh now what we mean by freedom in the
political world
or in our political culture
and not only in politics specifically
but the way our political culture
impinges on what we mean by freedom
simply in human existence
uh the meaning of freedom uh is uh is
not a settled matter in the political
world uh we can say let's say roughly
that there's a meaning of freedom uh
associated with um
liberalism with a small L classical
liberalism going back to let's say the
American founding and the enlightenment
and the philosophy of John Lockach uh an
idea of freedom that is associated with
uh limited government and that puts a u
lot of emphas emphasis upon the
ownership of private property and uh the
human faculty of um
you could say stewardship over property
caring for prop property increasing
property um these are great themes of uh
classical liberalism
uh limited government uh private
property rights uh the uh in individual
rights we we limit government in order
to preserve a zone of freedom for the
individual the classical liberal idea of
freedom uh cannot help but inform
uh the very resonance of the idea of
freedom when we use this term not only
in a political but in a religious or
philosophical context but uh
you will have noticed that the classical
liberal idea of freedom is not the only
one so there's a more radical idea of
freedom associated with the
cultural political term liberation
uh that goes back
we could trace it in postmodern
philosophy and in neo-Marxism uh but it
uh the term liberation
uh has a particular uh coloration uh
that was invoked very prominently
especially
beginning in the 1960s and the 1970s not
only in the United States but in
uh
western and other developed democracies
as we say and this liberation clearly
has a different tonality and a different
uh reach and different implications from
uh the concept of freedom as John Lock
or James Madison for example might have
understood it but in any case these are
politically defined notions of freedom
that are in the air and that uh press
their claims upon us in one way or
another
and a religious idea such as for
Latter-day Saints the idea
of agency
or let's say for a Catholic follower of
Thomas Aquinas a believer in natural law
as human participation
in God's eternal law uh these religious
concepts uh agency and natural law
uh tend to be heavily colored by the
political environment
in which we or environments in which we
we believers uh operate
and uh so we we may think that politics
is just uh one limited specialized
uh compartmentalized
area of our lives which we would like to
keep apart from well in a word from our
souls we would like to imagine that the
problems of the city
political problems
could simply be separated from concerns
of the soul and for that matter concerns
of our uh religious communities concerns
of those who gather together to try to
contribute to the uh mutual benefit of
each other's eternal souls we'd like to
think these are separate but the uh the
the the leakage
uh I would say is inevitable the uh the
tendency of politically framed terms to
seep into our religious vocabularies
is uh extremely uh pronounced
and I'm just going to suggest an example
which I will soon be developing in print
and uh here uh in these uh video
recordings and that is example precisely
of the latter-day saint concept of
agency because it turns out that this
concept has recently been in the news we
can say because a prominent uh national
uh journalist and uh prestigious author
uh Jonathan Roush of the
uh Brookings Institution in Washington
DC jonathan Roush has a recent book
let's see i brought my visual aid for
that too
uh cross purposes Christianity's uh
broken bargain broken bargain with
democracy that's a very recent
publication by Yale University Press
uh Jonathan Roush uh who uh could be
described as a uh to in today's terms as
a a moderate liberal certainly
uh a civil and reasonable fellow with
whom we can profit by discussing
Jonathan Roush uh I should say was very
prominent in the pro
uh homosexual marriage uh advocacy
before that problem was apparently
settled uh by the United States Supreme
Court at least as far as the United
States is concerned jonathan Roush is in
some ways a cent a centrist uh liberal
or a political commentator of the center
left uh having won
having had the battle for homosexual
marriage won uh for him uh he is now uh
in this book and in other publications
trying to carve out a
reasonable and sensible and civic
spirited um kind of middle ground and as
part of that middle ground he has
reached out to Latter-day Saints
including um uh high officials in the in
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints and prominent uh voices uh among
uh Latter-day Saints and at Brigham Y
young University I should say and he has
appealed to Latter-day Saints
um inviting us to put aside uh
polarization and what he judges to be
now a sterile or even uh destructive
uh culture wars to put all these aside
in order to join uh an alliance with
liberalism
liberalism rightly understood the
moderate liberalism
as he conceives it that he believes he
represents roush has invited Latter-day
Saints to um not only to join moderate
liberals such as himself but in a in a
way to be a beacon and even to provide a
a theological model for other Christian
churches to give up polarizing
anti-liberal culture wars and to
uh join
a moderate um liberal
consensus
which can promote civic peace good
citizenship more generally and put
behind uh put behind us a nastiness and
divisiveness
and uh the fear-mongering that he sees
represented by more conservative
expressions of Christianity well
I'll be writing and talking more uh
about Roush soon but the point I just
wanted to make to conclude today is that
Roush central to Roush's
outreach to Christians and to Latter-day
Saint Christians in particular is his um
conviction
his insight so he thinks that
this Latter-day saint idea of agency
which he has stumbled across in
conversing with u
prominent Latter-day Saints also seeking
what is best for civility and
constructive pursuit of the common good
in the public square
jonathan Roush has come to the
conclusion that Latter-day Saints are in
possession of a theological idea of
agency which can provide the touchstone
of a new uh moderately liberal American
civility all right the way this connects
to what I've been saying before is that
it provides a crystal clear example of
how our very idea of agency
uh a a religious idea at the heart of
our understanding of God man man and
eternity how this political idea
becomes infused with a certain excuse me
how this theological idea becomes
infused with a certain understanding of
political justice and what freedom
should mean in the political realm now
you've already guessed that I don't
think that Roush's proposition is a
wellfounded one or the one that we let
or one that we latter-day saints should
buy into i'll be explaining that further
but for now the point is
and Roush is a brilliant Rash or more
than Roush's writing rous's reception uh
quite an enthusiastic a prominently
enthusiastic reception of Roush's
political spin on Latter-day Saint
agency shows us I would say the tendency
and in this case I believe the perilous
tendency of our religious ideas to be uh
stamped by uh the uh by our political
circumstances and the political notions
that arise uh to address our the these
political circumstances
is moral agency as per the Book of
Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants
and the Pearl of Great Price is the
Latter-day Saint concept
of agency the the concept that Jonathan
Roush sees as the key piece of a puzzle
of a new
moderate and reasonable liberalism uh
that's a question that I'll delve into
more deeply in uh our next session of
the city and the soul and you will also
be referred to uh my writing on this
subject which will soon be appearing in
print or rather online
thank you very much and goodbye for
today from the city and the soul
