I closed the last post with a question:  Having abandoned the vision on which the medieval university was built, what are modern universities organized around?  The answer is “Nothing in particular.”

They are queasy alliances of interest groups which have no ultimate commitments in common.

Among the more respectable things the university tries to be are a job training center, a place for technological research, and an accreditor of fitness for employment.  But universities don’t do any of these things well, and each of them can be better and more cheaply by other kinds of institution.

You don’t need to go to college to learn how to manage a hotel, or to prove that you can program a computer.  Government and industry can carry out technological research just as well at their own facilities.  And college prepares people for employment so poorly that some corporations are now forced to run their own classes in math and English composition.

The university also tries to be a place for doing things that just don’t need to be done at all, like giving young people a place to “discover themselves.”

This which means giving them a place for a protracted period of dissipation while avoiding adult responsibilities.  Parents who think this is the best way for their children to grow up could save money by just sending them on cruises.

Universities offer places for preserving failed ideologies and validating faddish “identities,” but we have politics for that; we don’t need universities.

And they are massive public-works programs for keeping a larger number of people employed as scholars than could otherwise find that kind of work.  We do need scholars, but let us be honest: Most scholars would be better employed at something else.

The things universities do which other institutions can do better eventually will be done by other institutions.  The things they do which don’t need to be done will eventually lose public support.  I will not mourn these changes.  They are overdue.

I will mourn the loss of the one thing universities can do well, which was done in medieval universities, but which the modern university no longer believes in:  Pursuing the vision of the coherence of reality and its friendliness to the mind, and forming minds which are capable of sharing it.

We will have to find another way to do that.  I don’t know what it will be.  I believe it will be found, but it will not be found in my time.  There are signs on the horizon, but they are faint.

And so to reply to Vedder and Denhart:  Gentlemen, you are mistaken.  These are the reasons why the college bubble will pop; this is why the higher education system will collapse.  Not because it is “still tied to its medieval origins.”

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhart concludes, “Many poorly endowed and undistinguished schools may bite the dust, but America flourished when buggy manufacturers went bankrupt thanks to the automobile.  The cleansing would be good for a higher education system still tied to its medieval origins – and for the students it’s robbing.”

Vedder and Denhart are right about the need for reform, but they are mistaken about what kind of reform is needed.  And they are utterly confused in thinking that the problem is that universities are “still tied to medieval origins.”

Medieval students had to master seven elementary studies before going on to advanced degrees.  The first three, called the trivium, were grammar, or the laws of language; rhetoric, or the laws of argument; and dialectic, or the laws of clear thought.  The next four, called the quadrivium, were arithmetic, or the laws of number; geometry, or the laws of figure; music, or the laws of harmony; and astronomy, or the laws of inherent motion.

Why these seven?  Because medieval universities were organized around the view that the universe makes sense, that knowledge is grasping that sense, that the mind can really grasp it, that all knowledge is related, and that all of its parts form a meaningful whole. 

By contrast, our universities are organized around – what?  Actually, they aren’t universities at all, because they have given up their vision, the coherence of universal reality and its friendliness to the rational mind.

Most humanities scholars gave up that view some time ago.  In fact, they mock it.  That’s why we have so little that even pretends to be a core curriculum, and why even general education courses are a smorgasbord.  The pretentious postmodernist credo is “suspicion of metanarratives,” which means no one gets the Big Story right.

Of course that is a Big Story too.  “Once upon a time people believed there was a Big Story which would make sense of things if only they could get it right.  Now we know better, because there isn't any Big Story, so no one gets it right.  And we are the clever ones the ones who got that right.”

How clever are these clever ones?  You tell me.  Several years ago my own university sponsored a freshman assembly about choosing a major.  Faculty in the humanities and sciences presented pep talks for their fields of study; student leaders asked them questions.  The tone of the event was epitomized by the question, “If you were a bar of soap, whose shower would you want to be in?”  Grinningly, the faculty moderator pressed the faculty panelists to answer.

I am ashamed to say that they did.

This is not the sort of problem which can be solved by cost-savings, team-teaching, or distance learning.  Such solutions are merely economic.  The problem is spiritual.

Though scientists have held out longer, belief in the coherence of universal reality is vanishing among them too.  The physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote in his book Across the Frontiers that “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

This view isn’t a finding of science.  It’s merely a culmination of a line of thought which began with philosophers like Kant, who thought our minds can never really get at reality itself, but only at their own thoughts about reality.

Having abandoned the vision of universal truth on which the medieval university was built, what are modern universities organized around?  Stay tuned.

* “How the College Bubble will Pop,” Wall Street Journal, p. A13, 9 January 2014.

Last week I was telling the Original Visitor about –

The Original Visitor breaks in:  You don’t have to be so didactic.

Budziszewski:  Why do you care?  You’re a figment of my imagination.

But you’re imagining me to be something like a real reader, and a real reader would find your language patronizing.  “I was telling him,” indeed.

Sorry, that's not my intention.  How would you say it?

I thought we were having a little chat.

All right.  Last week the Original Visitor and I were chatting about the four witnesses.  Better?

Yes, much.

May we now resume our broadcast?

Yes.  You were going to tell me what the third witness is.

Well, you remember that we were talking about our natural design.

Of course.

The second witness was recognition that in fact, we do have a natural design --

I remember.  So?

So the third witness is just recognition of its details.

What do you mean?

If the human person really is a meaningful whole, then each of our various powers and features has moral significance.

For example?

For example, the respiratory power is for breathing, not sniffing airplane glue.

So by meanings and purposes you just mean the functions of our bodily organs.

No, I’m talking about all of our powers and features.  The power of anger is for arousing us to the ordinate defense of endangered goods.  The sexual power is for turning the wheel of the generations uniting the procreative partners.  The power of practical reason is for deliberating well.  The power of wonder is for stirring us up to seek truth, especially the truth about God.  Each of these powers should be used according to its purpose.

A little propaganda, eh, Mr. Blogger?  I see how you slipped in the item about sex.   

I didn’t “slip it in.”  We recognize the inbuilt meaning and purpose of the sexual powers in exactly the same way that we recognize the inbuilt meaning and purpose of, say –

Try anger.  There’s a power for you.  Tell me the “inbuilt meaning and purpose” of the power to become angry, if you can.

Wouldn’t you say that the inbuilt meaning and purpose of anger is to arouse us to the ordinate defense of endangered goods?

Why should that be the purpose?

Be serious.  Apart from arousing us to the ordinate defense of endangered goods, why should there even be such a thing as anger?

And I suppose you’d say, “Apart from the need for posterity, why should there even be such a thing as sex?”

Would I be wrong?

Why not say that the meaning and purpose of sex is simply pleasure?

Because the exercise of every voluntary power is pleasurable, and that tells us nothing about its purpose.  You wouldn’t say that the inbuilt meaning and purpose of the power to eat is simply pleasure, would you?

You said that each of our “powers and features” has moral significance, but all of your examples are what you call “powers.”  Give me an example of a “feature.”

Sure:  The fact that men and women are complementary.

Complementary, like different?

Complementary, like different in a way that makes them correspond, that makes them form a whole.  There is something missing in a man which is more fully present in the woman, and something missing in a woman which is more fully present in the man.  They balance each other.

And why do you say that this fact about us has “moral significance”?

Because any way of life which denies or defies it is asking for trouble.

Every few sentences I want to hit you.

Why?  I don’t have any urge to hit you.

Never mind.  Tell me the fourth witness.

When I do you may hit me anyway.

Why?

Because the fourth witness is all about asking for trouble.

So what is it?

The natural consequences of our deeds.

Hmm.  What do you mean by “natural consequences”?

All of the things that happen to us when -- and because -- our lives cut across the grain of our design.

Like what?

If I cut myself, then I bleed.  If I use a lot of dope, then I become its slave.

So by “natural” consequences you mean bodily consequences.

No, I mean all of the consequences which arise in the course of nature.  If I live by knives, then I die by knives.  If I desert the mother, then my child grows up without a father.  If I hop from bed to bed, then eventually I lose the capacity for intimacy.  If I betray my friends, then eventually I have no friends.

Okay, not just bodily.  You mean bodily, emotional, and social consequences.

Don’t forget the intellectual consequences.

Like what?

If I make myself stupid, then I will end up even stupider than I had intended.  Works every time.

I’m not sure I understand you.

You should.  I’ve been talking about it for weeks.

Oh, I see – those stories you’ve been telling in your blog –

Yes?

Most of them are about the natural consequences of suppressing conscience.  Right?

Right.

So they’re about the natural consequences of making yourself stupid.

Yes.

But then they’re not about just one witness.

No.

They’re about two witnesses at once.  The first and the fourth.  Deep conscience and natural consequences.

Right again.

So the four witnesses don’t work independently.  They depend on each other.  They interact.  We need all four.

Exactly.  Do you notice how that takes us back to the question you asked at the beginning of the conversation?

That was last week.  What was it again?

You asked why what I call natural law doesn’t sound much like what thinkers like Hobbes and Locke called natural law.

Oh, right.

I said I work in the classical natural law tradition, but they were revisionists.  So you asked about the difference.

You’re going to tell me that thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke got natural law wrong because somehow or other they got the four witnesses wrong.  Correct?

Yes, but it’s even worse, because the revisionists didn’t even admit that there are four witnesses.  You see, they were simplifiers.

What do you mean?

The hallmark of classical natural law thinking is that it tries to weave all four witnesses into a tapestry.

So you’ve been saying.

But the revisionists tried to make their tapestries with fewer colors.  They always ignored or diminished at least one of the witnesses.

Illustrate.  Use Hobbes.

His theory recognized only one of the four witnesses.

Natural consequences?

Right on the first try.  Not only that, he recognized only one kind of natural consequence.

Violent death.

Right.  He considered man’s natural condition to be anarchy.  But in anarchy life was short.  According to him, we worked out moral laws in order to stay alive, and we invented government to enforce the moral laws.

But that’s not all wrong, is it?  Morality does help keep us from each other’s throats.

It does.

And government does enforce – never mind, I don’t want to say that.  Still, isn’t there something to be said for keeping one’s theory simple?  Occam’s Razor and all that.  Why clutter up the picture with unnecessary details?

Because they aren’t all unnecessary.

You’re saying the revisionists threw out some moral data.

Actually, a lot of it.

And I suppose throwing it out had natural consequences too?

Yes!  When you push some of the facts out the front door of your theory, you force them to try to creep in through the back door.  Worse yet –

Go on.

Worse yet, they may not succeed.

At what?

At creeping back in.

You’ve lost me again.

Would you mind not being found until next week?

"Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma.  The fact is quite the other way.  The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them.  The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them."

-- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The Original Visitor:  Hello.  I’m back.

Budziszewski:  Good morning.  Haven’t heard from you since blog post number one.  I thought you’d lost interest.

I never left.  I’ve just been lurking.  Reading your posts in the shadows.

Be my guest.

Besides, it isn’t as though I’m your only visitor.

And you know this?

I know many things.  I even know that visits to your website spiked on December 9th.

How do you come by this knowledge?

I’ve hacked your website statistics.

Can all of my figments of imagination hack my data?

Probably not.  I’m talented.

What brings you out of the shadows now?

I’ve been trying to figure you out.

What’s to figure out?  My blogs are pretty straightforward.

Well, for a guy who calls himself a philosopher, you tell an awful lot of stories.  I thought you’d spend more time proving theorems or something.  Do you mind answering a few questions?

Ask away.

For starters, why do you call yourself a natural law thinker in the first place?

Didn’t I make that clear in our previous conversation?

Sort of.  But the things you say don’t sound much like what other natural law thinkers say.

Natural law thinkers like who?

Like the ones my teachers made me read in college.  Thomas Hobbes.  John Locke.  Weren’t those the big guns?  The state of nature and the social contract and all that jazz.

I see the problem.  You’re right.  I’m closer to Locke than to Hobbes, but what I call natural law doesn’t have much in common with what either one of them meant by the term.

Why not?

Because I hew to the classical natural law tradition.  Those fellows were revisionists.

Tell me the difference.

The revisionists pulled the classical tradition to pieces and threw most of its intellectual equipment out the window.  Those implausible ideas that you mentioned -- the thoroughly unnatural “state of nature” and the thoroughly unhistorical “social contract”?  They were the things they used to plug the holes.

What did they throw out?

Some metaphysics, like the concept of real essences.  Some philosophy of mind, like the distinction betweenconscientia and synderesis.  Lots of things, actually.

You’re losing me.  Didn't you see that blogger who said your blog would "make your head hurt"?

Yes, but I thought he was complimenting me.

Give it a rest.  Can’t you just talk common sense?

The terms I used are for talking about common sense more precisely.

Forget the toolbox.  Use street language.  Talk with me like a guy at the bus stop.

Okay, let’s try this.  Four deep considerations run through all of classical natural law theory.  We can call them the four moral witnesses.  I mentioned them the first time we talked.

Except then you called them roadsigns.

Right.

Go on.  What are these four witnesses?

The first one is deep conscience, which provides the starting points of all moral reasoning -- principles which don’t have to be proven, but which we used to prove everything else.  For example, I don’t need a proof to know that equals should be treated equally; the principle is evident in itself.

Maybe conscience is just a way of thinking we can’t escape.  Maybe if we’d evolved differently, we’d have a different conscience.

You’re asking whether the contents of conscience are arbitrary.  Whether they could have been radically different.

Right.

But we don’t experience ourselves as blooming, buzzing, patched-tegether confusions.  We experience ourselves as meaningful wholes.

Even if some of the meanings are elusive at times?

Yes.  It’s because we experience life as meaningful that we’re troubled when meaning eludes us.  We regard the sense of meaninglessness as an aberration.  And that’s the second moral witness:  Recognition of the designedness of things.

Maybe we just evolved a belief in meaning.

I take it that this belief would satisfy a pre-existing need for meaning?

Yes.

And that need evolved too?

Yes.

In that case the need to believe in meaning must have adaptive value.  Tell me what it is.

If you believe your life has a meaning, you’ll try harder to survive.

You’re assuming what you set out to prove.

How?

Belief in meaning would motivate you only if you already had a need for meaning.  Why should we first evolve a need to believe in a meaning which doesn’t exist, then evolve a tendency to believe that it does exist?  You could save a lot of time by not evolving either a need for meaning or a belief in it, and just evolving an urge to survive.

Hmm.  For purposes of argument, I’ll let that stand.

You mean you can’t answer me.

No, I mean I want to get on with it.  Even if we do recognize “the designedness of things,” tell me why you call it a “moral” witness.  What does it have to do with knowing right and wrong?

For one thing, it vindicates the previous moral witness.

Vindicates it in what sense?

If everything in us is meaningful, then conscience is meaningful too.  It’s not an illusion; it really does witness to morality.  It is an inward testimony to God’s law.

Stop.

What’s the matter?

How did God get into this?

I thought you said you’d been reading this blog all along.

I have.

But we’ve been over this.  If things are designed, then Someone must have designed them.

I thought the whole point of natural law being “natural” is that it made recourse to God unnecessary.  Don’t atheists have consciences too?

Yes, but they can’t account for them.  If they are consistent, they will insist that human beings are the arbitrary result of a process that did not have us in mind, and that conscience is nothing more than a residue of that process, just as meaningless as the rest of it.  Have you heard of George DeLury?

I’ve never heard of a philosopher by that name.

Not a philosopher.  A wife-killer.  He drugged and suffocated her.  After he was released from prison, he wrote about the pain of his remorse.  But he said that it meant nothing, because it expressed only a primate inhibition against killing our own kind.

Hmm.  So you’re saying that the second moral witness is a moral witness because makes the first moral witness count.

Yes.

And if there really is a Designer, then I suppose you would say that we should be grateful to Him too.  Assuming the principle of gratitude.  But I suppose you’d say that the principle of gratitude is part of what deep conscience testifies to.

Yes.

To be continued.