Between Philosophy and Prophecy
By Christopher Altieri
“There’s going to be a fight,” my father said, “as soon as the puck drops.” He wasn’t speaking to me or my brothers and sisters (or my mom), but for the benefit of friends sitting just behind us at Madison Square Garden on January 16th, 1992.
Our friends were from our neighborhood and were new to hockey. This was their first NHL game, if memory serves, and they were seated behind us quite by chance. We were and are a hockey family—my family bleeds Broadway Blue. Dad had been a player and was a student of the game as well as a coach. He still is a student of the game, and though his coaching days are behind him, he will coach the Rangers from his couch.
Sure enough, the Calgary Flames’ tough guy Craig “The Chief” Berube and the New York Rangers’ enforcer Tahir “Tie” Domi dropped their gloves as soon as the linesman dropped the puck.
When the gloves came off and the heavyweights started their brutal dance, our friends’ mother gasped.
“How did you know that?” she asked, in the tone and with the expression of one who had witnessed something marvelous and quite possibly magical.
There wasn’t much to it.
Berube had just taken a run at the Rangers’ goaltender (Mike Richter that night, who was still backing up John Vanbiesbrouck in those days but would go on to be one of the great netminders for the Rangers).
Running a goalie is a major violation of hockey’s unwritten rules. Berube had broken “the code”—that’s what players call it—and what’s more, hadn’t received the penalty he deserved from the referee. When Domi made sure to line up against Berube, even following him during the break in play when Berube switched to the other side of the faceoff circle, anyone who knew hockey and was paying attention could have predicted what would happen as soon as play started.
I use that story sometimes to teach high school boys about the prophets, who are not the guys who can predict the future, so much as they are the guys who see clearly and speak trenchantly about what’s happening right now.
It may be a useful story for framing the work of journalists, too.
That’s not to say journalists are latter-day prophets, so much as it is to say scribblers and prophets—when they’re doing their job—are both like the knowledgeable hockey fan talking their interested neophyte neighbors through the rough and tumble of fascinating, dizzyingly fast-paced, occasionally brutal game play.
If I’m right about the analogy I’m trying to draw here, then this fact is pertinent and has powerful implications. One is that impartiality in the journalistic sense does not require—because it cannot reasonably expect—Stoic indifference either to a given state of affairs or to the outcome of a given controversy. In The New Science of Politics: An introduction, the great 20th century political philosopher Eric Voegelin put the matter this way:
As for the subject matter, it is nothing esoteric; rather, it lies not far from the questions of the day and is concerned with the truth of things that everyone talks about. What is happiness? How should a man live in order to be happy? What is virtue? What, especially, is the virtue of justice? How large a territory and a population are best for a society? What kind of education is best? What professions, and what form of government? All of these questions arise from the conditions of the existence of man in society. And the philosopher is a man like any other: as far as the order of society is concerned, he has no other questions to ask than those of his fellow citizens.
Basically, Voegelin was saying, the philosopher has no questions that are not those of the citizen as such. So too, for the journalist, whose task is to inform the public. The journalist is a citizen, and his questions—like the philosopher’s (and the prophet’s)—are those of the citizen as such. His work gives citizens the wherewithal to judge of matters interesting the common weal: Who? What? Where? When? Why?
That last W—Why?—often appears to be the trickiest, since it is a synthesis of the first four, the most difficult to articulate and the hardest to nail down. It also has—or may have—multiple objects: “Why did this happen?” is one question; “Why should I care?” is another. The occasions in which a pat answer to either of those questions is available, are vanishingly rare. There are right ways and wrong ways of thinking about such and similar questions, but no answers to them are simply right.
“Why?” is not the fundamental question, in fact, whether for the philosopher or the journalist.
The fundamental question is: “What?”
You’ll note there were five “What?” questions in that short passage from Voegelin. Two others could have been “What?” questions and in fact are reducible to “What?” questions.
“How should a man live in order to be happy?” is a compound asking two “What?” questions: “What must a fellow do in order to be happy?” and (implicitly), “What is happiness?” which—as the structure of the passage exquisitely dramatizes—is something about which we are always already asking. “How large a territory and a population are best for a society?” is asking what size—in human and geographical terms—is best for a city?
Voegelin—also in The New Science of Politics—describes the philosopher’s task as a work of recovery, attuned to the “unfolding of the typical in meaningful concreteness,” and apt to elucidate the symbolic structure and psychology of reality, which in those days was menaced by 20th century mass movements. Voegelin explains this at some length in the Foreword to Science, Politics, Gnosticism, and says explicitly elsewhere (I can’t quite pin down where at the moment) that his whole project arose from the political turmoil during the rise of the Nazi threat.
“It dawned on me,” Voegelin said in his Autobiographical Reflections, “that the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of immediate experiences.”
It is perhaps small wonder that I, a fellow trained as a political philosopher who made his bones and his living in the frequently near-the-knuckle trade of investigative journalism, should be sensible of affinities between disciplines apparently very different and in fact frequently opposed to one another in the minds of those who observe both.
I have wondered whether I am a journalist who covers Church politics, or a political philosopher whose subject matter is a peculiar city, observed and chronicled in a journalistic mode. I mentioned it in the Afterword of Into the Storm: Chronicle of a Year in Crisis, which appeared in 2019, but only briefly discussed it there. That was no time for navel-gazing. Neither is this.
Neither the philosopher nor the journalist can do his work from a position of neutrality, but at the same time neither can be what he is supposed to be from a position of partisanship. Like the prophet, they both seek the good of the city. Like the prophet, they both see and say what’s happening right now.
“Give me insight into today,” says Emerson in his famous essay on The American Scholar, “and you may have the antique and future worlds.” Emerson the essayist—I would, with the late Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, receive him as a philosopher—asks not, “for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy.”
“I embrace the common,” Emerson says, “I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” I have noted elsewhere, following Voegelin, that “the common” literally says the xynon, i.e., “a whole that transcends [man’s] particular existence,” as Voegelin puts it in The New Science of Politics, a concept first differentiated by Heraclitus. “What would we really know the meaning of?” asks Emerson:
The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;—show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;—and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
I return to that essay by Emerson, and I return to that passage in that essay by Emerson, at least yearly. It reminds me to think without distraction about ordinary human things, so it reminds me of how uncanny—to say it with Cavell—the ordinary really is.
“Reading,” says Cavell in an essay of his own—“The Philosopher in American Life”—in displaced conversation with both Emerson and Thoreau (in conversation with Emerson), “is a variation of writing, where they meet in meditation and achieve accounts of their opportunities.” Cavell says the work of philosophy is a product of reading. “[T]he reading in question,” however, “is not especially of books, especially not of what we think of as books of philosophy.”
“The reading,” Cavell says, “is of whatever is before you,” which I take as Cavell’s way of describing the same concern Voegelin came to articulate in his remark about his work on a history of ideas becoming a distortion of reality because ideas depend upon the symbols by which—well or poorly—real people in concrete societies express immediate experiences. I do not insist on other readers hearing those remarks as a call for what Cavell calls, “[R]eading whatever is before you,” but only demand the right to receive them as such.
To ask, “What is before us?” is to ask what’s happening right now. To see what is before us—not merely to see it but to read it—is the work of the journalist, the philosopher, the prophet.
Chesterton, I noted in an essay for Southern Cross that appeared in May, was a journalist who would have chuckled at the suggestion he was either a philosopher or a prophet. He was a scribbler, very much a scribbler’s scribbler, and a Fleet Street fixture. He saw things clearly and he spoke them plainly—without fear or favor, as the saying goes—and he certainly gave us insight into today.
It occurs to me that I noted as much in an essay for The Chesterton Review, a year or so ago, though there I put it in the present: “Chesterton gives us insight into today.”
Today is a mess.
“History is always messy,” I tell my students, “and it is always happening.” In a little book I brought out not too long ago with CTS in the UK, I put it this way: “Whether by design or by accident of providence, being in the world while not being of it requires that we be able to see clearly how bad things are, without losing sight of the good.”
To be in the world without being of it.
That is the peculiar vocation of the Christian, as such.
When a journalist is a Christian—especially when a journalist is a Catholic—professional duty elides with that of baptism, but the Venn diagram is never a perfect circle. There is a real and important sense in which this truth of journalism’s professional practice holds for any trade or profession or occupation a Christian undertakes. C.S. Lewis got after it in Mere Christianity, where he says: “[S]ome Christians—those who happen to have the right talents—should be economists and statesmen.”
“[W]e want journalists,” I said with Chesterton at the top of that The Chesterton Review essay, “who know in their bones that our business is ‘to criticize the world,’ and also that ‘the world will not stand it unless we begin by criticizing ourselves’.”
We want journalists who read whatever is before us and see clearly what is happening right now, who know—another Chestertonian turn, this one found in The Ball and the Cross—“That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational,” than the story of the man who did, because it means, “that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth.”
What we need now is journalists who will still ask what the fellow was doing up there, in the first place.
Christopher R. Altieri is a journalist, editor, and author of three books, including Reading the News Without Losing Your Faith (Catholic Truth Society, 2021). He is contributing editor to Catholic World Report.