---
title: "Between the Benjamins: A concurrence of criticism"
date: 2022-06-24T12:07:46+01:00
series: "1. Main Feed"
image: img/between-the-benjamins.jpg
enclosure: audio/between-the-benjamins.mp3
description: A concurrence of liberal criticism
draft: false
---

{{< audio "https://gmgauthier.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/podcast/audio/between-the-benjamins.mp3" >}}

Based on a comment I left on this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W0_TuvQBUo

Here is the comment:

I don't see why you couldn't adopt Thomas Aquinas' definition of love as a secular maxim: Willing The Good Of The Other.

You liberals just need to settle on what the good is. Of course, for Aquinas, it was God and his will expressed as a creative love, in creation itself (as articulated in the scriptures). So, the theory had symmetry: aligning the individual will to the universal will and then acting on that, meant love of self, love of the world, and love of other.

So, to make the secular version of that work, you need to find a substitute for the divine universal will. Marx relocated it in the state, which would "administer" a material transformation of individual wills along a socialist eschatological path - a sort of terrestrial universal will. The progressives, on the other hand, insist that individual will is all there is, and seek to worship individual will, as such. Resulting in commitments to things like anarchism, and worse, the dissolution of all categories.

Beyond a divine universal, a terrestrial universal, and a menagerie of self-satisfying/self-destructing terrestrial particulars, it's difficult to see what substitute you could invent for will that would not end in the disaster of progressivism or materialist authoritarianism. But then, perhaps that is just a failure of imagination on my part.
