Editor’s Note: This article was first published in New Solidarity, the newspaper of the LaRouche movement, Vol. 10, No. 72, Nov. 13, 1979, and is provided to EIR courtesy of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation.

It is well-known among people who know anything at all of current world affairs, that I have a special friendly regard for President José López Portillo y Pacheco of Mexico. I have often characterized him as a great President of a relatively weaker power, in contrast to the poor government enjoyed among we citizens of a great world power. For the sake of both Mexico and the United States, I have often said, “I wish our countries could exchange Presidents.”

I have also emphasized my respect for the achievements and qualities of France’s President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and have rightly praised the accomplishments of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the Federal Republic of Germany, especially Schmidt’s accomplishments of the post-1976 period. Yet, although I view Giscard, Schmidt, and López Portillo similarly, my regard for the President of Mexico has been quite special.

It is proper and perhaps necessary to emphasize that point, since I am now obliged to criticize President López Portillo publicly for leading, included features of a September address he delivered at the University of Miami.[fn_1]

In the concluding portion of that address, the President of Mexico rightly emphasized the accomplishments of the American Revolution and United States Constitution as a triumph of reason over not only Britain but over irrationalism. He stated: “Reason, consent, opinion, juridical will—all of these values explain the genesis of this state, the first modern state with a written constitution, which is the oldest in the West. And what is even more important, it is still in force and has been modified but very little.” López Portillo is a better supporter of the principles of the United States of America than most of its own presently-visible leading officials.

However, the President did not do so well in his efforts, earlier in that same address, to trace the roots of the American Revolution. Since he committed those errors on the soil of the United States, I am obliged to correct his errors publicly on that point. This I do, not because of any merely academic consideration. The statements of the President of Mexico affect the thinking of Mexican Americans rather directly, especially when those statements are delivered inside the United States. The errors the President made are not merely formal, academic errors, they represent errors of strategic judgment. These errors of judgment obviously affect Mexico’s dealings with the United States, and also account for weaknesses in Mexico’s own role to date as a leading voice among the developing nations of the world generally. The persistence of such errors of judgment by Mexico and other forces could contribute significantly to both a worldwide depression and the growing possibility of general, thermonuclear war. This is no esoteric matter, but a highly practical consideration.

I was frankly shocked and pained to note that the President singled out such names as William of Ockham, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau as those intellectual influences whose successive development he regarded as the root of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution. Formally, the President’s error was that he singled out the most notorious among the intellectual spokesmen for the cause of irrationalism as the current of intellectual life to which he traced the development of rationalism.

By ordinary standards, his mistake might not be seen as an egregious one. In the United States, much of Europe, as well as in Mexico’s academic life itself, this same mistaken set of beliefs has been made commonplace. To any person competently grounded in pre-1800 history of Europe, the Ockham-Hobbes-Locke succession indicated by President López Portillo is absurd. Unfortunately, this absurdity has been made more or less official among academics during this century. It is not astonishing that even so educated, brilliant, and capable a figure as Mexico’s President would be misinformed on such matters.

As already emphasized here, this is not a matter of academic debate on history. Misunderstanding of the efficient principles of past history must tend, necessarily, to lead toward crucial blunders in the efforts to make current history. Any person who studies Ockham, Hobbes, Locke, et al. from the standpoint the President outlined in his address must necessarily be impelled to make potentially fatal errors of practical political judgment under conditions of crisis such as the present crisis.

Man or Animal

The philosophical outlook of Hobbes and Locke is defined axiomatically by the assumption that society is merely a collection of individuals, and that these individuals are essentially a gifted sort of talking animal. The same views were the basis for the lurid “hedonistic calculus” doctrine of the notorious pederast Jeremy Bentham. In the Victorian period, a time when double-talk replaced plain speaking, John Stuart Mill and his friends substituted the word “utilitarianism” for the frank admission of bestial “hedonism.”

The same degrading immorality is the essential feature of the work of French-British intelligence agent Montesquieu. Montesquieu, like his friend, the evil Voltaire, was prominent among those who promoted the cult of Roman Law, in opposition to the conceptions of moral law underlying the establishment of the U.S. Constitution, in opposition to the influences of Leibniz and Pufendorf. The latter two were the principal sources of anti-British legal philosophy permeating the writing of the Constitution and the judgments of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall. The essential fault of Roman Law is that long ago documented by St. Augustine: Roman Law and the sodomy-permeated degeneration of the Roman Empire are interconnected.

The pathetic neurotic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, counterposed the “primitive, noble savage” to the more perceptive view of uncivilized man offered by Hobbes. Otherwise, Rousseau not only represents the same “hedonistic calculus” represented by Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham; Rousseau is rightly viewed as the malignant influence embodied in Robespierre’s evil, and in the practice of British secret-intelligence agents Danton and Marat. Rousseau, together with [Pierre-Paul] Proudhon, [Max] Stirner, and [Mikhail] Bakunin, represents the true direct parentage of modern terrorism and “anti-nuclear” hooliganism generally.

The Importance of Plato

The central question of all philosophy, including the question of science in the most comprehensive and profound sense of the meaning of “science,” is whether man is merely a sophisticated animal, or is distinguished absolutely from the beasts by some essential quality called “humanness” or otherwise identified as the “human soul.” The documented source of systematic knowledge on this question is centered around the dialogues of Plato. The agreement on this point among Judaism and Christianity, and later, Islam, is the basis for identifying a 2,000-year-old philosophical current known as Neoplatonism as the kernel of the Judaism of Philo and of apostolic Christianity.

The importance of Plato for Philo’s Judaism, for the Christian apostles, and for such Islamic thinkers as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, was a principle consubstantial with a creative, universal being, which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam call “God.” This point was extensively elaborated during the early 15th Century by the great canon of the Christian papacy, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, especially in Cusa’s De Li Non Aliud (The Non-Other). Whether Protestant or Catholic in specific profession, all modern Christianity consistent with the writings of such apostles as St. John and St. Paul, and of St. Augustine, shares the essential view defined by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa—although with more-or-less-explicit knowledge of the systematic theological argument from case to case. The same is true for Judaism’s followers of the great rabbi Philo, and for the currents of Islam whose insight into the writings of the Prophet Muhammad concurs with that of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. It was on this basis that Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa launched afresh the great ecumenical movement among Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Not accidentally, all the fundamental achievements of modern scientific thought are properly traced directly through the word of Cusa and his collaborators. It was Cusa’s critical appreciation of the resurrected knowledge of the Platonic scientist Archimedes, which is the centerpiece of the Golden Renaissance currents, centered around Padua. Directly from that source of renewal of science by Cusa et al. we have the great Gilbert (Francis Bacon’s adversary), the work of Kepler, the achievements of Galileo, Descartes, and Leibniz. It was through the French École Polytechnique of Gaspard Monge and Lazare Carnot that French and German science contributed the fundamental advances to the theory of functions during the 19th Century. It was these French and German scientific influences—with aid of their collaborators in other nations—which produced every fundamental scientific achievement of the past two centuries, achievements centered during this century in the circles around France’s Louis de Broglie and Bernhard Riemann’s old university, Göttingen.

The secret of the apostolic Christian’s theology and of competent physical or biological science are one and the same. There is no counterposition between “faith” and “reason,” a counterposition which President López Portillo’s misinformation prompted him to make the centerpiece of his address.

The most basic empirical proof of the absolute difference between man and the beasts is the fact that man has progressively improved his knowledge to the efficient effect of making possible increases in populations at higher levels of both individual material conditions of life and individual moral and intellectual development. This represents an increase in man’s willful command of the lawful ordering of the universe. This increase arises through subordinating human society’s practice to those scientific advances which are the unique accomplishment of the self-development of human creative mental powers. Man, by discovering more perfectly the actual, lawful ordering of the universe, and by subordinating his practice to that discovery, masters the lawful ordering of the universe. Thus, “Freedom,” the power to innovate efficiently on behalf of the human condition, and “Necessity,” the obligation to submit one’s will to the evidence of scientific discovery, are one and the same thing.

The Power of Reason

This special power of human personalities, this power for creative discovery, is not only that which absolutely distinguishes men and women from mere beasts. It is a specific and knowable power, which Platonists and Neoplatonists term Reason. Every level in the advancement of knowledge is soon proven to be defective because of its inadequacy, its lack of perfect correspondence with the lawful ordering of the universe. This defectiveness is essentially located in axiomatic assumptions peculiar to each stratification in the advancement of scientific knowledge. Consequently, our attention is rightly focused on those lawful powers of the human mind which enable it to supersede one axiomatic ordering of knowledge with a new, higher, more efficient one.

The ability to analyze successive “layers” in the advancement of scientific knowledge is termed, after Plato, the study of the “higher hypothesis.” By focusing our attention on the empirics of transformation of successive orders in knowledge, we are focusing empirically on those lawful powers of the mind which, if applied, lead to successive advances in the perfection of man’s knowledge of the lawful ordering of the universe. The conceptualization of this creative process as a lawful process is termed “the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis.”

The empirics of human existence over the ages prove that it is the “hypothesis of the higher hypothesis,” and not any particular stage of scientific knowledge, which represents man’s actual knowledge of the lawful ordering of the universe. Similarly, as Plato proves in his Timaeus, and in relevant other writings, the universe is not composed of the “elementary particles” supposed from a merely logic interpretation of the internal features of a defective mathematical physics. The universe is necessarily a self-developing, multiply-connected manifold—just as Riemannian physics demonstrates it to be.

Thus, Reason stands outside the competence of logical interpretations of relations among physical individualities as such. It is empirically located only in that quality which absolutely distinguishes man from the beasts, in the power to advance science in the manner demonstrated to be an advancement through technological progress.

Technological progress is not, however, an end in itself. The function of scientific and technological progress is to foster an ordering within society which demands and places primary value upon that quality which makes human beings human in practice: the development of the creative potentialities of mind. To have an acceptable form of society, the relations among people must be based on the valuing and self-valuing of the individual for human qualities, that creative potentiality which distinguishes a person from a slaughterable ox or chicken.

Thus, the contest between today’s proponents of nuclear-energy development and “anti-nuclear zero growth” is a fundamental moral opposition of Good to Evil.

The power of Reason in political affairs is knowledge of Reason combined with the practice of calling forth from within other persons that power, that quality which makes them human.

Between Birth and Death

The power of Reason is simply and directly demonstrated within the ranks of almost any group of persons.

Each of us is born. Each of us will die. Between those two events, which constitute our life, shall we merely sate our appetites and relieve an existentialist boredom with exotic pleasures? If so, we are morally no better than beasts, and once dead are properly soon forgotten as persons whose lives fulfilled no purpose for preceding generations or their posterities. Unless we live to some efficient purpose which survives our death, we are as nothing.

As a scientist, one may make a discovery which benefits contemporary mankind universally, and which serves as a foundation for new discoveries made by others. As a teacher, we may assimilate such knowledge, to place it at the disposal of others. As a workman, we may assimilate that knowledge to the purpose of making its benefits universal for practice. As parents, we develop children with the moral dedication and powers to further the process on the cornerstone of what we and our predecessors have bequeathed to them.

So, we must live to a purpose outside ourselves. This does not lessen us as individuals. It establishes the importance to every person, present and future, of an individual life so lived. We eat, meet other needs, improve our leisure, and secure to ourselves the means to contribute and to develop ourselves; there are no ends in themselves, but that rightful consumption we require to realize our potential to contribute to society. We live upright and proud in the knowledge that our lives are instruments dedicated to an eternal, immortal, universal purpose.

Those who accept that view of themselves as proper, I call “moral.” Those who reject that are properly viewed as “wicked.”

That is the view common to Neoplatonic civilization, to apostolic Christianity, to the Judaism of Philo and to the Islam of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. That is the view which establishes the dedication in common. That is the view, running through the adversaries of Hobbes, Ockham, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, which moved the founders of the English colonies of North America, the founders of the United States and its Constitution.

Only persons who share that view have the kind of moral sense or personal identity to risk all, if necessary, to remain true to that moral purpose. Unless one embraces that view efficiently, one must necessarily falter under aversive pressure, or be easily corrupted “ere the cock crow thrice.” Without that conscious self-commitment, one’s judgment must falter and err in many ways under the impact of fearful crisis.

My respected ally López Portillo’s error was therefore not an academic one, but represented a potentially dangerous concession to those destructive influences which now threaten the existence of humanity.

Endnote

[fn_1] President López Portillo made his remarks on Sept. 30, 1979 at the University of Miami, where he received an honorary degree. [back to text from fn_1]