Instead of a Political Philosophy

Kevin Kim had a good post the other day on where he fits in on the political spectrum and his take on the ideologies of left and right. Kevin’s refusal to engage in the Manichean exercise of declaring one team the embodiment of all that is good and pure and denouncing the other as the spawn of hell is certainly refreshing.

This got me to thinking about the principles I tend to take for granted when thinking about politics, so I thought I’d jot them down. This isn’t intended as a full-throated defense of these principles, much less anything as grandiose as a “political philosophy.” More like some loosely connected thoughts, ruminations, and speculations on what I take to be the purpose and scope of political authority.

No Salvation Through Politics

Against postmillennialists of the Right and liberationists of the Left I take it as axiomatic that nothing we can do will bring in God’s Kingdom. Politics is not a means by which we build the Kingdom of God on earth. It is a strictly this-worldly affair whose aim is to secure the conditions of tolerable earthly existence during this age.

For Christians at least, politics can never be the locus of one’s final allegiance or the bearer of one’s identity. They are first and foremost citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, and their commitment to any earthly kingdom will be penultimate at best. This results in the “desacralization” of politics and a sober realism about what it can and can’t achieve. No regime, political system, cause, or candidate is above criticism or immune to the effects of sin. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

Arguably the worst horrors of the 20th century were precipitated by the desire to bring in by force a political utopia – heaven on earth. Fascist and Communist revolutionaries tried to “immanentize the eschaton,” to use Eric Voegelin’s phrase. Not only is this an attempt to play God, it neglects to take seriously the extent of human sin and the limits of human wisdom in this age. Any responsible politics will have to be limited in its aspirations.

Coercion is Bad

Longtime readers (both of you) know that I renounced my former adherence to doctrinaire libertarianism, but one thing that the libertarians get which often seems to elude conservatives, liberals, communitarians, etc. is that coercion is inherently morally problematic. All use of government power implies at least the possibility of the use of force. Laws are backed with enforcement power, which means, if necessary, you will be fined, imprisoned, or possibly killed for not complying. As the father of our country put it “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.”

Which is not to say that I think the use of coercion is always wrong. But it does seem to me that there is a prima facie duty (to borrow from W.D. Ross) to refrain from coercion. And the burden of proof falls on the person advocating coercion to show why it’s necessary. (This would apply a fortiori to lethal force, requiring an even higher burden of proof on the person advocating war or capital punishment.)

One, Two, Many Loves

“Pluralism” has become a kind of liberal shibboleth, but there are good reasons for respecting the limits that pluralism puts on government action. The usual argument put forth begins with a kind of value relativism (or at least a skepticism that we can know the good) and then concludes that no one should “impose their values on others.” This argument conveniently overlooks the fact that it presupposes the non-relative value of non-imposition, and threatens to lapse into a contradiction.

Fortunately, one can take value pluralism seriously without retreating into relativism. Augustine points the way with his famed notion of the “two loves.” According to Augustine, our loves (i.e. what we “value,” to put it in the parlance of our times) can either be oriented toward God or toward the finite goods of this world. Those who love God above all else constitute the “City of God” and those who love finite things constitute the “City of Man.” Moreover, in this life there’s no telling who’s who. And, we could add, at any given point in time, particular individuals may be at different points along the road toward loving God; our selves remain divided. Plus, at any given time none of us are able to examine our own selves objectively enough to determine whether our own loves are properly ordered; we are right to be humble about imposing our own prefrences as a matter of public policy. This de facto pluralism makes the imposition of anything more than a partial peace impossible, since it can’t be assumed that everyone shares the same scale of values.

The upshot is that, for Augustine, there is no hierarchy of values shared by the denizens of the City of God and the City of Man. It would be evil for earthly values to be imposed on those who love God, and it would be fruitless for the heavenly values to be imposed on those whose loves are turned toward finite goods, since only God can induce spiritual regeneration in a soul. Genuine community requires loves held in common, but no earthly kingdom can meet this standard. At best, governments can impose a kind of peace, but they can’t bring people’s loves into alignment with the true hierarchy of values. Virtue cannot be coerced.

The Limits of Pluralism

However important it is to respect pluralism, everyone (or nearly everyone) agrees that out and out anarchy would be bad. A helpful distinction here, I think, is between pursuing goods and preventing harms. Goods are plural, and often irreconcilable. Promoting one may lead to a diminishing of others. And people are divided on how they rank various goods.

But there is much less diversity of opinion regarding harms. Nearly everybody regards violent assault, invasion of bodily integrity, deprivation of material goods, starvation, and ill health as evils to be avoided as almost any cost. So, it seems to me that a politics of limited aspirations dedicated to securing the peace of the earthly city should be dedicated, above all, to minimizing these types of harms.

It is, not coincidentally, precisely in avoiding these kinds of harms that coercion seems most justified. It’s a lot easier to justify the use of force to prevent certain death than to round up support for the NEA. But, lest this be mistaken for merely a libertarian relapse on my part, I take it that harms like starvation, ill health, destitution, and environmental degradation are just as serious and so there is no reason why, in principle, government action wouldn’t be appropriate to mitigate or prevent those kinds of harms (via wealth redistribution, regulation or whatever is deemed to work best).

Some harms are, of course, controversial. For instance, abortion is clearly a serious harm to if you think the fetus has the same moral standing as a newborn infant (or even if you think it has some degree of moral standing), in which case there would seem to be a justification for government action to prevent or curtail it. However, given its controversial nature in this time and place, a lot will depend on prudently assessing what laws can be realistically enforced given the current moral consensus (or lack thereof).

A Chastened Liberalism?

So, what we end up with is a government that is aspirationally limited, minimally coercive, tolerant of pluralism, and empowered primarily to secure peace (however limited and fragmentary) by preventing harm and meliorating the worst effects of human sin.

Not a very exciting or exalted view of the role of government, I grant you. I’m probably still more influenced by libertarianism than I realized (or maybe better the more chastened classical liberalism of someone like F.A. Hayek). But in a world where untold evil has been committed (and is being committed) in the name of exalted political ends that may not be such a bad thing. I have to say that these words from C.S. Lewis have always resonated with me:

The secular community, since it exists for our natural good and not for our supernatural, has no higher end than to facilitate and safeguard the family, and friendship, and solitude. To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all the economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit. (“Membership,” in The Weight of Glory, pp. 161-2)

Best I can come up with at the moment, anyway…