Democracy without foundations

How about a little book blogging? Robert P. Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy looks like it’ll provide enough food for thought for several posts worth of material.

Kraynak sets out to defend what he calls the dilemma of Christianity’s relation to modern liberal democracy. His thesis is that “modern liberal democracy needs God, but God is not as liberal or democratic as we would like Him to be.” (p. xiii)

In chapter 1, “Why Modern Liberal Democracy Needs God,” Kraynak makes the case for the first part of his thesis. He begins by distinguishing ancient democracy, as we see it in ancient Athens, from modern liberal democracy, as it came to exist in the English, American, and French revolutions. Athenian democracy was aimed as much as anything at providing an arena for the expression and cultivation of manly virtue. It incorporated a blood-and-soil ethos that tended to be both xenophobic and imperialistic.

By contrast, modern liberal democracy seeks to provide a framework within which citizens pursue their own goals and projects, especially those of commerce. Modern democracy was from its inception a bourgeois creed. Rather than basing itself on a particular account of virtue or excellence tied to a particular culture, it takes as its starting point “the rights of man” as set out in the American and French revolutions. Modern democracy, Kraynak contends, is “self-consciously ideological.”

The fact remains that modern liberal democracies have been shaped by philosophical doctrines in a way that previous regimes never were; and the decisive doctrine is the philosophy of liberalism.

If we probe the foundations of this philosophy, we reach the deepest level of modern liberal democratic culture: the new notion of human dignity that underlies individual rights and democratic consent. The modern notion of human dignity has many dimensions. The first is the dignity of the individual, meaning the inherent worth of every person as a responsible moral agent, possessing independent judgment and free will. This could be called rational autonomy, for it implies the capacity of individuals to make choices for themselves; it could also be called willful autonomy, for it often involves raw assertions of the will in creating a unique personal identity. The second dimension of human dignity is political, the dignity of a people or a nation that freely chooses its destiny. This is sometimes referred to (in the language of the United Nations) as national self-determination or (in the American tradition) as republican self-government. (p. 21)

Philosophical liberalism radically calls into question all authority and limits on human aspirations. For this reason it goes hand in hand with self-government as well as “technological mastery and economic improvement” (p. 25). Liberalism tends to have a certain metaphysical view of the world; the universe is, at best, indifferent to human behavior. If there is a god, he doesn’t intervene in human affairs (it’s no coincidence, Kraynak would say, that someone like Jefferson was a deist). Humans must use their reason to discover the rational laws governing the universe in order to improve their lot.

Kraynak sees two major problems with liberal democracy. The fist is that it involves a trade off creating what he calls, following thinkers like de Toqueville and Ortega y Gasset, a debased “mass culture.”

On the one hand, bourgeois civilization increases the material standard of living and economic opportunities to unprecedented heights for the vast majority of people, overcoming the misery and degradation of poverty that most people have endured for centuries. But the negative consequence is a society dominated by the prosaic activities of material production and consumption, usually in the sterile atmosphere of an urban office building and impersonal suburb, where the chief concerns of people are economic security and status, bourgeois creature comforts, and physical health. These concerns are so obsessive that they begin to redefine reality and create a new metaphysical consciousness which turns the bodily/material world into an absolute horizon. (p. 28)

The degradation of mass society is the outcome of the second, and more fundamental, problem with liberal democracy. This is its agnosticism and skepticism about the ultimate ends of human existence. Since the 17th century one of the main arguments for liberal society has been an appeal to skepticism about our ability to determine what the good is. As Kraynak puts it, “the less certain we are about the highest ends of life the more all people gain in dignity by seeking to determine their own identities and becoming the masters of their fate” (p. 30).

But once ultimate ends are banished from the public sphere, the blandishments of consumer society rush in to fill the void. Instead of a society of daring non-conformists we get a society of careerist-consumerist drones. The problem, Kraynak insists, is that liberalism can’t provide a satisfying account of the human dignity it supposedly exists to protect.

Kraynak surveys the major schools of liberal thought: the rights-based liberalism of Hobbes and Locke, the utilitarianism/pragmatism of Bentham, Mill, and John Dewey, the idealism of Kant, and, finally, the postmodern anti-foundationalism of thinkers like Richard Rorty, and the contractarianism of John Rawls. All of these perspectives fail to provide a secure grounding for human dignity due to their skepticism and subjectivism. They attempt to ground human rights in the shifting sands of desire or self-interested reason while maintaining a scrupulous agnosticism about the ultimate value of human life. None of them provide compelling reasons for thinking that humans posses the dignity which is supposed to ground liberal democracy.

Rorty in particular Kraynak takes to represent the reductio ad absurdum of liberalism, since Rorty frankly admits to being a “freeloading atheist” living off the moral capital of Christianity and its insistence on the dignity of each individual. This leads to Kraynak’s conclusion that the “moral assumptions underlying modern liberal democracy cry out for religious and metaphysical assistance” (p. 37).

The kind of assistance liberal democracy needs is a compelling account of human dignity. None of the philosophers of liberalism have provided good reason why, in a materialistic world, human beings should deserve any special treatment. How do bits of swirling atoms come to be endowed with dignity?

Though Kraynak doesn’t mention it in this chapter, we could point out the further issue that liberalism faces, namely, deciding who should count as persons in the first place. Having abandoned any notion of human beings as created in the image of God, some thinkers have tried to ground human dignity in certain faculties possessed by (at least some) human beings such as rational thought. This has resulted in the development of so-called personhood theory where it isn’t enough simply to be a human being in order to posses dignity. Instead, one must have attained a certain level of rational thought or “self-consciousness” or some other property that supposedly secures “personhood.” On this account certain “marginal” human beings (the unborn, the mentally disabled, even healthy newborn infants) no longer qualify as “persons” in the full sense and are, correspondingly, owed a diminished amount of moral consideration. This indicates that what began as an egalitarian creed may, having lost its metaphysical or religious underpinnings, end up justifying the oppression of the weak by the strong.

Having concluded that liberalism needs some religious underpinning, Kraynak is going to turn to the question of whether Christianity in fact entails, as so many have contended, support for liberal democracy.