I am reading Hugh Brogan’s wonderful biography of Alexis Tocqueville.
Here’s two pieces of classic Tocqueville.
The first pertains to the shift from aristocratic glory to the bourgeois pursuit of material prosperity.
But if it seems useful to you to direct the intellectual and moral activity of men towards the material necessities of life, and to use them to produce well-being; if reason strikes you as more profitable to men than genius; if your object is not to generate heroic virtues but peaceful habits; if you prefer to witness vices rather than crimes, and fewer great deeds in return for fewer outrages; of, rather than moving in a brilliant society, you are content to live in a prosperous one; if, finally, the chief object of government is not, in your opinion, to raise a whole nation to its greatest strength and glory, but to procure for each of the individuals who make it up the greatest possible well-being and the least distress; then equalize status and build a democratic government. (263 in Brogan)
The second states his ideals.
I dream of a society where all, regarding the law as their own handiwork, love it and submit to it without difficulty; where, the authority of government being respected as necessary rather than divine, love is felt for the head of state not as a passion but as a calm and rational sentiment Each citizen having his rights, and being sure of keeping them, a manly, mutual confidence would be established between the classes, and a sort of reciprocal condescension, as far from pride as from humiliation. Educated in their real interests, the people would understand that to profit by the blessings of society it is necessary to pay for them. Free associations among the citizens would replace the power of individual nobles, and the State would be sheltered alike from tyranny and license . . . . Changes in the body of society would be regulated and gradual; should there be less distinction than under an aristocracy, there would also be less poverty; enjoyments would be less spectacular, well-being more general; learning and science would diminish, but ignorance be rarer; passions would be less violent and manners gentler; there would be more vice and less crime. (276 in Brogan)
What went wrong? Tocqueville seems to have underestimated the competitive nature of focusing one’s efforts on economic gain: both the economic need to beggar one’s neighbor and the psychic impulse to only savor one’s good fortune in relation to the other’s ill fortune. Or, to be more direct, the Christian need to identify and punish the reprobate. It is the glee with which punishment is meted out—augmented in America by racial animus—that is most depressing as we watch the spectacle of the Republicans taking health care away from millions.
I’ve had an odd aversion to blogging these past few months. A malaise that I cannot name—and can only partly blame on my back/sciatica problems. More a deep fatigue with the predictable channels in which my own thoughts run; nary a new thought to ponder or pursue. And also a deep disgust with the nation’s obsession with Trump. All eyes turned toward that clown, reporting his every twitch, and neglecting all other events, possibilities, and interests. Like every child who is acting out, he needs to be sent to his room, placed in isolation and ignored for however long it takes for us to regain our own life since I have no delusion that anything at this point can change his behavior. It’s our sanity that is at stake here, not his.
In any case, there have been some feeble stirrings of life in me lately. I went up to New York for the annual meeting of my political theory reading group. What a delight to spend a day talking with ten very thoughtful and intelligent people. Our common reading this year was Melville’s The Confidence Man, a dizzying text that pulls every rug from under the reader’s feet, providing nowhere to stand.
I may write more about the meeting later. But for now, two takeaways:
George Shulman noted that, if all appeals to transcendent and/or foundational grounds are taken away, then only comparative analysis is left. To which someone (I am sorry I can’t remember who) in the group added: “there is also the solidity of objects.”
I am still trying to decide if this is right. I think I understand the question: what can thought do, what resources does it have at its disposal, if it cannot locate/posit/affirm some indisputable ground or some transcendent standard for judgment? The two contenders seem to be Johnson’s “thus I refute Berkeley” (i.e. the solidity of objects) and a rough-and-ready ability to judge one of two states of affairs as preferable to the other (a favorite move of Rorty’s). The comparative mood can articulate the criteria along which it makes the comparative judgment; what it cannot do is claim those criteria must and will hold for all judgers. It can only “woo the consent”(to use Arendt’s translation of Kant on judgment) of those to whom its comparative judgment is addressed.
On the solidity of objects, we might go to Arendt on truth. There are facts beyond which we cannot get. We can argue about the causes of World War I forever, but if you say Belgium invaded Germany in 1914, we have no conversation at all. Facts are stubborn, even compelling in the strongest sense of the word “compelling.”
But is that it? I need to think more about whether that’s all.
Point number two was Jason Frank’s insistence that populism requires an enemy. Put that into dialogue with this comment from The Guardian about the British election.
“As someone pithier than me once said, you don’t win a culture war with facts. Heroes wanted. Conflict wanted. Goals wanted. Dreams wanted. Tell me a story I want to be part of.”
I like the story bit (of course)—and have been focused for some time on how we can tell an inclusive story. That’s why I resist the enemies notion, the idea that a “conflict is wanted.” Which may mean also wanting to find an alternative to a “culture war”—or any other kind of war. I don’t mean not having a choice. What I want is a choice between a conflictual tale and a non-violent, embracing story.
Classic weak-kneed liberal, in one way. Denial of fundamental divergence of interests and of the fact that the powerful and wealthy will not surrender their power and wealth without the fight that forces them to do so. But the idea is to have that fight at the ballot box and for the powerful and wealthy to accept their defeat as legitimate when it is enacted through democratic means. Don’t be naïve, the radical responds. There is no democratic process; the game is rigged in favors of the haves. And, in addition, there is no political passion, no motive strong enough to move people to action, without antagonism, without a “them” to fight against.
Let be fully naïve then. That position (with its Schmittian insistence on the necessity of “an enemy”) seems to me akin to saying the strongest political passion is hate—and only a politics that mobilizes hate will succeed. Whereas I am in search of a politics of love.
I began this blog shortly before the election, that is two months ago. I am not the only one, I am sure, who feels like it has been two years, not two months.
Today I want to complete the thought about hatred of politics before moving on to other things. Perhaps Trump will be good for someone like me by pushing me to attend to lots of other things in this world. Certainly, I fully intend to avoid being Trump obsessed. The media’s all-Trump all the time posture has done its part in helping to insure I will not be Trump obsessed. The coverage is so fatuous, so imbecilic, that it has proved easy to tune out.
Anyway, here’s my thought. Politics is about, on some very basic level, how we can manage to live with one another. Human life is unsustainable without cooperation. We are social animals and, thus, have to develop ways of being together. That is our glory and our curse. The frictions of our close proximity to intimates, the neighbors, and to strangers are all too familiar. It’s hard to get along with people—maybe because of the very fact that we are dependent upon them.
In any case, one way to define politics (as my last post already suggested) is that it attends to the ways we can manage to live together without descending into violence. Such violence is an ever present possibility and all too often a reality. But I want to say that ordinary, mundane, quotidian politics, with all its frustrations, compromises, and less than ideal arrangements, offers our alternative to violence. We rub along as best we can, having to decide again and again if this injustice, this slight, this inequity needs be swallowed—or if not swallowable, how far are we willing to take the fight for what we deem fair.
So mundane, everyday politics is a pain in the ass. It requires the constant vigilance that we are told is the price of freedom, requires always being on one’s guard against others trying to take advantage, and then having to gin up oneself to once again enter the fray. When there are so many other ways that one would like to be occupying one’s time.
And, then, if we move from this everyday, mundane politics, there are two further sources of disappointment, of hatred of politics. The first is utopia. If politics is about the ways we arrange to live with one another, it is all too easy to imagine alternatives that are better than what we currently have. People are just so god-damned ornery, uncooperative, selfish, inconsiderate etc. etc. The everyday is never as good as we think it could or should be. So getting bogged down in the tiresome negotiations that characterize our getting along with others always pales in comparison to the better society we can imagine if people would only be more agreeable. Daily, lived, politics will never be as good as it should be—and so we will always hate it. It’s so difficult, so time-consuming, and the results are always so imperfect.
On the other side of utopia is violence. Within all of our political arrangements, even the most benign, there is the place of violence, the place where physical force is exerted against bodies. The police and the prison. Enforcement of the law. So even for those who love politics, who are attracted to both its theory (how to build cooperative institutions and social arrangements) and its reality (the give-and-take of negotiations and compromises), there is always this haunting by violence, this fact of a fatal flaw in the pursuit. This tainting must afflict our attitude toward politics, must insure an ineradicable ambivalence. At least for me, it is why I keep coming back to the issue of violence, why that issue feels like the one I have most inadequately addressed in my by now voluminous writings on political questions.
I do want to make one, final, unrelated point. There are those who love politics because they love the thrill of electoral contests. Certainly, our media plays to the “horse race” side of politics while under-reporting the details of actual political negotiations. Given the winner take all nature of American elections (as contrasted to proportional representation schemes), the thrill of annihilating your opponent can be attached to winning an election. So the very attributes that would lead one to be a “political junkie” in relation to electioneering are exactly the wrong attributes for doing the day-to-day work of politics—which is finding a way of enabling people in a pluralistic society to get along and even to manage to accomplish some things collectively. That’s why the Republican Party strategy of “if Obama is for it, we are against it” is so distressing. It turns politics into perpetual contest, with no attention to what it might be good to do, but only attention to thwarting one’s opponents at the polls and in matters of policy. And, as others have noted, that strategy generates hatred and disgust of politics—which serves the end of getting people to tune out, thus allowing the robbery of the public good that many Republicans aim for.
I feel rather condemned by this paradox. To hate politics today is to cede victory to the Republicans. They have worked hard to make Americans hate politics—and that hatred provides cover for their rearranging our society to benefit only a very small elite. So the obvious response is that I should fight against that hatred; I should keep my head in the game. But it is so dispiriting, so ugly, so soul-destroying. The temptation is not to touch this pitch, to save oneself since the general conflagration appears unstoppable.
I am going to address another version of this worry when I turn to discussing Christopher Newfield’s extremely important book, The Great Mistake, in my next few posts.
I am sympathetic to the notion that liberalism can be considered a temperament or a sensibility. One source for this idea is William James’s musings about temperament in the first lecture of his series called Pragmatism. Another source is Richard Rorty’s comments about “bleeding heart liberalism,” about which I will have more to say in my next post.
The temperament (or sensibility) idea is that a general way of responding to the world, a mood or constellation of emotional habits/reactions better predicts one’s attitudes toward specific events or issues than a set of intellectual propositions that line up in non-contradictory fashion. (George Lakoff is the current writer who most fully pursues this line of thought.) A certain set of ideas or a certain ideological position appeals to someone because of that person’s temperament. At its most extreme, we could even argue that the ideas are a “rationalization” of the more basic feelings. I am not partial to this kind of debunking move. For me, “rationalization” is not a dirty word. Instead, I view ideas as the public articulation of what could be called moral or political intuitions. We are called upon to justify our intuitions—to ourselves as well as to others. We try to move from feelings, from intuitions, to inter-subjectively defensible positions. To make that move requires articulation in propositional form, with supporting reasons and evidence. Our feelings need to be examined. They are not necessarily correct, nor are they incorrigible.
Calling liberalism a temperament, then, would be a way of trying to find some commonality in the variety of liberal positions. And it would allow us to say that liberalism responds to changing historical circumstances, finding ad hoc solutions and stop-gap measures in the face of various threats, without trying to identify some specific ideational content. Liberalism as a sentiment can be creative, can be making it up as it goes along, while still being somewhat identifiable as a way of being in the world, a somewhat definable sensibility. I am not insisting that this approach will work, but I do think it more likely to identify what John Locke and Martha Nussbaum have in common than an analysis of their intellectual commitments would. Still, one would also then have to argue that Nozick builds on certain aspects of Locke’s intuitions, while Nussbaum aligns with rather different ones. (In other words, I am still resisting any account that would somehow claim that all the differences between Nussbaum and Nozick are insignificant because, au fond, they are both “liberals.”)
One traditional hallmark of the liberal temperament has been the willingness to do the kind of examination of gut-level reactions I described above. Liberals are open-minded and skeptical of all dogmatisms. This is what the liberal arts try to inculcate in students. William James would add that liberals are empiricists. They respond to evidence—and change their minds on the basis of it. That’s part of being open-minded.
Of course, it’s easy to say that liberals are just praising themselves when they claim the high ground of open-mindedness, as contrasted to their opponents. Except that many of their opponents take their own dogmatism as a badge of pride. And those same opponents scorn liberals for being wishy-washy, for being swayed in public debate, for having no principles that are never to be abandoned, and for taking nothing as sacred. Liberals are pragmatists, in the everyday sense of those who look for what is expedient, and pragmatism is a dirty word, not something to be admired.
It’s this liberal penchant for compromise that I want to consider now. Here is where I find the significance of Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on negative liberty (which Dustin Howes discusses in a very different way in his book). Berlin’s pluralism comes down to the assertion that there are a variety of public goods: equality, justice, security, prosperity, individual autonomy, freedom from want, clean air, access to health care (the list could go on and on). We want all of these things—and have good reasons for wanting all of them. But—and this is the crux—they are not all compatible. Necessarily, there will have to be trade-offs. So, to take a famous example, John Rawls accepts that you should expect to have to trade some equality for economic efficiency/prosperity. To achieve total equality would be to sacrifice more economic prosperity than is desirable. So the trick in Rawls (the max-min principle) is to find the sweet spot, that place where you have the least inequality while still producing adequate prosperity.
This is what drives the ideological opponents of liberalism nuts. Liberals are always saying: it’s more complicated than you think. Or they are saying: on the one hand, yes; but on the other hand, no. There are no simple solutions. It’s always about trade-offs and compromises and negotiations among competing goods.
And negotiations among competing stake-holders. Liberal pluralism asserts not only that there are competing (and incompatible) goods, but also that there are competing (and antagonistic) social groups. Social conflict is endemic and non-eliminable. The question is how to manage such conflict in ways that stop short of violence. [Now we are firmly back into Howes’s territory. And he relies on Hannah Arendt for his assertion/acceptance on non-eliminable “plurality” as a basic (the most basic?) fact about the human condition.]
So it can seem that for liberals everything is up for negotiation. I would add that any solution, any achieved way of making the trade-offs, is only temporary. No agreement, no institutional arrangement, under these conditions is very stable because no resolution is ever fully satisfactory. Trade-offs and compromises are always imperfect—and hence always generate dissent and efforts to re-arrange the current set-up. To a large extent, that’s what politics is: the continual, never-ending conflict among various members of a society to establish what they believe is a better set-up than the one currently in place.
Another way to say this: liberals are Aristotelean. They are non-extremists, who always believe the best position lies somewhere in the middle. (William James’s term for this was “meliorism,” which—again—was for him a state to be desired, not a dirty word.) All I am adding to Aristotle is the claim that the middle is unstable; it is ground that will continually be shifting under our feet because circumstances and needs are not fixed. The extremes are not bad in and of themselves; they can, in many cases, represent desirable things. But if pursued single-mindedly, those goods can have undesirable consequences. Their pursuit needs to be tempered by an awareness of the other goods that are jeopardized if I only pursue that one thing.
What is very much needed, then, in order to keep the peace under such conditions is an ability to never demonize your opponents. Once the legitimacy of their opposition to me (their valuing some goods more highly than I do) is denied, then I have no reason to negotiate with them. They are beyond the pale—and all forms of excommunication (including violent ones) are now justified. Jan-Werner Müller’s essay on populism in the December 1, 2016 issue of the London Review of Books (Müller has a recent book on the topic that I have not read) is sobering reading on this score. He states—and I think he is right about this—that populism is dangerous precisely because, claiming to speak as the authentic voice of “the people,” it refuses legitimacy, a place at the table, to any of its opponents. (Populism as a variant of Rousseau’s “general will”? Howes worries about Rousseau in his book.)
More to come along these lines. Rorty’s “bleeding heart liberalism,” and the relation of liberalism to democracy (which does lead to thinking about what liberalism might hold “sacred”—i.e. non-negotiable).
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