Schuon

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Rationalism in politics II

(post exorcised)

Rationalism in politics

I think someone should write an essay sometime on rationalism in politics. Not being a writer I do not know how to introduce such a topic and make it seem relevant to you... except to start. I feel like putting my thoughts down complete for once, and you are my unfortunate, perhaps unwilling audience!

Rationalism in politics is the notion that man's psyche, or his selfhood if you wish, can be understood by its division into two separable parts, a rational mind and a nonrational component called body. Rationalism merits its name because it places the seat of the will solely in the rational mind. One can draw a pictoral model for the idea. Imagine a line of causation representing self-rule extending downward from the ratio to the nonratio, represented as two boxes, one for mind one for body. The downward line signifies that the will, which in rationalism takes seat in the rational mind, has power over the body. There is also a reverse line of causation, one running upward and representing desire. It is the body that produces the desires and gives them to the rational mind to execute and fulfill. In the model it is important to realize that the "body" is an arational natural and usually material thing separated from the seat of the will. Being arational and unwilled, it has therefore an unchanging nature; it is solid, absolute, a "fact." In contrast the mind, being rational and having will, can change. However, and this is the importance of the upward line of desire, the mind only acts in order to fulfill the desires. This model is what I mean by rationalism in politics. Ironically, it can be summarized in Hume's phrase: "reason is the slave of the passions."

A politic is necessarily predicated on an anthropology, for a government must understand who it is governing. Our anthropology is the above, an abbreviated psychology for which we can thank Thomas Hobbes: Men are ruled from above but driven from below. It is right to call it a rationalist anthropology because it seats the will completely and only in the rational, and seats the good solely in the nonrational desires. Hence the mind acts solely to calculate—or rationalize—which of its available choices would be most advantageous to gratify the desires. Now politically, the anthropology implies a lot. If the seat of the will is the ratio, man can be ruled only by giving commands to the rational mind. After all it is the mind that has free will. It would be as silly to sign treaties with the body, whose nature is arational and unchanging, as it would be to entreat a rock. In addition, because the mind acts only to fulfill desires of the body, the mind can only be commanded by threatening the desires. As economists like to say, "incentives matter." Thus rationalism advises we regulate behavior by incentive or violence—by carrot and stick. Knowing now the political implications, let us draw more lines on the pictoral model, expanding it from a rationalism in psychology to a rationalism in politics. Imagine the causal line of rule now extended down from state, through mind, to body. It runs from state to body because state commands mind and mind commands body, but also because state threatens mind with incentives and violence, both to the body. As for the second line in the model picture, it can also be extended. Man is ruled only for the body, since in the body originates all desire, and in rationalism, fulfilling desire is the only good. This shall be important later. Hence the causal line of desire extends up from body through mind to state. Desire drives even the state.

The model is, sad to say, indispensable to understanding modern politics. The mortal questions of politics are

1. What is the purpose of organizing ourselves, and
2. Knowing that purpose, how shall we best organize?

In Greek we might call the answer to (1) the arete of the state, or its basis of association. We would call an answer to (2) its arche, or its organizing method. In the model (1) the basis can only be to sate the desires, pleonexia. In the model (2) the method can be only that system which best provokes actions by incentive and threat. Having long ceased to inquire about the first question, again thanks be to Hobbes, Kant, et al., there exist broadly speaking three modern solutions to the second, distinguished primarily by what sources they provide for incentive and threat. These will be more or less the modern political theories.

To talk about and distinguish these three solutions, the moderns rely on a distinction that consumes not only our unearthly academical postulating (e.g. Rawls and Nozick) but the tedious disputes between parties left and right on current events programs. I mean the distinction between coercive or "state" power on the one hand, and noncoercive or "private" power on the other. You do not have to talk politics long with people before they enumerate the state's powers in their personal article 1 section 8. I shall have to think more about the necessity of making this distinction sometime, but for whatever reason it is always made, and there are three ways to allocate incentive and threat according to the private and public sources of power. One might allocate the use of incentives to private people and agree to have no coercive state and hence no threats, which is anarchism. One might allocate both power to incentivize and power to threaten mostly to the state, which is some form of autocracy. Last, one might allocate threats to the coercive state alone, but use it only "for the purchase of rights," allocating the power to incentivize in greater or lesser measure to either the public or private sphere. This is some form of modern liberalism, from socialism to "welfare" liberalism to libertarianism.

I will speak on liberalism, for it concerns us most. The "rights" purchase is the characteristic idea of liberalism and pertains both to its "classical" and its modern forms. Of the two I am sorry to say only the modern form makes any sense to me, assuming rationalism in politics. For a liberal we organize ourselves to secure against our neighbors certain inalienable rights, rights enforced by threat of violence, threats only the state can make. Liberals differ a great deal by the number of rights they believe the state should secure by threat of violence. However, within rationalist politics, there is no basis (arete) for enumerating the inalienable rights other than by their success in the gratification of desire. For example, liberals who believe in the enumeration of three rights, namely life liberty and property, usually assert that these are the "natural" rights to purchase, a completely arbitrary distinction from the perspective of the rationalist model. If the arete of our organization is to best sate desires as pursued by rational minds, we should enumerate to the public mechanism those threats that would best assist rational minds in the pursuit, and distribute the power to offer incentives between the mechanisms public and private power the same way, according to their assistance to the pursuit of desires. There is no mention in the rationalist model of this "naturalness," hence no rational basis for any other standard of distribution than success in pleonexia. Put more starkly, if we grant rationalism in politics and liberalism in methodology, John Rawls is right. Any liberal who makes distinctions among the enumerated rights and distributed incentives ought to be asked to justify where they draw the line among possible rights and the distribution of incentives. If the answer is because the line they draw is "natural" or because it conforms to some notion of "justice," they ought to be asked why they consider it good for people to organize to obtain natural rights or to meet justice. If they say it is good because it is the best way to satisfy our desires, there is no reason to postulate these unnecessary entities "nature" or extrarational notions of "justice." By parsimony let us dismiss them. However, if they say instead "naturalness" or "justice" are the best ways to achieve some other good that has nothing to do with gratifying desire, then we have by definition ventured outside of liberalism. It is not liberalism because rather than purchasing rights with threats we are purchasing something else good, something for which the granting of certain positive rights might be an intermediate but for which the rights are not the final end and therefore are not inalienable.

It is disturbing to me how common and how innocuous the rationalist model is. It goes undiscussed but remains the logical and veiled hypothesis of most of our politics. The liberal worldview, and others such as the "neoconservative" that provisionally accept rationalism for reasons pragmatic, have placed all their eggs in the basket of rationalism because they by definition seek to purchase rights useful for gratification. Yet, I gather, most people only unconsciously accept a theory so vulgar, and moreover they accept it despite their own experience and despite, in particular, their religion—except as always for Protestantism, the logical politics of which consists of nothing but slavish capitulation to rationalism, via as always the Enlightenment drive to understand everything in immutable and hence scientifically verifiable categories—in particular human nature. I do think Max Weber did a good job to illustrate this. According to the Enlightenment's not-so-innocent accomplices in Western religion, the kind of person the model describes is every person deep down, and this human nature is universal and unchanging. As Weber argued, Protestantism (and certain fallen Catholicisms, I would add in honesty) is only too happy to dispense with other political goods beyond gratification because of what it views as the impossibility of purifying man (original sin). And of course, if there is no political good beyond the pursuit of desire, religion has nothing to do with politics—Rome has nothing to say to Jerusalem—they two indeed, as liberals like to say, are separate.

I cannot help relying on the model myself sometimes, despite myself, for there is something to its neatness and smooth categories. After all if there is anything men can be counted to agree upon, it is that they would like to satisfy their desires, whatever they are. This closeness to the truth, or at least to practicality, is always the case with grave error. As Lewis wrote, "the flower of unholiness grows closest to the altar." Or as he wrote elsewhere, "it is easier to mistake brass for gold than to mistake clay for gold." In my opinion once a rationalist answer has been given to (1) the death knell has rung and we have to choose among the profane autocracies, liberalisms or anarchisms. By the way, it is telling that, given rationalist politics, our political choices reduce down to the merely economic and calculative, whereas "values" decisions (such as whether to permit abortion) are just the incidental consequences of whatever rights we purchase to satisfy desires. I think L.R. pointed this out to you when she became frustrated with the way you grounded your opposition to legalized abortion in libertarian rights theory.

Truly, most people unconsciously assume the model answer to (1), indeed even if they envision themselves opposed to something so vulgar. Most of the available theories rely on it: for example, pursuit of human desire by "contract" is just what concerns social contract theory, either of Locke or Rousseau. More recently it is not questioned by Rawls, whose "primary goods" are just the desires which, so says the model, are part of human nature universal and unchanging. This is why he chooses to retain them in the original position even as he throws out other putative goods, which would, being less universal, corrupt the veil of ignorance. Nor does Nozick question it, whose "entitlement theory" refers to an entitlement to a historical distribution of the secondary means to sate desire, i.e. wealth, coupled with an arbitrary assertion (from the standpoint of rationalism, I argue) of natural rights to the means of gratification. Few speak of the Good. There is some glimmer of resistance in Edmund Burke and his little platoon, his repugnance of "sophists, economists and calculators," his recognition that in a cold world man needs to wear a thick coat of culture and mores to be fully human. But even Burke accepted the laissez-faire, a consequence only of liberalism.

I do not know how well a job I have done describing something I have stolen perhaps from Michael Oakeshott, though from what I understand this is not quite what he says. I apologize for writing you such a buzzing systematic account from someone who is not a philosopher; the ramblings of the uneducated tend to be awkward and full of holes. But this is the fullest expression I can give of how I understand your politics and maybe it will help you understand me. Perhaps later, I shall shatter this model the best I can, deo volente. But perhaps I don't have to; I suspect you can tell I will deny that the good for which we organiz, our arete of politics, is to satiate the desires pertaining to man's nonrational side, a side which I do not hold to be unchangable. That is, I deny human nature is completely "stable" in the way you mean the word, though to ignore our severe inertia is foolishness in statescraft. More importantly, I would argue that the rationalist anthropology itself is wrong. It has left out the spirit, which is not politically important to rationalism, which is the reason for your "separation of religion and politics," founded on rationalism. Again, unaccountably it believes that the nature of the self cannot be changed, disciplined, made holy, despite the overwhelming witness of those who cultivate ascesis worldwide and historically. Also it ignores the interrelatedness of the mind, body and soul, which is perhaps the most important thing to be said. It is not the mind alone that should be commanded, and perhaps not in the mind alone does the will sit. Certainly we must not govern the will by threat or incentive made to a nonrational and insatiable side of the self that unaccountably we refuse to govern. I claim with Plato the goodness of man involves a right orientation of every part of the self, all oriented toward the good, body mind and spirit together, interrelated because the distinction between the three is not an immutable or sharp one, as are the Enlightenment distinctions. The whole of man must be governed, and to make undue separation between body, mind and spirit is to try to govern one part but allow the others to fly loose in the winds of passion and cultural fashion to the detriment and eventual bestiality of the governed. It is against these decadent winds that the ruler must stand, and not only stand against them for the people but also for himself, or else he is no ruler. Until political power and goodness come into the same hands, the troubles of states and of humanity itself will increase without bound, as is going on right now. Indeed, one of the problems with democracy is that the worsening of the people is reflected in the worsening of the rulers, who then worsen the society, worsening the people further. How many leaders such as Washington can we find in the 20th century? How many such as Obama in the 18th?

Where happiness outranks wealth

A post on "Bhutan: Where happiness outranks wealth"

A lot of "happiness" studies, arising in the literature at the intersection of econ and psych, testify to a disconnect between wealth and happiness. Wealth is very important to self-reported happiness until one reaches the level of self-sufficiency. Wealth matters less to self-reported happiness beyond the threshold salary of, in the U.S., around $20,000 a year, and the degree to which wealth matters for greater salaries seems to be a decreasing function of the salary itself; true luxury matters almost nothing to happiness indeed. A striking second result: For the middle class and the rich, it appears only unexpected movements in the level of one's wealth change happiness, and then only for the time it takes for one to get used to the new level. Changes, not levels, matter to the "luxurious psyche." (Plato would smile.) There is even a documented negative movement, that certain members of the richest classes seem to have more worries and anxieties.

The article describes an agency trying to shield its people from this disconnect by managing the accumulation of national wealth. My colleagues might be shocked, but if I were to research the agency I would probably find myself basically in accord with it. Poverty is never a good thing, even (and especially) from a Buddhist or Christian religious standpoint, but at what price prosperity? Only a rationalist in politics would believe technology is always a good thing. A human being is more than just a rational mind but a will and a body. He may react "irrationally" to changes in his environment—irrational from the perspective of one unfamiliar with the human heart—and react in ways permanently damaging. This is even true if one believes people "eventually figure it out" after at first reacting poorly. If society is in some sense an organism, brutal short-term damage can abide and even alter the organism permanently. The organism of my body will recover from a weak blow, yes, but a strong enough blow can cost me a limb or even a heart.

Here is a truly lovely essay written by a 20th-century traditionalist economist who worked in international development: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html. It draws from his experience advising a Buddhist state much like Bhutan on how to develop (and to what extent it should develop according to the Western model) without losing its people to the pursuit of ephemeral values and not the Dharma. The essay takes seriously the percepts of the religion with respect to economics and, since their religion is so different from those of Abrahamic heritage, it is easier I think for modern readers to tolerate and even appreciate it... though on the level of politics he is prescribing the same bitter medicine colored differently and stamped with a fashionable yin and yang.

As an economist I know my science studies "games of choice under constraint" with an eye to draw an analogy between the game and the world—with luck, a statistical analogy that can be tested. As you might imagine the method carries with it a traincar's worth of epistemic baggage. I have never found the time to search through it all and doubt I would be able to tackle it anyway. Regardless, one assumption the science makes, the assumption par excellence which makes much of economics mathematically tractable and which is found universally in every paper i study, is that agents desire more of what they already have. (There is a Greek word for this: pleonexia.) Economic behavioral assumptions, I think, apply to man... I am sorry to use this terminology... only by virtue of his fallen state. I think it is fallen not only because the behavior is logically speaking insatiable but because societies concerned to guard the psyche (rather than the "rights and privileges" of the post-Enlightenment political consensus) find ways to restrict the appetite, sometimes violently. Yet the appetite is the very assumption on which I build models. Given that economic theory depends in many ways on pleonexia, one suspects the theory might not capture the behavior of traditional people. I have a hope one day to test certain behavioral assumptions of economics on members of traditional or (if you'll permit me to add a prefix) neo-traditional societies such as Bhutan. After spending some time in one of their monasteries, I hope they succeed.

The pretense to reason

The logic books define two words that ought to cause more trouble than they do. The words are "sound" and "valid." They are qualities of argument. An argument begins by assuming premises, a few statements of fact taken for granted—the argument needs to start somewhere. From the premises it draws intermediate statements that proceed in logic, concluding finally with the point it had hoped to justify.

Some arguments are better than others. If an argument's conclusion does in fact "follow" from the premises, if its statements "flow" from them by logical necessity, our books say to call the argument valid. We cannot do without the metaphor of follow and flow here; it is interesting we must take this recourse. Next, in addition to validity, if an argument's premises are actually true our books say to call the argument sound. The two words hang together: Valid arguments furnish logical conclusions from a set of premises. Sound arguments start from true premises, so their conclusions are not only logical but true. Sound arguments count as knowledge.

It might appear a sound argument not only counts as knowledge but creates it. Psychologically this may be the case for the hearer—and the psychological sense is the more important for us, for it is the more therapeutic. As for a logical or epistemic newness, however, no argument can actually boast to offer that sort of innovation. Each step in an argument is assembled from what had already been said. A statement in an argument does nothing but logically combine or rephrase its premises. Each line succeeds its prior line because it came from the prior line, and conclusions flow ultimately from premises the way water in a falls flows from the river upstream. We might do well to say the premises "contain" the conclusions already, the way a lake contains all the water that may one day strike the falls. Therefore, does the conclusion offer anything else than—the premises, exposed and unpacked? Socrates is a man; men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal. This is valid, one can accept it if the premises are true. Yet it is nothing but a skillful combination of the premises: Socrates, man, mortal.

And as for the premise that Socrates is man? We crave soundness. Is the premise true, which would make the argument sound? To find out we announce a probe of his manhood: "Is Socrates man?" We need to establish his virility. We need to argue again—an argument, hence a new set of premises and a new series of steps drawn from them. Obediently we gather data from history for the premises, and construct another valid argument by logic, arriving at the proposition Socrates is man. A success in terms of validity, but we still crave soundness: This new argument that Socrates is man, is this new argument sound? This new argument, are its premises also true? We shall need yet another argument. Every sound conclusion flows from its premises, which may themselves derive from the conclusion of some prior argument. One may start with any conclusion and trace it back through a flow of prior conclusions and prior premises hoping to stop somewhere—at an "axiom," a self-evident root of thought, a premise unshakable—at least for the sake of argument.

The history of philosophy is partially a history of increasing precision in logical argument. It has earned dividends. After 2,500 years of philosophical hindsight, years spent practicing the kind of meticulousness that breaks youth and eyesight, we now can very well guess what sorts of conclusions flow from what sorts of premises. More grandly, we can very well guess what sorts of philosophies will spring from what sorts of axioms. Since we know the relation, let us ask: Which axioms shall we choose—for the sake of argument? Do not assume I am commenting on foundationalism here, the position that truth requires a premise of ultimate self-evidence. You do not have to agree with foundationalism to recognize the importance of choosing premises for argument. Every argument has to start somewhere, regardless of whether you agree with foundationalism. Those are the "rules of the game." In the game of soccer we must choose strikers, midfielders, defenders. In philosophy, for the sake of argument, we must eventually choose axioms. But we crave soundness. Which axioms are the right ones? Note I do not write: which axioms are the sound ones? For soundness is a quality of argument.

The axiom is the real question, and here is the real problem: one cannot argue for axioms, for then—they would not be axioms. One may not premise them without robbing them of their self-evidence. One may not question their virility. We have experience in argument, centuries of meticulous practice in argument, we compete with the world's best in exactitude today and before and probably hence, and yet we find that we have exhausted the market's demand for logic. Knowing the sorts of conclusions that the various axioms lead to, precision is no longer something for which we will pay a premium. What we really need to know is: How do we choose the axioms? This is the only question worth asking, but it cannot be answered "rationally," because then we would give an argument and—all is lost. We have premised the axioms in argument, which poses the question: What are the axioms' axioms?

Imagine the following, for it happened and is happening. You tell me the axioms, and we—even I—can give you the set of conclusions you will likely reach. Reach, that is, even after you publish your judicious and even-handed critique of the status quo, followed by an incisive book-treatise throwing open a door to an unrepresented alternative and (necessarily) the publishing of a follow-up for popular audiences founding a tradition, and some papers noting its continuity with favored past sages (now pre-sages)—then a timely heretic appears, a century of internecine squabble passes and hones the essential insight, paring away all assumptions unnecessary to the seed, but the dissension weakens the tradition; it fades for a generation as new fashions in philosophy obscure it. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, whose self-declared sophophiles are actually sophophages. They regard your work as itself a fashion, "considered historically, objectively and according to contemporary criteria"—and are they perhaps right? A depressing anxiety. They unearth your splintered monuments, in a chaste future resigned to scour the past not for answers but to classify. Finding you and your progeny they file the collected works in a library for students to write papers on your grammar and your footnotes. Ironically they shelve your collected works beside others saying the contrary. Is a bookshelf of contrary philosophies not like three wines of separate vintage combined to make a more "palatable" blend? Our future sopho-connoisseurs finish by coding your work in a decimal system that distinguishes philosophical books by—yes—by their "school" which really means—finally, yes—by their axioms. The axioms which chose the conclusions. You could have started with your conclusions and reverse engineered the axioms. How distasteful and yet, did you do that? It's disheartening to worry that one may have begun with conclusions and only then have chosen the axioms. But was it better to begin with axioms, which no less had to chosen, for no argument can be offered for them? Either way, it strikes you, it doesn't really matter, for either way there was: a choice.

At the bottom, choice. Centuries of argument proving—proof, unnecessary! Arriving no closer to a "rational basis for belief" precisely because—we have one. And that basis founded in axiom, the ultimate premise for any line of argument, itself having—no basis in any line of argument. Vanity of vanities. Where is Anaximenes now? He might be interested to learn we have discovered what he always knew, that it is all: air.

Act of Dissipation, 1536

Modernity must have become official—I do not say that it began, but that it took office—at least by the dissolution of the English monasteries in 1536 and 1539. The causes and conditions of modernity are better understood by the historians than I, for we did not become modern overnight, nor do I say such a vast movement was isolated in time and place. But it does not take much reading to understand what a vast alteration in mindset must have prevailed upon the ruling class in order for them even to countenance the Acts of Dissolution.

Not so long before, the affairs of a "king" and the demands of "national" affairs must have seemed quite removed from life. Knights may have marched through the towns on way from one war to another, but their affairs were not of a piece with those who lived by the land. Even news probably could not permeate, for there was no printing press, except through the chief organizing institution of the day: the religious house. These controversial institutions were what Henry VIII despoiled. Most of them had admittedly ceased to be primarily religious institutions, though it would be incorrect to say that they were secular. They were a surrogate for what we might now call a network of NGOs, substitutes for a weak central government (even a weak sense of "nation").

The houses were not perfect, but active local governance probably had its advantages too. In any case I do not know enough to speak about the costs and benefits, but I do have enough wisdom to suspect that their presence was in some sense a response to the needs of the people. Suffice to say, when the charterhouses were swept and their sometimes swollen stores of wealth appropriated by an innovation in governance and allegiance, it could only have swept away locality in the old sense of the word. The peasants ceased to be members of a Christian order and enrolled in one secular, transferring allegiance out of a system that (however imperfectly) directed them to look beyond life to one focused primarily on the here below. As a secondary consequence, people who were first Londoners, Yorkshiremen or East Anglians began now to be English in identity, for the order was no longer local in character but "national."

As a corollary, Protestantism is therefore one of the necessary conditions of Western modernity, for only an individualistic ecclesiology would permit a mere king to wreck the church.