Saturday, August 29, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
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
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?
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
- What is the purpose of organizing ourselves, and
- Knowing that purpose, how shall we best organize?
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?
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