The Non-Divinity of Systems

Ever since Plato wrote The Republic, and Hobbes Leviathan, men have worked to systemise not only forms of government, but the rationale that underpins them.  This is entirely in line with the premise of Plato’s Academy, which implored that nobody who entered be ignorant of geometry.  As calculus exists to appraise endless variables, so the equivalent must be available for human affairs. 

The goal of political philosophers is first to describe the human condition and then provide legitimacy for governance.  As our systems became larger and more complex, these justifications took greater scope.  Early enlightenment thinkers hailed Natural Man, one free of social constraints and able to manage things from first principles, as the base for building Social Man. 

Hobbes imagined a state of nature as perilous, a war of all against all; Rousseau drew the absolute opposite conclusion.  Both were working backwards – imagining man where he started to explain where he ended up.  Hobbes sided with civilisation, Rousseau against it.  In these two thinkers are the germs of modern conservatism and modern liberalism, at least in limited political terms and in the Western European context. 

Later thinkers, like Weber and Durkheim – sociology being the bastard child of phenomenology and political philosophy – abandoned these rationalist positions for empirical ones.  Our love affair with data is not new.  Statistical studies too often serve to make the obvious and the absurd equally believable. 

It is of limited use to imagine Natural Man.  All of us are brought into circumstances prior to us.  To replace the concept of Natural Man, Rawles gave us the Original Position.  We are all asked to imagine ourselves in the Original Position, that is to say, as God.  Without recourse to our own interests – beneath a veil of ignorance – we can create a system that is fair and just for all.  This is impossible as the minute we are born we have skin in the game.  Western thinkers today pay homage to this idea as befits a society obsessed with detached individualism.  The Original Position, intrinsic to modern liberalism, is one reason Westerners are hopeless in advocating their own interests.  They believe they share the responsibilities, and presumably the invulnerability, of God; greater hubris is impossible.

Many thinkers in the last two centuries bent toward building a political system indeterminate from the human material that crews it.  Part of this is thanks to German idealism.  Hegel’s notion of the Absolute and Marx’s revolution of the proletariat are similar in that they talk a great deal about humanity but care very little for human beings.  The forces they imagine are beyond the ken or flow of ordinary life.  They channel residual religious energies that fermented the vague deism that presaged the materialist form this would take in Marx.  Twentieth-century political systems were deeply religious, appealing to faith, even if that faith was in historical processes.  Many books, now mouldering somewhere, were written about the inevitability of dialectical materialism.   

Indifference – at times hostility – toward the cultivation of virtue has characterised the growth of progressive systems, and liberal democracy is no exception.  As we have embraced cultural and individual relativism in our approach to normative ethics, we have become unable to express anything collective beyond Popper’s notion that we ought not tolerate intolerance.  The implication is that everything else is on the table.  Making even the most basic universal claim about virtue is bound to ignite a clamouring crowd.  Many now feel sorry for the most abominable felons, but will never forgive a racist.

I doubt Popper meant we should become tolerant of mundane human evil and view intolerance, today regarded as a political crime, as the only behaviour that should be resisted by civil society and the state.  Nonetheless the mainstreaming of Popper and his type positioned human freedom as the only measure of the Good Life worth protection.  Freedom in this context is badly misunderstood, subject to the utopian whims of individuals seeking apotheosis. 

In whiggish American constitutionalism we see the noble attempt to create nut-and-bolt systems tight enough to be incorruptible.  Here some Aristotle might be helpful to contemporary observers.  According to his take, there are good and bad forms of all sorts of government, depending largely on the virtue of those who man them.  A republic run by evil men is necessarily worse than a monarchy under a good king.  An indifference to character in lieu of system-type is endemic in our time.  We hope parameters and formulations will suffice, despite real-world evidence they will not.  Copies of liberal-democratic-republican systems, in places without established traditions of civic virtue, are hell on earth. 

Consider the crush depth of a submarine as analogous to the pressure of human wickedness.  Some systems, like communistic ones, implode the second the water closes above them.  They become farce.  Others survive longer, but if you plunge deep enough even the best systems disintegrate.  Some lend themselves toward human evil by incentivising its usage.  These systems dominate the history books of the last century. 

The defeat and discrediting of these rival systems allowed us to become hubristic about our own, to lionise them rather than the character of the individuals and societies that produced and dispensed them.  These systems that are no longer delivering on their own basic terms and continue an unabated downward plunge.  The premise of liberal democracy is that of a shared franchise and limited, divided state power; what we see now is the subversion of front-facing political systems to the benefit of those we cannot see, in the interest of those we cannot hold answerable.  Power dispersed in the way we’ve managed is power unaccountable, and the sheer viscosity and opaqueness of our governments lead people to mistrust them.  The ideal of a virtuous political class is as laughable to today’s public as that of virtuous real estate agents.  We know they are not, by interest or design, concerned with virtue; to suggest otherwise is to admit startling naiveté.  Virtue has been substituted with buzzwords that correspond to productivity or effectiveness.  Obsessions with ‘signature behaviours’ and ‘values’ indicate virtue’s absence.

The vision of political systems that can run themselves independently of their human cargo is the ultimate autistic dream of the mechanistic, technological worldview that Heidegger warned about long ago.  We spare our loyalties for systems, and argue intensely about them, while forgetting that the man is always more important than the machine. We forget the human element at our own risk, proving that the self-driving political system will never quite exist, and that we can’t expect even the most robust schema to function if people of ill will are in charge.  By indulging this fantasy we have neglected the cultivation of private and public virtue.  Like a train with no driver – or worse, a malevolent one – such a system will eventually derail itself catastrophically.  Perhaps amongst the wreckage we will remember virtue.