De: Edward Feser from Postliberal Order <postliberalorder@substack.com>
Liberal Discord, Postliberal
Peace
Philosopher Ed Feser examines our political
polarization, and why liberalism cannot achieve peace.
Democratic peace theory
holds that democratic states are inherently unlikely to go to war with one
another. That’s not a proposition I’ll be examining in what
follows. What I want to address instead is a notion that might seem a
natural corollary – that a democratic state will also foster peace between
the factions that exist within it. This might seem especially
likely of a liberal democracy, which claims to tolerate a wide
diversity of viewpoints among its citizens and to guarantee the same basic
rights for all, those who lose out in the democratic political process no
less than the winners. And it might seem to be likelier still when the
main factions within a liberal democracy all endorse liberal democracy itself
(as opposed to some factions seeking to overthrow it). Yet this thesis does not
sit well with the current political situation in Western liberal democracies,
including the United States. A recurring theme of recent political
commentary isconcern about how polarized American politics has become over
the last two decades or so. Some even express the worry that the U.S.
could eventually see either another civil war or a “national divorce” of the
two main factions, though exactly how either scenario could play out is far
from clear. Of course, today’s
partisans will claim that the problem is precisely that those on the other
side do not respect liberal democratic institutions. But they also
believe that their own side wants to uphold them. Progressives
say they seek to “fortify” democracy against MAGA Republicans who refuse to
accept the results of fair elections. Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans say
they want to protect democracy from progressives who would stack the Supreme
Court, censor dissent, deploy lawfare against their opponents, and rig the
electoral process. While each side warns of threats to democracy, each
also holds that these threats come only from the other side. Neither
sees itself as disloyal to the liberal democratic order. This would come as no
surprise to Plato, who warned in the Republic that as democracies
decay, each faction increasingly tends to accuse the other of being a threat
to democracy, and to weaponize the legal system in order to bring the other
to heel: “[Citizens] are then accused by their rivals of plotting against the
people and being reactionaries and oligarchs, even though in fact they may
have no revolutionary intentions… There follow impeachments and trials in
which the two parties bring each other to court” (Book VIII, 565 b -
c). This is one reason why, on Plato’s analysis, though democracies
begin with high-flown rhetoric about freedom and equality, they can end in
grubby tyranny.
Postliberal Order is a
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this essay, and others like it, consider becoming a patron for $3 a month. Augustinian peace While Plato has much to teach us
about why democracies fall into such discord, St. Augustine’s treatment in The
City of God on the nature of peace is especially instructive. To
be sure, unlike Plato, Augustine was not discussing democracy,
specifically. But since what he has to say applies to polities in
general, naturally it applies to democracies in particular. And I
submit that it applies especially to liberal democracies. In a famous passage,
Augustine tells us: “Peace, in
its final sense, is the calm that comes of order. Order is an
arrangement of like and unlike things whereby each of them is disposed in its
proper place” (Book XIX, Chapter 13). As an alternative and
better-known translation renders the first line, peace is “the tranquility of
order.” Now, “calm” and “tranquility” can characterize anything from a
quiet garden scene, to a dog resting comfortably on the sofa, to a crowd
enjoying an opera together,to an individual human being’s state of
mind. Augustine is speaking of cases of all of these kinds, because his
account of the nature of peace is intended to be entirely general. But the “order” part of
the analysis is both more fundamental and less well-understood than the
“tranquility” part. Peace, for Augustine, is not merely a feeling of
wellbeing, nor the absence of tumult or the like. These, when true
peace prevails, are a byproduct of an “arrangement” in which each thing is in
its “proper place.” Among the examples Augustine gives is the way that
the organs that make up the body work together for the sake of the survival
and flourishing of the whole. When this order prevails, the organism is
tranquil. When it does not (due to disease or injury), tranquility is
lost, giving way to pain and dysfunction. More important than the
proper ordering of body parts to one another, though, is the proper ordering
of the body’s passions and appetites to reason. When the former are
governed by the latter, a human life is well-ordered and tranquil. When
instead reason is overwhelmed by the passions or appetites, life becomes
disordered and peace of mind is lost. Analogous orders, each with its
own kind of peace, can be found in the different levels of social
organization. Augustine writes: The peace of a home
lies in the ordered harmony of authority and obedience between the members of
a family living together. The peace of the political community is an ordered
harmony of authority and obedience between citizens. The peace of the
heavenly City lies in a perfectly ordered and harmonious communion of those
who find their joy in God and in one another in God. (City of God,
Book XIX, Chapter 13) As these examples
indicate, just as peace presupposes order, order in turn presupposes, on
Augustine’s analysis, an end for the sake of which an order exists
and an authority (or at least something analogous to an authority)
that coordinates the parts of that order so that the end is realized.
The parts of the body exist for the sake of the organism’s survival and
flourishing, and the nervous system coordinates them. The political
community exists for the sake of the common good, and government’s
responsibility is to ensure that that is realized. And so on. Naturally, when those in
power abuse their authority or govern foolishly, they disturb rather than
uphold the peace of the social order that it is their duty to lead. As
Augustine says, “remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals
on a large scale?” (City of God, Book IV, Chapter 4). Order,
and thus peace, will also be impossible when the wrong end is pursued.
While power, wealth, pleasure, and other earthly goods have their place, the
lives of both individual human beings and of societies become gravely
disordered when any of these is made the ultimate end. Only
God can be that. Hence, “the City of God subordinates… earthly peace to
that of heaven. For this is not merely true peace, but, strictly
speaking, for any rational creature, the only real peace” (City of God,
Book XIX, Chapter 17). Or as Augustine famously prays to God at the
beginning ofthe Confessions, “you have made us for yourself, and our
heart is restless until it rests in you.” Thus does Augustine hold
that, while a wide degree of diversity within a society is compatible with
order and peace, this diversity reaches its limits where the ultimate end of
man is concerned. The City of God can make “common cause” with “the
earthly city which does not live by faith [and] seeks only an earthly peace,”
where matters conducive to such peace are concerned. But it must
“dissent” and even “become a nuisance” on matters of religion: So long, then, as the
heavenly City is wayfaring on earth, she invites citizens from all nations
and all tongues, and unites them into a single pilgrim band. She takes no
issue with that diversity of customs, laws, and traditions whereby human
peace is sought and maintained. Instead of nullifying or tearing down, she
preserves and appropriates whatever in the diversities of divers races is
aimed at one and the same objective of human peace, provided only that they
do not stand in the way of the faith and worship of the one supreme and true
God. (City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 17) Expanding on Augustine’s
account of peace, Aquinas tells us that the virtue most productive of peace
is charity rather than justice (Summa Theologiae II-II.29.3).
For while justice can remove obstacles to peace, it is charity that
positively brings peace about. In particular, love of neighbor inclines
us to cooperate for the sake of the common good; and love of God aims us at
what is the highest good for the individual and the social order alike,
realization of which alone can bring order and thus peace. This evokes Augustine’s
classic summary of the organizing principles of evil societies and of good
societies, respectively: We see then that the
two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by
self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the
love of God carried as far as contempt of self… In the former, the lust for
domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates; in
the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one
another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by
obedience. (City of God, Book IV, Chapter 28) Self-love, in Augustine’s
sense, is of its nature conducive to disorder and thus the loss of
peace. For it directs individualsaway from cooperation for the common
good, and away from God, direction to whom alone can bring order to the
individual soul and to society. Liberal discord Now, liberalism is in
every way subversive of peace as Augustine understands it. Peace is a
byproduct of order, and social order requires authority. But
liberalism’s egalitarian component is subversive of authority. It
treats authority not as a natural part of the human condition, but as at best
an evil to be tolerated and something to which we are obligated to submit
only insofar as we have consented to do so. It is not the wise and just
ruler, but the rebel and the subversive who are idealized in the popular
culture of modern liberal societies. Feminism has undermined the idea
that the father has natural authority within the family, to the point that
even few conservatives or churchmen are willing publicly to defend it. Social order as Augustine
understands it also requires an end to which individuals, and the social
formations of which they are parts, are directed. But liberalism’s
emphasis on individual freedom has subverted this too. It rejects the
notion of a single highest natural end to which individuals and societies must
be ordered in order to flourish, in favor of maximizing the liberty of
citizens to pursue whatever idiosyncratic and discordant ends they happen
contingently to have. It replaces the common good with a chaos of
competing goods. Naturally, these egalitarian
and libertarian elements within liberalism have eroded the stability of the
family. Men and women no longer see marriage as an institution to which
they are oriented by nature, which exists primarily for the good of the
children it produces, and which fathers and mothers are obligated to commit
to for life for better or worse. Rather, they regard it as essentially
an optional pact for mutual advantage, and its demands are onerous enough
that many no longer see much advantage in it. Hence far fewer people
today enter into marriage in the first place, or stay married when they do
enter into it, or have many (or, often, any) children when they do stay
married. Far fewer children are raised with fathers or the discipline,
protection, and security of income that fathers traditionally provided.
Widespread juvenile delinquency, along with a dramatic increase in anxiety,
depression, and aimlessnessamong the young, have been the sequel. The egalitarian and
libertarian strains in liberalism have alsofostered deep distrust of social
institutions in general (governmental, economic, and so forth), some citizens
resenting them for being insufficiently egalitarian, others for being
insufficiently libertarian. Justice is conceived of by them in terms of
perfect equality and maximum freedom – fantasies which, because they are
unrealizable, leave citizens perpetually frustrated and suspicious, certain
that dark political or economic forces must be scheming to keep these dreams
from being realized. And it is not the charity
of the City of God, but precisely (this distorted conception of) justice,
that is taken to be the chief virtue in liberal societies. Charity, as
St. Paul teaches, “bears all things.” It thereby reconciles us to the
inevitable imperfections and disappointments of social life. But
justice tends to demand satisfaction “though the heavens fall.” Since
liberal demands for equality and freedom can never be satisfied, liberal
societies tend to foster persistent grievance and recrimination over perceived
ineradicable injustices. This is especially so
when citizens see no good beyond the present life – which brings us to
liberalism’s greatest departure from Augustine’s account of peace.
Since our highest end is in fact God, there can be no order, and thus no
peace, without an orientation toward Him on the part of individuals and
societies. But it is precisely this divine end and divine authority
that liberalism is most keen to push out of the public square. At the
beginnings of the liberal tradition, it was the Catholic faith, specifically,
whose social and political influence liberalism sought to curb. As the
centuries wore on, even a general Christian influence came to be held
suspect. Now liberalism insists on purging from public life even a
generic theism, and indeed even religion conceived of more abstractly.
And as I have argued elsewhere, to protect
the public square from the possibility of religious contagion, liberalism
tends to foster a skepticism about religion that eats away even at private
conviction. Augustine criticized the
pagan Romans not only for theirworship of false gods, but for the immoral
practices by which those gods were often honored. Money, pleasure,
fame, power and the like have become the gods worshipped in modern liberal
societies, differing from the polytheism Augustine criticized in lacking even
the illusion of a higher end. The ennui and unease of modern Western
life are the inevitable consequence of this idolatry. The City of Man today The liberal tradition,
broadly construed, is centuries old. I don’t claim that the pathologies
I’ve been describing, now so evident, have always afflicted it, certainly not
to the degree they do now. But the reason they did not is that liberalism
has been living on the borrowed capital of the Christendom it
displaced. Liberalism came only gradually, albeit relentlessly, to
dominate the thinking of the elites, then of the institutions the elites
governed. It came to mold the ethos of the populace at large even more
slowly and gradually. But it is now at high tide, and the Christian
view of the world at a low ebb, even within large segments of the
institutional Church. And the moral capital borrowed from the remnants
of Christendom is now largely used up. Yet there are still those
who hold to the faith once delivered, and this brings us back to the issue of
political polarization. Such polarization is due, in part, to the
diverse and discordant ends that proliferate in liberal polities, and to
never-ending quarrelsover remaining inequalities and restraints on
liberty. But there is also the fact that no social order can long
persist without some overarching end, and some governing
authority to direct citizens to that end – not even a society that purports
to impose no end and to be suspicious of authority. Liberalism thus makes
liberty and equality themselves the organizing ends of the social order, and
the liberal state sees to it that these ends are realized (through either
egalitarian policy or libertarian policy, depending on which faction of
liberalism is in power). Because these ends are susceptible of such a
wide variety of interpretations, the result is inevitably that the liberal
order ends up at war with itself, the partisans of one vision of equality or
liberty endlessly at odds with the partisans of another. But there is
also the fact that those who remain loyal to the remnants of Christendom
resist the liberal project altogether, to the ire of liberals of all stripes
(right-liberals of a libertarian or classical liberal bent no less than
left-liberals). In short, liberalism is
the currently dominant guise of the City of Man, and thus the successor to
pagan Rome. That city is at war with the City of God in our day no less
than it was in Augustine’s. And it is no more capable of affording
peace, as its ever more fragmented current condition shows. When this
current incarnation of the earthly city finally collapses, as pagan Rome did,
it will be left once again to the City of God to preserve whatever was good
in it – and to redirect it to the service of God, in whom alone our hearts,
our families, and our society can at last find rest.
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