Ping Pong 23: Themes
The aim of this Rant is to take stock of where this series has led, before the next ones plunge into the two revolutions of the eighteenth century. Underlying all of the series so far, are perhaps four distinct if interconnected themes and their variations, which might be summarised as Reason and Law; Pragmatics and Empiricism; Peoples and Place; and Friend and Unfriend. Each of these separate themes develops the idea of justice is different ways, all of which will then be considered in this Rant.
Law and Reason: the connection between thinking in certain ways, and law, is a very deep one in political thought. Or perhaps it is better to say, that this connection really is political thought. That is, political thought is the idea that one can, from the study of societies, say something meaningful about the nature of those societies and beyond those societies about the state of Man. The study of particular sets of laws is thereby revealed to reason. At which point two further moves become possible. On the one hand one might compare differing societies, in the hope that one might abstract general rules of human nature. That is, in the hope that reason might deduce deeper laws from the general study of particular sets of laws. On the other there is the idea that one might use reason to infer how law should develop and change within a particular society.
Each of the three moves above involves a notion of justice. To examine laws according to reason, that is, to assume that they are the kind of thing that can be taken out and understood apart from the individual context in which they are applied, is to have already assumed that they must concur with some idea of justice. I.e. customs followed are already assumed to be caught up in an objective system, a system of justice, and not therefore related to the mere nuts and bolts of the everyday. Likewise the idea of relating laws one with the other, to learn things about humanity, is once again to ask deep questions about how humanity aims to be just, and why. Finally the attempt to infer new laws, assumes that the connection between law and reason is a just connection, and therefore that laws ought to develop along the path of reason (and therefore along the path of fairness).
In this way the three rather distinct elements of humanity, thought, morality, and custom, become blended into the same brew. Reason as it actually might be first experienced, in Maths or simple deductions, becomes merely the simplest and most basic example of a means of thinking, whose true destiny is to support law and justify the ways of God to man (and Man to God). Likewise the idea of morality, that is of everyone being able in some sense to allow for other humans in thought and actions through empathy, is transfigured into a witness of a higher destiny or eternal law. Finally the fact that human cultures only operate through established conventions and customs, becomes itself an expression of eternal law whether that law is moral in its encompassment, or merely reveals something of humanity’s deeper nature.
The result is that there is a deep problem bequeathed to thinking. The issue of law was tied up with the issue of absence. Law is what one followed in the absence of a living God. The Book and the Law which it revealed became the incarnation itself. Law therefore at the very moment that it became universal and for all, become drawn into a higher mystery, and angled towards an absence. It was indeed this very absence that made the law so very incontrovertible. And yet viewed from elsewhere this absence means that there is a deep lack or unaccountability which underpins law. To the initiate the manifest nature of law might appear God given, to everyone else it remains rather a mystery. This lack matters because it manifests itself at the very time that the law is meant to be being universalized. This last fact has then two further deep consequences.
On the one hand, for those outside the privileged loop of belief, every set of laws will feel strange and alien, having at their heart a deep belief, be it in God or the free market, which appears unaccountable and inexplicable. On the other hand this very lack, this very arbitrariness in the very eye of reason, will be quite invisible for those who are implicated in the Law. For them all that then needs to be done for their way to become ‘accepted’ by all, is that it is outlined in detail, and its merits proved. Once this proof has occurred everyone should accept their point of view, and once this does not occur then the only recourse of such apostles is to violence of one form or other. Hence ironically the blind side of the ‘over just world’ is war, a war of extermination (be it of a culture or life), a war which no justice can encompass, understand or stop.
Pragmatics and empirics: Pragmatics arise no doubt as a partial reaction to the problems of law and reason. It (pragmatics) has at its heart the opposite move. Law, and justice need not to be thought of in terms of some absent System, but rather as perpetual creations of this system. This creation has two aspects. Any one society is the product of its own very particular rules and regulations. One need not therefore look for higher principles to understand the nature of such communities. On the contrary all one can do is to locate the ways in which their differing practices operate. It might in time be possible to create a loose system for ordering such communities, and yet this system will remain always provisional and problematic, as the only thing that is real is the individual societies or communities, and their local ideas of justice.
The empirics therefore aim to create within all the deep chaos of the world a small set of known affects; a small circle of light in all that darkness.
And yet the boundary line between the empirically known and everything else, is extremely porous. Light has a habit of bouncing off into the darkness, while shadow invades the sphere of the known. Locke’s farmers might have pitched up on the virgin shores of America, and might therefore have a right to exploit the land as they saw fit; and yet that right had to also allow that there were others on that land already, others whose rights needed to be destroyed or discounted. My sphere of light needed then to disallow other’s light, or better to convert them into my shadow. At the other extreme, my light bounces out beyond its sphere, and mixes with the darkness. Thence the globe of light becomes indistinct. I might already at any time be following a path beyond what is known, and beyond what I can coordinate with all the other things that I know. This was Hume’s problem. Morality might theoretically be universal, and yet that universal could not be reached, as it not only took too much time, but also the very act of looking changes the goal posts of what must be found.
Hence Empirical thought, comes up hard against its own limits, limits that define causes as external to it, but then needs those causes to invade that which it thought it knew. From which it follows that its attempt to encompass a system of justice based upon what is known becomes impossible, as that known becomes infused with the unknown or the unseen.
Peoples and Place: The connection between a shared land and shared people was as deep as Plato. What else was a city state but the collectivising of or a subset of the people (male and rich) and a location? Plato’s just state occurred when people and place matched each other perfectly. Likewise for Aristotle there was a deep connection between the land that one farmed, one’s climate and one’s customs. Certain states were tied to types of place. There is of course something beautifully comforting in this move. Humanity and its customs becomes geological. That is, it becomes merely an expression of the deep physical world, and all the worrying stuff about the morality (or otherwise) of a set of laws can be dropped in the fuzzy (but still Iron) necessity of a place. It becomes perfectly moral to allow others to starve as an expression of their place, and enrich oneself because of one’s own…
However this move gains another direction, when one considers human history (and language) as also a product of place. A people emerge not merely as an expression of a climate, but also a history. Their won history becomes then tied to their land, and their struggles to keep and maintain that land. Moreover, this conjunction of place and history allows the latter to break out of the past in two ways. On the one hand, the present, which shares the land with the past, is naturally seen as a mere expression of that past. All the day to day concerns of one’s life and even more one’s family and own local history becomes caught up in the ‘great’ drama of a people. One is in one’s life therefore already a part of a far greater tale. On the other hand, this tale ceases to be about any individual or even a family. It is embodied then, not in individual genealogies but rather in the land itself, which is seen as expressing that history (and with it, that belonging). Genealogy is therefore replaced by the oddly inclusive notion of people. It matters then little whether these people were fact or fantasy (Who were the Celts?), as being part of such a folk, related more to a way of viewing one’s own history and the way that history ties one to a place, that anything else. Forebears (ironically) become inclusive.
This connection of place and history creates an incredible alchemy. A people can invent for themselves a collective sense of themselves, a sense that unlike Greek thought, encompasses every member of society, and could be embodied within a nation, with all the rigmarole of ‘higher destiny’ that that move involves.
And yet of course once again there is a very cost to the notions of justice that any such people might produce. They can only be just within the bounds of their own history and place. The implication is of course clear that once again everyone outside that history or that location, is beyond the pale of individual justice. Even more problematically if a nation is thought to be the single unit of justice, it becomes very difficult for one nation to define the paradigm of interfering with another. Paradoxes which of course haunt modernity.
Friend, unfriend: Running across all these themes is the great theme of Friend or Foe. The deepest or at least most constant answer to the problem of who should govern a state is always Me and my friends. So that the problem of who should rule a state becomes caught up with that other problem about how one creates an axis for defining who one’s friends are. Here there are two rather different strategies. Traditionally one might define one’s friends through an adherence to a certain set of values, and beliefs. I am friends with all other socialists or all other free-market thinkers. Or with all other lovers of knowledge. Alternatively one might define one’s friends within an axis of shared backgrounds, and assumptions: I am friends with other public school boys or other members of the working class or other citizens of Athens.
These differing leagues of friendship come with both different attitudes and policies attached to them, which both extend the rights of the friends, but also define the sense in which others might join. Hence the leagues of ideologues, define the world according to their shibboleth, but allow everyone to join the league. The Leagues of comrades have a tendency to be more exclusive, as to be a member is a birthright, and their policies reflect that fact. However one needs caution here, it is perfectly possible for this latter league to extend to other denominations of friendship, as long as they pretend to themselves that all others are really as they are by culture and custom. Take David Cameron, as an example. At the heart of his deep vacuity and inconsequentiality lies the belief that he really can pretend that the rest of the world is really an extension of Eton. This role in this meta-Eton is to be its head boy (and to that end he only talks the language of schools with their bullies and their lessons). It is a testament to the oddities of the times that he can survive in any other domain than the music hall and the realm of farce.
However it would be of course a mistake to confuse these leagues. Ideologues are never comrades (although any individual can of course belong to both leagues). To include others because they sign up to a manifesto or to include others simply because one is pretending really hard that they are like oneself, are rather different things, and create different dynamics and different possibilities for action. Likewise they create different ways to think about other peoples. The Ideologues will not be confined to a nation (or rather there will be a tension in their definition within a nation), while the comrades are of course welded into their state as to nothing to else. Different agendas that infuse how they respond to events elsewhere. For the comrades, the actions of other states are likely to resolve into the algebra of bully and victim, while for the ideologue, it will relate to deeper struggles and blockages that states find themselves within when they stray from the true path (whatever that might be).
Badges of friendship, and the unfriendship of those who will not wear the badge that one dons in pride, become then the defining axes within a society, and the self-justification of one’s own beliefs and their evocation for all of humanity (or at least one’s immediate friends, can easily become the only reason for political thought (and the notion of justice).
All these themes therefore ultimately founder at the same point. It is very easy to define a state composed of others like oneself; the Rub was always how to allow others so very different to oneself within one’s own community. A Problem that after the eighteenth century became all too urgent. An urgency which could only be initially met by revolution and change, and it is to these revolutions that the next of these Rants will turn.
