Ping Pong 2: The Splitting of the Virtue
The previous Rant ended with the problem of whether one could move back from private to public virtue. What could a virtuous citizen and a virtuous state look like? Need they involve one and the same sort of virtue? And if they do not, then what is the relationship between the different kinds of virtue, public and private? Can one be a good person and a bad ruler or a bad person and a good ruler? These questions, whose origins can be traced back to Ancient Greece, are ones which perhaps every generation needs to resolve in their own way, and very much according to their own circumstances. For example, it seems very much the case that the last twenty years or so has seen a sea change in the way that we understand the relationship between public and private virtue. In the eighties say, it was almost received wisdom that bad individuals often made the best of rulers; while good ones were thought to be somehow weak and suspect. Irrespective of the evidence, Mrs. Thatcher for instance, was held to be a personal tyrant, and yet thought to have the power to lead, - which it was claimed, required a degree of tyranny and cruelty. Various Labour leaders by contrast were held to be good people, and yet, it was assumed, that they would therefore necessarily be ineffective leaders. This assumption seems then to have been questioned (if not reversed) over the last few years. Political leaders are selected on whether they will be able to ‘communicate’ their own likeability to the voters, irrespective of any abstract notion of leadership.
The problem of what makes a leader good, is therefore one of the besetting problems of all times since at least Ancient Greece. And yet this problem is one that has, within Western thought, a chequered history of it own. A history which, as discussed in the previous Rant, can be conveniently enough, started with Socrates’ equation of virtue with knowledge and public with private; and traced, as that idea was gradually eroded, and the public and private’s separate goods cast asunder, as they were by the time of Epicurus, Aristotle and Alexander the Great. How then did subsequent generations reconcile the two elements once again?
Perhaps the most important of political philosophers to ask this question in antiquity was Cicero, who was of course, as well as a writer, also a politician, a famous orator, and an even more famous egomaniac. In respect to the current argument there are two critical developments which Cicero makes in the theory of virtue and government. On the one hand, Cicero in effect suggests that it was a mistake to understand virtue as one thing. He therefore identifies three different types of virtue and associates them with three different kinds of state. On the other hand, he reworks the position of history in defining which state is the best. In Plato and Aristotle, history was synonymous either with a falling off from the ideal state, or distinctly circular (with states leading to other states and they to others, until one came back to the point that one started from again). It fell then to Cicero, in the surviving texts of antiquity at least, to pose the opposite possibility. Maybe, he suggests, it is only through a history (for him the history of Rome) that a perfect constitution can arise at all. Maybe history can then have a benign and progressive influence of its own.
In regard to the first of these arguments, Cicero clearly limits what a republic does. Building from the Latin world for a republic, “Res Publica”, things or matters public, Cicero suggests that only certain actions (and certain types of virtue) pertain to things of government, or things public. Here then Cicero proposes a very original answer to the problem of political virtue. Namely that only certain of the human virtues were relevant to the political sphere. Virtues that related to ‘things private’ (be they relationships or finance), not only could, but must remain private. Not only does the ruler have a right to a private life, but (and just as importantly) the citizen has the right not to care about that private life. That is, they have the right to make political decisions based on very particular virtues (and abilities). They therefore have the right (and duty) to distinguish personal regard from political virtues, and therefore to behave to their governors in a way quite other to the way that they would behave to their friends. The implication of Cicero’s argument here, being that this ability to tell the public from the private is not something that comes easily to humanity – but is rather a sentiment that must be carefully fostered, in order that citizens can make sensible decisions about whom should govern them. Leaders making TV shows about themselves is therefore very old news, but none the less dangerous, in that it erodes the ability of the viewers to make a real political choice.
What then are these distinct political virtues?
First and foremost virtue lies in the duty of the government to look after its people. This paternalism is a feeling, which Cicero suggests is best expressed within a monarchy. A Cicerian monarch operates according to principles that would not disgrace the paternalism of a One Nation Tory (this is of course no accident, for Cicero was of course a mainstay of a good ‘classical’ education). And yet, such monarchies were inherently unstable in that they were most prone to confuse matters public and matters private. The monarch was therefore very likely to act according to their own individual interest, and desires, leading to tyranny and corruption: A politician then and now, was praised for helping the narrowest of state interests (say British arms manufacturing); and yet roundly condemned the moment they help their family or friends. Blair was therefore attacked more for not quite respecting the boundary between public and private life (think ‘Cheriegate’, and all the stories about his jobs on leaving office) than he was for supporting the trade in murderous arms and almost as much as he was for going to war illegally… But it is equally easy for the people themselves to become confused, and mistake public and private aspects of their rulers, leading to flattery and ill advice.
The second main public virtue lies in liberty. Cicero therefore lauds anything that allows a populace the rights to free speech and public debate. Moreover such freedoms are important not just in themselves, but also because these debates by definition will involve matters public. Or perhaps better, it is in the fire of public debate that private matters are transfigured into something that everyone has a right to think about, and have an opinion on. And yet Cicero suggests that this ability to share matters and make them public is only really possible if the population has shared interests. - So that once a population becomes too diverse, its ability to be free is eclipsed (that is its ability to have matters public). Moreover Cicero suggests there is no simple answer to such a problem, as one cannot simply construct an artificial ‘matters public’ without that construct reflecting over much the interests of one group in society (and therefore never really being a thing truly Public). Freedom is therefore just as likely to self destruct as monarchy is – it must tolerate all comers, and yet that very toleration creates strains within what is free.
This tension between complexity and freedom is of course one of the deep problems of modernity. On the one hand, in the West at least, we praise ourselves for our own freedom; we set our ‘freedom’ up as a totem or a God, a badge of honour which we wear (and flash in the face of everyone else). And yet then of course we cannot hold the line of toleration, as the logic of freedom involves it own destruction. A destruction that we try in vain to counter by either delimiting the very freedom whose universality we have praised to the skies, and thereby appearing to be the worst of hypocrites, to those whose freedom is thereby destroyed. Alternatively we attempt to pedal a myth of a globalization that hones in on Coca-Cola-MacDonalds Americanism, and thereby indulge in the worst kind of imperialism and sectional interest. Either way we never go back to re-examine the advent of the problem within the very notion of freedom itself.
The third kind of virtue (Cicero suggests) which needs to be found in a republic, is the fostering and rewarding of individual talents; that is government by those who are the best at what they are doing. However (and before this argument starts to sound too New Labour) one needs to point out that Cicero’s argument rests on opposing the selection of the Best, with Freedom. The implication for him at least is that one does not simply find the best by opening up the selection process to everyone, as (and here Cicero is explicit) one can only do that if one has in the name of freedom, changed the nature of what one is selecting for. That is, if one makes selection centre around the candidates being selected (in the hope that one of them is the best), one thereby treats the job itself as a pre-given. And one therefore does not (as Cicero advocates) make the selection turn around the job itself (which could of itself mould anyone of a number of people into being the best for it).
However Cicero suggests it is just this centring upon the jobs (and not the people) which will eventually unpick this form of government, and for two reasons. On the one hand it is difficult to ensure the selection of the best – elements of freedom or monarchy will therefore tend to invade the selection process (do we favour comprehensive or private schools?). On the other rewarding the best is itself problematic as it can easily slip into a system where the reward itself (be it money or land) is confused with the ‘best’ itself; and all the more so given the sheer intangibility of selecting what the ‘best’ might be. It therefore follows that a government that starts with the simple aspiration to reward those who were good at certain jobs, all too easily slips into a rule by the wealthy and powerful (and thereby becomes a form of monarchy).
Hence for Cicero each virtue slips very readily into a vice. Or rather, in itself it offers no protection against the vices that necessarily accompany it, and that will always, left to themselves, imperil that state. Cicero’s answer to this problem - that one needs a mixed constitution, - has been very influential in two respects. On the one hand this was of course the blueprint for almost all modern states (think Balance of Powers). Nor is this a coincidence. The founders of the American and French republics in the eighteenth century knew their Cicero just as well as did the Tory Party in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They therefore designed a constitution with monarchic (presidential), aristocratic (congress), and democratic (voters), elements. We still very much live in the consequences of Cicero’s complex assertion that there were in fact three types of political virtue.
On the other hand, Cicero’s argument that history can create what humans cannot, namely a mixed constitution, with appropriate balance of powers, has on the face of it been just as influential. Or perhaps better, it has allowed the West as a whole to claim the right that Cicero claimed for Rome alone, namely the right to insist that one particular series of local traditions, and one history, has led a people (or a selection of peoples) to the best of all ’constitutions’. And yet one needs care here, the constitutions that have been most Cicerian have of course been just those constitutions which were written at a certain time and a certain place, by certain people. Cicero has become almost a fig leaf in order to hide the artificial nature of constitution writing. That is, he has allowed the writers of modern ‘mixed’ constitutions to claim that the documents which they compose are the result of centuries of history, rather than being (as they almost invariably are) a hodge podge of ideas, some old, others new, garnered together and reflecting the interests (or at least the concerns) of the drafters. This ambiguity as to the role of history has then hampered all modern attempts at state building. That is, there is a marked tendency to assume that the mere drafting of a constitution is itself enough to ‘complete’ a history, and to assume this, irrespective of the actual history of the people involved. The subsequent inevitable ‘failure’ of this strategy is then put down to the history of states (or peoples) being somehow imperfect, immature, or just plain wrong - and never due to the sheer idiocy and implausibility of the model itself.
Moreover the sheer implausibility of lauding one history and one local series of traditions over all the rest was apparent enough in Antiquity, and this for two clear reasons. On the one hand Cicero’s republic was ultimately the epitaph to a system that was dead (and a death that cost Cicero his own life) rather than the handbook to a vibrant living system: History turned its back on Cicero just at the moment when he thought it lay in his grasp. On the other, the idea that Roman thought, in the purist sense that Cicero meant it was somehow morally superior to all other’s thoughts, proved to be a line that was impossible hold when in the early and mid Empire, Rome became aware of the richness and vibrancy of other traditions (which Cicero dismissed). Other possibilities for virtue had therefore to be developed, which sought to keep the very basic division of virtue into different kinds, but also allowed for the richness of thought as it had then become.
Cicero, and his splitting of virtue into three is a theory worth almost all of a Rant of itself. As (through the accident of history, and the prejudice of classical education) it is a theory in whose shadow the West (and now to more or less degrees, everyone else) lies. It should be of very great concern to us all, that this theory was not the practical description of a workable constitution, but rather the romantic evocation of a past that never was, and the hope of an even better future to come (one which never materialized). In basing our states on it, we therefore risk in the name of this pious hope, confusing our matters public with a cod history, which was never even our own…A risk which of course we are now attempting to export to the rest of the world. Is it then really any surprise that they resent and resist us as they do?
