My students and I have been discussing Aristotle’s political thought recently. Yesterday, our discussion centered around Aristotle’s insistence that the political association must be about more than the protection of rights (in essence a mutual defense alliance). Aristotle instead endorses civic friendship in which our lives are truly interwoven in pursuit of substantive justice.
As we talked, it occurred to me that President Obama ran as an Aristotelian in this sense. HE would be the one to lift us beyond our petty, individualistic concerns toward a higher vision of community justice. WE, upon joining him, would become the ones WE have been waiting for. Candidate Obama successfully pleaded his case for a left-of-center version of civic friendship. President Obama has had a tough go of implementing it as the consequences become manifest.
All the way around the table, the students were skeptical of the possibility that a government can move from our current pluralism to unity around some vision. Instead, they seemed to prefer the idea that government sets fair rules and conditions for people to pursue their individual ends. Because my students are mostly Christians, I moved the example away from President Obama to a Christian republic in which people aren’t forced to be Christians but where Christian moral norms hold sway. They didn’t have much hope or enthusiasm for that, either. Or, at least, they thought it was equally impossible in our current culture.
I wonder if there is a clue here indicating to us the limits of an instrumentality like the state and pointing toward the possibilities of the church.
September 28th, 2010 | 1:43 pm
I believe the clue in this is not that the possibility of a rei publica Christiana no longer exists, but that Hobbesian-Lockean-Rawlsian liberal political theory exercises real hegemony in the U.S. — and, increasingly, in the West as a whole. Perhaps you should remind your students that even liberal polities legislate morality.
September 28th, 2010 | 1:48 pm
I don’t think Obama ran as an Aristotelian. His calls for and (thoroughly spurned) offers to help rebuild a more civil political culture are, I think, meant to create the conditions under which a liberal democratic state can do it job as a liberal democratic state. This is precisely to create the space for individuals to pursue their private conceptions of a good life. There is, however, room in this picture for elements of an Aristotelian picture. First, even a purely political common culture requires some shared values and, I’d argue, the inculcation of certain virtues. Secondly, there’s room in this picture to urge that the health of a shared political culture requires limits to the conceptions of a good life individual might choose to pursue. Liberals like Obama are quite willing to acknowledge the cumulatively destructive public effect of millions of private decisions, and that the ideas and values that encourage those decisions may be a proper concern of government.
September 28th, 2010 | 7:04 pm
“a Christian republic in which people aren’t forced to be Christians but where Christian moral norms hold sway. They didn’t have much hope or enthusiasm for that, either.”
Maybe I imagined it all, but I could swear that I lived 60 of my 77 years in just such a culture. It was very pleasant (although life could be hard). I could come and go anywhere in the city or countryside at any hour of the day or night and feel perfectly safe. Everybody seemed to know what life was all about, people could be depended on because there were shared values and understandings of right and wrong and what limits were built in to society, and everybody knew what their roles and obligations as family members and citizens were. I must have dreamed it all.
September 29th, 2010 | 1:30 am
As background information, you might be interested in cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s amazing discovery of a rather specific moral code in Obama’s speeches:
“For the sake of unity, the President tends to express his moral vision indirectly.”
“The Obama Code” includes what Professor Lakoff refers to as “seven crucial intellectual moves”. I was interested in the ways he imagined the President stripping what he defined as “conservative values” of any moral basis.
http://www.truth-out.org/022409R
September 29th, 2010 | 6:51 am
Two more links for consideration: Toqueville on American civic-mindedness and religion, contrasted with Victor Davis Hanson’s observations concerning Europe’s current problems: “Why, for example, do Europe’s cradle-to-grave entitlements so often end up encouraging declining populations, atheism, and the lower worker productivity that is readily apparent to the casual visitor?”
September 29th, 2010 | 11:00 pm
Why, for example, do Europe’s cradle-to-grave entitlements so often end up encouraging declining populations, atheism, and the lower worker productivity that is readily apparent to the casual visitor?”
Do they? Is there really a causal connection? I’m not scoffing, just asking.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact