Recently I was rereading Rawls on the notion of public reason. This idea is dear to Rawls, because it’s part of his larger vision of participatory democracy. We need to be “in on” the reasons behind public policies, because that’s necessary in order for us to be able to assent or dissent in an informed way to the regime that governs us.
Informed consent (or dissent, as the case may be) is part of the deep meaning of political freedom. Yes, what Isaiah Berlin called our negative liberty can be protected by various civil rights that limit government interference, but positive liberty, what Kant called autonomy, involves willing for ourselves or consenting to what the state requires us to do.
The informed part of informed consent involves our reason, as Rawls recognizes (and codifies in the idea of public reason). But Rawls is a modern man who is conscious of the ways in which bad social circumstances can influence and distort our capacity to reason. Here’s what he writes in an important footnote from Political Liberalism (p. 223): “Freedom at the deepest level calls upon the freedom of reason. Limits on freedom are at bottom limits on our reason: on its development and education, its knowledge and information, and on the scope of the actions in which it can be expressed, and therefore our freedom depends on the nature of the surrounding institutional and social context.”
That’s surely right. We can be indoctrinated and thus end up imagining as reasonable things that are in fact unreasonable. Reason needs to be guided and tutored, as every parent knows.
I want to leave aside the latent contradiction that this insight poses to Rawls’ idea of public reason, which is supposed to be “political” and not “metaphysical,” which means relatively low flying rather than focused on the Big Questions. (The contradiction is that our freedom depends on its proper development, and “proper development” necessarily requires judgments that are “metaphysical.” And thus the idea of public reason only works if people are guided in their reason by more than public reason.)
Instead, I’d like to make an observation about progressives. A traditionalist agrees with Rawls about positive liberty, which is why a traditionalist, religious or otherwise, for the most part endorses the inherited forms of the “surrounding institutional and social context.” There can be distortions, but the traditionalist thinks that the Church, for example, or classical education, or social norms about marriage and family, guide and tutor our reason in the right direction. As a consequence, the traditionalist needn’t turn to politics and the state in order to ensure proper “development and education.”
I’ve come to see that this is not so for progressives, who by definition want to turn the ratchet of history forward so that, for the first time, we can attain true reason. This requires changing “the surrounding institutional and social context,” and this requires expanding and enlarging the power of government. For example, marriage is a traditional institution. The progressive thinks it’s unreasonable and needs to be changed. That will require the hard power of law to coerce and transform the soft power of custom.
There are many examples: the marketplace, of course, as well as cultural issues such as race and gender roles, as well as a whole range of attitudes toward guilt and shame. The conservative or traditionalist isn’t opposed to any particular expansion of the political to control and redirect already existing social and institutional structures. As I said, we recognize the existence of distortions. But the progressive tends to see deep problems that require deep and sustained interventions. The limitless ambitions of progressive educators offer an example. And progressives don’t have much in the way of soft, cultural power at their disposal (as do, by definition, traditionalists, who have the power of tradition). So they’re easily tempted to inflate the hard power of law to ensure that people aren’t overly influenced by tradition. That’s why the activist judges tend to be on the Left, not Right.
I’ve come to see that aside from the fantasy world of libertarians, everybody is in favor of benevolent coercion–for the sake of freedom. The difference is that a traditionalist trusts the dispersed power of culture to do the trick, while the progressive concentrates on the focused power of law and government to create a new culture. For the progressive, the personal is the political. It must be in order to justify government intervention for the sake of educating us in the “right” direction.
September 20th, 2012 | 11:38 am
But this is hardly new. It is almost the definition of a liberal that he believes that the past is more a warning than an example and refuses to be bound by the precepts of men who believed in slavery and sorcery, in torture and persecution. He tends to regard history as an unbroken record of the defeat and frustration of freedom. Why would he have anything to hope from existing institutions?
September 20th, 2012 | 1:21 pm
michael,
i’d ask the liberal on what basis she believes that slavery (think sex trafficking), sorcery, torture, and persecution are any less prevalent today than in the past. ok, maybe sorcery exempted, if formally defined. besides, what makes her think things won’t get worse in the future? why all the optimism?
i suspect the real problem has always been what theologians call the fall — a post-lapsarian world filled with post-lapsarian people. and the fundamental “government” that counts at the end of the day within the context of the fall is “self-government” or “self-mastery”, aka virtue.
for some strange reason, liberals skip right over aristotle/thomas to rousseau and hobbes…. but can anything other than self-mastery lead to a “better world,” which is what we all want?
notice, of course, that these days, only traditionalists believe in the fall, in disordered appetites, in vice, and in virtue. if progressives had their way, all we’d need is more therapy, more social projects, more science, and more technology.
September 20th, 2012 | 7:34 pm
“progressives don’t have much in the way of soft, cultural power at their disposal”
Given that so much of journalism, the media biz, Hollywood, the arts, and academia are disproportionately staffed by modern liberals and the hard-left, how could this be true?
How much power do the storytellers and bards and interpreters of our culture have? How much do the “experts” have? That’s soft power alright.
September 21st, 2012 | 11:02 am
Nice post–good to see R.R. Reno back in good form.
Reno senses a “latent contradiction” in Rawls: “our freedom depends on its proper development, and “proper development” necessarily requires judgments that are “metaphysical.” And thus the idea of public reason only works if people are guided in their reason by more than public reason.”
It may be a little unfair to respond to a parenthetical remark an author explicitly says he doesn’t want to pursue, but this is interesting I think, as I don’t see a contradiction here. Rawls is not assuming that the “proper development” of freedom requires no metaphysical commitments, or, to put it more concretely, that an upbringing and education within the constricted world of public reason is adequate to the development of freedom. Rather he is assuming that there is an array of ‘comprehensive doctrines’ that can provide the framework necessary for this development. And of course he’s is arguing that it’s not the place of the state to adjudicate the disagreements between them.
As for the remainder, I don’t see anything here that raises problems for Rawls. In fact, to the extent the posed difference between progressives and conservatives is accurate, a Rawlsian framework seems a good one for allowing these disagreements to play out politically in a way both sides ought to accept.
September 22nd, 2012 | 4:23 am
Andrew writes
“i’d ask the liberal on what basis she believes that slavery (think sex trafficking), sorcery, torture, and persecution are any less prevalent today than in the past…”
But that is no part of the liberal argument. Their whole point is that we are still living with the legacy of tyranny and oppression bequeathed us by our ancestors; more than that, what they object to is the rule of the dead hand.
This is the point of Jefferson’s argument, “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation… The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished themselves, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.”
September 22nd, 2012 | 11:00 am
I agree with @Tex Tradd
Not only do progressives numerically dominate many influential fields in society measured by register party afflation and self reported voting patterns. America has many many progressive laws from the progressive income tax, to affirmative action. If people are going to be labeled traditionalists there is a good argument to be made that the liberal progressives are the modern traditionalists. I find the label traditionalist unhelpful though; it distracts from the real reasons that people disagree with each other. I’ve never met any self labeled traditionalists or people who uses tradition as the basis for their political thinking.
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