Letter #51: Aint no alien, nor Pygmalion...just a tag-along Republican

The difference between pretentious pedantry and brilliant political theory is about twenty points on an I.Q. test. To you, I leave the task of assigning me to one side of the intellectual divide; I fear I know already. Nevertheless, a sincere political philosophy really has to be founded on genuine ideas and assumptions about the nature of God (if any), man, society and government.

Many years ago, I read an arm-load of books in a now mercifully forgotten quest to devise the political theory by which I measure myself, my fellows and our society. The end product, I remember, had seven levels of aggregation. Then I read The Inferno and its seven levels of Hell. Well, my political theory went up in smoke. Better off forgotten…until now, that is.

The upper two levels are all I remember and I will have to make do with those. Basically, my thinking comes out of the classic social contract theory of John Locke – big surprise for a Yank (NOT) – as well as bits and pieces from the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein (don’t ask), Baron Montesquieu, John C. Calhoun, John Stuart Mill, and Plato (don’t tell). The assumptions underlying my thinking are straight-forward.

• There are such things as moral absolutes implied across time and societies.
• Nobody ever gets these absolutes absolutely correct. That fact of human life does not absolve us from turning our backs on them.
• The ends do not justify the means; rather, the means sully or ennoble the ends.
• The truth is crushing in its simplicity.
• The just society is that which enables the greatest number of people to attain their properly ordained statures in the eyes of God.
• Man and Woman were created in God’s image and, therefore, concepts like qualitative utility do apply.
• The upper two levels of my erstwhile privately held theory represent the social compact – as the culture, conventions and traditions of a society – and a formal social contract.

Many elements make up the social compact, which is rather vague by necessity as it expresses values more than rules. The social contract is more likely to be an explicit subset of these norms and traditions. Those cultural elements that become explicitly stated in a contract do so because they codify as ‘sacred’ absolute ideals inferred over time and practice. In the U.S. context, our founders wisely made the contract largely secular.

Since any human adherence these absolutes has uniformly proven to fall far short of those ideals, we call these incomplete manifestations 'values'. These values, to be included in a written social contract, have to be accepted by all the contracting parties. Of course, contract terms often change with the times. In the case of the U.S. Constitution, such change is never meant to be casually accepted.

In fact, many of the values are self-evident; so much so that defining them is difficult and largely rely on ostensive definitions. It is analogous to Justice Potter Stewart’s remark that he could not define 'pornography' was but he surely knew it when he saw it. Liberty versus license is difficult to distinguish precisely. Yet we can discern liberty both in its presence and its absence.

To me, at least, the Declaration of Independence is the defining document of our social compact. But many others from diverse disciplines contribute to the social compacts antecedent, the social covenant which defines values and other elements of contemporary life into a living and widely followed culture. Examples might include the painting ‘American Gothic’ by Grant Wood, the poem ‘Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost or the music of Stephen Collins Foster.

Secularly sacred values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (assumed to contain the right to property), are manifest in that Declaration. That is not all. Other tenets, later included in the Constitution explicitly as the social contract, include a primacy of civilian power and a right to revolution to end oppression or corruption (usually found fornicating in the same bed of iniquity).

Beyond the necessity of surmounting high hurdles to change the social contract through amendments, the Constitution clearly allows for the existence of implied rights, not enumerated in the Constitution and subsequently articulated or inferred by the States and the people. The rub is how does one know what these rights are and whether they were known by, knowable to, the average citizen as not to be surrendered to the government through the Constitution?

The key point here, as a conservative, is that the contracting parties under the Constitution are the governed who surrender some portion of their rights (for example, the freedom to act without restraint; that is, with absolute license) to safeguard the value of liberty. This trade-off, taken seriously, is what is meant by people living and breathing the democratic spirit.

Without that fundamental engagement by the citizen, usually reinforced by the social compact as coloured by the social covenant, the contract basically becomes unenforceable and implodes. Without the guidance of the social contract, ‘show-me’ definitions become blurry as individuals once again redefine their singular governance. Gradually, more likely rapidly, the culture becomes indefinite and the compact itself collapses under the weight of popular interpretations spiralling into space in every which way.

One of two states is likely to ensue: mob rule or anarchy, almost inexorably to be followed by tyranny. Now there have been many, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, who believe that mob rule would be okay because, left to his natural (i.e., pre-social) state, man is basically decent. Others, for much the same reason, believe that anarchy would be an improvement. Karl Marx thought so.

In my heart, I would prefer to believe in Marx and Rousseau. Nonetheless, I live in the world and not in my heart. The heart may have its reasons that reason does not know. Yet, when I read the Black Book on Communism in 1998, I realized what happened in places where a sublime ideal of a future without laws ended up permitting mass murder of millions now. Of course, that future never quite showed up.

Blaise Pascal, conservative thinker from several centuries ago and misquoted in the previous paragraph, had a better idea of man than Marx or his progeny of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot et al.: Man is neither angel nor brute. The terrible irony remains that as he acts the one, he becomes the other. Again, please excuse this far too long of a letter. Next note will be a dance in my Kulturkampf zone.