LOVE AND THE JUST SOCIETY
Brace yourself for a torrent of words on love, justice, truth and knowledge and why, despite seemingly ever worsening news on the environment, we carry on struggling for a just cause. I call it the Last Great Cause. It may, or may not be, a Lost Cause. But we carry on. Why we do so has nothing to do with calculations of success or failure. It is based on something deeper. I can’t do numbers, so have to use an awful lot of words. And I haven't got the heart to edit, just my view of the greater love that carries us all (as a very good friend of mine puts it). So here goes ...
This way of posing the question allows me to throw off the hard hat of (modern) political philosophy and go directly to the grounds of this connection between love and justice.
Max Weber characterised modernity in terms of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. I think the German on this means ‘dis-godding’. The idea is that scientific advance since the 17C has shown the world to be objectively valueless. It is in this context that the modern political philosophers I have studied have been trying to piece together in institutional and legal terms the unity that has been lost in the grounds of our being. (We lost the overarching ethical framework brought by ‘God’ – Nietzsche was the one who called time here on modern moral theory with his pronouncement that ‘God is dead’ – the same time the common ground, the commons, were being enclosed and parcelled out).
The liveliest minds of our age think that foundations are neither possible nor necessary. We live in an ethical stream, says Mick Smith, who refers to an ‘anarchic excess’ beyond reason. I have studied modern philosophers trying to establish the rational grounds of universality and commonality. So it is in this context of lost grounds that I use the term ‘reciprocity’, establishing the relations between individuals in an impersonal institutional order, a rational freedom as a lawful freedom. Justice as something impersonal, connecting individuals who are strangers to each other together the world over. But this is my minimal agenda, one that can be accepted by most people with minimal assumptions. Answering the old political question of how to create the One out of the Many. We can establish the institutional framework for this, and show how we can create a social identity in which the individual/particular good or interest can coincide with the general/social good or interest.
But what does this rest on? Games theory? We can show how it is in our interest to communicate and cooperate with others for common ends. The problem with games theory is that it presumes the very thing that stand in need of being change, the motivations and assumptions of the players. We have to go further than rational calculation. That’s why I am critical of the contract tradition in political philosophy, this attempt to restore a lost commonality via the self-interested calculations of discrete individuals. This was my background in political philosophy and ethics, contrasting Anglo-American individualist liberalism with a ‘rational’ or Continental tradition. Always there was something missing. Call it excess, the essential something left over after reason and knowledge. I call it something core, something beyond calculation, codification and institutionalisation. Something that transcends the political and social facts of time and place. I realised that we have been putting Reason where God once was. And it encloses the world in a reason divorced from its ethical component, the component that is grounded in something more than a Kantian self-legislative reason. The Cartesian project of the disembodied mind, the discrete ‘I’, divorced from the sensuous – and valuable and enchanted – world that enfolds and sustains us. This philosophy, premised on the divorce of nature and culture, produced a citadel of Reason – a world of concrete, iron and steel – a techno-urban industrial world with its new idols of state, money, commodities, capital. These are the counterfeit communities, the external collectivities, that unite an atomised society of discrete individuals, mediating between individuals that are separated from each other in the essentials of life – the justice inherent in the rational – and moral - universe.
For Aristotle (and Plato before him), human flourishing is based on justice, and justice is the social virtue par excellence in that it governs relations between human beings. Justice is a permanent disposition of the will to render to each his right. Human beings are always just or unjust in relation to each other and since the effect of justice is to ensure that human beings act rightfully toward another in accordance with reason, justice is therefore a virtue. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that every virtue is justice and justice is all the virtues. And yet Alasdair MacIntyre notes that Aristotelian Man is a stranger to love. This separates love and justice. And this is where (old Aristotelian at heart) I was separating love and reciprocity. Aristotle is thinking of legal justice pertaining to the citizen, how law prescribes how each person should act with a view to the common good of the city. That’s precisely how I read the rational freedom of modern philosophers as a lawful or institutional freedom, something which brings separated individuals together in an impersonal realm. But there is, indeed, a greater love than this. A love that involves a greater justice.
And to be fair to one of the modern philosophers I wrote on, Hegel understood this. For him, a life of Christian faith - a truly human life - is not one spent in the single-minded pursuit of a purely personal salvation and well-being, but an ethical life in relation to others, what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit. In this life, our hearts are turned towards the universal, towards the good of each and all together. Hegel points out that Christian love is not some 'feeble love' (lahme Liebe) that embraces all humankind abstractly and emptily, but involves the concrete love of one's neighbour.
Aquinas, following Aristotle, identifies this common good with the life of political community itself. This community is what Aristotle called Politikon bion, public life, a communion of persons, in which each individual finds an essential element of his or her flourishing. The political community is therefore a basic human good (ST 1-2 94.2). Indeed, to the extent that it is perfect, this public life contains all other natural human goods and can therefore be considered an ultimate end. The love and association of others is an integral part of flourishing, meaning that the political common good has the character of an ultimate end. The life of the political community is therefore a form of friendship, philia and amicitia. Aquinas is therefore in agreement with Aristotle in conceiving the city to be an ultimate end. It’s just that Aquinas goes beyond Aristotle here to point to the absolute ultimate end beyond the political community, beyond the particularities of time and place.
The separation of nature and culture/reason lies at the source of our troubles here. We can define the common good easily enough, but struggle to provide reasons why individuals should take it seriously or act upon it. The dominant form of rationality is one of individual self-interest, and to act for a long-term common end entails a sacrifice that, to the individual, is irrational. Our social relations are rigged up on the basis of this individualist and instrumental rationality, and it is depriving us of the ability to act for the deeper, richer freedom and happiness that comes from the unity of each and all.
The loss of an overarching ethical framework is debilitating. A common good needs common ground. Where is it?
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
This quote from Martin Luther King jr states my own views. The idea comes from the American Unitarian Theodore Parker. Parker was a transcendentalist. Like Thoreau, he held the world to be divine. Reason, fact, evidence tell us often that we are beaten. I hold to a transcendent hope that says otherwise, and stimulates the will to keep going. It was with this bedrock commitment that Parker could predict the eventual triumph of the cause to abolish slavery:
Abolition was a tough political fight. Just causes changing history for the better are always tough fights. ‘These are the times that try [or test] men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.’ (Tom Paine, The American Crisis).
Tom Paine wrote those words at a time when the American Revolution was faltering, and some people were starting to walk away. Courage comes in many forms. The most important quality of all is moral courage. It’s about standing up for what you believe in, regardless of calculations of success or failure. But what is that commitment to justice based on? Why do we carry on? We can try to calculate the odds in struggles such as this, but ultimately they come down to conscience, the natural law which is written in the hearts of each and every one of us.
Martin Luther King jr held firmly to that view, affirming a commitment to a justice that transcended the laws, institutions and practices of his time and place in history. His Letter from the Birmingham Jail makes that crystal clear. ‘I am in Birmingham because injustice is here ...I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.’
"How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" King replies:
‘The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality ...’
In light of increasingly bad news on the climate, I think King’s – and Parker’s - refusal to lapse into the ‘valley of tears’ and focus on the ‘immortality of the soul’ is salutary. I’ll elaborate.
History is an optical illusion. We look at the facts recorded in the history books and come away with the impression that the past was more certain than it actually was. Hindsight bias takes the uncertainty out of history. We, as active agents living in the present, see only an uncertain future. Yet the future for the American revolutionaries was also uncertain, the odds were against them when Paine spoke up. Paine’s call for action inspired hope and raised the spirits and the rest, as they say, is history. We, looking back, know what happened in history and are inclined to think that whatever happened was likely to happen or even inevitable. We lose the uncertainty of history as a lived experience. Of course, when we live our own history, we experience uncertainty with respect to the future. We are inclined to see our future prospects as bleak. So, too, did those past agents who made history. Yet they acted nonetheless.
So what was it that drove Parker, King and Paine, drove all those who acted out of the hope for something better? Love and justice. (Can we throw truth in there? I would).
Why do we fight for the living world? ‘It’s about love, and it’s time we said so’ answered George Monbiot.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/16/pope-encyclical-value-of-living-world
I’m thankful that George praised Pope Francis for reminding us that our relationship to the natural world is about love, not merely the provision of goods and services. Because that is my background, that’s the message of Creation Care I took to my own little church all those years ago in an attempt to persuade people that climate action is a moral imperative, taking the example of St Francis.
Love? There is love in this moral landscape. “For God so loved the world he gave his only son…” That’s love incarnate. That’s a love that comes with pain, suffering and sacrifice. That’s a love that doesn’t suffer from climate fatigue, that never gives up a just cause. That’s the love that drove Martin Luther King jr in his struggle for justice. That’s the connection between love and justice that I hold to. And I think it’s possible only if we hold this world to be objectively valuable, involving a notion of inherent worth, something deeper than value, something going back to the idea of ‘woerthership’. So which gods do we worship? Who or what do we love? With grace comes the idea that human beings can love God with a love worthy of God since this love is divine in its origin. Hence there is a natural love of man for God, a sort of first natural friendship by which man naturally loves God above all things.
It is easy enough to understand the ‘death of God’ through the advance of knowledge and know-how. Much more difficult to extirpate are the theological assumptions hitherto attached to God. These become unmoored, and become attached to the new idols of money, commodities, state power, bureaucracy, the nation etc. For Gray, the progressive mentality of the Enlightenment derives from Christianity; the concerns of the Enlightenment are indefensible without those Christian underpinnings. The result is not quite the disenchantment that Max Weber theorised, but the robbing of value from the natural world and its reinvestment in the human-made world, a new religion of man-made artefacts, what Marx identified as the world of alien power, human social powers in alien form. Here lies the violence of abstraction that characterised the modern world. As Derek Sayer writes: ‘The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial, human sacrifices to one or another of Weber's renascent modern gods. War itself is not new, modernity's contribution is to have waged it, with characteristic efficiency, under the sign of various totalizing abstractions which name and claim the lives of all.’ (Sayer 1987: 154/5).
Weber’s renascent gods are Marx’s alien powers, human powers taking alien form against them, exerting an external force that thwarts human will and value.
The word 'worth' is derived from the Old English word 'woerthship', from which we get 'worship.' The idea of intrinsic worth thus asks us to answer the deepest of question concerning service, sacrifice, to what end or purpose do we live. The idea of worship raises the awkward question of just which god do we serve? 'No man can serve two masters . . . Ye cannot serve God and mammon' (Mt 6 : 24). The word Mammon is a transliteration into New Testament Greek of the Aramaic mamona, meaning 'wealth' or 'profit'. The attachment to wealth estranges human beings from the inherent worth of things, from the ground of our being, from God. If we see intrinsic value in the world, we are brought face to face with the sin of idolatry: what do you worship? what has worth for you? how do you distinguish the real thing from false idols? Here is the challenge to mechanistic materialism, to Robert Boyle's 'empire of man'. Having separated spirit and matter, faith and reason, value and fact, and constructed a Megamachine in which function has replaced purpose, means have displaced ends, our modern day imperialists pretend that spirituality doesn't exist, yet proceed to worship the new idols of the centralised nation state, bureaucracy, the market, money, capital, commodities, soulless, impersonal things one and all. Here is where service is owed in the modern world. And here is where we will find sacrifice and suffering aplenty. But out of a misplaced love, not out of real love.
I will go for the God of love, the God of personal relationships, the God of love manifest, a God which draws us out of the ego and into relationships with others and the world. A God of responsibility too. We have obligations relating to others and the world, we are made to 'own' the consequences of our actions in a most personal sense. The God of love presiding over a just order? I’m a Thomist on this. Aquinas constantly praises the wisdom and justice with which God has ordered all things. "Because God wills something, God also wills the things that are required for it. What is required for the perfection of a thing, however, is owed to it. Therefore, there is justice in God, which consists in giving to each its own. Hence it is said in Psalm 10.8: The Lord is just and has loved justice" (SCG 1.93.6/784). This justice is based on the doctrine of Providence, the idea that God orders all parts of creation for the best.
Aquinas wrote that ‘love takes up where knowledge leaves off’. (St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, q.27, a.4, ad.1.)
Thomas' argument to answer the objection that what is not known, cannot be loved. Since it seems we cannot know God in this life, therefore we cannot really love God. The Latin reads, "Et ideo ubi desinit cognitio, scilicet in ipsa re quae per aliam cognoscitur, ibi statim dilectio incipere potest." In English, "And therefore...love can begin at once where knowledge ends, namely in the thing itself which is known through another thing." Thomas' argument is that the order of love and the order of knowledge do not necessarily correspond We can love more than we can understand. A child, for example, may love its mother more than it does when it is an adult and love goes cold, even though knowledge is greater. God can be loved in this life, not because we know God in Himself, but we can love God through the Church, and the sacraments, virtuous life, etc. He says something similar in his Commentary on 1 Corinthians, where he identifies love with friendship and unity, which transcends knowledge. Knowing someone is not the same as loving them; hence, love takes us beyond the limitations of knowledge.
That points to the continuity between knowledge and love (between theoretical reason and practical reason in the language of ancient Greek philosophy). I think this is a key question, something we have lost – how to translate knowledge into practical ethics, how to combine the cognitive and the affective. The knowledge we acquire is thus a prelude to ‘taking an attitude towards...’ And love is the supreme ‘attitude to take towards...’ Love is the supreme level of knowing. Love and you will know. We make that transition from theory to practice when we take a loving attitude towards the objects of knowledge. I like biologist Bruce Lipton’s phrase ‘the survival of the most loving’ in this respect. (The Biology of Belief).
My favourite quote from the Bible comes from Isaiah 66, in the form of a question that God puts to us: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the Earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?’ I like the connection between Heaven and Earth, I like to hold transcendence and immanence together, I like the fact that we are given the responsibility for housing the sacred, becoming moral beings in living up to the divine immanence.
Answering that question requires a lot more than technical knowledge, it requires the practical ethics outlined above.
I believe there is such a thing as moral truth as well as scientific truth. I believe that morality is more than a series of value judgements, a mere congeries of irreducible subjective opinion. I think we can find the grounds or foundations of these truths in the ‘rational universe’ (yes, that ancient Pythagorean idea). I say grounds here. What are the grounds of mathematics? Are there any? We may be standing with our feet in the mid-air. Yet it all makes sense, it all ties up. And I believe this rational universe is also a moral universe. Proof? With the tools of modern philosophy, I can’t give any. When, in the context of theorising on political society, I argue for ‘reciprocity’ and reciprocal relations, I can engage in a rational reconstruction of the institutions required for what I call a ‘rational freedom’, a freedom that holds that the freedom of each individual and all individuals is co-existent. But I found my way back to Aquinas from the moderns for this very reason – the moderns are trying to piece back together the deeper unity that was lost when we started to see the world as objectively valueless. The connection between nature and reason/culture was severed, leaving us with having to put the common good together institutionally and politically, having lost its natural and moral grounds. Can we have those grounds?
This is to express the view that the justice of the human order depends on its participation in the Platonic Agathon, or the Aristotelian Nous or the Stoic Logos, or the Thomistic ratio aeterna. Whether any or none of these theories satisfy us completely, at least ‘we know that we are in search for an answer of this type.' (Voegelin 1952: 6 23). Can we supply an answer on the modern terrain? Just what order are we participating in? One based on a self-legislating reason? Groundless grounds?
If God is a being or presence – something capable of rational demonstration or proof – then God could not properly be called the source of all being (since it begs the question of what, in turn, created God). So Tillich argued that God be understood as the ‘ground of Being-Itself’.
‘Love is God and God is Love’ Einstein writes in this letter to his daughter. Is that the love that is the ground of being?
For Voegelin, ancient philosophy and scholastic theology constituted 'the major and certainly the decisive part of Western intellectual culture'. The idea of the modern world as the triumph of Enlightenment over superstition and ignorance is untenable. We gained in some areas but lost in others, and now find that our know-how misfires and our knowledge is unpersuasive and unappealing. We lost the appetitive and affective dimensions. We lost the connection between fact and value, and now find that all the knowledge in the world cannot mobilise an effective response to the environmental crisis.
I’m half-remembering (and probably mixing up) a quote here, “there’s nothing new, just a lot of things we’ve forgotten”. (I’m thinking Aristotle, but it sounds more like Plato). There’s an awful lot of things that we’ve been forgetting. I think the deeper point is that knowledge as such doesn’t set us free or save us, this is the kind of thing that lies behind the naïve idea of progress. Well, we shouldn’t be so bewildered that that promise has not been delivered, no matter how much technical means we have at our disposal. 'Formerly’, Einstein argued, 'one had perfect aims but imperfect means. Today we have perfect means and tremendous possibilities but confused goals' (Einstein quoted in Roger Garaudy The Alternative Future 1975:39). So there is no mystery why our knowledge is misfiring or being diverted into destructive channels. Times change and knowledge increases, but I hold to something that may be called the implicit philosophy, something that transcends the particularities of time and place (but is manifested in and known through concrete particulars). It’s something that looks to our natural dispositions to the good. And that doesn’t depend on the quantity of knowledge at all, not in ourselves or in our society. The stock of knowledge may increase, but many decision makers fail to act on that knowledge, because they let other aspects of a situation cloud the moral dimension. But moral knowledge, knowledge of what we ought to do, I hold, is in some way innate – a capacity we all have. Experience, habit, prudence etc develop that capacity and allow us to build up the moral virtues. This is difficult to generate when civil society has fractured into an atomistic and private existence, we fail to develop that character. Instead, we are socialised into being what? Consumers in the private realm. This is the ego as a prison.
The modernist or Enlightenment presumption has been that the greater the advance we record in ‘objective’ knowledge, the more we advance as a species. John Gray makes this objection: ‘Knowledge does not make us free. It leaves us as we have always been, prey to every kind of folly.’ (Straw Dogs, p. xiv). Weber emphasised the extent to which the rationalisation of the world through the advance of scientific knowledge brought about the dissolution of an overarching objective ethic. Instead there is a polytheism of values. Gray agrees, the advance of knowledge does not bring about a consensus on values. Gray, 2000 Years and Beyond, pp. 46-50). It brings about the opposite.
I’m thinking of Aquinas now, that knowledge is not a virtue in the truest sense, because it lacks appetitive content. To be a virtue, knowledge would have to make one positively desire to grasp the true and the good. It doesn’t. Hence our bewilderment as to why so much knowledge has yet to deliver on its promises. It won’t and it can’t. Not on its own. ‘Having knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so.’ Along with the ability to act well, we need, above all, the will to act well. That comes from within, something we are born with. The application comes from a social context or habitus which activates and canalises our innate moral capacity, builds the right character. But none of these things are supreme in themselves, they are the scaffolding of love. And that’s the love that leads us to justice.
Getting back to the idea of an implicit philosophy, I think Aquinas is even more interesting here in that he makes it clear that moral ‘knowledge’ itself is not the all-important thing. More important is how we all of us make use of what we already know, that inner moral sense we are all born with. It’s not that knowledge is unimportant, just that it doesn’t make a person more virtuous. We all have this natural law within, and are all of us capable of applying this law to the variety of situations in which we find ourselves. The good person qualifies as good not on account of acquiring knowledge and being aware of calculations and consequences in the application of knowledge, but by virtue of understanding the right thing to do, drawing upon what is within, and holding to doing the right thing. Wrongdoing may be a result of forgetfulness, ignorance, etc but that unwitting wrongdoing itself results from a failure at some other level.
And the obvious question arises, surely we can be doing better with all of this knowledge at our disposal. We can. But in the end, it gets back to this, before the knowledge we may acquire from books and texts, we should seek the knowledge written into our hearts. We can, with the biologists, call it an innate moral grammar. In his Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul alludes to the concept of Natural Law and contends that it is written on the human heart. This law, he infers, transcends manmade laws and is accessible by human reason because it is innate and intuitive. (Romans 2:14ff). The knowledge of right and wrong is written within. This law transcends human-made laws, but is accessible by human reason because it is innate and intuitive. Natural law, then, is not the law of nature in the sense of biological or ecological principles but nature as seen through the eyes of reason. Things go wrong in the world when we ignore all of this, as our rulers certainly do – or have to, given the extent to which they are constrained by imperatives of money and (institutional) power. But we may all err in this way. The closer to (objectified, institutionalised) power we get, it seems the more forgetful of the love we know we become. We need to redefine what we mean by power, and come to see power more in terms of healthy growth and flourishing. As in Lipton’s ‘the survival of the most loving’ – or Indra’s Net of interdependencies or Kahlo’s ‘Love Embrace of the Universe’. This is the love that comes before all the rest and is the point of all things. And that is the love that leads to justice.
There is a thirst and a hunger for love, for justice, for meaning. It’s other-regarding, an opening up to others and to the world. And it is something that diminishes through its frustration or denial. I’m sure that that is what Terry Eagleton means when he argues ‘love is the very model of a just society.’ ‘Love means creating for another the kind of space in which he can flourish, at the same time as he does this for you. It is to find one's happiness in being the reason for the happiness of another.’ Deprived of that relation to others and to the world, we feed and we drink, and may succeed in satisfying the physical self, but fail to fulfil the whole being. We struggle to define that ethic in terms of a modern philosophy which has grown on a terrain that has divorced the worlds of fact and value and separated nature and culture/reason and forever berates us with the convention that it is invalid to derive an ‘ought-to-be’ from an ‘is’.
Me, I hold that we live in an objectively valuable world, a rational universe, a moral landscape. That love, justice and knowledge exist on a continuum.