Pleonexia and Public Life
I begin with a couple of articles. First, this one written by Aditya Chakraborty in The Guardian:
'The failure of our governing elite is technical and political, for sure. But it is also moral. They have short-changed the public for so long that they don't know any different.'
- Aditya Chakraborty
I like that word 'duty.' It's an old-fashioned word, like 'honour,' 'obligation,' and 'virtue.' I want to see these back in public life and in interpersonal relations in society. We have been living 'after virtue' for a long time now, and the effects on political and social life are now beginning to show. We know the malaise must have gone far when the impeccably and unashamedly liberal Guardian is talking the language of morality without using those dreaded 'inverted commas.' They still do, it, mind. I interpret this practice generously, as an invitation into looking beyond false fixities rationalizing the bad practices of an existing order to a true law and order in which we may safely dispense with inverted commas. For my part, I have always been sure that the true, the good, and the beautiful exist, and the sooner society gets back on nodding terms with the three transcendentals the better it will be for all of us.
'I am not going to bleat about “leadership”, as if whatever ails Britain could be set right by the thwack of firm government. I want instead to point out a fundamental trend in public life that is utterly corrosive. Far from resembling the sometimes dim but dutiful set depicted by Orwell, today’s political elite are strangers to collective interest or public responsibility. Their conduct serves to undermine both the establishment of which they are part and the country they run.'
There is much more to leadership than strong government delivering 'thwacks.' True leadership inspires others to follow (and presumes a willingness to follow, something in short supply in an age of wilful self-assertion where everyone has a right to their own opinions/facts - hence my concern with 'character.') I'd like to talk about 'leadership,' and 'character,' too. And the 'common good,' something much more than 'collective interest.'
In his recent book Reckless Opportunists, sociologist Aeron Davis reports back on his interviewing more than 350 people constituting interlocking elites at Westminster and Whitehall, big business, the media and the City. He finds no morality here, no character, no virtue, no concern with the common interest or common good. These people get to the top quicker and stay there for a short while, take what they can for themselves, rushing on to the next gig. Such is public life and politics: a game of revolving doors. So I would like to talk about leadership, true leadership, with a sense of duty and responsibility and a concern with the common good, as against this crowd of plunderers who are, in Davis' words, “precarious, rootless and increasingly self-serving”. They grab whatever they can while they can whichever way they can before crashing out to the next gig, all the time emptying public life of its meaning and value, weakening the foundations of the very institutions placed in their trust. Here is the 'big government' and 'strong state' that so obsesses the anti-socialists among the conservative right, and here is where true conservatives should be focusing – because this class of people are the ones destroying public life, morality and the common good. 'There is no heroism here, just moneyed nihilism. There are no ideas, just reheated Thatcherism about low taxes and burning red tape. These people say little about national interest, but their ears prick up when it comes to compound interest.'
That's not conservatism, that's a liberalism gone decadent, an ideological cover for the anarchy of the rich and the powerful. Of course such people are virulently anti-socialist – they are against any collective purpose or constraint that stands in the way of their self-enrichment. Their only interest in the common good is what they can take from it.
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, the UK is full of talk of how broken Britain can be put back together. The issue is much bigger than that, because this fracturing is evident all over the western world. We need a wholesale moral reimagining that is concerned with the quality of the social relationships connecting people together in society, with the character of persons and modes of conduct constituting the social infrastructure, and with ensuring that our institutions serve the purpose or purposes for which they were formed rather than the interests of those free-riders lucky enough to have burgled their way into them. Politicians out to make a career for themselves will always claim that they intend to do some such thing. It is popular with a public fed up to the back teeth of public failure. It will only happen if said politicians back their words up with social participation and practices on the part of those sections of the citizen body concerned to reclaim the common ground and the common good. And that's a moral question.
I come now to an article for Modern Church written by Jonathan Clatworthy. This article addresses the moral question:
“What kind of morality, or amorality, or immorality, is it?”
“How has it arisen?”
“Do we have better alternatives?”
Are there moral standards or not? Either there are, in which case let's talk morality, and get as serious about talking ethics as scientists are about talking science. Or there aren't, in which case the powerful have licence to plunder and the rest of us should stop crying about it - 'it's the way of the world' and the grass won't pay no mind. I've never cared for Einstein's God of indifference, it fits the sophism of the anarchy of the rich and powerful much too much.
Clearly, the controversies caused by such behaviour, and the evident distaste expressed by large sections of the public, indicate that there are moral standards, and that people adhere to the, and want their laws and institutions to adhere to them. To challenge and change this behaviour, we need to show much more courage and conviction in reclaiming the language of morality. Those liberal leftists who have spent recent decades making careers by telling us that morality is repressive of difference and otherness, suppressive of individual liberty, an ideological tool of ruling class reaction have now had their revenge – and it is the poor and the powerless, the exploited, frankly the general populace being preyed upon by the rich and powerful who are on the receiving end. For reasons I shall explain below, authority, law, morality, and community are not inimical to freedom but their very condition. Without them, the left can realize no emancipatory aims and ambitions. Instead, they are adrift in the amoral and nihilistic world in which power decides.
I agree with Jonathan when he writes:
'Ruling classes are always tempted to misuse their power to benefit themselves. Healthy societies make sure the temptation is checked – by laws expressing moral values committed to the common good. We need to reaffirm the values of the common good.'
This is my view. In criticizing subjectivism in ethics to the extent I do, I am specifically referring to the dissolution of morality into irreducible subjective opinion. That does not mean that I am against the subjective dimension. On the contrary, I argue for the need to unite both the objective and the subjective dimensions, here with respect to morality. I uphold a distinction between law as the objective norm of morality and conscience as the subjective norm of morality. A healthy society is based on the legitimate expression of both.
Plato held the law to be sacred. In the contemporary world, law no longer commands the respect it once did. The reasons for this are many - a libertarian notion of freedom that has conflated liberty and licence, the critical view that law is merely part of the ideological superstructure of a class society, and no more, a materialistic atheism that sees all standards as human, conventional, and endlessly changeable, and last but not least, wrongdoing and abuse on the part of lawgivers and law enforcers.
I proceed from the definition of law given by St. Thomas Aquinas. I believe that it is the best definition in that it consists of the four basic elements that will be found in all true laws: 1) reason; 2) the common good; 3) lawmaking authority, and 4) promulgation. St. Thomas defines law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated" (Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 90, art. 4). That definition will satisfy all in a secular world. My view is that we need more, and that St. Thomas gives us this more in the form of eternal law, God's divine plan, which is the highest of all law, which directs all created things to one supreme end. This eternal law consists of transcendent norms, values, and truths which are made manifest in time and space in many different ways: in the physical laws of nature, in positive law, (human-made law), in the natural moral law (through the function of the conscience), in positive divine law through revelation.
The world has departed from this definition, and the fact that a liberal newspaper is beginning to talk about the moral underpinnings of the political order is an opportunity for me to talk, again, about the need to affirm transcendent standards against the sophism of conventionalism (the latter being the liberal position when shorn of its theological and metaphysical commitments).
I'd like to take the opportunity to chip in with a few parallel thoughts of my own on Plato and Rousseau. Rousseau, I argue, is a Platonist of the democratic age, openly opposing what he rightly calls 'sophism.' The ills described above have been a long time coming, but Rousseau saw their seeds being sown from the very beginning of liberal modernity. In fact, this ailment goes back a long, long way, indicating that it is not a problem of accident or environment or institutions in a particular time and place but something rooted in human nature. I refer here to Plato's engagement with Thrasymachus in the Republic four hundred years BC. It's an ancient form of liberalism, in a way, an amoralism and sophism beyond good and evil.
After having presented Socrates' civil conversations with others concerning the nature of justice, Plato introduces Thrasymachus as one who departs from what the others consider justice to be in terms of paying one’s debts and recognizing the truth. Thrasymachus explicitly defends the life of the unjust as superior to that of the just on account of it being more profitable and more pleasurable to the individuals benefiting from such behaviour. Thrasymachus is forthright in arguing for the superiority of the unjust to the just life:
“Consider further, most foolish Socrates, that the just is always a loser in comparison with the unjust. First of all, in private contracts: wherever the unjust is the partner of the just you will find that, when the partnership is dissolved, the unjust man has always more and the just less. Secondly, in their dealings with the State: when there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income; and when there is anything to be received the one gains nothing and the other much. Observe also what happens when they take an office; there is the just man neglecting his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses, and getting nothing out of the public, because he is just; moreover he is hated by his friends and acquaintance for refusing to serve them in unlawful ways. But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man. I am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is more apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do injustice are the most miserable--that is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace-- they who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest.”
Thus, the unjust person is considered smart in being self-serving at the expense of the just, engaging in free-riding on the assumption that all others will do the right thing, avoiding paying taxes and fulfilling contractual agreements with impunity, when all others fulfil their obligations.
The arguments that Thrasymachus presents in the Republic are expressions of a sophist view which is based on material self-interest. In this view, justice entails no objective standard outside of and binding upon individuals but is simply the interests of the strongest. In this view, individuals may disregard any moral or political obligation, objectively understood and embodied in laws and institutions, with impunity should these impinge on their self-interest (although they may maintain the pretence, for politically expedient reasons). The priority for the individual is always to acquire as much of what goods are available as possible, maximizing personal gain and minimizing personal cost.
Such a view expresses a narrow conception of self-interest, and one that is self-defeating and self-destructive as well as ruinous of the public realm. It is far removed from an enlightened self-interest which recognizes relations to others as well as the reality of a common good or collective interest. Plato described Thrasymachus’s philosophy in terms of what he called pleonexia. This describes a condition of insatiable appetites which consumes both the public realm and the self in one and the same process for the same reason. In a condition of pleonexia the satisfaction of one’s own interests is elevated to the status of a highest good that overrides all other goods, ultimately to its own detriment. Because the good of the individual ultimately depends upon the health and quality of goods which are greater than the individual, including relations to others. Plato thus shows that the burden of pleonexia cannot ultimately be borne in that it entails demands and desires that are incapable of being satisfied: no amount of material wealth, quantity, or money could ever be considered to constitute 'enough.' Fulfilment implies limits. Pleonexia is a condition that knows no limits, it is the enemy of 'enoughness.'
In Book 9 of The Republic, Plato issues the warning that the condition of pleonexia can lead a person to becoming a tyrant. He cautions further that even tyrannical power, if attained, is incapable of satisfying the demands of pleonexia. Instead, tyranny only serves to intensify the miseries of both ruler and ruled together. The condition is thus a political and psychological malaise that eats away at the public realm and the public spirit and imagination, diminishing other-regarding behaviour until it finally consumes itself, and everything else. The self-absorbed, self-possessing ruler lives in fear of the citizens, who are now reduced to subjects; in turn, the citizens now live in constant fear of the ruler’s arbitrariness and caprice.
Plato demonstrates an acute concern with this malaise afflicting the body politic. He returned to expand upon the problem of pleonexia in The Laws, where he states that the super wealthy – those in the grip of this condition - are incapable of virtue:
“Now it is almost a necessity that those who become happy also become good – and this he should wish for – but it is impossible that those who become very rich become also good.”
Their very wealth betrays their character:
“They mean those few human beings who possess the property that is worth the most money – the sort of possessions even some wicked men might have. If this is so, I at least would never agree with them that a rich man becomes truly happy, if he is not also good. But it is impossible for someone to be both unusually good and unusually rich.”
Why? Because, as Plato reasons, to pursue great wealth to serve one's own self-interest is to focus on one's own selfish desires in indifference to, and often at the expense of, the legitimate moral concerns of others. Once the individual is consumed with pleonexia, then there is little or no room for anything else. Such people recognize the collective interest or common good only as a resource for them exploit or filch. For this reason, Plato argues, the 'very rich' lack a moral compass, an anchor that lies outside of their own ego; they lack, too, the principles that go with such an appreciation of the good. Those in a state of pleonexia feel no obligation to pay taxes or uphold contracts, and feel no obligation to speak the truth or promote the common good. For avoiding such obligations is a condition of serving a self-interest that is divorced from the legitimate moral claims of others and which is divorced from notions of the public good.
That's Plato, an eminently conservative philosopher, whose view is integral to my attempt to recover a politics of the common good.
I'm interested, too, in Rousseau. He's considered 'controversial,' a 'totalitarian' and 'illiberal' democrat. Rousseau is much maligned and much misunderstood. He criticised liberalism at its roots, exposing its false ontology in separating individuality and sociality. He traces the errors which result from such a separation. I consider Rousseau to be the greatest Platonist of the modern age, a philosopher who democratized the Platonic ideal. In his apparently paradoxical concept of 'the general will,' Rousseau demonstrated the great insight that the true and the good could not, in a democratic age, merely be stated and given passively to the people but had to be actively willed by them, becoming something affective. With this great insight, Rousseau succeeded in reconciling the two dominant wings of western political thought: the idea of an objective or transcendent truth and reality and the notion of subjective will and choice.
I find Tolkien and the notion of stewardship in his writing pertinent here:
“The rule of no realm is mine … but all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task … if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I am a steward. Did you not know?” — Gandalf (in J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’)
In Tolkien's “The Return of the King,” there is a striking exchange between Gandalf and Denethor. Gandalf has just arrived with Pippin from Rohan, and the two have been admitted into an audience with the Steward of Gondor. Denethor says to Gandalf, “Yet the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, however worthy. And to him there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor; and the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.”
Gandalf listens and replies, “Unless the king should come again? Well, my lord Steward, it is your task to keep some kingdom still against that event, which few now look to see. In that task you shall have all the aid that you are pleased to ask for. But I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?”
Compare and contrast Gandalf's words on stewardship with the decadent conception of Denethor, who conflates the particular good of his realm with the common good of Middle-earth as such.
My own work on Tolkien
Tolkien’s words on ‘fighting the long defeat’ are wonderful and endlessly inspiring – he gives us a ‘hope without guarantees.’ And a long defeat that, in acts of love and kindness and solidarity, gives ‘glimpses of final victory.’ There’s a lot of discussion on what it takes to motivate people to act at the moment. Tolkien’s environmental concern came years before environmentalism as a movement, and is really a Christian stewardship. Many would consider him nostalgic, reactionary even, anti-technological – but he saw the impacts of industrialisation and urbanisation and didn’t like them, thought that they drew us away from the right way of relating to each other and to the world. Tolkien teaches that large scale ambitious projects need to be grounded in small-scale reasoning, communities of practice and love of place – a Hobbit like existence in which the ordinary actions of the little people knit communities together and create the warm and affective bonds between us, making us prepared to act to defend the places and persons we love and value. I develop these themes at length in this Tolkien piece. We need an environmentalism that gives the ‘little folk’ a material and moral stake. If we are Hobbits at heart, and if we create the Hobbit habits of the heart, then we will have the motivation to act and don’t need to be persuaded. And here I show how the protagonists in the Lord of the Rings put everything on the line and throw their whole heart and soul into the struggle. Everything they hold dear is at stake, the people and places they love, everything they hold true and know to be right. They long to preserve these things and are prepared to sacrifice themselves for their protection. I develop Tolkien's natural anarchy and pacifism.
I'll end with a note on 'Isonomia.'
Isonomia ("equality of political rights," from the Greek isos, "equal," and nomos, "usage, custom, law,") was a word used by ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus and Thucydides to refer to some kind of popular government. It was subsequently eclipsed until brought back into English as isonomy ("equality of law").
Plato is known - and rejected - for being a conservative critic of democracy. For Plato, democracy led to chaos and then to tyranny, in the attempt to clear up democracy's mess. We need to understand the reason for Plato's criticisms. Plato very much attacked the atomistic conception of democracy, particularly individualism. Athenian democracy was not isonomia, and it possessed inherent contradictions which were remarkably similar in type, if not identical, to those of its modern bourgeois liberal counterpart. This is something I was very much concerned to bring out in Marx's critique of bourgeois rights as against the universal implications of citizen rights. Find if you can the work of Karatani, who shows how market freedom led to economic inequality, because there was the possibility of slave labour, poorer citizens could use their political power to bring about the redistribution of wealth, groups such as women, foreigners and slaves were excluded from citizenship, resident foreigners were financially exploited – there was xenophobia – imperialism was used to create further wealth which could be redistributed, the arts of persuasion could have a dubious impact on electoral process, and there was the extensive infighting and plotting connected with party politics. In Karatani’s account, Plato would be a Pythagoras trying to avoid these problems, while Socrates would be trying to restore the values of isonomia. I put this here because I made brief mention of isonomia in my PhD work, found it interesting, but did not develop the idea. I was happy enough with democracy and notions of democratization, but it is plain that, in emphasizing the character of the individuals composing the demos, expressing a concern that they lead themselves by the nous rather than allowing themselves to be led by the nose through the manipulations of sophist leaders, I was refering to something quite distinctive.
This is all very interesting, especially in light of the failures of atomistic conceptions of democracy, which parallel the modern condition of ethics and politics (subjective preference, irreducible subjective opinion etc). But pursue the comment on Rousseau, to see how we can do better through Rousseau democratized Platonism.
And there I shall have to leave things. One day, I shall resume my work on Rousseau. I need to finish my Dante first, in time for the 700th anniversary of the great Florentine's death (2021). I want to do the peerless poet-philosopher justice, and pay him handome tribute, not least because he has been an unfailing guide in my life, and has pulled me through one trough after another. I also want to finish my Gerrard Winstanley book. And do a million other things. You can find out more on my Being and Place site.