The Politics of Love – Affirming Possibilities for a One Nation Green Conservatism
For a Social and Moral Ecology
Just when I think my very charmed and even odder life had no surprises left, it takes another turn which suggests the best may be yet to come. Or the worst. It’s hard to tell. But if you have the direction right, you won't go far wrong. I have always encompassed multiplicities whilst going beyond names and labels to identify commonalities. I remain committed to drawing people together on the things they share in common, recovering the political and ethical commons which alone ensures that the legitimate expression of difference in politics achieves convergence rather than divergence.
I have been impressed by Rory Stewart’s bid to become leader of the Conservative Party, and hence to become the Prime Minister of the UK. I wrote and told him so, and his office got back in touch with a request that I write to my Conservative MP to ask him or her to vote for Rory. I don’t have a Conservative MP, but I felt inspired to write to a couple of dozen Conservative MPs in the north of England. In fact, I may write to a few more in the rest of the country. It's important, I think, that we have a political leader who is capable of leading the country as a whole, rather than just one 'tribe' in it.
That’s more easily said than done, certainly in the absence of support systems and community architecture enabling people to act. That’s what brought ‘the Big Society’ down – the absence of spaces for genuine and effective associational activity and interaction. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ wrote Marx. We badly need to resolidify in this increasingly atomised society. Politics is about mediating division and conflict so as to produce a common solution that is at least acceptable for want of anything better. When divisions become entrenched, nothing that happens at the political level is considered acceptable. Social media exaggerates the differences separating people, increases the demands on politics, inflates expectations and the sense of possibility within particular groups, and generally expands a sphere of ‘populist’ power without political responsibility. Add to this the fact that what is euphemistically called ‘the economy’ – the capital system – remains in private hands, then politicians are revealed to be in charge of a public domain that is increasingly losing power, support, and legitimacy. The populists on the outside simply ratchet up impossible demands, making claims on the public realm that cannot be substantiated. Whilst this will become evident in the long run, in the short run it makes the job of politicians well-nigh impossible.
It seems I’m not alone in taking an interest in Rory Stewart, though. Here’s an article first published in the New York Times
Somewhere amid all that banter, Mr. Stewart has hijacked the Tory leadership campaign with a surprising argument: Britain must reapply its energy to compromise, between its own angry factions and with Europe, and return to Mrs. May’s withdrawal agreement….
The call for compromise requires the social and, most importantly, the moral conditions for compromise. I shall write more on this later.
His voice comes as a welcome surprise at an angry moment in Britain. He speaks calmly of reconciliation, seemingly impervious to the partisan rancor around him, like Ferdinand the Bull.
I wish to God I was impervious to this partisan rancour. Politics is about conflict and division, certainly, and I get irritated by people who continually insist that the politicians should ‘stop arguing’ and ‘get together’ and ‘sort things out.’ Politicians are together in a public forum, and to ‘sort things out’ they need to argue, advance different platforms, and reason things through. Those who are tired of this need a lesson in what politics is. Unfortunately, we seem to be nurturing a citizen body of individuals with inflated expectations and demands and no patience for politics and no understanding of realities. That said, there is a difference between politics as the expression of difference and partisan rancour. I have never liked the party system, never liked the way party machines took over politics and set about organized vote-catching in the late nineteenth century (the inevitable consequence of ‘mass’ democracy and the extension of the franchise, political historians argue), don’t like whipping, and don’t care for streets full of protestors with placards saying ‘up’ with this and ‘down’ with that, getting most excited at the sight of the targets of their ire or their rivals who have organised a counter-demonstration. I don’t care for shouted sloganeering. I want to see a more constructive politics, permanent material organisations not merely embedding power but capable of assuming responsibility for demands and actions. I dislike the fetishism of demonstration, it is the politics of permanent protest that can never constitute a genuine public. I have withdrawn from the politics of claim and counter-claim and am looking to reclaim the word 'political' for its original meaning - the creative self-actualization of the people.
“The key word that we need to get back to,” he told the BBC’s “Question Time” on Thursday, “a word that is so powerful, and nobody ever uses in politics, is the word ‘love.’”
That's most interesting - that ancient conception I want to go back to is linked to Aristotle's notion of friendship. Justice is the form that love takes in the public realm, backed by law. I agree with St. Thomas Aquinas' definition of law as law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated." And I live in hope that human beings will, one day, be brought into the greatest love of all, the greater glory that is God, who is Love. I write more on the politics of love below. Rory says that nobody ever uses the word 'love' in politics. I do, but I suppose I am on the outside of official politics. But I do argue for a politics of love. Human beings do nothing without belief. Those who think politics can be reduced to fact are foolish. Facts do not inspire effort. Most human beings require belief in order to be motivated to do anything. Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.
The article continues:
‘Mr. Stewart, 46, is posh, eccentric and clever, precisely, as one journalist wrote this week, the sort of oddball Britons love.’
Jessica Elgot, who covers politics for The Guardian, noted that on her daily commute, she had seen people watching videos of Mr. Stewart on their cellphones.
“What an odd time we live in,” she marvelled.
Odd indeed. I’m interested in the political centre ground as more than a haven for political cowards and evaders. I’m glad to see how badly this new Centre Party is doing. People are crying out for radical change; it is the failures of centrists in recent times that has fuelled this ‘populist’ backlash. I want a true centre ground and not an ideological cover for a politics of an iniquitous and failing status quo. Let’s not forget the culpability of Labour, Democrats and Liberal Democrats in the crises of recent times. A centrism along these lines is the very thing, allied to a globalised economic liberalism, that brought us to here.
The article discusses Rory Stewart’s championing of compromise as leading him to embrace often idealistic but hopelessly unpopular positions. ‘It seemed to suit him perfectly, resembling another of his literary heroes, the fictional nobleman Don Quixote.’ I love Don Quixote. I love that he saw - and was prepared to challenge - the rational madness to come. I dislike the instrumentalization of the world and shall carry on tilting at windmills.
I like what Rory Stewart says on reconciling divisions. I write further below on what needs to be done to overcome these divisions. It's nothing less than horrendously difficult. The article refers to people who listen with interest to him, but remain unpersuaded:
“It’s too late,” Mr. Wellock said. “We’re a divided country, and I don’t know how we get back together.” He praised Mr. Stewart’s “fresh approach,” but added, “He comes off as a wee bit naïve.”
He then paused at the mention of Lawrence of Arabia, whom Mr. Stewart has sometimes cited as a role model.
“Well,” he added, “I suppose he was naïve, too.”
And maybe I’m naïve too. I believe in the power of love and friendship to bond a society of different others together. I tend not to get taken in by the claims of politics, mind. I stay away from the main parties and reject protest politics and protest votes as attempts to exert a pressure without responsibility.
I do like what Rory Stewart said on BBC’s Question Time:
“The key word that we need to get back to, a word that is so powerful, and nobody ever uses in politics, is the word ‘love.’”
I do. The cynics and realists in politics will dismiss those words as hopelessly naïve. Actually, they affirm a profound truth. Love is the greatest power of all. I use the word ‘love’ in politics, and I use it a lot. I write on Aristotle’s friendship, but go further and write of friendship in Dante’s sense of being Beatrice’s ‘my friend.’ If we follow the allegorical direction of The Comedy, Beatrice signifies the grace we need for salvation. That’s a friendship that speaks of Dante’s genuine love of divine wisdom and of the Love that moves all things. That’s the politics of love we need, remembering that love needs to be properly ordered to its true ends.
I have indeed written on the implications for politics of all of this. So before I go any further, I shall quote my good self on the politics of love from a book I wrote on the peerless poet-philosopher Dante in 2013:
It is worth emphasising the extent to which Dante connects the search for love with the pursuit of justice. Far from locking love away in some spiritual attic, Dante brings it to the centreground of politics. Love has a direct bearing upon the central questions of politics – justice, the good society and the common good. In the context of the Thomist synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian cosmology, the coalescence of love and politics should not be so surprising. The questions of human flourishing within the public life of politics – the ultimate end for Aristotle - are resolved within the ultimate end for Aquinas – perfection through union with God. For Dante, politics is preparatory for us coming to see and know God. Dante subscribed to the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition which integrated politics within a comprehensive metaphysical framework. Within this tradition, Dante could not be indifferent to politics. One should not be surprised to read of the extent of Dante’s commitment to and participation in the politics of the Italian city states. There is nothing in Dante of the Christian disdain for and rejection of politics. But Dante’s participation in politics concerns more than mere power struggles. Indeed, Dante is seeking to transcend the petty concerns of politics as practised in the city-states in favour of a larger vision of political peace and unity.
For Dante, love was also an active concept in politics. This is not as surprising as it may sound. From Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas, friendship, amity, is the firm foundation of political life of the community. Plato had defined justice as the social virtue par excellence; Aristotle had defined the human being as a zoon politikon, a social animal. 'All things in common among friends' the saying goes, and it is the personal virtue of individuals that ensure their common use.’ (Aristotle Politics 1981: 115). Aristotle is the most realistic of philosophers, but he expatiates at length on love and friendship as the common ground of politics. Aristotle distinguishes philoi as ‘friends’ and philia, philein etc. as 'affection', 'fond' etc. from philauton as 'selfishness', 'lover of self. The ancient conception defines humanity as a social and cooperative species, possessed of both philia (friendship) and dike (justice).
St. Thomas Aquinas combines will, love, justice and mercy within the ultimate end for human beings in relation to God. He makes love and the passions the very naturalistic basis of morality.
Human beings need others in order to be themselves. The common good and the common life is at the heart of any politics so defined. Politics is a matter of love. The key question of politics is how disparate men and women might, as social individuals, join together in their various orders and degrees, in order to best live and flourish well. Does the binding element come from within, via love, or does it have to be imposed from without, via law?
‘That wisdom and control should, if possible, come from within; failing that it must be imposed from without, in order that, being under the same guidance, we may all be friends and equals’
Plato Bk ix 1987:356
Peter Critchley, Dante’s Enamoured Mind 2013: 99/100
Critchley, P. 2013., Dante’s Enamoured Mind: Knowing and Being in the Life and Thought of Dante Alighieri [e-book] Available through: Academia website <http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Books
I’ve watched Rory Stewart with a mild interest in the past few years.
I like what he says on the environment.
Rory Stewart: Of course there’s a climate emergency. Here’s a wide-ranging Conservative programme to tackle it.
"We must be radical on the environment because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s popular. It’s true that our only hope of winning a future election after nine years in office, will be by becoming again a party of radical change that appeals to younger voters (just four per cent of Conservative voters are currently under the age of 24). But we all originally joined political parties or entered Parliament to protect and improve the world – and this is perhaps the greatest cause of our age. This must be a citizen’s movement, as much as a government initiative …"
He talks well and he sounds like he means business and has a determination to get things done. So do all the best politicians, mind, until they are tested with office, and we find all their fine phrases exposed to be empty rhetoric. I tend to be lenient on the politicians here. Their emptiness in office is not the fault of personal failings on their part but expresses the condition of the modern world perfectly. The politicians are not alone in uttering empty words. Nietzsche told us long ago that the modern world uses moral terms that no longer have any referent. Elizabeth Anscombe said the same in the 1950s, MacIntyre is saying the same today. We all use words that we believe in, but fail to see that we lack the social practices and relations that alone give them content and reality. We have an abundance of ideals, but a deficiency in the means of their realization. Estrangement is the key figure of modernity, as seen in a whole series of separations of human beings: from each other in community; from government and the political commons; from the sources of life, meaning, and belonging; from the various means of modern life, economic and institutional; from Nature and the ecological and biological matrix; from God and our true native land; ultimately, from ourselves. This society is imploding from within.
I shall not repeat myself on this, simply refer people to my main works. What I will say is that I have been most impressed by Rory Stewart’s acute awareness of the growing division and conflict in society, leading to an increasing unwillingness on the part of people to compromise. I hope he takes this keen concern on his part further and analyses it in terms of the loss of the political and ethical commons, the loss of a shared moral language and community, and the dissolution of an overarching and authoritative moral framework buttressed by social practices. This has been my consistent line of enquiry for over two decades now. I saw the entrenchment and extension of divisions coming. They are strongly rooted in the ground of modernity and cannot be easily uprooted. The absence of a moral architectonics furnished with an infrastructure of motivations and practices caused David Cameron’s hopes for ‘the Big Society’ to dissipate. I also argue for 'the Big Society,' it is a very good idea, but it requires a social restitution and reinvigoration to work. Power, resources (moral and psychological as well as financial), and institutions are all involved. The modern tendencies to abstraction are far too powerful to be checked by phrases and intentions not buttressed and sustained by communities of practice, the creation of a habitus which both incites and enables us to know, learn, acquire, and exercise the virtues, and the character-forming discipline of family, work, and community, of other-regarding entities and activities that draw us out of the minimal self into the expanded being of the maximal self. We need others in order to become and to be ourselves, and it is that loss of community, of the social aspect of human personality, that has gone missing. It is not easily put back.
I’ll go back to that quote from earlier. “It’s too late,” Mr. Wellock said. “We’re a divided country, and I don’t know how we get back together.” He praised Rory Stewart’s “fresh approach,” but added, “He comes off as a wee bit naïve.” Ideals need to be attached to their means of realization. Without that, they are utopian.
It’s a divided world, and the divisions run deep into the social and cultural fabric. That these divisions are more than socio-economic in origin goes some way to explaining their intractable nature. It may be ‘too late’ for this civilisation, which is merely to say that liberal capitalist modernity may well have run its course. ‘Too late’ in this case, then, is not a cause for despair, but a call to a new beginning. But do we know how to do it? ‘I don’t know how we get back together,’ says Mr Wellock. He’s not alone in this. People the world over are in revolt against a failing social system, but don’t quite know what is going wrong nor how to put things right. People are crying out for a genuine public community, but have lost the ability and the nous to create one themselves. People in the main don’t know why the world is dividing to fall and don’t know what to do to put things back together. I have given my ideas over the years. I write socialism for conservatives and conservatism for socialists, all along developing a consistent critique of liberalism that goes to its very ontological roots in the false abstraction of the individual and the social.
I want to address two aspects of this diremption, the socio-economic and the moral.
In the first instance, and most obviously, there is the widening gap between government and governed. That there is a disconnection between people and their representatives is easy enough to spot – it is a statement of the obvious given the rising tide of protest and ‘populism’ – what is much less obvious is to identify the causes of that disconnection and generate viable political strategies which facilitate reconnection. One of the most popular political slogans of recent years has been ‘take back control.’ As with all slogans in politics, this one is all the more appealing in its distance from political realities. The lack of control on the part of government is the central explanation for the crisis in legitimacy. Governments no longer govern not on account of any personal failings or lack of character and leadership qualities, but because, with the means and mechanisms of economic existence in largely private hands, serving private priorities, they cannot govern. Capital and finance under the corporate form have gone global, slipping the hands of the most powerful governments. As the experience of left of centre parties across the western world has shown, there is no longer any pretence of managing the economy, merely making a virtue of necessity. ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ said Bill Clinton, as if presenting us with a pearl of political wisdom. It’s politics that is only indirectly in the service of the democratic will, in other words. The primary function of government is to facilitate the process of private accumulation, now taking place on a global scale, and only secondarily – in the context of popular dependence on the capitalist economy – a concern with a democratic will shaped by that dependence. And it’s failed. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown promised the end of boom and bust, boasted of the light touch of financial deregulation, let private markets rip, presided over record levels of social inequality, and inflicted the biggest economic depression since 1929. The same point applies the world over. The complaints of liberals with respect to Donald Trump ignore the fact that the Democrats have had eighteen of the last twenty four years of the presidency. Liberals need to stop seeing themselves as plucky outsiders pressing emancipatory causes. They are insiders, they have been the dominant force on the inside for a long time now, and they need to see the problems that now confront us as self-authored and take ownership rather than project them onto political rivals. The ‘populist’ wing of the great public no longer believes the liberals. The Socialist Party in France now polls less than 10% of the vote, the German SPD and the British Labour Party are riven by in-fighting. The truth is that that tradition of government intervention and mild incremental reformism is exhausted, and now exists only in a condition of endless civil war in an attempt to maintain a bankrupt status quo – a centrism that no longer has any grounds – against the demands for radical actions from the left. When the economy is expanding, you can make a virtue of a necessity that stems from a lack of control over the means of socio-economic life. At least you can when people are prepared to suffer the consequences of rising inequality, social and cultural division, and ecological degradation. Add concerns over immigration, drugs, terrorism, and crime to the list – all arising from the prevailing social system – and you have a massive pressure fuelling an era of populism and protest. People are responding to the demand to ‘take back control.’ That such ‘control’ is appealing is not so surprising. But people, in their separation from the realities of politics, have yet to discover the truth that politicians long ago discovered – in a capitalist economy in which the means of social existence are in private hands, and whose relations have gone global, there is no ‘control’ to be had, unless you are seriously prepared to engage in the thoroughgoing project of social restitution of alienated power that Marx outlined. I see nothing like such a viable project, buttressed by material organisation, on the part of either right wing populists and left wing protestors, not even from Greens demanding ‘system change, not climate change.’ I support the Green Party, and was not only a member of the Greens for decades, but actively campaigned on the streets for them. But I have always been concerned to avoid Greens becoming absorbed in the conventional political sphere, replacing the failures of parliamentary socialism with a parliamentary ecologism. The problem with reformism lies in the view of capital as a public domain subject to the democratic will, whereas in fact it is a regime of private accumulation, now global in scale. This article is well worth reading: Germany’s Greens: Long Wave or Short Hype?
What is required is political action and policy in the context of mass mobilization and widespread social transformation. I don't quite see it yet, although I can see the beginnings of some such thing. I do see is a plethora of inflated rhetoric and unrealistic demands constantly escalating in the absence of a reality check. Given the extent of the disconnection between government and governed, the governed in isolation from the centres of political and social power are able to entertain the most inflated of ideals and expectations, substituting easy slogans for hard analysis (that's more a criticism of the populist right than the protesting left, mind, but still applies generally). That doesn’t make politicians and government the ‘realists’ who are right in this whole farrago, far from it. They may be the biggest unrealists of all. They have been happy to indulge the most vacuous of phrases and slogans in order to solicit the windy applause of masses they felt capable of keeping at a safe distance. We are now reaping the whirlwind. With these empty slogans – Brown’s ‘society of all the talents’ – politicians earned a little short term popularity, covering the paucity of their effective politics in areas of real life concern – but raised generations on flapdoodle. The debacle of Brexit is one consequence. The problem is that people have come to believe these empty slogans, and are turning on politicians who, evidently, are in control of nothing. The problem is that the people who respond to a slogan like ‘take back control’ see the lack of control in terms of personal political failings, instead of seeing those failings themselves as rooted in the series of separations which constitute capitalist modernity. The individuals composing the governed are turning on politicians composing the governing class with a vengeance, blaming weakness of political will and leadership for what are institutional and systemic flaws and failures. We have a political class that purports to govern, but lacks the capacity to govern. We have a public that demands ‘control,’ and responds to the cheap and easy slogans of those who promise to restore such control in the long run in order to subvert government and governmental frameworks they dislike in the short run. That long run will never and can never come. But by the time the people find that out the hard way it will be too late. Hence my comments on power without responsibility. Government, as a result of its own complicity in a failing capital system, is taking a hit as the visible, public, face of capital’s subjectless system of alien control, and can do no other so long as it remains capital’s political command centre. People don’t know this reality, and are mobilising their demands in abstraction from it. Confronted with this reality, they may come, like the politicians, accept it as the only one possible. Where, after a century or more of the socialist challenge, is the viable socialist alternative which can command the allegiance – and inspire the personal effort – of millions? In the absence of a viable alternative, people may well choose to remain with a failing economic system that is instrumental in unravelling the planetary ecology … Or they may reformulate their demands for ‘control’ in a more meaningful way, targeting them against the centres of alienated power and not just their institutional trappings (the legal and regulatory frameworks trying to preserve something of the social and environmental fabric). The sooner politics addresses realities the better, politicians and people alike. The biggest reality check of all is the crisis in the climate system.
At the moment, we have increasing sections from the ranks of the governed in revolt, making demands from outside the realm of constituted political authority that are utterly unrealistic. Unrealistic in what way is the key question to answer. If we keep existing institutional arrangements intact, then this populist pressure from the outside cannot but be destructive, making it all but impossible for politics to function and governments to govern. But the lack of control over the means of socio-economic life have done that anyway – it’s just that people have now noticed, have lost patience, and are demanding ‘control.’ We need to take that demand into political and social (and ecological) realities with a mass movement of citizens capable of transforming the nature of the ‘the political.’ If we don’t resolve this democratic contradiction positively, then we will enter the realm of political fantasy – authoritarian leaders manipulating the inchoate yearnings and demands of a still uncomprehending ‘mass.’
If people are serious about putting things right and putting the world back together, then they need to do some serious reading and avoid political and ethical soundbites and slogans for the cemeteries of political hopes and reputations they are.
That's the socio-economic reason as to why there is a disconnection between government and governed in the contemporary age. I now come to the moral reason as to why the divisions of the modern world are now becoming so entrenched.
In the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche announced the “death of God.” He went on to expose the terms we use in moral discourse as empty, lacking the referent that alone gave them meaning, and as devoid of practical content, lacking the social practices and modes of conduct that once gave them force. The “death of God” thus entailed the loss of the overarching authoritative moral framework that not only bound each and all equally, but also inspired actions and commanded the loyalty and allegiance of millions. This framework has now dissolved into a series of value judgements, none of which can claim superiority over the others. In place of the one substantive good there is instead a multiplicity of competing goods. Liberalism preaches agnosticism on the good, upholding a neutral public sphere that holds the ring to maintain the conditions of a conflict pluralism. Many will celebrate plural society as a good thing, the condition of a free society. The problem is that this vision of competing goods is incapable of constituting itself as a unifying force around a substantive good. Instead, we have an agnostic and legalistic public sphere enforcing equality and neutrality in conditions in which ethics has been dissolved into a market place. Individuals are free to choose their own values. As Max Weber put it, in an objectively valueless and meaningless world, individuals are not only free to choose the good as they see fit, they are obliged to make such a choice if they are to have any good at all. People are free to choose their own gods, or, we may say, devils – since in the absence of an objective ethical standard there is no way of evaluating and distinguishing between such subjective choices. Politics mediates conflict, the legal sphere holds the ring, and some form of compromise results in the interests of civil peace. Such is the optimistic theory of liberalism. It is now becoming increasingly evident that this balancing act has only worked for so long through a parasitism on older moral traditions. Liberalism dissipates the moral capital, but cannot replenish the stock. It is at this point that the divisions not only become entrenched, they start to intensify. This happens once liberalism sheds its metaphysical origins and underpinnings and instead becomes an overtly political and conventionalist doctrine. By this, I mean that rights cease to be something grounded in metaphysical principles and instead are explicitly stated to be human creations, conferred by the state. That sounds very liberatory when framed in terms of the democratic state, but ‘the people’ are not always right, do not always speak with one voice, and are not always liberal and democratic either. And ‘the people’ are rarely as one. There are individuals who compose the demos and the unity afforded by transcendent standards. Human beings exist within asymmetrical relations of power and resources; the voices of some human beings very often count for more than the voices of others. If we make human rights merely conventional, as things conferred by the political realm, then we make them something arbitrary, rooted in nothing more secure than the fortunes of politics. In his Life of Dante, written around 1351, Giovanni Boccaccio declares: 'There is nothing in this world that is more unstable than public grace. No hope is more insane, no advice more foolish than that which encourages one to find consolation in it.’ There is nothing more unstable than rights which are based on no more than a conventionalism. In the first instance, things that are openly recognized to be human self-creations can never be compelling in value terms, only in terms of force – they are creations of power, maintained and enforced by power, and challenged, checked, subverted and overthrown by power. No one is morally obligated to obey the self-created values of others. Such things lack motivational and obligatory force. In the second place, something which is conferred by the state is just as easily withdrawn by the state. Rights are natural rights based on the natural law. The denial of such rights can always be countered with a moral argument for that reason, regardless of the current balance of power in politics.
The collapse of the overarching and authoritative moral framework into a civil sphere of competing goods based on irreducible subjective opinion has issued in a moral marketplace characterised by a continuous self-cancellation in the first instance and building in time into self-annihilation in the final instance. It’s not that modernity cannot generate any moral theories in the absence of God, it can; in fact it generates a positive cacophony of moral theories. The problem is that none of these moral positions can offer good reasons to persuade, compel, inspire, motivate, and obligate others. We hear the view expressed continuously that there is a moral imperative to protect the planet. It is, of course, right to preserve planetary health, for any number of reasons, including our own self-interest. But a moral imperative only exists in the context of a wider ethic and ethical system which embraces each and all equally. We do not have that comprehensive ethic. Environmentalist friends who point to 'Nature' here simply fail to see the ethical point, hence their appeals go ignored. A statement of fact does not constitute an ethic, least of all when science tells us that we live in an objectively valueless, meaningless universe that came from nowhere and is going nowhere.
Instead of a genuine ethical system we have a number of competing goods, and individuals are free to choose whichever good they deem most likely to serve their interests and satisfy their wants. Once we understand this, we will be able to see why there is a lack of collective movement to act on the common good, address issues of common concern, a failure to resolve differences and compromise and agree for the greater good, and a failure to respond to moral imperatives to protect the planet. We lack the overarching and authoritative moral framework and the supporting infrastructure that gives any ethic its practical content and force, hence our moral appeals are ineffective and our moral language lacks a purchase on reality.
The authoritative moral framework has dissolved into a sphere of irreducible subjective choices, likes, preferences, and wants. There has been an inversion in the relation between absolutes and relatives. We have taken God, as the ultimate Absolute, the Highest Good, and dissolved it into the moral marketplace. In other words, the modern world has relativized the Absolute. This has given us not merely a conflict pluralism between competing goods. More than this, with individuals free to choose their own goods as they see fit, they have a tendency to stick to their choices religiously. In relativizing the Absolute, the modern world has come to absolutize the relative. Each tends to see their chosen good as their own personal god, to which they cling with all their might, since their very identity depends upon it. That's what happens when God ceases to be a force outside of individuals as well as inside their hearts. Hence there is no tendency to compromise and no tendency to see the other side of an argument. In terms of ethics, there can be no compromise. Without an objective moral standard, there is simply no way of evaluating the choices that each individual makes. And, of course, each individual will consider that their particular choices are the right choices, and will not be persuaded otherwise. Individuals are not merely choosing their own goods, they are choosing their own gods. As a result, human society is dividing and being wrenched apart by adherence to a series of false absolutes, relatives inflated beyond their true importance. We lack an appropriate scale of values by which to measure, and temper, our moral choices and actions. All we can do is fight it out. The only winner in such a situation is power; it's a Hobbesian world based on the war of all against all. It's been a long time coming, but we are almost there. Hobbes' solution was the strong authoritarian state; nothing else could keep order in such a fractious terrain.
I have never voted Conservative, so this may be described as an odd turn of affairs for me. That said, I haven’t voted Labour at any level since 1992, and I regretted voting for them even then. I never ever trusted Tony Blair, I felt him that most dangerous of politicians – an ambitious, value-free careerist, and a weak man whose claims to moderation and centrism concealed a craven surrender to the worst elements of the status quo. And he was a liar. He had worked out that Newcastle United were everyone’s favourite second team, the anti-Manchester United, so he invented a persona of himself as a diehard Newcastle fan from youth. He told lies about how he remembered watching Jackie Milburn from the Gallowgate end at Newcastle. He was too young to have seen Milburn, it was a complete lie. And I remember saying that if he could tell so great and so easily checked and falsified a lie on so small and unimportant a thing, what kinds of lies would he be inclined to tell under the cover of power. We found out. I never voted for him.
I am still reading people trotting out the mantra that if you don’t vote you have no right to complain. That’s the kind of errant nonsense that had people voting for Blair. People who don’t like the Conservative Party have to vote for someone, right?; and only the Labour Party stand a chance of defeating the Conservative Party, right?; a vote for any other party than Labour is not just a wasted vote, but it puts the Conservative Party back in, right?; and there’s an obligation to vote, since if you don’t vote you have no right to complain, right?; and people fought and died for the right to vote, right? So you have to vote for Blair's New Labour, right?
Wrong. This kind of thinking is so wrongheaded I don’t know where to start, and don’t even want to. I studied history, and I can take you back to the Chartists and forwards from there to the Suffragettes – such people fought for the right to vote not as an end in itself, but as a means to the betterment of society. They didn’t make a fetish out of the suffrage like too many are inclined to do today. There was a point to voting, and the vote was part of a widespread social transformation. I like Marx’s notion of an ‘active suffrage’ running alongside a 'passive suffrage' in this respect. Marx was well ahead on this, linking the move to extent the franchise to the root and branch transformation of society.
As for the vote fetishists, they lock us eternally within the choice between lesser and necessary evils. The problem is that in choosing a lesser evil, you are still choosing an evil, and you soon come to find that the problems you thought you were addressing have become worse over time to become the greater evil you had hoped to avoid in the first place; and then you find that the evil you had hoped to avoid has not only not gone away, it is now posing as the solution to all the problems that you and your party are now being blamed for – the liberator and saviour of those damned by their evil choices. It's the politics of despair. Vote for what you believe in, not against what you hate the most. But you can't always do that given the electoral systems we have ...
I don’t care for any of it. i just see despair and the arguments of desperate people, people who think 'just getting on with it' is the height of political wisdom, and not the clueless, reconciled, dull-witted, and unimaginative apology for moral and intellectual laziness it really is. I have always voted and have never not voted. But I have always been sceptical of conventional politics and the party system and party loyalties. I’m not tribal in that way and don’t have party allegiances which hold me to the view of my party right or wrong, or wrong and even more wrong when it comes to certain parties. I was a member of The Green Party and will stand by my support and activities their over the years. The Green Party have had an impact far above their small numbers. I am no longer a member. But the Greens have proven their point. Think where we could be now had The Green Party been in office instead of Blair and Brown …
It’s not so much the politics at the level of taking sides and voting that concerns me but the conditions of doing politics well. I think these conditions are deteriorating rapidly and have been deteriorating for decades, and all across the western world. We are losing the ethical and the political commons and, as a result, societies are dividing within, along social, cultural, and ideological lines. There is no longer a shared moral discourse and there cannot be when morality is considered merely a series of value judgements, irreducible subjective opinion, mere personal preference in a moral marketplace. Add social division and inequality to the mix and you have the recipe for political and social breakdown.
That’s where we are. And that’s why my ears have picked up listening to Rory Stewart.
He openly used the ‘old fashioned’ word prudence. I like the word. I like the virtues. I don’t consider them old-fashioned, either, I consider them timeless truths that are essential to any healthy and functioning society. As he elaborated, he seemed to link the word more to fiscal probity, as against the tendency of politicians to make financial promises that are popular, but which they will be unable to keep – spending money here and there, cutting taxes, the usual (yes, politicians who are without substance have discovered that giving money away is popular, what genius).
I wrote some words of praise to Rory Stewart and his office replied immediately and encouraged me to spread the word on social media and write to my local Conservative MP. I don’t have a Conservative MP, never have had one and very probably never will. I live in a solidly Labour area. But I decided to write to north west Conservative MPs in the aftermath of Rory Stewart making it to the final list of candidates. He’s very much the outsider, with Boris Johnson very much the favourite. This is one for Conservatives. If you just want to win and celebrate triumph in a still divided, and very probably ever more divided land, then Johnson is your man. I don’t like this politics of the endless yes/no, not least because it is pointless. ‘Where there is nothing,’ Max Weber wrote one hundred years ago, ‘both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ I am interested in recovering and reasserting ‘something’ against that nothing. The recovery of unity and community, and the conditions of both as real rather than ersatz, would do me fine. I hear little along these lines in politics. But Rory Stewart has spoken very eloquently on division and the dangers it holds for a nation.
Why am I interested as a non-Conservative? Because the political terrain is terribly fractured. People pushing for radical change – making demands I agree with in the main – do not, as yet, constitute a viable public and, seemingly locked in a cycle of permanent protest on the outside of power, seemingly never will. It’s not enough to know what you are against, you need to know what you are for and, most importantly, you need to build solidaristic ties and structures and viable material organisations capable of furthering those positive values. Without those, you are merely a pressure group, checking power from the outside, but never being able to embed and institutionalize their own power. In the end, you to take institution building seriously, since it is institutions – and systems – that make for a functioning society that satisfies the legitimate demands of its members. I see tendencies to fracture when it comes to the hard yards of politics. The Liberal Democrats I cannot take seriously. I never could. They remind me of those angels who remained neutral at the time of Lucifer’s rebellion. I’d array them on a wheel with their eyes fixed on a pointless and unreachable banner for all eternity. (That’s what I love about Dante – he doesn’t varnish the truth). The Liberal Democrats spent ages pushing for a system of proportional representation whilst extolling the virtues of coalition. They haven’t been in office since Asquith before the First World War. But they entered coalition with David Cameron. Their MPs, in the main, made it work. Those who objected stayed out or resigned. The members though did nothing but bellyache about how they didn’t vote for anything the coalition government did. Coalitions never do. As to the PR they offered the country, it was the worst form of PR that would have made the least changes. And they had us out campaigning for this. It was rejected, rightly, putting PR off the agenda for years to come. Pretty poor politics all round. As for Labour, the party of brotherly love, they loathe and despise each other with such a passion that Lord alone knows how they would treat the rest of us.
I have a theory: the only hope we have is for conservatives to understand that they need to be socialists in order to reclaim social and communal powers back for the society from which they originate and give conservative values on community, the sacred, and authority substance; and for socialists to understand that they need conservative values of the sacred, community, true law and order, authority, and transcendent truths if they are to make socialism anything more than yet another failed and empty economic system. The problem with socialism is that it tries to effect unity on the basis of the weakest and most ephemeral and transitory of ties – economic self- and sectional interest; the problem with conservatism is that it tries to effect unity on the basis of the private economy as a sphere of egoism and diremption and division.
The predicament of the contemporary age is that the people who are skilled in practices have the wrong principles and the people who have the right principles are utterly cack-handed in practice. The result is that conservatism continues to preside over dislocation and disintegration whilst socialism continues to deliver a top-down anti-social bureaucratism.
In terms of politics, then, I am somewhat short of options. The Green Party, certainly, remain appealing, the only party I have ever been a member of. I have to say what appealed to me about them was the way they styled themselves as the ‘anti-party party.’ I liked the idea that politics could be made accountable to truth. I didn’t like that this truth was identified with scientific knowledge and that, when it came to ethics and an actual politics, the position was depressingly liberal and therefore vacuous.
The office of Rory Stewart got in touch with me and asked me to write to my Conservative MP and spread the word on social media. I don’t have a Conservative MP and I really am determined to put an end to my activities on social media, in an effort to reconstitute my links to real society. I was given a few ideas and suggestions by the office of Rory Stewart and I used these to write to a few MPs.
Here’s what I wrote to Rory Stewart, followed by my letter to Conservative MPs.
Who knows, maybe I’ve helped win a vote or two in the effort to make Rory Stewart not only the new leader of the Conservative Party but the Prime Minister of the country. If so, that’s more influence than I have ever had in politics. It’s an odd world and the truth about it, once we take into consideration the inevitable embellishment, is bound to be odder still. I’ve never voted Conservative, but I would definitely vote for Rory Stewart.
Here’s my comments rewriting what I wrote to him:
I think the ideas and values Rory Stewart expressed in the Conservative leadership campaign are very impressive. Whilst I have never voted Conservative, I am without any party allegiance these days, and so feel able to lend support wherever it is merited. The problem is not just that the mainstream political parties are failing but that the alternatives people are flocking to in protest are even worse. None can constitute the unity we need. Because the ethical and social basis of such well-tempered order is lacking. People are locked into never-ending enmity over their political choices and loyalties, but this is only throwing the top soil at one another. The roots, withering and dying under our feet, remain untouched. More than deciding between the political choices available to us, the problem is that we have lost the conditions of doing politics well; we live in a society that is divided socially and culturally and which has lost a sense of a shared reverence.
Rory Stewart’s words on conflict and division struck a chord with me. I also enjoyed his reference to that ‘old-fashioned’ word prudence. As a virtue ethicist, I would like to see a lot more words like this being used: as qualities for successful living, the virtues are timeless.
I wish Rory Stewart well in his campaign. I have no faith whatsoever in the political alternatives. This country needs a genuine conservatism, one that is capable of restoring unity around more than the ephemeral ties of material interests and resolving issues by a scale of values rather than mere power and might, one that looks to disclose transcendent values rather than impose truths of its own. In my own philosophical work I affirm transcendent standards as against the conventionalism and sophism of modern society, the projection of values that serves only to plunge us into the endless yes/no of politics as a self-cancellation. I’m afraid that between them the libertarians of right and left have fractured the social terrain, meaning that those who speak the language of the virtues – an eminently practical ethics – may well struggle to be understood in the first instance, and initiate practical remedies in the second. We lack the appropriate modes of conduct. But if we are to succeed in recovering unity in a consensual devotion to common ends, we will need a combination of character formation and social formation based on the virtues. We desperately need a political movement centred on the common good - where the words “common” and “good” both mean something substantive - as a corrective against an increasingly deformed libertarian ethic and utilitarian calculus.
All ambitious large-scale projects will succeed only if they are based on practical reasoning, social proximity, trust relations and love of and commitment to home and place. I call it a society of volunteers in which people do the right thing because it is they know it is the right thing, as distinct from a society of conscripts who are compelled to act by legal force. Rory Stewart is the only candidate I have heard who is in tune with such thinking. I sincerely hope that he succeeds. Because unless our politics proceeds along these grounds, I foresee only continuing division and rancour in British society, a dislocation and disintegration provoking myriad populisms, fundamentalisms, and collectivisms in reaction that is evident in the rest of the western world.
I was most impressed by Rory Stewart’s words on conflict and division in the context of the increasing reluctance to compromise on the part of many. This comes to the heart of the problem in the modern polity. That reluctance is not merely a problem of will, it denotes a structured incapacity. Modern society is divided at its core, socially, economically, and culturally, and is going to extremes in the process. That extremism is both cause and consequence of this division, provoking the division and then exploiting it. In my own work, going back to the 1990s, I have been concerned to make the point that the centre ground upon which different sides are able converge consensually no longer exists, it has been hollowed out by various forces, sending the world to extremes. Appeals to the common good and the centre ground are worthy, but will fail in the absence of a social identity in which individual good and social good coincide. I make the same point to my environmentalist friends – we lack a social identity grounded in communities of virtuous practice, communities which serve to unite the short-term individual interest and the long-term collective interest. Hence appeals to ‘save the planet’ fail, not as a result of human greed, stupidity, and indifference as too many say, but for want of effective means and mechanisms enabling individuals to join together in common endeavour. That includes moral and psychological means and mechanisms, the inner motives, as well as institutional and organisational.
Voting and party allegiance is one thing. Most of all I am interested in securing the conditions of doing politics well. These conditions are absent at present, hence the tendency of political ‘debates’ to fracture into an endless and self-negating cycle of assertion and counter-assertion, degenerating into animosity and ill-temper. The problem is that there is no basis for compromise since we lack a shared moral language which enables agreement on ends. When ethics is reduced to mere value judgements – irreducible subjective opinion in place of objective standards binding on each and all equally – politics cannot but fracture into a series of power struggles. We need to recover the conditions of the ethical life in the points of stability and support that bind people and communities together in a common endeavour. That involves more than employing the terms of virtue ethics but insists on investing them with life and content by buttressing them with a range of social activities within communities of practice.
These are questions which concern the conditions of basic civil order, the ties and bonds of healthy communities. These questions are not, ultimately, questions of governmental and legal force, although an effective overarching framework is integral to the health and integrity of these conditions. We need to establish and sustain the appropriate habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, acquired, and then exercised. Government and politics serves to establish the framework that facilitates right conduct and character formation on the part of individuals, but cannot compensate for their absence. We need to put the accent on an internal self-government and self-policing through the cultivation of the right character and appropriate behaviour on the part of individuals in the first place, to avoid resort to the inevitably limited scope of external force and sanction in the second. The external institutional and legal trappings of modern society are failing simply because they are incapable of dealing with the impossible stresses and strains running throughout the fractured social and moral fabric.
Government and law cannot maintain order among a “public” of atomised egoists so absorbed in their own concerns and conflicts that they are incapable of resolving disagreement and establishing unity. All it can do is maintain the civil peace, and this is becoming increasingly difficult. Politics can no longer mediate the conflicts that modern society is generating. Without a common moral language based on a common moral reason, individuals are concerned only to promote their own sectional interests and agendas against others, pressing particular claims upon an increasingly beleaguered and overwhelmed public realm from the outside, exercising no responsibility from the inside. Such a political terrain can never sum to constitute a genuine public life, only generate an increasing disorder until, one day, the whole fabric collapses and will only be held together by external force. When that day comes, then heaven help us all – because this fractious and fissiparous anti-society will fall in on itself, and only the strong, the assertive and the pitiless will survive.
Rebuilding public community and reclaiming the political and ethical commons requires personal moral effort, the character-forming discipline of an everyday life lived through work, family and community, and a commitment to something greater than the self. The issues that are in danger of overwhelming society at the moment, which politics, law, the police and other public services are in the frontline in dealing with, are issues of self-government and self-policing in the first instance - they concern character, conduct and behaviour, and these things need to be taught and reinforced by society's little schools and platoons.
Here’s to the recovery of more ‘old-fashioned’ ethics – and to affirming the timeless truths which knit people and societies together through the character-forming discipline of practice, commitment and community – it used to be called sacrifice and service to others, but has gone out of fashion in times when serving self-interest is considered the height of reason.
My very best wishes to Rory Stewart for the future, because the more people from all political sides we have like this, the better for all of us. In present conditions, the easiest thing to do is divide. We badly need people in politics who can identify commonalities and draw increasing numbers of people together around them.
My letter to various Conservative MPs was rather enthusiastic, and long. I’d like to think I won a vote or two for yet another attempt to recovery One Nation Conservatism in a nation split apart by economic, political, ethical, and cultural libertarianism (a product of a liberalism that finally succeeds in shedding its metaphysical supports to unleash the holy god-like ‘I.’
Dear [recipient name will go here],
Re: Leadership Elections
Although I am not one of your constituents I feel so strongly that Rory Stewart is the man who is able to unite and lead this increasingly divided nation. I am not a Conservative voter, but would certainly vote for a Conservative Party led by Rory Stewart. So I am writing to urge you to consider voting for Rory Stewart to ensure that he is one of the two candidates put forward to Conservative party members. He offers a real alternative, not only to the Conservative Party, but to the country.
Rory is the best candidate to address the Brexit crisis without inflicting enduring division on the country. I like that he talks about ‘old fashioned’ virtues like ‘prudence,’ giving hope that we may yet recover the virtues as a qualities for a flourishing life. These are not old fashioned at all, but timeless qualities that have been out of fashion for too long. Rory can bring them back in such a way as to make them more than empty abstract words – he will back them with social practices within the character forming culture of work, family, and community.
All potential leaders claim to be able to unite the country. I believe Rory understands the necessary springs of action, character and modes of conduct that are required to constitute such unity as something much more than an abstract top-down surrogate ‘community.’ He’s a true conservative, then, but one who is capable of connecting with all those voters who are currently crying out for a unity and a society that is at peace with itself. He knows that such peace comes with justice, personal effort, responsibility. In my view, Rory Stewart will not only connect with voters who would not otherwise support the Conservative party, I believe he will back his inspiring words with the actions that will unite the country and keep those voters in the long run.
I work in the local community and I can tell you that people are not only losing faith in politics and the public realm, they are increasingly holding politicians in contempt. Whilst much of this is unfair to the extent that it ignores the difficulties that politicians face in reconciling often divergent demands, there is certainly a disconnection in evidence which certain ‘populist’ figures are prepared to exploit. That can never end well. Rory Stewart is someone who can restore the faith of the public. Many people I know have responded to his words. I live in a solidly Labour part of the country, so I know that my words may not carry too much weight in Conservative circles. But I can state categorically that Rory Stewart is striking a chord with people from all backgrounds. He can reach people that others cannot, he can unite the country in a way that others cannot, and he can unite the country around actions rather than empty slogans. His honesty in addressing the challenges we face, his refusal to indulge in wishful thinking and promise false solutions, his encouragement to each and all to put a shift in themselves in turning things around make him the ideal candidate to heal the divisions threatening to tear this country apart. He builds from the base, from where all enduring solutions come.
Rory Stewart is an inspiring figure who has captured the public imagination. That he is capable of attracting support from across the political spectrum is no mean achievement at a time when mainstream politics seems in the process of implosion, with who knows what consequences. His ideas are both inspiring and eminently practical, a practical idealism grounded in realism. Here is a man who can touch, inspire and motivate the common moral reason of all and put the accent on solving problems. All interested in addressing the problems can ‘do business’ with Rory Stewart. I fear nothing but the further entrenchment and extension of divisions when I look at politics as currently constituted in the country. Divisions now run so deep that people are no longer inclined to accept election results. Politics can no longer perform its mediating function. Rory Stewart doesn’t just do politics well, most importantly, he is concerned to secure the conditions for doing politics well. The man will cut through the endless ‘yes/no’ of ideological politics to get things done. There’s nothing more likely to inspire and unite the country than that.
Rory Stewart promises a practical way of transcending the divisions that are currently in danger of becoming so entrenched as to make any kind of political compromise impossible. They say elections are won from the centre ground. The problem is that the centre ground is ceasing to exist in any meaningful, practical, sense. The world is being sent to extremes. Rory Stewart knows this and has what it takes to reconstitute that common ground and to recreate the shared discourse that enables different people to compromise for the common good. Lose that, and we end in a sophist world of meaningless power struggles, where justice is merely the interests of the strongest. That is not the way for any political leader or party to go. Plato referred to it in terms of pleonexia. It’s a self-absorbing greed that eats the public realm before eating itself. It’s the very antithesis of true love and true politics.
At the moment, increasing numbers are demanding radical change. Change is coming. You will either get it from an extreme left or an extreme right lost in wishful thinking and fantasy, or from a standpoint which is truly radical in getting to the root of the matter. I would strongly urge you to consider Rory Stewart as a leader who can be truly conservative and radical, inspiring effort to be a unifying rather than a dividing force. Not only would Rory lead with appropriate action from above, most of all, he would recover the tradition of practical reasoning and communities of practice, thus facilitating a self-leadership on the part of citizens below. At a time of ‘global’ problems there is a need for ‘global’ solutions. But to succeed, ambitious projects of political and social action need to be grounded in small scale practical reasoning, social proximity, communities of virtuous practice, and love of home and place. I believe Rory Stewart is the man who has the knowledge, the experience, and the commitment to reconfigure politics in such a way, uniting each and all in the process.
In a nutshell, I’d simply say that Rory Stewart is the leader this country needs to overcome its divisions. I think this is an important consideration, insofar as we need to think of reconstituting the health of the political and ethical commons, that is, something more than the victory of our side against all other sides. There has to be a greater purpose to winning other than merely winning. Rory has that purpose. Please consider voting for him. He is the leader this country needs and he is more than capable of fulfilling that role.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Critchley