Right Reason

Lent and the Monkish Virtues

 

The life of a monk ought at all times to be Lenten in its observances but because few have the strength of this, we urge that in LEnt they should maintain a life of complete purity to make up, during these holy days, for all the careless practices throughout the rest of the year.- St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict

 

Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the Lenten season for Western Christians. For those who are unaware of the nature of the liturgical season, the discipline of Lent is characterized by penance, abstinence and alms-giving. In general, Lent is reorientation one’s life towards God in preparation for Easter. 

In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume rails against the monkish virtues behind the fasting tradition of the Lenten today. He characterizes them as worse than useless, but genuine vices that don’t encourage what is good and proper in human life: 

Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? (EPN: IX.9) 

On the issue of the monkish virtues, Hume swings and misses. His treatment completely whiffs the issue. He entirely misses the point and, in missing the point, helps to set up two hundred years of similarly missing the point, especially by philosophers of the analytic tradition. Without the monkish virtues, which focus on what we center our attention around, ethics becomes merely about the rules of social interaction. That grand tradition of missing the significance of the monkish virtues culminates in Peter Singer’s imbecile claim that “sex raises no unique moral issues at all.” 

The monkish virtues have nothing to do with being a valuable member or society or in enjoying a glass of wine. The monkish virtues are about orientating our lives in their proper directions. When a Catholic abstains from a hamburger on Ash Wednesday, he isn’t doing so out of some sorry sense of self-loathing or out of a notion that hamburgers are bad on certain days of the year. If he were to reach for one in a buffet line and then remembers, “It’s Ash Wednesday!”, he is doing neither. What he is remembering is that, though hamburgers (when properly prepared at least) are certainly something that are good, that they are not the good that he should orientate his life around. 

 

 Human life is characterized by fragility. Memento homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. Time will break everything around us, be it our laptops or pets, and eventually it will break our mortal coil. To orientate our lives around fragile things is to tie ourselves to ashes and dust. Although, as part of this impermanent world, we need to live our lives within it, we ought not base our lives around something as impermanent as food and drink, other people or our pets. We can bring out the full Platonic beast and question the reality of this fragile world, but that’s not a direction I’m all that interested in traveling down.  

Hume might retort that death and fragility doesn’t matter. That it’s an event that should have no impact on our lives and that we should be therefore not care abut it. C.S. Lewis responded wonderfully to such a mindset in “A Grief Observed”:

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death.And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Death does matters. We need to therefore be mindful to what we cleave to. The monkish virtues help us to remember that our habits bind us to fragile. As Pope Clement exhorts the Corinthians in his letter to them: “Let us keep our eyes firmly fixed on the Father and Creator of the whole universe, and hold fast to his splendid and transcendent gifts of peace and all his blessing.” The monkish virtues help us to break away from that which is fragile in the world and to look towards that which is ever-lasting. 

Liberalism Need Not Be Based In Consent

We may become the makers of our fate once we have ceased to be its prophets.

-Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

 

In “Classical Liberalism: Contemporary Voices,” Patrick J Deenan stumbles upon one of my political pet peeves: The insistence that liberalism need be rooted in consent. He argues:

The affinity between liberalism and democracy is found most fundamentally in liberalism’s insistence upon consent as the only basis for legitimate power and authority. While in theory liberalism can accept any form of government, including a constitutional monarchy, from the very beginning, the architects of classical liberal regimes decided that periodic consent was the best means of ensuring ongoing legitimation. While John Locke speaks of the theoretical possibility of “tacit consent” as an ongoing basis on which to ground claims of legitimacy, as a practical matter, it is difficult for people simply to pull up stakes or foment a revolution when they decide that their tacit consent no longer suffices. Elections solve a practical problem, and liberalism became wed to democracy.

 

Especially when Mr. Deenan is advertising the rather lengthy and rambling essay to be a seminar about liberalism, to ignore the streams of liberal thought that have no relation to the idea that legitimate government is based on consent. The mistake is a compounded conclusion of a similar mistake about identifying the authors from whom the liberal tradition flows. Most important is whom he fails to consider.  

In his earlier article, “Liberalism Sources and Themes,” Mr. Deenan had boxed himself into that erroneous conclusion by arguing that that Locke and Paine are the fonts of classical liberalism. But what of David Hume and Adam Smith? David Hume had provided a timeless criticism of theories of government based on consent in “On the Original Contract.” The Scotsman even went so far as to write: “When we assert,that all lawful government arises from the consent of the people, we certainly do them a great deal more honour than they deserve, or even expect and desire from us.” 

Hume is certainly one of the font heads of liberal thought, so where does he fit in Mr. Deenan’s narrative. Short answer, he doesn’t and Mr. Deenan’s narrative therefore doesn’t capture the breadth of liberal thought.

 

The idea that any government, legitimate or not, is based on the consent of the governed is a laughably absurd idea and deserves to be shamed as such. As Hume writes in “On the Original Contract”:

The face of the earth is continually changing, by the encrease of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there any thing discoverable in all these events, but force and violence. Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of? 

Liberalism deserves to be taken seriously. By couching it in social-contract talk, we, almost by definition, fail to take it seriously. The social contract is an intellectual fraud. It fails to take into account that governments have a focal nature to them which, when legitimate, can properly demand the obedience of those in its jurisdiction. It doesn’t ask, it forces. 

Liberalism seeks to minimize that superior-inferior relationship that governments introduce into society, and to seriously go about that practice liberals cannot think that people have agreed to take the inferior role. Instead, they are there largely as a consequence of historical accident. Historical accident and fortunate violence, not consent, are what have formed the political institutions today. Any stream of political thought that contends otherwise doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously for the same reason that any biologist who believes that Genesis is the factual creation story doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously: Neither are true, neither conform to their given objects.     

Of Consent and Civilization: My Misgivings On James Buchanan

 

 

 

I’ve never been that much of a fan of James Buchanan nor have I shared the enthusiasm for public-choice theory among those who I would otherwise be in sympathy with on matters of politics. An article published years ago in The Independent Review by Geoffrey Brennan and Michael) Munger, titled “The Soul of James Buchanan” (I can't get the link to The Independent Review piece to work, captures many of the areas where I further disagree with Buchanan. 

 Whereas Buchanan is a social-contract theorist who is optimistic about the ability of human reason to craft rules to solve the problems generated by social existence, I utterly reject social-contract theory, and believe that whatever rules humanity has are necessarily generated by history. We both may be skeptics, but we are at odds about what we are skeptical about. Whereas, Buchanan is skeptical about the ability of history to generate rules well suited to a liberal society, I’m a skeptic about reason’s ability to substantially improve upon the rules that history has bestowed to us. 

 

I find it hard to get behind James Buchanan’s research program because I simply do not find any worth in social-contract theory. I think social-contract theory is incredibly dangerous to sound thought about the nature of society. No state is the product of a social contract, and social-contract theory can blind us to understanding what the real nature of each state is. Each state is the product of its history — which involve a myriad of experiences, from conquest to commerce to rules determining inheritance— and so our understanding of what each state is should take into consideration that they are the products of historical evolution rather than an agreement hashed out among its members. 

Rather than guiding our understanding of each state as a creature embedded in its own particular history, social-contract theory tempts us to replace an understanding with what we think the state should be. Buchanan fully embraces that danger when he writes, with Gordon Tullock, in the introduction of The Calculus of Consent that “We are not directly interested in what the State or a State actually is, but propose to define quite specifically… what we think a State ought to be” (Liberty Fund: 1999, 3). However, if we do not understand what the nature of the state actually is, then how can we delude ourselves into thinking we can improve upon it?

 

As one would figure from the title The Calculus of Consent, consent plays a massive role in Buchanan’s research program. As Brennan and Munger write: “His notion of consent was surprisingly nearly literal. He really meant consent, unanimous consent, giving each person a veto over any alterations to the status quo“ (p. 5). Yet, if politics has a point — a final cause, so to speak — it isn’t to generate consensus, it’s to generate acquiescence. 

People in politics aren’t trying to generate agreement so much as silence. A successful policy is one that people don’t protest. The successful states that we see around us aren’t the result of consent, but a result of people being willing to put up with what the state is doing. For instance, it would be absurd to say that contemporary Republicans have consented to the Affordable Care Act. They certainly haven’t; nevertheless, aren’t going up in arms about it, and have instead acquiesced to fighting it through politics. The rules of the game that dictate how Democrats and Republicans fight over the Affordable Care Act haven’t been decided in a social contract, but instead are part of the inherited institutions that all Americans live their lives surrounded by.

Republican voters may also have been very unhappy when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012; however, they are willing to acquiesce to his presidency, and to look forward, they hope, to having their own president in office in 2016. That acquiescence is what unsuccessful states lack. Egypt’s state failed in 2011 when its citizens were no longer willing to acquiesce to Hosni Mubarak’s rule. Consent just has no place in that picture, and so there’s no good reason to talk about it. Instead, we should be talking about acquiesence, and the reasons why people get along in society without actual consent, which they certainly manage to do, as American politics, however partisan it may be, gives witness to. Social-contract theory simply misses the train on that very important point. 

 

Moreover, Buchanan rejected the very process of descent with modification that makes the evolution of rules in society possible. As Brennan and Munger write: “He believed that people ought to craft for themselves the rules of the socio-eco-politico game by which they were to interact” (p. 7). Without the inheritance of rules, there cannot be the evolution of rules. The evolution of any entity is the consequence of the different variations it has accumulated across generations. If any entity is to evolve, then it must descend with modification, and that descent must involve some form of heredity. 

If rules are created by each generation anew for the designs of that generation, then they don’t evolve; rather, they are created anew each generation. Brennan and Munger write about how Buchanan rejected that traditions had any legitimacy: “He rejected completely the Burkean conservatism that required deference to tradition and symbols of merit that were static and inherited” (p. 7). Without a modicum of deference to inherited rules, then human society cannot function. Inherited rules provide the focal points by which societies cohere. To deny their legitimacy is to deny the very fabric of society. 

 

The liberal society cannot be divorced from its history. Edmund Burke appreciated that fact in Reflections on the Revolution in France, yet Brennan and Munger position Burke as a conservative opposite of Buchanan's classical liberalism, even though many classical liberals, such as Lord Acton, were admirers of Burke. Though the two may want to divorce the virtue of hope from the virtue of faith in “The Soul of James Buchanan?”, they are surprisingly ignorant of the fact that the virtue of hope springs from the virtue of faith. The theological virtues are united. We can have hope because of our faith. Without faith, there is no foundation for hope. To go on hoping without a sound foundation of faith isn’t a virtue, but a vice.

The reason why we can have hope for a liberal civilization is that we have faith that the civilization’s rules, which have evolved in historical processes that cannot be flattened out to human craftsmanship, shall be able to curb the ambitions of tyrants, and to guide people in peaceful coexistence. David Hume got to the faith we should have in liberal institutions when he wrote in his essay, “That politics may be reduced to a science”: “Is our constitution so excellent? Then a change of ministry can be no such dreadful event; since it is essential to such a constitution, in every ministry, both to preserve itself from violation, and to prevent all enormities in the administration.”  

David Hume on the Degenerating Effects of Public Debt

From David Hume’s essay “Of Civil Liberty”:

The source of degeneracy, which may be remarked in free governments, consists in the practice of contracting debt, and mortgaging the public revenues, by which taxes may, in time, become altogether intolerable, and all the property of the state be brought into the hands of the public. This practice is of modern date. The ATHENIANS, though governed by a republic, paid near two hundred per Cent. for those sums of money, which any emergence made it necessary for them to borrow; as we learn from XENOPHON. Among the moderns the DUTCH first introduced the practice of borrowing great sums at low interest, and have well nigh ruined themselves by it.  Absolute princes have also contracted debt; but as an absolute prince may make a bankruptcy when he pleases, his people can never be oppressed by his debts. In popular governments, the people, and chiefly those who have the highest offices, being commonly to the public creditors, it is difficult for the state to make use of this remedy, which, however it may sometimes be necessary, is always cruel and barbarous. This, therefore, seems to be an inconvenience, which nearly threatens all free governments; especially our own, at the present juncture of affairs. And what a strong motive is this, to encrease our frugality of public money; lest, for want of it, we reduced, by the multiplicity of taxes, or what is worse, by our public impotence and inability for defense, to curse our very liberty, and wish ourselves in the same state of servitude with all nations that surround us?

 

The recent experiences that Italy has with the European Central Bank pressuring them to reform is demonstrative to the threat against popular government which debt poses. When credit becomes increasingly difficult to get, government will happen neither by laws nor by popular assent; instead, government will happen by the desires of bond holders. In 2011, when the fiscal situation in Italy was looking dire to the functioning of the nation, Italy’s president appointed Mario Monti, who had served as a European Commissioner within the European Union, as a senator for life, and then within a week invited the unelected senator to create a new government as a response to that situation. Prime Minister Monti then proceeded to create a cabinet largely filled with unelected technocrats in order to enact fiscal reforms to regain the confidence of bond holders that Italy would be able to pay its debt in the years to come. 

However justified Monti’s government may be, it certainly could not be upheld as a paragon for popular government. The measures it passed were desired not by the Italian people, but by the bond holders who made the Italian government’s operation possible. That the accumulation of debt threatens the future stability of popular democracy is a lesson which those on the left should be keen on emphasizing. Eventually, there may come a day when the public agenda is set not by representatives, but by those who have money to lend. 

 

Alas, debt is a slow poison, and one that is most dangerous because we don’t know the future state of the world. Having debt is fine until there comes a day when one’s plan for paying it off is suddenly rent apart by the cruel forces of history.