Image courtesy of The Hill
The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
Aristotle argues in Nicomachean Ethics that politics is “the highest ruling science” because it employs all of the other sciences to order society and individual action towards the highest good for peoples and cities. While achieving individual happiness is “satisfactory,” Aristotle writes that “it is finer and more divine to acquire and preserve it for” whole societies. In other words, the goal of politics is to use laws to construct a society that achieves maximum possible human flourishing.
From a secular perspective, this temporal human flourishing is the greatest possible good. The aim of human existence is to achieve as much personal happiness as possible right now; there is no eternal realm where injustice will be set right and truth will prevail. Politics, then, becomes of supreme importance to modern secularism. It is its chief source of meaning. If society can be improved (or even perfected), this can only be done through politics.
I believe this view is destructive to both society and individuals. William F. Buckley, the father of much of modern conservatism, encapsulated my argument in a phrase he drew from political philosopher Eric Voegelin: “Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton.” Voegelin was responding to what he saw as a modern political version of Gnosticism — an ancient Christian heresy which, among other things, claimed that the present earth could be made into heaven through human efforts. To “immanentize” means to bring into existence in this moment, and “the eschaton” refers to a future paradisal state of the universe. Buckley’s phrase was a rallying cry against progressive efforts to use government to establish a utopian society on earth. But the temptation to treat politics as the highest good is not exclusive to the left and is extremely dangerous for numerous reasons.
First, if achieving happiness in this life is of paramount importance, and politics serves as the mechanism to accomplish that, then there are no limits to the exercise of political power. If someone believes they have a superior conception of the good for themselves and society at large, they are entirely justified in advancing it through whatever means necessary and as quickly as possible. Such a view encourages political violence and totalitarianism. It was the underlying ideology of Soviet tyranny, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood on a personal level after his time in the gulags. The Soviets believed in a dialectic whereby they could perfect society by eliminating (or “re-educating”) obstacles to progress — evil people, according to their worldview. But, as Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, it is not so simple: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” This deeply religious understanding of the state of humanity is key to seeing why utopian projects fall into despotism.
Second, a life centered around politics is unhealthy. It necessitates that one must always be focused on the highest levels of government and the behavior of others, rather than the spheres closest to oneself. These spheres — family, church, civil society, community — are the ones that bring the most meaning to our lives, because they offer happiness that transcends immediate material circumstances. Obsession with politics, on the other hand, distorts our values and distracts our focus.
Religion is the answer to all of these dilemmas. It offers eternal hope, lifting our eyes to things above, and purpose to guide life in the material world, recognizing that it is not all there is. We have a greater end than mere temporal happiness; religion teaches us that individual morality and the pursuit of truth, among other things, are “intrinsically valuable…as an aspect of the well-being and fulfillment of human beings,” as Robert P. George writes in Conscience and Its Enemies. There is a coming eschaton, but not one mankind must immanentize through its own political efforts.
The American system recognizes this truth as a fundamental principle. It protects the classical liberal tradition of endless debate, the right to be wrong, and individual freedom to discover, accept, and live by truth and virtue. The political decisions its citizens make are not existential, but merely conclusions about how to better order society in our temporal home. Catholic cleric Fr. Richard John Neuhaus summarizes the writing of Fr. John Courtney Murray about the beauty of the American system in this regard in his book American Babylon: “Murray envisioned a democracy in which citizens were ‘locked in civil argument’ about how we ought to order our life together. He believed the genius of the American experiment, what he called the American Proposition, is that it provides the procedures and cultivates habits by which the argument could continue as long as the experiment was sustained. The American Provision is provisional, not eschatological. The final end, the eschatological end, of history is the promised Kingdom of God. Far short of the kingdom as we are, that final end is, in present time, anticipated in the life of the Church.”
I encourage everyone to follow Neuhaus’s and Murray’s teaching and get involved in a local religious community, and to spend more time and energy there than on any political commitments. After all, this is the path to a healthy life and a healthy politics.
Copyright © 2024 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.