Politics (16) - Balancing Faith and Scepticism - (16) November 2013 - Literature Review of My Work on Politics and Freedom

Image credit. The painting has an amateurish touch to it, as far as I am concerned. Nevertheless it does capture the mood of a beach in March, tickling my longing for a walk on the northern shore of Ameland. Leaning forward against the cold March wind or being driven by it for miles on end, eventually stopping off at one of the beach restaurants.

Continued from here.

It is true, politics is in many important ways a tug-of-war between faith and scepticism. Taken to its extreme, faith in politics is a tunnel vision imposed on an entire society. Scepticism in politics is the rebellion of the critical mind against the tunnel visions of faith. Every political actor will share in both to some extent. Faith is the engine of political activism, and it takes a good deal of faith to lend minimal coherence to a political vision. Faith as energiser cannot be separated from faith as teller of a coherent and appealing story. The social universe cannot be experienced by a human being - it is too complicated to be amenable to immediate empathy. We must insert narratives to make that alien realm perceivable in terms of our customary experiences. That is the job of faith. When the story runs too smoothly it is a sign that something is wrong with it. Scepticism is on the outlook for stories that are too smooth. To understand the common social world we must tell us stories about it. Challenging theses stories is one of the most important techniques of sharing them, of making us relate to one another. Appeals to faith and scepticism are a significant part of the language that we use in political discourse to signal to one another how we see "social reality".

P025 Politics of Faith and Scepticism (1/2) from 11/10/2013

Oakeshott discusses two contrasting political styles: 

• the politics of faith which in inspired by the conviction that society as a whole must and can be subjected to the implementation of a uniform set of goals, as exemplified in actual history, say, by totalitarian communism, and

• the politics of scepticism which is inspired by distrust in uncontested assertion of power or preponderance of ideas or policies in a society.

Oakeshott's claim is that modern liberalism instantiates the politics of scepticism with its roots in Augustinian Christianity, which he interprets as an intellectual bulwark against human hubris in that according to this doctrine the redemption of sinful man can never be of his own making but must be an act of grace extended to him by God.

By contrast, the politics of faith is rooted in Pelagius Gnostic challenge to Augustinian humility. According to Pelagianism, by his own self-concious efforts at leading the right life, man is able to effect his redemption - a sacrilegious ambition from the Augustinian point of view.

In politics, argues Oakeshott, these approaches translate into Hayek's fatal conceit (the politics of faith) and the liberal attitude (the politics of scepticism) which is mistrustful of grand schemes intent on regulating and shaping society both in minute detail and in a large sweep.

Politics cannot achieve what is the preserve of religion. In this sense, both areas are strictly separate, and attempts at abolishing the distinction are ill-fated. The righteous thing for man to do is to live within the laws of nature ordained by divine will; trying to change the nature of things is sinful and will be punished by failure.

I see two problems with this view: for one, it leaves out of consideration the thoroughly illiberal use, and perhaps even original intent, of the Augustinian Christian doctrine of original sin. The proper answer to untenable hubris in politics is not given by renouncing one's ambition to alter the world by political means.

The second problem that I have is that associating Pelegarianism with the politics of faith ("totalitarianism") seems to involve a dramatic case of overkill. It seems to me, history has shown that man is capable of creating the social world desired by him to a far larger extent than divined in earlier centuries. And this has been an impressive demonstration that not every outcome of large scale "social engineering" is necessarily massively disadvantageous to the community or even totalitarian in nature. Conversely,  the demand that meekness be a central characteristic of the Christian soul has been misused in a fashion by those who applied religion as a tool of subjugation and furtherance of their own domination that may well be called totalitarian .

In fact, denying people access to the Pelegarian vista, keeping them meek and passive, may be any bit as oppressive as a regime of totalitarian zealots that seek domination by enlisting the people to act according to their commands and objectives.

I venture to suggest that the Augustinian horror at a Pelegarian world is the horror of losing control over the human soul. The moment people are given the credible perspective of being able to rid themselves of a nightmarish afterlife, you are starting a ferocious competition for accomplishing the job of redemption. You empower people to be their own saviour. Inevitably, they begin to consider themselves very important. True, the prospect of self-redemption creates a risk of hubris. And there are more than enough episodes of the politics of faith going awfully over the top (French and Russian revolution). However, the margin between meekness and hubris is very wide, allowing much to be accomplished that is far better than both extremes.

It is interesting that the intellectual tradition of freedom extends one of its roots deep into Christian impassiveness. Is their a connection with the idea of laissez faire?

It is also interesting that the idea of rebuilding and renovating the existing social system by human design, even in part, has become an anathema that defines modern liberalism much like human self-redemption was anathema to Augustinian Christianity.

But where does this leave the liberalism that sought to empower the citizenry so it would be able to build a society that cannot be described other than as being the result of conscious construction? Not even the first great achievement of liberalism, the separation of politics and religion, was designed to deny citizens the possibility to build their own society - it was  rather thought, and rightly so, a peacekeeping precondition that was to make animated political participation by "the masses" a more sensible proposition.

Getting stuck with the Augustinian strictures on the creativity of the human political animal - is that the heart of regressive liberalism?

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P026 Politics of Faith and Scepticism (2/2) from 11/10/2013

It is awkward that Oakeshott should characterise the dogmatic liberal theory of natural rights originated by John Locke as an aberration from the politics of scepticism, when earlier on he had argued that this style of politics is anchored in the equally dogmatic Augustinian theology of original sin with its praise for human meekness and impassiveness. In other words: the Augustinian tradition, in my view, gains its peculiar consistency by being thoroughly dogmatic about a truncated position of man in the realm of vita activa. Why would one expect a political style derived from that tradition not to gain its peculiar consistency by being thoroughly dogmatic? After all, it faces the same basic challenge to ensure that people's ability to act of their own accord remains narrowly limited. To that purpose you need to produce arguments strong enough to disarm the inquisitive, the congregating, the cooperative political animal that seeks to change the world, rather than sitting in an impassive position of compliance vis-à-vis a given order.

Liberalism has served as midwife to a world wherein freedom has been able to propagate to a degree where people can no longer be held back by a politics of scepticism that denies them political self-realisation while being protected against the excesses of a politics of faith. In the liberal world in which we live, scepticism survives as a check on faith, it survives as a system of powerful challenges to any tendency that places inordinate power in certain doctrines and groups intending to portray and rule society in terms of a singular vision.

Freedom has broken through the limits of a narrow politics of scepticism. As a result liberalism is facing a dilemma: either it remains a discernible force at the cost of becoming the marginalised guardian of a narrow politics of scepticism, or else, it may hope for influence and visibility but only at the cost of merging into more active political philosophies, such as social democracy.

It would appear to me that a modern concern for liberty should not be directed at identifying a consistent body of political theory keeping the key that promises to unlock the ultimate truths of freedom but at reconnoitring the elements of freedom submerged in a world that takes her for granted. We should keep asking ourselves without prepossession what freedom means today? More than manifest violations of freedom, I dare say, it is a lack of awareness of the meaning of freedom that poses the biggest danger to her.

In the Augustinian tradition, from the very outset, scepticism had been so narrow as to coincide with faith. Its purpose was to keep people from doing "their own thing". Scepticism as faith remains with us in certain forms of dogmatic liberalism.

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Continued here.