Prelude to Politics (17) -- Institutionalised Scepticism -- An Emerging Thread of Arguments

Image credit. Not quite as easterly "Marchy" as the above vista, still it was a March day today, in April. Cold, blustery, occasionally sunny, a waning presence of winter, still only a few flowers, bushes, and trees courageous enough to wear colours.

Continued from here.

Politics (7) - Politics (18):

(16):

We cannot be sure of what we try to convince us of in the face of society's dramas. We can only grasp the scenes, the play, by faith and doubt. We tell each other tall stories that we do not believe when we are spoken to and listen to them, and ardently believe in when it is our turn to speak. 

 Oakeshottian terminology:

• 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.

More theses:

• a strong tendency in social reasoning to think in dichotomies and extremes; reality is more greyish, middle-of-the-roadish

why?

• politics in a free society makes us more conciliatory and compromising in reality

• political competition creates countless fronts on which the energies of power are diffused

• 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 (in Oakeshottian terms)

• when the story runs too smoothly it is a sign that something is wrong with it

• scepticism (on Oakeshottian terms) is on the outlook for stories that are too smooth

• 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"

• the political infrastructure of a free society is organised scepticism

• 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

However,

• the proper answer to untenable hubris in politics does not consist in renouncing one's ambition to alter the world by political means

• man is capable of creating the social world desired by him to a far larger extent than divined in earlier centuries

• not every outcome of large scale "social engineering" is necessarily massively disadvantageous to the community

 

• 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

• a modern concern for liberty should not be directed at identifying a consistent body of political theory that is supposed to be keeping the key that promises to unlock the ultimate truths of freedom; instead it should be concerned with reconnoitring the elements of freedom that tend to get 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.

Continued here.