The theory
is best understood by way of contrast with other theories, including other
theories discussed by Simon. What Simon
calls the “coach-driver theory” holds that government officials are analogous
to the driver of a coach who simply follows the directives of the passengers in
the coach. The “divine right theory”
proposed by some 16th century thinkers holds that governmental
authority is imparted to rulers directly from God.
The transmission
theory can be thought of as a kind of middle ground position between these two
theories. The coach-driver theory
essentially takes political authority to begin and end in the community, with
governmental officials functioning as mere instruments of the community’s will
rather than having any true authority over it.
The divine right theory denies that the community plays any role at all where
political authority is concerned, locating such authority only in the ruler and
in God, who conveys it to the ruler. The
transmission theory attributes a greater role to the community than the divine
right theory does, but a smaller role than the coach-driver theory does. It holds, contra the divine right theory,
that political authority really does reside in the community, and that it is
only through the community that rulers get this authority from God. But it holds, contra the coach-driver theory,
that such authority does not originate in the community and does not remain
there, insofar as it comes from God and is transferred to governmental
officials.
Another
illuminating contrast is with the way popes receive their authority. It comes directly from God, rather than
through the community. Hence, papal
authority is more like the authority the divine right theory attributes to
kings, rather than the authority governmental officials have on the
transmission theory. To be sure, popes
are chosen by human beings, namely the cardinal electors. But the transmission theory distinguishes the
cases by holding that while the cardinals designate
the man to whom papal authority will be transmitted, they do not themselves transmit that authority. Again,
God does that.
This
distinction suggests yet another theory of secular political authority, known
as the “designation theory.” This holds
that while the community designates
the officials to whom political authority will be transmitted, it is God rather
than the community who transmits it. It’s
like the divine right theory but allows some role to at least part of the
community (again, to designate the recipient of authority, but still not to
transmit authority). The transmission
theory takes even the designation theory to attribute too much to governmental authorities
and too little to the community. The
designation theory essentially makes secular political authority analogous to
papal authority.
It seems to
me that another useful way to understand the transmission theory and its
relations to other theories is by analogy with the different metaphysical theories
of causality that were discussed by Scholastic writers. (This analogy is mine rather than Simon’s.)
The view
defended by St. Thomas Aquinas is known as concurrentism. It holds that created things are “secondary
causes.” This means, on the one hand,
that they have genuine causal power (that’s the “causes” part); but on the
other hand, it also holds that they have their power only in a borrowed way
insofar as they cannot act at all apart from the divine first cause (that’s the
“secondary” part). Think of the stock
example of the stick being used to push a stone. The stick really does push the stone, but
only insofar as some person uses the stick to push it. The stick could not act without the person “concurring”
with its operation. In the same way,
natural objects have real causal power – the sun really does melt ice, a bird
really does built a nest, and so on – but only because God concurs with their
operations by constantly imparting causal power to them.
This is a
middle ground position between occasionalism
and what commentators sometimes call mere
conservationism. According to
occasionalism, there are no true secondary causes in the natural world. God is the only true cause. Hence, it isn’t really the sun that melts
ice. It is God who melts it, on the
occasion when the sun is present. It isn’t
really the bird that brings the nest into being. It is God who does so, on the occasion when
the bird is present. And so on. Mere conservationism, by contrast, holds that
while God conserves natural causes in existence, they are entirely capable of
acting on their own without his concurrence.
It is the sun alone that melts the ice, the bird alone that builds the
nest, and so on, with no need for God continually to impart causal power to
them once they are created.
I would
suggest that on the transmission theory of authority, the community is a kind
of “secondary cause.” It plays a genuine
causal role in imparting power to governing authorities, even if it does so
only as the instrument of the divine first cause. The divine right theory and designation
theory, by contrast, are analogous to occasionalism in that they attribute no
causal role at all to the community in transmitting power to governing authorities. Only God transmits it (though the designation
theory allows that the community plays another, non-transmitting role). Meanwhile, the coach-driver theory is
analogous to mere conservationism insofar as it makes the community all by
itself the source of authority, rather than transmitting it from God.
I would
suggest that these distinctions and analogies also illuminate the way the
Scholastic natural law tradition differs from liberalism. Liberal social contract theories are
essentially variations on the coach-driver theory. Political authority originates entirely from
the people rather than from God. This is
true even in Locke’s version of the social contract, despite its theological
component. That there is a law of nature
in the state of nature is, for Locke, due to God. But there is no governmental authority in
that state of nature. Government is not a
natural institution, and its power is thus not the kind that derives from the
author of nature. Rather, it is a
product of human artifice, and its power derives from the human artificers who
make it. Moreover, while the “inconveniencies”
of the state of nature make it prudent for us to leave it and set up
governments, there is no strict obligation under natural law for us to do
so. Whatever authority governments have,
then, is not transmitted to them by God through the people, but from the people
alone. Indeed, strictly speaking the
people retain this power, which is why, for Locke, when the people decide to
overthrow an oppressive government, it is the government rather than the people
who are “rebelling.” The government is
like an insubordinate employee who has to be fired – or, to borrow Simon’s
analogy, like a coach driver who suddenly takes the passengers somewhere other
than where they paid him to go.
As Simon
notes, a problem with the coach-driver theory is that, consistently pursued, it
would entail anarchy. A passenger in a
coach has no obligation to go where the coach driver wants to drive him, even
if the other passengers want to go there.
The dissident passenger has every right to get out of the coach rather
than submit to the will of the driver or the majority of passengers. Similarly, Simon points out, the coach-driver
theory has no plausible way of explaining why members of the community who
disagree with the majority should submit to that majority or to the government
personnel who act on the majority’s behalf.
Social
contract theories have a similar problem.
They have no plausible way of explaining why people who object to the
terms of the hypothetical liberal social contract (Lockean, Rawlsian, or
whatever) should be expected to abide by it – or indeed, why a merely
hypothetical contract should be binding on anyone in the first place.
My analogy
with mere conservationism also suggests that it is no accident that liberal
societies have, Locke’s theism notwithstanding, tended to become increasingly
secularist over time. One of the
objections to mere conservationism is that, given its assumptions, it seems
inevitably to collapse into deism or even atheism. If natural objects can act or operate without
God, then (given the Scholastic dictum that action
follows being), it is hard to see why they could not also exist without him. Similarly, if political authority in no way
derives from God, it is not surprising that people should increasingly see theology
as something that has no proper role in politics.
Finally, I
would suggest that all of this also illuminates what it is, or can be, to be postliberal. Many assume that postliberalism is bound to
be authoritarian or despotic. As I have
argued elsewhere, that is simply not the case. And the distinctions drawn here make clear
why. To be sure, one could reject
liberalism in favor of a divine right theory or a designation theory of
political authority, and it is easy to see why such theories might lend
themselves to authoritarianism. But one
could instead reject liberalism in favor of the transmission theory of
authority. And while that theory is
compatible with monarchy, it is also compatible with aristocracy, democracy, or
some mixed constitution.
Indeed, many liberals claim to see in Bellarmine and Suárez precursors to their own position. They are quite wrong if they suppose there is anything in these Scholastics that is strictly liberal. But they are right to hold that ideals such as the rule of law, constitutional limits on governmental power, and grounds for a polity with a strong democratic component are to be found in the Scholastic tradition. What this shows is not that the Scholastics were proto-liberals, but rather that not all non-liberals fit the despotic caricature liberals like to paint of them.
I assumed Pope Leo XIII in Diuturnum Illud rejected St. Bellarmine's theory when he wrote: "It is of importance, however, to remark in this place that those who may be placed over the State may in certain cases be chosen by the will and decision of the multitude, without opposition to or impugning of the Catholic doctrine. And by this choice, in truth, the ruler is designated, but the rights of ruling are not thereby conferred. Nor is the authority delegated to him, but the person by whom it is to be exercised is determined upon."
ReplyDeleteHe did not. If you look up the name of that document in Heinrich Römmen’s book on state authority that’s on the Internet archive, you will find a section discussing that very question. Leo had no intention of condemning the translation theory.
DeleteI do love these articles. Everyday I find myself more convinced about the way Prof articulated post liberalism.
ReplyDeleteTo me the only personal sticking point I have is that post liberalism seems to entail that other non christian religions cannot spread their faith or bring others to their fold.
I think such kind of policies would cause disharmony at home as well as make it harder for missionaries abroad.
And I have spoken to classical natural law theorists who also believe that other faiths ought to be allowed to convert and bring people into their fold.
I you can convince me Prof that a post liberal society that allows other non christian faiths the same chance to grow and expand without limiting it, I will really consider putting on a post liberal cap. I think Christianity can still thrive in that sphere.
For any faith that really takes itself seriously, thriving equals the growth of that faith at the expense of all others. Otherwise, it's just another flavor of ice cream.
DeleteThe only reason to allow any other faiths would be to tolerate them in favor of the side effects inherent in suppressing them, much like free speech.
This would not be cruel according to Christian Faith (or others that take themselves seriously), because the best good for a non-believer would be to become a believer and not more unbelief.
OK, so growing at the expense of others is in the interests of (at least your) religion. But then why should anyone else tolerate your religion? Maybe they shouldn't, and you're preaching Holy War and Catholic Supremacy. If so, why are you wasting your time on this website instead of joining a militia? Because if you're serious, that's what you should be doing. But I don't think you'll do that, because you know that you (both you personally and RadTrad Catholics as a group) would get your asscheeks clapped by secular society if you did.
DeleteEXE
DeleteTaking arms should only be considered as a last resort.
I think a general sort of Christianity can prevail by slowly gaining through electoral representatives.
The only question is to what extent should one world that power to silence or coerce one's ideological opponents.
And I think that even though initially for many years we might have the upper hand, power corruptsz just like how the Trump administration is drunk ob it's power now and post liberals like Chad Pecknold aren't even attempting to speak out. only Dr Feser speaks out
Hence free discourse should be allowed.
I'am sometimes having some discussions with a radtrad close friend and this theme seems to me quite relevant, Norm, i'am thinking about that too.
DeleteBy what i understood from Dignitatis Humanae, while human religions have no right to be treated like our faith, one can't really be converted by the power of the State, the journey from unbelief to belief can be aided by how society treats our faith, but the journey can only happen if there is space to it to happen at all.
This we can clearly see with stuff like the jews story inside Christendom. One do see jews "converting" by force or in order to having social benefits, but people like the iberian Conversos, for instance, were not exactly a model of believers. The Yoruba descendents here on my country also are a example, for they tended to mostly disguise their religion with catholic symbols in order to pratice it and being left alone. The human person can't and never should be forced to believe in things by force, and if a man acts like a christian but does not believe, what we acomplish? Nothing.
Looking by this angle, a post-liberal government will usually need to grant false religions the freedom to spread and even convert in its borders.
To be sure, even the concil document acknowledge that there are limits to what degree of freedom a false religion can have, but this will aways be a prudential issue, and what it is in a completely diferent model of social organization like medieval England, for instance, should not necessarily be a guide to what we should do in a country today, so a post-liberal country likely would not be close to as intolerant as we are led to believe*.
If our friends here and especially our good Professor could give their takes, that would be wonderful. I consider this very relevant to knowing what we want politically and even to the Church dialogue with radtrads.
*to be sure, depending how this State forms, who forms it etc we can have something veeery bad as well or something so close to what we have that it is post-liberal in name only, only God knows the directions than history takes
Interesting thoughts Talmid...
DeleteI to would like Prof's take on it.
It seems you imply Locke’s position that a tyrant is the one guilty of rebellion is foreign to the scholastic tradition. I’m not very familiar with Locke, but as you represent him, it reminds me of Aquinas who generally finds the tyrant, rather than those who oppose him, as guilty of sedition in his treatment on sedition in the summa.
ReplyDeleteWhat metaphysical justification for this investiture would there be beyond the normal natural end of fulfilling higher order social goods?
ReplyDeleteA community might ask hire an engineer to build them a new bridge and as part of this defer to them on issues of construction; would one however say the authority of the engineer ultimately comes from God? In a sense it does as the realisation of a social good is part of the fulfillment of our nature which does come from God.
An engineer serves material needs by following physical laws.
DeleteA ruler serves spiritual needs by upholding civil law: not that the civil law is spiritual; but spiritual pursuits are thus enabled by checking the ignorant, upholding justice, and providing for the general welfare.
Indeed, but unless one is admitting vox populi vox dei that end requires no special mandate from God beyond that of being the society’s choice to realise a good (on theistic natural law fulfilment of one’s nature = fulfilment of God’s will). The goods you mention are of course different in nature from the material needs furnished by the engineer; but they are still grounded in the natures in question and do not prima facia require any further special mandate. What I suspect is happening is that the Platonic heritage of Aristotle is showing in the topic at hand—as in the idea that a society is a macrocosm of a rightly ordered person, soul and body, and this means orientation of the mind to God.
DeleteThat seems correct,
DeleteThe Catholic understanding of the matter is that the Church and the State are perfect societies. They are called perfect because they both have a perfect end: namely, the salvation of souls. They also have all of the authority and means and mechanisms within them to accomplish that end.
The State does this by seeing to man's material welfare as I described, and therefore enables the spiritual welfare. The Church then does it's threefold office of teaching, governing, and sanctifying in all things spiritual. This cooperation of the material and spiritual probably gets it original language and philosophic treatment from Plato as you say, but in as much as it's parts of it come from the Faith, it would be true anyway.
I agree about its coming from Plato, which I don’t view at all as a bad thing, and as you say the origin does not make a difference in the end as to whether it’s right. It felt a little out of line with the “pure Aristotelian” natural law which was why I asked that out of curiosity (I deliberately kept the supernatural theology aspect out of it because assumably this theory of governance would admit authority to non-Catholic nations.)
DeleteA while back I was mystified by the apparent rejection of this theory by Leo XIII and Pius X in favor of the designation theory. As Heinrich Römmen showed, however (like I said to the other commenter, look up Leo’s encyclical in R’s book on state authority in the Internet archive), such is far from the truth.
ReplyDeleteExactly what is the definition of “liberalism” that this article assumes? It is ironic to see it criticize liberalism while favorably quoting Yves Simon, a liberal.
ReplyDeleteExcellent question. What is Ed's definition of liberalism?
Delete@Norm: I thought error has no rights. Can that dictum be squared with the kind of post liberalism that would legitimately allow non-Christian or even non-Catholic religions to proselytize?
ReplyDeleteError has no rights, but humans do.
DeleteResponding to both Norm and ficino:
DeleteFirst, Norm, I don't think the postliberal notion requires that "that other non christian religions cannot spread their faith", it only entails the possibility of limits on some religions. As I understand it, in an extremely pluralistic situation (like our will be in, say, 1 generation if trends continue), where no single religion commands the favor of even so much as a majority, and there are several with large minorities, probably no state-imposed limits would be appropriate. But in other situations, say where one religion holds 95% of the people, then some limits on other religions would be feasible. (And yes, as I understand it, in a 95% Muslim country, some limits on Christian proselytizing would be considered appropriate.*)
The second point is that while we tend to prefer to SAY that we are in favor of full religious freedom, we don't actually mean it: we aren't OK with child sacrifice by those religions who would (absent laws against it) have such practices. What necessarily falls out of retaining such constraints (even as limits against extremely unlikely 'religions' is that a people - and a state - not only can but MUST be able to decide (a) what counts as "a religion" and exclude some claims, and (b) that some claims are clearly contrary to natural law and therefore MUST be false religions, and need not be granted free scope as religion.
(Though it is a more socially delicate an arena of state judgment, it is not really any more improper for a state than judgments needed for public health requirements: both require judgments according to reason for public welfare, both rely on reason, not faith.)
And thirdly: a state may have a role in suppressing improper methods of persuasion / conversion. An obvious example would be stopping libel that falsely accuses a religion of various wrongs. But there is no principled reason it could not go farther than that: the root principle at stake is not that "state interference" in the marketplace of ideas is improper, it's that there is a cost to such state activity and there is a delicate balance of costs and benefits, which broadly favors non-interference. That's not an absolute prohibition, and state support or promotion of truth is not always an evil thing even if state being hands-off is also not always an evil thing. (We do this promotion all the time by funding research publicly: it's impossible for that funding to be non-judgmental, as it always entails gate-keepers deciding what's useful to fund and what's not (or: less useful), which promotes some to the demotion of others.)
*The Catholic Church has maintained (as re-stated, in Vatican II) that where there is appropriate openness to reasonable argument and evidence, Christianity has nothing to fear from regimes that are not (yet) ready to embrace Christianity. As long as there is a pathway for argument and evidence, even for example the government's own experts taking on the role of evaluating and gatekeeping on Christian missionaries bringing the truth, historically God has not stinted and has provided sufficiency for this to open their eyes and change their hearts. It is where the government BOTH repudiates the outside religion AND refuses any pathway to consider arguments and evidence that Christians can rightly side-step that attempt to suppress Christianity, because it's not reasonable i.e. it violates even the natural law.
Tony
DeleteI too would draw the line at Child Sacrifice...
And I would also outright ban satanism.
But I think apart from that the question of monotheism or polytheism, hinduism or Christianity.
Adherentds of all these faiths can have a level playing field to convince others to their fold.
I think it is important to the general mission of the Church that we can make such claims in other places while also providing an example that other faiths could come to christian nations and prosletyse without fear.
I think Christianity can thrive in such an ethose.
As to error
I don't think error has a right although given that faith is a personal act , especially Christian faith that is brought about by the holy spirit and cannot be forced, there are questions about how much leeway might a person have to make errors as they Sincerely seek the truth.
I am thing more along the lines of tolerance.
But to humanize it a bit wouldn't Prof in his atheistic phase trying to convince others to be atheist be worse then a Hindu who believes in some higher power and follows other aspects of the natural law pertaining to family and responsibility trying to convince people into his fold.
Coach driver theory seems to me to be awfully simplistic: if a chosen official runs up against a situation outside of his explicit list of directives, he would (always) have to resort to a plebiscite to know what the passengers (the citizens) direct him to do. But this will quickly devolve: everyone who doesn’t like one of his actions / decisions will demand “this exceeds your powers (or, this is a case that demands an exception), you must have a vote”, and everything will be voted on directly: “government” would be nothing more than a series of votes over every picayune detail, i.e. nothing useful at all. Not to mention the difficulty of carrying out a vote without rules that might make some people upset because they are "unfair." (Pure, direct democracy – where every citizen votes on every decision - has never been successful on a large scale for even so much as 10 years.)
ReplyDeleteDivine theory has no history to recommend it (with the possible – but disputable – exception of Saul and David): all other governments came to be by the hands of humans acting, and not acting clearly unambiguously by God’s orders. The French have had 5 republics and 4 monarchies in the last 235 years, with nary a God-given directive in the bunch. People under a (good) monarchy might imagine divine right makes sense, but people who are directly involved in the sausage-making business of representative democracy never think it’s by divine right.
It is not clear how transmission theory manages to be practically different from designation theory, if you add in (a) that there be a government is a precept of the natural law (i.e. people are obliged by nature to form governments to rule for the common good o the community); (b) under both theories the people retain the right to revoke an assignment / designation in the case grave disorders in the government (e.g. a tyrant who abuses his authority); and (c) (under both) the people do not have the right to revoke an assignment / designation absent grave disorders in the government. With these premises, transmission theory notionally has the authority pass through the people on its way to the government, but they have no right to NOT pass that authority on to a government and just sit with it in their own hands indefinitely, and they can’t “take it back up again” at whim, only at need because of abuse of power (or implosion e.g. if the leaders are all killed). And then they have to turn around and form a new government. How is it effectively different?
Tony,
DeleteOne place that you can see the difference between designation and transmission theory is when Suarez writes about the retained capacity of the people to legislate through custom. As far as I can see, the way he grounds his position is only intelligible if he holds to the transmission view of authority rather than the designation view.
John, that's interesting. I think Aquinas makes 2 explicit points about custom in its interaction with the legislator: (1) a legislator may overturn an existing custom through a law, to promote the common good. And (2) a new custom may be understood to "overturn" a pre-existing law that prescribes against it, if and only if the legislator makes no attempt to restrain that new practice, but Aquinas locates the rationale as being that the legislator is implicitly legislating a new law by not acting against the new practice, and so he manifests his will in so permitting the practice without acting against it: law is an emanation of the will of the one in authority, making his legislative will manifest (usually through speech or writing, but in this case through omitting to act against). Thus Aquinas places the authority still in the legislator not in the people, even in this case.
DeleteWhile Aquinas (and others) following Isidore's comments on "law" give appreciation to the idea that "custom has the force of law", there is a deep difficulty with this. First is that there is no clear way to establish / demark when something has become "a custom" sufficiently, and secondly there is no clear way to establish when prevailing conditions that make the custom impossible, or imprudent to retain, no longer to be rightly followed, or not to be followed in the same way, or not always, etc. I would suggest that in many situations, we should say rather that custom has force but that it's force is of a different nature than that of law. It DOES bind, but in a different way, with different modes which admit of different limits, exceptions, abrogations, etc.
Some customs are so deeply rooted that they are the source upon which the society organizes itself for a government and a legislator (e.g. the language in which the constitutional rules are stated), while other customs go no farther than one family, or even one generation of one family. And everything in between. It would be shocking if people were entirely and totally free to stop giving assent to the deepest customs out of mere preference or laziness, and yet just as shocking if someone refusing "to come to the family picnic we always have on the first Saturday of Spring" merited being disowned from the family for it. And if enough family members stop going, it ceases to be a custom.
Because the deepest customs of the society are implicit foundations upon which the human legislator draws his power, he too is (broadly speaking) obliged to respect and follow them, and is not (morally) free to abrogate them by law out of whim.
I suspect that the issue of using custom to differentiate runs up against the idea of a "command" society vs a "permission" society. A command society is roughly "all that is not commanded is forbidden", i.e. is totalitarian and runs ALL decision-making from the authority downwards. The "all that is not forbidden (by express command) is permitted" society is on the other end.
DeleteIt is my understanding that Christianity, because of Christ's dictum "Give to God what is God's, and give to Caesar what is Caesar's", rejects command theory outright. But that doesn't mean it runs directly to permission theory whole hog: custom can be created by people acting initially in small units on their own "authority" (i.e. their own autonomy so to speak, under subsidiarity), and grow into custom, with no need for law, but custom can oblige certain actions even when law doesn't. (It is my understanding that this room for individual choice, decision-making, autonomy is supported by Sirach 15 "God willed that man should be left in the hand of his own counsel".) This is one of the reasons Isidore's quote (cited by Aquinas in the treatise on Law) requires that the law should be "according to the custom of the country": it may constitute a binding limit or constraint, even on the legislator.
My impression is that Suarez goes further than Aquinas in explicitly grounding custom in the sovereignty of the people, which remains foundational irrespective of the regime type. For this reason Suarez also gives more power to custom and sees its power as less dependent on regime type than Aquinas does.
DeleteI have only read bits of Suarez, no significant-sized chunks, so I don't know how he argues it. It's plausible on it face, but...
Deleteexplicitly grounding custom in the sovereignty of the people,
Kind of depends on what is meant by "sovereignty", doesn't it?
It is my impression that almost everyone in the West is in favor of some level of individual autonomy / decision-making (which, if repeated often enough by enough others becomes custom without any operative action beyond INDIVIDUALS acting for their own part). And most are in favor of the idea of governments arising through the action of humans' choices. It has never been clear to me that the kind of human sourcing that goes into custom is also involved in the sovereign activity of establishing a constitution / government: the latter necessarily requires intentional behavior toward the goal of a ruling order, whereas custom arises inchoately, somewhat formlessly, generally without intention that the action become custom, and effectively never in the form of intending rulership over others. New custom happens while we attend to various things, whereas a new government doesn't just happen. And it is unclear how you could get authoritative rulership out of pattens of similar behaviors for which there is no intention of forming binding order.
So, my question is not whether custom can be deeper than a governmental order (clearly it can be), nor even whether it might be more authoritative (at least at times). It is about how custom can be said to be tied to sovereignty. Should it be said rather that the headwaters of both custom and government are found in human nature, and indeed perhaps even that the headwaters of both are found in the same root faculties of reason and free will, but perhaps that they arise differently and therefore with some ordering principles, by which they are integrated and ordered?
I fail to see how the Coach-Driver Theory is in trouble, at least any more trouble than the other theories. You say that there is "no reason" why anyone who dissents from the majority's opinion should submit to it. But I don't see how invoking God fixes anything; it simply relocates the problem from general ethics to religion. If the community says "you should obey the government because it is appointed by God", then what happens to the man who says "I don't believe in God", or "I believe in a different God than you", or even "I interpret Scripture differently than you do"? If your answer is to suppress him and take away his rights, then you're in no better a position than the social contract advocate. You've simply chosen (one specific interpretation of) Christianity as your organizing principle instead of liberalism, and in that case you aren't any better off than the liberal. Literally any belief system could ground authority in this fashion, all that would be required is for it to be widely accepted in society.
ReplyDeleteYou’ve simply chosen your own brand of authority, which means you are no better off.
DeleteWell, even if you were correct, that would leave both of us in the same boat - it wouldn't make your situation *better* than mine.
DeleteBut in fact, I'd disagree, because the authority that I've chosen is A)consented to, and B)reformable. If you like, I guess you can say that both choices are arbitrary, but we can have rational discussions and arguments about what goods we value and ought to pursue, what limits we ought to put on freedom, etc. Old decisions can be qualified or overturned in light of changing moral ideas and new knowledge. This way, it adapts to its circumstances and (hopefully) improves over time. Compare this to a foundation based on Christian dogma, which can never be changed or reformed (at least not formally), and requires us to make a large number of assumptions about a stream of tradition and a series of old books, many of which assumptions are clearly false or at least dubious. My system doesn't require me to hold a huge quantity of assumptions about the nature, unity, origin, and uniformity of Scripture, the nature of God, etc, and its decisions admit that they're fallible and capable of being overturned. That seems better to me than a system that does require those assumptions and which is required to pretend that its reforms to its old dogmas are not actually changes.
Thank you, EXE, for a thoughtful reason why the Reformation brought so many ills with it. The Church should have remained unified under the Catholic Church.
Deletea large number of assumptions about a stream of tradition and a series of old books, many of which assumptions are clearly false or at least dubious.
DeleteIf you're trying to convince people like me, Feser and other Catholics, this line is making it fall pretty darn flat. "Clearly false"? Rather clearly, you aren't going to get agreement on that.
In the 2000 year history, there are only about 3 plausible candidates for actual changes in definitive teaching, and even those aren't deep principles.
This way, it adapts to its circumstances and (hopefully) improves over time.
I think it likely that Christian states adapted to circumstances, in the 1200 years from Constantine to 1500 AD, and arguably improved over time as a good number of fairness rules we use now were developed or extended during that time. And without changing Catholic dogma!
Well, at least you've made it clear where you stand. You want your religion to dominate society and enforce its beliefs on others.
DeleteAnonymous:
Delete"If you're trying to convince people like me, Feser and other Catholics, this line is making it fall pretty darn flat. "Clearly false"? Rather clearly, you aren't going to get agreement on that."
I'm not here to argue with you about your dogmas. My point is that Catholicism requires a great number of beliefs about what books constitute the Bible, who they were written by, and what they really mean, the nature of tradition, the Church, etc not to mention claims about the existence and nature of God, things which even you would have to admit are not observable. These claims are not at all obvious - that's a simple fact. I am not here to try and disprove your dogmas or even convince you to give them up, I am simply explaining to you that, for the purposes of establishing a society, it is much better if our governance does NOT require everyone to subscribe to this vast list of non-obvious claims. If you disagree, then you're free to show me how Catholic dogmas are in fact actually obvious after all. Until you do so, I feel entitled to my position.
"I think it likely that Christian states adapted to circumstances, in the 1200 years from Constantine to 1500 AD, and arguably improved over time as a good number of fairness rules we use now were developed or extended during that time. And without changing Catholic dogma!"
DeleteI never said it was completely impossible for a state based on religious dogma to adapt to circumstances. If those dogmas aren't challenged by the new circumstances, then everything's fine. The problem is that, when the dogmas no longer work, the state, rather than simply acting, now also needs to come up with an excuse for how what it's doing doesn't count as changing or ignoring dogma - it needs to play a shell game. Most often, what actually happens is that burdensome or unimplementable dogmas get put on the shelf and ignored as everyday life goes on without them - in fact, this was a surprisingly common occurrence during the Medieval period that you hold up as a paragon. Secular rulers frequently tried to tax the church's property, appoint bishops (in flagrant defiance of Rome's authority), and ignored Church laws regarding marriage wherever it was in the interests of power to do so. King Richard II of England even passed the Statute of Praemunire, directly restricting the Pope's power over England - essentially asserting that the King of England was not subject to the Pope. Now you might come back and say that all of this was secular politicking and not a matter of the Church changing Her dogmas (I have more to say about that idea, but we'll leave that for another day). That may be true, but the point of my bringing all of this up is to show the flaws of using Christian dogma as the basis of society. Not only does it cause religious persecution, it also forces society to come up with a bunch of "work-arounds" for the areas in which it fails to deal with regular life adequately. Try to force dogmas into regular life, and they will quickly be ignored or re-interpreted so as to be less burdensome.
As a final aside, I'll not that this isn't an issue unique to Christianity. Sharia Law is infamous for both its inflexibility (being believed to be divinely revealed, after all) and its utter inadequacy as a legal system for any modern context. Because of the many holes in it, in practice Muslim states either do not implement it at all, or supplement it and hedge it 'round with pragmatic jurisprudence (fiqh) as well as secular, non-divine laws (qanun). But it seems to me far more honest and reasonable to simply admit that the entire system is fallible than to claim part of it is infallible, then rigorously shield the "infallible" part from any situations that it isn't capable of handling.
@EXE:
Delete"I am not here to try and disprove your dogmas or even convince you to give them up, I am simply explaining to you that, for the purposes of establishing a society, it is much better if our governance does NOT require everyone to subscribe to this vast list of non-obvious claims. If you disagree, then you're free to show me how Catholic dogmas are in fact actually obvious after all. Until you do so, I feel entitled to my position."
The way you frame the issue is completely one-sided; to restore some balance, how about you defend your own principles for "the purposes of establishing a society", whatever those are, and give a rational account of them? Otherwise we are entitled to our position. And I remind you that, to take just one example lifted from your list, to defend arguments for the existence of God one has to even give an account of something as self-evident and obvious as causal principles, so your own principles will be subject to a similarly high epistemic bar. Otherwise we are entitled to our position.
"The way you frame the issue is completely one-sided; to restore some balance, how about you defend your own principles for "the purposes of establishing a society""
DeleteDemonstrate that I am under any obligation to do so. Why would I be? I haven't actually made an argument for how I think society ought to be positively ordered. I have merely been criticizing the use of Christian dogma for this purpose. I see the trick you're trying to pull, Roddy, you're not slick. You're trying to shift the burden of proof to me, privilege your own beliefs as not requiring justification, and then oblige me to get a PHD in philosophy to "prove you wrong". Bullshit. The truthfulness of Christian claims isn't even relevant to this argument; only whether or not it is reasonable to expect most people to be convinced by them. That is what we've been talking about. My position is that Christian dogma is at the very least not OBVIOUSLY true, therefore it is inevitably going to be a matter of dispute and disagreement, and thus is not a good foundation for common agreement. As evidence for the non-obviousness of Christian dogma, I submit the observation that a very large percentage of the people who encounter Christian dogmas do not believe in them, and that even among Christians there is very serious disagreement about what they are. Do you dispute this observation? If so, on what grounds?
@EXE:
Delete"You're trying to shift the burden of proof to me, privilege your own beliefs as not requiring justification, and then oblige me to get a PHD in philosophy to "prove you wrong"."
You said that until we show you the truth of the Catholic dogma to your own satisfaction that you are "entitled" to your position. So, by parity of reason, unless you show us to our satisfaction the truth of your principles we are entitled to our position. I am not "shifting the burden" as you put it, or have you "prove me wrong", I am simply making a methodological point. You do not get a "You loose, I win" free pass.
"My position is that Christian dogma is at the very least not OBVIOUSLY true, therefore it is inevitably going to be a matter of dispute and disagreement, and thus is not a good foundation for common agreement."
There is so much wrong packed in so few words. The Church has insisted that dogmatic pronouncements like the trinitarian nature of God are not provable by natural reason, but are known to be true because God has revealed it, so they cannot be "obviously true", whatever "obviously true" is supposed to mean exactly. On other things, such as the existence of God, the Church insists that it can be known to be true by natural reason. Does that count as "obviously true"? You are using "dogma" not in the technical sense but in a polemical sense, but dogma is not even the correct level at which to speak of issues such as the correct ordering of society.
I could go on, but at any rate, the same can be said about pretty much every position. To take just one example, liberal principles (whether cribbed from Locke, from Rawls or whomever) are not agreed upon, even among liberals themselves. They appear relatively recently in human history and are largely irrelevant for many large societies like China and India. Matters of disagreement are not a good foundation for common agreement? If that is your standard, then I am going to wait behind the veil of ignorance for the air-tight proof of your own principles.
EXE,
DeleteHere is the claim you made:
"My position is that Christian dogma is at the very least not OBVIOUSLY true, therefore it is inevitably going to be a matter of dispute and disagreement, and thus is not a good foundation for common agreement."
I am interested in how you defend the claim that something must be "OBVIOUSLY true" to be a good foundation for common agreement in a society. What are these things you hold to be obviously true and therefore foundational and beyond dispute and disagreement?
It's honestly pretty pathetic seeing both of you scramble to try and reverse my completely negative claim into a positive one. I have never once made any claims about how society ought to be ordered, or what principles we should follow. That's not what I'm interested in discussing right now. Instead, you are putting words in my mouth, and accusing me of saying things that I never said. Scroll up and re-read what I wrote.
DeleteAt this point, it looks like you don't actually know how to support your own positions, and can only engage from the rhetorically easier position of poking holes into somebody else's claims.
grodriguez, in particular - you have a PhD in Mathematics, so I am certain that you are able to follow my argument. So I can only conclude that you are choosing to not engage with it deliberately.
EXE,
DeleteYou stated what your position was. I quoted it and asked you to defend your position. I didn't have to "scramble" for anything other than just reading what you actually wrote.
You stated that anything not OBVIOUSLY true, being a matter of dispute and disagreement, is not a good foundation for society. This does not seem OBVIOUSLY true to me nor even plausibly true.
can only engage from the rhetorically easier position of poking holes into somebody else's claims.
Have you ever considered conducting a moment of self-reflection before hitting the PUBLISH button?
@EXE:
Delete"It's honestly pretty pathetic seeing both of you scramble to try and reverse my completely negative claim into a positive one. I have never once made any claims about how society ought to be ordered, or what principles we should follow. That's not what I'm interested in discussing right now. Instead, you are putting words in my mouth, and accusing me of saying things that I never said."
If I "put words in your mouth" then you can quote my exact words and highlight exactly what I got wrong. In particular you can show me where I allegedly commented on "any claims about how society ought to be ordered, or what principles we should follow" of yours. As long as we are at it, you can also explain how I "reverse my completely negative claim into a positive one"? Is this similar to the complaint of atheist retards that trot out "atheism as absence of belief", is that what we are talking about?
"At this point, it looks like you don't actually know how to support your own positions, and can only engage from the rhetorically easier position of poking holes into somebody else's claims."
Ha ha ha ha! You mean you do not like the taste of your own medicine? I am simply taking *your* own standards to their logical conclusion.
"grodriguez, in particular - you have a PhD in Mathematics, so I am certain that you are able to follow my argument. So I can only conclude that you are choosing to not engage with it deliberately."
I did engage; I quoted your single-sentence summary of your position and then made two distinct points. The first is that you are mashing up distinct things and comparing incomparable things, and the second, that your exact same complaints can be lodged against any substantial position, and since I do not know what you believe and am not going to guess, exemplified it with liberalism.
"Social contract theories have a similar problem. They have no plausible way of explaining why people who object to the terms of the hypothetical liberal social contract (Lockean, Rawlsian, or whatever) should be expected to abide by it – or indeed, why a merely hypothetical contract should be binding on anyone in the first place."
ReplyDeleteWhy is this supposed to be confusing? The contract is what most people think is fair and reasonable, and it represents our strongest effort to create the best society that we can. If you want to participate in that society-building project, then all you have to do is set aside the parts of your particular doctrine that are incompatible with making that project work, and only to the extent necessary to make that project work. Secularism is not neutral, nor does it pretend to be, despite what Feser has been saying about it for ages. But the social contract doesn't require secularism or religion to be subordinated to each other, just that they both suspend parts of their doctrinal beliefs in the interests of harmony, that they refrain from oppressing each other. This seems to answer the question, unless you consider "my religion is not allowed to enforce all of its beliefs on the rest of society" as being equivalent to "my religion is persecuted".
Maybe, possibly, your theories here could result in a democratic society rather than a despotic one. However, it seems like it would require a religiously homogeneous society in order to work, because instead of appealing to shared beliefs about goods you are appealing to shared beliefs about God. "Authority is transmitted directly from God" doesn't work if people don't agree that God exists, or don't believe in the same God, or don't believe the same things about their shared God. So, congratulations, you've avoided the "tyranny" of liberalism, and instead reinstated the confessional state. Now, I suspect that this doesn't bother you, and that it might in fact have been the real goal all along, but I fail to see how this is a better solution. In fact, it seems utterly incapable of dealing with the reality that Western society nowadays is overwhelmingly NOT religiously homogeneous.
ReplyDeleteAll of your complaints about other systems than coach theory or contract theory assume the non-existence of natural law. If man has a social nature, and this is knowable by reason, then that's a foundation not relying on "invoking God".
DeleteYou talk as if beliefs about goods are homogenous.
DeleteTerilien:
Delete"You talk as if beliefs about goods are homogenous"
No, no I don't. I'm very much aware that people disagree about goods all the time. But they also disagree about gods all the time, and I think that asking "what goods should we pursue?" is a much more productive and solvable discussion than "what gods should we worship?".
Anonymous:
I'm afraid that natural law doesn't help your case here. For one thing, even if NLT were true, you'd still need to *convince* people that it were true in order for it to be an effective foundation for society. It's certainly not obvious that it's true, or else we wouldn't be having this conversation and everyone (or at least the vast majority of people) would just instinctively know it. Good luck with that - I don't think you're going to have a lot of success convincing anyone outside of conservative Catholic circles that NLT is true or even plausible.
Maybe, possibly, your theories here could result in a democratic society rather than a despotic one.
DeleteYou seem to assume that everything other than a democracy is despotic, but there were monarchies and aristocracies that were not despotic. A constitutional monarch, especially, isn't always a despot.
You also seem to assume that democracies are not despotic. But a democracy can (and often did) exercise despotism, with the majority despotically railroading the minority in unjust ways. Not to mention democracies that practiced slavery.
However, it seems like it would require a religiously homogeneous society in order to work,
Until maybe the last 300 years, most nations tended to run very religiously homogenous. Is that inherently a bad thing?
For one thing, even if NLT were true, you'd still need to *convince* people that it were true in order for it to be an effective foundation for society. It's certainly not obvious that it's true, or else we wouldn't be having this conversation and everyone (or at least the vast majority of people) would just instinctively know it.
DeleteYou can replace NLT with contract theory, and the rest remains true: you have to convince people, and it's not obvious or 6,000 years of people BEFORE Locke would have known it.
"Until maybe the last 300 years, most nations tended to run very religiously homogeneous."
DeleteThis is just plain incorrect. Religiously diverse societies have existed for ages, and with varying degrees of pluralism vs assimiliationism. The Achaemenid Empire was explicitly pluralist and allowed local people groups to keep their cultures and religious traditions. The Mongol Empire did not concern itself with imposing religion on its subjects, and did similarly. Even more ideologically intolerant rulers were often forced to adopt pluralist policies by the realities of their situation, such as with the Islamic rulers in India (who largely gave up on trying to convert the native population in any meaningful way). The Middle East has Sunnis, Shias, Ibadis, Christians, Jews, Druze, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, and Manicheans just to name a few. China has Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and various folk religions going on. Really, religious homogeneity has largely been a European phenomenon, restricted to the lands where Christianity held political power.
"Is that inherently a bad thing?"
Not inherently, in the sense that the mere fact alone that people largely have the same religion is not wrong. But it *is* wrong to try and force other people to adopt your religion. Trying to *forcibly create* religious homogeneity would be an oppressive action.
"Until maybe the last 300 years, most nations tended to run very religiously homogeneous."
DeleteThis is just plain incorrect. Religiously diverse societies have existed for ages
I can't tell whether you are being sloppy, or what. The examples you give are mostly multi-nation EMPIRES who conquered one group after another. The separate groups, though, before being conquered, often were not pluralistic - though some were (and I didn't say all were mono-religious, just most).
Your example of the middle east is funny as all heck, since for most of the last 1400 years Islamic groups have practiced varying degrees of persecution of others. Even when they allowed Jews and Christians to exist (not all did) they required them to submit to the jizra and imposed severe restrictions on them, i.e. oppression. They even persecuted other sects of Islam, and still do sometimes.
In the Americas you had all sorts of oppression or forced assimilation, by Iroquois, Comanche, and Aztecs, along with others, which had the effect of religious reduction or annihilation. Incas were relatively more tolerant when they conquered other peoples, but still forced the conquered people's religion to subordinate roles.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about how the state and society ought to be best ordered. Do you mean "nation" as in "ethnic group" as opposed to broader governments? If you did, then your claim is irrelevant, unless you add to it the belief that every "nation" ought to have its own state, which is a separate belief that you need to argue for independently.
DeleteThe rest of your comment is just you signalling off a bunch of bigotry and whataboutism in the face of historical facts. Did Muslims do religious oppression? Sure, sometimes. Is dhimmitude a good thing? No, religious pluralism is my ideal. But if they were anywhere near as savage and intolerant as you make them out to be, why do so many religious minorities still exist? Compare that to Europe - when's the last time you met a European Pagan? It's deeply hypocritical of you to point at Muslims doing religious suppression and then ignore the far greater and far more successful history of Christians doing the same thing. How many anti-Jewish pogroms did European Christians do? How many pagans did the Roman Empire officially oppress after its conversion? How many witches were burned for religious reasons? How many people were killed in the Baltic Crusades? But you don't care about any of that, because "your side" did it, so that makes it OK.
But you don't care about any of that, because "your side" did it, so that makes it OK.
DeleteBut...I...DON'T...think that. Why would you assume that? In fact, I don't think it's ok for the government of a Catholic country to force people who were never Catholic to begin with to become Catholic by violence or threat of violence, as happened various times, and sometimes the forcible change was expressly condemned by Rome. Or for the government of a Protestant country to do it, as also was true in the Reformation. Or for the Greeks to do it during the reign of the Ptolemies. Or for the Muslims, etc.
Let's do a future projection (if this doesn't happen within 100 years, it will happen within 200, (absent a global systems failure)). An evangelical protestant group is tired of "liberal" constraints on their preferred way of life, they fund the modification of an asteroid as a human habitat, and move there. The government is formed to promote and secure their evangelical protestant way of life. Included in this is a provision that if you decide you don't want to be an evangelical protestant, or don't want the government to promote that, or don't want to live with the social / legal constraints that are made to secure that, you must leave, (but the state will pay for your exit). At age 18 you are given the freedom to expressly sign on to this regime, or leave (government paying for your exit). Visitors are required to explicitly agree to respect these rules, and long term visitors are required to either BECOME evangelical protestants supporting the above governmental regime, or leave.
100 years later, someone grows up there, reads about Catholicism, decides he wants to become Catholic, and lets this be known. He is forced to leave. Is this unjust oppression, and if so, why? And, in what way, given that this regime was (clearly) formed in a manner compatible with contract theory, where everyone signed to it, and every adult expressly signs on to the contract (it's not an implied contract, it's actually written).
EXE, you don't want America, currently pluralistic, to become mono-religious where the government joins efforts to promote and secure a mono-religious regime: that's understandable, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that it should become that when the vast majority would oppose it. The question is whether a theoretical society's (i.e. not this one) postliberal regime that is expressly founded on natural law principles (as they see them) and a general social preference for something other than pluralism and "neutrality" construed as secularism is expressly oppressive and/or wrong.
Huh. Usually, when someone starts going on about Islam or that Europeans weren't the only sinners in history, that's a sign that they're a bigot trying to deflect. I apologize if you actually aren't like that, it's just that 99% of the time that assumption holds true.
DeleteOK, so, the situation you've proposed seems...fine? Reminds me a lot of the Amish. While I would still have personal misgivings about any such project, I admit that these are in fact just emotional misgivings, rather than arguments against it. So yes, you can have your hypothetical Space Christian colony, provided that leaving is something that a person can feasibly do, without it being a de facto death sentence or condemnation to a life of poverty. Though personally, I have to wonder what the point of this discussion is supposed to be exactly - is it just an intramural dispute on governance between people who are all assumed to agree that Christianity is the proper basis for government, and thus the pluralism issue is presumed solved?
I have to wonder what the point of this discussion is supposed to be exactly - is it just an intramural dispute on governance between people who are all assumed to agree that Christianity is the proper basis for government,
DeleteThe point is to allow space for the question of whether the typically Ralwsian <>notional neutralism and pluralism trends toward secularism by built-in assumptions against (any) religion being really true. To allow space for the question of whether a state formulated on the basis of temporal good which is conceived as the only conception of good allowed to the state is the best kind of state for a people who believe in an eternal good beyond this life. The point is that what kind of state you think is the best kind of state in principle regardless of whether you can see a pathway to getting there, might affect what kind of state you push for that is practically possible.
I mean, sure, but don't we already have plenty of data on that? For over a thousand years, Europe was governed by states based explicitly on Christianity. Can we really treat this as if it were an answered question?
DeleteI also don't think your description of Rawls is accurate. Rawls doesn't assume that any religion is false, at least that's not my understanding. The point of the Veil of Ignorance is to try and get people to think of what the "ideal" Social Contract would be, if we could agree on one in the best possible circumstances. Part of that is removing accidents of history that might bias our thinking or incline us to give advantage to "our" groups. For instance, you would probably not want to create a society where Blacks are discriminated against if there was a chance that you'd be born Black. Similarly, you probably wouldn't want all societies to be Catholic confessional states that socially disadvantaged Muslims if there was a chance that you might be born as a Muslim immigrant. You probably wouldn't want a patriarchal society if there was a 50/50 shot of your being born as a woman, and so on. The point is to try and remove partiality and get you to consider the possible harms that current social structures cause, which you might miss because they don't affect you directly. It's easy for a man to laugh at the idea of The Patriarchy, but that's because it's very rarely if ever going to actually disadvantage him. When designing a hypothetical ideal society, it seems reasonable to me to try and remove all those particular accidents of history that bias us or blind us to the harms that just so happen to not affect us.
Above, I should have said "can we really treat this as if it were an UNanswered question?".
DeleteHey, Prof Feser, I know that you have strong opinions about Rawls, but from the way you're speaking of social contract theory here, it seems like your understanding of him is somewhat flawed. Have you ever heard of these responses?
ReplyDeletehttps://substack.com/home/post/p-156613617?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Dr Feser,
ReplyDeletePer your reference to Cardinal Cajetan, I have to give a shout out to the great Dominican dogmatic theologian, Cajetan Cuddy, O.P., S.T.D, professor at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC
https://dhs.edu/people/rev-cajetan-cuddy-o-p/
A wonderful man
DeleteIndeed he is.
DeleteEqually, if not more important than the particular theory of authority is how the country is actually governed. I don't know of a short phrase to encapsulate it all, but basically the point is that people can use the same words to describe what are substantially different situations.
ReplyDeleteSome might say that in our world today, liberalism is a widespread theory of government, but our societies would not be recognizable to John Locke or even John Rawls. Or even someone from 30 years ago.
There is so much dishonesty nowadays that so-called leaders will take up whatever philosophies are useful to them (for various reasons such as prestige, or that other people believe in it) but only insofar as they are useful. Other than that they do what they want.
And in addition, any particular philosophy of governance (whether liberal, post-liberal, or otherwise) must have some way of preserving itself. Otherwise, you are not supporting a system of particular values but a road that can go anywhere. (I am not claiming that a philosophy must be static but modifying and replacing with something else are not the same).
I understand that this is a separate issue from the philosophical underpinnings of a post-liberal theory of government, but it is important to because any political philosophy is vulnerable to being subverted by people who adopt it out of convenience but are not true to the principles.
The honesty and good motivations of the leaders and the ability to maintain leaders with such qualities are of more importance than what is claimed to be the theory of governance (because often it is not followed honestly). I would even live in a society that believed in the divine right of kings if it was a good king than a society where that is supposedly based around freedom but where freedom is constantly being eroded.
So, are you suggesting that a social contract type of system needs to be active in keeping out a religious group whose stated goal is to overthrow such systems, and who will "abide by" the rules in place only until either they can outvote the others, they can violently overthrow the others, or they can defy those rules without penalty? Exactly the opposite of what Britain has done for 50 years?
DeleteAh, classic Islamophobia. Remind me, how eager are British Muslims to replace the law with Sharia? Actual facts, please, not vibes or the unsourced postings of some fringe blogger or Reform politician. If you're correct, the data should support you, no?
DeleteSeems as if you’re willing to virtue signal in defense of any group that is conveniently non-Christian by simply yelling out “Islamophobia”. Nonetheless, the name Anjem Choudary and his sympathizers should be enough evidence to counter your claim.
DeleteAh, where would the poor aul racists be without their disingenuous reframing? You could just be more honest about it and call me a race traitor. Anjem Choudary is indeed a supporter of terrorism - which is why he's been proscribed, sanctioned, and imprisoned. From what I can tell, he does not seem to be very popular among British Muslims, nor does terrorism more generally. If you have evidence that that's actually not true, and that most of them do in fact support terrorism, then please provide it. Otherwise, if we can come to conclusions on a single datapoint, then the existence of David Duke proves that all White people are Klansmen.
DeleteAs to the comment from the May 4th Anon. Of course one might not read that as referring to Islam judging by recent actions of the British Government in restricting speech and protest. But for someone in the U.S. to make that point is to overlook the beam for the mote.
DeleteIronic that you talk about being disingenuous all the while erroneously conflating Muslims as a racial category so that you can make the comparison to David duke representing whites. It doesn’t work that way as anyone with basic sense knows Muslims aren’t a race. But we know how hard it is for leftists to not blindly perceive Muslims as just another group of “brown” people.
DeleteIf you're correct, the data should support you, no?
DeleteSays Gemini 3:
An estimated 1,400 children were victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham, England, between 1997 and 2013, with perpetrators predominantly identified as men of Pakistani heritage. Numerous reports of abuse were ignored by authorities for over a decade.
Scale of Abuse: The 2014 Jay Report conservatively estimated at least 1,400 children, mostly white British girls from care backgrounds, were sexually abused and exploited.
Perpetrators: Investigations found that grooming gangs, predominantly of Pakistani, Muslim heritage, carried out the abuse.
Failure of Authorities: Police and child protection services failed to act on reported crimes for years, with some officials later citing fears of being called racist, or failing to properly investigate.
Impunity and Abuse by Authorities: During this period, the vast majority of cases went unprosecuted. Some victims reported being ignored or treated with contempt by authorities, and in some cases, further abused by police.
At the time, police and other officials sometimes explicitly justified their non-action by referring to "Sharia law" and "not imposing English law" on the Muslim subcommunity - as if raping non-Muslims somehow was an internal Muslim affair, and as if it was OK for a sub-community to establish itself in Britain with its own laws contradicting British laws: either overthrowing British rule in that location, or defying British rule with impunity.
AI-Brained Anon:
Delete"Look, the machine I built specifically to agree with me agrees with me!"
Seriously? Using AI as your source just proves that you're a dunce. I guarantee you I could ask it to support my position and it'd do the same.
Brad W:
DeleteWould you let your daughter marry an Indian Christian?
Legally I can’t prevent my daughter from marrying anyone. Personally I wouldn’t want her marrying anyone who isn’t racially european and christian both.
DeleteI genuinely do not care if that’s racist.
So instead of simply acknowledging that your reckless conflation of Muslims as a race is wrong, you ask a totally left field question. We were talking about British Muslims, many of whom are Pakistani. Not sure what Indians have to do with it.
DeleteCongratulations, Terilien, you're the most honest person on this entire blog. You're a disgusting piece of trash, but at least you don't pretend that you aren't racist, unlike these other chicken-sh*t commenters.
DeleteEXE If I could pin your reply to my bedroom wall, I would.
DeleteWait. I can!
EXE You do realise being racist isn't a sin and nobody cares about being called one anymore, right? Mixed marriages are detrimental in any context, racial or religious.
DeleteEXE, your comment towards Terilien is totally ridiculous. Wanting one's children to marry people of similar ancestry and religion is the norm throughout history.
DeleteWhat about that story in Genesis of Abraham wanting Isaac to marry one of his own people? Is that so terrible or is that just what people do?
You asked Brad W. if he would want his daughter to marry an Indian Christian. Well, would you insult an Indian Brahmin who wants his daughter to marry another Indian Brahmin?
If people have become convinced that something which the vast majority of everyone who has ever lived, including most people alive today, believe is normal and natural is actually bad, maybe the problem is with them.
If someone does end up marrying someone of a different ethnicity or religion, well, that has also happened for a variety of reasons. It is ultimately the choice of the individual, but it is nonetheless preposterous to say that wanting one's child to marry someone similar is bad.
"Wanting one's children to marry people of similar ancestry and religion is the norm throughout history."
DeleteWas it? I don't doubt that this ended up being the case a lot of the time, but that's more a function of the fact that for most of history, most people had very little mobility and did not have the opportunity to marry anyone who lived more than 20 miles from their birthplace. Is there actually good evidence that the majority of people throughout history opposed the idea of mixed marriages in principle? Certainly we have counter-examples. Mexico, for instance, is full of them. The entire Mestizo ethnicity exists because of Spanish-Nahuatl intermixing, not to mention the various other mixed groups (Afro-Mexicanos, for instance). The Malagasy, the people of Madagascar, are a mixture between Bantu-speaking Africans and Austronesian settlers from somewhere around Indonesia. The Normans are the result of Norse settlers mixing with French peoples, and the English are the result of those people mixing with Anglo-Saxons. Southern Italians have a large chunk of their ancestry from the Berbers who once ruled the region, and the Normans had no problem marrying into that population when they took over Sicily as well. I could go on for hours, but this is probably better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_miscegenation
This comment is getting over-long, so I'll respond to the rest of your points in separate comments.
"What about that story in Genesis of Abraham wanting Isaac to marry one of his own people? Is that so terrible or is that just what people do?"
DeleteWell, I don't know if you accept scholarship, but the vast majority of scholars who study the Hebrew Bible think that this story was written by the Priestly writer(s), and one of that source's particular fixations is endogamous marriage (another is playing up the role of Aaron, claiming that only his line are real, genuine priests, despite several other passages saying the opposite). This reflects the fact that the writer (most likely writing in the Exilic or early Post-Exilic period) was particularly concerned with Jewish identity and condemning culture/religion/race mixing. Even if you want to ignore all of that, you still have to deal with the fact that Joseph *didn't* marry such a woman, but in fact married an Egyptian pagan, the daughter of a priest:
"Then Pharaoh named Joseph Zaphenath-paneah; and he gave him Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera priest of On, to be his wife.(Gen 41:45)"
"Well, would you insult an Indian Brahmin who wants his daughter to marry another Indian Brahmin?"
Given that the Brahmins use such marriages to perpetuate the social and economic dominance of their caste, then yes, actually I would. Castes are a particularly horrible form of oppression, and I oppose them wherever possible.
EXE,
DeleteWhat exactly the proportion is of endogamy vs. exogamy is, I'm not sure, but I still think the majority would have been endogamy.
"that's more a function of the fact that for most of history, most people had very little mobility and did not have the opportunity to marry anyone who lived more than 20 miles from their birthplace"
Someone could say, "people now often marry others of different ancestry and religion but that's more a function of the fact that modern society mixes different groups and that travel is easier more common".
Many different circumstances affect who people encounter in life and who they end up marrying, but why is the first one somehow invalid and the second valid? They both are circumstances that affect things. It's no good to say, "oh that was just the circumstances", when the same can be said about the other.
Whether and to what extent people opposed exogamy in principle will probably depend on the society in question, but a preference does not have to mean an absolute opposition. If you are part of your own group and support your own group, why is it wrong to want to marry inside the group?
"I still think the majority would have been endogamy"
DeleteYou *think* this. But based on what? Data is important. You *could* be right, but there is no way to know from this. It's entirely possible that this is simply your natural biases speaking - we as humans are naturally predisposed towards assuming that everyone else thinks the same way that we do. And of course, this applies to me too, lest you think I'm trying to imply I'm above it. Neither of us can safely assume that what we feel most people think in fact *is* what most people think, especially when projected back through history. The difference is that I don't claim to know either way. You are the one making a positive claim (in this case, that an active preference for endogamy is and has been the human norm for most or all of history). This might be intuitive for you, but you shouldn't naively trust your intuition with factual claims about the world, especially complicated ones. Human cognition is simply too flawed and riddled with bias to be trusted blindly.
About your other point, you aren't wrong as far as you go. You're correct that the higher rate of exogamy in the modern day is at least in significant part caused by greater mobility and access to travel. Of course it is, the person we marry depends heavily on our particular circumstances. But this doesn't actually undermine my point at all. Remember, I wasn't saying that everyone always wanted to marry outside the tribe, and only a lack of technology prevented them. Rather, I was pointing out that we don't have good evidence of a widespread *ideological* preference for endogamy (IE, "I would only marry within my ethnic group even if I could just as easily marry anyone in the world"), and that the fact that most people did marry inside their ethnic group throughout history is not good evidence for it, because that evidence is far more plausibly explained by the fact that those people largely didn't even have the option of marrying outside the tribe to begin with. To use a different example, nobody has ever flown like Superman, because humans can't do that. Is this good evidence that people don't *want* to fly like Superman? Of course not. To prove your point, you'd need better evidence - for instance, if every culture had customs forbidding or discouraging exogamous marriages, or if we had consistent witness for thousands of years that at least the majority of major cultures looked down upon such unions, or that they had traditions viewing such unions as shocking, or dangerous, etc. Alternatively, you could look through genetic history to see if there's evidence of miscegenation being rare, or only happening in situations where it's better explained by having happened non-consensually (IE, through conquest). But if that's lacking, and you find that miscegenation is relatively common even in situations where one group isn't dominating another, then that seems like evidence against your position, at least the stronger version of your position. Remember, this doesn't have to be a binary "you have the perfect answer" vs "you are an idiot who knows nothing" situation. It might just be that we don't know whether the thing you believe is true or not, and we might just have to live with that. But that's still better than believing stuff just because we want to.
So, in transmission theory, the community is a created thing and is a "secondary cause", which I assume is based on the premise that nobody is created in isolation (which is a hard concept for me to understand in the first place, being generationally American and all).
ReplyDeleteThis secondary cause then naturally generates authority that may be transmitted to the ruling government upon what the community has given up to the ruler or has indebted to transmit to God's judgement.
We could say hypotheticals all day but I imagine that this is a sounder view because the ruler must then steward the community's authority as to not have their authority be indebted to God's judgement, as far as in their position they think that it no longer applies.
I am not trying to make a point, just making sure that I understand this correctly.
Where I’m a little unclear is this: what constitutes the “community” transmitting authority? Historically speaking both the community and the state tend to form each other, in such a way that precludes the community from being entirely prior to the state.
ReplyDeleteMoreover we know the entire community does not transmit authority: rather some kind of set of representative body does(usually an elite). But this presupposes at least a state-like structure already. Who transmitted authority to them?
A community cannot exist without an authority which defines and organizes this community. Therefore a community cannot be fundamental in transmitting authority from God to human rulers. For this community only exists if it is already under an authority, i.e. an individual or group which has the power to claim to be this authority. So I would say that authority is transmitted by the individuals or groups which are able to exercise it, because they through their actions or positions have obtained the power to do so. Seems a very simple solution to me, and analogous to how natural forces derive their causal power from God.
DeleteI'd like to second these two questions/objections. If anything, I'd say the state has traditionally held the authority to define the community, and there are plenty of historical examples of how governments have been able to establish their own legitimacy by choosing and cultivating either an elite (in premodern states) or a mass base (in modern states) whose interests align with that of the rulers. Nationalism as a political project is (among other things) the manufacturing of a community to undergird a state; just ask Bismarck.
Delete@Anonymous
DeleteCertainly gives authority a rather nihilistic "might makes right" quality, though, doesn't it?
The example of Bismark, because of its modernity, seems to show that the state defining the community is not traditional.
DeleteA community cannot exist without an authority which defines and organizes this community.
DeleteI don't see this as historically accurate - or at least not necessary, nor the norm. The term "nation" referred first to a people united by common descent ("birth"), not by a common government. Cf. Israel, descended from Jacob.
And the growth of governments out of the (smaller) tribal and (larger) clan groups with their primarily familial hierarchy relationships seems often to have gone through a moment of recognition - between distinct tribes or clans - of a bond recommending a formal unity of some sort without that (already existing) bond constituting a definite ordering principle between the parties, putting them into a kind of parity so that they were effectively coequals in respect of the community being generated, rather than under a familial hierarchy. (At least, the Greeks seemed to have had something like this in mind in producing the concept of a "polity".)
Typically, a people having common language, religion, descent, and history was some kind of a natural community before they became a political community by explicit intention in forming a government. You wouldn't hope to form a government out of disparate people having NOTHING already in common who merely decide to work together.
If anything, I'd say the state has traditionally held the authority to define the community,
Certainly - in the manner of declaratory law, by which the government sets forth what has always been understood to be so (i.e. by custom), often to clarify boundary cases that custom hasn't been able to clearly settle, generating disputes. The 14th Amendment is such a form of declaratory law, but it relied on a prior base concept "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", (and, only came after 80 years of the polity operating without such law).
and there are plenty of historical examples of how governments have been able to establish their own legitimacy by choosing and cultivating either an elite
I think, if you reflect on this a bit more, you may notice an assumption you're relying on: when that government was FIRST organized through the actions of some "elites", there must have been already some mechanism / ordering standard by which those elites were recognized as elites in the community and therefore whose proposals merited special attention and consideration.
The formation of a bona fide polity with an explicit government is a multi-phase process, and one necessary pre-condition is a people with sufficiency of common standards (usually through common language, customs, descent, history) to recognize some versions of "leaders". People with no language and history in common won't even be able to discuss forming a political unity without some common standards of rightness, success, common good. The government's later action to declare its constitutive members is necessarily an ex post facto recognition of certain pre-existing real conditions, not a creation ex nihilo.
I think that Terilien's comment was essentially right, in that there are phases by which some kind of an already sort-of-united people with at least some things in common become a MORE united people in a polity: you don't see a government form full-fledged out of 50,000 (much less 50M) people who haven't anything at all yet bonding, them to make union as a polity, the final push to a formal government is more a finishing touch on what already binds them as some lesser form of community.
What about the crude and simple alternative theory that governmental authority is transmitted to those who have the power to effectuate it?
ReplyDeleteIf Simon's analogy of the coach driver is accurate to liberalism- then American government is not liberal.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Federalist 10 and other founding documents, representatives were to "refine and enlarge the public views," to deliberate about the common good. They were not simply to be follow the coach passengers' (i.e. their constituents') exact demands.
This is starkly clear if you read Schumpeter "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy." Schumpeter rejects American government because it assumes ideas about the common good, while a true liberal regime eschews ideas of the common good.
I believe this is quite correct: the Founders clearly did not believe the representatives in Congress were there to merely transmit the majority sentiment of their constituents, they were supposed to exercise prudence, discretion, and judgment of their own. And still less were the president and judiciary merely to act as transmitting the will of the majority of the people under them: the judiciary, in particular, was meant to sometimes be a bulwark against oppression by the majority on a minority.
DeleteI didn't know that Schumpeter attacked this aspect of American government.
Here is what I had in mind from Schumpeter, Tony:
Delete"The eigteenth century philosophy of democracy may be couched in the following definition: the democratic method is that which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will. Let us develop the implications of this.
It is held, then, that there exists a Common Good, the obvious beacon of light of policy, which is always simple to define and which every normal person can be made to see by means of rational argument. There is hence no excuse for the presence of people who do not see it except ignorance- which can be removed- stupidity and anti-social interest. Moreover, this common good implies definite answers to all questions so that every social fact and every measure taken can be unequivocally be classed as "good" or "bad" (p250)...
...There is, first, no such thing as a uniquely determined common good that all people could agree on or be made to agree on by the force of rational argument. This is not due primarily to the fact some people may want things other than the common good but to the much more fundamental fact that to different individuals and groups the common good is bound to mean different things" (p251).
...
Thanks, CJ.
DeleteIt is held, then, that there exists a Common Good, the obvious beacon of light of policy, which is always simple to define and which every normal person can be made to see by means of rational argument.
It's interesting how Schumpeter creates a straw man to then knock down. It is clearly erroneous to say that the (18th century) idea of democracy implies this, certainly the Founders didn't say such a thing. They obviously had enough experience governing in democratic governments to be able to see holes in the notion that the common good is "simple to define", and vast experience of disagreement between HIGHLY respected parties of known intelligence, good will, and information.
Nevertheless, the fact that not all people will ever agree on a definition of common good, nor agree on appropriate means to achieve it, doesn't logically imply that there cannot BE a common good regardless of their disagreement. There were germs even though in the 1800s many people disagreed about this new theory. I am positive that at the end of time all people in heaven will agree on the definition of the common good and how it is achieved.
He has correctly identified 3 of the main reasons why people fail to agree on how to achieve it, but 2 more - which he doesn't mention - are just as important. First, different life experience has given to each person different scales of measurement to use to weigh on matters of prudence, and therefore each person will weigh differently according as his own experience affects his judgment. And second, each person will have different personal preferences which define - for him - his own personal good, which means that how he fits in with the common good is relative to individual matters of which he is the principal decider. Which means that even while there is some common good which is indeed common to all, its achievement in practical reality depends ALSO on individuals and their own conditions, and thus requires input from individuals speaking for their own (distinct) needs and aspirations, some of which may be met by good measures to account for them, while others cannot be met because of other conflicting needs that are more urgent or more important.
TO EXE
ReplyDeleteThank you EXE for your many recent contributions to this combox, which generally take a different tack to or act in opposition to the mainstream combox position. This has enlivened the discussion and greatly enlarged the range of points discussed.
Please continue posting, despite the occasional hostility from others, and remember that vastly more people will read what you have to say than post here.I do not always agree with your positions -though I often do - but they make the discussion far more interesting and enlarge the range of perspectives discussed. So please do not jump ship and leave the combox out of frustration or whatever, as I believe that you once did before!
This...actually rather touches my heart. Thank you. This makes all the effort I spend here feel validated. Truth be told, I was wondering whether it was worthwhile to bother anymore. I admit that I can sometimes come off as rather an ass. Sometimes that's intentional, but usually only if I genuinely believe that the other person has absolutely nothing of value to say (IE, they're deliberately just contradicting me at every turn for purely partisan reasons, or they're deliberately misrepresenting my claims, or they're being racist, etc). I understand that my beliefs are likely never going to agree with the majority of people here, and that's fine, so long as any amount of genuine conversation is happening. I'd be happy if any kind of meaningful interaction beyond angrily snapping at each other were possible. We're in very dark times right now, especially as regards the most vulnerable of us (trans folk, queer folk more generally, neurodivergent/autistic people, ethnic and religious minorities, heck, you could make a case for the poor in general). I know I'm not gonna change the world by arguing on a random blog, but maybe I can change a few minds. Besides, it helps me to psychologically "get over" the fact that I used to think very similarly to the consensus on this place.
DeleteIt doesn't matter one way or another.
ReplyDeleteThis position seems to be condemned by Pius X and Leo XIII:
ReplyDelete"The Sillon places public authority primarily in the people, from whom it then flows into the government in such a manner, however, that it continues to reside in the people. But Leo XIII absolutely condemned this doctrine in his Encyclical 'Diuturnum Illud' on political government in which he said: 'Modern writers in great numbers, following in the footsteps of those who called themselves philosophers in the last century, declare that all power comes from the people; consequently those who exercise power in society do not exercise it from their own authority, but from an authority delegated to them by the people and on the condition that it can be revoked by the will of the people from whom they hold it. Quite contrary is the sentiment of Catholics who hold that the right of government derives from God as its natural and necessary principle.' Admittedly, the Sillon holds that authority – which first places in the people – descends from God, but in such a way: “as to return from below upwards, whilst in the organization of the Church power descends from above downwards.' But besides its being abnormal for the delegation of power to ascend, since it is in its nature to descend, Leo XIII refuted in advance this attempt to reconcile Catholic Doctrine with the error of philosophism. For, he continues: 'It is necessary to remark here that those who preside over the government of public affairs may indeed, in certain cases, be chosen by the will and judgment of the multitude without repugnance or opposition to Catholic doctrine. But whilst this choice marks out the ruler, it does not confer upon him the authority to govern; it does not delegate the power, it designates the person who will be invested with it.'" Notre Charge Apostolique (1910). That last statement from Leo XIII is very clear "whilst this choice marks out the ruler, it does not confer upon him the authority to govern; it does not delegate the power, it designates the person who will be invested with it". In virtue of the public law in a mixed or democratic polity the people derive directly from God the power to designate the rulers but once they have designated them the rulers derive the authority to rule (for whatever term is specified by the laws) directly from God.
Suarez doesn't envisage the transmission of power from people to ruler as a delegation, but as an alienation of power; once accomplished ( in a monarchy, this can be implicitly, through the political conventions of each society, or explicitly, in the constituting of political societies or in extraordinary ways at moments of crisis), political power resides in the government. Suarez had developed the point of view already present in Aquinian thought. Saint Thomas wrote of the prince as the "vicar" of the people, as "standing in their place". Both Aquinas and Suarez, when considering legitimate resistance, envisaged representative chunks of society taking charge against tyrants, or governments that seriously transgressed natural law. These considerations did not depend on leadership by the dynastic next in line. Suarez argues that "the people" is a society corporatively-viewed, not a mass of sovereign individuals. Bellarmine had similar views on these issues.
ReplyDeletePope Saint Pius X did not wish to condemn this long-term scholastic thought. He was motivated instead by the serious errors in the ideas and approach of the Sillon, whose line on democracy was not Scholastic but was based on a shallow compromise with liberal, Enlightenment philosophy. Cardinal Billot, who assisted Pius X in the battle against modernism, explicitly endorsed the scholastic theory of transmission. As Leo XIII explained several times, civil societies, unlike the Church, are not divinely-chartered, but are inherent in nature, which has the means the found and renew them.