A Friend’s Comments on “The Person as Political Starting Point”, and my Responses

Taylor Somers
Aug 8, 2017 · 7 min read

I really want to keep up writing regularly, every other day at least. In an effort to keep it going, and since there’s less than an hour left in the day, I’m going to transmit a conversation I had with a friend — it was a private conversation via Facebook Messenger, so I’ll identify him/her only if he/she requests — who gave me some great feedback on the first bit I wrote on Medium. The conversation is edited minimally to make for easier reading and following along, and I found it very helpful to clarify some of my thinking.

Friend: “The question that I’m left with is this: What do politics have to do with the cultivation of the person? Isn’t the ideal liberal society one in which questions of solidarity and life purposes are left to people to figure out? If the state weighs in, how can it not do so oppressively? Saying that we should be involved in the creation of shared narratives that bind us together sounds, to me, like the sort of society envisioned by the ancients, Rousseau, and Marx, who had totally different ideas about what ‘freedom’ means than us today.”

Me: “I’m envisioning this as a way for me to sort out what I think more than anything, so anything I write in this regard should definitely be taken as more of a working hypothesis than a definitive statement. But my response to the first thing (what does the political have to do with the cultivation of the person) would be something like Aristotle’s, probably: That is, the ultimate purpose of the polis is human flourishing. Human flourishing can only take place in community with others, so it is inherently political, since we exist in common physical space, but also common ecological and cultural space, and so must have methods of regulating our actions and those of others within these commons, which is a political enterprise.”

“And like you say, the liberal society does leave as many questions of personal development and solidarity to the individual as possible. It tries to minimize any areas of ‘overlap’ so to speak, or to put it another way it maximizes the sphere of the private. There definitely is a sphere that is and should be private, and there need to be constitutional constraints on the actions of the political sphere, but I think we may have taken it too far. A situation of unbounded autonomy along the lines of what liberalism proposes is something that I think few people would actually choose from behind a Rawlsian veil.”

“For instance, I think of urban design and urban planning. It’s not liberal. Liberalism would be just letting everyone do what they want with their land and whatever happens happens as far as the aesthetics and utility of the city.”

“There are plenty of cities that are basically like that, but those aren’t the ones that there is high demand to live in. Most people want to live in relatively tightly planned cities, with variations on a theme as far as architectural styles and specific designs for walkability, density, etc.”

“But I would say the process of planning and design definitely needs to be democratic and participatory, so that everyone has an equal say, and also that we shouldn’t be neutral as to whether people participate. There should be as few barriers as possible, and possible some form of encouragement.”

Friend: “I agree with the principle that some coordinated action that obviously makes life better for almost everyone should be embraced even when it limits the totally free individual movement, but the question is always how far we should go with those limitations. I guess my concern with giving the gov the power to infringe on the private sphere is that I don’t trust the government to do the right thing. First, there’s never going to be perfect representation — some populations will be over-represented and some underrepresented. Second and more importantly, from the perspective of an individual, why would I give a whole lot of people who I don’t know the power to change the rules by which I live my life, when I don’t have to? When I can just resort to the liberalism argument? That way, I won’t be able to change policy meaningfully, but neither will policy changes that I don’t agree with be able to fuck me over.”

Me: “I have the same concern largely, and maybe something that comes out of that is the degree of overlap and political power should be proportional to the level of government. If these kinds of decisions that we want to make collectively and democratically are made by people who have to look us in the eye because we see them every day, we’re more likely to tread carefully and take one another’s perspective into account. The higher and broader the level of government, the more liberalism might make sense, in a lot of ways. This was an idea held by a lot of ancients and ancient-style political thinkers, who often had ideas on the maximal size of an effective polis.”

“Another way I’ve thought about it lately as well: Highly individuated, alienated societies may be, ceteris paribus, more susceptible to tyranny than classically republican communities with lots of overlap and public space. Less social solidarity, the result of having fewer things in common and a relatively maximal private sphere, I suspect makes people vulnerable to “law and order” appeals by politicians, for instance. But that’s just speculation on my part. And to your point about imperfect representation, certainly that’s something that will always be with us, but if we presume in favor of participation and try to encourage it and remove barriers to it, ideally we would be able to promote a culture of participation in decision-making and thereby inoculate ourselves against the potentially tyrannical danger of technocracy, where we all just do whatever we do in our private sphere and leave politics to the professionals because the commons is distant from our everyday lives rather than something we encounter regularly.”

Friend: “For me, it follows that a system specifically designed to amplify the private sphere will produce a citizenry that isn’t politically or civically sophisticated — they just haven’t thought much about communal rules and expectations and so aren’t good at or interested in policy debates, which makes tyranny easier and government in general more crude. That’s a good point.”

“I share your fear of technocrats, but am also unsure of how a more open democratic system would pan out, especially in such an enormous country.”

Me: “It may well be that the best level for this kind of engagement could be something like a city or a Swiss canton.”

Friend: “Exactly, shrinking the sphere makes sense to me, but I don’t see how it’ll work, given the importance of size in international relations.”

Me: “It’s got to be some kind of federal structure.”

“Here’s the other issue I have with liberalism and keeping the sphere of the private as expansive as possible: I think it may amplify private power that gravitates toward wealth”

“The bigger the realm of the private and the less participation of the general citizenry in politics, the more power the wealthy have because they have more leisure to pursue politics and more material resources at their disposal. It opens the door to an expansion of public power in the wrong way, that is, at the service of a relatively small group of wealthy people.”

Friend: “Totally, which winds up translating into political power. I think that it’s a big mistake to equate liberalism the political philosophy with liberalism the moral theory. The desire to keep the state out of our private lives isn’t the same as saying, ‘Fuck my neighbor; every man for himself.’”

Me: “That’s true, these are definitely very different impulses. I think the big question is whether one tends to produce the other. That is, does the pursuit of a maximal private sphere produce a tendency toward that kind of moral liberalism or egoism?”

Friend: “Yeah, and even if it doesn’t, can we really rely on people to coordinate to solve social ills? In that sense, the value of the government is really that it allows us to overcome the collective action problem.”

Me: “Ultimately, the difference between what I’m thinking of and liberalism may come down to this: Liberalism is always going to say, ‘The burden of proof is on you to tell me why this should be a collective decision rather than a private one; we need to presume in favor of the private.’”

“A collectivist of some kind might have that position but reversed, and say the burden of proof is on the liberal to show why a decision should be private rather than public.”

“I’m just an Aristotelian on the question. I guess I wouldn’t presume one or the other, or place the burden of proof on either side; I want to say I’m open to drawing the line between public and private anywhere, based on certain criteria. And it’s a key question to determine what those criteria should be.”

Friend: “I’m there with you. You just did a great job of framing the question, but its an intimidating one to try and answer. For example, movements that try to use the state to realize inter-generational justice (reparations, extended) make me appreciate liberalism’s emphasis on the individual as the most sacred unit and limited government. If the state is captured by people who aren’t friendly to your group, liberalism seems like a good idea.”

Me: “I definitely agree there, and that’s why you kind of have to address it on multiple fronts. The alternative to liberalism I’m talking about probably also requires strong separation of powers as well as a fairly robust federalism in order to avoid the kinds of things we want to avoid with masses of people voting their group interests and whatnot.”

Taylor Somers

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Orthodox in religion, heterodox in everything else.