Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑April 3rd, 2022, 4:47 pm
I think that rather than looking at that issue of estrangement, Stawrowski is looking more at "the moral assessment of the political order." For him the political order is not the government as opposed to the ordinary citizens (as estrangement presupposes), but rather the entire political order and polity, which includes government and ordinary citizens. For example, he says:
"The moral dimension of democracy is to be found, above all, in its axiological foundation—the values on which it rests and which are expressed through specific institutions of the democratic political order."
So the moral dimension of a liberal democracy is something that permeates the political order through and through, including the values and institutions that are not specifically governmental.
I'm thinking that the distinction between the state and the nation is fundamental to political philosophy. So I've stumbled at the first fence by taking what Stawrowski wrote about the culture of a nation and reading it as being about the state.
Maybe it would be easiest to say that Stawrowski is looking at all of these various things insofar as they are connected. At the beginning of the excerpt he says, "
Does an essential connection exist between the moral erosion in contemporary societies of the West and their democratic constitutional forms?" One of the underlying presuppositions is that cultural realities and governmental forms are mutually interdependent, rather than the idea that they are mutually opposed. In some sense he is undertaking a genealogical approach to political philosophy, and a large part of what he is doing is identifying historical trends of political philosophy descriptively. He does have a critique, but it is not a critique of a bad governmental form that oppresses citizens. The target of the critique is rather the entirety of the modern democratic society, including the governmental form, the values, and the institutions, but especially the "axiological foundation."
Of course, the excerpt from Stawrowski is very complex and nuanced, so it's perfectly possible that you are seeing things that I am missing.
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pmBut I struggle with some of these concepts. When we talk about the institutions of British culture, do we mean the BBC ? The House of Lords ? The Church of England ? Or is an institution something less organisationally tangible - cricket, queuing, garden sheds ?
My guess is that Stawrowski would see the first three as institutions and the latter three as something like values, but yes, all of those things are at play. For example queuing and the underlying principle of, "First come, first served," might be a practical example of a democratic-egalitarian practice. The more egalitarian a society is, the less they would countenance attempts to cut in line on the basis of status.
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pmIt made sense to me that a cohesive society, strongly bound together by a shared culture, would have a government dedicated to promoting that culture abroad, and defending it against threats from within. (I cannot help feeling that there is something vaguely admirable about this. Even if it's not any of the classical virtues).
Whereas a divided society has more energy invested in the subcultures that distinguish different groups of citizens from each other than in what they have in common. And in such a society, government becomes a tool for each group to try to impose its ideas on the others.
But maybe that's not what Stawrowski was writing about at all.
I think this is related to what he is saying. For example, a society that values the Hegelian 'moral' above everything else will be a very litigious and individualistic society with little group cohesion.
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑April 3rd, 2022, 4:47 pmI think there is a continuum in concrete states between the authentically distinct poles that Stawrowski identifies. I think you correctly identified the first pole as a polity which has a thick or somewhat thick ethical life, and also fosters this ethical life... ...The second pole isn't really a state that is necessarily evil, or totalitarian, or power hungry.
Agreed. It's not that the modern democratic state sets out to oppress. It's that the state lacks a view of its own proper role and purpose, instead putting its strength and capacity for violence at the service of whichever coalition of subcultures can muster the most votes (under whatever voting system pertains, which isn't necessarily a simple nationwide total).
Yes, in some ways, but it seems like you are conceiving of the pre-modern state as something which has a self-conscious role and purpose, whereas the modern state does not. That may even be true in some ways, but I would want to be careful not to define the modern state in an entirely negative way (where "negative" means "what the state is not, or what it lacks"). I would want to try to identify the self-conscious role and purpose that the modern state has, if there is one. Stawrowski seems to think that the preeminent value of the modern democratic state is Kantian moral autonomy, and that this positive value explains much of what has happened.
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑April 3rd, 2022, 4:47 pm
"The road to a democratic state of law opened only when the idea of freedom of an outlook on life, in other words, the moral autonomy of man, had moved aside the idea of religious freedom and, in its place, began to play the role of the axiological foundation of the ethical state of minimum. It was, after all, the first modern political thinkers who were responsible for this—most notably, the above-mentioned Hobbes, who in creating the theoretical foundations of the new model of the state, took as a starting point not the existence and conflict of different ethical communities, but the rivalry of egocentric, autonomous individuals. The replacement in philosophical argumentation of the concept of religious freedom by the idea of autonomy deprived it of an important point of reference to everything that conditions the individual and that transgresses it. As a consequence, the perspective of the political community embracing diverse religious and ethical communities was almost unnoticeably replaced by the vision of the state as an association of morally autonomous entities—abstract isolated individuals, torn from their natural communities and thus deprived of their ethical roots and context. In precisely such a vision—the vision of a state, whose only value is moral autonomy of the individual and whose only care is to ensure that all citizens can develop safely and freely—this model has today become an almost universally accepted."
Where's the big difference between freedom of religious dissent and freedom to dissent from every other custom or belief of the majority culture ? Is it just dissent as an individual being contrasted with being part of a dissenting minority culture ? Or is he an atheist contrasting religious dissent with dissent about things that matter ?
Yeah, that's a good question. Since you phrased it in terms of dissent, the first thing I would say is that the difference is freedom of
religion vs.
dissent of individuals. When it was first enacted freedom of religion didn't primarily mean that you could dissent from some religion. More properly, it meant that you could belong to a different religion. A strong supposition still existed that everyone would be religious. In that way it strikes me more as a freedom to organize into cultural groups rather than a specific freedom to dissent. If you do a word search on "atheist" in the article it will take you to a paragraph where John Locke argues for a refusal to tolerate "atheists" (those who are mere ethical dissenters). That paragraph is very much on point.
The second point is one that you've already identified: the difference between recognizing the autonomy of ethical sub-cultures and groups and recognizing the autonomy of individuals. The former continues to promote strong ethical values in a way that the latter does not.
The third thing I would say is that a religion is the paradigmatic ethical-cultural community, and in the past it was often difficult to distinguish cultures from religions. So "freedom of religion" naturally occurred first historically, and since religion is the paradigmatic ethical-cultural unit, this eventually winds up being synonymous with freedom of ethical-cultural ...
cult (not sure what word to use). So I think the freedom to belong to alternative cultural identities is essentially the same as freedom of religion, although I wouldn't phrase it as "freedom to dissent from every other custom or belief of the majority culture," for that has much more to do with individual moral autonomy than any form of ethical incorporation.
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑April 3rd, 2022, 4:47 pmMuslims in England who find the justice system oppressive because it isn't Sharia Law ought to be "oppressed." There is nothing wrong with their "oppression."
I don't disagree. But are you saying this as a democrat who believes that their demand becomes legitimate as soon as they number 50%+1 in any given locality ? Or as a secularist who believes that convictions that are rooted in religious belief should never be imposed ? Or are you suggesting that Sharia should not be adopted in England because it isn't English ? That the British state should promote British culture ? That tradition offers a source of legitimacy that doesn't depend on voting ?
I would affirm those last three stances. It should not be adopted in England because it isn't English. There are other reasons, too, but that is the one I was intending with my statement.
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑April 3rd, 2022, 4:47 pm
The second thing I would say is that
any axiological ordering--even that of the modern liberal democratic state--is going to be oppressive to some people. There is no such thing as a neutral or non-oppressive polity. And this goes beyond Stawrowski's article, but I would say that even the axiological foundation of the ethical state of minimum (the modern democratic state) brings with it its own unique ethical convictions. There are not some states that are conviction states and others that aren't, there are just states with different convictions (Adrian Vermeule is good on this). For example, the U.S. has strong convictions regarding freedom of speech, and those who find freedom of speech oppressive would feel oppressed in the U.S.
Doesn't that undermine the whole notion, the whole distinction between thick-ethos government and minimum-ethos government ? Is that not an argument for looking at any minimum-ethos government and describing it as just a different type of ethos or conviction ?
Yeah, maybe, haha.
That was a bit of a tangent on my part, but I tend to think that Stawrowski and Vermeule could be fit together with some effort. The first thing to ask is whether a country full of individualists who value moral autonomy constitutes, by that very fact, an ethical community. It is difficult to say, but at the very least we would say that the community bound together by a shared belief in negative, individual rights is not an ethical community in the traditional sense. I would also say that it is undeniably a community that is bound up with
convictions, even if we don't want to call it an ethical community. What do you think?
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pmI don't see the US as a minimum-ethos polity, by the way. I think the US stands for a set of values more than most nations do. But less than it used to.
When the US President transparently acts in the world in a particular way because it will prove popular with voters in Kansas, rather than as an assertion of the values that America used to stand for, then we see Shawrowski's thesis in action. Democracy undermining values.
(No offense to Kansas. It just seems to be a place that is geographically further from the world outside America and thus psychologically less interested in understanding the world outside America than some of the coastal states).
Haha - fair enough. But then what would you take as an example of a state of minimum conviction? I wonder if such an idea is analogous to the common incredulity elicited when someone is accused of having an accent. Everyone has idiosyncratic convictions just as everyone has idiosyncratic accents, we just don't tend to notice them.
Good_Egg wrote: ↑April 6th, 2022, 6:36 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑April 3rd, 2022, 4:47 pm
"The connection between the idea of moral autonomy and the demand for democratic governments seems obvious. The idea of autonomy contains, above all, a factor of sovereign power: my power above myself and above everything that concerns me. If there exists an area in which I have no influence and which represents the limits of my rule, then my freedom and my human nature have not yet been fully realized. As an autonomous being I am lord of myself and I decide about myself, therefore, I have to decide not only about my private affairs, but also about all affairs which are connected with me in one way or another—including matters which are subject to the activities of state power. From this perspective, the demand for participation in power appears to be an outright moral imperative of every individual—and the introduction of democratic political institutions its obvious consequence.
Libertarianism seeks to maximize autonomy by keeping the private sphere large and the sphere of state control small. Democracy offers the individual a tiny sliver of power to control the state. And thus the temptation to exert power through the state, to expand the minimally-controlled-by-self sphere of the state at the expense of the not-controlled-by-self-ar-all spheres of other people's private lives.
The more you talk up that sliver, pretending that democracy satisfies the desire for autonomy, the less liberal the democracy becomes.
Perhaps, but is there some alternative political form that can accommodate autonomy? If individual autonomy is the value, then it seems that democracy must be the political form. I think that is what Stawrowski is saying: our predilection for moral autonomy demands democracy.
In response to your contention I would say that those who leverage democracy to transgress the autonomy of others are not motivated by the consideration of autonomy, but rather by some other consideration. Granted, it could happen that an emphasis on autonomy destroys a democracy, but this would seem to happen because the social cohesion is undermined, or else because citizens are acting selfishly in the name of autonomy, in which case the culprit is no longer
bone fide autonomy.