09 March 2019

Is political tolerance a virtue? Is polarisation an evil?


Let it not be thought, however, that I affirm that it is necessary to prize every peace. For I know that there is splendid disagreement and the most destructive unanimity. Yet one must love a good peace which has a good purpose: unity with God.
This may be a rather dangerous piece to write at the beginning of Lent and in advance of Forgiveness Sunday, but I don’t think that danger can be avoided. Over the past couple of days, The Atlantic has been making hay out of a political study that they themselves commissioned, to break down attitudes of political partizanship at the county level throughout America, including a profile of the ‘least politically-prejudiced place in America’. Personally, as a philosopher with an interest in politics, I am still not quite sure what to make of this study, its results, or the undergirding assumptions which seem to have prompted it in the first place and which continue to colour the perceptions of its findings.

In the main, one thing that troubles me about it is that it appears as part of a genre of media and ‘think-tank’ pieces that decry tribalism’ and ‘polarisation in terms that invariably punch harder one way than the other. The fact that Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a political extremist of the pro-corporate big-business Club for Growth liberal-right by any objective measure, can brand himself as the herald for this kind of political tolerance gives some indication of the utter sham it is. The other insidious thing about these studies, in my own view, is that they seem to hold up a purely-contextual standard and a mythos of ‘moderation’ that, on examination, has exactly zero connexion with the classical virtue of the same name. Being perceived as ‘moderate’ in American public discourse is cheap; by which I mean that it requires no independent thought, it requires only a modicum of political savoir-faire in place of actual knowledge of issues, and it certainly requires nothing by way of a moderate lifestyle which is easy on the natural environment and on the social fabric. (Put another way: moderation in the classical sense is achieved by ascetic discipline, not by adopting a centrist political outlook.)

At the same time, these pieces are – even if they are only doing so cynically – pointing toward some kind of real deficiency in our public life. The fact that Ben Sasse can find such a kind reception at NPR, even if it is only for purely self-interested and self-promoting reasons on both sides, does speak to a real human desire for a more person-scaled politics; and you can see this still more clearly in The Atlantic’s profile of Watertown. There is something deeply desirable about making and maintaining real connexions with real people who disagree with you, connexions which are notably promised but not well delivered on by online social media. There is something that strikes most of us, intuitively, as intrinsically wrong about applying ideological litmus tests to personal relationships. There’s something that instinctively appeals to us about that Jefferson quote. I think there’s something real in that moral intuition that deserves to be teased out; but – as you can probably tell from the foregoing paragraph – I do not hold that this moral intuition itself constitutes any kind of ‘higher good’.

There is something of an ‘ideal type’ that gets presented in these think-pieces, which can be informative as a starting-point. Look carefully at how Watertown is presented in The Atlantic, this ‘nine-square-mile town of 26,000’. It’s a close-knit small Northern town. It’s got active churches. It’s got ‘eyes on the street’, so kids can play safely outside on their own. It’s got ‘a daily, family-owned newspaper, a busy YMCA, and two different Rotary Clubs’. ‘Everybody’s kids go to the same schools and play sports and act in community theatre together.’ It also has a military base; something that connects it to the broader national project. People meet to discuss current affairs over breakfast groups. Democrats marry Republicans; pro-lifers and pro-choicers are lifelong friends. They ‘have relationships that go back generations, which is how things get done’. There’s something of the Yankee town-hall ideal in this portrait of Watertown that cannot be anything but deliberate, and it’s captured in this punch-line delivered by Dr David Fontana of George Washington University: ‘Politics—like many other things—works better when it is conducted among friends and neighbours, rather than among strangers.

This is a very tempting picture, not least because there is a great deal that’s right about it. Who doesn’t want some kind of harmony in interpersonal relations, that is mirrored by a harmony in politics? Who doesn’t want to have a body politic made up of friends and neighbours? (Solzhenitsyn was a fan of this model; take that as you will.) But Fontana’s Watertown-as-formula, which seems so common-sense as to be almost banal, deserves to be catechised. Does it in fact deliver what it promises to deliver? Should we want to be Watertown?

So, let’s start with the conditional. How do we determine who is, or is not, a ‘friend’ or a ‘neighbour’? Let’s turn to the Lysis, which is one of the ‘early’ Platonic dialogues which ends in an aporia and does not provide us with a ready answer of what defines friendship. Even though the Lysis leaves us with more questions than answers, we can already see some of the contours of what constitutes friendship and love from Socrates’s questioning of Lysis. On the one hand, real friendship cannot exist between two people who are already completely self-sufficient and virtuous. Friendship feeds on a certain desire for the whole, for the good, where it does not yet exist. And yet, in order for this desire to be there in the first place, some disposition for the good must already be in place even though the good itself is somehow lacking or deficient. It can be seen from the Lysis that friendship, indeed love of any sort, requires a certain level of difference, but it must be the kind of difference that mutually drives the two different persons toward the beautiful and the good. Lysis insists, under Socrates’s prodding, that true friendship cannot exist between the good and its opposite, evil. The conversation also seems to insist that a substantive shared understanding of the good is required for any true friendship, lasting or worthy of the name, to be present.

In the portrait of Watertown you can see hints of this common striving toward the good even between people who don’t agree – you can see it clearly in the human-scaled portraits of the people that are highlighted there. But notice what is missing from the general features of this genre of editorial and policy-writing: any insistence on the need for a shared conviction about the substance of the good. All that matters to them is the procedure emptied of content – but of course, a mere procedure devoid of content is already not Watertown. And here’s the even wilder thing: across the political spectrum, large majorities of Americans actually already do agree on what they say they want; they are just prevented from expressing those desires by the realities of the political system, which they are then told by the gatekeepers of centrist opinion that they are wrong or sick (or divisive or tribalist or partizan) for wanting to participate in! Most Americans right and left already agree that it would be good for the wealthy to pay more in taxes. Most Americans support Medicare for all defined as a single-payer healthcare system free of cost at the point of use. Most Americans believe it would be good for new mothers to stay at home on paid leave. Most Americans believe it would be good for Americans to be able to buy cheap generic pharmaceuticals from abroad. Most Americans think it’s a good idea to end our support for the Saudis in Yemen. These are all just, life-affirming goals which people of goodwill on the left and the right can support.

In these cases – probably not so much in others – these majorities of Americans actually do have a fairly clear idea about the form and content of the good; and they actually do agree on it. So, in one sense, I fully endorse the initial study in The Atlantic. It takes this much of a right tack: partizan stereotyping and secondary polarisation are undesirable because they prevent those of us who agree on these common-good goals from working together on these kinds of issues. But in a much broader sense, there’s more wrong with this study than there is right with it, because the Atlantic authors want us, as part of the moral of the story, to default to an indifferent centrism that is defined primarily by its lack of content with regard to substantive social goods. They (and other centre-to-centre-right authors in this genre, like Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Andrew Sullivan, Emily Ekins and Amanda Taub) are using the very real problem of dissatisfaction and anger with the political process, as a fig-leaf to cover other, more fundamental deficiencies in our body politic that have much more to do with environmental degradation, declining public health and distributional inequities in wealth, than they do with incivility or polarisation.

And those facets manage to peek in even in the portrait of Watertown. The recent government shutdown, for example, closed down the town zoo – to the chagrin of children and parents who live there. But instead of reflecting on what manner of dysfunction caused the shutdown, what its effects were on the local people, and what ultimately ended the shutdown (a concerted strike action by federal employees), the author instead takes refuge in a poetic metaphor that boils the whole thing down to an ‘intractable conflict’.

Again, do not take the foregoing as an argument for incivility. (There is a place for incivility, but that argument is a separate one.) Rather, this is an argument instead for a substantive politics based on working-class solidarity and true friendship across sectarian lines, which (because it is substantive, and because it is politics, and because it is working-class) we can expect will be attacked as uncivil, divisive, tribalist and so on in the press. We need to be fully cognisant of this going forward, both because the corporate media will encourage us to turn away people who mostly agree with us for the sake of dividing us, and because those same media outlets will turn around and blame us for the resulting division.

Instead, what we need to foster is some semblance of common agreement around a set of good purposes for a good accord as Saint Gregory the Theologian would have it. Though he was speaking specifically to theological agreements and disagreements, the same principle can apply to the ‘lower’ orders of agreement and disagreement as well, including politics – since we may affirm that certain political orders are more beneficial to human flourishing than others, on a definition of human flourishing that would include the spiritual goods after which the portrait of Watertown is so clumsily striving. We cannot allow the false, destructive facsimiles of unanimity and ‘tolerance’ emanating from the gatekeepers and beneficiaries of the current unjust right-neoliberal ordo to distract us from seeking the genuine truth that a just unanimity, on some level, is not only possible but halfway to being built already.

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