The Pity Party (5 page)

The rectitude that would make modernity sustainable has, historically, been part and parcel of the kind of civilization modernity seeks to replace, one united by a shared understanding of the cosmos and man's place and duties in it. Modernity guarantees freedom of religion and conscience, but in doing so privatizes religion, reducing it to the status of a pastime, shared by those who happen to enjoy it. However important faith may be to any individual, it is
not
the sea all moderns swim in, and neither is any other pastime, leaving us with limited affections for our fellow citizens.

Moreover, religion's power to encourage morality is inseparable from its ability to impart dignity and meaning to the lives of the faithful. By discarding and not replacing the world's former moral and teleological unity, we have created a modern way of life that, for all its proliferating comforts and possibilities, leaves many feeling empty and disappointed. And because of its limited ability to inspire awe and reverence, it has a limited ability to inspire the sense of duty and propriety that makes social contracts enforceable. We rejected Christendom for modernity because traumas like the Thirty Years' War were intolerable. But the passions and aspirations that caused such wars were expressions of the same ones that built cathedrals like Chartres. The taming of those human qualities turns such works from efforts to ennoble human existence by forging a connection to the sublime and transcendent into big, pretty tourist sites. As Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, the “end of history,” the final and complete triumph of modernity, “will be a very sad time.”

The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.
¹⁵

Harold Macmillan said in 1963 that what gave him the most satisfaction when he looked back on his long career in British politics was the sight of “a line of family cars, filled with fathers, mothers, children, uncles, aunts, all making their way to the seaside.”

Ten years ago most of them would not have had cars, would have spent their weekends in the back streets, and would have seen the seaside, if at all, once a year. Now—now—I look forward to the time, not far away, when those cars will be a little larger, a little more comfortable, and all of them will be carrying on their roofs boats that they may enjoy at the seaside.

Macmillan dismissed the idea that loftier pursuits were of any concern to the politician: “If people want a sense of purpose they can get it from their archbishops.”
¹⁶
By 1963, of course, the moral authority of those archbishops was already greatly reduced from what it had been during Macmillan's youth in Edwardian England, and it is much weaker today than it was half a century ago.

One modern remedy for the diseases most incident to modernity is totalitarianism, which sought to give people an encompassing sense of purpose once more by tearing up the social contract about agreeing to disagree. Totalitarianism was a modern answer by virtue of being completely secular, a theocracy without a theology. Its moral and teleological unity was, instead, based on such temporal concerns as the class struggle or the prerogatives of the master race. As George Orwell wrote in March 1940, Adolf Hitler had “grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life.”

All “progressive” thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings
don't
only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.
¹⁷

Orwell, writing here just weeks before German troops invaded France, can be forgiven for not realizing that people would temper their taste for self-sacrifice and loyalty parades once it became clear they were part of a package deal that included concentration camps and mass slaughter.

One must be bitterly cynical about humans' inability to learn from experience to think that the memories of twentieth-century totalitarianism will fade so quickly that any such ideology will be tried out again soon. Totalitarian brutality did make something brutally clear, however: You want a moral and teleological unity in an age of tepid religious faith?
This
is what it looks like. You despair over a civilization whose proudest achievement is a line of family cars making their way to the seaside? We've got something
much
more exciting.

Totalitarianism revealed, in other words, that people can't have it both ways. They have to choose. Its hideousness vindicated the social contract minimalists, who also believe we can't have it both ways, and it's better to tolerate triviality and inanity than risk the terrors of fashioning something more robust. This is the classical liberal position, more popular on the Right than the Left in our time. It tells us to agree to disagree on a great many questions, because all we really need to agree on are the terms for living together without interfering in one another's lives.

Furthermore, the adherents of this position hold out the hope that people will be moral enough to uphold the social contract if it is rightly devised. The right kind of contract could provide unprecedented levels of peace and prosperity, benefits so remarkable as to dispel any nostalgia for premodern moral unity. Better still, moral flexibility might not be ruinous if we devise a civic architecture dependent on people's most common qualities, as opposed to their most admirable ones. “This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public,” Madison argued in Federalist No. 51. In private affairs, arranging for ambition to counteract ambition would conduce to prosperity, as the emerging discipline of political economy was arguing. In public affairs it would give mankind a better chance than ever before to overcome
the
great political difficulty: to “first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Seven years after Madison wrote those words, Immanuel Kant, in
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch
, endorsed the same idea in similar but more expansive terms. Devising a successful republican constitution is “only a question of a good organization of the state . . . whereby the powers of each selfish inclination are so arranged in opposition that one moderates or destroys the ruinous effect of the other.” In a state so organized, “man is forced to be a good citizen even if not a morally good person.” Kant went on to express, in terms impossible to surpass, his confidence in the power of the right kind of constitutional order to solve political problems, “The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.”

Madison was more guarded. In Federalist No. 55, after taking up and attempting to refute hypothetical questions about how the Constitution's checks and balances might prove too weak to prevent this or that abuse, Madison finally throws up his hands. Yes, the “auxiliary precautions” that make ambition counteract ambition will help sustain a republic. But, no, a nation of devils will not form a successful republic, no matter how intelligent they are or how well their state is organized. “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust,” Madison wrote, “so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

This stance sounds more realistic than expecting domestic tranquility from a race of devils, but brings back the problem of sustaining modernity. If republican government, more than any other form, rests on the estimable and reassuring qualities in human nature, what, in turn, do those qualities rest on? This appears to be a formulation for relying on the moral residue of classical and Christian civilization. The whole point of the modern break with the European past, however, is to circumscribe that heritage. In this light, modernity begins to look like an enterprise that constantly draws down moral and civilizational inventories it does not replenish. That approach can work for as long as the inventories last, but not longer.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in
Democracy in America
that the Americans he had observed during his travels in the United States in 1830 had come up with the most promising, or least unpromising, solution to this modern problem, “the doctrine of self-interest well understood.” Tocqueville thought the formula of making ambition counteract ambition had penetrated the democratic soul by turning “personal interest against itself,” directing the passions by appealing to them. This is the logic of what we would call “deferred gratification,” manifested in entreaties to kids to stay in school, or just say no to drugs, in order to get a good job and live in a nice house someday, rather than subsist poorly and precariously. Deferring is important, in other words, but gratification's status as the ultimate prize is not questioned.

The doctrine of self-interest well understood accepts that people who believe honesty is the best policy are probably not as reliably or deeply honest as those who believe lying is a mortal sin. The first formulation implies that if, at least sometimes,
dis
honesty turns out to be the best policy, then dishonesty is acceptable. But as long as honesty really is the best policy—the smart bet—people who think this way are likely to be honest enough.

Understanding the doctrine of self-interest well understood is itself a challenge, however. It could be interpreted as self-interest shrewdly understood, as it would be when evinced by those who take the long view and weigh their risks carefully. The doctrine of self-interest well understood “forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves. . . .”
¹⁸
Tocqueville's admiration for Americans' civic engagement and commitment to many kinds of associations also suggests something higher, however, such as self-interest decently or honorably understood. The self-interested person, that is, knows that the self he is interested in will necessarily live among many other selves, forming communities and a nation. Being concerned for their well-being out of a prudent regard for his own well-being makes sense. What self-interest well understood does not encompass, however, is anything like self-interest heroically or nobly understood.

We may, then, treat self-interest, well understood and operating in a well-structured social contract, as the second modern remedy, after totalitarianism, to the diseases incident to modernity. Compassion is the third, one put forward as a remedy for both modernity's diseases and for the defects of totalitarianism and self-interest.

The first thing to notice about liberal compassion is that its lack of a theory is not accidental. Elaborating a philosophy of compassion is not an assignment adherents of the politics of kindness haven't gotten around to completing. Rather, what draws them to compassion is that it works just fine—better, really—without being theorized. Rousseau, the philosopher who devoted the most attention to compassion, argued in his
Discourse on Inequality
that compassion's best aspect was precisely that it came naturally to those who did not let their reasoning get in its way:

Nothing but such general evils as threaten the whole community can disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher, or tear him from his bed. A murder may with impunity be committed under his window; he has only to put his hands to his ears and argue a little with himself, to prevent nature, which is shocked within him, from identifying itself with the unfortunate sufferer.

No one, that is, has ever found it necessary to develop a doctrine of compassion well understood. Indeed, it is so elemental that even animals are moved by others' sufferings:

[I]t is well known that horses show a reluctance to trample on living bodies. One animal never passes by the dead body of another of its species: there are even some which give their fellows a sort of burial; while the mournful lowings of the cattle when they enter the slaughter-house show the impressions made on them by the horrible spectacle which meets them.

It follows that those who embrace compassion as the solution to the problem of modernity—and the political problem in general of getting people to live together peaceably—think the problem less daunting than has been supposed. The nature human beings share with other sensate creatures would let us, or at least greatly help us, get along with one another if only we would heed it.

The bigger problem, in this view, is not modernity or even politics itself, but the remedies put forward for them. So, for example, the liberal commitment to compassion entails the belief that a heavy reliance on self-interest, however well or poorly understood, is less a solution to a problem than a solution in search of a problem, and even a solution that causes a problem. Unlike Marxists, who reject capitalism as an economic system, modern liberals reject it most emphatically as a belief system. In particular, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the leftmost boundary of the liberal economic policy agenda has shifted rightward.