That is the basic outline, but a couple of sidebar notes on unsettled matters might be necessary. First, there are the "universalist" vs the "contingent" lines of thought. On the universalist side, there is the desire to find that which is "true" once and for all. There is a strong tendency in this direction, and it begins on the secular side with Plato and is reinforced on the sacred side within the thinking of most major theistic religions. Kant is clearly within this line of thinking, and the so-called "categorical imperative" I am vastly simplifying, but the categorical imperative is golden-rule rendered universal, as in act in such a way that one's actions should become the template for a "a universal law without contradiction." While Kant's argument is compelling in more ways than I can enumerate here, it's one of those things easier said than done. It is easy enough to articulate a "universal law," but to do so "without contradiction" proves to be extraordinarily difficult in the messy contingency of life as most live it. If one thinks of the legal code as an enactment of the moral imperative "thou shalt not kill," we have created any number of fine and arguable distinctions between murder and manslaughter to wrestle with the contradictions inherent within what at first blush seems a perfectly clear universal law. On the contingent side, there is the recognition that moral values are at best messy, at worst irreconcilable one to another. Most so-called post-modernist thinking falls off on the "contingent" side -- that is to say, the morality of a decision is contingent upon the circumstances within which it is being made. Here again, the analogy to language is formative. Just as a statement in a language is contingent for its meaning on the myriad of the syntactic and semantic relationships within the language, so too the morality of a decision is contingent for its force on the myriad of relationships within the culture. The moral "truth" of an action cannot be determined once and for all, but only here and now, an assertion that opens as well an historical dimension insofar as the "here and now" today is not the "here and now" of yesterday, nor will it be the "here and now" of tomorrow. It is a "whole" and must be considered as a "whole," but the "whole" of it is in constant flux.
Second, implicit in the above are the deeper questions about rationality itself, and might be labeled "science" vs "religion." There are many shades of thinking here, and I would not presume to capture them all, but most are, to one degree or another, what I would call "domain specific." As a broad commonsensical approach, for example, few would deny commonsensical rationality, the sorts of behavior we do (or don't do) engage because we desire (or fear) the consequences of our actions. Few of us believe that we can flap our arms and fly, and hence do not leap from tall buildings for fear of plummeting to the pavement below. To hold that belief, and to engage in that behavior, in short, is irrational. Likewise, we recognize the differences, for example, between the rational behavior of the average commuter who is worried about making his eight o'clock meeting and the schizophrenic who is ranting about the coming apocalypse on the street corner. Within the domain of the commonsensical, there are hundreds of background beliefs that we hold to be true (or true enough) to guide our everyday behavior. Here I want to say, the domain of the commonsensical roughly corresponds with the domain of the scientific -- that is to say, observable and verifiable truth about the world we inhabit -- and it forms the dominant form of thinking today. There is a universalist tendency within science, but again at the risk of over-simplification, it is a "contingent universalism." There is a search for universal laws of nature, but those "laws," once "discovered," can be (and often are) supplanted by finer and more encompassing distinctions. That search, as Kuhn and others have detailed, takes place on an historical scale, and while there might be an historical arch to how "discovery" takes place, the historical arch itself isn't predictive of future "discovery."
One difficulty, of course, is that science, as such, says nothing about morality. It can say a good deal about how we behave, and it can even say a good deal about why we behave in certain ways (and not in others) but science itself cannot make the transition from descriptive to prescriptive. This is not to say that some writers have not tried to find a scientific base for morality or more precisely -- moral behavior -- but in doing so they commit a fundamental error. Science, as an enterprise, is deterministic. As a result, most discussions of morality within science are tautological. For example, evolutionary biology is quite adept at explaining how we came to be as we are, and to suggest that there is an evolutionary base for such moral behaviors as altruism or self-sacrifice are important to the science of evolution because, as human beings, we are altruistic. If the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then by definition it must account for our altruistic and self-sacrificing nature. I say this because the original Darwinist formulations of evolutionary theory with the red in tooth and claw struggle for survival would seem to mitigate against behaviors like altruism, and so there has been some considerable thought given to the adaptive value of such behaviors. By the same token, however, if the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then too by definition it must account for our selfish behavior, and it must do so "without contradiction," otherwise the theory must be modified to resolve the contradiction. As it progressively resolves such contradictions, the descriptive validity of science becomes tighter and tighter, more and more true, but in the end it is confined to the domain of descriptive validity, and science as an enterprise does little or nothing to resolve the choice between altruistic or self behavior.
One could start over with the varieties of magical thinking. Although certain forms of religious fundamentalism are very much with us today, I want to rather quickly set them aside. I want to say that religion offers another form of "contingent universalism," but it is contingent only insofar as it's historical origins can be traced to a certain time and place. I also want to say that religion represents its contingent point of origin as the end of contingency, a representation that requires considerable "denial" of what comes after. To maintain the literal truth of the Bible, for example, requires extensive denial of a good deal that makes modern life possible, not least, of course, most of modern science. Beyond that, however, are the more basic concerns that are implicit to the notion of "denial." There is little or nothing in in theocentric religion, particularly the varieties of fundamentalist religion, that might be called democratic. The basic belief structure asserts, "I am right, and those who do not share my faith are wrong," and then "wrong" on at least a couple of levels. Not only "wrong" in one's beliefs, but also "wrong" in one's being. If we are right, and there can be no doubt that we are right, those who hear the testimony, those who do not likewise believe, those who are not as we are, must be, in one way or another, fundamentally flawed as human beings. There is a leap here between moral behavior, as such, to moral being and it is this leap that provides justification for many horrors. If such fundamentalist thinking is coupled with political power, no matter how the power is attained, the results are rather predictable and wholly unfortunate for those who are not of the right sort, who are not moral beings. If neither of the twentieth century horrors of nazism or communism were religious in their origins -- unlike, perhaps, the twenty first century horror of the Taliban -- most of the arguments that Hayek advanced against the ideological excess can be advanced against the theocentric excess. Both, as it were, attempt to remake mankind for idealized vision of society, not a society for the pluralistic reality of mankind, and in so doing "impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate."
In short, one can arrive at morality neither through science, nor ultimately through religion. One wants to say that it was the great genius of our constitutional framers to prohibit a state sanctioned religion. Although I have railed some against the emergent plutocracy, and I do believe it poses a greater immediate threat, the imposition of a state religion poses a more traditional threat. Although the latter begins with an affirmation of divinity and a vision of morality, when coupled with political power, it ends with autocratic denial and violence, both figuratively and often literally, of those and against those who cannot conform. I would say the same of the religion of science -- that is to say, a "science" that believes it has escaped its contingency and found the final solution to the last question. Fundamentalist, evangelical religion is much with us, in part because of the recent presidential politics that have elevated several of the most sanctimonious to the national stage, an equally evangelical religion of science -- or perhaps more precisely, of technology -- is very much with us. For lack of a better term, one might call them the techno-utopians, people like Parag and Ayesha Khanna, authors of the pamphlet How to Run the World or Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization. There is the persistent belief that a technology solution will redeem mankind. Eugeny Morozov review the pamphlet in a recent New Republic, to devastating effect, and there is a lengthening tradition of dystopian literature from Brave New World to The Matrix, all of which suggests that the religion of technology, no less than religions of revelation, end in the borg-like denial and violence against the necessary condition of our moral being, our freedom. Having said that, religion is nevertheless a fundamental liberty. To deny religion is to deny something fundamental in the pluralistic reality of mankind. I do not count myself as a religious person, a church going person, and I am willing to credit, to borrow a phrase, many varieties of religious experience, and I can do so because there are times when my soul lifts and I feel myself dancing at the edge of the universe with dragons and angels. To deny my experience of divinity is to deny something fundamental to my being, regardless whether it is an epiphenomenon of my brain chemistry or a sidelong glimpse of God herself.
Yet freedom, in and of itself, is not a moral value. Freedom must freely limit itself if it is to become a moral value. Limitation is inherent in living insofar as living is a perpetual choice of this (over the universe of other possibilities). Such choices, of course, locate themselves within a variety of spectra, from the self-conciously deliberate to the automatic unconscious, but they remain choices of this (over the universe of other possibilities) and to borrow a phrase, "that makes all the difference." We recognize the tyrannical, not in the limitation of freedom freely limiting itself, but in the prescription of choice, that which sets out in advance what may (and what may not) be chosen. We might, for example, talk about the tyranny of circumstance, the existential fact that one is here and now (and not there and then) or perhaps even more fundamentally the existential fact that we are, such as we are, in the given conditions of our existence -- that we grow hungry, thirsty, weary -- that we are short, unattractive, shy -- all of which set out in advance limitations on how we can (and cannot) act. Since I have touched on technology, and the sorts of techno-utopianism that pervade the literature, perhaps it bears mentioning that technology in the broadest sense is designed to free us from the tyranny of circumstance. If we can talk about a progressive development of technology, the progression resides in our expanding freedom from prescribed limitation on our freedom to act. Insofar as it is impossible to imagine a moral individual or a moral society without a broad freedom to act, the utopian strain in the techno-utopian thought resides in precisely this progressive expansion of the domain of freedom and the imagined vanishing point where the technology frees us wholly from the tyranny of circumstance and sets us wholly free to define ourselves self ethically and morally. It is a vision of the perfectly equitable, the perfectly just society. In the end, however, the deeper irony is this: technology changes, but does not free us from the tyranny of circumstance. Technology itself becomes part and parcel of the circumstance and exercises its own forms of tyranny, and it is perhaps not by accident that the protagonists of the techno-dystopian literature battle to free themselves from the circumstantial tyranny of technology.
Yet here again, in and of itself, freedom is not a moral value, even in its heroic opposition to tyranny, in part because we intuit rather quickly that my freedom to act is one thing, your freedom to act is quite another, and in the presumptive state of nature that Hobbes described my freedom will ever be a threat to your freedom and your freedom ever a threat to my freedom. It is also the presumptive state of nature that the various forms of social Darwinism have described, if not exactly red in tooth in claw, then certainly barbaric in the fight for ascendancy, the free exercise of prowess over others to limit or eliminate their being as a threat. As Veblen put it, "in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests itself in two main directions -- force and fraud." Though force and fraud are the virtues of Achilles and Ulysses, and we might find them both admirable types, perhaps even superior types worthy of our jealous emulation, but the free exercise of prowess over others, ascendancy, even superiority, portends nothing beyond itself. Prowess is nothing more than prowess, and it is deeply erroneous to ascribe transcendent value to those who exercise prowess. Prowess is not beyond, but before good nor evil, and the romantic turn of thought that would extol the Napoleanic escapades, that would posit a Nietzchean ubermensch, is deeply regressive and conservative, as Veblen's choice of barbarian would imply, of the primitive in our nature. We worship what we fear, and the Republican turn of thought that would reinstate the fully unfettered freedom of the free market is likewise regressive and conservative of a more Hobbesian, a more Darwinian state where the heroic struggle to survive produces the heroic type, where the free exercise of force and fraud results in the Achilles and Ulysses of the modern industrial and post-industrial economies, the CEO as a randy Nietzschian ubermensch, whose ascendancy would portend a transcendent value beyond the fact of and fear of those in a position to exercise their prowess over us, to demand deference and jealous emulation.
No, freedom is necessary, but insufficient to a moral life. One must freely limit freedom, but the question that is always before us is just this -- "how so?" There has been some discussion of late on the end of history, not as the end of chronology because presumably we go on accumulating events of interest, but rather as the arrival at a "process" once and for all. For Francis Fukuyama and others, the "process" is liberal democratic deliberation on the order of the western democracies. I wouldn't disagree with him too vehemently, though I would point out that western democracies are more fragile, less inevitable than he might believe. The history of mankind has been marked less by democratic deliberation, more by the exercise and institutionalization of prowess. If one does not accept the simple proposition that might makes right, then the background question, "on whose authority?" comes to the foreground. The answer to this question most in evidence is "on God's authority." There are, globally, a variety of Gods to whom one can defer, but the pattern in evidence is largely the same, and it serves a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, "on God's authority" does provide an authoritative answer, indeed the authoritative answer once and for all, to the "how so?" question. Deference to the Koran, deference to the Bible, each provide more or less definitive limitations on one's individual freedom in the form of sacred law. If there is to be a secular law, it is an elaboration on and the implementation of sacred law which ultimately takes precedence. On the other hand, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question of luck or fortune. It is probably not lost on most that both of the conservative candidates for president in this election cycle were winners of the so-called genetic lottery. Insofar as they are the progeny of "self-made men," it is probably not lost on most that both of the "self-made men" happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and were in a position to benefit from their good luck. One doesn't want to wholly discount their achievement. Being in a position to benefit is not quite the same thing as benefiting, and there are heirs to good fortune that descend into lethargy and licentiousness, but nevertheless, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question, why Romney and not me? If the winners in the struggle for ascendancy are not simply random result of sheer chance, if the winners in the genetic and circumstantial lottery are those elected of God in fulfillment of his plan, we have something resembling the divine right of Kings, the divine right of plutocrats to exercise broad authority over others. It is perhaps not entirely by accident that the Republican party is also the party of "god's authority," insofar as God's inscrutable distribution of good and bad fortune justifies the sorts of tyranny all too familiar through human history. In an oddly Nietzschian transvaluation of Christianity -- or perhaps more precisely a Randian transvaluation of Christian ethics -- Paul Ryan "is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand's worship of the successful and contempt for the 'moochers," as Paul Krugman put it. The rich are rich because they deserve to be rich, the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, and Mr. Ryan is "also quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor -- for their own good. In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, 'We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls the able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.'"
Another answer to the question "on whose authority?" is, of course, "on the people's authority," and it is this authority, not God's authority, to which the framers of our own constitution deferred. There are, however, any number of difficulties. "On the people's authority" does provide something of an answer to the "how so?" question, but it is a maddeningly partial answer. This "how so?" is, of course, both a process and results question. "On the people's authority" suggests rather clearly that some form of democratic deliberation is necessary, as process, if we are to freely decide how to limit freedom. It was perhaps the peculiar genius of the framers to prohibit limitations on the freedom of the press and the freedom to worship as forums for deliberation, but deliberation in and of itself implies differences of opinion, and just how those differences are to be resolved is another matter, particularly insofar as some differences ultimately are irreconcilable. The ballot and majority rule provides one answer, and it is perhaps the most expedient means available to resolve without resolving those irreconcilable differences, and enough has been said about the tyranny of the majority that I do not need to repeat it here, but it does lend itself to a moral vision informed more by Ecclesiastes, less by Leviticus -- more that is by a sense of moral and ethical churning than to definitive answers once and for all. To everything turn, turn, turn, he majority today may be the minority of tomorrow, a particularly distressing state of affairs for those who have, or believe they have, attained a state of moral and ethical certainty. Democratic deliberation, as process, does nothing to guarantee a particular result or even a particular type of result, and "on the people's authority" produces a result that is forever mutable, transient, contingent. If democratic deliberation represents an "end to history," it clearly does not put an end to disputations and events, but it does represent an end to any real sense of progression. It is social darwinism, but it is social darwinism divorced of any victorian sense of social progress or social optimism.
As an aside here, there is a certain mindset that would ask, "why not social progress?" As rational beings, it would seem that government could approached as we approach science and technology, and to do so would fuel an optimistic social progress -- just as our cell phones become better and better, our government could become better and better -- and one doesn't doubt that thoughts around the great society are fueled, as Hayek put it, by "habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and engineer." One could say the same of those habits of though engendered by the preoccupation with business problems as well as military problems, insofar as both business and military challenges are often allied with technology, and both are dedicated to the solution of a hedgehog problem -- making the institutional machinery work more effectively, more efficiently, and ultimately for the businessman more profitably and the military man more victoriously. That was the mindset most disturbing to Hayek, who went on to remark that it "tended to discredit the results of the past study of society which did not conform to their prejudices and to impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are inappropriate." For Hayek, of course, the sphere to which the mindset of the natural scientist and the engineer were least appropriate was the marketplace and the sorts of government action that would control the marketplace, and here one must give Hayek credit. If the history of the 20th century is a history of anything, it is the history of imposed ideals of organization, wholly rational and ultimately wholly ineffectual, for some of the reasons that Hayek enumerated, but for the reason suggested famously by Isaiah Berlin, that dedication to the solution of a hedgehog problem, one which presupposes a governing intentionality, one that posits a proper end for mankind. The theocentric presupposes a kingdom of heaven on earth, and in the meantime, as John Winthrop put, "we have entered into a covenant with Him for his work" to effectuate that "city on a hill." The communist presupposes, if not a kingdom of heaven on earth, nevertheless a wholly rational state predicated on the wholly equitable distribution of goods and serves, and if we have not entered into a covenant with god, we are nevertheless engaged within the inevitable march of history to effectuate the wholly communal state. In either case, as both Hayek and Berlin have suggested, dedication to the solution of the hedgehog problem, achieving the proper end for mankind, has engendered the greatest atrocities of history.
As a secondary aside, it is one thing to posit a personal governing intentionality, another to posit an institutional governing intentionality, and yet another to posit a universal governing intentionality for humanity proper. One can set out a purpose for an individual life, and indeed the framer's first amendment protection of the right to worship as one sees fit gives broad latitude for the individual to frame and pursue an individual end, an individual "happiness." Within the American character at least, there is a strong sense of both entitlement and obligation to frame one's own proper ends, even to the point of ascetic withdrawal from the social life of the times. Thoreau and the Unabomber were not distinct in their rejection of the social life of the times -- to include the technical, business, and military mindsets of the time. The fundamental difference was, of course, that the latter extended his personal pursuit of happiness into that which out to be the governing intentionality for humanity, the ontological 'this is my happiness' for the deontological 'this ought to be everyone's happiness,' and was willing to use violence to effectuate the extension of the personal to the universal. While I would not want to completely discredit the individual intentionality -- the individual will to ends if not absolutely unique to the individual, then sufficiently nuanced in its differences to count as unique -- I do want to discredit the notion of a universal governing intentionality. Here I want to make the analogy to language, more or less along the line of Wittgenstein, that a wholly private language might be possible, but it would not be comprehensible to others. Thoreau and the Unabomber each might have a unique perspective on life and how it should be lived, but to make their interiority, as it were, comprehensible, to make it recognizable to others for what it is, they had to express that interiority within the established social conventions of English grammar and that, of course, implies some sort of socialization within the conventions of English grammar. It is possible, as a thought experiment, to imagine Thoreau and the Unabomber sharing a "private language" and debating the efficacy of violence within that private language (as, say, two children raised in complete social isolation might develop a "private" language between them) but the point is simply this -- the interiority of a wholly personal and private governing intentionality must find its expression in social conventions if it is to be recognizable and comprehensible to others. To use Wittgenstein's term, it must find expression within a form of life. To be wholly comprehensible, one must act within the normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations, and therein lies the rub. The normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations are always, to one degree or another, arbitrary and limiting. One might speak English, one might speak Chinese, and one might even translate more or less successfully between the two, but one cannot speak both at once without lapsing into incomprehensible gibberish. One must choose.
I am suggesting that the framer's particular genius lay in two things. The first being a willful refusal to name one proper end for mankind, as evidenced for the most part by the willful refusal to name a state religion and the subsequent prohibition against the same. The second being an 18th century faith, not in the individual, but in the collective rationality of mankind. As a third and final aside, Rawl's condition of ignorance ...
Second, implicit in the above are the deeper questions about rationality itself, and might be labeled "science" vs "religion." There are many shades of thinking here, and I would not presume to capture them all, but most are, to one degree or another, what I would call "domain specific." As a broad commonsensical approach, for example, few would deny commonsensical rationality, the sorts of behavior we do (or don't do) engage because we desire (or fear) the consequences of our actions. Few of us believe that we can flap our arms and fly, and hence do not leap from tall buildings for fear of plummeting to the pavement below. To hold that belief, and to engage in that behavior, in short, is irrational. Likewise, we recognize the differences, for example, between the rational behavior of the average commuter who is worried about making his eight o'clock meeting and the schizophrenic who is ranting about the coming apocalypse on the street corner. Within the domain of the commonsensical, there are hundreds of background beliefs that we hold to be true (or true enough) to guide our everyday behavior. Here I want to say, the domain of the commonsensical roughly corresponds with the domain of the scientific -- that is to say, observable and verifiable truth about the world we inhabit -- and it forms the dominant form of thinking today. There is a universalist tendency within science, but again at the risk of over-simplification, it is a "contingent universalism." There is a search for universal laws of nature, but those "laws," once "discovered," can be (and often are) supplanted by finer and more encompassing distinctions. That search, as Kuhn and others have detailed, takes place on an historical scale, and while there might be an historical arch to how "discovery" takes place, the historical arch itself isn't predictive of future "discovery."
One difficulty, of course, is that science, as such, says nothing about morality. It can say a good deal about how we behave, and it can even say a good deal about why we behave in certain ways (and not in others) but science itself cannot make the transition from descriptive to prescriptive. This is not to say that some writers have not tried to find a scientific base for morality or more precisely -- moral behavior -- but in doing so they commit a fundamental error. Science, as an enterprise, is deterministic. As a result, most discussions of morality within science are tautological. For example, evolutionary biology is quite adept at explaining how we came to be as we are, and to suggest that there is an evolutionary base for such moral behaviors as altruism or self-sacrifice are important to the science of evolution because, as human beings, we are altruistic. If the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then by definition it must account for our altruistic and self-sacrificing nature. I say this because the original Darwinist formulations of evolutionary theory with the red in tooth and claw struggle for survival would seem to mitigate against behaviors like altruism, and so there has been some considerable thought given to the adaptive value of such behaviors. By the same token, however, if the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then too by definition it must account for our selfish behavior, and it must do so "without contradiction," otherwise the theory must be modified to resolve the contradiction. As it progressively resolves such contradictions, the descriptive validity of science becomes tighter and tighter, more and more true, but in the end it is confined to the domain of descriptive validity, and science as an enterprise does little or nothing to resolve the choice between altruistic or self behavior.
One could start over with the varieties of magical thinking. Although certain forms of religious fundamentalism are very much with us today, I want to rather quickly set them aside. I want to say that religion offers another form of "contingent universalism," but it is contingent only insofar as it's historical origins can be traced to a certain time and place. I also want to say that religion represents its contingent point of origin as the end of contingency, a representation that requires considerable "denial" of what comes after. To maintain the literal truth of the Bible, for example, requires extensive denial of a good deal that makes modern life possible, not least, of course, most of modern science. Beyond that, however, are the more basic concerns that are implicit to the notion of "denial." There is little or nothing in in theocentric religion, particularly the varieties of fundamentalist religion, that might be called democratic. The basic belief structure asserts, "I am right, and those who do not share my faith are wrong," and then "wrong" on at least a couple of levels. Not only "wrong" in one's beliefs, but also "wrong" in one's being. If we are right, and there can be no doubt that we are right, those who hear the testimony, those who do not likewise believe, those who are not as we are, must be, in one way or another, fundamentally flawed as human beings. There is a leap here between moral behavior, as such, to moral being and it is this leap that provides justification for many horrors. If such fundamentalist thinking is coupled with political power, no matter how the power is attained, the results are rather predictable and wholly unfortunate for those who are not of the right sort, who are not moral beings. If neither of the twentieth century horrors of nazism or communism were religious in their origins -- unlike, perhaps, the twenty first century horror of the Taliban -- most of the arguments that Hayek advanced against the ideological excess can be advanced against the theocentric excess. Both, as it were, attempt to remake mankind for idealized vision of society, not a society for the pluralistic reality of mankind, and in so doing "impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate."
In short, one can arrive at morality neither through science, nor ultimately through religion. One wants to say that it was the great genius of our constitutional framers to prohibit a state sanctioned religion. Although I have railed some against the emergent plutocracy, and I do believe it poses a greater immediate threat, the imposition of a state religion poses a more traditional threat. Although the latter begins with an affirmation of divinity and a vision of morality, when coupled with political power, it ends with autocratic denial and violence, both figuratively and often literally, of those and against those who cannot conform. I would say the same of the religion of science -- that is to say, a "science" that believes it has escaped its contingency and found the final solution to the last question. Fundamentalist, evangelical religion is much with us, in part because of the recent presidential politics that have elevated several of the most sanctimonious to the national stage, an equally evangelical religion of science -- or perhaps more precisely, of technology -- is very much with us. For lack of a better term, one might call them the techno-utopians, people like Parag and Ayesha Khanna, authors of the pamphlet How to Run the World or Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization. There is the persistent belief that a technology solution will redeem mankind. Eugeny Morozov review the pamphlet in a recent New Republic, to devastating effect, and there is a lengthening tradition of dystopian literature from Brave New World to The Matrix, all of which suggests that the religion of technology, no less than religions of revelation, end in the borg-like denial and violence against the necessary condition of our moral being, our freedom. Having said that, religion is nevertheless a fundamental liberty. To deny religion is to deny something fundamental in the pluralistic reality of mankind. I do not count myself as a religious person, a church going person, and I am willing to credit, to borrow a phrase, many varieties of religious experience, and I can do so because there are times when my soul lifts and I feel myself dancing at the edge of the universe with dragons and angels. To deny my experience of divinity is to deny something fundamental to my being, regardless whether it is an epiphenomenon of my brain chemistry or a sidelong glimpse of God herself.
Yet freedom, in and of itself, is not a moral value. Freedom must freely limit itself if it is to become a moral value. Limitation is inherent in living insofar as living is a perpetual choice of this (over the universe of other possibilities). Such choices, of course, locate themselves within a variety of spectra, from the self-conciously deliberate to the automatic unconscious, but they remain choices of this (over the universe of other possibilities) and to borrow a phrase, "that makes all the difference." We recognize the tyrannical, not in the limitation of freedom freely limiting itself, but in the prescription of choice, that which sets out in advance what may (and what may not) be chosen. We might, for example, talk about the tyranny of circumstance, the existential fact that one is here and now (and not there and then) or perhaps even more fundamentally the existential fact that we are, such as we are, in the given conditions of our existence -- that we grow hungry, thirsty, weary -- that we are short, unattractive, shy -- all of which set out in advance limitations on how we can (and cannot) act. Since I have touched on technology, and the sorts of techno-utopianism that pervade the literature, perhaps it bears mentioning that technology in the broadest sense is designed to free us from the tyranny of circumstance. If we can talk about a progressive development of technology, the progression resides in our expanding freedom from prescribed limitation on our freedom to act. Insofar as it is impossible to imagine a moral individual or a moral society without a broad freedom to act, the utopian strain in the techno-utopian thought resides in precisely this progressive expansion of the domain of freedom and the imagined vanishing point where the technology frees us wholly from the tyranny of circumstance and sets us wholly free to define ourselves self ethically and morally. It is a vision of the perfectly equitable, the perfectly just society. In the end, however, the deeper irony is this: technology changes, but does not free us from the tyranny of circumstance. Technology itself becomes part and parcel of the circumstance and exercises its own forms of tyranny, and it is perhaps not by accident that the protagonists of the techno-dystopian literature battle to free themselves from the circumstantial tyranny of technology.
Yet here again, in and of itself, freedom is not a moral value, even in its heroic opposition to tyranny, in part because we intuit rather quickly that my freedom to act is one thing, your freedom to act is quite another, and in the presumptive state of nature that Hobbes described my freedom will ever be a threat to your freedom and your freedom ever a threat to my freedom. It is also the presumptive state of nature that the various forms of social Darwinism have described, if not exactly red in tooth in claw, then certainly barbaric in the fight for ascendancy, the free exercise of prowess over others to limit or eliminate their being as a threat. As Veblen put it, "in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests itself in two main directions -- force and fraud." Though force and fraud are the virtues of Achilles and Ulysses, and we might find them both admirable types, perhaps even superior types worthy of our jealous emulation, but the free exercise of prowess over others, ascendancy, even superiority, portends nothing beyond itself. Prowess is nothing more than prowess, and it is deeply erroneous to ascribe transcendent value to those who exercise prowess. Prowess is not beyond, but before good nor evil, and the romantic turn of thought that would extol the Napoleanic escapades, that would posit a Nietzchean ubermensch, is deeply regressive and conservative, as Veblen's choice of barbarian would imply, of the primitive in our nature. We worship what we fear, and the Republican turn of thought that would reinstate the fully unfettered freedom of the free market is likewise regressive and conservative of a more Hobbesian, a more Darwinian state where the heroic struggle to survive produces the heroic type, where the free exercise of force and fraud results in the Achilles and Ulysses of the modern industrial and post-industrial economies, the CEO as a randy Nietzschian ubermensch, whose ascendancy would portend a transcendent value beyond the fact of and fear of those in a position to exercise their prowess over us, to demand deference and jealous emulation.
No, freedom is necessary, but insufficient to a moral life. One must freely limit freedom, but the question that is always before us is just this -- "how so?" There has been some discussion of late on the end of history, not as the end of chronology because presumably we go on accumulating events of interest, but rather as the arrival at a "process" once and for all. For Francis Fukuyama and others, the "process" is liberal democratic deliberation on the order of the western democracies. I wouldn't disagree with him too vehemently, though I would point out that western democracies are more fragile, less inevitable than he might believe. The history of mankind has been marked less by democratic deliberation, more by the exercise and institutionalization of prowess. If one does not accept the simple proposition that might makes right, then the background question, "on whose authority?" comes to the foreground. The answer to this question most in evidence is "on God's authority." There are, globally, a variety of Gods to whom one can defer, but the pattern in evidence is largely the same, and it serves a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, "on God's authority" does provide an authoritative answer, indeed the authoritative answer once and for all, to the "how so?" question. Deference to the Koran, deference to the Bible, each provide more or less definitive limitations on one's individual freedom in the form of sacred law. If there is to be a secular law, it is an elaboration on and the implementation of sacred law which ultimately takes precedence. On the other hand, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question of luck or fortune. It is probably not lost on most that both of the conservative candidates for president in this election cycle were winners of the so-called genetic lottery. Insofar as they are the progeny of "self-made men," it is probably not lost on most that both of the "self-made men" happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and were in a position to benefit from their good luck. One doesn't want to wholly discount their achievement. Being in a position to benefit is not quite the same thing as benefiting, and there are heirs to good fortune that descend into lethargy and licentiousness, but nevertheless, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question, why Romney and not me? If the winners in the struggle for ascendancy are not simply random result of sheer chance, if the winners in the genetic and circumstantial lottery are those elected of God in fulfillment of his plan, we have something resembling the divine right of Kings, the divine right of plutocrats to exercise broad authority over others. It is perhaps not entirely by accident that the Republican party is also the party of "god's authority," insofar as God's inscrutable distribution of good and bad fortune justifies the sorts of tyranny all too familiar through human history. In an oddly Nietzschian transvaluation of Christianity -- or perhaps more precisely a Randian transvaluation of Christian ethics -- Paul Ryan "is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand's worship of the successful and contempt for the 'moochers," as Paul Krugman put it. The rich are rich because they deserve to be rich, the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, and Mr. Ryan is "also quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor -- for their own good. In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, 'We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls the able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.'"
Another answer to the question "on whose authority?" is, of course, "on the people's authority," and it is this authority, not God's authority, to which the framers of our own constitution deferred. There are, however, any number of difficulties. "On the people's authority" does provide something of an answer to the "how so?" question, but it is a maddeningly partial answer. This "how so?" is, of course, both a process and results question. "On the people's authority" suggests rather clearly that some form of democratic deliberation is necessary, as process, if we are to freely decide how to limit freedom. It was perhaps the peculiar genius of the framers to prohibit limitations on the freedom of the press and the freedom to worship as forums for deliberation, but deliberation in and of itself implies differences of opinion, and just how those differences are to be resolved is another matter, particularly insofar as some differences ultimately are irreconcilable. The ballot and majority rule provides one answer, and it is perhaps the most expedient means available to resolve without resolving those irreconcilable differences, and enough has been said about the tyranny of the majority that I do not need to repeat it here, but it does lend itself to a moral vision informed more by Ecclesiastes, less by Leviticus -- more that is by a sense of moral and ethical churning than to definitive answers once and for all. To everything turn, turn, turn, he majority today may be the minority of tomorrow, a particularly distressing state of affairs for those who have, or believe they have, attained a state of moral and ethical certainty. Democratic deliberation, as process, does nothing to guarantee a particular result or even a particular type of result, and "on the people's authority" produces a result that is forever mutable, transient, contingent. If democratic deliberation represents an "end to history," it clearly does not put an end to disputations and events, but it does represent an end to any real sense of progression. It is social darwinism, but it is social darwinism divorced of any victorian sense of social progress or social optimism.
As an aside here, there is a certain mindset that would ask, "why not social progress?" As rational beings, it would seem that government could approached as we approach science and technology, and to do so would fuel an optimistic social progress -- just as our cell phones become better and better, our government could become better and better -- and one doesn't doubt that thoughts around the great society are fueled, as Hayek put it, by "habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and engineer." One could say the same of those habits of though engendered by the preoccupation with business problems as well as military problems, insofar as both business and military challenges are often allied with technology, and both are dedicated to the solution of a hedgehog problem -- making the institutional machinery work more effectively, more efficiently, and ultimately for the businessman more profitably and the military man more victoriously. That was the mindset most disturbing to Hayek, who went on to remark that it "tended to discredit the results of the past study of society which did not conform to their prejudices and to impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are inappropriate." For Hayek, of course, the sphere to which the mindset of the natural scientist and the engineer were least appropriate was the marketplace and the sorts of government action that would control the marketplace, and here one must give Hayek credit. If the history of the 20th century is a history of anything, it is the history of imposed ideals of organization, wholly rational and ultimately wholly ineffectual, for some of the reasons that Hayek enumerated, but for the reason suggested famously by Isaiah Berlin, that dedication to the solution of a hedgehog problem, one which presupposes a governing intentionality, one that posits a proper end for mankind. The theocentric presupposes a kingdom of heaven on earth, and in the meantime, as John Winthrop put, "we have entered into a covenant with Him for his work" to effectuate that "city on a hill." The communist presupposes, if not a kingdom of heaven on earth, nevertheless a wholly rational state predicated on the wholly equitable distribution of goods and serves, and if we have not entered into a covenant with god, we are nevertheless engaged within the inevitable march of history to effectuate the wholly communal state. In either case, as both Hayek and Berlin have suggested, dedication to the solution of the hedgehog problem, achieving the proper end for mankind, has engendered the greatest atrocities of history.
As a secondary aside, it is one thing to posit a personal governing intentionality, another to posit an institutional governing intentionality, and yet another to posit a universal governing intentionality for humanity proper. One can set out a purpose for an individual life, and indeed the framer's first amendment protection of the right to worship as one sees fit gives broad latitude for the individual to frame and pursue an individual end, an individual "happiness." Within the American character at least, there is a strong sense of both entitlement and obligation to frame one's own proper ends, even to the point of ascetic withdrawal from the social life of the times. Thoreau and the Unabomber were not distinct in their rejection of the social life of the times -- to include the technical, business, and military mindsets of the time. The fundamental difference was, of course, that the latter extended his personal pursuit of happiness into that which out to be the governing intentionality for humanity, the ontological 'this is my happiness' for the deontological 'this ought to be everyone's happiness,' and was willing to use violence to effectuate the extension of the personal to the universal. While I would not want to completely discredit the individual intentionality -- the individual will to ends if not absolutely unique to the individual, then sufficiently nuanced in its differences to count as unique -- I do want to discredit the notion of a universal governing intentionality. Here I want to make the analogy to language, more or less along the line of Wittgenstein, that a wholly private language might be possible, but it would not be comprehensible to others. Thoreau and the Unabomber each might have a unique perspective on life and how it should be lived, but to make their interiority, as it were, comprehensible, to make it recognizable to others for what it is, they had to express that interiority within the established social conventions of English grammar and that, of course, implies some sort of socialization within the conventions of English grammar. It is possible, as a thought experiment, to imagine Thoreau and the Unabomber sharing a "private language" and debating the efficacy of violence within that private language (as, say, two children raised in complete social isolation might develop a "private" language between them) but the point is simply this -- the interiority of a wholly personal and private governing intentionality must find its expression in social conventions if it is to be recognizable and comprehensible to others. To use Wittgenstein's term, it must find expression within a form of life. To be wholly comprehensible, one must act within the normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations, and therein lies the rub. The normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations are always, to one degree or another, arbitrary and limiting. One might speak English, one might speak Chinese, and one might even translate more or less successfully between the two, but one cannot speak both at once without lapsing into incomprehensible gibberish. One must choose.
I am suggesting that the framer's particular genius lay in two things. The first being a willful refusal to name one proper end for mankind, as evidenced for the most part by the willful refusal to name a state religion and the subsequent prohibition against the same. The second being an 18th century faith, not in the individual, but in the collective rationality of mankind. As a third and final aside, Rawl's condition of ignorance ...
Out of time ... more later ...
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