Identity, complexity, and seeing like a state
An outline for a new argument in favor of low church liberalism
Greetings,
The newsletter this week is a bit late, for which I apologize, and consists of a single thought about political philosophy: Perhaps the liberal political order exists to preserve social complexity in the face of destructive pressures towards simplification.
I was recently interviewed on a legal podcast where we discussed my book The Dignity of Commerce, and the discussion got me thinking about the normative basis for liberal political orders. By that latter term, I mean something like a political system that places substantial limits on the power of the state by imposing side-constraints on official action in the form of various legal rights secured to individuals. Generally speaking, philosophical defenses of liberalism can be divided between what I think of as “high liberalism” and “low liberalism.”
“High liberalism” sees the liberal political order as reflecting the deep structure of moral reality. The liberal order’s emphasis on freedom and rights reflects the fundamental truth that we are autonomous individuals who possess pre-legal moral rights. Within the high liberal church one can place the emphasis on either autonomy or on rights. If one places the emphasis on autonomy, then what is fundamental is the vision of human beings as self-authoring choosers. We are authors of our own identities, and the good society is one in which our opportunities for self-authorship are maximized. If one places the emphasis on rights, then the fundamental moral reality has less to do with our status as self-authoring choosers than with our status as independent agents with an absolute claim to police the boundaries of our self against others. The central concern is less the maximization of opportunity for self-authorship than the minimization of violations of personal independence. Very roughly speaking, I think that this philosophical difference lies at the heart of the disagreements in our society between largely autonomy-focused progressives and largely independence-focused libertarians.
“Low liberalism” sees liberal institutions and practices as occupying a rather less exalted moral status. To be sure, members of the low liberal church are enthusiastic supporters of legal rights against the state and requirements that the government treat its citizens with equal concern. On many practical issues, low liberalism and high liberalism will likely agree with one another. However, for low liberalism the liberal political order is a response to the particular historical conditions of modernity. Those conditions include states that have a fearsome institutional capacity for coercion and cruelty and a society marked by endemic moral pluralism and disagreement. This leads to two problems. The first is the simple risk of political cruelty on a massive scale. Think Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, or — on a smaller scale — George Floyd and Derek Chauvin. On this view, liberalism is a way of limiting the capacity of the state to inflict suffering. This is the so-called “liberalism of fear.” The other main strand of low church liberalism is a bit less dark. It defends liberalism as a workable peace between different moral tribes that given modern conditions, cannot hope for final persuasion and agreement. The modern liberal political order developed in the wake of the 16th and 17th century wars of religion as a way of creating a permanent truce between the sectarian warriors. This modus vivendi vision of liberalism can be carried forward to include modern moral sectarians.
Generally speaking, I am a low church liberal rather than a high church liberal, and I have most often thought of this in terms of the liberalism of fear and modus vivendi liberalism. However, I wonder if there might be a third way of thinking about low church liberalism based on the nature of identity and the institutional requirements of modern states. My argument would go something like this:
First, think about what is required in order for us to form coherent identities. I don’t think that the self can exist entirely in and through itself. Aristotle captured this thought pithily when he suggested that the man who exists entirely outside of the city or political community (polis) would be either a god or a monster but could not be a person. Rather, in order for us to become human beings we require communities. The most obvious way in which this is so is the biological necessity that we be cared for by others both in our infancy and childhood and in our dotage and old age. We are also dependent on language in order to form complex thoughts and self-awareness, but language is necessarily the product of a community. Beyond the necessities of biological nurture and linguistic inheritance, our identities are constituted though a thick set of experiences, rituals, myths, institutions, networks of kin and friendship, moral beliefs and practice, etc. that communities generate. What it means to be the person that you are is in some sense to have had the kind of upbringing and life that you have had, but that upbringing and life is not something that you autonomously author. To be sure, you have freedom and can make choices, but you are not self-created. To have a self is to have something made possible by the thick networks of community.
Second, think about the institutional requirements for the state to exercise its power. States are institutions that seek to control and remake social reality. In order for them to do this, that social reality must become legible to state bureaucracies. In effect, the state must be able to see the world. From the point of view of state institutions, the complexity of social reality is a problem because it makes that reality illegible to the state. Accordingly, bureaucracies have an imperative to simplify social reality. The law, for example, does this by stripping away from social relationships everything that is deemed to be legally irrelevant. Mostly this is simply conceptual. When a lawyer or judge analyzes a car accident and its aftermath or a breached agreement, they simply ignore most of the social reality – who is this person’s family? what language do they speak? where did they grow up? etc. However, the law will also simply force social reality to conform to its demands in some cases. Hence, for example, it is quite common for communities to generate very complicated relationships around the use of land, with people having overlapping rights to use, limited exclusion, access, and the like. However, property law tends to ruthlessly simplify these relationships. Hence, under the legal principle of numerus clausus ownership in land is limited to one of a limited menu of social relationships.
If these two ideas are correct, then as states pursue more and more ambitious projects of social control and social reform, they will have to be able to “see” larger and larger swaths of social reality. However, in order to make this social reality legible to state actors it will have to be simplified. There is thus an inverse relationship between the exercise of state power and the level of social complexity that is possible within a community. At the extreme, the totalitarian state will require that social relationships be reduced to relatively simple categories like membership in the party, a reified and fictitious idea of race, or the like. Bureaucratically opaque institutions like religious traditions, families, local communities, and the like will be treated with suspicion and hostility. However, as social life is simplified in the service of legibility to the state the resources from which human identity emerges will be impoverished. Accordingly, the social ambitions of the state ought to be limited. Hence, liberal institutions and practices.
In this argument, we treat the state with suspicion not because we are committed to the self-authoring chooser or the independent rights bearer of high liberalism or because of our fear of cruelty or the demands of moral pluralism as in low liberalism, but simply because we wish to preserve social complexity. The value of social complexity lies in the requirements of identity formation. Because we are embedded beings who, as Aristotle suggested, depend on communities for our identities, those identities are threatened by any overly ambitious state projects. This is not because the state will target us for cruelty or because we will be unable to generate social consensus around ambitious projects of social engineering but simply because the state cannot act without simplifying social reality and identity requires social complexity.
Just a thought.
See you next week,
Nate
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