Liberal Democracy Made Strange

If you are like me you were brought up eating, sleeping and breathing liberal democracy. I didn't know this at the time. Lib dem is the ideology that we practice on a daily basis. But I want to make it strange for a moment, so that we might see what it is.

Open Google Earth. You are far away from the planet. You zoom in, coming closer to a land formation, the middle east, Turkey to Saudi Arabia. On this land are multiple people groups, some of whom follow Islam, some Christianity, some Judaism, others secular. If you hold that your allegiance is to a version of the good shared by a collectivity you see yourself as part of a people group. As a group you occupy land. This land may also be shared by people of other groups. Lib dem tells us that the only way to live in peace with these people of other groups is to privatize our particularities, and live a public life that is difference blind. Thus we sell what we make to people regardless of their group allegiances. The groups we are a part of tell us that the only way we can live at peace with other members is to privatize those things that are publicly contentious. In the broader shared space, I should privatize my religion so that I can live at peace with others of other groups. [Religions invert this: I should privatize my political opinion, so that I may share more with my friends.]

Lib dem is a group that holds a good. The good is that those other groups are a problem because they conflict with the making of a broader group - humanity. In this respect lib dem must make us over as equals (the privatization impulse) so as to extend the group affiliation as far as it can go. The problem here is that lib dem must extend globally, because the members of the species - humanity - extends globally. What falls victim to this broad extension of governance? Particularity. Do people like to have their particularities taken away? No. Consider NY in the 1800s as Scorsese portrays it: the town was a dutch settlement taken over by Brits. Irish, Italian, German and Jewish settlers decided to move in, not to mention African slaves. Did any of these people want to give up their ethnicities, their cultures, their religions? Not entirely. They may have given up one thing or another, but not their entire particularity. NY must be an identity that reflects the particularities of each subgroup. And the groups must not be put into play by the city ID, but rather, held coextensively.

But lib dem likes to limit difference, so it says, especially after the race riots of the 1960s, you can hold on to your ethnicity, but don't make a big deal about your religion. Religion is a particularity that we can do without, because, afterall, it is a "belief", an ideology, which is subscribed. Ethnicity is not, it is natural. Of course this notion of ethnicity has died away, and now ethnicity is little more than an ideology along with religion. All we have left is "difference" - not ethnic difference, not religious difference, not linguistic difference - just homogeneous difference.

The problem with lib dem is that empty difference may be good for keeping peace, but it isn't good for the soul. It isn't good for the mind. It isn't good for liesure. Empty difference is what you encounter when you can't tell the difference between a pepsi and a coke. It is fast food. Lib dem's chief product is fast food. Walmart is the symbol of lib dem governance, because it is a broad shelter under which all people can come and buy anything they want. It collects everything and assimilates it to nothing. Everything is relativized as a commodity, an ideology (ethnicity, religion, sexuality).

So I'm a bit fed up with lib dem, and it is not because I don't like negative freedom, or public agency, or peace, or broadly extended law, or "multiculturalism". It is that I don't like being made in the image of fast food.

Ultimately, lib dem must erase region, localities of all kinds, nations, land demarcations. This is because the ultimate vision of lib dem is to have a borderless globe over which all can travel as nomads. Lib dem is about being unfettered. The problem is that I like to be a bit fettered. I like my linguistic distinctions, my religious views and practices, my local water with its specific minerals. I like things that are rooted, and I like having roots.

Can lib dem be delimited such that it ceases to promote "difference" and begins to allow roots?

Quotes of the Morning

"The more devastation and instability an unbridled marked creates, the more illiberal a state you need to contain it." (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 220)

"Capitalism has always pitched diverse forms of life promiscuously together - a fact which should give pause to those unwary postmodernists for whom diversity, astonishingly, is somehow a virtue in itself. Those for whom 'dynamic' is always a positive term might also care to reconsider their opinion, in the light of the most dynamically destructive system of production which humanity has ever seen. But we are now witnessing a brutally quickened version of this melt-down, with the tearing up of traditional communities, the breaking down of national barriers, the generating of great tidal waves of migration. Culture in the form of fundamentalism has reared its head in reaction to these shattering upheavals. Everywhere you look, people are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to be themselves. This is partially because other people have abandoned the notion of being themselves as an undue restriction on their activities" (Eagleton 49 - 50)

"[There is a] fundamental paradox located at the center of the rule of law in a democratic society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, Franz Kafka, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Jacques Derrida, Alan Keenan, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, while disagreeing on numerous issues, concur in asserting that a democratic state seeking to honor the rule of law is also one in which a sovereign power operating both inside and outside the law is brought into play. Since the paradox expresses the lawlessness upon which the rule of law depends it is often hidden from public view. ...[G]aps and fissures open up periodically between positional sovereignty as the highest authority to interpret the law and sovereignty as the effective power to decide what it will be. ...[F]or a government of self-rule to come into being out of a nondemocratic condition, the public ethos needed for democratic governance would have to be preceded by the kind of laws that nourish it; but those good laws, in turn, would need to be preceded by that very ethos if they were to emerge. The laws and the ethos must precede each other." (William E. Connolly, Pluralism, 134-5)

"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 5)

"The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries" (Schmitt, 36)

The Legitimacy of Modernity: Blumenberg, Lowith, Schmitt, Milbank and the Pomos

How did the Modern world emerge? Is it, as some claim, a disobedient child of modernity, or does it have a legitimate identity of its own, independent of Christendom? This is what Robert Wallace, translator of Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of Modernity has to say:

“Blumenberg makes it clear here that while the modern age is not the result of a transformation (whether through ‘secularization’ or any other process) of something that was originally Christian, this does not mean that it sprang into existence spontaneously, as though into a historical void. The continuity underlying the change of epoch is, he says, a continuity of problems rather than of solutions, of questions rather then of answers. Instead of remaining forever fixated on ‘doctrines’ or ‘ideas’ as the stuff of our tradition, we need to learn to relate these to the human activity of inquiring, of questioning, which gives them their relevance and concrete meaning. When we do so, Blumenberg suggests, we may find other kinds of continuity besides those of rightful inheritance or illegitimate misappropriation, and other kinds of novelty besides that of unprovoked ‘creation from nothing’” (Robert Wallace xviii).

Blumenberg wants to see modernity as springing from a Christian context, but what springs has to have a different composition then what fell. His critique of Lowith is on grounds of continuity. In emphasizing the illegitimacy of progress (bad providence), Lowith highlights how progress fails where providence didn’t. Blumenberg wants to claim the opposite. That progress is not deprived providence, but that providence was such an insufficient prototype of progress that we cannot highlight their identity; we must emphasize their difference, the rupture of Christendom. How did this rupture occur? 1. Science moved beyond Scientia; Bacon et al overcame Aristotle. 2. The literary arts overcame classicism (Wallace xvii-xviii). Both of these innovations occurred in the 17th century.
Do I agree with Blumenberg? Partially. I think that Blumenberg is right to complicate the genealogy of progress. If we stress continuity too much then we oversimplify the context and the issues that lead to progress. However, I think that Blumenberg is trying to smuggle Lowith’s thesis back into this text, by demonstrating how continuity is a mistake, but by linking providence and progress through a more complicated narrative.

However, I think that we need to turn to Carl Schmitt and consider how the idea of the nation state has emerged from Christendom. Blumenberg might have more on his hands then he thinks?:

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God become the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries” (Political Theology 36).

What becomes clear in Schmitt’s analysis is that he is using analogical reasoning, which recognizes that when we highlight a similarity, that similarity is couched in a great number of differences (I want to say infinite here but I fear I may be misusing the term). I sense that Blumenberg has adopted a flat view of being, univocity, which interprets all things with being, as being of the same genera. Analogy would claim that there is always a difference between different orders of being. That we must preserve this distance between Being (of God) and being (of man). This complicates Lowith’s thesis on continuity – progress is analogously related to providence. The state is analogously related to the Church.

It struck me that Milbank’s interpretation of the liberal subject and the secular realm is relevant to this discussion. Milbank claims that the secular realm is not only related to the Church, but that it is a theological construction which emerges from Medieval thinking (religious and secular realms and priests). He also claims that the creation of secular space in protestant settings was firstly a theological creation. Milbank claims that Locke and Hobbes argued for private property by considering Adam's mythological position in the Garden of Eden. Milbank extends his argument to the providence in Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market place, and to socialism in de Bonald's (and Saint-Simon's) positive (and Catholic) state.

There is another level, or context, for this general argument – the relationship between Christendom and Modernity - that I we need to consider: Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy have launched a full fledged deconstruction of Christianity (and Foucault had an implicit argument about the relationship between Christian confession and modern subjectivity). Why do we need to deconstruct Christianity if Modernity is legitimate on its own? I think Derrida, Nancy and Foucault have sided with Lowith in claiming that Modernity is still intimately related to Christendom, so intimately that it must still kill the Christendom Father in order to evade its shadow.