It is easy to confuse anarchism with nihilism.

The nihilist cares for nothing but destruction itself.  He derives strength ironically (and illogically) from the “meaning” of no meaning at all.  Owlman makes this perfectly clear, giving perhaps the clearest nihilistic statement in modern times.

The anarchist has a different approach.  His desire to destroy comes with reasonably good motives and a limited scope.  He really seeks not to destroy and create  better way of life.  One senses this in the music of Rage Against the Machine.  They have passion and plenty of excessive, destructive anger, but they plead for something real.  G.K. Chesteron’s brilliant The Man Who was Thursday touches on this as well, with the character of Sunday (slight spoiler alert) serving as the chief destroyer and chief unifier of the characters in the tale.

So it should not scare us too badly that a professor from Yale comes out in favor of anarchism.

James C. Scott’s book Two Cheers for Anarchism has a bark worse than its bite.  He believes that the state has some function to play, though never quite describes how.  He reveals himself as a strong critic of the industrial capitalistic modern world, much like Ivan Illich.  His critiques hit on something amiss about our predicament.  I wish he said more about about solutions.  In fairness, the road out of our situation is long and narrow.

How might one sympathize with a self-described anarchist?  We must first gain historical perspective and realize that the modern world looks very different from almost every other historical era.  The ordering of our lives occasioned especially by the industrial revolution make our lives much more regimented not by nature, but by our own creations, than any other time.

To work against this Scott urges us to abandon all centralized and regimented government solutions.  A simple example illustrates his point.  The Dutch tried an experiment with a notoriously dangerous and congested intersection.  They could have spent tens of millions and took several months to make an overpass.  The more obvious solution called for breaking up the intersection with more traffic lights and more centralized control.

Instead they opted for a traffic circle, with glorious results.  Accidents sharply declined and so did congestion. Traffic circles call for drivers to pay attention and make judgments, but Scott argues this is precisely why they work.  Governments need to get in the habit of giving over more initiative to the people and divesting themselves of institutional means of control, even with something as simple as traffic lights.  Plenty of other examples illustrate the same point, including

• The superiority of the ‘randomness’ of nature to regimented/”scientific” planting of trees and gardens
• The failures of housing projects vs. the concept of “neighborhoods.”
• The unseen bonuses of shopping in neighborhoods as opposed to the ‘big box’ stores,

and so on.  His basic argument comes down to the concept of “small is beautiful.”

But he goes beyond this.  The “anarchist” part of the book involves his encouragement to small-scale kinds of disobedience to perverse means of establishing control.  He cites the recent example of French cab drivers suddenly finding themselves targeted for offenses of a particular traffic law.  They smelled not safety but money-making for the state as the motive.  So they banded together and decided that they would rigidly obey all the various traffic regulations.  Of course, traffic ground to a halt throughout French cities, the point being that

• The practice of the people truly define what the law is, such as with speed limits, and
• The state has stuffed the people full of useless and menacing regulations.  To enforce them all is impossible, to enforce most others would be arbitrary.

Scott laments when the natural actions and interests of the common man get co-opted by organizations.  Whatever their initial intentions, the imposed structure of unions, protest organizations, and the like, can never match the organic actions of the common man.  He admits that at times that state plays a useful function in giving an imprimatur, or proper force behind collective action, such as in the Civil Rights Movement.  But in general, a step towards centralization moves one closer to lifeless banality.

I also give Scott a lot of credit for recognizing that large-scale revolutionary action will make things worse.*  Every modern revolution created a more oppressive state than what it replaced:

• After the American Revolution, British loyalists got a far worse treatment than any revolutionary against George III ever did before 1775.
• The French Revolution made things far worse than the worst of the old regime
• The Bolshevik revolution made Russia far worse than under the czars
• Mao
• Etc., etc.

We fix things, then in the steady and simple way of rejecting top-down government centralization, and looking for small ways in everyday life to assert the independence of organic communities and organic action.

So far so good, but while I realize the book merely wants to serve as an introduction, one issue in particular bothered me.

Scott states that, essentially, no possibility of a just society even existed until the political invention of modern democracy.  Ok . . . but . . . all of the worst examples of modern totalitarianism occurred in the name of the people.  It seems like democracy can, like nuclear power, give tremendous benefits but also cause tremendous damage.  Scott admits this from a structural standpoint, i.e., universal citizenship gives way to universal conscription, but misses something on the political side.

Scott also attaches himself too strongly to democracy itself, with the English Civil War as a case in point.  One can make a reasonable case that Charles I abused his power.  I think it much harder to justify his execution, done in the name of the law, in the name of the people, after a trial of dubious legality.  I know of no historian who argues that the Protectorate under Cromwell gave people more freedoms than Charles I.  In time, England begged Charles’ son to come back and rule as Charles II, and he returned to huge acclaim.  Again, it seems that the “Restoration” era under Charles II provided more tolerance and more room for localism than Cromwell and his more democratically minded Puritans.

The vision Scott argues for reminded me of G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc with “distributism.”  Scott decisively breaks with left-leaning academics who despise the “petty bourgeoise,” and instead looks for just the sort of limited land-ownership and localism that this class provides.  But the closest parallel to this kind of organization has historically only come from

• Frontier societies, whose time may be sweet but is inevitably limited, as it waits for the rest of society to catch up
• Societies on geographical fringes, like the eskimos, aborigines, jungle tribes, desert nomads, etc.
• The Middle Ages

Maybe modern democracy is the cause, not the solution to the problems Scott decries.  Marx himself, I believe, believed that capitalism served the purpose of destroying local traditions, a necessary step towards worldwide revolution.  Maybe we need not blame democracy for all of the problems of the industrialized state.  But at the very least, sometimes non-democratic governments do a better job of preserving localism and traditions.

I wish Scott had tackled this.

Scott also may need to choose.  Does he prefer organic localism, or individual rights, democracy, etc.  The two do not always mix, so which does he prefer?  As an anarchist Scott blames the system.  But with democracies people generally get to create the system they want. If a democracy goes bad, then, blame the people, and not the system.  We get what we deserve.

Scott will strike many as decidedly modern, but if you poke around writers and thinkers with a bent towards bygone eras we get some surprises.  The great J.R.R. Tolkien railed against the modern world with his life and work to no avail.   Yet in a letter to his son he wrote,

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people . . . .

He continued on the nature of ruling that,

Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. At least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediaevals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you dare call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that—after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world—is that it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way . . . .

David Bentley Hart quotes from this letter in a recent article in First Things, and Hart himself seems to get the gist of Tolkien’s meaning when he writes,

The ideal king would be rather like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the whole game. There is something positively sacramental about its strategic impotence. And there is something blessedly gallant about giving one’s wholehearted allegiance to some poor inbred ditherer whose chief passions are Dresden china and the history of fly-fishing, but who nonetheless, quite ex opere operato, is also the bearer of the dignity of the nation, the anointed embodiment of the genius gentis—a kind of totem or, better, mascot.

Scott has done a great service with his book.  If he writes again I would love for his critique of modernism to go a bit a deeper.  Lets see what he can write if he broadens his vision.

Dave

*He never gets into why this is, however, and the question is worth pondering.  Why do popular revolutions create more totalitarianism than the governments they replace?

This post was originally written in 2017, and you will note the reference to Trump as president below . .  .

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If you wanted to be an English aristocrat in the Victorian age (or perhaps most any age) one needed to hunt foxes.  For years this perplexed me.  Sure, foxes eat chickens sometimes and maybe cause a bit of mischief, but they posed no real threat to anyone.  They did not seem like noble quarry.  But then I realized that foxes were not hunted because of the damage they did to farms (like you would hunt wolves or wild hogs), or the danger they posed to the hunters (like lions or bears), but because they were so clever at avoiding traps.  To hunt a clever beast, one had to display their own cunning.

Machiavelli has always beguiled his admirers and detractors alike.  Reading him can feel like a bracing tonic, but then he leaves you cold with his “Machiavellian” calculations.  He seems both clear and contradictory.  We may wonder if we can read him as anything more than a guilty pleasure.

We need not look further than his “It is Better to be Feared rather than Loved” chapter from The Prince.  In his typically realistic/pessimistic way, he says that the love of the people will never be constant, whereas fear will keep them bound to the ruler.  This seems to fit within Machiavelli’s general framework, but we should recall that as an avid student of history, Machiavelli would surely know that fear never works beyond the short-term.  The most successful rulers throughout history may not have people “love” them in the sense in which we use the word, but they did establish relationships and a series of mutual benefits for the ruler and ruled.

Erica Benner makes the bold suggestion that not only is Machiavelli giving bad advice in this notorious chapter, he knows he is giving bad advice.  In fact, he wants his audience (the D’ Medici’s who ended Florence’s Republic) to take this advice and make themselves odious to the people.  He hopes, in fact, that the Republic he loves might be restored through the stupidity of those that read him.*

Ordinarily I would suspect some show-off chicanery with this analysis, but Be Like the Fox surprised me with its even-handed and careful approach that remains accessible to someone like me.  She begins by suggesting that we should not view Machiavelli primarily through the lens of The Prince, but rather through the body of his other work, and especially, his life as a diplomat.  The book weaves biography and analysis gracefully.  Diplomats, especially Renaissance diplomats, often had to speak elliptically and carefully.  The message lay not so much in what was said but in how it was said.  Perhaps Machiavelli’s writings evidence some of this same character.

At his best, Machiavelli bring us back to questions of purpose in political action.  Benner includes an example from Machiavelli’s own life to illustrate this.  Early in his marriage Niccolo had a brief affair with his cousin Bernardo’s female servant and got her pregnant.  She admitted to Bernardo that Niccolo was the father.  From his diaries, we know that Bernardo considered carefully what to do.

Privately he approached Niccolo and mentioned the pregnancy and, in neutral tones, the accusation. “What will happen to the Machiavelli name,” Niccolo, “when word of this gets out?”  Niccolo sympathized with the poor girl and his cousin.  He blamed himself . . . because, he said, a friend of his had seduced the poor girl while he and his wife were away from the house.  Niccolo offered to try and track him down.  Of course, after a few days he reported that the “man” was a scoundrel and would never fess up.  But . . . since he recognized that the fault in the end lay with him, he agreed to provide for a large dowry for the girl so she could get married . . . quietly.  After all, no one wanted a scandal to tarnish the Machiavelli name.

If the cousin’s goal was to bring Machiavelli to repentance, this method may have hindered that cause.  If he desired a quiet solution to the outward problem itself, this worked. Would a direct attack on Niccolo bring about a quickening of his conscience, or merely a stubborn defense that would leave him (Bernardo) holding the bag for his pregnant serving girl?  Benner tells this story early in the book to illustrate the point of much of Machiavelli’s writing.

Benner supports her analysis of The Prince especially through the life of Cesare Borgia, whom many suspect Machiavelli admires on their first reading.  As the son of Rodrigo Borgia, a.k.a., Pope Alexander VI, Cesare had enormous advantages.  “Fortune loves and impetuous youth,” Machiavelli writes.  Cesare had a string of great victories throughout Italy based in part on his charisma, luck, and a talent for acquisition via dubious means.  Yet Machiavelli consistently notes that,

• People who use deception to great effect always assume that everyone else will be honest.
• People who thrive on conquest often have a hard time building a stable network of alliances, and making and keeping friends.
• People who have the smile of Fortune rarely realize that Fortune has a fickle streak.  One must do the work of real relationships to create a truly stable state.

In other words, The Prince has much more implied criticism of Cesare Borgia than praise,

Benner illustrates this with other events in Machiavelli’s life.  We assume that Machiavelli just cared about results and not about methods, but Benner argues this would make nonsense of many of his experiences and other writings.  When Pope Sixtus IV (seemingly) supported the failed assassination attempt of Lorenzo and Guillamo d’ Medici, it left Florence in a vulnerable position despite the fact that Lorenzo survived.  Lorenzo’s ruthless revenge not just against the assassins themselves, but the entire Pazzi family from whence they came (which included a few clergy) gave the Pope ammunition to take control of Florence regardless of the failed plot.

Lorenzo scrambled and tried to isolate the pope by getting Naples to break free from their alliance with the Pope.  He thought he scored a major coup for Florence and saved the city.  But then . . .

• The Pope was still furious because of the treachery of Naples
• Venice, as an side player in this whole affair, got angry that no one included them in the conversations and joined the Pope against Florence.
• Meanwhile, Naples had only signed a non-aggression pact with Florence, which meant that they offered no military assistance, leaving Florence in exactly the same position as before.

Slipshod diplomacy made for now diplomacy at all.  Thus, Machiavelli concludes that, “One must things by their methods, and not merely by their results alone,” a conclusion that may surprise us.**

In his fun From Barbarians to Bureaucrats Lawerence Fairley makes the point that companies go through  many of the same life-cycles as civilizations, and uses A.J. Toynbee’s analysis to aid him.  One stage belongs to the “Barbarian.”  Fairley writes that one may be a “barbarian” leader if,

• You love competition, and the ‘thrill of victory.’  You cannot shrug off losing.
• You are action-oriented.  You don’t care so much for ideas or systems, but results.
• You like being in charge and like making decisions
• You may not have come up with the vision, but want badly to see it through and have definite plans for doing so.
• You don’t have tons of patience for those who seem to be standing in the way of your mission.
• You see the ‘struggle’ in absolute terms of us/them, good/evil, etc.

Certainly Cesare Borgia fits this bill, as I think, does our current president.  Fairley points out that we can have good and bad “barbarian” leadership, with each style obviously having its strengths and weaknesses.  Cesare Borgia’s problems came directly after the fighting stopped, as did Alexander the Great’s, as perhaps did Donald Trump’s?  With Cesare, Machiavelli seemed to indirectly counsel that the worst thing one could do with a barbarian was prolong the fighting, which plays directly to his strengths.  The true barbarian, however, will never handle peace well.  Let Cesare stumble over his own feet.  Let Fortune abandon him.  Perhaps Machiavelli would counsel Trump’s political opponents to lay low and let Trump defeat himself.^

In hindsight, of course, some of Machiavelli’s advice looks less and less “Machiavellian.”  In  Debriefing the President, John Nixon writes of his experiences at the CIA and especially about his time spent with Saddam Husssein.  In the midst of his criticism of Clinton, Bush the Younger, Obama, and George Tenet, he reveals changes in his opinion.  He admits that he thought the best intel the U.S. possessed pointed to a stockpile of W.M.D’s, and so initially supported the war.  But he concludes that Iraq and the Mideast would be much better off today with Saddam in power.

Well, obviously.  But Nixon makes this claim more interesting with Saddam’s own words and history, much of which he missed himself as an intelligence analyst leading up to the war.  Saddam’s greatest threat was not the U.S., he argues, but Sunni-based Islamic terror, because he relied on the Sunni’s for nearly all his power in Iraq.  Thus, Saddam would have opposed Al-Queada and especially ISIS, as mortal threats to his regime.  Perhaps the fighting would have happened regardless, but Saddam may have appeared vulnerable enough for more open fighting, which would have played right into the U.S.’s tactical and technological advantages.

Maybe so, though this is much easier to say in 2017 than it was in 2003.  Still, I surmise that Benner would concur with Nixon that the best policies come from taking a lesson from the fox, who lives not by paying attention to ideology, but by finding the best way to avoid traps.^^

DM

*Other aspects of The Prince suggest something similar.  He discusses in one chapter that there are two kinds of kingdoms. One type is easy to conquer because they are divided, but this same type of kingdom is all the more difficult to hold precisely because of its divisions.  Was this a word of warning for his D’ Medici enemies who had taken advantage of Florence’s internal divisions?

**Machiavelli argues that Florence survived only because of the serendipity of Turkish activity right at this moment.  The Italian city-states agreed on little besides the fact that Turkey was their greatest enemy.

^This is the conventional view.  But it may be that Trump is actually doing a good job fulfilling his basic promises, as the irrepressible and always enjoyable Camille Paglia points out in her interview here.

^Here I speculate on Benner’s and Nixon’s position, and do not necessarily mean to give my own.  Machiavelli’s work forces one to answer many questions about Christianity’s relationship to politics–but I haven’t come up with an answer yet!

In his classic work Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton uses a masterful analogy.  In discussing the relationship between authority and adventure, he writes,

Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

As good Americans we tend to believe that absolute freedom and tyranny lie at opposite poles.  We are mistaken. Instead, they have a tendency to bend around and shake hands.  Plato recognized this long ago in his Republic. After discussing various forms of government in Book VII and how the good in each gets perverted, he turns his attention to democracies:

The ruin of oligarchy, [said Socrates] is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy — the truth being that the excess of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government . . .

The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.   . . . And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

Socrates continues in the discussion to say that democracies create “a new kind of drone.”

I thought about both Plato and Chesterton when listening to a reaction from one commentator on the Supreme Court’s decision on homosexual marriage.  He agreed with the decision not for legal or moral reasons (which I would disagree with but at least understand in part), but because, “thankfully, the Court recognizes that we live in the 21st century.”  That is, the Court should essentially approve of whatever we happen to be doing at any given time.*  This may look like freedom, but in fact enslaves us to a particular moment without any benefit of perspective. Maybe we must come to terms with the fact that this is what democracy means now.  Perhaps it has always been so and we failed to recognize it.  In any case, this method leaves ourselves only to the walls inside our own heads.

This is why “great” revolutions often end up making things much worse than the regimes they overthrew.  Of course no one intends this at the outset or even recognizes the possibility, partly because revolutionaries perceive a truth, or part of the truth, with crystal clarity.  This truth will give them the motivation they need for revolution.  But because this truth is only part of the whole Truth, it leads to a frozen dogmatism.  The fences melt away in our rush to embrace freedom, and all end up huddling at the center whether they wish it or not.

One of the great virtues of Nicolas Berdyaev’s The Russian Revolution is his keen vision that sees past the political aspects of Communism and into its spiritual core.  Of course the Soviet state adopted atheism as its official policy, but Berdyaev puts the roots of communist origins within the deep and ardent tradition of Russian spirituality.

Anyone who has read 19th century Russian literature recognizes the depths of profound insight and feeling those masters tapped.  Their intensity of feeling led them to examine the nature of suffering perhaps as no other epoch has.  The first modern globalization movement allowed more sensitive souls more exposure to more suffering.  Some, like Dostoevsky, took suffering and had it transformed by the cross.  But others failed to do so, and developed what we might call a “naked” hatred of suffering.  As one early Bolshevik proclaimed, “Suffering has no right to exist.”  Everyone must be happy.

This rejection of the meaning of suffering cannot bring one closer to our fellow men, because of course we do suffer and always will.  To reject suffering sets one up to reject the experience of mankind, and then, mankind itself.  Suffering without the Cross gives way to tyranny.

The early revolutionaries had within them a deep asceticism.  All things not geared fully towards improving the material lot of the people must be expunged.  Beauty itself became a debauched and corrupting luxury.  Everyone must do without so that nothing ever gets wasted, either in the mind or on the ledger sheet.  Such asceticism, without grace, again leads to tyranny. But let us not miss the fact that this tyranny has its roots in a certain idea of freedom.  Communists wished the people to be free from suffering, free from worry about the future, free from the competitive aspects of capitalist societies.  Now we know that such freedom leads to a drabness and narrowing of life.

Berdyaev wrote in 1931 and he had a keen insight for the westerners to whom he wrote.  Westerners at that time and now, fundamentally are skeptics, and they assumed that the Soviets shared this basic outlook.  Not so.  The communist has deep (though misplaced) faith, and the people understand and embrace this faith.  The state could not hold together for any other reason.  This faith flies in the face of “evidence” against it.  Most communists rejected the physics of the early 20th century, for example, because Einstein and others smacked of mysticism, and we must exorcise all mysticism so that the people will have true happiness.  In the end pure rationalism becomes entirely irrational and ridiculous.  Still they press on.  Our failure to recognize this faith led us to combat it by all the wrong means.  One thinks of Nixon trying to impress Khruschev by showing him better refrigerators.  It showed our misunderstanding and our bankruptcy.  Was this all we had to offer?  If Khruschev was not impressed, we should be surprised.

The first part of Berdyaev’s book focuses on the spiritual failures of the revolutionaries themselves, but then he adroitly and appropriately turns the tables.  How did such a movement come about?  If the revolutionaries showed great spiritual hunger, we must consider the fact that churches in their locales could not feed them.  The rise of communism comes from the failure not just of capitalism to produce a just society, but from the Church to live out its calling.  He writes,

Christianity has not put its truth into full living practice.  It has found its realization either in conventional formula or in theocracies which deliberately ignore freedom (which is the fundamental condition of any genuine realization), or it has practiced a system of duality, as in modern history, when its power has weakened.  And therefore Communism has made its appearance as a punishment and a reminder, as a perversion of some genuine truth.

As I and others lament the recent high court decision on the validity of homosexual marriage we do well to follow Berdyaev’s example and point our fingers in the right place.  For what we see before us comes fundamentally from the Church’s failure to explain the true nature of marriage not as an emotional bond between two people, but as an image of salvation itself, the marriage of Heaven and Earth.  In Eastern churches, the bride and groom process around the congregation during the service wearing crowns.  These crowns represent crowns of the martyrs.  Marriage, like monasticism, is a kind of martyrdom, a death out of which new life emerges. What we see before us should serve as a “punishment and a reminder” of what we should have proclaiming and living out all along.

Dave

*One sees this in many places in our culture.  Take, for example, the rise of graphic novels.  Rather than be comfortable with the strengths and weaknesses of the medium, we hear ardent insistence that “graphic novels are just like books.”  In my limited experience it seems obligatory for authors of young-adult fiction to include a mean teacher in the story who fails to allow a student to hand in a book-report on a graphic novel.  The theme is the same —  whatever we happen to be doing must be affirmed by all.

This post has had a few different lives (originally written during the party primaries in 2016) . . .

Our most recent election raises many questions for many people.  One thing appears clear . . . we knew that the Republican party was in trouble before this election.  Otherwise, Trump never would have received the nomination.  The fact that Clinton lost, however, shows the weakness of the Democratic party as well.  The whole party system will likely need a reboot in the coming years.

Below is the first re-posting note . . .

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I published this about a year ago (you will note the dated references), but republish it to coincide with our look at Aristotle in our senior level Government class.  The original post is below.

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Democracies have always had at best an uneasy relationship with aristocracies, for obvious reasons. The very presence of an aristocracy either seems like an obstacle or a reminder of the inadequacy of democracy.  But first and foremost, I suppose, democracies would interest themselves in self-preservation.  In turn it might mean, to paraphrase Aristotle, that democracies should adopt not the political practices that democracies want, but those designed instead to preserve democracies.

I thought of Aristotle’s dictum while reading Jonathan Rauch’s provocatively titled Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back Room Deals can Strengthen American Democracy.   I love the title.  Its (seeming) incongruity demands further examination.  But I admit I initially dismissed the idea as a farce — until I thought about Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.  Democrats should be careful of cheering Trump on in the almost certain hope that he will fall on his face in due course.  We need good candidates on both sides to spur one another on and stabilize the electorate.  I found myself thinking, “Trump has had his fun and served his purpose.  Why hasn’t someone taken care of this?”  Then I realized that what in fact I wanted was a smoke-filled back room where “decisions” got made about these sorts of things.

No one suggests that such a solution resembles democracy.  But Rauch argues that these practices in fact preserve middle-ground, the key to a stable democracy. We fret about the increased polarization of the country and the lack of compromise. Look no further, Rauch argues, then to the decline of the power of parties — in our day particularly, the decline of the Republican party.  He contends that political machines in fact serve two key purposes:

• They traffic in interests not ideas.  Ideas have no limits, no boundaries.  The “system” of politics is more easily quantified, thus more easily measured and controlled.
• The candidates of a ‘machine’ stand accountable to a conglomeration of interests.  Ideological candidates have much less direct accountability.  This lack of accountability makes ideological candidates more free, and thus more oppositional.  As Rauch writes, “Show me a political system without machine-politics, and I’ll show you confusion, fragmentation, and a drift towards ungovernable extremism.”  Moderation, he argues comes not from moderates, but from machines that by design moderate everyone’s extremism.

Machine politics reminds us of Tammany Hall and other kinds of organizations filled with what even its ardent defenders might call “honest graft.”  Rauch argues that politics always involves making a lot of sausage.  But he argues that political machines also accomplished a great deal.  Tammany Hall dramatically boosted voter turnout and passed a great deal of progressive legislation.  Lyndon Johnson made who knows how many deals to pass the Civil Rights Act.  Progressives, Libertarians, and Tea-Partiers, Rauch argues, get so caught up in the purity of the idea, the purity of the process, that nothing ever gets done.  For him they are the modern-day lotus eaters.

But however good sausages taste, watching them get made never sits well.  Machine politics face the hurdles of ideologues. The modern media microscope surely offers no help either.  I can see Americans get fed up with polarization and return to a more centrist mindset.  I can’t see the media going away or turning a blind eye any time soon to back-room deals.  This poses the biggest challenge to a return to the bygone days of political machines.

Rauch makes an eloquent plea for his idea.  He effectively demonstrates the moderating effect of machines.  I wish he had talked more about the inevitable nature of ideology in democracies, or the inevitable nature of ideology in human experience.  For Rauch, ideology is almost a four-letter word. He recognizes its power, but not its place.  So, ok, machines can moderate ideologies.  But I wonder if Rauch the pragmatic realist is asking us to accept the fantasy that (to reference Thucydides) interest will trump honor and/or fear.

Also we need more than a modern comparison to evaluate it. We need greater perspective outside of our own sphere. Basically what he asks for is a democracy managed by a semi-official oligarchy.  In many ways we had this in  post-Napoleonic Europe in the 19th century.  How does this period stack up?

Some features of this era:

• A significant increase in democracy through expanded voting rights, and in some places, limitations on the ‘elite’ legislative bodies (like the House of Lords in England).
• Relative peace — at least internally in Europe.  Wars happened but they tended to be limited in scope and duration.
• An aristocracy that had less power than the previous century but still lots of influence.  What’s more — this aristocracy had more mobility than perhaps at any other time in history.  Traveling around Europe formed an integral part of the growing up experience for many aristocratic youth.  Thus, the aristocracy formed a real “boys club” throughout central and western Europe (most of the monarchies also had some familial relationship to one another as well).
• As an extension of this, lots and lots of international conferences to settle disputes and award prizes to the participants.

Of course no era is perfect.  Some would point out that the “relative peace” I mention came at the expense of significant overseas expansion. I argue elsewhere that such expansion created domestic internal issues.  Others might say that the catastrophe of W.W. I emerged from the ultimate failure of this system. We should consider their record in context, however. The system they established must have the backdrop of the chaos of the highly ideological French Revolution and the resultant Napoleonic Wars that killed millions.

We will see whether or not this next election shows the need for the return of political machines.  If Hilary Clinton runs against Jeb Bush for the presidency, we might even argue that such machines never left.  But another question that Rauch fails to ask is, can they return to prominence?  It may be more than a matter of political will.  The decline of political machines has its roots beyond politics.  For example, after itunes, Youtube, etc., record companies exist, but not in the same way.  The power they had in the 1990’s to release greatest hits albums of their artists but put one new song on the album to try and make die-hard fans buy entire albums to get that one song — may never return (not that I’m bitter or anything).  We can observe this de-centralization most everywhere in our culture.  And surely this de-centralization comes at a price, but also gives some benefits?  Rauch sees no real benefits to political de-centralization and cannot weigh the merits of both.

But this is still a good book.  It makes one think.  Fundamentally, it asks us to consider whether or not democracies, left to themselves, will preserve themselves from their own folly.

I had a startling realization over this past Christmas that I might be getting old.

My son received an album by The Who as a present and I ended up reacquainting myself with their music as we listened to it together in the car.  Hearing again especially some of their earlier music, all the fuss “eggheads” made in the 1960’s about rock music destroying the youth, and ultimately destroying our civilization, made total sense.

How could this be happening to me?  It could possibly have something to do with the minivan in the driveway . . .

My reaction came not so much from their penchant to destroy their instruments (which I always just found pointless and hardly scary or “revolutionary”) but from the lyrics, rhythm, etc.  Everything seemed to be about angst, alienation, anger, emotional distress, “I’m better than you,” and so on.  Again — some of this changed as they matured as people and musicians in the 1970’s.

“Kid’s these days!”

But if one reflects on popular music in general we see that The Who (who at least were interesting and talented) probably were not nearly as “dangerous” as some other bands/pop stars.  So much even of the best pop music (even early Beatles) aims for the lowest denominator of teenage emotional distress.*  So much of it seems so small, petty, narrow, trapping us inside ourselves.  When we consider that the goal of the Christian life is “contentment in all things” through union with God and our fellow man, we see how obviously such music works directly against that.

In her recent interview with Tyler Cowen the always engaging Camille Paglia talked of how she finds the culture of today small and largely pointless.  In contrast, the culture she grew up in celebrated the large and grand.  The Ten Commandments has the huge statue of Pharaoh move across the screen, or the vast expanse of the desert in Lawerence of Arabia.  Today the internet opens up a whole world and yet we sit fixated on tiny screens.

Perhaps there is a connection between the two.

In the Church’s patristic era a variety of monks described a spiritual state they called “acedia.”  Through a series of unfortunate twists and turns the sin of acedia would come to thought of as mere laziness.  But originally, it meant something deeper and more profound than this.  Abbot Jean Charles Nault seeks to recover its original meaning and its relevance for today, in his book The Noonday Devil.  He attempts to explain the meaning of acedia with roots in apathy, boredom, and indifference.  The middle section, where he discusses the work of Thomas Aquinas, got a bit tedious for me at least (which is a shame because St. Thomas is not tedious).  Despite this, one sees clearly that Abbot Jean has written a useful and timely work.

Abbott Nault begins by tracing the development of the idea of acedia, first recognized, or at least, written about, by the early desert monastics.  Anyone familiar with the writings of such fathers know they possessed profound spiritual and psychological insights.  We can see this when they called acedia the “noon-day devil.”  In the middle of the day in the desert the sun comes to its height and the heat–and the torpor of the day– reach their peak.  Bodies and minds alike become wet noodles.  But more than this, with the sun at its height we see no shadows and are not conscious of time passing.  Without shadow and the passing of time, we lose a sense of mystery.  Without mystery, we grow disenchanted with the world.  Soon enough, we grow not just disenchanted with the world, but our very selves.  In due time, disenchantment leads to disgust even with our very existence.

Hence, Abbot Nault brilliant summation that acedia is a “sin against the gift of the self.”

Since the first to discuss acedia were desert monastics the original applications had to do with desert monastic life.  Acedia took a variety of forms:

• Temptation to leave one’s cell/calling — variety is the spice of life, so we say.  For the monastics no monk needed anything that was not already in his cell.  The temptation to seek variety led to a dissipation of spiritual energy.  A love of variety only masks a disgust with creation itself.
• Too much concern for one’s physical health–this seems hardly akin to “disgust with oneself” or creation.  But if we look closer . . . hypochondriacs are navel gazers.  They  misplace their vision and will not look at the stars.  This obsession leads down the path of disenchantment, first  with creation, and then with the self.  Some recommend frequent meditations on death as a special cure for this.  Take care of your body all you like, but death will take you all the same.  In addition, meditation on death will mean meditation on a mystery, and the possibility of re-echantment with the self, creation and ultimately, with God.  In fact, meditation on the brute fact of one’s death was a frequently prescribed remedy for acedia.
• Neglect in observing the rule–often the temptation is to ‘minimize’ the rule and make things easier.  Sometimes others sought to go beyond the rule to great extremes.  Both paths seek one’s own way in the spiritual struggle, however, and this leads to isolation from community.  Both paths fail the discipline of “staying in your lane” and contentment with what has been given.
• Aversion to manual labor–this seems more like what we would expect to hear
• Desire for “worldly pursuits”–service, activity, and so on.  Surely these are good things!  And they are, but “remain in your cell.”  Stay in your lane.

The monks gave various cures for acedia such as exercise, combining work and prayer, and so on.** But none of the remedies allowed the monk to avoid his true calling, and hence, his true self.  “Have the discipline and the desire to become truly human.”

The devil has craft.  He masks acedia in various ways, one of them being the desire for self-preservation.  We feel that our routines suffocate us.  We need fresh air, a change of pace–surely God created such variety for a reason!  But this desire to embrace the so-called fulness of ourselves is false.  In reality we seek to escape ourselves.  This subtle deception makes itself evident when we switch from an “open” approach to life rooted in love to a “closed” approach rooted in obligation.  No lover seeks to perform the minimum to show his intention to his beloved.  But most of us get out of the dentist office as soon as possible.  We take a “closed” approach to our disciplines when we see them as taking instead of giving life.  We erect walls and a moat around our identities.  This so-called self preservation actually shrivels and dissipates us.  We avoid the self by scattering it to the four winds. Without true self-knowledge we will end up dealing with God only when we “have to.”

Many years ago I met very briefly a bishop not terribly unlike some of these desert monastics in terms of his habits.  He was old, thin, and spoke in a quiet though melodious voice.  Yet he easily seemed to me the most “solid” person in the room.  The weight of his personality struck me with great force.  Here, I thought, is a real person, whose discipline of heart and will have made him an infinitely stronger man than myself.^  I recall thinking, “If for some reason he tells me to jump, I will certainly ask, ‘how high?'”

One can easily see how acedia would have a field day in our modern world.  Good evidence exists that the multiplicity of choice in fact makes us less free. We have a hard time avoiding distraction, but the real problem is that we do not want to avoid it.  Many of us crave distraction to keep us away from ourselves, and most of us carry an easy means of distraction in our pockets.  To return to Paglia’s observation, a world of small screens will lead to small minds and a great dullness.

Despite the appalling landscape of our own hearts, I see some ground to build upon.  The Church still understands that monogamous marriage leads to great fulfillment and a true understanding of love of God.  Many often say that they did not really know their spouse until marriage.  So too, many of us did not really know ourselves until practicing marriage either.  We understand here the value of “staying in your lane.”

But progress in our culture on this issue may involve a different understanding of human experience and our place in the world.  We should remember the “middle way” of the desert fathers.  “If you are hungry, eat.  If you are tired, sleep.  But . . . do not leave your cell.”

— Dave

*This was not the case as much with groups that came out a more weighty blues tradition, like the Chuck Berry, Led Zeppelin, and especially, . . . most especially, Jimi Hendrix.

**In a whole other section Nault describes that a frequent remedy for acedia involved lamenting and weeping over one’s sins.  A trivial person, just like a trivial culture, will not be able to take anything seriously.  A true sense of personal sin will give you the  humility to “stay in your lane.”

^The desert fathers have a reputation for extreme severity that the many quotes in the book do not support.  Obviously their monastic life included more asceticism than exists in the world, but all in all, they strove for the “middle way.”