Why Me?The case against the sovereign self.
Posted Monday, June 9, 2008, at 6:57 AM ET
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponUnfortunately, however, Elshtain's Christian-inspired moral sincerity has, in recent years, led her to become a politically engaged conservative, and too often in the book, standard-issue right-wing ideology drives out thoughtful clarity. Elshtain's predictable conservative pieties lead her to stack the deck: She not only passes over all that was wrong when God ruled the world; she ignores all the benefits that follow from the fact that people now do.
Had Elshtain related the history of Christianity rather than the history of theology, her portrayal of European history would have been quite different. Godly and political authority, far from constituting dual realms, frequently operated within a moral division of labor. The most extreme example was provided by the Inquisition: The church sought out the heretics, while the state sent them to their death. But even in less bloody circumstances, Catholicism was most comfortable as a state church, quite happy to use the sword in defense of God's word. The dualism of which Elshtain is so proud existed more in theory than practice.
The Protestant Reformation broke the link between the pope and the prince, but only to offer instead a church that furthered the interest of a particular nation. Elshtain is on firmer ground here; her discussion of Martin Luther quite accurately points out how his fear of disorder led him to defend the prince's use of the sword in the bloodiest of ways. But if Luther blended spiritual and political authority, he can hardly be classified as a dualist. Monism therefore has religious as well as secular origins—an obvious fact, but one that Elshtain all too easily glosses over.
It is when we come to the modern period that Elshtain's politics become too one-sided to ignore. There are many examples from which she could have chosen in discussing the sovereign self. There is, for example, the notion of individual autonomy embodied in the civil rights amendments that prohibited slavery in the United States. Or there were all those thinkers who claimed that people living in situations of poverty and desperation required help in the form of the welfare state. Both of these movements on behalf of self-sovereignty, as it happened, were led by deeply devout Christians. They were, in that sense, dualistic: They judged man's law—Southern customs on the one hand, the logic of the market on the other—as incompatible with the compassion of Jesus Christ.
To be sure, citing examples such as these might have complicated Elshtain's contention that self-sovereignty is a bad thing. But the example she does pick to illustrate why autonomy is the wrong goal for human beings is simply off the charts: "The Nazi project," she writes "was a dream of perfection, a systematic rational project, not a descent into barbarism as is often alleged." (Although the Nazis dominate this section of her book, they are not the only example of self-sovereignty's distortions that she cites; she also discusses abortion.) Liberals and progressives in the United States were once eugenicists. So were Nazis. Self-sovereignty therefore leads to the gas chambers. People who lacked the most basic of human rights were the victims—victims not of a dictator motivated by virulent racism and delusions of grandeur but by the ideas of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.
It is a shame that someone of Elshtain's learning can endorse such a one-sided view of the modern condition. Without self-sovereignty, it is true, we would not have women demanding control of their bodies. But nor would we have born-again Christians claiming a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. If you are a believer, God indeed created you. But perhaps he also created those miracle drugs that keep you alive—as well as the desire, which so many seem to have, to die with the dignity with which they lived.
Liberal democracy, moreover, does not make it impossible to find justice in the world; it brings justice down from the skies and locates it in laws and courts charged with fairness to all sides. That is a far cry from a time when divine justice, because it transcended both the state and the self, was unchangeable by either. Against an all-seeing, all-powerful God and an arbitrary and capricious prince, I'll take the sovereignty of the self any day.
The Least Fun Thing About Video Games: Friendly Fire
Why Is It Such a Big Deal That We Found Water on the Moon?
My Czech Vacation Made Me Kinda Sad
Help! I Got My Co-Worker's Sister Pregnant!
The Obama Administration Is Giving This Gitmo Detainee a Raw Deal
Another Book From Philip Roth About How Much It Stinks To Get Old
Remarks from the Fray:
[Elshtain] completely undermines herself with that Terri Schiavo point. Had it been up to God, she would not have lived as long as she did. It was people and the state who were keeping her alive by artificial means. And when the people removed their man-made prevention of her death, she died. So if God is the governing authority that decides who lives and who dies in a situation like that, then God wanted Terri Schiavo to die. No one killed her. They just stopped preventing her death. This is an example of people submitting to God's plan, not defying it.
Of course, that's assuming that you believe in God.
It's also hilarious that she would have us believe that God ever held complete power and rule of law. If you believe in the story of Eden, people rejected God almost from the moment they were created, ruling themselves and eventually forming government when they were cast out of the garden.
If you don't believe in the creation story and choose evolution, then man evolved from animals; the first rule has always been survival (individual rule), followed by order (government rule), and eventually followed by religion, which was really only ever used as a handy tool for government backup.
Regardless of your religious belief or non belief, this whole things sounds like a sad piece of propaganda coming from someone educated enough to know better.
--Selene212
(To reply, click here.)
The fatal flaw in the reasoning of those who decry "playing God" is that they assert the ability to do just that. Any claims about God's law come from the mouths and pens of men. We are thus left with trusting the authority of those who claim to speak for God - and they are many and varied - and trusting the individual to make his own moral choice. Any appeal to God is necessarily an appeal to either a human authority, or the sovereign self.
--Fitzpatrick
(To reply, click here.)
It has been said many times that a person who represents himself has a fool for a client. Similarly, the self-employed have the most demanding boss. When it comes to sovereignty, the scenario doesn't look any better.
The Catholic viewpoint is that God is King and every substitution is erroneous on its face because it doesn't accept that fact. This is a very robust point and is only open to challenge of the fact of God's dominion, which is generally done via an assault on His existence or nature.
Here, the question is more one of a practical nature: do people govern themselves well? The answer is very similar to asking whether flagpoles stand up well by themselves... and the answer is generally 'no' because any single pole standing straight up is stable but not robust. A pole even slightly disturbed finds itself increasingly out of balance and rapidly crashing to the ground with no way to halt this decline. This instability is characteristic of many dynamic systems which are stable inside a very small phase space but not robust - so they do not re-enter the stable space once they have left it.
Humans are much the same way. The person who stops smoking compensates by overeating, then gets radically overweight and continues to take comfort in food; becomes lonely and needs more comfort; has bad health, loses a job, needs more comfort... and dies of a heart condition. All sorts of addictions and mechanisms for seeking validation and security feature the same feedback mechanisms. Rage, anger and violence feed on themselves. All sorts of negative emotions, self-righteousness, arrogance, anxiety ... they feed on themselves and often on each other. People unmoored from associations which govern them effectively may be stable - briefly. In essence, only theoretically.
People need authorities. They need family authorities, state authorities, perhaps divine authorities. Absolute power makes the person independent again, and unstable. It corrupts. The founding fathers recognized that groups of people need to be deeply interconnected in ways that restrict their freedoms, so they cannot simply spin off into destruction; they need self-control as much as possible, but then, they need to be governed; by each other, and well, for their own interests.
Some fools blame all failings on the society and all successes on the individual. Anyone with sense would see that there are social failings that go uncorrected by individuals, yes, and propagate down to reflect poorly on all the members of a society; but that there are also individual failings that are constantly corrected by society and that a mass of ungoverned individuals would be utter destruction for all the individuals involved. However, the more people organize independently into small associations (like families) and subordinate organizations (like communities and states) and independent networks (like the market and churches and government) the more stable the human condition will become.
It may not be ideal at any time, and improvements will be more difficult perhaps due to stability and the fact that flaws won't be as glaring when they are free from controls that moderate them, but individuals will be governed effectively - but not by a single centralized and easily radicalized authority.
Since the alternatives are utter disaster for everyone all at once and tyranny that leads to disaster inevitably, we shouldn't be so ready to give up on the moderation of distributed authority, even if we have doubts at times about the hierarchies that manage some of it.
--BenK
(To reply, click here.)
(6/10)