What makes somebody a revolutionary?

There’s an interesting conversation but what the personality type might be or the motivations underlying who the person is.

If one stops and thinks about how they interact with the political system it produces a different answer. Most people might complain about something but they’re willing to remain in discussion.

One of the things the French situation through the 18th century opened up was the question of how you could actually produce change. It’s one thing if the question is whether institutions are capable of producing outcomes if we simply change the personnel, policies, laws, or practices.

It’s a different question if the institutions themselves become unacceptable.

Questioning whether something is wrong from a policy perspective or whether you have a problem with the basic structure is a different point.

Revolutionaries’ argument does not rely on whether the government itself might be able to change something. The problem is at the core the government is incapable of changing what they wish.

Trying to find the motivation for this is a little bit more complicated. The point that envy might be at the core of somebody’s thinking is one point.

I’m going to suggest it’s more complicated than that. Increasingly a lot of thinking involves whether or not the basic political structure itself is a problem.

They might be envious or something. And I would suggest that it’s probably a core point.

That being said both the Social Democrat and the conservative frequently argue that they don’t like how a constitutional mechanism works. Trying to figure out how that plays out and find a solution is more to the point.

Is envy a cornerstone for what revolutionaries need?

This isn’t necessarily a mark. Liberalism has produced the same question. And for that matter conservatives have produced the same point themselves.

But the core of the question remains: if somebody wants radical change what sits at the corner of the argument?

In the mid 18th century, a number of French liberals did point out that one of the problems was that most of the population could be mollified.

This became one of the central points that in order to create change one needed to produce the situation where people were more motivated for radicalism.

For those that wanted to produce change especially in the situation where things would be reformed in a way that they wanted the argument became interesting.

French revolutionaries made the point of trying to change the situation. Many would argue that that’s what they had to do.

Here’s a question. If you want to change the fundamental structures of how society functions it no longer becomes a question of promoting different policy options.

This is why a revolution requires something more. One has to reconsider everything about how it operates in a normal situation.

One argument that’s important, for a number of people trying to understand the difference between those who want to reform something and those who are radical in trying to change everything from the ground up are different.

Reformers are actually a problem. It’s possible to change something and it doesn’t go as far as the radical beliefs are necessary. As such you can end up being in conflict with those who might appear to be on your own side.

Those who seek reform might be able to see success. The reformer can see success within an existing order. The revolutionaries definition of success requires transcending that order. Somebody who’s revolutionary might be asking for something that is not possible.

Before becoming leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin was very aware of ensuring that those who would be involved in his political movement need to constantly be seeing problems.Lenin recognized the problem that confronts almost every revolutionary movement. Immediate improvements can satisfy the very people whose dissatisfaction is supposed to produce the fundamental change.

As such there was very much awareness of constantly reinforcing the emotional motivation for being much more radical.

Now this is again how you question what causes somebody to be revolutionary?

The reformer sees dissatisfaction is a problem to solve. The revolutionary may need dissatisfaction in order to solve a large problem.

There’s a number of people that want to change something. Simply tinkering around the sides. But this is also where a number of more revolutionary thinkers have criticized that one of their problems is moderate reforms that undermine those who want more substantive change.

And this is the specific psychology that is more intriguing. Those who constantly need more radical outcomes than what your standard reformer might be looking for.

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How much of another person do we actually know when almost everything we know about them is what they have chosen to show us?

Questioning one’s motives is common. Why somebody does something is frequently a consideration when we are evaluating what they accomplished.

A number of spiritual beliefs make the point that motivation is frequently more important than what somebody actually did. Being motivated by bad intentions can frequently mitigate even an appearance of something positive.

At least part of the question is always what the motivation is driven by. We regularly don’t actually see what somebody’s purposes are for pursuing an action, or even for presenting themselves in a particular way. There are inferences that can be drawn from their actions, their circumstances, and the statements they make. But an inference is not the same thing as knowledge.

The problem becomes more noticeable when we encounter somebody through some sort of medium rather than in person. We are not simply observing a person. We are observing what has been selected, presented, recorded, edited, or written about that person.

Telling somebody that online interactions aren’t the real world is therefore an intriguing place to start. One should probably not have to be reminded that a YouTube video has been intentionally produced for entertainment or for a particular educational purpose. But neither should the presentation be treated as an unfiltered projection of reality.

The same problem exists with the written word. Historical novels are an obvious example. A reader can encounter historical facts alongside fictional portrayals of particular individuals and eventually become unable to distinguish between the two. The fictional character begins to acquire the same reality as the historical person.

Perhaps the psychology of how we get here starts from something more aspirational. Our interactions with online or fictionalized accounts of the real world frequently appeal to what we wish to be true. It is therefore less a case of simply being unable to discern reality from fiction than it is a case of wanting something to be true.

When he was found guilty, Socrates was said to have argued that killing him would end up hurting all of Athens. There’s still a rock in the center of the city upon which Socrates is said to have made this plea. They couldn’t replace him. There was a belief that he was presenting that he was sufficiently unique.

Of course a number of people would argue that Socrates’ motivation might not have been entirely pure. There’s also an obvious element of its self importance underneath it.

At least part of what’s going on in this episode is the presentation, and an understanding that the person that is being remembered, who Socrates was, was deliberately constructed for us to remember.

Let’s presume for a moment that maybe what he was trying to get at wasn’t entirely self-serving. Is somebody’s value to their community such that it should be taken into consideration when you’re considering potential acclamation or punishment for them?

One of the things Socrates had at the center of his life however was the presentation of a public self. His method of constantly questioning everything was a teaching tool to be sure, but it also presented who he wanted people to think he was. At the end of his life ensuring that that image was what was retained in one’s mind was probably as much the purpose as anything else

Public appearances are obviously something most individuals condition themselves more. We present a front that we want others to see such that we’re giving a particular impression.

I asked the question how frequently someone consorts not only who they are, but presents something of a false face while they’re doing it.

There are stories that Charles I on the way to the executioner’s block wore an extra shirt so that he wouldn’t be seen shivering, it was a cold day, and people might get the wrong idea. He didn’t want people to believe that he was scared of the fate that awaited him.

Maintaining the image of a stoic head of state who’s prepared to meet anything.

Living in a heavily media age we have probably become not only a custom, but almost indifferent to most individuals trying to present a certain appearance when they are in public. The question of how accurate it is can frequently be beside the point. Most celebrities intentionally are producing an artificial character and it’s that which they want to either be acclaimed or rejected based on their interest.

But how much does constantly viewing people in this artificial manner warp how we see true interactions?

Are we becoming too desensitized to the idea that some things are artificial, especially specific characterizations, and other things are not.

Something historical examples present is that the belief the media has changed human behavior is probably overstated. What media has changed is more the frequency and scale at which public presentations occur. It’s possible for an individual who might have been working on their public character once a week to now do so many times a day.

As a result it becomes far less likely for counterexamples to exist for many. The public persona of who somebody is is all the large portion of the population is ever going to have an interaction with.

From a psychological standpoint it’s the distinction that one has to make between who somebody is, their character in the actions that they typically take on their own volition, and who somebody presents themselves as.

This becomes the distinction of whether or not something really is or it’s something that we wish it to be. All too often what media frequency has allowed is that the aspirational component has become increasingly present. Singular moments where one presents a front ends up becoming a much more permanent aspect.

At least part of the question then becomes, does constantly trying to present an aspirational or desired image alter who the person is themselves? Does authenticity slowly give way to constantly acting a role?

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There is something of a popular notion that modern conservatism begins at the end of the 18th century with the reaction to the French Revolution. The Revolution was seen as the culmination of the Enlightenment era, and conservatives were in revolt against what the 18th century had produced.

It’s certainly a popular idea when one looks at the Romantic era that followed. Romanticism in the early 19th century was, in part, a reaction to increasing rationalization, industrialization, and the alienation they produced, and to the loss of an organic society. This was especially popular throughout much of the artisan world. The Romantic reaction and the conservative reaction overlapped in their suspicion of what modernity was producing, but they were not quite the same thing.

Hugh Cecil, the nephew of Lord Salisbury, the former British prime minister, argued that modern conservatism was born on May 6, 1791.

One would have to know the parliamentary record to recognize the importance of that date. It was when Edmund Burke broke with the more radical Whigs led by Charles Fox and launched an attack on them for becoming too attached to the French Revolution. The Whigs had attacked traditional authority, but Burke had seen it going too far and now embracing a form of radicalism of its own.

Burke’s central point for breaking with the Whigs was specifically political and epistemological. His conservative premise was that the Whigs had put too much emphasis on the ability of rationality to find the correct conclusion.

Modern conservatism did not originate simply as a reaction against revolution. It originated within the constitutional tradition when some of its own participants concluded that the revolutionary interpretation of that tradition had exceeded its legitimate bounds.

At its core was a constitutional viewpoint of balance. In Britain, this meant the Crown, the aristocracy, and the Commons operating in concert. Most countries had similar notions in which hereditary tradition and some form of popular input were supposed to balance one another.

Indeed, it is possible to make the argument that conservatism as a political program was, at its original inception, almost entirely focused on constitutional matters. In some respects, this is why Burke himself is somewhat of a curiosity for those who try to place him within an economic or cultural program today. He doesn’t fit cleanly because, in neither of those examples, does he have a particular viewpoint that has a straightforward modern application.

It’s also why it wouldn’t be entirely out of line for a liberal to invoke Burke’s idea of constitutional balance. Most classical liberals would agree with a number of the conceptions he propagated, just as they would agree with Montesquieu or Madison.

One could reject Enlightenment principles and accept particular institutional arrangements. The distinction became one between reason as a tool and reason as a premise for political authority.

The argument wasn’t that people shouldn’t use reason. The skepticism was that reason, operating from first principles, could adequately reconstruct a society whose accumulated knowledge vastly exceeds what any individual could possess.

This is where some would argue that Burke harkened back to an era before the Enlightenment. There is an Aristotelian resonance here, where philosophy sought a mean between extremes. In this case, neither the absence of reason nor reason unconstrained by experience is sufficient. Too much reason, when not constrained by experience, circumstance, and prudence, was what Burke saw as the problem.

Burke in some ways is somewhat curious. He attacked the mid-century for being too deferential to Crown authority. As such, he certainly was not in what would have been considered the old style. But by contrast, he was also less than enthusiastic about some of his more liberal colleagues.

It’s sometimes forgotten that he actually had personal interaction with some of the leaders in France before the Revolution. Having visited Paris and met with some of them, he was alarmed by the lack of reservation a number of them had about what they were about to embark upon.

Indeed, his Reflections on the Revolution in France carried a heavy criticism of disregarding the people and institutions that had come before. Their clean break from any notion of institutional memory was one of the biggest principles he keyed on as one of their significant flaws.

One of the concepts that sits at the center of Burke’s thought, but doesn’t get as much attention, is the interaction between transcendence and the current era. Most remember Burke’s argument that society is a partnership between those who have come before, those living now, and those not yet born. This appeals to anybody who believes in the idea of permanence in societal order.

But there is another implication to the argument.

The revolutionary believes the present can emancipate itself from the past. The modern conservative claim was in opposition to this idea of temporal self-sovereignty.

The present inherits something, modifies something, and transmits something.

But if this is true, there is a second point that is easy to miss. Even if they wanted to, conservatives couldn’t stop history from moving forward. One had to accept that there was an element of change that was inevitable and beyond human control.

Similar to the reform liberals who would later suggest that it was possible for society to manage components of everyday life that might be beyond what was reasonable, a conservative who believes that history can simply be stopped is invoking an element of control that isn’t possible for a human being.

This helps explain some of the arguments where Burke seems, in some respects, to be attacking Enlightenment principles while in other cases accepting particular ideas associated with them. He might have thought that imposing the scientific method into politics was foolhardy, but he could still respect Montesquieu’s idea of an institutionalized separation of powers to prevent the concentration of authority.

He opposed Enlightenment principles as abstractions, but could come to respect particular arguments when they improved that which he considered worth preserving.

It becomes a balancing act of understanding which traditions have value and need to be saved, while permitting moderate and incremental reform where something can be improved for the betterment of society.

This is where the argument over whether conservatives have an ideal point in history becomes somewhat off topic.

Conservatism believes that much of political knowledge comes from experience and learned behavior. This is why historical understanding sits at its center. But it also respects that the transcendent order has a historical trajectory of its own.

There are two contrary errors.

The first is that we can deliberately construct a society according to what reason tells us it ought to be. This is the revolutionary motive.

The second is that we can deliberately prevent society from changing. This is the reactionary error.

Conservatism was never the belief that nothing should change. It is the recognition that change cannot be completely controlled.

Unlike the liberal, human beings do not control the trajectory of history, nor should they expect that progress means improving human beings themselves. Human nature and the moral order are not infinitely malleable, and therefore political progress cannot consist in perfecting humanity through institutional reconstruction.

The past matters because it contains accumulated experience. It is through this experience that our understanding of human society is formed.

Burke’s argument was more than simply preserving traditions. It was that no generation possessed sovereignty over the historical process by itself.

The revolutionary wants to emancipate himself from the past.

The reactionary wants to prevent the future from arriving.

The conservative accepts that he is situated between them.

Liberalism asks what political arrangements human beings can rationally construct.

Radicalism asks what political arrangements human beings can construct if existing arrangements are obstacles.

Conservatism asks what political arrangements can survive the limitations of human beings.

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What are the limits to which a country’s legal structure can operate under? At what stage is the differences between various interests just too great for any political system to actually operate properly?

It is easy to imagine a point at which deliberative government begins to give way to a form of soft authoritarianism. If neither side recognizes the other’s underlying principles as legitimate, political authority increasingly becomes the mechanism by which one side prevents the other from acting.

A big part of the problem is ascertaining where rights and political authority comes from. For many the belief that rights are universal has always had the implication that they apply anywhere. A local political community altering them or suggesting a handful might not be pertinent was always considered at least partially illegitimate.

Yet that in many respects is one of the foundational problems in the first place. If something is claimed to be universal but it is not universally recognized, who has the authority to impose it?

Political communities have legitimate authority to organize themselves differently. Political particularity has a much longer human history, and it remains one of the possible ways of understanding the relationship between government authority and legitimate civil disobedience.

As a practical matter it’s been common for the globe to see different political systems in different countries. The universal argument typically becomes difficult when applied to political matters if you’re dealing with a different type of government and a different legal code. What one would be protesting in a socialist regime is obviously different from somebody who is opposing a capitalist order.

There’s obviously those that would argue natural rights could exist in either. Similarly communitarian prescriptions aren’t necessarily limited to a single disposition either.

But at least part of the problem is that there’s a difference between compromise, something that is commonly presupposed in most political orders, and restraint. All too often those who exercise political power lack restraint because they believe that the ability and legal authority to do something are sufficient reasons for doing it. A political order requires a form of self-discipline that recognizes that being permitted to exercise power does not necessarily mean that exercising it is wise or just.

The natural rights advocate doesn’t have to concede that rights are created by society. The communitarian doesn’t have to concede that rights exist prior to society. Both can recognize that political stability requires neither side to exercise unlimited authority whenever it gains sufficient power.

You don’t necessarily have to engage in a dialogue that you know that there’s no easy compromise, or any compromise at all, if it isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Is Socrates’ question of whether or not one has a personal moral obligation changed depending on where one is? Does having a legitimate claim to civil disobedience depend on the specific location one finds themselves in?

The trouble is all too often most are willing to go into these arguments for no reason other than winning them. It doesn’t serve a greater cause for the society at large.

That we’ve been probing the idea that if the basic first principles involved are fundamentally different is it possible for a society to maintain order poses a much more difficult problem. If we don’t agree to the original structures then it would seem as though either side is going to view the other as not having any legitimacy at the start.

Using one’s own judgment can’t become an unlimited license to disregard the political order. This was always the problem if you had a single individual with too much arbitrary authority. It also is the problem of those who would exercise civil disobedience if they take it too far.

At least part of the theory behind constitutional structures in the first place was the presumption that people would disagree. The question was whether or not there was a limit to how far that disagreement could go.

The compromise that is possible may not be a philosophical agreement at all. It may instead be an agreement to exercise political restraint between people who remain philosophically opposed. WE may never agree about where rights come from, what government ultimately exists to accomplish, or what constitutes the good political order. But a pluralistic society may survive without that agreement if neither side assumes that its own conception gives it unlimited authority over the other.

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The question of whether or not a republic has an ideal size carries with it another connotation as well. One presumes a smaller Republic is typically more homogeneous as far as the values and viewpoints of the citizens. This typically meant most thoughts on constitutional structures would be easier as most people would generally agree.

As political communities become larger, the question is not simply whether competing interests can be balanced, but whether people with fundamentally different conceptions of political life can remain under the same constitutional order.

All too often we presume compromise means something along the lines of meeting halfway. That’s generally easy on most policy fronts.It’s especially easy if we’re talking about something that is mathematically defined, like a tax rate.

Some disagreements permit compromise over the outcome. Others concern the rules by which an outcome is judged legitimate. The latter cannot necessarily be solved by meeting halfway.

If somebody’s very premise upon which the constitutional structure is designed is not only different, but produced from an entirely different philosophical orientation then what do you do?

We started with the point of whether or not classical liberals’ disposition towards natural rights and the more communitarian approach of rights being a product of the political community’s interaction can be reconciled.

At least in some quarters you would find many arguing today that they are not. Those who argue for the more communitarian approach frequently see natural rights as being too limiting for what a government can do. Those who believe government action is necessary to preserve certain ideals that they wish see it too much as a straight jacket.

By contrast you would find more than a few promoting natural rights that would find the idea of having to negotiate what their civil liberties are as being repugnant.

The problem is in many respects this isn’t a constitutional argument in the traditional sense. The two sides are not agreeing to argue using the same rule book. At least one of them, if not both, are arguing that the rule book itself is the problem. It’s imposing something that they fundamentally disagree with. The problem is that the shared foundation that makes the dialogue possible is itself what they are disputing.

Political separation provides a mechanism for resolving disagreements that cannot be resolved with a single constitutional framework. Political communities provide a mechanism for allowing incompatible conceptions of political life to coexist without requiring one to defeat the other.

Historically, the existence of separate political communities meant that different peoples could organize their political lives according to different principles without either having to impose those principles universally on the other.

At least part of the problem is the modern world has increasingly been viewed more and more through a universalistic lens. The idea that somebody living across a river might operate under completely different concepts of values and rights seems increasingly at odds with some modern conceptions of political legitimacy. The modern world has increasingly adopted a universalistic conception of political legitimacy: the assumption that certain political principles should apply regardless of the particular political community in which someone lives.

At what point does a common international standard become an attempt to impose a particular conception of legitimate political life?

It’s possible somebody can say no. Simply not join and continue on their own terms. The problem with this of course is it usually comes with a cost as far as not being able to trade or lacking access to certain resources. We typically make the trade off such that everybody will be willing to sacrifice certain ideas in order to be part of the broader global community.

Having political separation from your neighbor doesn’t mean complete independence from everyone else. There’s always going to be technical arrangements that include economic costs, diplomatic costs, various access to institutions, reducing your trade agreements, and reduced influence abroad.

Is political autonomy meaningful if the cost of exercising it becomes sufficiently high?

Is that part of the problem that we’re entering now?

Is at least part of the idea of producing a more peaceable situation allowing disagreements to exist with firm boundaries between different groups. It’s probably fair to say we’re at a stage where we should respect that not everybody is going to agree. As those agreements are more significant, maybe it would be better to recognize trying to force everybody into a common legal structure is probably never going to be the best situation.

This was always the recognition that knowing that a different country might have different laws and customs than you did. But nobody was forcing you to live under those conditions. The entire idea was that different individuals could suit their own belief system by where they were.

The existence of different political communities has historically carried with it the recognition that different peoples might legitimately organize their political lives differently. The modern tension is that we increasingly want to preserve political diversity while simultaneously insisting that certain political principles are universal. Those two impulses are not always easy to reconcile.

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Modern Civil Disobedience

If Plato introduced the question of if there was a moral underpinning, all too frequently today we focus on a different point.

Many modern protests tend to focus on specific policies. It’s not that a government has behaved in a way that is considered immoral in the sense that Socrates was approaching. Instead it’s typically a point of disagreeing with a course of action.

How frequently do we see something that is organized by a specific lobby or a union that is trying to simply influence public opinion?

Arguing about tax rates or spending is easy enough because both sides can at least agree on the basic structure of society being correct. There isn’t any disagreement as far as radically trying to change the system.

Most politicians might not like somebody disagreeing with them in the streets, but they typically tolerate it with the recognition that it’s possible at some moment in the future they might be in the opposite role. If your opponent ends up winning the next election it’s very possible you’re the one that becomes the opposition.

In many respects that introduces a basic understanding for most modern governments. Very frequently those who would protest them believe that the government is legitimate because they can be removed if the protesters get sufficient support. The next election can produce the opposing viewpoint.

A government tolerating protesters has to recognize that unless it can convince a sufficient number of its citizens that its course is correct it could very well end up losing to the protesters.

This scenario is entirely focused on the presumption that disagreement remains political in its nature. We aren’t arguing about whether the government has the ability to do something, it’s whether or not what it’s doing is correct.

This understanding helps to maintain most of the basic civil order that exists.

It’s something completely different if the question becomes one of whether or not you believe the government itself has been acting in a way that is not considered legitimate. In many respects this is where the question of whether a protest is legal enters the conversation. We considered disagreements with a government over policy matters to be acceptable under most legal codes.

Legal permission and a moral obligation are two different things. It’s rare for most disagreements to enter the moral realm in the modern era. We don’t ask whether or not a protest is legal. They usually are.

But the question of whether or not it’s morally justified, or whether the political order has a legitimate claim to prohibit disagreement is something else entirely.

There are a number of times where political authorities might believe what is being protested is illegitimate because of a view of necessity or that there is an irrefutable claim from the other side.

This can also become more foundational.

What if modern liberal thought is one of the issues being questioned. There’s an increasing number of political philosophies that question the entire concept of oppositional government. If you believe the opposition itself to be illegitimate in what it’s trying to propose then it becomes much easier to clamp down on protesters.

This is easy enough to see authoritarian regimes. Opposing those in charge is typically seen as sedition in and of itself.

It gets more complicated with a constitutional arrangement that presumes some element of democracy but also sees limits on how far that entails.

Is it possible for somebody to vote wrong? Or vote for something that would not be permitted constitutionally.

Democracy suggests that the majority should have substantial authority over government. But a constitutional structure puts limits on what a majority can do. It is possible for the majority of the population to vote for something that isn’t allowed. This is always implied that there are some things that are so illegitimate no level of support can make them permissible.

It opens the question as to who decides what falls outside of the normal boundaries. Is it the constitutional text, courts, some sort of conversation through the legislature or other political apparatus, the electorate, or something about the political culture itself?

An easy example is whether or not a new political party that emerges is allowed to challenge elections. Can a constitutional democracy prohibit a political movement from participating in Democratic competition because it’s seen as being outside of the existing order?

The legitimacy of opposition is therefore partly dependent on the possibility of alteration.

There’s been many examples where calls have been made to outlaw certain movements because they’re considered too extreme and outside acceptable conversation. Yet this raises a difficult question about the relationship between constitutional constraint and democratic input.

At least part of this is that the status quo doesn’t like an issue that’s being presented. Is it legitimate to move that outside of the normal realm?

Does this mean the political system itself only recognizes certain viewpoints that are considered legitimate?

This is one of the places where traditional liberal positions and those who would promote political communitarian positions can come into conflict. It’s not simply a policy disagreement anymore. It frequently involves what is considered acceptable as far as how the government behaves.

The communitarian conception places greater weight on the social formation of citizens and shared norms than the classical liberal conception does. Shared social norms aren’t merely preferences that exist alongside political life; they’re part of what constitutes the political community itself.

In this respect would civil disobedience by the same individuals who would propose something considered illegitimate not pose itself something of a bigger problem?

Plato had asked the question whether or not maintaining political order carried value to prevent chaos. Political order has value because without some recognized authority capable of settling disputes, individuals become the final arbiters of their own obligations.

The protection of individual conscience can itself threaten the political order necessary to protect individual conscience.

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Incompatible Sides

So long as the problem remains a difference in point of view, it typically doesn’t reach the level that Plato was warning about threatening the political order. Pluralism works remarkably well when people disagree about conclusions but accept the legitimacy of the process by which conclusions are reached.

But there’s something different if a protest ends up bringing into question whether or not what the government is doing, let alone the government itself, is legitimate.

The issue becomes not whether or not the government is doing something that you disagree with. It becomes whether or not the principles determining the government are themselves considered legitimate.

One of the questions when you have a classical liberal, in a communitarian distinction is whether the two can operate in harmony with each other. The essence of what they believe is rights for the average citizen not only differ, but their basic understanding of where they derive from is different.

Is one’s rights a condition before a government is formed, or are they a creation of what society has agreed upon?

The modern constitutional tradition has often attempted to preserve the idea that at least some rights stand beyond ordinary political discretion. But there’s an increasing number of scholars, both legal and philosophical, that have begun to focus more on the latter.

Can one have rights if there isn’t an order to the system they’re living in? From this standpoint the idea of a rights proceeding government seems problematic.

Pluralism has largely tried to argue the different points of view are not inherently problematic. Constitutional structures are designed to allow substantive differences to be able to occur within cordial conversations. But those disagreements always imply that everybody is involved except that disagreements are part of the game.

There’s also an important distinction. Procedural pluralism suggests that we disagree about substantive questions, but we agree to use the same rules for resolving those disagreements. Foundational disagreement is different. Here we disagree about the very principles that determine which rules are legitimate.

Solving a problem through procedural pluralism may mean that you might not get your preferred solution, but you accept it because you agree with the method. If it becomes more foundational the problem becomes the two sides don’t agree even on the premise.

And if that becomes true, pluralism becomes much more problematic.

There’s also something to be said for the distinction between legitimacy and tolerance. Saying somebody is profoundly wrong, but accepting their right to argue for it is pluralism. By contrast, somebody’s position being so fundamentally wrong that they can’t be permitted to participate is something different.

The argument Plato was getting at that without political order on the community chaos would likely ensue in some respects brings up the extreme idea of what happens when pluralism breaks down. Allowing different viewpoints means that most are not going to naturally gravitate to a single solution if they have to. There’s a presumption of individuals being different in their own dispositions.

Have we reached the stage where it’s now a problem trying to figure out how those two would interact?

One solution that sometimes gets suggested was that they had to live in different political communities. This was the idea of why borders were so important. If people cannot agree on the principles governing their political life, perhaps they should not live under the same political authority.

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Hi all,

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be launching a new website for Sapiential.

The purpose has always been to build something closer to a library than simply a collection of newsletter posts: a place where the things I’ve written over the past few years can be collected, organized, and easily searched.

The new website will make it much easier to connect pieces that deal with related questions and themes. Rather than having an older essay disappear into a chronological newsletter archive, the various pieces will be organized so that you can follow a particular subject and see how different ideas and arguments connect with one another.

It will also allow the various series I’ve been writing to be viewed as longer-form works, which is how they were originally intended. Instead of putting the entirety of each essay into an email, the newsletter will increasingly serve as a preview of new material, with the full piece available on the website.

The newsletter will therefore have two main purposes: highlighting new pieces as they are published, and pointing readers toward the various collections, series, and older material in the Sapiential library.

Being subscribed will still mean that you’ll be kept up to date with new material, but it will also give you a regular way of discovering the different series and ideas that have been developing through Sapiential over time.

The goal is ultimately to make Sapiential less of a chronological newsletter and more of a growing library of ideas that you can explore at your own pace.

More on the new website soon.

The first problem history presents with the modern conception of the self is that our agency has limits. The second is that everyone else’s agency has limits as well.

History rarely is simple. Events are usually the product of multiple actions, circumstances, and decisions interacting with one another.

It’s tempting to look at individual actors pursuing individual goals. Not only does it make for an easy narrative, those that do look at history like to look for heroes and villains. Following somebody’s own agency as to what they do makes it fairly easy to try and equate good and bad specific people.

But we’re multiple different actors pursuing different things; these are always going to come into conflict. It’s just as likely somebody for the right motives ends up running into a circumstance with unintended consequences. This is what happens when you end up with multiple interests all colliding with each other.

There are numerous historical events that are caused more accurately by the interaction of two different pursuits that were never intended to interact with each other.

For any given action as it is unfolding various circumstances from geography, culture, technology, previous experiences, institutions, all interact. Even more to the point as different agents interact with each other they’re constantly changing these factors in real time.

The result is never that one can simply proceed as they had planned at the start. As things constantly change you have to adapt. But as real life is progressing you have multiple interactions changing everything constantly.

This is in essence what history is. It’s what makes it so complicated and why so frequently a single event can have multiple historians interpreting it in different ways. In some respects it’s as simple as historians who have different focuses bringing a different viewpoint to what they put the primary factor on.

But all too often you also have the issue of simply different individuals viewing those circumstances through their own perspectives. As such the interaction with a particular time and place is also being affected by different individuals pursuing different interests in any given moment. This means everybody isn’t pulling in the same direction.

At least one conclusion someone can get to when they’re looking at this kind of a scenario unfolding is that individuals operate inside circumstances they didn’t create and aren’t really controlling. Here lies one of the problems with putting individual agency as being so powerful. It’s restrained by factors that are almost impossible to measure until after they’ve happened.

There’s also the important point that this typically does not come with a clean or ideological disposition. Even two people that might agree can still see an event as it’s unfolding through different perspectives. As a result they might actually respond in a different fashion, not because they think differently, but because they’re viewing something through their own past understanding which probably doesn’t perfectly align.

It’s entirely possible for the same action to produce different results if the circumstances are different. Or for the same circumstance to be unfolding in a different fashion because the actors involved are different. This is the problem with treating historical circumstances as controlled experiments. The presumption that you can control things like particular individuals’ actions depending on where they are is dependent that everything else remains the same all the time.

The conditions that make the historical outcome possible might not be reproducible. Country x might have done this and it worked. But what else was actually true about the country when they did it? One needs all of the variables to be replicated as well.

History doesn’t work that way. In many respects it’s numerous factors interacting with each other at any given moment. It is contingent.

The further the prediction depends on precisely reproducing human interactions, the more fragile it becomes.

It’s possible to learn from past behavior. When somebody did this in this circumstance here was how it played out. But presuming that you can recreate the exact same situation presumes that you can control all of the individuals involved as well as any of the inanimate components to be exactly identical as well.

One effectively needs to create the perfect science experiment. Real life doesn’t work that way.

One could look at a modern political conversation now. As legislative or political leaders converse over an issue, it’s inevitable that there’s changes happening to it as the conversation goes on. To what degree does this leadership take into account the ever-changing dynamic?

Do they believe the original plan will remain viable even as things change as it moves forward? This is frequently one of the greatest conceits of political power: the belief that any problem or situation they’re dealing with remains in the state of stasis. You aren’t dealing with something that constantly requires updating.

In some respects this is the difference between somebody ruling through an ideological disposition, the belief that an idea has solved an issue, versus someone who uses historical precedent and is more open to unexpected or unwanted developments.

The ideological model would suggest that you identify a problem, have an identified principle, and then can produce a solution that can be implemented.

By contrast, the historical approach would say we have identified a problem, we can propose a solution, then have to see how reality interacts and adjust accordingly as things change.

History reduces one’s confidence that individual action can determine its own outcome. Not because somebody loses agency or can’t do what they want. It’s that pursuing what you want is going to inevitably run into countless factors that means what you expected to happen is very unlikely.

Agency doesn’t disappear; but it has to become adaptive.

The mature historical actor therefore isn’t the person who believes they can control events, but the person who can recognize when circumstances have changed and alter their actions accordingly.

This turns the modern notion of the self as being prime on its head. Instead the interactions of literally hundreds and thousands of different elements ends up determining the course of history. No one can presume beforehand which factor will dominate, because its significance depends on its interactions with others.

It might be the ultimate lesson in humility if somebody actually learned it properly.

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I’ve been asked more than a few times why some people like studying history so much. Specifically it seems to center on specific points of history that might not seem particularly important. Moments that might not readily present a lot of relevance.

At least part of what underlies this position is if you are going to look at individuals’ behavior in certain circumstances, trying to ensure that they might have some relevance to something today would be one of the driving purposes.

It’s not entirely unfair. Specific types of events, like the causes of wars, are frequently one of the more popular items for a lot of historians as well as those who focus on foreign affairs or intellectual factors. What specific types of personalities or behaviors might elicit certain outcomes. What certain types of situations might present greater dangers to us.

But broader history, sometimes comes under a bit more disrepute as being unimportant. There’s probably a very specific reason for this.

There’s increasingly the suggestion that society is becoming increasingly historically illiterate. This is especially true of history that is farther in the rearview mirror. A genuine belief that studying something that happened 3,000 years ago might not necessarily be pertinent.

In the modern world where self-importance and moral relativism has become common this might make sense. We increasingly judge historical people according to the moral framework of the present, rather than attempting to understand the circumstances in which they actually lived.

What is there to learn from somebody long gone? It’s especially notable because the relativistic quality of modern life implies common moral lessons have become something being overcome. Material value and human nature are seen as reinforced.

On one hand this probably fits into the general belief of progress. Society today is in most respects materially superior to what it was 100 or 200 years ago. We like to believe that material progress is also applicable to things like morals and ethics. Human beings are improving.

Affluence allows the average person not only far more leisure time, but things to do with that time that gives an impression of being more civilized. The belief that material progress is tied in with moral progress is part of our regular routine. Trying to imagine what somebody without modern conveniences might think seems like going to something more primitive. Our material advances fit right into that constant reminder.

Rejecting the typical view that human nature is fixed, and that humans are generally flawed individuals, we’ve replaced it with the belief that malleability has allowed not only for people to improve but that we’re on a trajectory towards perfection. Self-autonomy allows one to pursue their own track to becoming as complete a whole as they can make themselves.

History provides a long-term story arc for this sort of philosophical orientation. But it also becomes little more than a curiosity. After all, if we’re better than we were 200 years ago, what is there to learn from a flawed person then that I’m now much better than?

The belief in self-autonomy and being your best self also implies that other people’s actions don’t necessarily have a bearing on your own unique traits. Everybody’s allowed to choose everything about what they are today. This makes for a very anti-historical framework.

The modern conception of self has difficulty accommodating history.

If there’s a general purpose to history it tends to rely on things like learning limits. What factors prevented somebody from doing something that they wanted to do? What happened when two people pursued their own goals and through no fault of their own ended up in a clash that caused both of them to have to change their behavior?

All of these pose problems because they mean that you are no longer the center of your own universe. History teaches that having to pay attention to other people and circumstances beyond your control can sometimes be a necessity. Your own principles and objectives, regardless of how laudable they are, might simply not be possible because of circumstances you can’t control.

And therein lies the problem with the modern concept of progress.

Seeing human nature as fixed and people being limited by factors that they can’t manage on their own is not a negative view. This isn’t a question of human beings being wrong or evil. It’s an understanding that you can’t control everything. It should be something fairly obvious for somebody who really thinks about the first principles of the self-autonomy arguments.

But it also opens the problem of complexity. The belief that one’s own agency allows them to conduct their life as they choose ignores that there might be something that alters that agency’s ability to function. In some respects is this why avoiding historical lessons, the recognition that one’s agency might at times not be sufficient to get the outcome they desire, simply something we’d like to pretend doesn’t exist?

If everybody can pursue whatever they want, then eventually those pursuits will conflict. One person wants something that another person wants to prevent. One group’s objective interferes with another group’s objective. One person’s freedom becomes another person’s constraint.

At that point, individual autonomy is no longer sufficient to explain what happens.

Something else has to enter the equation.

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Maybe the biggest problem with democracy is the expectations that it endows upon the population.

If one were to ask the average person what democracy is you would probably get an answer along the lines of people choose what the government is. Or what policies the government is supposed to enact.

These aren’t necessarily bad answers. In fact in most seminars you would probably get the response they’re not wrong, but incomplete answers. Democracy usually also involves more engagement than simply on election day.

But it also highlights a different issue. Believing that if I vote for somebody it’s like activating a vending machine that’s going to give me particular outcomes is hazardous in itself. Even beyond my candidate not necessarily winning, the presumption that there is a direct correlation between what a voting public desires and what the inevitable outcome is is simply incorrect.

The government is beholden to my opinion.

All too often any government ends up dealing with circumstances it didn’t expect. It has to change course, pursue different policies and it might have originally been believed. At least that would be what would normally happen for a government that is actually governing.

One of the biggest problems with modern democracy may not be that citizens have too much political power but that they have come to believe they have far more control over political outcomes than they actually possess.

This is why one of the more common arguments when democracy was in incubation was that the population wasn’t voting for policies, so much as selecting individuals with whom they respected their judgment. My representative in the legislatures was supposed to have reasonable discernment as to what course of action that they should pursue.

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Much of the argument surrounding government decisions being legitimate usually revolves around particular legal points. What we considered as being reasonable within the defined rules.

But what about a moral question before one gets to that position? What is the intersection between when one is allowed to act outside of what would be considered normally allowed because there’s a moral justification for doing so?

Does that position actually exist?

Plato considered the question of how to deal with a situation where legal wrongs have been perpetrated. In his dialogue Crito, Socrates gets offered the chance to escape from prison. There isn’t a question that Socrates sees his death sentence as being an unjust action.

However he comes to reject the solution of disobeying the law himself.

Even if the judgment was wrong, what would happen to the political order if citizens treated an unfavorable judgment as sufficient reason to disregard the laws?

The principle being advocated argues one must not commit injustice, even in response to having suffered injustice. Socrates’ personal moral obligation and his obligation to the political order are intertwined.

This is set up as including committing an affront to someone else, not to mention the community, even in response to it being perpetrated against you.

This might seem counterintuitive to most people now. The response for many would be to respond in kind to someone they believe that is harming them.

But there is a side that is not simply on the personal level. One of Socrates’ most important arguments is that by escaping he would be trying to undermine the authority of the legal order. This is a little bit of a different point.

The argument isn’t in this case simply about Socrates himself, now it extends to the broader community. The particulars of the sentence are important. Socrates has basically been accused of trying to undermine the system. By escaping he would effectively be proving the case. He would be intentionally trying to flaunt the law.

Even those that believe that they have a legitimate grievance and should commit an act of disobedience against the government typically don’t want to radically change the system. They aren’t inherently revolutionaries trying to overthrow the current order. In short most would probably agree that an act of disobedience against the government is more likely to be directed towards changing the government or its policies rather than burning everything down.

There’s something interesting happening here as Plato personifies the laws within Socrates’ speech. The counter argument is constructed from the perceptive of the political order. The argument that the citizen must endure a wrong judgment unless he can persuade the community that the judgment itself is wrong.

The legal order cannot function if individuals unilaterally determine which judgments bind them. The principle here is that allowing every citizen to be able to question decisions in this fashion would cause chaos.

Who gets the final authority to determine which particular judgment is binding? If every citizen is entitled to say I’ve determined whether this judgment is unjust and does not apply to me, the legal order loses its ability to arbitrate disputes.

It’s a fair point that many of those today who would participate in a protest would likely argue that trying to change government action isn’t trying to injure someone else. Let alone the community as a whole. It’s easy enough to make the argument that if an unjust policy has been pursued trying to get the government to change it as part of democracy.

A large part of the point that Socrates is pointing to is that using dialogue or means that the political system allows should be sufficient. Or at the very least ensuring that one doesn’t be untoward themselves in how they go about engaging that political system becomes much more important.

Does this mean that a government that is unjust and refuses to listen to anybody is then beyond changing? What Plato seems to be implying is that at least there must always be some reasonable, and personally honorable, approach that is available to someone.

At least part of the problem is a number of modern protests tend to have a much more fundamental bend to them as well. In Socrates’ case we’re talking about an ethical legal point. He believes he’s been convicted of something that shouldn’t have been a crime.

We frequently see demonstrations now that are about first principles. Whether or not there’s an underlying legitimacy.

There’s now increasingly the point that most believe that the government that’s operating isn’t simply illegitimate. There’s an increasing tension that exists between what people believe on the underlying purposes of government or what legitimate policy should be allowed has come into contention. On this front Plato’s argument that one has to continue to operate within an ethical realm on a personal front seems to be in conflict with how most people would perceive the current structure.

Does unjust application of the law release someone from their obligation to the legal order?

It’s not simply that the government has done something they disagree with. All too often they believe the government’s underlying belief system is itself illegitimate. From that standpoint it has become more of a case but the conflict isn’t simply we need to change something within the system, but change the system itself.

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Why Should We Obey the Government?

How many actually have a positive view of what governments typically do in our current times? It’s fair to say trust in almost any public institution has fallen greatly. It might bring up one of the basic questions of the start: why is government necessary to begin with.

Political authority was typically originally designed as a means of protection. As original forms of liberalism were devised, the argument the governments could also abuse their own citizens started to enter the conversation. Having some kind of legal framework to prevent this from happening was where classical liberalism began.

This is the argument that the government is a contract. Provides basic necessities as well as protecting the community from outside threats. In return there’s guaranteed rights for the citizenry to ensure that the government doesn’t abuse its authority towards its own people.

It does carry an additional component. A government can acquire authority legitimately and subsequently lose its legitimacy. Political authority is fiduciary rather than being unlimited. Simply coming to power through legal means doesn’t give you the ability to then behave arbitrarily.

This framework seems at least somewhat clear cut into how one could ascertain if there was a legitimate reason to oppose a government order. They had violated their part of the agreement and ergo were no longer legitimate.

This expanded to the idea of natural rights. Citizens weren’t creations of the state. They existed prior to it. Indeed the entire argument over having protection from various threats be it external or their own government was entirely framed under the auspices of one’s rights needing some form of forcible protection.

The most important philosophical principle on this front is that the rights and duties that are involved in this arrangement precede a government’s existence. The government comes into creation in order to ensure natural rights are protected.

There is an argument in this case that even if a government comes to power legitimately, it is capable of becoming illegitimate by breaking constitutional restrictions. Its legitimacy doesn’t entirely depend on the means in which it gained power. It has to continue to function in a legal way in order to remain worthy of the citizens’ respect.

It was almost at the same time that a competing concept of governing legitimacy developed. Rather than viewing individuals as atomic units, there were those that viewed society as collectives. Under this line of thinking governing legitimacy didn’t derive from a contractual belief.

In fact one of the hardest criticisms of the classical liberal position was that there was nothing that stated that any given person born now had agreed to the contract that had effectively been made for them before their birth.

Why should a person born into an existing political community be regarded as having consented to an agreement they never personally made?

Instead the belief that a more politically communitarian position, that the public could generally agree in real time, what the various rights and responsibilities of any citizen was could also be equally valid.

In this situation the government isn’t beholden to a concept of preceding principles. Instead the rights and principles that it’s defending are based on the citizens that had chosen it and put it in power.

Rights would not be constituted based on a concept of the state of nature. Instead rights are derived by the community and the government in many instances enforces them. The citizen is basically beholdened to behaving based on what the community standard has set.

This isn’t a new concept. As I stated it’s almost as old as classical liberalism. There’s many instances of a philosopher like Rousseau with his conception of the general will during the mid 18th century speaking in very much these terms. Those that viewed France as a nation and would embark on the French Revolution had many that would have viewed democratic rights as being collective not individualistic.

It also should be noted that collective sovereignty can operate as both a conservative or a progressive ideal.

One question is whether or not these two positions are capable of being reconciled with each other. It is a fair point that most modern constitutions do try and take something of a median position between the two.

Some questions are deliberately placed beyond ordinary democratic majorities, while others are left to democratic determination.

The problem is like any constitution, it requires both sides to recognize each of their positions as being in contention and being legitimate. Being able to still have cordial conversations even though the fundamental basis point of your ontology is radically different.

There’s an important distinction that this isn’t the traditional conservative progressive divide. It’s possible for a democratic community to be either an employee or a common form of rights. Similarly either could also go in the classical liberal direction and argue rights proceed constitutions.

But the ontological difference does typically imply most conversations are going to be irreconcilable as far as finding common outcomes. In practice there’s generally been an intermediary position where in some respects governments are supposed to not be able to enforce policy on certain points, the classical liberal position takes precedent, and democratic will takes precedence in other places, the more communitarian approach.

A criticism that rarely gets applied but it’s probably frequently apt, would be the number of times that balance ends up going out of equilibrium. One side starts to gain an advantage and tries to employ its own view much harder than should be possible.

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When one disagrees with the government, there’s a common belief in liberal societies that disagreement or protest is legitimate. In fact for many there’s an argument that civic duty requires voicing viewpoints even in between elections.

Governments by contrast are supposed to be sensitive to various feedback within public opinion.

Now a government being misguided might be one thing. But what happens if a government is fundamentally unjust in one of its policies or a procedure that it is pursuing?

One might come up with some extreme versions of this. People being held without bail. The elimination of basic rights to question the government through speech laws or crackdowns on public demonstrations. But even more subtle forms also can persist.

One might suggest that the Civil Rights movement at least shed light on something such as blacks being treated differently by the police.

The question of how one responds to what they may see as an encroachment is a little bit more difficult.

Many original classical liberals would have argued that civil liberties emerge not from state structures. Natural law, whether it be considered to be ordained by God or simply the natural order of the universe, decreed on each person certain rights that the government couldn’t infringe on.

Some have argued the most important line in the American declaration of Independence is where it proclaims governments are created to secure natural rights.

There are others that look to a common standard in order to justify rights This line of thinking is much more communitarian in its orientation. As opposed to a natural order a society collectively decides what’s in its best interest in the form of how governments are encumbered with powers during elections. Governments can then decide in the best interests of all.

One of the better recent examples of this was former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief aide, Gerald Butts, famously tweeted during the truckers protest in Ottawa that he saw the protest as people abusing rights that weren’t enacted for them by the government.

If there’s a fundamental different foundation over what gives justification for limitations on government, it introduces a different point. Similar to the argument of whether or not negative rights and positive rights can coexist, if the source of where those rights come from is fundamentally at odds with each other is a compromise even possible?

Regardless of what the theoretical model is, in practice there’s also various considerations to take under advisement.

Does doing what is legally permissible make a difference in one’s thinking. Does morality or ethics play a role? Do you have an obligation for this civil disobedience in certain situations? Is there a question of honor or dishonor that might enter one’s line of thinking?

Much of this might seem like academic comments, remember there are societies almost every year that have had to come to terms with how they’re going to answer these questions. Not all of them have answered the same thing. And very frequently the various answers do not always come back with consistent expectations.

It’s quite possible somebody might do something that gets seen as being the right course of action later yet suffer greatly in the moment. Similarly some are appointed only to be vilified later.

There are many who would probably point out most of these issues aren’t categorical. That’s exactly right.

Similarly issues over whether or not civil disobedience is legitimate isn’t a simple yes or no answer. And all too often whether or not a group behaved correctly might not be immediate.

One point to bear in mind there’s a number of times something might be legal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it might be seen as legitimate. there’s fine distinctions between what a society might consider morally and ethically sound and what has been codified as being explicitly wrong.

In fact in many instances it’s probably fair to say the moral question tends to dictate one’s actions far more frequently than a bare legal argument.

There’s also the proverbial question whether or not asserting rights necessarily means that there’ll be any practicality to it either.

Even questions of whether or not a right might be naturally endowed doesn’t necessarily let me diminish the importance of some sort of civil order in order to maintain it. The state of nature itself was never necessarily a safe venue. This is why Jefferson made the point of saying that you needed a government to secure rights. It simply wasn’t a case they were created by the government.

The bigger question that I’m hoping to approach is both how we might consider some of these differences and whether or not it’s possible for different components of a pluralistic society to agree on a medium.

The latter question might be the key to the whole thing. Is there a legitimate point that those that consider rights to be originated from different sources able to have an ontological compromise that makes sense?

It seems to be an increasingly pertinent question as societies become increasingly heterodox. Not just an obvious way as long heterogeneous identities. But increasingly different ideological orientations that don’t accept pluralism are becoming part of the equation as well.

Most concepts in modern history have dealt with the notion that disagreement itself will remain and has to be permissible. But if pluralism itself is seen as illegitimate because one ideology has a conception of justice that gives them an obligation to eliminate competing conceptions, you’ve reached a boundary point.

Is it possible for people to disagree where rights originate, and agree on an institutional mechanism? Or does the original ontological component become a bigger problem?

In many respects liberal constitutionalism was originally designed as a mechanism for containing disagreement, not necessarily solving the disagreement. There was always the potential that two people were different and it couldn’t be solved philosophically.

Is that still a possibility that holds?

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Human choice always operates within certain contours or restraints such as the inheritance of the past. - Raymond Aron

Raymond Aron was one of the more prominent philosophers in France right after the Second World War. Well he didn’t specialize in foreign policy matters, his thinking tended to cross over to a lot of issues that were pertinent. His social philosophy especially had a heavy component of arguing that people were rooted in probabilistic determinism. That is most motivations exist within specific contours.

More to the point whether you were talking about individuals or culture there was still something to be had that one social understanding was developed because of where they were. This ran counter to a lot of the emerging ideas at the time. Unlike most that wanted to believe universal ideals would take hold over traditional concepts of natural restraints Aron remained in a traditional bend.

To put this in a broader sense that is traditional conservative thinking. Most people’s agency exists only within contours. Someone can’t decide to do something they’re incapable of doing. Social understanding is dictated from both what you learn from experience as well as the specific environment that you existed in. On that level two people that exist in different places on the globe will have different behaviors because of being in two different places.

It shouldn’t be surprising that this line of thinking became useful on one level with foreign policy but also despised at the same time. The coming of the Cold War certainly put serious constraints on what some countries might have wanted to do. The next four decades were to be dominated within a structure that very much mitigated any political leader’s motivation. At least assuming nobody wanted to start a nuclear war.

But a bigger argument emerged during the 1950s while this conversation was going on. Capitalism versus socialism/communism was fought not so much as a geographical understanding as an ideological one. As such foreign policy thinkers started to turn away from the idea that localism could influence how someone might think on the global stage. This was a radical break. Most geopolitics up into the 1940s had been dominated by people who were geographers.

Politics was understood through this orientation.

Trying to understand why somebody who lived in a fishing village at the end of a river would behave in a way and more to the point interact with somebody who lived across a big sea on the edge of a mountain carried questions about influences. Did fishermen on a river behave fundamentally differently because of that specific comparison to the guy beside a mountain range? For the most part most geopolitics had said yes. Geography was as important as anything else largely because it derived how people live their day to day lives. Different resources and different modes of being able to travel and interact with other people.

A local culture ran as a cross between human history in the physical geography that they dealt with. On that front when you were trying to deal with a different location, understanding how their geography affected the most part of the calculation. This meant most geopolitics presumed ideology could never be all encompassing to mitigate localism.

But it locked a basic ability to question whether two countries might both be capitalist but have different interests. Even though you might have the same broad ideological orientation doesn’t mean that you’re going to have the same motivations or conclusions. From that standpoint the more traditional view of the environment as more important than a philosophical premise still tended to rule as far as foreign interaction went.

A local community would have a common history that was frequently produced because of the specific location that they lived in. From that standpoint lived experience was dictated as much by the natural environment as it might have been by any individual trying to re-engineer how society should function.

The Cold War era might have produced something of a false read but the question still is there. Does geography still matter? The Cold War had not made geography irrelevant. It merely made ideology a more convenient language for describing international politics.

Is there still a sufficient difference between somebody who lives in Africa and somebody who might live in northern Russia simply because of the location on the map? Even with any government differences or other intellectual lines one would still say the average person would see a radically different day-to-day existence due to climate in the specific terrain they found themselves in.

Again if one was to ignore the specific politics going on, for the everyday person the traditional geographic point still holds more weight than a lot of the artificial debates that would exist within the University class. Believing that different people would instantly gravitate the same ideological format presumes that nothing matters other than how you can reform somebody’s line of thinking. But as most human beings have to deal with simple things on a daily basis practical matters are going to overwhelm intellectual wishful thinking all the time.

One only needs to look at the current situation where those that would want more global level control rely almost solely on the idea that they can produce an idea that will overwhelm any other interest. That people in different locations might have different needs at any given moment undermines the idea that you could have a single authority able to deal with every part at the same time.

If geography still holds a valid consideration as far as a population’s interest at any given moment it means that any central authority will always fail. Something more local that can understand the specific contours of an area is going to be necessary to provide a more appropriate response. The one size fits all model that has always been the dream of those who live detached for most of the population never considers this problem. The reason is fairly simple. Most intellectuals would be honest with you to say that you couldn’t have a singular answer unless you could remove the difference various geographies would have.

It’s not even a more technologically advanced or people progress point. The technology one would use to live in the desert is not the same as somebody who lives beside the ocean. No matter how much you want to say that times can change something there’s certain points that remain constant no matter what. That anytime some sort of political or social orientation tries to produce an organization that becomes too large and can’t deal with the natural differences on the ground it runs into trouble.

Remembering what the earliest foreign policy thinkers focused on, namely geographical considerations and what they impose on a local population as far as needs or aspirations still is something that needs to be remembered whenever you’re thinking of a particular situation. Geography still matters more than ideology does.

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Language of moderation cannot hide -

My sea is empty and its waves are rough;

Gone from the map the shore where childhood played,

Tight fisted is a peasant, eating love;

Lost in my wake the archipelago,

Islands of self through which I sailed all day

Planting a pirate’s flag, a generous boy;

And lost my way to action and to you.

• W H Auden, Through the Looking Glass

The 1920s was a curious decade. For many countries, at least on the surface, it appeared as though most of the optimism that existed through the late 19th century and into the early 20th century had returned. After some momentary market hiccups at the end of the First World War everything seemed to go back into perpetual growth mode.

This was also something of a contradiction. The 1920s looked like a restoration precisely because restoration is impossible.

For the victors of the war their overseas empires at least briefly expanded. Things seem to have righted themselves back to you the natural course as those who believed in scientific determinism had come to view it.

However, within the cultural scene, especially literature, a dark and nihilistic view became something of a dominant theme. Images of the distant past which could never be reclaimed. An almost ghostly image flowing away from those shores that have been left gave an uncertainty foreboding of what was to come.

Trying to explain the world in which they lived had become something of an impossible task. Poets writing of a world lost were all too often describing what was actually going on in their own minds.

Within most philosophical schools and academia one of the biggest lessons that World War I had produced was the questioning of whether or not improvement was necessarily guaranteed. For those that had relied so much on the idea of experience, it seemed to suggest that history was no longer certain as a good teacher. What lessons were there to be learned in a mass slaughter?

At least part of the problem was trying to come to grips with the mistakes that may have been made in the decisions leading up to the war. Could something different have played out had someone simply chosen a different path. For those trying to paint a literary picture it was curious how many seem to suggest that there wasn’t. Maybe inevitability made it easier to swallow that nobody had actually caused the problem it simply had to be.

Divine fortune made its choice for everybody.

There might have been two potential conclusions that could have been drawn from the historical events. On one hand someone might have made a catastrophic choice. This would require understanding human judgment better, if there was an institutional failure, any form of incentives or character. It also would have suggested that progress might end up having dark episodes.

By contrast with the argument that the catastrophe was simply inevitable. It was simply a course of history that was impossible for human beings to change. Psychologically this is a much easier idea to internalize.

To be fair it would take military and international relations historians nearly 50 years to come to terms. There still isn’t really a particularly universal view either. There’s literally hundreds of different theories on exactly what the principal cause was. Maybe that’s why the cultural industry is trying to understand something provided something of a better release than those who were juggling facts and circumstance.

For those looking to culture to escape, it very much must have seemed as though they were staring through a looking glass. The world that seemed so certain wasn’t simply disrupted. The sense of the interwar years of both sometime to a past that had now been lost in a seemingly mechanized future increasingly inhuman was something that most still couldn’t grasp.

It’s one of the more intriguing parts of the era that culture became this strange combination of escape on one hand and nihilism on the other. Increasingly theaters presented much lighter performances. Comedies and stage plays that typically didn’t require as much deep thinking. The introduction of greater accessibility to the masses also meant more of a consumption approach than had been true 30 or 40 years prior.

For those who still took up their pen as their primary a dark introspection took hold.

The problem with this particular looking glass is that trying to understand the past didn’t help. Unlike the proverbial comment that you can’t change what has happened and only learn from it didn’t seem to fit in the new reality. One still had to live with the memories of what had happened between 1914 and 1918 but it seemed more of an empty lesson rather than one that might be tried to avoid. All of this was made worse by the fact that everybody was about to go through it again in due time.

It’s perhaps one of the more sad commentaries that a central hubris that exists in most public figures is their inability to learn from both their own actions and those actions of others. The constant belief that you’re able to reconstruct reality the way you wish it to be, such that you are able to form society into the model that you would have it is a perpetual dream.

It isn’t that those at the outbreak of World War I had been trying to mold anything that was necessarily utopian. Their mistake had been not understanding the limits on which political action might need to be recognized. Being able to control everything has always been one of the central human failings that only propagates itself exponentially when it gets combined with ability within the seats of power.

If there had been a mistake it was believing that no matter what might occur tomorrow, they would be able to control it and it would never get out of hand. It was this point, made worse by the fact that as the war had dragged on too many had consistently tried to reimpose the same line of thinking. Humans could always be masters of everything in their environment. The mistake that had rolled out from that belief is what had produced the nihilism that now acted as comfort on the consciousness that it had to be.

Events shaped a completely different mindset from what came before. Increasingly the literary world came to see the political figures not as evil, but instead as figures with no particular ability to manage anything. Almost tragic figures. The tragic politician now is necessarily somebody who’s stupid or malicious. He frequently can be someone who mistakes and knowledge of a system for the belief he has mastery of it.

Much like the image Auden presents, looking back through a series of islands not completely able to get a clear picture of how they navigated through them.

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The best instituted governments, like the best constituted bodies, carry in them the seeds of their own dissolution; and, although they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their disillusion. Every hour they live is an hour the less they have to live. All that can be done, therefore, to prolong the duration of a good government is to draw it back, on every favorable occasion, to the first good principles on which it was founded. - Lord Bolingbroke

At the beginning of the early modern period government structure dominated a lot of conversations. There was something of a belief within those on the Whig side that if they simply designed everything right it would produce desired outcomes. Human agency could be reduced to mechanical operations such that you could end up getting to the right place.

At the turn of the 18th century Lord Bolingbroke was the Tory leader in England. His warning that any government could be corrupted if left to its own devices was in some respects considered heresy in the moment. Those that commanded that the government believed because they had votes they could do anything they wanted. The argument coming off the opposition side was that even having more votes didn’t mean that you had universal ability to do anything you wanted.

What was ironic was he was only a few decades ahead of being taken up by those that would have opposed them. By the 1750s most of the same ardent Whigs that would have denounced this concept now came to embrace it. Funny what happens when one no longer is in a position of authority. All of a sudden trying to figure out what powers you have to make sure the government cannot abuse you is much more important.

It was a bit of a difference between whether those mechanisms that you had counted on to control somebody’s worst impulses would maintain themselves or whether it was more a case of individual agency. For most people that occupied what was at the time called liberal values, these were those that largely saw self-actualization as the primary goal, believing that the problem was that most mechanisms would deteriorate.

By contrast those that would be called traditional conservatives, or Tories, saw that individual action would try and break down anything somebody didn’t like. As conservatives viewed societal cohesion based on tradition as being something to uphold they were always on the look for somebody who would try to subjugate a population to their will. Those that would break the traditional norms.

By contrast the liberal viewed somebody who would use societal norms to subjugate their own impulse. When the two of them operated in concert it tended to work fairly well. The two sides could mitigate each other’s worst instincts. Into the moment it produced what might be a more complicated figure and it’s worth looking at it.

A liberal didn’t want to let an inherited social authority become absolute. The conservative instinct was not to let the individual become absolute.

The argument that was happening in Britain at the turn of that century produces what might be considered odd for a modern person. It was the more liberal members of parliament that supported the crown or the king having more power. Tories by contrast wanted the House of Lords to have the ability to control the executive branch. An easy answer might have been that the House of Commons and the King tended to decide with each other. But it was more complicated than that.

Whigs could favor a stronger crown when they were trying to get their policies implemented, while Tories could defend parliamentary institutions as restraints on executive power.

Yet there would be moments in the future where the opposite was true.

The core argument that emerged was that most constitutional structures were designed originally in the modern era to restrain arbitrary power. At their inception everybody basically lived in a moment where they could understand why they didn’t want the guy across the room being able to tell them what to do. This is one of the key components. Most constitutional restraints exist for the opposition not for the government. The entire idea is to restrain what the government can do.

This is where the argument that over time most institutions, especially those based on either a mixed concept, something like a monarch and an elected legislature, republican structures for anything that has similar features had a natural build to deteriorate over time. From that standpoint one had to constantly try to revert it to its original form.

As soon as somebody is in power they’re going to have a natural tendency due to human nature to try and be able to do things whether or not they should be or not. It’s not so much that somebody might be overtly evil but if they can find loopholes in the rules they’re going to use them. As such governments will naturally try and break down the original forms that are intended to constrain them.

It usually happens more subtly however. This was the point in this moment. Government corruption is not inherently pushed by somebody who would want it. By contrast they’re simply behaving in a way because they’re trying to eliminate constraints on what they can do.

It’s notable that most of the best remembered political thinkers in the anglosphere were opposition politicians. Those that critique how power was exercised tended to have a much more clairvoyant view than those who are exercising authority. Much easier for somebody in an opposition role to see breakdowns happening than for those in government.

It’s one of the classic reasons why there’s the argument that anybody with authority needs watching no matter how virtuous you might think they are.

One’s own position often depends on where they sit. It is frequently pointed out that one of the biggest problems is that those that are the biggest critics in opposition will inevitably change their tune. Those who have denounced corruption they’re in opposition then end up wielding patronage as soon as they’re in office. To take one of the chief points. James Madison, the author of the American Constitution, alluded to no man should be his own judge. You had to have somebody always overseeing any other authority figure in order to maintain the equilibrium.

It’s easy to see when one person’s in power to try and skew the system to their own direction. But it doesn’t end there. Any group that is trying to coordinate the same way will inevitably end up in the same point. Political systems were originally designed to allow for different points of view to operate. But every political orientation is going to try and emphasize their own points over anybody else’s. This ended up being the argument that those back at the beginning warned about.

Recognizing what the point of the original structures was is crucial to reminding ourselves to go back to what the point in the first place was. As you slide farther down in time, different actors and different political groups will try and skew it towards their own ends. Most arguments in the moment tend to benefit those who have influence. At any given moment that can shift. It’s helpful to be reminded that you want to remember most of the protections you have or when you don’t have political power to help you. And everybody is going to be in that situation at some point.

Democratic theory was obsessed during its incubation with the idea that not so much you wanted votes to decide everything. More to the point you wanted to control those who had greater ability to make decisions such that they couldn’t abuse their electorates. Needing a government is one thing, but one doesn’t want to be under its thumb.

The argument that was made near the start that even the best institutions will deteriorate because the people that try to operate in them will twist them still rings true. We want to remember what the original purpose to control authority is at all times. The best way to save a government is to draw it back when possible to the first principles on which it was found. Those that were made, typically, for certain power started to play with them.

Constitutional government was never meant to find people who can be trusted with power. It is the constructive system which even people who cannot be trusted with unlimited power can govern without being masters.

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“It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.”

Aeschylus

If external pressure forces most people to behave in a way that is not inherently natural to them, is there that the mask includes this point as well?

Is being envious of somebody a form of wearing a false front? The argument might seem ridiculous. Is a general comment animosity towards another individual actually seems to show one’s own true colors much more vividly.

We can disguise envy just as we disguise conformity, but envy also reveals something about us that conformity conceals.

Not liking somebody or refusing to interact with them in many respects can actually be a better descriptor of who somebody truly is. Not everybody is going to be best friends.

One of the implications here is that by being gracious towards someone they do associate with but under the surface wish they had more success is equally as disingenuous.

There’s an important distinction here. Admiring somebody is not necessarily a bad thing. Even trying to emulate them when they accomplished something and you want to follow in their footsteps can be a positive trait.

By contrast when it turns to envy, somebody else has something or has achieved something that you want, and resenting them for it becomes corrosive.

In some respects the primary point is that we like to emulate someone that we might admire. This is a different argument than somebody being forced into a position for fear of ostracization.

The point being made here is that a different sort of vice, envy, also can have an effect on how we behave. In this case it might be a positive one. At least on the surface. By trying to emulate somebody that needs admiration we become somebody that everybody in the crowd admires by effect.

With the original point this again states that most people are not actually being who they truly are. But in this case there’s a different underlying tone going on. Rather than being scared, the implication is that everybody can basically try and be the best as they perceive it and receive rewards.

Envy’s considered a vice generically because the idea of resenting somebody for their own success implies a form of personal derision. In some ways there’s an irony going on here. The very things one might be envious of actually help the same person achieve higher status by emulating them.

But openly disliking somebody, may actually tell you something quite generally about who they are. By contrast if I’m openly gracious because social convention requires it, well privately resenting everything they’ve accomplished, the graciousness is itself a mask.

This might seem like something of a conundrum. After all, most people growing up do have role models. Someone that you want to be like and that is not in and of itself a bad thing.

What’s being pointed to is something somewhat different. Like most Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’ focused on an idea of hubris.

Being motivated by an internal concept of trying to improve oneself is certainly considered a good trade. By contrast envy recognizes something in another person that you believe is being rewarded and you lack gratitude for knowing the person. Indeed you would prefer that they had not won because it makes you feel like less for their success.

The implication becomes is it possible for two people to both be successful at the same time. You don’t need to tear somebody else down in order to do well yourself.

There’s an interesting question here. Envy revolves around a question that it’s impossible that somebody else’s success will somehow diminish me. There’s no reason for that to be inherently the case.

It’s quite possible for two people to be successful in two different ways and both have value, just not in the same fashion.

And yet the argument of who somebody truly is frequently revolves around comparisons. Your identity increasingly becomes valued against others. In this sort of situation it becomes very difficult to presume how somebody can be truly on their own without at least someone being judged by the group as to whether or not their values are better or worse than somebody else’s. on

Look at the quote from the other direction. The person who is being envied, probably was aware that they were getting a claim for what they were doing. It’s fair to say that most people know public acknowledgment is a sign of approval. In this respect a lot of the people that are envying themselves can end up presenting what they perceive as being what the public wants. It can become a two-way street in this respect.

Both sides end up presenting masks of who they are depending on what is interpreted.

The strange thing about envy is that it may reveal as much about the person feeling it as the person receiving it. We can distinguish resentment with courtesy, admiration with imitation, insecurity with competition. From the outside they might even look remarkably similar.

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The idea of solitude being necessary freedom probably seems extreme to most people.

Most would argue that, psychologically, we are drawn to interact with other people.

“In every walk of life, we assume the expression and appearance of the person we want others to believe we are. Hence, we may say that this world is a world of masks.”

François de La Rochefoucauld, The Moral Maxims and Reflections

This quote is taken from the age of aristocrats. It’s easy to dismiss the point as simply those who want to fit in with the upper elite. But try and consider it within a modern context.

How many business leaders will present the best front for the company that they’re representing as opposed to really saying what they would if they were allowed to.

The argument becomes I represent something larger than myself, therefore I can simply not say whatever I privately think.

There are numerous artists who will present their work less as something that is completely created, then trying to make sure that it will actually be accepted by popular culture. An artist might want to create what they truly want, but they also can frequently be thinking about what will be accepted.

The public figure might seem more easy to figure out. I have to present myself in a way that persuades other people to give me something. They might truly have some legitimate motivation. But they’re also constantly constrained by having the play with the public.

All of these are different derivatives of the same point. Are our public selves not molded at least partly by the interaction we’re making.

Of course there’s two different sides to this. On one hand you could constantly be changing your appearance from one engagement to another, in which case one might wonder whether or not you really do have a true identity underneath though. This does run in contrast to a person who might be their authentic self when they’re not having to behave in a public forum.

This obviously presents the easiest argument that frequently comes up in today’s age. The number of times somebody running for office, or in some public forum will display something that cynics will instantly call as being telling the public what they want to hear. This is the modern version of what Rochefoucauld was referring to.

Aristocrats constantly had to present a front that fit into a specific culture. We now like to think that we’re in a situation where everybody behaves as they truly are. Freedom has basically been won for most middle class thinking. Yet as soon as that same middle class person has to stand in front of a group to what extent do they revert to an aristocratic front in order to be accepted.

This also isn’t necessarily deception. A number of people will adapt themselves to what they’re hearing from the crowd that stands in front of them. They present a public face, while frequently retaining many of their own traits.

At this stage the bigger question becomes at what point does accommodate what the public suggests become self erasure.

In many respects we eliminate parts of ourselves in order to become accepted, some parts of our personality still become prominent. But to what degree does that equation sit as a median?

For most this also isn’t necessarily a conscious moment. Frequently most people will simply acquiesce one point in a singular social gathering. Then it becomes another acquiescence and another one. Slowly these increasingly become a collective that means that you have changed your behavior in public settings, collectively that make you somebody someone different than you would be in private.

With middle class lifestyle things like one’s reputation, especially if we’re talking about a professional reputation, become central. Your identity is in some ways colored by the ability for it to fit in in order for you to be successful.

The number of times when we talk about how materialism has become so entrenched into much of society we frequently don’t carry a thought as to what would happen if we behaved in such a fashion that it might damage our material wealth. Would you be willing to really say something that might damage your professional credibility? If it was on a point of principle.? If it was something that you truly believed?

Human psychology gives us plenty of reasons to compromise. Rewards encourage certain behaviors;. The difficulty is that repeated compromise can eventually make the behavior itself feel natural.

There are many that would make the point that this can be manipulated easily. It frequently was if you were living in the European Court of a monarch 300 years ago. This was exactly the intention where most aristocrats had to interact with each other in such a way to produce what the monarch wished.

You now have things such as professional organizations or social groups associated with particular upper middle class intellectual groups that behave in similar functions. We frequently get rewarded if our behavior mirrors a specific intention.

We haven’t necessarily changed anything, we simply replaced one ideal of thinking with a different one.

It’s not hard to see how a mask not only becomes something natural, and in some something that is almost a given. This might be one of the hardest components for most people that come to terms. The original argument that freedom is impossible unless one lives in solitude, fits in with the point that in regular societal interactions we end up presenting a front of who we want people to think we are.

You want to impress your boss. You want to impress your parents. You want to impress your children. All of these are still very much pertinent in today’s orientation.

The trouble comes when we don’t necessarily want to impress people anymore. We want to become the kind of person that those people will approve of. Increasingly, what motivates you is no longer an internal view of who you are, but an external one.

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Most people like to be popular. The feeling of every person in the room liking you.

But how many of us think about it from the other direction? Would you like to be the person that wasn’t necessarily popular, but one who valued being able to retain your own viewpoints?

‘A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom…’

Arthur Schopenhauer

The implication here is curious. True freedom, the ability to be who you truly are only works with no outside influence. If anyone has to deal with crowds you inevitably will end up forming yourself to fit in better.

The curious implication is even being free in your own mind, being able to think about things as you wish, becomes more difficult through interaction with others.

On one hand there’s the inevitable trade-offs that come with being able to get along with your neighbors. The average person typically puts a fair bit of value in the social cohesion that comes from everybody interacting. Are we so different that that interaction only comes with the denying of at least part of who we are.

It’s fair to say that this isn’t the complete abdication of freedom. It’s not as though you become a slave to some cultural force.

And this is where there’s probably a nuance in the quote.

The note that liking solitude is key to somebody who actually wants to be able to think for themselves. From this standpoint there’s a number of individuals even now that would probably agree with the general premise.

As opposed to being bombarded with information from multiple sources all the time, simply being left alone to think is something most of us have lost in modern years. On this point it’s less an argument about whether or not social interaction itself is a problem or not. The question becomes how much do you depend on to get your own value.

Social mores are obviously something that everybody in any given society gets conditioned for. But to what degree do you actually lose some of your own principles when you do that?

For those that condition themselves that their entire sense of self-worth is dependent on those social norms, it’s obviously a case that your own identity ends up becoming less yours in more what the rest of society will project onto you.

This runs similar to the argument about having conversations with various individuals. Do you seek out the company of those who you agree with all the time? Those who you disagree with?

How about those you perceive are intelligent? Or those you are convinced that you are smarter than and therefore trying to get personal fulfillment out of showing your superiority?

This comes to a different question. Is what motivates you internal or external?

The argument that you can only be truly yourself when you’re being left alone always implies that at least in some respects we’re holding something back depending on the company we keep. But that doesn’t inherently mean that you need to give yourself away either.

There’s a frequent argument that societies conditioned themselves to encourage homogenization.

However, the image of somebody in solitude being able to be their true self remains an interesting one. Who you are, if you’re being completely honest with yourself, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a jerk. But it might mean that you are inherently unpopular with one or two positions.

That point ends up producing the component of how societies actually work. If everybody is simply sidestepping one issue, for concerns of social backlash how would that play. Or even more to the point everybody is sidestepping an issue that isn’t the same one. All of a sudden you have a number of people that are being different on separate points in order to fit in on different values.

A presumption that two people who disagreed in different ways may seem more common presumes that the public answer is more defining than it actually should be. By contrast when you start to add that this is an entire group rather than simply just two, the problem multiplies.

You have a number of people slightly altering who they are in order to get along better. It gives the appearance that there is a relatively commonly held viewpoint. But it’s quite possible all of their views are much more different if asked independently.

In fact it can be carried even farther. We presume we understand how a population is supposed to answer our problem after they have conversed with each other. If you ask each of them independently, without conversation, it is quite possible you would get a much radically different answer and one that had far less commonality to it.

Of course by the time everything ends up playing out you end up with a situation where most people think they know who everybody else is. But in reality because everybody was simply being a little bit different it produces a completely different cultural centrality.

How would we deal with this? How do you really understand who people are?

As I stated it’s not as though people are trying to be entirely different. They’re simply trying to mask up certain parts of who they are that they think are problematic. And in some respects this makes it harder to distinguish true identity from false identity.

There’s numerous examples of comments through history that have tried to explore this idea. Everybody to some extent is trying to be themselves, well at the same time wearing something of a mask to fit in better.

This is a combination of on one hand a cultural imposition, well on the other hand it’s something more personal. Our own psychology doesn’t like being ostracized.

How do we try and play between the two of them?

You cannot eliminate the social pressure to conform. You also would not really want to. Civilization requires some degree of accommodation. The harder question is knowing where accommodation ends and surrender begins.

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It should almost be a punchline by now. Every time that a ruling or some directive comes out of the International Criminal Court one of the first questions that comes up is who is going to pay attention to it. It’s similar to other emotions that get passed by bodies like the United Nations General Assembly or directives out of the human rights council. What might be more telling is that the number of countries that have come to ignore these bodies has been growing.

There are those idealists that still believe all of this is the sign of progress. We are moving towards more global cohesion where everybody is going to just hold hands and get along. But more than any other bit of evidence it’s probably safe to say that it’s the actions of international organisations that have shown just how divided the planet still is. Most rulings tend to have supporters in one block of countries that all generally have the same interest in that moment in opposition from those who have their own interests that run counter.

For some of the institutions it’s specifically who it is that’s making decisions. Specific bodies like the Human Rights Council, usually being everybody’s favourite, get their usual derision. One only needs to look at their roster to understand why most countries believe that to be a farce. When countries like Libya or Syria serve as the chair and get to view anybody else who they don’t like is violating people’s rights it’s not hard to see why legitimacy very quickly evaporates.

One of the biggest problems is what gives legal codes or the entire idea of an orderly structure legitimacy. When you’re looking at the state level most people presume because there’s a law everybody simply follows it. But the most important component is that everybody living in that particular society broadly respects that that law is valid. That is the population consents. I know I’m ignoring the utterly tyrannical regimes where it’s basically enforced at the end of a gun, but as a general comment most local areas it’s because of a commonly held set of values that a legal structure is able to hold.

To put it mildly at no time has there ever been anything that resembled this kind of social cohesion at the international level. Quite the opposite, this is why national borders exist. Different countries have different value structures and it’s so long as that remains true that the idea of an international rules-based system or any concept of international law is ridiculous. And so far as international law does exist it’s more or less made up of treaties to which various countries have agreed to. But this again underlies that what international law is can change from one place to another depending on what countries have agreed to what agreements.

As a general comment the move towards arguing for a liberal rules-based order was pushed predominantly by neoliberals in the United States at the end of the Cold War with the belief that they had won. The entire world would basically move into the ideological orbit that the United States had occupied. Not only did this not happen for the most part, large parts of the current world shifted in the exact opposite direction. Asserting their own views on what priorities needed to be put forward.

As far as what really has ended up happening on the ground, international law has largely been whatever somebody can reasonably enforce on their own. This is the other point as a general comment: a legal statute only is valid as long as there’s some way to actually enforce it when you have a violation. This has never been very consistent when it comes to dealing with international issues. Generally speaking, every country that has the ability to enforce something is going to be the one that gets its way. So the same with any international organisations like the United Nations. You still need to cobble together the votes on the floor in order to be able to get something passed. Then you need countries that are actually willing to do something with hard assets to enforce it.

This isn’t a method of the philosopher Kings of Plato’s Republic. It’s brazen politics just taken to the global scene and for the most part most of them are still operating under their own country’s self-interest. This is why having restrictions on what international organisations can actually do has remained such a valid argument. There is no common denominator as to what is best for any given Nation at any given time.

Now look at what is going on with organisations that believe they operate in the international order over the last couple weeks.

The arrest warrants for Israeli leadership is a good example of countries being able to assert influence through an international organisation even though there isn’t a definitive definition of the crime they’re implying. That a country doesn’t have the right to defend itself after being attacked would be a completely new concept. Not to mention that most Western countries have Hamas listed as a terrorist organisation. However this isn’t a legal issue so much is political. Being able to conduct foreign policy by asserting that a country that is likely to win a conflict that you don’t like can be charged with something.

If there’s a positive that’s emerging from some of this it is that a number of the important countries, most notably the United States, have seen a radical increase in the number of people that believe that the United Nations as well as a number of the organisations that come out of it no longer serve an effective purpose. Somebody like the US effectively defunding the UN would be a big step towards putting it out of business.

The biggest issue in this front is just admitting that any sort of international rule system never really existed in the first place. It was always a case of what country could assert that authority in any given moment. As the world becomes more multipolar that becomes much messier. It makes no sense to give them a form to do this if it’s going to constantly be used against you. From that standpoint it makes no sense for most of the West to have any interest in trying to maintain something that doesn’t function.

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