After the last few theoretical posts, I might as well set out some details about the sort of polity I would like to see. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my ideal constitution looks rather like the British constitution, albeit more refined and much more self-confident. At the head is a hereditary monarch, sworn to God and anointed by God’s Church. Most of the business of government (perhaps a little less than in Britain currently), however, rests with a bicameral legislature, one house of which is elected by universal suffrage, one of which is entirely unelected. I will go on to discuss exactly how I would refine that constitution. I will start out with more ‘sensible’ ideas regarding the composition of the House of Lords, and gradually veer off into ever wilder fancies. You have been warned.

First, Lords Spiritual. May the British Humanist Association gnash their teeth, though I have a bone for them to gnaw later. For as long as English laws have been written, English bishops have had a hand in them. Secularist angst notwithstanding, the (not remotely accidental) result has been the finest legal system known to man. Lords Spiritual directly tie the legislature to the pursuit of the common good. I am not wholly insensitive to the claims of pluralism, however, and I say that the proper response to them is to expand the Lords Spiritual to reflect (somewhat) the pluralism within society.

I suggest that one third of the Lords should be Anglican (not necessarily bishops, or even specifically members of the Church of England: it is the Parliament of the United Kingdom, after all); another third should be Christian leaders, with denominational distribution reflecting demographics; the last third should be other religious leaders, distribution reflecting demographics again. Christians are counted twice (ie Catholics get a share of the Christian seats according to the proportion of Catholics in the Christian population, and a share of the final third of seats according to their proportion in the total population; I am undecided as to whether Anglicans should be counted three times). I am, with something of an ironic smirk, open to including humanists among the final third of Lords Spiritual. A final note on this: since religious hierarchies tend to be male, the Lords Spiritual are likely to be male-dominated. To alleviate this, I suggest specifically seeking out female religious leaders, hence what I have previously described as my ideological USP, seats reserved for nuns.

Among the Lords Temporal, I would like a healthy balance of epistocrats and episto-commoners. That is, I want reserves of deep learning in the Lords, in the form of the finest historians, economists, and perhaps even philosophers that the academy has to offer. Nevertheless, knowledge does not suffice for wisdom, and probably the most profound cleavage in British society is between those who have graduated from university and those who have not. To ensure that the latter have a voice in government, I would reserve a substantial number of seats for non-graduates.

Beyond this, my thoughts are rather vague, but essentially I want the community of the realm to be represented. Various ‘natural constituencies’ would be identified and assigned delegates: ‘the business community’ and the trade unions, the world of arts and the world of sport, the public sector and the charitable sector, and so on and so forth. Oh, and one of those natural constituiences would most definitely be the hereditary Peers of the Realm. To balance out this last point, one might well want to consider prisoners, the homeless, and even asylum seekers as ‘natural constituencies’ to be represented amongst the Lords Temporal.

So much for the principles of composition. How will the Lords be chosen? Naturally, I would start with the Queen. She would talk to parliamentarians, trying to get a sense of who is most respected and admired across all the benches. She would then call upon those most respected parliamentarians to form a committee charged with selecting the Lords. The members of that committee would, in turn, try to put together a larger team of staff who they respect, trust, and believe to be good judges of characters. What the Queen did in Parliament, this team would do in the country at large: talk (and above all listen) to people, trying to find out who within specific religious organisations, academic fields, and various natural constituencies is widely respected and admired. There would be no votes and no qualifications, only personal judgements of character, for which there is no adequate substitute and without which we ultimately cannot do.

Once this system is established, moreover, it can be extended to the Commons: potential candidates would be subjected to similar scrutiny, and only those who won the respect of the committee would be eligible to stand.

On to the matter of instruction in virtue: I would have a National Service. I envisage something rather more substantial than the obligatory Gap Year proposed by the Right Honourable Rory Stewart; it would be a major social force. I am not entirely sure what it would do, though since communities generally are so desiccated, I take it that there is a great deal of scope for more community-building projects. I would encourage involvement from all faith groups, the humanists included: representation in the Lords Spiritual can be tied to support. Ideally, each faith-group (yes, even the humanists) would have (quasi-)monastic institutions embedded within the Service.

I saw someone on twitter suggest that National Service could be tied to pensions; that sounds perfectly sensible to me, and it could be tied to state benefits quite generally. There might be a Service Stipend functioning as a basic income. As with the selection procedures for the Lords, I would put trust and personal judgement, and not bureaucratic legibility, at the system’s heart. Local service leaders would decide what sort of work was appropriate to which people: some would simply get the stipend for nothing, the physically disabled might spend a few hours a week contributing to a listening service from home, the mentally disabled might spend a similar amount of time at an animal sanctuary or with the elderly, and so on. The point is not to make sure that only the deserving receive assistance (though it may be hoped that they system will help the ‘undeserving’ to address whatever issues are holding them back) but to encourage a spirit of service in all, and secure for each the psychological benefits of knowing that others value their contribution.

We will consider more general roles for the service later. For now, let us return to parliament. I would complement the merely passive ‘approval by committee’ criterion with an active one of contribution to the service. This would not be like the more gentle contributions tied to basic state benefits, but an intensely demanding contribution evaluated by service leaders. Ideally, the potential parliamentarians would spend a significant amount of time within the (quasi-)monastic institutions discussed earlier. They would only be eligible to enter parliament given the approval of those with whom they served.

What goes for the legislature, meanwhile, ought equally to go for the judiciary. Advancement as a judge would be similarly contingent on service, since law is fundamentally a matter of morality, and not technical competence. Further to this, I would institute a new court, either above or instead of the current Supreme Court, which would essentially be a revived Star Chamber. Its core of standing members would be the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, one or two other Lords Justice Spiritual elected by the rest of the Lords Spiritual, the Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Chief Justice. For any given case, specific outside counsel would also be appointed: this is counsel in the general sense, inclusive of both lawyers and non-lawyers having special understanding of the matter at hand. For each appointed outside counsel, however, an ordinary member of the public would be assigned by lot. The point of this Star Chamber is to take the weightiest matters outside of the purview of judges qua legal experts, and, instead of merely shunting them back to the legislature, placing them in touch with the transcendent.

All right, now for the really eccentric stuff. First. I take it as axiomatic that hierarchy is inevitable. We are not so much faced with a choice between hierarchy and its absence, as between an honest and a covert hierarchy. Of course, an honest hierarchy is better. I haven’t much to say on the details of a good hierarchy, except that there should be clearly-defined, widely-acknowledged, and above all high expectations on those near the top. The main point I want to discuss is the relationship between the hierarchy and the National Service. Advancement in the hierarchy should be dependent upon service.

There are many ways in which one might plausibly be said to advance in the hierarchy. Going to university? Do service first. Russell Group? Do more. Oxbridge? More again. Entering a profession? Service. Career in finance? Whole lot of service. Academic chair? Service. Editorship of a newspaper? CEO? You get the idea. The rites of passage would be somewhere between the gentle, just doing one’s bit associated with state benefits, and the full rigour of entry into parliament and the courts. One might worry about the squandered talents of competent pricks. This can be addressed by affording them a hybrid status subject to certain penalties: say, liability to higher tax-rates, inability to attend major cultural and sporting events, and general ‘exclusion from polite society’.

I think that covers all I want to say for now. An unelected upper house to represent the community of the realm, encompassing Lords Spiritual to ground government explicitly in the pursuit of the common good, some Lords selected for the value of their knowledge, and others to represent the many people lacking a university education. A selection procedure based on personal judgements of character, and a general aversion to bureaucratic legibility. A National Service to bind all to the care of all, and train all, especially the powerful and privileged, in virtue.

This is the third part of a loose series. Part 1 sounds out the idea of a Christian mean between pagan and liberal worldviews; Part 2 tries to delineate that mean more directly.

In the previous post I acknowledged that I was indulging in caricature. I am averse to self-designation, especially in political terms, so I don’t really see myself as Taking A Stance Against Liberalism. ‘Liberalism’ can mean many things, and though it seems accurate enough to say that my views, and especially my Online Activity under this pseudonym, place me within a post-liberal political orbit, there is too much of the scrupulous analytic philosopher in me to make so bald an assertion as ‘Liberalism is bad’ (or, for that matter, ‘Liberalism is good’). So here are two positions I reject, which anti-liberals might want to identify as liberalism; and two positions I accept, which pro-liberals might want to identify as liberalism as instead.

Bad Liberalism: Two Principles

1. Voluntarism: the position that justice is not a matter of what is substantively good, but what is or would be willed. The details can be haggled over, but this is the basic idea of the social contract tradition in political theory. In moral philosophy, it has a direct equivalent in contractualism, and a close relative in utilitarianism (and most purely, Singer’s preference utilitarianism). And it’s bad. There is a common good for an entirely polity that is not reducible to a complex calculus of consent, as there is for diverse communities within that polity, as well as particular goods for each of the people comprising it. Apart from leaving ourselves open to the tyranny of deformed sinful wills, treating questions of justice in this light is inevitably trivialising and demeaning. Our wills are, however imperfectly, oriented towards the good, and it does not satisfy to seek instead for that which is willed by enough wills which respect enough the wills of others.
2. Anti-Umbilicism (or, discord). This may be viewed as an important case of voluntarism, and the name is an homage to this tweet:

When you think of how man is born tethered with a literal cord of dependency to their parent, you realize Rousseau was literally retarded.— Paul Hundred (@paul_hundred) October 23, 2018

I discuss both of these position in the previous post, but this one particularly in the concluding paragraph. By Umbilicism, I mean the view that the social order into which we are born imposes upon us particular social obligations. Every child is bound to their mother by a moral as much as a physical cord. So too every child born a citizen of the United Kingdom is bound to Her Majesty Elizabeth II. Every child enrolled at St James C of E Primary School is bound to that school, and plausibly also to the parish and even to St James himself. The anti-Umbilicist denies these things, on the basis that no child chose the social position in to which they were born, and particular moral obligation (if it exists at all) can only proceed from freely chosen commitments.

Good Liberalism: Two Principles

1. Constraint. For all my inveighing against containment recently, I do think of it as necessary. Humans are Fallen, sinful creatures, and tend to abuse power. Thus it is prudent to constrain power that tyranny may be prevented. Hence the separation of powers much beloved of Madison and Montesquieu: the more diffuse the power, the more difficult its abuse. So too for due process, rule of law, perhaps even inalienable rights (though these might better be transformed into intrinsic wrongs).
2. Concord. This is a subtler issue than constraint, that of avoiding voluntarism’s opposite extreme: the position that people’s wills are politically irrelevant. Humans, however, are volitional creatures, and it is at least part of a community’s good that the wills of its members are respected. Ceterus paribus, an alien imposition is a lesser good than a common project. Thinking through the implications of concord, some clearly are liberal in flavour: it favours representative institutions and gentle treatment of those who pursue the common good imperfectly. Some implications, however, are pre-liberal in flavour: it equally favours the moral formation of the people as a legitimate political goal.

Note that there is an important tension between Constraint and Concord (now we return to my complaints about containment). Consider Madison’s parallelism: if men were angels… if angels were to govern men. The argument, of course, is that since it is men, rather than angels, who govern men, Constraint is necessary. But the argument assumes that the non-governing portion of mankind need to be constrained, too. A system of rigid constraint upon the people, however, would be the opposite extreme from the Voluntarism considered above, and in relation to which Concord was partially defined. What, then, of a system of rigid constraint upon the prince?

Expecting pure Constraint to secure the right exercise of power is a violation of Concord unto itself. If just rule is an alien imposition upon those in power, then it is a lesser good than it would be if the powerful sincerely sought it for its own sake. Mere Constraint on power is not enough; the powerful should actually be good. Therefore a political system ought to be constructed in such a way that the good are given power and the powerful trained to be good.

Ultimately, Concord can be seen as a master-principle for a post-liberal order. Politics is the common search for the common good. As such, voluntarism has no place within it, and Umbilicism should be joyfully affirmed. Political power – ultimately, violence – is rightfully employed to serve the common good. Therefore Constraint is needed to prevent concentrated power undermining the common good, and government devolving to tyranny. But since the common good is also a common project, violence, against prince or people, ought only to be a last resort. Instead, we need both representative institutions and mechanisms for elevating the virtuous in to power; we need government to aim at instructing people in virtue, and none more so than the people who govern.

This is the second part of a loose series. Part 1 sounds out the idea of a Christian mean between liberal and pagan worldviews; Part 3 indulges in some wild fancies about how to apply these ideas in Britain.

Take three caricatures: Pagan, Christian, Liberal. Pagan believes that the cosmos has been ordered by Reason. Within the social world  the basis of that rational order is the family, in which women, children, and slaves answer to the patriarch (pater familias, kyrios), and the patriach answers to his ancestors. Those families are bound together into cities by divinely-sactioned rites, and those cities are bound together under the dominion of a Saviour and Son of a God, to whom worship is due. The patriarch has power over an infant’s life, before and after birth. Sexual activity is licit insofar as it conforms to the social order. 

 Christian believes that the world has been created by the free decision of a rational God. God has ordained certain social structures to benefit mankind: families, cities, kingdoms, yes, but God’s church above all. Each person is the beloved child of God, a member of Christ’s Body, before they are anything else within their social world. A father may hand over his ancestral portion to a monastery; a son may enter that monastery rather than continue his lineage. To be joined to a new city is not to be bound to new gods, for all cities recognise one God. The king who may be seen sitting in his palace or riding a horse to war is not worthy of divine honours. God alone has power over an infant’s life, before and after birth, and sexual activity is licit insofar as it occurs within the bond of matrimony (and serves the proper end of the same).

Liberal believes that the world is a brute fact, albeit one happily amenable to rational analysis. The social world is (or ought to be) structured in ways that every individual within it has freely chosen (or would freely choose). Families provide an efficient solution to the problem of child-rearing; cities maximise economic opportunity; democracies conform the social order to the sovereign will of the individuals it comprises. Women have the power to abort an unborn foetus, but not to murder a born child. Sexual activity is licit insofar as it is consensual.

Even in the abstract, it is clear that Christian’s position is a middle-ground between two extremes. For Pagan, all depends on reason and divine sanction; for Liberal, all depends on will and human benefit. Christian holds these diverse strands together. Christian agrees with Liberal that men do not hold power over the life of infants, and with Pagan that women do not do so, either (though here at least Liberal may press a different claim for the middle-ground). For Christian, sex is licit insofar as it conforms to a specific social institution, marriage, which is founded upon consent.

More than this, Pagan, Christian, and Liberal have succeeded one another historically: views broadly like Pagan’s predominated in Europe during antiquity; views broadly like Liberal’s predominate there now; views broadly like Christian’s did so during the middle ages.

One might, therefore, worry about the stability of Christian’s position. Many feel alienated and lost within liberal modernity; some of these rise against modernity in explicitly reactionary critique. A still smaller subset include Christianity within their critique. These are the racial nationalist neopagans who complain about ‘Christc***s’ Online and share memes like the one above. The thing is, they have a point. If you like your ascribed identities, intense ethnic bonds, and resolutely particular cultures, Christ has given you a kicking. Christ has killed our old identities; he has given us fellowship with Korean Pentecostals and Papuan Anglicans; he has replaced the songs of our forefathers with the Psalms of David.

Full-bore Progressive Christians, meanwhile, are apt to turn this argument on its head. Why should we content ourselves with half-measures? If we are to remain faithful to the revolution inaugurated by Christ, we had better continue along the liberal path. It is through (some improvement upon actually existing) liberalism that the original promise of Christianity can be made a present social reality.

Variations on these arguments can be made from within and without the fold. Christian reactionaries are perfectly capable of pining after social certainties – of class, family, and more beside – that Christ himself has questioned. So too can they fall into hasty agreement with seculars who deny the descent of liberal norms and institutions from Christian predecessors. Secular liberals more sympathetic to the Christian legacy, meanwhile, can rally to the aid of their Progressive Christian allies: didn’t you hear that Jesus questioned those social certainties? His real followers today, therefore, do the sort of thing that meets with our approval.

My reasons for rejecting Pagan’s position are, from our perspective two thousand years after the Incarnation, rather dull, if not outright NPC. It strikes me as starkly contrary to the innate and equal dignity of all human beings. The human person is not a peg to be hammered into the cosmic order; we matter more than that. Ultimately, moreover, kings and patriarchs do not matter more than anybody else. This is what the Gospel teaches; and, largely because the Gospel has taught it, it has become common knowledge even among those who deny the Gospel. There is no road back to the ancient polis, still less to the barbarian tribe beyond its walls, and it would be a terrible thing to try such a road if there were one.

Yes, there is value in being born into a well-defined social role and an identity independent of achieved status, but it was an awful thing to be a thrall or a helot or a dalit or a lotus-footed concubine. In English alone, the Psalms of David have been made new by both Mary Sidney and Boney M. Whether by Zeus or YHWH or mitochondrial Eve, all men are brothers. Whatever heroic pose we may wish to adopt in defiance of modernity, it shall look foolish, and probably thuggish, if we forget these truths.

The specific issue of the filial relation between liberalism and Christianity is a more delicate matter. While we wait for Tom Holland to sling his latest at us, the story has been well told recently by Larry Siedentop and Francis Oakley. Though I think this story is true and important, I won’t try to set it out at any length here. Taking up just one point I mentioned in my last post, the line Quod omnes tangit, taken from the Roman law of adoption, was first elevated into a kind of constitutional principle by canon lawyers, and later cited as such when the English Commons were summoned to the Model Parliament of 1295. I have seen Oakley partisans try to debate Adrian Vermuele on Twitter. Those conversations don’t appear to have been particularly fruitful, perhaps because the Oakleyites substitute historical analysis for political theology properly speaking. As a last resort, the sufficiently stubborn Catholic reactionary may simply dismiss whatever displeases him as proto-Conciliarism, and so heretical.

It is probably Liberal’s position that presents the most pressing challenge, however, given its dominance today. My response to it is not, in outline, especially novel either. One of the ways that Liberal has supposed to have moved beyond Christian’s blinkers is by being tolerant. Liberal squirms at the thought of Boniface felling the oaks or Justinian closing the Academy. More recently, she is appalled at British attitudes to Qing China and Yoruba Nigeria. But this as much as to say that Liberal wants to tolerate Pagan and respect his worldview. She cannot consistently take it as a monster to be slain.

Liberal, if she will follow this thought through, is on to something. Pagan represents a valid and natural mode of human social life, albeit warped by sin. That mode of life is more properly to be reformed than rejected. It is easy to say ‘let’s keep walking away from Pagan in the same direction as Jesus’, but grace does not destroy, but perfects, nature. To insist that Liberal has chosen the greater part is to reduce questions of justice to the merely human attempt to extrapolate from the operation of grace, rather than a sound synthesis of natural and revealed principles.

To close, let’s return to another point from my previous post: the Law of Aethelberht. It’s likely that Augustine and company altered customary law by the bare minimum required to establish a legal position for the Church. Otherwise, the code simply records how the Kentish had always (or at least, lately) done things. One of its most famous features, of course, is its enactment of an early English class-system: compensation for every crime varies according to the social status of the victim. What did Augustine and co think of the code? They had lived in Rome; they knew, and some were likely involved in, Frankish legislation. They were men well learned and well travelled. It cannot seriously have occurred to them that the laws they were setting down for Aethelberht were they very best, most Christians laws that could be written.

I expect they anticipated that, as the Gospel took root among the English, as native learning and native wisdom grew, their laws would become more perfect. It is idle to speculate what they imagined those more perfect laws would look like, if they even considered the specifics of the matter at all. Did they want the king to be bound by the counsel of his great men, or even by a council of his common men? Did they think that, really, the toenail of a peasant ought to be worth no less than that of a prince?

Any half-reflective pagan could have told you that their social order was not finally and completely Rational. If we fail to measure our social order against a sufficiently stringent standard of justice, or work towards what remedy we can where that order falls short, we make a grave error. Nonetheless, we are all born into a social order that we did not chose, which imposes upon us genuine, particular moral obligations that we did not will for ourselves. It is another error again to regard that order and its obligations as illegitimate simply because unchosen. Between these errors, I suggest, lies the Christian mean.

This is the first part of a loose series. Part 2 tries to delineate the Christian mean more directly; Part 3 indulges in some wild fancies about how to apply these ideas in Britain.

Circa 602 AD: King Aethelberht of Kent is the foremost power in Britain. The strong commercial and diplomatic ties he enjoys with the Franks over the water have raised him above the many other petty chiefs, Germanic and native Brythonic, that strut about the island. Such cross-cultural ties have been strengthened further by Aethelberht’s reception of the mission of St. Augustine and his conversion to the Christian faith. Under Augutine’s influence, the king issues a code of law, using the Latin script as a vehicle for his own Saxon tongue.

Circa 1355 AUC: Aethelbert remains the foremost power in Britain, with especially close connections to his Frankish neighbours. All Saxons, and all Franks, share roughly the same religious world. Kent’s system of law is just as it is in 602AD, excepting the explicit references to the Christian Church, but it has not been written down, and nor is it something that the king himself is being seen to issue.

672 AD: Theodore, an intellectual from the heart of the still living Roman Empire, now occupies Augustine’s old position as Archbishop of Canterbury. He has founded a thriving cathedral school, and is now convening a council at Hertford. Bishops from across the Anglo-Saxon realms assemble, as well as King Ecgfrith of Northumbria. The council rules on marriage law, and for continuing nationals councils in future.

1425 AUC: no intellectual from the centre of Mediterranean civilization has taken up a prominent place in British society. No school as been founded, and no English national council is held.

790 AD: Alcuin of York returns to England having spent much of the last decade at the court of Charles, the Frankish king now styled ruler of the Roman Empire. He counselled the king and served as master of his palace school. Alcuin was one of many English intellectuals prominent at this time. Some, such as Boniface (as well as Alcuin himself), ventured abroad to shape the world beyond British shores; others, such as Bede, set themselves to rigorous scholarly endeavours at home.

1543 AUC: the Latin script in which Kentish law was not written back in 1355 AUC may now be familiar to the Saxons thanks to their post-Roman Brythonic and Frankish neighbours. The institutions and incentives that bring forth the first flowering of English scholarship in the 8th century AD, however, are missing.

899 AD: Aelfred of Wessex dies as King of the Anglo-Saxons, ruling in the south from Exeter to Canterbury, and in the west from the Isle of Wight to the Mersey. Aside from beating back the waves of Northmen, he enthusiastically promoted education and justice throughout his domains, and presented himself as king of the all the English by issuing a common book of law.

1652 AUC: Britain suffers under a new round of Germanic invaders. It may be that the last round of Germanic invaders find their best representative in Aelfred of Wessex. This lord’s martial prowess is perhaps surprising given his thoughtful, sensitive disposition, but he sets himself well enough to his main task. He is remembered not only as a good warrior, but a good ruler, generous and fair to all his folk. It probably does not occur to him to sponsor learning on any scale, nor to define his kingship by justly issuing and upholding law.

1070 AD: The last in a long line of invaders settles into his English dominion after a brutal conquest. Nonetheless, the new king, William, is keen to present himself as a guardian of the old laws, customs, and institutions of the realm, much as his predecessor Cnut had been. Intriguingly, he and his army also did penance after their victories, in acknowledgement of the evil done is shedding so much blood.

1823 AUC: Britain has been roiled by invasions. None of the invaders have made any great show of remorse for their bloodshed. Without the archives, the court scribes, the fixed national grid of spiritual power built over the centuries by the English Church, nor are the invaders particularly interested in aligning themselves with the old laws.

1102 AD: Anselm, another European intellectual elevated to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, presides over another national council. The council declares: ‘Let no one hereafter presume to engage in that nefarious trade in which hitherto in England men were usually sold like brute animals’.

1855 AUC: as in 1423 AUC, no foreign intellectual takes a position of prominence, and no national council is called. Whatever power predominates in Britain has no particular compunction about the taking, trading, or owning of slaves.

1119 AD: King Henry I of England fights off an invasion of his Norman lands by Louis of France at Brémule. 900 knights participate, but only three are killed. As Christian soldiers, reported Orderic Vitalis, they did not thirst for the blood of their brothers.

1872 AUC: the armies of Britain continue to cut down their enemies on the battlefield, whatever their background may be.

1123 AD: St Bartholomew’s Hospital, the oldest still operating in England, is founded, administered by the associated Augustinian Priory.

1876 AUC: no hospital is founded.

1295 AD: King Edward I of England summons a parliament to finance his coming military campaigns. In doing so, he cited a principle taken from the Roman law of adoption: what touches all, should be approved by all. On this principle he summoned not only the traditional magnates of the realm, but knights, burghers, and townsfolk. In this, he was following the precedent set by his father’s enemy, Simon de Montfort; who in turn cited the formal repudiation of arbitrary rule foisted upon Edward’s grandfather John by his magnates; who in their turn cited the liberties proclaimed by Henry I at his coronation; who in his turn was anxious, like his father William the Conqueror before him, to be seen as upholding the ancients laws of the English realm.

2048 AUC: knowledge of Roman law among the English is very limited. Certainly, the transformation of a minor point in the law of adoption to a principle of good governance, in fact under taken by canon lawyers, has never occurred. There has been no tradition of national assemblies running back to 1423 AUC. There has been no ideology, entrenched for similarly long, of the king as the upholder of law, and no archives full of precedents to draw upon.

In truth, it’s hard to tell what the Britain of AUC 2048 would be like. There is less still to be said about what the Britain of AUC 2772 would be like. But certain points are more readily discerned. The universities, the hospitals, the parliaments, jury trials and the rule of law: those things we most value about medieval Britain, and which stand behind the things we value most about today’s Britain, had specific roots in the Christian Church. The Church provided the practices and presumptions which nourished them. The Church brought the learning and the law, even from as far away as Tarsus. Without the Church, none of these rare fine things would have come to be: not in the time that they actually came to be, certainly, and nor, for all we can tell, ever. As no less an apologist than Bertrand Russell admitted, the thrill of saying that religion was good only as a stimulus to astronomy having palled, the civilization of Northern Europe was mostly the work of missionaries However upright modern atheists or high-minded ancient Stoics may be, the simple fact is that much of what is best in Britain we owe to Christianity.

A bit of an about face for this meagre blog, but I am by no means absolute anti-Pinkerite.

I should start by saying that I'm pretty sympathetic to @sapinker. I think he genuinely identifies important positive trends, and does us a service by trying to document & explain them so ambitiously for a general audience, often in opposition to dubious intellectual fashions.

— John of Salisbury will rise again (@SalisburyJohnof) October 17, 2018

In particular, I’m inclined to defend him from attacks from the Left, which is what I’m doing now. It seems that Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs has been having a go at him. I’ve found Robinson to be pretty annoying in the past, but I do agree with him that Pinker is much more annoying . The substantive issue I want to address in inequality, which Robinson discussed in an earlier piece, though I will return to some more general observations later.

Pinker claims that ‘equality is not a fundamental dimension of human well-being’; Robinson is unimpressed. Pinker starts with the levelling down objection: one way of making people equal is to reduce everyone to the level of the worst off. But pursuing inequality this way is terrible. So it’s not really inequality itself that’s bad, but the lowly condition of the worst off.

Pinker further contends that, since people are being lifted out of extreme poverty, the condition of the worst off is improving. Since this improvement, and not rising inequality, is what really matters, our present economic system is working well. Huzzah.

Robinson is incredulous, and in response he describes a simple feudal system. There’s a lord who owns a lot of land. The peasants, but not the lord, work the land. The lord takes the vast majority of what the land produces, leaving a pittance for the peasants. However, the land yields more year and year. Most of the increase goes to the lord, but year on year the returns for the peasant increase too, however little.

Surely this system is unjust, says Robinson. Yet it looks much like the global economic system Pinker praises. The condition of the lowest improves incrementally, and, though the gains for the richest are far greater, the incremental improvements at the bottom are all that really matter.

This criticism makes sense. What Robinson is urging we do, I take it, is properly to minimax. That is, he is (at least for arguments sake) conceding that it the condition of the lowest that should concern us. But against Pinker, he is claiming that mere improvement is insufficient: we should be maximising the minimum, making the worst as well off as we possibly can.

Fair enough. But Robinson’s simple feudalism is really simple. The lord can just give the peasants more of the fruits of their labours. Or give them the land they work. The uselessness of the lord, and the ease of improving the peasants’ lot is part of the story. The question is: how easy is it improve the lot of the least in the real world?

Superficially, we produce a lot of stuff, and much more of it could go to the least well-off without dragging anyone else down to the bottom. This remains true even when the amount being produced is steadily increasing. Well and good. But these observations from Robinson remain too superficial. When Pinker points out that wealth is not a finite resource, but rather grows, the import is surely this: redistributing the wealth available now is insufficient. We need to be able to sustain this level of production, and ideally more, while continuing to tip the distribution towards the bottom. This is… a delicate matter. A massive disruption in the distribution of wealth is apt to cause a massive disruption in the system of production, jeopardising the future wealth of all.

Now presumably Robinson has some thoughts about this. And there is clearly some responsibility on Pinker to argue that the current system, insofar as he endorses it, comes close to doing the most possible for the least. But in criticising Pinker here, Robinson really ought to do more to acknowledge and address these issues. Moreover, he ignores the subtexts in which Pinker’s position is defended.

Pinker is annoying because he’s conservative and congratulatory. And yet: the internet is cool, and the black death was not, as Robinson admits. We live in a world with one and not the other, and that is a stupendous achievement. We live in a world in which vast quantities of food, medical drugs, and labour-saving devices are produced. That is a stupendous achievement. Of all the economic systems humans have attempted, none have been so excellent. Of all the systems we could attempt, few would be so excellent: per Pinker’s observations on entropy, the possibilities of disorder overwhelm those of order. The conservatism and congratulation are well placed, because of the scale of the success Pinker documents, and its fragility.

The world we have made works really well, by the crucial standard of worlds that have been actual and not merely fanciful. Of course we want it to work better in many respects, but the attempt to make it do so should proceed from deep appreciation for, and understanding of, the ways in which it works well now, so enthusiastically discussed by Pinker. Hence the congratulatory tone. Without this, we are apt to veer into the wide realms of disorder. Often enough have incautious attempts to improve the world left it worse. Responsible change is cautious, considered, and informed by the best of what already is. Hence the conservatism.

Everyone should strive for a more just world. But remember this is hard, as much in identying genuine improvements as implementing them, especialy since the low-hanging fruit was picked long ago by the Dukes of Chou. https://t.co/xDsszCDmoj

— John of Salisbury will rise again (@SalisburyJohnof) October 2, 2018

On balance, I did come away from Robinson with a lower view of Pinker and a higher view of equality. I personally am not especially invested in economic liberalism as the solution to all ills: indeed, I rather like trolling the ASI. But I remain sceptical of the confidence of Robinson and his ilk that economic justice is waiting should the vested interests only be swept away. And however little it may help to turn to Pinker at times of personal suffering or specific injustice, there is a point to that Panglossian glint in his eye. The achievements of our civilization are precious, and we must take care both in preserving and extending them.

One flaw of Pinker’s work is a tired rehearsal of what is essentially anti-Christian dogma. He is ever eager to revisit the worst behaviour of Christians, but is simply not interested on what the other side of the ledger might look like, acknowledging Christian achievements only in passing where the evidence leaves him without excuse. In the first chapter of the book, Pinker presents what he calls a reality check: a vivid reminder of the brutality of past ages. After a section on Homer, Pinker devotes one section to the Hebrew Bible and one on the rise of Christianity, the rhetoric of both of which clearly works, despite some protestations, to impugn Judaism and Christianity. The second section picks up from the discussion of the Hebrew Bible and starts with Jesus, though the earliest event recounted is the Persian invention of crucifixion, and essentially concludes by commenting on how wonderful it is that so few people now accept the logical implications of their religious beliefs. Thus the vast cruelty of ancient empires is used, misleadingly, to build up the moral momentum for a condemnation of Christianity. Bizarrely, he even uses martyrology as an example of the sacralisation of cruelty, which makes one wonder what he thinks of posters of the Tiananmen square protests.

Most interesting is Pinker’s final chapter, where he makes his reckoning. An important section of the chapter is shot through with ambiguity: Pinker takes us through some factors which don’t feature in his favoured explanations for the reduction of violence. But he hedges on just what he thinks of these factors. In one sentences, the factors are not important; in the next, they are not minor. What is his standard? Are these factors that have not made any appreciable reductions to violence over the long term, or are they simply factors that are not completely correlated with violence reduction? When discussing religion, he comes out fighting: ‘little good has come from ancient tribal dogmas’. He then concedes that ‘particular religious movements’ have sometimes done good, and attempts to distance himself from the rashest rhetoric of the new atheists. Only at the end does he aim directly for the claim of inconsistent influence with what might have been considered an immediately clinching argument: religion is a diverse phenomenon, and so it ‘has not been a single force in the history of anything’ (a point that seems to have slipped Pinker’s mind earlier in the book when commending contemporary Catholics for the view that all religions are equally good).

   Plainly, Pinker believes that religion in general and Christianity in particular have not made appreciable reductions in violence over the long term. He needs to tell us that Christianity has been very bad before noting that religion as such is simply not the kind of thing that could be consistently good or consistently bad. Real analysis in support of this view, however, is lacking. He notes that ecclesiastical authorities have opposed humanitarian reforms and that inter-denominational differences have inflamed conflicts. These facts are not especially illuminating, since they can be predicted by more general facts, namely, that those who benefit from the status quo will seek to preserve it, and that ideological differences inflame conflicts (compare Pinker’s exculpation of the Enlightenment from the excesses of the French Revolution). The effect that the particular religious movement inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth has had on violence levels is not really in view.  

 The evidence for the contrary position glimmers beneath the main argumentative currents of the work. One example is what Pinker calls a taboo against taking identifiable human lives. Pinker claims both that the taboo is the upshot of ‘an ideology that held that lives are owned by God’ and that it is ‘in general a very good thing’. He goes on to say exceptions to the taboo were exuberantly made, and that it had little practical effect through most of  European history. Nonetheless, one of the phenomena he must explain is the lionising of human life in what he calls the humanitarian revolution (the moral amelioration following the Enlightenment) and the rights revolution (that following WWII). One of the long-term factors enabling these revolutions, insofar as it furnished them a broadly-accepted ideological foundation, was the human life taboo which, on Pinker’s own account, Western Europe owes to Christianity.

An even clearer debt to Christianity, meanwhile, slips beneath the very tip of Pinker’s nose. After the fall of Rome, Western Europe entered a state of anarchy. On Pinker’s account, this meant bloodshed. Such a state approximates Hobbes’s war of all against all. The way out of the endemic violence is through the power of Leviathan: the state. The state enforces law, thus quashing the war of all against all. This Pinker calls the pacification process. Pacification gains its own momentum, however, as people internalise the attitudes that help them to flourish within a law-governed society. This Pinker calls the civilising process. Pinker carefully documents the wonders these processes have done for Europe: violent deaths a fraction of the average for non-state societies, and homicides plummeting since the Middle Ages.

 After examining specific cases such as the American frontier and postcolonial Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, he is prepared to acknowledge that ‘in zones of anarchy, religious institutions have sometimes served as a civilising force’. Here, two off-hand comments rub interestingly against one another. When discussing the European civilising process, he rubbishes the idea that a life ‘centred on tradition, church, and the fear of God is our best bulwark against murder and mayhem’.  The violent Papua New Guineans whom churches helped to tame, however, he describes as ‘not unlike the knights of medieval Europe’. Which raises an obvious question, one that Pinker overlooks in his earlier rush to rubbish the fear of God. If Western Europe was a zone of anarchy, and religious institutions sometimes serve as a civilising force in such zones, might not the Church have contributed to the civilising process of Western Europe? On this point, the historical record is clear. The Catholic Church exported legal and administrative nous throughout Europe. Bishops were the first to write laws in English. As the feudalisation of France became ever more violent, the monks of Cluny stood up to proclaim the peace of God. Christianity did indeed help to civilise Western Europe.

Beyond these two contributions to Western Europe lies a wider issue. Though global in scope, Pinker’s work retains a cheerful Euro-centrism. This is partly a byproduct of an American writing in English, but also Pinker believes that Europe is at the centre of the global story. Rather daringly, he suggests that European empires pacified and civilised, and so reduced violence, around the world. More than this, it was in Europe that the singular event of the Enlightenment occurred, and the humanitarian revolution that followed. So a question arises: why modern Europe? Why did the singularity of the humanitarian revolution happen where and when it did?

 Pinker appeals to the invention of the printing press. Both humane ideas, and narratives of those suffering various forms of violence, proliferated, leading to the revolution. He also raises the issue of why Islam did not have a humanitarian revolution, pointing suggestively, if sketchily, to the historical and ideological absence of any separation between mosque and state. But  world history is not confined to Christendom and Caliphate. Four centuries before Marcus Aurelius became Caesar, India boasted the extraordinary philosopher-king Ashoka. Nonetheless, it was rife with window-burning and caste division as Europe entered the humanitarian revolution. After millennia of imperial civilisation under the tutelage of Confucius, the Chinese state descended periodically into hemoclysm and familial execution was not officially abolished until the 20th century. As Pinker documents, femicide is prevalent in both regions today. And in Europe itself, no humanitarian revolution ever seemed about to burst forth in the millennium between Solon and Constantine. I don’t doubt that superior printing technology was an important trigger, but Pinker elsewhere rejects ‘technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence’. The singularity of the humanitarian revolution requires further thought.

The printing press, I suspect, was one of two immediate sparks; the fuel, however, had been laid over centuries. Pinker is reluctant to state explicitly what he often concedes implicitly, that the history of religion is a part of the history of ideas, and some excellent ideas have religious origins. The taboo on life-taking we have already noted. Despite claiming that ‘the Bible is one long celebration of violence’, when Pinker goes looking for exponents of peace in Western culture, it is to the Bible that he turns. Rightly so: the book of Amos, whose origins are in the 8th century BC, contains what are likely the first recorded denunciations of war crime. ‘For three transgressions of the Ammonites, and for four, I will not revoke the punishments; because they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead in order to enlarge their territory’. Other concerns of the Hebrew prophets include the protection of the poor and the impartial administration of justice. Christianity entered the world as an enlightened, humane philosophy. Unlike many similarly enlightened philosophies, such as Stoicism in Classical Antiquity and Mohism in China, Christianity became the dominant ideology of a large portion of the world’s population, encompassing not only an intellectual elite but peasants and powerbrokers. As we have seen with regard to the human life taboo, this facilitated the emergence of enlightened moral consensus, with common people prepared to act and governments prepared to listen.

   More than this, the spiritual power of Christianity was vested in a specific institution, independent, at least in Western Europe, of any particular state. The Church did not merely, as I have already argued, fend off anarchy: it held Europe to ideals. Among those first episcopally authored English laws were prohibitions on the export of Christians as slaves. Pinker mentions how Europeans expanded their circle of concern so that they would no longer enslave one another. What he neglects to mention is that the initial expansion of concern was to cover all Christians (or at least, Latin Christians). The peace of God became a prohibition against assaulting peasants, merchants, women, and children that held throughout Christendom. Even where it failed to restrain actual violence, it helped establish the precedent that non-combatants were not legitimate targets.

 One of the telling signs that Pinker ignores is the low European death rate from war in the period preceding the Wars of Religon: that is, the period of a unified Christendom. Though he makes much of the long term decline in military violence, the death rate does not return to its pre-Reformation level until the 19th century. Pinker suggests that the lords of Europe were self-interestedly avoiding arming their peasantry. Perhaps this was one factor, but the facts go strikingly against the grain of Pinker’s argument. A Hobbesian war of all against all, which is how Pinker characterises Medieval Europe, ought, on Pinker’s own logic, to have a much higher death toll. Nor elsewhere does Pinker allow that large death tolls require large armies: he thinks that much higher death rates were and are generated by habitual raiding in pre-state societies. And indeed comparable situations elsewhere in the world, such as the warring states and warlord eras in China, appear to have been far deadlier.

The deeper answer was that fewer people died in war because Christendom was united. Not only did the Church prescribe restricted warfare, as we have seen, but it upheld a vision of international order. Western Europe was not ruled merely by strongmen, but Christian lords bound by ties of fealty and guided by Mother Church. Naked wars of dominance and conquest, such as prevailed in Classical Antiquity, no longer had a place. The exception shall prove the rule. William of Normandy sought Papal blessing for his English campaign, stressing his legitimate title to the English throne.  He was crowned twice, once by the Archbishop of York and again by Papal legates. The legates forced him and his whole army to do penance for their shedding of Christian blood, and during both coronations he swore to uphold the laws of England. Such was his commitment to penance that he levelled the hill on which the battle of Hastings was fought so that a new abbey could be built the altar of which would stand exactly where Harold Godwinson fell. Such was his commitment to upholding the laws of England that he claimed (probably falsely, but nonetheless tellingly) to have gathered 70 of the wisest men in the land to compile a digest of the law, in a document that came to be known as the Laws of Edward, his predecessor.

This commitment to English law would prove momentous. When William’s son Henry needed to secure his power base, he pledged to uphold the laws of Edward, bolstered by his own Charter of Liberties. And when, a few generations later, civil war loomed between John and his barons, the Archbishop of Canterbury brought the parties to the negotiating table. This in itself is an indication of the Church’s role in keeping peace. But what really mattered is what the Archbishop did next. He reminded the disputants of Henry’s Charter, and under its inspiration drafted a new, great charter. This became perhaps the most famous of all legal documents, and a talisman of the limitation of state power. As Pinker notes, once the leviathan is in place, a new problem arises: how to restrict its own violence. Solving this problem ‘would have to wait another few millennia’, and the Church blazed the trail.

 The Catholic Church, in short, forged Western Europe into a moral community. The weak were taught to expect peace and justice; the powerful were disciplined to promote peace and justice. The expectations were often dashed; the promotion was often half-hearted. And of course the moral community had its limits. Most (but not all: Pinker mentions Antonio de Montesinos, who protested the treatment of Native Americans, though he characteristically overlooks the conversion of the whole Dominican Order and eventually the King of Spain) assumed that everyone outside of Western Europe, and plenty within it, were beyond the community’s limits. This theory and practice of Christian moral community is, I suggest, the fuel of the humanitarian revolution. I mentioned two sparks that ignited it, the first being the printing press. The second was the collapse of that moral community.

  The Reformation divided not only Western Christianity but, as MacCulloch reminds us, the very house of Europe. According to Pinker, the subsequent wars were more devastating than any European wars until the 20th century. The collapse of Christendom was a severe trauma. This trauma prompted intellectuals to imagine, and statesmen to create, a new moral community to replace the old.  Such was the initial impetus behind the humanitarian revolution. The pivotal figure, on this view, is Hugo Grotius, who wrote On the Laws of Wars and Peace in the full flood of the hemoclysm. He was quite open about his motivations: ‘throughout the Christian world, I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war’. His influence was immense, not only on the intellectuals who led the Enlightenment, but among statesmen, who were eager to woo him while he lived and paid him still greater tribute after his death in the Peace of Westphalia. As Pinker notes, this inaugurated the modern era of international order, and is widely seen as a deliberate implementation of Grotius’ ideas.

 After a few more centuries and another period of European catastrophe, this new moral community had become the global community of the United Nations, declaring the universality of human rights. Though Cicero and Mozi lamented the unnecessary violence during the the rise of the Roman Empire and the Era of Warring States respectively, they lacked a broad audience confident that their principles should and could shape the affairs of nations. Cicero was murdered and Mozi forgotten. Christendom bequeathed that audience to Grotius. Without its ruins, there would not have been the resources to build the modern moral community.

  For all Pinker’s scorn, then, Christianity has indeed appreciably reduced violence over the long-term. The Catholic Church watched fearfully as a welter of Germanic warlords swept through the former dominions of Rome. It brought them laws, to which even the warlords were subject; it brought them elevated ideals, recognised by both prince and peasant; it brought them a community larger than tribe, or state, or people. The Church found barbarians and left something unprecedented: the sort of civilisation in which a humanitarian revolution could occur.

Thanks for joining me! This was an auto-generated post, but I decided to keep it on account of the soundness of Izaak Walton.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton