Why Me?The case against the sovereign self.
Posted Monday, June 9, 2008, at 6:57 AM ET
Who gets the final say? This simple question is at the heart of religion, politics, and psychology. If I am a believer, God's decisions are authoritative: If he says that I shall not kill, I am obligated to follow his commands, fallen into sin though I may be. Political leaders, by contrast, claim that their word ought to be the last word: If I receive a tax bill from the government, pay it I must, or I risk going to jail. No to both, says the radical individualist: Modern psychology teaches that I am the captain of my own ship, quite capable of steering it in any direction I choose.
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StumbleUponBy now, there is next to no debate about which of these approaches to sovereignty is best. The idea that God's word is supreme is generally associated with an age of dogma and superstition unsuitable for the way we live now. Too many abuses of political authority exercised by totalitarian leaders properly make us cynical about the idea that political leaders ought to be trusted. Best, then, to locate sovereignty in the self; it has taken us a couple of thousand years to achieve freedom and autonomy, but now that we have, we can never go back to more authoritarian, or even authoritative, times.
Sovereignty: God, State, and Self is not afraid to challenge this received wisdom from the ground up. To understand what impels the project of its author, Jean Elshtain, it is helpful to know how a group of conservative intellectuals, many attracted by various aspects of Catholic theology, approach America's culture wars. (Elshtain herself is not Catholic.) On March 31, 2005, a comatose Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, died. Republican politicians who had rushed to her defense were widely discredited; Americans across the board viewed them as interfering with a family's right to make its own decisions. But for thinkers such as Elshtain, Terri Schiavo's death became symbolic of everything that had gone wrong with liberalism. Here Terri Schiavo was: weak, dependent, unresponsive. By allowing her to be killed, her husband, the courts, and all those who supported them had chosen to use the power of the state to snuff out the life of one of God's creatures simply because her living existence was causing them discomfort.
How did modern society take such a barbaric turn? Elshtain argues that if we had lived in more theological times, we would have had greater appreciation of the mysteries of life. Had we understood that Terri Schiavo had been created by God, and that killing her meant substituting our judgment for his, we would surely have done everything in our power to sustain her existence. But instead of making God's word sovereign, we treat the individual as the final judge of right and wrong. Shifting the basis of sovereignty from God to the state to the self has left us, in Elshtain's view, unable to appreciate "common sense, decency, dignity" and has eroded "our sense of shame, our capacity for joy, our ability to recognize when our dignity is affronted, our ability to love, not just to use, others."
These are bold claims, and Elshtain has written a bold book, one meant to shake up the now-entrenched view that we are at center of the universe and the better for it. She argues that medieval theology offered anything but a blind worship of obedience. A long struggle between popes and kings ended with a standoff: a realm in which God was supreme and another ruled by the sword. As long as such a duality existed, absolutism could not; Christians could appeal to divine authority to protect themselves against the worldly dictates of a prince. From this point of view, the transfer of sovereignty from God to government was a giant step backward. Once the state takes over, the Christian right to resistance—and the sense of being responsible to God—atrophies.
Elshtain's point makes intuitive sense if the state is an absolutist one. But she carries her argument one step further by arguing that even liberal-democratic states are "monist." Unlike the medieval recognition of two ways of life, they accord public status only to one, recognizing claims based on secular reason. All authority is public authority. Those who insist on bringing God into the public sphere cannot be tolerated. This, too, is not justice in her view; it is rank prejudice, a failure to allow the appeals to divine authority religious believers were once given the freedom to make.
In more recent times, we have learned to question all public authority, including that of liberal-democratic states, invoking instead the sovereignty of individuals. For Elshtain, this represents one last step away from a just world. Once we believe that we can control nature, rather than acknowledging that we are controlled by it, we substitute ourselves for God—without being God. Seeking self-mastery, we set little store by those who, for no reason of their own, lack the capacity to direct their lives in the ways we assume all autonomous individuals must. The rise of the sovereign self therefore demands the destruction of those human lives that are deemed not worth living, including "the severely mentally disabled, the feeble elderly, a fetus, a comatose person, an Alzheimer's patient." Self-sovereignty, far from making us free, leads inexorably to the domination of the strong over the weak: the most unjust situation of all.
No one can read this book and not come away impressed by the compassion Elshtain shows toward society's most vulnerable human beings; compared with a philosopher such as Peter Singer, whose utilitarian calculations lead him to conclude that we might be better off killing babies with Down syndrome, Elshtain is someone I want on my side.
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Remarks from the Fray:
[Elshtain] completely undermines herself with that Terri Schiavo point. Had it been up to God, she would not have lived as long as she did. It was people and the state who were keeping her alive by artificial means. And when the people removed their man-made prevention of her death, she died. So if God is the governing authority that decides who lives and who dies in a situation like that, then God wanted Terri Schiavo to die. No one killed her. They just stopped preventing her death. This is an example of people submitting to God's plan, not defying it.
Of course, that's assuming that you believe in God.
It's also hilarious that she would have us believe that God ever held complete power and rule of law. If you believe in the story of Eden, people rejected God almost from the moment they were created, ruling themselves and eventually forming government when they were cast out of the garden.
If you don't believe in the creation story and choose evolution, then man evolved from animals; the first rule has always been survival (individual rule), followed by order (government rule), and eventually followed by religion, which was really only ever used as a handy tool for government backup.
Regardless of your religious belief or non belief, this whole things sounds like a sad piece of propaganda coming from someone educated enough to know better.
--Selene212
(To reply, click here.)
The fatal flaw in the reasoning of those who decry "playing God" is that they assert the ability to do just that. Any claims about God's law come from the mouths and pens of men. We are thus left with trusting the authority of those who claim to speak for God - and they are many and varied - and trusting the individual to make his own moral choice. Any appeal to God is necessarily an appeal to either a human authority, or the sovereign self.
--Fitzpatrick
(To reply, click here.)
It has been said many times that a person who represents himself has a fool for a client. Similarly, the self-employed have the most demanding boss. When it comes to sovereignty, the scenario doesn't look any better.
The Catholic viewpoint is that God is King and every substitution is erroneous on its face because it doesn't accept that fact. This is a very robust point and is only open to challenge of the fact of God's dominion, which is generally done via an assault on His existence or nature.
Here, the question is more one of a practical nature: do people govern themselves well? The answer is very similar to asking whether flagpoles stand up well by themselves... and the answer is generally 'no' because any single pole standing straight up is stable but not robust. A pole even slightly disturbed finds itself increasingly out of balance and rapidly crashing to the ground with no way to halt this decline. This instability is characteristic of many dynamic systems which are stable inside a very small phase space but not robust - so they do not re-enter the stable space once they have left it.
Humans are much the same way. The person who stops smoking compensates by overeating, then gets radically overweight and continues to take comfort in food; becomes lonely and needs more comfort; has bad health, loses a job, needs more comfort... and dies of a heart condition. All sorts of addictions and mechanisms for seeking validation and security feature the same feedback mechanisms. Rage, anger and violence feed on themselves. All sorts of negative emotions, self-righteousness, arrogance, anxiety ... they feed on themselves and often on each other. People unmoored from associations which govern them effectively may be stable - briefly. In essence, only theoretically.
People need authorities. They need family authorities, state authorities, perhaps divine authorities. Absolute power makes the person independent again, and unstable. It corrupts. The founding fathers recognized that groups of people need to be deeply interconnected in ways that restrict their freedoms, so they cannot simply spin off into destruction; they need self-control as much as possible, but then, they need to be governed; by each other, and well, for their own interests.
Some fools blame all failings on the society and all successes on the individual. Anyone with sense would see that there are social failings that go uncorrected by individuals, yes, and propagate down to reflect poorly on all the members of a society; but that there are also individual failings that are constantly corrected by society and that a mass of ungoverned individuals would be utter destruction for all the individuals involved. However, the more people organize independently into small associations (like families) and subordinate organizations (like communities and states) and independent networks (like the market and churches and government) the more stable the human condition will become.
It may not be ideal at any time, and improvements will be more difficult perhaps due to stability and the fact that flaws won't be as glaring when they are free from controls that moderate them, but individuals will be governed effectively - but not by a single centralized and easily radicalized authority.
Since the alternatives are utter disaster for everyone all at once and tyranny that leads to disaster inevitably, we shouldn't be so ready to give up on the moderation of distributed authority, even if we have doubts at times about the hierarchies that manage some of it.
--BenK
(To reply, click here.)
(6/10)