Andrew Willard Jones’ recent piece on this site, titled What States Can’t Do, was, as always, provocative, as he meant it to be. It is also, quite properly, inside baseball: a contribution to a kind of careful discussion between people who already share large areas of agreement; who have, through a years’-long process of conversation and shared study, arrived at a common conscience.
We “know together” what many of the problems are with classical liberalism; we’ve been rummaging around in the political theology of the last 5000 years long enough to have our minds turned inside out; it’s been a disorienting experience and a wonderful one; you read St. Thomas, and the ideas hit your mind like four shots of espresso over ice, and you find yourself awake after having spent a lot of time in a half-daze, wondering vaguely why the political and metaphysical worldview you had passively accepted from the ambient culture (John Milton, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jon Stewart) just didn’t seem to match your own experience at all – not your experience of family life, not your experience of friendship, nor of beauty, nor of community, nor of the place you live in, nor of your own mind, body and spirit.
So, to be fair, we’re doing pretty good. “Everyone agrees,” says Jones,
that the end of human life is happiness. Everyone agrees that happiness is found in virtue. Everyone agrees that the purpose of politics is the formation of this virtue socially, which we call the common good. Everyone agrees that politics must be oriented toward our final end, union with God. Everyone agrees that grace is necessary for this final end to be achieved. We are all integralists, and that is a very good thing.
But there are still points on which postliberals disagree, and Jones knew quite well that he was poking a stick at one of them in this piece. Where we disagree, he says, “revolves around what we mean by ‘the state’ or by ‘the government.’” We disagree “on what constitutes politics, or at least what aspect of politics is the most important.”
The two positions he presents in the form of two temptations: For those whose understanding of what politics is centers on the government, the state, the temptation is to authoritarianism. With libertarianism or “classical liberalism” as their primary opponent, they see politics as key to human flourishing, and understand politics primarily in terms of rulership, statecraft, government— those things being understood more or less as they commonly are in our culture. Think about attorneys general, legislatures, armies, off-the-record conversations at overpriced cocktail bars in Dupont, classical architecture, and the hangman.
Other postliberals, also seeing politics as key to human flourishing, think of the primary location of politics as at the local level— and, most keenly, in the family. Politics here is primarily a matter of communities of unequals living together in a family, and communities of equals living together as gathered families, in friendship. This is Jones’ position.
Those postliberals see authoritarians (left and right) as their chief opponents. “The temptation here,” he says, “is to de-emphasize the state to the point of anarchism.” As a result,
while we agree on nearly everything, we disagree at the simplest level: should we have a smaller state or a larger state? Should the state do more or do less? Should we undermine the state or take control of the state? This matters because even the most rudimentary practical political strategy in the United States must begin here.
He does not want to be an anarchist— certainly he is not an anarchist within the family, and he understands that there are properly “layers” of political authority that can interfere with a father’s ruling of his family: if he’s abusive, he may be restrained by the police acting on behalf of the mayor or the governor or, presumably, if worse comes to worst, by the FBI acting on behalf of the president, or something; if, that is, he’s a tyrant, he may be deposed by a higher authority. But when and how does that kick in, and how ought we to think of that “higher” authority?
Jones frames his case for his answer to this conundrum in terms of subsidiarity, which, as he says, is generally defined as “the principle that problems should be dealt with at the smallest social level possible and that larger, or ‘higher,’ powers should only intervene when these smaller levels fail.”
He doesn’t disagree with this, but wants to frame it more positively: “subsidiarity is a positive assertion about who human beings are in our very natures. It is a metaphysical assertion.”
That assertion is that the most effective and profound political power – and moral authority; the two are interchangeable for Jones, which may (I am not sure) be correct – is the most local. As he says,
Politics is about the formation of virtue. Its problem is this: how does one man lead another man into virtue? Subsidiarity is the assertion that this happens most efficaciously at the most personal level possible. The relationship between a parent and child is archetypical. No one can lead a boy into virtue more efficaciously than his father. This is so because their relationship is profoundly intimate, ordered first and foremost by love and characterized by inequality.
The father leads his son into virtue by knowing his son intimately. He knows his weaknesses and his strengths, his inherent temptations and his natural goodness. The father uses this knowledge to deploy his superior power effectively in the perfecting of his son. This is nothing else than the “care of souls.” This care is most effective when the father can use the son’s virtue in order to build more virtue. If the father can find his son’s love, the place where his son obeys him out of love, he can discipline his son in such a way that the good deeds mandated by the father are performed with a good intention by the son—for such a good intention is a prerequisite for virtue formation.
Now, what Jones describes is good and sane and necessary: it is the foundation for – not all, but most – other politics. If you’re not raised well, it will be very difficult – without grace, impossible – for you to become a well-formed and complete man, able to participate in other politics, able to be trusted with marriage, able to pass on that moral formation to the next generation.
But what he describes is not what subsidiarity is, and it is not a complete description, or a normative one, of politics.
Subsidiarity doesn’t mean that things ought to be done at the lowest possible level. It means that things ought to be done – that power ought to be exercised – at the appropriate level for the kind of rule that is happening. More local is not better. It’s not worse. It just is: and all that is, is good; local communities, families, are good; the power exercised in families and the decisions made in town meetings, when that power is exercised well, tends towards the fullness of being of those over whom it is exercised, and the fullness of being also of those who exercise it; where decisions are collaborative and collegial, decisions among peers, that friendship also tends to the virtue, the completion, of those who experience it and exercise it.
But power and political authority exercised at higher levels – again, only if it is exercised well and justly – also tends to the good of both the rulers and the ruled. It is not attenuated or second-best.
Certainly, when you are deciding how to solve a problem, start with your own body: is the lightbulb burnt out? Get up on a damn stool and change it yourself, or, if you are busy and want your son to learn how to take care of such things, ask him to do it, and yes, if he’s a pain in the neck to you about that repeatedly, by all means take away his iPhone until he does. Do not call up the homeowners association or Andrew Cuomo or Vladimir Putin to try to organize the changing of your lightbulb.
But it may in fact be the case that the situation at hand ought to be dealt with not by you but by Andy Byford. This is certainly the case if the situation involves persistent train delays at Canal Street, or (at this point, I grudgingly admit) at Blackfriars.
Let’s look at this more carefully. First, Jones’s primary and normative understanding of what politics is — the primary political relationship, as it were — is a father's authority over his young son. That seems wrong on the face of it: the primary political relationship surely is that of the married couple.
In the narrative of scripture, being joined to his wife is something like the crown of political life for Adam — not the absolute beginning, because his dominion over the animals was in a way a kind of political rule, but the completion; the end of the beginning of political life. His bachelor existence, surrounded by irrational animals, is incomplete. The political nature of marriage is both internal and interpersonal — Adam does rule over Eve — but also outward-facing; they stand shoulder to shoulder in the original task that Adam was given; he can now do that task better, with his ezer kenegdo, his helpmeet or ally in this task. Marriage, not parenthood, is the moment of “completion” of human nature and the beginning of political nature; parenthood naturally flows out of this superabundant social goodness but does not create it.
Second, even where a father's relationship with his son is primary, I don't think that his relationship with that son when he is a child is the primary version; rather, the telos of the father-son relationship is that of a father relating to his grown son. The paradigmatic relationship between a father and a son, and the paradigmatic political father-son relationship, is of course that between Christ and His Father. Alastair Roberts writes that “When we hear the expression ‘sons of God’, we tend to think of the intimacy that can exist between fathers and sons in young childhood.” This is because this is the most intense version of the father-son bond that most of us have experienced. However,
if this concept is more clearly shaped… by the relationship that exists between the Father and the Son, as manifested in Christ, our concept of sonship might be significantly altered. This relationship is not primarily that which exists between a younger child and his father… but that which exists between two adults.
Dr. Roberts points out that in Galatians 4:1-7, St. Paul’s argument implies that it is only when an heir enters his majority that he can even properly be called a son; before that, he is “no different than a slave,” and rule over slaves, as we know, is not properly political.
We often hear that “Abba” is the form of address used by very young children to their fathers. But that is not what St. Paul seems to be getting at as he calls us to attend to the Spirit speaking in our hearts:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
It is not that the image of the young son is false. Jones points out rightly that one of the ways that God describes his relationship with Israel is as the father of a young son:
a child must sometimes be restrained from hurting himself or hurting others, regardless of his intentions. Sometimes he must simply be stopped. A father needs to know when and where this is the case. He must know when to trade his far, far more efficacious moral authority for his far less efficacious coercive power — when he must trade the positive for the negative. This requires prudence, intimate knowledge, and love.
This means that politics is most powerful at the smallest level possible. No law is better at leading a person into virtue than that of a just father. This is the reason that the Bible and the entire tradition uses the example of a boy becoming a man to describe how law works:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son….
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of compassion,
with the bands of love,
and I became to them as one,
who eases the yoke on their jaws,
and I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11)
It should be noted that this is a very young boy — God has him on leading-strings; he's just learning to walk. And yes, absolutely, this kind of training in virtue, this kind of being-raised-well, is absolutely crucial to everyone’s moral and political formation; if you are not given this by a loving father as a child, it will be very difficult for you to be a good man, formed in political virtue, and able yourself to rule others.
But Jones seems to me to take this moment in the political life of a man and make it the highest and truest expression of politics. This immediately should trigger alarm bells: Commissioner Gordon ought to activate the Stagirite Signal ASAP. To be a toddler (Aristotle would like to remind you) is not the telos of a boy. The telos of a toddler is to be an adult man.
And that relationship — of a father and his adult son — is, if anything like this is, the normative way that fathers and sons relate, and so even if the father/son relationship is the most politically charged or "real" or normative, it is the relationship of an adult son who has been formed in virtue, and who is now able to partner with and carry out the “family business,” whatever it is. In fact, it is chiefly (at least as often presented in Scripture) the relationship of the father to his eldest son, who bears the family project forward into the world.
As Dr. Roberts writes:
Christ’s sonship is characterized by his performance of the work of his Father, trusting and obeying his Father, bearing the name of his Father, being sent by, speaking, and acting in his Father’s stead, imitating his Father’s example and bearing his image, guarding and maintaining the rights, interests, and property of his Father, receiving a marriage feast that the Father is preparing for him, and entering into the inheritance and blessing of his Father.
Why, then, is Jones’ account so intuitively true for some? I think it’s because the relationship between, say, a father and his young son is one of the least screwed up and most sane political relationships that we have left (along with the relationship between a husband and his wife.) Most men just don't have much personal experience with, for example, being the leige-sworn vassal of a good lord, or a guild member; a member of a ship’s crew, or an ambassador to a trusted ruler. We don't know what those other political relationships feel like.
Don't get distracted by the medieval language here; these are types of relationships that most people in history would have known at the very least better than we do. I suspect that there are ways of being human well, being political animals well, that we moderns will only begin to get a taste of this side of the Parousia; we will need remedial political formation in virtue to become ourselves properly.
That means that Purgatory, for a lot of us, might look a lot like being assigned to live out these other kinds of political experiences. They are flavors that we have not, for the most part, tasted at all. But that doesn't mean that we can't understand that they are there to be tasted. We have testimony; historical descriptions of people being politically formed by serving good kings, good emperors; serving on ships; serving in the retinue of governors-in-exile, virtuous subversives reclaiming their land. And of course to begin to taste that flavor ourselves, we have novels to read.
It is probably true that in every age, and in every society within every age, there are kinds of experiences, even basic necessary human experiences, that are less accessible, though never wholly absent; we live in a fallen world and that is part of what that means. But we will not, finally, be swindled of those experiences.
There is another thing to note here, though. “This is the reason,” writes Jones, “that the Bible and the entire tradition uses the example of a boy becoming a man to describe how law works.” Of course this is not the case. Some of scripture, some of the tradition, uses this language. But the writers of scripture at least as frequently refer to Israel as the Bride. The political formation of Israel in the Wilderness after the Exodus is what the Hosea passage describes, and that is where the Law was given. But that is not the first or only political formation of Israel, and it is not the only allegorical account that we have of the events of the Exodus. Surely Ezekiel 16:6-14 is another picture of the same events, the same process, as the Hosea passage?
Ezekiel 16 begins earlier, perhaps not with the calling of Abraham, but with Israel’s birth rather than toddlerhood. It tells the same story that the Hosea passage does, through the founding of the nation, describing not just the giving of the law but the making of the covenant, a specifically political moment. It is very arguable, then, that this image, rather than the Hosea one, ought to be a primary political allegory for us.
But even marriage does not exhaust the political. Yes, absolutely living in a loving nuclear family is in many ways the intensest experience of political good, of joy and formation in virtue; certainly it is the most easily accessible to us. As Jones says:
This means that the fullest human happiness (which is the fruit of virtue) is possible only through the smallest level of social interaction; at the level of family and friends and at the level of personal love. We all know this to be true.
However, it is nevertheless true that the lower exists for the sake of the higher, and is perfected in it — or don't we believe that anymore? But even his own example points to that in some cases at least:
This complex hierarchy [of families built into towns built into nations] is necessary for two reasons, one positive and one negative. The first reason is that the father’s little society must be integrated into larger societies in order to achieve the common goods that can only be had at those larger levels. These common goods decrease in number and importance as the scale increases. In fact, they track directly with the decrease in moral authority, the two being different ways of talking about the same thing.
So, for example, the goods of belonging to a beautiful artistic culture can only be had through a larger polity. There is real moral authority at a higher level when it comes to these goods. But enjoying such goods still requires the proper functioning of the lower levels in order to be maximized—a child must be taught by his family to love art. Goods at the top pre-suppose and perfect goods at the bottom. This is the positive side of subsidiarity.
His claim and his example fight each other. The enjoyment of, say, going to see a musical, and the good of belonging to a thriving artistic culture, are very distinctly not a less intense or less morally authoritative (if one takes aesthetic experience to be a form of moral authority, and at this point in the game, why should we not? let’s just go for it) kind of good than being trained to love music as a child in one’s home. Those fully civilized experiences are what the training is for, though of course the training — all that family karaoke and all those scattered CDs — is also good in itself.
The experience of going to see, say, Man of La Mancha on Broadway, and of living in a society where Man of La Mancha exists — the good of belonging to a beautiful artistic culture (just trust me on this) — is the telos, the real thing, that training in appreciation of Broadway musicals at the family level gives you the key to. That is the treasurehouse. The key exists for the sake of the treasurehouse; the treasurehouse, not the key, is the point.
And the Aristotelian/Thomistic teaching, at least, is that there is an experience of political life that is a parallel to the experience of being well-trained in the appreciation of musical theater, while living in a city big enough to support musical theater. That experience is what we call the political common good. And that training at home — training in virtue, yes, by your father and mother, training such as is described in the Hosea passage and in Jones’ images — is what will give you the key to this treasurehouse.
You may not ever have experienced this! You probably haven't! But it is there to be experienced, and you will experience it — primarily, you will experience it in living in the political community of the Empire of Jesus Christ. And you may — many people have, in history, to a greater or lesser degree; it’s not all that weird; not any weirder than summer stock — experience the ectype of that archetype, in living in a good-ish political community now: not the kallipolis itself, but something that gives you the flavor of that place.
That flavor is not the coziness of the family circle, or the intimacy of the village. But it is real, and it is good.
It is also not divorced from the familial, from marriage. In his talk delivered at the Humanum conference in Rome in 2014, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote that in the face of polygamous cultures, where, as we see in the Book of Esther, one man can essentially hoard many women, the revolution of monogamy meant that each man, made in the image of God, might attain a kind of imperial dignity by marriage. “What Genesis was saying,” he writes, over against the polygamous empires in whose context it was written, “was that we are all royalty… Every bride and every groom are royalty; every home a palace when furnished with love.” Even the family is not entirely cozy.
But just because every home has that flavor of the macro-political, the imperial, that does not mean that that is the primary place it exists. And just because a good-ish imperium or a good-ish city, a kallishpolis, doesn't exist now doesn't mean it can't, or hasn't. And we can find out what that flavor is by reading, by learning, by imagining.
Right now, similarly, Broadway is closed. New York City is not the artistic community that it was, last year. But we can remember, and we can know what to look for, what that flavor is, if we run into it again.
It may be that Man of La Mancha will never be revived. But Brian Stokes Mitchell, after he got over his own bout of COVID, started singing “An Impossible Dream” out his window on the Upper West Side, at seven in the evening, when people cheer for the healthcare workers. As a demonstration of regained lung capacity, sure. And as a defiant gesture against the virus, against the darkened stages fifty blocks south, as a promise, and as a rallying cry.
It's not what it would be onstage, with a full orchestra. But it reminds us of that experience, and is in its own London-during-the-Blitz way, glorious.
In just the same way, we can, in the middle of the devastation and crisis that is our current experience of polity, come together and do something noble with each other, something that truly catches the flavor of that Imperium that does – quite rightly – lead us to a virtue beyond our families.
To political adulthood.