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CONCRETE
LEVELS OF BEING AND THEIR POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS In her masterwork, The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt famously argued against the notion of universal human
rights. Such rights were posed too grandly and abstractly. When the
crunch came, they were more or less worthless. Not one to mince
words, Arendt argued that those who were first stripped of
citizenship in a particular polity,
as Jews had been in Nazi Germany, could not make their claims stick
anywhere else. Instead, she says, having been stripped of civic
identity, they indeed became what they were accused of being by the
National Socialists: the scum of the earth. There is a distinct
Burkean flavor to Arendt's criticism with her emphasis on the
concreteness of citizenship by contrast to the abstractness of
universal rights. For Arendt, universal identity was a chimera and a rather dangerous one
at that. In times of civic peace the proposition of universal
identity does not get tested. In times of war it does and there it
is found wanting unless—and this is a vital caveat—there are
international conventions in place that guarantee certain modes of
conduct, whether to refugees or prisoners of war. These conventions,
like the Geneva Conventions, may be violated in the breech. But it
is vital that they be there. One can at least appeal to something and
hope that that something has some heft in a crisis situation. In
sum, Arendt's view is that rights must be concretely lodged within
the statutory armamentaria of nation-states—must be attached to
polities—or they are not worth the paper they are written on. A
major development of the post-World War II era is, of course, the
universalization of human-rights discourse and the insistence that
these rights attach to being-as-such. There is a "something"
about the human person such that that being is not to be violated in
certain ways, whatever the exigencies of a political situation. As
well, tables of positive rights—lists of the claims such beings
can reasonably make upon the polities of which they are a
part—attempt to go beyond preventing harm to promoting good. Now,
the idea that identity transcends national boundaries is not a new
one. It lies at the heart of ancient Stoicism, or one version of it
does. It is the epicenter of Christian belief: that human beings are
created in God's image and, as such, possess an inviolable dignity
that is God-given, not the revocable privilege of a political body.
Christian deterritorialization of identity is powerfully present in
one of my favorite moments from St. Augustine's great Confessions.
Augustine, his Christian brothers, his son, Adeodatus, and his
formidable mother, Monica, are making their way down the Italian
boot for embarkation to their native Hippo when Monica dies near
Ostia. This was a cataclysm in the ancient world—to go into the
soil, the foreign territory, of a site that is not one's homeland,
not, therefore, the giver of one's identity. (Here it is worth
remembering that Socrates calls Athens his "mother.") Augustine,
knowing this powerful belief (although his mother is a Christian),
begins to fret and, before she dies, Monica tells him not to worry,
that "God knows where to find me." The
Christian deterritorialization was correlative with a downgrading of
the centrality of citizenship, membership in a particular polis or
civitas. The prototypical
Christian identity is not that of citizen but of pilgrim. The peregrinus
or peregrina wanders across
and through territories but he or she is not essentially of them.
This does not mean Christians are to ignore civic matters utterly:
here Augustine's discussion of the vocation of the judge and why a
Christian should undertake such an inherently tragic vocation is
instructive. Yes, one does have responsibilities to one's time and
place through the forms of its concrete expression in households and
polities: in both domus and civitas.
Most important, however, the concrete expression of one's identity
is revealed within the body of another institution: the ecclesia.
The ecclesia benefits from
conditions of civic peace but is not a creature of the city or
empire. It possesses real autonomy. If a member of the ecclesia
is called upon by the city or
empire to violate his or her faith, loyalty to faith trumps other
loyalties, even to the point of martyrdom—precisely why Rousseau
was so churlish in his insistence that Christianity was a lousy
civic religion. There could, in other words, be a real clash between
layers or levels of identity and in such a case, although, for the
most part, one is enjoined to be a loyal subject, one's faith
takes precedence. Augustinian
universalism is far more concretized than is Stoic universalism, in
part because of Augustine's dynamic layering and inner penetration
of institutions. The household is a component part that contributes
to the completeness of the wholeness. Our work in small ways and
about small things contributes to the overall harshness or decency
of any social order. On earth there must be compromises "between
human wills" if there is to be anything resembling peace; indeed,
the heavenly city on earthly pilgrimage helps to forge peace by
calling out "citizens from all nations and so collects a society
of aliens, speaking all languages." She—the civitas dei—does
not annul or abolish earthly differences but even "maintains them
and follows them," so long as God can be worshiped; in this way,
she makes "use of earthly peace" and it is in her interest, as
we might now say, to help to contribute to earthly peace. Temporal
peace is a good, whether it is the peace of the body (health and
soundness), or fellowship with one's own kind, or "light,
speech, air to breathe, water to drink, and whatever is suitable for
the feeding and clothing of the body, for the care of the body and
the adornment of the person." Amid the shadows that hover over,
above, among, there are nonetheless two rules we can follow:
"first, to do no harm to anyone, and, secondly, to help everyone
whenever possible." This is the ethic of the pilgrim-citizen; of
the one who is tethered to this earth and its arrangements through
bonds of affection and necessity but who recognizes at the same time
that these arrangements are not absolute and not final. Two
models of political being, or of being with political implications,
are now on the table. First, Arendt's insistence on the centrality
of particular citizenship in particular polities. She was adamant
that no one can be a citizen of the world as he or she is a citizen
of a bounded nation-state. Although her reflections on the human
condition are not tied via explicit argumentation to her emphasis on
political being, her anthropological presuppositions are central to
this enterprise, particularly her concerns about the dangers of any
human quest for totalities. Second, in the Augustinian framework
citizenship in a particular polity as definitive of being is
de-emphasized by stressing two alternative forms of membership: the
first in a concrete and particular body—the ecclesia—which
places one definitionally in a universal oikumene
that calls out people from all nations and binds them to one another
through fellowship contingent upon beliefs. If to this one adds the
necessary configurations of human beings as familial creatures whose
relationality is given the tug and thickness of the concrete
prevails. If one were doing this spatially, one might say that
Augustinian identity is both "below" and "above" that of
particular states or empires. (Not, remember, to the utter exclusion
of responsibility to and for one's polity given his emphasis on
the good of temporal peace and the importance of neighbor love.) Augustine
did not talk about rights, of course, but he put in play a universal
identity based on God-given dignity attached even to beings most
would define out of humanity, out therefore of the features of
givenness to the ethical enterprise. He tells us that there are many
accounts—his chief authority is Pliny's Natural History—of
strange creatures whose existence raises questions about human
derivation and definition. There are:
There
is a double trajectory to Augustine's concrete moments of being
that partake of universal features as these revolve around identity
and definition. So long as creatures have some sort of language and
certain human features, however bizarrely embodied, they belong
within the broad domain of that irreducible being called human
before whom all forms of reflection must pause. But identities are
revealed only through concrete, local, and contingent associations.
(Interestingly, Augustine's two imbedded cardinal rules—do no
harm and help whenever you can—conform to the two tables of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the negative (you cannot
treat human persons in the following way. …) and the positive (you
must treat human persons in the following way, if at all possible.
…).
L There
is a tug-of-war around this rationalist boundary in our own time
between those who want to dethrone a too narrow understanding of
reason as definitional of the human (without dethroning reason
altogether) and those who seek to privilege a particular version of
rationality or consciousness as defining the human and, in so doing,
even offer up the possibility of elimination of those categories of
persons who are not capable of self-consciousness, whether because
of a mental disability or because they are newborns. But it is the
reterritorialization of identity that is my real concern here. The
solidification of this effort is certainly Westphalia, but the truly
fatal move is the Peace of Augsburg, 1555, with its cuius regio eius
religio principle, for this defanged the universalism of the Christian
dispensation and sought to confine it within the boundaries of
particular political configurations. The church, in effect, became
subordinate to the state and existed at the sufferance of the
prince. This is one of the reasons I speak of "the Protestant
nation-state" in my book Women and War.
A
portion of that argument went like this: Luther prepares the way for
the political theology that underlies the emergence of the
nation-state. In the future, the triumphant state becomes more
difficult to resist, churches having been disarmed in their relation
to the state, that is, hedged in by a cordon sanitaire
that muted their potential political force or, more decisively,
constituted churches as arms of the state (in England and Prussia,
for example.) The implications of Augsburg were profound. All one
need do is to observe the way the Prussian State Lutheran Church
lined up with the National Socialist regime—with Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and a small number (the numbers are actually more
substantial than we once realized) resisting and often paying with
their lives—to lament this territorialization of religious
identity. If
to Augsburg and Westphalia one adds the growing love for the patria that
became the basis of modern nationalism, you have a potent force for
internationalism construed as the alliance or the clash of
particularisms. There were profound consequences for political good
in all this and for expression and revelation of certain human
possibilities and capacities, including over time agitation for
constitutional and democratic forms of governance. Much of this
agitation arose from patriotic love for one's nation and a
commitment to her and to what sort of place she was. Rousseau went
overboard, as usual, but his insistence that one must gaze upon the
fatherland every waking moment and that one's every thought should
be of her is an extreme statement of a potent and very real
sentiment. Within the strongest versions of the nationalist
configuration, no institution within the patrie can
be said to have autonomy, beginning with the family. The family
becomes a subset of the nation-state's definitional imperialism,
so to speak. The household exists for the good of the polity rather
than being, as it was in Augustine's view, good for its own sake
as a way human sociality reveals itself in social configurations
that involve love, duty, necessity, loyalty, fidelity, and powerful
emotion. (Perhaps the clearest statement of this is Hegel's and I
would simply refer the reader to my discussion in Public Man,
Private Woman rather than to detain us here.) Model
three of concrete political being, then, is the Augsburg-Westphalian
model of identity as congealing around the nodal point of national
identity and citizenship. I take this to be a more severe form of
the privileging of national citizenship that Arendt emphasizes.
Arendt clearly believed that it was possible for potent friendships
to transcend the circumscription of national identity, but even here
she notes that one is never "at home" in a language not one's
own, at least not fully, so friendship is most powerfully realized
with those who speak "the same" tongue. The Rousseauian model
presupposes a nigh exclusivity of relationality as confined to the
national, if I read him correctly. (Although there are so many
Rousseaus one could probably find some counter-evidence to this
claim without too much difficulty.) Arendt's life experience also
brings forward another identity fragment—for it is not an identity
people seek willingly to realize—and that is refugee under duress,
and this by contrast to the adventurer or, indeed, the pilgrim. The
refugee is not an identity that gains institutional expression save
for those temporary institutions that spring up to serve those in
such an unfortunate position. (To the extent that this status
becomes permanent or quasi-permanent, it would probably need to be
called something else.)
L John
Milbank, in his provocative work Theology and Social Theory, argues that Augustine offers up the possibility for a complex
"metanarrative realism." The implications for how we understand
concrete levels of being and their political implications are clear.
Here is a very difficult passage from Milbank that makes the point,
although it does so in a way that will require some unpacking:
For
Milbank, what Augustine achieves is nothing less than an immanent
critique or "deconstruction of antique political society."
Augustine agrees that the earthly city is "marked" or
"stained" by sin. But this sin of violence is not given
ontological priority, as it is in Hobbes and much of modern theory.
Rather than ushering into a demand for a totalized particular, if I
may deploy such an awkward construction, Augustinian realism ushers
into a rueful recognition of limits rather than a will to dominion
that requires others for one to conquer or to absorb or to banish.
If one makes the project of peace, and its good, a project for all
levels of identity and being, then it is possible for the good work
of a more capacious, less violent way of being to start small and to
grow larger, so to speak. In
the Augustinian model, the way this happens is rather
mysterious—it isn't pellucid at all—because there is much that
goes on that alters the direction of human willing that is not
visible to the naked eye. I mention this because Augustine would not
want the small, generous things we do, the necessary, neighborly
work, to be downgraded in the overall scheme of things.
Augustine's tranquillitas ordinis
is a right ordering of human relationships that, ideally, requires
as little coercion as possible. The level of coercion will rise as
one moves through the various levels, but even here Augustine
analogically links those who would be masters and have others at
their beck and call whether in households or empires. Loyalty
to one's polity is definitely a good in this scheme of things but
it isn't the only good—it is not a superordinate good. If any
institution is privileged, it is the ecclesia
as the site of deepest human loves, beliefs, and commitments as this
institution works to achieve intimations of the peaceable kingdom
during its earthly sojourn. That sort of kingdom can also be
presaged in political life, but this is far less likely given the
abiding temptations of that life and how easily it is given over to
the libido dominandi. Working
analogically, though layers and levels of being, one can see how
disorder in one can create tension and conflict in the other if one
is working from the top down, so to speak. Civic chaos wrenches
families and friendships and churches, too, apart. It is more
difficult to see how it works the other way around, although here we
now have mountains of empirical evidence on the overall social or
public costs of widespread disorder or breakdown in the
family—another story for another time. Let
me refract the issue one additional way. Many early
twentieth-century reformers in women's peace efforts hoped that
the virtues, values, and goods of households—of women's
work—could ramify out to change cities (they called it civic or
municipal housekeeping) and, eventually, the international realm in
which states relate. A chief spokesman for this view was the
American social theorist and reformer Jane Addams. She observed that
within the turn of the century immigrant city—hers was Chicago,
which was composed of over 80 percent foreign-born immigrants in
1900—those who would be part of warring and hostile factions and
enmities in the old world, found ways to work together and get along
under the very different conditions of the new world. She observed
their ordinary kindnesses and sharing with one another and took note
of the fact that friendships and even marriages took place across
what would be hardened lines of identity in Europe.
A To
argue that different cultures as they culminate in nation-states are
analogous (or can be) to groupings of immigrants in the city,
presupposes that one can adumbrate an entity that will play a role
analogous to the city. What or where is the international arena's
Chicago, so to speak? There is no overall ordering principle; no
glue to hold the different identity configurations together, even in
a loose way. Especially so in our day and age when temporariness
comes more and more to define human living. Our abodes are less
permanent, from household to nation. This creates incentives to hang
loose rather than to commit on all levels. But it also detracts from
the citizenship held so dear in the Arendtian and the Augsburg-Westphalian
models. And it detracts from the commitments, loves, and loyalties
central to the Augustinian model. Any
viable model has to account for layers of identity and their
relationship. It has to make room for the privileging of one aspect
of identity should it come into conflict with others. It must
acknowledge both our propensity for conflict and violence as well as
our ability to seek out and attempt to live out alternatives. It
must make provision for our desires for rootedness as well as our
yearning to roam. Human beings move through, across, and over
landscapes. Any important feature of identity, to be important, must
be concrete. Concrete means it must be more than a sentiment or
conviction: it must be embodied in some institutional or relational
form that has some sturdiness and capacity for perdurability. I see
something along the lines of a fusion of the citizen with the
pilgrim or peregrinus. To be a
pilgrim is very different from merely drifting, crossing boundaries,
or proclaiming one's cosmopolitanism. There is moral purpose in
pilgrim identity. There is the realization of identity in and
through pilgrimage that is very different from the fleeing of
identity (or being forced to flee) of the refugee or the wanderer. Working
all of this out is much beyond the scope of this paper—and perhaps
beyond the scope of my abilities—but it would be an interesting
challenge to try. Perhaps Vaclav Havel is gesturing in a similar
direction in his very interesting discussion of "Home,"
although, as with much of Havel's thought, to which I have been
drawn for many years now, there is a vagueness when it comes to
concrete, institutionalization location for at least some of the
levels and layers of identity he articulates. But it is a capacious
vision and a good place from which to end; one might say really to
begin:
If
one's concrete anthropology, built on the ironies and tragedies of
human history and experience, is brought to bear on this Havelian
reflection of dynamic circles of being, it would warn us that any
one of his moments of "home" (and being at home) will be
tempted, even driven, to become superordinate and one will be back
in the usual fix—the absolutizing of one moment and its gobbling
up or bracketing of others. The
Augustinian argument would hold that the way to limit this tendency
is to suspend indefinitely the moment of superordination as a
historic possibility: it awaits the eschaton. But this suspension
requires concretion—hence the need for robust, plural institutions
of considerable variety but not infinite plasticity. (Because, e.g.,
we know enough to know likely outcomes of some arrangements by
contrast to others, particularly if the focus is that of human being
at its most needy and most vulnerable. There is less plasticity on
some concrete levels of being than others insofar as institutional
forms are concerned. But that is another discussion for another
time.) If I seem to have said very little about an affirmative ethics it is because I have engaged the question by doing it, so to speak.
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Copyright 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. |