Survivors of the nations

Posted on | November 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

I’m not usually a fan of posting long quotes on the blog (although I have sinned after this manner several times before). However, I came across this passage from Jeffrey Stout’s 2006 article, “Survivors of the Nations” (SJT, 59:2), and it seemed like an excellent demonstration of the fundamental divide between the neo-traditionalists and their critics. It also reminded me of the debate earlier this year between the Front Porch Republic and the Postmodern Conservative.

Writes Stout:

When After Virtue and The Peaceable Kingdom appeared, also in the early 1980s, it became clear to me why my editors were somewhat less enthusiastic about my conclusions than I expected them to be. MacIntyre and Hauerwas now sometimes spoke as if liberal modernity essentially consisted in a rejection of tradition, but their main theme was that liberalism is simply mistaken in its assumption that political life can be conducted rationally and virtuously without a prior agreement on the telos of human life. To my surprise, they sometimes referred tome as a liberal, although to their credit theymade clear that I did not reject reliance on tradition as such. At first, I was prepared to see their modernity–tradition dichotomy and their caricature of liberalism as provocative rhetorical gestures, justified by the need to get a complacent audience thinking. It was reassuring that MacIntyre and Hauerwas were sometimeswilling to take back or qualify some of the claims I found dubious. I defended them against scholars who ignored the fine print. It has always been possible to interpret their views in the charitable way David Fergusson does. All you have to do is play down the initially shocking bits while playing up the qualifications. As time went on, however, I came to think that their rhetoric was actually making a bad situation worse. Let me explain how I reached this conclusion.

We survivors of the nations – survivors of the injustices that nations have visited on the poor, on slaves and their descendants, on resident aliens, and on other nations – are also citizens of nations. As such, we bear responsibility for the commissions and omissions those injustices involve, for healing the wounds they have caused, and for loosing the bonds of oppression they have imposed. The responsibility weighs on us.Whose burden would not be lighter without it? One important social trend in our period is a retreat from the responsibilities and disappointments of citizenship into families, friendships, local communities, lifestyle enclaves and religious communions. The retreat is understandable, because the latter relationships all hold out the promise of solace, meaning and a sense of agency to the people involved in them. These relationships are not obviously corrupted by power and money in the ways that the political economies of nation-states are, and they do not typically implicate us in horrendous evils. As identification with the civic nation weakens, however, a citizenry’s sense of responsibility for the behavior of the state diminishes. The role of the citizen atrophies, thus leaving the enormous power of the state in the hands of an elite that can operate with impunity.

In my view, the demise of citizenship, though well under way, is not complete, so people who care about justice still have reason to resist it. MacIntyre and Hauerwas, however, consider it a fait accompli. The demise of citizenship, as they see it, is a byproduct of the fragmentation of ethical discourse in the modern period. Lacking agreement on the telos of human life, citizens are unable to resolve their differences through an exchange of reasons. Public discussion thus becomes a mask for the assertion of arbitrary preferences. If shared ethical deliberation in religiously diverse societies is a sham, there is no point in trying to revive a culture of citizenship in the hope of holding nation-states accountable. The only sensible course is to devote one’s energy to ‘the construction of local forms of community’ within which the tradition of the virtues might survive the ‘new dark ages which are already upon us’.

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One Response to “Survivors of the nations”

  1. A question of interest. « Second Paradise
    January 11th, 2010 @ 7:34 pm

    [...] Also from Theopolitical: Jeffrey Stout on citizenship and anti-liberalism. [...]

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Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

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