On putting cruelty first
Paul Kingsnorth made a recent post on his Substack about realising that ‘everything is religious’. It’s only visible to paid subscribers, but I highly recommend subscribing. Everything he posts is worth thinking about.
To summarise very quickly, by ‘everything is religious’, he means the sense that life is ‘defined by ritual, worship and the need to connect with a transcendent Other’. He traces the loss of this vision of the world to the aftermath of the Civil War in England and, by implication, to the European wars of religion more generally.
I think this touches on something very important for the period that we in the West appear to be entering.
There has been a lot of commentary over the past few years about increasing distrust, division, and ‘filter bubbles’. Especially in the US, the political left and right accuse one another of drifting towards totalitarianism. I’m not interested in litigating those disputes; but I think that it is fair to say that behind the hysteria and exaggerations, both sides have a point. When Facebook, under the flag of ‘fact-checking’, is censoring politically inconvenient material from the British Medical Journal and Cochrane, it seems safe to say that the elite’s trust in the populace has taken a turn for the worse.
If we accept that a drift towards totalising ideologies is occurring, then that is a drift away from something else rooted in the wars of religion. I will use Rawls’s term for it, Political Liberalism. Care needs to be taken here, though. The phrase ‘liberalism’ is often thrown around in a very loose way to mean a whole bunch of different political, economic, societal, and psychological elements that may or may not be connected to one another. When using the phrase ‘political liberalism’ I mean something more precise: the idea that it is possible to have a political order that is neutral between what Rawls called ‘comprehensive doctrines’. By ‘comprehensive doctrines’ he meant something that might provide someone with an overall vision of the world. Christianity or other religions would be one example; but so, too, would political doctrines like communism and, importantly, other forms of liberalism.
The name ‘political liberalism’ is relatively new, but the impulse towards it sits close to the very heart of the broader liberal project that grew out of the wars of religion. For example, see Locke’s address ‘To the Reader’ from the start of ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’, a hugely influential text:
‘Our government has not only been partial in matters of religion; but those also who have suffered under that partiality, and have therefore endeavoured by their writings to vindicate their own rights and liberties, have for the most part done it upon narrow principles, suited only to the interests of their own sects.
This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the principal occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever have been the occasions, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure.’
Nothing in this extract or Locke’s letter as a whole necessarily contradicts Kingsnorth’s vision of lives ‘defined by ritual, worship and the need to connect with a transcendent Other’. Locke’s argument is for allowing people to live according to such visions. At the same time, though, the very societies in which this liberal toleration flourished have also been the societies in which uncontrolled individualism has tended to dissipate the very idea of a life structured around anything other than the self.
An important question the West now faces again is ‘is political liberalism possible for us?’ In other words, if we accept that people need to situate their lives in some larger pattern of meaning, whether traditionally religious or more secular, then can we organise politics in a way that allows them to do so without choosing sides between the competing visions of what is good? Or, to be brutal, can we still live together?
I don’t know the answer, but if we take this problem seriously, then I know who we need to listen to.
Judith Shklar was a contemporary of Rawls. When she was a teenager, she and her family fled to North America to avoid anti-Semitic persecution in Europe. She spent her career as a political philosopher at Harvard. Though respected, she has not achieved the wider recognition her work deserves. For my money, she is the most important English-language political thinker for at least a century.
I cannot do justice to her work in a blog post, but if there is any hope for political liberalism then I think it rests in her idea of ‘putting cruelty first’. Her concept is deceptively simple. Rather than a summum bonum, a greatest good towards which politics should be arranged (such as ‘freedom’ or ‘flourishing’), it says that there is a summum malum, a greatest evil that politics must seek to avoid. That evil is cruelty.
I will use one of Shklar’s definitions of cruelty: ‘the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end’. She would, I think, have been sceptical of attempting to understand cruelty by the lawyerly analysis of words; but, for me, the word ‘deliberate’ should be understood broadly to include those cases where someone is reckless about causing pain or fear.
Putting cruelty first is not the same as merely thinking that cruelty is very bad. To put cruelty first is to make a line beyond which politics can never go. It is to say that cruelty must be avoided no matter what good it might achieve.
Putting cruelty first leads to what Shklar called the liberalism of fear. This has both a moral and an empirical component. The moral component is the belief that cruelty is a uniquely bad wrong. The empirical component is the observation that power always tempts us to be cruel and that we humans are not very good at resisting the temptation. This observation leads to a vision of politics that is not what might be expected. The aim of the liberalism of fear is not to use politics to stamp out cruelty from above, but to nourish an approach to politics that is suspicious of all power; and especially suspicious when we believe power is being used for good, because that is the very time when we are least guarded against the temptation to be cruel.
The liberalism of fear is a limited form of political liberalism. ‘Comprehensive doctrines’ can coexist with the liberalism of fear if they do not require cruelty. When a doctrine requires cruelty, however, the liberalism of fear does not require that element of it to be politically respected.
There are a couple of reasons to think that this is where we must find the answer to the question ‘can we live together?’ The first is that if political liberalism is to actually exist, then it must offer some moral vision that can inspire people; but it cannot offer a complete moral vision without becoming simply one more ‘comprehensive doctrine’ among many. I know of no other plausible way to thread that needle. The second reason is simpler. If we cannot even agree not to be cruel to one another, then it is already too late to ask whether political liberalism is possible for us. We must instead choose sides in a war of ideologies.
As I said, this post cannot do Shklar justice, but the other thing about putting cruelty first is that it helps to clear your own moral vision. I mentioned the wave of recent commentary on distrust and division above. These articles often mention everyday cruelties such as online bullying, but they treat the cruelties as side-effects of underlying social divisions. This is, I am sure, back to front. Our societies have become divided and distrustful because we have allowed ourselves to become cruel people.