I’ll have to get up to speed on
that, but it was something like that.
I was intrigued by the issue, but I
was never convinced that Wolff had fully made his case (he seemed to leap from
the reality of this conflict to the necessity of embracing anarchism!). Years
later, when I worked with the late Professor Greg Kavka (he was one among my
advisors), he briefly mentioned to me his take on Wolff’s point: it was a simple
reductio ad absurdum. I think it all happened within two or three steps as we
walked. Typical Greg.
I think I understood Greg’s
point—as I say, he only mentioned it to me—something to the effect that, if
Wolff’s understanding of the moral implications of autonomy were correct, even
promises would be verboten. Absurd.
Well, yes, I supposed. I suspected
that something was wrong with Wolff’s account. Maybe Greg nailed it. But I was equally convinced that there was something there in Wolff's worries and that
Greg’s reductio utterly missed it. I’m sure I didn’t try hard enough to
articulate the “something”—to Greg or to anyone else.
I’m sure I couldn’t have, anyway.
It was nearly thirty years ago, and I was what I was.
* *
*
I’ve always been attracted to a
loose doctrine or set of doctrines that one might call “communitarianism.” I am referring (I suppose) to those philosophies that give to “community” and
membership in a community an important, perhaps central, place in thinking
about individuals and society. Maybe it would help to note that, in
communitarianism as I conceive it, individuals have a “sense of community” and
routinely view the actions (etc.) of the community as their own. This way of
thinking has always made sense to me (and, by that, I do not mean that it isn’t ultimately cracked through and through) and, it seems, led me to
sense, albeit nebulously, big, fat issues at the heart of politics as it
concerns the individual. Something—or some range of problems—concerning the communitarian
individual and the state has stuck in my craw at least since I was a third-year
student at U.C.I. (c. 1976-7). At this moment, I feel some pride in this fact,
for, at that time, I had not been exposed to any systematic treatment of
political philosophy or of “a” political philosophy. I was pretty much just
thinking my own thoughts in my own way. That I took such thoughts seriously and
kept brooding amazes me now. (I won’t even mention here even greater obstacles
to my progress as a thinker originating in my peculiar membership in a strange
and blinkered northern wolf clan.)
Naturally, this communitarian
tendency in my thinking, which, as I say, extends back at least to my
undergraduate years—and seems to have predated my college-era philosophical
influences—is generally foreign or worse to liberal theory, especially liberal
theory that tends to the right (libertarians). It is unfortunate, I suppose,
that I generally learned of political philosophy in the Analytic
Philosophy milieu, and, within that, a generally liberal/libertarian
environment (of the kind exemplified by Wolff, more or less), one that never
seemed to take community seriously. It was only later, in grad school, with the
rise of Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and his political ideas, that I
came across some communitarian thinking, though I believe that my professors
were ultimately bewildered by that man. Not sure. (I was bewildered, too, but
mostly because he was just difficult, like quantum physics, not because he was
deeply foreign, like Scottish haggis; I heard the man speak once at a local
college. I stared at him. It didn’t help.)
I can tell you now with some
amusement that I have a mind like a popcorn machine. Or perhaps I have such a
mind if you imagine a world of youthful popcorn machines that grow old and that
eventually settle down to some staunch cooking (of corn, I suppose). So I’m
this older corn-cooking gizmo looking back at some seriously youthful poppery.
It is very nearly a useless mind that pops as mine did (and still does,
mostly). I would have some flimsy (or sadly profound) grasp of something good
and important, but it was utterly undone in the world as it is by all that
crazy popping that went on around it in my head. Imagine a painter who is determined to
paint something fine and great and who would do so were it not for his endless
finger-brush spasms, peppering the canvass with riotous color and texture that
really and truly amount to nothing but lurid disorder and wanton chemical wastage.
Imagine a nurseryman trying to sell
his odd trees that, he says, are wonderful and beautiful, really they are, but that undergo a
very lengthy development entailing ugly branches and leaves and even an
offensive odor. But one must have faith, he says, that such trees will come
through in the end, exploding into bushy and majestic and fragrant glory, but
only after growing stolidly and hideously in the corner of one’s garden for
twenty or thirty years, stinking up the place and scaring children.
I am such a tree, I think. Not that
I have anything beautiful to offer. Perhaps I should adjust my metaphors a bit.
(In truth, the old machine still pops, hideously, like those super-heated
kernels in the daring extra seconds of the popcorn bag in the microwave.) It
isn’t beauty or glory or genius that I offer. What I offer is, rather, simply
that which I have to offer, and have had to offer all of these years, such as
it is, but a thing only newly available, after a lifetime of inarticulate
blatherings and unpleasant passionate scribblings and lunatic monologues.
I am quite serious about this. I am
happy not because I have anything special or deep to say, but because, after all this
time, I can foresee settling my mind long enough to finally say “it,” the
“something”—that thing I have, in some sense, always needed to say. It may be
rubbish, this “something,” though I doubt it. It is what it is. It is important
to me. I give no thought whatsoever to whether it is important to you, dear
reader. (Read on, you fool, if you must.)
This, of course, is only a preface
(you may now burst out with laughter). I have no intention of revealing the
“something” to you, for I cannot, since I only sense it, and I only sense that
it is time to begin to work it out. I’ll say this: the feeling of the reality
of this problem for the individual—in such times as ours—is, for me, strong still. It
is the same feeling, and, times being
what they are, it is a feeling worth working out and affixing to the expansive white wall, thus
revealing all of its parts and the fine whole it creates across one’s living
room and down one’s hallway and in one’s mind and throughout one’s life.
Now, more than ever, my society (my
community, my state, my colleagues, my people) seems a monstrous thing, an
idiot, a maker of disasters and pain (but not only that). Individuals generally, though not universally, seem
utterly oblivious to this monstrous quality as I see it. And, no, I don’t claim
to have special insight here. It is, rather, the odd acuity of a tortoise who
persists in noting a puzzle in the sky or trees or grass, day after day,
throughout his lengthy and unassuming tortoise life. And because only he has
devoted such time and energy to this subtle mystery, it eventually dawns on him
what sort of thing it is. It’s inevitable. His is the victory, not of genius,
but of obsession, or perhaps, to be more charitable, of some mild intellectual
virtue wedded to an absurd willingness to keep staring at those trees, those
clouds, that grass, each day, decade after decade, generation after generation, absent any
guarantee there is anything there at all, but only wind and mundanity and a
tortoise life ill spent.
The tortoise will now lay out his
idea. Slowly. In his own time, in his own way. We must find a way (says the tortoise) to think
about what it is to live in this society, such as it is, populated now, more
than ever, with lunatics and liars and thoughtless bleating lambs. Where are
we? What ought we to do? What could anything we do mean?
I realize now that I have misdescribed my project, for it is only a subtle help that I hope to offer, no
great answer. In fact, I feel now that it is not that I have come to some
answer to an old problem; it is more that I see that I have refused to think about
that problem, to really think about, despite its being so obvious a problem. And I’m getting older. And I
am among young people, and that helps me to see my younger self and to like the
silly, clueless but earnest guy. And I have these fleeting recognitions of the
calmer, mirthful thinker inside; he’s the wise, old uncle who cannot help but love those
wacky kids with all their folly and energy; and who, perhaps, can now at long last manipulate
himself into some brief articulateness and clarity of thought.
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