On Eric Metaxas: Political Faults and Democratic Conversion

Abstract: I provide some basic feedback/reflection on Eric Metaxas’s book talk/presentation concerning his pop political work, If You Can Keep It. I further use Metaxas as a foundation to explore some greater problems concerning democratic theory—namely, what it might mean to permit political faults, and further how the eradication of “fault” ought to relate to liberal politics.

I have really been enjoying some of the public readings going on at Politics and Prose lately—my most recent visit was for Eric Metaxas, who was promoting his new book of conservative political history/theory, If You Can Keep It (drawn from Benjamin Franklin’s famous phrase regarding the management of a novel republic). Metaxas was himself rather off-putting: I found his attitude vain and confrontational, his demeanor possessing an intelligence that has suffered from an overdone pretention he mistakes as a mark of prestige. His often and unnecessary asides regarding his attendance of Yale and his Manhattan lifestyle seemed to forget the audience to which he addressed himself—at his best, he could clearly string a sentence together and felt comfortable speaking to an audience that did not necessarily share his views; at his worst, he was condescending and unsubtle, without much in terms of valuable or original research to support such arrogance. While he was sure he was mining some overlooked aspect of Founding thought, Metaxas’ project was hopelessly ignorant of the vast ocean of similar genealogical efforts: like a naïve boy bringing back a turquoise shell from the beachhead, convinced he’s discovered a new species and intent on immortalizing his name with the help of some obscure Latin genus.

Metaxas’ argument seemed to breakdown to something like this (I have yet to read the book; I am commenting on his commentary of his work): that we stand at something of a crossroads as a nation; that we are “stuck with a negative narrative’ we tell ourselves; that a “people” and a “culture” consist of “poems and songs and stories in common”[1]; that there is an “eternal present of art” (which stands as the spine of his historical method/appropriation); that at the time of the American Founding, the core “fathers” (a deep and dangerous reductionism characterizes a great deal of Metaxas’ historicism) shared a belief in the vital triumvirate of republicanism—a “golden triangle” that linked freedom to virtue, virtue to faith, and faith back to freedom; that self-government (and here he almost inadvertently links Mill to Foucault to Kant) is necessarily government over the autonomous self—and that when people are governed “from above,” the question of virtue is muted alongside the question of freedom; that—and this is where I believe he commits another theoretical error—self-government is only applicable to/appropriate for an (already?) virtuous people.

To this end, Metaxas clearly promotes the idea that freedom requires virtue, and that faith is the privileged harbor of such virtue. The timing/subtle relations between these supposedly self-reinforcing phenomena went without analysis in his talk—perhaps his treatment is more thorough in the book; in particular, he totally eschewed any consideration, a la Berlin or Sandel or Grass, regarding the pitfalls of positive liberties and faith-based politics—he came closest by distinguishing good faith from bad faith, healthy love of one’s country (what he calls “patriotism,” and, echoing Burke, grounds this conception in the idea that one ought to be taught to love narratives “actually worth loving”), constructive from destructive pride[2], and so forth.

These were by far the most intriguing aspects of his presentation: that “real faith” is equivalent to “unforced faith”[3], a type of faith that “captures you on its own terms”—e.g. not imposed by government, a “fully free faith” that is matched by a “healthy love/pride” full of critical vigilance and immune to the darker forms of positive judgment: a kind-of loving scrutiny that has the unique air of a sublimated Augustine. (An “unhealthy pride Metaxas seems to define in terms of “tribalism”—an odd, undefined, post-colonial trill of his thought.) Little else to really report: some lingering comments on how we are “stewards of a gift”[4] and the ultimate fragility of the democratic experiment[5] were of minor provocation; his most interesting—and perhaps theoretically contentious/salient—point was that we could use a good George Whitfield in our political times—as though each era demanded its own Savonarola, to be employed to a given end. To this end, I think it is silly to invite the devil, but I am led to wonder: is there a place for the demagogue in each epoch, like a necessary cog in a workable machine, a vital actor whose role cannot be substituted

This reminds me of a tangential passage from Leopardi’s Zibaldone; I would say: any good lover/partner, any good parent, and good friend—any and all healthy and stable human relationships permit within themselves the presence and occasional exercise of certain faults. The nature and validity of these faults emerge from the contingencies, expectations and sensibilities dynamically produced and shared between relations—the only a-priori legitimacy seemingly falling back on some mutual signature of consent. This speaks to one of the perpetual debates that anyone who has been in a serious relationship has no doubt encountered: how much to validate another, even in their imperfections (the idea that the “perfect is the enemy of the good” provides the primary textile to weave this cloth), and when to push for that person’s alteration/transformation in any given direction. I have witnessed the antipodes of both forms in my own life: the extreme of validation, which I believe leads to entropy, stasis, narcissism, etc.; and the extreme of the harsh and relentless pursuit of perfectibility, which assumes its own arrogance and self-destruction. What, then, would a happy and sustainable play/equilibrium of these forces look like? As one needs to be converted daily, so must one re-calibrate this ratio with a quotidian vigilance. But the greater point is this: in a relationship, in a family, in a nation, the question as to when and how to love the faults/defects of the other—and when/how to discriminate/select among faults to mitigate or excise—is one of the truly great and unteachable arts, a gift granted through some delicate intermixture of intuition and experience (Aristotle on judgment; Lormore on imagination). A definitive sub-science of this art is the nature of changing/altering another—the rectification of faults in any form of human relation must first and foremost surmount Kierkegaard’s general problem—namely, how to make someone something other than what they currently are; how to make a man into something he is not. Related is Polemachus’ injunction against Socrates regarding how to persuade those who refuse to listen. What I now want to say is: you don’t change them into something they are not—rather, you learn their language, greet them on their terms, purge yourself of a will to dominate—all in an effort to change a person, not into something different, not in conformity with a separate model, but into a better, more unified/whole/coherent version of themselves.[6]

Several considerations follow, cast in terms of the pitfalls of “positive liberty”[7]: under what conditions does one determine what the ideal model of another ought to look like? Is this an act of mutual consent[8]? I am reminded here of Arendt and the problem of the “daemon”: if one does not know oneself, but another does—does this entitle the other to certain instruments of alteration otherwise undisclosed to the self? That is, in this model, to change, the self must externalize a will to change viz. the presence of another, who in turn operates on the self.[9]

What I want to argue is an amendment to a principle drawn from Hobbes: namely, that the justification/legitimation of sovereign rule is not only determined by the presence of order/security, non-interference and the absolution/transference of a certain type of fear,[10] but rather order that comports to a given ideological end. This is only to comment on the basic architecture of sovereign representation drawn forth by Schmitt, and which he turned into democracy’s elasticity clause of dictatorship. In other words, sovereignty is only intelligible to a specific positive objective, whether acknowledged explicitly or hidden within this or that rhetoric. Or: sovereignty is the abstract-material means to the realization of an existential end.

I would say that the successful management of sovereignty, which amounts to ordering to a specific lodestar, is akin to the political production of homeness[11]; or: the true art/aesthetic of government is the production of human homeness. Therapy and amelioration are first and foremost aesthetic gestures.[12] Further, this discloses how sovereignty is an abstract and universal architecture applied to/molded for distinct and unique ends—hence the question as to what a sovereignty that is operationalized toward the end of homeness ought to look like. I would also note that just a something like the “aesthetic” emerges for Kant and Schiller through the “play” of opposing faculties, so must the aesthetic of government emerge through the appropriate “play” of juridical and veridical[13], taken here as a type of consistency and mirroring between the two—vaguely representing, in turn, the separation between thought and action that links Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Kant to Arendt, and so forth. Many of the confusions and insights viz. conversion and human metamorphosis hinge on this point, which is itself rooted in a quasi-teleological view of individual potentialities of growth[14]—that people can and do change, but that change is often toward becoming ever-more present versions of themselves—that people transform ever-inward and grow ever-closer to themselves, so to speak, and it is less about adding or subtracting core qualities or characteristics and rather about a judicious management—an attention[15]—one relegates to nurturing some qualities, and not just suppressing/oppressing others.[16] The idea is to lead another to adopt certain regimes of attention voluntarily; here the relation between a regime of attention and a form of personal constrain/restraint needs to be explored.[17] Those chosen regimes must be selected in order to augment the in-built propensity toward demonstrable qualities; as I have elucidated elsewhere, I am convinced that much of the work of this adoption may be completed by the binary and sequential relation between wonder (the first “trip”) and its pragmatic payoff (the re-stabilization after the initial stumble). How then, to 1. Purge oneself of tilting prejudices; 2. Judge which faults are endemically healthy and permissible; and 3. Guide another into a more perfect version of what they already are?—The task and deontology every civic-minded liberal—that is, of every liberal republican.

[1] See: Renan, Fleming, Geertz.

[2] See Rousseau on self-love.

[3] See Susan Jacoby on secular conversion in her mediocre Strange Gods.

[4] Here, we might connect Franklin to a figure like Marcel Mauss.

[5] I am reminded of Mill and Dewey.

[6] Gandhi’s focus on self-alteration as the basis of the conversion of another is here a primary model.

[7] See Isaiah Berlin.

[8] Locke’s idea of tacit consent, and Cavell’s uptake of this notion, are here relevant sources for further consideration.

[9] The maneuver here is primarily Hegelian: a type of staging/sacrificing the self in the dialectic of otherness/alterity. Further problems arise in the more immediate political sense: Rousseau’s idea of the people’s “character,” for instance. See also Renan, Geertz, Berger/Luckmann.

[10] This we might call the liberal reading of Hobbes. See Quentin Skinner.

[11] See Ernst Bloch on utopia.

[12] See: Jason Frank; Ranciere; Kant, Schiller; William James; Wittgenstein.

[13] See Foucault.

[14] See: Agamben; Aristotle on Telos; Calvin on predestination—R. H. Tawney.

[15] See Augustine on attentio; David Foster Wallace comes to mind here as well.

[16] See Nietzsche and Freud; Marcuse.

[17] See Locke on the idea of freedom and Ranciere’s idea of self-education.