Ben Sasse's speech this year at the Manhattan Institute's Hamilton Award Dinner
Americans are going to need better habits than we have right now to help our people, our citizens, and our republic thrive. Because virtue has always been at the heart of what it takes to keep a republic. To borrow Lincoln’s metaphor, it’s the golden apple in the silver frame. Politics, the silver frame, is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty, but life—the daily stuff that’s made up of community, affections, and habits—that’s the golden apple at the center.
It put me in mind of CS Lewis's quote in Mere Christianity
The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.
3 comments:
Let me draw your attention to something.
"Politics, the silver frame, is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty, but life—the daily stuff that’s made up of community, affections, and habits—that’s the golden apple at the center. The state’s job isn’t to define that, but it’s to secure the preconditions, the silver frame that enable all the little platoons and communities to pursue the golden apples. That’s what needs to be protected."
So, what he's arguing is this: "An agenda of national priorities" is in fact directly aligned with "what it means to be a good citizen." The way we get all those little platoons is by having a state with the right agenda; and that sets the conditions for human flourishing and happiness. It's Aristotle's model with only a small adjustment from 2,000 more years of history.
With this and your comment at your own site, I am only convinced that the exercise could in theory be justified along those lines. What I am actually seeing as proposals does not seem to justify itself in that way, but more along the lines of "these things would solve problems we believe America has." That is far downstream, to my eyes.
They may believe their motives are exactly as Aristotle would recommend. I think their actual motives are suspect, hidden behind decent ones.
Oh, I don't doubt. But Plato's recommendations are totalitarian; the last thing we should do is follow either of his political strategies. I think what I want to suggest is that politics is in general unreliable and likely to lead to evil; that power attracts people for whom control over others is the point. This is the natural progression: it always has been. That doesn't make it good. Evil has been a permanent feature of human history.
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