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    What Is a ‘Network’?

    by

    Niall Ferguson: The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

    Originally published in Liberty and Law, May 21, 2018. Republished with permission.

     

    We know a noun has pervaded our sensibilities when we derive a verb from it. ‘Network’ appears in sixteenth-century English, and was meant literally: a work of netting, coarse or fine. As an abstraction meaning any complex design of threadlike entities, from a river system to a political economy, the word didn’t arrive until the early nineteenth century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson were among he early adopters—writers influenced by European Enlightenment thought, especially as filtered through Germany. ‘Networking’ as a verb appeared in our own time, with the computerization of everything serving as an accelerant.

    Niall Ferguson does exactly what historians should do, explaining the origins of the modern understanding of networks and illustrating the theory with several dozen examples, ranging from Italian Renaissance merchants and Spanish explorers to the election campaign of Donald Trump. “The Square and the Tower” refers to the city center of Siena, Italy where the shadow of the watchtower falls on the marketplace below. The tower represents the “vertical” or hierarchic structure, the square the “horizontal” or democratic structure. The one tends toward rigidity and command, the other toward fluidity (at times anarchy) and consent. Ferguson notes that the tension between these two kinds of ‘networking’ is “as old as humanity itself,” and sees history as the interplay of the one with the other.

    Perennial and universal phenomena like networks must have attracted the attention of intelligent people long before the word was coined. Signor Machiavelli inaugurated ‘modernity’ as the human quest to master the course of events and to gain control over that vast network nature; the centralized modern state he lauded exemplifies the “vertical” network, and he intended it to be an indispensable part of his project to out-‘network’ the biggest network.

    Before Machiavelli, the earliest philosophers, in naming ‘nature,’ marked out an order of regularly interacting parts a ‘whole.’ Turning to human life, they did not imagine ‘states’ but instead identified regimes—effectively, networks of rule involving persons and their institutions, their patters of life, and the purposes those persons, institutions, and social patterns aimed at achieving. Those philosophers understood politics as the architectonic art, the political community as the most comprehensive form of human organization.

    Ferguson identifies the intellectual founder of modern network theory as the influential Swiss-born mathematician Leonard Euler, who formulated it in 1735 while working in the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences. He later joined the Berlin Academy, so his two major political patrons were no less a pair of enlightened despots than Peter the Great and Frederick the Great, sitting atop hierarchical networks that enabled Euler’s theory to circulate far, wide, and rapidly.

    Euler studied a set of seven bridges in the Prussian city of Königsburg. Why was it impossible, he wanted to know, to walk across all seven bridges in one trip, without re-crossing any of them? The geometrician’s answer involved understanding the relations of the bridges as a pattern of lines and their intersection points or “nodes.” The pattern or structure of any given set of lines and nodes delimits ways in which energy (in the case of the footbridges, the flow of pedestrians) can travel—as in one of today’s electrical power grids, for example.

    Euler was among the pioneers of calculus, the branch of mathematics which takes the classical plane geometry of Euclid and in effect ‘sets it in motion,’ plotting points along a curve—this, much to the fascination of later political philosophers, as they considered both the modern state (the tower) and its civil wars (in the square). Americans will recall their friendly visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, who described both the ‘tower’ of the administrative state and the ‘square’ of democratic associations complementary and conflicting features of modern life.

    The attempt to reduce a social network and the changes it undergoes to a mathematically-based science awaited the invention of the modern French- and German-inspired academic discipline of sociology toward the end of the nineteenth century. As the theory developed, Ferguson observes, several insights accrued.

    First (and pace Thomas Friedman), even the most ‘democratic’ networks aren’t quite “flat,” horizontally arranged though they may be. Persons located at the nodes where social, political, and economic lines cross enjoy an advantage over persons who aren’t. “Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, crucial roles turn out to have been played by people who were not leaders but connectors,” he says. Whereas he holds up midnight-riding Paul Revere as his example I would choose Benjamin Franklin, that supreme networker of both tower and square.

    Second, consent-based networks organize according to the principle of “homophily,” a notion more colloquially captured in the old saw, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’—a principle now playing on a website near you, and in clubs, churches, and political parties for millennia.

    Third, and paradoxically, weak ties with a network are strong. The stronger my ties, the more exclusive they are, and the more exclusive my ties, the less extensive they are. This point obviously needs to be supplemented by the observation Ferguson made initially, that certain positions or “nodes” within networks are better than others; a tightknit group occupying a node might extract considerable benefits and hold on to its position for a long time. This accounts for a fact well known to politicians and political scientists alike, which is that oligarchies are hard to overturn, not only because they enjoy ‘vertical’ power but because they cohere well ‘horizontally’—good news for the Chinese Communist Party.

    Fourth, when we speak of an image or a message ‘going viral’—whether it’s Hitlerian poison circulating through the veins of Germany or a YouTube photo of kittens in a basket—the structure of the network delivering the message matters more than the message itself. Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message” (which itself went viral, half a century back), succinctly summed up the thought. Grant Wood’s career as a painter went nowhere until he hired an agent with ‘connections’—connections to a network. Or, to take one of Ferguson’s examples, “Without Gutenberg, Luther might have been just another heretic whom the Church burned at the stake.”

    Another stock phrase, ‘the city never sleeps,’ applies to networks (all of them, not only urban ones). Even the more rigid, hierarchic networks—trees, monarchies—stay active, change over time, cause things to circulate, so long as they live. Peter and Frederick were not only great; they made things happen by establishing structures, including research and educational institutions, militaries, railway systems.

    Networks also interact with other networks. This gets dramatic when a hierarchic network confronts a newer and more egalitarian one. “When a network disrupts an ossified hierarchy it can overthrow it with breathtaking speed,” as communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe learned to their sorrow,” and as current hierarchies in China and elsewhere currently work very hard to prevent. “But when a hierarchy attacks a fragile network, the result can be the network’s collapse” not all bands of guerrilla fighters win their wars of attrition.

    Finally, the networked rich really do get richer. “Most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian” given the position of the wealthy along the node-and-line structure of “horizontal” networks. The medieval churchman, the Gilded Age railroad magnate, and even the studiously egalitarian computer entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, got very rich, sometimes very quickly, by occupying strategic chokepoints in the structures they knew very well, having invented them.

    All of this means that the much-ridiculed conspiracy theorists among us are on to something, even if they don’t quite know what it is. Ferguson shows how such organizations as the Illuminati and the Freemasons did indeed conspire in their semi-secret networks. In describing exactly who they were, how they operated, and to what extent they succeeded (usually much less than their enemies suppose), he both confirms and sanitizes—makes sane—parts of the conspiracy theorists’ hypotheses. It turns out that, contrary to certain dyspeptic members of the monarchist clergy of France, the Freemasons didn’t really cause the French Revolution—but they did have a hand in it. The most successful network of conspirators in Western history was surely the early Christian Church, to the consternation of pagan-minded observers from the Roman Emperors to Edward Gibbon. Harmless as doves and prudent as serpents, indeed. A conspiracy might be benign, too.

    Much of the entertaining instruction in the book comes when Ferguson gets down to cases that illustrate network theory. Born in Scotland, he is one of those charming know-it-all show-offs in the Oscar Wilde line, albeit with fewer witticisms and more facts, as I suppose one must expect from a historian. Not surprisingly, one of his cases is the British Empire, and the way in which the British elite prospered by exercising a “relatively light touch” in ruling Britain’s colonies (American Revolution = lesson learned). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Empire rested in large measure on local rulers and such “private networks” as steamship and telegraph companies, banks, and missionaries. To be sure, the elitists themselves doubled down on snobbery and old-school ties, but they also proved amenable to marrying vigorous and attractive outsiders—even the occasional American such as Jennie Churchill. They still hunted foxes, but condescended to write for newspapers and to sit with tradesmen on corporate boards.

    Networks can also fail catastrophically. Designed in 1814, under the Peace of Vienna, to prevent recurrence of anything like the Napoleonic Wars, the European geopolitical order solemnized under that pact held firm for three generations thanks to a well-founded aversion to death and destruction. By the time Otto von Bismarck had prodded the many Germanies into consolidating as one state (a state that could whip France), patchwork on that order was urgently needed.  With his Russian diplomatic counterpart Nikolay Girs, Bismarck then designed the Secret Reinsurance Treaty of 1887. Under its terms, “Germany and Russia each agreed to observe neutrality should the other be involved in a war with a third country, unless German attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary.” Russia was thus blocked from allying with France to contain Germany, but the benefit was Russia’s gaining a free hand over the Black Sea Straits. The arrangement dissolved after the preening, over-ambitious fool of a young Kaiser, Wilhelm II, got rid of the troublesome old Bismarck and failed to honor the 1887 treaty. After that, “the surprising thing” was not that “war happened in 1914, but that it did not happen sooner.”

    The Great War itself led to another German networking blunder: sending an obscure conspiratorial networker named V. I. Lenin from confinement in Germany, where he belonged, back to his native Russia, along with $12 million of walking-around money. “To an extent most accounts still underrate,” writes Ferguson, “the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation,” one that took Russia out of the Great War only to plunge it into decades of internecine, state-sponsored terror and to throw the rest of the world into a condition of decades-long tension. The Gulag, after all, was in one sense yet another network, as were the spy cells Josef Stalin established at Cambridge University, Washington, D. C., and indeed around the globe.

    This brings up an important difference between network theory and classical regime theory. Networks, studied as mathematicians like Euler and mathematizing social scientists study them, are ‘value-neutral,’ mere structures, whose causal importance outweighs the effects of the ideas and sentiments they convey. As suspicion nags, however: The medium may be the message, but so is the message. The various messages I receive come to me through the same medium, my computer, but some of the messages warrant serious attention (whether grateful or worried), others not.

    What is more, a message might shape a medium, as a visit to a Gothic cathedral will suggest. When Aristotle contemplates a network,, he does not rate the structure of the tree, or the city, above the way they live or the purposes they pursue (even if, in the case of the tree, the organism has no consciousness of its purpose, or at least none a human can do much more than imagine). As a latter-day Aristotelian once said, ideas have consequences, too—consequences that are to some degree independent of, even while entwined with, structures, persons, and customs.

     

     

    Scruton Sums Up

    by

    Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley: Conversations with Roger Scruton. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

    Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 54, Number 5, September/October 2017. Republished with permission.

     

    In Felled Oaks: Conversations with DeGaulle, André Malraux called the founder of the Fifth Republic “the last great man France haunted.” On his gravestone, Roger Scruton wants the inscription, “The Last Englishman, Organist at this Church.” Statesman and Frenchman, philosopher and Englishman, each man warrants a valedictory dialogue with a writer who understands him, a testament to what they attempted to achieve for the civil life of his country. And despite claims that nationality must fade, it may be that ‘globalization’ hasn’t had the last word, after all, that intellect and patriotism may yet endure against the leveling forces of democracy wrongly understood.

    Scruton has found an excellent collaborator in Mark Dooley, author of one book on Scruton and editor of another, and himself a former teacher of moral philosophy. Dooley wisely prompts Scruton into a dialogue on his life and works which develops as a sustained argument about the relationship fo morality to esthetics and of both to a decent civic order. With Burke, Scruton rejects any posture of abstractedness from the place where he stands, even as he reflects on considerations that go far beyond any one place. He builds a critique of the misplaced abstraction that social science often finds hard to resist. Recounting the story of his parents’ wartime courtship (he was born in 1944), Scruton says, “They fell in love not only with each other, but with the banks of the Thames”: Two persons, one place, commingling with love, form the image of the kind of philosophy Socrates practiced. Scruton may also be as much the last Socratic as the last Englishman—or, to think more optimistically, the most recent one.

    For Socrates, love understood as the erotic quest for wisdom, animates reason, or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Scruton’s early studies consisted of a good dose of science, the modern citadel of rationalism, but also literature and music. Crucially, his first memorable English teacher was a student of the great scholar F. R. Leavis, who understood the study of literature to be “a form of judgment and not… a form of enjoyment.” Similarly, among the composers whose works he first heard, it was Mendelssohn, and the contrapuntal development of his Hebrides Overture, “which made it clear that music is a kind of argument from premise to conclusion and not just something to be enjoyed.” From the awakening of his intellectual life, Scruton sought to understand the core of things by means of reason; unlike his contemporaries in the 1960s, he never valorized the passions. Resisting his relentlessly practical parents, he decided “that the only really useful subjects are studies of the useless”—otherwise known as liberal education.

    Although he learned Greek and Latin (see ‘uselessness,’ above), his main philosophic preoccupations were the moderns, initially Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He did not become so intoxicated by their prose as to sacrifice his own perspective for theirs. Watching a paraplegic bookseller struggling with a pile of books, he “sensed how wrong Nietzsche was about pity, since what I felt was admiration too.” Even as he studied the fashionable analytic philosophers at Cambridge—finding a lasting benefit in their insistence at being no respecters of persons but of men and women who tested any philosopher’s argument they encountered—he never succumbed to fashion. His distinctive philosophic achievement turned out to be to start with the moderns, and indeed many of his older contemporaries, then think his way towards ideas first discovered by the ancients. While continuing to esteem (for example) Hegel, he ‘edits’ the doctrines of the moderns with the same scrupulous intelligence with which he crafts his own prose, taking the sensible parts and discarding the nonsense. Closer to home, in reading Aristotle, he found him to be “doing exactly the same thing as Wittgenstein,” only a lot earlier. T. S. Eliot’s tailor told the American scholar Hugh Kenner, “A remarkable man, Mr. Eliot. Never quite too much.” In these well-judged selections, Scruton exercises a similar wholesomely enthusiastic restraint in thinking about the thinkers he has studied. This comports with the place he began his philosophic scholarship: like literature and music, Cambridge University itself “had once stood for something, had indeed stood in judgment on the national culture.”

    Take science, the most prestigious activity of national culture in postwar Britain. Can it judge, or should it instead be judged? “Science begins when we ask the question ‘Why?’ It leads us from the observed event to the laws which govern it, and onward to more general laws. But where does the process end?” It ends when science reaches the necessary limit of its inquiry, namely, “why the series of causes exists,” why the world exists in the first place. In bringing us back as far as the Big Bang, science perforce leaves “something else to be explained, namely, the ‘initial conditions’ which then obtained”: how was it that “this great event was about to erupt into being”? “A positivist would dismiss such a question as meaningless. So too would many scientists. But if the only grounds for doing so is that science cannot answer it, then the response is self-serving.” What goes for the limits of scientific naturalism also goes for the question of what good science, or any other human endeavor, much less the cosmos itself, may serve: Science cannot tell us what science is for, or whether its aims are justifiable.

    Philosophy, by contrast, has usually done just that. Postwar British philosophy was dominated by the analytical school, as practice by A. J. Ayer and others. Analytic philosophy “implanted in me a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking,” his choice of esthetics for his topic of postgraduate research “help[ed] me to synthesize my interest in philosophy with those artistic aspirations that I was still clinging to.” The university’s lecturer on esthetics, Michael Tanner, made esthetics into “a kind of door out of analytic philosophy into the true life of the mind”—a thing that can not only analyze but synthesize and envision.

    Hegel, for example, “had an extraordinary synthetic mind,” but characteristically Scruton took from that mind exactly what his own mind sought, and no more. Hegel’s most remarkable philosophic achievement was to develop a new ontology centered in historicism. He argued that ‘History,’ defined by him as the course of events in which the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all things, thoughts, and actions, unfolds itself dialectically, that is, in accordance with a new kind of logic (provided by Hegel himself) in which apparent contradictions are synthesized to produce new modes and orders of human life. The laws of ‘History’ make the course of events predictable; even the laws of nature are historical, a matter of evolution or development. but Hegelian metaphysics left Scruton cold. “That’s the annoying part of him.” What Scruton took from Hegel was rather the moral principle of recognition —effectively the moral importance of honor, in the face of the materialist philosophies of Hobbes and Locke—and the understanding of art as a “moment of consciousness” or self-understanding, which the artist fixes in his creation. “I had set myself the task of doing in the language of analytical philosophy what Hegel had done—which was to put art into the center of philosophy and to say why it is significant.” The logical/ontological notion of ‘History’ as a sort of vast dialectical argument embodied in action gives way to something much less grand, but also less liable to abuse by ‘totalizing’ political thinkers like Marx, Heidegger, and Kojève, apologists for tyranny.

    Avowing that “my political convictions are very Hegelian,” Scruton means that they take history as a source of a kind of experiential or experimental truth-seeking, rather than taking ‘History’ as an instantiation of the march of progress toward a predictable culmination, namely, the fully unfolded Absolute Spirit. He remains an Englishman in his politics even as he strives to understand the nature common to England and every other place. In his study of the English common law (he passed the Bar but never practiced) he found not so much a venerable tradition as a way of practical reasoning and “a process of discovery—an “attempt to understand the human world” which “both uncovered and endorsed the impartial justice whereby the English people ordered their lives.” He had prepared an intellectual setting in which he could eschew just about every moral and intellectual fad of the subsequent four decades.

    Hence his well-known ‘conservatism,’ which should be taken quite literally as a will to conserve combined with a habit of reasoned judgment about what to conserve and what to relinquish. Like so many British thinkers (most famously, Edmund Burke), he began to find his way politically in response to the antics of the Europeans on the Continent, particularly French and Italian antics. Grounded in experience but rejecting historicism, Scruton witnessed the events of 1968 France and the pervasive influence of Marxism in the Italian universities with revulsion. He especially disliked “those hippies”—the hostel-hopping Americans were the most annoying—whose revolutionary credentials more or less began and ended with resentment of their parents. He immediately saw the contrast between their street theater and the genuine (and genuinely risky) resistance offered by the dissidents under the Communist regimes of central and eastern Europe. Western intellectuals who failed to understand the malign character of those tyrannical oligarchies only served to weaken the societies which sheltered them. “The best thing that Derrida ever did was to get arrested in Prague.” Deconstruct that!

    Deconstruction is the analytical impulse of modern philosophy gone wild. It lands its practitioners in an inescapable cycle of claimed victimhood, the demand for recognition, and then some new form of domination. The only way to escape is to recur not to analysis, which offers no purpose, or to Hegelianism tout court, which offers as its end a worldwide statism, but to the intellectual love that animated classical philosophy and to the personal and civic forms of friendship which moderns crave yet fear, habituated as they are to the charms of an administrative state that (in the West) rules them with blandishments, not truncheons.

    Scruton’s various philosophic forays consist of attempts to rekindle consideration of love and friendship, to bring them back to the center of philosophy and citizenship as examples of human freedom. His studies of architecture appropriate the Hegelian idea of designing buildings that consist of “the outward realization of the inner life,” an attempt “to set free choice in stone.” It wasn’t the Blitz that ruined London, it was the squalid architecture that replaced the rubble with concrete monstrosities. This wasn’t really architecture at all but engineering—part of a vast attempt at social engineering that expressed a “contempt for man and God,” a depersonalization and de-civilizing of citizens in the name of egalitarianism. Similarly, in his writings on human sexuality, Scruton sees in the ‘Sixties ideology of sexual liberation another failed attempt at leveling—perforce self-contradictory, inasmuch as in any liberation the strongest will rise to the top (in this case the beautiful at the expense of “the unattractive or the helpless”). “Properly construed, sexual desire is an interpersonal relation, which focuses on the self-conscious subject.” To misinterpret sexuality in terms of power, as Foucault did, bespeaks “a serious intellectual defect.”

    The social consequences of making science into scientism, of failing to see the ontological and moral limits of scientific knowledge, produces “an emerging human type which doesn’t take risks, which doesn’t go out to the other and which doesn’t form attachments on account of never having been attached as a child.” This “society of reduced humans, who are just bodies,” may still reproduce itself; “a child may be created, as a random by-product of their sexual pleasures,” then “left at the doorstep of the state, so ensuring that it too will grow up as a stranger in a world of the estranged.”

    For Scruton, recovery begins with the least bureaucratic practice there is: hunting. Bureaucrats hate hunting, and typically try to regulate it out of existence on the basis of the radically egalitarian argument that men have no right to shoot animals. Hunting resists such false compassion by forming a “collective enterprise in which three species [human beings, horses, and dogs] are giving each other support” quite literally in pursuit of a common object, namely, an animal that either threatens or feeds the human being. Hunting leads the human mind to consider the distinctions among the species that the human mind by nature identifies; hunting sets you straight about equality and inequality, identity and difference.

    So does farming, which requires the farmer to acknowledge and understand “the relation between man and nature as one of mutual dependence,” pointing him toward that stewardship of the land that the God of Genesis endows. In Hegelian terms, farming opens a way of understanding oneself as human, as the being which finds itself responsible for the world beyond itself. Nor is this all work and no playfulness, inasmuch as some farms produce grapes, which can be turned into wine. Here Scruton follows not Hegel of beer-gulping Germany but Plato’s Socrates; wine “enable[s] us to step out of the urgencies of daily life into some more relaxed arena”—Socrates would call it a symposium—”where we can encounter people in another mood.” Conversely, “the absence of wine in Saudi Arabia is one reason why it has stayed so solidly locked in its joyless sterility.” Wine even illustrates a philosophic principle, the Kantian distinction of a thing as an object as distinguished from the thing ‘in itself’: “Drink that glass of wine and compare your knowledge of it after you’ve absorbed it with your knowledge of it before.”

    Beyond these material indications of love and friendship, whether social, civil-social, or convivially philosophic, Scruton calls his readers to consideration of music and religion. If science can lead us back to origins without being able to explain them, and forward to purposes without being able to tell us what they are, but then denies the significance of such ‘transcendental’ concerns, music turns us toward, not away from them. “Music is like a language, but it isn’t impeded in the some way that language is by the need for conceptualization and answerability to truth conditions. So it naturally becomes a symbol of the thing that wants to be said but cannot be said.” The problem then becomes “whether you can distinguish those things which are mere projections from those things which are, as Wordsworth would put it, intimations of the beyond or of the mysterious reality of the world.” Music sensitizes minds to things undreamt of by science, although not necessarily by philosophy, as philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche illustrate. By “putting meaning into things”—via custom and artistic creation—human beings are not arbitrarily imposing meaning on a meaningless flux; “we build meaning into our experiences, but we can only do so if they already have the valency that makes this possible.” Just as science brings us back to the origins of the universe (the Bible calls it Creation) without finally being able to explain them, artistic creation presupposes some underlying and also ‘transcendental’ reality upon which creation works and toward which it aspires.

    If so, this makes religion philosophically respectable. But “that, of course, doesn’t mean the doctrines are true.” The same conversion (the Greek word thus translated means the ‘turning around’ of the soul, its reorientation away from the idols of the cave and toward the light) that religions speak of, Plato’s Socrates also speaks of. Whereas Locke “described philosophy as the ‘handmaiden of the sciences,'” Plato (and Aristotle) think it’s the other way around; the erotic quest for truth, the drive in us to know, makes us want to know more than what science can teach. “I’ve always thought of philosophy in the old Platonic way as the attempt to find a comprehensive picture of what we are, of where we are and of how we care.” Religion arises from that same quest. Both philosophy understood Platonically and religion vindicate science while guarding us against scientism.

    Scruton illustrates this by considering the science of brain chemistry. Scientistic as distinguished from scientific thought “takes hold of the embryonic scientific theory about the workings of the nervous system and uses it to re-describe the questions of consciousness and human action”; “all we think, feel and do” get explained (or explained away) in terms of synapses. But analysis of synaptic activity does not show why it is (as Kant observed) “that we are distinguished from every other item in the universe by our ability to say ‘I’.” If my pain nerves jangle, I still say ‘I am in pain.’ In this as in cosmology and morality, science takes us a long way, but not all the way to what we want to know. “But if it’s a question asked from beyond the limit of science, then it immediately takes on a theological character and the question is whether there is such a thing as a theological answer. And that is where philosophy kicks in.”

    How so? For most people, religion “fills in the gaps that science leaves open.” Those “living a religious life are, in a sense, completed in a way that they wouldn’t be if they just lived according to the nihilistic worldview that our culture advocates.” The untruth of nihilism manifests itself in the evident point that we exist, that there must be something rather than nothing. Religions tell us why.

    Do they speak truly? They cannot all speak truly in their entirety because religions contradict one another. “Religion brings [believers] nearer to the truth about their condition than they would otherwise be,” but “they don’t think this through philosophically.” By contrast, a philosopher finds “concealed truth within” the religions. Scruton points to Averroes as a philosopher who does this, and he might easily go back further to Origen or indeed before Christianity to Plato’s Socrates. There are “two parallel routes to the thing we call ‘religion’: there has to be the religion of the philosopher, and the religion of the ordinary faithful.” Famously, Socrates insists on the need for self-knowledge; Scruton (thinking of Kierkegaard, not Socrates) finds “that the grounds of all religious belief are within the self, and that religion contains the set of stories that encapsulate our self-understanding.” But Kierkegaard, unlike Socrates, retreated into subjectivity. “That is what I would call a philosophical failure, a retreat from truth rather than an encounter with it. You have to accept that truth is objectivity and not subjectivity.” Why?

    Here is where analytic philosophy usefully intercedes. “We know from Frege and Tarski that truth is connected with reference, that reference is connected to identity and that identity determines our ontological commitments. Ultimately, therefore, you cannot avoid the scientific realist worldview: it is simply a consequence of logical thinking.” And, it might be added, logical thinking or the principle of non-contradiction is inescapable: The same thing cannot perform or endure opposites at the same time, in the same part, and in relation to the same thing. You can think of something that is black and white; you can even think of something that is grey, a mixture of those opposites, but you cannot even conceive of something ‘blackwhite,’ any more than you conceive of or point to a square circle. You cannot even honestly claim to ‘have faith’ in the existence of a square circle, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Thinking about Christianity, then, a philosopher would think logically about the Trinity. Without being able to pin down what the Bible means by it, he can at least clear up some confusions about it, and might even discover something profound in it.

    Logical thinking, the dialectic seen in and exemplified by the Platonic dialogue, also enables a philosopher to compare and contrast different religions. The polyphony of Christian music (perhaps a result of the ‘social’ or Trinitarian character of the Christian God?) contrasts with Islamic culture. “There is little real music coming out of the Islamic world” because “there is no polyphony in Islam. The culture is saying only one thing, a huge unison which constantly fragments and can restore itself only by violence.” Islamic law builds no institutions, no authoritative pathways to channel human activities away from violence. “Sharia law… is addressed to the individual and it says ‘this is how you must live'”; it does not really show how to live a life in common with other lives. Abraham and Jesus talk to God the Father, but you don’t talk, or at any rate talk back, question, Allah. Recall Scruton’s understanding of the common law as a social or dialogic, and also experiential quest, for understanding justice and you will see why he wants to be remembered as the last Englishman and the organist at his own church.

    Mark Dooley’s conversation with Roger Scruton thus accomplishes two highly valuable things. It provides and overview of Scruton’s philosophic quest showing how its elements cohere; better still, it cordially invites us to read his books, arousing the intellectual desire to do such work which animated the souls of the old philosophers.

    United States Congress: A Brief Introduction

    by

    Originally published by Constituting America, January 2018. Republished with permission.

     

    Against the arbitrary rule of George III, the American Founders opposed the rule of law. On the most fundamental level, in their Declaration of Independence, they appealed to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God against tyrannical violations of the unalienable rights established by those laws. Eleven years later, in designing the human, conventional constitutional law that reframed the federal government, the Founders established a republican regime intended to prevent the return of arbitrary rule to their country.

    Of the three branches of government, they put the legislature first; understanding that the perfect, divine Lawgivers established the rule of His laws in nature, the Founders knew that procedures established for imperfect, human lawgivers needed to keep such persons directed toward the defense of the natural laws. Congress also ‘came first’ for a historical reason: In our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the legislature was the only branch of government. Not only was Congress itself unicameral, but the executive and judicial powers were folded into it.

    Such legislative dominance had seemed to make the rule of law unassailable, but the contrary turned out to be true. Under the Articles, laws passed by Congress couldn’t penetrate into the states to govern individual citizens. This left an apparently formidable, unicameral federal legislature dependent upon the states for revenues and for enforcement. The purpose of the rule of law is to place a layer of protection between the persons enforcing the commands of government and the persons ruled by those commands. But the rule of law is nonetheless a form of ruling. Under the Articles, the states amounted to a second, political ‘layer’ of authority; the federal government could enact laws but it could not rule by those laws. As Publius writes in The Federalist, “Government implies the power of making laws”; it also implies the power of enforcing them.

    If the federal government shall truly govern, however, additional safeguards needed to be build into it. A unicameral legislature that made laws but also enforced them and judged cases arising under them, reaching down to individuals within each state, might behave like a many-headed version of George III. Better, then to follow the longstanding recommendation of John Adams and establish a bicameral legislature. With the legislators in one house proportioned to the population of the states, the popular or democratic character of American republicanism would survive. Although women couldn’t vote in most states, the percentage of adults who could vote in the United States was still higher than in any other legislative body in the world at that time—far higher than in the British House of Commons, for example, whose members were elected by no more than fifteen percent of the adult population. By contrast, not only were the House members chosen by a more broadly-based electorate, but members themselves needed to meet no property requirements. Publius observes, “Under… reasonable limitations, the door of the House of Representatives is open to merit of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether young or old, and without regard to property or wealth, or to any particular profession or religious faith.”

    The other branch of the legislature, the Senate, exists to protect the states, which exchanged their power effectively to veto federal legislation for a hand in making that legislation. With each state equally represented in the Senate, and with Senators elected by their state legislatures, citizens in every  state could feel confident that the federal laws which would now rule them directly would not compromise the rightful powers of the states. In addition, the requirement that any proposed law would need approval of both houses, and that the senators would serve terms three times longer than members of the House, guarded citizens against what Publius calls “sudden or violent impulses” in lawmakers who might otherwise be swept up in the passions of the moment.

    Although our contemporaries frequently use the terms ‘democratic’ and ‘republican’ as if they were synonymous, the Founders did not. The purpose of republican or representative government, as distinguished from the pure democracies of ancient Greece, where all acted as legislators and often as judges in the assembly, was precisely to empower reason over passion, to obtain “a cool and deliberate sense of the community,” as Publius phrased it. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates”—a philosopher, a person ruled by reason—”every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,” so powerful the passions become when human beings begin to orate at one another. Had Athens had a senate, Publius goes on to observe, Socrates would not have been put to death by his countrymen; the existence of a second seat of deliberation would have slowed things down, given Athenians time to think the matter through.

    Despite their longer terms in office, and despite the property qualifications required of senators, the United States Senate would be no voice for an aristocracy, no House of Lords, The Constitution prohibits laws establishing primogeniture, the social and economic foundation of landed wealth. Senators may be richer than members of the House, but they are every bit as ‘common.’ All Americans are ‘commoners.’

    As a final precaution, the Framers of the 1787 Constitution carefully enumerated the powers of the federal government. Congressional law governs interstate and international commerce, the military (including the militia), and establishes a federal judicial system operating under what Publius calls a “uniform code of civil justice.” Other powers remain in the states, or in the sovereign people.

    The design of the United States federal government has been admired and sometimes imitated throughout the world. Yet few Americans today think of their government as very much limited to matters of commerce, military defense, and constitutional law. Given the legal and institutional safeguards the Framers enacted, why then do we now see such an extraordinary concentration of power in the federal government? Part of the answer may be seen in the transformation of Congress, a transformation undertaken and completed in the first seven decades of the last century, but especially between 1933 and 1969.

    The same phenomenon has been seen in the states. Although I have never worked in Congress, I have worked on a state legislative staff. At no time did I or anyone else on that staff participate in formulating the bills that became laws. Each of the two major political parties had staffs in the state capital charged with that responsibility, augmented by the Office of Legislative Services, a state agency staffed by attorneys who reviewed all bills to ensure that the language was legally correct. ‘My’ state senator could propose an idea for a law, push to get it out of committee and onto the floor, but neither he nor his staff could have been seriously described as lawmakers.

    We were nonetheless quite busy. Doing what? Typically, a constituent would call our office, in some degree of agitation over treatment received at the hands of a state administrative agency. My first task was to determine whether the complaint was likely to be legitimate, which it usually was. It transpired that, on occasion, unelected bureaucrats contract George III syndrome; symptoms included arbitrariness, injustice, and a touch of conceit. I would call the relevant state official (unlike the ordinary citizens, I had a handbook with their names, titles, and telephone numbers) and engage him or her in civil but firm conversation. I would often draft a letter to the relevant department head for the senator’s signature, following up on that conversation, putting a sort of legislative-branch imprimatur upon the point. Given the fact that the legislature retained control of the purse-strings holding the funds which kept bureaucratic lights on, these efforts more often than not had the desired effect.

    That this new non-legislative task now forms the core of what’s still called the legislative branch of the federal government—that the procedure I followed was very far from restricted to the government of just one state, or even all the states, but extends to Congress itself—was confirmed at that time by political scientist Morris P. Fiorina, who published the current edition of his book on the subject in 1989. Cogently titled Congress: Linchpin of the Washington Establishment, this study has deservedly become a standard text in colleges throughout the country.

    Fiorina began by contrasting the rate of turnover in the biannual House elections of the nineteenth century with that seen since the 1960s. In the 1880s and throughout that century, 40-50% of House members were replaced in each election. By the 1980s, the replacement rate had dropped to 15%. Being generally more elderly than their House colleagues, Senators die or resign more frequently, but that is no measure of voter sentiment, except in those cases when a Congressman may resign in anticipation of losing. So, for example, since 2008, 43% of Senate seats have ‘turned over,’ while the House has held steady.

    Why the difference between the early Congress and the modern Congress?

    Fiorina identified two principal causes. In the nineteenth-century House, committee assignments had been determined by the Speaker of the House, but Progressive-era reforms included a system of committee advancement based on seniority. Once years in service counted towards a member’s eventual chairmanship of committees and subcommittees, voters had a reason to keep ‘their guy’ in office; the more seniority he has, the more federal dollars he can direct to your district.

    More important, however, was the Progressives’ expansion of the federal bureaucracy, which spiked upwards in the New Deal of the 1930s and then again with the Great Society programs of the 1960s. With a substantial and complex centralized bureaucracy now in place, combining legislative/regulatory, executive, and judicial/administrative-court powers within its agencies, Washington developed what the English call an ‘establishment’—a permanent ruling class. Legislators still legislated, but in a different ways; they still did favors for constituents, but also in a different way.

    The good-humored and slightly cynical Professor Fiorina described it in terms of a certain sort of clever circularity. Congress enacts a law, signed by the President and sometimes initiated by him, through his allies in Congress. Congress couches the law in vague, general terms. This leaves the bureaucracies with the task of filling in the regulatory details; since the proverbial devil happily resides in details, this makes many Washington establishmentarians very happy indeed. Here’s where you, the citizen, come in: lost in the bureaucratic maze, confused by paperwork, whipsawed (as you think) by persons you didn’t elect, who consequently care little for your plight.

    Ah, but now you turn to your rescuer, your friendly, local Congressman. He (or rather his staff) intervene heroically on your behalf, setting things right, winning your approval and, more usefully still, your vote and a reputation as one stand-up guy. To top it all off, your devoted representative can do this while inveighing against bureaucratic red tape and burdensome paperwork, imposed upon hardworking taxpayers by faceless and unfeeling bureaucrats. Thus Americans may detest ‘Congress’ while re-electing their own Congressmen time and time again. They just can’t stand the other 434 members of the House. Or, as legendary House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill put it in the 1980s, “All politics is local.”

    This new and symbiotic relationship between Congress and the Washington bureaucracy has resulted in larger Congressional and administrative staffs. For Congress, Fiorina cites statistics that are now familiar. As late as 1960, House members’ office staffs averaged nine positions. By 1977, that doubled. Senators had larger staffs to begin with, but these staffs doubled, too. Less lawmaking was going on, on the Hill, but more pork-barreling and a lot more ‘constituent casework’ had been added.

    In the past three decades, things have changed again, although not back to the old norm. Staffs have been reduced, now averaging 14 for House members, 34 for Senators. (One might observe that desktop computers have also made staffers more productive, with less need for typists and file clerks.) The real change isn’t in staffing, however, but in public opinion. All politics is still local when it comes to helping constituents with routine problems. But (as Fiorina himself has written in recent articles) our political life has become much more ‘national’ in terms of the issues addressed in local Congressional campaigns. Here, the turning point was the 1994 House election campaign engineered by House Minority Whip New Gingrich. Gingrich persuaded House Republicans to run on such national issues as welfare reform, term limits, tax cuts, and a balanced budget amendment. It worked; his party won enough seats to take the majority for the first time in forty years.

    Since then, a semi-‘nationalized’ electorate hasn’t ‘polarized’—meaning, separated itself into ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ factions, with no centrists—quite as much as commentators claim, although it has polarized somewhat. In Fiorina’s term, political and media elites have “sorted” themselves into such factions; there are no more conservative Democrats, and no more liberal Republicans. A few moderates remain, grabbing headlines on close votes, but Democrats like Senator Russell Long and Republicans like Jacob Javits no longer exist. A middle-of-the-road electorate has no comfortable home in either party; a substantial portion of our fellow-citizens consider themselves ‘independent voters.’

    Fiorina’s analysis should be supplemented by observing that the increase in national sentiment among voter and also ideological conflict among elites has sharpened in part becaue more people now question the post-World-War-II consensus, which consisted of broad approval of Progressive-style government policies. The difference between, say, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election was a matter of degree. The difference between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1968 was not, nor was the difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Reagan and Trump ran against the administrative state itself. That has caused the heirs of Progressivism to take their battle positions in defense of their status quo—nowhere more so than in the “linchpin of the Washington establishment.”

    Another way of putting it is: For the first time in a century, Congress is getting interesting, again.