BY SEAN WALSH
I couldn’t be what’s known as a political libertarian because the version of freedom assumed doesn’t seem to me to be worth getting excited about. To borrow the language of the Dominican Thomistic theologian Father Servais Pinckaers, I’ll take freedom for excellence over freedom of indifference. I understand that libertarianism isn’t particularly sensitive to that distinction, or many others now I think of it, which is why we part company.
The distinction is an important one however, and flows from the quite reasonable observation that in order to understand what makes a life a good one, we need to understand first what makes a life a life.
The existentialist argues that your life is the accumulation of your choices – existence precedes essence is how Sartre puts it. The virtue ethicist replies that, on the contrary, we are essentially configured to seek to do the good, but will need help in acquiring the dispositional map necessary to help us find it.
I’m not that keen, then, on the proposal that people should just be left alone to do what they want. Because what people want is rarely excellence but convenience. And a convenient life is an ongoing missed opportunity.
How does this moral theorising translate into a political philosophy and thence into practical politics? Well the first thing to point to is the false opposition between freedom and rules. Too often these are taken to be mutually antagonistic, at best, when in fact they need each other. John Searle points out that the rules of chess define what chess is (they are constitutive and not just regulatory is how he puts it). Within those rules you are free to play solidly, like Korchnoi, or aggressively, like Kasparov.
Similarly, some governing structure is a necessary condition of any freedom which can coherently be talked about as such.
But I’m not keen that governments should be left to do what they want either. It is very difficult for governments to seek to do the good because it is at every moment in hock to the machinery of the state, and there is no such thing as a virtuous machine. Pace Descartes (as characterised by Gilbert Ryle) even human machines couldn’t have souls.
Additionally, it is unwise to hand over to governments the sort of freedoms that libertarians want for themselves (certainly) and the rest of us (theoretically), for the simple reason that they will always find something nefarious to do with it. In the past that usually meant starting wars. These days it tends to take the form of going Dr Frankenstein on the rest of us, as in the cases of Lockdown, Net Zero, and Mr Streeting’s frankly disturbing obsession with ideologically motivated child eugenics.
And if you are going to tell me that in Britain1 the government is constrained by the requirements of democratic accountability then my second instinct (my first one being violence) will be to laugh in your face. Mr Blair’s constitutional incendiary devices, which were set to long-delay timers, are still detonating, and the mission to replace political accountability with judicial/quango activism is ongoing but nearly complete.
I suppose what I’m getting round to saying is that government and citizen are locked into a relationship for better or worse, with ongoing spats, grudges, shared memories, and constantly mutating back-and-forth power imbalances. Call it the “Clinton marriage” theory of government.
So I’m in general unsympathetic when political parties with realistic executive aspirations say that they want to ban something, as Reform are now proposing with face coverings. But in this case, I’m eminently persuadable.
We know that face coverings can bewilder the “facial recognition” software that the police would insert onto every street and into every home in the country should they be so indulged. That’s about the only thing going for them, however. Masking your face in public is socially destructive and spiritually enervating. The requirement to do so was the runt of the ineffectual litter of petty prohibitions born during the Great Fear of 2020.
The metaphysics of the human face are Eucharistic in the sense that the soul is really rather than symbolically present in it. Understanding this helps us close the disastrous conceptual separation Descartes introduces between the immaterial and material aspects of the human person. Catholics should understand this in terms of sacramental physics, in which the natural/supernatural distinction is dissolved, if only momentarily, and the relationship between soul and body is revealed as one of entwinement not mutual independence.
There are secular ways of making a similar case. The embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty speaks interestingly about these things.
Faces are holy and desecration is wrong, even when a person does it to himself. Bring on the ban.
1 I’ve given up “UK” for Lent and already feel much better for it.