The Two and the Many: Or, Lovers and Politics

Politics is the way of organizing humans living-together. It is not a good, but the process for arriving at it. Politics overcomes a natural disorder, Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” Politics is, then, ignominious gathering, because it organizes out of natural necessity to prevent the Hobbesian war. Hobbes’s solution was tyranny, one against all. Of course, ordering life for necessity reveals man’s incapacity to rise above the ignominy in which Hobbes found him. This is the modern view of politics, somehow finding virtue in necessity, the material urges that bind man to the lowest side of nature.

Modernity has tried to obscure these urges by giving equal weight to all of them under the heading of popular sovereignty, thus shifting the Hobbesian formula to the few and the many. But this only expands the tyrannical base of politics, guaranteeing the Hobbesian struggle in the name of popularity. Popular politics does not really resolve the struggle between the few and the many, it only offers temporary alliances for the sake of partial gratifications, thus institutionalizing the Hobbesian struggle in the form of pluralism. The order sought by organization frustrates the unity sought by the many and reveals the impermanence of politics, its incapacity to unite men beyond their urges.

In order to make this living together tolerable, if not desirable, man has contrived various methods of human organization. Democracy is one of these methods, yet it is not a good but a means of arriving at one, the many over the few. As a method, some good was anticipated because it assured the satisfaction of the greatest needs, the many. But there is no good in numbers, only a way of sustaining an organization, a popular tyranny. It is a tacit recognition that man is not a democrat by nature. Indeed, his nature points him away from the many in whose presence he is diminished. His singularity, and the uniqueness that gives expression to it, are muted in a democracy. But so is his selfishness, the many overwhelming the one. Even majoritarianism, the operating principle of democracy, allows the individual only temporary alliance with the many, making impermanence a character flaw of democracy.

Democracy’s egalitarian intention also restrains the individual, his selfishness, not out of goodness, but because he is a threat to the many. While directed at the power of the few, equality seeks the least denominator, not out of love for the low, but fear of the high. Whether democracy can survive its method of operation depends on its culture, the pieties of a people that point them towards the many, which is a kind of good because it restrains the passions of the few who would disregard the many. Equality lowers; pieties elevate and offer the many a reason for their power, why their democracy is worth defending. Democracy can only be good when its culture offers the individual some reason for wanting to be part of the many, some reason to restrain his natural desire to be one of the few.

In America, culture always checked the few by organizationally restraining their passion to replace the many. Our institutional arrangements dispersed power um of democratic method. This is why all democracies are unique, and why many cannot survive the democratic process, which is contentious on any account.

The reason for this is fairly simple; democracy contains no moral imperatives, only a prescription against tyranny, one against to the many. But this is ignominious organization; it is not a good but mechanically allows for the popular
(self-) definition of the good. That is, it allows the many to determine why they should prevail over the few. Culture thus adds quality to the quantall. Culture is the antecedent to democracy and informs the consensus that shapes public action, and thereby blunts the passions of the many. We see this in various secular modifiers of democracy: liberal, representative, economic, social. All are attempts to import some moral agenda into democracy without declaring their cultural prejudice. Gertrude Himmelfarb reminds us of how John Stuart Mill, who sired a rather permissive liberalism, “took for granted that those virtues that had already been acquired by means of religion, tradition, law . . . would continue to be valued and exercised.”¹Each of the modifiers, then, smuggles in some moral premise for shaping the many. They are masks, subrogates for culture, and the attempt since the Enlightenment to substitute a secular ontology for the Judeo-Christian assumptions. The reason for the substitution is the recognition that the political is only a partial good, and it must turn to culture for direction.

More than other political forms, the democratic process needs the sanction of culture to constrain the passions of the masses, just as nature needs the cooperation of the political as a temporal shelter for man and woman. The political must seek to mediate the forces of nature from which it draws its constituents. This is why there is always a tension between the two and the many. Equally, the political needs man and woman in its search for permanence found in children. The idea of generational bonding not only connects family members to each other, but also provides the political with the durative capacity to sustain itself into an unknown future. More important, the connectedness of the two is exemplar for the many, making love the aspiration for all politics.

This union provides the political with historical, not just accidental, significance and forms the basis of tradition that sustains the political through time. The many are, then, at least partially coeval with the two, the political search for immortality found in family. This is why the Greeks connected citizenship to blood relation, creating a simulacrum of family through conjugal love. The Greek Eros, the search for universal meaning found in everlastingness, helps regulate all the passions, including the political. But this is not possible in an attenuated democracy, one disconnected from a culture that guides the natural passions, because the passions are selfish and isolating, returning man to the state of nature.

Democracy, untutored and unguided, cannot create community, a fraternity of souls, because it is bound to necessity. This is why equality, the principle of democracy, is always dangerous outside of politics. It is reductionist, not elevating, because it lowers the aspirations of its generative components, man and woman, by robbing them of the eternity they seek in erotic union. Understood romantically, equality is disintegrative because it seeks to isolate the uniqueness and passion of man and woman, who can only be united with others under conditions of love. It returns man to a natural state, to a privacy that was supposed to be overcome by the most public of human organizations, democracy. This is why democracy, understood as a process, gravitates into pluralism, interests momentarily united as an amalgam of self-interests.

Interests disconnect individuals from the public and reveal man’s hidden desire to exclude others from private life where necessity rules. This explains the current effort to privatize those things that were formerly a public matter, matters once understood to be important to the public good. The demand for privacy exposes the desire for the limitlessness of those things people wish to be put beyond the pale of judgment, hence beyond meaning. Privacy then becomes the abode of meaninglessness. But it is curious how one might emerge from meaninglessness to meaning, from the private to the public, and understand how one is connected to the moral order of things. If all forms of private sexuality are equally approved, and if sexuality is insulated from meaning, then are not their children?

Without culture the self has no love beyond the self, only temporary alliances, proving man’s transience in the temporal world. This is clearly visible in the current ambiguity of human relationships, and explains the tentativeness of family ties, especially those of children. Controlling the centrifugal forces of self-interests is always problematic in a democracy, and impossible apart from a culture that cannot integrate them morally. Because interests are always low, seeking to serve the self, there is no way to elevate them under an egalitarian democracy. The community and the integration sought by culture are corrupted by the separateness demanded by equality. But it was precisely separateness, an unnatural isolation, that was sought from the beginning of the sexual revolution. The corruption of culture was completed with the lowering of romantic union to the status of the political, a process without an aspiration. This turned Western culture towards the low, the urges of the body, and began anew the process of civilization.

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Love or Politics

The modern understanding of romantic union, the passionfulness that seeks completeness in eternity, was transformed during the Romantic literary and philosophical movements of the early nineteenth century. Of course this was preceded by the rationalist vanguard of the Enlightenment, which promoted our obsession with equality. Indeed, the Romantic ideal of love was driven by the idea of equality and demanded equilibration of beloved to lover. Reciprocity overturned the former love of the high, a beauty symbolized in the whole of Being. However, the beautiful was diminished by modern politics and secularization, the former aiming at equality, the latter at the temporal and mundane. Seeking to subjectify the beautiful, by making it accessible to the least denominator under the banner of equality, renders it common, banal. The connectedness sought by love is now separated for the sake of politics. This prompted Allan Bloom’s conclusion that, “Love of the beautiful may be the last and final sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.”²

Love is a verb, and rarely manifested symmetrically, because lover and beloved seldom move towards eternity at the same pace. The lover who sees the future first longs for possession, the completion glimpsed in the beloved. The unevenness in human coupling creates a romantic tension, and explains why love sometimes ends in tragedy. Love’s loss empties us of our redefined content. We are helpless in the process, even the prospect, of falling in love, because we take our minds off ourselves. Indeed, the very anticipation of connectedness (the “falling” in love) overcomes us, makes us vulnerable. This is because self-forgetting lies beneath the ecstacy of Eros, while it diverts the self-remembering of temporal interest.

Under conditions of modernity, with its affection for rational and material outcomes, the distinction between reciprocity and equality has been blurred. The first asks for surrender, the second demands it but offers no higher purpose for doing so. This has only undermined courting in romantic union. Today, courting is seen as an atavism, a throwback to the days when men pursued women, rather making contracts with them. Genteelness, the gentle-man of self-restraint and honorable intentions, is fraught with danger, condescension, patriarchy. There is a kind of neo-primitive anarchy that greets one on the first encounter. The old rules of courtly favor that set limits to expectations, and the gallantry that prescribed male conduct, were greeted by female modesty, if not chastity, and hinted at female uncommonness, beauty. This whetted anticipation and controlled love’s aspiration for completeness. But the rationalist demand for equal outcomes has concluded with the demand for equal incomes as a political requisite to romantic encounters. This reduces love of the high, eternity, to the low, interests momentarily united for equal gratification. This is contrary to our historical understanding of Eros and its relationship to politics.

Our understanding of love and politics has its antecedents in the Greek polis. The ancients understood the city as a harmony of the souls that compose it. They conceived the soul as a tension between necessity and perfection, the low and the high. Public life was the good life because one had to be free of necessity to participate in it. The Greek term, idiot, designated the private person bound to necessity, those things that shackle men to the lowest side of nature and set them apart from each other. But the Greeks also understood the longing men have for immortality, and sought to reconcile it to the aspirations of the city. Indeed, the meaningfulness of citizenship to the Greeks was expressed through friendship (phratria), which turns love inward, a love of one’s own. This is why they connected citizenship to blood relation rather than territory. It was their way of reconciling the love of the two and the demands of the many. It is the city, the civitas, that provides a “kind of organized remembrance,” where the noble and the beautiful are passed on generationally to newcomers who benefit from them.³This is why there was a symbiosis between art and politics as the artifactual, where art represented what was noble in a people and worthy of preservation as an “organized remembrance.”

The Greeks cultivated a harmony of individual souls and the soul of the city. We retain this prejudice today in our rather jaded understanding of “cosmopolitanism,” the kosmo/polites. To be a citizen of the city was to be a citizen of the universal truths towards which all souls aspire in their capacity for goodness. It was the city that served as a reckoning for souls. The Greek isonomia was, then, a proportional happiness, an unbalanced equality, of individuals who contributed their portion to the whole, and were thereby made whole. This is in striking contrast to today’s “rights theory,” which wreaks disharmony and disorder for the sake of the constituents that no longer define the whole but stand in opposition to it. For instance, we no longer speak of “wholesomeness,” now an archaic term of personal self-flattery towards those persons who reflect the moral aspirations of the whole.

A similar, but Christian, ontology was offered by Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the Puritan father and articulator of the early American conscience. Edwards connects “true virtue” to the “whole nature,” and the “universality of things,” because it is “an agreement of the heart to the great system, and to God,” which is the “divine principle” for ordering our lives.”⁴One can hardly exaggerate the influence of Edwards’s moral aesthetic in the formation of colonial communities, which often found its way into early state constitutions. The powerful similarity between the Greek and Christian views lies in the cosmological understanding of the whole of Being: the beauty of the particular acting in harmony with the whole, which subordinates all men in their humanity. This is why a republic of virtue was adopted in America, so the civitas, the community of souls, might point to the true order (and Orderer) of things.

The Greeks understood how love points to the whole, the divine order of things, and is the inspiration for it, which is why love and beauty are inextricably interwoven. For the Greeks, the soul was not some bifurcated antagonism, a duel to the death between mind and body, nature and nurture, individual and society. These are modern dualisms, popular since Descartes, for the sake of social science theorizing. Instead, they saw the soul as a continuum in nature, reaching towards the divine as completeness. Thus good and bad were offset and regulated in moderation, the equilibrium in the soul. The fulcrum was between the individual and the public good, the aspiration of the good man and the limitations of the good citizen. Good men reckoned on the whole, the good order of the many, not from the interests of competing particularities.

This is why education, paideia, was the education of the soul, and why it is central to public life, what we call civic education. Love is connectedness, the passion for the beautiful, and is transmitted to the young via cultural institutions. The teaching of it aims at the relatedness of the whole of life, of which the political is a necessary but not the highest part. It is a self-surrendering on behalf of a relationship that redefines the soul. It then shapes and reforms all tastes in favor of something outside and superior to the self. Indeed, Philip Rieff defines culture as a “moral” demand system, and its decay is a “symbolic impoverishment” of what is high and worth emulating.⁵It represents the collective movement away from a brutish nature through the education of civil society. It is the expression of the aspiration of the cult, its movement towards immortality. Culture thereby seeks to do what politics alone cannot do, assure the endurance of human organization.

Of course the inward turn of interest can never be the foundation of education, now the very basis of public schooling, because its purpose is self-flattery. Indeed, the self is now pandered to in the form of “esteem enhancement” through the catechizing of humanist teachers. But this humanism reflects the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It does not teach love of the beautiful, but of the useful, rendering humanity a solipsism because it is inner-directed. Of course, all utilities are temporary and expose man’s transcience, thus disfiguring love’s quest for beauty and immortality. This is why childhood education and parenting are so significant. They form the dispositions towards what to love, what to hold high and worth emulating. The usurpation of parenting by a public schooling that equilibrates all relationships, the high and the low, mocks the beautiful in favor of the commonplace, banality—the ugly.

The current obsession of public schools with techniques for sex, and the diseases it can bring, obliterates the self-forgetting of love for the sake of a self-remembering that transforms all connections into utility, rendering them low and meaningless. Today, self-remembering is painfully connected to self-preservation. So we teach disconnectedness in the schools and wonder why the apathetic is connected to the political. Yet there can be no commonweal when there is no common love. Rather than teaching what to love, we teach what to use. The politics of equality has corrupted our souls by lowering our aspiration for love, transforming intimacy into shared interests that point to the low as a reckoning for human desire. But love, the coupling of lover and beloved, is self-overcoming through another self. When self-submission is consummated in another self, it is what we call romance, which then defies all human parochialisms, cultural and political.

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De-eroticizing the Beautiful

The inward turn of love, hence the self-interest that promotes it, is currently visible in the erotic politics of multi-culturalism. Contrary to its proponents, it is not opposed to the materialist and mercenary interests of the old order, but a perversion of them. The de-spiritualization of the old order, what Eric Voegelin calls the “de-capitation of God,” was completed with the modern adoption of Cartesian dualism, and the final victory of the body over the mind as the reckoning for modern theorizing. The defeat of the mind, and its historic search for order, lowered the aspirations of the political and forever connected “love” to the mundane world. Not only has the political been redefined as the economical, but the spiritual has been re-cast and re-emerges out of the material: class, race and sex. These are separate ordering principles and expose the Western movement from the transcendent to the descendant. Each of the orders now reckons from the lowest end of nature, particularisms incapable of a universalist justification.

The constricting and antagonistic purpose of the new orders is obvious from their provenance in the Marx/Engels essay, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” (1884). The authors who conceptualize history as the movement of material forces completely de-eroticize human coupling for the sake of economic parity. They identify a “successive exclusion” of group members from the sexual bond which leads to the “pairing marriage [and] the abduction and purchase of women.” They posit the foundations for feminism, always obsessed with the oppressor/oppressed antagonism, and class struggle as the instruments for uprooting the old romantic order: “The overthrow of the mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex.” Most of the rhetorical excesses of feminism are here: the “patriarchal family,” the wife as “prostitute,” monogamy as the “wealth in the hands of one person,” and family life “transformed into a social industry,” when “the care and education of children becomes a public matter.”

Turning from the universal and eternal that formed the reckoning for the old order, which subordinated lover and beloved alike, the new orders turn to body symbolisms as the source of identity and affection. This is an inversion of the earlier traditions which looked to the cosmological to explain human purpose on earth. Indeed, Western culture moved from the low, the demands of the body, to the high by way of Greek, Jewish, and Christian pieties which offered the individual some part in the whole of Being, a beauty for which self-surrender is not only necessary but desirable. This idea is embedded in our understanding of citizenship, and why Americans referred to themselves as a community; they loved things held in common. This is why there has always been a felicitous harmony between lovers and “democracy” in America.

But this is because America settled the problem of the two and the many, lovers and politics, by subordinating the many to the commands of the One. Unlike a secular democracy, a republic is hierarchal, and distinguishes between what is permitted to Yahweh and what is forbidden to man. The secular ideologies that modify democracy, therefore to constrain its principle of operation, are fabrications of the mind and seek to replace the theological understanding with the materialist understanding, God’s will with man’s will. The first subordinates politics, not for the sake of the good life but for the sake of the good afterlife. The second turns to necessity, the mundane urges of the body, allowing equal expression to all of them, perhaps the only remaining democratic virtue.

In America, lovers and politics were both subordinated to a transcendent love that served to integrate them and make them whole. Indeed, E Pluribus Unum served as the expression of this transcendence and helped to explain man’s political purpose on earth. It thereby set limits to politics, what is permitted to it. Once cleansed of its culture, the collective aspiration for the beautiful, expressed in action as virtue, politics eviscerates any justification for its existence except equality; a banal denominator. Purged of beauty, democracy then becomes an instrument of popular self–repression, the movement of a people towards the low and unpraiseworthy.

Indeed, Western culture, which pointed the way for America, was very much shaped by a hierarchal love, agape in the Christian sense, which humbled all who submitted to it. Both the “laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God,” as our Declaration holds, conspired to subordinate men and women to children as the temporal, cultural expression of this humility. While democracy is only a partial good, the many over the few, its vulgarizers seek to transform it into an absolute good by elevating the instrument for its political expression, equality. But equality is always at war with culture, what the people hold high, the sacred over the profane.

Unlike the salvationist politics that are the stamp of modernity, a republic of virtue posits no telos for itself, has no ambition of perfectibility, sees no conclusion to human suffering, and offers no grandiose purpose to justify its existence in the face of competing Weltan-schauungen. It does not seek to abolish evil, only to limit its successes. Nor does it aim at universal goodness, but offers itself as an exemplar to others. This explains its impotence today. It lacks a combat readiness essential in the market place of modern ideologies.

A people is defined by what it worships, that which humbles the many. There is an abyss between a people grounded on the verities of God’s commands and one disconnected from God and nature but pointed towards equality of outcomes. The first requires a love that subordinates all individuals while it embraces the union that is God’s and nature’s generation of man on earth. The latter denies generation as its justification and turns to political and economic ends to sanction familial ties. The love of the high, beauty, is then transformed into a passion for the low, the body as a reckoning for the political.

Under the conditions of multicultur-alism, origins are understood to govern destiny. What one is defines one’s “perspective” and place in the world, reducing the universe to the matter of an inescapable body essence. This fulfills the Marxist dream that matter determines meaning, hence a meaningfulness that one can never transcend. Man is not only limited by his beginning, but confined to it by the new material politics that assures him that he can never rise above it. This is the nemesis of Judeo-Christian culture, which finds its end in its beginning; it thereby circumscribes the possibility of inhumanity by pointing men towards a cosmology that serves to integrate them.

This is why romantic union, the coupling of man and woman, takes on so much significance. It prefigures a destiny in which the whole of life is involved. The good order of the two helps form the good order of the many, because they make connectedness their raison d’être. But according to the feminists, sexual regeneration is a “cultural construction,” ordained neither by nature or God, nor endorsed by tradition. To the surprise of all science and nearly all parents, sexual coupling is a mental fabrication, a product of the white, willful, male mind. Contrary to biblical understanding, not God but man made woman, the navel notwithstanding.

Yet, according to biblical tradition, immortality for man and woman was present at creation. It was not something earned, an act or achievement, it was part of creation, for Adam and Eve a given. But having fallen to temptation, a consequence of disobedience, man and woman were punished—with freedom. In a nutshell this reveals the tension between the mundane political world and the spiritual understanding. What in politics is the first human craving, is biblically the first human weakness. This forms at least part of the hostility secular, mundane feminists have for religion. They take freedom as an absolute good, and the capacity for its maximization, choice, as the instrument for its expression. But they offer no moral, natural, or divine standard for mediating between mundane choices.

Plato’s “measurement of measurements,” theology, has been abandoned in favor of choices driven by bodily compulsions. This is an inversion of the Judeo-Christian understanding in which choice, preferences among alternatives, already represents the curse of the fall. The tree of life represents deathlessness which points Adam and Eve towards what they seek when conjoined by God, it was given at creation. But the unity (of spirit) created by God became separated by temptation, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The capacity for choosing, the will towards an unknown future formerly provided by God, now entails the potential for defiance, disobedience, and the potential loss of immortality.

Theologically, and understood as the ground for grace, free choice is not an unreserved good but signifies the necessity of choosing between good and evil, between recapturing the original intention (redemption) and paying the price for choice, freedom, or obedience. Free choice is limitless choice. But without limits it is impossible to identify the political, that which distinguishes one’s own and forms the boundaries of moral duty.

Limits prescribe human conduct by distinguishing between the private and the public, necessity and virtue. The former virtue, cultivated in private under the tutelage of faith and family, created the connection to the public by way of the doctrine of shame, acts forbidden and beneath human aspiration. This was the link between love and politics, one which relaxed their tension. But today, “tolerance,” understood as an unwillingness to make distinctions, is used as an instrument to obliterate shame, thereby breaking the link between the private and the public, the two and the many.

Shamelessness shatters the cultural significance of democracy by disorganizing its principal justification, why the many should prevail over the few. How can one emerge from the private to the public and believe one is connected to a moral order? Indeed, if privacy is cleansed of its moral significance, then are not the children issuing from it? And if children are cleansed of their political importance, the carriers of tradition, can the political justify its movement through history? The durative towards which the political aims in regeneration must now surrender to the evanescent choices of the private, regardless of the forms they take.

Contrary to the rhetoric of emancipation, all choices entail encumbrances, some fatal, others tragic, many unintended. No one really believes in absolute free choice, for this would mean one without consequences, hence meaningless. We hope that our choices will yield our intended consequences, perhaps the real hubris of the Enlightenment, certainty. Ironically, it is precisely the unknowables of the future that prompt men to give up their freedom to closed systems of thought, ideologies, scientific and pseudo-scientific theories, that lead us towards the immortality we abandoned in the first place. What formerly ended in heaven now ends in history. The civilizational cycle is completed now. We return to the isolation and separateness in which Hobbes found us, now aided by the rationalist human sciences; only this time it is by choice. Nothing could so thoroughly confirm the fear of the Romantic poets, that the tree of knowledge kills the tree of life.

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Having abandoned the certainty of an infinite, knowable future for the freedom to chose what is uncertain and finite, Adam and Eve were comforted with their coincidence, their complementariness. God gave each to the other, not singularly, but in their relation: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a help opposite him” (Genesis 2:18). Formerly pointing towards eternity, each one now points towards some approximation of it in the other.

The fall contained within it a means for its own temporal overcoming, the two fleshes made one. Despite man’s “tendency [inclination] from his youth on towards evil” (Genesis 8:21), his help against it was the partner, the one “opposite” him. The eternity formerly assured by God, although unfree, certain, infinite, was made voluntary, contingent, and finite under conditions of temporality, the realm of choice. So that we might chose the high over the low, the beautiful and not the banal, the Law and the Word were given. Thus Mosaic Law offers warnings against self-and collective destruction: the “thou shalt nots” point to danger, the “thou shalts” point towards goodness. The first aims at the individual, the latter at community. The former seeks to protect us in the temporal plane, the second to organize it politically. This is implicit in the word culture, from the Latin cultus, meaning “worship” or “homage” towards the high, that to which the people bow down. And the quality of any people is determined by their culture, not by their interests, which are always selfish and disintegrative. The survival of the former will depend on the place it gives to the latter, which is the drama of politics, how a people organize their living-together.

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NOTES

1. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York, 1994), 86.
2. Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York, 1993), 15.
3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), 198.
4. Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, 1991), 2, 62.
5. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Chicago, 1987), 245–247.