The Good Life
Written by Mark Harris on July 10th, 2007Of late, I have found myself often in the midst of arguments amongst conservatives, libertarians, and other inhabitants of the centre-right cantina, and have found a recurring theme concerning what is the ultimate end of politics. The answer tends to be Liberty. That in our course of political events, we should seek to maximize liberty. Yet, I believe there is an undercurrent of disagreement here about what defines liberty. Certainly, we are not looking for some libertine oasis of do whatever you want, but rather we seek “The Good Life.” Which is to say some mixture of order and liberty that is most conducive to people leading The Good Life.
Libertine excesses were the French Revolution model, whereas the American Revolution was, at its heart, a conservative revolution designed to give the true vigorous liberty of rights and responsibilities. What say you STG readers about what is the highest end of politics?
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PM
The highest political end is the survival of your people and culture. True freedom is the freedom for your people to govern themselves as an independent nation.
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The question is whether or not self-determination is likely to lead to the Good Life. Now I certainly think that you can’t apply blanket rules. Certainly, as Edmund Burke showed in his argumentation about the Irish and the American colonies there can be support for self determination, but it is not the highest political end.
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PM
My point is that you need self determination before you will get anything else. You can’t have freedom, or prosperity, or harmony with the divine order or whatever other thing you decide you want unless you have the capacity to govern yourself. You must have the ability to make choices as a community.
Additionally, in the long run, the ability of peoples and cultures to sustain themselves are the only thing that matters. 500 years from now, no one will care about how much money you made, what party you voted for, or even whether you had “freedom”(whatever that means) or not. If 500 years from now, there is a group of people that identify with the history, culture, and traditions that we are making right now, then we succeeded at least at that basic level. If those people aren’t around, then we must have screwed up somewhere.
I’m not dismissing the need to discuss questions about what the role of religion should be in the government, or how high taxes should be, or whether we can legislate morality. A people can disagree on what the Good Life means and how to get it, but at least they share the same cultural context. In terms of values, they are speaking the same language and can understand each other.
It’s quite another thing to discuss these questions when the barbarians are at the gates (or already inside) and ready to start imposing their values on you, regardless of your moral code, or your political traditions, or your universalistic ideas about how you think human nature should operate. Therefore, I say the most important thing is to secure the future of your people before you can even talk about anything else.
Now what constitutes “your people” is another matter but that’s a big debate in itself so I’ll shut up. Good night all.