In a recent Law & Liberty essay, Aaron Alexander Zubia meditates on the question of how Americans should approach the problem of “Saving Ourselves from Party Rage.” He does so by criticizing David Hume and his politics of “utility for utility’s sake.” Zubia argues that, in our own time, “the politics of utility is spent,” and “the politics of truth has come back with a vengeance. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.” In this brief response, I reject that dichotomy and urge an appreciation of politics as its own sort of endeavor in free societies, quite distinct from either utility maximization or truth-seeking. I further argue that a strong belief in the existence of objective truth cannot, itself, determine what sort of politics we should have. If we want to redress shortcomings of our contemporary political culture, a recommitment to our constitutional inheritance will serve us better than an insistence on getting all Americans to settle fundamental questions.

Zubia’s Argument

Zubia, who is the author of a new book on Hume’s Epicurean tendencies and their recurrence in modern liberal thought, points us to Hume’s attempts to meet the rancorous partisan atmosphere of his own day. Hume wanted to counter the disintegrative tendencies of partisanship by encouraging moderation and believed factions could be softened by emphasizing interests and conciliation, rather than a struggle over foundational truths. Zubia doesn’t say this was wrong, exactly, but to the extent the strategy could be successful, it depended crucially on “historical circumstances combined with a shared moral and religious consciousness.” Rather than celebrate this shared inheritance, though, Hume the arch-skeptic assailed it in his other work. If the Humean sensibility had predominated, his preferred style of politics would have been impossible.

Zubia says that contemporary liberals, on both the left and right, want to imitate Hume’s move—lowering the stakes of politics by having it avoid questions of ultimate meaning. But this move cannot work in our society, because our own cultural inheritance has been frittered away. We have no cultural capital left to draw upon, and are thus a contentious mess. “Without shared meaning, purpose, or identity, the polite politics that Hume recommended is impossible,” Zubia insists. If we are to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, we will have to forsake “the politics of utility” and turn instead to the more basic “politics of truth and virtue that built the West—and that the politics of utility effaced”.

What this would entail is somewhat unclear to me. But Zubia suggests embracing the politics of truth would allow us “to season our speech with the classical Christian virtues of humility, self-denial, and piety—not to mention grace and forgiveness—for which the Humean worldview leaves no room.” This move would then allow us to “mitigate party rage” in a way that “the middling politics of utility simply does not.”

A Category Error

Zubia, whose book looks fascinating, has probably forgotten more about Hume than I have ever known, so I will avoid saying much about the Scottish philosopher. In passing, let me note that, notwithstanding his own deep skepticism about revelation, Hume often defended the importance of religion in stabilizing society and even endorsed having an established state church, provided that it was coupled with tolerance for dissenters.

I also question whether Hume’s political theorizing can be reduced to an endorsement of a “politics of utility.” Hume was not at all indifferent to moral ideas, nor was he any kind of crude, hedonist utilitarian. Rather, he believed that man’s passions played a much larger role in social life than many theorists cared to admit, and that political life must be organized accordingly. In his famous study The Passions and the Interests, Albert Hirschman noted that Hume’s ideas about pitting potentially deleterious passions against each other were part of a prominent current of eighteenth-century thought. Such a strategic frame of mind did not lead Hume to deny the problem of viciousness, but it did inform what he thought the job of the politician should be:

Whatever may be the consequences of such a miraculous transformation of mankind as would endow them with every species of virtue, and free them from every species of vice; this concerns not the magistrate who only aims at possibilities. Very often he can only cure one vice by another; and in that case, he ought to prefer what is least pernicious to society.

That all jibes rather well with the Aristotelian formulation of politics as an inherently practical science, aimed at securing actions conducive to the good of the community. Whereas the contemplative sciences, such as physics and metaphysics, aim at truth for its own sake, politics is always concerned with real-world effects on existing societies.

That leads me to my central bone of contention with Zubia: there is no reason to imagine that people face a dichotomous choice between the “politics of utility” and the “politics of truth.” Inasmuch as it must be about helping people achieve their goals, politics is bound to be “utilitarian.” Inasmuch as it must define what is worth achieving at all, politics must be concerned with fundamental truths; inasmuch as it is concerned with how state actions will actually affect the world, politics will have to be concerned with all manner of practical and empirical truths.

In his classic work, In Defence of Politics (1962), the political scientist Bernard Crick went to the heart of the matter:

Politics is not religion, ethics, law, science, history, or economics; it neither solves everything, nor is it present everywhere; and it is not any one political doctrine, such as conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism, or nationalism, though it can contain elements of most of these things. Politics is politics, to be valued as itself, not because it is ‘like’ or ‘really is’ something else more respectable or peculiar. Politics is politics.

The essence of the political is the search for common actions. Agreeing to act together does require a kind of meeting of the minds—to give their support to a common project, people must be convinced that there are needs in the world that collective actions ought to address. It also requires a widely shared desire to practice conciliation, which is not always present. Not every grouping of human beings is capable of sustaining politics; Crick, for one, is eager to concede that both anarchy and coercive rule by a dominant group are more common responses to the problem of disagreement in the history of our species. But when a mutual desire to practice politics does exist, political agreement can often go forward without clarifying the ultimate ends of action. Vagueness and tentativeness are common features of political agreements. One group may believe in the need to make a change out of their sense of justice, while another may see its own self-interest implicated directly. Bringing together such groups is the classic stuff of coalition-building.

This process, when healthy, is shot through with moral, aesthetic, and prudential judgments about what is worth doing. If all of these are put in service of mere mutual backscratching, that is indeed impoverishing. But we ought not imagine that, in order to succeed, it must achieve some kind of deep-level consensus about what is worthwhile or important. It is precisely the point of politics to enable collective action even when disagreement persists.

What Shared Foundation is Required to Practice Politics?

Zubia’s plea for a turn to the “politics of truth” is rooted in an anxiety that twenty-first-century American society lacks what he takes to be a necessary prerequisite for practicing politics at all—a “shared moral and religious consciousness.” He is undoubtedly correct that members of a polity need some shared basis for acting; if we were simply strangers to each other, nursing mutual suspicions and informed by radically different belief systems, we would be incapable of forming a coherent polis.

But where, exactly, does Zubia get the idea that Americans have become so much like strangers to each other that only a collective recurrence to foundational truths can save us?

If I can read between the lines of his essay a bit—perhaps projecting ideas onto the author that are not his own—I imagine he is troubled by a mindset that has become increasingly prevalent in our society. Namely, the elevation of “lived experience” as a kind of trump card, especially for members of minority groups. If all discussions must be made to conform to “my truth,” that does amount to giving up on a mutual search for the truth, even in mundane matters. It corrodes our ability to see ourselves as a single people, inhabiting a single polis together, and instead promotes endlessly fracturing tribalism. It does indeed threaten our ability to practice politics.

Supposing everyone took these sorts of intellectual moves seriously, I would be inclined to agree with Zubia’s assertion, that “without shared meaning, purpose, or identity, the polite politics that Hume recommended is impossible.” But actions speak louder than words, and we do not, in fact, behave as though we think everyone’s subjective truth ought to govern us. Instead, in our political discourse, we appeal to common moral exemplars and heroes. We make use of familiar, well-worn political institutions. There is, certainly, a lot of dissensus about the meaning of “equality,” but the commonality of our commitment to this value is remarkable.

Americans in the twenty-first century certainly do diverge in many of their beliefs about foundational philosophical, moral, and theological truths—but it has ever been so. One could claim that previous differences were all intramural fights between different sorts of Christians, while our own times must contend with more fundamental departures, but I wonder what a member of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s would make of that argument. His fear of papists is surely a match for contemporary believers’ worries about “nones.”

Acknowledging the continuous presence of religious strife in American history ought to make us wary of imagining that we can practice politics only if we all start from the same foundational commitments. We share a common orientation toward politics—a belief in the possibility of working out our collective problems together, a willingness to abide by the results of shared processes. Our lack of agreement on fundamental religious truths does not impair us; certainly, it does not prevent us from “seasoning our speech with the classical Christian virtues of humility, self-denial, and piety—not to mention grace and forgiveness.” Many Americans deeply involved in the politics of their communities surely practice those virtues on a regular basis, including when they are drawn into common action with those who think very differently from themselves.

What Does Believing in Truth Settle?

I suspect Zubia’s worries about identity politics would lead him to disagree with this last assertion—that he would say that “cultural radicals” are implacably opposed to our system and, in fact, constitute a threat to it. Their radicalism may indeed make them unfit for politics, but for that very reason, I doubt their efficacy.

But in any case, Zubia’s alternative of embracing the “politics of truth” remains unclear.

Let’s agree that there is such a thing as Truth—the capital-T Truth. An objective reality that stands apart from any person’s ability to manipulate it.

Our shared commitment to this idea isn’t trivial. It offers prophylaxis against totalitarian regimes’ attempts to redefine “truth” in their own image. It should undergird a shared commitment to sound reasoning and evidentiary standards in public discourse (certainly something we could use!).

But it does not get us much farther than that in helping us decide what our politics should be—unless, that is, we are willing to further stipulate that a particular group of people is in full possession of Truth. If we agree on that, our task is to fashion a theocracy that ensures this elect group’s power to legislate. But apart from the early years of the New Haven or Massachusetts Bay Colonies, Americans have never imagined that we could collectively embrace any such group. We are unlikely to do so today.

Instead, even absent the prospect of deep-level moral agreement, we must turn to difficult questions: How are we supposed to ascertain the truth, and how should we bring it to bear in addressing the practical questions that politics must answer? 

Our constitutional institutions embody practical answers to these questions, and our collective reliance on them is a shared commitment that ought not to be undervalued merely because it leaves so many important questions open to perpetual disputation. We ought to appreciate our political traditions for what they are—imperfect, provisional, and, yes, largely practical and utilitarian in their details. When some of our fellow citizens suggest that these very institutions are shot through with incurable moral defects, our rebuttal must be practical: We must make use of and renew our constitutional traditions, and by doing so prove that they can still facilitate collective action that will hold this country together. That is, to be sure, a tall order. But it is far more attainable than trying to re-found our nation based on a shared transcendent foundation. Our shared political foundation is sturdy enough—if we do not forsake it.