At one point in The Ethics of Beauty, Timothy Pattisi emphasizes that the American Constitution and the system of government it established are products of the Enlightenment.[1] Indwelling the notion that the universe operates like a machine, the founders aimed to design their new nation as a mechanism that guarantees reliable governance. The entire notion of “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” is the constitutional equivalent of “regulators” on a machine.

This paradigm for visualizing the world and human society arose when Sir Isaac Newton depicted the universe as mechanistic, composed of matter and forces. From this viewpoint, human reason is merely a force (mental power) that is useful for altering the physical world and human society. In the realm of industry, this involved technology; in the political realm, it meant harnessing the mind’s power in pursuit of political and economic dominance. This inevitably led to a perception of society as consisting of isolated individuals interconnected by various forces.

I’ve been writing this series of blogs because of this perspective’s social, cultural, and political consequences on the world. If those who believe we are at the end of the modern world and at the beginning of what is called the postmodern world are correct, and if it is necessary to adopt a more organic and human-centered view of the world—one that encompasses mind, body, and spirit—then it is not surprising that our political institutions are under great stress. We see the results of a mechanical view of reality taken too far all around us.

As I have said before, if all that is involved is a will to power, and if politics is simply war by another name, then the destructive political behavior we read about daily is warranted. However, if the materialistic view of the world is incorrect, then there is hope to avoid the decay of our social institutions. Achieving this will require changes in our perspective on the world and the way we structure our political institutions.

Basing Politics on an Outdated Model of the World.

The modern worldview that produced the United States Constitution views reality as ultimately materialistic. The “real” consists of material things (ultimately particles) connected by various forces. In this perspective, the universe, including the human race, is visualized as a complex machine made of matter and energy. In recent years, this materialistic model of the world has been replaced by one that assumes deep interconnectedness, relationality, freedom, and inner sensitivity. It is an “organic model” that perceives the universe not as a machine but as an organism or a process. In my view, and that of others, the older mindset has led modern politicians, policy-makers, and intellectuals into numerous errors. Henry Sapp puts it as follows:

 [We] are faced today with the spectacle of our society being built increasingly upon a conception of reality erected upon a mechanical conception of nature now known to be fundamentally false. … As a consequence of this widely disseminated misinformation, “well-informed” officials, administrators, legislators, judges, educators, and medical professionals who guide the development of our society are encouraged to shape our lives in ways predicated on known-to-be-false premises about “nature and nature’s laws.”[2]

The world, as modern relativity and quantum theories describe it, is deeply relational, historical, and sensitive to minor information inputs. If the world itself is organic, relational, traditional, and sensitive to minor information inputs, then so are human beings and the societies they create. This insight leads to a much different and more relational view of human society—a view consistent with an older classical view of human society.

As Pattisis puts it, “our ignorance of this basic being of society is one reason why, since the Enlightenment, domestic political disagreements have frequently evolved into violent civil wars.”[3] It does not take a lot of imagination to see this truth in the kinds of domestic violence that the United States and other Western nations have experienced in recent years. The breakdown of the enlightenment idea, ideals of government, can be seen this week in the rioting in Los Angeles and the responses of politicians to that violence. Some are egging on the violence, and others are using violence to stop the violence. In each case, there’s a belief that the violence is justified.

The Insight and Structure of the Founding Generation

It is widely recognized and universally accepted that the United States of America was the first great democracy of the modern world, born from the Enlightenment and its focus on human freedom. Consistent with their worldview—that the world was fundamentally a machine—the founding generation sought to create a system of government that would reflect that reality. The legislative, executive, and judicial functions were separated as “powers” competing with and checking one another’s behavior. It was the naïve belief of the Enlightenment that this would happen automatically. In a way, our system of government was meant to introduce Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” into the realm of governance.[4]

In Pattisis’s view, this division of government into executive, legislative, and judicial functions replicates the insights of Plato in The Republic and Jane Jacobs in her work on political philosophy. Both Jacobs and Plato saw society as made up of certain kinds of special interest groups. Plato sees that an ideal state requires ideal rulers to administer its political and governmental affairs. If these rulers are to be able to rule effectively, then the various social classes that make up any society must be harmonized. Otherwise, there can be no justice. Any society is made up of different classes of people. Plato was familiar with Greek societies and those of the surrounding area. In these societies, there were six fundamental groups:  Rulers (charches), Soldiers (polymystes), Farmers (perioikoi), Craftsmen (tekton), Laborers (helots), and Slaves (douloi).

The first two groups are related, for the rulers generally came from an aristocracy (aristoi) with military training and ability. In the Republic, Plato sometimes reduces the various groups to three: rulers, philosophers, and everyone else. [5] In her musings about politics, Jane Jacobs simplifies the Platonic vision of society into two categories, Guardians and Traders. Guardians administer and guard the social system. In our society, the guardians are those active in politics, in the executive, legislative, and judicial parts of governments, as they are found in various national, state, and local bodies. Guardians populate modern bureaucracies.

The problem, as Jacob sees it, is that the interests and perspectives of Guardians and Traders are inevitably at odds with each other. She goes into great detail, illustrating how Guardians and Traders view the world in completely different ways and hold entirely different opinions on politics and morality. For instance, generally speaking, Guardians don’t like the trading aspect of business; it’s too chaotic. Conversely, traders disapprove of regulation and order, preferring the freedom to conduct business as they wish; it’s too restrictive. Guardians change the rules of society to create their vision of stability. Traders highly value predictability in law and the enforcement of contracts, whereas Guardians prioritize administrative, military, legal, and political power.[6]

Complicating matters is that Traders and Guardians hold different views on the nature of justice. Traders generally believe that justice means everyone receiving what they have earned and deserve. Guardians, conversely, see justice as about equality in outcomes. Both perspectives are partially correct but ultimately limited. For instance, social status and luck often play significant roles in success. There’s nothing just about being born to wealthy parents or experiencing moral luck. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that equality of outcomes can stifle productive striving and the pursuit of excellence. According to economic theory, if pushed too far, equality of outcomes leads to moral hazard. For social peace to prevail, some “third force” must operate within any society to balance these competing ideals.[7]

This point precisely connects the work of Jacobs and Plato to The Ethics of Beauty. Due to the intractable conflict among various social groups, a third force is necessary to unify and harmonize society in order to achieve social peace. Jacobs recommends, and Pattisis follows her approach, that a “third force,” which can take the form of love, serves as that social bond. As Pattisis puts it:

“What is required in order to have a civilization is a concert of the two social justices under the influence of love. Love is what makes it possible for us to balance the two opposing main kinds of social justice into one social harmony. This is why the Byzantines called their social and political theory “symphonia”—they were after a concert, a musical and artistic balance and proportion of the merchant approach and the warrior approach to social order.” [8]

I have previously described the necessary change as a return to a fundamentally organic, communal, wisdom-oriented view of social life, which I call sophio-agapism. As I put it in another context:

Sophio-agapism embraces a communitarian viewpoint that sees all participants in society as part of a common community bound together not just by power but fundamentally by a willingness to sacrifice for the community, whose interests must be considered in addition to the selfish interests of individuals that make up that community (the agapic move). In particular, nurturing families, neighborhoods, mediating institutions, and voluntary societies create social bonds that give stability and restraint to the state’s power and can accomplish goals that state power alone cannot achieve.

Political love is fundamentally a recognition that society is a joint endeavor requiring the cooperative efforts of all participants to achieve human flourishing. It is a social bond that transcends individual grasping and searching for personal peace, pleasure, and affluence. It requires confidence that the existing social order, as flawed as it may be, provides positive benefits to all members of society and should be protected while at the same time advancing in the realization of justice and human flourishing.

Sophio-agapism embraces the ideal of social harmony as the goal of political life. The modern, revolutionary focus on equality dooms political life to unending conflict among persons and classes. Political life aims to achieve progressively more significant degrees of harmony among the various participants in any society. A return to viewing social harmony as the aim of wise and just decision-making is implied by the interconnectedness of the world and the various societies humans inhabit. Equality

is undoubtedly an essential component of justice, as are opportunities to achieve, the acquisition of property that one can call one’s own, respect for all citizens, and a host of other components of a functional society. [9]

Overcoming the Delusions of the Enlightenment

One Enlightenment delusion was the belief that creating a universally accepted moral and political system would be possible solely through human reason. The organic approach advocated in The Ethics of Beauty and my work, Illuminated by Wisdom and Love, holds this idea to be fundamentally flawed. Human history and social institutions are inherently historical and reflect the traditions that preceded them. There is not, nor has there ever been, a “universally accepted moral and political system” nor is one possible. There cannot be a single fixed system of social harmony.[10] We live in a constantly changing historical flow of culture and society. Whatever the current state, someone will be dissatisfied and suggest changes.

Any serious reader of the Federalist Papers and the history of the Constitutional Convention recognizes that Madison, Hamilton, and others were well-versed in the earlier, classical view of society. They were influenced as much by Cicero and Edmund Burke as by Thomas Hobbes. The problem we face is that contemporary political thinkers and actors are overly-influenced by Hobbes and the intellectual optimism of the Enlightenment. Fundamentally, this must be overcome for the postmodern world to flourish.

Instead of believing that we can construct the perfect political system solely through human reason, we need to focus on fostering social harmony and refining our current political system. This reflects the principles of sophio-agapismand The Ethics of Beauty. Most importantly, we must move past our fascination with the idea that politics is merely war by another name. Politics is a collaborative effort among the members of society to achieve the optimal balance of interests at any given moment. If it seeks to be anything more, it leads to the tragedies seen in Germany, Russia, China, and other evident calamities of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

[1] Tomothy Pattisis, The Ethics of Beauty (Maryville, MO: St. Nicholas Press, 2020), 584, note 30.

[2] Henry F. Sapp, “Whitehead, James, and the Ontology of Quantum Theory” 5(1) Mind and Matter (2007) downloaded at https://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/WJQO.pdf (June 16, 2020), 85. In this quote, Sapp is not speaking of the exact phenomena that I am concerned with here—the tendency to view all reality as a machine—but his quote is equally applicable to what I am saying in this essay. Sapp is concerned with the assumption of materialistic theory that our experience of human freedom and the efficacy of human thought is an illusion. This quote from Sapp is one of my favorites and appears over and over in my writing.

[3] Ethics of Beauty, 583.

[4] Ethics of Beauty, 584, note 31..

[5] Plato, Republic tr. G. M.A. Grube rev. C.D.C Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992)

[6] Ethics of Beauty, 561. Pattisis creates a page-long chart showing the differences, which is well worth reading.

[7] Id.

[8] Id, at 566.

[9] G. Christopher Scruggs, Illumined by Wisdom and Love: Essays on a Sopio-Agapic Constructive Political Philosophy (College Station, TX: Virtual Bookworm, 2024), 258-9.

[10] This was the mistake of Plato criticized by Karl Popper in his magisterial work The Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).