The Last Patrician (41 page)

Authors: Michael Knox Beran

BOOK: The Last Patrician

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ââ8
.âThe more closely we investigate the
real
history of the classical city-state, as opposed to the ideal history the dreamers have given us, the less likely we are to accept the communitarian thesis. The classical Athenian polis for which Michael Sandel, among others, pines, a city “whose conditions of life afforded [its citizens] the leisure, learning, and commonality to deliberate well about public concerns,” was, even in the glorious fifth century of Pericles and Phidias, very far from being a civic paradise. In Thucydides' account of the period we discover a political life fully as ugly as our own; we find there the same relentless desire for power and mastery, the same unending clash of interest against interest, the same ceaseless aggrandizement of self and untiring devotion to merely personal felicity, that characterize our own American politics today. The citizens of fifth-century Athens, for all their careful deliberation, for all their exquisite sense of “commonality,” acquired an empire and ruled it tyrannically; acted in reckless disregard of the principles of human decency and their city's long-term interests; and committed acts whose barbarity was exceeded only by their folly. The Athenians sent the innocent Miltiades, the architect of victory at Marathon, to die a horrible death in a dank dungeon, and forced Socrates, among the greatest of their city's men, to drink the cup of hemlock. The various treacheries, ostracisms, judicial murders, and mass executions sanctioned by the citizens of Athens in the golden apogee of their power and glory, and the disastrous civil war in which their deliberative politics culminated, ought to give even the most ardent communitarian pause.

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.âAt the heart of the communitarian idea is the belief that people should extend the same sympathy and affection that they instinctively feel for their families and friends to the larger spheres of the neighborhood and the city. One contemporary advocate of communitarian ideas, Suzanna Sherry, has argued that citizens should “behave toward their country and its citizens as they do toward their families: proud, protective, and willing to make sacrifices.” Suzanna Sherry, “Responsible Republicanism: Educating for Citizenship,”
University of Chicago Law Review,
vol. 62, p. 162 (1995). But it is not only unrealistic to ask people to love a crowd in the same way that they love those with whom they are intimately connected through blood or friendship, it is also deeply subversive of sound economic order. An observation of Hayek's is illuminating. Were we, he says, “to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do,” we would “destroy” that wider civilization. Aristotle, the preeminent philosopher of the polis, was unable to see that an extended market orderâa “macrocosmos” in which the profit-driven commercial trading he denounced played a critical role in the efficient allocation of resourcesâhad a good deal more to do with the greatness of fifth-century Athensâa “microcosmos”âthan the practice of public virtue that he extolled. See Hayek,
The Fatal Conceit,
pp. 18â19, 43â47, 80â81.

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.âOut of an excessive fear that government might create an “established” religionâa state church like the Church of Englandâthe Supreme Court has given us, in the last few decades, a jurisprudence that misreads the First Amendment and effectively prohibits the government from supporting promising means of rescuing people from despair, even when those means would tend neither to establish a church nor to infringe upon the free exercise of religion. (The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free excercise thereofâ¦”) In the Supreme Court's view, however, even the most indirect support of religion
in general
âas opposed to particular religionsâis a violation of the Establishment Clause. The Court invented this constitutional prohibition out of thin air; the First Amendment itself says nothing about government support for religion in general. If the Establishment Clause requires the government to be scrupulously neutral between faith and faith, it nowhere requires the government to be neutral between religion, agnosticism, and atheism. The constitutional case law of the last few decades is at odds with the country's shaping traditions; the federal government has
never
been neutral on the question of the value of religion in general (as opposed to the value of particular religious faiths). American history is full of examples of government “support” for religion, from chaplains and prayers in the legislature and the armed forces to the federal holiday of Christmas. When the other day I went to mail some letters, I could not help but note the irony, perhaps the tragedy, of a constitutional regime in which the post office is permitted to print stamps depicting the Blessed Virgin and play “Silent Night” in public places but in which federal aid to “faith-based” programs that save people's lives is forbidden. There are, however, indications that this hostility toward religion is beginning to wane. In an influential book,
The Culture of Disbelief,
constitutional scholar Stephen Carter took issue with those who would make the Establishment Clause a “guarantor of public secularism.” Carter argued that if the Founders' vision of a “wall” between church and state is to be made “compatible with the structure and needs of modern society,” a “few doors” need to be carved into the wall. Congress, emboldened by the change in public sentiment, recently passed a law guaranteeing “that a church has a right to compete for state contracts to perform welfare services without compromising âdefinition, development, practice and expression of its religious beliefs.'” The state of Michigan has gone so far as to instruct “its welfare officials to start âreaching out toÂ â¦ faith-based organizations for help' in guiding people off public assistance and back into the mainstream.” It's not clear, however, that this new approach will survive scrutiny in the courts.

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