To overcome divides, we must be Kentuckians first, Republicans and Democrats second.
A clutch of Kentuckians have now been charged with crimes committed during the Jan. 6 riot at the US capitol. Petitions have been filed in the Kentucky legislature to impeach both Democratic Governor Andy Beshear and Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron. Kentucky’s longtime fifth-district Congressional representative Hal Rogers voted to reject presidential election results from Arizona as well as Pennsylvania.
It seems our Commonwealth has become a house divided and profoundly so. Is there any way out of this mess? A clue might be found, I think, in philosophers of the past—more specifically in the moving commentary on an ancient philosopher that anchored President Biden’s inaugural address.
Summoning citizens together through their capacity for shared love, Biden appealed to a passage written by fifth-century philosopher and saint Augustine as he came to terms with the sacking of his own capital, Rome, by invading Visigoths. Biden paraphrased a statement from Augustine’s City of God: “a people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.”
How can this insight help us here in Kentucky today? Augustine reminds us that what would bind us together must lie beyond self-interest. It must be shared. And, more than that, a healthy political community cannot be grounded in justice alone. It requires, in addition and more basically, shared feelings, sympathies, and desires.
But a general idea of love itself isn’t a clear enough guide. President Biden properly asked, “What are the common objects we love that define us as Americans?” His answer: “Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And, yes, the truth.” That list, I’m afraid, inspired though it is, does not quite plumb the deep complexity of Augustine’s thinking.
Just before becoming a Christian, Augustine had been a devotee of the philosophical skepticism that flourished in Plato’s Academy. The skeptics taught Augustine that truth is elusive. As struggles over both election fraud and the COVID-19 pandemic remind us, we human beings stumble through what I’d call an “epistemic fog” of scientific and political controversy with little more than incomplete data, fragile probabilities, dim histories, and educated guesses.
The dogmatic certainties proclaimed by both sides in today’s political controversies are simply unwarranted, and they divide us. Caution, humility, and compassion for one another’s errors are truer to the human condition.
While love is crucial, Augustine also well understood that we human beings are prone to love badly. With often tragic results, we love the wrong things, in the wrong ways, and on the wrong occasions.
Biden’s list describes idealized objects of shared love. Unfortunately, it has been abundantly clear in recent days that more commonly we love our hierarchies, our power, our material acquisitions, and our own opinions even more. Sometimes, troublingly, we seem to love hating one another the most.
That last perverse kind of love points to something in the background of Augustine’s definition that might usefully be added to Biden’s aspirational list.
Before Augustine, the Greek philosopher Aristotle understood that political community depends upon political philia or civic friendship. That kind of friendship draws us together as we work towards what the Constitution calls, without irony, our General Welfare. Civic friendship establishes solidarity among us and cultivates a common life deeper than our political differences. One might call it the love proper to democracy.
If we’re going to overcome Kentucky’s toxic political divide, we must add to President Biden’s list of shared loves our fellow Kentuckians. We must be civic friends first, Republicans and Democrats second. Cultivating that kind of love is, of course, a tall order today. Achieving it will require not only extraordinary political art on the part of our nation’s leaders but also the exercise of renewed good will among its people. It’s time to set ourselves to that important task.
Dr. Peter S. Fosl is professor of philosophy at Transylvania University. www.PeterFosl.com
This story was originally published February 19, 2021 at 9:40 AM.