Hillsdale Prof. Adam Carrington—teaches politics—recently wrote an interesting & heartfelt essay for Law & Liberty on the restoration of citizen virtue through friendship, looking to Aristotle for guidance. In a very divided nation in a rather dark mood, this is certainly needful! I admire Carrington’s moral demeanor & he has said kind things about my own writing as well & on the basis of mutual admiration, I wish to take objection to his essay on two levels.
Politically, Carrington ends up with three political demands phrased as “we must” regarding civil associations, small towns/neighborhoods, & education. He complains that the society is in a really bad way, that friendship is failing, all the way from the private level of friendship between men to the state & national level of friendship among all Americans. This is certainly true. I also agree with his guiding idea, that Tocqueville is the path to Aristotle & that conservatives should aim ultimately at understanding Aristotle's teaching of virtue & justice if they are to be effective as conservatives. But Carrington does very little to match ends & means: These three demands which are the aims set forth in the essay with the analysis of human action or political action specifically. For rhetorical purposes, he doesn't say who “we” are who “must” change America for the better. But if you think about it, it becomes obvious that only those who know the things of which he speaks—what pertains to the political & generous friendship he recommends—can do them. Since one cannot do what one does not know how to do. Therefore, it cannot be most Americans, since they lack the things he demands, or we wouldn’t have national problems—their predicament is itself the reason we complain about the American situation; & where there is no “can,” there can be no “must,” so in effect, he's asking for a remarkably aristocratic takeover of education, local politics, & civil society. I cannot believe this is what he means! This is not to deny that in every community some men have a great public spirit & remarkable capability of helping out in essential ways—we all know someone who impresses us in that regard; or those who don’t nevertheless have a dissatisfaction with what is euphemistically called dysfunctional communities in the jargon of the social sciences—the moral & intellectual basis of that dissatisfaction, of course, is the awareness that with the right leaders the community could turn around & flourish. But the rhetoric of the essay is a teacher addressing the general audience, his fellow citizens—not the remarkable men themselves, who perhaps don’t need teaching anyway. So Carrington aims very high & seems to me to neglect the lower levels where practical knowledge could actually help. I believe we need a political analysis of community & community problems that's much more modest & which can appeal to the middle class interest in property rights (with all the legal-economic stability implied) & education for kids (here, I'm much closer to Carrington).
Intellectually, Carrington mixes the analyses Aristotle offers in the Politics & Ethics, as though they were more or less the same, when they are emphatically not. I’ll show this by applying the teaching to America. The virtues discussed in the Ethics are, most of them, considered simply unavailable to most people; to read Aristotle's Ethics is to conclude that there are almost no virtuous men in America. I am not sure Mr. Carrington would be an exemplar of most of them, but I of course hope he is; but he cannot be an exemplar of the peak virtues, or we would have heard about it. It is of the essence of moral virtue that people know about it through reputation, at least. The teaching of the Ethics is much more aristocratic than any aristocracy we’ve heard of, since it is not satisfied to improve the manners of the wealthy, the governing class, or the military, but insists instead on forming men able to rule themselves & the community according to an analysis of character. So the analysis of friendship that crowns the discussion of those virtues in the Ethics is extremely inapposite to Carrington’s political discussion, which is explicitly aimed at American democracy. For my part, I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to talk about the Ethics when we talk about our politics, except perhaps Aristotle’s analysis of choice in Book III. Had he asked my opinion, I would have told Carrington what common sense says: If you want to talk about the regime & how to improve it, look at the Politics instead. It’s much more impressive for dealing with matters of life & death, but it’s much less ambitious philosophically. It could actually persuade people looking for answers, precisely because it lacks those beautiful & lofty thoughts. Aristotle deals with changes for the better or worse in regimes in the middle of the Politics, about which Carrington is strangely silent; (he mentions instead the beginning of the book—pre-political rule in the household, for example—& the ending—the best regime). We need to look at political friendship, not philosophical friendship, & offer some practical notes on where it can be found & fostered in our circumstances. The less we pride ourselves on knowing philosophy, the more we can expect to speak well about political activity.