SAM writes:

I want to comment on this slapdash article by the political philosopher Michael Ignatieff in The Atlantic.

The article is written as a brief defense of Machiavelli’s amoralist position in politics. But the defense is revealing less for its content than for the way in which it provides a window into the inner world of the secular liberal intellectual. I know of no way to describe that world except to say that it is a dream world; an ideological hallucination.

The article begins by describing Obama’s decision to kill Osama Bin Ladin. Ignatieff writes of this:

“It’s a Machiavellian moment in a second sense: an instance when public necessity requires actions that private ethics and religious values might condemn as unjust and immoral”

This is utterly bizarre; there is no deep or pressing moral dilemma involved in making the decision to kill an avowed terrorist with the blood of nearly 3000 Americans on his hands. I cannot for the life of me think of a single prominent moral or religious outlook, other than extreme pacifism, on which this is even a difficult moral decision. Ignatieff’s claim that this as a moral conundrum, the resolution of which vindicates political amoralism, is intelligible only to someone already deep in the throes of anti-colonial or anti-Western moral assumptions. In other words, it is only a conundrum to someone who lives inside an ideological hallucination. In the world outside that hallucination, no moral conundrum even exists.

And then, later, he writes:

“A leader guided by public necessity is less likely to be cruel and vicious than one guided by religious moralizing. Machiavelli’s ethics, it should be said, were scathingly indifferent to Christian principle, and for good reason. After all, someone who believes he has God on his side is capable of anything.”

Again, it is as if this was written by someone living in a dream world where the last 120 years never happened. It is obvious to anyone that the worst monstrosities inflicted on mankind came by way of thoroughly secular and mostly left-leaning regimes in the 20th century; it was at the lowest ebb of Christian influence on society that industrial scale slaughter and cruelty reached its peak. That Ignatieff can casually toss this sentence off as though it were simply obvious is revealing. Someone who can attribute the worst of human cruelty to religion, when we are not even two decades away from the most secular and most barbarous century in human history, does not live in the real world. He lives inside an ideological hallucination.

Laura writes:

Eric Voegelin called it the “Gnostic Dream.” In The New Science of Politics, he wrote:

The phenomenon of the dream world, based on definite principles, requires some explanation. It could hardly be possible as a historical mass phenomenon unless it were rooted in a fundamental experiential drive. Gnosticism as a counter existential dream world can perhaps be made intelligible as the extreme expression of an experience which is universally human, that is, of a horror of existence and a desire to escape from it.

[..]

It is the mood of late, disintegrating societies that are no longer willing to fight for their existence.

[The New Science of Politics; pp. 167-68]

— Comments —

Alan writes:

Michael Ignatieff was the leader of Canada’s federal Liberal party and stood for election to be Prime Minister of Canada.

The final paragraph in the article is frightening in its implications for this is apparently what the elite liberal world thinks:

We should not choose leaders who agonize, worrying about the moral hazards of the power they exercise in the people’s name. We should choose leaders who sleep soundly after taking ultimate risks with their own virtue. They are doing what must be done. The Prince’s question about the current president would be: Is he Machiavellian enough?

Stan writes:

I don’t think it’s right to say that Machiavelli was amoral: he certainly seemed to believe in good ends and bad ends.  What is remarkable about him is his disdain for the rules of conventional morality when they hinder achievement of a genuine good.   For example, if a strong and stable government is far preferable to the condition of perpetual civil war, then securing that government by criminal means may be morally justified — this is all that Machiavelli’s supposed amorality amounts to.  It’s the doctrine that the ends justify the means.  (Contrary to one mistaken view, it doesn’t imply that ANY end would justify ANY means.)

Thus, despite what Ignatieff says, there is no implied gulf separating public and private morality.  There only seems to be a gulf because a ruler acts on behalf of a political community, and the implications, the repercussions, the consequences of  each of his actions must be far different from what they would be if he were acting as a private person.  And if Machiavelli is right, the morality of an act is inseparable from its consequences.

Ignatieff (who strikes me as something of a power-worshiper) is also wrong to oppose “public necessity” to Christianity.  First, it seems fairly obvious that someone who believes he has God on his side (or that he’s on God’s side) is more, not less, likely to act in the teeth of conventional rules and precedent.  Second, Machiavelli’s “scathing indifference” that so impresses Ignatieff is not really about Christianity at all: rather, Machiavelli rejects the notion that morality can be reduced to a fixed set of commandments or maxims that must be rigidly followed regardless of circumstances.  This may or may not be compatible with Christianity, but it is not primarily concerned with refuting Christianity.

Whatever Machiavelli’s intention may have been, Ignatieff recommends “public necessity” as an alternative to Christianity because, he claims, it would reduce cruelty and violence in the rulers who accept it.  And how in the world did he reach this conclusion?  There seem to be at least two unstated assumptions: first,  that Christianity is incompatible with “public necessity” and second, that religion itself is the source of undesirable psychological traits.  It turns out that Ignatieff is an intolerant atheist, and he is trying to use Machiavelli as an ally of his agenda.  It’s all nonsense.

Sam writes:

That passage Alan quotes contains yet another egregious lapse into unreality courtesy of Michael Ignatieff. Reading this over, I feel as if these leftist intellectuals aren’t even thinking about what they are saying but are simply parroting the things that they hear while immersed in their echo chamber.

To illustrate, Ignatieff writes:

“We should choose leaders who sleep soundly after taking ultimate risks with their own virtue.”

This is a short sentence, but it reveals a lot so let’s unpack it. Here, Ignatieff unwittingly illustrates why atheists and secularists have always been disqualified from positions of high office. For a secularist, it is impossible in principle to take an “ultimate risk” with one’s virtue, because the secularist denies the afterlife. His idea of an “ultimate risk” is to risk going down in recorded history as a bad man according to those who write the history books for future generations. But the individual actor risks nothing, personally on this account. According to the secularist, the individual simply expires at death and is subject to no more harms and no more rewards as a matter of metaphysical necessity.

For a Christian, to take an “ultimate risk” with one’s virtue would mean being exposed to the possibility of eternal damnation, the worst conceivable outcome to any human existence. No clear-headed Christian would expose himself to that risk, for that really is an “ultimate risk” of one’s eternal destiny. An eternity in Hell is an eternity of loss, a “risk” that the secularist philosophy dares not even dream of.

So, a priori, who would be more likely to commit moral monstrosities when given a position of power? Someone who believes they will be rigorously judged at death, and that the outcome of that judgment will make the difference between eternal bliss or eternal perdition, or someone who believes that death is simply the end of one’s existence? To ask the question is to answer it.

As I noted earlier, Ignatieff, like most secular intellectuals, lives inside an ideological hallucination. In his hallucinatory world, religious believers in positions of power are unconstrained in their exercise of it, even though they believe that they might spend an eternity in torment because of them. So religious believers in power are bad, because they might do anything, including things that they know would damn them to hell forever. In this same hallucinatory world, secularists, who ex hypothesis go out of existence at death, are all so scared of being thought poorly of by future historians whose barbs they will never feel that they will invariably consider only the common good. This is sheer insanity.

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