Authority a la Carte
How Teleology Becomes Liberalism
“Nietzsche or Aristotle?” — Alasdair MacIntyre
In this, the 50th article on this Substack, we will draw together some of the threads of previous articles. We will show that liberalism’s main alternative (“traditional” teleological ethics) is no alternative but its father, and that we have a better, stronger, and frankly more traditional alternative ready to hand in command-based ethics. Thank you to everyone who has a paid subscription here, you keep this going:
Marcus summarized the problem aptly:
This problem of modernity is made worse by the fact that 100 times out of 100, what counts as ‘natural law’ turns out to be the result of political expediency. Here is no alternative to modernity, but part of it—maybe its principal cause.1
Teleology is no more of an alternative. It’s not just that teleology fails to be useful. In teleology failing to live up to its own standard (of being “for something”, i.e. for rendering morality workable), it is thereby totally undermined. The answer, as we shall see, is to dispense with all “for the sake of which” in matters of ultimate moral weight. This will be jarring to the reader, especially the traditionalist who has been steeped in a world of moral ends. But unlike commands, ends are unclear and must be ultimately be decided by every agent for himself—God’s ends become his own ends. How? Let’s break it down.
Teleology introduces ends2 into the problem of conduct. Everything is for something—sex is for procreation, a community is for securing the common good, etc. Whereas a command can simply be followed without inquiring into the purposes of the commander,3 teleology demands this inquiry at every turn. It’s not enough to say “we can’t let this foreigner in because the law forbids it”—the law itself is simply an instrument of the lawgiver’s purpose, so we must constantly ask whether the law serves that purpose, whether that be human rights, equality, the common good, the popular will, freedom, democracy, or what have you. These purposes are what Adam Katz has called super-sovereignty, a kind of master-law that stands above the actual law.4 What begins as something ostensibly hard and objective such as justice, becomes a menu of rationalizations for whatever men already want to do, it becomes a battleground, the site where whole civilizations go to die. By the time you’re asking what justice really is, you’ve lost it irretrievably.
There is no end, no purpose, no “that for the sake of which” as regards the LAW. A law is simply a command, and to adjudicate the purposes of that command is to override it. To question commands on the basis of whether they fulfill their intended ends is to issue your own commands—here is the problem of liberalism in a nutshell. This super-sovereignty, this endless debate over what justice really demands, over what a community is really for, over what white really is—all this is sublimated self-legislation. And to legislate for oneself is to lose the law altogether.
To judge ends and whether the law serves them is to put yourself in the place of the lawgiver. One cannot both be lawgiver and bound by law: this is the basic insight of absolutism that runs from Bodin to Schmitt—as Bodin says, a hand cannot bind itself:
For just as, according to the canonists, popes cannot bind their own hands, so neither can the supreme prince, nor the highest magistrate, nor any private citizen, give decrees or commands to himself. Hence that clause affixed to the end of all laws and edicts: “because it has so pleased us.” So that it may be understood by all that laws, although just, depend on the will of the one commanding them. But all princes and peoples are equally bound by divine and natural laws, he and who tries to break or dispute them will not escape the judgements of divine majesty.5
This last point about the natural law is important, because of what Bodin is not saying. He’s not saying that natural law confers the right to rebel, but that nature will visit destruction on the unjust. As we shall see shortly, the only right you have to rebellion is given by the tradition itself.
Absolutism is often taken to be itself the father of liberalism, when in reality it is the interregnum between liberalism and liberalism’s own father—it is a state where the will of the lawgiver reigns above individual conscience rather than the other way around, where ultimate decision rests in someone and not everyone. Decisionism, far from making liberalism unopposable, is the only conceivable opposition to it that doesn’t simply recreate it immediately under “based” garb. If the actual law has been usurped under the colour of ‘natural law’, the usurper’s successors never become legitimate no matter how much time has passed. Without formal, legal sanction, legitimacy is impossible and law can simply be created out of nothing.
Teleology thus enshrines sola fide, and it does so by the same dynamic as does conscience, because judging ends being a matter of one’s own judgement, it depends on one’s own conscience. Ends are never something simply given like commands, but always evaluated. Every generation, every person, must judge goals, ends, purposes, and values anew, must decide for himself what the purpose of law is, who the highest lawgiver is—this is the essence of conscience: before grace, the confirmation. Just as a hand cannot bind itself, just as a man cannot be his own witness, to sit in judgement of the god is to put oneself on the god’s throne. For our archaic forebears, no grosser impiety could be imagined. The fruit of all this talk about telos is the modern world.6
Whereas a command can simply be followed, an end must forever be interpreted—it’s a legal realist boot stomping on the law forever. “Ends” are exactly how we can drum up gay marriage from the American constitution: we judge not by the letter of the law, not by what the framers actually wrote, but by their supposed “intentions”, which are invariably our intentions. The constitution can’t simply be followed, it must forever be recast, remade, reinterpreted, it must be a ‘living document’, which is just to say, it must be thrown out. Judging ends and intentions is smuggling in our own, often unwittingly. This is the historical rule, and we can tell because in practice teleology has been followed by rampant atheism and/or the collapse of the social order, both anciently and in the modern world. This is the same process we described in our article Liberalism, Then and Now: an idea moving to its logical conclusion, becoming ever more internally consistent.
By now the reader has probably asked himself the question: but how do we judge which commands to follow? Some commands contradict others. Which is authoritative? How do we judge? Without collapsing back into super-sovereignty, the answer is simple—the ancestral principle: the elder command prevails. No judgement or conscience is involved; this is basically an algorithm. Nor is this principle justified by some higher principle (like practicality etc.)—it’s self-evident based on what authority actually is: authorship. Your father is your authority because he authored you. The alternative is to destroy authority. Endlessly asking “is that authority really authoritative though? on what basis?” devolves into radical subjectivism where you are the ultimate authority, epistemic and moral—authority a la carte.
But what if your father is a pedophile? The teleological paradigm grounds your right to rebel on ends, presumably determined by community leaders inquiring into the rational purposes of fatherhood, etc. But what if they’re pedophiles, as has historically happened? You can see where this is going. This line of thought leads back to you adjudicating the legitimacy of authority, i.e. to antinomianism. The ancestral or folkish paradigm, on the other hand, deals with it quite simply: your father’s command to bend over is overridden only by the command of your grandfather, who presumably was not a pedophile and whooped his ass for being degenerate, or if not, then of his own father, his own father, and so on—all the way back. Unless you’re descended from a line of pedophiles all the way back to the high gods, the problem is easily resolved in a morally intuitive way—and crucially, without doing away with law altogether.
We have here the inverse of legal realism, which is just to say the inverse of natural law and teleology—folkish morality treats the eldest command, and not the youngest, as sovereign. There is no possibility of revolution except as sanctioned by the tradition. The only alternative to this is each man as the judge of ultimate matters—sola fide.
So MacIntyre is wrong when he poses Nietzsche as an alternative to Aristotle. The two are structural correlates. Both call for self-legislation, and both augured the end of their own worlds—Nietzsche was just more direct about it. Absolutism, command, decision, and imperium—all these are synonymous with LAW, and the only real alternative to self-legislation. Those of us who are folkish reject absolutism too quickly as something foreign, when in reality it could not be closer to the root of our folkhood: it is the astonishing revival in modern times of the Indo-European déms pótis, the “master of the house”. This gives us our word despot today, and we can see the depth of the revolution against real authority by the semantic change from something good to something evil—this is far from the only example of such a prehistoric revolution.
“But”, MacIntyre might say, “teleology gets the last laugh! Aren’t we arguing that imperativity is better than the alternative—and by better, we mean serves a certain purpose?” No. We’re saying that teleology fails to live up to its own standard, of serving any purpose at all unless that purpose be permanent revolution. The “purpose of the law” is an empty concept—the purpose of the law is off-limits to anyone but the lawgiver, because by inquiring into the purposes of the law it is lost.
We have said before that we are one people insofar as we are under a shared imperative framework. Imperatives being agent-relative, they furnish us with a moral basis of folkhood.7 Without such a particularist framework, either the people and the morality have nothing to do with each other, or “the people” is all of humanity. The duty of the father is not the duty of the son, because each has been issued different commands. How much truer between societies than within?
See Coulanges, The Ancient City, p. 255.
Goals, purposes, etc.
Almost always. While there are exceptions, we can’t build our system on exceptions.
Dennis Bouvard, Anthropomorphics, p. 41.
Bodin, Six Books of the Republic, book i, ch. viii.
There’s obviously more than one cause of the modern world. Teleology is both cause and symptom.
This in no way denies any other basis, such as in blood.