The Trouble in Catalan

Catalan has declared independence from Spain. Throughout this process the Spanish government has acted about like the Chinese government would behave - with total inflexibility and threats of force.

The "enlightened" EU members refuse to recognize Catalan. In the end we see that some huge centralized structures may put up better fronts than others, but their interest is in accumulating control which is the antithesis of individual liberty.

I am not a secessionist myself, in the sense that I don't want to secede from the central government, I just want to greatly reduced its sphere of influence. But I am a secessionist in the sense that I believe what the Declaration of Independence says about the right of communities of humans to alter or abolish a form of government which no longer fulfills its just purpose - protecting their God-given rights. This right of secession is meaningless unless it stands whether or not the offending government declares it to be legal or illegal.

The Spanish Constitution of 1978 was influenced by the Fascists of the Franco administration. Naturally it puts "National Greatness" over "Human Freedom" in its priorities. But by making it illegal to leave Spain no matter how antagonistic the relationship is we find there was no particular reason for Madrid to treat Catalan with respect or equity. Paradoxically, when it is legally recognized that a province can leave a central state, it sets in motion forces where that province is treated in such a manner that it will tend to not want to leave. When the central state attempts to enforce the fiction that leaving can't even be discussed much less attempted, it will set in motion forces which lead to the dissolution of the nation.

One of the pillars of localism is that relationships between governments at various levels should be voluntary.  And if a sub-unit decides that it wants to change the unit it is in then there should be a legal process by which this can be done. Agreeing in advance on the terms under which a split can occur not only makes inevitable splits less painful and bloody, it can actually reduce the chances that a split is necessary!

   

The Worst Idea Humanly Conceivable

I can understand why people are wary of mixing a religious institution with the institution of the state- it is a combination which has historically proven ruinous to both institutions and also to the people they are supposed to serve. This is why the Founders forbade the Federal government from passing any law respecting or prohibiting any religious establishment. The formal unification of the institutions of Church and State, except in the Person of Christ, is a blasphemy.

On the other hand, they made no effort to separate their personal faith from their ideas on public policy and how they governed. Indeed most of them believed that our Republic could only survive if both leaders and people informed their behavior by religion and morality. That despite the fact that those who governed had far less power than their modern counterparts, because the state was much smaller.

The idea we have these days-  that the people who govern us should act as though there is no God or that He is irrelevant to public policy or governance, is probably the worst idea that can be humanly conceived. Do we really want to give a group of corruptible humans a vast amount of power and tell them "act as though there is no God watching over you. Act as if there will be no eternal accountability for what you do"? 

Between the terrible idea of fusing the institutions of Church and State, and the worst idea humanly conceivable of pretending that the knowledge of God is irrelevant to statecraft, is the classical middle ground advocated by Localism. It is the middle ground between would-be tyrants who use the name of God as an excuse for everything that they themselves wish to do, and the radical secularist who would leave us with the thorough and decentralized, paradoxical, chaotic tyranny which comes from a society which sinks into moral nihilism.

Localism's solutions are subtle, and unfortunately we live in times where many people seize on unsubtle, knee-jerk reactions as "solutions" with little thought or reflection. While slaves can get by with little thought or reflection about the nature of government, in the long run free people can't. Consideration of such matters is inextricably connected to the idea of self-governance. Without a balanced and thought-out view of the role of religious faith in governance we cannot have a complete political philosophy. The second book below in particular makes this clear.

   

A Philosophy of Government for Jordan Peterson

A friend turned me on to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a Canadian professor known for his reasonable defenses against the excesses of political correctness, as well as his lectures demonstrating that the major themes and archetypes of Christianity are "true" in a higher and valuable sense irrespective of the question of whether or not they were true literally.

We don't know exactly what Jordan's philosophy of government is, if he even has one. But based on everything I have seen and heard from him, he fits the profile of someone who would be a localist. That is, a localist as described in "Localism, a philosophy of government" operationally and the lesser-known "Localism Defended" philosophically.  What he is saying about good and evil, truth and lies, and complexity and dialogue over pat answers strongly points to a human who would agree wholeheartedly about what Localism has to say about us and our government.

Localism is all about a continual process of government adjusting its parameters in order to meet the needs and desires of the population it purports to serve. It respects tradition and stability without being irretrievably bound by it. It is not locked into any particular place on the left-right spectrum, though its inability to enforce large-scale coercion makes it incompatible with authoritarian forms of government from any part of the political spectrum. It is in the middle of the up-down spectrum between the stifling authoritarianism of the central state and the lawless chaos of anarchy.

The quote in the picture above, where Peterson equates evil with the force which believes that its knowledge is complete, is very much in line with what Localism says about humans and government. That is, since no system of human government is perfect, what matters most is the ease with which one can do a "reset".

Since different people are in different places culturally and morally, the right answer for them about where the lines should be drawn may not work for different people in a different city hundreds of miles away. Localism recognizes that our knowledge about what government should do is not complete. The answer will vary as the situation and population varies, and we should be willing to sleep well at night even if people we have never met in a city we have never visited are not doing things the way that we think that they should. Other philosophies of government, including those which prattle on the most about liberty, regularly lack this basic humility. The few over-arching restrictions in localism have the sole purpose of preserving decentralization of political power and thus protecting individual self-determination from all enemies both foreign and domestic.

What I am arguing here is that Peterson's views on humanity and the very nature of our struggle with truth necessitates a view of government which does not ascribe unmitigated virtue to either the common man or some set of "elite" rulers. This is just the sort of balanced view prescribed by localism. I once called it "The Dark Knight of Political Philosophies" because it is not the one we want. It does not flatter us. But its the one we need because it tells us the truth about ourselves whether we are rulers or ruled. We all need "sorting" from time to time because we are not intrinsically good (properly related to truth), we are intrinsically "unsorted", to put it mildly.

Yet even though Peterson equates certainty of knowledge with evil, he believes that truth exists and that the life-long search for it is good. These are the hallmarks of a classical thinker rather than a post-modernist thinker. Localism is built upon exactly those classical rather than post-modernist foundations. It is the combination of the classical view that truth exists and is noble to pursue combined with the humility of recognizing that we will never get all the way there. This exact balance is why I believe that localism is essentially Jordan Peterson's world-view applied to a philosophy of human government. Central-state authoritarianism can too easily come from a classical view of truth without humility, while lawless anarchy springs from post-modernism premises.  Peterson embraces classical thinking but with the intellectual humility which makes it open to improvement and ultimately bearable. This is precisely the localist view of things.

I notice on his lectures about "Nationalism vs. Globalism" he speaks favorable of nationalism. The reasons he gives for favoring it are even more applicable to localism than they are nationalism. He talks about units that the typical citizen is able to relate to. He talks about the broken or delayed feedback mechanisms when the controllers are too distant from the controlled. Every argument he makes for why nationalism fares better than globalism would work even better for localism, even compared to nationalism.

I don't want to oversell it. The first book in particular is from a very American perspective. The second book is more explicitly theistic than Peterson in that Peterson only says the concepts from Christianity are useful while localism posits that we cannot rule out the existence of God and therefore what the existence of God might say about human government. It is not from a view of a "disciple" of Peterson. It is not a "result" of anything Peterson had to say, but rather a confluence of thought from two people who share a similar basic world view in may important respects. Peterson addresses much broader themes and may even find the idea of application of his premises to human government as a tedious and derived topic best left to more narrow thinkers. If that is the case, I am humbly willing to be one of those thinkers.