The What-If of this Blog

What if a convocation of thinkers could be summoned in some hyper-dimensional state, suffering neither burdens of physicality nor pressures of time?  Human beings they would yet be, yet also free to ponder collectively on the basic principles they would choose to guide an ideal society.

Men have tried sometimes to approximate such a process, with varying results.  One might think of the men of stature who conferred with Job, or of the ancient academies, or of the American Constitutional Convention, or of the assemblies of the French Revolution.  All quite different, yet all concerned with the timeless question of how man should act, and how he might be constrained to so act.

Of course their answers differed, and the results of their mutual ponderings (such as were enacted) differed.  And of course they were limited in the constraints of their humanity in manners that would not apply in the idealized convocation described above.

But is there really a complex, multivariable nature to any analysis we might make of real-life attempts to conceptualize an ideal society?  We could choose to analyze any such an attempt according to how we felt it was conducive to piety, reverence, loyalty, order, justice, equality, prosperity, happiness, transparency, accountability, or any such list or combination.  Or, on the other hand, we could examine any attempt to conceptualize an ideal society according to the real-world constraints that bore upon the attempt’s participants.

The choice is really that simple, as is the choice of (almost invariably privileged) thinkers to conduct their deliberations in an attitude of humility—or not.  For while fallible humans might choose legitimately to consider, say, justice (or not) as an element of an ideal society, they are not at similar liberty to ignore their own limitations.

Nor can any attempt to conceptualize an ideal society ignore the flawed humanity of the society’s constituents; if the populace is considered perfect, then any fantasized society can be constructed from them.  There persists, then, an inescapable reality: no conscientious analysis of human morality has any claim to legitimacy that does not accord primacy to humility and its necessary complement—mercy.

As an element of how we must treat each other, mercy is not one duty among others—it is the context in which all other duties are made intelligible.