Today’s gospel lesson from the Orthodox lectionary is on the parable of the leaven, and how a little bit really improves everything. In general, the leaven is love: you can change the world around you if you genuinely love. This is a fundamental truth, but the world has so damaged the concept of love, that until it is properly understood, I think it is dangerous to push it as a civic virtue. Instead, I would like people to start being civil.
Civil and tolerant people may or may not be virtuous in an absolute sense. Civility and tolerance can be expressions of higher virtues, but they are not morally virtuous in and of themselves. In fact, without strong theological moorings, they can easily be expressions of immorality, or, as is more often the case, amorality.
As a social virtue, civility allows individuals to work together more efficiently- but it does not lead individuals to become better people. For this, love is the virtue individuals should strive for. Love can, however, cause some pretty severe conflicts in society. Of course, I’m not talking about the shwarmy and pathetic “why can’t we just get along” conception of love so prevalent in today’s society, but the kind that sincerely wants the best for the beloved. In addition to being “nice” (or civil) this kind of love demands action when the lover thinks the beloved is doing something wrong (and not just something dangerous): it actually makes each of us spiritually responsible for our brothers and sisters.
The old saws “I would not do this if I did not love you” and “this is going to hurt me more than you” are quite out of fashion, but they point to an important and neglected aspect of love. It is the intrusive “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” rather than the more civil “don’t do unto others as you wouldn’t have them do unto you,” and it is very dangerous to implement on a large scale in the City of Men. It is dangerous because it leads people to invade the lives of others, and as a political ideology it’s implementation leads straight to totalitarianism.
God save me from any government here on earth that loves me! Loving my friend, I ask and help him to change when I think he is missing the mark. Both the “mark” and the means to best meet it are either shared among friends, or (at least) subject to discussion. This is especially the case among friends who share the same faith. The government is not so subtle. Nor is it necessarily controlled by friends. In fact, in a heterogenous society the variation in morals (shorthand for the “mark” and the method of attaining it) is likely to be quite severe. To make matters worse, the state is also much more powerful than most circles of friends.
Just call me a “bleeding-heart” conservative: I see many of the horrible conditions our world creates and want desperately to ameliorate them, but I am wary of the “unintended consequences” government solutions create. But it’s even worse than that: outside of a very restricted set of policy areas (e.g. security, infrastructure, safety net, education) I do not trust the government (or my brothers and sisters who vote) to know what is good for me or anyone else. Of course we can find common cause within a pluralist/multi-cultural world on the “lowest common denominator” moral issues, but even these become problematic if you scratch too hard (nor is it simply an issue of Christian vs. post-Christian morality because Christianity itself has been politicized).
I look forward to the day when I live in the kingdom where personal and civic morality converge. But on this side of the eschaton, there is no temporal ruler who can fuse the two; and people who confuse politics and religion, campaigns for revivals, and candidates for messiahs are setting themselves up for serious failure.
