Are fraud, deception, lying, and dissimulation not only permissible for the stability and security of the state – but necessary – precisely because scrupulosity in (private, personal) morals is fundamentally at odds with the requirements of collective political life? On the face of it – or just below the cosmetically painted face of their artful writings – Machiavelli and Bacon appear to take sides with the state’s security and stability against lofty personal morals – if and when the two are at loggerheads. The antithesis of this position is outrageously expressed in E.M. Forster’s famous declaration, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
History is full of noteworthy instances wherein strong individuals, compelled by their conscience, their principles, their honor, or their love, stood defiantly against the city, the tyrant, the “state,” the Church, or some other version of “the Big Other” that threatens the lone individual with its Leviathan-like bulk and power.
If we begin from a position which recognizes the value and importance of both the individual and the state – or private and public life – then we may find it easier to avoid an either-or, oppositional dualism. If a “middle way” weren’t so often boring and tepid, one might be forgiven for suggesting that these two – the individual and the city or state – are interdependent. Can we really have one without the other? They may not always be in a harmonious or complementary relationship – usually they are not – but aren’t such discords and oppositions as much invitations to creative solutions as they are grounds for a cynical or pessimistic rejection of one side or the other?
Framing the (tandem, complementary, correlative) situation in such a way that we are strongly urged to pick a side (Antigone or Creon, Prometheus or Zeus, Socrates or the Athenian jury, Galileo or the church, Edward Snowden or the US government?) is an appeal to heat (passion, attachment, prejudice) and an insult to light (reason, arbitration, mediation). So, when anyone passionately and/or rhetorically argues only for one side of this continuum or spectrum (on one end of which is individual autonomy and, on the other, the inviolability of state security and authority) we should prick up our ears and then check to see if our noses don’t “smell a rat.”
To go back to my first question in the initial paragraph: is the source of this reported split or unresolved (unresolvable?) conflict between public/political necessities and private/personal morality the West to be found in the (apparently insurmountable) incommensurabilities between Judeo-Christian religion and Greco-Roman rationalism? This seems to be a central question for Leo Strauss in his great essay, “Progress or Return?”
It would appear that Pope Alexander VI – rather like Machiavelli – simplified things by denying or jettisoning the Judeo-Christian half (or leg) of the Western inheritance. Of course such brazen “worldliness” and contempt for Christian virtues makes the Borgia pope a shocking hypocrite. Is the one-sidedness we see in the Borgias – or, for that matter, the uncompromising “anti-worldliness” of Savonarola – even permissible in any Westerner who is seriously intent upon negotiating the tension of opposites that defines our past, our present, and, no doubt, our future?