Politics Can't Make Us Virtuous
Why we need mediating institutions to cultivate virtue
Humans love to pull levers, especially when we think those levers will change everything. And one of our favorite levers to pull is the lever of political power. We tend to imagine that any problem we have can be addressed through political intervention. National mental health crisis? Clearly this is first and foremost a political problem. Epistemological crisis (“fake news”), clearly this is first and foremost a political problem. Homelessness, poverty, crime, people voting for the wrong candidates—all first and foremost political problems. And of course, some of these are largely political problems. But they aren’t only political. The political lever is not the only one we can pull and sometimes it’s not the best one we can pull. Because when we look first and foremost to the government to address all our problems (which happens on the right and left) we ignore the role of mediating institutions, where communities made up of individuals get involved in acting with their influence to make change on the local level without the threat of coercion that politics brings. And I would argue that there are some things that the political lever is simply ineffective at doing, like cultivating virtue in citizens.
Policies can restrain evil. Do not murder. But restraining evil is not cultivating virtue. It’s only preventing the worst forms of vice. Bad policies can encourage vice and normalize it. But the deep cultivation of virtue in a person can’t be done by the State, not by a secular State that denies the existence of a telos in God. There are just some things that the lever of politics can’t do well. And my concern is that much of the culture wars and our current political wars are turf battles to gain control over a lever that can’t do what we need it to do: to cultivate virtue in our children and neighbors. For that, we need to turn to mediating institutions.
