Political realism originally meant that we did not expect too much from politics, or indeed from man, himself the agent of political action.
Yet, politics also meant that we did not expect too little either. All existing regimes show signs of both expectations. The Enlightenment heritage usually expected too much.
Indeed, it promised eventually to provide a perfect world by eliminating recurrent wrongs. It would achieve this lofty goal by transforming economics, constitutions, psyches, or the environment. What was wrong was judged to be outside of man, not within him.
The Machiavellian tradition, however, expected too little. It insisted that, to get things done, we had to do some evil, or at least we had to assign some prince or party to do the nasty tasks for us. All regimes were necessarily founded on the basis of allowing, even welcoming, some evil.
{mosads}Most people remain perplexed that things seem to become worse even as we have all the access to information and technology that any previous generation could not imagine. Often God gets the blame for this mess. Presumably He could have “fixed” things better in the beginning. In desperation, we hear of learned scientists wanting to redesign our bodies or to eliminate death entirely. Others claim that we need to flee to some outer space planet. We are consuming everything with which the earth has provisioned us. Otherwise, it’s so long Charlie for the human race, what with global warming and other such lofty enthusiasms.
The realist tradition, which claims, among others, Thucydides, Aristotle, and Augustine, thought that such a thing as human nature existed. It held firm over time and space. Both dire and dignified deeds would recur pretty much in the same way every time human beings appeared, no matter how they configured themselves politically. We could find good folks in terrible regimes and bad apples in relatively good ones.
Realists thought that, comparatively, we would always have rich and poor. Plato thought this to be the case also except, perhaps, in his city in speech. But it had no earthly location except in the mind of whoever wanted to think it through. We would always have a configuration of good and bad, usually, with eerie consistency. Citizens could be classified fairly accurately by Aristotle’s virtues and vices or by the Ten Commandments taken in their bare essences.
Realists admitted that men existed to act among their peers. They needed to make things that people required and desired. The universe seemed already provisioned to provide for human needs and wants.
But the astonishing thing was that to make useful and elegant things, man had to use his brains. Foraging in the fields and forests was not enough. He is the one creature who was required to think in order not only to provide for himself, but also to be what he ought to be. Certain standards or strands of nobility with which he was compared kept bothering his soul. In spite of his best efforts to eradicate any sense of an obligatory human nature, it keeps coming back. It was pretty clear to the sages of our kind not only that things could go wrong, but that they were likely to do so unless we worked to prevent it. Aristotle had not talked of habits for nothing.
This prevention of personal disorder, however, was premised on the fact that no automatic formula could be devised to guarantee that men must do what is right. The reason for this caveat seemed to imply that the rational animal had to choose to use his head. Right choice needed discipline and insight. But it was also clear that the actions of the worst of our kind also revealed a high level of cunning intelligence. Real tyrants were not dummies or just brutes. They were, as Plato taught us, philosopher-kings gone wrong. We miss the drama of our time if we fail to note the logic of decline that follows a relentless and systematic deviation from the good, almost as if to say that a more than human intelligence works against our true dignity.
But why did things go wrong? If it were necessary that they went wrong, we have no reason to blame anyone for anything. And as Aristotle also said, ethics and politics are matters of praise and blame, almost as if this judgment is an essential element in our lives together. Tell me what you praise or blame and I will tell you what you are. And if you do not tell me, I can usually figure it out by your actions, as you can mine.
So it is realism we seek, the common sense that keeps away from both utopia and hell on earth, the realization that we have here no lasting city.
The Rev. James Schall, S.J., author of “A Line Through the Human Heart: On Sinning & Being Forgiven,” is professor emeritus at Georgetown University.
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