Compensation replaces retribution

"In the political order ... justice replaces vengeance, and negotiated solutions abolish absolute commands." (The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Roger Scruton, 2002; page 2). 

According to this notion of a political order, compensation replaces retribution. With this substitution, right at the outset, is where the Western way of thinking about politics runs aground.

Tempered by secular processes

The separation of Church and State is about not only the introduction of legitimacy into the domain that heretofore was dominated entirely by authority. The introduction of legitimacy forces the dialogue into purposes and objectives that must yield to reason, to expression and deliberation, to the impersonal processes of the corporate will and desires. By virtue of their impersonality, the civic decision-making process can take on the self-restraint that legitimate authority necessarily requires. 

The Bible (both Hebrew and Christian) as well as the Greek polis both posit spiritual systems that are tempered by the secular processes that are designed to represent, in part, the public weal. 

The sheep-consuming unit

As they were preparing for the exodus from Egypt, the Israelite movement of the basic national unit from the natural family to the sheep-consuming unit re-defines the national identity as being about a dedication to the Godly purpose and not about the wishes of the head of the family. 

If anything, the prerogatives of the first-born are being usurped in the national founding and are being displaced to a larger group identity, to subservience to the Old One. 

Reason, not revelation

"According to Marsilius [in his 14th century tract, Defenser Pacis] it is the state and not the church that guarantees the civil peace, and reason, not revelation, to which appeal must be made in all matters of temporal jurisdiction." (The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Roger Scruton, 2002; page  4). 

If we ask the question why has reason been weakening along with the weakening of the mainstream religions, the answer is because the mainstream religions had made their accommodations with the state; the fringe spiritual movements had not. So if the states weaken, the mainstream religions weaken along with them while the fringe spiritual movements, having not made their accommodations with the state, are not drawn down by the weakening of the state.

The way of temperance

When (as they do in America) they say they are a nation of laws and not men what they mean is authority trumps honor, that the leader's claim to power is with respect to some objective which resides outside of, and even in opposition to, his person. 

When we move from personal to group decision-making, especially when we move to large groups such as armies and nations and international relations, we need ways to manage the carnal issues. We need both to preserve the carnal sensibility while at the same time removing or tempering the atavistic impulses. 

Language is one way to effect that temperance. That is the path of reason and deliberation, the role of parliaments, all of which belongs to the domain of the state. There are however other ways, ways which apply to the church. 

It is in the religions that those tempering media are in crisis today. They have stopped functioning well. Those are the pain points where the religious systems need refurbishing. 

Sacred power & civic power

The notion of the church being subject to the state as an incorporated body of the state is evaporating. 

In the Middle East the mosque sees itself as superior to the state; in Europe the church is evaporating and only a secular state is being left over. Europe and the Arab/Muslim world are opposite sides of the same two coins: Europe has a weak church but a strong state structure (in the event, regional rather than national), while the Muslims have a strong mosque and weak states. 

Before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the person of the sultan or the caliph incorporated secular power and coupled it with sacred power to manage the matter of authority and honor; after the empire’s collapse, temporal power transferred to the European repository of civic power – the state – which has caused much confusion in the Arab/Muslim world. 

The prerogatives of authority

Duties are the obligations not of subjects but of sovereigns, of those who are in charge of themselves. 

Rights and duties both fall on a citizenry in their capacity to dictate and to dispatch the prerogatives of authority, which is to say the deployment of power to some common purpose in the corporate interest. 

When a subject performs a duty, they are performing it not as a subject but as a sovereign.

Benefit from the mechanisms

The primary function of the political process is not to arrive at an algorithm of decision-making but to transform each member of the polis into a citizen who would fulfill his duties faithfully. 

The ritual function of the political process is its most potent feature. It is not that a social contract subjects the citizens to the dictates of a government founded on the principles of legitimacy which is its most important attribute, it is that the political process transforms people into the sorts of people who could benefit from the mechanisms of a legitimate governmental process. 

The process shapes the people who then in turn participate in the process. It is hardly different from the evangelical process of conversion and rebirth. The act of participating as a member in the community shapes the people, energizes their souls, which in turn makes it possible for them to contribute productively to the corporate life of the community. 

The first element of stewardship

When a member of a group acts out of duty rather than out of either loyalty or honor, they are acting with the interests and the welfare and the standards and practices of the group in mind. 

That is how the decisions of the group are transformed as a resultant of the decisions of the members. This displacement of decision-making from centering on the person of the decider to centering on some other interest which the decider is keeping in mind, this displacement is the first element of stewardship. 

The 'representative' in representative democracy embodies that shift in the person's thinking when he makes his decisions out of a sense of duty, with the interests of the group paramount in his decision-making. The representative is the embodiment of those group interests and the election of the representative is the performance of civic duty par excellence. As such, elections rather than town hall meetings are the quintessential instruments of duty-engendering. 

Honor-shame societies can have meetings where everyone votes but when the group elects a representative who votes in their name, the process is tending toward the engendering of duty and the formulation of authority. 

Ruled by power

"... the difference between the West and the rest is that Western societies are governed by politics; the rest are ruled by power." (The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Roger Scruton, 2002; page  7). 

The ability for a society to be governed by politics depends on its citizens adopting a posture of authority, which posture translates in their conduct as the doing of one's duty. 

The dictates of loyalty

Western youth today seem to consider neither duty nor honor as particularly important virtues, and conduct themselves almost exclusively by the dictates of loyalty. 

Secular involvement

Because the spiritual authority (religious leaders) has subjected itself to secular authority (government leaders) it is difficult for spiritual leaders to give secular leaders directives about what the secular leaders should be doing with respect to matters that fall under the province of secular leadership. 

Consequently the spiritual leaders can't see their way clear to addressing the spiritual malaise that results, for example, from the world's addiction to oil because that sort of problem belongs squarely on the shoulders of the secular authority. Spiritual leadership has sued for secular involvement, and has been willing to give direction to secular authority, with respect to matters that properly and traditionally belonged in the church's domain like helping the poor; caring for the sick; sexual, marital mores; etc. Spiritual leaders are not accustomed to thinking and offering spiritual counsel about the largest political and most important strategic challenges the secular leadership is facing. 

For starters the spiritual leadership can't imagine what a solution could even look like nor can they credit themselves with being able to think through all the complex practical ramifications of an attempt at a solution. So they keep thinking about the smaller issues and never even see the effect on the world's spiritual condition of the larger geo-political forces are having and imposing on societies everywhere. 

When the secular leadership gets weak the spiritual leadership needs to step in and give them guidance, and that's what's not happening these days because the spiritual leadership is itself weak. The world’s spiritual leadership needs to recognize its own weakness and to fix its own house before it could address the larger challenges facing the social order. 

Akin to love and kindness

The covenantal relationship between God and Man as it is described by the Bible contains the same respect for autonomy that was the principle concern that drove the social contract theorists in defining a mode of government that would preserve that sense of autonomy in the citizenry. 

Whereas, however, duty expresses the authority social contracts afford their citizens, the relation between Man and God is governed by something else, something more akin to love and kindness. Alongside the authority and the impulse to retributive justice that duty affords the citizens of a society governed by a secular administration, the affection for God on which a spiritual community bases itself engenders feelings of kindness, mercy and the impulse to distributive justice that fully complement that duty and fill out the members’ sense of autonomy and stewardship. 

An identity that can take responsibility

The autonomy of the spiritual covenant coupled with the authority of the secular contract engender in the individual member an identity that can take responsibility for him/herself. 

That identity is then able at once to govern society justly as well as to engage in trades and tradita in the free exercise of the self-possession the society inculcated in its citizens and members. 

The ground of inalienable property

What cannot be sold also cannot be surrendered to another and delegated. 

What is inalienable to the person or the group accrues to them as rights. It also becomes their duty to superintend that property and those rights. 

Authority is the ground of property when that property is inalienable. 

In the Middle East & in Europe

• In the Middle East the religion is taking up the role of the state, and when that happens you get the kind of cruelty we are seeing; 
• In Europe the state is taking up the role of religion, and when that happens you get the kind of mildness we are seeing. 
• In the Middle East the religion is not performing its function and as a result raging vengeance is overwhelming retributive justice; 
• In Europe the state is not performing its function and as a result compensatory justice is overwhelming retributive justice. 
• In the Middle East case the prosecutors are unfettered; 
• In the European case they are disabled. 

The first person plural

Once we recognize authority, honor, loyalty as orientations the lesser self takes on with respect to its identity as a greater self we understand that the social contract entails not only the pre-existence of a first person singular but that the social contract also requires a first person plural. 

The first person singular is the lesser self; the first person plural is the greater self. 

The inter-generational bond

Scruton wants to argue a separate category of greater self he calls membership, which he defines as the inter-generational bond between the dead, the living, and the unborn (or yet-to-be-born) within any given generation. 

This inter-generational sense of membership explains the sense of stewardship people feel as well as the sense of giving that goes beyond the quid pro quo of the social contract. 

We wonder whether this sense of membership is nothing more than loyalty flavored with a bit of honor. 

Leaning to authority or loyalty or honor

The West defines the secular, political order as the ground of authority (and hence duty) and autonomy for every member of society while the other dimensions of the greater self, the dimensions that fall under the rubric of membership – family bonds, religious affiliation, ethnic, linguistic, geographic, etc. – work, in some way, in tension with the secular ground of authority in a political, state-based, national social organization and collective. 

The West is that social organization that privileges this secular ground of authority; the Rest bases its social organization on the other dimensions of the greater self, those that come under the rubric of membership, what we would identify as loyalty and honor. 

It could be that the US is leaning to authority while Europe is leaning to loyalty and the Middle East to honor. The apocalypse could well mean the end of authority and autonomy in either direction, either because honor has overwhelmed it or because loyalty has. 

The personal & the political

Authority, along with the political and electoral processes that define its rights and duties, divides the personal from the political in ways that societies organized along the lines of loyalty or honor do not. 

When nothing is political then everything is political and the personal domain becomes infected with the honor-bound issues and concerns of the power structure in ways that are intrusive and dysnfunctional. Alternatively, when nothing is political then everything is personal and the common weal becomes the screen on which many of the personal pecadillos of the membership get projected, to little avail and to the detriment of that society's ability to respond to strong leadership and therefore to function resolutely, innovatively and effectively.