Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 58

Modern Age

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Winter 2018

enough to make this final concession: "A science of politics must
try to defend order . . . through the most peaceful means possible,
while recognizing that it can aspire to nonviolence only at the
price of unleashing the greatest possible violence." In the spirit of
fusionism, it must be a fine balance. Using the least possible violence and allowing maximum freedom undoubtedly is the moral
way, but insufficient order can be catastrophic.
It is important to recall that Meyer considered the state (and
the family) to be the "natural" limits on freedom. He started with
civilization and Aristotle's assumption about man as a social and
political animal, but that means Meyer discounted perhaps 3,000 to
6,000 years of agricultural civilization's evolution and 7,000 years of
hunter-gatherer socialization before that. Yes, by the end, man was
social. But was he "naturally" so? The state clearly was not "natural."
Girard's analysis is important not so much for its specifics as
for the change in perspective it brings toward human time. An
awareness of that time's extraordinary length must affect how a
serious person looks at everything.
Recognizing that humanity did not start with civilization and
was not primarily social at the outset highlights the tenuous nature
of freedom-the degree of violence in nature, the difficulty of
containing it, and its possible reemergence absent suprarational
moral restrictions. Whatever interior constraints may be inherent
in us, human desire and the passion for others' goods and mates
must have dominated the species for a very long period before
the state arose. Social restraints were required to limit passionate,
primal freedom's violence, which was not tamed until symbols
of the sacred-sacrifices, prohibitions, taboos, and institutions
of ritual utilizing coercion, much of it against the innocent-produced order and prepared the way for the state and civilization.
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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Contents
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Modern Age - Winter 2018 - Contents
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