Can we all just get along? We are one people united. We are the world. Okay, okay. You’ve heard all these slogans repeated in times in trouble. Why do we keep falling for it? And why is it such pap?
Spitzer talks about how “our desire for love and to love is unconditional, but our actuality is conditioned. Our desire is for the perfect, but our actuality is imperfect.” So we humans desire and have a sense for the perfect, but we definitely suck sometimes. And some more than others.
You don’t have to go far to see this in our personal lives. Just recall a time when a lover failed to meet your expectations. Initially in the honeymoon phase, we confuse the other for being perfect and unconditional in their love. He or she may have qualities of the transcendent, but they cannot be a proxy for God. So if you’ve killed off your relationship to Him, all your higher desires need to be fulfilled by that other person. Talk about high-maintenance!
It’s no different in communities and culture. People have their own self-interests and values, so some disorder is inevitable in any system that respects liberty and virtue. I once heard that democracy is designed to frustrate the totalistic impulse. And that’s a good thing, because any unifying system from top-down is going to constrain pluralism and the dynamism that ensues.
Gödel said any system has to be consistent or complete, but cannot be both. As such, it is not likely you can come up with one global vision where everyone will come to consensus with and live as one people united.
Kristor at Orthosphere gets into the fallibility of political formalism and says,“This is why the general conservative deference to local traditions is the most appropriate political attitude. It is the opposite of a theory. It is rather a method…Or, it is like applying a few time tested general principles to plan a building fitted to its environment, rather than designing an ideal house or farm plan that will work well everywhere.”
The Church understood this need as Subsidiarity: concrete decisions must be made on the level closest to concrete reality. Local idiosyncrasies matter, and should be taken into account whenever possible. While this may lead to ethno-centricism, it can also allow for intimate imperfect love in community over an abstract, unachievable perfect love.
“This is why there can be no global government. It is also why no government can be perfect in its execution of justice; for government as such involves adjudication between subsidiary social organs, in pursuit of social harmony according to some scheme of justice – of morality and right political order – that government per se cannot but presume must properly rule with just authority over disparate subsidiary social organs that are somewhat dissimilar in their own notions of justice. Only when all such social organs, up and down the social hierarchy, ascribe to a common cult, and so to a set of general principles about how society should go, is even good government ever possible.”
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. And that’s the problem in a nutshell folks!