Dying for the telephone company
I’ve recently been getting into William Cavanaugh’s work; everything he writes seems to be incredibly perceptive. Here’s a quote from his essay, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20, no. 2 (2004): 263.
Alasdair MacIntyre alludes to this dual aspect of the nation-state in the following memorable quote:
The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf… [I]it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.
MacIntyre thinks that the nation-state can and does promote certain goods of order, but he also contends that it is incapable of promoting the common good. Integral to the political common good is a distributions of goods that reflect a common mind arrived at by rational deliberation. Rationaly in turn depends upon recognition of our fundamental dependence on one another. According to MacIntyre, the nation-state is an arena of bargaining amongst different group interests. In the absence of any generally agreed rational standard to adjudicate among such interests, decisions on the distribution of goods are made on the basis of power, which is most often directly related ot access to capital. The sheer size of the nation-state precludes genuine rational deliberation; deliberation is carred on by a political elite of lawyers, lobbyists, and other professionals. For the same reasion, the unitive community that the idea of a nation offers is an illusion. The nation-state is not a genuine community, a functioning rational collectivity whose bonds make possible “the virtues of acknowledged dependence” necessary for the common good. As MacIntyre says, “the shared public goods of the modern nation-state are not the common goods of a genuine nation-wide community and, when the nation-state masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both.
