On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion.

Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes.

1.

Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out of the church as a heretic.  We don't even really know where or when he was born.  Augustine says he was from what is today England, whereas Jerome says he was Irish.  We know he was active beginning in around 380 C.E., placing his birth somewhere in the middle of the 4th Century, the period of the first flowering of what is controversially and disputedly known as "Celtic Christianity."  We know he was well-read in both Latin and Greek, and given his time period and region of origin, this fact means that he was assuredly a monk.

It was in 380 that Pelagius leaves the British Isles and comes to Rome.  And, having arrived in Rome, he found it to be a cesspool.  Not only were the non-Christian or barely Christianized Romans living lives of debauchery and decadence, but Pelagius also found the Christian believers to be rather casual about their moral lives.  It seems that that general response given when questioned about these moral failings was some variation of "what do you expect?  I am a flawed, sinful person that relies on God's mercy."

For Pelagius, this was a cop-out.  But, more to the point, Pelagius saw this as being grounded in a flawed anthropology.  If you teach people that they are inherently, fundamentally flawed and sinful, then they will act like it.  But for Pelagius, God made creation, and by extension humanity, good.  And, thus, we should act like it.  God gives us a free will, a mind to discern, the Law of Moses, and the teachings of Jesus.  These tools are sufficient, in Pelagius's mind, to be able to live a moral, just, and Godly life.  And, so, we need to get on with doing that.

This position ran Pelagius into direct conflict with Augustine.  For Augustine, the basic goodness of humanity is inherently and necessarily corrupted by original sin.  Because of original sin, we are not capable, on our own, of engaging in good acts--left to our own devices, we will always do evil.  Only through a direct intervention of grace can the possibility of good acts come.

In Augustine's framing of Pelagius, the focus on personal responsibility for doing good is a formula for neuroticism.  Ultimately, you are trying to do something that you can never do, and so you will constantly fail to reach the standard of perfection that you seek.  This is the normal way that Luther's story is framed--he was obsessed and tortured by his efforts to be the perfect monk, and found freedom in the notion that it wasn't about his efforts but about God's saving grace.  "Pelagianism" is used as watchword for excessive moralism, scrupulosity, and neuroticism, contrasted with the relief and freedom provided by the Augustinian framework.

2.

As I mentioned, Pelagius really isn't given an opportunity to respond to his critics.  So, I will do my best to provide a retort on his behalf.

First, who said anything about perfection?  If you import Augustinian notions about God requiring us to be perfect to achieve salvation into a Pelagian framework, then yes--it is impossible to achieve that level of perfection to be saved.  But I see nothing in Pelagius's position that necessarily compels perfection as the standard.  Indeed, the extensive penitential system that develops later in the Celtic Christian tradition recognizes that people are going to fall short of perfection.  And while that penitential system can be rather extreme at times, it is ultimately grounded in a commitment to the idea that you can work through your mistakes to a new and better level of moral activity.  The perfection of God is not a target you must hit, but an asymptote that you can approach.  Viewed from that lens, much of the neuroticism attributed to Pelagius fades away.

But my real criticism is that Augustine doesn't actually get rid of neuroticism, but instead makes it different and worse.  As mentioned above, good deeds are not possible in and of themselves, but are only a product of the fundamentally extrinsic ontological status of being in a state of grace.  This results in one of two possible relationships to good deeds.  Either they don't matter, because what matters is whether or not you are saved.  This is the original problem that Pelagius identified, a laziness or (worse) a justification for narcissism and self-indulgence.  But there is the other side of the coin--if I am failing to do the right thing, maybe I'm not actually in the state of grace?  And, unlike the purported neuroticism of Pelagianism which at least encompasses the tools for working on the problem, in the Augustinian formulation there is nothing you can do about being outside of the state of grace.  Moral failings are the leading edge of an existential problem that you can do nothing about.  To me, this is way, way worse psychologically than the worst version of Pelagianism.

More over, Augustinianism doesn't provide narcissism or neuroticism, but weirdly both.  If you are a narcissistic person by nature you will likely gravitate toward the narcissistic dimension that justifies or excuses your bad actions, and if you are neurotic you will be pulled toward the existential concerns about salvation.  But I think most people are pulled in both directions, swinging between the two poles.  And if there is anything worse than a narcissist or a neurotic, it is a narcissistic neurotic.  That's a pretty good description of Augustine himself, honestly--Confessions is the narcissistic neurotic ur text.  So we should not be surprised that his disciples manifest the same traits.

And there is another problem, or at least Pelagius would (I think) see it as a problem.  If our world, and all of us, are inherently and unfixably corrupted, than none of this actually matters.  Maybe we might have some sort of positive obligation to engage in some specific acts of charity, as a rider on one's status as a member of the Elect.  But these acts of charity are ultimately purely ritual acts.  It doesn't matter whether these acts of charity are effective, whether they help anyone or anything, because ultimately nothing and no one can help anything, anyway.  They don't matter in and of themselves.  If you have an Augustinian mentally, then you don't actually care about the people around you, or the world around you.  Why would you?  It's all shit anyway. 

Ultimately, Pelagius is asserting the true, ontological value of doing the right thing.  When Jesus says that if we have two cloaks we must give one to the person who has none, Pelagius would interpret that command to be grounded in the fact that now a person who once didn't have a cloak now has one, and that person's life is better, and that matters.  Yes, of course, no one is going to do the right thing every time.  But if we are striving toward doing the right thing, working on being a better, more just, more compassionate person, then we are doing something meaningful and important.  And outcomes matter--doing right by others and doing right by our world has concrete, meaningful, positive consequences for everyone and everything.  So, like, we need to be doing that.  This is, at least in Pelagius's reading, an absolutely central part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.  Being a good person who does the right thing matters.

3.

Back in 2020, I found this article by Carlo Invernizzi Accetti in Foreign Policy.  When I first read the article, I thought it was insightful, and the last three years have only deepened my appreciation for the article.  Accetti argues that Biden's ideological position is best described in reference to the European Christian Democrats of the immediate post-war period, perhaps best embodied by Konrad Adenauer of (West) Germany.  In that world view, a broad-based coalition occupying the center of political life and focused on delivering tangible benefits to the largest number of people, while strengthening the social and cultural bonds of the nation, is both the right thing to do on the merits and also the most effective way to marginalize the extremes of Left and Right.  These extremes are tribal, destructive, centipedal forces that are ultimately corrosive to the political and social life of the nation.  It is self-consciously and unapologetically institutionalist and pragmatic.

In order to hold these views, you must first believe that it is possible to make meaningful improvements in the lives of people, and that you can do this within the existing paradigm.  You don't need a revolution or some sort of external intervention to make things better for people.  You will not fix everything, nor can you, but incremental gains are real and meaningful gains nonetheless.  If you can't give everyone student loan relief, to take one example, then it is good to give some people student loan relief, especially if that "some" are those who most need and will most benefit from relief.  Pragmatism is not a bad word.

This world view is also anti-ideological, or at least is suspicious of ideologically-focused politics.  This is not the same as not believing anything--as set forth above, this is a belief system--but it is skeptical of beliefs that are detached from concrete outcomes.  Don't judge me on my fidelity to some philosophical paradigm, this view says.  Judge me on my outcomes, whether I have done well by you and by others.

Again, I think this well describes Biden's approach to problems over the last three years.  And, judged according to this paradigm, Biden has done extremely well.  Unemployment is the lowest it has been in a generation.  Inflation is coming down, faster than in other parts of the world, and it seems clear that much of the inflation was the product of COVID-related supply shocks.  We have greatly remedied our standing around the world, and have taken a strong line against tyranny without getting involved directly in world conflicts.  And all of this has been done in the context of razor thin legislative margins, especially after 2022 and the absolutely shambolic House Republican caucus running the House.  It is, in my judgment, an almost herculean set of accomplishments under maximally difficult circumstances--the most difficult since FDR in '32.

So, why isn't this reflected in Biden's poll numbers?

4.

As mentioned, Biden's style of politics is predicated on the notion that what matters are the concrete policy outcomes produced.  And I think that is what matters.  But I don't think that's what matters to many Americans.  Instead, what matters to many Americans is the degree to which a political movement is aligned with the correct worldview.  Obviously, there are wide, wide disagreements over what that correct worldview actually is.  But my view is both the political Left and the political Right agree that what matters is whether a political movement is aligned with the One True Way.  And they believe this because what matters is whether they, the individual political actors, are aligned with the One True Way.  Being associated with MAGA, or with the DSA, is necessary because MAGA or the DSA are righteous, and being righteous is what is important.  Concrete policy outcomes are a product of the ultimate triumph of the One True Way, and not really all that material in and of themselves.  They certainly are not properly subject to incrementalism and compromise.

In other words, American politics are dominated by a secular version of the Calvinist paradigm of our Puritan political ancestors, and thus by extension Augustinianism.  What matters is not our good deeds (i.e. policy outcomes); what matters is our status as being one of the politically Elect, people who hold the proper ideological worldview.  Policy positions are not for their own sake, but as a sign of our status as members of the Elect.  Indeed, we see both the narcissistic strain of Augustinianism and the neurotic strain in our politics.  As to the narcissistic end, it manifested not by hypocrisy (which would be a normal political failing), but by a seeming indifference to any concrete outcomes, and instead a monomaniacal focus on how a political leader makes you feel.  On the neurotic side, we have the obsession with purity, with proving that one is properly situated within the proper ideological paradigm via performative acts (whether or not, again, those acts have much in the way of long-term, concrete effects).  Either way, politics is about how you personally are affirmed as a member of the Elect, with the debate between Left and Right reduceable down to the boundaries of who is within the circle of the Elect.  Right now in American life, the Right leans toward the narcissistic side (embodied in an iconic fashion by Trump) and the Left leans toward neuroticism, but we see elements of both in each side.

There is lots of discourse around the concept of "fake news."  There is no question that social media and communication technologies greatly facilitate the dissemination of "fake news."  But I am convinced that the heart of the phenomenon of fake news is the lack of commitment, on both the Left and the Right, to the notion that an accurate description of the state of the world actually matters.  You don't need an accurate description of the state of the world if politics are ultimately about how a particular leader makes you feel, or whether or not you and your comrades are properly performing the correct ritual acts to establish in-group membership.  If what matters is whether or not you are members of the Elect, then you are free to traffic in fake news to your heart's content.  After all, none of this really matters, anyway.

5.

Biden doesn't care about how he makes you feel.  Biden doesn't perform the rituals of his purity, to show you his membership as one of the Elect.  He has changed his political positions on things a ton during his long political career--he lacks the consistency of the true believer.  And he doesn't do these things because he doesn't think these things matter.  What matters is making people's lives better, making our collective world better.

It would be wrong to say that Biden's stances are the result his of ancestors being from the same part of the world as Pelagius.  Roman Catholicism in its post-Reformation Irish version is an excellent example of the neurotic Augustinian paradigm discussed previously, not anything attributable to Pelagius.  But Pelagius's ideas never really went away, if usually without attribution to the man himself, because I think many people have a built-in intuition that what we do here in this life matters, really matters.  And because ultimately I think most people don't share the fundamental pessimism about ourselves and our world that is hard-coded into Augustine's world-view.  Life can be monstrous and shitty, but it can also be beautiful and wonderful, and I don't think we must, or can, or should discount that or shunt that off into some direct manifestation of God breaking through the otherwise undifferentiated slime.  

And that is why, in the end, I am a Pelagian.  I simply cannot accept Augustine's contention that we are garbage and our world is garbage except and apart from some small sliver of the inbreaking of God.  No, this world is good, and worth fighting for--on its own terms, and for its own sake.  And, for that reason, how we fight for it and whether we are or are not joining in the fight matters an enormous amount.  We will stumble and we will fall, but we can get up again and keep at it.  Because in the end it is worth it.  And that commitment is not in conflict with the relationship with Jesus as I understand it, but at the very heart of it.

This commitment also translates to politics.  I want to government that makes people's lives better, or at least doesn't make them worse.  It is inevitable that people will have legitimate disagreements over how to do that, how different goals should be prioritized, even on what does or does not make people's lives better.  All of that is fine and normal.  What is not fine is a politics that eschews all of those considerations in favor of a libidinal engagement with feeling like someone in power is making you feel the way you want to feel.  Because while the world and people are fundamentally good, there are definitely those people and circumstances that shutter that light of goodness and transmit their darkness out into the world.  If all you want is a politics that makes you feel good and feel like someone who belongs, it is trivially easy for those bearers to darkness to provide that to you with one hand while salting the earth for everyone else with the other.  You need a standard outside yourself for what is good, and you need to care that this good is being done, for yourself, for others, and for the world.

As President Biden would say, that's the point, Jack.