Democratic revolutionaries and material harvests
What Henry Sumner Maine meant by 'progression to contract' should be interpreted as the evolution of some few societies (initially Rome, then the common law countries, now western Europe and beyond) to a dignity-based version of the social contract. This is precisely the kind of system where we are able to recognize democratic revolutionaries in search of a people willing to establish and protect individual rights as their voluntary and formal stewardship responsibility, and where there is a still greater reliance of accountability enforced upon governments from beneath -- in this case to supervise over-enthusiastic expressions of private institutional freedom. It is important to note that what honor-based citizenries most fear -- social disarray occasioned by powerful loose cannons -- is given legal warrant in the newer version of the social contract.
By the very fact of augmented freedom, private entities willing to strut their dignity are not only not less prone to mischief but are in fact all the better enabled to take matters too far -- to carry prerogative to the point of caprice. Part of caprice is the swollen pride at believing they possess ownership of their office and can hole up within it, insulated from pressure or accountability. All of which makes it necessary to insist that no 'advanced' system of social organization can tolerate the seemingly innocent dictum that offices be permitted to 'self-police', whether because interference from without would seem to dis accept the dignity of the office, or because only officials can know how best to conduct their own affairs.
We must be unmistakably clear about two over-arching desiderata: the dignity of the office is best served by enforcing stewardship, not by allowing officers to escape responsibilities in the name of self-respect (read self-aggrandizement). As for who best knows how to maintain professional integrity, we rephrase what has gone before: offices are the interface of private prerogatives in the service of public interests, whence, as quasi-public institutions, their intended beneficiaries are not only credited with a de facto stakeholder right of holding officers accountable, but are in fact admonished to do so. It is the necessary corollary to the right of a democratic sovereign to topple a defective government -- nothing could more perfectly legitimate public accountability over governments (or any other authorized entity) that act as if beyond the reach of the law or sovereign.
The dignity-based social contract and the role of stewardship in modern society is prefigured even in our spiritual wellsprings, perhaps best exemplified by recourse to yet another branch of theory -- Christology. Nietzsche may have wittily observed that Christ was the first, and last, Christian; what he failed to observe was that this just happened to be the world's first major religion premised upon the inherent dignity possessed of each and every soul. Accordingly, God's grace is had for the mere asking, and not because a public authority allowed it or because a priest sanctified it. Christianity will also presume that any original "covenant' came from God, not from man (whence the consideration of inherent worthiness, and whence the likeness to a dignity-based contract). Furthermore, not only did Jesus conceive of his followers as officeholders (Christos ~ office) but required their stewardship (1 Cor. 9:11): "If we have sown a spiritual crop for you, is it too much to expect from you a material harvest?"
That the dignity-based social contract is a direct parallel to Christological reasoning should not be a surprise. Law and religion are each variant expressions of principles dealing with human nature; in particular, of adverse reliance. The truth is again that religion can no more dispense with stewardship than can law; and a law that would willfully weaken stewardship does the spirit and justice of its calling no favors.
Hypocrisy
The honor-dignity binary was prefigured in nineteenth-century philosophy and followed shortly thereafter in anthropology. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche introduced the Apollonian-Dionysian (DB and HB respectively) system while Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict introduced the shame-guilt binary (HB and DB, respectively). After theory-deficient anthropologists defaulted the matter to sociologists, the individualist-collectivist binary took precedence, and now competes with the true and correct honor-dignity binary, correct for expressing the elemental mythic desiderata of the respective cultural types. Honor and dignity devolve into the others, not the other way around.
What shame is to honor, guilt is to dignity. Shame presupposes a publicly recognized breach of respectability owed others. The dignity-based equivalent of disrespect is dis-acceptance, the mere thought of which, because questioning dignity, invites guilt. During the cold war Jean Francois Revel often identified American guilt as the culprit responsible for timidity in facing down the forwardness of the honor-based Soviets. Honor-based folk seem to sense this disability in the susceptible. Japan was confident America could not well up the courage to repel an attack or deal productively with its aftermath. Saddam Hussein famously fantasized, twice, that the United States had to be bluffing, for he was certain they just didn't have the stomach. By the time Bill Clinton extracted his famously sensitive policy vane from the opinion polls, Milosevic had delivered a clinic on how to make dignity-based nations look pretty silly.
The real problem with dignity-based folk is that the tools and methods necessary to defeat an honor-based enemy are sometimes precisely those that make them start feeling guilty about everything: 'Oh, we just can't stoop that far.' Revel was the first and last to elucidate the political side of guilt in recent times ( How Democracies Perish ). The former US President Ronald Reagan was a man who understood honor-based people if only because he was constantly fighting an internal struggle over honor and dignity throughout his life. To give credit where due, he fought fire with fire and managed quite creditably. Liberals have yet to figure out that when conservatives say they will compromise, it means they are gaming dignity-based queasiness at low-handed methods. Liberals need to get real.
Conservatives, whether rural, working class or religious, are in general better able to understand honor-based foes for the simple reason that they themselves tend to be honor-based. Times were when they were also perspicaciously aware of impudence before it playfully poked at their 'indecency button'. Today, however, there is little that's over the top for strong-willed conservatives. And there's little that the liberals are willing to do about any of it despite the fact that those most upset over the loss of stewardship values are also equally wary of disturbances too close to their own 'indecency button'.
There are basically two strains of indecency to be concerned about, one typifying each of the cultural types. The honor-based rule of thumb is that one must steer clear of malevolent disrespect, and at all cost avoid arrogance (a DB thus labeled might as well acknowledge failure in the 'winning hearts and minds' category). In the distinction as between the moral and the ethical, the HB go the moral route, meaning they feel it in the heart, whereas the DB take it to the head with principles of ethics. The DB set are most up-in-arms about displays of dis-acceptance or dismissiveness toward them. Topics liable to get there in a hurry: whatever is inequitable and/or unprincipled relative to their standards.
What, at their best, classical liberals and moderate conservatives share in common is an abiding appreciation of the stewardship responsibility to condemn and defeat hypocrisy. Whether from moral scruples (conservatives) or ethical principles (liberals) the result is a knee-jerk outrage against wanton hypocrisy. But people of this caliber are no longer a majority on either side either of the political or cultural divide. Hypocrisy in politics is all the rage.
"Progressives who had their hearts set on Obama," once observed Nobel economist Paul Krugman, "were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion." Curtis Roosevelt, grandson of FDR, recently wrote , "Why rely on the commitments of someone who received our wholehearted support in the election of 2008 -- because we thought he had emphatically made these promises -- and then tabled them upon moving into the White House? Our support for 2012 should not require blind faith." This business of 'blind faith' is precisely why social contracts require a stewardship consideration from the promisor.
Similar comments have been made about the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The same litany describes at once an indecently-acting conservative Frenchman, and an indecently-acting liberal American. At bottom the complaint is their hypocrisy, the uncomfortable dissonance between promise and practice. Political wannabes get the notion that labels don't so much matter, nor good habits; what matters is that they be elected because, well, they will make the best President. Why? Quite simply, only they can deliver; they are the best! The redundancy, the absence of any principles or serious intent regarding policy seems to typify the age of me, me, me. Those who do speak to principle tend to be at once conservative and over the top.
Now the opposite of hypocrisy should be what conservative and liberal enemies might utilize to see through their mutual enmity. We have suggested 'decency'; Revel suggested sincerity. Interestingly, it is the Occupy Movement that most fully understands this. Its consensus assemblies reduce mainly to pleas for decency, sincerity and magnanimity. Like the French and American opponents of hypocrisy, the Occupiers are likewise a mix and match of liberal, moderate conservatives, and small but vocal contingencies of Tea Partiers and libertarians -- and of course their European (and elsewhere) near-equivalents.
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