If you’re any kind of localist, Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods belongs on your shelf. Unless, of course, you’re the kind of localist who doesn’t put much stock in theorizing localism, which might be the best kind to be, and is certainly the most common. In that case you have my permission to skip this rather demanding book and concentrate on living as it says you should: raising your family, doing your work, occasionally “mucking about” with issues you care about, and generally enduring with grateful heart the slings and arrows of mysterious providence, until it’s time to slough off your coil. Pretty simple, really.
Mortal Goods is about the radical nature of such political modesty, or what Radner is bold enough to call “political indifferentism.” No matter what kind of localist you are, you aim in some sense to live within limits, and you look for a mode of political action that takes limits as its starting point. Localism is modest, in this sense, and in its modesty it is largely indifferent to the divisions that animate citizens who may hate each other but otherwise share the first premise of the modern age, which is that limits are there to be broken. When the success of the economy depends on perpetual growth fueled by boundless consumption, and the legitimacy of the state depends on a receding horizon of social progress fueled by an ever-expanding list of rights, “modest hopes” are obscene. Simply living as you should, without lending your energies to the machinery of progress, can be a mortal threat to the way things are.
Radner’s political indifferentism is not quiescence. Our real civic duty is to tend to the conditions that allow us to enjoy our “mortal goods,” his term for the stuff of life as it is given to us. Mortal goods boil down to “the birth and death of human beings . . . the generative love of parents and children, who together are such birth and death given as gift” (16). The book opens with a reflection on some classic letters from parents to their children, and closes with Radner’s letter to his own. This is a politics that begins and ends with the family, and if there is any such thing as an “ideal regime” it is the peasant village, “a gathering of human families for the sake of endurance across the harsh terrain of mortal life” (191). But many kinds of actually existing regimes have room for such gatherings, and our proper aim as citizens is not to transform the empires of progress into the Shire. Our business is not with ideals. We have a basic interest in existing institutions that support material life and in their competent management; beyond this realm of “normal politics,” we need not concern ourselves. Only when normal politics shifts into “abnormal politics”—a situation in which the institutions themselves, or their breakdown, start to threaten our mortal goods—are we perhaps called to do anything more. Even then it’s a matter of discernment and fraught with danger, since “the frequent consequences of abnormal politics . . . mean that the embrace of abnormal politics can itself be, and more often than not is, an attack” on mortal goods.
In general, social life is too complex to control, and most of our social problems are the result of believing otherwise. Our “solutions” are our problems. Nor can we hope to solve that problem. There is no program to end all programs. Eventually, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and something is loosed upon the world. Radner calls this “catastrophe,” a term of art that describes for him not an accident or an irregularity but “the shape of existence.” Catastrophe is the shape of existence because existence is not predictable, and it is when we forget this that we fall prey to “progressive hopes,” which lead to fearful ends. Liberalism, fascism, and communism are all varieties of progressivism, and “all aim, on one level, at the mitigation of catastrophe”—which may at times involve the strategic instigation of catastrophe in the service of progress, an irony with which the Nazis and Stalinists were quite comfortable. Liberalism has taken a softer approach, but “there is a sense in which all modern societies are drifting toward a ‘Chinese’ system” (171) of digital micromanagement, if not reeducation camps.
Perhaps it is or will become our duty to oppose this, just as it was the duty of Canadian citizens to oppose the residential schools for Indigenous children, one of several examples Radner uses to clarify the implications of indifferentism. “The recognition of that assault—and repentance for it—is a political act,” and it falls within the bounds of our duty. “The awareness and identification of colonialist depredations is not . . . the result of an ideological perversion, as some . . . on the Right have asserted. But is repentance more than an act? Is it a political program of sorts?” Radner thinks not. “The schools were to be resisted and finally torn down. In their wake, politics takes perhaps another turn.” It was a program for “progress” that created those schools in the first place. The answer is not another program. Likewise, the Chinese system is a program for progress, and that underlying ideology cannot be resisted by the partisans of some equally programmatic alternative.
Mortal Goods is a rich and provocative book, but I have downplayed the fact that it is an attempt to reimagine, not political duty in general, but Christian political duty, as the subtitle has it. It speaks to localists, but it is not a theory of localism per se; it’s a work of theology, and its imagery is biblical. The most memorable of these images is Radner’s use of “Nazareth” as a synecdoche for the kind of politics he has in mind, just as people use “Athens” or “Jerusalem” or “Washington, D.C.” as stand-ins for the larger wholes of which they are parts. Radner is willing to say, against both politically conservative and politically progressive contemporary Christians, that the politics of Jesus are “brutally modest.” “Jesus’ life seems to have been mostly one of local, familial labor and relations, carried out in the compass of a small town or village . . . . His life ends with the commendation of his bereft mother to the care of his disciples; perhaps, in its call upon family and neighbor in the midst of a small catastrophe, this is the sum of his politics.” (184-5). Nazareth is neither a Christian state nor a social movement for liberation from the powers that be. It’s just home.
For Radner, Christian politics is not “Christian politics,” and that’s why I’ve been able to write about Mortal Goods as if it weren’t an explicitly Christian book, though it certainly is. I read and wrestled with it as a Christian, and I don’t think you can fully understand Radner’s conception of “mortal goods” without some grasp of Christian theology, according to which “it’s all good,” including the bad. “Good and evil are writ into the lineaments of creation,” as he puts it (29). But there is something deep in that theology that can speak to people who aren’t Christians, just as Radner’s book can speak to localists, who after all can come from many persuasions. A Taoist, for example, could find much to appreciate here (“Let there be a little country without many people. Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred, and never use them. Let them be mindful of death, and disinclined to long journeys.”) So might an existentialist, at least in certain moods: Radner mentions the book of Ecclesiastes as the “scriptural ballast” for his political theory, and calls it “that most political book of the Bible.” I thought in particular of Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which similarly understands our mortality not as an evil to be overcome but as the limit that makes life, which contains both good and evil, ultimately good. Hägglund takes this in a very different political direction, but in a world where literal immortality is the professed aim of some of the world’s most powerful people, there’s a sense in which even Hägglund’s socialism might find itself at the barricade with Radner.
“It is easy for me to believe,” said Wendell Berry, “that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Radner is on the side of the creatures. It’s an open and important question whether this requires something like his localist indifferentism, a “politics of endurance,” or whether there is room for more ambitious visions for the use of power—which could come from the Left or from the Right—to protect our mortal goods. I tend toward indifferentism myself, but by all means let the theorizing continue. “Theorizing,” I think, is itself one of the mortal goods, if we keep it in its proper place and don’t expect it to change the world.
Image Credit: Filippo Palizzi, “Stalla con due asinelli e tre figure” (1871) via Wikimedia
