What is the ideal governmental system?

Last week I went to a First Things event in Chicago where Editor-in-Chief Rusty Reno debated with New York Times columnist and Catholic, Ross Douthat, about the interplay of Christian Faith and Political Power.

More specifically, they explored pros and cons of integralism. As I sat there thinking, I found myself wanting to take a few steps back and approach the matter from a first principles basis.

My mind gravitated toward the more generic question of “Which governmental system is best?”, and here’s how I would think about that:

( I’ve organized the content into the following sections: 1. Does this question even matter? 2. How do we determine what makes one system better than another?3. Which societal objective should Christians deem most important? 4. The Gospel for me, the Government for thee 5. The Mystery of Love’s Implementation 6. Perhaps managing the State is really just about managing the perceived difficulty of the Christian life 7. Tying it all together )

**1. Does this question even matter? ** Well, the question matters enough that we’re asking it in the first place. But the point here is for us to assess: In the final analysis, to what extent should the topic of “ideal governmental system” matter?

At least from the lens of a Christian worldview, one could argue that we shouldn’t really care about what the kingdoms of this earth look like, since we should dedicate our full heart, mind, and soul towards building the kingdom of God.

Further, Jesus Christ didn’t come to overthrow Rome, much to the disappointment of many who followed him. His mission was relentlessly focused on the spread of the Gospel and its practical encouragement to Love God and Love Others.

This message is of a different kind than one focused on political power, which would have needed to include components of “we need to replace current leadership” and “we need to change certain laws” in order to be characterized as such.

Instead, Christ’s message seemed to be: “Independent of what the laws and structures of society currently allow, this is how you should live your life.”

He provided a model of perfect social relations, separate from any temporal system of commerce or citizenship.

At the same time, despite Jesus’s message not being explicitly political, it nonetheless drove dramatic political change, shifting the trajectory of Western Civilization for the next two millennia.

Could Jesus have intended such political reform as a primary, ex ante objective? Or was this disruption a natural byproduct of what happens when people collectively “Seek first the Kingdom of God…” ?

I’m inclined to believe it’s more of the latter, where seeking first the kingdom of God with 100% attention necessarily produces better outcomes in other spheres, even if one isn’t consciously caring about those spheres.

Still, even if such political reform were merely a subconscious after-effect of spreading the Gospel at scale, it’s worth considering for a moment *how *Christ’s message might lead to political action. By what mechanism would spread of the Gospel “cause” political reform?

In theory two methods at play would be:

  • A critical mass of the general population embraces the key pillars of Christianity / Judeo-Christian ethics. These principles would then be implemented upstream into law either by vote (in representative systems where citizens elect their leaders) or by a leader wanting to be liked by his or her constituents, thereby choosing to espouse the views that the people would want to hear.

  • The leaders themselves are converted into the faith and consequently begin to rule according to a new set of values and priorities, irrespective of what citizens want, influencing society downstream.

I don’t know enough about Early Church history to have a strong view on how Christian principles actually spread through the various political spheres, but it almost certainly had to be some combination of both.

Regardless, let’s consider one more distinction with regards to whether this topic “matters”:

There is a difference between “caring” about what your system of government is (as far as having a preference for system X over system Y) versus actively investing passion and effort into influencing and promoting system X over system Y.

The opportunity cost of the former is negligible, yet the opportunity cost of the latter can come at the expense of promoting the kingdom of God.e.g. The more I focus on having Republican vs Democrat conversations, the less I’m able to focus on Christian vs non-Christian discussions, or the interpersonal sharing of lives and matters of the heart (the true substance of Life).

So then, to what extent should we care about determining which political system is best?

I’ll come back to this question again at the end. . .

2. How do we determine what makes one system better than another?

Let’s assume for a moment that we should care about which system is best.

By design, the purpose of any “system” is to facilitate an optimization problem or increase the likelihood of achieving some result.

Which system is “ideal” depends on which optimization problem we are seeking to solve. Some possibilities:

  • maximize subjective happiness (minimize perceived suffering)

  • maximize average wealth

  • maximize average lifespan

  • minimize variance in outcomes (maximize lifestyle homogeneity)

  • minimize risk of violence (maximize “peace”)

  • maximize number of souls in relationship with God / maximize “Love”

    Etc.

We can see how different systems along the Socialist ←→ Capitalist, Open ←→ Closed, and Totalitarian ←→ Free spectrums address these problems both in theory and in practice. For theory, pay attention to what the people promoting System X claim they will solve (or read some books by the system’s thought leaders). For empirical outcomes, look at GDP per capita, happiness surveys, income inequality, crime rates, etc.

What does the American system seem to be about? Well, per the Declaration of Independence, the system seeks to optimize “Life”, “Liberty”, and the “Pursuit of Happiness”.

That’s the theoretical intention, and historically the American system appears to have delivered relatively more on these goals compared to other world powers, even if it falls short of bringing us to the ideal.

Empirically, the system (or at least its capitalist components) seems to have optimized for increases in average wealth and lifespan, albeit while also producing variance in outcomes via income inequality (though breaking down reasons for this can be complex, and these related conversations can end up being about multiple systems interacting — a system of systems).

Compared to some of the more measurable goals above, you may notice how the variables of '“Life”, “Liberty”, and the “Pursuit of Happiness” are particularly abstract, or at least difficult to specify.

“Life” is almost an infinitely encompassing word that can capture the entire experience and dignity of the human person, spread across different tiers of richness.

“Liberty” is also somewhat ambiguous, though we can potentially estimate its proxy by observing the number of meaningful decisions the average person is permitted by the State to make (the number of accessible choices one has), as well as the average importance of those permitted decisions. i.e. We acknowledge qualitative difference between choosing which socks to wear vs which career to pursue.

“Pursuit of Happiness” is interesting to me, because it’s different than merely maximizing happiness itself. There is a “pursuit” that is being promoted, which we could consider to be a participatory maximization of “opportunity”. And increasing opportunity (available options) necessarily increases the exercise of Liberty (for true liberty requires options), and ultimately a good “Life”. This philosophy is drilled in further with the language of “pursuit”, since that implies a voluntary orientation and action after some desired goal.

The originally intended principle behind the American system seems to be about having freedom (lack of arbitrary State interference) to both define one’s goals and to make decisions in service of those goals (as constrained by a “Life-promoting” moral framework of social relations, which was historically rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics). Further, in these words there seems to be the idea that happiness is not something that can be maximized directly, but rather that it would be a secondary byproduct of maximizing opportunity to exercise one’s own free will.

In sum, assuming we do care about the system, we need to first be clear on what objective we are optimizing for, which brings us to the next point.

3. Which societal objective should Christians deem most important?

At the very core, Christians are called to love. What does it mean to love?

Let’s note the following sample of ideas:

  • St. Thomas Aquinas: “To love is to will the good for another.”

  • The Greek word for unconditional love (the ultimate kind) is agape. Agape can properly be understood as “charity”.

  • *Our Sunday Visitor’s Catholic Encyclopedia *describes agapic love as “generous self-donation without concern for reward.”

We can also consider the opposite. Christians are called to avoid sin, which is essentially the antithesis to love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines sin as “an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods.”

So then, the Christian’s desire for society should be to maximize love and minimize sin (failure to love). From a systems or regression perspective we would seek to maximize love/minimize sin by manipulating the variables that can contribute to more or less cumulative love.

Consider reframing the variables from section 2 above (e.g. average wealth, distribution of wealth, happiness, etc.) in the context of love maximization and sin minimization. You might notice that the effects of some are more obvious to infer than those of others.

e.g.Obvious: “Minimizing violence” ≈ Minimizing a severe form of sinNot so Obvious: “Maximize Average Wealth” = ? . . . On the one hand, lifting people out of poverty should reduce envy-related crimes, such as robbery and burglary. On the other hand, accumulation of wealth can lead to pride and various forms of selfishness. (Check out Proverbs 30:8-10 ’s “give me neither poverty nor riches” idea)

We begin to see how various problems creep up when we attempt to bridge the gap between the abstract and the concrete:

  • It’s easy for us to recognize that whatever we do, we need to maximize love and minimize sin. However, since the variables of love and sin can’t be manipulated directly, we are instead stuck trying to affect these indirectly through politically measurable mechanisms like wealth, crime, and surveyed “wellbeing”. I would call this the problem of estimation. The concrete parameters are an insufficient representation of the abstract ideals that we are seeking to optimize. i.e. It’s not entirely clear what economic policy X does to promote Love vs Sin (though imagine how our discourse could change if we started to measure society’s pressing issues in such a way. . . ).

  • Every policy introduces tradeoffs. It’s rare to encounter a decision that has 100% Pros and 0% Cons. Any political issue can potentially encourage more Love in some areas, while creating more occasion for sin in others. Assuming we could estimate these impacts with reasonable accuracy, we would still need to impose some sort of hierarchy of values in order to choose between options. This is the problem of prioritization. e.g. If you were able to, carte blanche, eliminate the sin of stealing vs the sin of adultery, which would be better for society?

In sum, it seems to me that a Christian’s “systems” objective should be to maximize love and minimize sin. However, these intangible forces of the human heart cannot be directly controlled by the State, so at best we can only evaluate the State’s ability to change the external circumstances that promote behaviors of love and discourage occasions of sin.

4. The Gospel for me, the Government for thee

When we talk about “governmental systems”, we are really just talking about things (laws backed by threat of State violence, monetary incentive structures, etc.) that affect how other people behave. When it comes to ourselves, we tend to think about behavior more poetically.

As a devout Christian, you might say that the reason you choose to pursue the Good, as opposed to Evil, is because you want to Love God, express the Imago Dei, get closer to realizing the Beatific Vision, participate in God’s Divine Will, respond to Grace, etc.

The fact that human laws say “don’t commit crime XYZ” might have absolutely no practical bearing on your disposition, as you may be so fully consumed with the Gospel that lower levels of moral consciousness are far from your daily purview.

Alternatively stated, you may be so intrinsically dedicated to the pursuit of virtue that the status of current society’s laws is irrelevant to your personal choice of action. You will Love God and Love Others, regardless of what social container you find yourself in.

Through adequate self-reflection and prayer, you can be aware of your own conscious thoughts and motivations, your own heart and will. But the inner realities of other people. . .? Only God can know those with certainty, and that fact can be scary.

Yet we can see some visible manifestations of the human heart through behavior. And it seems that those who are most politically passionate hope that by managing human behavior externally we could effect real change internally in the heart (leaving aside any Machiavellian or tribal motivations for embracing politics).

So the overall question about governmental systems becomes a question of:

What is the best way to have other people be more loving and sin less, using the coercive powers of the State?

Hmm. . . perhaps now we finally arrive the center of the dilemma. What do the coercive powers of the State have to do with matters of love and sin?

Love is a free effort. Fruits of Free Will can’t be maximized directly, or else they wouldn’t be free — they would be deterministic, established by cause and effect. Love necessarily requires freedom, or else it wouldn’t be Love. The State cannot legislate love nor “make” anybody desire the good of another.

What about sin? On the surface, it appears that we *can *create rules that deliver penalties for various sins.

e.g. We can have a murderer be physically moved to a prison.

Such penalties and punishments create “reasons” for citizens to avoid certain sins (“I don’t want to go to jail, so I won’t do this action.”). But when we take a closer look, it’s not that laws are encouraging citizens to avoid sins, insomuch as they are encouraging people to avoid socially undesirable behaviors.

Why the distinction? Per the teachings of Christ, sin is fundamentally a matter of the heart. The one who embraces a full-on hatred of another and tells him “F*** You!!!” is just as complicit in sin (failure to love), at least at the level of the heart (Matthew 5:21-26).

Externally visible “crimes” are always downstream of a sinful heart, of a broken relationship with God, self, and others. Legislative mechanisms can disincentivize certain behaviors, but they can’t deterministically change a person’s core attitude.

Again, we recognize that no configuration of the State (or governmental system) can directly change the condition of a human heart. So then, in what ways could we potentially use the State to promote love and discourage sin, if it can’t do these things directly?

5. The Mystery of Love’s Implementation

How is Love implemented into the human soul in the first place? And can this process be replicated and scaled?

  • Love must first be received in order to be given. We are able to Agape other people, only to the degree that we receive God’s Love for us.

    This is not merely a propositional form of knowledge, where one mentally says the statement: “God loves me.” It’s something of a more mystical and interpersonal nature, where we can to go to a space with God, feeling and experiencing his presence and loving gaze. We can also tangibly experience God’s Love in the Sacraments.

    To a lesser extent, we may receive an approximation of unconditional love from others (e.g. a child from her loving parents), which can give us psychological “security” to love others for some period of time. Still such sources are often inconsistent and seem to serve more as a means of giving us a taste of what True Love can look like, rather than being the source that can fully fill our cup.

  • Sharing of the Gospel plants the seeds of a worldview grounded in Love. While it’s a mystery to truly understand how the Gospel (and Holy Spirit) takes over a human heart, we can verbalize at least some of the psychological dynamic.

    It goes something like this: Our hearts and wills our broken, and we see that there is a famine of Love and a reality of Death. Through receiving the Gospel, we learn and accept the “Grand Cosmic Narrative” that:

    • The Creator of the universe, who is Love and Logos, took on flesh through the Incarnation.

    • He suffered, died, and came back to life, “taking on our sins” in some metaphysical way and “proving” the supernatural power of redemption.

    • We can participate in this Resurrection process, which fully encompasses the human person, from the physical to the spiritual dimensions.

    • Ultimately, through receiving this gift of Love, we are able to have an open channel and relationship with the Creator and can subsequently bring Love to the world, doing our part to alleviate the famine, and participating with God in the redemption of all creation.

Let’s take this model of Love Implementation and address the matter of how the State can promote or interfere with Love, with respect to the laws it makes, all else being equal (I’ll explain the significance of this qualifier below).

Laws that explicitly limit spread of the Gospel*:

*Aside from reported cases where God gives someone a direct vision or dream of the cross of Christ, the spread of the Gospel (which leads to Love) has been most commonly facilitated through other human beings. One needs to literally hear someone else speak the words and sentences of the Good News before installing that belief themselves.

There are also cases where an individual’s first encounter with the Gospel could be directly with written texts, such as the Bible, articles on the internet, or other books.

Either way, this means that the State could interfere with the proliferation of Love by preventing the spread of the Gospel, via banning access to any speech or written word that shares this message.

Laws that limit community interaction:

Social relations are key, as the Christian life is fundamentally about relationship. If the State forced you to be alone, for whatever reason (in our current day and age, it’s not hard to imagine dystopian scenarios of extreme quarantine or “Ready Player One”-esque disconnected connectivity), that would de facto impede your ability to both give and receive Love. Interacting with other humans is a precondition to loving them.

Even if spread of the Gospel was banned, you could still Love other people. However, if all meaningful social interaction was banned, then your ability to Love others would also be constrained in some way.

**Laws that “force” you to sin ***(at least under threat of material deprivation, prison, and/or death)*

The State could demand that you sin and weaponize its punitive powers against you, should you choose to dissent. One doesn’t need to look far into history to see the kinds of incentives States bent on genocide and political persecution imposed on their citizens.

At the same time, we know that no one can truly “force” us to sin, due to God’s incessant insistence on the preservation of Free Will, the necessary precondition of Love. And despite facing what would be incredibly difficult choices, God promises that an individual can always choose the Good and will never be tested beyond what he or she can bear (1 Corinthians 10:13).

In any event, we see in these above examples how various laws can impede proliferation of Love while spreading sin, all else being equal. . .

Such an analysis is conducted purely through the lens of human control, limited by our frail understanding, which depends on forces that we can “predict”. What about God? Can we predict his movements and works? When we think about “all else being equal”, we include God in that collection of frozen variables. But in reality, God operates dynamically.

The real question, as it pertains to our consideration of Love-affirming vs Love-denying laws, is this: Can God’s redemptive work be limited by human systems?

If it can, then it’s really important we regard our preference for any given political system seriously.

On the one hand, it feels strange to suggest that humans could interfere in the realization of God’s Will. Christianity and knowledge of God have spread, irrespective of political systems. God’s presence has been experienced not only in countries with freedom of religion, but also in those where Christians face great persecution — in fact, the intensity of his presence may be even stronger in those regions where oppression is highest, as evidenced by a higher prevalence of miracles as well as the gift of supercharged sanctification that I imagine accompanies martyrdom.

On the other hand, we cannot deny that concrete metrics estimating religious fervor (e.g. church attendance, surveyed belief in God, philanthropy, etc.) vary depending on which governmental system is in effect. Surely, a fervently-secular communist government run by a totalitarian would influence religious decline in a manner different than a theocratic or religiously free counterpart, would it not?

How God’s Mission is affected by human systems ultimately remain a mystery to me. Does God even want to us to think in terms of these all else being equal optimizations (where “God’s work” is in the bucket of “all else”)? If anything, the more we think in these terms, the less we seek out the power of prayer and God’s providence, as well as finding opportunity to Love in our daily moment.

6. Perhaps managing the State is really just about managing the perceived difficulty of the Christian life

If we agree that it’s a mystery how God chooses to move through the hearts of humans in, for example, communist vs capitalist governments, then maybe our attachment to influencing political outcomes has more to do with our fear of difficulty and suffering than anything else.

While we may not be able to directly measure how we’re doing as a society with respect to maximization of Love (see section 3), we do seem capable of estimating how the difficulty of living the Christian life can vary depending on which environment we find ourselves in (or at least compared to the reference point of our present circumstances).

i.e. “I may not know whether God will save more souls in System X vs System Y, but I think System Y will make it much harder, on average, to be a virtuous person. Therefore, I will promote System X, as it introduces fewer frictions and is closer to what I think the ‘Good Life’ looks like.”

How does one system, compared to another, make it more or less difficult to make morally good decisions? I’ve mentioned some examples above, with respect to fears of persecution and lost social cohesion. So then, should we pursue the systems which make the decisions to choose Good “easier”?

Well, on the flip side, it’s my understanding that in the heavenly economy, one’s reward for choosing Good will be greater when circumstances are more difficult. It seems to be the case that the one who chooses Good in the midst of suffering realizes a greater Grace than the one who chooses love in the abundance of blessing. Therefore, should we deliberately architect a system of difficult circumstances so as to increase the spiritual reward for those who do make it through gauntlet?

That line of thinking has its limits as well, for in the extreme formulation it would lead us on a path of intentional self-destruction. Further, I don’t think it would be in the will of God for us to, essentially, approach our neighbor with a mindset of “I’m going to make your life more miserable, so that your rewards in heaven can be greater”. . .

The former impulse of making the choice of Love easier to pursue seems preferable, though its implementation will still be subject to great debate (e.g. Should we limit how much wealth a citizen can generate, since too much wealth can make Love more difficult? Yet we’ve also seen that innovation properly unleashed—and incentivized—can alleviate a great deal of suffering.)

7. Tying it all together

We started with the question of "What is the best system of government?” (from a Christian perspective).

We saw that a system is “best” with respect to its ability to facilitate a particular set of outcomes. Which outcomes should Christians care most about? Maximization of Love and minimization of sin.

We quickly realized that while “maximization of love” is nice to say in theory, it’s a challenge to implement in practice due to the issues common to any endeavor that seeks to move a general principle into a specific application. (I didn’t explicitly call it out, but this dynamic is bread and butter for the virtue of Prudence).

We pondered whether the coercive nature of any State is fundamentally in conflict with spirt of these objectives, since real Love cannot be coerced. Yet we also recognize that we have the ability to create circumstances that can make exercise of Love an easier decision.

So we’ve effectively reframed the original question of “What is the best government?” to → “Which system makes it easiest for its members to choose Love?”

And before all this, we explored whether this question even matters—whether it’s worth investing life energy into identifying a “better” system and promoting it. This domain seems to matter only to the degree that energy spent pursuing it facilitates the higher order mission of “Love God and Love Others”. And such a mission ultimately comes down to micro-level actions with those in our daily lives rather than macro system overhauls.

Incrementally, we are faced with decisions of “Do I spend these next X minutes promoting political system X or do I find a way to directly Love someone God has placed in my life?”

I could even ask myself whether it was worth the time to put the words of this post down for you to read instead of spending more quality time with a loved one. Only God truly knows.

We may wonder: To what extent are we responsible for increasing others’ opportunity to Love and limiting others’ occasion of sin? If it’s the case that we’re willing the good of others for their own sake, then it’s possible God may judge a political action of voting or discourse as Love. Yet if such a pursuit would have us fall into a sinful “party spirit” (see the Galatians 5:20 work of the flesh), then it would decrease Love and harden our hearts.

Perhaps the only way to know the answers to such incremental decisions is through direct revelation that can come from intimate prayer with God. (I have more thoughts I’d like to say about this but will save those for a later post)

Much has been said at this point, and I feel content with the set of points covered. However, I think those interested in going further could uncover more insight on this topic by looking at:

So what’s the best form of government? I can’t say for sure. But if one’s primary goal in life is to become a saint, then it doesn’t really matter.

— Drago

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