Rick Santorum & the Necessity of Contingency (or Why I Consider Myself a Leftist)

As one of a near-dozen Republican presidential hopefuls competing in some sort of perverse, quadrennial American civic ritual, there have been few opportunities for noticing Rick Santorumuntil his campaign pulled even with Mitt Romney’s, resulting in them tieing for the lead in the Iowa Republican caucuses with 25% of the vote each. But having noticed him, there’s a lot that can be learned. Functionally, he’s not much different from some of the other candidates, but there is a refined purity to his politics (particularly with his views of the nation, the family and of sexuality) that allows us to address some broader concerns.

Specifically, on Santorum’s campaign website he cites his belief in American exceptionalism at the international level and “traditional” (read: Christian, heterosexual couples with children) families at the domestic level as the foundations for his policy positions; positions that include an orientation towards war (with Iran) and capitulation to corporatism (through reduced regulations). Embedded beneath these position statements are axioms about the world, axioms which assume a societal ordering that is grounded in a divine plan, an eternal structure, a “natural order”.

With that in mind, let’s turn our attentions to philosopher and former psychoanalyst Levi Bryant. In his recent blog posts on object-oriented ontology and politics (Part I, II) examined the differences between Lucretius and Aristotle’s attitudes about the nature of the social order. Whereas Plato and Aristotle saw a sort of natural sense to the social order—women being inferior to men, the necessity of a philosopher-king (read, technocrat), etc—Lucretius held that:

Whatever exists you will always find connected to these two things, or as by-products of them; connected meaning that the quality can never be subtracted from its object no more than weight from stone, or heat from fire, wetness from water. On the other hand, slavery, riches, freedom, poverty, war, peace, and so on, transitory things whose comings and goings do not alter substance– these, and quite properly, we call by-products.(De Rerum Natura, Humphries translation, 33)

Lucretius was on to something. As the years have wound on all that was solid has melted into air: we have learned of our evolved origins and shared ancestors, found seemingly immutable laws to be probabilistic, debilitated the hopes of hobgoblins for consistency in mathematics, begun deconstructing anthropomorphism (with bees, dolphins, octopi and other animals), and are gradually deflating our beliefs in morality and ethics, free will, God and even our own rationality. Even our rigid notions of the universe are at risk, first with the relativity of space and time, and now with talk of parallel universes with alternate physics, and the contingency of elementary particles and mirror images of the Big Bang. I hope to unpack each of these in future posts.

The common thread here is what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls ”the necessity of contingency”. Whether or not Meillassoux’s thesis is entirely correct, he’s on the right track; time after time after time, the “natural order” of things turns out to be surprisingly…contingent. This is troubling news, particularly for those who, having been fortunate to enough to benefit from contingent events of history, hold power and maintain it by insisting upon a fictitious natural order. It makes little difference whether these are kings hypothesizing a god-granted throne, environmentalists yearning for a return to Eden, or hedge-fund managers lobbying against government regulations against finance; the implicit assumptions are the same.

This is why there can be such a deviation between the policies and the politics one supports. For example, the ideas Ron Paul expresses on this video about foreign policy resonate well with me, but I am far from a libertarian. Libertarianism, like humanism and many other ideologies, is founded upon assumptions of the natural order; the basic rights of man, property rights, and others. Much Enlightenment thinking was grounded in similar assumptions whose hegemony has been and is being contested by the landless, the proletariat, the queer, the female, the young, the indigenous, the non-citizen, the ecological and the non-human.

And much of what passes for politics on the left (whatever that is) is equally guilty. Whether in the name of the environment, or of human rights, or of tolerance or what-have-you, the well-meaning have tossed aside the strange liberties that a full reckoning of the world provides. Bryant describes the tension between the “natural order” and the “necessity of contingency” as the difference between internal relations within a consilient “object” (using the onticological term) and external relations between different objects. Quoting Bryant:

Lucretius articulates the thesis that has been common to all leftist thought for the last two thousand years: relations are external to their terms. […] And in demonstrating the contingency of these sorting and structuring mechanisms, what thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, and Marx above all show is the possibility of other ways of relating. Their point is never to say that we are ineluctably trapped in these relations– though it can be damned hard to escape them –but that these relations aren’t “natural”, they aren’t internal, they don’t have to be this way.

Thus, where Burke attempts to situate politics in a stable universe and a natural mode of governance and economics, Marx instead argues for communism on the basis of a contingent history of capitalism.

This does not make the ideas of leftist politics necessarily better, by any metric. They may be worse, even far worse, but what they never are is natural. When they go wrong, they can and ought to be changed, and that change, that difference, makes all the difference.

So when I hear Rick Santorum extol the American nation or the American family or heterosexuality as normative and natural and right and good, I hear the worst of Aristotle’s apologetics for the perverse contingencies of power, and my imagination is piqued and my anger aroused, because another world is possible.