THE lEFT/rIGHT IS JUST THOSE...:

[W]hat if economic and political phenomena do not -- or cannot -- comply with moral reason as though they were deliberately caused? What if causation, as we apply the concept to social arrangements, is a myth? What would that mean for political life?

It might, as we have seen, mean a proliferation of ill-considered attempts at control. But it might also mean an acceptance of the seemingly arbitrary. This would be a good in the same sense as mystery is a good: because it enables faith. Acceptance of mystery requires the virtue of humility. It discourages radicalism without justifying quietism. The fact that we will always have the poor with us does not excuse us from the duty of charity: On the contrary, the inevitability of poverty, and the influence of arbitrary events on whom it touches, accentuates our social responsibility to address it.

But there is a difference between a regime that insures against the inherently harsh edges of a free economy and one that seeks to re-order -- as Rawls would -- every phenomenon to moral criteria. A state with that degree of authority must wield power it would be difficult not to abuse. Similarly, there is a difference between a regime that recognizes it is partly the product of accident and force, not simply reflection and choice, and one that subverts political institutions that are not, strictly speaking, morally reasonable.

A regime that embraces the fact that not everything is known or knowable will be cautious about the use of power. Perhaps an acceptance of mystery would also lead to a renewal of faith -- not the severe and unforgiving faith that sees natural tragedy as divine punishment, but a faith based on the reasonable limits of reason.

These limits are essential to an adult's view of the world. The child, just learning causation, sees a world without moral causation as a terrifying place, but the adult recognizes that such is often unavoidably the case. Sometimes events occur without someone to blame, in which case it is the consequences of those events, not the events themselves, that deserve social attention. Sometimes we operate under constraints that complexity imposes, and in these cases, we must limit our expectations. Adults know these facts in private life but often forget them in politics.

The statesman knows that recognizing when events are within our control and when we must accede to them is the hinge of prudence. But he also knows the price of total control is total submission. Such is the tension between liberty and the conquest of chance. It is, in a political sense, the difference between the perspective of an adult and the fantasy of a child. Politics, of course, does not always arouse our most mature qualities. But political reflection can.

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