If you are to begin speaking of how some being or order is to be regulated, you must begin with what that being or order is. The question of ontology is inseparable from the question of good order. To understand what constitutes the health of the human body requires understanding the purpose of the human body’s function. An idea about what health could be like apart from letting the human body manifest for itself will always be divergent from the body’s actual health. A poor theory of good order that is insensitive to natural cycles will always end up trying to treat the symptoms while failing to understand what failure of order brings about those troublesome trends.
The human body forms for human purposes, but that’s not the same as saying all purposes humans seek out are aligned with the body. Humans exercise a greater latitude over their behavior than other animals, and so more easily diverge from the specific purposes towards which the human body evolved. Some see this as representing man’s transcendence over evolution, but this is hubristic. Man is and always will be subject to the forces of nature, which operate according to their own purposes. Humanity is a part of a greater cosmic whole, and his nature is satisfied within it. Divergence from the purpose of the human body is unhealthy in just the same way we would recognize an organ’s divergence from its natural purpose is unhealthy. This theory of morality, which is called natural law theory, is but an extension of the fundamental insight that an order and its good cannot be understood apart from each other.
On politics, there is a profusion of confusion for a lack of perceiving the necessity of this insight. Values which might be pursued by society are treated as though they are arbitrarily chosen, and of ultimately equal possibility. Society is only observed by ideologues for how their vision might be implemented, not that they might understand what society is. Yet society is definitely an order of its own. It is not an aggregate of human wills; though its individual parts are possessed of will, to suppose that it is itself an aggregate of these wills and as such takes its form through human will is the fallacy of composition. Society is an organic being which arises as a network of interacting parts and systems solving problems imposed by the constraints of space and scarcity. This non-anthropomorphic understanding of society, which does not attempt to start with understanding some human wills and then “scale up” but rather begins by observing it as an integral whole, elucidates social order in a way the compositional method does not.
Society forms for social purposes, and humans are a part within that. As we recognize that within the human body individual groups of cells can be recognized as either conducive or deleterious to the health of the whole, so can we do the same for society. But, and this to warn off the trigger happy who might interpret this simplistically, it does not follow that all forms of part displacement are equal. When acting on the human body to improve its health, surgery is only one of many means. Sometimes a regimen of regular exercise and healthy food is all that’s required. Or, ongoing treatments which heal the body over time are optimal. Even when surgery is employed, it is always preferred that it be minimally invasive and as simple as possible. The health of society would be pursued in much the same way. A political theorist should be nearer a medical theorist and a politician nearer a medical doctor. The tendency of modern political theorists to set aside the intrinsic purpose of society and of politicians to make every possible intervention counts against them. Were it to be responded that they simply do not believe in intrinsic purpose, especially not of society, then they admit there is no standard against which their work might be judged and their work is entirely without purpose.
For what end does society form? It forms for an end beyond individual humans; this is evidenced in the way it continuously exerts particular selection pressures which evolutionarily alters human populations. This occurs for its own purposes, modulating human qualities so that humans are more apt to the needs of civilization than their primordial, tribal environment. It is a pole of infinite gravity, for the more something is adapted to this end the more readily it becomes adapted, and so on end over end through time. This ultimate purpose upon which all civilization converges must be interrogated.
This social gravity is a force not only on humans but on all the universe. Individual objects with competing ends naturally tend to destroy each other, and have very little to protect its own order against a vicious world. The natural solution is coordination with other objects, to subordinate under another order through which each part gains protection of its own order. Thus physical objects come together and form chemical objects, and chemical objects come together to form biological objects. This process continues through to humans and ultimately civilization, a great chain of ends.
What is this end that draws the world so strongly to itself? Why is it in forming the purpose of converging on this pole that beings are better able to preserve their integrity? This rapidly passes from the metaphysical to the theological, and indeed this should not be spurned. The outright rejection of the theological as a licit form of reasoning and the replacement with a purely “secular” standard has not improved reason but only blinded us. Speaking on political order as a vestige of cosmic order is lofty, and modern political theory has simply not been lofty enough.