1. An objective moral order2. The human person as the center of political and social thought3. A distaste for the use of state power to enforce ideological patterns upon human beings4. A rejection of social engineering, or the "planned" society5. The spirit of the Constitution of the United States as originally conceived, especially the division of powers between state and federal governments and between the three branches of the federal government6. A devotion to Western civilization and an awareness of the need to defend it
I definitely believe that there is an objective moral order, one that is discoverable in nature -- for example, one discovers that the virtues Aristotle praised are in fact the things that make your life better if practiced. That is simply true; and yet the idea that one should draw ethical lessons from nature, even or especially human nature, is very much under attack.
I'm not quite sure what the alternative to proposition 2 was intended be; perhaps the preservation of an institution, such as the Church or a city-state? I would say that this proposition is shared by right and left, though; feminism, for example, is all about the lives of human women (and not, say, lionesses); our cultural disputes are more about whether this or that person's interests should be upheld where they conflict. The dispute about trans-* athletes is really just a dispute about whether their individual interests should trump those of the individual women athletes they might be displacing; it's not a dispute over whether the interests of a person should or shouldn't be the root of the decision.
Proposition three is framed in terms of tastes, which might be right; although it might not be. I suspect many conservatives, if asked, would be happy to resume criminalizing certain sexual practices and/or lifestyles; and some remaining laws banning sexual practices, such as pedophilia, are hotly supported by conservatives. Meanwhile the state sometimes does provide a useful corrective to non-state attempts to impose ideological agendas; people have successfully sued in court to restore rights that were being suppressed by employers or corporations.
The fourth proposition is where the failure is most obvious; the proposition is the right principle, but so far the planners are stealing one Long March after another.
I would submit that the fifth proposition is misguided, although I once held to it. I have decided, however, that it is not the Constitution but the Declaration of Independence whose spirit must be the eternal and unyielding guide. The Articles of Confederation came and went, and the Constitution may do likewise. As long as we hold that 'all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights,' and that 'governments are instituted among men (solely) to secure those rights,' and may be replaced whenever they become destructive to that end -- as long, too, as we do not yield our original understanding of what rights these were, to include freedom of speech and thought, religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to be secure from official oppression -- well, that is the thing to be preserved.
The sixth one is true, and never more true than now. A defense is needed.
18 comments:
"I'm not quite sure what the alternative to proposition 2 (The human person as the center of political and social thought) was intended be; perhaps the preservation of an institution, such as the Church or a city-state?"
The alternative favored by the Left is the Group as the primary focus; especially the ethnically defined community. (It's always 'Black communities', for example, not 'Black *people*)
Also, sex-defined (and sexual-preference defined) Groups.
I once angered several people in a graduate seminar by proposing that the individual is the basic unit of history. One person went all collectivist and another went the other way to Dawkins' idea of "the selfish gene".
I would think that 2 is about individualism, as opposed to collectivism or nihilism, maybe.
For 3, "I suspect many conservatives, if asked, would be happy to resume criminalizing certain sexual practices and/or lifestyles; and some remaining laws banning sexual practices, such as pedophilia, are hotly supported by conservatives."
Well, are sexual practices ideological, necessarily? I think conservatives don't see it as ideological but rather from real natural laws, and the same natural laws that guide society in other ways (such as laws against murder) also guide it to limit sexual behavior.
Obviously, their opponents will cast such things as ideological, but that doesn't mean we have to take their opponents' word for it.
I was thinking about Bruce Jenner today, running for governor, discussing his ideas on camera and expecting society to simply accept without comment his long hair, makeup, attire, obvious facial and body modifications, and so on.
I personally don't care about his infatuation with sexual identity, and wouldn't comment on it in person. I do believe, however, that this is reflective of serious psychological problems, an instability that would inevitably affect his decision-making, and likely for the worse. Any person could reasonably challenge his fitness for office on this basis alone. We've become inured and conditioned to accept such mental illnesses as being part of the norm, in modern times. But think of how jarring something like Bruce Jenner would have been 30 years ago, or Richard Levine, bizarrely, grotesquely picked as a Health Secretary, with mental health under his purview.
I wonder why such things are accepted. Is it because Medical Science has progressed to the point where it can approximate such unnatural and unreachable desires? But they are still approximations. Yet here we are, exhorted to accept the results as a genuine article, just as banal a selection as hair color.
It cannot stand. Your sex life is your business and not mine, whether you like it or not. And vice-versa.
Well, are sexual practices ideological, necessarily?
No, not necessarily so. It is possible to leave them out of ideology, or to include them. According to the second wave feminism slogan that 'the personal is political,' it certainly can be incorporated into political ideology. In fact, some of our hottest ideological disputes have been on the subject.
Homosexual practice was actually illegal when I was young, on the grounds that it was deviant and morally corrupt. There are very old philosophical arguments for this (you can find one in Plato's Laws) and modern ones as well (e.g. Kant's Metaphysics of Morals). I wouldn't say either of these were ideological, so much as purely philosophical; but conservative ideology might well have incorporated either or both in defense of its legal and institutional preferences. Conservatives very much did appreciate a legal order that supported the moral order, and it was part of traditional conservatism to maintain institutions that upheld and enforced these ideas.
We have, in just a portion of my lifetime, raced from that illegality to treating the same behavior as a major human right that cannot be morally gainsaid or legislated against. This is due to the success of another ideological understanding of sexuality and its role in life and ethics.
So, maybe conservatives had a 'distaste' for using the state to enforce this, but if so I didn't notice it in the old days; maybe in 2016 that was already sour grapes, so to speak. "Sure, we can't enforce the old laws or uphold the old moral order, but it was distasteful to do so anyway."
In any case, they lost; though that was hardly the most important of the fights they have lost, and perhaps even one that it is better to have lost. I had significant concerns for the damage that might occur to the institution of marriage, but ten years on I can't say that I think they've materialized.
I do believe, however, that this is reflective of serious psychological problems, an instability that would inevitably affect his decision-making, and likely for the worse.
Bear in mind the study from the other day, that fully half of young liberal women have been diagnosed with mental health issues. If you start holding up mental health as a necessary condition for being entrusted with political power, you'll disenfranchise a substantial part of the country.
maybe conservatives had a 'distaste' for using the state to enforce this, but if so I didn't notice it in the old days
I'm not sure I was clear. I don't think conservatives saw that as enforcing ideology, so those laws would not have violated the principle for them, just as laws against prostitution or pedophilic sex don't now.
So, "A distaste for the use of state power to enforce ideological patterns upon human beings" would not be enforcing particular morals by law, but rather enforcing ideology by law, e.g., Critical Race Theory, Marxism, etc.
Or so I think. Maybe I'm wrong by what was meant by "ideology." I'll have to go back and re-read.
I think this is also a distinction made by an objective moral order. If we can say that something is objectively wrong, then it isn't ideological to ban it. Banning murder is not an ideological position, for example, it's a natural expression of that objective moral order.
I tried to go back to the original article I got this from, but alas it's 404.
As for the damage from the legal victories of homosexual practice, I think plenty of damage has been done, and more will come.
Of course, plenty was done by the sexual revolution of the 50s and 60s, too, and that was largely heterosexual. It's not homosexuality per se, but sexual immorality. Still, if you go back to the literature, to Ginsberg and Kerouac and all their ilk, social acceptance of homosexuality was a significant part of that as well.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings have caught up with us.
I think this is also a distinction made by an objective moral order. If we can say that something is objectively wrong, then it isn't ideological to ban it.
There are two problems with this distinction, though I see where you are going with it.
1) While having an objective standard for what is wrong can move the decision about 'what is wrong?' out of the realm of ideology, the practical decision to respond to wrongness with government-enforced bans is in fact ideological. You don't have to do that; you can respond to vice with persuasion, or education, or by accepting an ideology holding human liberty is more important than enforced morality. Having an objective standard for morality doesn't get you past the practical point of what to do about wrongness.
It's also not generally true that determining objective moral truth is sufficient by itself. One might say, "Murder is wrong" and also "Murder needs to be banned," and yet hold that "Drunkenness is wrong" and not that "Drunkenness needs to be banned." There are additional considerations that have to be worked out. Kant applies himself to this particular problem by distinguishing between the Doctrine of Right (where government force can or should be used to prevent or punish wrong) and the Doctrine of Virtue (where it shouldn't). Kant, I think, actually believes that masturbation is morally worse than murder; but murder violates the rights of another, and thus can be stopped forcefully, whereas masturbation shouldn't be punished at law.
2) Even when you are trying to lay out your moral arguments clearly, you can deceive yourself or others about your real ends. Prohibition was an attempt to ban something that was described (and perhaps even conceived) as objectively morally wrong -- drunkenness, a form of the sin of gluttony -- but in fact was motivated by a desire to reduce immigration from wine-loving Italy and beer-loving Germany and Ireland.
So you end up having to address considerations that your objective moral arguments are masking what may be impermissible considerations or goals. How to sort out these conflicts can be done in moral philosophy, but is likely to shade into ideology at scale. Whether you hold that immigration is a net benefit or a net harm to society (or becomes harmful beyond certain levels) is likely to have to do with ideology: with, for example, whether you think it is most important to preserve a good culture or to be welcoming and fair to strangers. (Alternatively: more important to preserve culture or to advance capitalist goals, which might include keeping wages low and productivity high in ways that high immigration supports.)
For these reasons, I don't think objective morality suffices to avoid ideological considerations. Nor need you try to do so, necessarily; a thoughtfully-constructed ideology is not by nature a bad thing.
Your points are well-taken. Since I can't find the original article this came from, I don't think I'll argue the point anymore, but I would like to rephrase some things.
First, for the conservative, the ideology isn't dominant. We begin be asking what is right and what is wrong, and then ideology may be necessary to answer the next question. If it's wrong, what do we do about it? So ideology is subordinate to moral philosophy.
For the left, in contrast, ideology seems to be a much more dominant part of their worldview.
I might then rephrase the general rule from "A distaste for the use of state power to enforce ideological patterns upon human beings" to something more like "The use of ideology for the use of state power must be subordinate to moral philosophy based on the objective moral order."
I'm not sure that is exactly right, either, but maybe it is a little more precise.
I'd like to come back to "2. The human person as the center of political and social thought" and part of your comment on that:
... feminism, for example, is all about the lives of human women (and not, say, lionesses)
I'm not sure that's right anymore. I think early feminism was about that. I find some things in early feminism that I think are very persuasive and seem right to me. However, more recently, feminism has gone the critical theory route and adopted class categories, so they are no longer interested in the lives of individual women except as examples of the female proletariat revolting against the patriarchy. Republican women, for example, are not really women to them. So, the left may begin with an interest in individuals, but it always moves toward the collectivist mentality (at least, in the US it seems to).
... our cultural disputes are more about whether this or that person's interests should be upheld where they conflict. The dispute about trans-* athletes is really just a dispute about whether their individual interests should trump those of the individual women athletes they might be displacing; it's not a dispute over whether the interests of a person should or shouldn't be the root of the decision.
That's a very conservative framing of the disputes. That may be what it is about for us. But I would say for the left, they are about who is to have power. The dispute about trans-athletes is really a dispute about who has the power to define terms and declare debates won. The individual interests of both the trans-athletes themselves and the women athletes' lives are irrelevant to the left. The Revolution must prevail, regardless of the individual costs.
"The use of ideology for the use of state power must be subordinate to moral philosophy based on the objective moral order."
That's definitely better. It probably needs some refinement along the lines of the centrality of human liberty to that objective moral order, so that there is a normal prejudice against using state power that can only be overcome in cases like murder. The basic approach is workable, though.
For the left, in contrast, ideology seems to be a much more dominant part of their worldview.
For the Marxists and those who have adapted Marxism to critical theory, it becomes indistinguishable from the philosophy. The history, too: nothing is admissible into the historic discussion that contradicts the ideologically determined outcomes. The philosophy serves as the foundation for the ideological grinding machine that eats up all facts, and transforms them into outputs conforming to the ideology's pre-approved narrative.
As I've mentioned before, our education systems that have been captured by critical theory serve as training grounds here. The clever student proves himself (or herself) by showing how well they can take an apparent contradiction and interpret it as actually supporting the ideology after all. For true Marxists (who are the best of this lot by far), this is the capitalist whose work seems to actually benefit and raise up the workers; that is to be said to be another form of control. For critical feminism, it is the men who like women and support them in pursuing their goals; obviously just another way of forcing the women to depend on men (which fortunately those supported women were clever enough to detect and exploit, stealing from the patriarchy a little of their own liberation without believing the men's lies about being on their side).
Critical race theory is really flourishing along these lines right now. The 1619 project is an example of it.
It probably needs some refinement along the lines of the centrality of human liberty to that objective moral order, so that there is a normal prejudice against using state power that can only be overcome in cases like murder.
Yes, though I'm not sure how I would phrase it. Of course, the Bill of Rights does that to some extent. It would be more powerful except that the courts have limited it in various ways.
The way I think of it is that the sovereignty of the state is borrowed from the individual citizen, and as such the power of the state cannot (at least justly) be used to infringe on the sovereignty of the individual, but maybe I'm making this too complicated. I dunno, just thinking aloud.
It is certainly true that the courts have decided that 'whatever they say is legitimate' is the standard for legitimacy. Your phrasing nicely captures that, whatever is said by any court or every court, it is really the citizens who are the final source of power and the final authority over what is or is not legitimate.
Forking the thread a bit, but
Isn't a big part of the right-wing conservative ethos an emphasis on FAMILY, even if -- sometimes near the margins -- support for the family comes at the expense of the individual members of the family?
Strictures on Divorce or abortion; imposition of child-support and alimony; "social security" for the widow and orphan; the "living wage"; local control (choice) of schools; tax credits and deductions for home-ownership or dependent children; DACA ...
During the woman's suffrage debate the claim was floated that allowing a woman/wife/homemaker to nullify the opposing vote of a family's man/husband/breadwinner would unfairly advantage voters outside families. That, leading to family-hostile public policies. Which sounds strange now, but the results are what they are.
That's a good point, although I don't think support for DACA was very strong among conservatives. But that's not important.
I'm not sure how to frame that in our list of principles. Do you have a suggestion?
Re Jenner. A despised but strongly-evidenced theory out of Johns Hopkins and supported elsewhere is that about 50% of men-becoming-women don't actually think of themselves as women so much as enjoy thinking of themselves as women, a subtle but important distinction. There have been protests, even violent ones, at APA conventions about even allowing such theories to be heard. I knew one of the participants, a humorous but vicious psychiatrist in fourth-year residency at my hospital who was transitioning from woman to man.
The condition is called Autogynophilia, and folks might be interested in following up on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology#Autogynephilia
That's interesting, AVI. I'll have to read up on it a bit.
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