Political theory

Some notes, for whatever they’re worth:

• “Freedom” sounds good rhetorically because it has an open-ended quality that seems to stretch out into the infinite. That makes it a good substitute religion that can support open-ended commitments like patriotism and world empire. It’s also good to pin ultimate loyalties to. That’s why liberals call themselves liberals rather than egalitarians. In day-to-day political life freedom mostly merges into lifestyle freedoms and economic concerns—middle-class benefits like reductions in taxation and in regulation of small business. That gives its ideal side a certain unreality. When the Berlin Wall fell the oppressed Easterners didn’t head toward churches and libraries, they went to the shopping mall. To make its ideal side seem real there has to be a crusade or jihad on its behalf. So freedom tends to be a martial ideal.

I just finished reading John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Along with most of the other things Murray wrote it’s available online. He was a serious, intelligent and reflective man, and he deals with important issues, so the book’s well worth reading. I don’t have time now for a full-scale discussion though, only for a few notes.

To give a very brief summary of overall impressions, it seems to me that overall Murray’s positions are much like those of Catholic neocons except less pro-capitalist. Like the neocons he thinks liberalism, Americanism and orthodox Catholicism are a good match. It seems to me things have moved on and demonstrated serious problems with that view, although it’s natural to resist that conclusion because it puts contemporary American Catholics in an uncomfortable position. Murray is particularly concerned with the problem of religious diversity and religious freedom. To my mind, different religions and whatnot can often co-exist peacefully and productively through some sort of modus vivendi, but there’s no super-principle that can stand above the strugggle and guarantee a modus vivendi can be found and specify its proper content. Murray and other liberals seem to me to exaggerate the extent to which something like a super-principle is possible. The result is that substantive judgments get smuggled into the law on the pretext that they stand for neutral principles governing the relationship among differing substantive views.

Everybody today thinks laws against employment discrimination are a great good and even a moral requirement. I think they’re an obvious evil. I think they’re inconsistent with any reasonable conservatism, which means I think they’re inconsistent with any tolerable society. I’ve complained about them here and there on Turnabout, but a summary of the objections might be useful to focus the issues.

A basic problem with such laws is that employment is a complex relationship. Hiring, assignments and promotion involve subjective issues of trust, compatibility, mutual comprehension, and ways of cooperation. It’s impossible to separate judgments of those things from one’s sense of who people are. Antidiscrimination law insists on doing just that with respect to basic dimensions of personal identity. Whether you’re a man or woman, white or black, recent Chinese immigrant or Mayflower descendent, can’t have any effect that matters on how anyone deals with you at work. That doesn’t make much sense:

The Catholic Church in England and Wales has issued some Diversity and Equality Guidelines on the relationship between antidiscrimination law and the mission of the Church and its agencies. The Guidelines have drawn some unfavorable comment because of their positive treatment of “living together” (including homosexual) situations. Beyond the specific issues, however, they include a Policy Statement that’s short and provides an occasion for thinking about general principles and whether common attitudes of Church officials today toward “social justice” issues are really consistent with an intelligent understanding of Catholicism.

Has public discussion come to an end? Bush and his supporters want to transform the world by force to eliminate tyranny and establish freedom and democracy everywhere. The transformation of the world is to parallel the accelerated tranformation of the United States through effectively open borders. It’s not clear why any of that makes sense, but Bush isn’t interested in discussing the matter and calls you a racist if you raise questions.

There is a strain of right-wing thought, especially in Europe, that holds Christianity responsible for the collapse of the West into rationalized egalitarian mass society. Christian monotheism and emphasis on the equality of souls before God, it is said, undercuts particularity, diversity, and hierarchy. And in the absence of some admixture of those things all you can have is social and moral chaos ordered at most by some combination of force, fraud and money.

The implications of such claims aren’t altogether clear. It’s as if someone said it’s been bad for my character to have the ancestry and upbringing I do. What sense can that make, when so little remains of me apart from those things? The West is simply the group of societies that were once part of Catholic Christendom, together with their overseas offspring. While Western culture is said to be composed of classical and Germanic as well as Christian elements, it’s not easy to separate the three. Christianity began in the Roman Empire, it spread, developed and grew up there, its formative languages were Greek and Latin, and the Roman Empire converted to it in accordance with its own needs. So why is Christianity foreign to Classical culture any more than Platonism? As to the Germans, they too became Christian without external compulsion—presumably because of weaknesses within paganism—and didn’t have much civilization before then.

So what does it mean that actual conservatism—conservatism that accepts the natural, historical and transcendent as substantive realities and so is distinguishable from the attempt to convert the whole world into a sort of rationalized industrial process—doesn’t exist in American public discussion? (I take it that paleo or traditionalist conservatism is not really part of the great conversation today.)

The question presented by current public standards regarding racial discrimination is whether it’s OK to prefer to form connections with people to whom one has an ethnic or cultural connection, on the grounds that things tend to work better that way, or whether it’s so wrong to do so that extirpating such conduct is an obvious and pressing duty, and anyone who thinks otherwise is an illegitimate person with no place in public life.

No conservatism worth having can accept the ’60s revolution regarding sex and sex roles. The revolution wasn’t just another set of modifications to practices and secondary principles that are always changing anyway. Like the Bolshevik Revolution, it was a genuine modernist revolution that has created an unprecedented situation at odds with any normal way for people to understand themselves and live together.

My answer is no, at least if conservatism is to be more than the view of a few comfortable intellectuals. “Conservatism” can mean many things, but it always involves a sense that in the most basic ways life can’t be understood or controlled. At bottom, we have to accept and cooperate with things as they have been given us by God, nature, history or chance. Utopia isn’t going to happen, and we’re not even going to get close. We have to live with reality instead.

Such an outlook won’t become the basis for carrying on social life unless people in general are willing not only to live with it but to give it their loyalty as something right and good. They have to be able to view the mystery at the heart of the world as something positive they can submit to without degradation, rather than mindless contingency that crushes them where they can’t escape or outwit it or stick its burdens on somebody else.

From a traditionalist conservative point of view, the modern world looks doomed. Its insistence on rooting out all social institutions not based on free-floating choice and formalized expertise—that’s what “inclusiveness,” its highest moral principle, is all about—leaves no place for the settled informal connections and understandings that make possible decent human relations or even ordinary rationality. So it seems headed for chaos, tyranny and neo-primitivism as institutions stop functioning in an orderly above-board fashion and rely instead on force, fraud, bribery and durable pre-rational connections like blood and tribal loyalties. From a trad standpoint, then, the future can look like post-Soviet Russia, only with less common culture and more numerous and varied Chechens.