Month: September 2004

No one can avoid having some significant interest in her or his relationships to the nation-state just because of its massive resources, its coercive legal powers, and the threats that its blundering and distorted benevolence presents. But any rational relationship of the governed to the government of modern states requires individuals and groups to weigh any benefits to be derived from it against the costs of entanglement with it, at least so far as that aspect of states is concerned in which they are and present themselves as giant utility companies. — Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals

Disputations makes some distinctions.

That’s what Ken Layne wants to know:

These are facts. The Republican leadership stands for absolutely nothing beyond growing the federal government, federal deficit and federal control of our lives at a staggering, unforgivable & untenable rate. We have a president who has never seen a spending bill he didn’t love — he has yet to veto anything.

What is fueling the party faithful? How do self-proclaimed conservatives maintain their righteous frothing at the mouth when it is abundantly clear that their party hasn’t the slightest resemblance to Conservatism? How do you avoid Exploding Brain Syndrome when the hated opposition looks like Barry Goldwater compared to your insane tax-cut-and-spend Big Government rampage? …

…(And no, I’m not claiming to be a Goldwater Conservative. Like the overwhelming majority of voters — that 60-70% in the middle of the Political Spectrum — I simply believe it is reasonable to demand a government that practices restraint in all matters. You know, like staying the hell out of our private lives, not taxing us to death, not spending money it doesn’t have, and not sending our troops off on ridiculous & doomed adventures dreamed up by a bunch of dingbats in some back room conducting foreign policy like geeks playing Dungeons & Dragons.)



Via Unqualified Offerings.

John Ray at Dissecting Leftism points out some of the limitations of understanding politics along a simple left-right axis. This is a particularly interesting observation:

Putting it at its briefest, the Left/Right division is so pervasive because that IS how the great majority of people think. There are of course varieties of conservatism — with religious conservatives and economic conservatives having least in common — but they all do have SOME things in common: Principally a respect for the individual. Leftists, by contrast, talk in terms of groups and say that the individual must bow down and conform to some largely mythical “community’. And both the Communists and Hitler were very good at that.

I think there’s some truth in what Mr. Ray says here, even though it’s somewhat contrary to what I’ve written before about modern liberals being heirs to the “Millian” project of liberating the individual.

Another way of understanding things would be to posit an individualist-communitarian axis. Communitarians think that politics should serve a common good, while individualists see the purpose of politics to be fostering the choices the individual makes about what is good. On this understanding communitarians and individualists would both come in “flavors” of left and right. For instance, a libertarian is an individualist of the Right, while someone like Amitai Etzioni is a communitarian of the Left. A liberal who wants to create a “choice-enhancement” State (the term David Koyzis uses) is an individualist of the Left, while someone like George Will might best be understood as a communitarian of the Right. This would account in part for the tensions we often see among those ostensibly on the same political side.

Walking to work today I happened to see a car with a “Go Vegan!” bumper sticker right next to a “Darwin fish” sticker. This isn’t particularly surprising, and in my neighborhood there are plenty of cars expressing such progressive sentiments. But after thinking about it a bit, I decided there was a subtle, but significant, inconsistency here.

Now, I’m not interested here in the merits of Darwinism as a theory for explaining evolution. And for the record, I don’t think there’s any inconsistency between Darwinism as an explanatory theory and Christian faith. I think the early chapters of Genesis clearly belong to the genre of what Karl Barth called “saga” – stories that take place outside of observable history, but tell us important truths about God and his relation to the world and to us. Genesis is not a textbook of proto-science. Which is not to say that Darwinism may not be flawed; it has many critics, inside and outside the scientific disciplines, and those criticisms have to be evaluated on their merits. But that’s not a debate I’m particularly interested in.

No, what I’m interested in is “Darwinism” as a worldview, or philosophical outlook – a worldview that excludes God or any transcendent dimension to existence. I assume that anyone who puts a Darwin sticker on their car is doing something more than affirming a particular theory about the origins of life, especially when that sticker is a parody of a popular Christian symbol.

What does this have to do with veganism? Well, quite apart from the fact that Darwinism has, notoriously, not had the most progressive consequences when applied to morality, I wonder if someone who is a philosophical Darwinist/naturalist can consistently believe that humans have a moral obligation not to eat or exploit animals. After all, if the natural world is all there is, what lessons does it have to teach us as far as morality goes? The obvious conclusion would seem to be that conflict, violence, and predation are “natural” and so there’s no reason humans shouldn’t imitate our animal brethren in this respect.

Exhibiting moral concern for animals is in many ways an “unnatural” behavior. We have no obvious interest, individually or as a species, in treating them with compassion or in refusing to harm them. While a thoroughgoing naturalist may be able to rationalize moral conduct between humans as a kind of survival strategy, to extend moral consideration to animals seems, on these premises, to be stretching things beyond credibility.

If nature “red in tooth and claw” is the bottom line, the most fundamental reality, then it’s very hard to see why we have moral obligations to our fellow creatures. To act “with the grain of the universe” will be to act in ways that are fundamentally self-seeking. So, it’s hard to see Darwinism as a fitting complement to progressive views about animals, or other human beings for that matter.

I don’t mean to deny that, in strict logic, it’s possible to be a philosophical Darwinist or naturalist and to hold moral opinions that value all life. It’s just that these opinions won’t be grounded in one’s fundamental views about the world. Morality becomes at best a heroic, but ultimately futile, Camus-esque enterprise of spitting in the face of an absurd and uncaring universe.

By contrast, Christianity teaches that the bottom line of reality is not violence and conflict, but peace. This is one of the lessons of Genesis – again not as a psuedo-scientific account of the origins of life, but as a vision of God’s creation as it was meant to be (and will be). In the Garden humans and animals live together peacefully – even the animals are vegetarian! (cf. Genesis 1:30) Creation is a gift of a good God and is itself fundamentally good (being qua being is good, as Augustine said).

This vision of the peaceable kingdom is ultimately what gives Christian ethics its coherence. Because Christ reigns, Christians can afford to be nonviolent. The Jesus fish goes much better with the “Go Vegan!” sticker.

More on the mysterious meanings of “conservative,” “liberal,” and “moderate” from Get Religion:

What I have seen so far has — surprise! — raised more questions for me about the way the mainstream media use certain loaded words. This time around, I am wondering what the word “moderate” means when applied to members of the Republican Party who are pro-abortion rights. As they march to the platform, commentators are noting that their presence is an attempt by the GOP to reach out beyond its “conservative” base and reach “moderate” voters.

I am confused and want to ask this question. If abortion on demand is the “moderate” position, what is the “liberal” position? For years, polls seem to indicate that the public is divided three ways on this most painful of issues. On one side is a camp of people who do not want to limit abortion in any way, even when dealing with the partial-birth procedure that some Democrats have compared with legal infanticide. On the right are the conservatives — fundamentalists, even — who want an outright ban with few, if any, exceptions. In between is the great muddy middle in the electorate that favors some legal restrictions.

But in public media, “moderate” means pro-abortion-rights — period. Those who favor any legal limits are “conservatives.”

Help me out here. Who are the “liberals”? What is the “liberal” position on abortion? Has anyone seen this perfectly honorable political term used lately, in the context of political issues linked to a debate about morality and culture?

More here.