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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.

We’re hearing a lot about how the Republicans are showcasing their “moderates” at the convention in an attempt to woo swing voters. The puzzling thing about this claim is that the so-called moderates don’t seem to necessarily have much in common, nor are they necessarily moderate in any straightforward sense.

Consider: the three prominent “moderates” are Sen. John McCain, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Ah-nold. Now, McCain is ultra-hawkish on the war (both Iraq and the broader war on terrorism), and so, apparently, is Giuliani. However, McCain is a well-credentialed social conservative (pro-gun, anti-abortion, etc.) whereas Giuliani is, by all accounts, extremely socially liberal. I’m not sure where Arnold stands on the war, but he is also pro-choice, pro-gay rights and liberalish on gun control. McCain has been known to oppose tax cuts and pork spending (but on general “fiscally conservative” grounds) and has championed campaign finance reform and certain environmental legislation. Arnold also seems to have a soft spot for green causes, but has generally positioned himself as pro-tax cuts.

So, wherein lies the moderation that supposedly unites all these worthies? One suspects that “moderate” is just being used to refer to anyone who departs in any way from the standard conservative Republican positions (anti-tax, socially conservative, hawkish on defense), which ends up looking like an attempt to paint the standard “conservative” positions as extreme by definition. Hardly a sporting way to conduct political debate.

Really, it’s McCain who’s the odd duck here. Giuliani and Arnold can both be classified as more or less what used to be called “liberal Republicans,” “Rockefeller Republicans,” etc. Though the classic liberal Republicans were not quite so bellicose on foreign policy. In fact, a lot of the liberal Republicans of yore were actually quite dovish or even isolationist (e.g. William Borah, Gerald Nye and other progressive Republicans of the WWII era, plus more recently Mark Hatfield of Oregon). On the other hand, McCain – socially conservative and interventionist – is in many ways the mirror image of this old-style “progressive Republicanism.” What perhaps does connect McCain to the older tradition of progressive Republicanism is his advocacy of various reform movements to clean up the political process (campaing finance reform, etc.).

Another complicating factor is that until about 35 years ago, “social issues” weren’t really on the agenda. Everyone basically agreed (for good or for ill) about what we consider the hot button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

All in all, the reality’s a lot more complicated and interesting than the simple labels of “conservative” and “moderate” make it out to be.

Sed Contra and Scandal of Particularity both have follow-up posts on the Rod Dreher article mentioned here yesterday.

Hugo Schwyzer has a good post on “supply” versus “demand” approaches to reducing abortion.

And check out Beliefnet’s Steven Waldman’s blog from the GOP convention covering the religion-and-politics beat.

I admire the boldness with which these persons undertake to speak of God. In addressing their argument to infidels, their first chapter is to prove Divinity from the works of nature. I should not be astonished at their enterprise, if they were addressing their argument to the faithful; for it is certain that those who have the living faith in their hearts see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, and in whom we purpose to rekindle it, persons destitute of faith and grace, who, seeking with all their light whatever they see in nature that can bring them to this knowledge, find only obscurity and darkness; to tell them that they have only to look at the smallest things which surround them, and they will see God openly, to give them, as a complete proof of this great and important matter, the course of the moon and planets, and to claim to have concluded the proof with such an argument, is to give them ground for believing that the proofs of our religion are very weak. And I see by reason and experience that nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt. — Blaise Pascal

Bill Vallicella has an incisive post on the meaning and importance of reverence, a concept that has fallen into much disrepute in our culture. Postmodern culture despises the idea that we owe anything or anyone reverence, because it flies in the face of the kind of debased egalitarianism, unthinkingly embraced by many, that flattens distinctions and denies the truth of any moral or aesthetic judgments that might imply a hierarchy of values. How long any civilization that embraces this kind of nihilism can last is an open question.