Before I even get into this business, let me assure one and all that this is strictly a come as you are thread. How you approach it is strictly a matter of personal style. If you want to read it seated before your computer in full Hazmat gear–fine. That’s your call. On the other hand, you may wish to approach it in an altogether less formal manner–you might, for example, print it out, exchange it for your favorite rubber ducky, and read it while lounging in the relaxing comfort of a hot bath. Hey, it’s up to you. Here goes.
I haven’t been participating in the nearby Homosexual Marriage thread (still going strong at over 1600 hits), except for a couple of pretty random posts.
The reason for my abstinence is that I tend to be of the opinion that neither “liberals” nor “conservatives” are willing to face up to the implications of their positions in general–the “marriage” issue being just one example. Most liberals are unwilling to face up to the implications of the relativism that their positions entail, but which conservatives gleefully confront them with in the form of slippery slope arguments. Most conservatives, for their part, are unwilling to face up to the fact that their positions also involve them in a Humean style conservatism: an implicit relativism combined with a more cautious attitude toward change. (I realize, of course, that many “conservatives” would reject the notion that they embrace any type of relativism, but I say “implicit” because they must, at a minimum, lay aside their deepest convictions to be full participants in American public life.) Each side seems to accept as America’s public philosophy what I have called a “fuzzy libertarianism,” each representing what could be called different “flavors” of a fundamentally libertarian attitude. Each side resolutely refuses to examine the foundation for their favored assumptions, which, in my opinion, both rest on an Enlightenment view of Christianity.
Let me illustrate this from an article I just read. The article starts off by discussing a book by a fellow named Shannon, who at some points discusses the views of his friend, “the American social critic and historian Christopher Lasch.” Here are a few quotes from the article:
After spending 180 pages…dissecting modernity’s secular and rationalist frame of mind, Shannon turned to Lasch to underscore his overarching point: Americans, he contended, were trapped in a political and cultural straitjacket due to…
what Shannon termed
“the Reformation-Enlightenment attack on tradition”
The article then continues:
But despite his acuity of vision, Lasch seemed unable to accept one ominous historical reality: due to the modern rejection of a world governed by a “spiritual order” and the affirmation instead of “the creation of value and meaning by autonomous human subjects,” the sort of community for which Lasch and so many others yearned–whether they were on the left, center, or right–was impossible. Whatever their own self-flattering perceptions, Americans were, constitutionally, “a people bound together only by a belief in their inalienable right not to be bound together to anything.” Given this brute philosophical and political reality, the unceasing jeremiads pronounced by moralists like Lasch, however intelligent and well-intentioned, were doomed to fail. “Calls for moral responsibility are pointless apart from some context of shared values, and the only values Americans share are the procedural norms of a libertarian social order, the thinness of which incites the anxiety that drives the jeremiad in the first place.” He concluded the book with a damning pronouncement: “The bourgeois attempt to construct a rational alternative to tradition has failed.”
I basically agree with this assessment.
