Harvard's Michael Sandel goes Public

Michael Gerson has an op-ed today on the Communitarian Michael Sandel. Professor Sandel is making several of his lectures available online at http://justiceharvard.org/. What makes Sandel an anomaly on campus is that he is willing to critique the cultural libertarian view which says, “that government's only job is to set fair rules and procedures; it is entirely up to free individuals to choose the best way to live.”

"I do not think," He says, "that freedom of choice -- even freedom of choice under fair conditions -- is an adequate basis for a just society." For Sandel to say something like that on a campus which is filled with professors and students who assume it as a matter of fact is quite gutsy. Gerson’s nicely summarizes Sandel’s Communitarianism:

This equation of justice with freedom, he says, is unrealistic about the way human beings actually live. Our views of right and wrong, duty and betrayal, are not merely the result of individual free choice. All of us are born into institutions -- a family that involves our unconditional love, a community that elicits feelings of solidarity, a country that may demand a costly loyalty. Sandel argues that a liberal individualism cannot explain these deep attachments. We are "bound by some moral ties we haven't chosen."
Sandel, in the good company of Aristotle, contends that knowing "the right thing to do" in any of these institutions requires a determination of its purpose. And the purpose of government is not only to defend individual rights but also to honor and reward civic virtues -- patriotism, self-sacrifice and concern for our neighbor. This third definition of justice, by nature, is a moral enterprise.

Right before your very eyes

Gregory Wolfe, editor of IMAGE Journal, has a interesting set of posts on the state of Catholic literature today. He says most Traditional Catholics subscribe to the ‘myth of decline’: Catholic Letters has fallen off since the mid-twentieth century when writers like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor were around. Wolfe points out that these critics probably would not have appreciated these writers if they had been alive at that time. Take Waugh’s reception by his fellow Catholics for instance:

Even as conservative a writer as Evelyn Waugh had to write a long, impassioned letter defending his satirical novels to the Archbishop of Westminster, after he had been attacked in the British Catholic magazine The Tablet. Poor Waugh had to do the worst thing possible for a satirist and comedian—he had to explain his jokes. (In his novel Black Mischief he had described a campaign by white colonialists to bring contraception to the native African population, with hilarious and unpredictable side effects—as a form of undermining anti-Catholic thinking.)

Another argument in the myth of decline thesis is that these mid-twentieth century writers wrote ‘muscular’ prose. Think of Flannery O’Connor’s use of the Grotesque as an example of this. Wolfe responds that such a method was needed at the time, but that our own age requires a different tact:

But what happened when the century moved on, past world wars and into a less overtly dramatic time? When it came to a writer like Walker Percy—whose credentials as a traditional, Mass-attending Catholic are not in question—that cultural change can be seen clearly. Percy put it quite bluntly: the world he lived in was not the stark world of his Southern friend Flannery. His was a South of golf courses and gated subdivisions, not bleak homesteads set off in the woods.
For Percy, the absence of God was still an issue, but he felt that it had been submerged by prosperity, that modern unbelief and despair had become domesticated, anesthetized by shopping malls, new-fangled pills, and inane movies.
In such a world, God is not likely to be heard in shouts but in whispers.

This might be the weaker part of his argument because a case could easily be made that Walker Percy tried to shock his readers just as much in the same way that O’Connor ever did.

That aside, Wolfe concludes his posts by mentioning some contemporary Catholic writers, like Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott, and Andre Dubus. His concern, and it is one worth discussing, is that Traditional Catholics are failing to recognize that they are living through a type of literary renaissance as we speak.

Who are you going to trust?

The most recent Harry Potter film, the 6th in the series, is actually the best one so far. And it is directed by David Yates, who made the 5th film, which might be the worst in the series.

A criticism leveled against the series is that it presents Harry’s rule-breaking as praiseworthy. For example, Dumbledore lists it as one of Harry’s virtues in the second book.

Yet it is clear that Harry is not a rule-breaker in the ‘rebel without a cause’ sense. There are two types of rules, moral and legal, and Harry never breaks the former. To my knowledge, he never commits intrinsically evil act or does evil so good may result. The legal rules he breaks are general, not absolute, because they are meant to capture the majority of cases and thus do not apply in emergencies.

Of course, what gets parents up in arms is that an adolescent does not know when a particular situation is normal or extreme and so they are apt to break a rule which ought to have been obeyed.

The solution to the above problem can be found in Rowling’s stories itself. Harry, it must be admitted, does not seem concerned about abstract rules. On the other hand, rules given by a flesh and blood person do interest him. In those cases, Harry always looks for signs of credibility and if he finds them, then he is willing to defer his judgment. Take the most recent film. Professor Dumbledore asks Harry, more than once, to trust him on a matter in which Harry disagrees with him. And Harry obeys. The film ends on a note in which it appears that Dumbledore was mistaken and that Harry should have handled things his own way. But I suspect that is Rowling’s way of keeping the reader/viewer in suspense and that Dumbledore’s judgment (and by implication, Harry’s submission to it) will be vindicated by the end.

The message then is not to disregard rules; instead, we should defer to them when they are promulgated by the credible authority. Moreover, we should do so even when the rule might not make sense for the moment. Our concern for rules should not be because they are ends in themselves, but because we trust the person behind them.

Social Conservatives and Libertarians: why we might not be able to get along

Hunter Baker has an interesting post in First Thoughts on the differences between Libertarians and Social Conservatives:

“My fellow panelist (Doug Bandow) will speak better for libertarians than I can, but I think it is fair to say that in their view, the reason we choose to live together in political association rather than as hermits in the woods is so that we can enjoy the benefits of mutual defense and commerce. Thus, all the government we really need is a military to protect against external threats, police to protect against internal ones, and maybe courts to enforce contracts between individuals.
Social conservatives, in contrast, line up more or less with Aristotle, who insisted that political life is about more than just mutual defense and commerce. Instead, political associations exist to enable us to develop a civic friendship whereby we will discover moral excellence as a community.
For social conservatives, that Aristotelian civic friendship means there is value in turning the law to certain moral purposes beyond things like mutual defense and enforcing contracts. Instead, we hope to make law in such a way that it promotes human flourishing and prevents or discourages things that lead to decay and decline.”

I appreciate Hunter offering Aristotle’s thought, not Edmund Burke’s, as representative of social conservatism; however, I would parse the divergences with Libertarians this way:

1) The nature of freedom. Libertarians are concerned ONLY WITH exterior freedom-meaning they are worried about the pressure the state can apply. Social Conservatives, on the hand, are concerned with a deeper understanding of freedom, interior freedom. There are things other than the state which can enslave you e.g. your appetites. A drug addict or alcoholic is free according to a Libertarian, but not according to a Social Conservative.

2) Human nature and Bioethics. The Libertarian values Autonomy so he recognizes no authority outside of the self. In this scenario, redesigning human nature through biotechnology is permissible. The Social Conservative values Human Dignity and which requires a transcendent reference point. Tampering with human nature then would be playing God.

Putting Locke in a Locke Box-or at least his image

David Brooks and Stephen Hayward are worried about the undue influence of guys like Limbaugh and Beck. Hayward writes, “We've traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.”

Peter Lawler, on the other hand, appears to take a broader look at the conservative movement as a whole:

In general, I wonder whether the Founders=Locke=good and the Progressives=Germans=bad narrative has run its course or needs a lot of supplementing at this point. A lot of younger conservatives see that part of our problem today is our promiscuous libertinism, and that it might be caused by our inability to keep Locke (or the spirit of calculation, contract, and consent) in a "Locke box." Increasingly, all of life is being turned over to a self-indulgent view of "autonomy," and that really does erode both a proper understanding of love and a manly spirit of self-government.

Anyone familiar with Claremont Review will recognize that Lawler is taking aim at the “narrative” which is popular there. For people at Claremont are more concerned with the growth of government than with the Culture Wars. Postmodern Conservatives see the latter problem as being more worrisome as every aspect of our lives becomes more and more Lockean.

Thomas G. West, who has popularized the Founders=Locke=good storyline, would and has contested Lawler’s portrayal of Locke. But I wonder if the Straussian distinction between intention and influence comes into play here. Regardless of Locke’s intention, his influence or role in the history of political philosophy is that his thought represents autonomous individualism. And it is the influence which has to be put into the ”Locke box.” (A similar argument could be made for Machiavelli and ‘Machiavellian’.)

Big Government Health Care PSA

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Ken Thomas of No Left Turns posted this video by former UD students.

"Would you like that with Nature or History?"

Bill Clinton was the first sitting President to speak before a Gay Advocacy group. At times he sounds like a moral relativist in the speech: “Our ideals were never meant to be frozen in stone or time.” And again here: “We are redefining, in practical terms, the immutable ideals that have guided us from the beginning.”

Yet moral relativism cannot be his final position since he wants to be able to say things like this: “So I say to you tonight, should we change the law? You bet. Should we keep fighting discrimination? Absolutely.” The injustice of discrimination only makes sense if there is a fixed standard of morality it fails to live up to.

Where, one wonders, does Clinton find that standard? Is it in the “law of nature and nature’s God” as the founders argued in the Declaration of Independence? Clinton’s answer is no because “….when we started out with Thomas Jefferson's credo that all of us are created equal by God, what that really meant in civic political terms was that you had to be white, you had to be male, and that wasn't enough -- you had to own property…” (For a counter to the hypocrisy charge, read Thomas G. West’s response)

Where does this fix standard exist if it isn’t found in our nature? The alternative proposal in modern times (think Hegel) is History. Clinton says, “Indeed, the story of how we kept going higher and higher and higher to new and higher definitions -- and more meaningful definitions -- of equality and dignity and freedom is in its essence the fundamental story of our country.” He also talks our imaginations being “limited” but it will be “broadened” in the future. We can see here the Progressive notion that history itself is a rational process which provides an evaluative standard. The End of History or the Absolute Moment is the measuring stick which all previous ages must stack up against. This is why Modern Liberals can say we are “better off” in 2009 than 1909 and the people of 1909 were “better” than ones living in 1809.

The Marxist version of history as a rational process has long been discredited, but the Progressive understanding is alive and well among Modern Liberals. Consequently, the real debate between Conservatives and Liberals today is not over an absolute or relative standard of morality, since both believe in an absolute, but whether Nature or History is foundation for it.