Expanding the Secular Square

There has been a lot of thoughtful commentary on the HHS Mandate the last couple of weeks. Ross Douthat and Yuval Levin argue that Obama levels the ‘little platoons’ of civil society in favor of expanding the power of the state. Here is Levin:

“In this arena, as in a great many others, the administration is clearly determined to see civil society as merely an extension of the state, and to clear out civil society—clearing out the mediating layers between the individual and the state—when it seems to stand in the way of achieving the president’s agenda. The idea is to leave as few non-individual players as possible in the private sphere, and to turn those few that are left into agents of the government.”

Our Tea Party and Libertarian friends will see this as further evidence of Big Gov’t getting bigger, and they’re right, but it important to note the President thinks of himself as the true champion of individualism. The mandate is in the service of freeing the individual from her biological bonds. The proper distinction here is not individual v. state, but the state v. intermediary institutions.

David Brooks says the plurality of the little platoons is being replaced by the uniformity of technocratic administration, a topic dear to our Ivan the K.

On a different note, Carson Holloway says the HHS mandate reveals the logic of liberalism as a creeping and creepy secularism: “…for an older generation of liberals religion had to be kept private in the sense that it could not try to control the government for its own distinctively religious purposes. A more ambitious set of liberals then came to claim that religion had to be private in the sense that religious believers should not bring their moral convictions to the political and legislative process. Now, much more ambitious liberals hold that religion must be private in the extreme sense that it must not be allowed to engage, in its own way, with the society at large. Religious institutions may enter into and interact with society, but only if they leave their religiosity behind in doing so.”

Jefferson’s famous “Wall of Separation between Church and State” has been used to prevent the influence of religious belief on public policy. Now that wall is being further expanded to separate belief from action. Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and instructing the ignorant were once considered Works of Mercy and thus matters for the private sphere. In the latest stage of liberalism, such actions must conform to secular standards of morality as dictated by the state. The next step in the privatization of religion is to make it a matter of the mind and nothing more. And in this particular case that means keeping Catholics in the closet.

What women want…to not be women?

Last Saturday was the memorial of Roe v. Wade and a part of Peter Lawler’s recent post touched upon it and its predecessor, Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized birth control:
We need to get over the modern error that the best way to get ourselves happy is to free ourselves from our natures.

Women’s Lib is about liberation from…being WOMEN. Birth control and abortion enable women to divorce themselves from their baby-making equipment. Having unshackled themselves from their feminine natures, they become free-floating individuals. Lawler continues, “We too often, in the name of autonomy, reject as authoritative the guidance nature—our social natures– gives us…But much of what we think we can reject or discard remains real or real enough.”

You can see this premium on Autonomy in Justice Kennedy’s decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court Case which revisited Roe:

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”

It can also be found in this exchange between Peter Robinson and Stacey Karp, President of the San Francisco Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW)

Stacy Karp: …Women are not here to be married, to have children, those are not their sole responsibilities and purpose for being.
Peter Robinson: You're pretty interested in metaphysics, too. What are women here for?
Stacy Karp: Whatever they want to be here for.

Of course, if every individual is free to decide what it means to be woman, then that just means the word doesn't really mean anything at all.

Here is Lawler’s take on Kennedy and Karp’s view: “There’s little that’s more hellish than my being stuck with the perception of “pure possibility,” the perception that every door is open to me with no guidance at all concerning which one to choose.”

Tocqueville argued that the power vacuum created by the absence of authority will just be filled by something or someone else because most people will not be able to live unaided. In the 1830’s, the authority was the MAJORITY. Today’s authority can be detected in statements like “Studies show…” or “Experts say…”

The dubious promise of these technological devices is women can be happy without having to be virtuous (chaste, temperate). My hunch is if it liberates anybody, it will be predatorial men. Here is Peter Robinson on the matter: “..the beginning of the period, the 1960's society, if a man got a women pregnant he was expected to marry her and provide for her and the child. Society imposed sanctions of responsibility on the man. Now if a man gets a woman pregnant it's her fault. She should have been on the pill. And she's forced to either have an abortion or to raise the child alone. She falls into poverty. We know that single mothers raising children tend to be in poverty at much higher rates than other sectors of the population."

Looks like women, and men for that matter, will be ‘stuck with virtue’ for the near future.

The Young and the Productive

David Brooks’ article is very helpful in seeing what is at stake in the current healthcare debate. Obamacare promises to reconcile two apparent opposites:

1) Cover 31 million Americans who are currently uninsured.
2) Bend the cost curve

Now these two claims are incompatible since it should increase costs to cover people who were previously not covered. Brooks explains how these incompatible claims will be made compatible:

1) Cut Medicare payments
2) Raise taxes in the future (the present Congress requests future Congresses to do this.)

Lets look at the first one. Who will decide what Medicare payments are cut and what criterion will they use? A technocrat, a government bureaucrat with scientific expertise, will do so on the basis of “productivity.” In other words, the person’s medical costs will be covered if he is deemed productive member of society. This tips the scales in favor of the young and industrious in society.

This doesn’t mean the young have it made because there is still number two: Raise taxes in the future. Remember, taxes will be raised later, not now. It will be the young and productive who get stuck with the bill.

Political Science versus Political Philosophy

Today is rather commonplace that Government professors refer to their disciplines as political science. The belief is that politics (and economics for that matter) should be modeled after the natural sciences. In order to achieve this, the study of human affairs will be reduced only to the quantifiable. Students should study charts and graphs which are black and white and thus non-debatable. If a fact cannot be assigned a numerical value, then it is not a fact or at least not matter for the political scientist to consider.

This method replaced the older view which studied the words and deeds of statesmen and the works of political philosophers i.e. the study of arguments. Arguments cannot be quantified, yet they are the lifeblood of politics. What sustains the interest of students (and citizens) is not polling data, but the give and take of debate. The more thought provoking question is not whether health care reform will pass this year, but whether it should pass.

Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield has argued for a return to the more traditional model. In an essay titled “How to Understand Politics”, he argues that the Humanities gives us a more complete picture of human nature.

One theory that political scientists adhere to is ‘rational choice’ which reduces human beings to calculators. Mansfield points to characters like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad as a counterexample to this assumption. Achilles does not calculate every move. Instead, he disregards his material self-interest in favor of glory and honor. The Humanities reveals the complex motivation of human beings which the more scientific theories fail to account for.

Elsewhere, Mansfield discusses that this scientific reduction of human motivation is part of a larger project of modern political thought to implement ‘rational control.’ One consequence of this view is the ability to predict future events, say elections. Yet the inability of political scientists to accurately predict such things calls into question the possibility of such control.

While unable to guarantee any of its answers, a humanistic approach towards the study of politics might yield a truer account of public affairs.

Big Government Health Care PSA

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

Obama and Brooks: disciples of Edmund Burke?

Gabriel Sherman discusses the Obama-Brooks bromance in the New Republic today. It turns out both of them are fans of the political philosopher Edmund Burke. (Sam Tanenhaus drew a connection to Obama and Burke in his “Death of Conservatism” article also.) This is surprising because Russell Kirk had crowned Burke the father of modern conservatism. What is it about Burke that could attract these three very different figures?

Burke’s most famous book, Reflections on the Revolutions of France, disavows abstract principles in favor of ‘prescription’ or what we would call tradition. Kirk buys into all of this. Obama and Brooks, on the other hand, are probably interested in the first part-disavowal of principles. President Obama prides himself on being post-partisan and a pragmatist. David Brooks has made a name for himself for NOT being a doctrinaire conservative. Peter Lawler has said about Brooks, “He has the ambiguous title of being the most conservative columnist at the NY Times.”

Burke’s (and Kirk’s) disavowal of principles is the reason why Harry Jaffa has argued against this particular vision of conservatism. Practices presuppose principles and their divorce leaves the former without a guide. The result is the reduction of Burke’s prescription to our current President’s pragmatism. Orginal Burkeans like Kirk opposed innovation; today's Burkeans demand change.

Let the experts handle this, sir.

Last week President Obama dissolved the Bioethics Council commissioned by President Bush. This is just another step in a series to put “restore science to its proper place.” The previous step was to federally fund embryonic stem cell research, something his predecessor had forbidden.

Ivan Kenneally, in an article in The New Atlantis, has worked out the presuppositions of the current President on these matters. Obama is, what Keneally calls, a technocratic populist. I’ll explain these terms in reverse order. He is a populist because he believes special interests, in this case the Christian Right, has highjacked the issue of stem cell research. This is why the Bioethics Council had to be dissolved. In the eyes of many, the council was simply a cabal of Catholic conspirators who were trying impose their extreme views on the rest of the country. (Peter Lawler, who was on the Council, has pointed out there was no such conspiracy because not everyone was Catholic and the group came to no consensus on any of the issues they discussed.) Obama’s removal of this ‘faction’ for the sake of the common good makes him a populist.

Why is he technocrat? More importantly, what is a technocrat? They are a group of “hyper-educated elites with specialized politico-scientific expertise [who] are singled out to manage the benighted rest of us.” Now, how can this be since we just learned the President favors the many over the few. This is the tension within Obama’s thought, a tension which Kenneally says goes back to the Enlightenment itself. For Enlightenment thinkers wanted to achieve two goals: equality and base politics on the model of the natural sciences. The belief in the latter is because of the success of the natural sciences in the modern era. If politics could be made more scientific, it was believed, then we could achieve prosperity and perpetual peace.

While the theory began in the Enlightenment, it only became actualized in American Politics in the 20th century. It begins with Woodrow Wilson and his essay, “The Study of Administration” and continued with subsequent Presidents. Patrick Deneen has a quote from JFK discussing the shift:

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -
Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the
matter is that most of the problems … that we now face are technical problems,
are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not
lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred the
country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond
the comprehension of most men….

All the themes of the technocrat are on display here: “political viewpoints” are irrelevant because today’s problems are “technical” and require “administrative” solutions. These problems are “beyond the comprehension of most men.” Here is the tension with populism. The 20th century is the century of the common man AND the century of enlightened administration. Modern Liberals, like Plato, believe in monarchy-the only difference is his field.

Now we can understand what President Obama means by putting “restore science to its proper place.” It means letting the scientists make the call when it comes to questions like stem cell research and cloning. David Brooks has pointed out that this Obama’s strategy when it comes to health care also:

Which is why you have MedPAC. That’s the Medicare Payment Advisory
Commission that you want to turn into a health care Federal Reserve Board — an
aloof technocratic body of experts that will make tough decisions beyond the
reach of politics. You can take every thorny issue, throw it to MedPac and
consider it solved.

Notice the decision will be made “beyond the reach of politics.” The problem raised by living constitutionalism, judicial activism, occurs here too. A small, elite group of unelected officials will decide our most important issues for us. But the perennial question which has dogged Plato’s philosopher-king, rears its head: Who guards the guardians?