Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology

A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.
As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.
As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.
One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.
Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.
More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.
The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.
Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.
People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.
One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.
But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)
Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.
When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.
Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.
The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”
We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.
Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.
More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.
Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.
[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]

Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology

A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.

As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.

As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.

One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.

Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.

More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.

The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.

Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.

People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.

One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.

But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)

Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.

When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.

Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.

The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”

We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.

Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.

More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.

Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.

[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]

Civility in Modern Discourse: A Brief Reflection

In the foreword to her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman offers what at first blush feels like an out-of-place observation: Evils like domestic violence or child sexual assault persist because people are too polite to confront it. Thus, witnesses’ eyes avert and people adopt a not-my-business demeanor to rationalize their lack of courage to stand up for the helpless.

In a book about complex post-traumatic stress disorder, an introduction about evil — and how civility enables evil — represents a curious rhetorical strategy. Yet it fits. Stories abound about how no one intervened to help a battered wife or molested kid, but after the news became public friends and neighbors said there was something they coudn’t quite pin down that felt amiss.

Yeah. That something was their own moral cowardice, conveniently obscured under the color of civility.

Civility as a civic virtue has taken something of an odd turn in the last half-century. Whereas once it represented the mutual respect of citizens and the observance of polite manners, now it’s morphing into something less coherent. Consider:

  1. The new civility says we shouldn’t judge others, for anything, at any time. If you disapprove of the behavior of another, you’re socially obligated to keep your own counsel, even when you believe that the other person’s behavior is wrong or harmful. Civility and nonjudgmentalism are becoming increasingly synonymous.
  2. Civility applies only to people within the in-crowd. Social demonstration that you’re not in the in-crowd means you’re no longer worthy of civil treatment. This strategy of moral isolationism is particularly effective on the Left; if you don’t support certain policy goals like “marriage equality” or “environmental protection” then you’re not just wrong, you’re outside the scope of respectability and may therefore be treated cruelly, dismissively or unfairly as punishment for holding a contrary opinion. In a sense, civility is the social mark of tribalism: You extend it to fellow travelers and withhold it from the tribe’s enemies.
  3. Civility has become something of a scare word for political moderates, who seem to think “civility” requires everyone to accept half a loaf for comity’s sake. A good No Labels kind of moderate would look at an NRA member and a Brady Campaign member and decide that virtue meant banning only half the country’s guns. Perhaps those with an odd-numbered serial number. Whether the half-a-loaf strategy is even coherent never seems to matter; what matters is that the Civil Moderate gets to feel smug for playing a modern-day King Solomon.

The ties that bind us in community have been fraying for a long time. The idea that neighbors have a responsibility for each other, or that everyone deserves to be treated decently even when you disagree, seem to be derogating in favor of a civility-as-nonjudgmentalism that undermines the power of public expectation to maintain public morals.

Once upon a time, if a man backhanded his wife in public, everyone would know and he’d either have to reform or be ostracized. Now, people simply avert their gaze when they witness domestic violence — or at the least, decide it’s solely a police matter.

Thus does the new civility undermine the old community.

Reflections on a Friend's Shift from Libertarianism to Progressivism

A while back I lamented a trend in conventional political commentary — that as a general rule, conservatives tend toward syllogistic argumentation whereas progressives more often rely on emotive claims and ad hominem attacks.
A recent discussion with my friend Alaric proved most enlightening about why rhetorical strategy varies by ideology and how one’s political leanings can directly affect a person’s system of critical reasoning — as evidenced by his own significant ideological evolution.
But to get to that point, we must start a dozen years ago, when I joined the Herald as a new staff columnist and Rick was the paper’s Web editor. Before running the online desk, he ran the opinion desk, and he continued to contribute occasional opinion pieces even after shifting responsibilities. So I got to meet him through weekly opinion-staff meetings.
In those days, he was a fairly conventional libertarian, obsessing about negative liberty and chanting the “no force or fraud” mantra like a political Om. For example, he took the position in one of our point/counterpoint column pairings in favor of the legalization of prostitution because the transaction — including, as it does, solicitation and consent — doesn’t entail force/fraud/coercion. My counter was that poor women may well be effectively coerced by their pimps or by the consequences of their financial condition, but such was the dogmatism of his libertarian leanings that he dismissed that point by saying that the immediate transaction of solicitation+purchase+sex didn’t involve meaningful coercion by the john, so … nyeh nyeh. (I might be misremembering this slightly.)
Over the years we maintained our friendship; indeed, we still work together, but now for a hospital instead of a newspaper.
Starting around 2007-2008, I started to see a bit of an ideological shift from my dear old walking caricature of a libertarian. He began to eschew the concept of negative liberty. I understand he ended up as an Obama voter. Our recent political debates became unusually contentious and he is, at this point, probably firmly enmeshed in the progressive left.
So last week I invited him to Grand River Cigar for a tasty dram of Port Charlotte 7 and a Partagas 1845 to discuss (not debate) the nature of his ideological move. The two-hour session proved enlightening. Some conclusions worth highlighting:

  • Part of his move includes a religious component — his ongoing private study of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism has emboldened him to reject arguments rooted in religious premises and to feel safe enough to stand up for atheist perspectives instead of apologizing for them or paying milquetoast obeisance to religion’s asserted right of privileged access to the public square.
  • His disillusionment with the dogmatic center/right started where mine did — the pre-surge collapse in Iraq coupled with GWB’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the silliness about Harriet Miers for SCOTUS.
  • His experience as a husband and as someone who budgets carefully has engendered a not-insubstantial cynicism about corporations and wealth. I won’t say he’s at the point of resentment but it’s clear that he’s more open to redistributivist policies than once he was and his trust in the integrity of large corporations isn’t very high.
  • And why is he more tolerant of radical egalitarianism? Because his big fear is social instability akin to the French riots a few years ago or the current breakdown in Greece, and his solution to this is to ensure that everyone has decent-paying jobs and a generous social welfare net. The theory is to remove the socioeconomic kindling today to avoid a broader conflagration down the road. The prospect of a violent class war genuinely scares him — I think because mass riots and social breakdown threatens the material safety he worked hard to achieve, and he’s developed a risk-averse, safety-oriented sensibility as a way of protecting his current position. (He is an avid reader of social history, so I wonder if there’s a latent influence here from his readings about the establishment of community regimes?)
  • As such, he no longer believes that negative liberty is sufficient. As best I understand it, I think he believes the deck is stacked against normal people by corporations and unresponsive government such that negative liberty, in itself, is a dead letter: Nice in principle, meaningless in execution. Since power, wealth and prestige are (so it’s claimed) a function of prior access to power, wealth and prestige, an ordinary person has little chance of substantial material success on his own right and by his own effort (c.f., Obama, B., “you didn’t build that”). Thus, a system that provides for a base level of economic security for all citizens — funded by the wealthy — addresses the disparity in opportunity between top and bottom and at least ensures that the bottom has enough to mitigate the risk of social instability.
  • Concurrently, his shift from coldly syllogistic reasoning to something more emotive pervades his thinking on all levels. He said, for example, that he now understands why “the personal is the political” and tends to agree. The human condition ought to trump all other considerations, so any argument that leads us away from giving everyone the resources they need to live happy and fulfilled lives may be rejected prima facie because the conclusion — no matter how logical — fails to respect the dignity of individual persons and their alleged right to a material safety net that preempts violent social disorder.
  • Because the political and the personal are so intertwined, the threshold for what constitutes an ad hominem shifts — arguments and arguers who don’t support the basic point about positive economic entitlements or communitarian sibboleths simply don’t enjoy the same right to be treated respectfully because their conclusions are, a priori, both wrong and immoral.
  • He is not a Kool-Aid drinker of the Left; he seems aware that his new ideological abode has foundations as shaky as the one he left, but nevertheless he seems more temperamentally comfortable in his new home. He admits that future experiences may well prompt additional movement and doesn’t seem to foreclose the chance that could well come back to conservatism later in life.

A few generalized observations:

  1. There’s a serious ethical problem at the heart of the Left’s willingness to dismiss or even demean opponents who don’t share their underlying sociopolitical conclusions. There’s very much a “purge the kulaks” sentiment in some quarters of the progressive movement, such that conservatives or center-left liberals who don’t toe the line aren’t merely wrong but morally defective. And thus not worthy of serious consideration or even civil treatment. The way that progressives treat people who disagree on global warming provides an illustrative case in point: If you disagree with the alleged consensus position, then you are a “denier” who should be shunned and not even allowed to articulate a contrary opinion or present divergent evidence.
  2. The growing divide between Left and Right feels less and less like policy disputes and more and more like irreconcilable worldview divergence. The trend toward shifting modes of discourse (emotive vs. syllogistic privilege in argumentation, for example) means that it’ll be harder to bridge the partisan divide for a middle-ground solution. The party that does the best job of capturing the independents, then, will probably do best at the ballot box. Unfortunately, both parties are polarizing and the activist wing on both sides is sufficiently loony that most clear-thinking folks will come to disdain politics even more than they currently do.
  3. The economic fault line of egalitarianism keeps rearing its head. Conservatives generally favor equality of access to opportunity; progressives generally favor equality of result even if that means redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful. Basic ideas like what “fairness” means will keep throwing sand in the gears of government.
  4. Never underestimate the fear of instability or risk. The “bread and circuses” approach to buying off the poor to keep them compliant remains a core part of progressive ideology, even if they don’t see it those terms.

Watching Rick’s ongoing ideological shift provides some insight into why people shift their entire philosophical grounding. I’m glad he’s my friend and I appreciate the chance to talk about these issues with him.
The conclusions, though, about what brings people to the Left or to the Right do serve as giant signal fires about the possible social discord that lies ahead.

Reflections on a Friend’s Shift from Libertarianism to Progressivism

A while back I lamented a trend in conventional political commentary — that as a general rule, conservatives tend toward syllogistic argumentation whereas progressives more often rely on emotive claims and ad hominem attacks.

A recent discussion with my friend Alaric proved most enlightening about why rhetorical strategy varies by ideology and how one’s political leanings can directly affect a person’s system of critical reasoning — as evidenced by his own significant ideological evolution.

But to get to that point, we must start a dozen years ago, when I joined the Herald as a new staff columnist and Rick was the paper’s Web editor. Before running the online desk, he ran the opinion desk, and he continued to contribute occasional opinion pieces even after shifting responsibilities. So I got to meet him through weekly opinion-staff meetings.

In those days, he was a fairly conventional libertarian, obsessing about negative liberty and chanting the “no force or fraud” mantra like a political Om. For example, he took the position in one of our point/counterpoint column pairings in favor of the legalization of prostitution because the transaction — including, as it does, solicitation and consent — doesn’t entail force/fraud/coercion. My counter was that poor women may well be effectively coerced by their pimps or by the consequences of their financial condition, but such was the dogmatism of his libertarian leanings that he dismissed that point by saying that the immediate transaction of solicitation+purchase+sex didn’t involve meaningful coercion by the john, so … nyeh nyeh. (I might be misremembering this slightly.)

Over the years we maintained our friendship; indeed, we still work together, but now for a hospital instead of a newspaper.

Starting around 2007-2008, I started to see a bit of an ideological shift from my dear old walking caricature of a libertarian. He began to eschew the concept of negative liberty. I understand he ended up as an Obama voter. Our recent political debates became unusually contentious and he is, at this point, probably firmly enmeshed in the progressive left.

So last week I invited him to Grand River Cigar for a tasty dram of Port Charlotte 7 and a Partagas 1845 to discuss (not debate) the nature of his ideological move. The two-hour session proved enlightening. Some conclusions worth highlighting:

  • Part of his move includes a religious component — his ongoing private study of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism has emboldened him to reject arguments rooted in religious premises and to feel safe enough to stand up for atheist perspectives instead of apologizing for them or paying milquetoast obeisance to religion’s asserted right of privileged access to the public square.
  • His disillusionment with the dogmatic center/right started where mine did — the pre-surge collapse in Iraq coupled with GWB’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the silliness about Harriet Miers for SCOTUS.
  • His experience as a husband and as someone who budgets carefully has engendered a not-insubstantial cynicism about corporations and wealth. I won’t say he’s at the point of resentment but it’s clear that he’s more open to redistributivist policies than once he was and his trust in the integrity of large corporations isn’t very high.
  • And why is he more tolerant of radical egalitarianism? Because his big fear is social instability akin to the French riots a few years ago or the current breakdown in Greece, and his solution to this is to ensure that everyone has decent-paying jobs and a generous social welfare net. The theory is to remove the socioeconomic kindling today to avoid a broader conflagration down the road. The prospect of a violent class war genuinely scares him — I think because mass riots and social breakdown threatens the material safety he worked hard to achieve, and he’s developed a risk-averse, safety-oriented sensibility as a way of protecting his current position. (He is an avid reader of social history, so I wonder if there’s a latent influence here from his readings about the establishment of community regimes?)
  • As such, he no longer believes that negative liberty is sufficient. As best I understand it, I think he believes the deck is stacked against normal people by corporations and unresponsive government such that negative liberty, in itself, is a dead letter: Nice in principle, meaningless in execution. Since power, wealth and prestige are (so it’s claimed) a function of prior access to power, wealth and prestige, an ordinary person has little chance of substantial material success on his own right and by his own effort (c.f., Obama, B., “you didn’t build that”). Thus, a system that provides for a base level of economic security for all citizens — funded by the wealthy — addresses the disparity in opportunity between top and bottom and at least ensures that the bottom has enough to mitigate the risk of social instability.
  • Concurrently, his shift from coldly syllogistic reasoning to something more emotive pervades his thinking on all levels. He said, for example, that he now understands why “the personal is the political” and tends to agree. The human condition ought to trump all other considerations, so any argument that leads us away from giving everyone the resources they need to live happy and fulfilled lives may be rejected prima facie because the conclusion — no matter how logical — fails to respect the dignity of individual persons and their alleged right to a material safety net that preempts violent social disorder.
  • Because the political and the personal are so intertwined, the threshold for what constitutes an ad hominem shifts — arguments and arguers who don’t support the basic point about positive economic entitlements or communitarian sibboleths simply don’t enjoy the same right to be treated respectfully because their conclusions are, a priori, both wrong and immoral.
  • He is not a Kool-Aid drinker of the Left; he seems aware that his new ideological abode has foundations as shaky as the one he left, but nevertheless he seems more temperamentally comfortable in his new home. He admits that future experiences may well prompt additional movement and doesn’t seem to foreclose the chance that could well come back to conservatism later in life.

A few generalized observations:

  1. There’s a serious ethical problem at the heart of the Left’s willingness to dismiss or even demean opponents who don’t share their underlying sociopolitical conclusions. There’s very much a “purge the kulaks” sentiment in some quarters of the progressive movement, such that conservatives or center-left liberals who don’t toe the line aren’t merely wrong but morally defective. And thus not worthy of serious consideration or even civil treatment. The way that progressives treat people who disagree on global warming provides an illustrative case in point: If you disagree with the alleged consensus position, then you are a “denier” who should be shunned and not even allowed to articulate a contrary opinion or present divergent evidence.
  2. The growing divide between Left and Right feels less and less like policy disputes and more and more like irreconcilable worldview divergence. The trend toward shifting modes of discourse (emotive vs. syllogistic privilege in argumentation, for example) means that it’ll be harder to bridge the partisan divide for a middle-ground solution. The party that does the best job of capturing the independents, then, will probably do best at the ballot box. Unfortunately, both parties are polarizing and the activist wing on both sides is sufficiently loony that most clear-thinking folks will come to disdain politics even more than they currently do.
  3. The economic fault line of egalitarianism keeps rearing its head. Conservatives generally favor equality of access to opportunity; progressives generally favor equality of result even if that means redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful. Basic ideas like what “fairness” means will keep throwing sand in the gears of government.
  4. Never underestimate the fear of instability or risk. The “bread and circuses” approach to buying off the poor to keep them compliant remains a core part of progressive ideology, even if they don’t see it those terms.

Watching Rick’s ongoing ideological shift provides some insight into why people shift their entire philosophical grounding. I’m glad he’s my friend and I appreciate the chance to talk about these issues with him.

The conclusions, though, about what brings people to the Left or to the Right do serve as giant signal fires about the possible social discord that lies ahead.

Divine-Command Ethics in a Secular World

A quick review from Moral Philosophy 101: The divine-command theory of ethics holds that morally laudatory behavior is that which conforms to the will of God or a canonical text; morally blameworthy behavior is that which contradicts divine teaching.

For an ethical theory, divine command is hard to beat in its simplicity. The tough questions about the source of morality or the proper content of a praiseworthy life don’t need to be determined, they merely need to be consulted through a religious text or spiritual leader. Unlike the sophisticated mental gyrations that deontologists or utilitarians must make to obtain some degree of logical coherence for their moral system, people who get their ethics from God have an easy go of it. As they say: RTFM.

Assuming, of course, that you actually believe in God and accept as binding the principles of whatever holy scripture you profess. A problematic assessment, insofar as the patterns of modern religious belief shift religious conviction for more and more people from a deep-seated, unquestioning faith toward a cultural or familial artifact to be observed but not necessarily internalized.

It’s ironic, then, that in the Western world, there’s a resurgence in divine-command ethics — fueled not by organized religion, but within those belief systems that substitute as a quasi-religious alternative for a mostly atheist or agnostic worldview.

The most obvious expression of the “new” divine-command ethics derives from the unshackling of ideology as a first-order motivator, particularly but not exclusively with folks from the Left. Their decline in respect for institutional authority means that neither religious nor political leaders can inspire unquestioned loyalty that helps to impose an externally locused belief system on them. Freed from religious norms and disdainful of mass culture, these souls “deify” their ideological predispositions and use internally derived principles (made absolute) as the yardstick of morality.

Cultural anthropologists argue that humans are hard-wired socially to adopt belief systems that help differentiate friend-from-foe in larger social contexts while providing a reservoir of meaning about one’s purpose and destiny. The reasons for this are vast and deep — E. O. Wilson presents a good high-level overview of the concept in his recent book,The Social Conquest of Earth. Long story short, we need beliefs that situate us within the whole. Religion has played this role for millennia; more recently, religion has been augmented by ideology or nationalism, but the underlying tendency remains unchanged and in some places “augmenting” is giving way to “supplanting.”

As fewer Westerners profess unwavering support for any specific modern faith tradition, the tendency for social belonging — with all of the moral norms attendant to membership — transfers from religion and large-scale politics into increasingly granular social structures with local leaders and deeper passions and less of an intellectual superstructure to keep these local belief systems from falling into solipsism.

Radical environmentalism serves as an excellent case in point. Forget the stereotype of granola-eating, pot-smoking, Birkenstock-wearing long-haired hippies banging drums and communing with Gaia. There are plenty of respectable folks who fit nicely into polite society who nevertheless no longer have a private belief in God and subscribe to radical environmentalist theory. There’s a reason, after all, that Greenpeace types or urban anarchists often hail from upper-middle-class backgrounds: They had a conversion experience, and have traded the boring, empty churches of their parents for the hip, authentic religion of struggle on behalf of the Earth. Anyone who’s read about Saul on the road to Damascus understands the archetype; anyone who’s ever spoken to a radical environmentalist understands their need for social inclusion.

Thus we see increasingly blind obedience to canonical norms:

  • Humans are causing global warming that will destroy the Earth.
  • People who don’t agree that “climate science is settled” are heretics who deserve to be ostracized.
  • Corporate greed must be rejected if the environment is to improve.
  • Humans have all sorts of socioeconomic rights to income security and access to organic/local foods and any opposition to this must be overcome by any means necessary.
  • &c, &c.

One reason that political debate about climate change is so bitter is that it’s taken on the trappings of religious warfare. True believers fight against those who cast a more skeptical eye on some environmental nostrums. The evidence of the phenomenon is vast and deep: Just look, for example, at how the prophets at East Anglia conspired to reject from peer-reviewed journals any suggestion that the (made-up) numbers supporting climate change were, in fact, problematic. Fair-minded people don’t act like this. People caught in the grip of divine-command ethics, do.

I’m picking on the environmentalists because they’re an obvious target, but the shift I’ve outlined covers many newer “faith traditions,” including those who continue to protest against Darwinism or struggle against abortion. Although it seems that this phenomenon is rooted in the Left, the Right isn’t immune to it, either.

The most fascinating aspect of all of this is that the one ethical system that’s so often derided as being the simplistic holdout for the unenlightened seems to naturally attract those who wear their sense of sophisticated upon their sleeves.

Divine-command theory, in a classic sense, proves philosophically interesting because it’s inherently unfalsifiable at its core. This “rock” that anchors religious morality, if unchained by texts and priests and centuries of practical experience, can lead to curious inversions of generally accepted ethics. Like, for example, radical environmentalists who deliberately spike trees in such a way that loggers could be seriously injured or even killed.

Put differently: If any particular implementation of divine-command ethics is unconstrained by institutional or cultural norms, the risk that “anything is permissible” in service to the ideological point at its core increases the relative gridlock and fragility of the political process.

Ethics without God is possible. God-based ethics without God, however, increases the risk of radical absolutism that poisons the well for everyone.

A Schema for Planning Your Self-Actualization

Last week I had to substitute teach at Grand Rapids Community College for my friend Duane, who was out for emergency medical reasons. The class is Interpersonal Communications, a summer session within the Communications department. The class focused on content about defining interpersonal communications as a concept and reviewing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Interesting thing about Maslow. A lot of younger folks think they’re at the top of the pyramid, having achieved self-actualization because they are college students or have a nice car or enjoy the affections of a hot significant other. But young people almost never summit the hierarchy. They’re deluding themselves because they don’t really know what it’s like to be at the very base of the pyramid and lack the life experience to know what it’s like to be the master of your own fate instead of merely succeeding at surfing the winds of someone else’s destiny.

I was thinking about Maslow this week as I enjoyed cigars, Scotch and pleasant conversation with my friend Rob. Rob is a smart fellow and an irritable bastard if ever there was one. He’s the kind of guy who could convincingly yell, “Get off my lawn!” and you’d believe it. But he’s also an insightful guy with a good heart lurking beneath the crust of his curmudgeonhood.

The discussion with Rob meandered across many different subjects, but one that stuck out was life planning. He has goals and the sketch of an outline for getting there, which is good. Many people never think about their Bucket List and fewer still outline a concrete plan of action for achieving any of those items. That’s where Maslow fits in; a self-actualized person won’t just wistfully regret not achieving greatness — he’ll grab it by the horns and wrestle it into submission. Indeed, Maslow himself said: “The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear those impulse voices from within — and to make the point: This can be done.”

I started a well-defined process of life planning in 2007. I revisit my master list every few months to tweak it as needed. Over the years I’ve spoken with people who kinda-sorta understand the value of such a process, but they lack either the motivation to execute it or the conceptual framework for building it. I can’t force people to do anything, but I can offer my own thoughts about how to plan your life well enough to let the self-actualizing kernel within you to thrive. Caveat: What works for me may not work for you. That said:

  1. Disabuse yourself of the romantic notion of who you aspire to be, and start with who you are.  We’re all masters of self-delusion, legends in our own minds. The hardest part for most people is to come to an honest assessment of one’s true strengths and weaknesses without conflating them with the aura of the Ideal Self we keep locked in a deep part of our psyche. When you look at what holds you back, for example, your glance should be inward; if you find external reasons for all of your failings, then you haven’t dug deep enough.
  2. Develop a personal mission statement, a simple declaration for yourself that establishes your vision of what a self-actualized life entails.  A good exercise for getting there consists of the deceptively simple-sounding task of writing your own obituary. When you die — I hope, at a ripe old age — how do you want people to describe the quality of your character? What notable achievements do you want memorialized?
  3. Craft a bucket list of specific, achievable life goals you want to achieve before you die. No two people will have the same list, but the list is relevant. Maybe you want to be published, or climb Mt. Everest, or visit every continent, or run a marathon before you turn 40. Whatever. List at least five things that, when you’re whittling on the front porch as a wrinkled old man, you can point to as extraordinary accomplishments worthy of a well-lived life. When you finish an item, add more. Use the SMARTER approach to developing the lists — make them specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-limited, ethical and rewarding.
  4. Identify pertinent strategies that will govern how these goals should be achieved.  A plan of action requires a methodology that frames the appropriate execution of that strategy. This is the ethics part of the equation. What values color how you’ll live your life? I’ve developed six maxims that guide my own approach:  Reduce consumption; cultivate serenity; nurture relationships; exhibit insatiable curiosity; do fewer things but do them boldly; and favor action over study.
  5. Classify your goals according to some logical schema.  Choose the broad aspects of your life that mean something and set goals accordingly. You could set goals for finances, physical fitness, travel, spiritual development, academic achievement, etc. The schema — the framework — for each person will be different. But the framework lets you set goals in each category and helps you link goals among categories to help with prioritization decisions. For example, if you want to climb Mt. Everest and also reduce your body-mass index from 40 to 25, it makes sense to focus on the BMI restriction first (morbidly obese people may have trouble with mountain climbing). But knowing you want to scale Everest means your exercise program should focus on cardio and endurance instead of just weight lifting, as a strong man with weak cardiopulmonary function will have a tougher time scaling Everest than a slender man who can whip out a marathon without thinking.
  6. Break down big goals into a series of smaller, time-limited tasks.  Maybe your goal is to hike the Appalachian Trail. Good for you, but that’s not enough. You need to start with smaller tasks, like buying gear and doing day hikes and then graduating to overnight hikes in the backcountry. You need to meet fitness goals and bank enough cash to sustain you and research the trail. You need to learn about drop boxes and pick up tips about first aid and figure out how to deal with the various animals and plants you’ll encounter. Hiking the AT may be laudable; deciding to do so with no prior hiking experience isn’t, unless you set milestones to get you ready for the trip. Its also easier and more motivational to meet smaller, local goals that serve as stepping stones to bigger tasks that support a major bucket-list achievement. Divide and conquer.
  7. Track your progress.  Keep your tasks organized in Outlook or OneNote or Evernote. Maintain a journal. Log your calories or your workout routines. Start a blog. Just do something to give yourself a documented record about where you’ve succeeded or where you’ve failed. You need to know how prior performance looked so you can refine your approach in the future.
  8. Revisit your plan periodically and never hesitate to revise it.  Minimally, do a complete re-think and revision every six months. Dedicate a day or a weekend to looking at your progress and adjusting your plans. Treat it like a private in-service: Go somewhere quiet, rid yourself of distractions and continue on your journey of focused self-improvement.  Remember that there’s no shame in adjusting timelines, deleting goals or modifying tasks.
  9. Keep the big picture front-and-center in your daily life.  Print your goals list and keep a copy in a notebook or on your refrigerator. Look at it daily, or at least several times per week. Remind yourself over and over and over about what’s important so that you keep going. Even fitful progress is better than no progress at all.

As I said, this approach won’t work for everyone; it’s a right-brained strategy that favors logic over intuition. Nevertheless, I encourage everyone to follow some path that includes well-defined goals. Especially for folks in their mid-20s through their late 30s — a prime time for laying the foundation for a happy retirement — making solid, long-run choices now may pay handsome dividends later in life.

Degrees of Financial Freedom

Funny how impending death or long-term incarceration focuses the mind.

In the moments when their lives are laid barest, the sick, dying and imprisoned fall into two camps. The first remembers happy memories and remains at peace with whatever lies ahead. The other obsesses about things left undone or sentiments left unsaid. But the latter group’s obsessions relate to people or to experiences — almost never to each person’s material condition. I have yet to meet a person in prison or in a hospital who spent much time thinking about property or money or financial histories or credit scores.

The life lessons I’ve gleaned from ministering to the sick and imprisoned came into sharp relief this week, subsequent to a casual conversation with a few friends over cigars and adult beverages. The TL;DR version: Financial freedom as a concept is important to a fully flourishing life, but there’s remarkable disagreement as to what the idea entails.

I thought about it and it seems like we can put “financial freedom” on a scale of sorts:

  1. No income, no assets, no or bad credit. Significant life constraints.
  2. Limited income or assets. Bad credit. Routine difficulty in meeting life needs.
  3. Limited income or assets, but average or good credit. Holding one’s own.
  4. Adequate income, bad credit. Potential for comfort demolished by personal financial mismanagement.
  5. Adequate income, average/good credit. Lives a comfortable, if not luxurious, lifestyle.
  6. Above-median income or assets. Bad credit; does fine day-to-day but options for major purchases (mortgages, auto loans) reduced.
  7. Above-median income or assets, good credit. All needs met and can “splurge” without really thinking about it.
  8. Significant income/assets. Life’s an oyster.

As I think about my friends and family, I see them falling all over my eight-point scale. I know one person who makes due on surprisingly little income. I know another who spends every penny of the many, many dollars he makes. I also know a well-off lawyer who won’t spend to save his life.

I also think about Steve, a guy I knew from the Herald. He had one life goal: To get his degree, buy an old Airstream trailer and head for the West Texas desert. He wanted a motorcycle, a dog, a shotgun and the freedom to explore his art and photography without worrying about keeping up with the Joneses.

Inasmuch as people stress over money, when you’re on your deathbed you don’t generally lament that you didn’t have a higher credit score.

Perhaps the truth is more Biblical: Financial freedom isn’t something that Dave Ramsey confers, but rather it’s a state of mind. If you can meet your needs, you’re free; if you can’t, then it’s time to change your life plan.

Just remember: At the end, no one cares.

Reflections on the "After Liberalism" Essays in "First Things"

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.
Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”
Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.
Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.
In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!
Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?
Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.
The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?
As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

Reflections on the “After Liberalism” Essays in “First Things”

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.

Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”

Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.

Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.

In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!

Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?

Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.

The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?

As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.