New Fusionism, ctd.
Rod Dreher (a.k.a., the”Crunchy Con”) has a really interesting post up as the latest installment in his gay marriage debate with Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker. It isn’t so much about that specific debate, as it is about the philosophical divide that this debate exposes. “Debates about debates” can get pretty tiresome, but I think that this one is quite important.
Rod begins with a long quote from Alasdair MacIntyre about the concept that I have called moral axioms, and their inescapability in political debates. Here’s an excerpt of a post in which I give my version of this basic idea:
Those who believe that basically all non-coercive behavior should be legal can surely make many such arguments. Any such moral argument, however, will ultimately rest on a set of beliefs that could be characterized as being “coughed up by an unconscious emotion”. We might call these, in a less loaded term, moral axioms. You don’t get a free pass out of this game by just saying you favor any non-coercive behavior, because either the restriction on coercion must itself be a moral axiom, or it must, in turn, rest upon some other more fundamental moral axioms.
The funny thing about axioms is that if they are so basic that pretty much everybody agrees with them, then reasoning from them to conclusions about specific policies will often lead different people to very different conclusions. If, on the other hand, they are highly developed, then lots of people won’t agree that they are axioms. Similarly, advocates for such a system of laws can surely make many smart prudential arguments that the vast majority of people will be vastly better off materially under such a system of laws. Of course, lots of people will be convinced by these arguments, but lots will not. In fact, many, many millions of people in the world actually believe that Sharia-level restrictions on personal behavior are appropriate.
What do we do to resolve this impasse when we’ve said all we have to say and there is no reasonable prospect that more talking will create agreement? Our choices are “whoever controls the most guns rules”, or toleration. This is what leads me, for all but the most fundamental of issues, to subsidiarity.
Rod’s post then goes on with a couple of very long quotes from traditionalist conservative Jim Kalb who sounds, at some points at least, like he’s channeling Hayek. I tried to put this into political context in a more recent post in which I said that a tactical alliance of social conservatives and libertarians is advisable for both groups:
I think that the prevalence of the social conservative worldview, broadly defined, is on a long-term downward trajectory in the United States. I make this as an attempt at a descriptive, not normative, statement.
This obviously might change. To some extent, this trend is a product of increasing material abundance, and a truly catastrophic reduction in living standards would likely reverse it, as an example. But the environment in which we live increasingly is one in which it grows ever-more-difficult to maintain a national legal regime that permits any implicit or explicit preferences for a traditional way of life.
What this means for traditionalists is that the best they can hope for is a national government with minimum scope of authority, because it will tend to use whatever authority it has for ends that they don’t like.
As I’ve argued previously, I think that a proper understanding of libertarian thought should call for restraint in imposing uniform national rules, even some rules designed to prevent localities from restricting some individual autonomy.
This is not an alliance of soul mates, but one of shared interests. This also implies a view of politics that is more about building sewers than cathedrals. It’s necessary work, and in a certain frame of mind can be inspiring in its effects; but it’s low to the ground and full of muck.
yeah, but if you are a libertarian whose definition of freedom means freedom traditional restraints on your behavior (e.g., sexual mores), the government is just the powerful institution you need on your side to batter down entrenched cultural norms.
— Boz · Apr 1, 04:31 PM · #
It’s more helpful to say that moral judgments are grammatical rather than axiomatic. For instance, everybody has a concept of justice (the “affecting perception of”), just like everybody has a concept of verb. This is true even though the concept is unreflective. Primitives use verbs and understand the difference between a verb and a subject even if they don’t explicitly articulate this distinction into a theory of language. The same goes for morality. Injustice, as a phenomenological experience, appears and intensifies according to quasi-inaccessible rules of construction; this experience is gatewayed by a deep grammar that orders and emphasizes information from the external world, insofar as this information relates to intent, character and agency (a fact which unconceals the, ahem, “ultimate cause” of morality).
Complicating this is the unconscious drive for narrative consistency. Thus, what begins as a serious of discrete, grammatically constructed judgments — that was wrong, that was right, that was wrong — is forced into line by the subterranean need for explanatory order. It’s at this justification stage where articulated axioms appear. Tortured elaborations and inconsistencies appear here as well. See, e.g., Hauser’s The disassociation between moral judgments and justification:
The literature here goes on and on. Conclusion: it’s not our multi-dimensional reasoning from axioms that creates the antagonisms; rather, its much more akin to what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. Part of it is innate (acuity, sensitivity, pre-conscious emphases), part of it is learned, part of it is socialized, and part of it is elected.
In other words, the problem goes much deeper, and is much more ineradicable, than anything MacIntyre dreamed possible.
— JA · Apr 1, 05:00 PM · #
JA:
What if I provided a very general definition of moral axiom as “a belief about the rightness or wrongness of an action that is not, in practice, subject to change through verbal persuasion”?
— Jim Manzi · Apr 1, 05:20 PM · #
Jim,
Only if we stay in the realm of abstract moral argument, and proceed according to the rules of logic. When that happens, we can transfer our argumentative fidelity to the axioms qua axioms rather than concern ourselves with their practical content. This “intellectual honesty” is possible, and does happen.
However, if we try to reduce this to practice, it can be conclusively demonstrated that any axiomatic system you build, however complex and robust, will, occasionally, through out answers to moral dilemmas that are antagonistic to real world judgments — this is true even if you’re the one who built the system. Worse, the problem isn’t even insufficient context clues. The problem is: when we render moral judgments in real time, we access a cognitive module that doesn’t obey the kind of axiom schema you’re talking about.
Affecting moral judgments — the kind that matter — happen lightening quick, using System 1 intuitional and emotional processing. Only after these judgments already exist will our left hemisphere take over and try to distill a logic with which to justify them.
Exhibit A: Andrew Sullivan.
— JA · Apr 1, 05:58 PM · #
What if I provided a very general definition of moral axiom as “a belief about the rightness or wrongness of an action that is not, in practice, subject to change through verbal persuasion”?
I’ll go with this, but it seems to bring us back to “whoever has the most guns makes the rules”; and that makes “New Fusionism” look an awful lot like gerrymandering, or at least that’s how it looks to me.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 1, 05:58 PM · #
Exhibit A: Andrew Sullivan.
Heh.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 1, 06:48 PM · #
Well, as an astute commenter to the original post that’s from pointed out “whoever has the most guns makes the rules” is always true. If I were to express the sentiment I was trying to get to in a less stylitically pleasing but more precise way, it would be something more like “whoever controls more guns enforces uniform national rules”, or toleration.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 1, 07:32 PM · #
If I were to express the sentiment I was trying to get to in a less stylitically pleasing but more precise way
I’m afraid that everything that came after this phrase has left me wondering if I even know what it is you’re arguing for.
What I thought New Fusionism meant was that I should throw in with Dreher et al and help him form his idiosyncratic communities where he can live free from the intrusion of married sodomites and whatever else it is that vexes him and his fellows because I helping him protect his idiosyncratic community, I help to ensure there will be a idiosyncratic community that will allow me to indulge in whatever nonsense a national majority might not be so tolerant of (fully automatic weapons, fishing with dynamite, not being required to have a license to operate a sailboat, whatever.)
If that’s what you’re arguing for with is New Fusionism, then I see the logic; but I’m more inclined to believe that the future will have me and Rod Dreher arm in arm, arguing for strong federal protection of First Amendment rights. I guess that’s more of a “building cathedrals” point of view, or at least fighting to keep them from being torn down.
But like I said, after your last post, I’m not really sure I know what you’re talking about.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 1, 08:45 PM · #
What I thought New Fusionism meant was that I should throw in with Dreher et al and help him form his idiosyncratic communities where he can live free from the intrusion of married sodomites and whatever else it is that vexes him and his fellows because I helping him protect his idiosyncratic community, I help to ensure there will be a idiosyncratic community that will allow me to indulge in whatever nonsense a national majority might not be so tolerant of (fully automatic weapons, fishing with dynamite, not being required to have a license to operate a sailboat, whatever.)
That’s what I meant.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 1, 11:54 PM · #
That’s what I meant.
Where would my professor friend in Oklahoma, or my lingerie store owning friend in Utah fit into this “idiosyncratic community” scheme of yours? (Actually, we already know where they would fit it.)
I guess the bigger question is whether or not it this sort of thing would be limited to my films. Under this New Fusionism regime, could an “idiosyncratic community” ban the reading of Text Patterns? Or would their be some federal protection of a US citizen’s right to read Alan’s various provocations? (If I were king, Alan’s head would already be set upon a pike as warning to others.)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying your plan is without appeal. If this means no federal enforcement of Obscenity Statutes and we and our various wholesale customers can sell our DVDs to retail consumers in Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee, etc without our having to fear being charged federally or being extradited, perhaps I could learn to live with the idea that my professor friend in Oklahoma feels he can’t use our films in is teaching and medical practice for fear of prosecution; or my lingerie store friend in Utah who won’t carry our DVDs for fear of prosecution. If they don’t like it, let ‘em move somewhere else, right?
And yet I can’t help feeling there’s some benefit in setting national baseline for civil liberties. I’m pretty sure that’s what the framers had in mind with that whole Bill of Rights thing they tacked onto the Constitution. But I’m not a scholar; and most of the time, when I think I’m arguing my principles, if I really think about it it turns out I’m just arguing my self interest.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 2, 12:36 AM · #
Funny how life is sometimes. While I was writing the above, a woman in Cincinnati was placing an order for three of our films.
This is notable because Cincinnati found its way onto Do Not Ship lists after the 1990 Cincinnati v. Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center case. Ultimately the photographs in question were found not to be obscene, and CCAC was acquitted, but nearly 20 years later, separate from the rest of Ohio, Cincinnati zip codes are still on Do Not Ship lists. (Talk about idiosyncratic!)
As a matter of principle (or maybe just mere self interest) we do not maintain a Do No Ship list, and trust that should it come to it, a jury of our peers, even in the most idiosyncratic community, would find my work worthy of First Amendment protection. None the less, there is always a certain feeling of uneasiness when an order from one of these “idiosyncratic communities” comes through. But despite this we fill these orders because we feel it is important for us to assert our right to conduct commerce in the face of state intimidation, and because we feel it is important to stand in solidarity with residents of communities where in the the idiosyncrasies are such that their fundamental liberties are trampled.
Now if I understand you, “fundamental” is where the hang up on this whole business lies:
As I’ve argued previously, I think that a proper understanding of libertarian thought should call for restraint in imposing uniform national rules, even some rules designed to prevent localities from restricting some individual autonomy.
From my perspective, New Fusionism seems to accept the actions of the Cincinnati prosecutor and practical effects of the court case on the First Amendment rights of both Cincinnati residents and members of other communities who might wish to have discourse with them, and similar situations in many other jurisdictions, as a necessarily trade-off against the authoritarian imposition of national, liberal standards that might ultimately be an even greater threat to individual liberty.
I guess my next question would be what other incurring into individual liberty would New Fusionism class as acceptable collateral damage? The right of adults to engage in consensual sexual relations outside of marriage was only granted constitutional protection in 2003. Does New Fusionism envision that some idiosyncratic communities might see fit to impose restrictions on sexual relations between consenting adults, and see these restrictions as a bulwark against an even more restrictive national standard?
And besides the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, what other civil liberties does New Fusionism see as ripe for local interpretation? It’s hard to find a way to ask that question that doesn’t sound sarcastic, but if I’m being asked to “throw in” with Dreher & Co. it seems like a question that ought to be asked.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 2, 12:04 PM · #
I think you are having an axiomatic FAIL, Dr. Manzi.
You are simply proposing localized mob rule, as Comstock astutely points out.
It is unworkable and anti-pragmatic.
Cite: Brown vs. Board, Loving vs. Virginia.
— matoko_chan · Apr 2, 02:16 PM · #
You are simply proposing localized mob rule, as Comstock astutely points out.
I think what Jim is proposing is that mob rule is inevitable; and that between national mob rule and local mob rule, local mod rule is the lessor of two evils. I have long been fond of these two passages from Federalist #10:
“A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.
That would seem to speak to Jim’s willingness to sacrifice the liberty of a dissenter in Oklahoma so that there might be a place for dissent in the larger body politic. I understand the logic of this, but also have noted that it’s an easier argument to make when you’re asking someone else to make the sacrifice.
As a child I was taught to put great stock in the wisdom of our founders; to regard the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights as a sacred text; and to esteem the Supreme Court of the United States as a body above petty political concern. But as the years have passed, I find my views have become, shall we say, more nuanced; yet I find I still cling to the idea that the Bill of Rights represents some sort of universal truth, even when I know better.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 2, 04:31 PM · #
But because of the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights Dr. Manzi’s New Fusionism is a non-starter.
Shouldn’t the intelligentsia of the right acknowledge that to the conservative base?
It is perfectly obvious to me.
— matoko_chan · Apr 2, 08:01 PM · #
I mean….don’t you learn from history?
Miscegenation laws and segregation academies were wildly popular in their local communities.
If you try that same stuff with homosexual citizens of the Republic and SSM, the Supremes are just going to come in and jack you up all over again.
What is the point?
— matoko_chan · Apr 2, 09:06 PM · #
Hey! How’s this for an idiosyncratic community!
I’ve just learned that Mass. State legislator Kathi-Anne Reinstein is moving to introduce a law that would make it illegal to make sexually explicit images of anyone over the age of 60. Naturally I’m curious where Ms. Reinstein thinks our latest “Bill and Desiree: Love is Timeless” should fit into this idiosyncratic regime of hers.
Of course I’m curious what Jim thinks too.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 6, 04:26 PM · #
So am I.
Although honestly I don’t see this as a culture issue so much as a freedom of speech issue. If I’m a conservative-libertarian or libertarian-conservative, when it comes to free speech I’m just libertarian.
— PEG · Apr 6, 04:33 PM · #
Yesterday I left a comment on Rod Dreher’s blog suggesting his concern over the threat that SSM posed to his First Amendment protections made us natural allies. Rod deleted the comment. That’s not a promising start for Jim’s New Fusionism.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 11, 05:11 PM · #