Serendipity?

Some good ideas come in dreams

As a philosophy graduate, I’m a sucker for a discussion of moral philosophy even if it’s from David Brooks. It helps that I woke up too early on Friday with the words solemn, sacred, and defile in my head and rushed to the computer to review Jonathan Haidt and moral foundation theory. Later I found Brooks’ “How Democrats Can Win the Morality Wars.”

Brooks likes to mediate in a somewhat annoying both-sides way. On the left hand, “moral freedom”; on the right hand, “you are not your own.” Why can’t we just get along?

The left, he argues, has its own annoying way of both insisting on its own sense of right while dismissing other people’s as ignorance and bigotry. He’s right about that. Meaning, tolerant progressives are insufficiently sensitive that too-rapid change leaves conservatives feeling that the ground is dissolving under their feet like the traditions that kept Tevye from suffering vertigo. But Brooks also acknowledges that conservatives’ anxiety comes from the perception “that they are losing power as a cultural force.”

Brooks chalks up the tension to differences in moral framing. What it is about, too, is power itself:

This has produced a moral panic. Consumed by the passion of the culture wars, many traditionalists and conservative Christians have adopted a hypermasculine warrior ethos diametrically opposed to the Sermon on the Mount moral order they claim as their guide. Unable to get people to embrace their moral order through suasion, they now seek to impose their moral order through politics. A movement that claims to make God their god now makes politics god. What was once a faith is now mostly a tribe.

This moral panic has divided the traditionalist world, especially the Christian part of it, a division that has, for example, been described in different ways by me, by my Times colleague Ruth Graham and by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic. Millions of Americans who subscribe to the “you are not your own” ethos are appalled by what the Republican Party has become.

So is there room in the Democratic Party for people who don’t subscribe to the progressive moral tradition but are appalled by what conservatism has become?

There should be. That’s how it works in families, doesn’t it?

Plus, can we have a social contract in a “moral freedom” world that rejects broader social standards? Yet the left sees need for a social contract; ours is falling apart like our physical infrastructure. Conservatism, or what it has become under sway from libertarianism, asserts its own version of morality that imposes obligations on others while absolving its own from them: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Brooks concludes:

America needs institutions built on the “you are not your own” ethos to create social bonds that are more permanent than individual choice. It needs that ethos to counter the me-centric, narcissistic tendencies in our culture. It needs that ethos to preserve a sense of the sacred, the idea that there are some truths so transcendentally right that they are absolutely true in all circumstances. It needs that ethos in order to pass along the sort of moral sensibilities that one finds in, say, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — that people and nations have to pay for the wages of sin, that charity toward all is the right posture, that firmness in keeping with the right always has to be accompanied by humility about how much we can ever see of the right.

Finally, we need this ethos, because morality is not only an individual thing; it’s something between people that binds us together. Even individualistic progressives say it takes a village to raise a child, but the village needs to have a shared moral sense of how to raise it.

The problem is both left and right want to have it both ways. How they react when they don ‘t get what they want is different.

Brooks thinks if progressives can acknowledge that both moral traditions need each other — they do — the lion and lamb can learn to coexist. He’s being naive. I lost count of how many moral panics have consumed conservatives before burning out just since the Reagan administration. They are not panics so much as tantrums. As Prince Henry said of Falstaff’s bald-faced lies, “Prithee, let him alone; we shall have more anon.”

It is not just through tantrums and politics that we see the right now acting out. Brooks dodges this. The North won the Civil War but lost the peace to Klan terror and Jim Crow. The left may dominate culturally today, but conservatives have become reactionary and violent, not just at their loss of cultural or moral power, but at having to share power with those they see as lessers. As they did in Wilmington and in Tulsa over a century ago. As they did in Selma on Bloody Sunday. They will dominate the rest of us or people will die. Also see: Christchurch, NZ, Charleston, El Paso, Pittsburgh, Buffalo. No amount of both-sidesing will balance that account.

“Ultimately,” writes Brooks, “the gay rights movement triumphed in the court of public opinion when the nonradicals won and it became attached to the two essential bourgeois institutions — marriage and the military.” Good point. The left must be adapative.

The fight to preserve (if not to restore) abortion rights may require different framing as well. Anat Shenker-Osorio recommends abandoning “choice” as the principle behind abortion rights. It is an essentially libertarian frame that has seeped into liberal thinking. Medical privacy and bodily autonomy are more universal and more progressive hills to fight on. The Irish used other three other “c” words in their fight: care, compassion and change.

As for defending our fragile republic, invoking conservatives’ atrophied sense of what is sacred in America may be something you’ll see more in these pages. That Republicans have defiled the temple erected to Lincoln’s legacy, that their disloyalty disgusts Americans too respectful of and committed to American principles to wrap themselves in Chinese-made flags or to worship false idols as self-proclaimed Real Americans™ do.

It might do no good to remind them. But it will be satisfying.

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