Dreher-Linker-Sullivan on gay marriage

The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. "Discrimination and intolerance" are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties--sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings--on which independent, informal, traditional, and nonmarket institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure.

Because such arrangements operate on principles that are regarded as irrational, and because they are difficult to supervise and control in the interest of rationality and equal freedom, they have no place in advanced liberal society and are edged out as the social order progresses. The normal functioning of the institutions of liberal society has precisely that effect. Social-welfare programs reduce the need for institutions and ties other than the state bureaucracy and various market and contractual arrangements, while "inclusiveness" abolishes the relation between the workings of society and any specific religious, cultural, or sexual standards. Only rational formal institutions remain functional and authoritative. What were once traditional social institutions with definite form, function, and authority become personal pursuits that each can make of what he wishes so long as all others remain free to participate or abstain as they will. Marriage and family are replaced by "relationships" and "living together"; religion becomes a freeform pursuit of individual fulfillment; and inherited culture becomes an optional consumer good, a matter of personal style or group assertiveness.

Such tendencies make it impossible to deal reasonably on their own terms with issues of identity, such as sex, kinship, ethnicity, and religion. Those distinctions play no role in the liberal understanding of rational social functioning, so they are understood as pure principles of irrational opposition and hatred: absolute, unbridgeable, and impossible to reconcile with a peaceful, just, and efficient social order. The consequence is that they must effectively be abolished--trivialized, conceptually dissolved, canceled through reverse discrimination, or kept from entering into thought at all.

Under the regime of liberalism, the way in which people have traditionally understood themselves and others now can have no bearing on their relations to each other, at least to the extent that those relations have substantive consequences. Who you are can have no connection to how things are with you, except to the extent that "who you are" refers to your relation to institutions liberalism accepts as authoritative. A man and woman have to be the same, but a Harvard and state-university graduate can be different. The result is the forcible imposition on everyone of a wholly abstract and radically depersonalized order that abolishes the connections and distinctions by which human beings have always lived in favor of more formal ones such as wealth, education, and bureaucratic position. Factually considered, that new order is unequal and unfree, but it is able to pass itself off as an indisputable application of neutral principles to which no sane and moral person could possibly object.

Advanced liberalism has become an immensely powerful social reality. Liberal standards for human rights and government procedures are widely viewed as universally obligatory, at least in principle, and no competitor has comparable general appeal as a way of organizing social life. The technically rational organization of the world to give each of us as much as possible of what he wants is quite generally accepted as the correct guiding ideal for politics and social morality. Pluralism, the fight against discrimination, and an ethic of "caring" are accepted as political, social, and moral imperatives. And administrative and therapeutic intervention in all aspects of social life is considered the self-evident means of vindicating them. Such views are especially strong in the societies that have been enduringly successful in modern times, and among the intelligent, well-educated, and well-placed, most of whom believe them a matter of simple justice and rationality and can conceive of no other legitimate outlook. Concerns about self-government, moral traditions, and inherited loyalties do not carry anything close to the same weight. To make a serious issue of such concerns is regarded as a sign of ignorance or psychological or moral defect.

In spite of serious chronic problems that no one knows how to attack--extraordinarily low natality, rising costs of social-welfare programs, growing immigrant populations that do not assimilate--basic change seems unthinkable. No matter how pressing the problem, only analyses and solutions compatible with liberal positions are allowed in the public square. Almost all serious discussion is carried on through academic and other institutions that are fully integrated with the ruling order, and in any case antidiscrimination rules make wholehearted subscription to principles such as inclusiveness the only way to avoid legal and public relations problems that would make institutional life impossible. Genuine political discussion disappears. What pass as battles between liberals and conservatives are almost always disputes between different stages or tendencies within liberalism itself.

So dominant is liberalism that it becomes invisible. Judges feel free to read it into the law without historical or textual warrant because it seems so obviously right. To oppose it in any basic way is to act incomprehensibly, in a way explicable, it is thought, only by reference to irrationality, ignorance, or evil. The whole of the nonliberal past is comprehensively blackened. Traditional ways are presented as the simple negation of unquestionable goods liberalism favors. Obvious declines in civility, morality, and cultural achievement are ignored, denied, or redefined as advances. Violence is said to be the fault of the persistence of sex roles, war of religion, theft of social inequality, suicide of stereotyping. Destruction of sex and historical community as ordering principles--and thus of settled family arrangements and cultural forms--is presented as a supremely desirable goal. The clear connection among the decline of traditional habits, standards, and social ties; the disintegration of institutions like the family; and other forms of personal and social disorder is ignored or treated as beside the point.

Many people find something deeply oppressive about the resulting situation, but no one really knows what to say about it. Some complain about those general restrictions, like political correctness, which make honest and productive discussion of public affairs impossible. Others have more concrete and personal objections. Parents are alarmed by the indoctrination of their children. Many people complain about affirmative action, massive and uncontrolled immigration, and the abolition of the family as a distinct social institution publicly recognized as fundamental and prior to the state. Still others have the uneasy sense that the world to which they are attached and which defines who they are is being taken from them.

Nonetheless, these victims and their complaints get no respect and little media coverage. Their discontent remains inarticulate and obscure. People feel stifled, but cannot say just how. They make jokes or sarcastic comments, but when challenged have trouble explaining and defending themselves. The disappearance of common understandings that enable serious thought and action to be carried on by nonexperts and outside formal bureaucratic structures has made it hard even to think about the issues coherently. The result is a system of puzzled compliance. However ineffective the schools become, educators feel compelled to inculcate multicultural platitudes rather than to promote substantive learning. No matter how silly people find celebrations of "diversity," they become ever more frequent and surround themselves ever more insistently with happy talk.

You would do well to read 2Blowhards' lengthy interview with Jim, which offers a more easily digestible form of his view. Note especially this passage:

2Blowhards: Can you explain what you mean when you write about (and criticize) "liberalism"? The way you use the word will be unfamiliar to many people.

Jim Kalb: By "liberalism" I mean the form of political modernity that's triumphed. Modernity is the attempt to base everything on human thought and purpose rather than tradition and religion. If you apply that to social life then society becomes something for people to reconstruct in the interests of whatever goals they happen to have. Naturally, different goals are possible, so the real question becomes whose goals count. If it's group goals that matter then the whole enterprise boils down to group self-assertion and you get fascism. If it's goals of the individual, you get liberalism. So liberalism is basically the view that society should be understood as a kind of conscious arrangement or machine that should be reconstructed and adjusted continuously to give people what they want, as much and as equally as possible.
...

2B: I like to suggest to people that we need to get over our fear of the word "conservative" because we're all conservative to some extent. We have to be in order to survive. How and why did people get scared of the word?

Kalb: As you say, to function at all everyone has to accept things that are traditional or anyway not chosen. It's all a matter of degree. People should be thinking about the role different ways of thinking, including conservative ways of thinking, play in dealing with the world. Once they do, the conservative case is mostly made. The point of modernism is that there's going to be one clear theory of everything. If you admit that conservative ways of thinking have some permanent value then the modernist dream of a single system of ever-more-perfect rationality falls apart. Greater acceptance of tradition becomes the coherent way to go forward.

I think the ultimate reason people are afraid of conservatism is that they don't want anything to touch them. It's frightening to think that we don't make the world and can't control it, that we have to accept and trust things that lie outside of us that we don't understand completely. After all, the world can seem very threatening, and it's nicer to think that there are experts somewhere who understand things and take care of everything for us. Also, telling people they just have to accept some things makes them worried someone's going to put something over on them. The conservative answer is that there's a kind of cumulative implicit consensus we can look to, but someone has to discern and interpret the implicit consensus so it's hard to get rid of the worry altogether.

2B: So what is conservatism?

Kalb: It has a negative and a positive aspect. On its negative and theoretical side, it's a rejection of political modernity. It says that the project of basing society on human thought and purpose can't work. One reason it can't work is that purposes and thoughts need a social setting to make sense. If our purposes and thoughts need a setting they don't also construct the setting. It has to be something that already exists that we're entitled to take for granted.

A reason liberalism in particular can't work is that the goals of individuals conflict, so by themselves they don't give rise to any kind of order. If you try to base social order on giving individuals what they want you have to claim that everyone really wants the same thing, or that you've got some neutral way to give everyone what he wants equally. The first claim is obviously false, and the second claim can't work unless the only things people want are things like consumer goods and private indulgences that don't essentially affect other people. That's not what people are like, though. So in either case you end up telling people what they have to want. The individual who chooses his own values can't really be the standard.

2B: What's the positive side of conservatism?

Kalb: On its positive and more practical side, conservatism is an attitude of trust toward basic features of the social world, an attempt to make sense of social life and carry it on by reference to inherited habits and understandings. It's based on a sense that loyalty is a good thing, that what's worked for a long time probably has something to it, even though what that thing is can be difficult to articulate without some thought.

2B: What do these definitions have to do with the kind of liberalism and conservatism we read about in the news?

Kalb: In the case of liberalism I think the fit's pretty good. It's a mature philosophy that's won its battles, so it can present itself in a clear and straightforward way. Slogans like "social welfare," "inclusion," "equal freedom" and so on are very much in line with my definition.

In the case of conservatism it's more complicated. Conservatives don't trust logical systems, and they like to go with what's settled and seems to work. That takes away from coherence, especially once anti-conservative views have become established in society. You get people who call themselves conservatives and claim to be the real egalitarians or revolutionaries, for example.

Another problem is that people who are in the business of providing explanations -- academics, journalists, various experts -- are almost always modernists. A big reason for that is that attempts to reconstruct society on rational principles give people who write and explain things a much bigger role in the scheme of things.

Anyway, the result is that liberal views become the accepted background of public discussion while conservative views seem odd, contradictory, and generally hard to make sense of. A conservative is always someone who rejects at least part of the liberal campaign to reconstruct society in the interests of equal freedom. The specific things conservatives resist and the reasons they give vary and usually don't form a logical system. So the point and justification of their views can become quite obscure.

Read the whole thing -- Part One here; Part Two here; and Part Three here.

And you should buy Jim's book, "The Tyranny of Liberalism," which is a blockbuster that belongs on the shelves of any thinking conservative who wants to understand where we are today, and where we are going. (Jim's FAQ on traditionalism and sexual morality is also a must-read.)

I say all this openly recognizing that absent some unforeseen events that radically shake up the debate, I'm on the losing side of this issue. As Michael Brendan Dougherty explains in The American Conservative, unless the cultural right figures out some way to make the traditionalist case against legalized same-sex marriage convincing to Americans under 40, we will have same-sex marriage in this country, supported by a majority of voters. (This is why I wish my side would pour its resources into carving out a constitutional zone of protection for the religious liberty of traditional churches, synagogues, mosques and religious institutions, while there are still enough people left who would not want those institutions to be penalized by the law for not embracing homosexuality). As Kalb puts it, liberals have an easier time justifying gay marriage: give the people what they want, as long as it doesn't "hurt" anybody else. Conservatives, on the other hand, have a more complex vision of the Good, one that is hard to articulate persuasively in a consumerist, individualist society with no shared transcendent concept of the Good, except as, in the words Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy used to reaffirm the right to abortion and to establish the right to gay sex, "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."

On Andrew's response, I think it's more than a little cheeky to use the words of Pope John Paul II to defend a position deeply contrary to what the Pope poured out his life defending: Roman Catholic moral witness. The only thing worth saying here, I suppose, is the reiteration of something I've said a thousand times in my exchanges with Andrew. I am a Christian who was once of the Roman Catholic Church, and am now of the Orthodox Church. Andrew calls himself a Catholic, but his individual conscience is his guide. I believe in a different source of moral authority. To Andrew (and Damon), this looks like "fundamentalism" and a belief in the "inerrancy" of Scripture (which isn't true, but to modernists, who believe that religion and tradition offer no authoritative grounds for moral decision-making (except when they advance liberal goals), my views appear to be unreason itself. But as MacIntyre has shown, the Enlightenment project has failed: they cannot establish from reason any compelling case for why their view should be privileged. To me, it looks like dangerous unreason: a radical willingness to tear down ancient structures (because if you can radically redefine marriage based on human desire, nothing is solid -- which is why I said earlier if you accept gay marriage, you should be prepared to apologize to the Lost Children of Rockland County, as there will be no firm grounds on which to tell them that their mutually consenting relationships were wrong).

The question is: does gay marriage serve to incorporate same-sex couples into the moral order, or does it, in ways that may not be easily apparent, radically undermine the foundation of our moral order? I keep saying that gay marriage is only the logical extension of a change that overtook our society after the Second World War, specifically in the Sixties, led by heterosexuals. The next logical step is legalized polygamy, or a more generalized and bourgeoisified version of whatever you call the anarchy they have in the inner city. But the social radicalizers would never admit this, and may not see it themselves. Then again, if you had said back in the Sixties and Seventies that abandoning traditional standards of marriage and sexual relations would lead to gay marriage, few people would have believed you. Ideas have consequences, as traditionalists know.

Which brings us back to where we started: talking past each other. I don't see any way out, especially because our society grows swiftly and increasingly more emotivist. The radicalizers have the courts and the media. Soon they'll have the society at large, and it is we traditionalist conservatives and trad Christians who will be the radicals. Correction: we will be known as radicals; we already are radicals, most of us just don't know it yet.