Elf Sternberg

I've often said that I have a lot of sympathy for religious communities, especially the ones that live up to the expectations I perceive in the foundational documents of those religions, such as Buddhism or Christianity which talk a lot about peace, loving the poor, caring for your community, and finding your home. Christine Emba's essay, Liberalism is Loneliness, talks a lot about how "liberalism" (and by this I guess she means the Enlightenment's project to free inquiry from dogmatism, the "classic liberalism" that many conservatives talk about shortly after mentioning how many books they own) has a take on the current in her review of Patrick Deenan's Why Liberalism Failed, in which she writes:

As liberalism has progressed, it has done so by ever more efficiently liberating each individual from “particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities — unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will.” In the process, it has scoured anything that could hold stable meaning and connection from our modern landscape — culture has been disintegrated, family bonds devalued, connections to the past cut off, an understanding of the common good all but disappeared.

And in the end, we’ve all been left terribly alone.

She goes on to talk about how "conservatism" has given us a free market "to buy back what has been destroyed," and "liberalism" has given us regulation to "to protect what you can't!"

Emba goes on to say,

To overhaul liberalism, we will have to overhaul ourselves, exchanging an easy drift toward selfish autonomy for a cultivated embrace of self-discipline and communal responsibility. As daunting a project as reforming a political order might seem, this internal shift may be just as hard.

She's right, but that's not the whole story, and to argue that this is "liberalism's" fault is to ignore, viciously and with malice aforethought, the history that brought us to this place.

I mulled a lot about trying to put my finger on what bothered me about Emba's essay when I read Nandini's Ramachadran's essay on Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, in which she talks about how the movie is "about the mysteries and melancholy of kinship."

Keeping kin is a perplexing thing. We are all tethered to a world made significant through others, they lend weight and shape and texture to the stories we tell ourselves (and about ourselves) to survive. We choose the kin we keep and we hope to be so chosen in turn; knowing how and whom to love often demands the full measure of a person’s ethical intelligence. Love is the luxury of intimate witness: to grant another person an irreducible importance that no one can ever fully deserve.

Ramachadran addresses our individualism by talking about chosen kin, about the community we choose.

In the United States, the history that brought us to this place, in this time, is one of Social Darwinism run amok.

Ramachadran's comment on love and intimate witness ends with this:

If this last year has taught us anything, besides, it is that lots of people (most of them men) don’t strive to deserve it; they expect such affectionate rescue from their own irrelevance without cultivating the habits of thought necessary to return a similar solace. What does one do, then, if most men simply don’t know how to stop being entitled monsters?

And that is, ultimately, the entirety of the tension between Ramachadran and Emba. Emba wants us to go back to a place of kinship, and Ramachadran says we can't until we unlearn the psychopathic tendencies that live among us, and have been steadily growing worse in the past fifty years.

Again in the Foreward to The Conservative Mind, Kirk tells us that we must cultivate "a moral imagination and a tragic sense of life" in order to appreciate "an account for what ails mankind today."

Contra Kirk, let's review the last ten years. Or let Charlie Stross do it, but basically it comes down to this: In the past twenty years:

• AIDS went from being a death sentence to a chronic but manageable disease
• The proportion of the total world population unable to acquire food, water and shelter dropped by half
• Africa managed 5% growth, resulting in a billion people seeing an improvement in their quality of life
• In the US, violent crime is at its lowest levels in 56 years
• In the world, the odds of dying in warfare is at its lowest levels since the beginning of human history
• "You have cancer" is no longer an authomatic death sentence either.
• "You had a heart attack" means "You might well live another 30 years."
• In the US, 10 million acres of new forest land were recovered in the past ten years,
• In the US, air pollution is at its lowest levels since the 1950s.
• The US economy grew at 30% between 1980 and 2010, but energy usage went up only 26%
• We're making progress on wiping out polio and malaria
• Despite economic and population growth, the US's water usage has been stable since 1985
• Malthusian prophecies of famine, war, pestilence and death continue to fail as reliably as the Christian Eschaton

The world has problems. But my generally optimistic world view is not informed by a constant dwelling on a tragic sense of life.

Laurie Higgins has a charming little article, Republican skeletons in the closet, in which she excoriates the Republican nattersphere for refusing to look too closely at Republican politicians who are known or strongly rumored to be gay, and for reacting with outrage whenever one is "outed" in someway, claiming that it's an invasion of privacy.

( A short detour about Christianists and privacy )

Higgins is all in a froth that "homosexuality matters. Volitional homosexual behavior is deviant, immoral behavior regardless of its etiology. That moral claim is not only a legitimate but also a necessary moral claim to make publicly." That's just a typical Christianist argument. It's boring.

What got me fascinated by Higgins was this paragraph:

Same-sex desire and volitional homosexual acts are analogous to polyamorous desire and volitional polyamorous acts, all of which are legitimate conditions for moral assessment and moral disapproval. Most voters would want to know if a candidate embraced polyamory; most voters would reject a candidate for his affirmation of polyamory and his engagement in polyamorous behavior; and those who rejected such a candidate would not be vilified for their political decision or called poly-haters and polyphobes.

That raised my eyebrows: it's the first time I've heard anyone from the Christianist side of the table actually use the term "polyamory" without sneer quotes. It's as if Higgins is unaware that the term is less than twenty years old and is still contentious even within the Polyamory community.

The take-away here is that poly is winning: by framing it in the same context as homosexuality, as a legitimate civil arrangement, rather than depicting it in ways similar to swinging, the poly community has successfully put its detractors on the defensive.

Russell Kirk is sometimes regarded as one of the founders of the moderns conservative movement. In the mid-1950's he wrote a book called The Conservative Mind in which he outlined a number of interesting tenants of what it meant to be a conservative.

Reading them, I can't help but see that each and every one of them is based on nothing more than a feeling of rightness, perhaps smugly so, written across Kirk's persona by his own experience with religion. I've been reading Kirk, and I'm reacting to it, like every reader. More to the point, although his ideas will surely feed my writing, I'd like to get a grip around his ideas and explore them.

Kirk's first two premeses are these:

1. The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.
2. The conservative believes that there exist natural distinctions, and that society requires orders and classes that emphasize these distinctions.

If you've already recognized the inherent tension in these two statments, congratulations. If you see the basic flaw in the first premise, and how its resolution resolves the second, you're way ahead of me.

If I were a theist, I might agree with Kirk's first statement: it flows naturally from the consequences of a unitary and interventionist theism. God made us. God imposed His Will upon us. But I'm not a theist and I don't believe in interventionist superstitions. So I have to turn to human experience, and the mounting collections of evidence to make my case, and not to an arbitrarily chosen minority religious position.

And I'll give Kirk's first statement as true, if the analysis is shallow and banal enough. Because here's what we know: there is not one human nature, there are many. There's no such thing as "neurotypicality," there are only varying degrees of many different human mental capacities. The biological focus on reproduction goes awry when other mental modules, meant to provide order among men in the tribe during the millenia of evolutionary adaptation, converge in excess: homosexuality. The mental capacity to understand the pain of others, meant to create sympathy among tribespeople and hold the tribe together, end up flawed among a small subset to provide the viciousness needed to survive in a competitive environment: psychopathy. Another mental capacity to multitask, to be distractable, to be capable of certain kinds of synthesis get sacrificed to make room for capabilities that give us invention, innovation, focus: high-functioning autism.

There is not one human nature: there are thousands of different kinds. This is not the "diversity" of Kirk's second principle, except in the poorest of constrained definitions: this is innate abilities that cannot be rectified by imposing a uniform order. No laws can be created that fit "human nature" perfectly because human nature has a temporal component: it is only the mass aggregate of human beings alive at any given moment, and the law is desperately trying to catch up with that aggregate, the one straining against the other. Law is forever adapting to the moving target that is human nature, and human nature only exists as the contingent outcome of recent events and the dead hand of tradition.

If we're to take what's left of Kirk's argument seriously, we have only this left to admit: if we go with illiberal communitarianism intent on solving the needs of real people, then our problem is finding a constraining framework for action that satifies everyone, and I mean everyone: the sociopath as well as the saint, and the ultimate constraint is one that satisifies nobody. If we go with a society that actually believes in real liberty of conscience and action, then we end up with a meritocracy where limited psychopathy ends up being rewarded, where unequal distributing of resources results from individual choices.

Somewhere in the middle there is the solution. And I think Kirk's got the better handle on it by respecting that those differences exist and must be managed, but he and conservatives like him have a hell of a lot to swallow in accepting that human nature is deeper and more subtle than even we humans commonly accept. There is a tension in Kirk's thesis that comes down ultimately to simple power dynamics, a world in which the powerful do what they can, and the powerless accept what they must. In Thucydides' time, that quote applied to very clearly demarcated classes. Unfortunately for Kirk and conservatives like him, that's no longer true.