Despite the title, this post is actually not a continuation of my debate with Dan about the rationality of elite institutions. I’m sure you’re devastated!

Two web articles that appeared on the same day last week offer two different answers to a very important question. Stipulate that the basis of liberal democracy is that every human individual has a claim to moral significance, and therefore a right to be treated in a certain way, that is not dependent upon anything other than his status as a human individual. The question: How do we know this?

The question matters for at least two major reasons. How we know we have rights will define the parameters of our rights. And it will also be critical to shaping our social strategies for upholding our rights – including how we build moral consensus.

In one article, Hadley Arkes argues that the concept of “freedom of religion” (a central concern of ours here at HT) has actually become something of a threat to our rights. The only sound basis for knowing our rights, Arkes argues, is reason; yet “religion” and “belief” are asserted as grounds of rights apart from any consideration of their reasonableness:

 If the bishops pronounce the law to be “unjust,” not merely counter to beliefsearnestly held by Catholics, but unjust according to reasons understandable to others across the religious divide—then the problem is transformed: The bishops are using the language that ordinary citizens will use as they deliberate and argue together in the public forum. And yet, if that is the case, the bishops would stand on no different plane from that of other citizens who have argued in public on serious questions of right and wrong—and lost.

Imagine, in that respect, the owner of a business who has no particular religious reflexes, and through the force of his own moral reasoning he has come to bear reservations about the sexual revolution and the contraceptive ethic. He does not wish to endorse that ethic by paying for the contraceptives used by his employees, especially when they can amply afford them already. If he raises a claim of “conscience” against the new mandates on Obamacare, would he complain that he was being denied his “religious freedom?” It is curious that this late in the seasons of our experience the point has not broken through that the two claims may be at odds: We cannot insist on the one hand that our judgments on law and public policy are formed of moral reasoning and the Natural Law, and yet claim on the other that when the law runs counter to our moral judgments we have suffered a denial of our “religious freedom.”

Arkes makes a good point that we must not give up the role of reason in justifying our rights, and that we are in danger of doing this if we absolutize “religion” simply as such as the basis of our rights claims. Rights of conscience only make sense within “the recognition that conscience is not directed inward to the self and one’s feelings, but outward to the natural law.” We must build upon a common moral ground available to all, both for philosophical reasons (because right and wrong cannot be what they are on any other terms) and sociological reasons (because without a common ground we can’t sustain society).

By the way, I take the final sentence of the passage I have quoted above to be somewhat ironic. I think Arkes is not really saying we must make an absolute choice between rights claims grounded in reason and rights claims grounded in religion in any sense; rather, he is saying we must make an absolute choice between rights claims grounded in reason and rights claims grounded in an absolutized deference to religious belief. Hence the scare quotes around “religious freedom” at the end.

I agree we need a common ground, and reason is important to that. But is reason the only element of that common ground, as Arkes (characteristically) presupposes?

On the same day Arkes’ article came out, Peter Berger offered a meditation on the advances of liberal democracy in the 20th century in which he argued for the primacy of experience over theoretical propositions.

The most memorable part of Berger’s article is actually not the argument for experience over reason, but his delightful way of summarizing the essence of liberal democracy:

Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who died in year 10 of the Common Era, was famously asked whether one could state the meaning of Torah while standing on one leg. He replied yes, then formulated the first version of the Golden Rule, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another”….Hillel added: “This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary”.  A couple of years ago I participated in a conference in Berlin on the question of “European values” – which of course are no longer just European, but are global values of liberal democracy. I referred to the Hillel anecdote, then suggested that one could also state the meaning of “European values” while standing on one leg. One could simply quote the first sentence of Article 1 of the constitution of the Federal Republic: “The dignity of man is inviolable” (“Die Wuerde des Menschen ist unantastbar”). The rest indeed is commentary, but this is what it is all about. [ea]

I love that! And who better to play the Hillel of our age than Berger?

Berger goes on to argue that the basis of our moral commitment to the dignity of man is experience, not theory:

It is also important to understand that these values are not just theoretical propositions, but the result of lived experience. Of course there are elaborate theories about the values of liberal democracy. But these theories are grounded in actual human experience, including the experience of people who are not theorists (the great majority) and perhaps have never read a book. At the core of this experience is a perceptionof man as, precisely, the bearer of an inviolable dignity. Put differently, anthropology precedes ethics.

One of my favorite examples of this is from American literature, in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: Huck is sailing on the Mississippi when an escaped slave climbs aboard his raft. Huck is a child of the Old South, socialized in its ethics, which tells him that he ought to return the slave to his rightful owner. He cannot bring himself to do this. Why? Huck has not been the target of abolitionist propaganda, has not read Uncle Tom’s Cabin let alone any philosophical treatise on the rights of man. Rather, he suddenly perceives his passenger as a human being with intrinsic dignity and the right to be free. This is what in classical Greek drama was called an anagnorisis, a “recognition scene”. This is not a theory, but an experience. It can be mediated by theory and legitimated by theory after the fact. But the experience is primal.

The article culminates in the claim that because our moral commitment to human dignity is ultimately grounded in experience, not theory, it is detachable from its historic “mediation” in Christian theology, Greco-Roman philosophy and other sources, and transferrable to those of other beliefs, including athiests. As Berger puts it, in Europe a unique confluence of factors surfaced the moral commitment to human dignity, but now, having been surfaced, that commitment is “universally available.”

In spite of their disagreement, it’s noteworthy that Arkes and Berger agree – and pretty strongly – on the importance of buiding on a moral common ground that is available to all humanity. Arkes calls it “reason” and Berger calls it “experience.” That disagreement embodies a large debate over anthropology. Are human beings more fundamentally rational or more fundamentally instinctual?

Do we need to make a choice? Not necessarily – it’s possible to avoid both the Kantian tendency to privilege reason and the sociologist’s tendency to privilege experience. This is part of what attracts me to Locke’s epistemology, in spite of its shortcomings on some important points. Despite what two generations of college professors have said, Locke doesn’t actually privilege experience over reason, but strives to take both seriously as grounds of knowledge. (As I said, he strives. On some points he doesn’t quite succeed.)

But here’s a deeper question. How can we take equally seriously the role of religion itself as a formative anthropological influence? I don’t mean to set up “religion” as something separate from either “reason” or “experience” because both reason and experience are part of the package we call “religion.” Yet the same can be said in reverse – to a large extent our reasoning and experience are mediated by religion rather than the other way around. (Notice how all the classic epistemologists spend so much time wrestling with the knowledge of God; there’s a reason.)

I think this acknowledgement is necessary to the deeper “freedom of religion” we’re striving for here on HT. There are limits to the extent to which the moral premises of social life can ever be shared, as long as we don’t share a religion. We must build on common ground, but the common ground itself can’t be too extensive. Otherwise we either fail to take seriously that the human being is a religious creature, or else fail to take seriously how deep our religious differences run.

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I recently had a conversation about forced compassion with a friend of mine who I view as typical of the political far right. In our discussion, we turned our attention to one of the largest problem areas in the Dairy State: Milwaukee. My friend would like to see the elimination of ‘forced compassion’ in Milwaukee, a proposition I agree with, but I asked him what would fill the gap of needs in the city if government assistance is eliminated? His answer is all too common on the far right: nothing, the poor can simply dig themselves out of poverty through their own personal initiative and hard work. Start a small business, be creative, go to college, pull yourself out.

This is a typical answer, one even candidates on the right have referenced when talking about the costs of college education. Work hard, make sacrifices, give it your all, and you can succeed in achieving the American dream, regardless of the financial level at which you began. Thus, those in inner-city poverty can dig themselves out of poverty if they try hard enough. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what those on the far left would argue that everyone who is poor needs government assistance.

The difference is not so much about strategy but promised results. Those on the left honestly believe that they can help everyone out of poverty through their assistance programs, which is certainly doubtful. But look at those on the right who argue for personal ingenuity on the part of the poor to dig themselves out of poverty. At best, only a small percentage will actual dig themselves out because such a small percentage of human beings are wired in this way. The culture and cycle of poverty has eliminated the drive in many people causing them to become resigned to their place of poverty. Those on the right seem content to consign the poor to their current position and then point to the personal failures of the poor as the reason they remain in poverty.

I’m not a sociologist, but it appears to me that those on the left and the right help roughly the same percentage of people. I’m not going to attempt to explain why, I just know that changing parties in power seems to have little effect on the status of the poor. Those on the left promise a lot and deliver little. Those on the right promise little and deliver about as much. Those on the left want to ‘force compassion’ and attempt to help everyone while those on the right call for ‘free compassion’ and help only those who help themselves. Neither position is helpful. The left seems to eliminate personal responsibility while the right places too much emphasis upon it. What then is the proper response?

What I would propose over the next several posts that I make on this topic is a strategy that ignores both the playbook of the left and the right while taking pieces from each in an attempt to help the poor. The right must be rejected for not helping the helpless. The left must be rejected because one realistically cannot help those who refuse to help themselves. The right should be listened to for emphasizing the value of personal drive. The left should be listened to for emphasizing the need to help those who do not have personal drive. The result of a combined strategy will not be political as much as it will hopefully be Christian and attainable. Milwaukee can be helped, but only if we as individuals separate ourselves from political rhetoric and theory and get involved in the trenches of the cities, fulfilling James 1:27 rather than just talking about it.

I’ve been out of commission for over a week now, so I’m afraid this post won’t respond to the very interesting current debates happening on this blog. But I was recently in an airport and passed an advertisement with a picture of a puppy on it (which, naturally, stopped me in my tracks) and the header reading “Oops.” The tagline: “50% of animals born are accidents.” This is a curious discovery, because I actually didn’t know that the other 50% were planned. Did Fido and Fluffy practice family planning before Fluffy’s latest litter? Are they spacing the litters so as to afford a bigger dog house or obedience school?

The meaning of the ad is obvious, of course; one recalls Bob Barker’s famous dictum, “Help control the pet population; have your pet spayed or neutered.” And for the record, no objections to that. But this isn’t a post about animal control; it’s actually not even about human birth control. Rather, I’m wondering just how far we’re going in our attempt to bring nature under man’s control. Are we really now calling animal births “planned” or “accidental”?

Control implies choice, but of course, we can see where such “choice” often leads. We assume that more choice is better (this is America, after all, and I say that with tongue firmly planted in cheek). But it seems that as choice increases, we are simultaneously choosing increasingly to control, to put the reins on nature. And of course, there’s nothing wrong, or very little wrong, with intervening with nature in some circumstances, though it seems to me that it should be more when something has gone wrong with nature than when it has worked simply how it, well, naturally functions. But I wonder if we might need something more than the idea of “choice” to talk about when we should, and should not, try to control or intervene in the way that nature works. Why? Because nature might actually tell us something about who we are, and, therefore, how we might best flourish.

John Rawls, as a quintessential modern liberal (not meaning leftist, here!) gives us choice: “We should…reverse the relation between the right and the good proposed by teleological doctrines and view the right as prior.” We have a right to choose, he might say, because we have shed the “teleological doctrines” – i.e., exactly those doctrines that see some sense of normativity inscribed in nature.

But again, as free as we might think we are to pursue our own ends and choices, we have to ask if that kind of freedom is sustainable in political society. At some point, if we have loosed the binds that nature once imposed on us (binds which, I repeat, may very well have been suggestive of the parameters within which we best flourish), might the animal control people want to control other things, too? In other words, if everything is choice, might, eventually, nothing be our choice?

Culturally elite institutions claim to champion the interests of women, minorities and children; preventing a two-class society; and other values that ought to lead them to support the policies we favor on life, marriage, economics, etc. So why don’t they favor those policies?

Dan says they have made a conscious and intentional choice to subordinate those values to other values, such as multiculturalism and sexual liberation. In other words, Dan says that they know their favored policies are destroying women, minorities and children, driving us toward a two-class society, etc. and have decided that’s OK because that’s the price they have to pay to be multiculturalist and liberationist.

I say poppycock.

Dan argues that if you are in a position to know the real effects of a policy, have a motive to know, and the connection between the policy and real effects is not very complicated, we are entitled to assume that you do know, and are making conscious choices in light of that knowledge.

Against that, I say the human capacity for self-deception is far greater than Dan gives it credit for. Human beings are fallen and sinful creatures, and our sin affects our consciousness. We are “darkened” by sin. This does not excuse us from responsibility for our actions. But it does mean that the sin we are committing when we act wrongly is often a negligent failure to know what we ought to know – to know what we would have known if only we were good people – rather than a conscious decision to do the act even though we know that act to be wrong.

This manifests itself at both the individual and social levels. At the individual level, we are each capable of vast self-deception. At the social level, we build social systems to legitimize and reinforce the self-deceptions we wish to believe.

Dan fails to acknowledge that in addition to having strong reasons to want to know, culturally elite institutions also have strong reasons not to want to know. Their motive not to know is the same as ours: we feel like we avoid the burden of moral responsibility. We don’t, because our ignorance is culpable ignorance, but we feel like we do. And the elite institutions in particular have embedded themselves in especially strong social systems that constantly legitimize and reinforce their self-deceptions. We are not entitled to assume that the motive to know is always and everywhere stronger than the motive not to know.

The idea that if you can know and would want to know then we are entitled to assume that you do know strikes me as clearly Pelagian. I assumes that the functioning of the human mind is not darked by the impact of sin.

Dan gives two examples to illustrate his case. The first is media coverage of radical Islam:

One of the central characteristics of this extreme theology is its misogyny.  The media, however, has been strangely silent on how destructive this is to women.  They’ve even gone beyond silence – they actually run interference for radical Islam, pleading for our tolerance and understanding of differing cultures.  The rights of women take back seat to a higher value (in their minds) – promoting and defending the multi-culturalism imperative.

I question whether media outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, etc. have actually said very frequently that our response to things like women put to death for having been raped should be merely to exercise tolerance for other cultures. My impression is that they have avoided talking about the subject at all, which is not the same thing. (Other institutions have no doubt promoted that view of Islam’s treatment of women, but for that very reason those institutions are less culturally elite than the media Dan has in mind.)

Why are the media silent about radical Islam’s treatment of women? One hypothesis is that they have consciously decided it’s more important to be multiculturalist than to be feminist. Another hypothesis is that they believe radical Islam is a declining force that is losing ground and will continue to do so, while conservative backlash against feminism in developed countries is a more clear and present danger, and focusing attention on the problem of radical Islam’s treatment of women will have the negative (from their view) effect of strengthening conservatism politically, to the detriment of feminism.

My impression is that the second hypothesis is much more often the case than the first one, although there are no doubt exceptions. The more important point, however, is that Dan ignores the possibility of the second hypothesis altogether.

Dan’s second example is feminism and abortion:

Each of these culturally-elite organizations has invested heavily, both in dollars and intellectual effort, in normalizing the practice of abortion, making it culturally acceptable.  An abortion, of course, involves taking the life of a human being.  And everyone involved in the subject knows it.  Not only is the proximal fuse short between the policy and the destructive consequence, it is simultaneous.  So we may safely charge them with knowingly favoring a policy that has as its primary purpose harming children.  Why?  To preserve sexual libertinism.

But do they know that abortion takes the life of a human being? They say they don’t believe that. Are all of them consciously dissembling all the time? Or is it more plausible that they have really bought into the ideology that says abortion doesn’t take a life? I know that ideology is patently false to anyone who has given the question a modicum of critical thought, but I don’t think that entitles us to assume they don’t believe it.

Our opponents are sinful people (like us). But precisely because they are sinful people, we are not entitled to assume they are guilty of the kind of demonic evil Dan attributes to them. To the contrary, because they are sinful people we are obligated to give strong consideration to the possibility that they are self-decieved about what they are doing, and are therefore not nearly as evil as they might appear to be.

The Gospel Coalition carries my column today on “Militant for Justice, not for ‘Culture War'”:

 The problem of the “culture war” is dividing evangelicals, especially in the rising generation, into two camps. This conflict is going to determine the future direction of evangelical political engagement. My problem is that I’m on both sides…

The one thing these camps agree on is that we have to make a stark choice. We can fight for justice in politics, or we can build civic solidarity with our unbelieving neighbors. We can’t do both.

Not me. I say we can have our cake and eat it, too!

I offer three practical steps toward fighting for justice without falling afoul of the culture war. Let me know what you think in the comments!