When I was in college I had a suitemate named Paul who was not known for his subtlety but certainly for his undying loyalty to the Green Bay Packers, even referring to Green Bay as the “Holy Land.” One day Paul and I were discussing a friend of ours when I commented that this friend was a fan of those detested Chicago Bears. Paul responded by saying “that’s okay, we have all sin in our lives.”

Of course, Paul was joking…at least I think he was joking. Yet, Paul’s comment reveals a human tendency to treat our individual amoral opinions, attitudes, and loyalties as moral issues. We address rather mundane concerns such as which athletic team we cheer for, what restaurant or drink we prefer, and the like as if those selections are intrinsically moral. And while that may simply lead to comical responses like Paul’s, this tendency often causes us to view those with different viewpoints and outlooks as immoral. As we demonize others’ dissimilarities, we justify our negative treatment and slander of their diversity of thought by placing ourselves upon a moral pedestal above the immoral riffraff beneath us.

This is not to say that morality fails to impact our opinion of amoral topics. For instance, I detest particular professional athletic teams because of my perception that those teams in question are more likely to cheat and break the rules of the game in order to get ahead, no matter the cost. I have boycotted brands because of my knowledge of the way they treat their workers, their involvement in sweatshops, or because of the immoral views of the parent company. This is how our understanding of morality should be applied to the world around us. But to assume that a team like the Green Bay Packers is the one I should cheer for, not because I live in Wisconsin or because I appreciate a city-owned team, but because it is moral to do so is simply plain foolish.

Sadly, nowhere does this seem to be more common than in the realm of politics. An individual’s basis for morality should impact their vote and their political views. But it has become common in this heated election year to claim one’s own positions to be the moral view and to demonize the other parties’ viewpoints as immoral. Within in the last month I stood in my kitchen listening to a friend of mine attempt to make the political argument that inefficiency is immoral. Perhaps efficiency is economically valuable, good for individual growth and flourishing, but it certainly cannot be viewed as either moral or immoral. There are efficient ways to help the poor but also efficient ways to kill them!

Efficiency and a wide range of other political views are claimed to be moral or immoral while not having an intrinsic morality. Consider that both major Presidential candidates have attacked the other’s view of economics using the word “immoral,” which is ironic considering the morality of manipulating the truth is not addressed. Yet these various economic positions have little to do with the realm of morality. Sure, it would be immoral to say “As President, I promise to take everyone’s money for myself.” That’s stealing, which is immoral. There are some political positions in our nation that I would claim are immoral. But to claim that someone’s economic viewpoint is immoral because it is different is quite baffling. It appears to be an attempt to gain an appearance of moral superiority and demonize alternative options.

As one who works daily within the field of “morality,” I cringe whenever I hear someone claim that a differing political viewpoint on an amoral topic is ‘immoral.’ Here at Hang Together our underlying goal is to build ‘moral consensus for a united America.’ This is an incredibly arduous undertaking, a task made even more difficult if we attempt to gain a ‘moral consensus’ on amoral issues! Such an effort would be impossible, and quite frankly, a waste of time. Our attempts here are not to gain a uniformity of application and action but a consensus on ‘morality.’ We will be united even with in our diversity. Is that not what it means to be American? E Pluribus Unum…Out of the many, one…unity in diversity?

Within this election year, I have greatly enjoyed the way I have been challenged by people of many different political stripes to think about a plethora of issues from new perspectives. I hope that this continues throughout the year and I hope it can occur on a national level as well. Yet, nothing will staunch this flow of ideas and interaction of viewpoints like attempting to label our opinions as moral and the opposition as immoral. To do such would is foolish, slanderous, and simply wrong. Kind of like being a Chicago Bears fan.

Over the weekend, NRO’s Ramesh Ponnuru drew attention to some remarks by Rand Paul on “libertarianism” and the future of the GOP. Paul said:

I’ve been talking to a lot of the national leaders in the Republican party… and there are certain parts of the country we’ve given up on, the whole West coast and New England, so what I keep telling them is maybe we need some libertarian-type Republicans who might be popular in those areas. Maybe a less aggressive, more socially tolerant but still fiscally conservative policy that may be more libertarian might do better in California, might do better in Oregon, Washington, ne. And I think if we had that it might be a great strategy. Our problem in the presidential election is we’ve given up 150 electoral votes before we get started.

Ponnuru has a number of points in response, some of which I agree with. He points out electoral evidence that social issues aren’t hurting the GOP in these areas as much as Paul indicates, and also reminds us that both parties, really, start the electoral race with large regions of the country out of reach; it’s not clear the GOP is at a disadvantage in this regard.

But Ponnuru begins his response by saying:

I wouldn’t have thought that Rand Paul was one of the those libertarians who saw his philosophy as a combination of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, since he himself opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. Perhaps he’s saying that the Republicans need candidates who are more libertarian-type than he is?

That’s a fair question. Now here’s my question: does “more libertarian-type” and “socially tolerant” mean pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage? Or was Paul calling for candidates with a different kind of attitude? Perhaps for Paul, language like “libertarian-type” and “socially tolerant” really just means candidates who are willing to deinstitutionalize the culture war.

For me, reading over what Paul said, it’s the phrase “less aggressive” that especially raises this question. Do pro-life, pro-traditional-marriage politicians usually use the phrase “less aggressive” to describe the pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage positions?

I wouldn’t prefer to use the word “tolerant” to describe what I take Paul to be describing. But then, I also wouldn’t prefer to use the word “tolerant” to describe support for the right to kill babies.

Since some of you will be wondering, and since it may legitimately be relevant, it’s worth noting that the question of Paul’s own beliefs has itself been the subject of some controversy. In his last election, his opponent attacked him with claims he’s a phony Christian. I don’t think it’s usually worthwhile to examine the sincerity of a politician’s beliefs; for if we wish politicians not to seek windows into our souls, in Elizabeth’s classic formulation, we might start by not seeking windows into theirs. (Of all men’s souls to seek a window into, I would have expected the politician would not be the spiritual tourist’s first choice.)

But that’s exactly the reason I think this datum may be an additional reason to interpret Paul’s remarks in the way I’m suggesting. After his unpleasant experience, perhaps Paul views “libertarian-type” and “tolerant” attitudes as the only way to get this kind of ridiculous thing out of our electoral politics. I don’t think so, but he may think so.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the first time in ten years, and I’m wondering if this should be a once-per-decade read so as to take the pulse of American culture. Ten years ago, it was provocative theoretically, but seemingly futuristic. Today, while the brave new world Huxley describes isn’t actually here, the dystopic future it describes seems, in some senses, not all that far off, either. What has happened?

For one thing, yes, I’ve matured ten years, and that has quite a bit to do with the matter. But a recent discussion on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America pricked my brain in a spot that perhaps needed pricking, and I’m wondering if perhaps what else has happened is that our American democracy has done precisely what Tocqueville warned against. We’ve expanded the realm of contingency to, well, just about everything.

I should back up. Tocqueville saw most of American life as contingent rather than fixed, and he took this to be a mark of the new era unfolding in America – a democratic age without the fixed roles determined by heredity and class of the passing aristocratic era of his native France. Americans, he observed, act as individuals, not as the class-bound members of an aristocratic society. They are bootstrappers, self-made men, they believe in hard work and social mobility. In short, where we are born – and who we are born to – doesn’t determine who we are. We do. (For more, see Ray Charles.)

But Tocqueville saw two aspects of American culture that didn’t – and, importantly, shouldn’t – fit this mold of total freedom and flexibility. Church and family were not contingent; rather, these were the source of the very mores that stabilized and undergirded the otherwise constantly in-flux nature of American life. (Even Tocqueville’s famed voluntary associations, which partisans of civil society often tout as the cure to our American social ills, are also contingent – we can join or leave and we are free to change the nature of the associations.) For Tocqueville’s America, “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” He insisted that “men cannot do without dogmatic belief, and even that it is much to be desired that such belief should exist among them. I now add that, of all the kinds of dogmatic belief, the most desirable appears to me to be dogmatic belief in matters of religion…” Religion, Tocqueville observed, restrained Americans from allowing liberty to devolve into license as this people, freed from the aristocratic tethers of family name and fixed classes, built a new nation under the audacious claim that “all men are created equal.” The “main business of religion,” he wrote, “is to purify, control and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire during times of equality.”

The family, furthermore – for Tocqueville, particularly the role of women in the family – preserved a zone of safety, stability, and nurturing in a democratic society otherwise driven by delinked individuals pursuing their own ends. That zone, though, had to remain fixed in its basic form – i.e., one man, one woman, and children – rather than join the list of up-for-grab elements of democracy, in order for America to preserve her democracy. While I’m far from advocating a return to his fairly rigid role for women, it is worth considering how much time Tocqueville spent in emphasizing the dangers of extending the drive to equality-as-sameness to the category of the sexes. Men and women are different, and that difference is the basis of the family, and the family is, with religion, the foundation of American democracy.

So why should Americans care about the decline of religion, or about the latest attempts to change the meaning of marriage? Because in dissolving these institutions, or attempting to render them as contingent as all other aspects of life, we remove the last natural safe havens for human life from society, in an ostensible effort to render all aspects of life as zones of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ But as Tocqueville cautioned us, not everything can be contingent if liberty is to survive. The Americans he met were free from class strictures, but firmly tied to the “controls” and “restraints” that it is the “main business of religion” to provide.

It is naïve to believe, however, that if we remove these restraints we will simply be more free. Humans will dogmatize something, Tocqueville reminds us, and Huxley reminds us that the state is all too happy to step in and provide a replacement when we have thrown off the yoke of religion and gender difference.

It’s titles like that one that leave little doubt about my current “profession”: I am a graduate student. I say that not as a boast (because voluntarily living on the edge of poverty for years on end is something to be proud of?) but by way of explaining why it is that I think methodological questions are worth serious reflection, especially as this new group blog gets off the ground. 

Now, of course, one needn’t be a student or an academic to appreciate the importance of method. It’s just that in the academy the importance of method is almost literally drilled into your head. (Even to the point that you know how to do something long before you know what is worth doing, but that’s a topic for another post.) For our purposes, method can be defined pretty simply: it’s how you do what you do.

Here at Hang Together, we are committed to seeking, probing, and discussing a “renewed moral consensus for a united America.” This goal is quite different than, say, finding the area of a triangle or determining the chronology of American presidents. It seems clear that for each of these goals there is a method that would be more useful than others. For the two examples I just gave, some form of mathematical and historical method, respectively, would be appropriate. As a corollary, there are methods that would not be appropriate to the inquiry. Try as I might, no amount of American presidential history will help me find the area of a triangle. So the first methodological reflection is that there are good and bad ways to go about doing what we hope to do. 

So what method is appropriate to our goal? I won’t pretend that there is a single or a simple answer. Indeed, as we are largely driven by a theory concerning the importance of moral consensus, it wouldn’t surprise me if a variety of methodological approaches could be fruitfully employed. Nonetheless, I believe it’s important that our methods, whatever they may be, are characterized by their concern with the common good we seek to promote. Too often in political discourse arguments aren’t so much exchanged between opponents as they are circulated amongst sympathizers. When we circle the wagons and preach to the choir, we foreclose opportunities to make progress towards resolving the questions we and our “opponents” agree are so crucially important.

As we begin an endeavor to find, rediscover, renew, or construct a moral consensus, we should think seriously about the prerequisites for such a journey. If, after all, we are united in a measured critique of the “culture wars” and the all too common tendency to conflate Christianity, conservatism, and the fate of America, then we should be wary of attempts to fight battles and worry about the aftermath later. Any eventual settlement of the questions we grapple with will be informed by and depend on how we get there. And getting there implies that we walk side-by-side with those with whom we disagree. Doing so requires framing and discussing the issues we explore with honesty and humility. The second reflection, then, is that, when and where possible, we should focus on the common stake we have in the questions we undertake to answer, the ground we hope to share with those who disagree with us.

The final reflection concerns the matter of disagreement just mentioned. We are, after all, treading over contested terrain. That we are seeking moral consensus tells us that agreement is currently lacking. And, like those with whom we will engage, we approach that terrain with deeply held beliefs of our own. Many of those beliefs are incommensurable with opposing beliefs. There will come times when compromise is impossible and disagreement will remain. Far from signs of failure, these instances are to be expected, for such is the nature of moral, religious, and even some political convictions. 

Thus, the final methodological reflection is that we must have the resolve to state the beliefs that may leave us at loggerheads with others and may exclude others from our ranks. We mustn’t fall into the trap of believing that there is some grand synthesis to be achieved between conflicting claims about our moral, religious, and political universe. But there is agreement to be had. The challenge of this whole project is to find it and invite others to join us there. 

Berlin Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel Yona Metzger(source)

You may have heard about the report that a rabbi in Germany (of all places!) is being criminally charged for practicing circumcision. But over the long weekend, word came through from a local source to Ed Whelan that the story has been misinterpreted:

I understand that you are just conveying a report that appeared elsewhere in the press, but as far as I know, that report is not accurate. Prosecutors have not brought criminal charges against the rabbi in question, at least not in the sense you probably intended.

 

What’s happened is this: An anti-circumcision activist filed a written criminal complaint with the police in Bavaria, based on the fact that the rabbi advertises himself as a ritual circumciser (mohel). Under German law (as far as I understand it) the prosecutors are obligated to investigate the complaint. The precise form of that investigation (within legal boundaries of course) is completely up to them and the police, but they have abundant discretion, as in the U.S. I note that the rabbi, David Goldberg, says he hasn’t even received official notice of any charge.

 

In short, a citizen has charged another one with a crime, but the state has not charged anyone yet; an “investigation” is ongoing, and not a terribly aggressive one by the looks of it. This report, from Die Welt, strongly implies that the prosecutor is going to take his sweet time, thank God.

 

Meanwhile, a similar accusation in Berlin ended with the state prosecutor declining to bring a case, saying there was no evidence of a crime.

 

It is profoundly troubling for a lot of reasons that these people are making criminal complaints against rabbis for practicing their faith at all. I am glad that you are helping to call attention to the situation — but as bad as things are, they are fortunately not quite as bad as you portrayed them.

Whelan describes the source as “a well-informed reader whose judgment I respect.”

This certainly changes the narrative about what’s going on in Germany, and I think it offers some important new lessons as we wrestle with religious freedom in the U.S.

One lesson is that the law and the constitutional order matter. Germany has this problem because, like most of Europe, its legal system is still too much shaped by premodern assumptions about the nature of political authority and its relationship to the social order. Try explaining to the average American that Germany has a system where you can file a criminal complaint about your neighbor and prosecutors are obligated to investigate it. We should be thankful – while we still have it – for our system of the rule of law, personal liberties and checks and balances, which allows us to hold coercive power at arm’s length.

Another is that the real legal and political issues are deeper than “religious liberty” narrowly understood. The problem in Germany is not that it has the wrong policy on circumcision. The problem is the legal and constitutional order at a much deeper level. When you have a system that assumes every act is subject to a sort of presumptive societal review, you can have religious toleration (we, society, decide to permit you to practice your religioun) but not freedom of religion – a social order in which the primacy of the conscience is taken for granted as the bedrock social commitment.

A third is that extralegal norms matter just as much as the law. There is no system that will always prevent cases arising that threaten to do gross injustice and call into question the security of our most basic liberties. When that happens, our liberties depend on some anonymous Herr Schmidt deep in the bureaucracy saying to himself, “here’s a case where the rule was made to be bent,” or even broken. God bless those German prosecutors for knowing when a “mandatory” investigation needs to fall between the cracks and sit there for a while.

Speaking of which, a fourth lesson is that one of the most important sources of extralegal norms is professional mission, ethics and pride. It’s important to tell people that they should be ready to stand up for anyone’s rights, any time. But what’s really going to save us is if everyone has a strong sense of the mission of his or her profession (such as being a prosecutor), the moral responsibilities imparted by that mission, and the sense that our personal dignity depends in part on our willingness to prioritize that mission and those ethics above the short-term imperatives of our organizations and our personal interests. You can bet that Herr Schmidt, whoever he is, is thinking a lot right now about the purpose of his office.

Let’s hope he’s not the only one.