A Conservative Against Waterboarding

Manzi steps forward.

Filed under: conservatism, morality, torture

Who’s a Republican?

Arlen Specter isn’t. Nor am I. And nor, it seems, is much of anyone else:

… when you are looking for clues as to where the two parties stand politically there is only one number to remember: 21.

That’s the percent of people in the Post/ABC survey who identified themselves as Republicans, down from 25 percent in a late March poll and at the lowest ebb in this poll since the fall of 1983(!).

In that same poll, 35 percent self-identified as Democrats and 38 percent called them Independents.

Glad as I am to see the War Party get its comeuppance, there’s little question in my mind that in the short term at least this is a very bad thing. These are trying times that call for serious dialogue and a responsible opposition, and a rigidly doctrinaire* party that hemorrhages independents and screams treason at the slightest sign of intra-party criticism is not going to be able to provide any of that.

* Though N.B.: When Ta-Nehisi Coates adds opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage to Ross’s list of the issues that define the predominant understanding of “real conservatism”, I can’t but feel that he’s missing something. There are plenty of people whom movement groupies will gladly identify as among their own despite diverging positions on “social issues”, while the You’re a closet liberal! treatment is usually reserved solely for anti-interventionists, opponents of torture, and others whose jingoism “patriotism” can conveniently be impugned. Oh, and people will also get that treatment if they support trillion-dollar deficits and massive interventions in the domestic economy … so long as their names aren’t Cheney or Bush.

Filed under: conservatism, patriotism, politics

The “Debate” About Torture at NRO

Total number of posts at The Corner so far over the weekend: 11.

Total number of those posts that had to do with torture “torture”: 9.

Total number of those posts doing anything other than defending the Bush administration: Zero.

Total number of shreds of moral seriousness left among the Republican mainstream: Yes, you know the answer.

Filed under: conservatism, torture

“One Straw Man Leads To Another”

At the Scene, I’ve got a post up responding to Ramesh Ponnuru’s criticisms of my recent defense of Alice Waters.

Filed under: conservatism, food, personal

In Defense of Alice Waters

Friends and readers have been inquiring whether, given my previous praise for what I’ve called Alice Waters’s “culinary conservatism” (on which see more from Alan here and here), I’d have anything to say about Julie Gunlock’s criticisms of her project in the virtual pages of National Review Online. To be perfectly honest I’d much prefer just to let this one slide, but I’m pretty sure that bloggy ethics rule that out … so here goes.

Let’s begin with a story. I am, as it happens, presently working through some issues in ethical theory with a group of Berkeley undergraduates, and as is not at all uncommon in these sorts of circumstances I seem to be the only person in the room who thinks that value claims are more than an expression of Humean sentiments. “Murder is wrong”, say I. “But not always!” comes the reply. “Perhaps”, I grant, “but sometimes it is wrong, which just goes to show that rightness and wrongness are parts of the objective world.” “But how do you know?” comes the utterly predictable response. “For what would you say to someone who disagreed with you?”

At this point my tendency is to get rather agitated and ask them what they would say to someone who disagreed with them on whether the available fossil evidence proves that there once were dinosaurs, and this tends at the very least to throw them for a loop. But in the present context that’s neither here nor there: the immediate relevance of exchanges like this one lies in the disturbing extent to which subjectivism has corroded the foundations of our public discourse; hence “I think” or “To me” precedes nearly every sentence, senses of have taken the place of the real things, nonsensical talk of subjectivity waits lurking around every dialectical corner, and so on. But now compare my Berkeley undergraduates to Ms. Gunlock:

The truth is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources. Those who can afford it and want it should have it (my emphasis – JS), but organic food is not a panacea for the world’s ills.

Suppose we grant Gunlock the point about expense and luxury – though I’ll return to that in a moment. But why not just: Those who can afford it should have it? How exactly does “want” matter? (Are there cases in which people shouldn’t have what they want?) Is it really that impossible to wrap one’s mind around the idea that, just as there might be genuine relationships of superiority and inferiority among ways of life or novels or works of art or music, so the same might hold for what we eat? Can it be true that the very same movement that gives us the classicism of the New Criterion and George Will’s case against blue jeans is unable to recognize that our meals might also be part of what constitutes our lives as noble or, as the case may be, not? The “purpose of food”, writes Gunlock, “is nourishment” – but of course while that may be true enough for dogs and cats and horses, it’s no more true in our case than it is that the purpose of sex is procreation, the purpose of architecture providing shelter, or the purpose of music passing the time. Would the world really end if we allowed considerations other than wants and the almighty dollar to impact our choices about what we bring to our table?

And as to that almighty dollar: Gunlock quotes Waters as acknowledging the increased cost of local and organic food, though adding that “people [will] simply have to make the choice between expensive grapes and Nike tennis shoes”. Not good enough!, objects Gunlock:

What [Waters] fails to appreciate is that some people can’t buy those tennis shoes either.

Really? You think so? I mean, is this supposed to be news? No doubt Waters, squishy liberal that she is, is at least a bit sensitive to the fact that not everyone can afford to eat well; that doesn’t rule out, however, the possibility that those who can eat well, should, and that if you’re lucky enough to face the choice between grass-fed beef and cable TV it’s probably the latter that ought to go. As in any other case, figuring out what’s right demands attention to particular circumstances rather than universal rules; but given Gunlock’s rhetoric, it hardly seems “condescending” to say that matters pertaining to what the Slow Foodies like to call gastronomy often gets pretty short shrift in such deliberations.

Does eating well mean always eating organic? No, it doesn’t – and I’m quite confident that Waters wouldn’t dispute this. Nor does it mean always buying locally, always buying seasonally, always knowing your producers, and so on. But perhaps more than anything else, what eating well demands is cooking well, and then eating what you’ve cooked around a table and as a family: hence if there’s anyone who should be criticizing Waters’s case for buying fresh ingredients (lots of trips to the store!) and doing such things as cooking your own beans (takes hours!), it should be those parents who, unlike Gunlock, don’t or can’t manage to stay at home. But once again, making the case for the noble or virtuous nature of a certain way of life doesn’t mean making that life binding on everyone; Waters knows fully well that not all families manage to have a stay-at-home parent, and that those families with two working parents will have to cut corners when it comes to meals. This doesn’t, however, preclude her thinking that whenever it is possible, cooking should be given its due.

Look, though: I’ve joined in on criticizing Waters before, and the Slow Food people pretty much cut off contact with me after a pretty caustic column that I wrote for Culture11 about the genuinely out of touch and – dare I say it? – elitist elements of San Francisco’s “Slow Food Nation” extravaganza. It’s one thing, though, to raise criticisms of the way a message is being delivered, and quite another to use those criticisms as a tool for clumsily bludgeoning that message’s content. Grunlock of all people should be sensitive to the need to choose one’s words carefully … and NR, for that matter, shouldn’t lose sight of the possibility that attention to taste and respect for the wisdom of the past might have something to teach us about how we ought to eat.

(Cross-posted at The American Scene.)

Filed under: conservatism, food, philosophy

Conservatives and Civil Liberties

Andrew Sullivan asks for evidence of conservative blogs or sites that protested the Bush-era surveillance state. I haven’t been at this for all that long and am sure that there are others who could do a more impressive job of this than I can, but for the record you can go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (that one’s by JL), here, and here for an initial sampling of my earlier writing on the subject. Like I said, just for the record.

Filed under: civil liberties, conservatism

“Activist” Judges

E.D. Kain objects to Ed Whelan’s complaints about the “lawless judicial attack on traditional marriage and on representative government” manifested in yesterday’s Iowa ruling:

Quite honestly, I have difficulty following this logic.  First of all, the court was taking into account the constitutionality of the ban on gay marriage in the first place, and quite rightly found that it was not, in fact, constitutional.  Revoking the ban is not activism; it is a reaction to activism.

This seems to me to miss the point quite widely, since the question at stake here is precisely whether the court was right in finding the gay marriage ban to be unconstitutional, i.e. whether the finding of its unconstitutionality was or was not genuinely reflective of the constitution. If it wasn’t, then “activist” and – especially – “lawless” seem quite reasonable appellations. Hence Jacob Sullum, himself no conservative and a very firm advocate for gay marriage:

… this decision, like the California Supreme Court’s similar ruling last year, seems to be another example of result-oriented jurisprudence that ultimately undermines a constitution’s ability to constrain government action and protect individual liberty. If you read the court’s analysis as it goes through the arguments for a gay marriage ban and (correctly, in my view) finds each of them wanting, it’s hard to see how this process differs from what legislators do.

It’s clear that the Iowa constitution’s equal protection clause, at the time it was adopted, was not understood to prohibit a law limiting marriage to a man and a woman (assuming the issue would even have been intelligible). So the basis for saying that such a law is inconsistent with that clause today has to be an evolving understanding of what equal protection entails, especially regarding what it means to be similarly situated. But barring a constitutional amendment, judges can implement this new understanding only by reinterpreting the clause to mean something it did not mean at the time it was written. That sort of license can lead to all sorts of mischief, as the evolving understanding of the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause (to pick one especially pernicious example) illustrates.

Assuming – as I know is not entirely uncontroversial! – that laws cannot change their meaning, and that the function of the judiciary is simply to interpret that meaning and not to enact new laws, Sullum seems clearly right to me: whether or not ending the gay marriage ban is, as Erik writes, “an undeniably good thing”, and indeed whether or not he is right (as I think he surely is) to complain that conservative skepticism of judicial “activism”, and the corresponding attachment to “representative government” as an alternative, tends to be every bit as “result-oriented” as the kind of jurisprudence that Sullum is criticizing here, it can still be the case that the Iowa ruling overstepped the court’s proper bounds (read: was lawless). An “attack on traditional marriage”? Perhaps not. But it can, for all that, still be an illicit attempt by a branch of government whose lawful power is only that of interpreting existing laws instead to create new laws where none had existed before. If doing a similar sort of thing wasn’t okay for the Bush executive branch, then what makes this an occasion to cheer on the Iowa Supremes?

Filed under: conservatism, government/law, marriage

Tradition, Traditionalism, and Marriage

There’s a lot that I’d like to say about Rod Dreher’s latest missive in the same-sex marriage discussion, but I’m strapped for time and so will confine myself just to one point.

I agree with Alasdair MacIntyre, and so also with Rod, that modern liberalism lacks a certain sort of moral foundation, and that this lack leaves it unable to formulate, and indeed unable even really to tolerate, understandings of human sexuality and the human good more generally that go beyond the merely self-serving. I also agree with MacIntyre, and so again also with Rod, that liberalism thus “transformed into a tradition” is an essentially particularistic mode of moral and political theorizing whose inadequacies can be shown up and, hopefully, supplanted by a self-consciously tradition-bound mode of inquiry that is not characterized in the same way by these sorts of lacks. Where I – and, I would imagine, MacIntyre as well – do not, however, agree with Rod is in the particular way in which he seems to think this embrace of tradition ought to be effected: for the move to tradition seems, on his way of putting things, to rest primarily on a simple appeal to a set of old verities (“I am a Christian”, he writes, and “I believe in a different source of moral authority” than the merely individual conscience), and so strikes me as insufficiently attuned to what MacIntyre identifies as the need constantly to grapple with the problems and shortcomings that are inherent in one’s tradition as it stands at any point in history.

That is to say, as has been said quite well in recent days, that a tradition, as opposed to a mere ideology, is never something that is static, that it is always something that is ready to modify and adapt itself to the new sets of problems – philosophical, scientific, cultural, political, or whatever – that arise during the course of its existence. (I take it that this is, at least roughly, what MacIntyre is not a Burkean.) A tradition that fails to do this is a dead tradition, which is really to say that it is no tradition at all; hence a tradition, unlike perhaps a constitution, cannot be the sort of thing it needs to be unless it is a living thing, which is to say a growing and changing and always at work at problem-solving thing. But when self-conscious attunement to one’s inescapable place in a tradition becomes, as it does in Rod’s language, a simple commitment to “traditionalism”, to preserving those “ancient structures” that are the only things standing between us and those who wish “radically [to] undermine the foundation of our moral order”, it seems to me to fail in this crucial task. Put somewhat differently, on MacIntyre’s view it is quite possible – and indeed has very often been actual – for even the most established tradition to be shown to have been an inadequate tradition; hence when two traditions come into conflict, it obviously cannot be as tradition simpliciter that either of them triumphs, but only as a tradition that is superior to the other. And showing that this is so obviously requires something quite other than simply shouting “Tradition!” when the time for debate arises; rather, it requires grappling with one’s own tradition’s blind spots and potential inadequacies, and not merely harping on those of its rivals.

And where are the blind spots and potential inadequacies in the “traditional” (which is just to say traditionally Western – he’s equally opposed to polygamy, after all) conception of marriage that Rod is championing? Well, one important challenge that I’ve talked about before and would like to focus on here is that of finding a way to articulate, and achieve a robust social recognition of, what I’ve called the “kinds of nobility” and “standards of perfection” that are characteristic of homosexual relationships in contrast to heterosexual ones. (Note that you can believe in such things even if you think the standards in question demand a quite challenging sort of chastity.) I assume, or at least I think I can assume, that Rod recognizes the need to do this sort of thing, and as I’ve noted before it’s a sad irony that it is primarily those who stand in opposition to same-sex marriage who’ve brought the push for it on themselves by failing so miserably in these crucial tasks. We need to find a way to recognize a certain class of homosexual relationships as the kinds of things they are, and so to articulate what it is that such relationships ought to be like if they are to be exemplary instances of their kind: but if not by calling them “marriages”, then how can this recognition be achieved? Through the language of “friendships” or “partnerships” or “civil unions”? Surely not; those first two categories are laughably inadequate to what is at stake, while the third is just the attempt to use a meaningless legalism to fill what is fundamentally a cultural hole. (Indeed, for this general reason I agree with JL Wall that the common suggestion simply to drop the language of “marriage” from the lawbooks altogether is actually a call for an even more radical departure from tradition than the push to extend the category to same-sex couples.) And so the point is just this: that orthodox Christians and others who share a similar conception of human sexuality and the proper nature of the family, are presently so inadequate to this task constitutes a serious failing – a failing of of the sort that has left many great traditions of the past lying dead by the wayside of history. That need not happen here, of course; but to keep it from happening will require the real work of grappling with this and similar present and future inadequacies and finding ways to adapt our tradition to address them. Extending the title of civil marriage to homosexual couples, while still attempting to retain as much as possible of the Christian conception of sexuality and the nuclear family, would be one way to meet this challenge; and while there are other responses that are feasible in principle, it is hard to imagine many of them working out in practice. If, however, our tradition is nothing more than a traditionalism, if it is something that is living rather than dead, it needs to show itself adequate to recognizing this and similar challenges and finding within itself the resources to address them.

Well, I guess that wasn’t short, though for all those thousand-plus words I still managed to say only a small bit of what I’d have liked to get to. Apologies if (that?) it was excessively dense.

Filed under: conservatism, family, marriage, morality, philosophy

The Echo Chamber Rules, Again

Beliefnet’s Aziz Poonwalla has a very smart response to Daniel’s take on RedState and Culture11:

Reading the piece on C11’s founding to which [Larison] refers, I can’t help but think that the conservative movement as a whole is imploding, and C11 simply got caught in the detritus. Movement status, especially as promoted by sites like RedState that espouse nothing more than ideological litmus tests that are bereft of any linking narrative of values or philosophy, has largely inverted conservatism. Where before you might expect that a conservative would be a staunch defender of the constitution, you have cheerleading for warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention of American citizens without trial; where you might expect a conservative to stand up for the working man, you have a preference for bailing out banks instead of blue-collar industry; where you might expect a conservative to revere the Legislative Branch, you have them cheering on the Executive essentially legislating from the bully pulpit (while condemning the Judicial branch for the same). It’s a chaotic mess now, with standard bearers like Rush instead of Burke.

[…]

Perhaps it’s best that C11 went under; the smart voices who wrote for it can do more to advance their cause by working within the existing media rather than trying to create a niche of their own. This paves the way for conservatives to start interacting with the (liberal) world rather than standing apart from it, yelling futilely, “stop!”

There is some excellent stuff in there on the dangers of optimism, too, and that last remark also got a first-rate treatment from JL Wall, who’s been doing some terrific blogging over at his place since the winter quarter drew to a close.

Earlier: The Echo Chamber Rules: Part I, Part II, Part III.

Filed under: conservatism, media/culture

Outsourcing

I really, really liked this post of E.D. Kain’s, which brilliantly says several dozen things that I’ve wanted to find the time to say over the past few weeks. (Really! I swear!) That we live in a world where such things are able to happen is, of course, a testament to the tremendousness of the world we live in, which is a testament in turn to the rightness of what Erik is arguing. In keeping with my commitment to a reduced blogging load, then, I’m happy to let him do the work for me, and let you have the fun of reading it.

Filed under: conservatism