Once again, the 2020s Right attempts to make a perfectly valid point in the most boneheaded, ineffective way possible
A look at the new Louisiana law mandating the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom
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Talk about going for the crudest culture-war salvo one could fire:
Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.
The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.
“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses” who got the commandments from God, Landry said.
Opponents questioned the law’s constitutionality and vowed to challenge it in court. Proponents said the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the language of the law, the Ten Commandments are “foundational documents of our state and national government.”
Cue the howling from the we’re-now-irreversibly-pluralistic-and-this-is-an-anachronistic-attempt-to-shove-a-particular-worldview-down-kids’-throats crowd.
In fact, many of the howlers will assert the this opens the door to governmentally sanctioned sexism, racism, transphobia, and myriad other demography-based antipathies they ascribe to the Judeo-Christian framework.
But a point must be conceded. We are indeed a far more pluralistic society than we’ve ever been. Diverse, if you’d like.
It’s about here that we see that the next layer we need to peel back is the concern over multiculturalism in out culture, particularly our educational system, that arose about four decades ago:
In the 1980s and 1990s many criticisms were expressed, from both the left and right. Criticisms come from a wide variety of perspectives, but predominantly from the perspective of liberal individualism, from American conservatives concerned about shared traditional values, and from a national unity perspective.
A prominent criticism in the US, later echoed in Europe, Canada and Australia, was that multiculturalism undermined national unity, hindered social integration and cultural assimilation, and led to the fragmentation of society into several ethnic factions (Balkanization).[66]
In 1991, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a former advisor to the Kennedy and other US administrations and Pulitzer Prize winner, published a book critical of multiculturalism with the title The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.
In his 1991 work, Illiberal Education,[67] Dinesh D'Souza argues that the entrenchment of multiculturalism in American universities undermined the universalist values that liberal education once attempted to foster. In particular, he was disturbed by the growth of ethnic studies programs (e.g., black studies).
The late Samuel P. Huntington, political scientist and author, known for his Clash of Civilizations theory, described multiculturalism as "basically an anti-Western ideology." According to Huntington, multiculturalism had "attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings."[68] Huntington outlined the risks he associated with multiculturalism in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity.
Diversity and social trust
Harvard professor of political science Robert D. Putnam conducted a nearly decade long study on how diversity affects social trust.[69]He surveyed 26,200 people in 40 American communities, finding that when the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, the more racially diverse a community is, the greater the loss of trust. People in diverse communities "don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," writes Putnam.[70] In the presence of such ethnic diversity, Putnam maintains that
[W]e hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us.[69]
And now, it’s about here where we ought to consult John Rawls, who made the question of how a democratic republic can hang together the thrust of his career as a philosopher. His 1993 work Political Liberalism was the culmination of that inquiry.
He gave a 1998 interview in Commonweal that encapsulates his argument pretty well:
PRUSAK: Keep to this new problem [the one examined in Political Liberalism], to this question of how to make a liberal constitutional democracy not only receptive, but attractive to religious believers, people who wouldn’t call themselves first and foremost liberals, people who live according to a comprehensive doctrine. The distinction between a comprehensive doctrine and a political conception, in your language, has been difficult for many people to understand. Could you clarify it?
RAWLS: A comprehensive doctrine, either religious or secular, aspires to cover all of life. I mean, if it’s a religious doctrine, it talks about our relation to God and the universe; it has an ordering of all the virtues, not only political virtues but moral virtues as well, including the virtues of private life, and the rest. Now we may feel philosophically that it doesn’t really cover everything, but it aims to cover everything, and a secular doctrine does also. But a political conception, as I use that term, has a narrower range: it just applies to the basic structure of a society, its institutions, constitutional essentials, matters of basic justice and property, and so on. It covers the right to vote, the political virtues, and the good of political life, but it doesn’t intend to cover anything else. I try to show how a political conception can be seen as self-standing, as being able to fit, as a part, into many different comprehensive doctrines.
Now the good of political life is a great political good. It is not a secular good specified by a comprehensive doctrine like those of Kant or Mill. You could characterize this political good as the good of free and equal citizens recognizing the duty of civility to one another: the duty to give citizens public reasons for one’s political actions.
A bit later, after looking at the application of Rawls’s argument to a specific issue (physician-assisted suicide), the conversation gets more granular:
RUSAK: A critique of your work is that, really, even though you’re open to religiously grounded arguments that could be translated, let’s say, into public terms, terms all people could understand, nonetheless you’re making a veiled argument for secularism. Now this is something you deny.
RAWLS: Yes, I emphatically deny it. Suppose I said that it is not a veiled argument for secularism any more than it is a veiled argument for religion. Consider: there are two kinds of comprehensive doctrines, religious and secular. Those of religious faith will say I give a veiled argument for secularism, and the latter will say I give a veiled argument for religion. I deny both. Each side presumes the basic ideas of constitutional democracy, so my suggestion is that we can make our political arguments in terms of public reason. Then we stand on common ground. That’s how we can understand each other and cooperate.
PRUSAK: Let me restate this: the question would be who determines the terms of public reason. A religious believer might say, well, revelation isn’t only private—it’s here in this book. How come I can’t make an argument from this background? Or more to the point, how come I have to argue in terms everybody agrees with, or might agree with? Given who I have to argue with, it seems that those terms slide into secularism. Take the argument for the sacredness of life. The believer might say that this has been revealed. But by having to make arguments in terms everybody recognizes, I’m being asked to renounce the truth as I know it....
RAWLS: No, you’re not being asked to renounce it! Of course not. The question is, we have a particular problem. How many religions are there in the United States? How are they going to get on together? One way, which has been the usual way historically, is to fight it out, as in France in the sixteenth century. That’s a possibility. But how do you avoid that?
See, what I should do is to turn around and say, What’s the better suggestion, what’s your solution to it? And I can’t see any other solution. This solution has been followed in the United States since the First Amendment. As you know, until then, we had establishment in New England with the Congregational church, and we had it in the South with the Anglican church. How did Madison get separation through Virginia and later Congress? The Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the smaller sects hated Jefferson; to them he was a secularist of the worst kind. But Madison could get Jefferson’s bill passed because the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and smaller sects who were excluded in New England and in the South got together for their own protection.
People can make arguments from the Bible if they want to. But I want them to see that they should also give arguments that all reasonable citizens might agree to. Again, what’s the alternative? How are you going to get along in a constitutional regime with all these other comprehensive doctrines? And just put it in those terms.
The above boldface is mine. I did so because we can now turn back to the Louisiana governor’s assertion that “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver.”
Fine. I happen to concur. But unless one’s aim is to run roughshod over all who see it differently - to “own the libs” - one is going to have to employ some persuasion, and it can’t come from it-says-so-in-the-Bible circular reasoning. That’s what used to turn me off about evangelical entreaties when I was a secular agnostic.
Want to hear my personal suggestion for how to approach the Ten Commandments controversy?
Actively foster alternatives to public education. Classical schools, homeschooling. Public education is hopelessly corrupted by teachers’ unions, a federal-level Department of Education and the DEI establishment.
Strive toward a vision of public education withering on the vine.
To those who would say that moves us farther away from Rawls’s aim of us all getting along in a constitutional regime, I’d say we can’t do any worse than what the ostensibly democratically arrived at notion of getting along the the above-mentioned interest groups have bestowed to us.
The Ten Commandments are indeed an unassailable guide to the basics of sane living. But the state of Louisiana has not done anything here to increase societal consensus that that is so.