The absolutes column and the still-sorting it-out column

I have faith that matters in the second column can indeed be sorted out, by confidence in those in the first

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Quite a summer so far, no? There is, of course, the avalanche of domestic developments, as well as such world-stage incidents as Israel letting the Houthis know it means business, momentous elections in various European countries, Paris trying to balance hosting a festive Olympics with very justified security concerns, and - this one made me grimly, schadenfreude-ly giggle - North Korea denying that the summits and beautiful letters signified that Kim and the Very Stable Genius had become buds.

You know what we do and don’t do here at Precipice. We don’t do horse-race, ground game tracking of political contests. We certainly don’t lionize political figures (except Ronald Reagan). We don’t invite you to distract yourself with pop-culture glitter.

This is a conservative site - that is, it asks a basic question: What can be counted on in the universe to be immutable - always true, always right, always good? And it looks at the ancillary question regarding where we might look for convincing arguments for something’s immutability.

An actual conservative is going to be an absolutist about most things. However, because humankind’s material advancement is a real thing, issues arise that require an ever-greater degree of contemplation to arrive at a core absolute that can guide us as to how to proceed. The progressives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries got their basic observation right - that the urbanization and industrialization of the US and the West generally was taking us into uncharted territory - even if their collectivist prescriptions have proven to be profoundly mistaken. There are even stickier wickets on our plate in the age of AI.

But the moment presents a ripe opportunity to bring the clarity of an orientation toward absolutes to the world around us.

Herewith, then, my stab at categorizing a few concepts as either being recognizably always true, or still requiring some conversation to find what is always true.

Absolutes

The gospel message - It is a matter of fact that Jesus Christ was born of a Jewish virgin, trained as a carpenter, stared the devil down during forty days of self-exile, gave the world its most profound spiritual teachings, performed miracles, was arrested, beaten and tortured until he was a barely recognizable blood-soaked hunk of shredded tissue, and crucified. He then rose from the dead and hung out with his disciples and friends for several days and then ascended into heaven right in front of their eyes (leaving them with the Great Commission just before he did).

Free market economics - This view - correct view - of how human beings give and receive has some great champions: Adam Smith, Fredric Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman. All that these great minds have written about the subject can be distilled into a simple precept: A good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period. No outside entity has any business being party to that agreement.

Yes, per what I said above about changes wrought by human material advancement, new considerations arise with increasing frequency. What about that advancement’s possible impact on weather patterns? What about the implications of the above-mentioned AI? What about wealth disparities? What about private entities doing business with entities in authoritarian countries?

I submit that hewing to the above simple precept will guide us toward workable answers to these questions. Keep things neat. Respect what belongs to whom, and the right of he or she to whom it belongs to do as he or she sees fit with it. Economic freedom is inseparable from any other kind.

As I said in the piece titled “John Locke and the Ruckus in the Harbor” I wrote for The Freemen News-letter on the occasion of the Boston Tea Party’s anniversary,

. . . the groundwork had been laid in the ideas fleshed out in Chapter 5 of John Locke’s 1690 work Second Treatise on Civil Government. 

One noteworthy aspect of that work is that Locke refers to God more than was characteristic for him. He predicates what he has to say about appropriating objects found in nature for productive use by asserting that the human being owns himself, as is befitting a creature imbued with free will. By inference, what the individual does with that self is his own as well.

Locke also shows that money is more than a lifeless medium of exchange for use in purely material transactions. Money allows two individuals or groups thereof to arrive at that thing that is so exceedingly rare in human affairs: agreement. After ownership of the natural objects of the world has been established, money makes possible the gravitation of those things to situations that are most inclined to enhance everyone’s well-being. Person A has a surplus of, say, corn grown on his land, but that surplus is going to have value to Person B, who owns a mill, that would not even occur to Person A until he’s approached about it. After the transaction, Person A’s realm of possibility for improving his lot is greatly expanded. He can spend or invest the money he’s gained in any number of ways. 

It’s from the elegance of that scenario that great minds are motivated to consider how to best guarantee that no entity overrides the agreement. How shall we protect not the safety of Persons A and B and their corn and money, as well as ensure that the value of the corn isn’t distorted by outside forces?

Taxation is as old as the notion of government itself. It wasn’t until Locke and thinkers in his wake woke people up to the notion of individual sovereignty and the necessity of volition in economic activity, however, that anyone had much of a framework beyond brute force for talking about ownership and exchange.

Maleness and femaleness - Human beings come in two varieties: guys and gals. Nature designed their genitals to fit together, so that the species could propagate. There are inherently distinctly male and female ways of approaching life, rooted in the biological differences between the sexes. This, of course, must be spoken of broadly, but it’s nonetheless true. And, generally speaking, those of each sex find, certainly those biological distinctions, but also the approach to life of the other, attractive. Aberrations of this are rare (and must be put in the still-sorting-it-out column).

Okay, that’s a sufficient list of absolutes to get a conversation started.

Now, what still requires sorting out?

The balance between the male and female approaches to life referenced above - Too much maleness can lead to heavy-handedness. It’s why every community now has a domestic violence shelter. It’s why we didn’t have universal suffrage in the US until 1920. It’s what’s behind burkas and women in countries like Afghanistan having to be accompanied by a male relative to leave their homes.

It’s why Christian women - those who believe what I said about the first absolute listed above - are bristling at the church that’s supposed to safeguard and spread that gospel message, as I discussed in a recent post here:

Complimentarianism versus egalitarianism is the one that causes the most trouble among folks who want to be serious about their Christianity. And it’s not easily sorted out. Kaeley Triller Harms, Kristen DuMez and Beth Moore seem to have the more grace-based arguments vis-a-vis those who flat out reject their positions.

On the other hand, brute force continues to be a given of the human condition, and men are best suited to lead thousands of people into battle against enemies. They are better equipped to subordinate the nurturing instinct to the killer instinct in times of national security threats.

And we must acknowledge that Western institutional Christianity has become lopsidedly feminine, as Leon Podles makes clear:

MEN THINK RELIGION, and especially the church, is for women. Why are women “the more devout sex”?1 Modern churches are women’s clubs with a few male officers. Or as Brenda E. Basher puts it, “If American religion were imaginatively conceptualized as a clothing store, two-thirds of its floor space would house garments for women; the manager’s office would be occupied almost exclusively by men.”2

Men still run most churches, but in the pews women outnumber men in all countries of Western civilization, in Europe, in the Americas, in Aus- tralia. Nor is the absence of males of recent origin. Cotton Mather puz- zled over the absence of men from New England churches, and medieval preachers claimed women practiced their religion far more than men did. But men do not show this same aversion to all churches and religions. The Orthodox seem to have a balance, and Islam and Judaism have a predom- inantly male membership. Something is creating a barrier between West- ern Christianity and men . . .

What to make of the undeniable attraction some people feel for those the of same sex - Fellow Substacker Joel Carini visits this subject often. Here’s a taste of the conclusion he is working toward:

. . . celibate, gay Christians may call themselves gay because some people really are gay. The word “gay” in celibate, gay Christian is nothing but an accurate description of that person, a perfectly appropriate adjective. Whether someone “identifies as” gay is quite beside the point. We do not get to opt into or out of identities at will; rather, we can and must use words to describe the world and ourselves as we are.

This “realism” about sexual orientation has an important implication: To tell a same-sex attracted person not to call him or herself “gay” is to tell him or her to dissimulate, to pretend, to lie - to be a hypocrite. This is the real risk of ignoring the category of sexual orientation, of saying that it is an unbiblical category. In doing so, we require people to pretend to be other than they are. We imply that how they are is too shameful to be acknowledged. We gaslight them about how God has made them, the cross he has chosen for them to bear.

If our Christianity requires a whole class of people to hide features of themselves and pretend to be other than they are, I fear that it reveals that we do not believe God could save people who were really and truly broken, whatever our professed theology.⁶By the same token, like the Jewish Christians of Galatia, it indicates that we think that some feature of our sexual physiology or psychology qualifies us, and disqualifies others to be saved - for us, heterosexuality, for them, circumcision.⁷

On the contrary, there is no ground for boasting. Whether your sexual desires align with the created order, or they do not, we are all equally unworthy of salvation . . .

How Western nations should deal with nations hostile to Western principles - We need oil from Saudi Arabia. We need rare earth minerals from China. American manufacturers have deeply entrenched supply chains involving some unsavory actors. I daresay that imposing tariffs is a counterproductive way to sort through this. And businesses can only be so nimble. Does one get out of Dodge before the shooting starts, or hang in there, hoping to keep making widgets on some kind of island of stability in an unfriendly environment?

The irreversible obliteration of norms and customs - Casual has proven victorious over formal. In terms of maneuvering though the world on a daily basis, it has made my own life easier. I can interview a lot of magazine article subjects wearing shorts. While I personally prefer to sit down to a proper place setting for a meal, I grab fast-food chicken tenders on a fairly frequent basis, particularly on busy days.

The downside is the erosion of gestures of consideration, notions of respectful ways men and women ought to greet each other, real elegance and flair, and standards in matters of artistic expression. Oh, and here’s another: teachers leaving their profession due to being tired of being assaulted by students.

Look, I’m an old rock and roller. Something in me still feels a surge of affirmation of the looseness with which I comport myself when I hear great jump blues or The Beatles or side one of the Happy Trails album by Quicksilver Messenger Service. (Oh, Lordy, that John Cippolina could dispense some guitar wizardry.)

But everything’s a tradeoff. We doffed our powdered wigs and frock coats, but it seems we lost our respect for heritage and our prioritization of clarity in the process.

Again, as with the list of absolutes, this gets us started, but is surely not a complete rundown.

Be thinking about what might be added to either list and chime in.