Thoughts on principles
They don't go away just because we want to proceed relativistically
One of the first things I came across in my initial perusal of the World Wide Web this morning was Damon Linker’s piece at his Substack Notes From the Middleground entitled “The Retreat to Principles.”
Now, Linker is one of those observers who can be counted on to deliver a level-headed viewpoint, even if it’s not one that someone like me would be completely on board with. His back-of-the-book essays at The Week have been calm in tone and in search of the healthy perspective.
He did write the 2010 book The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders. Its central argument is that citizens / voters ought to know whether the doctrinal / theological / ontological convictions of those who would shape policy and law are going to interfere with the way the Constitution was designed to ensure a functioning pluralistic representative democracy.
Not much to argue with there, but I thought political scientist Russell Arben Fox, in his review of Linker’s book at Amazon.com, made an indispensable point:
. . . those who have complaints about this book basically fall into three camps: 1) those religious conservatives and traditionalists who are unconcerned at how their theology and their practices potentially challenge the premises of liberal democracy, and who want to be able to use the rules of liberal democracy to advance goals that are, whether they realize it or not, illiberal; 2) those religious believers, who may or may not be conservative or traditional, who do not recognize their actual beliefs and practices in the sometimes overly philosophical or ahistorical analysis arguments which Linker makes, and would like to defend their participation in liberal democratic politics accordingly; and 3) those who think his picture of the "secular liberal state" is flawed in this first place--that democracies are not, and shouldn't be, nearly as separate from authoritative moral traditions or collective religious "establishments" of one sort of another as he makes them out to be. I would count myself in the third camp (and you can read my long response to Linker[...] if you're so inclined). But that third group is bound to be the smallest; the first two types of critics will be much larger.
Of the first one, there's probably little point in urging them to embrace the book; after all, Linker is writing primarily to his fellow liberals, not to convince illiberal folk that they're wrong. Of the second group though, Linker has something important and thought-provoking to say; even if it is true that some of his details are wrong, or his picture of certain practices and beliefs is incomplete, honest believers in traditionalist religions (and I am one myself) owe it to themselves to think about what Linker is saying--to think, in other words, about their own potential illiberality, and why that ought to make them pause when they think about voting for their co-religionists (or run for office themselves!).
Fox is saying a lot there, but by “indispensable point,” I mean his observation that the “third group is bound to be the smallest.”
Which brings us to Linker’s current piece.
Most of it’s behind a paywall, but what he has to say in the publicly available paragraphs is my focus here:
Last week, 83 writers, intellectuals, and academics on the center-right signed their names to a document titled “Freedom Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” I’m friendly with and respect several of the people involved in the project, so I don’t want to be a party pooper. And indeed, nothing the authors or signatories claim to stand for strikes me as dangerous or a threat. It’s a libertarianish restatement and subtle updating of the “fusionist” ideology Frank Meyer fashioned in the pages of National Review in the decade following its launch in 1955 and William F. Buckley codified in the “Sharon Statement” of 1960, to which the new statement alludes in its opening sentences.
Yet I nonetheless dissent from the new statement of principles—because it assumes what the center-right needs is a statement of principles. As I’ve argued before, I think principles are overrated. They’re aspirations. General statements of ideals. Those are good things. But politics isn’t usually about issuing pious declarations, however noble. It’s about looking at the world and its problems and responding to them with intelligence, which often means with pragmatic flexibility. It’s about exercising judgment—about which problems are most pressing, about which can be solved or at least alleviated, and about how best to go about doing so.
The collapse in support for the center-right and consequent surge of support for right-wing populists like Donald Trump since 2016 is far more a reaction to the poor judgment displayed by the administration of George W. Bush and the presidential nominees who followed him (John McCain and Mitt Romney) than it is about a failure to uphold principles that now need to be reaffirmed. In fact, believing that principles are what matter most of all may have contributed in a significant way to the bad judgment calls that brought us to this point.
To illustrate the singular importance of judgment and limitation of appeals to principle, I’m going to make this post a point-by-point critical response to “Freedom Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” I should note that on a few points, I develop the objections advanced by Ilya Somin in his own smart, critical response to the statement—though he and I are often coming from different places. (As a libertarian, Somin often wants the authors of the statement to be more consistently principled, whereas I usually think they’d be better off doing the opposite.)
Think about it. What he’s arguing for is good old situational ethics, which is about as problematic a way to engage the world as one can find.
I have a question, Mr. Linker: On what are we to base this judgement that you find to be the highest arbiter of our attempt to make sense of the scene before us?
The search for immutable principles is the oldest driving force in Western philosophy - indeed, in all human inquiry into our existence. This Substack, Precipice, is so named out of a determination to find a solid place to stand before a yawning abyss.
During that initial perusal this morning, I also came across a Politico piece by cultural observer Virginia Heffernan entitled “The Crisis Over American Manhood Is Really About Something Else.” It’s an entry among several in an issue of Politico devoted entirely into modern notions of masculinity.
There is some significant dovetailing going on between her essay and Linker’s. She rather effectively makes his point with her coverage of the Stronger Men’s Conference that took place in Springfield, Missouri in April:
. . . an Army tank squatted incongruously on a church chancel. Not one of the pastors, sports figures or niche Christian influencers who sermonized about masculinity throughout the well-attended event, which was a literal come-to-Jesus affair with a power-ballad band and pep talks, remarked on it. Presumably the tank stood for the masculine virtue of lethality. Or maybe rigid defensiveness.
Other totems of virility, including Motocross champions, Fight Club references and a formal prize for densest chest hair, were on hand like citronella candles to shoo away gay vibes. To a crowd that looked all-male, Pastor Levi Lusko, a former porn addict, unfurled a highly disturbing sermon on how much he loves sex. He cited an old lyric by T-Pain and Flo Rida to explain Eve’s allure to Adam: Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur.
She covers Senator Josh Hawley’s remarks to the conference (“in a neo-televangelical Hillsong style, Hawley delivered a bona fide sermon enjoining men to find their purpose. His reading of Judges even took some clever turns, identifying — as some evangelicals do — a “pre-incarnate Jesus” in the Old Testament. No matter what worldly troubles the guys were facing, Hawley assured them, they each had a divine calling: to become mighty men of valor.”)
From there she launches into a truly fascinating look at a nineteenth-century debate - really a fierce battle - about the nature of manhood between John Adams and Alexander Hamilton:
Adams Masculinity was the version of American manliness proposed by President John Adams in 1797, when he sought to designate Hercules as the nation’s avatar because the demi-god son of Zeus chose domestic virtue over sexual pleasure. Adams Masculinity frowns on tomcatting and affairs. I’ve come to think of Hawley’s version of manhood as Adams Masculinity.
Meanwhile, its opposite, Hamilton Masculinity, which is also Trump Masculinity, is good with tomcatting and affairs. In an open letter published in October, 1800, Hamilton described Adams as blundering, ignorant, vain, and jealous. For his part, Adams wrote in an 1806 letter to a friend that Hamilton suffered from “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.” Each thought he was the manlier man.
I personally think she does a bit of stretching to equate Hamilton Masculinity with the Trump version, but by the end of her piece you can see that she does so in service of the argument she’s building.
She runs us through a lot of other interesting nineteenth- and early-twentieth century history as well, such as Walt Whitman’s column series for the New York Atlas, “Manly Health and Training,” in the late 1850s, and historian Albert Bushnell Hart’s 1902 essay “Harvard Manhood.”
She commendably ties it all together, but arrives at a pretty typical left-of-center conclusion for our day: that white males who have come up through elite institutions, as well as the more rough-and-tumble type of white American male, are threatened by the accelerating diversity that characterizes modern society.
This is all an invigorating sociological inquiry, but we’re still faced with the unavoidable matter of principles.
What is to be our compass as we sort out the multilayered currents and crosscurrents in which we maneuver?
In June 2022, I wrote a piece here entitled “Spirituality Without a Lodestar Comes Up Empty.” It begins as a riff off a Bulwark piece by Daniel N. Gulotta about the rise of the “Nones” (millennials and Gen Z-ers who have no religious affiliation) and the decline of both traditional and progressive institutional Christianity.
I say this about Gulotta’s conclusion:
Gullotta notes that astrology, celebrity worship, fitness obsession and movements based on conspiracy theories are some other ways people have sought to seek a glimpse of a level of reality beyond space and time.
I find the way Gullotta ends his piece most unsatisfying. He merely states that these secular forms fulfillment-attempt fit into the national character in a certain sense:
We are natural believers. While scholars may debate the meaning and significance of any of these examples—and deeper questions about what constitutes religion as a unique form of social life—the durably high level of spiritual enthusiasm is a feature of the culture of the United States that sets it apart from that of secular Europe. In its many new forms, American religion may very well turn out to be with us always, even unto the end of the age.
Come on. Oprah and Spider Man ain’t Barton W. Stone and Charles Grandison Finney. Have we lost all sense of proportionate stature if we can’t see how flimsy the substitutes with which we’ve preoccupied ourselves are?
My own conclusion is this:
I’ve since come to see that the point is for imperfect people to come together to avail themselves of that for which they’re starved: a sense that they’re not going to tumble into the abyss.
In my own case, I think the historian in me is part of what brought me around. I knew one couldn’t dismiss the Bible, neither in and of itself, nor its role in shaping societies, cultures and world events in the last two-thousand-plus years. So I knew it was time to crack it open and reacquaint myself.
And I am indeed finding an arc to the overall story it tells. What occurs before and after swirls around a 33-year period, and, more specifically, a three-day span, in which the between-the-eyes cosmic game-changer all human beings seek transpired in space and time, with eternal implications.
We all need a message from something outside ourselves, an indication that there’s a significance to the pain, joy, fear and fulfillment we experience, that there’s a reason for these things called our existences.
We sense a basic architecture to the universe, even if we occasionally become smug and Nietzchian, existentialist or nihilist. We’re haunted by the sense that we play an inescapable role in that architecture.
Looking into what thousands of great thinkers over the course of thousands of years have done with that sense requires some humility. It requires admitting that perhaps the thought of contemporaries who have come along in our own lifetimes or a few decades back isn’t going to provide adequate answers.
That’s not easy for us to do these days. We are quite - to use a phrase that shows up a few times in Scripture - stiff-necked.
We risk becoming like those described in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, creatures who can hear the faint strains of the joyful celebration that is going on within the reality that is Heaven, but wistfully resign ourselves to a dark eternal lot instead, because it seems more appealing to have an endless discussion among ourselves about what paradise might be like rather than entering into it.
Let me communicate plainly here.
Something very unprecedented has entered our societal conversation in the last two or three decades. When talking about how American representative democracy ought to function, the old debates about race, or economic collectivism versus the free market, or the proper role of institutional religion, are now second to the fact that we have completely upended the notion of human sexuality that all societies and cultures throughout the world and history have understood. We are presuming to reinvent what it means to be a human.
And without a lodestar - something to which we can refer that will tell us what is always right and always wrong, and always natural and always unnatural - we’ll be winging it. We’ll treat as a given each new distortion that gets an airing.
The thing to remember about principles - about defining them, no matter what orientation one brings to the table - is that they have to be transcendent. If we start looking at something we’re inclined to deem a principle, and determine that human beings came up with it, it’s not a principle, and we need to move on in our search.
Linker does us no service with his hanging of his hat on the concept of “judgement.”
You have to back up a few levels to come up with any kind of coherent way of doing our sorting out of societal problems and conditions.
We can pretend otherwise. A lot of people do these days. But the principles by which we’re supposed to shape our lives and our society don’t go away just because their existence makes us uncomfortable.