For Atheists, Everything Is a Matter of Opinion

(This post originally appeared at AtheistConnect.)

In the comments to my previous post arguing that atheism cannot account for morality, Nate asks: “[w]hy must there be a transcendental reality” to account for morality? It’s a fair question, though not a novel one.  Philosophical skepticism is at the core of epistemological inquiry concerning the nature and extent of human knowledge.  In his Meditations, Rene Descartes asked this question not just about morality, but about the entire scope of what we purport to know.  In his famous thought experiment, Descartes plunged himself into universal doubt, acknowledging the possibility that our minds were being manipulated by an “evil genius” to falsely believe in the reality of an external world around us.  The first step to resolve that doubt was to realize that the very exercise itself confirmed the existence of a being engaged in the act of doubting—an argument Descartes articulated as cogito ergo sum.  Having authenticated his own existence as a thinking being, Descartes path from doubt, very crudely summarized, proceeded by presenting an a priori argument for the existence of God, and then arguing that because God is not a deceiver, those things we “clearly and distinctly perceive” must be true.  Other than the cogito, many philosophers disagree with Descartes’ arguments.  But the problem for us today is the same as it was for Descartes as he sat in his study mired in universal doubt:  Since empirical reality is subject to doubt, then in the absence of a touchstone that transcends that reality, how can we lay claim to any knowledge about the world?  If we reject Descartes’ path from universal doubt, perhaps we have to be satisfied with the possibility that our brains might actually be in a vat somewhere being manipulated by Descartes’ evil genius, or in some other equivalent of the “matrix.”  But let’s move on.

Another significant blow to empiricist epistemology was dealt by atheist philosopher David Hume.  Hume, fond of explaining philosophical principles by making reference to billiard balls, observed that while he consistently observed that certain behavior occurred when one billiard ball struck another, he never observed anything that could properly be described as “causation.”  Causation, Hume argued, is an abstract relationship that has no extension in empirical reality.  All that we can perceive, according to Hume, is a “constant conjunction” between certain events and certain effects; constant conjunction, however, is not the same thing as causation.  For example, the moon comes out when the sun goes down; yet, the moon does not come out because the sun goes down.  Thus, while he could not help that his mind believed there exists causal relationships between the billiard balls, and while his mind further drew predictions about the expected effects of those purported causal relationships, Hume acknowledged that he could not give a reasoned account of the relationship or his predictions.  That is, because we cannot perceive causation, maintaining belief in causation in a purely empirical worldview is philosophically arbitrary.

Hume came to the same conclusion with respect to induction.  We might gain information by studying information perceived in the world.  However, once we purport to make claims about the future based on that information, we are no longer making purely empirical claims.  Instead, we have inserted a transcendental premise into our argumentation, namely, that the future will resemble the past.  Because we have no empirical data about the future, such claims are unjustified and arbitrary as a matter of empiricist philosophy.

Thus, Hume demonstrated that, with respect to fundamental tools of science—causation and induction—we have not escaped the basic Cartesian dilemma presented in a purely materialistic worldview:  Without a touchstone that transcends experience that permits us to bridge the world of abstract ideas to the physical world, all our claims about the world are wholly arbitrary.

With that in mind, atheism’s problem of morality is easily demonstrated:  In a purely empirical, materialistic worldview, there is no basis upon which we make claims that acts have moral value.  In fact, the existence of “moral value” cannot be proven empirically in the first place.  We do not have any empirical data about moral claims.  Indeed, what might moral value smell like?  How much does it weigh?  Nate claims that “Human life should be precious just because it’s human life. There doesn’t have to be more reason than that.”  This claim is the definition of chutzpah:  atheists, such as those on AtheistConnect, belligerently rail against religion by alleging it offends human reason by making moral commandments by fiat.  I disagree with that claim, of course, but Nate has here offended atheism’s raison d’être:  he has asserted a moral commandment by fiat.  Worse still, by his own fiat, it would appear.

For my part, I do believe human life is precious because I believe all life is created by God, and because I believe that, having been created in God’s image, I have a moral nature that reflects His values and instills in me a proper respect for human life.  My moral worldview is held together by these sorts of transcendental claims about the very nature of humanity, and thus allows me to make intelligible claims about what sorts of obligations are universally imposed on all human beings.  In a purely materialistic worldview, however, it is impossible to make intelligible claims about morality.  In such a worldview, the only sorts of moral claims possible are “I” statements:  “I believe slaying a child is wrong.”  “I believe slavery is wrong.”  “I believe genocide is wrong.”  Like Hume’s beliefs about the relationships between billiard balls or predictions about the future, these statements are mere matters of unfounded opinion.  In the absence of some claims about the transcendental nature of humanity, purporting to hold “moral” beliefs is philosophically arbitrary.

Atheism Cannot Account for Objective Morality

(This post originally appeared at AtheistConnect.)

AtheistConnect published several posts recently concerning the question whether it is necessary to posit the existence of God to provide a cogent account for objective morality.  For the reasons briefly stated below, among others, I argue the affirmative:  God is necessary to provide an account of objective morality and, accordingly, atheism necessarily cannot provide such an account.

First, consider the argument made in this article referenced in Nate’s post:

Even if we accept that it’s true that there is no point in being moral if there is no God, this wouldn’t be an argument against atheism in the sense of showing that atheism isn’t true, rational, or justified. It wouldn’t provide any reason to think that theism generally or Christianity in particular is likely true. It is logically possible that there is no God and that we have no good reasons to behave morally.

The suggestion that “It is logically possible that there is no God and that we have no good reasons to behave morally” is a worthless statement.  Man is the sort of being that has both a moral intuition, and a rational faculty that demands an account be given for his beliefs—including his moral intuition.  These are non-negotiable preconditions with which all persons approach the world, and for which an epistemological and moral framework of the world must give an account.  Atheists’ response to the problem of morality, however, is either to deny man’s moral intuition (e.g., by positing “morality” is nothing more than the calculated pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain), or to deny the need for a rational account of that moral intuition (e.g., by arbitrarily replacing religious morality disfavored by atheists, and replacing it with secular humanist morality).  Thus, although atheists claim to reject transcendental reasoning, they fail to give anything resembling a cogent, rational account for man’s moral intuition in its place.

Worse, atheists often purport to take advantage of the gaps in their own reasoning by arguing that theists are clearly wrong to suggest that atheism implicitly rejects objective morality, and thus cannot establish a basis for mounting moral condemnation of, for example, the Holocaust or 9/11.  To the contrary, the argument goes, atheists do acknowledge objective morality, and even behave morally, generally speaking.  But this is misdirection.  In fact, the theist’s fallacy in making this argument is to assume that atheists comport themselves consistently with their proffered worldview when, in reality, they do not.  The theist’s unsound argument thus runs as follows:

1. Since having rejected the existence of God, atheism has not provided a suitable alternative account for objective morality.
2. Intellectual consistency requires rejecting that for which no suitable account has been provided.
3. Atheists comport themselves consistently with their proffered worldview.
4. Thus, atheists reject objective morality.

Of course, the reason this argument fails is because premise (3) is false:  atheists either are intellectually dishonest, or they simply don’t understand that their worldview cannot account for objective morality.  Again, one might say “I don’t believe in God” as a glib expression of one’s anti-authoritarianism and wide-eyed skepticism, but it actually means something very severe—particularly if it also means “I do not believe in anything that transcends empirical phenomena.”  This is a profound claim that tears down important metaphysical underpinnings of one’s view of the world, including the intellectual framework necessary to account for objective morality.  If the maker of such a statement has any interest in talking seriously about such ideas, he will have to posit an alternative theory of reality that can account for them.

But nothing like this has come forth from atheism’s ranks.  The drab statement quoted above about “logical possibilities” concerning God and morality is effectively the sum and substance of all atheism has to say about objective morality.  In discussions of moral philosophy, then, atheism is, at best, intellectually irrelevant.

Multiculturalism and the moral order

This story reminds that there is a great potential friendship between conservatives and Muslims when it comes to instilling positive values in our children, and resisting the trend to secularism.  Here’s an excerpt, though I recommend reading the whole piece:

Then I looked across the school playground and saw a Muslim mother, the mother of my daughter’s best friend, holding her headscarf in place with her hands as the wind blew about restlessly. I caught her eye for a moment and we smiled at each other. Before this moment, I had never thought that my situation in any shape or form was similar to that of a Muslim mother. And I had never thought seriously about talking to a Muslim mother about issues of faith or raising children in our community. But now I was beginning to reconsider. Perhaps our Muslim fellow citizens, especially those who are spiritually and intellectually confident in their ways of life, can challenge and inspire us to reflect more deeply on our own faith and morality, and perhaps in the process we might discover that we share some of the same moral principles and hopes and dreams for our children.

We always hear so much about the things that separate Muslims from Christians (and no doubt there are things that do separate us), and often these differences are expressed in negative and prejudiced ways. I wonder if our misunderstandings and misconceptions prevent some of us from trusting and forming spiritual bonds and friendships with those who are confronting some of the very same challenges that we confront. I live in a community where many of my moral views about sexuality, marriage, and the family are in the minority. Sometimes they are challenged (respectfully and disrespectfully), and every now and again someone agrees with them, but often they are simply dismissed. Like my daughter, I’m comforted to know that there is someone else with whom I share similar experiences (and perhaps a moral view or two).

There is, perhaps, a different brand of multiculturalism that underscores rather than undermines the moral order.  It’s a shame that many conservatives have written off American Muslims because of disagreements on certain narrow political or foreign policy views, when we really have so much to agree on.

The Place of Values in Politics

FLG shared this interesting piece today by Stanley Fish at the NY Times, lamenting the widespread practice of parrying political criticism with tu quoque defenses:

I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair.

I think I agree, though I hesitate to downplay the value of consistency.  That’s a noble moral quality, too, is it not?  But Fish is right that we oughtn’t engage in “cheap tricks” and technicalities to skirt real, substantive objections against our guy, even if they did it when we lodged real, substantive objections against their guy.

Fish goes on with some deeper insights about the modern political soul:

The solution? Remove beliefs from the political agenda — we’re not going to vote on them or distribute goods on their basis — and come up with a formula for keeping them at bay while respecting the rights of citizens to have them. . . . And how do you do that? By making it a requirement that laws neither reflect the ideological view point of one party nor marginalize and/or stigmatize the ideological viewpoint of some other party. Only pass laws to which persons of any viewpoint could assent: “No one can put anyone else under a legal obligation without submitting simultaneously to a law which requires that he can himself be put under the same kind of obligation by the other person.” This seems admirable, but what it means is that moral judgment is forever deferred and made subordinate to the supposedly greater good of allowing all viewpoints to flourish. (Why that is the greater good I have never been able to understand.)

What was perhaps merely a political expedient—i.e., emptying the moral content of certain topics to make them less politically unwieldy—has disrupted the integrity of our underlying political makeup.  We are, first and foremost, a virtuous people that recognizes certain universal moral precepts; that recognizes this is a world of values, and that laws are designed to assist that people navigate that world of values as that people embarks on its political enterprise together.  At one point in American political history, we led bifurcated lives in which, concerning matters of law, we were obligated to pretend at moral agnosticism; in other matters, conversely, we were obligated to ascertain good and evil, and to praise the former and denounce the latter.  But the triumph of secularism has been to take that narrow realm of legalistic agnosticism and turn it into the rule that governs all aspects of modern life.  The expression of moral values is resigned solely to the narrow domain of home life—and even there it’s not safe.

Morality without God?

Kyle Cupp rejects the idea that God is a necessary precondition for morality, offering three arguments:

[W]hile people disagree about moral norms and principles, most people have some moral presuppositions in which their deliberations are grounded. These presuppositions may be religious, but they don’t have to be. A belief in Jesus may motivate one volunteer at a soup kitchen, while the very presence of someone who is hungry may motivate another. A theist may avoid murder because it violates God’s commandment, while an atheist may avoid murder because of the loss and misery it delivers. The consequences of human action alone provide reason for not permitting everything.

Cupp’s second argument is related to the first:

[E]ven if God exists and has written the moral law, the believer still acts based on the presupposition that the consequences of obeying the moral law are better than and preferable to the consequences of violating it. In doing so, the believer and the unbeliever share basically the same presupposition.

These arguments are really just different ways of suggesting that bad acts lead to bad consequences, and thus we don’t need a separate concept of “morality” to tell us not to do bad things (or, conversely to tell us to do good things).  Whatever the merits of Cupp’s argument, it is not an argument about whether we can have an objective, universal morality without God.  Focusing on consequences only helps us avoid things we happen to find personally unpleasant.  It does not tell us anything about the relationship between unpleasantness and badness as a moral concept.

However, Cupp presents a third argument that is a bit more complicated to explain and thus to refute:

Third, while the absence of a divine lawmaker would leave humanity without a divine moral law, humanity would still have ground on which to build an objective morality. Unless it is held that God composed the moral law arbitrarily, then the moral law is something that makes sense given the way of the world. There’s a difference between killing a flea and killing a person not merely because God says so, but because there are significant differences, physical and metaphysical, between an insect and a person. Therefore, even if it were left to men and women to write moral laws, they are not thereby doomed to write arbitrarily, without rhyme or reason. Moral reflection can look to insights about the physical and metaphysical as a sailor would look to a guiding star.

In other words, the argument suggests that because God, even if he does exist, is not arbitrary, then his handing down a moral code is not the same thing as saying we depend on God for the existence of morality in the first place.  While God did us a favor distilling the moral law in the Ten Commandments, the moral law exists whether or not God does.  Thus, the trick in a godless universe is not deciding whether there is a moral law at all, but discerning what it is.

This is a sophisticated argument, but I think it ultimately unravels into arbitrariness.  If we assume, as Cupp does, that there is a transcendental reality, man’s inquisitive nature demands there be some account of its nature other than arbitrarily picking out certain of its characteristics.  Beyond the empirically observable world, what truths can we purport to know?  Certainly, we depend on such truths to make sense of our observable reality.  For example, to make any predictions about the world, we have to assume, as a transcendental fact about the world, that the future will resemble the past. Without this profoundly non-empirical claim, science cannot do any work.  Similarly, causation, induction, grammar, numbers, categories, political obligations, and so on, are all non-empirical claims that are nonetheless necessary for a meaningful understanding about the world.

But it is dismally unsatisfying to simply posit them without explanation.  Thus, while I applaud Cupp for acknowledging the existence of an objective morality, I reject his invitation to proceed with intellectual inquiry without demanding any rigor in accounting for these important transcendental truths. To suggest, for example, that we do not need any explanation for why there is a morality in the first place, or why we are the sort of creatures that recognize it and are impelled to follow it, is no answer to the argument that we do.  The existence of God, and more specifically the Christian account of God, man, morality, sin, and salvation, begin to provide such a construct for these transcendental realities.  Regardless of whether that construct is persuasive, it cannot be seriously doubted that it is a more rigorous account than the shopping cart account, which is all atheism can offer.

A quiz for conservatives on San Francisco’s proposed ban on infant circumcision

The San Francisco Examiner reports:

[C]ome November, it sounds like voters will have the opportunity to jump on the ban wagon by deciding whether to ban male circumcision.

San Francisco resident Lloyd Schofield said Thursday he is “on track” to have enough  signatures to place his proposed measure on the November ballot that would make it illegal to “circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the foreskin, testicle or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18.”

This presents a good exercise for social conservatives:  If you support morals legislation (e.g., suicide, euthanasia, drug use, animal cruelty, bestiality, prostitution, sodomy, homosexuality, polygamy, adult incest, public nudity, profanity, stem cell research, human cloning, and so on), what sorts of arguments might you employ to oppose the forthcoming San Francisco initiative to outlaw infant circumcision?  Arguments based on personal privacy might not work if you support prohibitions on prostitution and incest.  Arguments based on religious freedom might not work if you support prohibitions on polygamy and drug use (e.g., peyote).  Arguments based on parental rights might not work if you support bans on stem cell research and human cloning. 

So, how do you oppose the ballot initiative on infant circumcision? 

The Constitution presupposes Natural Law, which in turn presupposes God

Apologies for reposting this John Adams quote from American Creation, but I’m tucking it away as part of my research on constitutional presuppositionalism:

"To him to believes in the Existence and Attributes physical and moral of a God, there can be no obscurity or perplexity in defining the Law of Nature to be his wise benign and all power Will, discovered by Reason.  A Man who disbelieves the Being of a God, will have no perplexity in defining Morality or the Law of Nature, natural law, natural Right or any such Things to be mere Maxims of Convenience, to be Swifts pair of Breeches to be put on upon occasion for Decency or Conveniency and to be put off at pleasure for either."

— Letter to Thomas Boylston Adams, March 19, 1794, quoted in The Founders on Religion:  A Book of Quotations, edited by James H. Hutson (Princeton:  2005), pg. 132.

The Conservative Contribution to Progressivism, Part 2

This is the follow up to my first post describing the historical and social underpinnings of the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, drawing largely from Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920.  The thesis, arrived at in this post, is that while conservative values may have played a role in progressivism’s initial volley, the ultimate goals of progressive movement were anything but conservative.

* * *

The new standard of living being conceived in the minds of Americans at the end of the 19th century put individualism in the crosshairs.  At the beginning of the 19^th century, individualism was a hard lot, but a seemingly fair one.  A fledgling national government, a nigh-nonexistent system of roads, and a still sparsely populated nation rendered individual sustainability difficult but relatively predictable.  By the end of the 19^th century, however, the vagaries of national macroeconomics were already beginning to render markets less predictable; the vast expansion of federal power rendered economic activity an increasingly political affair; and the maturing American economy, fortified by extensive rail and telegraph networks, saw industries becoming dominated by big firms.  All the while, increasing numbers of common working Americans were funneling into urban factory life.  While farms seldom provided more than subsistence living, Americans felt relatively proud and fulfilled.  They had a markedly different experience in the new American factories, however.  All this made working class Americans increasingly discontent—all they needed was a reason to impugn the individualism that sustained the unhappy state of affairs.

Conservative activists were all too eager to supply such reasons.  The expansion of pleasure-seeking to the middle-class worsened the problem of vice and had weakened the family structure.  The Social Gospel leader, Washington Gladden, for example, traced prostitution to middle- and upper-class affluence, as young men increasingly began to put off marriage “until they are able to support a wife in good style.”

“[A]nd as the wealth of the land increases and their neighbors live more and more luxuriously, the phrase ‘in good style’ is constantly undergoing changes of meaning. Young women become accustomed in their parental homes to a certain amount of comfort and of leisure, and they do not relish the thought of beginning to live more plainly and more laboriously in a home of their own.” When these people postponed marriage, Gladden affirmed, “one of the inevitable consequences is the increase of social immorality”: young men, single for too long, would seek sexual satisfaction with prostitutes. The attack on the brothel, then, might not get at the real problem that threatened the home. “I do not believe that there is any remedy for this social disease but the restoration of a more wholesome sentiment concerning this whole subject of family life,” Gladden concluded. “The morality of what we call our respectable classes needs toning up all along this line.”

(Emphasis added.)

It is this sentiment—that “morality . . . needs toning up”—that represents the conservative contribution to progressivism:  as new social, political, and economic forces began to disrupt cultural and moral values, many conservatives sought to push back in kind not merely to curtail those effects, but to counteract them.  Man and his moral character were no longer something to be left to the sole province of himself and his community; they must be “toned up” and remade through the law.  Under the progressive construction of man’s moral predicament, man was no longer accountable for his own actions.  Because people were malleable and defined by their environment, criminals were not wholly to blame, since their crimes owed in part to the sins of society.  “What we have got to have,” said Gladden, “is a different kind of men and women.”

Thus, a renewed vigor for morals legislation ensued, directed at card playing, gambling, horse racing, Sabbath breaking, pornography, dance halls, contraception, and, most famously, liquor.  Liquor, more than all other vices, was seen as the root of man’s moral decline—particularly, the breakup of the family and the degradation of women.  In this respect, McGerr recounts Carry Nation’s attack of a nude painting in the bar of the Carey Hotel in Wichita:

“It is very significant that the pictures of naked women are in saloons,” she explained. “Women are stripped of everything by them. Her husband is torn from her, she is robbed of her sons, her home, her food and her virtue, and then they strip her clothes off and hang her up bare in these dens of robbery and murder. Well does a saloon make a woman bare of all things!”

Yet, progressives quickly realized that prohibition of vices was not enough:  remaking man could not be achieved by negative campaign alone—it required an affirmative component.  Progressives would have to find “substitutes for the saloon.”

Alcohol free clubs and dance halls were needed to fulfill people’s desire to meet and socialize; libraries and gymnasiums were needed to fulfill the desire for stimulation. In short, the transformation of individuals required a more sweeping transformation of their environment.

With the progressives’ transition from a prohibitory campaign to more affirmative attempts to reshape mankind came the end of any partnership with conservatism.  Progressives moved beyond their “conservative” agenda to restore Victorian values, and instead began to explore a more radical, activist agenda.  Progressives began to remake rather than merely preserve society.  Law was not merely an anchor; it could serve as a sail.

This aspect of the progressive agenda was clear by the time of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, who stated:  “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life. . . . Our problem is to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”  Progressivism had by this time become a different thing entirely than the post-Victorian conservatism it set out as.  Indeed, it could be said the project never was truly conservative in the first place, and that the lament of the decline of Victorian values was merely lip service to justify the brewing radicalist urges.  Thus, perhaps even the prescriptive components of the early progressive agenda were less about preserving Victorian values than preliminary efforts at remaking all of society—the symbols of Victorianism simply served as a convenient cover of authenticity for an otherwise radical movement.

Whatever their original intentions, progressives eventually settled on an agenda that harmed conservative values:

Ironically, reform could destroy what it was intended to preserve. Crusading in the name of the home, reformers were supplanting the very thing they wanted to protect. As outside agencies supervised children in and out of school, ordered the material environment of tenements and parks, and regulated adult behavior, the family and the home became less important. “As in the human organism, when one organ fails, its functions are often undertaken and more or less imperfectly performed by some other organ,” Josiah Strong noted; “so in the great social organism of the city, when the home fails, the church sometimes undertakes the functions of the home.” A host of other “organs”—settlements, playgrounds, Boys’ Clubs, schools, courts, municipalities, state governments, the federal government—were undertaking those functions as well. But even the most reflective progressive activists appeared oblivious to the actual impact of their reforms on many homes.

According to E.A. Ross, progressivism eroded man’s moral fiber:  “Too much consideration for moral weakness would fill the world with moral weaklings,” he insisted. “To abolish temptation is to deprive the self-controlled of their natural right to outlive and outnumber those who have a cotton string for a backbone.”

“Once work was so constant that married women did not realize their loneliness or the want of appreciation which befell them,” Kate Gannett Wells contended in an essay titled “Why More Girls Do Not Marry”: Now society and the middle class have leisure to examine their states of mental solitude, and to see just where husbands are wanting. Fifty years ago the woman was too busy to stop for the morning kiss as her husband went to work.  Now she has time to think about the absence or infrequency of the greeting for half an hour before she reads the morning paper, in which she finds some fresh instance of man’s wickedness.

Thus conceived, progressivism cannot be sustained as a practical tool put in the service of conservatism—it is a wholly new conception of man, society, and government.

Law, Society, and Shame

My hometown of Huntington Beach is ranked top in the state of California for alcohol-related traffic deaths.  Recently, the city council considered putting repeat offenders on the HBPD’s Facebook site with the apparent hope of shaming them into sobriety.  (The council voted down the proposal last night.)  Though I was and still am ambivalent about the idea,* I was surprised by the hostility many expressed toward the proposal.  Several folks expressed the sentiment that the punishment for drunk driving, or any crime for that matter, is dictated by the penal code, and cities may not add more than what the law already provides.  This article sums up the objections nicely:

Dwyer may have the best of intentions, but his proposal clearly goes too far. Yes, drunk driving is morally reprehensible, and those who do it should be punished according to the law. But they should also be given the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, change their ways, and become contributing members of society. If their face is immortalized in Facebook infamy, that recovery process would become significantly more challenging. Dwyer shouldn’t let the court of public opinion interfere with the court of law, because, as Lt. Reinhart said, “Law enforcement is not about public shaming.”

The suggestion that the proposal would “interfere with the court of law” is hyperbole.  But the sentiment that “the court of public opinion” should count for nothing radically misconceives the relationship between law and society.  Criminal laws and punishments are based on values held by society.  But activities prohibited by law are not the only ones a society might condemn, and criminal punishments are not the only ones society might elect to mete out.  Shame, for example, is important because it reinforces the notion that actions are not merely wrong because they result in a deprivation of liberty due to criminal punishment, but because they are evil and antisocial.  Likewise, enduring a criminal sentence is not the only mode of redemption; communities can offer acceptance and forgiveness and opportunity to rehabilitated individuals who have proven their good character.

Engaging in certain wrongful behavior is antisocial, and the function of shame in society is to root out and eliminate such behavior.  Indeed, the behavior that we choose to criminalize tends to be the behavior that is the most harmful, the most antisocial.  It is absurd to suggest that, by criminalizing such behavior, society loses its moral right to characterize the behavior as shameful.  It would be just as absurd as suggesting that, by defining and enforcing a criminal penalty against a convict, society loses its moral right to later characterize the convict as rehabilitated and forgiven.

I’d be willing to bet that most of the folks who are against the Huntington Beach proposal are also the sort who believe that government should stay out of the business of legislating morals.  The oddity, assuming I’m right, is that if it is supposed that law ought not deal in the sphere of morality and shame, and if it is also supposed that communities ought not deal in shame where the law provides a punishment, then the result is to have removed shame from our society altogether.  This, I think, would be a very bad thing.

* My thought is such a law obviously must be confined to those convicted of, not merely arrested for or charged with, DUIs, and that it must also be confined to repeated convictions, probably at least three, or perhaps two within an 18 or 24 month period.

The Conservative Contribution to Progressivism, Part 1

I was referred to Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 after making some comparisons of conservatism and liberalism to Progressivism.  It was one of the first full length books I read on my new Kindle, and I found myself glad for the ability to easily tag and annotate McGerr’s many important ideas.  Upon finishing the book, I’ve set out to fortify the basic position I advanced here, as I believe it is vindicated by the historical record set out in McGerr’s book.

It has become a more involved project than I anticipated, however, and thus I have decided to break it out into several parts—probably three, by the looks of it.  The first part, below, concerns the decline of the era of Victorian individualism, and the forging of a new idea of individualism and individual entitlements.

* * *

For good reason, rebranding liberals as “progressives” is a widely used tactic on the right.  It is so effective because it associates the left with the repugnant and, even better, failed political movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  That movement, of course, is the one that strove to remake humanity—economically through redistribution, morally through prohibitory legislation, and genetically through sterilization and eugenics.  The  Progressives’ zealous campaign against individual rights ultimately led even FDR, the very symbol of the remade 20^th century America, to distance himself from the movement.  Thus, even while its legacy survives, Progressivism’s name is a scarlet letter in American politics.  An intellectual family tree that relates Progressivism to modern liberalism is thus a tremendously effective polemic device.

Yet, the right often neglects to mention that conservatism also makes an appearance on Progressivism’s family tree.  In its early stages, after all, Progressivism was a reaction to the decline of Victorian values, bowing under the weight of an increasingly industrialized and fractured American society.  Campaigns to stem the uptick of divorce, prostitution, and drink resulted in our nation’s first flopped constitutional amendment.  Progressives also were content to use the power of their new labor unions to exclude blacks from entire industries.

In A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, Michael McGerr outlines the social, political, and economic forces giving rise to the Progressive movement.  It is the early stage of the Progressive moment that most clearly reveals conservativism’s contribution to the ill-fated project.  As justice Frankfurter would later write in 1940 in Minersville School District v. Gobitis,

The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.  Such a sentiment is fostered by all those agencies of the mind and spirit which may serve to gather up the traditions of a people, transmit them from generation to generation, and thereby create that continuity of a treasured common life which constitutes a civilization.

It was this sort of conservative sentiment, unconservatively enshrined in national policy, that initially propelled the Progressive moment.  American individualism, loosed across a vast continent connected by an unprecedented network of rail and telegraph wire, put strain on America’s underlying social fabric.  The divorce rate following the Civil War inclined steeply as high society became obsessed with the pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement, perverting the virtue of individualism.  While the Victorians had balanced individual freedom with self-control, hard work, and domesticity, McGerr points out, “[t]he rich had seemingly cast aside those balance weights. In the hands of the upper ten, individualism became an excuse for complete autonomy, a legitimization of indulgence and inequality, and a rationalization of the troubling national status quo.”

Because of the wild success of America’s system of government in creating vast fortunes and divergent ways of life, Americans, perhaps unwittingly, undermined the connection with their own social fabric. The old town economies and country religions were out.  A new national economy and civic religion were in.

The wealthy, however, did not seem to grasp what was happening, or account for the growing resentment felt toward them.  From their perspective, their parties “helped the economy because ‘many New York shops sold out brocades and silks which had been lying in their stock-rooms for years.’”  Teddy Roosevelt tried to stave off the coming revolt, noting that social and political stability impel the wealthy to observe certain “duties toward the public.”  “Do they not realize that they are putting a very heavy burden on us who stand against socialism; against anarchic disorder?”  “I wish that capitalists would see that what I am advocating is really in the interest of property, for it will save it from the danger of revolution.”

The extravagance of the “upper 10” during the depression years of the 1890s galvanized populist resentment, particularly as Victorian individualism was failing the industrial class at the same time.  Industrial work was distantly attenuated from its product, and thus the traditional agrarian work ethic, like the traditional agrarians themselves, began to wane.  McGerr notes that by 1900, following the depression of the 1890s, wage workers in manufacturing earned an average of $435 for the year.  The working-class earned less yet:  anthracite coal miners averaged $340 for the year; domestics, $240; and agricultural laborers, only $178 with room and board.  The middle-class, on the other hand, working as clerical workers in railroad and manufacturing firms, averaged $1,011.  For the lower classes, McGerr argues, “Victorian individualism was impossible . . . . Many workers simply could not make enough to support themselves, let alone a family.”  This, along with frequent economic upheavals typical of markets, tended to undermine the moral force of individualism among turn-of-the-century wage-earners.

Despite capitalism’s harsh terms, its attendant virtues of thrift and self-sacrifice began to decline.  As McGerr notes, wage workers simply “saw little point in trying to save their dollars and deny themselves.”  Instead, they took the little they had and threw it into the same rat hole of excess as the rich.

Some workers shared the upper-class obsession with fashion and display. Young laboring women spent precious dollars on flashy clothing intended to match or even outdo the upper ten. “If my lady wears a velvet gown, put together for her in an East Side sweatshop,” a reporter in New York observed in 1898, “may not the girl whose fingers fashioned it rejoice her soul by astonishing Grand Street with a copy of it next Sunday? My lady’s in velvet, and the East Side girl’s is the cheapest, but it’s the style that counts. In this land of equality, shall not one wear what the other wears?”

Booker T. Washington also documented this burgeoning sense of entitlement to the bounty of modern life, irrespective of the means to acquire it:

In these cabin homes I often found sewing-machines which had been bought, or were being bought, on instalments, frequently at a cost of as much as sixty dollars, or showy clocks for which the occupants of the cabins had paid twelve or fourteen dollars. I remember that on one occasion when I went into one of these cabins for dinner, when I sat down to the table for a meal with the four members of the family, I noticed that, while there were five of us at the table, there was but one fork for the five of us to use. Naturally there was an awkward pause on my part. In the opposite corner of that same cabin was an organ for which the people told me they were paying sixty dollars in monthly instalments. One fork, and a sixty-dollar organ!

. . . .

On Saturday the whole family would spent at least half a day, and often a whole day, in town. The idea in going to town was, I suppose, to do shopping, but all the shopping that the whole family had money for could have been attended to in ten minutes by one person.

The rise of hedonistic individualism hastened the decline of Victorian values.  McGerr notes that “middle-class husbands and wives judged their spouses by the pleasures they provided—the quality of the home and its objects, the happiness of the marriage. The failure to meet those increased expectations was a principal reason for the increasing breakup of Victorian marriages.”

This new form of individualism came as a result of a growingly diffuse economy in which labor and consumption had become only distantly and obliquely related.  Industrial work was attenuated from its product, and thus the traditional agrarian work ethic, like the traditional agrarians themselves, began to wane.  The American laborer no longer provided his own essentials of survival, but instead deposited his effort into a vast and complex economic machine.  His yield, his “wage,” served as the only symbol of his output, a rebuttable presumption of the value of his labor.  And, as his commercial appetites continued to increase, American workers started to rebut the presumption.  The wage system was being thrown into upheaval:  if the market would not set a wage sufficient to meet the American worker’s standard of living, he would set it himself.  “It seems to me that when a man, my father, works all day long, he ought to have a beautiful home, he ought to have good food, he too ought to get a chance to appreciate beautiful music.”  Thus formed a new basis for “individual rights” in American politics.

Accordingly, Americans, as laborers, resorted to collectivism to feed their individualism as consumers.  The marketplace had suddenly become too large and ominous, and the means of production too mechanical and rote, to expect to have much chance of improving one’s lot without collective action.  Though businesses would later seek to avoid unionization through “welfare capitalism,” it was already clear that unionization and government regulation were tools too powerful to go unused.  Moreover, the new strain of antisocial individualism complained of by Progressives was of relatively recent vintage, created in large part by a growing industrial economy fortified by a strong central government.  The cultural and societal growing pains caused by this surge in industrialization were serious concerns. Like the ills of slavery, since government had aided the accession of uncorked individualism, it was natural and perhaps even appropriate to look to government to redress its abuses.