DAMON LINKER FEBRUARY 15, 2009
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In his criticism of the "illiberal liberalism" of this post, my friend Noah Millman makes several broader arguments against the metaphysically neutral form of liberalism I've been defending over the past few years (in the final chapter of my book, and in a recent blog post). Here are his objections:
Linker’s whole project . . . rests on the proposition that absent a neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments you inevitably get social conflict. I pretty much disagree with that proposition whole-hog – I don’t think liberalism is (or can be) a wholly neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments (indeed, I think this partly because I agree with some of liberalism’s metaphysical commitments); I don’t think such an arbiter would enable you to avoid social conflict (what would compel the loser to abide by the verdict?); and, for that matter, I think you can have devastating social conflict without any real disagreement about metaphysical commitments (those metaphysical commitments themselves may in many cases be “superstructure” rather than “substructure”).
Beginning with the last item first: I have never claimed (or believed) that a metaphysically neutral liberalism can help you avoid conflict altogether. On the contrary, politics is a never-ending series of conflicts without end. What liberalism does (or should try to do) is work to avoid distinctly political conflict about metaphysical questions. It does this by attempting to focus politics on securing the preconditions of what Aristotle called "mere life" (defense against external and internal threats; material prosperity) while channeling or deflecting questions wrapped up with "the good life" (God, the highest good for human beings, the content of happiness, the ranking of the virtues, etc.) into the private lives of the polity's citizens. One could therefore describe liberalism as a politics of the common good, albeit one that understands the common good in restricted terms. Whereas Aristotle believed that every political question involving "low" issues of public order and economic flourishing pointed toward (and presupposed) "high" metaphysical commitments that needed to be sorted out in the political realm, liberalism denies this -- saying, in effect, that politics can and should be conducted in mundane, prosaic terms without reference to metaphysics.
The benefit of this contraction of politics to "mere life" is that it renders less likely the most intractable forms of human conflict. But conflict over other, less fundamental matters -- about whether and what kind of economic stimulus we should pass, about how we should address climate change, about how we should respond to the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, and so forth -- go on and on. Meanwhile, our metaphysical conflicts -- about whether there's a God, about whether and to what extent cultural changes in American life over the past fifty years should be celebrated, lamented, or actively opposed, about the proper place of self-restraint in a good human life -- take place primarily in the private sphere of civil society (in books and newspapers and magazines and blog posts, in the halls of universities and think tanks), with the state doing its best to stay out of it.
(The issues that create the most problems for this view of liberalism are social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, because those on each side of those issues advance incompatible metaphysical claims. This is precisely why I think the common good would be advanced by bringing the Constitution back into a position of neutrality on abortion. On gay marriage, things are trickier, which means I'll deal with it in a separate blog post down the road.)
As for Noah's point about needing metaphysical appeals in order to "compel" the losing side in a social conflict to "abide by the verdict," I'm afraid I need to hear more details. But I wonder: Why isn't it enough for the losing side to accept that losing is one possible outcome of playing by the rules of liberal politics -- rules that benefit the losers as well as the winners in (other) innumerable ways? And anyway, is it really true that the losers in such a conflict would be more likely to abide by the verdict if the presiding judge based the verdict on metaphysical appeals? What if the losers don't share those metaphysical commitments? If not, wouldn't the appeal to metaphysics just make things worse?
This is ridiculously abstract, I know, but until Noah provides an example, that's all we have.
4 comments
...This is ridiculously abstract...
Good point.
- basman
February 16, 2009 at 9:26am
I enjoyed reading this post but I'm not sure I agree with or even understand your point about gay marriage and abortion. I know that a lot of the opposition to gay marriage points to parts of scripture to justify itself, but that doesn't mean that's where the problem originates. Some people find homosexuality offensive in the same way they find, for instance, public nudity, and don't want to legally condone anything about it. I don't see how resolving this is necessarily more about metaphysics than a community deciding how it wants to treat streaking or loud music or graffiti etc.
I'm not very confident about that gay marriage position because I haven't fully thought it through, but on abortion I am confident. Metaphysical considerations are red herring- if you believe in souls, then you're arguing with people about when the odds of a soul having entered the fetus are so high that destroying it needs great justification. If you don't believe in them, then you're arguing about when it becomes too human-like to destroy. Babies don't start really mentally resembling people in significant ways until they're like 4 years old, and because everyone opposes post-natal abortion we're all arguing in a murky, tricky grey area. Appealing to different metaphysics can be useful for making it look black and white but IMO obscures the heart of the debate.
- Simon Greenwood
February 16, 2009 at 9:52am
I think Damon is correct, broadly speaking, in arguing that liberalism must prescind from metaphysical claims, at least liberalism as it has evolved here in the U.S. over the past several decades. I'd also agree that the avoidance of arguing over "ultimacies" (one way to define metaphysics is, borrowing from Aristotle, the science of first principles) is an important key to American political stability and our maintenance of two centuries and counting of elective government. Of course there was that unfortunate interruption back in 1861...
Though a blog may not be the best forum for discussing such issues, I'll give it a go.
Three points to be made by way of qualifying the cheerful portrayal in the previous paragraph:
1. Some of the most profound and bitterly contested issues facing the U.S. today inevitably trail off into just such questions of ultimacy, i.e. beginning- and end-of-life issues, and for that matter a fair amount in between. We find it exceedingly difficult to discuss them without being forced to ask what IS a human being, and what, finally, is the basis of the "rights" that we so loudly assert? The Civil War was in part the consequence of our inability to resolve that question politically with regard to the fully human status of African-American slaves. Anti-abortion absolutists sometimes claim that they are the true heirs of the abolitionists, and there is a disturbing superficial plausibility to the comparison.
3. One of the more compelling secular arguments on the pro-life side points to the way that the circle of humanity, the enfranchisement of what it means to be a human being and a member of the community, has tended to expand steadily in liberal regimes -- up until Roe v. Wade, which representing a rolling back of that expansive momentum. The arguments that depersonalized the unborn apply with disturbing ease to the severely handicapped and retarded.
3. A state that eschews metaphysical commitments of some kind has greater difficulty, I think, in explaining to its citizens why they should fight and die for it. Questions of national purpose don't seem answered satisfactorily if we frame them in purely materialistic terms, e.g., an ever higher standard of living, maximization of freedom and autonomy as ends in themselves, etc. Faced with an existential threat, states tend to get metaphysical in a hurry. Some sort of civil religion seems a perpetual instrument of statecraft, even if framed in innocuous terms in stabile and non-threatening times. I sensed this keenly after 9/11 when someone like Tom Friedman struggled to express just what it was that represented the spiritual goods that we were compelled to defend against the threat of politicized Islamic radicalism -- his own type of go-getter globalized economism is not well-suited to such a discussion. I know that Christopher Hitchens thinks the purely political goods of liberal democracy are sufficient to warrant fighting for when they are under fundamental attack. I believe he is right (though I disagree that Iraq was the place to wage such a fight). But that's a harder sell to people when the shooting and the dying begin, especially when it's one's own children that are dying.
- mjhollerich
February 16, 2009 at 4:57pm
mj: I think it's not too hard to ask people to fight for freedom, justice, and democracy, broadly understood, without also asking them to fight under a religious or some other metaphysical banner. For certain types of "patriots," in fact, it's not even hard to ask people to fight for something as trivial as a flag or as nominally godless as the U.S. Constitution. There's sufficiently broad agreement on the importance, goodness, and profound nature of those things -- well, maybe not the flag -- even without tedious adventures into realms where, literally, nobody knows what they're talking about. Our state does in fact eschew metaphysical commitments. (It's in the First Amendment.) And, even to the extent it doesn't, they're pretty minimal commitments. In the end, it makes little difference whether you regard our rights as "God-given," "natural," or merely "self-evident" -- these are matters of vapid speculation. What's more, those distinctions won't settle the abortion debate (to the extent it isn't already more-or-less settled), or anything similar.
- jhildner
February 16, 2009 at 5:50pm