I’m a Christian intellectual. (I hope that’s true, on both counts). I have a PhD in theology. That’s what I know best. I participate in the Christian form of life, or at least I try to. It provides me with my most basic intellectual tools. This Christian way of thinking is not inaccessible to non-Christian or secular people, but it can sometimes be hard for them to think it worth their while. That’s understandable. We all have to do triage.
Secular progressives also have theology of sorts, as well as a form of life. A friend of mine teaches at Andover and he has described it to me, which isn’t necessary since I was raised and educated at the point where progressivism overlapped with liberal religion. (Ah, for that earlier time when religious was not so nearly a synonym for conservative.) It’s in many ways a highly effective and appealing moral culture that I’m sometimes grateful for, and when I’m not I remind myself that there are aspects of traditional religious culture that I regret as well.
Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, The Righteous Mind, argues that secular progressives suffer from a kind of blindness. They don’t seem to “taste” the full range of moral concerns, if you’ll permit the shift in metaphors from eyes to mouth. I wrote about it in the Public Square last year (“Our One-Eyed Friends”)
There’s another kind of blindness as well. Liberals can’t see themselves as a culture. A friend of mine once quipped, “Liberalism is the story for people who don’t think they need a story.” This is a weakness. It makes liberal progressives genuinely baffled when they met seemingly intelligent, well-intentioned people who look like them but aren’t liberals, which is pretty much the rest of the world.
How do I put it? Secular liberalism is a universal vision that liberals imagine to be the natural condition of man. This makes liberals sociologically unaware. They think their views are “natural.” This is a very strange view given the history of culture.
Christianity is a universal vision that Christians know to be a supernatural possibility that has to be consciously and freely affirmed–and might not be! This makes Christians more sociologically self-aware, by which I mean that we know ourselves to be a distinctive way of being human that can’t be taken for granted.
Judaism is a universal vision that Jews know to be the consummating destiny of all humanity whether or not anybody else knows or affirms it to be so–and in fact the expectation is that they won’t. This makee religious Jews very sociologically self-aware.
It’s the sociological lack of awareness—the liberal blindness—that accounts for the paradox of liberal intolerance, at least to some degree. If you can’t see your identity as in some sense contingent, then you’ll have a hard time restraining the imperial necessity of your convictions.
January 28th, 2013 | 1:20 pm
What an excellent critique Reno offers of the dominant paradigm. How very liberal of him!
Ironic, no? To critique the liberal world-view from the standpoint of being a Catholic – a word that means “universal”? To critique liberals for regarding their views as “natural” – when viewed from the standpoint of “Natural Law”?
Of course, the labels “Catholic” and “Natural Law” emerged in a bygone era in Europe when the Church was the dominant paradigm. In the US Catholics have pretty much always understood their status as minorities, and their perspective as (Dare I say it?) parochial? (I dared!)
But if you come to understand that ALL identities are contingent, what then? If I know the Truth, and I’m in power, why should I restrain the imperial necessity of convictions?
I can think of reasons. But those reasons are grounded in – liberalism.
January 28th, 2013 | 1:51 pm
The last paragraph of this piece bring to mind “After Virtue”, where MacIntyre argues that God’s omniscience precludes any act of decisionmaking, since, and so social scientists, in their argument for their own special knowledge of of “scientific” predictive power that will eliminate uncertainty, are in essence playing God. (MacIntyre says it much better than that).
January 28th, 2013 | 3:56 pm
You raise an interesting point about liberal blindness, but there’s an aspect of Haidt’s work that doesn’t get enough attention, in my opinion — probably because it’s a hard message.
Haidt says liberals and conservatives vary on how much weight they put on six moral foundations — Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation.
That makes sense. It’s reasonable to say that not all these characteristics should get the same weight in our moral analysis. So if that was as far as it went, that would be fine.
But that’s not as far as it goes. Haidt has also found that (in general — speaking of populations and not of individuals) while conservatives are capable of seeing issues from a liberal point of view, liberals are not even capable of seeing issues from a conservative point of view.
It’s not only that liberals don’t value certain standards, they can’t even understand them.
I don’t think people pay enough attention to that aspect of his work, and I don’t see how Haidt can escape the conclusion that liberals are morally underdeveloped.
January 28th, 2013 | 3:58 pm
I can think of reasons. But those reasons are grounded in – liberalism.
The question is, can you imagine the possibility of reasons which are not grounded in liberalism.
January 28th, 2013 | 4:32 pm
This reminds me of Sartre’s annoyed reaction to the suggestion that his philosophy belonged to an identifiable school known as “Existentialism,” rather than being sui generis. As Heidegger wrote:
January 28th, 2013 | 5:39 pm
In a majority African American town (DC) one is keenly aware of the painful legacy of slavery in America. Secular progressives are completely aligned with this awareness – they are even at the forefront of it. I agree with Prof. Reno that secular progressives have some big blind spots, as they assume they are on the right side of history at all times. I am constantly amazed at their lack of understanding about the cruelty of abortion and the painful legacy of the loss of over 50 million children over 40 years. Just as traditional religious leaders led on abolition and civil rights, one can hope secular progressives (who don’t look very progressive) will catch up some day on the culture of death.
January 28th, 2013 | 9:34 pm
Reminds me of the New York Times reporter, deciding how to ID people quoted in stories. There are two possible IDs: “conservative” and “expert.”
January 29th, 2013 | 7:43 am
Solipsism is the soul of the American liberal. It results in many near-pathological behaviors, besides the blindness the author points to. It also accounts for the habit of assuming responsibility for the bad behavior of others, e.g. terrorists, for whom the progressivist instinct is to ask the question, “What did we do to make them behave that way?” (Which also explains their routine demonization of Israel, support of the Jewish State being, in their eyes, America’s Original Sin.). It leaves them in the constant anxious search for an imagined moral high ground, hence their resentment toward anyone who would undermine it by pointing out inconsistencies. It is, in the end, idolatry, which is always at base the worship of the self, the chief doctrine of which is the progressivist’s beloved “primacy of conscience”.
January 29th, 2013 | 10:08 am
Crowhill –
That’s… more than a bit of an exaggeration. I think you’ve more into it than what he wrote.
January 29th, 2013 | 10:35 am
I don’t really think it is helpful to divide the country into Liberals and Conservatives and then demean and demonize whichever group you don’t belong to. If Liberals have their blind spots, then so do Conservatives. It seems to me that Catholic Social Teaching is neither Liberal nor Conservative (or perhaps both Liberal and Conservative). I have a favorite passage from the Declaration on Procured Abortion that I quote frequently:
How many Conservatives, particularly Conservative politicians, would embrace this approach?
January 29th, 2013 | 10:37 am
Are liberals “in the constant anxious search for an imagined moral high ground”?
Learned Hand:
Herbert Muschamp:
Reinhold Niebuhr:
Blaise Pascal:
Perhaps so.
January 29th, 2013 | 11:54 am
@nobody.really: Seems like this blindness is a function of power. The 2 examples of sight Rusty points out are Christianity and Judaism. One is on the decline while the other has always been on the verge of destruction. Will liberalism’s success lead to it’s sight?
January 29th, 2013 | 1:10 pm
I suspect the powerful always have the privilege of being blind to certain things. A dominant paradigm —
.
Yup, liberalism is a dominant paradigm. Yup, it has been criticized for blindness – as in the quote above, offered by Catharine A. MacKinnon, speaking specifically about male domination of society.
Christianity has also been a dominant paradigm in the US. Since colonial times the majority of colonists/citizens have professed it (although recently the share of people professing mainline Protestantism has fallen below 50%).
Where liberalism and Christianity collide, somebody’s preferred view loses. Can we criminalize sodomy? The Supreme Court says yes – then no. People on each side of this issue experienced a loss – and presumably gained some new insight in the process. Neither side could remain entirely blind to the concerns of the other.
January 29th, 2013 | 2:57 pm
Ray,
I think perhaps you haven’t read or listened to enough of what Haidt actually says.
Do a google search on “jonathan haidt liberals don’t understand conservatives” and you’ll get plenty of sources supporting precisely what I said above.
January 29th, 2013 | 7:35 pm
The title of Jonathan Haidt’s book is The Righteous Mind, but I think it is important to note that the subtitle is Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. It’s not What Divides the Good People (Conservatives) from the Bad People (Liberals).
William Saletan’s review in The New York Times is very evenhanded. Regarding the point under discussion, Saletan says:
January 29th, 2013 | 9:20 pm
It seems my thoughts on Mr. Reno’s latest piece have well overrun the 300 word limit.
January 30th, 2013 | 12:36 pm
I like this view; it seems to reflect the views of (then) Cardinal Ratzinger that the Catholic Church might become smaller but purer. It’s a view that says, “We’re a minority and we’re comfortable with that. We offer you membership as an option – not an expectation.”
Yet I sense this view of Christianity is a curiously cold, ahistorical one. Throughout much of US history it has been assumed that a person was Protestant unless he emphasized otherwise. In various (ethnic) neighborhoods it’s assumed that people all embrace a similar religion. Certainly this is true within families. In short, the idea that I would operate on the default assumption that a person professes no religion “unless he has consciously and freely affirmed it” is false – or at least, of very recent vintage. As a sociological matter, most of us are born into a religion; we must exercise an act of will to change that default designation.
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