Does anyone out there really believe in “metaphysical neutrality” in the political realm, or, for that matter, in a purely “political” liberalism (later Rawls) that would be neutral with respect to understandings of the meaning of life, or of “the whole”? I can’t believe Damon Linker does (see his quite anodyne, non-committal suggestion linked by Mr. Poulos below - “The Quest for Metaphysical Neutrality”). Can we be rid of this non-starter of an argument once and for all? Is politics not the realm of collective human choice and action? Does not every action aim at some end(s)? Now, can we make sense of any proximate end without taking into account, as best we can, the larger circumstances and interests of the individuals and community whose ends are in question? Hobbes of course suggests we rigorously exclude the question of purpose and just agree that we all want to avoid violent death. But such an agreement obviously involves, not neutrality with respect to ends held by some to be higher than mere life, but a clear and deliberate depreciation of such ends. The same structure of argument repeats itself time and time again in liberal thought, from Locke through Mill to Rawls: what is presented as a non-partisan or “metaphysically neutral” privatization of ends in fact proves to be a privileging of certain ends – certain liberal or liberationist ends – over others.
A perfect little example of the inevitable collapse of the strategy of neutrality is provided (if I may go back a few weeks - actually quite a short lag time for me) in a blog post against Proposition 8 by Andrew Sullivan. Our only hope in a modern, secular, pluralistic society, he argues, is “to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature.” The conflict over issues such as same-sex marriage can be set aside, Sullivan thinks, if only we accept that we live in a “disenchanted polis,” a political community with no substantive moral content. Our public space, he assures us, can be simply legal and procedural, and thus morally neutral.
However, we have only to raise the question “why?” in order to begin to see through this (no doubt completely sincere) protestation of neutrality. Why would such a neutral society be good — perhaps only because it manages to keep the peace among morally incompatible groups? But will this “peace” not be constituted by one or another set of public priorities, and thus one or another dominant vision of a good human life? Mr. Sullivan does not keep us waiting long for a peek at his answer to such a question. Only a few lines after celebrating the new, purely modern, procedural, and disenchanted polis, he yields to a lyrical impulse in expressing his underlying moral vision: “We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment.” Clearly Sullivan’s privatized and neutral public sphere is grounded in a moral ontology that he is comfortable proclaiming as publicly authoritative, an ontology that locates ultimate meaning in the individual creation of meaning, and in the empowerment of the “self” to express its meanings without bounds.
Mr. Sullivan sees no contradiction between his posture of neutrality and his confession of faith in the ultimacy of self-expression, and we would not expect him to. He holds his fundamental moral beliefs so dogmatically that he does not even see that they are anything but neutral.
But the cry immediately arises: we cannot forsake the ideal of neutrality, for then we are left in a war of all against all with no rational standard to which to appeal, abandoned to a cacophony of fanaticisms that can only portend unfettered violence. But, please: this bête noire is conjured precisely to steer us back to some spurious neutrality. (Although we must concede to the founders of liberalism that the wars of religion gave good reason to despair of substantive reasoning.) Liberals are compelled to raise this bogey in order to drive us back to the dream of “neutrality”; with them, it’s always either Rawls or Carl Schmitt, either relativism and utter privatization, or absolutism and the Taliban.
But, if not neutrality, the specious neutralizers ask, then alternative theory is there, what general theory of political justification will guide us? Now try this on for size: there is no such theory. The essential mistake is to demand an a priori general theory of what counts as reasonable in the first place. This is one way of stating the postmodernism of our conservatism: we are not anti-foundationalist in the hypermodern sense (a disguised, radicalized neutrality), but rather postmodern in the authentically political sense: we claim no neutral, a priori “foundation,” but advance our substantive reasons in the political forum to be weighed according to their worth. Bring your reasons, we say, as they address both the political facts on the ground and your best understanding of connections with larger purposes (no a priori exclusion of religious insights, of course, or of arguments from inherited experience), and we’ll bring ours. And then we’ll talk, and we’ll mobilize interests and claims. That’s why they call it politics. And it’s never “neutral.”
