A re-assessment of conservatism is an inevitable topic of discussion, and certainly a worthy task. But I confess the topic wearies me – not only because I’m old enough to have seen a number of earlier iterations, but more, I think, because I’m less and less convinced the most audible voices (that excludes present company, of course) are circling even within shooting distance of the heart of the matter.
Now I suppose that arrogant statement obliges me to attempt to say something about the heart of the matter. The ever-trenchant Professor Lawler is of course right on the mark in pointing to the priority of virtue to liberty (while astutely bringing liberty back in through the back door in the context of Christian personalism). In Mr. Berkowitz’s statement, a primary interest in liberty is held to be sufficient to elicit the indispensible virtue of moderation, and thus “the political conditions hospitable to traditional morality, religious faith, and the communities that nourish them.” Would that it were so… but that time and those conditions, I fear, have passed, or are passing before our eyes.
The defect of PB’s argument becomes clear for me in his barely disguised defeatism regarding the institution of marriage. I confess this is a deal-breaker for me. I understand perfectly well that the demand for moral “purity” in politics can be ill-advised and self-defeating, and that in a “pluralistic” society (as so many are so fond of saying) we must learn to hold our religious convictions at arms length when thinking politically, and this for the very purpose of preserving as hospitable an environment as possible for the practice and even the sharing of those convictions. Politics indeed is all about “weaving together rival interests and competing goods.” I believe, with Aristotle, that the challenge of this weaving is not only an unavoidable necessity but is in fact profoundly humanizing, for it requires statesman and thoughtful citizen alike to think through their understanding of the good in relation to competing understandings and interests; it thus enlarges the mind and soul.
But the weaving of pluralistic politics does not take place in some empty or neutral moral or metaphysical space. As we weave (or are woven into) some immediate political modus operandi, we are re-weaving the constitutional understandings and practices within which political negotiations take place. And there is still a third, trans-constitutional order of weaving that is taking place, and of which we are only rarely required to be aware. By this I mean the order in which a fundamental understanding of our humanity is at work and in question.
This, I suppose, is why I am weary: because I believe there is now no responsible way to avoid the task of engaging this fundamental question as a question with very real and immediate political stakes. (This is not at all to say that I would simply recommend engaging it directly and routinely in the political or ideological arena.) The Founders (and yes, the re-Founder) of our constitutional order drew more or less implicitly upon an understanding of humanity (not simple and uniform, but still recognizable in its unity) that had religious and philosophical roots going back millennia. This understanding contained many fault-lines and alternative interpretations, but now its unity is visible against the contrast with a radically new assertion: that there is no meaning or limits to human existence except as asserted or created by each individual human being, for his or her own pleasure or “self-expression.” This assertion was of course not invented this year, but the task of “conservatism” (if the name indeed still applies) is transformed by the recently achieved (if still mostly implicit) political prominence of this claim.
Is not the new political prominence of this assertion manifest in the really quite sudden mainstream respectability of the movement for the complete removal of all social and legal privileges enjoyed by marriage? PB, one has to say, is completely supine before this movement, and the “trend lines” it suggests. He aligns himself with conservatives insofar as he urges keeping the question of same-sex marriage (so-called, I must say) “out of the federal courts and subject to … each state’s democratic process,” but he takes it as given that this process will be driven, finally, by an irresistible trend in favor of the ethic of liberationism. He has already accepted that radical re-weaving beyond the constitutional weaving.
I haven’t, I can’t, I won’t accept this. (Look, I’m overcoming my weariness!) Does this make me a “purist” beyond the pale of today’s “reasonable pluralism”? So be it, if that is what the times demand. Constitutionalism now requires an intellectual and spiritual responsibility that reaches beyond the immediate management of “rival interests and competing goods.” The meaning of “good” is at stake, whether we like it or not.
To be continued, with your help.
