Designer Babies (And a Comment on Secession)

Let me try to make the connection implied in the above title.

First off, I’m trying to mainstrem the postmodern and conservative view of designing babies at BIG THINK .

And here’s more , in response to an irate transhumanist.

And all this talk on secession—and the passions being aroused—is getting our minds off the big issues today. I don’t think we postmodern conservatives buy into the Lincoln was a tyrant who struck a mortal blow against liberty in America view favored by some libertarians.

Alexander Stephens, remember, called Jefferson Davis a tyrant for trying to do what was required to win the war for his “country” (yes, Davis, for all his flaws, called the Confederacy a country—only countries fight wars and ask for recognition from other countries), and Stephens even claimed that the South lost the war because of Davis’ despotic offenses against the rights, in particular, of the sovereign state of Georgia. That was pretty nuts—one reason among many the South lost the war was pathological parnoia about the rights of sovereign states at the expense of effective military resistance.

My postmodern objection to getting all hot and bothered about that war these days is that it feeds into what is, to my mind, the inadequate view that even Lincoln’s understanding of the moral crisis that fueled the war is enough to guide us in facing the threats to freedom and dignity these days. That’s not to say, of course, that I didn’t think Lincoln was right on slavery and on much of the true dignity of the workingman (and woman).

The best that can be said for the South’s case (and it’s not that good) is that the Framers’ attempt to divide sovereignty was bound to create a kind of partisanship that would eventually produce a civil war (see Hobbes). The impartial Tocqueville reminds us that our Framers did intend an incomplete national government and not some league of nations. But he also noticed that loyalty was flowing in the direction of the states, and he was fairly pessimistic about the future of the Union. It turns out the Union had more of a future than he speculated, but the war could have gone either way. Another thing we learn from Tocqueville is the despair of the South in being stuck with the monstrosity of race-based slavery and the nature-denying, spiritual despotism of growing ferocity it required of the masters. We might want to say the South wanted a war it would lose as the only way out. It really was a way out.

Secession, the unjustly neglected Orestes Brownson reminds us, is at the expense of the indispensable political principle of loyalty. I can keep writing about the perils of understanding citizenship too contractually, but that would take me down the often traveled (if only by me) how to keep Locke-in-the-Locke-box road.

Still, it’s imposible not to admire Bob’s good natured tenacity on behalf of what he really believes to be a gentleman’s cause.