Dogma Aversion Syndrome

On the one hand, the higher levels of religiosity present in America (compared to Europe) are often attributed to the lack of an established state-sponsored church in the US. Religions compete in an open marketplace for followers and this competition improves the products and services available, or so the capitalist thinking goes.

However, as with my recent post on economic dynamism driving us towards cultural individualism, there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work here. If religions are competing for *customers* then the power of the moral injunctions (thou shall nots) religions are supposed to be instilling in believers runs counter to the customer-is-always-right ethos that pervades all other kinds of *consumer* interaction we participate in.

Burger King doesn't tell me what to do, they let me have it my way. It's hard to see the Pope embracing quite the same attitude on things. But maybe he just needs to hire some better PR staff.

From USA Today:

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best.

This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates "winners" and "losers" in America's freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

[snip]

What strikes me most about my students' religions, however, is how similar they are. Almost invariably, they mix fun with faith. (Facebookismianity anyone?) But they do not mix faith with dogma. My students are careful — exceedingly careful — not to tell one another what to believe, or even what to do. Above all, they want to be tolerant and non-judgmental.

[snip]

During the 1930s, the neoorthodox theologian H. Richard Niebuhr skewered liberal Protestants for preaching "a God without wrath (who) brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

But my students' "dogma aversion" (as one put it) goes liberal Protestantism one further. These young people aren't just allergic to dogma. They are allergic to divinity and even heaven. In the religions of their imagining, God is an afterthought at best. And the afterlife is, as one of my students told me, "on the back burner."

[snip]

In their final exam this past semester, I asked my students to reflect on whether young Americans are the canaries in the mines of more traditional religions. Study after study has shown that American college students are fleeing from organized religion to mix-and-match spirituality.

So what will happen to what one of my students referred to as the "religions of discipline" when this millennial generation (born in the late 1970s through the 1990s) grows up? What will today's youth do with religions whose ethical injunctions arrive as strict commandments rather than friendly suggestions? Will they be able to abide religions that divide the human family into the saved and the damned, that present as absolute truth what they suspect is mere speculation?

My students' projects suggest that traditional religions are in trouble.

[snip]

One of my students, Carrie-Anne Solana, told me that the religions her colleagues presented in class amounted to nothing more than "organized atheism." "They took normal human impulses," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex and socializing, she said, "and justified them under the title of religion while not offering any form of explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die."

I am not saying this is a good thing. Clearly any faith so thoroughly vacated of its moral strictures isn't much of one. But it seems that the cultivation of moral virtue needs to be presented as having more value to young people in the here and now. Adhering to doctrine needs to lead to a *good life* in this life.

Now *good* can be defined in many different ways, not merely as simple hedonistic happiness. But if all the benefit to following dogma accrues only in the after-life, well that's a recipe for declining market share.

And I'm not quite sure this type of thing is going to make up for that:

Secular Right vs. Jim Kalb

The blog Secular Right has the following mission statement:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

In a serve-and-volley mildly reminiscent of two recent GingerMan posts here and here, Jim Kalb takes his sword to the air-quotes of Human Flourishing in the above:

My own view, which my book goes into at length, is that by itself rational empiricism gives you desire and technique as (radically anti-conservative) guides to life. Satisfaction of desire doesn’t seem to constitute human flourishing. To get beyond it though you need a moral tradition that’s understood to connect to something that transcends desire and thus the empirical.

So far as I can tell, an adequate theory of such a thing is going to have to explain why life objectively has a purpose, and that’s going to involve attribution of purpose and intention to the world at large. In other words, the theory is going to be religious. And it’s going to say something definite, otherwise it will be useless. So it’s going to make specific religious and non-empirical (”supernatural”) claims. [em: original]

Razib Khan, a.k.a. "David Hume," responds here:

As for the idea that a transcendent reality is necessary, I will venture to offer that I have always found the models and theories posited by religious people about their gods less than awe inspiring. There certainly beauty and glory in this universe which is simply outside the purview of human animal comprehension; anyone who has grappled with the formalisms of Quantum Mechanics can claim that they seen the face of the incomprehensible & awesome abyss.

But I believe that its relation to a human political and social order are tenuous at best. Rather, the primary entity which transcends is the community and society, because I do believe a strong case can be made that individualistic hedonism which is the final form of classical liberalism offers diminishing returns precisely because of the nature of the human beast. We are a social animal, and individual happiness is contingent upon communal amity.

Note: These sorts of philosophical discussions are of course only relevant for a very small, if influential, minority. Most human animals operate in a world of custom and innate reflex, not analytic reflection.

The final note resonates, I think, with my prior post re: Scandinavia. Which is to say that even lacking a seamless philosophical consistency, so long as a society is providing an ethical framework within which human flourishing remains possible, to the extent we can measure it (i.e. life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness), then I think we have to conclude that the society is *working* successfully at some fundamental level.

People do not consult their philosophy texts in the course of their daily existence, and even if they do, we seem to be able to live quite comfortably in states of severe cognitive dissonance on many such topics through effective rationalization of our own behavior such that it aligns with our "beliefs."

In a surprising turn of events, the blog response by Khan has failed to change Jim Kalb's entire metaphysical view of the universe:

The authors at Secular Right apparently believe that their choice of godless conservatism is justified, and that they're avoiding errors made by John Rawls, radical Islamists, and Sarah Palin. For them to say their beliefs reflect their natural human desire to survive and stay on good terms with their fellows may be true, but it doesn't explain their grounds for saying they're right and others are wrong. The beliefs of those other people reflect such things as well. Also, it seems that whichever groups, arguments and goals actually win best represent the natural tendencies of man and the world. Is actual success then the standard for rationality, justification, the summum bonum and all the rest of it?

In fact, of course, the Secular Right slogan is "Reality & Reason" and not "Hail Victory." It doesn't do though for them to claim their views are better because in addition to following natural human tendencies they are in accord with reality and reason. Is the claim of truth and rational superiority just an expression of inborn drives and social conditioning, or does it have to do with reality and reason in a sense that transcends naturalistic behavioral explanations and makes their views truly the more worthy choice?

Whole lotta smiting going on

Rod Dreher, in a post that responds to Andrew Sullivan, makes a statement that I am still having trouble getting my mind around:

Andrew brings up an important point, one that serves to highlight a critical difference between the two basic strains of American conservatism -- libertarian, and traditionalist.

Libertarianism is anti-statist liberalism. It is also the dominant school of American conservatism.

[snip]


For the libertarian, human happiness is the highest goal, and that happiness is something that the individual is free, within broad limits, to decide for himself.

Traditionalism is a harder sell, obviously, as any philosophy that imposes limits on human choice and liberty will be in America. Its telos is not happiness, but virtue. In fact, the traditionalist does not recognize human happiness apart from virtue. A bad man who is content with himself cannot truly be said to be happy, in this view.

If it's a matter of agreeing with Andrew that the Sixties (which is to say, the social revolution that broke open in the Sixties, but which has been ongoing since then) made possible a greater increase in personal satisfaction, and even legitimate happiness, then I do agree with him.

Certainly there can be no greater example of the gains made in virtue via the repudiation of immoral and unjust legal barriers to full black citizenship. Similarly, women are treated more fairly now, and though some of you will doubt me, I agree that the world is a better place for gay folks than it once was. It would be foolish to view the Sixties as nothing but darkness, in the same way that it's hard to deny that many good things came out of the Enlightenment.

The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad.

I answer in the negative. [em: mine]

In the above, Dreher recognizes broadly (and embraces) the benefit of the Sixties for blacks, women and gays (i.e. that is to say approx. 60+% of the US population), but concludes that on balance the total impact was negative.

Now, it would be unfair to Rod (having read him regularly) to say that this indicates that he would willingly trade those gains to restore the benefits he sees as lost. It would more likely be that he would have preferred to find a manner to achieve most of the same benefits without the associated costs that he finds objectionable. But still, even when taken at that charitable level, this is an absolutely fantastical statement from my point of view. The losses have outweighed the gains?!?!

He doesn't elucidate what exactly he judges these losses to be, but from my reading of him over time, I would conclude that they typically fall into 3 categories:

1) Decline in religiosity - resulting in unspecified, but extremely perilous, moral decay with a nihilistic emphasis on personal fulfillment
2) Family breakdown / divorce - resulting in more single-parent homes and social problems emanating from same
3) Sexual freedom / abortion - related to item #2 and the decline in traditional marriage

Now, if I were Rod, and I saw the total volume of abortions performed since Roe vs. Wade as effectively a national holocaust, then maybe this would make some sense. After all, one cannot compare the increase in freedom for many individuals to the actual loss of innocent lives for others and judge the tradeoff as worthwhile.

But, I don't get any sense that the abortion question is the singular fulcrum upon which this determination pivots. In other words, I doubt he would answer the question alternately even if Roe v. Wade had never come to pass, but all other societal changes remained the same.

So, what to make of this? When I read traditionalists such as Dreher, there is an almost unremitting sense of impending doom in their writing (he actually has a blog post category tag called "decline and fall"). But, it is never entirely clear from whence the final cataclysm is going to erupt. However, what we do absolutely know, for sure and with certainty, is that there is a Judgement Day on the very near horizon where the world gets its collective comeuppance for having strayed from the path.

Then there's this from the New York Times:

Phil Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia, talking to hundreds of Danes and Swedes about religion. It wasn’t easy.

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

Well documented though they may be, these two sets of facts run up against the assumption of many Americans that a society where religion is minimal would be, in Mr. Zuckerman’s words, “rampant with immorality, full of evil and teeming with depravity.”

Which is why he insists at some length that what he and his wife and children experienced was quite the opposite: “a society — a markedly irreligious society — that was, above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.”

[snip]


At one point, he queries Jens, a 68-year-old nonbeliever, about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture. Jens replies: “We are Lutherans in our souls — I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah. It’s an old, good, moral thought.”

To be clear, I myself am not anti-religious. For the most part, I was raised outside of a religious context, and so I don't really feel particularly strongly one way or the other about it. When pressed about the nature of the Almighty on one occassion, I replied, "What can I tell you? I don't have well-formed opinions on the matter."

Religious belief and community obviously has great meaning for an enormous number of people and for that I am thankful on their behalf. However, what I can never fully appreciate is the absolute certainty with which some (especially conservative religionists) claim that an unreligious environment leads, without possible exception, to complete and utter societal breakdown and chaos.

Which is just to say that it seems that there is demonstrable evidence that there are still ethics even without specific doctrinal religious belief. Even people who are full blown atheists do not intentionally raise their children to be sociopaths.

In other words, what exactly is the problem with Scandinavia? And, why isn't there more smiting in progress there anyway?

Jim Kalb replies...

Who knew? I thought this was a closed conversation just between me and the other voices in my head :)

In any case, Jim Kalb has responded (graciously) to my post re: his talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism.

[Gingerman concludes] that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.

I don't think that's quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they're different but they can't get on without each other. You won't be able to make use of reason unless you take a lot on faith, while a belief that you can't understand in an orderly way isn't much of a belief.

[snip]

And then there's the old subjectivism issue: things and actions can be objectively good or bad, and that's not observable or measurable. If they couldn't then "irrational," which is an evaluative term, would be an empty term of abuse.

[snip]

As to God, it seems to me we can't make sense of our situation without Him. The world must be reasonable for us to know it rationally, and it must have an intrinsic connection to purpose for some purposes to be intrinsically good and others bad. How do we talk about such features of the world without religious categories?

Now, in my defense, I don't think I was quite so black-and-white on the point of declaring that Kalb sides with Faith and against Reason, as from my original post here:

[Kalb] doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.

Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.

In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).

There is some sloppy slippage of the term "reason" in my words above. And, it is no doubt true that when excerpting someone's words it is difficult to do so without doing some damage to the meaning when re-contextualizing it. But, given that Mr. Kalb has an entire book on the subject, I'm sure his arguments will hold up admirably :)

In any event, to re-visit my original post, the reason (if I may be so bold to use the word here) that I found Kalb's argument intriguing was on 2 points:

1) Kalb rejects (or at least deems as insufficient) the common conservative Burkean logic that traditions should be given the benefit of the doubt, since we humans have little capacity to foresee unpredicted consequences of sweeping social changes. From Kalb:

Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.

Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.

It was in the sense that Kalb sees the necessity of changing the terms of the debate (or at least pushing open their boundaries) in a manner I hadn't encountered before that intrigued me. I read him as arguing that there needs to be more of an affirmative stance in favor of holding certain traditions, and that it is insufficient (in practical terms) to rely solely on a "first do no harm" dictate of Burkean vintage in order to hold the line.

My own belief, however, is that modern political philosophy per se is not the principle driver of the "unsettling" which upends Burkean defenses of tradition, but rather economic dynamism. This is one of the internal fissures of the US Republican variant of conservatism, which is that the GOP melds the open-borders, free-trade interests of economic conservatives with the traditional social interests of cultural conservatives. And, in the long run, there is an inherent conflict with the two.

Now, obviously, there is a feedback loop between economics and culture. We fashion the tools that fashion ourselves, to paraphrase McLuhan. But, economic change tills the soil from which social and political change grows.

As an example, I went to visit my in-laws for X-mas holidays in Washington DC one year. As part of the trip, we went to a museum on the Washington Mall which, at the time, was featuring a retrospective on American life of 100 years ago. Wooden wheelbarrows, hand-wrapped straw brooms, obscure farm implements, and positively terrifying medical instruments abounded.

All of these items were in common usage at the time of the birth of my grandmother (who lived to 92). She was born into an agrarian society, lived through an industrial one, and died only recently, as we enter a new age that still seems to be finding its legs (i.e. information, bio-genetic, other...??).

The economic ground underneath modern life changes with such rapidity that it implicitly casts the wisdom of the ages into doubt. In pre-modern societies, the elders literally were the repositories of the Truth, accumulated in their own life experiences, as to how one should live successfully (read: they knew how to stay alive). And, the evident practical value of this wisdom gave them and the traditions of the society they governed a moral authority.

For example, here's Dreher quoting Patrick Deneen:

It has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture.

Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance.

My grandmother could do most of the things on this list. And by many measures, our time would regard her as uneducated or look upon her as "simple" in spite of the variety and the complexity of things she knew how to do. But if the lights went out tomorrow, she would have been the smartest person we know; she (and not our college professors) would have seen us through. She's gone now, and much of that knowledge has been laid to rest with her because, by the time of my generation, we didn't need to know those things anymore.

Now, surely the utilitarian argument alone for tradition only carries so much weight, but still, when 8-year-olds are teaching their own grandparents how to program the VCR, the natural deference to elders, and their traditions more broadly, inevitably gets more critical interrogation.

Additionally, economic progress itself allows for the "leisure activity" of exploring non-traditional social arrangements and mores. It is only a very rich society that can afford the 1960's in the sense of being able to finance the freedom of many young people to hang out in college, smoke weed, and burn their draft cards and/or bras on alternate weekends. A few generations earlier, they all would have been farming and hoping for a harvest of sufficient size to live through the coming winter.

I haven't read enough of Kalb's work to comment, but it is a common conservative trope to blame all the ills of modern social life on the liberal cultural elite. By my lights, traditionalism has far more to fear from its bankers than its college professors.

2) More interestingly, though, is the defense of *irrational* traditionalism, which is to say that Kalb seeks a reasoned way of defending traditional loyalties and cultural norms against claims of irrationality that otherwise render such conservative sensibilities illegitimate within the current forms of accepted public discourse.

From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.

In other words, only by arguing forward, via reason, from objective first principles (i.e. God) can one reach defensible conclusions for such traditions. Thus, Kalb claims the future of conservatism will require faith to effectively justify itself.

The reason this claim interests me is due to the concept of what constitutes *irrational* belief. This is to say that there is much that I may hold dear, my moral sense if you will, that I cannot justify in any purely rational sense. However, I also cannot justify it via reference to an omniscient God that establishes universal objective standards. Thus, taken from this standpoint, which belief system is actually *irrational* here?

Quite obviously, Kalb has spent much more time thinking on these points than I have. And, it probably goes without saying that I am not going to convert to Catholicism (Kalb's faith) any time real soon. But, Kalb's intellectual claim, if you will, deserves to be addressed.

Kalb extends his thoughts to his initial response here:

The identification of reason with a scientism that rejects tradition, faith and the ability to recognize what things are--which involves belief in essential natures--as irrational, and therefore oppressive. As I note in the last entry, the result is that reason can no longer deal with the most basic and obvious features of our situation. When meaning becomes personal choice or assertion, and social thought is no longer able to deal with marriage and family, you know you've got a problem with how people are thinking about things.

But of course, don't take my word for it, read it all :)

Link bait for Alice. Indulge yourself, my dear.

My sense, though I may find out this assumption is unwarranted, is that most GingerMan readers do not click through to read the full-length articles that I may excerpt within my own blog. Thus, I often have a tendency to excerpt larger sub-sections of external posts in order to ensure that the full import of the author's meaning is clear.

However, I am pretty sure that the following article in the New York Times is going to prove irresistable to my dear wife:

Getting Catholics back into confession, in fact, was one of the motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

[snip]

“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.”

Who Let the Dogma Out?

This post is subject to my prior disclaimer about conservative/liberal terminology, which is to say that it speaks more to the divide from a political philosophy standpoint than a partisan Red/Blue one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's Rick Warren in a published Newsweek debate with well-publicized atheist Sam Harris:

WARREN:

I believe [The Bible] is inerrant in what it claims to be. The Bible does not claim to be a scientific book in many areas.

[snip]

I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction to it.

This seems to me as a fairly banal set of statements in the broader context of our modern political and cultural life. The intellectual move is to posit that reason tells us things that we can know and observe about the physical workings of our world, but that everything beyond this (morality, spirituality and other issues of a transcendent nature) is the purview of faith since truth claims in this domain cannot be readily determined via scientific inquiry.

Essentially, Warren depicts reason and faith are two different models of epistemology, but ones that are complementary rather than contradictory. Intellectually, it is a modern form of truce in the Scopes-monkey-trial wars for cultural supremacy.

However, in a very thought-provoking article from James Kalb (Reason and the Future of Conservatism), he clearly sees these two philosophical viewpoints as more naturally oppositional in nature.

He doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.

Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.

In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).

He starts by defining the current playing field:

“Reason” is the way we come to reliable conclusions about what is real, what is admirable, and what we should do. That is to say, reason is the way in which we come to conclusions about the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Modern thought likes conclusions that are clear, demonstrable, and to-the-point. So it is drawn toward scientific materialism, which tells us that everything worth thinking about can be understood based on simple concepts and clear demonstrations, and which is closely bound to experience and action.

It’s hard to bring principles into public discussion that critically-minded participants are not willing to accept, so scientific materialism now functions as our public orthodoxy. [em: mine]

In other words, in today's "polite society" the only arguments that are allowed to matter are ones that you can demonstrate through applied reason.

How does this impact our current socio-political environment?

Contemporary liberalism is the political perspective that develops the ethical implications of scientific materialism. So, correspondingly, it tells us that the point of politics and morality, like the point of rational action generally, is to get what we want.

[snip]

Thus, the standard for morality and politics must be maximum and equal preference satisfaction. Give everyone what he wants, as much and as equally as possible.

[snip]

Such reasoning has three important consequences for contemporary liberal politics.

First, experts and markets rule. They give clear and rational answers, through clear and rational procedures. In concept, expertise should trump markets, because it is more clearly rational, but in practice it is a bit of each and the balance shifts.

Second, nothing is sacred, except the ego and its desires. If the goal is getting what we want, then everything is a resource to be used to maximize satisfactions. Physical objects, social arrangements, moral understandings, even human nature and the human body have no essence that must be respected.

Third, informal, nonrationalized arrangements like historical community, particular culture, and the family, that mostly run themselves in their own way and cannot be supervised by neutral experts, cannot be allowed to affect social life.

They’re irrational and at odds with the system of universal equal freedom to which liberalism aspires.

And, so where does this leave us?

The short answer is that it doesn’t work in the long run. You can’t formalize things to that degree.

Human life runs mostly by implicit knowledge (otherwise known as habit and prejudice). Similarly, social organization depends on informal ties that are irrational from the modern point of view.

If loyalty is treated as a personal taste, or as a means to an end, which is what now counts as rational motivation, it’s not loyalty anymore. Political modernity takes time to transform inherited ways, but as the process approaches completion society becomes less and less functional.

[snip]

From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.

What conservatism needs, then, is a non-modern understanding of reason—of what makes sense. Otherwise conservatives will always be playing defense, with no clear idea what the game is about.

In other words, attempts to defend conservative cultural traditions (gay marriage anyone?) cannot succeed if one confines oneself to merely arguing on a pure coldly rational basis, since the tradition itself did not come into existence on purely rational terms. It is a sort of category error in a sense.

But, it was his final move that struck me as interesting and possibly provocative:

Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.

Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.

We need a more definite reference point. So where do we get a reference point that’s sufficiently independent of the status quo and enables us to orient our actions toward transcendent goods, truths and essences that we can’t completely grasp?

Religion is the obvious source. You can pretty much define religion as a scheme of orientation toward goods and truths we can neither do without nor understand completely. The acceptance of such a scheme is called faith. The future of any conservatism worth bothering about must therefore have something to do with religion.

In essence, can one argue for the value of something that cannot be reduced to a quantitative cost/benefit trade-off without resorting to the God trump card? Kalb says no, or at least not successfully in our current cultural context.

Not being a philosophy student myself, I am not necessarily armed to contest his claim. In other words, I believe myself to be an ethical person (or at least strive to be so), but I am also certain that I could not rationally defend a withering attack on the value of all of the moral and political sentiments that I hold solely through appeals to logic and science alone either.

Maybe I just choose to call my own dogma by a different name.

The pre-historic GingerMan emerges

One of the blogs I read regularly is Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con. As an Orthodox Christian and social conservative, Dreher & I have little in common philosophically, but this is why I find it interesting to read him. I get some insight into a mind that works very differently from my own.

Shortly before I started this blog, I posted a reader comment to Dreher's blog. It was the first comment I had ever made there, or on any blog anywhere. But, a short time later, the GingerMan was born.

Thus, my blog comment on Dreher's site stands as a kind of proto-GingerMan climbing out of the primordial ooze of my thoughts and onto the dry land of the blogosphere, but still struggling to stand upright on its own (though I am not sure that Dreher would appreciate my choice of a Darwinian analogy here).

Here was Dreher's post in the midst of the initial unveiling of the credit crisis on Nov 20, 2008:

The WSJ's Daniel Henninger sees the economic crisis as fundamentally a crisis of faith and morals. [em: mine]

Excerpt:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions. [em: mine]

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.

Well, everybody said "Merry Christmas" back in 1929, and still. But I see his point.

Now, those who read Dreher regularly will readily see the appeal of this article to Rod's sensibilities. It refracts the economic crisis through a lens of moral degeneracy and reframes the narrative as one of retributive cosmic justice for our straying from the moral path we had formerly embraced. All that's missing is a few thunderbolts from the sky to bar-b-que Bernie Madoff in his shoes before he is imprisoned for massive financial fraud.

This struck me as utter bunk. And, it got my blood up. So, I posted the following comment (in part) as a reply:

This is just pathetic.

Let me tell you a fairy tale about the great Pastoral Fantasy of American past. Back then, people were nothing but wonderful, neighborly yeoman farmers. We were all Christian and lived by a strict moral code and an ethic of honor. Owing to this fact, there was no greed. It was just hand-shake agreements and square-dealing all-around. Then the Sixties came and the Garden of Eden was overrun with hippies and gays.

Ever hear of the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1600's?

[snip]

The reason the Greatest Generation may have been more “restrained” in their risk-taking appetite is not due to their superior sense of morality but because they had come through the searing experience of the Great Depression itself.

While you wave at this point in your comment at the bottom of the post, Rod, you are also way too quick to lay the blame for any societal ill at the feet of individual personal morality and lack of religious adherence. Otherwise, you wouldn't have posted this horses*** in the first place.

In a weird way, when I read such obvious self-congratulatory moralizing, I feel that I am more in touch with our collective "fallen nature" than conservatives such as Dreher. I don't think human nature has changed much over time, and the ethical failures of our current age (to the extent that this particular crisis itself even has a principally ethical root, which I dispute) are the same as they ever were. Whereas, Dreher and others long for some mythical Eden-like past where, owing to stricter religious observance across society, we escaped our capacity to sin and lived in a Latin Mass-centered moral paradise.

I don't believe such an ethical nirvana has ever existed (that's in Heaven, remember?). The critical moral issues that religions speak to were all present in the past and remain so today, irrespective of differences in formal modes of religious observance.

In short, being religious on the surface of one's life does not ensure an ethical core. You would think this would be a lesson someone such as Dreher would have internalized better than most. But, maybe it is one lesson that is only learned slowly and painfully.

As Dreher recently admitted:

Most Catholics, though, and most people in general, have a very difficult time seeing that their own side is capable of doing terrible things. Before the scandal, I was what you might call a political Catholic. Yes, I knew that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but in truth I believed that the real problem in the Church was the liberals. And I could give you a lengthy catalog of the bad they had done to and in the Church. Though I'm not a Catholic anymore, I don't think I was wrong about those things.

What I was wrong about, though, and very, very wrong indeed, was assuming that "our side" was therefore blameless. I really did think ideologically. Once, when I lived in Washington, someone brought up then-Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas for some reason. "Is he orthodox?" I asked. Yes, came the answer. And that settled it for me: Grahmann was one of the good guys. No more questions needed to be asked.

In fact, as I would find out once I got here, Grahmann was one of the bad guys in the Church. His public orthodoxy, while commendable, told us very little about the way he governed the Catholic Church in Dallas -- which, as it turned out, was terrible.

As I was beginning to report on the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I was warned by a reputable and deeply knowledgeable Catholic priest, a man who has been made to suffer for his orthodoxy, that I better not assume that just because a priest or layman claims to be orthodox, that they're trustworthy. Many villains hide beneath the cloak of orthodox Catholic piety, he told me. It's a feint they use to throw people off their scent. Trust me, he said, I've seen this a lot.

[snip]

What I found in actual experience is a mixed bag. I found liberal Catholic laymen and priests with whom I agree about little theologically, who were absolutely heroic in the scandal. I found conservatives with whom I agreed about most everything who were cowardly. What I found mostly, though, was that a man's true character could not be reliably discerned from his theological orientation. It was so much easier to be able to separate the sheep and the goats by ideology. But it's not real, and to give into that temptation is to set oneself up for humiliation, or worse, the perpetuation of evil. [em: mine]

[snip]

It's a temptation every one of us faces -- and if you don't think you face it, you are setting yourself up for a fall. I'm not saying there is no such thing as good and evil, right and wrong, or that all sides are always equally culpable in wrongdoing. What I'm saying is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: the line between good and evil runs right through the human heart. As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble.

"As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble." Now that's a place where Rod & I can agree in full voice.

Sullivan on Gay Marriage and Prop 8

To any that did not see it at the time, I can highly recommend Andrew Sullivan's response to Rod Dreher's post on this topic as one of the best defenses of gay marriage that I have come across:

Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.

To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently.

[snip]

But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way.

That way 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. [em: mine]

[snip]

Sorry, Rod, but you and I have to live in the disenchanted world our generation was born into. The dreams of total pre-modern coherence - whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century - are dreams undone by freedom. 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. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law.

The great thing about this post is that it gets beneath the surface legalisms at issue and exposes the heart of what is really under debate, which is the philosophical conflict between traditional conservatism and modernity itself. Gay marriage is simply the battle de jour upon which "deep statements about human nature" are being argued.

As Dreher himself writes even on the heels of the Prop 8 "victory" in California:

The concept of marriage has largely been severed from established norms in the popular understanding and is now seen as a contract formalizing the love a couple (for now) has for each other. Today, marriage has no intrinsic meaning that people are meant to serve; rather, it can be shaped to support people's desires.

This is the logical next phase in the development of modernity, whose 500-year project has been the gradual emancipation of the individual will. When gay marriage proponents argue that conservatives are on the wrong side of history, they're right. [em: mine]

Moreover, the prejudice – both in the bad, bigoted sense, and the good, Burkean sense – that protected traditional marriage is evaporating. Conservatives will lose this war because they have lost the young. And they have lost the young because they have lost the culture.

And, this is the "loss" that conservatives such as Dreher are really inveighing against. It is not about marriage per se, but rather about the long, slow loss of unquestioned cultural authority that is now being realized via modifications to our formal systems of legal authority (e.g. divorce, abortion, gay marriage).

Notice Dreher's obvious lament of the "gradual emancipation of the individual will." Taken as a standalone statement, one might be tempted to label a "gradual emancipation of the individual will" as freedom, which within the secular ethos of the American polity is always categorized as an unmitigated "good."

But, within a philosophical framework of Original Sin and the inherent fallen nature of man, emancipation of the individual will, by definition, leads to evil. There can be no good outcomes for mankind or society without the constraints of religious doctrine to check our baser impulses. The apple beckons and we are futile to resist.

Or, as Wilkinson more succinctly noted in a discussion of Atheists vs. Pedophiles and which group was more despised by the American public:

Wilkinson (facetiously):

I mean it's kind of obvious. If God is dead, then everything is permitted. And if everything is permitted, the first thing you want to do is abuse children.

Oddly, I think somehow that this moment provides an opening for religious conservatives to advocate more effectively for the positions they hold dear, since (in a modern context) they will be forced to justify and argue for the utility (moral or otherwise) of the positions they espouse. There is no unified cultural North Star doing all the heavy lifting of justification for them.

And, my sense is that those elements of religious faith that serve humanity (the Golden Rule, et al) will survive unscathed from the confrontation with modernity, while those that are merely relics of a different social order will simply fall over time, since the weight of cultural inertia alone is no longer enough to sustain them.

That is what Our Father said it was

UPDATE: I made slight modifications to the text to make my final point more clear.

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Just finished reading Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture by Grant McCracken.

Difficult read in places, but paints a picture of the development of the concept of self-hood and how an individual can/cannot change within a culture through different "transformations" (e.g. rites of passage, for example) which demarcate modifications in the nature of the self.

I will probably have multiple entries on the book (since there is much richness to draw on), but I'll try to summarize the thesis broadly below. He describes our culture as transitioning from:

1. Traditional - Face-to-face societies where ritual and myth are the means of transformation. Only prescribed types of transformations are allowed. Individuals may not choose or invent their transformational routines.
2. Status - Hierarchical societies where individual station is defined by birth (e.g. class or caste systems). Individuals could endeavor to change their status by cultivating exteriors (clothing, speech, deportment) and interiors (thought, emotion, outlook) to create a convincing performance of the social self.
3. Modern - Beat poets (previewing the 60s social upheaval) declared war on status transformation and adopted an oppositional cultural stance against the pretensions of bourgeois society. Authenticity and the individual self were valued above (and were in conflict with) mainstream social norms. Even within the mainstream, modern faith in technology and progress depicted an evolutionary self, one with the capacity for self-directed change, that was always forward looking and unmoored from its past.
4. Postmodern - The self is porous, fluid and open to near complete self-determination. The individual claims the right of self-authorship and the right to change the cultural categories that define him/her. Moreover, the individual consists of many "selves" with an emphasis on exploration of multiplicity over singular authenticity.

In short, the portrait moves from a sense of selfhood that is defined and limited by the outer societal norms, to one where the self is free to become nearly anything that one can imagine.

Now, the thesis is NOT that we shifted through all 4 phases, one displacing the one prior, but that they are additive. We still have "traditional" forms (e.g. weddings, etc.) but the power of society to define and control those meanings is limited and even contested (e.g. Prop 8).

I found this quote regarding traditional societies to be an echo of many present day culture war issues:

The ruling ideas of a traditional society are truly sovereign. They discourage criticism, originality and the "disposition to change." They discourage the very concept of reform. As J.S. La Fontaine puts it, these societies "base their concept of society on the idea of tradition, established once and for all. Society is the projection over time of the original founders, heroes or ancestors."

[snip]

What does not serve the "traditional forms" of a society is not allowed to matter. For many of these societies it isn't wisdom unless it is received.

When questioned as to why a particular ceremonial activity is carried out in a particular way, Navajo singers will most often say, "because the kiyin dine - the Holy People - did it that way in the first place." The ultima ratio of non-literates tends to be "that is what our fathers said it was." [em: mine]

The quote above reminded me of this recent Dreher post on the schism within the Anglican church.

Damon is troubled, and understandably so, by the fact that American churches are breaking apart based on positions congregations and individuals within them hold on culture-war issues. I don't see how any serious believer, whichever side he takes, can be cheered by schism. But I am inclined to think of schism as the second-worst option, if the only other is to accommodate one's church to a serious heresy.

As Damon notes, the stance a believer takes on issues like abortion, homosexuality, order and authority in the family, and a related constellation of concerns, typically places one within one camp or the other. It's no accident that there's a thread connecting stances on both sides; i.e., there's a reason why Christians who oppose abortion rights are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage rights, and vice versa. It all comes down, in the end, to Authority. [em: original]

If you believe that Scripture, or Scripture and the institutional Church, is the Authority for deciding questions of meaning and morality, then you are far more likely to fall on the traditionalist side of these questions. If you believe that individual conscience is the Authority, then you are likely to be a progressive.

To Dreher, a social conservative, the ultima ratio on any such question comes down to: that is what Our Father said it was.

Chicken or the Egg: Family Size vs. Secularism

Interesting article from the Hoover Institute (so must be taken with grain of salt) that posits that the decline in family size may be a driver towards lower levels of religiosity in society, rather than the prevailing assumption that rising secularism in the modern age results in lower rates of child bearing.

[But look carefully at that common formulation, because it contains the same hidden assumption as that of secularization theory — i.e., it assumes that because people are more religious, therefore they have larger families. But where is the evidence for putting things in that order? It is at least as plausible — in fact, given the evidence, it is more plausible — to assume the opposite: that something about having larger families is making people more religious, at least some of the time.]

The article goes on to note that rates of child-bearing in Europe went down prior to declines in church attendance.

Not sure that this totally coheres for me. While acknowledging that the article is intentionally speculative in nature (note the rather weak claim of "at least some of the time" in the quote above -- could this be falsified??), the facts, such as they are, that are marshaled in defense of the claim are far from comprehensive or convincing.

The article cites the American experience as the exception for Western societies (i.e. we are more religious, therefore more children than Europe -- or alternately, that we marry and have children at higher rates therefore we are more religious, as the author would have it). But, I have seen other statistics before which claim that if one controls for immigration (i.e. Latino immigrants have higher birthrates than native-born in the US) that we are not significantly different than Europe.

Additionally, within Europe, one finds higher birthrates in relatively secular Scandinavian countries than in more socially traditional and religiously observant ones, such as Italy. It has thus been speculated that a society needs either a) a more open labor market, such as in the US, that makes it less onerous for women to leave/re-enter the workforce or b) a more generous social welfare policy, such as in Northern European countries, to ease the financial burden of child-bearing in a modern industrial economy.

In the sense that the author is simply calling to attention the general presumption that, "after all, religious people tend to have larger families; so what?" and suggesting that the lazy causality assumed therein is tenuous, then I can agree. But, the overall thrust of the article clearly aims for much broader claims and implications.

I think that one of the footnotes feels a little closer to the truth:

[Wilcox also suggests three reasons for “why churchgoing is so tightly bound to being married with children”: because they find other couples like themselves in churches — i.e., those navigating family life; because children “drive parents to church” in the sense of encouraging them to transmit a moral/religious compass; and because men are much more likely than women to fall away from church on their own.]

In short, for people with children, churches can form a natural community within which the burdens of childbearing can be shared and from which desired socialization of their children can be obtained.

Many statistics cite, in spite of the frequent claims of US religiosity, that many "religious" Americans are deeply ignorant about some of the most elemental facts of Christian doctrine. Thus, I am left to wonder if one can fully explain their church-going behavior as specifically "religious" in nature. It seems that the benefits one may get from church cover a far broader set of social needs, not simply spiritual ones.

Mostly, I don't think that the causality is clean in either direction. Clearly Mormons have a much higher birthrate that Americans as a whole. But, the author would imply that childbearing comes first, then religious faith follows (or "at least some of the time" -- snark). But, why would Mormons consistently have more children to begin with, before faith has taken hold? Something in the water in Utah?

More plausibly, it would seem that many Mormons are raised in relatively cohesive communities where church-attendance is the norm. And, a host of social expectations (both those imposed from without, as well as that one internalizes from growing up in such an environment) guide both the decision to have children and to attend church within the community.

In short, banning the pill isn't going to bring masses back to the Mass.