Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Sorta political: "Everyone should be free to, you know, like make their own moral choices."

Mollie Hemingway has a great piece up about the media response to Marco Rubio's response to the question, "How old do you think the earth is?" You really want to read the whole thing so I won't steal her fire by repeating all the best bits here.

One thing that particularly struck me as the starting place for something new of my own was this bit:
You know who was the last “journalist” to ask President Barack Obama when he believes human life begins? It was that Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Warren. Do you remember Obama’s response? At the Telegraph: Tim Stanley has thoughts on this:
More importantly, if it’s okay for Barack Obama to say that abortion is “above my paygrade” and refuse to offer a guess as to when life begins, why is it not okay for Rubio to dodge a bullet when asked a question about the origins of the Earth? Considering that the question posed to Obama back in the 2008 election had serious moral consequences and Rubio’s does not, I can’t understand why Obama’s evasion is heralded as a victory for common sense but Rubio’s is treated like a declaration of war on science. The hysteria and hypocrisy are tiring at best.
While I agree with Tim Stanley, as quoted by Mollie H, that there is both inconsistency and hypocrisy at work here, it's important to see that, for the new clerisy, that is those of us who learned in college that ethics is an abstract subject, that inconsistency and hypocrisy is a good thing. As the cliché from a few years ago had it: It's not a bug, it's a feature. We are fully aware that they are inconsistent and want to continue to be.

Or, to put it another way, it is precisely because there are serious personal moral consequences related to questions regarding abortion that we in the new clerisy think it's okay to dodge the question.You may think the really important questions here are political and they are important but the new clerisy mindset is first to dodge the personal moral choices. The urban and urbane utopia we imagine is one in which no one would ever have to live with guilt at the thought that something they did was morally wrong. It's a world in which no one is going to harsh anyone else's mellow by asking them to consider that maybe certain things they have done are morally wrong.

Now maybe someone is now thinking, "But what about racism? The new clerisy has no trouble telling others that racism is wrong!" And we might add, or genocide. Except that the modern mind is remarkably inconsistent about this. When racist attacks are launched against Condoleezza Rice, and they were, the new clerisy doesn't approve of them but they don't exactly run around calling anyone's attention to them either. "Condemning racism" is a fun thing to do when every head in the room is bobbing in agreement and the only people who are hurt are the ones who wish they had thought about getting up and pontificating about this first. But condemning racism that actually might cause you to defend the candidate that all good college-educated people hate is not nearly so much fun.

Similarly, while genocide is obviously "wrong" when it's historical, it's another thing altogether if condeming genocide means committing the UN to intervene militarily in Sudan right now or when bring it up just might piss off the Turks.

A similar attitude applies to the hard-cases argument. Someone might say, well, what about sexual acts involving cannibalism and, therefore, murder? Surely we're not going to say those are just a matter of personal conscience? Again, if you, as I do, come from the class that learns about ethics (always learn "about ethics" and never "to be moral") your first instinct will be to brush this one away. The unexpressed view is that this is too clear-cut a cause. It's so obvious that this is wrong because everyone knows it is. Confronted with the fact that some people actually want to and do do these things, we dismiss them as crazy people  who need to be treated for their own or others protection and, if that fails, locked up.

What we dodge, and keep dodging no matter how hard we are pushed, is the notion that there is a level at which morality needs to be taught with authority. That there are things that are just wrong and the full authority of Mummy and Daddy, society or the state might have to be used to enforce this morality as morality.

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