Rod Dreher paraphrases an insight from a reader who “was raised without religion and never ha[s] submitted to one”:
Note well the second quote above: we have no idea how to define the good, except in terms of expanding individual liberty and the possibility of fulfilling desire, which implies that to make firm moral judgments is a risky, even immoral, proposition. In other words, what is the good except what people choose? That may be the best we can do in our pluralistic secular society, but it produces what Michael Walzer would call a “thin” moral culture, and degree of moral discourse.
Thin indeed. But on second thought, I think we do – very thinly – pursue a tacit conception of The Good. “Individual liberty” in some cases is zero-sum, and our choice of losers signals what we think is good.
Orgasm is good, for instance. Self-esteem of orgasm-seekers is good. It’s hateful, and maybe should be a crime, to damage the self-esteem of an orgasm-seeker, provided he or she is seeking it with other consenting adults (but woe to him who suggests that the “with other consenting adults” gloss implies that consenting adult relationships have a government seal of approval if only in contrast to orgasm-seekers with children).
Orgasm-seeking is superior not only to uninhibited free speech, but to the free exercise of religion.
I suppose I might wrap this up with a bow and a moral of the story, but I just found myself becalmed without a tool for a job I intended to do tonight, and I don’t care to spend too much time blogging. My point here is that neutrality remains a myth.
Alan Jacobs “Confesses to Corrosive Skepticism“:
When I read this excerpt from James Lasdun’s new memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, my first thought was simply: I don’t believe this story.
My second thought was: What a terrible person I must be, to doubt someone who has gone through such a nightmare.
My third thought was: But I can’t command my belief.
“I can’t command my belief” is a mighty potent summary of a lot of what I find going on in my head as I see things falling apart, the center failing to hold.
I’m well into What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense. (You know it’s serious and scholarly because of the colons.) I’m reading it because I remain incorrigibly convinced that the case for same-sex marriage is incoherent, but find it difficult to articulate the reasons, and sought help from what widely is recognized as the best case for the traditional view (the view that in a sane, “conservative” polity would merely by virtue of tradition require clear and convincing argument to overturn it, and surely would not bear the burden of proof. “Oh, hell, why not?” is not much of an argument. But see item 1). There’s no shortage of nominalist arguments (for instance, God says homosexuality is bad, so it’s bad, and so is gay marriage), but I’d like to do better than that. It seems important enough to be worth the effort.
I cannot command myself to believe that that, oh, 50 million or whatever self-described “born again Christians” are just a bunch of mindless orgasm-seekers incapable of coherent thought or persuasion by coherent argumentation. Yet reportedly, more than 50% of the under-35 born-againers support SSM.
I cannot command myself to believe that observant Catholics and Orthodox can be taken in readily by a little blue and yellow bumper sticker and a few slanders like “homophobe.” These are the folks, after all, who are supposed to be remembering and even seeking the intercessions of people who died grisly deaths rather than to deny the truth — the truth of the Gospel specifically, but that subsumes quite a lot of morality, too (assuming one cannot, like the authors of What Is Marriage, frame or intuit an cogent argument without any reliance on religious authority).
I cannot command myself to believe, in short, that arguments from natural law don’t work any more if they ever did. That one is especially bitter to swallow. But my intellectual betters, including some on my side of key issues, say it’s true (here and especially here). And the numbers of agnostics and atheists who embrace my view of natural law is suspiciously low.
Circumstance may soon wreak in me these three convictions that I can’t simply command.
What I don’t expect ever to believe is that traditional marriage (yeah, yeah, I know some would love to interrupt with skepticism about that term) is forever gone, replaced by mooshy-gooshy erotic love ordered toward nothing more enduring than the Big O and some mutual support, as long as we both shall love. On that, I expect I’ll be a bitter-ender.
But conservatives used to complain about welfare policies that discourage marriage, or even encourage divorce, and I’m seeing some of those in my professional life. Repairing a strong culture of marriage may require repealing no-fault divorce, but it requires much more than that, too.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 