Totalitarian liberals - a follow-up to Obama's HHS power grab

In the words of John Paul II (Veritatis Splendor, N. 101):

Today, when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world — Marxism being the foremost of these — there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be denied and that the religious yearnings which arise in the heart of every human being will be absorbed once again into politics. This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. Indeed, “if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism”.  

 A good reminder that not only are tyrants and totalitarians always ethical relativists, like Nietzsche reducing truth to power, but also ethical relativists inevitably have totalitarian tendencies.  It becomes all about using coercive state power to impose your views on what you see as a backward populace.

Michael Gerson has a good article in the Washington Post about how "Obama plays his Catholic allies for fools."  The HHS mandate was delivered with a sneer, Gerson suggests.

Both radicalism and maliciousness are at work in Obama’s decision — an edict delivered with a sneer. It is the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 — a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal. Modern liberalism has progressed to the point of adopting the attitudes and methods of 19th-century Republican nativists. 

 It is a move so patently contemptuous of religious freedom and respect for conscience that it leaves those Catholics who provided Catholic cover for Obama with some explaining to do--not least the president of Notre Dame.

Consider Catholicism’s most prominent academic leader, the Rev. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame. Jenkins took a serious risk in sponsoring Obama’s 2009 honorary degree and commencement address — which promised a “sensible” approach to the conscience clause. Jenkins now complains, “This is not the kind of ‘sensible’ approach the president had in mind when he spoke here.” Obama has made Jenkins — and other progressive Catholic allies — look easily duped.

As John Paul II had warned, there is in this radical secularism embraced by this Administration as well as other political leaders across Canada and Europe, a growing intolerance of any kind of institutional pluralism, a profound shift in the understanding of liberalism.  It amounts to a turning away from America's founding principles and Constitution, from a democracy that depends on the strength of mediating associations and institutions that are not dominated or suppressed by the state.  As Gerson concludes,

Obama’s decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-­clericalism. 

The administration’s ultimate motivation is uncertain. Has it adopted a radical secularism out of conviction, or is it cynically appealing to radical secularists? In either case, the war on religion is now formally declared. 

The End of Relativism?

The Catholic Thing has followed up Father James Schall's gloomy prognostication of a week ago about how Catholics were being driven to the margins of public life by legal persecution, with an essay by jurisprudence professor Hadley Arkes. Discussing the California law SB48, which directs schools in the state to give only favorable accounts of certain groups. To the protected groups already in the Education Code, SB48 adds "Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans."  Moreover, teachers and administrators were enjoined not to offer any instruction or “sponsor any activity that reflects adversely upon persons on the basis of race or ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, nationality, sexual orientation.”

In other words, SB48 outlaws teaching anything like the traditional view of homosexual behavior, substituting by legal mandate a view only recently adopted on a significant scale about the moral equivalence of all kinds of noncoercive sexual behavior among consenting adults.

As Arkes argues, the issue is not one of tolerating the expression of diverse views, but precisely their suppression. Children in California are to be taught, and taught only, the view of sexual morality endorsed by the state.

Virtue ethicists such as Michael Sandel have long taken issue with the modern liberal view of morality according to which the state should remain neutral in such matters, leaving such matters to individual conscience. Courts have attempted to take this line of moral neutrality, as he points out in the case of the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage (which Sandel supports)but have come off the fence, celebrating in that case same-sex marriage as a public good. Sandel's argument is not so much that the supposed neutrality of this kind of liberalism is wrong, as that it is impossible.

The relativist argument, according to which states should avoid such judgments and leave them to individuals, is not sustainable. As opponents of abortion rights (and Sandel) argue, the question of whether abortion involves the intentional killing of an innocent human being cannot be a matter simply of individual judgment. In the slavery, if it is the wrongful coercion of another human being cannot be a matter of individual choice. To adapt a pro-'choice' bumper sticker, if you don't like abortion/slavery, don't have an abortion or own a slave.

So the relativist argument for tolerance of divergent views is best seen as an entering wedge. It may gain toleration in law and society for a behavior that has been condemned. But the aim is not tolerance or a relativist neutrality about moral judgments, but the reverse. The ground of state neutrality, as Lincoln argues with respect to slavery, is not coherent or tenable.

Similarly, as the tenor and tone of SB48 make clear, the rights of parents or of private schools will offer no haven from those who wish to impose the state's new morality on children. I am not a lawyer and I do not know how well the First Amendment's protection of religious liberty will hold against the state's bar on what it regards as “any sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda contrary to law.” Besides, should only people of faith have the right to dissent from the state's moral teaching? As Arkes concludes below, "The question finally is whether there will be freedom to hold back from the moral teaching being planted in the law: Will it still be legitimate in this country to call into moral question the homosexual life?"

The question, too, is not one of whether it is correct to call homosexual behavior into question on moral grounds - a question for moral theologians to debate, as well as moral philosophers or anyone else. It is whether it shall be legal to expose school students to the evident fact that teachings on the topic contrary to the state's recent ethical innovations are not so easily to be dismissed as "sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda;" They have been maintained by the great traditions of faith and philosophy over millennia - traditions from which California seeks to "protect" its students.

Here is Professor Arkes's essay:




From California: Another Front in the Culture Wars
By Hadley Arkes
Tuesday, September 27, 2011

From California again we get a glimpse of the future – or the future that a political class is consciously seeking to prepare for us in reshaping the culture. During the summer the legislature enacted, and Governor Jerry Brown signed into law, SB48, as an amendment to “the Education Code, relating to instruction.” That Code had already made ample provision to instruct the children of California in the contributions made by all racial and ethnic groups supplying votes for politicians. But there was an appreciation also for the contributors who were “entrepreneurs” and labor unions, and whose stories deserved to be told. With SB48 the legislature took a further step by adding: “Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.”

The schools were directed to give only favorable accounts of these groups in telling the story. But on the other side, teachers and administrators were enjoined not to offer any instruction or “sponsor any activity that reflects adversely upon persons on the basis of race or ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, nationality, sexual orientation.” There is not the least doubt about the intention to enforce this law. Nor is there much doubt about the main target of the law. SB48 bars “any sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda contrary to law.”

For religious teaching, read: any teaching offering a claim to truth rivaling the moral teaching in the law. That alternative moral teaching will be regarded as merely beliefs of a “denominational” character or a version of “propaganda.”

Make no mistake, Fr. Schall was quite right in his recent column: We are in the midst of a culture war. And a chief purpose of that war is to make it untenable to teach Catholic doctrine in public settings, or for Catholic institutions, in their work, to respect that teaching. But we would fall into a gentle mistake if we assumed that we are facing mainly the force of “relativism,” or that the appeal now is to the rights of parents to provide for the moral shaping of their children.

Yes, in part, to both. The force of relativism was felt first in teaching the wrongness of casting moral judgments, including judgments on the “styles” of sexuality. But there is nothing relativistic about the law in California. There is no willingness to tolerate the views of those who bear moral reservations about the homosexual life. The people who brought forth this law would draw on the “logic of morals” as Aquinas had it, and as it will ever be: they would commend and even require what is “right,” and they would condemn and forbid what they regard as “wrong.
”
Lincoln had all of this long ago: “If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.” He could conceivably grant then the authority to bar the abolitionist literature from the mails – if slavery were right. And if it were wrong to cast adverse moral judgments on the homosexual life, the understandings supporting those judgments could indeed be driven out of the schools.

The classic cases on the rights of parents and education were Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). In Meyer, the Supreme Court struck down a statute that forbade the teaching of any language but English to students in grammar school. In Pierce, a statute in Oregon barred students from attending private schools between the ages of eight and sixteen. Justice McReynolds insisted that there was no “power in the state to standardize” children in this way, and that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.”

But people tend to forget that McReynolds insisted at the same time that the State had a legitimate authority to regulate all schools, public and private, to insure, for example, that teachers are of “good moral character and patriotic disposition,” and that “certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught.” And so, the people governing the schools of Massachusetts point out that same-sex marriage is now part of the law: Students should come then to understand and absorb the moral understandings contained in the law.

The state has, after all, the rightful authority to insure that any firm or association under the laws is formed on legitimate terms for legitimate ends. It will not give a license to Fagin’s school for pickpockets, and it will not even license certain marriages. Anyone who takes education seriously will have to be attentive to moral education, including the moral ends of a “technical” education. (“For what purpose are you designing those trains: to speed people to their legitimate work – or to gas chambers?”)

This question will not be solved then simply by unfurling the banner of the “rights of parents” and private schools. The legislature of California has already noted that the new law would apply to “any aspect of the operation of alternative and charter schools.” If Catholic schools continue to teach doctrines now regarded as subversive, parents will not find a path of escape by moving into the enclave of Catholic schools.

The question then is not mainly about the rights of parents and schools. The question finally is whether there will be freedom to hold back from the moral teaching being planted in the law: Will it still be legitimate in this country to call into moral question the homosexual life?


Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law.

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The puzzle of intolerant tolerance

Michael Casey | Sunday, 27 March 2011

How can liberal democracies justify prosecuting people who wear crosses or refuse to preside at same-sex marriages and still pride themselves on being tolerant?

One of the most puzzling features of contemporary Western society is that governments are prepared to act intolerantly in the name of tolerance. Australian sociologist Michael Casey explains how this has come about.

* * * * *

MercatorNet: You have written about the puzzle of “intolerant tolerance”. What is this all about?

Casey: Tolerance is essential to any sort of life in common, especially in complex democratic societies. Originally it was simply a practice, a way of living together and respecting the freedom of others. It has now become a value in its own right, perhaps the supreme value. Certainly it features high up on the list whenever people are asked to identify what the West stands for.

To create a tolerant society, however, democracies increasingly resort to intolerance. There is no question that a decent society must protect itself and vulnerable minorities from groups which refuse to respect the rights of other people. But intolerant tolerance is directed against groups which actually respect and defend the rights and freedoms of others.

Christians, for example, are treated as intolerant for maintaining legitimate distinctions between couples who can and cannot be married; for reasonably exercising a preference in employing staff for people who share their faith; and for defending the rights of the unborn and disabled. Intolerance means refusing to respect the rights of others, but in these cases it has been extended to something which is not a form of intolerance at all: the right we all have to refuse to validate choices with which we disagree and to say they are wrong. Intolerant tolerance means enforced validation of certain values and practices in the name of the tolerance.

MercatorNet: When did the modern notion of tolerance take shape? Whom do you regard as the touchstone of tolerance in Western history?

Casey: The earliest important source is the Roman writer Lactantius (c240-320 AD), a member of Constantine’s retinue and a significant influence on the concept of toleration Constantine practiced after he became Emperor. Lactantius’ major work is the Divine Institutes, which provides perhaps the first well-developed theory of religious toleration. He argues that religious devotion is genuine only if it is freely adopted. Coercion in religious matters should be rejected because it contradicts the very nature of religious belief. If there is to be punishment for following a false religion, it should be left to God. In short, respect for religion requires respect for freedom.

The major modern account of tolerance comes from Harvard University’s John Rawls (d. 2002). For Rawls, the state must be “neutral” towards different values, and dedicate itself to the project of creating and maintaining an equality of freedom and justice so everyone can live by their own beliefs. This sounds nice, but achieving this goal, especially for groups which suffer discrimination, inevitably involves the state in closer and closer supervision of society. The logic is that “discriminatory” beliefs are intolerant because, when acted on, they violate the rights of others. To preserve a tolerant society the freedom of people with discriminatory beliefs must be restricted. So the “neutral” state finds itself in the business of approving or vetoing values, depending on whether they meet whatever the current requirements of tolerance might be. Increasingly, those requirements now brand orthodox Christians as intolerant.

Putting Lactantius and Rawls side by side highlights an important point. There is a world of difference between the tolerance which has its beginning and end in respect for freedom (Lactantius), and the tolerance which operates as a means of bringing about a vision of a good or just society (Rawls). It is usually when tolerance is placed in the service of a particular project, like that of Rawls, that it is most likely to produce intolerance.

MercatorNet: The characteristic philosophy of our age is relativism. How does this affect the concept of tolerance?

Casey: Relativism seems to make tolerance essential. If different values are no more and no less than equally valid, and if truth—and therefore judgment between values—is impossible, tolerance becomes the only basis of social and political life.

But this is a very slender reed on which to build a life in common. The unstated fear seems to be that we will very quickly be at each other’s throats if we each insist on the truth of our own values over others, so tolerance becomes an article of faith which overrides all other values. For the sake of social harmony, everyone must believe in it, and where necessary it must to be enforced. This task naturally falls to the state.

Relativism reinforces the myth that in a tolerant society the state is neutral between different values. But life is not lived in neutrality. When relativism shapes the moral life of a society any consensual activity by adults which does not break the law becomes a “right” which cannot be resisted, regardless of the destructive effects it may have for individuals and the community. There is no neutrality when the good cannot be preferred to the bad. If you want a genuinely tolerant society you need truth as the foundation, not relativism.

MercatorNet: But how can you possibly be tolerant if you believe in truth? Aren’t you thereby committed to discriminating against people who don’t accept “your truth”?

Casey: That view explains why relativism is regarded as the only form of moral philosophy safe for democracy. Given the abundance of conflicting views, values and desires, and the adamant insistence on our own supremacy, truth appears to be not only implausible but tyrannical. When truth prevails, so the standard line goes, it narrows existence, constrains the possibilities of knowledge, and limits freedom and autonomy. Its ideas of “good and evil”, “true and false” cause division and intolerance.

The way forward is to move from a stubborn insistence that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is dangerous, to conceding that perhaps truth is possible and available to us after all, and that in our own way we are all seeking it.

Conceding the possibility of truth, and that we all share a desire to find the truth and to live in its light, changes the situation completely. Nothing is lost from diversity, disagreement, skepticism and dispute, but they are re-located within a common journey which makes trust, openness and respect for each other in our different moral commitments stronger and easier. This is what real tolerance means.

Truth is not an answer in a box and it is not a cudgel. It is the unfolding of reality in which each of us takes part. Wherever our own search for the truth might lead us, the shared acceptance that it is the truth we are all seeking changes the game. It takes us out of the dead end of intolerant tolerance.

MercatorNet: A key element in your critique is “decisionism”. What is this? Why does it corrupt tolerance?

Casey: Decisionism is an ugly word for a very impoverished idea of authority. In its simplest form it means that, in the absence of truth, authority derives solely from the decision to assert one set of values over all others. It agrees with relativism that there are no values which are universally true, but completely rejects relativism’s conclusion that therefore all values must be treated as no more and no less than equally valid. Decisionism is a “solution” to relativism, with the decision—an act of will—taking the place of truth to justify one set of values as supreme over others.

In the way most Western governments currently work, the decision might be by majority vote or imposed by courts or government departments. But as long as the correct procedure has been followed, the decision is binding. It will be justified using the language of justice, rights and even truth, but the decision is what matters and to a significant extent determines what is “just” and “true” (or “tolerant”) in any particular case.

In the absence of truth it is success which validates, and a decision is successful only if it is the final word on a matter for everyone. If objections continue, especially from philosophical or religious convictions which reject relativism and argue for the truth, they call the whole show into question.

So, if Christians (for example) continue to maintain objections to certain decisions in defense of the dignity and freedom of the human person, in defense of human life from conception to natural death, in defense of marriage and the natural family, and in defense of religious freedom, conscience, human rights and social justice, they must be acted against to enforce what “the tolerant society” requires. The problems that relativism and decisionism cause for genuine tolerance explain how we end up with intolerant tolerance.

MercatorNet: How can we escape from “intolerant tolerance”?

Casey: We go wrong on most things when we go wrong on questions about the human person and transcendence. When tolerance ends by treating people who respect and defend the rights and freedoms of others as intolerant, it needs to be re-founded. One way of recovering the situation is to anchor tolerance in solidarity.

Tolerance, as we have come to practice it, assumes estrangement from each other. There is no common moral understanding, and even the idea of a common human nature is disputed. The only way of resolving the conflict of values is through the assertion of will. The relativism that underlies tolerance fosters suspicion, mistrust, fearfulness and lack of confidence in the world. It also encourages hardness and self-assertion in imposing one’s beliefs or defending them against the hostility of others. People either live alone with their convictions entrenched or come together with the like-minded, either aggressively or defensively.

Solidarity corrects this by re-establishing tolerance in the truth. All we have to do is concede that perhaps truth is possible after all, and might just be a better basis for our life together than the unexamined relativism from which we currently operate.

Solidarity assumes we belong to a single family. As in a good family, rather than simply putting up with each other with hardened hearts we should try to accept each other as friends, and be enriched by diversity rather than grudgingly enduring it. Solidarity treats human beings not as isolated atoms but as persons who depend on others for their fulfillment. We are autonomous, but our autonomy is shaped by reciprocity; by our ability to freely assume responsibility for each other, not just ourselves.

Intolerant tolerance has brought a presumption of enmity to democratic life. The way out is to replace this with the presumption which animates solidarity; the presumption of friendship.
_______
Michael Casey is a sociologist on the staff of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He examines this issue in more detail in an article in the first issue of a new Australian journal, Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics: Casey, Michael (2011) "The Puzzle of Intolerant Tolerance," Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 1.
Available at: http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol1/iss1/1

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