Laurie Higgins has a charming little article, Republican skeletons in the closet, in which she excoriates the Republican nattersphere for refusing to look too closely at Republican politicians who are known or strongly rumored to be gay, and for reacting with outrage whenever one is "outed" in someway, claiming that it's an invasion of privacy.

( A short detour about Christianists and privacy )

Higgins is all in a froth that "homosexuality matters. Volitional homosexual behavior is deviant, immoral behavior regardless of its etiology. That moral claim is not only a legitimate but also a necessary moral claim to make publicly." That's just a typical Christianist argument. It's boring.

What got me fascinated by Higgins was this paragraph:

Same-sex desire and volitional homosexual acts are analogous to polyamorous desire and volitional polyamorous acts, all of which are legitimate conditions for moral assessment and moral disapproval. Most voters would want to know if a candidate embraced polyamory; most voters would reject a candidate for his affirmation of polyamory and his engagement in polyamorous behavior; and those who rejected such a candidate would not be vilified for their political decision or called poly-haters and polyphobes.

That raised my eyebrows: it's the first time I've heard anyone from the Christianist side of the table actually use the term "polyamory" without sneer quotes. It's as if Higgins is unaware that the term is less than twenty years old and is still contentious even within the Polyamory community.

The take-away here is that poly is winning: by framing it in the same context as homosexuality, as a legitimate civil arrangement, rather than depicting it in ways similar to swinging, the poly community has successfully put its detractors on the defensive.

Tags: conservatism, shrill, sighting
Current Mood: amused

One of my favorite voices in the conservative wilderness is Daniel Larison. Larison is my kind of conservative: thoughtful, intelligent, capable of compromise and of seeing the bigger picture. We disagree on ideological ground here life begins (and whether or not my religious faithlessness constitutes "confusion" on my part, or his), but I always respect what he has to say.

Today, Larison has a great read on the nomination of Jon Huntsman, the Republican governor of Utah, to the position of Ambassador to China. Larison writes:

Fluent in a foreign language, trained in diplomacy, and experienced overseas, Huntsman represents in foreign affairs many of the qualities that his party has come to loathe–and his acceptance of the post indicates that he knows this. … Now, instead of being a voice of reason and experience in internal Republican debates, Huntsman will be supporting Obama's agenda. …

To gauge the depth of the GOP's predicament and its obliviousness to it, one need only note how many conservatives were in fact glad to be rid of Huntsman–even if he was overwhelmingly popular, intelligent, and largely on board with the party's priorities. The nomination and the Republican reaction send clear signals both that the administration is ready and willing to embrace Republican dissenters–however mild their so-called heresies may be–and that Republicans are actually pleased to lose them.

I'm actually really concerned for the Republicans. The Democrats, should they actually get their act together and start passing legislation, would be a disaster without a proper check and balance in the Congress. But all the Republicans have done recently is pass a party resolution calling on the Democrats to change their name to the "Democrat Socialist Party." They're stamping their feet, and that's all they have right now. It's insanely sad, and they're never going to be a national party within a generation if they don't figure out how to be more than the "The Party of Economic Oligarchs on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and the Party of Religious Fascists on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday." Nobody gets Saturday: we all ought to have a break at least once a week.

Tags: conservatism, life
Current Mood: amused

Russell Kirk is sometimes regarded as one of the founders of the moderns conservative movement. In the mid-1950's he wrote a book called The Conservative Mind in which he outlined a number of interesting tenants of what it meant to be a conservative.

Reading them, I can't help but see that each and every one of them is based on nothing more than a feeling of rightness, perhaps smugly so, written across Kirk's persona by his own experience with religion. I've been reading Kirk, and I'm reacting to it, like every reader. More to the point, although his ideas will surely feed my writing, I'd like to get a grip around his ideas and explore them.

Kirk's first two premeses are these:

1. The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.
2. The conservative believes that there exist natural distinctions, and that society requires orders and classes that emphasize these distinctions.

If you've already recognized the inherent tension in these two statments, congratulations. If you see the basic flaw in the first premise, and how its resolution resolves the second, you're way ahead of me.

If I were a theist, I might agree with Kirk's first statement: it flows naturally from the consequences of a unitary and interventionist theism. God made us. God imposed His Will upon us. But I'm not a theist and I don't believe in interventionist superstitions. So I have to turn to human experience, and the mounting collections of evidence to make my case, and not to an arbitrarily chosen minority religious position.

And I'll give Kirk's first statement as true, if the analysis is shallow and banal enough. Because here's what we know: there is not one human nature, there are many. There's no such thing as "neurotypicality," there are only varying degrees of many different human mental capacities. The biological focus on reproduction goes awry when other mental modules, meant to provide order among men in the tribe during the millenia of evolutionary adaptation, converge in excess: homosexuality. The mental capacity to understand the pain of others, meant to create sympathy among tribespeople and hold the tribe together, end up flawed among a small subset to provide the viciousness needed to survive in a competitive environment: psychopathy. Another mental capacity to multitask, to be distractable, to be capable of certain kinds of synthesis get sacrificed to make room for capabilities that give us invention, innovation, focus: high-functioning autism.

There is not one human nature: there are thousands of different kinds. This is not the "diversity" of Kirk's second principle, except in the poorest of constrained definitions: this is innate abilities that cannot be rectified by imposing a uniform order. No laws can be created that fit "human nature" perfectly because human nature has a temporal component: it is only the mass aggregate of human beings alive at any given moment, and the law is desperately trying to catch up with that aggregate, the one straining against the other. Law is forever adapting to the moving target that is human nature, and human nature only exists as the contingent outcome of recent events and the dead hand of tradition.

If we're to take what's left of Kirk's argument seriously, we have only this left to admit: if we go with illiberal communitarianism intent on solving the needs of real people, then our problem is finding a constraining framework for action that satifies everyone, and I mean everyone: the sociopath as well as the saint, and the ultimate constraint is one that satisifies nobody. If we go with a society that actually believes in real liberty of conscience and action, then we end up with a meritocracy where limited psychopathy ends up being rewarded, where unequal distributing of resources results from individual choices.

Somewhere in the middle there is the solution. And I think Kirk's got the better handle on it by respecting that those differences exist and must be managed, but he and conservatives like him have a hell of a lot to swallow in accepting that human nature is deeper and more subtle than even we humans commonly accept. There is a tension in Kirk's thesis that comes down ultimately to simple power dynamics, a world in which the powerful do what they can, and the powerless accept what they must. In Thucydides' time, that quote applied to very clearly demarcated classes. Unfortunately for Kirk and conservatives like him, that's no longer true.

Tags: conservatism, philosophy
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Biosphere, Midpoint