There's a bunch of flak flying back and forth between liberals and conservatives in the wake of the recent California Supreme Court decision redefining the legal meaning of the word "marriage." Maggie Gallagher put forth the most comprehensive policy reasoning against same-sex "marriage" that I've seen so far, and leaving aside the logical torpedoes that could be launched by any college freshman against the legal reasoning of the Cali Court, I think she hits all of them.
Here's the thing though: conservatives are still going to lose this battle.
I believe they will win the war, because ultimately the side with the right reasoning wins the day, but right now, the battle isn't about reasoning. It's about feelings. Jon Stewart, someone who I think would describe himself as a gay "marriage" supporter, actually demonstrated this principle on his show back in 2004 when couples began to wed in Massachusetts. He showed the ceremonies on the screen and then, tongue-in-cheek, began writhing in agony and facetiously saying things like, "Oh, the humanity!"
No argument. No reasoning. Just feelings. And the feelings right now are on the side of the liberals.
What are we treated to in the media? The televisions in this fight can show two things: gay couples getting "married" in jubilant celebrations, or conservatives passing laws against the formal recognition of such ceremonies. Which one tugs at your heart strings?
Or imagine a debate: the conservative will give all sorts of carefully thought out reasons as to why his position is correct, the liberal will show you pictures of children adopted by same-sex couples who are "cheated" because their "parents" can't get "married." Where would your sympathies lie?
Arguments against gay "marriage" can't be captured in a sound bite, they can't appear in a captioned photo on the front page of the New York Times, they don't make for powerful moving film scripts. Who has time these days to sit down and listen to the Pope's philosophical treatise on the meaning of marriage? Sure he's right, but who has the more captive audience?
In the end, these people will win. Not because they have better arguments, but because they garner sympathy for their cause swiftly, efficiently, and powerfully.
But that will change.
Right now, it's a battle between unwed gay couples on one hand (some of them with adopted children) and the Big Mean State on the other. Or worse yet: God!
Soon it will be the Big Mean State on one hand, and the Catholic adoption agency on the other. Soon it will be the lawyers on one hand, and the meek old priest and the First Amendment on the other. Soon it will be the young rich gay couple on one hand, and the girl who agreed to sire "their" child, but changed her mind when her love for it became too great.
In the end, I believe the American people will make the right decision on this issue, I just also happen to believe they're going to be wrong first.
Let's hope truth triumphs before too much damage is done.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
Side Comment
The internet is a dangerous place. Search too thoroughly for tech information in forums online and you come across postings on threads with signatures like this one:
"Ever since my experience points went into triple digits, I've had to keep the ladies and valkyries away with a +3 two handed broadsword. "
Welcome to Western Civilization version 2.0.
"Ever since my experience points went into triple digits, I've had to keep the ladies and valkyries away with a +3 two handed broadsword. "
Welcome to Western Civilization version 2.0.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Not Loving One's Enemies
I know I'm a bit late weighing in on Barack Obama's "cling" controversy, but I'm interested in it for a reason other than the conventional one. I'm interested in what it says about human morality.
Now, Senator Obama was speaking at an event for a number of affluent leftists in San Francisco and he was trying to "explain" why individuals in different circumstances have different moral and policy preferences. He was in a moral "ingroup." A place where he feels safe to express his opinions because he knows that there is significant if not total moral overlap between him and his audience. He is confident, because the way we obtain relative certainty about our moral judgments (which have no objective scientific standard) is through communal affirmation and assent.
The problem arises when an individual has moral preferences that are other than your own, and you are motivated to not judge that person. Obama was describing individuals that vote Republican, and presumably would vote for his opponent in an election, and was attempting to describe their moral networks in a way where there could plausibly be overlap with his and his audience's, while simultaneously, in this way, dismissing their importance. By doing this, he was able to avoid judgment, i.e. real engagement and respect for the free will and humanity of the persons whose worldviews he rejects.
This was also evident in his attempts to explain the views of one Rev. Jeremiah Wright with whom he presumably disagreed on a number of things, and with whom a substantial majority of the American voting population also disagrees. He tried to describe Wright's moral network in a way that any other American could presumably identify with it, or, at the very least, explain it away, as he did with the moral worldviews of the Pennsylvanian working class. In doing so, he treated Wright as less than human.
This again confirms my hypothesis that when we encounter moral worldviews with which we do not agree, if we are motivated to avoid judging the person with whom we disagree, we will attempt to describe his worldview in such a way that it becomes plausible to us were we to share in his personal experience. By doing so, we can both avoid judgment, and dismiss the opposing worldview as illegitimate. Only legitimate worldviews require engagement and either moral approval or disapproval. Only those arrived at by rational free human beings call for judgment.
In this Obama shows himself to be a product of our age. Someone so committed to avoiding the inconvenience of serious engagement with opposing worldviews, that he would stoop to the delegitimization of them and thus simultaneously dismiss the free will and the humanity of those that hold them. Whatever this is, it is not love.
But what we need to understand is that we all do this. Think of the people who tied themselves into knots trying to avoid sounding judgmental about Jeremiah Wright's comments. Think of all the excuses they made for him.
"Oh, he only believes that because of "x". If he had my experience, if he thought more like the way I do, he would be more like me. That poor confused man; a shame he doesn't get it like I do."
Why do this? Because judging opens you to judgment. Those who looked at Wright as a human being, rather than as sociological spawn, declared unequivocally that Wright's comments were wrong. That his worldview is wrong. That as a human being he has the responsibility of judging rightly, and his judgment is the wrong one.
I can already hear the fanatical accusations of racism.
Take this a step further, to a place of physical as well as verbal violence. We are in an ideological war with an alien civilization bent on submitting the West to its will. The West, fraught with guilt and self-hatred for wrongs committed and judged in the past, is horrified of being open once again to judgment: horrified by thoughts of freedom and responsibility. So what do we do? We describe the moral networks of Islamist terrorists in a way that makes them plausible to our own worldviews, and thus allows us to dismiss their claim to status as human actors. We hide from judgment by refusing to judge.
We think to ourselves, "No human being could possibly believe what these people believe. Therefore, there is no way that they could have arrived at this worldview freely. They must be constrained in some way, otherwise they would think exactly the way I do."
And so we debase them. We lower their standard. We treat them like children or worse, like animals. We claim that these grown men just don't know any better, and that these grown women aren't able to decide for themselves. We refuse to recognize their humanity by refusing to recognize their freedom and responsibility.
We have taken Christ's injunction to "Judge not!" and removed it from the One who declared it. Only under the final judgment of God through Jesus Christ can we live harmoniously in a community without judgment. We have usurped the judgment of Christ with our own judgment and declared the injunction ourselves in His place.
And we do this at our own peril, because by refusing to love our enemies, we offer them justification for murder. If they are no more than beasts, then we can't expect any better of them. So is the trial of our times.
Now, Senator Obama was speaking at an event for a number of affluent leftists in San Francisco and he was trying to "explain" why individuals in different circumstances have different moral and policy preferences. He was in a moral "ingroup." A place where he feels safe to express his opinions because he knows that there is significant if not total moral overlap between him and his audience. He is confident, because the way we obtain relative certainty about our moral judgments (which have no objective scientific standard) is through communal affirmation and assent.
The problem arises when an individual has moral preferences that are other than your own, and you are motivated to not judge that person. Obama was describing individuals that vote Republican, and presumably would vote for his opponent in an election, and was attempting to describe their moral networks in a way where there could plausibly be overlap with his and his audience's, while simultaneously, in this way, dismissing their importance. By doing this, he was able to avoid judgment, i.e. real engagement and respect for the free will and humanity of the persons whose worldviews he rejects.
This was also evident in his attempts to explain the views of one Rev. Jeremiah Wright with whom he presumably disagreed on a number of things, and with whom a substantial majority of the American voting population also disagrees. He tried to describe Wright's moral network in a way that any other American could presumably identify with it, or, at the very least, explain it away, as he did with the moral worldviews of the Pennsylvanian working class. In doing so, he treated Wright as less than human.
This again confirms my hypothesis that when we encounter moral worldviews with which we do not agree, if we are motivated to avoid judging the person with whom we disagree, we will attempt to describe his worldview in such a way that it becomes plausible to us were we to share in his personal experience. By doing so, we can both avoid judgment, and dismiss the opposing worldview as illegitimate. Only legitimate worldviews require engagement and either moral approval or disapproval. Only those arrived at by rational free human beings call for judgment.
In this Obama shows himself to be a product of our age. Someone so committed to avoiding the inconvenience of serious engagement with opposing worldviews, that he would stoop to the delegitimization of them and thus simultaneously dismiss the free will and the humanity of those that hold them. Whatever this is, it is not love.
But what we need to understand is that we all do this. Think of the people who tied themselves into knots trying to avoid sounding judgmental about Jeremiah Wright's comments. Think of all the excuses they made for him.
"Oh, he only believes that because of "x". If he had my experience, if he thought more like the way I do, he would be more like me. That poor confused man; a shame he doesn't get it like I do."
Why do this? Because judging opens you to judgment. Those who looked at Wright as a human being, rather than as sociological spawn, declared unequivocally that Wright's comments were wrong. That his worldview is wrong. That as a human being he has the responsibility of judging rightly, and his judgment is the wrong one.
I can already hear the fanatical accusations of racism.
Take this a step further, to a place of physical as well as verbal violence. We are in an ideological war with an alien civilization bent on submitting the West to its will. The West, fraught with guilt and self-hatred for wrongs committed and judged in the past, is horrified of being open once again to judgment: horrified by thoughts of freedom and responsibility. So what do we do? We describe the moral networks of Islamist terrorists in a way that makes them plausible to our own worldviews, and thus allows us to dismiss their claim to status as human actors. We hide from judgment by refusing to judge.
We think to ourselves, "No human being could possibly believe what these people believe. Therefore, there is no way that they could have arrived at this worldview freely. They must be constrained in some way, otherwise they would think exactly the way I do."
And so we debase them. We lower their standard. We treat them like children or worse, like animals. We claim that these grown men just don't know any better, and that these grown women aren't able to decide for themselves. We refuse to recognize their humanity by refusing to recognize their freedom and responsibility.
We have taken Christ's injunction to "Judge not!" and removed it from the One who declared it. Only under the final judgment of God through Jesus Christ can we live harmoniously in a community without judgment. We have usurped the judgment of Christ with our own judgment and declared the injunction ourselves in His place.
And we do this at our own peril, because by refusing to love our enemies, we offer them justification for murder. If they are no more than beasts, then we can't expect any better of them. So is the trial of our times.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Conflicted
While I consider myself well onto the "evolution" side of the evolution-intelligent design debate, I must say that I'm very tempted to see this if only to have the opportunity to catch a glimpse of Richard Dawkins sputtering in frustration in an unfruitful attempt to make any of his philosophical views make sense.
Monday, March 31, 2008
I absolutely love stories like these...
Two scientists are suing a pan-European research organization to stop them from turning on a proton collider because it could destroy the universe.
My favorite line:
"There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”"
Ah, sarcasm.
My favorite line:
"There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”"
Ah, sarcasm.
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