Corner Extra

SULLIVAN’S FALSE CHOICES
I do not consider myself to be a religious conservative. I am a religious believer and a conservative, and I agree with religious conservatives about some things, but there are other things about religious conservatism that keep me from embracing either the label or the organizations associated with it. For example: I do not believe that America is, politically or constitutionally, a “Christian nation,” as many Christian conservatives do. I condemned “Justice Sunday” at least as harshly as Sullivan. Sullivan writes that “religious truth is not and must not be the basis of a political order.” I may interpret that phrase and especially its implications in a different way than Sullivan does, but I can endorse it more easily than, I imagine, a lot of self-described Christian conservatives would be able to.

But the fact that I interpret it differently is part of the point. Sullivan tends to flatten the world into false choices: we must either be theocrats or supporters of his version of the separation of church and state. I disagree. His apparent inability to see any alternatives accounts for some wrongheaded posts of his, such as his suggestion that I would be put off by anything President Bush said about religion and politics in his recent press conference. (I was, in fact, happy with the substance of his remarks.) It is also, I think, the central flaw in his argument.

A FAILED PROJECT
Sullivan appears to believe that he is sticking up for compromise, moderation, tolerance, reason, and dialogue. I agree with him in thinking that these are usually good things. But I think he overestimates the extent to which any of them characterize his own conservatism of doubt, which actually has a strong tendency to immoderacy and intolerance.

Sullivan, the aspirant to moderation, allows that he has no wish to “banish” the conservatism of faith. He will make room for it. That’s very generous of him. But then Sullivan has also recently, in connection with the debate sparked by his article, approvingly quoted a correspondent who writes:
This is what Christian and Islamic fundamentalism have most in common: an open hostility to pluralism, to the idea that government should operate as if the ways and beliefs of others were as legitimate as their own. . . . [Abortion and homosexuality] just happen to be two issues upon which democratic pluralists and religious fundamentalists cannot and very likely will not agree, and where the war between the partisans of government by consent and the partisans of government by divine diktat will continue to be fought.


I think abortion should generally be prohibited. I don’t see how holding that view involves any hostility on my part to pluralism, to democracy, or to democratic pluralism. More to the point, I don’t see how defining one side of the argument over abortion as hostile to “government by consent,” etc., encourages a civil dialogue. I especially don’t see how the suggestion that Christian conservatives are a little bit like Osama bin Laden does so.

SULLIVAN & TRUTH
I wrote that Sullivan has a quarrel not just with religious “fundamentalism”--one of the many labels he uses to get his civil dialogue going--but with reason and truth. Sullivan says that I distorted his meaning, “conveniently” ignoring a passage in which he noted that “conservatives of doubt are not necessarily atheists or amoralists” and may be “devout Christians who embrace a strong separation of church and state.” My assertion that Sullivan has a quarrel with reason and truth is “simply bizarre” and “reflective of the problem” with conservatives of faith. (Incidentally, I hope no one will assume that I am defending “conservatives of faith” here or elsewhere. I think Sullivan’s taxonomy should be rejected.)

I ignored that passage because I judged it irrelevant. His essay said that the conservatism of doubt “begins in precise opposition to the new conservatives’ confidence in faith and reason as direct, accessible routes to universal truth.” It sure sounded as though he were denying that reason could find moral truths, and accusing conservatives of faith of having, well, too much confidence in reason. The fact that he claimed that his conservatism-of-doubt camp included some religious or morally upright people--which I never disputed, by the way--gave me no reason to alter that view. I assumed that religious believers in Sullivan’s camp were people who did not believe in rationally derivable moral truth, and he said nothing to dispel that impression.

Now it appears that Sullivan’s basic argument is not with reason, but with the use of reason by fallible human beings. He writes:
[A] conservative of doubt may believe that he has a very clear grasp on moral truth. He may believe he is in the grip of divine revelation. He may believe he is so brilliant that he has solved the riddle of truth for all time. But he is also aware that he is not the only one on the planet, that others may have equally certain views of the truth, and that turning politics into a place where one eternal truth is pitted against another is a recipe for civil war and social conflict. The result would be a religious war. It has to be.


MY FALLIBILITY
To put rather too much icing on the cake, he later approvingly quotes another correspondent who (rather witlessly) criticizes me:
Ponnuru seems to take it for granted that he has perfect access to moral absolutes, and that it is therefore perfectly natural to insist that they be followed by . . . all. In a pluralistic society we recognize that while these absolutes may exist, NONE of us has perfect access to them, and the ‘conservative of doubt’ knows from long, bitter experience that she who shouts loudest probably has a narrow, self-serving definition. Important moral questions are rarely such easy, thumbs-up or thumbs-down questions, anyway. The Conservative of doubt says “I trust you to make your own decisions in these matters--you should trust me. As a society we will agree on rough guidelines and leave the rest up to the individual.”


So, to sum up Sullivan’s current view: Reason might be able to reach moral truth, but 1) that doesn’t mean that any particular human being will be able to do so, let alone that all will, and 2) that we should therefore side with the conservative of doubt. The first proposition is hardly controverted by anyone, and the second is a non sequitur.

APPLIED DOUBT
Let me go out on a limb and say that it would be wrong to kill illegal immigrants one runs across (under normal circumstances, that is: if killing them is the only way to stop them from killing someone else it may be right). This conclusion does not depend on the premise that “Ramesh Ponnuru is always right about moral matters” or that “Ramesh Ponnuru’s faculty of reason is so highly developed that he never makes a mistake about a matter of moral consequence.” I can have a fairly high degree of confidence in this particular moral view, a confidence rooted more in the reasons I hold that view than in a high general estimation of my own abilities. The probability, even the certainty, that I am wrong about many matters of moral import does not establish that the government should be neutral between me and someone who believes that it’s okay to kill peaceful illegal immigrants.

PEACE IN OUR TIME
Sullivan, as we have seen, asserts that allowing claims about moral truth into politics would have to result in “religious war”--an assertion that assumes the impossibility of the old-fashioned view of politics as a kind of reasoning together. He adds:
Avoiding this kind of conflict was the crux of the liberal state and of the American founding. It requires bracketing your own moral truth in favor of political peace and pluralism. This is a big sacrifice, as Hobbes and Locke and the American founders fully understood. . . . But they were prepared to make it. The religious right simply isn’t--and the same seems to go for Ponnuru. . . . My quarrel is with Ponnuru’s version of “reason” and “truth”.


One of my quarrels, meanwhile, is with Sullivan’s history. The Founders had no principled objection to political actors’ making claims about moral truth. If they had such objections, they would not have been able to make a revolution. Many Founders argued for a distinction between politics and religion, but that’s simply not the same thing, and the assumption that it is the same thing is, as I have said, reflective of Sullivan’s misguided reduction of the possibilities available to us.

Here’s another quarrel of mine: Whether a particular method of handling claims about moral truth (or, for that matter, religious truth) will lead to peace can’t be purely a matter of deduction. Various Supreme Court justices have been telling us for five decades that a governmental policy of moderately strict secularism would lead to social peace and avoid an American reprise of the European wars of religion. Yet it is not obvious that the ACLU version of the separation of church and state actually does lead to increased social harmony. Perhaps it would in a society that included fewer conservative Christians. But that just raises the question of whether the path to peace lies in persuading them to modify their convictions, the ACLUers to modify theirs, or some combination of the two. People will disagree over which of these paths to take, and this disagreement will presumably replicate the underlying disagreement over how to treat religion in public life. So saying that we want an arrangement on these issues that is conducive to social peace doesn’t really get us very far.

FREEDOM AND PEACE
Indeed, there may be times, places, and circumstances where even the toleration of religious difference subtracts from a society’s peace. If, like me, you believe that people have a natural human right to religious freedom, that’s no great conceptual problem. A person’s religious freedom, in my view, does not depend on whether it promotes social peace. People who have less sturdy doctrines of religious freedom, for example ones that are rooted entirely in the experience of the European wars of religion, may, I suppose, reach a different conclusion.

ABORTION AND SLAVERY
Sullivan again:
Ponnuru then cites two hard cases: slavery and abortion. Slavery indeed presents a big problem for a conservative of doubt. But the premise of the politics I am describing assumes basic civil equality of all citizens. The American constitution's blind eye to slavery was indeed an excrescence, an exception made to bigotry, but at the same time an exception that proves the general rule. Is Ponnuru saying that all contemporary moral issues are of the same weight as slavery? He is, I think, in one respect. He believes that abortion is the slavery of our time. But I'm sure even he would agree that there is a distinction here. Even if you believe, as I do, that all abortion is immoral, the fact that the unborn child exists within another human being makes the situation much more complicated, with respect to human liberty. A conservative of doubt would try to fashion some kind of workable compromise on this--such as those crafted in countries like Germany or Britain, where the debate is how to limit and reduce abortion rather than how to ban it outright. In America, in contrast, we have an absolutist liberalism of faith, represented by the execrable Roe decision, versus an absolutist conservatism of faith, represented by the GOP platform outlawing all abortions. (In this, I think, the Court deserves most, if not all, of the blame). A conservative of doubt will nevertheless have to concede that at times, his politics may well tolerate moral evils, even evils he himself opposes as profound ones. He can and must make arguments to persuade his fellow citizens of his own ideas. But his ability to restrain himself from trying to eradicate all such evils by law is called ‘self-restraint.’ It's not a denial of truth or reason. It isn't a capitulation to relativism. It's called ‘moderation,’ a word sadly lacking from the theological discourse that is beginning to supplant political reasoning in American politics.


I don’t wish to leave the misleading impression that I brought up the issues of abortion and slavery. Sullivan did. Nor did I suggest that slavery and abortion are of the same moral weight. The notion that “all contemporary moral issues” are of the same moral weight as slavery is, of course, too idiotic to deserve any discussion from either Sullivan or me.

A FEW POINTS HERE
1. If Sullivan’s claim is that conservatism of doubt will do just fine since there are no moral issues before us that rise to the level of slavery, it doesn’t strike me as a terribly strong or appealing political philosophy, because it has to give way at just the moments when important questions come to the fore.

2. Sullivan’s “conservatism of doubt,” he tells us, “assumes basic civil equality of all citizens.” Good to know. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s he is okay with a basic equality even for non-citizens: His conservatism of doubt would not allow the enslavement or killing of illegal immigrants. But where does that equality come from and what is its scope? Don’t adequate answers to these questions involve resolving competing claims about moral truth? Does the fundamental equality of all human beings imply that one cannot allow the killing of the unborn, as I suggest, or does it not?

3. In raising the unborn child’s existence within another human being as a reason not to prohibit abortion, Sullivan is just making an argument about how a particular circumstance should affect how we bring morality to bear on public policy. That kind of argument is perfectly fine (although his particular argument strikes me as quite weak: the abortion debate does not concern the mere removal of an unborn child from the womb, or even the removal of that child followed by death from neglect, but rather concerns the deliberate killing of that child). But that kind of argument does not advance his general project of trying to establish that we should bracket off moral truth claims from politics.

4. I don’t understand Sullivan’s “self-restraint.” It is permissible for a pro-life American, he says, to try and persuade his fellow citizens of his ideas. Great. Many of us regard ourselves as trying to persuade our fellow citizens to agree that it is unjust to leave unborn human beings outside the protection of the law. It’s not as though it would be possible for us to outlaw abortion without persuading our fellow citizens, or as though we were trying to replace legislatures with some kind of dictatorship that could impose our preferred pro-life policy without having to persuade them. It’s not as though we are trying to get federal judges to outlaw abortion for us. So what’s Sullivan’s objection?

FEAR OF PERSUASION
Sullivan writes: “[Bush’s] embryonic stem cell compromise--ending federal funding, allowing private research--strikes me as exactly the right balance. But it is that balance that the fundamentalists want to up-end.” I have no idea what Sullivan is talking about here. Is there a bill before Congress to outlaw privately-financed research on stem cells taken from human embryos at IVF clinics? Is this a near-term or even medium-term legislative objective of any prominent social-conservative or pro-life group? Most social conservatives, it is true, think there should be a ban on stem-cell research where that research involves cloning a human embryo and then killing it. But Bush wants that ban too, so that can’t be the balance Sullivan is talking about.

I believe that pro-lifers long-run goals should include a prohibition on all research that kills human embryos, however that research is financed. But there is no way that goal can be achieved without creating a consensus for it, through persuasion and incremental legislative progress. So, again, what’s the objection? Nobody’s talking about imposing a pro-life policy over the public’s opposition. If the public won’t go for it, pro-lifers won’t get their way. We want to persuade our fellow citizens to extend legal protections to a class of human beings who don’t have them.

In the pluralistic democracy I believe in, there’s nothing wrong with that.