A Resource for Independent Scholars

Leave it to a comedian to state plainly that Truman’s use of atomic weapons was a war crime, only to backpedal out of political expediency faster than you can say Arlen Specter. This short-lived moment of lucidity has occasioned a lively discussion on the topic, by no means confined to the political left. Although many paleoconservatives in Truman’s day and beyond expressed horror at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conservative opinion today generally favors nationalism over morality, and we are invited to examine the supposed moral complexity of the issue. In today’s political right, only a few social conservatives and libertarians are willing to state the obvious moral truth that mass incineration of civilians is not justified by military expediency.

It would be easy to argue that the callousness of mainstream conservatives toward the rights of foreign prisoners and noncombatants is a major cause of its recent decline in popularity. It would also be wrong. Sadly, most Americans are willing to hedge basic moral principles for the sake of security. To the chagrin of the liberal news media, a majority of Americans polled in favor of the recent NSA phone surveillance program, even well after details of the program were leaked by the press. A strong majority of the public has supported keeping the Guantanamo prison open, and slim majorities have favored the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics. As for pre-emptive wars of choice, public support of the Iraq war from 2003 to 2007 closely matched the perception that the war was going well. It would seem that we support illegal wars in the short term as long as we appear to be winning, though the perceived success of the 2007-08 surge did not restore the war’s popularity.

Unprincipled compromise of moral values can be found even among academics, who are supposedly more thoughtful. Although the vast majority of American historians are politically liberal, their vaunted concern for human rights diminishes when discussing Truman’s use of the atom bomb. Indeed, the man who wiped out two cities and later led the nation into the disastrous Korean War is cited by most historians as an example of an unpopular president who was later vindicated by history. This supposed vindication consists only in the approval of liberal historians, who are evidently as prone to place partisanship over principle as their conservative counterparts. We can only imagine what they would write if a Republican had dropped the bomb.

The general coarsening of morality, even among the educated and among those who claim to preserve traditional social values, is a worrisome development. Some paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan have adduced from this reality that the left has won the culture war, through their domination of academia and the entertainment media that shape public opinion. Those who would defend the classical virtues must find themselves in a constant struggle against societal tendencies, and they must risk ostracism and ridicule for merely holding what has been held by practically all the great moral philosophers in history. The tyranny of the majority of which Tocqueville warned is evinced in the perception that the rectitude of same-sex “marriage” can be determined by persuasion of the majority. The majority, as we know, is notoriously fickle. Fifteen years ago, even liberals shrank from same-sex “marriage”; now, the propaganda machine would like to portray any opponent of such unions as a Neanderthal.

All too often, shifts in opinion on moral matters (and associated historical, sociological and anthropological judgments) hinge upon nothing more than emotion and propaganda. A thing becomes right or wrong simply because the current majority says it is. Such a hermeneutic is utterly unworthy of an adult human being, yet democratic culture makes it seem natural. Few even among the paleocons will go so far as to identify democracy as the root of moral relativism. Most have held some form of the naive view that the majority would freely accept virtue if only it were presented to them clearly. In actual experience, the morality of the masses, when uncoerced, gravitates toward mediocrity. We can see this with the gradual shedding of social constraints and the coarsening of mores over the last forty years. This coarsening is expressed in dress, diction, and bearing, as well as more quantifiable sociological phenomena. On the Internet, the more popular sites invariably attract cruder and more degenerate discourse. While democracy romanticizes the virtue of the masses, reality teaches that we can hardly expect great virtue from a people fed a steady diet of mind-numbing television and Twittering.

The ancient Athenians recognized that democracy, or indeed any form of government, could work only if it was governed by laws, which they called nomoi. The nomoi were not the acts of a legislature, but basic moral precepts that defined the legal principles of society. Even the popular assembly did not presume to have direct authority to change the nomoi, though they sometimes appointed a committee of jurists to recommend additions to the laws. Even this limited power was too much in the eyes of Plato and Aristotle, who emphasized that nomoi, especially those that are unwritten, must bind even the people as a whole. For this reason, they posited the necessity of founding a polity with a lawgiver such as Solon, a man (or men) of eminent ability, whose superior wisdom would establish basic laws that are better standards than most would choose for themselves.

When basic moral principles are considered immutable, or at least not subject to popular sovereignty, the nomoi rule, and people only implement them. They are to be amended only after grave circumspection by the most competent men. The basic morality of society as a whole is shaped in large part by the excellence of the lawgiver. If, on the other hand, people are given full sovereignty even over right and wrong, we will invariably gravitate toward social mores that reflect the moral mediocrity of the majority. Few would work if there was no need, and few would strive for excellence unless they were constrained to do so. We should expect a society just moral enough to keep the economy functioning, and indeed we increasingly expect our statesmen to be little more than business managers.

When a political or religious institution commits some crime, demagogues like to say that the institution has lost its moral authority or credibility. What, then, shall we say about the moral authority of the masses? Most of the great crimes of powerful institutions were committed with popular consent, and even when the people are sovereign, they seem to be unable to discern whether it is moral to exterminate hundreds of thousands of unarmed people, or to invade a nation without provocation. Given this dismal track record, I should not like to entrust any of our civilization’s most revered values to the whims of popular sovereignty. To quote Horace, Quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt? Modern political society seeks in vain its salvation through statutes and policies, as long it pursues moral mediocrity. The notion that the people are sovereign even over morals has led to the enshrinement of our baser instincts as rights. Those on the political left wallow in the sins of eros while those on the right commit those of thanatos. If society exists for something more than the fulfillment of animal impulse, it ought to strive for something better than the natural human condition.

Four leftist judges in California have substituted their confused moral philosophy for judicial precedent and popular sovereignty in order to advance a nonsensical definition of marriage. This act reflects the ill-founded presumption that the Weberian state has the authority to re-define pre-existing institutions such as the family, from which the state’s own authority is derived. The absurdity of applying a twenty-first century leftist interpretation to a nineteenth-century constitution is lost among those who value the end over the means.

For the moment, let us not concern ourselves with the incoherence of liberal jurisprudence, nor with the usual arguments regarding same-sex attraction. The popular misconceptions surrounding these issues do not admit of a simple, pithy response, though at least one attempt has been made to summarize the relevant arguments from a Catholic and natural law perspective. Instead, I should like to turn attention to the extraordinary fact that most defenders of the California court’s decision seem to be wilfully unaware of the fact that this position was recently considered extremist even among liberals, yet no account has been made of the reason for this sea-change of opinion.

Only fifteen years ago, the idea of same-sex unions constituting a marriage in a sense fully equivalent to conventional marriage was not mainstream opinion, even among social liberals. Indeed, the anthropologist searches in vain for a precedent, finding at best some rites of friendship or clandestine practices. Even the numerous ancient societies that approved of homosexual acts did not pretend that this had anything to do with marriage, which was irrevocably tied up with the rearing of children. As recently as forty years ago, the weight of scientific opinion, even among atheists, was that homosexuality was a psychological disorder, and numerous case studies indicated that it could be cured. Of course, the classification of a behavior as a mental disease involves a normative moral judgment. As mores changed, so would the definition of health.

The de-classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the 1970s was likely a reflection of changes in attitudes toward sexuality rather than the result of any scientific breakthrough, since to this day our understanding of same-sex attraction remains rudimentary and speculative. The influence of social attitudes on scientific inquiry could be seen in the 1990s, when there were several premature claims to have found a genetic basis for the attraction, evincing a desire to find such a basis. Given the lack of scientific progress, and the further fact that most people are scientifically illiterate, we cannot invoke science as a primary reason for the recent sea-change in opinion regarding same-sex unions.

Changes in modern social mores are dictated by two main arbiters of propriety: the state and the cultural media. Church, family and ethnicity tend to conserve values rather than fabricate new ones, while the liberal state constantly creates new mores via legislation and judicial rulings, and the cultural media, especially through the verisimilitude of television and film, have the power to shape impressions about what is normal behavior. We have just seen the power of a compact judicial majority of four over three to dictate mores to a state of 50 million people. Television, film, and journalism have also shaped mores, thanks to the effective nullification of decency standards in the 1990s, promoting a progressively vulgar and sexually hedonistic ethos, in which there is, understandably, nothing remarkable about same-sex attraction.

To this day, the majority of male homosexuals have little interest in monogamous marriage, yet they have advocated this issue strenuously, in order to achieve their ideological goal of full equivalence with “traditional” marriage, or marriage as it has always been known. Already aided by leftist judges and the increasingly libertine media, some have sought to indoctrinate children via public schools. Some U.S. federal judges have actually ruled that parents do not have a right to be notified of such indoctrination, which includes explicit references to same-sex “marriage”. Unable to produce children in their sterile relationships, the more militant homosexuals and their defenders insist on the right to shape the mores of other people’s children.

This act of violence against the family is not peculiar to this issue, but reflects a broader presumption that the state has greater rights over a child than a family. The proper response to this assault on familial rights is to resist such forms of state control, with force if necessary, to make clear that the state is but a servant of the households that formed it. The state that loses sight of this fact deserves to be dismantled until it returns to its proper role in society.

Vast resources of the state and private media have been directed (though not always consistently) toward shaping public opinion in precisely the form it has taken, often using unscrupulous tactics to suppress contrary evidence. Yet this trick could never work upon people who have a cultural memory independent of what is served through mass discourse. For such people, it would not suffice to assent to some vague sense that this is the “modern” or “progressive” thing to do, without any notion of how we got here. Here we come upon the most stunning aspect of such social changes: the complete cultural amnesia that makes it possible to forget the state of affairs of only fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years ago, the West was socially liberal and highly literate, yet by no means advocated the current paradigm of same-sex unions that is now proffered as a standard of liberalism, rationality, and open-mindedness. To regard anyone who differs on this issue as a hidebound conservative evinces a breathtaking ignorance of the recent past, where one could be liberal, secular and rational, yet regard same-sex “marriage” as bunk. I recall the famous words of Cicero:

Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur?
- Cicero, Orator ad M. Brutum (XXXIV, 120)

Not to know what occurred before one was born, that is to remain always a child. For what is the lifetime of man, if it is not connected with the remembrance of the histories of previous generations?

I wonder what Cicero would have said of those who cannot even remember what happened in their own lifetime, but are so faddish that they must disavow memory even of their recent past. As Cicero observes, the importance of recalling the past is that our lives are irrevocably connected to and derivative of the deeds of our predecessors. In other words, we need to know the past in order to understand where the present came from. In this way, we could see through many of the rhetorical tricks and misdirections that would-be opinion-makers cast at us, for we could see that they are not grounded in any substantive rational or empirical development. Knowledge of the past keeps liars honest, for they must be forced to account for why what they say now differs from what they said yesterday. Who remembers that, in the early nineties, “gay rights” advocates would deny that they sought the right to marry, dismissing such claims as alarmist fear-mongering? Yet why should we be surprised if no one remembers this, or makes nothing of it, when we permit a president to re-invent his reasons for invading Iraq in a matter of months?

We cannot expect the mass media, or even liberal academia, to place much emphasis on the past, since that would divest them of their cultural authority. The manufacture of an ignorant yet educated populace has been the work of a hundred years, beginning with the elimination of the classics from grammar school, so that today most university graduates wouldn’t know Cicero from Adam. Yet, as time goes on, the horizon of our collective memory shrinks ever further, so that “modern” only means the last twenty years or so, often even less. We surrender this collective memory only at the expense of our sovereignty against the encroachments of the state and the shallow intelligentsia who do not wish us to learn how flimsy is their philosophy.

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced on the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

The American obsession with race still thrives, as the death of Kurt Vonnegut has been obscured by a media frenzy over a petty racial incident. While the BBC devoted a full segment to Vonnegut on 12 April, ABC omitted coverage in favor of the ongoing cause celebre of an aging disc jockey who referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” a term so offensive that it is repeatedly broadcast and printed in major media without censorship. Even conceding that the term is racist and that coarse discourse should be banned from the airwaves, we are a long way from accounting for the disproportionate magnitude of the reaction, stoked in part by career race-baiters such as Al Sharpton.

Vonnegut’s observation, “Color was everything,” remains poignant today, despite efforts to create similar obsessions over gender, ethnicity, and sexual behavior. Sharpton actually lamented that not enough feminist groups had mobilized against the sexist aspect of the deejay’s comment, apparently not realizing that even career feminists can’t possibly muster enough outrage to challenge every instance of the word “ho” used in public discourse. Recently, Hispanic groups have sought a share of the spotlight, demanding that a WWII documentary place special focus on Hispanic veterans, a pure example of special pleading taking precedent over scholarly analysis. For many historical questions, ethnic distinctions are simply not relevant, which of course is what no advocacy group wants to hear. Despite their numbers, non-racial advocacy groups can scarcely summon the hysterical shock that follows a single racial slur.

Race remains the ultimate taboo, a topic to be approached only at grave peril. A torrent of blasphemies against God is protected free speech, and our society even takes pride in its liberal tolerance of such discourse, but thou shalt not blaspheme against race, for that is “hate speech”. Our culture worships the gods of racial identity, these mysterious essences of social groups.

The racial pantheon is subordinate to a chief god, “America,” considered as a pseudo-racial identity. “America is the greatest country in the world,” is not a mere patriotic boast, but a conviction of theological certitude, not to be challenged even by those from other lands. A stark example of the supremacy of this cult can be found in the astonishingly racist attitudes of many urban black Americans toward blacks from outside the U.S. Ironically, the historically oppressed groups tend to be the most acutely race-conscious of all.

The cults of racial identity make it impossible to discuss race candidly, as a simple anthropological fact. Our American obsession with color exposes itself at the most importune times, transforming a simple rape allegation into a racial crisis, as was the case with the railroaded Duke University lacrosse team last year. The usual suspects, African-American studies, women’s studies, and English professors (beneficiaries, in some cases, of an academic ideology that favors social identity over qualifications), signed onto an advertisement that was clearly sympathetic to the alleged victim and not to the accused, yet they speciously argued they had not prejudged the case. They did not explain how they could regard the allegation as a sign of “social disaster” unless the rape actually occurred. Given that much of their profession is devoted to subverting academic inquiry to emotional causes, we should not be surprised by this insult to our intelligence.

The best remedy I can see for this self-righteous hypersensitivity is to gently mock these taboos so they are taken less seriously. There are ample opportunities to poke fun at these pseudo-intellectuals and media hos, but for now I’m fagged out.