By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Normally at this time of year, the culture-war fight is
over a guy with a white beard. That's true again this year. What's different is
that Phil Robertson has taken Santa's place, and instead of a war on Christmas,
we have a war on "Duck Dynasty."
The patriarch of the popular A&E reality show said
some crude things about homosexuals to GQ magazine. A&E was sufficiently
offended that it suspended him from a show about his own family.
So far, the controversy understandably has been framed as
a fight over free speech. My National Review colleague Mark Steyn writes:
"Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don't
oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD
increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It's
quicker and more effective to silence them."
I think Steyn has the causation right. The free-speech
issues are the inevitable consequence of a venerable argument about what a free
society is.
Maybe I see it that way because I have Yuval Levin's
wonderful book "The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth
of Right and Left" fresh in my mind (Note: I review it for the January
issue of Commentary and discuss it with Levin for an upcoming edition of "After
Words" on C-SPAN). Levin chronicles the argument between the Irish-born
British parliamentarian and the English-born American polemicist over the role
of government and the merits of the French Revolution.
As Levin shows, Burke, the father of modern conservatism,
and Paine, an early champion of progressivism, were liberals in the sense that
both defended a free society. But their assumptions about human nature and
society led them to very different places. In a sense, they were protagonists
in the earliest rounds of a two-century-old culture war.
Paine saw the individual as the irreducible unit of
society, and the state as the guarantor not just of liberty but of personal
empowerment. He held that with the right application of scientific principles,
an egalitarian utopia could be achieved. It would simply require tearing down
the prejudices, customs and habits of the old order, just as the French
revolutionaries were doing. Paine eventually saw few distinctions between legal
and cultural impediments to liberty, which is why he came to denounce
Christianity as "repugnant to reason."
For Burke, no man is an island. We are born into families
and communities, and it is these and other institutions that give our lives
meaning. Society is a complex and mysterious ecosystem, and no set of experts
or "sophisters ... and calculators" can impose scientific perfection
on it. Any attempt to do so would threaten to destroy all that makes life
meaningful. A reformer and proponent of progress, Burke nonetheless believed that
progress must be accomplished gradually, not in one fell swoop of a social
engineer's pen.
Perhaps Levin's most telling insight is that all of
Burke's metaphors about government are about space, while Paine's are about
movement. The Burkean believes government is there to give all of the
institutions of society room to thrive and discover what is good through trial
and error. The Paineian sees progress as a society-wide movement, led by
government, with no safe harbors from the Cause. This is why Paine was one of
the earliest advocates of a welfare state -- funded by a massive inheritance
tax -- that would intervene to empower every individual.
President Obama's second inaugural was a thoroughly
Paineian document. In his telling, America is made up of individuals and a
government with nary anything in between. And because "no single
person" can do the things that need to be done, "we must do these
things together, as one nation," leaving no room for the diverse
institutions of civil society.
The debate over homosexuality and gay marriage is part of
a much larger debate that includes everything from Obamacare -- particularly
its hostility to religious exemptions -- to school vouchers, federalism and the
"wars" on women, Christmas, trans fats and inequality.
The children of Burke form the philosophical core of what
was called the "leave me alone coalition," a broad group of
institutions and individuals who rightly, and occasionally wrongly, rejected a
top-down effort to impose a one-size-fits-all vision of society. The children
of Paine, empowered by their sense of cosmic justice, want all of society's
oars to pull as one. And if you don't pull your oar to the beat of their drum,
prepare for their wrath.
No comments:
Post a Comment