By John Daniel Davidson
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
Dean Acheson, who orchestrated the Marshall Plan and
helped create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, had no use for moralizing
in foreign policy. He once said that listening to pious Canadians discuss
foreign affairs was like listening to the “stern daughter of the voice of God.”
His point was that there’s a big difference between being
moral and moralizing. Being moral is about changing the way you act and
actually helping others. It requires humility and tolerance because it arises
from an awareness of one’s own moral failings.
Moralizing, by contrast, is about changing the way other
people act—by force if necessary. Moralizing breeds intolerance and even
tyranny because it springs from a belief that, like the pious Canadians, not
only do you know the truth but you also have a solemn duty to impose it on
others.
In America today, being moral is out and moralizing is
in. Just witness the nonstop spectacle of moralizing everywhere you turn—from The New Yorker’s panicked denunciation
of Chick-fil-A’s “infiltration” of New York, to gun control activist David
Hogg’s boycotts, to the protestor
with a megaphone shouting in a Starbucks clerk’s face.
The Apu Affair
Not even “The Simpsons,” which has been around for 30
years, is immune to the moralizers of our day. We’re told now that Apu, the
beloved Indian-American owner of Springfield’s Kwik-E-Mart, is a hateful racist
stereotype of Indian-Americans and should be removed from the show, preferably
with a simpering public apology from the show’s creators. Comedian Hari Kondabolu,
an Indian-American, made an entire documentary about how he’s offended by Apu.
A recent episode of “The Simpsons” responded to Kondabolu
with a scene
of Marge reading Lisa a politically correct—and boring—bedtime story. At
one point, Lisa faces the camera and says, “Something that started decades ago
and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you
do?” The camera then pans to a framed picture of Apu with the line, “Don’t have
a cow!” written on it.
Kondabolu and other critics proceeded to have a cow,
accusing the show of trivializing their problems with Apu and the supposed
racism and negative stereotyping his character foments.
Nevermind that Apu, as Tunku Varadarajan recently noted
in the Wall Street Journal, “represents
the American trajectory of immigrant success and assimilation,” or that he’s
been a beloved character on “The Simpsons” for three decades without provoking
widespread outrage. The real problem with Kondabolu’s critique is that its
entire purpose is to control what others do. He wants “The Simpsons” to purge
Apu from the show, apologize for causing offense, and submit to his pop
cultural prerogatives.
The moral response to such moralizing is to say that if
Kondabolu and others are offended by Apu’s character, they should go create
their own comedy show and leave “The Simpsons” alone. In that sense, the show’s
muted response demonstrates one effective way to respond to petty moralizers:
not with an apology, but with disdain.
How To Deal With
Moralizing Student Protestors
For those of us who don’t run a beloved animated TV
series, law professor Josh Blackman recently demonstrated perhaps a more
effective way to deal with aggressive moralizers: engage them in debate and
don’t back down, no matter what. That’s what he did when a bunch of law school
students at CUNY tried to shout him down during a lecture about free speech on
campus, of all things.
As Blackman explained on his blog, he walked past a
gauntlet of homemade signs denouncing him as a white supremacist and racist.
Once at the podium, he proceeded to engage “the one legal argument” the
protesting law students had actually made: that legal objectivity is a myth. As
Blackman expounded on that point, he writes (obscenity warning),
A student shouted out ‘Fuck the
law.’ This comment stunned me. I replied, ‘Fuck the law? That’s a very odd
thing. You are all in law school. And it is a bizarre thing to say fuck the law
when you are in law school.’ They all started to yell and shout over me.
One student yelled at me, ‘You
chose CUNY didn’t you. You knew what would happen.’ At the time, I didn’t
appreciate the significance of her question. The students apparently believed I
picked CUNY because I wanted to be protested. This was the meaning of the
‘Don’t take the bait’ comment. To the contrary! I had never been protested
before. I was shocked that a lecture about free speech would occasion such a
protest. Yet, once I found out they were going to protest me, I was not going
to back down and withdraw. The hecklers at this public institution would not
veto my speech. I would stand there as long as needed to make my point.
That’s exactly what he did. Refusing to be silenced by
the heckler’s veto, Blackman simply outlasted the students: “I started to make
a comment about DACA, when the student standing immediately to my right said,
‘I don’t want to hear this.’ Then they started to exit. I said, ‘You want to
go? Please leave, by all means.’ They began to exit.”
Most of the students in question had never heard of
Blackman or his work. All they knew about him was that he supported, on legal grounds, President Trump’s
decision to rescind President Obama’s executive order suspending the law for
younger illegal immigrants. They likely had no idea he’s a brilliant legal
scholar who has testified before Congress, written op-eds for every major
newspaper in the country, and authored an acclaimed book on the constitutional
challenges to Obamacare. Many of them were surprised to discover that while
Blackman supports rescinding the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals order, he
also supports the DREAM Act, a position
he took the time to explain for them, despite the interruptions.
If CUNY were worth its salt, school administrators would
have expelled every one of them for such a display. Instead, the dean of the
law school defended the actions of student protestors, calling the protest “a
reasonable exercise of protected free speech” that “did not violate any
university policy.”
We see this now on campuses all over the country.
Administrators, afraid of being the targets of such protests themselves,
routinely coddle outraged, moralizing students and thus invite more of their
bullying behavior.
Progressivism Is
At Heart a Savior Complex
In the most recent edition of National Review I have a review of a new biography of Woodrow
Wilson by Patricia O’Toole. The book — aptly titled “The Moralist” — is a
withering chronicle of Wilson’s moralizing, from his days as a college
professor to his ignominious departure from the White House.
Throughout his academic and political career, Wilson, the
son of a Presbyterian minister and the father of American progressivism, was
incessantly preaching at people. Once he wielded real power, he was willing to
use it to silence his opponents and detractors, as he did during World War One.
His belligerent sanctimoniousness was a direct consequence of an unshakable
belief that he was right and if you didn’t see things his way you were either a
fool or traitor.
After the war, at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson’s
arrogance and moralizing became untethered from reality. O’Toole recounts one
instance when Wilson “startled Lloyd George by observing that organized
religion had yet to devise practical solutions to the problems of the world.
Christ had articulated the ideal, he said, but He had offered no instruction on
how to attain it. ‘That is the reason why I am proposing a practical scheme to
carry out His aims,’ he told his fellow statesmen.”
George later wrote that, “Clemenceau slowly opened his
dark eyes to their widest dimensions and swept them round the assembly to see
how the Christians gathered round the table enjoyed this exposure of the
futility of their master.” Imagine being so possessed of your own
self-righteousness that you think you should propose “a practical scheme” to
carry out the aims of Jesus Christ.
That, in a nutshell, is progressivism. It is hubris and
conceit mixed with a tyrannical impulse, and it is one of the reasons we have
so much moralizing in America today, yet so little morality.
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