Our Law and God’s

Hm. Another opportunity for a sophisticated cheap shot at Bush? It must be great to be so well educated and yet not have the running of the world in your hands. (That’s another cheap shot.)

It is a sophistry to claim that the liquidation of the Kulaks, the Jews and the educated class of Kampuchea result from religious ideas, purely by your own administrative redefinition. They are the product of extremist realpolitik, groupthink and self-righteous moralism; the ultimate expression of “society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact”.

While churchgoers are liable as leftist killers to suffer groupthink you are going a far stretch to claim that genocide is the property of the religious, at least in the last hundred years.

The third sentence should have read, “…two examples of these problems.” The last sentence should have read, “…or as to possible motivations…” Sorry, it’s late.

A “human artifact” meaning a product of human artifice. Distinctive meaning good, worthwhile, necessary.
We make these things like bricks out of the muck of superstition and necessity. Robert’s Rules of Order as human revelation.
You’re real close to a problem that’s whispy and vague yet absolutely central to this moment.
We have these tools that were given to us, handed down and refined along the way, by people who had less of a grasp on virtually every aspect of what it is to be alive than we do now except one, that of being human. We’re no closer to understanding that than Madison or Hume or Aristotle or Vico or anyone else, collectively or as individuals.
What’s easier to see, once you get the template for it, is the appeal to specific groups of specific doctrinal positions. Arguing for the universal good of mankind often masks an argument for the immediate benefit of a specific segment of existing mankind.
Thus we have religious delusions trumpeted by people whose surivival index is amplified by the strength of those delusions to bind them together. And it’s the same with secular political philosophies. Democracy being a kind of meta-version of that – doing things for the good of the majority will always appeal to the majority, just as things that are good for any given minority will generally appeal to them in turn.
Someone who believes the specific dogma of any of the fundamentalists of the world isn’t going to put democratic function above the dictates of their own creed, it’s specious to think they might, wishful thinking. So then what?
It might help to think of it as a more elemental struggle than it currently appears to be.
It’s not about sharing, it’s about getting a controlling share and creating a theocracy. We’re not discussing this with rational actors, we’re discussing this, when we do, with minds that have gambled everything on a fixed view of the world, so that relinquishing that view will mean mental and spiritual breakdown, dissolution, collapse. Not only are they fighting for physical survival as a group, they’re fighting for mental cohesion as individuals; and that means they have to maintain the walls of their delusional systems, rigorously, vigilantly.
Pointing out to people in positions like that that they owe their present freedom and the acceptance of their behavior by their neighbors to the tolerance that was built into the political system they’re now threatening with intolerance and destructive moral values, isn’t going to do much.
That I think was the idea behind the insistence on separation of the powers of church and state.
But true believers had to be cowed into accepting that separation, and have had to be cowed into accepting it ever since. By superior force as well as reason.
The really exciting thing is that there is, built in to the fundamentalist methodology, a mechanism for turning oppositional energy into a forward dynamic. So that saying publicly at this late hour that the Children of God should submit with the rest of us to a co-operative assembly – a compromise for the common good – is a snare, the seductive phraseology of evil.
As preposterous as it sounds I think it’s accurate, except for the valence of moral right and wrong. These are people whose lives depend on the organizations to which they submit, marginal people whose lives will become only more so in a secular society, but who find the very qualities that make them marginal – dull-witted credulity, timidity and herd-like docility – cherished and valued in the institutions they put above, and that put them above, such dangerous ideas as liberty and equality.
The beauty of Unger’s view is in how tenuous this order is, and how fragile. Which makes the responsibility of preserving it that much greater.

Notice that the two positions can be cojoined: we can remake the social world the way God would like it. As long as you can find some explanation for why the world isn’t the way God would like it, you’re fine.

Given that the greeks were discussing how much of a human artifact society may be more than a couple of millenia ago…

My impression is that the Greek view was generally that moral law was as objective and external as physical law, and that the discussion was an attempt to extract those laws from the unrefined mass of ‘common sense’. Are there even any Greek philosophers who talk about rights rather than right actions?

“My impression is that the Greek view was generally that moral law was as objective and external as physical law, and that the discussion was an attempt to extract those laws from the unrefined mass of ‘common sense’.”

Nope. Read the Gorgias or Protagoras, for instance, or Thucydides, or Euripides.

I’ll gladly accept Plato’s sophists, and stand corrected, but I don’t think it’s easy to read Thucydides as advancing a relativist position. Unless you’re claiming that the Melian Dialogue was reported verbatim?. (I also think there are more nuanced readings of Euripedes than the one in “The Frogs”.)

I note that Unger’s dichotomy reads Hayek right out of the history of social thought. “A product of human action but not of human design” is to my mind a better and more compelling account of society than either of his alternatives. In particular, it warns against the false proposition that “not given by nature” implies “amenable to deliberate reorganization”.

We’re going to keep fighting these same battles over and over again until we take on the divine command theory of morality head-on. That theory’s a non-starter. Conservatives have the edge in these debates because, though most people recognize that cultural moral relativism is radically implausible, few recognize that the divine command theory is just as implausible, and for similar reasons. Specifically, both theories entail that moral obligations are rationally arbitrary, thus robbing morality of any rational authority and amounting to covert nihilism.

We need to take this battle to them instead of playing defense all the time.

As Rob notes in his comment, a recognition that the political order is made does not preclude the possibility of unmade standards that guide that making. It simply precludes the possibility that we have simply inherited the ideal political order or that it has been described to us by revelation.

washerdreyer, thanks for correcting my misreading. My apologies Kieran.

I think the confusion I mentioned earlier is still going on. Nicholas does it (Hayek says we shouldn’t reorganize society, therefore saying that society is in some way a human construct writes him out of the history of social thought), the discussion of the Greeks is doing it (I know nothing about Greek philosophy, but it looks like ‘x held this moral view’, ‘no, x held this other moral view’), and citizen is certainly doing it (‘it matters where human rights come from’: yes, but does that necessarily have anything to do with your view of how society came to be the way it is?). Ethics and sociology are not the same thing, and I think Kieran has encouraged the obviously false view that they are by confusing them in this post. Equating the recognition that societies are built up out of a set of contingent human actions with secular liberalism is deeply misleading, both in terms of the secularism and and the liberalism. Locke appealed to the divine law to justify social institutions which were definitely human constructs according to his philosophical anthropology, so you can have religiously motivated ethics and believe in the human construction of social institutions (Alisdair MacIntyre also springs to mind, and I’m sure there are innumerable others). Burke, on the other hand, seems to have thought that we were bound by the social contract of our fathers, which must mean he thought that society was to some degree the product of contingent human actions, but was not by any stretch of the imagination a liberal. Indeed, society as contingent, yet a thing we ought not to interfere with, seems to be a fairly common conservative trope: one might say it was the core of their view.

Thomas,

I don’t think that’s even true. Thinking that society is contingent all the way down does not prevent you from thinking that we could intervene in it. Granted, if you think that the contingency of society is wholly uncontrollable, random, as it were, that intervention becomes impossible. This does not mean that you don’t think it would be better to intervene, note, just impossible. You would become a kind of libertarian by default (and a weird kind of libertarian, because all the libertarians I know of think that the state should intervene to enforce self-ownership rights, which would seem to indicate that they don’t think the society is totally unamenable to state interventions). Anyway, most people don’t think of contingency that way: a given society is the product of particular contingent factors, which can be manipulated by the state and other actors to some greater or lesser degree. So acknowledgement of contingency does not necessarily have to effect your (abstract) political-theoretical beliefs. The disagreement between liberals and libertarians is all about political-theoretical beliefs, not about sociology (at least in terms of society as contingent or operating to a divine plan).

Rob–I don’t think I was as clear as I could have been. When I said contingent all the way down, I meant to suggest the possibility that society/community might not be at all. That is, not just that society/community might have turned out differently.

My reference to libertarians was a reference to the general libertarian insistence that the state has no rights other than the rights of the individuals on whose behalf it acts. The state is us, contractually bound, not organically bound. If the state can punish, it is not because the community has a right to defend itself (whether divinely ordained or otherwise), but because some individual was wronged and has the right to punish. And so on. That’s the view rejected by Thomas.