Tag: Ross Douthat

I’m afraid I’m still puzzled by where this line of argument is supposed to take us. Certainly not to the absurd conclusion that Andrew’s email correspondent draws, which that if we grant legal protection to zygotes or embryos, we would need “start refusing to sell alcohol to breeding-age women,” or “refuse to let them ski, ride horseback, or cycle,” because “all those activities can cause miscarriages.” (And if you disagree, you’re siding with the Taliban – which I suppose has replaced “that sounds suspiciously like something Hitler would say” as the clinching argument of choice.)

Right. And similarly, because we extend legal protection to born children, we don’t let their parents take them swimming or skiing, and we arrest parents who keep guns in the house, and also alcohol, and of course there’s secondhand smoke and all the other “activities that can cause accidental death” and that are therefore illegal. Except . . . they’re not illegal, because we make a rather obvious distinction between “activities that might accidentally harm or kill another human being in your care,” and “activities intended to directly cause the death of another human being.” So I still don’t see how the fact that zygotes and embryos die accidentally all the time bears on whether killing them is wrong – beyond the instinctive feeling that if something happens a lot without our thinking about it much, it can’t be bad.

As for why we don’t think about it that much – well, certainly Julian’s right, in a sense, that we respond differently to earthquake deaths than to accidental zygote deaths because earthquake victims have a lot of qualities that prompt pity and empathy and grief, and zygotes don’t. The zygote doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t have a personality or memories, he doesn’t have the kind of intimate bonds that are ruptured by the death of an adult human being. So the tragedy isn’t nearly as great as it would be if I were to die, or Julian, or Andrew. And similarly, not all murders are created equal, which is why I don’t think there’s any contradiction between saying that abortion is murder and should be illegal, and admitting that there are greater extenuating circumstances – because of the intimacy of pregnancy and the understandable terror associated with becoming pregnant unintentionally – and less suffering involved for the victim than in almost any other form of murder, and that the penalties for a woman who procures an abortion should therefore be minimal or nonexistent.

Yet acknowledging that all deaths aren’t the same, and that all murders aren’t equally wicked, doesn’t mean that all lives don’t deserve legal protection. If I shoot a mother of four, it’s a much greater tragedy than if I shoot a friendless bum, and you’d probably want to give me a much stiffer prison sentence. But it doesn’t mean the mom should have the right to life and the bum – or the fetus, the embryo, or the zygote – shouldn’t.

And of course, the other reason we don’t respond emotionally to zygote deaths is because we don’t know they’re happening. The “zygote intuition” argument would make a little bit more sense, in this regard, if people never felt grief over a miscarriage. Then you could argue – “look, our moral intuitions tell us not to grieve over human life before that life acquires a personality, or self-awareness, or a face.” But of course, people do feel grief over miscarriages, by and large – just as they feel guilt (again, by and large) over abortions. Which suggests, in turn, that we don’t grieve for zygotes not because we somehow intuit that they aren’t really people, but because – unlike embryos and fetuses – we aren’t aware of their deaths. You can’t grieve for something you don’t know exists.

And you can’t kill it, either. I know that the argument-from-zygotes is intended to show the alleged extremism of the pro-life position, not make an empirical claim about the nature of abortion in the U.S. – but even so, it’s worth pointing out that no abortion clinic is in the zygote-killing business. They’re in the embryo and fetus-killing business, because by the time anyone knows they’re pregnant, the zygote is all grown up. So if for some reason we decided to move to an entirely intuition-based abortion regime, our zygote intuitions wouldn’t really matter much anyway – only our embryo and fetus intuitions would.

– posted by Ross

Andrew writes:

If you believe that human beings exist from the moment a zygote comes into being, there are almost no environments more dangerous for humans than inside their own mother.

Well, sure – but if you believe that human beings exist from the moment a zygote comes into being, you could just as easily argue that the safest environment for a human being, at that stage of its development, is inside its own mother. Yes, it’s still a pretty dangerous place – but so was the environment outside the mother’s womb, until the last hundred years or so. A kid born in Chicago in 1870, for instance, had a fifty percent chance of reaching the age of five. But that didn’t make him any less of a human being.

And it’s not quite true that, as Andrew puts it, “comparing the scale of what humans do to the unborn with what nature does is like comparing a high tide with a tsunami.” It’s more like comparing a middling tsunami to a major one. There are about 4 million births a year in the United States, and if we suppose that only a third of zygotes make it through to birth, that means that about eight million human lives perish naturally in utero. This is obviously a lot more than the between 1 and 1.5 million abortions that have taken place every year since the mid-1970s – but not so much more that the latter statistic fades into insignificance.

And even if it did, so what? “Nature” kills everyone, eventually. The death rate for people in the stage of development we call the eighth decade of life is probably around eighty percent or so. That doesn’t make it less of a crime if someone bumps my grandmother off. We don’t have laws against murder because we want to lower the death rate to zero – we have laws against murder because we accept that 1) everyone dies, but 2) it’s not okay to kill them.

Obviously, nature’s waste is a strong intuitive argument against the pro-life position – i.e., if zygotes and embryos perish in such great numbers, how can they be that important? If we don’t know these lives exist, and don’t grieve when they’re accidentally snuffed out, why isn’t okay to kill them? But I don’t think it makes for a very strong logical argument. The crux of the abortion debate is whether there ought to be a legal distinction between human lives (which zygotes and embryos and fetuses obviously are) and human persons – defined variously by brain activity, ability to feel pain, level of self-awareness, possession of language, ability to survive independent of their mother’s body, or what-have-you. And intuitions aside, I don’t think even the most ardent pro-choicer wants to start defining “personhood” based on survival rates. You won’t like where it takes you.

– posted by Ross

UPDATE: I simply want to echo every single point of Ross’. There’s a distinction between wilfull taking of human life and nature’s toll, beyond human control. The argument about zygotes does not logically alter the absolutist pro-life case, but it does, I think, provide context for an intuitive sense (echoed by Aquinas) that it’s too extreme a view. The tsunami-tide metaphor may be excessive. But the ratio of natural abortions to procured ones is still around 8:1. As for “personhood,” Ross is right again: that’s a separate question. I deal with all this in the book. The blog post was designed to nail down a fact.

– posted by Andrew.

That would be David Brooks, in today’s column:

I don’t know what’s more pathetic, Jack Abramoff’s sleaze or Republican paralysis in the face of it. Abramoff walks out of a D.C. courthouse in his pseudo-Hasidic homburg, and all that leading Republicans can do is promise to return his money and remind everyone that some Democrats are involved in the scandal, too.

That’s a great G.O.P. talking point: some Democrats are so sleazy, they get involved with the likes of us . . .

. . . Back in the dim recesses of my mind, I remember a party that thought of itself as a reform, or even a revolutionary movement. That party used to be known as the Republican Party. I wonder if it still exists.

Of course, you probably don’t have Time$elect, so you can’t read the whole thing.

– posted by Ross

So Marion Barry was robbed at gunpoint last night, and he wasn’t best pleased:

“There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys, that I am their friend,” Barry said at an afternoon news conference in which he described the robbery in detail. “I don’t advocate what they do. I advocate conditions to change what they do. I was a little hurt that this betrayal did happen.”

Somewhere in here, there’s a joke about liberals who get mugged by reality, but I can’t quite put my finger on it . . .

– posted by Ross

In a year of war, tsunami and hurricane, what just happened in the West Virginia mine might feel like a small tragedy, but then again where death is involved there are no small tragedies. And the twist of the knife – the false reports that twelve miners survived, and the premature celebrations – makes it that much more unbearable.

This is the point where Christians often murmur something about the mystery of suffering, or God’s mysterious ways. There is a mystery associated with suffering, but in general the language that David Hart used, following the tsunami, seems more appropriate to me – that “when confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering . . . no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God’s inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God’s good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms – knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against ‘fate,’ and that must do so until the end of days.”

There’s a trend in religious thought lately that dismisses the whole idea of heaven, of resurrection and eternal life and a redeemed creation, as anachronistic and spiritually immature. I wrote about it a little bit here, but it’s best embodied by a recent Harper’s essay on “The Scars of a Christian Inheritance,” in which the author, Scott Korb, offers this bit of wisdom:

Focusing on confession and love of the here and now may be just the right way to stomach this Christian legacy I’m living under. I can let go of both the ancient miracle of the Resurrection and the modern miracle Catholics experience when priests change bread and wine into the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. In fact, I must let go of these most basic elements of Catholicism that point to the afterlife, salvation, and personal, eternal reward. But why? Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned religious scholar, who is also not interested in the afterlife, has answered this question well: the afterlife is about preserving your ego “eternally in optimum conditions.” It’s that sort of egotism that God would have us let go of, and that builds walls between people.

You know, I very much doubt that when the miners’ families in West Virginia hope and pray for a resurrection of the body and a life everlasting, they’re indulging in “egotism,” or throwing up walls against God or each other. And yes, I’m taking a cheap shot – but sometimes cheap shots can get at an essential truth, which is that Christianity is about the conquest of death, not its enlightened acceptance, and that in the absence of a resurrection, no pious words can make either the miners’ deaths or our own anything but a horror.

– posted by Ross

One of the risks associated with certain ongoing socioeconomic trends – the upper class getting richer, the middle class shrinking, the barriers to social mobility increasing as a college diploma becomes ever-more essential – is that the twenty-first century U.S. will end up looking more and more like class-bound Europe, or worse, Latin America. Let’s just hope that hunting isn’t a leading indicator: it’s long been a much more democratic and working-class pastime here than in Europe, but Christina Larson argues that it’s now often too pricey for many Americans to afford.

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS: For politicians, from N. Gregory Mankiw, and worth a read by left and right alike.

– posted by Ross

Well, Heath Ledger isn’t better than the best of Marlon Brando, and you can find things to dislike in it without being “an insecure idiot.” But it’s a very strong movie, one of the year’s best in a way – restrained, graceful, and moving, at once spacious and intensely personal. The initial summer on Brokeback Mountain, I thought, was the weakest section, perhaps because it’s extremely difficult for any filmmaker, lacking the luxury of interiority, to dramatize how two essentially uncommunicative people fall in love. But once you accept that Ledger’s Ennis and Gyllenhaal’s Twist are in love, the rest of the pieces of the story fall into place, and the long unhappiness of their post-Brokeback lives – and the lives of their wives – is one of the more effective stories of personal tragedy that I’ve seen onscreen of late. (Though with Capote and The Squid and the Whale, this has been a good year for the cinema of intimate tragedy.) In a sense, the people who say that this isn’t a “gay movie” are right – insofar as it’s a story of love found and then partially denied, and the human costs of that denial, its themes are universal. Indeed, it’s just a sign of how few impediments the modern world places in the way of romantic passion that this kind of story can basically only be told about homosexuals – and perhaps not even about them anymore.

But of course it is a gay movie, too, in the sense that it’s a movie that doesn’t just tell the story of two men in love, but advances certain ideas about the nature of that love. There isn’t a political agenda in Brokeback Mountain, exactly – it isn’t a brief for hate crimes laws or domestic partnerships, except by implication – but there’s unquestionably a moral and philosophical agenda, and one that’s more radical, I think, than most critics are likely to acknowledge. The film is a study in the contrast between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and the former is – almost without exception – presented as preferable to the latter, as purer and more beautiful, and ultimately as more authentically masculine. Critics have noted, rightly, how Ang Lee portrays his heroes’ wives sympathetically – particularly Michelle Williams’s Alma – and this is true, so far as it goes. But while the film invites the audience to like them and pity their plight, it also trades in the darkest stereotypes of domestic life – the squalling babies, the tiny apartments and the mounting bills, the domineering in-laws and the general claustrophobia that almost any man feels, at one point or another, in his married life, but that Brokeback Mountain portrays as being the whole of it.

To a certain extent, the drama of the movie necessitates this kind of contrast, but it’s significant, I think, that the film doesn’t offer any model of successful heterosexual masculinity, or of successful heterosexual relationships in general. The straight men are all either strutting oafs, bitter bigots like Jack Twist’s father, or “nice-guy” weaklings like Alma’s second husband, whose well-meaning effeminacy contrasts sharply with Ennis’s rugged manliness. Jack and Ennis are the only “real men” in the story, and their love is associated with the high country and the vision of paradise it offers – a world of natural beauty and perfect freedom, of wrestling matches and campfires and naked plunges into crystal rivers – and a world with no girls allowed. Civilization is women and babies and debts and fathers-in-law and bosses; freedom is the natural world, and the erotic company of men. It’s an old idea of the pre-Christian world come round again – not that gay men are real men too; but that real men are gay.

– posted by Ross

This will be of interest mainly to those folks who obsessively follow box-office returns (you know who you are), but a few weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt boldly predicted that The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe would outgross King Kong not only overall, but on Kong‘s opening weekend. This was pure folly, as any BoxOfficeMojo-devotee could have informed Hewitt, and Jonathan Last took great pleasure in explaining just why the prediction was so unlikely to come true.

Well, Jonathan was right – but since the opening weekend, Aslan has been clawing his way back to the top. Kong barely outgrossed Narnia over Christmas weekend, and since then the C.S. Lewis adaptation has pulled back into the lead, making money hand over paw (sorry, sorry).

I’m a little surprised by this turn, in part because in spite of being smack in the middle of the target demographic for Philip Anschutz’s big project, I actually preferred Kong to Narnia (my complaints about the latter are here), though both were miles from perfect. (Steve Sailer has it right – there were two hours of a great movie in Kong, but unfortunately the film was three hours long.) But it’s still gratifying that Narnia‘s doing well, if only because it means they’ll film the later books – and hopefully, as with the Harry Potter movies, the adaptations will get better as they go along.

Unfortunately, the one they’ve started on, Prince Caspian, is one of the weakest of the seven – and the one after that, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is pretty dull as well. (If there’s any Narnia book where the religious allegory gets in the way of the story, it’s Dawn Treader.) And it would be a shame if audience interest dries up before they get around to The Horse and His Boy, or The Magician’s Nephew, or my personal favorite, The Silver Chair. (I’m hoping for Jeremy Irons as Puddleglum . . .)

– posted by Ross

Jon Meacham’s religion writing in Newsweek is often quite good, but his Christmas Day Times Book Review essay on religious books is wearying and banal. This conclusion, in particular:

On Christmas morning 1825, John Henry Newman, a young man of ferocious intellect and intense faith who had just been ordained an Anglican priest (he would die a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church), preached a sermon while a curate of St. Clement’s Church, Oxford. “It is a day of joy: it is good to be joyful – it is wrong to be otherwise,” Newman said. “Let us seek the grace of a cheerful heart, an even temper, sweetness, gentleness and brightness of mind, as walking in His light and by His grace.” Such was the view of a questing and committed Christian, a view not so different from that of Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century American agnostic. “Christmas is a good day to forgive and forget – a good day to throw away prejudices and hatreds – a good day to fill your heart and your house, and the hearts and houses of others, with sunshine.” Newman thought the brightness came from the Christ child; Ingersoll from simple human kindness. The important thing is that both detected light and each cherished it according to the dictates of his own mind and his own heart – an encouraging sign that there is more than one way to overcome the darkness.

Well, no. The important thing is whether Newman or Ingersoll had it right – whether Christ was, in fact, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, etc. etc. and the Catholic Church his instrument on Earth – or whether, to pluck a quote from Ingersoll, “the man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered.” (Or whether both were wrong and Muhammed had it right, or Spinoza, or someone else.) Newman and Ingersoll weren’t at odds over some abstruse point of theology, like whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son – they disagreed on questions that lie at the heart of who we are, what the universe is, what our purpose is on Earth and what our ultimate destiny might be. The fact that both men “detected light” and tried to “overcome the darkness” is a good thing – but it’s not the most important thing. Indeed, the fact that two men as diametrically opposed as Ingersoll and Newman could agree on it should be a pretty obvious signal that it’s not the most important thing.

This is a confusion that liberalism has wandered into lately. The original aim of the liberal philosophers was to remove the “high” questions, the important-but-unresolvable questions – what is virtue? is Jesus Christ the Son of God? where do we go when we die? etc. – from the political realm, where they had caused so much trouble, and into the private and personal sphere. Politics henceforth would focus on lower matters, and be more peacable because of it. The difficulty, of course, is that over time liberalism lost sight of the fact that the high questions are high, and the low questions low, and came to believe that because everyone could agree, say, that you should respect your neighbor’s property and avoid killing your enemy whenever possible, these were the most important questions facing humanity, and nobody – not even essayists and intellectuals – should sweat the other, harder-to-answer stuff. In early liberalism, governments weren’t supposed to take positions on Christ’s divinity, because the question was too important to be adjudicated by the state; in late liberalism, writers for the Times Book Review aren’t supposed to take positions on Christ’s divinity, because the question isn’t important enough to worry over.

Look, it’s swell that Ingersoll and Newman both enjoyed Christmas, and that both used the holiday as an opportunity to urge their listeners to be nice to one another. But Meacham is a practicing Christian, I believe, and so he presumably thinks that Newman was right about the rather important question of what Christmas is, and Ingersoll mistaken. Why doesn’t he tell us why, instead of ducking the issue? That would be an essay worth reading.

– posted by Ross

Everybody seems to have an opinion about Jeffrey Hart’s anatomy of the conservative mind, so I suppose I should as well. The main points of contention seem to be whether conservatives are often inclined to a kind of free-market utopianism (depending on how you define utopianism, of course they are), whether the pro-life cause is hopeless (Hart thinks so; he’s probably wrong) – and the question of whether conservatism has grown, well, dumber over the past fifty years. Hart implies as much, when he writes that the Republican Party

has stood for many and various things in its history. The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt, now the solid base of “Republicanism.” The consequences of that profound shift are evident, especially with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture.

There’s been an interesting back-and-forth on whether the South and the Sunbelt are actually less prudent, educated, cultured and so forth between Ramesh, Matt Yglesias, Jonah, and Ramesh again – but I think it sidesteps the main question. Of course the bastions of intellect and high culture in the U.S. are primarily located in the Blue States, and most of our intellectual mandarins tend to be Democrats and liberals. But this is hardly a change from the 1950s, before the South-Sunbelt shift took place, is it? Conservatism of any stripe has always been a minority view among the American intelligentsia – and if anything, the Southern turn of the GOP coincided with a dramatic increase in the number and caliber of conservative intellectuals, as various once-liberal thinkers abandoned a Democratic Party that seemed to have drifted too far left. (I probably would have been one of them, had I been around back then, and possessed of the same grab-bag of ideas and prejudices that I have now. I suspect I would have voted for Eisenhower and definitely would have subscribed to NR – but I probably would have called myself a Democrat, and a liberal, at least until 1968 and possibly deep into the ’70s.)

So while I don’t mean any disrespect to the Willmoore Kendalls and Richard Weavers, I think that Hart’s nostalgia from a pre-1964 East Coast conservatism is misplaced, and it’s far more reasonable to locate the intellectual peak of conservatism not in the early days of National Review, but after the Goldwater campaign and the Southern Strategy – in the 1970s and ’80s, when the early neocons rubbed shoulders, and ideas, with paleocons, quasi-cons and the emergent Christian Right, and when Ronald Reagan gave the Right an articulate and intellectually serious political spokesman. (How do we know it was a golden age? Well, in part because most of the big-name conservative intellectuals of today are holdovers from that twenty-year span – which speaks well of that era, if not necessarily of this one.)

Now I suppose Hart could argue that the yahoo-ization of the Right had only just begun during the Reagan era, and the drop-off from Losing Ground to The War on Christmas embodies the slow working-out of conservatism’s South-West sashay. But isn’t it more likely that the drop-off is mainly a result of 1) larger cultural trends toward quickie-books, shortened attention-spans and cable news shoutfests, and 2) the exhaustion and corruption of intellect that almost inevitably coincides with taking over the business of governing? There’s a lot more pressure to come up with new ideas when you’re on the outside looking in; once you’ve taken power, it’s easy to become convinced that history is going your way, that your enemies will remain in disarray forever (which they may, admittedly), and that it’s okay to accept a small sinecure from Jack Abramoff or the Deparment of Education in exchange for some columns or radio spots that you would have written anyway. It’s easy, too, to assume that political victories are a substitute for cultural change, to let domestic policy wither on the vine, to substitute populist slogans for new ideas, to seal yourself off from criticism . . . but I don’t really see how any of these Bush Era problems, however real, can be traced directly to the pernicious influence of the Sunbelt or the South.

THE LIMITS OF LIBERTARIANISM: Andrew, meanwhile, uses Hart’s argument about the GOP’s turn in the South to advance a similar but by no means identical claim:

The alliance between conservatism, as it was once understood, and the historically Democratic American South is, in my view, a brilliant maneuver for gaining political power, but something that has mortally wounded the tradition of limited government, individual rights, balanced budgets, political prudence and religious moderation that were once hallmarks of conservatism.

As Ramesh notes, this analysis leaves out the more libertarian Sunbelt, whose Goldwater strain of conservatism is closer to the kind of right-wing politics that Andrew usually champions. But more importantly, it leaves out the fact that the GOP’s geographic shift in the 1960s and 1970s made the party more concerned with small government and individual rights and tax cuts and all the other “hallmarks of conservatism” that Andrew favors, and less inclined to favor the liberalism-lite exemplified by (ahem) northeasterners like John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller. This is one of the two difficulties that I see with Andrew’s theory of what conservatism ought to be, and that I hope his book addresses – namely, that the constituency for his preferred kind of small-government conservatism tends to be the same people he regularly attacks, sometimes justly and sometimes not, as religious zealots and betrayers of the old Oakeshottian faith. The small-government purists in the House of Representatives, by and large, are also the people who want to ban cloning and defund stem-cell research, outlaw gay marriage and keep Terri Schiavo alive. If you want a more libertarian GOP on size-of-government issues, as Andrew clearly does, then you have to make some kind of peace with the Religious Right and its concerns.

So that’s one difficulty. The other problem is that a more libertarian Republican Party – and a more libertarian conservatism – probably wouldn’t be able to cobble together a governing majority, at least for the foreseeable future. There’s a reason for the GOP’s big-government turn in the last decade, and it’s not just malice, corruption and incompetence – it’s that some kind of a big-government turn is what the American people wanted from the post-Gingrich Right. Bush defeated (or at least nearly outpolled) Al Gore in 2000 not in spite of, but because of his willingness to promise spending increases, to co-opt Democratic ideas on health care and education, and to invent a silly-but-useful language of “compassionate conservatism.” This move has had a variety of dreadful consequences, from the explosion of pork to the outrageously overpriced prescription drug bill – but it was politically necessary, and still is. The conservatism that Andrew wants would be ideologically pure and intellectually respect
able, but the public wouldn’t go for it – and if conservatism expects to govern the country, it needs to find a way (and a better one than Bush’s) to meet the public halfway.

– posted by Ross