Stop Whining Start Thinking

IN EASTER Week, conservatives took a blow to the solar plexus. We thought that all we had to do was pass a law asking the federal courts to take a look at the Terri Schiavo case, and hey presto, Terri would have another two years to live while the courts mumbled over endless procedural issues, just like in capital murder cases.

Instead we piled into a locked courthouse door. And when we looked at the sign on the door of the Judicial Club, it said “Liberal Members Only. Conservative Deliveries in Rear.” Some conservatives were outraged. They started whining.

But the Terri Schiavo case is a godsend. It tells conservatives exactly where we stand in the culture wars. We have won control of two branches of government, but the other remains closed to us. First we won the presidency, the monarchical branch of government. In Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, we offered leaders to the American people that did what a monarch should: stand up for America. Then we won the Congress, the democratic branch of government. We won that because we have shown that we stand for the people against the vast Democratic apparatus of tax-eaters. Republicans stand for starving the beast; Democrats stand for feeding it. Conservatives stand for growing the country; liberals stand for growing the government.

But now the final challenge confronts us, winning in the courts, the aristocratic branch of government. With respect to the judicial branch, conservatives have a problem. The courts don’t take our ideas seriously. The reason is fairly simple; judges don’t think that conservatives have serious ideas. What conservative has not encountered the lumpen-liberal, softened by a lifetime in some tenured sinecure, who has said, “I just don’t understand how an educated man like you could think like that?”

The terms developed by Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism are helpful here. Conservatives must learn to lead the “moral/cultural sector” as well as the “economic sector” and the “political sector.” Right now the moral/cultural sector is big on the “quality of life” approach to medical ethics, or bioethics, that has been developing over the last decades in universities and think tanks.

Wesley J. Smith (http://www.consciencelaws.org/Examining-Conscience-Issues/ethical/Articles/Ethical11.html) reported on the bioethics community in the Weekly Standard back in 2000. He warned that it was developing a concept of “personhood,” a “quality-of-life ethic that requires individual humans to earn their moral and legal rights by displaying certain cognitive capacities.” You don’t get to enjoy full human rights unless you pass the test as, presumably, Terri Schiavo does not. It’s interesting, is it not, how our modern elite keeps returning to this theme. Once they merely wanted to cull the simple-minded, or the unfit. Then they moved on to the unwanted, and now the merely inconvenient.

The patriarch of bioethics, Joseph Fletcher, according to Smith, wanted a bioethics that was more than practical wisdom to guide physicians and hospitals. His followers agree. “Some bioethicists see themselves as the creators of a new moral paradigm that will replace the archaic Judeo-Christian order as the philosophical underpinning of society.” Maybe they are right. After they “ruminate” over a problem and reach consensus, it is surprising how quickly their agreement finds its way into law.

This utilitarian bioethics movement would not be a problem if it were engaged in a dialogue with advocates of the “sanctity of life” argument. But, as has become commonplace throughout the academy, it has built itself a walled community from which dissenting voices are excluded. Only utilitarians need apply.

In his article, Wesley J. Smith recommends a containment operation to keep the utilitarian bioethics community in check. But is that really enough? To win the culture war, to lead the moral/cultural sector, and to win over the judiciary, conservatives must occupy territory, including the walled camps of the bioethics establishment. Conservatives must “do” a better bioethics than the coterie of utilitarian secularists writing in the Hastings Center Journal and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Report.

Only when conservatives have transformed the moral/cultural sector will judges find themselves listening to advocates of the sanctity of life as much as they listen to the advocates of quality of life, and only then will they remove the “Liberal Members Only” sign from the courthouse door. Only then will they nod when a future David Brooks evenhandedly reports the Schiavo debate as “the clash of two serious but flawed arguments. The socially conservative argument has tremendous moral force, but doesn’t accord with the reality we see when we walk through a hospice. The socially liberal argument is pragmatic, but lacks moral force.”

Only then will they sagely nod when a future Mark Steyn insists that: “it may be legal under Florida law for the state to order [Schiavo] to be starved to death. But it is still wrong.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
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