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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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

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

Class War

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”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

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

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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