Matt Zeitlin Needs to Learn to Stop Respecting Social Conservatives
Matt Zeitlin writes:
Smart People Making Bad Arguments « Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper: Robert George is a very smart and accomplished man. He makes his arguments honestly and rigorously. So, when he goes to the Wall Street Journal to make an argument against gay marriage, it’s probably a good idea for gay rights defenders to perk up their collective ears...
Matt Zeitlin forgets the Iron Law of Intellectual Conservatism: intellectual conservatives are not smart and accomplished, and so they only sound smart and reasonable only for a particular historical instant--and then they are clearly seen as silly and stupid. Jacob Levy:
Jacob Levy: Conservatism and Its Absence of Contents: Tyler Cowen... makes the insightful point that "none [of the 20th century American conservatives] have held up particularly well..." It's a real problem.... [T]here's no modern work to teach alongside Theory of Justice and Anarchy, State, and Utopia that really gets at what's interesting about Burkean or social conservatism.... [H]istory keeps right on going--and so any book plucked from the past that was concerned with yelling "stop!" tends to date badly to any modern reader.... This is a particular problem because of race in America--no mid-20th c[entury conservative] work is going to endure as a real, read-not-just-namechecked, classic of political thought that talks about how everything will go to hell if the South isn't allowed to remain the South.... Oakeshott has his own version of these problems; doesn't "Rationalism in Politics" end up feeling faintly ridiculous by the time he's talking about women's suffrage?...
Indeed, as Matt writes immediately afterwards:
But what’s interesting about his pretty simple natural law argument for why gay marriage is a bad idea is how, well, silly it is. This isn’t really his fault. Natural law is a silly concept, and it’s often times just a cudgel used by conservatives to deny the rights claims of minorities. But anyway, here’s George:
Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.
What makes George’s natural law argument better than most is that he points out how our current legal understanding of marriage is premised on some sort of possibly procreative sexual union between the two opposite-sex people. But this only gets you so far. All he’s established is that the institution of marriage... formally, embeds some assumptions about the gender and behavior of the couples. What George can’t prove is whether this set up currently meaningful or if it’s in accordance with our ideas of justice. Historians and social scientists who actually study the empirical reality of what marriage is today don’t agree with George. Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson... characterize modern marriage as “hedonic marriage.”... [T]he language and formal institution of marriage may not have catched up with the changes we’ve seen since, say, the 1960s, but those changes are real.... [A]side from any flaws in George’s description of how marriage actually works... there is the sheer lack of recognition of how gays are disadvantaged because of their sexuality by not allowing them to marry. As Jon Chait pointed out, conservative arguments about social policy tend to absolutely ignore the welfare of gay citizens, and instead make tendentious or speculative arguments about why affording them equal rights willhurt everyone or will irrevocably damage our institutions. This seems like the insurmountable challenge for opponents of gay marriage. The institution has already changed into one that is no longer based around procreation. Also, we are approaching a societal consensus that discriminating against gay people just because of they’re sexuality is bigoted and wrong. Lots of gay people want to get married and abide by the standards, rules, regulations and expectations of married people. So, it’s going to take a lot more than a legalistic, nostalgic definition of marriage combined with a slippery slope argument about polyamory to deny a strong claim from fairness and equality about why a group of people should enjoy some rather basic rights...
I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE SOCIAL CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!
You can see this most clearly if you take a close look at Edmund Burke and realize that Burke is by no means a social conservative. Burke does not think that Tradition is to be Respected; he thinks good traditions should be respected. When Edmund Burke argues that Britons should respect the tradition of English liberty they have inherited from the Ancestors, it is because in this particular case Burke thinks that the Ancestors--not his personal ancestors, note--were wise. Whenever Burke thought that the inherited political traditions were not wise, the fact that they were the inherited Wisdom of the Ancestors cut no ice. In Reflections, Burke doesn't argue that Frenchmen should build on their own political traditions--the traditions of Richelieu and Louis XIV, that is. He argues--well, let's let him talk:
Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France: You [in France] might, if you pleased, have... given to your recovered freedom... dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution... suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. ... In your old [E]states [General]... you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.... You had all these advantages in your antient [E]states [General].... If the last generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors.... Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves.... [Y]ou would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage.... Would it not... have been wiser to have you thought... a generous and gallant nation, long misled... by... fidelity, honour, and loyalty... that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition... [but] by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king?...
Burke's argument is not that France in 1789 should have followed its traditions. Burke's argument is that France in 1789 should have dug into its past until it found a moment when institutions were good, and drawn upon that usable past in order to buttress the present revolutionary moment. This isn't an intellectual argument about how to decide what institutions are good. It is a practical-political argument about how to create good institutions and then buttress and secure them by making them facts on the ground.
What are good institutions? Burke is close to Madison: checks-and-balances, separation of powers, rights of the subject, limitations on the state. Burke's views on what good institutions are Enlightenment views--that branch of the Enlightenment that took people as they are and politics as a science, that is, rather than the branch that took people as Rousseau hoped they might someday be and politics as the striking of an oppositional pose. Because he finds that the English past is usable as a support for his Enlightenment-driven views, Burke makes conservative arguments in Reflections. But whenever conservative arguments lead where Burke doesn't want to go--to Richelieu or Louis XIV or the plunder of Ireland or the Star Chamber or Warren Hastings or imperial centralization--Burke doesn't make them. For Burke, conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical weapon, not a principle.
