How to Resolve the Paradox
Norm said something interesting today.
A framework for public life based on accepting that there is no single ‘road to salvation’, or – put otherwise – no single overriding moral truth, or that there is no way to be completely certain about whatever moral truth there may be, would seem to be the only alternative to permanent warfare between people of different belief systems (and that applies, of course, not only to religious belief systems). Call this framework ‘pluralist liberalism’. Is it not itself premissed, then, upon principles for which universal validity is claimed by its adherents? Some would say no, but I’ve never seen a persuasive argument for that. Liberalism makes a claim of its own to moral truth, but it’s a moral truth permitting those who believe in competing moral truths to live together, provided they don’t try to impose these on one another by violence. Which means that liberalism has to exclude the attempts of antithetical belief systems to monopolize the public domain for themselves. If there is an air of paradox about this, I don’t know how to resolve it.
Well…one way might be by saying there is a difference between a single road to salvation – which is, for instance, the kind of thing David Horowitz and Jamie Glazov kept trying to pin on Norm and Nick and the whole of the left in that misbegotten interview in Front Page a month or two ago – they kept insisting that the left as a whole believed in utopianism – like this:
But if you are on the Left, are you not part of an ideology that holds that human redemption, accompanied by human equality and a classless society, is possible and that it can be engendered through social engineering?
No. Next question. Or rather, back to what I was saying when I interrupted myself – that sentence isn’t even finished, which is a disgrace. Ahem: by saying there is a difference between a single road to salvation, and a framework based on accepting that there isn’t one (or, pluralist liberalism). By saying that universal validity isn’t exactly the same thing as a single road to salvation or a single – single, mark – overriding moral truth. By saying that a single road to salvation, a single overriding moral truth, and certainty about whatever moral truth there might be, are all on one side of this divide, all fit into one definitional box, while a framework based on accepting that there is no such thing, and plural liberalism, and claims of universal validity, are on the other. Perhaps it’s the secular aspect that separates them. Roads to salvation and single overriding moral truths tend to be theistic, and handed down by authority, and thus immune to questioning and reason; a framework that says there is no such thing isn’t. All the words Norm chose for the first half of the equation smack of taboo, of hands off, of don’t touch, of the holy of holies; the words he chose for the second half smack of the human and the discussable. The first half can be delivered by fiat; the second half relies on reasons. The first can’t be explained; the second can.
That’s how I would resolve the paradox. I would say that universal validity is not the same thing as a single overriding moral truth, because it’s a human thing not a goddy thing.
How would you resolve it?
Maybe.
As far as I can see (always excepting Bhuddism, which may not be a religion) all religions make a claim to absolute moral truth(s).
And those moral truths differ between religions, and between different sects of those religions.
This is where religious wars and intolerance come from, because of the competing absolute claims.
Obviously, a maximum of one of these sets of claims can be really true, since they are so obviously, incompatible.
When one examines the various claims of the religious mental drug-pushers, one finds, (what a surprise!) that their claims are, actually all false, in some respect or another.
Pluralist liberalism sidesteps this problem, by deeming religion, and religious beliefs, to be private matters, provided no harm is done to others. To put it more crudely, what you do as “consenting adults” in the privacy of your own homes/churches/mosques/etc is your business – please don’t bring it onto the street, ad frighten the horses.”
Unfortunately, we seem to be in a period where religious believers wish to insist on bringing their private beliefs into the public arena, and demanding that the rest of us abide by their standards. This last, of course, is contrary to the tenets of pluralist liberalism – hence the conflict.
Note – Bhuddism: As I understand it, the Enlightened One said something like:
“Here is a Way, it worked for me, it can work for you, it isn’t the only Way, but you might like to give it a try, and follow my example.”
What a contrast to the other, exclusive religions, claiming universal truth for only their version …..
There isn’t really a contradiction, is there? Liberalism means being liberal, not having a dominant ideology, except that there shall not be a dominant ideology – at least in religious matters. In economics and politics there tends to be a default ideology, but only because, like religious tolerance, its goal is to use whatever works best, not to use one method only and never to waver. When capitalism is beaten by a better economic system, it shouldn’t be a problem for liberals to embrace the new system. It’s all about devolving power, in all things, from the top, to as far down as is reasonably possible. Crucial to this is removing the dominant influence of (any) church, with its self-proclaimed, self-aggrandising unchangeability.
“there is a difference between a single road to salvation, and a framework based on accepting that there isn’t one”
I would resolve this by saying:
In much the same way as atheism isn’t a religion, pluralism isn’t a teleology.
But by insisting that there is no single way aren’t you being fascistically dictatorial over those who believe that there is?
Nope, because you’re not forbidding them to believe there is, you’re only forbidding them to impose their belief on everyone else. As atheism isnt a religion and pluralism isn’t a teleology (thanks, dirigible), rejection of theocracy and theocracy-equivalents isn’t dictatorship.
I quite like this, I think it works. I wonder what Norm thinks.
>Perhaps it’s the secular aspect that separates them. Roads to salvation and single overriding moral truths tend to be theistic, and handed down by authority, and thus immune to questioning and reason; a framework that says there is no such thing isn’t.< Ophelia, I would have thought the twentieth century had demonstrated that roads to salvation are by no means exclusive to the non-secular. The thousand-year Reich, the communist utopia just over the horizon (come the revolution)… And please, you know who, let’s not have “Marxism is a religion”. Parallels may be drawn – that doesn’t make them the same. >and single overriding moral truths< Now who was it who said “Morality is what serves the interests of the Party”, or some such words?
Um. Fair point, Allen.
I’m tripping myself up all over the place today.
Still, I did say perhaps, and tend to be. I did realize I was making it up as I went along…
Misbegotten interview indeed. What offensive and question-begging assaults on integrity. I like left-bashing as much as the next RWDB, but recognising that people don’t sign on for liquidating Kulaks with their first Democrat vote is pretty damn basic.
Nazism and Stalinism are tractable to criticism in ways that religion isn’t for precisely the reasons OB gives. I’m not convinced by the argument that either nazism or stalinism offered salvation. They offered psychologically and politically functional substitutes for it.
As for morality being what serves the party, ethics began as what serves the state so this is a trivial mutation.
RE: Left or Right In Politics
What Is Your Political Compass?
http://beepbeepitsme.blogspot.com/2006/08/what-is-your-political-compass.html
[Nope, because you’re not forbidding them to believe there is, you’re only forbidding them to impose their belief on everyone else. ]
any liberal state which includes an institution of property rights is presumably going to use state violence to ensure that the belief of some people in property rights is imposed on everyone else. For example. If I am a hippy of a communist or a Georgist who believes that the land is the property of everyone in common, and I express this belief by setting up a smallholding on Lord Blimp’s estate, then the state will send people to chuck me off it, and if I resist being chucked off, then in the end they will shoot me. Thereby, they’re going to impose their beliefs on people who don’t share them. There was quite a to-do about this general issue in Europe in the 19th century.
But I didn’t say beliefs, I said belief, in reference to one specific belief that Chris Whiley cited: the belief that there is one single way.
The institution of property rights is at least in principle debatable, though not really in practice. Macpherson’s book on possessive individualism is interesting on all this, of course. In other words, sure; that’s up to a point again; a liberal state is going to have some laws; but I still take that to be a different kind of thing from a single absolute Way.
All modern liberal states do in fact believe that there is one single way and we are now apparently prepared to go to war to impose it on our neighbours. The fact that some of our political rhetoric makes the claim that liberalism supersedes and encompasses all other valid ways of life hardly sets us apart from Islam or Communism.
That’s incoherent. Who’s we? And what is the “it” that “we” are prepared to go to war to impose on our neighbours? Are you equating Bush with “we”? Or with all modern liberal states? In either case, why? And who are “our neighbours”? And are there any modern liberal states that are prepared to go to war to impose this putative one single way on all its neighbours, with neighbours construed as countries as distant and noncontiguous as Iraq is to the US? That would mean there are modern liberal states prepared to go to war to impose one single way on most of the countries on the planet. That seems like a tall order. Which modern liberal states are these?
I do not believe that you are genuinely confused by the practice of British people and Americans to refer to the United Kingdom and United States as “we”. Nor do I believe you are genuinely confused by the metaphor “our neighbours”, and I know that you are aware of the specific foreign policy I am talking about because it is a key point of the Euston Manifesto which you have signed. You are also a regular reader of Norman Geras’ blog so you can hardly have failed to notice that there are a load of mainstream liberals who think it is OK to use military action to turn non-democracies into democracies. Unless we are trying to carry out some philosophical experiment in what happens if people completely give up on interpretive charity, what is the point?
You get funnier with every comment I read!
“I do not believe that you are genuinely confused by the practice of British people and Americans to refer to the United Kingdom and United States as “we”.”
Really!? Without explanation, without context, in a sentence that has started by talking about all modern liberal states? If that’s the practice of British people, good luck to you, but it’s certainly not the practice of Americans.
“Nor do I believe you are genuinely confused by the metaphor “our neighbours”,”
Meaning, nor are you willing to admit you were unclear. Okay, don’t. Your comment remains to speak for itself.
“there are a load of mainstream liberals who think it is OK to use military action to turn non-democracies into democracies”
All non-democracies? Or, even more sweepingly, what you said in the original comment, “we are now apparently prepared to go to war to impose it on our neighbours” which (given, as I said, the Iraq example, which would make almost the whole planet “neighbours”) means “we” (the US and UK, apparently) are prepared to go to war to impose democracy on most of the other countries in the world? You don’t regret saying the US and UK are prepared to go to war with most of the world in order to impose democracy on it?
That really is pretty funny.