Liberal morality

Paul K. writes:

There’s something I’ve been mulling over and am not sure if there’s an insight here. I recently read about a police raid that was made on a home because someone in the family was suspected of having downloaded child porn from the internet.

Turns out it was a mistake, caused by viruses that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations. It’s a chilling, Kafkaesque nightmare—a police raid, a family terrorized and ruined, all because of what their son was supposed to have looked at over the Internet. But it makes me wonder—why this frenzy over child porn in particular? Of course I too am repulsed by it, but only somewhat more so than I am by gay porn and other displays of dehumanizing perversion which are largely tolerated because they involve consenting adults. Would any traditional moralist see it as qualitatively different than the other outrages accepted in our culture—the lyrics of rap songs, the avant-garde art displayed in museums?

Do liberals feel they have to draw a line somewhere, to show that there are some things even they will not tolerate, to demonstrate that they too know sin when they see it? In the realm of morality, the lines they draw have shrunk until they enclose an area so minuscule that it seems incongruous to get into such high dudgeon over it. What’s more, it seems quite likely that in another ten or fifteen years our society will “evolve” to the point that it decides that kiddie porn is all right as well. (Those advanced Scandinavians find it acceptable after all.) No doubt tomorrow’s liberals will look back and shake their heads at the quaint hang-ups of the liberals of today.

LA replies:

This is an excellent observation. I’d say the liberal “line in the sand” you are trying to discern consists of two related aspects:

1. Consent. Liberalism says all wills and desires are equal. Therefore all consenting acts are ok. The content of the act is irrelevant. Consent makes all acts legitimate. Only acts involving minors who by law cannot give consent are not legitimate.

2. Equality. Acts between equally consenting selves are equal. An act involving a child suggests oppression.

So it’s the complete destruction of traditional morality, and its replacement by the left-liberal idea that only something that involves oppression by a more powerful individual over a less powerful one is bad.

The increased intensity of the moral disapprobation that you mention probably comes from compensation. Having dismantled all moral judgments except those having to do with this one narrow class of immoral acts, the liberals make up for it by being super moralistic and judgmental in that one area.

- end of initial entry -

Paul writes back:

Every once in a while a thought occurs to me that seems fresh. But then I wonder whether I have found a new insight on a subject, or merely come to a realization that has long been obvious to anyone who’s given it any thought. The former brings satisfaction, the latter embarrassment. So I appreciate your validating my insight!

LA replies:

Well, that’s not as bad as my problem:

Every once in a while a thought occurs to me that seems fresh. But then I wonder whether I have found a new insight, or merely come to a realization that I’ve had before and have written about before, and since forgotten about.

An inevitable problem when you spend year after year thinking about the same issues.

M. Mason writes:

Whenever I see a discussion like this, I’m reminded of a series of articles I read about twenty-five years ago written by Arthur Allen Leff, a respected Yale Law School professor. He was an agnostic, but in his work Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law he described with remarkable honesty how ethics and morality turn out when God is excluded. Leff desperately wanted to believe in two things that were irreconcilable: first, that humans could uncover a “complete, transcendent and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong … that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously,” and, second, he wanted to believe in no such thing, … “but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be.”

Lacking God, he followed the consequences of this view to its logical conclusion, and admitted that as far morality is concerned, what we are then left with is complete arbitrariness. To any purely human moral pronouncement, we can respond, “Sez who?” He writes:

…. All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect…. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.

To the above we can also add that any liberal’s beliefs about morality being determined by concepts of “oppression” and “inequality” are themselves merely the product of his own liberal culture and are, therefore, as irrelevant as the next person’s ideas as far as setting up a universal moral standard is concerned. Why should everyone else believe that “only acts involving minors who by law cannot give consent are not legitimate” or “acts between equally consenting selves are equal, [but] an act involving a child suggests oppression”? Why is even the oppression of others morally wrong? And what, exactly, is the liberal’s definition of “oppression” anyway? What if another person completely disagrees, or makes up their own definition? If “all wills and desires are equal,” then the entire game is up for grabs, and the liberal must grant to others the right to make the ultimate determination of what constitutes morality for themselves. How can any final “lines in the sand” really be drawn by liberals without resorting to unprincipled exceptions again and again?

LA replies:

That is an extraordinarily clear and painful expression of the spiritual devastation that is liberal, expressed by a tortured soul who is both committed to liberalism, and is honest about it. In fact, this Arthur Leff strikes me as a kind of liberal Nietzsche, staring into the void, and being honest about the fact that he’s staring into the void, but still resolutely rejecting any notion of the truth that might take him out of the void.

A liberal Jewish Nietzsche. Kind of funny.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 17, 2007 04:57 PM | Send