Nationhood and morality

Dimitri K. writes:

You pay a lot of attention to morality, homosexuality and other important issues. In general, I agree with you. However, it struck me recently that all those issues are not the most important ones at the time of war and crisis. President Bush is strong on abortions but soft on immigration, so, what is the result? What would you say about Catholic priests in France who signed a petition against homosexualism together with mullahs?

I started to think, that the job of the president of the US is not about abortions at all. It is not that the problem is unimportant, but it is not his business. One justification is the example of Israel: during the hardest first years of its independence, Israel was lead by almost a communist Ben Gurion. They did not surrender and did not die out, but won and multiplied. It seems to me that compared to national existence, the political affiliation is a minor issue.

LA replies:

I agree with Dimitri that national existence is primary. Before we can be concerned about a man’s morality, the man must first exist.

I would regard priests who joined with mullahs against homosexuality as fools or traitors. The West needs to restore its own moral health, not look to people from totally alien moral and cultural traditions as our “allies,” which only weakens our own existence and our ability to help ourselves.

And I agree that abortion should not be the business of the U.S. president. And it wasn’t his business, prior to the Roe v. Wade decision (1973) that turned abortion into a federal issue. Previously, the federal government had absolutely nothing to do with abortion one way or another.

Under the original American system, the national or federal government attended to the existence and safety of the United States as a whole. The regulation of morality was solely the province of local communities and state governments.

At the same time, morality is the foundation of nationhood. What creates a social community is a common moral and spiritual sense, in which everyone feels himself to be under more or less the same moral code as everyone else.

One quibble: I wouldn’t describe Bush as strong on abortion.

LA continues:

I put the relation between nationhood and morality this way. Man lives along two axes: the vertical and the horizontal. On the vertical axis is the hierarchy of moral and spiritual truth; God, truth, is higher than us. On the horizontal axis are the communities and cultures in which men live. The distinction between the respective communities is not primarily one of hierarchy (though communities may be more or less moral or civilizationally advanced than others); rather the distinction between them is that they are different.

So, on the vertical axis, there is moral and spiritual hierarchy; and on the horizontal axis, there are differences of culture, nationhood, race, political system, manners, laws, etc. Again, this does not mean that we cannot make moral judgments between different cultures or between difference political societies; but hierarchical distinctions are not the essence of their relationship; the essence of their relationship is that they are, to varying degrees, different from and mutually incompatible with each other.

To sum up, in the vertical dimension, man experiences himself in the Platonic tension between the higher and the lower. In the horizontal dimension, he experiences himself as a member of a culture which exists as one culture in an earthly plurality of cultures, which are, to varying degrees, different from each other.

Furthermore, we can understand various belief systems from their stance of belief or disbelief in these two structural axes of man’s existence.

Liberalism denies both these axes of our existence. It denies that there is anything higher than man and anything lower than man. And it denies that there are any differences between cultures that matter.

An atheist racialist denies the vertical axis, while he affirms the horizontal axis.

A liberal, open-borders Catholic affirms the vertical axis, while he denies the horizontal axis.

A traditionalist affirms both axes.

(There is a further comment on this discussion here.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 21, 2007 11:39 PM | Send