Dan Kelly’s thoughtful post of the other day asked us to consider who it is that we expect to join our Ferrari ride toward renewed moral consensus, what issues we might agree on, and where it is that we’re going in the first place. He also mentioned that the answers to these questions would likely be different “if we are starting in Berkeley as opposed to Branson.” I agree. But I think we should have a closer look at those local differences, which seem to be a cause for moral dispute rather than consensus, because they might actually be key to figuring out both where we’re going and who’s going with us on this moral consensus road trip.
I was recently in, well, Berkeley for a conference on Aquinas (you read that correctly – Berkeley, Aquinas), but I took advantage of the trip westward to visit a dear old Peace Corps friend in the area. Peace Corps has a way of rendering small the ideological differences that might, stateside, prevent people from forging lifelong friendships. After all, when you’re all in the trenches of homestays with Berber families, away from running water, sanitation and the English language, even radically different political ideals seems fairly unimportant, and this friendship was no exception. Back to Berkeley. I was having a chat one morning (over our granola and hemp milk, naturally) with my friend’s boyfriend, who shares her political views, and while we weren’t discussing politics per se, we were at least complaining about the current American cultural and political milieu – and finding quite a bit of common ground in the process. Most striking was a moment in which he proclaimed with a great deal of conviction that “the problem in this country is that the states don’t have enough power.” Well now. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one in the room who thinks that federalism is a good idea and that increasing centralization is a bad idea, even if he wouldn’t put it in such terms. He, a progressive San Francisco artist, would like to see more variety in our American cultural landscape, and he thinks that centralizing power and dictating top-down legal and cultural norms from Washington is not the way to get there. Who knew.
But this is just one anecdote, right? Surely we can’t expect allies to appear in such unlikely places very often? Perhaps we can, or at least more often than we might think. Our nation is deeply divided at present; no one needs to point that out. But I suspect that in at least some ways, we’re not going to get past those rigid ideological divisions towards a more unified America by tackling the issues head-on. What I mean by that is that we usually can’t expect to argue anyone who is ideologically distant from us – and, let’s be honest, that’s a lot of people – into joining our moral stance(s) on family, church, and civil society. I don’t think that my Peace Corps friend, her boyfriend, or I would have budged very far from our respective positions if we had tried to do so. But my friend and I had lived and worked both with each other – and with people with even more radically divergent religious, cultural and political ideals – for two years in Morocco and yet, somehow, we were able to get some things done and cooperate on matters that actually required some measure of moral consensus, at least for the projects at hand. In other words, we might not all agree on what education should be, but when it came to getting a community educational center in the village, we could still come together for the sake of our local community, making compromises when necessary and actually working with people with whom we disagreed, often fundamentally. I suggest that this is because we were acting through face-to-face interactions, at a local level, rather than simply picking up the local details of a top-down, centrally planned project.
The same thing can be true here in America, and if my Peace Corps friend and her boyfriend are any indicator, Americans want it to be true, at least at some level. There are places for ideas and arguments (goodness knows I spend most of my day with them), and certainly there are times when decisions have to happen at the national level. Still, achieving moral consensus also – perhaps even primarily – requires real interactions and activities, not just debates, between people at the local level, working out actual problems concerning their own communities. Doing so will mean that there continue to be different ways of doing things in Berkeley as in Branson, but that’s precisely the point – those who want a Berkeley society can live in Berkeley, and those who fit better in Branson can live out their lives there.
This is overly simplified, of course; much of where we live and who we live with is given rather than chosen. But then again, if our local politics and engagements are allowed to have any real bearing on our lives, that might be a very good thing.
I think this encapsulates our great challenge. Locally (understood not simply geographically but in terms of relational and social proximity) it’s easy to find consensus. You talk through things, you identify misunderstandings. Above all you establish a baseline of trust in one another’s goodwill. How do we cultivate moral consensus at the societal level? As our “about us” page says, society must be built upon goodwill and solidarity. No doubt those are more limited forms of goodwill and solidarity. I don’t have religious solidarity with persons of other faiths, I don’t have partisan solidarity with Democrats, etc. But there must be a “civic solidarity” that we do share. As for goodwill, we have to be realistic about its limits at the societal level. And taking things to that level can also create illusions of goodwill to substitute for the real thing. I was just re-reading Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” the other day; one of my favorite passages is where he berates people who make a big show of how much they donate to charity, but never lift a finger to help someone they actually know. “If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.” Yet even at this level we must cultivate goodwill. Emerson went too far when he went on to say that all shows of goodwill among strangers are affectations, and we owe nothing except to those we know personally and can authentically love. As Charles Murray has written (not in the book), one of the secrets of America’s success is that it is a place where people anticipate that strangers they’ve just met will deal with them honestly. (Economists are increasingly finding that this presumption of goodwill among strangers is well correlated with economic success.)
Hmm, yes. I think what I’m trying to get at is two-fold: first, that building societal consensus is more likely to occur at the ground level and go upward…perhaps I’m shirking duty here, but aside from infiltrating key institutions (à la Hunter, and I don’t disagree but I think it’s more of a power play than a consensus-building exercise), I’m not sure how consensus can grow from the top, as it were.
Second, I’m finding that this method of consensus-building – you might just lump it in with localism – can itself be a matter of consensus among people of different ideological stripe. It doesn’t hit the big issues directly; my ideologically different friend and I won’t be able to do one thing or another about national standards for public schools, for instance. But if we agree that we don’t want everything to be dictated from centralized power – which we often DON’T seem to agree on, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s as much the case as I had thought – then we’ve got not only a starting for consensus on local matters but a powerful resource to tap into for consensus on decentralization in some meaningful way.
A) Is that plausible?
B) Am I speaking to your point in the first place?
Cultural change needs to be both top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. Top-down in the absence of bottom-up lacks both legitimacy and entrepreneurial innovation. That’s one of Hunter’s lacunae.
The top-down element will be necessary or this local percolation of moral consensus we’re talking about will never become part of the culture; it will impact individual relationships “one at a time” but it will not be institutionalized. This is where Hunter shines. As he pointed out, 85% of Americans believe the human race has its origins in the intentions of God but this view now has close to no impact on the culture. Or to quote my Ray Charles post, it’s not culture unless the hotel plays it.
But remember that “top-down” does not mean “imposed by force.” It means “championed by people in positions of cultural prestige.” So top-down moral consensus doesn’t mean trying to force people into moral consensus (which is self-contradictory) but people in positions of cultural prestige describing reality in ways that seek, discover and build moral consensus. To take an example from another post of mine, you can’t vote for something if none of the candidates champions it.
Follow-up thought: if you did try to use a blunt instrument to hammer Moral Consensus (MC) into people by force, the right tool for the job would be an MC Hammer.
“So top-down moral consensus doesn’t mean trying to force people into moral consensus (which is self-contradictory) but people in positions of cultural prestige describing reality in ways that seek, discover and build moral consensus. To take an example from another post of mine, you can’t vote for something if none of the candidates champions it.”
Very true. I do agree with the Hunter thesis of getting people in places of prestige and why that both matters and, in my opinion, is perfectly legitimate and not really coercive, in its nature.
And then the point that we need champions of good politics so that we can vote for them. Oh my, yes. And I think I didn’t attend to that; we can’t pretend that everything can simply be worked out at local, even non-political, levels. Then again, I’m tempted to go straight to Plato, though, and start to speculate as to what would happen to those candidates (thinking ship allegory), and that gets circular – we need a virtuous/moral/philosophical (take your pick) society so that we can recognize good candidates, but then, we need good candidates so that those who recognize goodness have someone to vote for. So, probably, both. Sigh.
Or just get an MC Hammer. (Who, I believe, at some point become a pastor. Funny, that.)
Then again, I’m tempted to go straight to Plato, though, and start to speculate as to what would happen to those candidates (thinking ship allegory), and that gets circular – we need a virtuous/moral/philosophical (take your pick) society so that we can recognize good candidates, but then, we need good candidates so that those who recognize goodness have someone to vote for. So, probably, both. Sigh.
Hence the absolutely critical role of entrepreneurs! Meaning by that not just people who start their own businesses but all people with the rare gifts necessary to recognize major opportunities that are invisible to everyone else, and the sheer guts to go seize them in the teeth of all adversity. The entrepreneur doesn’t move from the top down or the bottom up, but rather moves the top itself from one place to another.
The entrepreneur is the reason cultural change is never a “closed system” that only carries out, so to speak, its own internal programming. And the liberation of entrepreneurs in American culture particularly has been one of our great sources of strength; decay is constantly counteracted by entrepreneurial renewal.
Please let there be a problem on which we can use an MC Hammer!
Karen, this is definitely worth a jaunt in the Ferrari. The vignette you described is interesting for two reasons.
First, it echoes our affinity for structural federalism, which is one piece of the broader subsidiarity principle. That is to say, governmental decisions ought to be made by the unit of government closest and most accountable to those whom they will affect. The idea is that there is an inverse relationship between a legislator’s willingness to act in a destructively coercive fashion and the chance he will meet the subject of his coercion at the grocery store, church, or on the street. And the relationship is direct with respect to the legislator’s impulse to act beneficently. This is all good.
Second, it likely points to a deeper philosophical division. Subsidiarity does promote, as you described, the ability to build communities that reflect people’s preferences, whether they be Berkeley-prone or otherwise. But I’d be willing to bet the boyfriend was not concerned that the federal government meddled too much in people’s lives. I suspect he was concerned the federal government was not regulating enough.
Subsidiarity (federalism) is a tool – a good and important one, but just a tool. It neither defines nor compasses the goal for which it ought to be used. We and your Peace Corps friend would pick up the same tool but immediately start working at cross purposes – he to get local governments to act more coercively, we to allow local governments to work less coercively.
And those ends do not necessarily have equal moral validity simply because people are making the decisions through the smallest unit of government possible. Both directions could go too far and overstep proper boundaries (on the coercive side by, say, depriving people of their First Amendment rights through so-called hate speech codes; on the legislative restraint side by, for example, refusing to pass zoning ordinances to prevent property owners from injuring their neighbors).
Having said that, however, I must hasten to add that if we could find broad consensus on this particular tool we would accomplish a great deal of good. And that is because, I believe, when Berkeley and Branson are allowed to stand on their own merits, Branson wins and becomes the most likely model for replication. Berkeley is an unsustainable philosophical and economic construct – it is spending down its inherited moral capital, and exhausting every bit of financial capital it can get its hands on. If it was made to suffer the consequences of its decisions, without subsidization and without a pre-existing moral base of capital, it would collapse in short order. And that is an experiment worth conducting.