Procedural liberalism and turning the other cheek (Across the Sundering Seas, #19)
Well, readers, I am back. And a thing happened in my life since last I wrote you: I abandoned social media! It has been a long time coming, in some ways. I first curtailed my engagement with Facebook a couple years ago, reducing it to five minutes once a week. I dropped Instagram around the same time. With Twitter, I have had an off-again, on-again relationship over the years, including a number of phases where I blocked it entirely on my machines during hours where I wanted to be working on something specific. But being offline and enjoying the mental silence that came with it broke loose opportunities for reflection and consideration, and the net was: I’m out. I am far more interested in the kinds of things we can accomplish with longer-form writing, and in the other projects that can now have my far-less-splintered attention.
(Although I don’t have a great deal to say about it in this particular issue, attention is increasingly of interest to me. Expect to hear more on it, including in the essay on books and reading I started on a month ago.)
I read a lot while at the beach. The next few weeks are going to be a veritable smorgasbord as a result. And part of my strategy was working through my Pocket archive… from the oldest forward, dating back several years.1 I had around 500 articles in the backlog—mostly long blog posts or full-on essays—and while a few of them were no longer of interest, many remained quite salient.
1. Slate Star Codex and Reactionary-ism
Two pieces by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) from back in 2013, in which I have disagreements with both the reactionary project he attempts to faithfully summarize (very deep disagreements) and the specific liberal project he favors instead (substantive disagreements, but rather less so than with the reactionaries):
(A minor complaint I have with at least the Scott Alexander of six years ago: title case man, title case!)
What I found most interesting reading these was that while I’m much more at home in the liberal project than in what I would frankly describe as the fever dreams of the reactionaries, I also find most articulations of liberalism—Scott Alexander’s included—do fall prey to the critique that modern liberalism has no particular self-justification or thick philosophy other than “hey it kind of seems to work?” That’s not nothing, but it’s also not a lot in my view.
Reducing our cultural and political commitments to “You do you, bro” seems to have some fairly clear downsides. the older idea of liberalism as first of all procedural—a way of living with our differences, based on a commitment to the equal value of the people with whom we disagree—slowly withers. In its place we get the valorization of the self, and with it the inability to question whether the self is in the end a sure guide. (Most of you know I’m a Christian, and among many other things that means that I’m not a Jedi: I don’t think “trust your instincts” will get us anywhere but in deep, deep trouble.)
All of those qualifications aside, Alexander’s summary here gets at something very, and increasingly, important to me and the way I want to approach the world (and I find it the more striking because he’s very much not a Christian):
The early Christian Church had the slogan “resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39), and indeed, their idea of Burning The Fucking System To The Ground was to go unprotestingly to martyrdom while publicly forgiving their executioners. They were up against the Roman Empire, possibly the most effective military machine in history, ruled by some of the cruelest men who have ever lived. By Andrew’s reckoning, this should have been the biggest smackdown in the entire history of smackdowns.
And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected.
Insofar as “liberalism” is a commitment to a way of life that honors the dignity of others—by refusing to do violence against them, often even when they are doing violence to us—it’s a thing that’s deeply at home with my own tradition. (I’d argue, in fact, that history strongly suggests that it requires a home in a tradition like mine, but that’s a much longer argument for another day!)
More on this below: it’s the thread which ties all these thoughts together for me.
2. Alan Jacobs on Procedural Liberalism and “Civility”
First, though: here are two bits by Alan Jacobs from last year on liberalism (procedural and otherwise) which I think get at the heart of both the challenges of this kind of liberalism and its necessity in a pluralist society.
a. Nostalgia for Liberal Proceduralism
I’m just going to quote this at length because it’s so important:
But protesters who shout down others without acknowledging that they too could be shouted down are acting without “intellectual integrity” and “good faith” only under the assumptions of proceduralism. And student protestors do not share those assumptions. For them, what matters is that their positions are correct and the positions of those they are shouting down are profoundly wrong.
Similarly, you often hear political pundits contend that Republicans act in bad faith when they cheerfully allow President Trump to behave in precisely the same ways that they fiercely denounced when President Obama did them, or that Democrats lack intellectual integrity when they protest behavior by the current President that they cheerfully embraced in the previous administration. These arguments too appeal to proceduralist norms in conditions where they simply have no force. Few of our politicians are willing to share a common set of rules and norms with those they are convinced will ruin the country if they get a chance (or are beholden for their seats to voters and donors who think that).
When Conan the Barbarian was asked “What is best in life?” he replied, “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” Had you been there, would you have replied, “Now Conan, you need to think about how you’d feel if the tables were turned, and it was your women who wailed in lamentation”? I trust that the question answers itself.
Proceduralism depends on the belief that my fellow citizens, while often wrong, indeed in some cases profoundly wrong, can be negotiated with. It depends on the belief that, while a world made precisely in my image may not be in the cards, if I and my fellow citizens agree to be bound by a common set of norms, then we can probably negotiate a tolerable social order. It depends on the belief that people whose politics differ from my own are not ipso facto evil, nor do they need to be pushed to the margins of society or forced out of it altogether. When those stances are not in play — and especially when all sides agree that error has no rights — proceduralism withers.
And that’s why, though I agree that proceduralism is morally limited and metaphysically thin to the point of invisibility, I am already missing it. I can feel the nostalgia coming on.
b. The Sad Compatibilist
In which Jacobs articulates something not unlike my own position:
I have been for most of my career what I call a sad compatibilist: I have tried to describe and promote a model of charity, forbearance, patience, and fairness in disputation to all parties concerned, not because I think my approach will work but because I am trying to do what I think a disciple of Jesus should do regardless of effectiveness. In these matters I continue to be against consequentialism. For reasons I explain in that post I just linked to, I’ll keep on pushing, but it feels more comically pointless than ever in this age of rhetorical Leninism.…
…But as far as I can tell… [there] are two kinds of liberals now: the Leninists and the Silent — the latter not happy with the scorched-earth tactics of their confederates but unwilling to question them, lest they themselves become the newest victims of such tactics. The Voltairean [sic] liberal is, I believe, extinct. “Not only will I not defend to the death your right to say something that appalls me, I won’t even defend it to the point of getting snarked at in my Twitter mentions.”
That latter bit could, I note, equally well be applied to many on the right, where “own the libs” now seems to pass for a political philosophy. What Jacobs calls “Rhetorical Leninism” is a style, not a party; and it is just is the style of YouTube/Twitter/Tumblr-era politics. The net of this kind of anti(-procedural)-liberalism—whether reactionary-from-the-right or radicalized-from-the-left—is a world in which we lose sight of the reason we built liberalism in the first place. Namely: the belief that nearly always we can do the work of persuading those with whom we disagree—that they are not our enemies, to be fought with every weapon available, but rather creatures verily stamped with the divine, and worthy of dignity and respect and care.
c. On civility in this context: realpolitik
And one more, expressly addressed to a little kerfuffle among Christian conservatives that blew up online over the last few weeks. (Note that The Sad Compatibilist, above was written against one of the major, and in both my and Jacobs’ view, majorly wrong interlocutors in this kerfuffle.) The echoes between Jacobs here and Alexander above are striking:
And there’s one more thing that sets the Christians apart: when they are attacked, when they are persecuted, they don’t reply in kind. Others say to the Christians, “You are my enemy”; Christians say to the others, “You are my neighbor.”
Were they wrong to live this way?
The best scholarly estimates we have — I’ve seen these numbers in several places but most recently in Larry Hurtado’s book Destroyer of the Gods — suggest the following:
- In 40 A.D. there were about a thousand Christians
- In 100 A.D. no more than ten thousand
- In 200 A.D. around two hundred thousand
- In 300 A.D. around six million
I sometimes imagine a context in which Christians (and others, but Christians are my tribe, so they’re the ones I’m going to be quickest and loudest to call to be better!) were known for this again. It’d be a very different one than the one in which too many of my fellow believers think that having strong convictions means attacking all who disagree as enemies. It doesn’t. It may mean working out those convictions politically at times—and that won’t necessarily make everyone love you!—but it also, and more fundamentally, means taking the hits and turning the other cheek and loving even the folks who most loudly attack us.