Honor is a harder master than the law.
Today, political campaigns seem devoid of moral justifications for their social policies. Instead, politicians mask their foundational beliefs and defend their proposals with mere facial arguments from liberty and equality. While considerations of liberty and equality are relevant and important; alone, they are insufficient defenses for policies regarding abortion, marriage, affirmative action, drugs, immigration, capital punishment, pornography, and a whole gambit of other social issues.
Today, society
is increasingly gripped by the notion that religion and moral beliefs have
little or no place in the public sphere. Science is supreme. When you debate political issues, you
aren’t supposed to defend your views with notions of morality. You are supposed
to say how it will affect the economy or how it will affect public health or
what will be “fair” in a sort of morally relativistic way. However, science can
only inform our decisions; science cannot determine values. But, I say that
religious views and moral considerations should be involved in our debates over
social policy. When politicians capriciously remove these fundamental beliefs
from their speeches and debates and pretend that they have no bearing on their
platform, it leaves public deliberations on the issues debilitated. It
unilaterally disarms anyone that believes in anything other than liberty of
choice or equality as the sole and ultimate objectives of human societies.
Those who claim
to be morally neutral do so misleadingly; they hold their moral beliefs so
dogmatically that they do not even recognize that they are not really neutral. There
can be no political community that is morally neutral. Their vision of a good
society is not supported by science but is a moral conviction. The values these
people esteem above others (without scientific support) are free
self-expression, liberty of choice, or some notion of equality. All good goals,
but at the same time, these people cheapen historically ubiquitous virtues like
wisdom, courage, kindness, temperance, or transcendence.
What kind of
society does this purported neutrality give us? It aims towards a polis that implicitly
accepts that there are no right and wrong and no real human virtues. It affords
no reverence to tradition. Tolerance and sharing are the only values in such a dispirited
society. This intensely individualist sort of social contract would only have
the benefit of avoiding religious or moral disputes. But, it aims too low. As
society allows room for the basest parts of human nature, evil actions become
normalized and acceptable. The saying of the day, “I can do whatever I want so
long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else” proves untenable. We cannot do evil
without negatively affecting those around us directly or indirectly. People too often underestimate
the harm they do to others. Similarly, society underestimates the effect of
removing public disapproval of evil.
This
disenchanted “neutral” society wherein all we can do is “get along” is not the
best we can do. We can strive for a wise, courageous, kind, temperate, and
transcendent culture and society. But, we have to be willing to say that these
virtues really are better than
characteristics like stupidity, guile, selfishness, overindulgence, and corruption
and that we will not condone them. And, can we not say that? I am not
advocating here a tyranny of the majority where the values of the powerful are
always imposed on those less fortunate. Plurality is a wonderful part of American
government. However, I am advocating a liberal society moderated and elevated
by the traditional and fundamental values we inherited from our founding
fathers. We should bring our beliefs to the ballot box with us, but not
establish a religion or state indoctrinated moral code. Politicians should be
more open and candid about the moral values that undergird their social policy
proposals.
Freedom and
equality are instrumental in obtaining a virtuous society; they are not the
ends in themselves. Let us stop pretending that those values are somehow more scientific or morally neutral than wisdom, courage, kindness, temperance, and transcendence. Virtuous living supersedes the value of cultural diversity
(though cultural diversity is certainly to be celebrated). A virtuous society
precedes a prosperous one just as a corrupt and decadent society precedes a nation in decline. Facilitating a virtuous society must be the first goal of American
politics, then freedom and equality.
