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Jewish World Review April 8, 2009 / 14 Nisan 5769 Secular liberalism as consensus By Rod Dreher http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Recently, I got into a lengthy blog debate with liberal secularist writer Damon Linker on the topic of same-sex marriage. It ended, as these things always do, with mutual frustration. Linker decided that I, a traditionalist conservative, believe gay marriage should be illegal because ... I believe it should be illegal. And I reached the same conclusion about his support of same-sex marriage. To Linker, my argument looks like faith-based special pleading. Likewise, his rationale struck me as little more than emotivism — the idea that something is true because it feels right. We talked past each other, not only because neither of us can agree on what constitutes the Good, both public and private, but also because — indeed, especially because — we cannot agree on how to determine the Good. Because moral reasoning in our postmodern culture is largely incoherent, the Linkers and the Drehers are doomed to remain mutually incomprehensible — which, said philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, helps explain the shrillness of contemporary public debate. But the Linkers have one great rhetorical advantage: In our culture, the framework for these arguments favors secular liberalism. As James Kalb explains in his important new book, The Tyranny of Liberalism —which, despite the red-meat title, is an intellectually invigorating read — liberalism "has become an immensely powerful social reality," one so dominant "that it has become invisible." BUY THE BOOK ... at a discount by clicking HERE. "To oppose it in any basic way is to act incomprehensibly, in a way explicable, it is thought, only by reference to irrationality, ignorance or evil," Kalb writes. "The whole of the nonliberal past is comprehensively blackened. Traditional ways are presented as the simple negation of unquestionable goods liberalism favors." Chief among those goods is the defining idea of modern liberalism, which Kalb calls "equal freedom." That is, liberalism's social goal is to maximize both equality and freedom. How does it propose to do that in a world that is to some degree both unequal and unfree? Through social engineering. Liberalism depends on the modernist conviction that neither religion nor tradition nor inherited loyalties has any binding authority on us. Anything that denies equal freedom is to be condemned as oppressive and marginalized, even outlawed. This is what Kalb means by liberalism's "tyranny." Having abandoned the idea that the Good stands outside the individual's judgment, our common life becomes a matter of negotiating preferences and satisfying wants. To trads, the same-sex marriage debate is inescapably about liberals trying to redefine marriage as primarily an expression of personal desire. "Aha!" says the liberal. "Who are you to impose your morality on me?" That's supposed to settle the argument, even though, logically, the traditionalist could say the same thing to the liberal. But the liberal speaks from what he presumes is a position of neutrality, even though his views are every bit as dependent on axioms as the conservative's. But that does the traditionalist no good. The broad liberal view is the consensus in American establishment, a social and political fact that conceals — especially from liberals — how much power liberalism exercises in determining not only the parameters of discussion but also the outcome. Conservatives find it hard to articulate a case for traditional marriage in terms acceptable in liberal rights discourse, as well as in the shallow rhetoric of contemporary debate. Defending traditional marriage requires burrowing deep into the meaning of the human person, sex, gender, society and law — and that's just for starters. Life in community is a mysterious and complex thing that cannot be radically remade to suit a preferred outcome. "If you can redefine [marriage] so that the sex of the parties has nothing to do with it, then you can redefine anything in human life any way you want," Kalb told me in an interview. "Man becomes the artifact of whoever is in power." This, I think, is what scares ordinary people the most about the swift attempt to kick the foundation out from under traditional marriage. They intuit that there is something, well, tyrannical in the idea that virtually overnight, the long-settled meaning of marriage could change in a vast social experiment without historical precedent — and that any attempt to resist this radicalization stands condemned as G-d-intoxicated bigotry. Trads are on the losing side of this argument, at least in the short run, given the cultural conditioning of latter-day Americans. Still, it is instructive to ponder the fate of modern Western societies that have cast out the biblical god as the source of moral reality. Wrote eminent historian Paul Johnson, "The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled." For those fearful of despotism, it is not a happy tale. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. BUY THE BOOK Click HERE to purchase it at a discount. (Sales help fund JWR.). Comment by clicking here. Rod Dreher is assistant editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum). PREVIOUSLY 03/31/09: With so many lies, who can we trust? 03/26/09: Government's war on farmers' markets may bring their demise 03/04/09: Our silly gods and American idols 02/03/09: My pledge? To know which way the wind blows 01/15/09: A populist prairie fire from the right? 01/05/09: Sam Huntington was plainly correct 11/10/08: Here comes the conservative civil war 10/21/08: Mad men in crazy economic times 10/14/08: The positive act of not voting 10/09/08: The speech John McCain should give 09/30/08: And it was written, our blame 09/22/08: The Beehive buzzes for Sarah Palin 09/08/08: Palin's a fighter — and worth fighting for 09/02/08: GOP slouches toward St. Paul 07/18/08: ‘Wall-E’ Pixar's surprisingly political postmodern masterpiece 06/08/08: Era of cheap airfare is over 05/29/08: What if they're not smart enough? 05/11/08: From horror, a child's loving gift 05/07/08:Will a canary be our last meal? 04/03/08: Economic crisis is of our own making 02/14/08: What child-men need is some tradition 02/05/08: A Republican victory this year could do more long-term damage to the party than a loss 01/22/08: Putting faith in Obama: Do GOPers tempted by him know what they're supporting? 11/20/07: We can't fix the world with The Care Bear Stare 10/17/07: Every father should read this book to his son 10/03/07: Not even our parks are safe … And I lay at least part of the blame on the cultural revolution and our obsession with the individual 08/22/07: The Decalogue, dangerous? Advice for a society that cringes at commandments 08/15/07: Playing the anti-science card 08/01/07: How the U.S. can avoid its own version of the fall of the Roman empire 07/24/07: Conservative author: Big business can be as dangerous a threat as big government 07/09/07: All quiet but the doleful pleas of a father who knows 06/28/07: When we let conspiracy theory masquerade as news, we fall prey to much more than deception 06/20/07: Stranded on Delta: They may love to fly, but it certainly doesn't show 06/13/07: When did conservatism start to mean never having to say you're sorry? 05/08/07: PBS darling gets abused by PC police 05/02/07: Impervious to beauty and deadened to depravity 04/20/07: What I know about being a loner 10/28/05: How the conservatives crumble © 2007, The Dallas Morning News, Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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