Bloody Moralism

The essay “Bloodless Moralism“, by the talented writer Helen Andrews, has recently been unpaywalled by First Things, and so it’s an occasion to revisit it.

Like everything Ms Andrews writes, it is beautiful, erudite, well-thought-out, and original. But it still falls into that frustrating category of essays: the one that advances a claim, the weak version of which is obviously true; the strong version of which is obviously false; and it’s never clear on which side the essay actually lands.

Andrews’ essay is an attack on the “social-science-ification” of public discourse, most practiced by progressives, which seeks to be informed only or mainly by a language of utilitarianism-soaked empirical considerations at the expense of moral language about the good, the true and the beautiful. So, for example, we are told that “racial inequality” is bad because it “costs GDP $1.9 trillion”–as if that could or should be the reason why we should oppose racial inequality.

The weak version of Andrews’ claim is obviously true: it is impossible to discuss oughts without discussing, well, oughts. Hume’s Law stands guard. To talk about what we ought to do is always, even implicitly, to advance a specific version of the good, the true and the beautiful, and to pretend that it could be the case otherwise is superstition; at best, it is idiocy, at worst it is fraud.

But the strong version is obviously false: facts, as Lenin said, are stubborn things. (I am told John Adams said it first, but I still attribute it to Lenin, that indispensable thinker of the real.) When one advances an ought in public discourse, one advances a moral vision, but one also advances an empirical vision: a claim about “that which is the case” and a claim about that which could be the case. Those are inescapably empirical claims, and they should also be advanced and questioned on that basis.

From my vantage point, we risk the problem of missing the ought as much as we risk the problem of missing the is.

Take, for example, this argument which is often encountered in public discourse:

1. It is just that every worker should have a living wage.
2. Therefore, the law should mandate a minimum wage of $15 per hour.

The problem, here, is not with the ought, it is with the is.

The problem is not with the moral vision which is advanced–of course every worker should receive a just wage–the problem is with the empirical vision: namely, what it evacuates from discussion is the empirical consideration that, perhaps, a minimum wage that is too high would cause poor workers, not to receive higher wages, but simply to be laid off and replaced by robots, in which case the poor would be worse off, not better off.

There is also a version of this on the right. Take, for example:

1. Prostitution is an unacceptable affront to human dignity because it treats the human person as an object and not a subject.
2. Therefore, all persons who engage in prostitution should be held criminally liable.

Again, you certainly won’t see me argue against proposition (1). But, empirically, there is a very good case to be made that laws against prostitution victimize prostitutes–people who, according to any cogent moral vision of the common good, are to be helped–by leaving them at the mercy of law enforcement officers, and thereby encouraging corruption and rape. That is a stubborn fact.

And, perhaps there are ways of squaring those circles. For example, perhaps wage subsidies could allow the labor market to balance supply and demand in an efficient way while fattening the pocketbooks of the working men. For example, perhaps the “Swedish option” of criminalizing the buying of sexual services but not the selling can usefully deter prostitution while limiting the rise of a corrupt underground economy. Maybe, maybe not. This is the hard work of policy-wonkery, which some of our philosophes tend to disdain as too bloodless, too taken with the stubborn fact and the green eyeshade. Some policy wonks might respond that this is how you make life better for countless actually-existing people, and they might be tempted to raise up a middle finger while they’re at it.

After all, if morality-free moralism counts as “bloodless moralism” then certainly fact-free moralism can be “bloody moralism”.

There is a current in Christian theology and conservative philosophy that seeks to recover beauty as, in Gilson’s phrase, “the forgotten transcendental”; it sees the forgetting of beauty as the heart of the modern predicament, and the recovering of beauty as the solution. To Scruton, it is the postmodern rebellion against beauty that has made us barbarically callous and shallow. To Balthasar, Milbank and Hart, the best Christian answer to postmodernity is a theology of beauty.

The reason why I am ambivalent about this movement is because I notice that a morality of aesthetics can also be, in its own way, bloodless and bloody, because it seeks to transform reality into a piquant tableau that makes little room for humanity’s imperfections. Scruton, in that absolutely English way of his, has no more venom than when he defends urban planning laws, which preserve the pleasant harmony of suburban streets. And I am sitting here, unable to help noticing the stubborn fact that, in the real world, urban planning laws are a vehicle by which the well-off protect their privilege at the expense of the marginal, with incalculable consequences. (A friend has done a study that sees real estate prices as the single most significant determinant of birth rates. As one who rents in Europe, I do not think it is too much of an overstatement to say that urban planning is killing the continent.) And I am wondering why Scruton’s Middle-English tastes are better than my admiration for, say, the scintillating beauty of Hong Kong’s skyline.

I persist in thinking that an excellent way of analyzing the 20th century totalitarian phenomenon is that it is a drive to re-aesthetize the world. Just compare an SS uniform with a GI uniform and you’ll see what I mean. This is the great link between Nietzsche’s project and the 20th century barbarians; the futurists certainly agreed. It might not be yours, but it is unquestionable that, like Steve Jobs, fascists have taste. Totalitarian regimes have produced not only laughable propaganda but art of troubling grandeur, such as Eisenstein’s masterpieces and Mussolini’s Roman architecture. On pure aesthetic merit, socialist realist posters beat the heck out of Pepto-Bismol ads as urban ornament. There’s a reason why the Red Army Choir is still popular.

It is not a coincidence that the Soviet Union produced the most beautiful music video of all time. Communist privation produces a video of astonishing economy, purity and, in the end, elegance. Just five shots in four minutes. Kharitonov’s lone baritone, with its stirring and majestic beauty. The uniforms. The baritone is followed by the explosion of the chorus, as the camera pans back to reveal the other chorists, arranged in that arresting, world-conquering wedge. The reflection of the choir on the floor shows the oars of the Volga boatmen: yesterday’s working class is today’s Red Army is tomorrow’s Internationale. The clip ends with a sunrise over peaceful melody, hinting at the eschatological future at the end of the class struggle. If this does not stir you, I do not want to talk to you, you show a corrupt mind.

While totalitarianism as re-aesthetization does point to a very important critique of modernity–what is it about modernity that creates this parched, desperate longing for totalizing beauty? (Again, the Cult of Apple serves as a contemporary example of the same phenomenon. And, of course, the 2008 Obama campaign.) But it also obviously stands as a criticism of aesthetic morality. Because if your goal is to reorganize society as your beautiful mosaic, then it becomes inevitable that those poor elements that do not fit into the picture must be destroyed.

I am not calling Scruton or Balthasar totalitarians. This is merely a very roundabout way of saying that that the stubborn fact can also be a guardian for moralism, quite literally a reality check, and one that may be the last line of defense against utopia. It remains unclear to me how a theology of beauty “cashes out” in terms of, say, living the Beatitudes. (Other than in self-evidently question-begging talk of, say, the beauty of serving the poor.)

In this case, it seems to me that Andrews only mentions in passing what ought to be the central criticism of the “social-science-ification” of moralism, which is that actually-existing contemporary social science proves much less than it believes it does.

Paradoxically, bloodless moralism is not bloodless enough. Ezra Klein’s problem is not that he is so taken with empiricism that he forgets moral values. Ezra Klein’s problem is that he is such a prisoner of the moral universe he grew up in that he will take any study that confirms his preexisting biases, slap it up online and crow “Science Says.” If Klein and his ilk really were committed empiricists, if they answered the insistent knock of the stubborn fact, they would realize that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than in their philosophy, and they would rise to the level of a Burkean-Chestertonian-Hayekian humility about the limits of human knowledge and they would abandon their fatal conceit.

The problem with equating the progressive style with bloodless empiricism isn’t just that it unwisely grants the opponent’s premise (a perennial problem on the Right), it’s that it’s just clearly not true. The biggest cultural movement of the past decade in the West was the rise of same-sex marriage, and that movement has been nothing if not the relentless advance of a moral vision in the name of moral absolutes. While there were side-skirmishes about, say, the evidence on same-sex parenting and child psychology, it’s obvious that same-sex marriage proponents really don’t care one way or another (and, from their perspective, nor should they). Empirical arguments were not so much countered as haughtily brushed off, as befits a moral crusade. The pink police state might be a dictatorship, but it is not a dictatorship of relativism.

None of which, in the final analysis, vitiates the weak version of Andrews’ claim: one ardently wishes that progressives would finally come out of the closet as the religious zealots that they are, bearers of a systematic theology of the true and good (if not the beautiful) as all-encompassing and as metaphysical as anything dreamed up by the Scholastics, as apostles and mystics of a Kingdom that is putting every power and principality under its feet.

But perhaps, once the time comes to fully immanentize the eschaton, the only thing left to trip up the crusaders will be the humble, but stubborn, fact.