There is certainly an argument to be made that war and human aggression is a self-perpetuating machine. Or that there are powerful entities who stand to gain from war (such as the military-industrial complex in the United States), and by nature, these organizations are interested in revenue and growth rather than the best interests of their country, or the welfare of their fellow man.
The two most often-cited examples of the effectiveness of nonviolent protest are Gandhi in India’s Independence Movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights movement. Given their results and extraordinary methods, I’d say most people agree that they were visionary leaders, and used nonviolent tactics to achieve their goals. However, it is disingenuous to use this as a justification for across-the-board pacifism, since these two movements cover a small fraction of possible political and military situations. In both of these instances, the groups involved were aiming to affect the domestic policy of a government that was unwilling to use lethal force, and to sway public opinion to put further political pressure on those in power. These tactics would not have worked, say, against Nazi Germany.

The other group of people I seem to encounter are of the belief that since they don’t agree with or approve of the things our armed forces and intelligence services are currently being ordered to do by the Bush administration, to work for anything related to the defense industry is to give tacit approval to the shift towards totalitarianism that has been in the neoconservative agenda.

I couldn’t disagree more. The executive branch ordering NSA wiretaps without obtaining warrants is a frightening step in the direction of unchecked government surveillance. However, to say that this proves we don’t need an NSA, or that the NSA does not do worthwhile work is naive. Keeping the politicians honest is not the NSA’s job, or the armed forces’ job, it’s our job as involved citizens. To approve or disapprove of a given war is understandable; to pretend that there never be a justifiable military action in our country’s future is shortsighted at best. Furthermore, if intelligent and concerned Americans don’t go into these fields, how will things ever improve? Richard Clarke called for young, fresh minds to go into government, because otherwise things will stagnate, and the old ways will persist as the world changes, leaving us behind. Don’t we need more people who have the country’s best interests at heart, as well as a sense of how important civil liberties are to maintaining a true democracy? A lot of the objectors I refer to in this post are liberal. I think the best way to make the case that “big government” can work is to roll up your sleeves and make it better yourself. I’m honestly very curious to hear any opposing viewpoints on this matter.

Digression: But back to the software with the “no military use” clause, which is really written in such a way to be a self-righteous political badge rather than an actual guideline for use. The problem with this is that the GPL itself prohibits an author from specifying precise conditions under which the software may be used and distributed, assuming the basic open source requirement of the GPL is met. In this way, the GPL is “pure,” in that it simply ensures self-perpetuation of code for the benefit of the community. It doesn’t matter if you’re a for-profit business, left-wing, right-wing, black or white, what matters is that if you play by the GPL’s rules, you have to share any work you want to distribute as your own, and everyone wins. An increasing number of programmers are losing sight of the community-based, nonpolitical goals of the GPL and trying to apply their own beliefs and biases and prejudices to software, and getting angry when things don’t go their way. You can’t donate a book to the library, and then prescribe conditions regarding who may or may not be allowed to borrow it. Perhaps the analogy is simplistic, but open source software is a public good, all the same.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that, while I don’t watch Countdown or MSNBC at all, the clips I have seen of Keith Olberman have routinely been anti-rightist in nature, whether in the form of incisively dressing down Bill O’Reilly for some idiotic comment, or the even more ludicrous Ann Coulter. I don’t know this is selection bias on the part of people who select the clips, or whether this is his general tone, but in any either case, it hasn’t been my experience that anything he’s said has been false or not corroborated by fact. Quite the opposite, in fact — he seems ready with an army of documented facts to bolster his own position, and I think that this clip in particular channels more of Edward R. Murrow than his signature sign-off. It energized me to see a mainstream journalist going to task on what others seem either too cowed or too much in thrall, as Olbermann meta-quotes, to be frank and open about. I hope you find it refreshing, or at very least thought-provoking.

-Demosthenes

1. Despite my relative certainty about the things I’ve discussed so far—the value and necessity of human reason, above all else—there are quite a few issues about which I don’t have ironclad opinions. In that vein, if there are any topics, specific or general, about which you would like me to post, please feel free to leave a comment here to that effect (or email me). I’ve got no scarcity of things to write about (he says, adding a twelfth post to his queue), but I’m genuinely curious about what sorts of things you’d like to see me write about, if you have any particular preference.
2. Speaking of issues on which I haven’t come to a decisive conclusion, I’d like to get a bit of conversation going about the concept of hate crime legislation. The ‘sensible’ position, at least in the circles in which I run, is that such laws would by definition be thought legislation, in that they place an additional criminal burden on anti-[group] thoughts above and beyond already-prohibited violent actions, thus violating the principle of freedom of conscience. The suggestion of this argument is that hate crime legislation would be on principle no different from a legal prohibition against bigoted thoughts—the only difference being that bigotry would be a secondary violation, so to speak. The obvious rebuttal here is that intent and mental state are already considered in the law in quite a few places, most notably in the various distinctions between degrees of murder/manslaughter. This seems to be more a matter of the absence or presence of intent than about the content of that intent, I suppose, but hate crimes could be represented similarly–the absence or presence of anti-[group] intent in the committing of a violent crime.

   My instincts here run in two different directions. On the one hand, I am very receptive to the hesitance to regulate thought in any way, and to the theoretical dangers of encoding a sort of prohibition of certain beliefs, even if those beliefs are idiotic and hateful. I recognize that the burden rests on those doing the regulating, and that rights are assumed to exist unless otherwise specified. On the other hand, the “hate crime legislation -> thought crime” argument seems to me somewhat misleading; I’m not entirely ready to say that enforcing hate crime legislation would be the same in principle as enforcing a prohibition on bigoted thoughts. It should be noted that the desire to kill someone because of their sexual orientation/gender/race/etc. can and should be distinguished from the belief that someone is inferior because of those characteristics, though obviously they are fundamentally linked. The question there, I guess, would be whether there is something to the willingness to commit a hate crime besides the belief in the inferiority of the victim’s group and a willingness to kill in general, and I’m not really sure how to answer that. Society has a definite interest in decreasing the number of violent crimes committed, and this is one of the main functions of the legal prohibition on violent crime: to create a state where the cost of committing a certain crime (imprisonment, etc.) is greater than the perceived benefit of committing that crime (material gain, emotional satisfaction, etc.). Hate crime legislation would seem to act to create such a state of affairs by targeting one of the potential impulses towards violent crime. The other function of law is protection in a more direct sense, i.e. removing dangerously violent people from the general population so that they won’t kill people, and it seems to me that the thought crime argument is more relevant to this dimension of law. As a deterrent, though (see desire utilitarianism), it doesn’t seem to me entirely out of the question.

What say you, dear readers, on either of these counts?

–Urizen

The article [ed: here] also states:

To be called to a level of goodness and sacrifice so constantly and so patiently by a loving but demanding God may seem like a naive demand to achieve what is only a remove human possibility. However, such a vision need not be seen as a red flag to those who believe nothing.

First, the author says that atheists see a call to “goodness and sacrifice” is a red flag. So, atheists are not good, and we do not engage in sacrifice. In fact, our rejection of religion, I assume, is because we, like spoiled children, simply do not want to do anything for other people. No, the ‘red flag’ is being called evil and selfish. I find my calling to goodness and sacrifice in a different source — from the fact that my fellow humans are capable of feeling pain and suffering and I do not want bad things to happen to them. Instead, I want them to be safe and happy. Period. End of story. No God involved.

Anyone who has trouble recognizing this as a legitimate source of good and moral behavior needs to take a long, hard look at their own morality.

–Urizen

Point being this: people and ideas are not interchangeable. In a situation like the recent so-called shakeup of White House staff, the suggestion, from a political/PR standpoint, is that by removing a prominent figure, the administration is somehow taking responsibility for and/or remedying the policies and concepts with which that person has been involved. In this case, the figure is pretty much just a mouthpiece, making the contrast between person and principle all the more clear. Taking responsibility for bad leadership or insufficient performance of a given job is one thing, but it shouldn’t be confused with changes in ideology, policy, or principle, especially given how exceedingly rare it seems to be for a policy idea to be conceived of and authored by just one person (and certainly not by press secretaries). The man or woman in a position of governmental authority often comes to symbolize in part the actions and words of the government as a whole, such that people see a “shakeup” in personnel as a real change, by the logic that the person carries with him or her the ideas of the administration, or at least some subset of those ideas. In most cases, though, these shakeups are merely a matter of finding scapegoats, dumping them to the curb, and pretending that more substantive things have changed so as to maintain an illusion of progress where there usually is none. I don’t doubt that there is at least some difference in leadership styles between Andy Card and Josh Bolten, but that transition is being very deliberately made out to be a change in more than personnel. If there are genuine differences in ideology between the old staff and the new, then fine, that’s something, but I have seen no particular evidence to suggest that there is—and there has been a near-constant (and unabashedly manipulative) attempt to trumpet these changes as a real shift in direction.

One of the many noteworthy (if not entirely original) themes tossed around in V for Vendetta is that of the symbolic relationship between man and idea. Vendetta explores the traditional wisdom that the idea is greater than the man, more powerful, far more difficult to extinguish—indeed, expressions of this idea bookend the film. The relationship, both within the film’s reality and in our reality, is more complicated than that, however; the idea is conceived, voiced, expressed, and enacted by the man, or by other men (I assume I need not clarify every use of ‘man’ by saying I’m using it gender-neutrally). I don’t mean to suggest that Scott McClellan or Andy Card are trivial, or that they don’t bear any relation to the ideas behind the administration, but typically our government is organized in such a way that with very few exceptions, the man is a slave to the idea. A very small minority within the administration crafts policy, and outside of this minority, everyone is subordinate to the enacting of the decided-on policy. This situation is not unique to the Bush administration, but they have certainly elevated it to an art form with their increasingly insular decision-making process and their unceasing refusal to listen to fact or opinion not already within the scope of the decided-on policies.

A true change of course would necessitate a change not only in the policies that have been so resolutely decided upon, but also in the decision-making process as a whole. A changed Bush administration would in theory be one that listened to its critics rather than dismissing them out of hand, one that embraced policy debate instead of claiming an unsubstantiated point of view as definitive truth, one that acknowledged the significance of objective reality rather than ignoring it. Until/unless that happens, we ought not accept the assertions that a staff shakeup is interchangeable with (or a satisfactory substitute for) a policy/idea shakeup. The symbology of leadership is not ironclad; we ought not confuse the symbol and the symbolized, the man and the principle. Eliminating the former does not eliminate the latter—rarely are ideas, even bad ones, so easily extinguished.

–Urizen

Edit: Alonzo Fyfe expresses a similar point (emphasis mine):

We have already been told that this shakeup does not include Rumsfeld. Instead, today, we hear that Press Secretary Scott McClellan is stepping down. This has all of the sense of a speaker, proposing poorly considered ideas based on fantasy and wishful thinking can make those ideas sound better if they switch to a different microphone. They have not yet recognized that the problem is with the message, not with the quality of the equipment used to tell it.

The first thing I'll ask you to understand is that public domain is the natural state for information and ideas to be in; things are said to 'fall into' the public domain, which certainly does make it sound like a default state. In the interim between an idea's or work's conception and its becoming truly 'free,' legal restrictions can be placed on its distribution and use.

One important thing to note about these restrictions is that they are temporary. There is no such thing as permanent intellectual property. Both copyrights and patents expire after a set span of years. This changed with the passing of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a piece of legislation bought and paid for in campaign donations from Disney. Here's a good article on the subject by Chris Sprigman of Findlaw.

Perhaps the most important thing everyone involved needs to recognize is the purpose of copyright is advancement itself. This point is well made by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, so I'll borrow her words:

"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but ‘[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.' To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art."

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.

499 US 340, 349(1991)

The law ultimately places the public good over the compensation of the individual. A challenge to the CTEA made the argument that the statute infringed on the First Amendment because it "placed a limitation on free speech without advancing any important governmental interest." (Sprigman)

Further reading:

• A lot of these points draw from Sprigman's article from Findlaw, which is certainly better written than this post.
• Paul Graham's interesting entry on software patents, a phrase that is synonymous with litigious nonsense to the Slashdot crowd.

(Side note: I should probably also make it clear that I’m using ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ pretty much interchangeably in these posts. This is perhaps not the best of ideas, and maybe in future posts I’ll be more precise in using ‘ethics’ to denote the philosophical inquiry into the nature of right and wrong, and ‘morality’ to denote the social/cultural systems generated thereof. For now, though, just pretend they’re identical.)

End Over Means?

Obviously moral behavior is a worthwhile goal, assuming the morality upon which it’s based is reasonable, self-consistent, and consonant with the fundamental values of everyone involved. Moral systems exist for the purpose of producing a group/society in which the default mode of interaction (not killing/raping/robbing Person X on the street) is optimal for the participants in the system, so clearly the “end state” of such systems is significant. The overall “morality” of a society (low rates of murder/theft/rape, lack of institutionalized slavery, etc.) is both a desirable goal and a partial barometer of the success of a given moral system. Its abilities to measure success, however, must be tempered by an understanding of the distinction between moral reasoning and moral behavior.

The Means Matter

Moral reasoning can be thought of as one possible way—but not the only way—of arriving at moral behavior. One might arrive at a belief that killing people is a Bad Thing by virtue of a religious teaching that murder is sinful. One might also infer the badness of murder based on the fact that it’s illegal. Both of these situations would be examples of faulty reasoning arriving at the correct conclusion—many things that religious traditions label as sinful are things about which no moral argument can be made, and many laws have been made in the past that are now universally recognized as unjust. When evangelical Christians claim that by disallowing displays of the Ten Commandments in public court buildings we are rejecting morality, they are conflating moral reasoning and moral behavior. In disallowing such displays, we are rejecting, among other things, the notion that religious doctrine is a proper method for dictating governmental systems of morality—law. We are rejecting the means, the reasoning. It also happens that most of the Commandments have no place in a rational system of morality, but that’s beside the point. Even if the Commandments were all self-consistent and based on universal human values, which is to say even if they were all proper conclusions, the reasoning upon which they are based is faulty. This doesn’t invalidate the conclusions themselves, but it is important to keep the means and ends separate here.

Process in a Changing World

The means in a moral system are significant for a number of reasons. Without an understanding of the reasoning behind the system, one would be much more likely to either break the rules or twist them in ways that make them inappropriate. An exclusively rule-based moral system may be mostly successful, but it is built on authority; when the authority starts to crumble, so does the moral system. A rule-based system will also, in the process of codifying the conclusions of specific lines of moral reasoning, compound the possibilities of inconsistency within the system, since the tiniest error in creating or articulating the rules can lead to rules that contradict each other. For any moral system to be successful, it must be wholly consistent within its bounds. (One commonly-offered argument against the moral codes of Christian doctrine is that they are wildly inconsistent. This is one thing Catholicism has going for it, doctrinally—the Catholic Church may be notoriously fickle, but at least there is a consistency between views on, say, abortion and capital punishment.)

At any rate, to my mind the strongest argument for the necessity of moral reasoning is the fact that without a mechanism for generating moral conclusions, we are potentially at a loss for ways to deal with new situations in human interaction. No matter how extensive and well-planned a rule-based moral system may be, without a strong consciousness of the reasoning and the principles behind the rules, it will likely fall short when confronted with situations its designers didn’t anticipate. This is not only true in the sense of changing understandings of social realities (see the Three-Fifths Compromise) but is also relevant when we’re placed in new and challenging situations about which our given moral codes don’t have much to say, simply because the authors of the codes couldn’t foresee the changes that centuries would bring. Human society is massive and ever-changing, even if it’s dwarfed by the universe, and it’s necessary for us to have ways of dealing with these changes in reality and understanding. To that end, it would behoove us all to have a better understanding of moral reasoning and how it works/should work, so that we are more able to deal with both new situations and lack of foresight (or intelligence, or honesty, or consistency) on the part of those who generate the moral codes upon which we base our laws.

Hindsight and Foresight

In a similar vein, it occurs to me that there is a subtle difference between the aims of morality-by-decree/revelation and those of morality-by-reasoning. The former often seems to be far more concerned with judging past actions—with quantifying sin and virtue for the sake of sorting the innocent from the guilty, the Heavenbound from the Hellbound. This is not to say that there’s not a serious forward-looking component to many religious teachings on morality, but in many cases, the generative side of religious morality is sacrificed to the altar of the judgment side of things. Morality-by-reasoning, on the other hand, is almost exclusively concerned with guiding actions in the present and the future. Judgment in a rational moral system exists in a role subservient to the guiding of actions and decisions; a rational moral system, one that is fully conscious of process rather than just ends (rules), is more fundamentally about what we should and should not do than what we should or should not have done. It acknowledges that punishment and reward are necessary in shaping desires (see Alonzo Fyfe on desire utilitarianism) so as to create a moral society, but that they’re not ends in and of themselves.

The Role of Law

This leads me to the related question of what the proper relationship between law and morality ought to be. This is something I’ve been meaning to address for some time, and I’ll save most of my thoughts on it for a later post, but I would like to elucidate the connection between the two briefly. Law is, in short, a vehicle by which we arrive at an ethical society. It is a codifying of morality-as-social-contract, enforced by governmental institutions so as to cultivate moral behavior, i.e. to protect those fundamental human rights we deem to be universal and inalienable (life, liberty, property, autonomy, etc.), thereby creating an optimal situation for individual and group. It should not be confused with moral reasoning or justification (that something is legally prohibited does not make it unjust), but it is another means to the end of moral behavior, one that is employed precisely because we can’t count on everyone else’s abilities of moral reasoning. In this pragmatic sense, law is necessary, but it is not, in the grand scheme of things, a sufficient substitute for genuine moral reasoning. Legal codes may cultivate moral behavior most of the time, but it cannot be argued that they make moral reasoning irrelevant, not as long as there are a) people breaking laws and b) laws that are unjust. I suspect that, humans being as imperfect as all other creatures, these things will both continue to be the case. I choose to hold out hope that there will continue to be progress, however—advancement in our understanding of what makes things right and wrong—and that people will embrace rational morality not just out of high-minded intellectual nobility but also out of intelligent self-interest.

Conclusion

Apologies for the more-than-usually-rambling nature of this post. It took on a life of its own, as these things are wont to do. The crux of my argument can be boiled down to this: moral reasoning and moral behavior are two different things. They are causally connected but not interchangeable. That a given system or process produces generally moral behavior does not mean that its mode of reasoning is sound, and it is necessary for there to be a consistent and logical mode of reasoning where morality is concerned. Without such reasoning, moral systems become more fragile than they ought to be, and we inevitably end up with dismal failures of moral judgment. For these reasons, it is necessary that we all develop a solid understanding of the process of moral reasoning, and that we not be lulled into thinking that moral behavior implies good moral reasoning, for no such implication exists.

–Urizen

A significant chunk of the recent debate among Democrats (or, more accurately, among non-Republicans) has been about how exactly we should be dealing with religion—specifically evangelical Christianity—from a political standpoint, which is to say from a public relations standpoint. With midterm elections rapidly approaching and campaigning for 2008 off to an early start, questions of policy and principle are, as is usually the case, taking a back seat to political maneuvering to satisfy the religious majority. Amy Sullivan’s Washington Monthly article a while ago about the interaction between evangelicals and the Democratic party was the catalyst for the most recent round of debates on this subject. Professor Myers and others came down hard on Sullivan (justifiably so) for what they saw as her willingness to abandon the principles of secular government for strategic purposes that almost completely miss the point. In particular, Sullivan and others have left the impression that atheists and agnostics ought to sit down and shut up for the sake of the team, a suggestion to which a number of us don’t take kindly. With little to no concern for self-preservation, I’d like to dive into this little debate.

Who Leads, Who Follows?

The conflict seems to me to have two separate, though obviously related, components. On the one hand, it is the same intra-party clash that’s been playing out for a couple decades at least, between so-called pragmatic strategy (move to the center, chase the voters), for which I can’t help but express a certain amount of disdain, and the more idealistic tendency to stay true to certain principles regardless of their perceived lack of popularity among the electorate. The obvious point to be made about this component is that ideology (in our case, very roughly corresponding to the constitutional part of constitutional democracy) and public opinion/vote-chasing (the democracy part) are the two competing and often conflicting impulses at the heart of our political system—and, more importantly, both impulses are and seem likely to remain both central and necessary, barring any massive, fundamental changes to the political system itself. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be subject to whatever the bigoted whim du jour happens to be, the point of constitutional law being to protect us all from such tyranny, and it’s certainly possible to provide just and principled leadership even when the impulses of the electorate are not so just and principled. Anyway, I digress.

The One True ______

The other component is more complex and tends to express itself in a variety of ways. Broadly speaking, it is the conflict between the simplicity of a monolithic culture and the complexity of multiculturalism, secular values, and differing individual identities. This complexity is, if we are being honest with ourselves, much more integral to our political and cultural heritage, and certainly more consonant with the values upon which the nation was founded—the actual values, e.g. an ultimate respect for individual freedoms and rights, not the “Christian nation” label that’s so dishonestly and inaccurately applied centuries after the country’s founding. More on values in a bit. This particular conflict often manifests itself as secular values vs. religion, primarily because of the way religious traditions (and, accordingly, religious leaders) seek dominion over not only ‘spiritual’ matters (i.e. the conjecture of theological narratives) but also political, philosophical, ethical, social, and (much to the dismay of many of us) even scientific matters. Whereas religion can be seen as a valuable source of cultural narratives and community identity, even by those of us who find the concept of faith contra reason to be repugnant, it cannot function as an appropriate set of philosophical and moral boundaries, due to its fundamental irrationality—even when it’s not explicitly contradicting logic and empirical evidence, it has no particular rational basis (that being the nature of a faith belief, whether the belief persists in the face of contradictory evidence, or merely in the absence of affirmative evidence). Only a system founded on human reason can serve as an appropriately universal barometer for human interaction, and therefore also a set of fundamental guidelines for law and government.

One + One = A Bigger, More Powerful One

Interestingly enough, conservatism is at the very deepest level similarly concerned with the establishment and preservation of some sort of monolithic national identity. This is especially true of modern social/cultural conservatism, wherein social and “moral” norms (scare quotes intended to separate these from purely rational moral values) are part of an attempt to establish an unassailable societal oneness, firm in the face of change and diversity. It’s unclear which is the cause and which the effect, but this certainly must be causally connected, in one direction or another (or both), with the increasingly religious brand of conservatism that dominates so much of the discourse these days. Within a political ideology based primarily on the establishment and preservation of tradition, there is a natural tendency to ally with that most ubiquitous and monolithic of cultural phenomena, religion. And so, with a bizarre cooperation between politicians who want to use the religious and religious figures who want to take advantage of politics, religion (very carefully and intricately connected to rightist politics) becomes the catchall term for values, for morality, for all that is good in human nature, even those characteristics to which religion can make absolutely no claim. Never mind that each entity is calculating in its use of the other—Republican politicians reap the rewards of their partnership with the religious contingent even as they express their scorn for the religious voters who swept them into office, just as religious leaders/power brokers are rewarded in such a way as to gain power over their congregations (but not as much over political affairs, as they have Business to contend with for the affections of the GOP). The relationship may not be perfectly cozy, but it’s certainly working its magic on the affairs of the nation.

Fine Then; Now What?

Back to the questions of logistics, then. What are we to do about all of this? We must start with the things we have to do, and in this case, the first thing we have to do is preserve without a doubt in anyone’s mind the sanctity of the principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, freedoms of speech and conscience—these things are not negotiable. Neither is the separation of church and state, or the necessity for a government founded upon secular, rational principles, those being the only principles responsive to change and to differences between individuals. Such a government does not have to disrespect the religious beliefs of its citizens, and in fact there are specific measures in place to avoid doing so. We must, however, be clear, consistent, and unapologetic about the need for a secular government. As PZ puts it:

How about if we reassure the evangelicals that they will always be free to worship as they please, there will be no interference by the government in their religion, but that in a nation with so many different religions floating around, we must and always will be a secular state and religion must stop interfering in government. Your belief in Jesus or Odin or the FSM is not a qualification for service in government (nor is it an obstacle), and isn’t even a testimonial to the quality of your character.

From there, we must disabuse people of the notion that religion = values, and that no religion = no values. Values are, on a fundamental level, the things that we decide to care about so as to establish a coherent and cohesive system of morality. Without any sense of value, a rationally-based system of morality has nothing to get it started. We assume first that human life is an appropriate value to apply universally; hence the moral prohibition against murder, because we ourselves don’t want to be killed, and the world would be a better place if we could assume a universal agreement that taking human life is a Bad Thing. We place value too in autonomy, for reasons that would be better explained by Locke or Mill. From this notion of autonomy we derive our concepts of the various human freedoms, and so on and so forth. At no point in this process is divine revelation or church doctrine necessary or even particularly illuminating; values as discussed here transcend religious belief, because they are more fundamental entities even than religion, which has become foundational for so many people. As Josh says:

Right now, with Democrats fumbling in expressing their values, it’s easy for Republicans to use religion as a proxy for values. “I’m a Catholic, so I oppose abortion,” is a cheap way of avoiding a discussion of personal values. There are pro-choice Catholics and pro-life Catholics (no abortion, no death penalty), anti-abortion/pro-death penalty Catholics, and anti-death penalty/pro-choice Catholics. They all justify their policy positions on the basis of religion and personal values.

And later:

It means that an atheist should be able to speak to a local interfaith council and convince a group of ministers to back him, and a congregation of believers shouldn’t be unreachable by an agnostic candidate. I can derive the Golden Rule as an evolutionarily stable strategy in game theory, or I can derive it from Jewish Law, or I can bring it from the words of Jesus. The value is still one of fairness to others, and I can talk about it in different ways, and show how it produces my policy positions. Religious freedom and freedom of speech are easy to derive from the Golden Rule: I don’t want others to restrict my religious expression, so I won’t restrict theirs. I don’t want others to evangelize me, so I won’t evangelize them.

Conclusion

Like all things political, this comes down to framing. More accurately, I suppose, it’s a matter of breaking down the frame that’s been so carefully constructed and allowing people to see that values are not and should not be dependent on church membership. From a purely immediate tactical standpoint, it’s difficult to argue with Sullivan’s assertion that Democrats’ perceived hostility to religious voters has a harmful effect at the polls. She misses the point, however, in offering Band-aid solutions instead of addressing root causes. Where she advocates setting up a new frame, one that aligns religiosity and moral values more firmly with Democratic politics, I would prefer to do away with the misleading conflation of theology with politics and morality. We should not apologize for maintaining a separation between religious orthodoxy and governmental policy, either from a principled point of view or from a pragmatic point of view. We need to do away with deception and oversimplification; we need to preserve freedom, individuality, and variety in the face of cultural monopolization; we need to get back to making people’s lives better, rather than trying to make them the same.

Freedom is a wonderful thing. Freedom to say, freedom to think, freedom to feel, freedom to believe, all regardless of what the neighbor may happen to say or think or feel or believe. Surely we can all agree on that.

–Urizen

The correct analogy regarding pseudo-fascism and real fascism, I think, is not to compare them to a king snake and a cobra, but rather to a cobra in different states: before it strikes, as it still slithers into range and raises its cowl; and after it has bitten. In the former, we can keep it at bay and even corral it. In the latter, we’re calling the ambulance.

This is right on the money, I think; the one thing I’d like to add/emphasize is that this sort of thing is a process, one that is relevant long before it reaches its conclusion. We’ve all heard the “first they came for [x], and I didn’t say anything because [...]” maxim, but I don’t think most of us have really internalized the reality of how fragile peace and freedom are, and how insidious the forces that seek to undermine them are. The strength of liberal democracy, aside from its respect for principles of individual autonomy, is that it is designed to be self-correcting, i.e. to respond to changes in our understanding of the world. This is the sort of thing that is anathema to neo-fascist groups and to the far right in general (though it’s not difficult to find ideological ties even to less extreme conservative ideologies—this being one reason, perhaps, why rightist hatred has taken such a significant role in modern mainstream “conservatism”), because for these groups, what’s important is a predefined orthodoxy—and there’s no room for challenging that orthodoxy.

What we have to acknowledge, then, is that this pseudo-fascist/fascist mindset is attacking government and society on the most fundamental level, which is, counterintuitively, also the most vulnerable level. Conservative ideology in its most basic form is marked by a certain natural skepticism towards unorthodox ideas, towards anything that deviates in policy or principle from the status quo. The fascist mindset, it seems to me, is a combination of two impulses: an extreme version of this death grip on the status quo, and an irrational and reductive division of the world into “us” and “them.” These two impulses justify and enhance each other, to the point of full-fledged eliminationism. This is dangerous not only in that it has the potential to develop into fascism proper (or at least “isolated” incidents of violence and persecution)—it also threatens the responsiveness of democracy and the fundamental respect for freedom, autonomy, and the intrinsic worth of human beings (regardless of political/philosophical/theological belief). Fascist tendencies and eliminationist rhetoric shouldn’t only worry us because they might result in real violence, though the threat of violence is real. We should also be wary of such mindsets because of the damage they do to the foundations of our society, a society that (like it or not) is designed to function according to a rational morality, not irrational and impenetrable orthodoxy.

Neiwert’s post concludes thusly:

But if we fall down on the job, and the American body politic under the influence of the extremist right gives rise to real fascism, and we do start seeing loyalty oaths and official suppression of free speech, mass arrests and street violence … well, by then, I’m afraid, it will be too late.

He is of course right to suggest that we need to worry about fascist mentalities now, rather than waiting until it’s too late. This is all the more reason for us to think about how such mentalities have been absorbed into mainstream politics, and to come up with ways to keep fascism and eliminationism from playing such a central role in public discourse. For a disturbingly large number of people, hatred and violent invective have taken the place of reasoned debate. This is not something we can afford to wait to deal with; for the sake of our society and everyone in it, we must embrace reason and civil discourse over neo-/proto-/pseudo-fascist impulses, or we can kiss the most wonderful and important principles of our world goodbye.

-Urizen