The Liberal/Conservative Dilemma

The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. (G.K. Chesterton)

Thank goodness today is the last day of election season here in the US (ooh, it’d better be!). There are few things I find more distasteful than partisan politics. The truth is, I am constantly frustrated by the division between “liberalism” and “conservatism.” These can carry such a wide array of senses as to be almost meaningless, but as Chesterton playfully notes, they do highlight two conflicting and often mutually destructive tendencies. Particularly when it comes to society’s response to vice, “liberals” and “conservatives” (stereotypically speaking) tend to advance mutually exclusive approaches, neither of which seems to me to offer a real solution to the problem.

The trouble is that there is rarely a one-to-one correlation between risky behavior and actual harm. Though gambling or drinking can ruin one’s life if they become addictions, they can be harmless pleasures if kept in moderation. Though drug use can be extremely dangerous, not everyone who tries drugs is harmed by them. Though casual sex can lead to unplanned pregnancy or an STD, it often does not and many people will (obviously) do it no matter what the risks are.

Now society tends to take one of two basic attitudes towards such activities. On the one hand, we can try to add artificial deterrents to make them more risky and (hopefully) less attractive. “Conservatives” who take such a view will tend to take a firm stand on right and wrong, stress the worst consequences of failure rather than the potential mitigating factors, and call for harsher sanctions and punishments for offenders, ranging from mere social disapproval to legal punishment. On the other hand, we can try to reduce the natural risks artificially, so that those who do engage in such behavior will face as little harm as possible. “Liberals” who take such a view will tend to speak non-judgmentally, give as much information about mitigating factors as possible, and call for rehabilitation rather than punishment for those who fail. Of course, both groups want to reduce the amount of harm done, but one emphasizes the dangers as a deterrent; the other emphasizes how to avoid them.

I’m grossly stereotyping of course, and probably no one falls strictly into one category or the other. But these do seem to be clear and opposing tendencies in our society, and they lead to fairly predictable results, neither of which is clearly more compassionate and dignifying than the other. The conservative approach rightly emphasizes the fact that we all have a choice whether to engage in these behaviors, and will tend to reduce the number of people who choose them, but this comes at the cost of piling much more severe harm on those who do so anyway. Alternatively, the liberal approach rightly emphasizes compassion for those in need, and will tend to reduce the harm done to those individuals who fail, but at the cost of allowing (or even encouraging) much more widespread vice. The ideal solution, it would seem, would be to discourage such activities as much as possible while simultaneously offering as much aid as possible to those who choose them anyway, but is this even possible? People are not stupid, and the cheaper a pleasure is, the more likely they are to pursue it.

And so it goes across dozens of issues. “Conservatives” rail against “liberals” for enabling abortion, while “liberals” fire back that outlawing it will only drive people to back alleys. “Liberals” accuse “conservatives” of excessively punishing drug use, while “conservatives” respond that reducing or eliminating punishments will only make the practice even more prevalent. “Conservatives” decry “liberal” socialism for enabling sloth, while “liberals” dismiss “conservatives” for their lack of compassion for the poor and powerless, etc., etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

And so, not only do we have to face the fact that neither solution can work on its own, but our current system ensures that we can rarely work together to find a better alternative that could work. And I’m skeptical about the whole enterprise. Don’t get me wrong, if politics is an evil, it is a necessary one. The problem is not in the attempt to limit harm—whether by liberal or conservative methods—but the delusion that better policies can actually solve evil, as though it were a bad sum on a balance sheet. But every political season it comes to the same thing: One side accusing the other of making things worse while claiming that, if only their own plans were put into practice, all would be well. But all will not be well (nor will all fall to pieces if the “wrong” side wins), because ultimately it comes down to our choices as individuals—to pursue virtue or embrace vice, to help the needy or ignore their plight—and no policy can make these decisions for us.

Virtue cannot be imposed from above, it can only be chosen on an individual basis, and vice can abuse any system, “liberal” or “conservative.”

Biblical Studies Carnival XXXIII

Michael Halcomb is hosting this month's Biblical Studies Carnival, and has done a great job collecting an extremely broad range of posts from the past month. Among them is my post asking What Does It Mean to Trust the Bible? Along the same lines he also points to an interesting post at Dunelm Road on Scripture and Tradition, and I especially wanted to point to Alan Knox's brilliant Scripture... As We Live It series, which reminds me of a great quote by G.K. Chesterton:

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

There's a ton there to read, so do take some time to poke around.

Quote - Chesterton on the Christian Critics

G.K. Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man:

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.... The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. (pg. 11)

Camping and Reading... Under Water

The title and pictures (below) are for Carmen’s sake. The weather report promised near perfect camping weather: 70s or 80s with just a chance of light showers. Instead, a major thunderstorm poured rain on us for most of the trip, half flooding our tent. Still, our brief camping trip was as relaxing as I could have hoped, and I enjoyed myself immensely. Apart from a few walks with my daughter (she was not at all deterred by the rain, though she did maintain a fearful curiosity of slugs), I spent most of my time reading, with the rain noisily bouncing off the tarp over our heads, and a cheerful fire to keep us warm. Thanks to the weather, the campground was surprisingly empty for the week of a major holiday, and the few times the sun did peak out the rain made the towering maples seem even greener. Most of all, however, I just enjoyed getting away from the internet and my other responsibilities for a couple of days.

As for my reading, I finished John Stott’s Why I Am a Christian and finally read C.S. Lewis’ autobiographical Surprised by Joy. Stott was somewhat of a disappointment, to be honest. I’ve heard good things about him, but this book seemed a rather flat and mundane defense of Christianity. It offered a few good quotes and one or two original argumentative turns, but nothing that really stuck with me. I had to force myself to finish its brief 133 pages. Surprised by Joy, on the other hand, caught my attention quickly and did not let it up, offering not only an informative picture of Lewis’ early life and conversion, but also a fascinating examination of the human condition. It was also fun to see Lewis interacting with G.K. Chesterton’s work (another of my favorite authors). Anyway, one of Lewis' points is that the attempt to capture or analyze experience inevitably fails, and that is certainly true of the trip. These photos do nothing to capture the full onslaught of the rain, nor the true beauty of the trees:

Quote - Chesterton on The Permanent Miracles

G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross:

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles.

Chesterton on Courage

G.K. Chesterton has an interesting discussion of courage which relates to a lot of what I have been dicussing lately: hope and sacrifice especially, but also what it means to find balance:

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the MESON or balance of Aristotle. They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great truism of the MESON remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. (Orthodoxy, from chapter 6, the whole of which is well worth reading)

Hell is Other People

G.K. Chesterton (whom, as my masthead suggests, I’m liable to quote rather often) once claimed that Original Sin is “the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved.” Criticizing the modern tendency to reject this doctrine, he argues:

The strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. (Orthodoxy, p. 19)

How anyone can look at our world and claim that the average human is “basically good” is beyond me, but however indisputable, the universality of human evil remains an exceptionally difficult doctrine. If God is just, how can it be that he punishes us for the sins of our forebears? So what if our ancestors sinned, why should that affect us?

And yet, could it really have been otherwise? Theoretically, perhaps, God could have created a world of isolated individuals each with no power to harm another, but such would have been more like a cosmic prison than a good creation. As soon as God choose to create a world of freedom and society, he accepted the risk that we would use that freedom to destroy that society, and one another.

This leads to an alternate understanding of the concept of Original Sin. Such is not an arbitrary punishment God imposed on us because of our ancestors’ rebellion, as though he were spitefully getting back at our parents by cursing us. Not at all.

The doctrine of Original Sin instead recognizes the obvious truth that our actions as individuals always impact the society in which we live, the society in which our children are born. Our children are “born into sin,” not because God creates them sinful, but precisely because they are born into a community of sinful people – selfish people, prideful people, prejudiced people, people like you and me.

And that is why the fall of our ancient forebears was such a disaster, for it established a culture of sin which affects all aspects of human society. Such was the cost of the gift of freedom, such is the dark side of community.