Muddles of Moderation
June 22, 2005
Joseph M. Knippenberg, professor of politics at Oglethorpe University, writing in Touchstone:
“When we mix and match our political opinions from the menus offered by political parties and public intellectuals, we sometimes choose opinions that are ultimately inconsistent with one another. We are “personally opposed to abortion,” but support “a woman’s right to choose.” We are environmentalists who love the safety and flexibility of big SUVs. We want lower taxes but are unwilling to give up the government programs from which we benefit.
“Abraham Lincoln (actually Christ) had a word (actually a sentence) for this: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” If “our” moderation is in fact the confused holding of ultimately contradictory opinions, then sooner or later one or the other tendency is likely to prevail.
“This outcome was indeed the hope of those liberal rationalists who availed themselves of religious language. By focusing on a worldly goal like “the relief of man’s estate,” they hoped to transform religion into an instrument of liberal rationalism, which seems indeed to have been the fate of some of the mainline denominations. Our current “moderation” may be the harbinger of a deeper immoderation down the road.
“….It isn’t clear to me that our moderation is either a moderation of principle … or a moderation of non-ideological common sense…
“For examples of the former, I can point to Abraham Lincoln, who was as convinced of the evil of slavery as he was patient regarding its abolition, and to Immanuel Kant (not a predictable example, to be sure), who enjoined us, following Scripture, to be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. Both Lincoln and Kant were aware of human finitude and fallibility. And both had hopes for a providential or historical guarantee of justice beyond merely human fashioning.
“Both the moderation of principle and the moderation of common sense are at least potentially stable in a way that a moderation born of confusion and ad hoc choices is not. I fear that our moderation is unstable because it is unprincipled, or rather, because it is ultimately immoderate. Its most culturally compelling element, at the moment, is sovereign individual choice, which recognizes no limits and is by definition infallible.
“In an effort to preserve us for “the better angels of our natures,” I will continue to put my shoulder to the wheel on one side, pointing to a foundation that combines a fallible recognition of limits with a faith in ultimate redemption. When we recognize that we are not the authors of our world, that we see through a glass but darkly, we can accommodate different prudential judgments, understanding how reasonable (but fallible) people can disagree and recognizing that there is good to be found and a lesson to be learned even when, politically, we lose.
“The ground, in other words, of genuine political moderation is faith, not in ourselves, or in our capacity to choose, or in political institutions that compel us to “split the difference,” but in God. In his “Farewell Address,” George Washington observed that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government” and insisted that it could not be sustained without religion. Those words were true over two hundred years ago. They remain true today.”
This is Muddles of Moderation in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Our Need to Master the Secondary Literature Leads to a Totalizing Brain Hemorrhage | Next: Stupid Sexy Flanders | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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