Party of Death
June 07, 2006
A bitter-sounding debate between John Derbyshire and Ramesh Ponnuru, both writers at National Review, over abortion and Ponnuru’s new book, The Party of Death is fascinating for the way it illustrates the divergent pressures within modern conservatism. I will not give an extensive summary of the arguments here, but readers are encouraged to see both Derbyshire’s review and Ponnuru’s response.
In sum, Derbyshire is a scientific materialist who approaches issues of politics and reason as a tribalist, while Ponnuru is a Christian who approaches politics and reason as a universalist. Derbyshire has no practical belief in God, thinks religion is functionally necessary as crowd control, thinks moral truth is hokum, and relies almost exclusively on accumulated tribal prejudices and protections for social cohesion and order. Ponnuru, on the other hand, is a committed Catholic, thinks the Catholic natural law tradition provides clear moral guidance to everyone reasoning rightly, and relies on a Lockean (which is to say liberal) notion of a procedural pluralism to provide social cohesion and order. Ponnuru argues the pro-life position as a procedural liberal Christian. Derbyshire argues against the invasion of his tribe by such puritan busy-body liberal do-goodism as an unapologetic prejudiced conservative atheist. What fun!
Ponnuru is right: a Christian cannot countenance (within his tribe at least) the various evils of abortion, euthanasia, etc., which are defended by the party of death. Derbyshire is right: Christianity is a cult, and plastering a thin veneer of natural law over procedural liberalism is an incredibly rickety construct to hang the whole moral order of a society on (which is likely to be co-opted by a totalitarian state). What is needed is some Christian Derbyshires (or Christian Machiavellians as I have elsewhere called them): those willing to discard the flimsy liberal assumptions about politics and reason and argue from within the cult; from within a specifically and tribally Western understanding of right order and the way the world is.
Both Ponnuru and Derbyshire are wrong about reason. Reason is not a natural faculty (both assume it is), whether that faculty is exclusively empirical and thus good only in the realm of science (Derbyshire) or primarily moral and thus sufficient for binding law (Ponnuru), rather it is an experience by which man negotiates the tensions of existence, and it is thus formative of order in his soul, and by extension, in the collective souls of his community.
(Addendum: I note that even in its current pathetic condition, NR remains a space where people argue and advocate politics while also identifying their religious commitments and how they are part of their political ideas. This is what all that evangelical worldview jawing and gassing is about; however none of the NR people are evangelicals so far as I can tell. Moreover, evangelicals just don’t produce this sort of thing for some reason. Why does this situation exist?)
This is Party of Death in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Highway to Hell | Next: Friendly Fire in the House of the Lord | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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