Here is a so- far unpublished essay I thought you might enjoy:
Contemporary Liberalism: Get A Life
The United States has an enormous amount of resources, both material and moral. As is often said,
there are countries in the world where people would be happy to live off of our garbage.
Indeed, it is almost an inevitable concomitant of prosperity that there be a great deal of
waste. The Plains Indians have been widely praised for using the buffalo down to the
bone, and rightly so. But the Plains Indians were also quite poor, and so their virtue was
rather more a necessity than some evidence of spirituality. Black share- croppers invented
ingenious means for rendering palatable portions of the pig that many of their more
affluent descendants would find beyond contemplation as food, such as snout and jowl.
As soon as people can afford not to eat collard greens, they tend to desist. Indeed,
prosperity may almost be defined by what you can afford to throw away.
As it is with material resources, so it is with moral resources. It has often been observed that
humanity is naturally ethnocentric. In certain languages, the name for the tribe amounts to
" the human beings" or " the civilized ones". There is a whole interdisciplinary genre in
academia devoted to speculations about how we construct The Other. Of course, as is
often the case with the woollier questions with which academia flagellates itself, the
answer is pretty obvious. In most societies, it takes about all the energy that one can
muster just to take care of your own. There is not much sympathy to spare, certainly not
on a practical level, for strangers. Anyone who cannot look after himself is a burden: a
child, a senescent relative, or those with chronic physical problems. The tribe has rather
enough on its hands without worrying over the tribe down river, which in any case may
easily become a threat in an already precarious situation. In fact, the development of trade
helps to mitigate such corporate self- absorption by enabling one to have generally
profitable relations with one's neighbors. In any case, humanitarian compassion is
predicated upon relative affluence and leisure. One must have tears to spare to cry over
strangers.
These facts point to a phenomenon not generally commented upon: that a good deal of the
monies poured into the coffers of do- good organizations, and a good deal of the litigation
and lobbying it supports, are enlisted to achieve what are, from one point of view,
astoundingly frivolous. We eat up tremendous amounts of time and money fighting court
battles over the spotted owl, or trying to preserve an expansive definition of wetland, as if
we had solved all of the really important problems of the world, such as mass starvation,
and can now move on.
I sometimes try to imagine the kind of person who is so haunted by the fur trade that he stakes out
Bergdorf's with a can of paint, waiting for some hapless socialite, preening in her new
sable coat, to unload on. Myself, I have to worry over my kid's homework, my wife's
occasional medical problems, the bills, how my mom will do as she gets on in years, if
my neighbor's pregnancy came out okay, and so on and on. I would say that the fur trade
is way down on my list of things to fret about, and even if I could work up a good fret, I
couldn't possibly spare the time or energy to stalk wealthy dowagers.In other words, I
have a life.
Since no serious person has so much time on his hands that he could not conceive of something
better to do with it than harass socialites, I have come to the conclusion that my
hypothetical anti- fur fanatic does not have a life, nor much of a desire to get one.Even
ordinary recreational activities make more sense, since everyone needs some
opportunities for refreshment and conviviality, and most of them are pretty harmless.
Better my fanatic should hang- out with a few friends and engage in tomfoolery.
Now, admittedly this is an extreme example, but it is not beside the point. I recall wondering about the ACLU back when it elected to commit time and
resources to defend the right of American Nazis to march through the town of Skokie.
The Nazis desired the march precisely because it had a large Jewish population and an
unusual number of Holocaust survivors. Even granting that the ACLU's mandate might
legitimately place it in the position of defending Nazi's under some circumstances, surely
this was a hard case. There have always been reasonable time and place restrictions on the
right of assembly, largely on the basis of public order. I could not quite fathom how the
general interests of liberty were served by permitting a march clearly intended as a
provocation and publicity stunt to take place, when the rights of the Nazis would have
been easily served in another venue. In any case, it seemed bizarre to commit resources to
something so obviously problematic and marginal. Indeed, as I thought about it, it
occurred to me that the whole notion of an absolute right of speech and assembly
extended to even the most noxious groups who, if they had a chance, would upset the
entire Constitutional order, was less an example of principled behavior than of moral
luxury. Groups like the ACLU are able to engage in the moral grandstanding of First
Amendment absolutism because no one takes the threat of the Nazis seriously, and
because we are a rich country that can afford such frivolous court cases, and the police
expense required to back them up. If the Nazis presented a grave threat to the
Constitution, or if the economy collapsed and courts were forced to ration access more
stringently, the ACLU would soon be out of business. First Amendment absolutism is a
luxury, as surely as the dowagers mink coat. Whether it is a harmless luxury may be a
question, but it is idle to pretend that such lawsuits are of grave import to the health of the
Republic.
The ACLU attorneys who chose to pursue this matter probably have lives, and are almost certainly better
balanced individuals than the anti- fur fanatic. But they share the characteristic of having
their priorities screwed- up, while congratulating themselves on their moral acuity.
Enormous resources were being expended essentially to allow some bullies to taunt
Holocaust survivors, perhaps provoke a riot, and get a lot of press. These resources could
have been expended on legal aid for the indigent, on promoting democratic principles in
Communist or Third World countries, or on starting a business in the inner city, thus
providing jobs. Wouldn't these alternatives have made a greater contribution to the life,
liberty, and happiness of the world? Certainly, the government's resources, tied- up in
court or in police protection on the street, could have been better employed by increasing
police protection in the inner city, or expediting the backlog of cases in the courts. People
talk constantly of the parasitism of lawyers, but generally exempt those presumed to be
engaged in public- interest law. Frequently, however, those engaged in "public- interest
law" are the worst parasites of all.
How many of the objectives that contemporary liberals expend so much effort on have the same
characteristic as the Skokie case, namely providing the luxury of moral grandstanding to a
few self- absorbed people, some of whom earn a good living for the privilege of preening
on matters of, at best, slight importance, frequently enough inflicting harm on some
innocent individuals who happen to get in the way of the moral Juggernaut? They ruin
farmers for the sake of tiny ecosystems, they force ghetto teenagers out of jobs for the
sake of the minimum wage, they put thousands of people out of work while litigating the
habitat of the spotted owl. They raise money and hire lobbyists to preserve the right of
Andre Serrano or Karen Finley to receive public monies, because refusing to subsidize
them would amount to "censorship", while infrastructure decays and high- schools
graduate illiterates. They start fights over the introduction of provocative material on
families and sexuality into the schools, while more than half of high school graduates
cannot place the Civil War within the correct half century, nor describe the process by
which a bill becomes a law. And all the while it is supposed by even many of their critics
that they hold the moral high ground, but are merely somewhat impractical.
It is time to stop the nonsense and admit that a good deal of contemporary liberalism is simply frivolous, at best wasting resources that could be better employed
elsewhere, at worst inflicting costs on others that are wanton and without the merest shred
of justification, while hypocritically cloaking itself in the mantle of moral sensitivity. This
is the non- ideological core of the disrepute into which liberalism has fallen among the
populace. Some writers delight in pretending that such hostility is suspect, since liberals
are self- evidently " for the people ", and thus that its root is something disreputable, such
as latent racism. But the plain fact is that liberalism has made a travesty of itself, and
most people are sick of paying the costs of lightminded self- indulgence. The general
refusal of voters to cast their ballots for anyone successfully saddled with the label
"liberal" is another way of saying to the liberal cadres "get a life". |
