Patrick and I have been having a comments conversation in the response section of my post "Empty Rights". Without taking sides, he's been trying to help me understand why conservatives have a hard time with rights language, and I'm grateful that someone has because I'm really curious to understand it. But so far I haven't been dissuaded that their problem comes down to: "Rights language has been co-opted by the secularists, and they don't appreciate how the whole business of rights depends on there being a transcendent cosmic order to guarantee them; nor do they appreciate that without the Christian universalism first articulated in the Gospels and by St. Paul no one would have developed any ideas about rights in the first place." If it were only a matter of philosophy and the history of ideas, I would agree for the most part, but these considerations are irrelevant in the political sphere.
This post is not about arguing one way or the other about the centrality of Christianity to the development of the Western ideas about human rights, but to argue that whether people recognize the intellectual pedigree for the modern rights tradition or not, they have an intuitive moral recognition of the inherent dignity of the human being, and can still be agnostic about cosmic orders or persist in their prejudices that Christianity is wrong about everything. It shouldn't matter in the political sphere. The idea of human rights or natural rights, in this fundamental sense, stands on its own two feet and can define the common ground in the political sphere for all people of good will, no matter what their cultural differences.
Patrick referred me to a 2008 post by Daniel Larison about secular conservatives in which he makes the conservative point:
If secular conservatives have “pride in Western Civilization,” as Derbyshire puts it, they cannot very well ignore or deride as nonsense the central religious inspiration of that entire civilization, which is Christianity. Are they obliged to accept revealed truths? No, but they can and should pay due respect to the revelation that animated Western societies for most of their history and the traditions of our ancestors that have been tested over time and which have endured to become established customs.
I treasure what Larison treasures, but this statement and so many more like it by conservative intellectuals always strike me as a little Rodney Dangerfield-esque. It's a little pathetic when you have to demand respect from people who don't naturally feel it. Too much of conservatism is about hurt feelings, of wondering why people don't like them or take them seriously. And then blaming them as the cause of our civilizational decadence.
I can't take this kind of defense seriously. I think it misreads our situation completely. My approach is to accept that the West is in a decadent phase and no one is to blame for it. I've written about this before, and point the interested reader to Jacques Barzun who defines decadence not as some collective moral failure, but as something that just happens as a natural matter of course. Civilizations as organic living things go through cycles, like the seasons, and we can't always live in spring time. Cultures and civilizations have their winter phases, too, and we're in one now. It's just harder to believe, because it's not our habit to do so, that a cultural spring comes after a cultural winter. Had we lived in Europe in the dreary 1300s, it would have been hard to believe that the Renaissance was just around the corner.
And so yes, we're in a winter phases, and two things characterize such winter or decadent phases. One gets nostalgic about springs and summers of the past–but thinking about them, while it might afford some comfort, doesn't help you to deal with winter realities. On the other hand you can look forward to the coming of the future spring and summer, and that's a better use of your time, because at least there are things you can do here and now to prepare.
It's a question of whether you think looking backward or looking forward promotes healthier mindset. Premodern societies look backward to the wisdom of the ancestors; modern societies can no longer hear the voices of the ancestors. If you are born into a modern society, you can like it or not like it, but the past and the wisdom of the ancestors simply does not organize our collective imaginations in the way they did for premoderns. The wisdom of the ancestors can be retrieved by individual effort, but that wisdom is simply not a given presence for moderns–it has to be sought out and chosen. Cultural conservatives are people who think that wisdom should be a collective given.
If we accept that the West is in a decadent phase, we need also to accept that it's futile to expect widespread cultural respect or valuation of its heritage. A decadent period is one in which people have lost any vital feeling of rootedeness in the culture's grand narrative, and for moderns that means having lost lost any robust sense of future possibility, because the grand narrative of modernity has been about progress and positive movement toward a better future. In our current decadent phase, the only future we can imagine is ecological or nuclear disasters and dystopic social arrangments.
People's needs in the decadence of a cultural winter become very basic, their ambitions short-range and limited, their perspective parochial. There's more a tendency to just get through the day than to plan for dealing with what lies ahead. It's a time of contraction and withdrawal, of tightening one's grip rather than being open-handed, a time to focus more on small comforts and staying warm than about any expansive projects and ambitious schemes. It's a time when one of those comforts is to indulge in nostalgia about the past, because at least we know something about that, and there was a greatness there that we lack now, and there's some solace in that in a time when we otherwise feel lost and anxious.
There is less solace in the future because it's unknown, indeterminate, open-ended, and frightening–and therefore it takes, I contend, more spiritual courage and discipline to focus on looking forward than looking back. That's my main argument with conservatives: I think they do too much looking back and not enough looking forward. And it's fundamentally un-Christian, because Christianity's essence, since its origins in the time of Abraham, is future oriented, to look forward in hope to the historical fulfillment of impossible promises. See the Niebuhr quote in epigraph under the title of the blog. For me this attitude toward the future is the most important contribution Christians have to offer the world; otherwise they offer nothing that isn't offered by others. It should be what gives Christians their strength and confidence to persist no matter what seems realistic.
I see the fundamental gesture of Christian conservatism and its orientation to the past to be a fearful and self-protective, as lacking hope and lacking faith or confidence in the Promise with a resulting small-soulness that lacks the confidence to love the world as it is. This tight-fisted, irritable, I-get-no-respect Christianity is tiresome and irrelevant to the world's needs. I look forward to the renaissance of a magnanimous, open-handed, world embracing Christianity that is confident about its place in history and cares only about serving the world, not being respected by it. If that were the public face of the Church, it would have the spiritual authority and respect so many of its members it crave.
There's more to be said, but I've said it all before, and I'll expand on how this relates to the question of rights and the need for us all to learn how to speak secularese in the political sphere in comments if there's any interest in my doing so.
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