Great scavenging! One of liberalism’s biggest problems today is that there’s no shared mechanism for inspiring people to meet their unenforceable obligations. A generalized Christian morality served that function in MLK’s day (and in Fosdick’s and Moulton’s). I don’t think it’s an accident that liberalism saw its greatest flourishing when we could count on the law for the enforceable and religion for the unenforceable.
I’m not advocating for a return to a Christian polity, but I do wonder what can serve that crucial function today … and whether a liberal revival is possible without it.
I was just looking at a most remarkable graph a couple days ago: apparently we have good enough records to pretty well prove that religious membership rates nearly tripled in America from the Founding through MLK’s era, when the modern decline began. Personally, I think rather than worrying about “calling for” a return to this or that, these kind of stats during the greatest period of moral progress in human history should really make individual liberals think back through exactly how it is they know that Christianity isn’t true!
Good piece. I often wonder what each political side thinks "victory" (if ever attainable) looks like. What will happen to your political foes? On the right, I fear a not insignificant amount harbor visions of leftists imprisoned or cowed into silence through government domination, or at least physical intimidation. On the left, I suspect a few think MAGA will peter out, but there are some that perhaps think they too will be cowed into silence not through the end of a gun, but through social media mobs.
Trump will one day exit off the stage, and perhaps a Democratic president takes over, but what happens to MAGA? Will liberals seek to try to persuade the persuadable, or will they ostracize anyone that goes against liberal orthodoxy? If this is the start of a new MAGA era, does the right think liberal thought should exist? Do they still believe in pluralism?
It's the problem with ideologically-utopian visions in general. Any of them would work fine if the population working under the system consisted entirely of perfect moral actors who are happy to conform to the norms of the system. Back here in reality, people are venal and easily tempted to defect from the system for personal benefit, and the best we can do is try to design the system such that cooperating is rewarded most of the time, and cheating is punished most of the time, with power dispersed such that "ambition checks ambition", and hope that works to persuade people to make good choices.
Wesley Yang made the same observation: That you can’t coerce people to love others. The difference is that Yang didn’t see this lack of generosity as a problem, just the normal state of things.
But specifically with King, it brings to mind a piece by Louis Menand about forced busing programs from the early ‘70s, their goals, and how those goals failed then, tend to succeed now without a coercive state, and not require “unenforceable obligations”.
Menand (talking about Milliken v Bradley in Detroit c.1974) relays something I found striking: The plaintiffs believed that if more white children came to their school, those children’s parents would get better resources for the school; the immorality of subjugation didn’t really enter into it. It’s depressingly pragmatic, but also misunderstands what being in the dominant caste is like: White people aren’t magic, as in the Eddie Murphy SNL bit about “discovering” all the goodies white people get amongst themselves (I hold out hope that the actual joke is that it’s making fun of what Black people *think* happens when they’re not around). The theory of busing, then, was to continue this theory of forcing resource demand from white parents whose child was now at a “worse” school.
Busing and other forced integration methods failed miserably, even when “enforcable” for a small time, I think because the discomfort and anger white families felt was “unenforceable”. Yet, fast forward to now, and in many neighborhoods successful parents move into a neighborhood and demand better resources for the public school their child goes to! The difference, I argue, is between voluntary and involuntary.
Great scavenging! One of liberalism’s biggest problems today is that there’s no shared mechanism for inspiring people to meet their unenforceable obligations. A generalized Christian morality served that function in MLK’s day (and in Fosdick’s and Moulton’s). I don’t think it’s an accident that liberalism saw its greatest flourishing when we could count on the law for the enforceable and religion for the unenforceable.
I’m not advocating for a return to a Christian polity, but I do wonder what can serve that crucial function today … and whether a liberal revival is possible without it.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
I was just looking at a most remarkable graph a couple days ago: apparently we have good enough records to pretty well prove that religious membership rates nearly tripled in America from the Founding through MLK’s era, when the modern decline began. Personally, I think rather than worrying about “calling for” a return to this or that, these kind of stats during the greatest period of moral progress in human history should really make individual liberals think back through exactly how it is they know that Christianity isn’t true!
Good piece. I often wonder what each political side thinks "victory" (if ever attainable) looks like. What will happen to your political foes? On the right, I fear a not insignificant amount harbor visions of leftists imprisoned or cowed into silence through government domination, or at least physical intimidation. On the left, I suspect a few think MAGA will peter out, but there are some that perhaps think they too will be cowed into silence not through the end of a gun, but through social media mobs.
Trump will one day exit off the stage, and perhaps a Democratic president takes over, but what happens to MAGA? Will liberals seek to try to persuade the persuadable, or will they ostracize anyone that goes against liberal orthodoxy? If this is the start of a new MAGA era, does the right think liberal thought should exist? Do they still believe in pluralism?
That’s communism’s main problem
It's the problem with ideologically-utopian visions in general. Any of them would work fine if the population working under the system consisted entirely of perfect moral actors who are happy to conform to the norms of the system. Back here in reality, people are venal and easily tempted to defect from the system for personal benefit, and the best we can do is try to design the system such that cooperating is rewarded most of the time, and cheating is punished most of the time, with power dispersed such that "ambition checks ambition", and hope that works to persuade people to make good choices.
Wesley Yang made the same observation: That you can’t coerce people to love others. The difference is that Yang didn’t see this lack of generosity as a problem, just the normal state of things.
But specifically with King, it brings to mind a piece by Louis Menand about forced busing programs from the early ‘70s, their goals, and how those goals failed then, tend to succeed now without a coercive state, and not require “unenforceable obligations”.
Menand (talking about Milliken v Bradley in Detroit c.1974) relays something I found striking: The plaintiffs believed that if more white children came to their school, those children’s parents would get better resources for the school; the immorality of subjugation didn’t really enter into it. It’s depressingly pragmatic, but also misunderstands what being in the dominant caste is like: White people aren’t magic, as in the Eddie Murphy SNL bit about “discovering” all the goodies white people get amongst themselves (I hold out hope that the actual joke is that it’s making fun of what Black people *think* happens when they’re not around). The theory of busing, then, was to continue this theory of forcing resource demand from white parents whose child was now at a “worse” school.
Busing and other forced integration methods failed miserably, even when “enforcable” for a small time, I think because the discomfort and anger white families felt was “unenforceable”. Yet, fast forward to now, and in many neighborhoods successful parents move into a neighborhood and demand better resources for the public school their child goes to! The difference, I argue, is between voluntary and involuntary.