Rey Redington once told me a war story from the days he
was running for public office. Forgive me if I've got it wrong,
Rey, but here's the gist as I remember it: Rey paid a heavy cost
for not lining up, lock-step, with certain political forces on
certain hot-button questions. He was not a party-line man. He did
not fit neatly into a box. Rey could never have wound up a
"machine politician" for the simple reason that he is
ill-designed to be a cog in somebody else's
wheel.
The same problem forbids me from being much involved in
politics, even in our community. I realize that is what the modern
pastor is supposed to do. Job description: community activist. I
think Ayn Rand was right when it comes to committees, so I'm
not attracted to community committee work. I did start to
make an exception some months ago. It was a group that gathered
in the wake of some kind of supposed sexual violence or
intimidation or something case (it only got murkier as time went
on). But then I
dropped it. It became quite clear quite quickly that the
group was a forum where one single view was welcome, one with
the initials P.C. A soda fountain with only one flavor on the
menu, despite all the gabbing about
"diversity."
I find myself a strange mix of opinions and unable to
find compatriots on either well-defined side. Let me let you in
on a little secret, just to give an example. Personally, I
tend to believe that abortions are usually immoral, that women
are ethically ill-advised to have them, with rare extenuating
circumstances which hardly ever come into play anyway in the
vast majority of abortions. And yet I believe that to
criminalize this action would be counterproductive. As in Prohibition and
the current absurdity of the Drug War, criminalization would
only make things worse. So I wind up shuddering whenever either the
fascistic minions of Pro-Life guru Randall Terry or the
fetus-be-damned Pro-Choicers march by. There's no faction I can support.
Not that they're exactly competing for my
endorsement.
It is common enough to hear the self-righteous "Gee,
I'm just too sophisticated" plaints of fence-sitters like me.
What needs more consideration, I think, is the interesting spectacle of a
head-on clash between sacred cow liberal values themselves. Let
me lob a couple of apples of discord.
First, the other day, it seems to me I heard Jacques
Cousteau was planning to propose a Bill of Rights for Future
Generations. Of course the point would be to get today's actual living
population to leave some resources for the future. Otherwise our
children and our children's children will rise up and say,
"Well, this is another fine mess you've
gotten me into!"
This is a perfect liberal proposal, partly because it is
an essentially, perhaps completely, symbolic action, like
the ultimately meaningless Nuclear Freeze push. Or like the Brady
Bill. (I'm for gun control, by the way.) Also, it is another
reason for the Left to preach asceticism, something they do with
zeal unmatched by religious folks who seem to have decided
they've had about enough of it.
But here's the big problem with it as a liberal cause.
The same logic would seem to argue for the immorality (and some
would argue, the criminality) of abortion. How's that? Simply
because to predicate "human rights" for potential (not
actual) human beings, i.e., the unborn generations, would seem to be to
acknowledge the claim that fetuses are unborn future potential
people with at least the right to life. Do potential
people have rights? When it came to abortion, ethicist Joseph
Fletcher did not think so. Mary Anne Warren and other pro-abortion
theorists think not. But then why worry about the ecological "rights"
of another set of potential people: those who will inherit
the earth from us? Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer
choice.
Dodged that one? I'm letting fly number two. Recently
Alice Walker, champion of all things multicultural and
politically correct, began to rally feminist opinion against various
practices all over the world which oppress and, specifically,
mutilate women. Among these repulsive practices are foot-binding
in China and (gulp!) clitoridectomy in some African societies. I'm
with her. I don't mind condemning these practices as
barbarous.
I'm also with Richard Rorty here: we don't have to be
able to demonstrate from common assumptions that these things are
wrong. We must simply be faithful to our own values and condemn
these things. Let those in the culture that practices these
things stick to their guns, too. And may the best man, er,
person, er perchild, win.
But I'm not sure Alice Walker has the same leeway. Do you
see what has happened to Alice? In the PC Wonderland, Alice
has sipped from a bottle containing the magic potion called
Feminism, and it has made her outgrow the cramped confines of once-comfortable Multiculturalism. According to the latter,
shouldn't she steadfastly refuse to judge the mores and beliefs of
other, non-Western cultures? What gives her the right to say
they are wrong? She would be much umbraged should someone, let's
say a not-quite-dead white male, take a shot at the practices
of another culture. One can imagine the screaming, for
example, should one dare to note that some American Indian tribes
(not "Native Americans," a phoney term most Indians
reject as a white liberal imposition) were indeed savages who fiendishly
tortured their prisoners just for laughs. I can see Alice's face
turning a rare shade of the color purple at
such an indiscretion.
But here she is, up in arms and bearing the White Woman's
Burden, carrying enlightened Western cultural ideas to benighted
non-Western cultures. Of course, feminism (a crucially good
thing) is itself a product of the Western Enlightenment (don't tell
any body, but, come to think of it, so is multiculturalism!
Do you think they have much use for it in Rwanda these days?).
To expect other cultures to get in step with our Enlightenment
doctrine of feminism is cultural chauvinism, isn't it? If it isn't,
please tell me the difference. Western feminists have not a
moment's tolerance for the misogynist cruelties of non-Western
cultures, nor am I saying they should.
If you say feminists are just trying to undo
power-relationships in the Third World which has kept women down, I will
agree with you. And I will suggest that strict multiculturalism has
become one more logocentric rationale for keeping that system in
place. Pretty much the same trick as the UN-approved New
Information Order, whereby all news coverage must stem from the
government-controlled media of each country. That way, tin-god
dictators like Idi Amin could avoid the scrutiny of inconvenient
Western reporters and nuisances like Amnesty
International.
So what's the problem in saying that you do somewhere
along the line have to curb the cultural relativism of
multiculturalism? I mean, Capitalists will usually admit there is a point
where their preferred system runs wild, and then you have to pull the
reins and pass anti-trust laws, for example. Why not just admit
the same principle here, that strict consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds? Only that then the same people, who tend
nowadays to be inflexible ideologues, would have to admit that
there is after all some room for flexibility.
It's like in Inherit
the Wind, when agnostic Henry Drummond squeezes
fundamentalist Matthew Harrison Brady into admitting that the six days of the
Genesis creation might not be literal 24-hour days after all.
He's let the camel's nose under the tent--and
so has Alice Walker.
Another thing that bugs me about liberal, supposedly
multicultural politics is that they commit the same error as the
freshman Anthropology major. Cultural relativism is fine for
everywhere else but your own culture. All others are right, but your
own is wrong. Derrida pointed out this axe-grinding bias in
Rousseau and Claude Levi-Strauss. They delighted to use romanticized
portraits of supposedly natural, unspoiled cultures to twit and
tweak the nose of so-evil Western culture. You see this, for
instance, in the efforts of some radicals in mainstream Protestant
denominations to force their agendas on their denomination's
churches, like it or not. Now, I happen to agree with the theology
of these radicals. That's not the point. But suddenly the poor
traditionalists seem not entitled to their point of view. I guess
there's no such thing as "multisubculturalism."
In the past, when a religious faction has received a new
revelation (and I think that's not too strong a term for the
dawn of religious feminist consciousness), they formed a new
sect. Admittedly, they only had to do this once the mainstream
resisted their calls to accept the new ideas. But why battle for
control? Why not an amicable parting? Agree to
disagree?
I'll tell you why, oracle that I am. It's all seen as a
power trip. Someone has to rule. Never mind that this way of viewing
things is male phallocentrism at its worst ("Who's
going to be king of the hill, boys?"). It's also anything but
liberal. These days, PC Leftists do not hesitate to confiscate campus
newspapers which present a different viewpoint. They do not hesitate
to shout down speakers with whom they think they disagree
(how do they know unless they hear them, I wonder?). This is not
"liberalism" any more. "Liberal" implies
freedom, especially freedom in expressing ideas. But no. Today we have non-liberal
Leftists. Their motto is that of Malcolm X: "By
any means necessary."
As Liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo
says in The
Liberation of Theology, in
traditional Christianity "minority
aspects (e.g., freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom
for Christian political action) see to be systematically
overvalued in comparison with factors that are more revolutionary
because they affect great human masses... in conditions of dire
poverty, ignorance, disease, and death" (p. 89). These
"minority rights," then, are of concern only to the oppressive elite and
hastily to be set aside on behalf of one's favorite group of
oppressed in whose name, as the vanguard of the proletariat, one
proposes to rule. Lani Guinere just published a book called The
Tyranny of the Majority. Was Winston Churchill wrong? Is majority
rule, for all its problems, no longer the best
way to go?
I guess it's clear by now that not much is clear. This is
why, among other things, I do not preach on the political
issues of the day. In my hands they turn into paradoxes which
cannot easily be lobbied or voted, do they not?
Guess I'll stick to religion.
Robert
M. Price