The story of David Epstein, the Columbia University political scientist and Huffington Post blogger now facing criminal charges of incest, has launched a very interesting discussion. What is fascinating about it, and deeply disturbing, is the inability of some commentators to articulate what is morally wrong about the act of incest. It is almost equally disturbing that a legal argument for a “right” to engage in adult, consensual incest stands on surprisingly firm footing, thanks to precedents the United States Supreme Court has already established in other cases on the “autonomy of the person” under our Constitution….
[blockquote] A majoritarian moral preference for the integrity of the family cannot, in this arena, claim a “rational basis†in the law as against the autonomous choices of free individuals to disregard that integrity if it suits them. There is no such thing, by the inexorable logic of Lawrence, as “the family.†There are only “families,†constituted by the choices of individuals to make them, unmake them, and bend their purposes to their own will. [/blockquote] External ordering requires an external authority empowered to order. To recognize an objective ordering such as ‘the family’ a man must first agree that there exists some authority capable of defining ‘the family’. If that man is a secularist, he will refuse to recognize any authority beyond his reach. How can it be otherwise since he denies all transcendent authority. He will see the definition as an arbitrary social construct imposed to control his actions and guide his conduct. According to his understanding, only men can give laws because only men exist. If men can make laws then men can also unmake laws. In order to gain freedom of action, he will seek to overturn the definition of ‘the family’ and remake it according to his own purposes.
This is why the language of morality has collapsed. The epistemological crisis of Western Liberalism is rooted in the presupposition that “only men make laws because only men exist.” Under this presupposition, every moral statement becomes an arbitrary construct to be made and unmade at will. How can you have a conversation about morality when each man is free to build his own set of arbitrary conventions? In the place of this conversation has instead arisen the unchallenged voice of autonomous individual. Justice has become narrowly focused on empowering the choice of the autonomous individual. Evil has become narrowly focused on coercing the choice of the autonomous individual. Morality becomes privatized and self-referenced for ultimately there exists nothing outside the private self.
Unfortunately, you can’t sustain a civilization on such libertine notions. Civilization depends upon people assuming certain imposed obligations and accepting certain imposed restrictions. The problem in the Western civilization is that we have decided we will only assume those obligations if we want to. We have decided we will submit to those restrictions only when we want to. And increasingly we have decided that we don’t want to.
carl
Carl speaks of “imposed restrictions,” a crucial phrase. What we have seen in America since the sixties, what we have complained about vis a vis the Baby Boomers, what we have objected to with TEC’s headlong course, is the abandonment of imposed restrictions, which, once rejected, have nothing to replace their power to define boundaries and identities. In recourse, we have fallen back on a “default” position, the solipsism we have spoken of here so often. The result is moral isolation; and such isolation inevitably leads to the decay of language – not merely moral language – because language relies on widespread consensus for meaning to exist.
We have watched TEC use language on the humpty dumpty principle but it is not simply TEC. This is a culture wide phenomenon, and we may look at advertising to see how profitable such a degradation may be. The argument of the author above is therefore equally applicable to polyamory or another cultural practice rooted in the irreducible principle: “I want to,” the very heart of all solipsism.
The Supreme Court in the matter of sodomy has set in motion a logic that I doubt can be repealed or reconfigured to stop its progressive damage. Larry
The good news about evil is that it eventually collapses under its own weight. And – it will be judged by the supreme and most just of Judges, and fully dealt with.
The bad news about evil is that, even though it is incapable of being self-sustaining, its collapse takes many down with it, to their sorrow and pain.
Great article, thanks for the link. Another good attempt to articulate the fundamental rationality and goodness of seeing sexual activity as formed by objectively existing social institutions, rather than those institutions being formed by our desires and voluntary (and mutually consenting) choices. We’re going to need a lot more like this in the current context.
“what we have complained about vis a vis the Baby Boomers … is the abandonment of imposed restrictions”
I was born in the 50s and formed in the 60s. Some of my earliest memories are of television images surrounding the civil rights movement. I can’t help it that some of my first thoughts when anyone talks about the goodness of imposed restrictions are of segregated drinking fountains and illegal mixed marriages. My point is not that every debate rises to the nobility of the civil rights movement, my point is that you can’t have an evil like the whole long life of slavery and segregation without the basics of society being undermined, and that doesn’t go away the moment you address the original evil. I believe in transcendent authority, I lament the breakdown of shared values, but I have to admit my gut still goes in the direction of asking “can you give me one good reason?” when people invoke the value of imposed restrictions.
I did not mean that all imposed restrictions are good – the slavery issue being a case in point. I DO mean that restrictions governing behavior, sanctioned by society, are essential for meaning to exist since these sanctions are connected to the integrity of language. Meaning in language is an imposed restriction, largely arbitrary, but not the result of a a pope. The other side of your argument is this: the rules governing tennis are imposed restrictions. If you take them away, the game eases to exist – even though many more are able to “play.”
What is crucial here is the voluntary acceptance of such restrictions, and to this degree “imposed” may be misleading. The slaves presumably did not buy into these restrictions while the slaveowners did, but they bought into them for profit, not for the common good, and it is for this “common good” that language accepts its restrictions. Language is the true commonwealth.
I reread this and realize that I have failed (again) to make these distinctions clear. Yet I still think this essay is as sound as one can find in the corruption of language. Larry