Hieronymus
16d ago
I’ve been thinking about the best way to answer. To be specific and even gesture at the scope of the issue would take an effortpost that I don’t have in me right now. But I can give a few examples:
- Ban abortion and assisted suicide.
- Reverse government recognition of gay marriage. The reason this one comes so early is that gay marriage makes a bunch of the other changes to family policy harder.
- Require a demonstration of (considerable) fault to obtain a divorce.
- Take fault into account when deciding what responsibilities the spouses have to one another in the distribution of property, etc.
- Acknowledge that people will abuse this if they can get away with it, and so treat perjury in divorce proceedings seriously.
I have ideas at various stages of development about how the state can make male-breadwinner, female-homemaker families a realistic option for more of those who want them; better respect parents’ rights and duties in raising their children; defend those who speak the truth on culture issues; protect the right of self-defense; and acknowledge the independence of churches. I am sure this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what comes to the tips of my fingers for now.
Hieronymus
18d ago
I don't know. Absent a revival, which is an act of God, I think by far the most likely outcome continues to be decadence as a state-enforced right.
Government policies that respect the natural law and seek to make obedience to it easier push back against this, and they have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom. They also facilitate human flourishing, which is no small thing. The state can't solve the problem, but it can do better than it has done. I am not optimistic about achieving this as a political matter, but I've been surprised before.
I’d like to break the “retvrn question” down along two axes. One is the criteria of evaluation: truth, helpfulness, and social attainability. The other is the spectrum of ideologies under discussion: groups who agree on critiques of liberal modernity have very different ideas of the right path forward.
Truth
The criterion of truth is the most important, and it’s the only one to apply to questions of metaphysics and religious doctrine. You, I, and society should seek to believe true things. Is willingness to buck the social consensus here liberal? Not necessarily. First-century Jewish Christians stood against the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Sanhedrin; first-century gentile Christians contrasted even more starkly with the pagan social order.
This does contradict some critics of liberalism: neoreactionaries and some rightward-inclined rationalists want to talk about religion in utilitarian terms. But they are wrong to do so. We have a duty to the truth; even if we didn’t, the cost of ignoring it is beating one’s head fruitlessly against the brick wall of reality.
Helpfulness
Helpfulness is, if not more controversial, then definitely less objective. There are always tradeoffs to be made. And the variety of liberalism’s critics becomes obvious here. You may be thinking about neoreactionaries or integralists. But I, as someone who loves American classical liberalism, share concerns with these other critics.
One is that increased social and religious diversity has exposed cracks in liberal principles that were safely papered over in a more coherent society. Much discourse and litigation over religious liberty since the middle of the twentieth century is a fight between three groups of people: people who want to pass laws and to expect those laws to be followed, people who expect freedom of religion to keep the government from making their religious duties illegal, and people who expect freedom from religion to exclude religious considerations from the regulated sphere of life.
Another is that the synthesis of progressivism and liberalism seeks state intervention to free individuals from the influences of their families, churches, and other societies of private life. No-fault divorce is now ubiquitous. Governments forbid male-only fraternal organizations. Some state universities de facto ban religious student groups by requiring them to admit as members or officers those who don’t share their convictions. After a while one begins to think that liberalism as it exists will not leave well enough alone; and if the state is to intervene, I want it intervening to support my idea of the good and not to ban it.
I think there are more people in this camp than there are neoreactionaries and integralists. We thought parts of liberalism were pretty swell, but they haven’t worked out as promised. Was that contingent on the winds of politics? Or could liberalism only support a healthy society so long as there was enough of Christendom left as a foundation? It’s difficult to say.
Social Attainability
I really don’t know what is attainable, particularly in the long run. I don’t think we Americans in 2006 could predict where the country would be in 2015, less than a decade later. Heck, I don’t think that in January 2016 we could predict where we would be in November 2016. Much is in flux.
You are right that we won’t see a return to medieval Christendom. But that’s not the only alternative to liberalism. And I worry that we’ve lost healthy classical liberalism anyway, that that option is no longer attainable.
(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)
I am emphatically not a mod. But, as a nontweeter myself, I’d like to suggest providing both Twitter and Nitter links for tweets. Using just a Nitter link is iffy because Nitter can struggle whenever Twitter changes something.
There is an option in the Motte account settings to rewrite twitter dot com links to nitter dot net links, but it was inherited as part of the codebase and not updated for x dot com. Every once in a while I think I should put in a feature request to update it, then I think I should submit a patch like a decent person, then I realize I don’t have an environment to test the patch in and I let the matter drop.
So, @ZorbaTHut, please consider this a low-priority feature request: It would be nice to have a Twitter domain option that works like the Reddit domain option, rewriting Twitter/X/Nitter/XCancel links into the user’s choice of X, Nitter, or XCancel links. If that’s too fiddly, tweaking the existing Nitter option to rewrite the new Twitter domain as well as the old one would give 90% of the benefit for 10% of the effort.
(Edit: Wow, autolinking domains did a number on the formatting of this post. Please excuse my weird typographic choices to make it more readable.)
Natural law is the moral order inherent in the order of creation, particularly human nature, as distinct from social custom or positive law such as statutes. In the ancient world it could be discussed by Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists, but in 21st-century America it is mostly a Christian idea.
This is an open question, and a vital one. I have some thoughts but not a satisfactory answer. Realistically, many of these policies couldn’t happen unless there were social change underway already, and I am not optimistic about that change happening absent a black swan event like another Great Awakening. I don’t want to pretend that wise social policy can fix things by itself.
True. I’d argue that the 1950s were kind of unstable to begin with, that the social legacies of the 1920s and of the New Deal had yet to be worked out.
Experience now gives the lie to some naïve past arguments for liberalization in a way that would make them harder to repeat. In the push for no-fault divorce, people argued (seriously!) that it wouldn’t increase divorce rates. Afterward, social psychologists said that divorce would be good for children. Those are arguments you can’t make with a straight face in 2025. If you wanted to restore no-fault divorce after a change in the status quo, you’d have to argue that no-fault divorce is worth the costs, not that there are no costs.
I can’t be sure.
Western societies were Christian before they were liberal, and liberalism benefited from the customs and ideas laid down under centuries of Christendom. One of the outstanding questions on the modern Christian right is whether classical liberalism necessarily erodes that foundation: Did it have to be that way, or was that just how it worked out? I don’t know.
I think that laws that make it easier to have healthy families and churches and so on will lead to more of them, and that having more of them will feed back into policy. That’s the virtuous cycle I mentioned. I can’t promise that it won’t be outweighed by other factors, but I still think it represents movement in the right direction. It’s just not a silver bullet.
More options
Context Copy link