John McCain is Pro-Choice.

Pro-school choice, that is.  My brother Alan, an education activist who publishes a provocative, nitty-gritty newsletter and blog out of Denver, just wrote an excellent (centrist!  yay!) post on the subject. 

You'd think the Republicans would find a less loaded synonym for the C-word in non-abortion contexts, such as:

We believe in a government that unleashes the creativity and initiative of Americans. Government that doesn't make your choices for you, but works to make sure you have more choices to make for yourself.

I winced when I heard that last night at the obliviousness to the irony of using that word so approvingly.  Of course, it's not the right but the left that has loaded the word "choice" with euphemistic portent.  My conservative brain-washer (in the good sense), Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, said many times in my hearing that (paraphrasing) the left has made "choice" a god, in ways that go far beyond abortion.  That is, choice in matters of morality and conduct, putting the self at the center of the universe and making one's own whim its law, limited only by a narrow conception of "as long as it doesn't hurt anybody."  Talk about ironies, how about this twisted relationship of a neopagan precept to a Christian one:

• Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. ~ Aleister Crowley
  • This famous statement derives from several historic precedents, including that of François Rabelais in describing the rule of his Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua and Pantagruel: Fait ce que vouldras (Do what thou wilt), which was later used by the Hellfire Club established by Sir Francis Dashwood. It is also similar to the pagan proverb: An ye harm none, do what thou wilt; but the oldest known statement of a similar idea is by St. Augustine of Hippo: Love, and do what thou wilt.  (Wikiquote)

Below is something I wrote a few years ago in relation to "cosmopolitans" -- like Barack Obama and me -- and "choice" and morality.  The word "cosmopolitan" (antonym:  "nativist") is making a comeback, as in this IM dialogue between Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein (link also sent to me by Randy).  I thought "cosmopolitan" was a pretty good word for what I am (because I really liked Kwame Anthony Appiah's very centrist book about it) until I discovered, just a day or two ago, that at the far end it has some awful associations -- people who place no allegiance above any other, nutjobs like Peter Singer who believe it's morally wrong to defend your own family, country, or species, and do-gooders like Jeffrey Sachs who believe the world's problems will be solved by the rich showering money on the poor.  Here we go again, from one extreme to the other!  And here I go, doggedly trying to drag it back to the center:
_____________________________

Are spiritual nomads moral relativists who answer to no god but the self, as traditionalists claim?

It depends.

On the one hand, here’s philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (who’s half Ghanaian and half British) in his book Cosmopolitanism:  Ethics in a World of Strangers:

Cosmopolitans believe in universal truth, too, though we are less certain that we already have all of it.  It is not skepticism about the very idea of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find.  One tenet we hold to, however, is that every human being has obligations to every other.  Everybody matters: that is our central idea. And again, it sharply limits the scope of our tolerance.

On the other hand, here’s Ford Vox, founder of  “Universism,” an attempt to codify the “outsider” worldview into a “religion without faith” (I believe Vox eventually saw that attempt as a contradiction in terms, and gave it up):

This is the long-awaited dawn of postmodern religion - religion in the first person. We're about living creatively, free from universal truths. . . .

 Universists know that our own unique perceptions are the only truths, apply to    ourselves alone, and will change as we change.

Our actions, our personal ethics, are derived from our own unique metaphysics.  They are the manifestation of our personal religion.

Universism distrusts universal moral principles, anything that prescribes the way humans 'should' behave.

          According to Universism, there is no transcendent right or wrong . . . 

           Morality is culturally and individually subjective . . .

          What is right for me? What is wrong for me?

We cannot truly celebrate the individual if we do not respect each person’s moral self-determination.

Universism declares absolute and total moral liberation for the individual.          

Morality is an idea like "good and evil" that does not express anything about the inherent nature of the universe.

My reaction to that is, “Yikes!”

Notice the difference in tone between Appiah and Vox.  One is uncertainty as humility in the face of the tough task of figuring out what’s best.  The other is uncertainty as carte blanche to “create your own reality” and decide what’s best -- for you.

I want us to go Appiah’s way. 

When it comes to metaphysics, we really don’t know.  When it comes to morals, we do.  Buddhism doesn’t posit a God, yet it’s in agreement with Judeo-Christian tradition that you shouldn’t kill, lie, steal, or screw around, and in agreement with Islam that you shouldn’t get drunk or stoned. 

There’s a purported Native American story circulating on the Web (as yet unauthenticated) about the “two wolves fighting within” –“the one that wins is the one you feed” -- that corresponds exactly to the Jewish idea of the yetzer ha-ra and the yetzer ha-tov, the inner inclinations to natural selfishness and spiritual kindness.  This suggests that good and evil do express something about the “inherent nature of the universe,” or at least about the inherent nature of human beings.

Throughout the human heritage -- our “grand reference library for the study of reality” – we find the insight that morality, in its essentials, is objective.  It’s not a matter of “should,” it’s a matter of “is.”  Experience has proven, over and over again, the truth of consequences:  “If you do x, you get y.”  And these reproducible experimental results, which have great predictive power, are summed up in the set of axioms called “wisdom.”  Wisdom is the science of the spirit.

For example, just as one of the basic laws of Newtonian physics is “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” one of the basic laws of moral physics is “What goes around comes around.”  In the East, that’s called the Law of Karma; in the West it’s “Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”  Or Martin Luther King:  "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  Don’t kid yourself:  the universe is not a blank slate for your will to write on.  You’re perfectly free to try to bend its laws, but it’s you who will break.  You could try living “free from universal truths” like the law of gravity, too.  Only in dreams and in fantasies like “The Matrix” can we fly unaided.

Embedded in the time-dated customs and myths of every tradition is a core of timeless truth about what works and what doesn’t.  Spiritual nomads go for that core.  They don’t restrict themselves to one tradition any more than scientists would only study science done in one country.  The point is to bring together the truest and most lifesaving information about reality.  So spiritual nomads deliberately take their moral compass from all points of the compass.  It’s both a matter of principle – defying the death-grip of Tribe – and a matter of best practice:  why not learn from the greats in every field?

Each human tradition has its own genius, a theme it has explored to depths no other culture can touch.  Native American culture, for instance, had a spiritual rapport with the natural world that we who live in central-heated homes and hunt by laptop will never remotely come close to, yet can honor as an ideal.  And everyone on earth, not only Christians, has been touched and changed by Jesus’ gospel of love.

Traditionalists will protest, But couldn’t you find all these same ideas within one tradition that’s all of a piece – the one you were born into, or the one that calls to you?  Probably -- if you stretch and reinterpret that tradition, as people have always done to keep their religions from dying of irrelevance.  For example, reverence for nature hasn’t historically been a big part of Christianity -- to put it mildly.  As part of a fallen world that constantly threatens to seduce us away from God, nature was to be hated, not loved.  But now there’s a growing evangelical Christian environmental movement, and theologians are finding Biblical support for the alternate view:  nature is God’s beloved creation, and we are charged with her care.

But reinterpreting one tradition to keep it relevant isn’t the work “outsiders” feel they’re here to do.  Their job is not to keep the forms of the past intact, but to be true to the emerging contours of the present and future.  Assembling a code from parts of many traditions only makes sense when you realize that nomads are seeing a different whole.  Traditionalists see the beautiful arc of their canon, like a bridge across time, being broken up and cobbled together with alien fragments into a mishmash, a chimera.  Nomads see the invisible but equally beautiful shape of now coming into the light as the right pieces are found, one by one, and fitted into place.  No single tradition matches that shape, because they were all cast in the mold of other times.

The nomads’ code does not spell out in great detail what to do and what not to do.  It’s a moral compass composed of principles, not rules.  It shows you why and why not, and how things work, and leaves the application up to you.  (If living things are “all my relatives,” for example, that doesn’t tell me what to eat, but it does have powerful implications for how I should treat what I eat.)  With a lifetime of practice, we gain skill in applying these simple but challenging principles quickly to a wide range of unpredictable encounters and dilemmas.  They are spiritual exercises in themselves.
_____________________________________

I think the one-line coda to this post should be, "Don't get me started."

Comments

[Peter Hoh]

Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, said many times in my hearing that (paraphrasing) the left has made "choice" a god, in ways that go far beyond abortion. That is, choice in matters of morality and conduct, putting the self at the center of the universe and making one's own whim its law, limited only by a narrow conception of "as long as it doesn't hurt anybody."

Apply this to economics, and I think it describes the rhetoric that conservatives use to describe capitalism.

Of course, one needs to remember that conservatives* often use that rhetoric to enable crony capitalism, which bears only a superficial relationship to capitalism.

*Yes, many liberal politicians support, enable, and benefit from crony capitalism just as much. They don't use Adam Smith as rhetorical cover, however.

[amba]

Great point, and one which I have made before too (this was during the Terri Schiavo case):

a strange thought. Liberals favor a Darwinian bioethics; conservatives favor a Darwinian economics. Each vocally decries the other's Darwinism and insists on the moral imperative to protect the weak -- as defined economically by liberals and biologically by conservatives.

Also wrote in comments the other night about the politics of personal destruction:

It's politics based on Vince Lombardi's "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

Saddest is the savage joy people take in it. What amuses me is how Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest it is, from people who pride themselves on their Christianity and despise Darwin!

[Tom Strong]

Excellent post. But come on: Peter Singer isn't a "nutjob." He's got some opinions that make most of us uneasy, but nearly everything he argues is well-reasoned, and he's quite open to argument and debate. He's not exactly lobbying congress to make infant exposure legal, nor is he encouraging others to do so. Even his longtime foils, such as Harriet McBryde Johnson, acknowledge this.

And neither he nor Jeffrey Sachs are "awful." Sachs is an economics genius who happens to be overly naive about the power of do-goodery; unlike Singer, he's dangerous in that he's actually trying to make things happen, but he's not all that effective. If they're the worst people in your tribe, you've got it good.

[Christopher]

It's not that reverence for nature hasn't been a part of Christianity, it's that it's been a minority report--to borrow a phrase often used when thinking about Jewish rabbinic wrangling about the Torah.

Anyone familiar with the various Christian calendars of saints, both east and west, will be shocked to discover many a desert elder or hermit preaching to animals, becoming friends with nature, even being saved by animals and learning something of God from fellow creatures. My favs include St. Anthony, St. Seraphim, St. David of Wales, and St. Benedict. It's not just St. Francis of Assisi. To reinterpret, to "pass on" is the heart of being within a living tradition. And sometimes that requires going deeper into the heart of something. Even being a nomad or in the wilderness, at least in Judaism and Christianity, is a part of the tradition necessary from time to time to break down idols. To enter the wilderness, to wander is "traditional". And necessary when the facile is preferred over entering the deep.

As I noted this morning about hunting, I was taught that if you kill, you eat. And I would add as a Christian, if you kill, you remember and give thanks. The "how" we treat animals we raise to eat is an important question, and one our "Christian" society in its concern for consumption largely fails to ask. The challenge of Jewish tradition on this score has been helpful in my thinking.

One of the things about Christian teaching is that we do something not simply because we get what we give, but we do something because at heart we are not ours to begin with, so our lives are lived out of response to this overall Generosity. After all, doing good by neighbor, loving one's enemy may get you killed.

As to choice, choice is really too often a middle-class focus. Frankly, poor folks in inner-city Oakland don't have a lot of options with regard to where to send their children. And the wealthy portions of Oakland broke away because they didn't want their tax dollars going to the poorer portions. I want to ask those who have more choices, how do we choose to treat our neighbors who have fewer options? But then being "all about me" is not simply a liberal matter; it's the zeitgeist of this country at this time.

[Tom Strong]

The traditionalists are very right about one thing: when in doubt, go back. Find a precedent. But you don't have to go back where they tell you to. There's ample precedent for Appiah's cosmopolitanism, for instance, in the Stoicism of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, or the skepticism of Socrates, the Buddhists, and Montaigne.

[Tom Strong]

Sorry, I just can't stop:

The argument that most "traditionalists" make is, in essence, a Darwinian argument. Because their particular tradition has outlasted most or all others in its field, it must ipso facto be the Truth!

But as Christopher points out - sub-traditions long seen as antiquated or obsolete can see a revival, if cared for properly.

[amba]

Peter Singer is awful. And a hypocrite to boot. He advocates giving away everything inessential that you've got (or selling it and sending the money to unfortunates in Africa or elsewhere), but as far as I know he has not done so.

I've helped a wealthy friend write a foundation mission statement. So I've read a great deal about the naïveté and wastefulness of just throwing money at other people's problems, which is often more about making the donors feel better than about effectively helping to make lives better. It also feeds local corruption and ends up enriching kleptocrats.

[Tom Strong]

As I recall, Jesus himself suggested the same thing, yet most Christians do not do it, and there are over a billion of them. Singer at least claims to give over 10% of his income to charity, as many Christians do. So he's hardly alone in either hypocrisy or generosity.

The thing about Singer is: so many people call him a monster, and so few bother to actually consider or argue with his ideas (Michael Pollan is a welcome exception in this regard) I would consider this approach extremely immoderate and all too typical of destructive politics. Frankly, I'm surprised you're so vehement in your dislike of him. Singer is known to be, at the very least, extraordinarily polite and reasonable in debate.

As for Sachs, sure. But it's not like he's unaware of such concerns; he's addressed them many times. His take is that a massive infusion of capital would ultimately improve government in Africa, even if much of it lined the pockets of already-wealthy dictators. As I said, this might make him naive; it doesn't make him awful.

(As a side note, I spent considerable effort the past few days defending Sarah Palin from attacks made by people I love considerably. So I consider this to be equal time, so to speak).

[Christopher]

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The story to which Tom refers is Jesus and the Rich Young Man. Jesus is addressing a particular person and the radicality of the Gospel to that person's situation. The text can be read in an universalizing way, that all should sell everything...the Roman Catholic Church for one rejected this reading in radical versions of Franciscanism.

But this illustrates what happens when we take one incident with Jesus and try to universalize without getting to the heart of the text (the principle), and frankly, if read in that way would be irresponsible for most to do so.

I am reminded of a 19th century Russian staretz, or hermit/wilderness elder, who was approached by a man who had left his wife and children to follow the way of the staretz. The elder told the man to return to his wife and children, because for this man, attending to them was his proper path and a response to God in Christ.

The "all must sell everything" reading is what I call a liberal "flatminded literalist" reading that is everybit as simplistic as fundamentalist readings of other biblical texts. I've heard the same done by liberals to brutalize Jesus's saying that seem to dismiss family to suggest that marriage and family don't matter to God.

The whole point of texts such as these to which Tom refers is that our entirety of life should be given to God, what the elders call detachment, not that Christians should always and everywhere sell everything...

[RW Rogers]

Christopher, when did the wealthy portion of Oakland break away from the poor one? I have friends who teach there, and others who live there, and I haven't heard any mention of it.

[Tom Strong]

(Sigh).

Can't a fellow make a simple, reductionist point on this blog without drawing eloquent, erudite responses out of the ether?

Glad to know the storm has been downgraded.

[RW Rogers]

As a side note, I spent considerable effort the past few days defending Sarah Palin from attacks made by people I love considerably. So I consider this to be equal time, so to speak

LOL! "You deserve a break today, so get up and get away to..." wherever and whatever you damn well please.

[realpc]

It is harder being a spiritual nomad, or outsider, but I think you have made a good case for it. For me, the essence of being an outsider is anti-authoritarianism. In other words, I don't usually feel like believing things just because some human being said it's true. That's why I can't belong to any one tradition.

Maybe it's a little harder to find guidance without a strict tradition to follow. Sometimes I try to find the rules of conduct in nature, and I think our human moralities are variations of the inborn moral codes found in all social species. In order to live happily in a group, you must be considerate of others, and it's more or less that simple. For any group to survive, most of its members have to understand this. Social groups are naturally trusting, and therefore can be sometimes taken advantage of by the immoral minority.

I don't think there is any necessary connection between religion and morality, any more than politics and religion are necessarily connected. Most of morality is just common sense -- don't have sex with your friend's wife or he will stop being your friend, and all your other friends will stop trusting you.

But there are also moral dilemmas and subtleties that we all face, and no tradition can help us with these. Very often we have to weigh priorities. Is it moral for a woman to work and put her children in daycare? There is nothing in any bible to guide us with these dilemmas.

So being an outsider is not so much of a disadvantage -- ordinary morality is mostly simple common sense, and moral dilemmas are beyond the scope of traditional moral codes.

[amba]

Christopher, your comments are so refreshing they're almost thirst-quenching.

It's that they break out of both ruts, which my brain is so very tired of, yet which keep being relentlessly ground deeper. It's so good to get "off the beaten path." Beaten to death.

[amba]

I realize I ought to add the paradox that I'm a patriotic cosmopolitan. One of the things I love most about this country is that the whole world is here, with a set of values that (if we observe them) enable us to live together, and an amazing cultural gumbo that has gained from every contribution.

[Rod]

Amba: A person who denies that there are any moral absolutes is a RELATIVIST. One who acknowledges moral absolutes, but recognizes categorical imperatives can clash and different answers can sometimes be reached while applying the same moral criteria, I would call a REALIST. All the reverence for life in Christian and Jewish traditions has not led to condemnation of those who draw lots on a sinking lifeboat - or of those who choose not to.

Christopher and Tom: My reading of The story of Jesus and the rich young man is that the first moral principal of Christianity is absolute allegiance to the will of God. Jesus was neither a Democrat nor a Republican - he was a monarchist. The problem for the rich young man was that he would not subordinate everything to God. It is not all of our wealth that is demanded of each of us, but a disposition to give up all of whatever we cherish if called upon to do so.