Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Beware The Vaseline!
October 26, 2003
Sometimes you can’t know you’re on a slippery slope until you’ve started barreling down it.
At Bill Quick’s fine Daily Pundit Weblog, we find the following:
Islam recognizes no superiors, certainly no temporal governments or nations as superior. There is only the Nation of Islam, and all else must submit to it.
Once you understand this, you understand the basic fallacy of this article: No “Canadians” joined terror camps. Muslims who happened to be living in Canada (or the US, or Britain, or Indonesia, etc., etc.) did so.Further, I would bet that even the large majority of Muslims who aren’t interested in the overthrow of the west would agree that their first allegiance must be to Islam, not to the nation they happen to be living in. They regard themselves as Muslim-Americans, not American Muslims.
Of course, one could say the same about the adherents of other religions. Christianity, for instance, springs to mind.
While at Nathan Alexander’s excellent Brain Fertilizer Weblog, we have this:
You don’t defy a court order, no matter how much you might disagree with it.
And at Kevin Baker’s The Smallest Minority, which your Curmudgeon has just upgraded to “indispensable,” we have this:
But it shouldn’t be the job of government to protect us from ourselves.
Because it can’t. All it can do is oppress us. And in its effort to protect us, it doesn’t just oppress the people who abuse drugs, it oppresses us all. The “cure” is worse than the disease - except there is no cure - just a new (and in many ways worse) problem on top of the one it’s supposed to cure.
It is in the nature of Man that he operates from fixed premises and principles. There’s no escape from this; relativism and what many mislabel “pragmatism” are inherently impossible to the human mind. This is as close to self-demonstrating as any proposition about humanity can be, and has been confirmed by endless reams of evidence over six thousand years of recorded history.
So, when a relativistic premise is introduced into our legal or moral code, it messes us up badly. It spreads Vaseline on the slopes of Man’s most basic weakness: the desire to see things as we would like them to be, rather than as they really are.
Note: There’s a difference between moral relativism and the application of context. “Thou shalt not kill,” shorn of the qualifications of context, would be an impossible principle to live by, so long as even one other person refused to accept it. Though this should be obvious to a healthy mind, it’s always proper to acknowledge it.
Bill Quick’s observation about the relation between private conscience and the State is both true and important. A Christian would be expected to defy the State if the State were to command him to violate his own moral code. It would be vitally necessary that he do so. To surrender would be tantamount to accepting enslavement.
Does that mean that Islam’s attempt to impose itself by force on the whole world is just as defensible as the Christian’s insistence on maintaining his own beliefs and the standards that emerge from them? Of course not. One’s conscience is inherently a private thing, that can only rightfully govern one’s own behavior. Practical demonstrations of the importance of this are numberless.
Nathan Alexander’s endorsement of the supremacy of a court order misses this point. Why not defy a court order? Because it’ll get you thrown in jail? Are there no good reasons, even moral obligations, to accept such an outcome? Would the American Revolution have been invalidated if Britain’s oppressions of the colonists had been ratified by court orders? Were the horrors of the Third Reich made acceptable or, God help us, mandatory, by their ratification by German judges? What about the Soviets’ impositions of personality-obliterating “psychiatric care” upon political dissidents—all of which were backed by court orders?
Kevin Baker strikes near to the heart of the matter when he writes:
All it [government] can do is oppress us.
There is a fundamental moral constraint, laid upon us by human nature, not to act against others with force except in defense of our own rights. We may collectivize the right of self-defense to deal with collective threats, such as invasion by a foreign power, but that is all. Asserting a collective privilege of coercing others into accepting some majoritarian standard for private consensual behavior is inherently oppressive, inherently wrong. A good man, be he Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Shintoist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or Amiable Agnostic, must have no truck with it.
To pierce that constraint even in the least of ways sends one down that Vaseline-covered slope. There’s only one place such a descent can end.
All political debate concerns what is and what is not a collective threat. There are no margins. Either some phenomenon threatens us all, in a way that requires a collective response for our very survival, or it’s a private matter that private persons should deal with in voluntary ways—the ways of freedom.
Because political decisionmaking is inherently collectivized, whether through town meeting-style direct democracy or through the election of representatives, we will frequently go wrong. That, too, is inherent in human nature; making mistakes is how we learn. What’s vital—what’s morally imperative—is that we retain both our humility and the primacy of our individual consciences.
Without humility, one cannot admit to a mistake, much less make amends for it. Without the supremacy of individual conscience, one has no incentive to do so.
Let just one political mistake go unadmitted, and disaster accumulates in its train, in the fashion of an avalanche. Shall we attempt to protect drug addicts from their own appetites? We create a huge black market that pours a river of cash into the pockets of the worst men in the world. Rather than admit our mistake, shall we pursue those men in defiance of the strictures of the Constitution? We produce an immense government bureaucracy whose deeds range from routine invasions of individual privacy to the fomenting of wars with other nations. Rather than confront the disaster our seed mistake has sprouted, shall we accelerate our efforts, passing “asset forfeiture” laws, restricting the free movement of cash, and throwing our military into the War on Drugs and committing unbounded resources to its prosecution? Some of the worst men in the world, instead of becoming drug kingpins, will seek employment in the Office of National Drug Control Policy—and given time, they’ll rise to the top of it.
All the above stems from one relativistic premise introduced into the legal code: Yes, yes, individual rights and responsibility and all that, but fighting drug use is more important.
A good Christian would know better, which suggests that there aren’t as many good Christians as there ought to be.
A legally sound, Constitutionally constrained court would know better, but our courts are worse than our mainstream churches.
A decent American would know better, but our schools have been destroying the knowledge base required to produce decent Americans for many years now.
A man is his moral code, and little else. Each of us, Christian, jurist, or undifferentiated citizen, must choose where he’ll make his stand: where he’ll plant his personal banner and say, “No more! You have gone too far and I must stand against you, regardless of the consequences.” A man who recognizes no clear line in the sand at which this becomes his personal moral obligation is not a man at all.
I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere Of Government]
Where will your line be? Above the Vaseline, or below it?
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