|
from Books & Reviews
Book Excerpt
"On the Fundamental Issues of
Social Life, One Side Always Wins"
The Pluralist Game: Pluralism, Liberalism
and the Moral Conscience
by Francis Canavan
(Rowman and Littlefield, 1995)
This tightly-written, scholarly but readable book provides a context for
understanding the cultural struggle that is currently being played out in our
schools and courts. Must a democratic society teach children that homosexuality
is equal to heterosexuality? That lesbian mothers are as good for society as a
traditional family? Is social affirmation of homosexuality a legitimate
civil-rights demand?
Francis Canavan, a Jesuit scholar and professor of political science,
attempts to sort out the ways society can function under the conflicting demands
of pluralism.
He makes several key points. When individual liberty is the only acknowledged
ordering principle, community disintegrates, and government becomes nothing more
than the arbiter of an unending series of competing claims for "rights." He
believes it is essential that we acknowedge a public philosophy.
Subjectivism and liberalism are not "neutral" philosophies. Philosophically, one
side always wins.
He notes that the moral and intellectual consensus on which our society has
lived is rapidly disintegrating. "There is a widely diffused feeling that we are
ceasing to agree even in basic aspects on what man should be and how he should
live...For multitudes today, truth is only what the individual thinks is true,
good is only what the individual personally prefers, and justice is his right to
act on his preferences." Liberalism, the guiding principle of our society, has
"blossomed into mere permissiveness."
At the core of this insistence on unlimited liberty is the belief that there
is no objective good, and that all lifestyles and convictions are merely
subjective tastes and preferences, all of which are equally entitled to
protection under the law. In fact subjectivism is, he says, the essence of
liberalism.
Freedom: The Only Universal Good?
Subjectivism and individualism have had a corrosive effect on our culture.
"To put it briefly, liberalism has made freedom the essential and
defining characteristic of man...Truth itself--whether religious
philosophical, or moral--must be subordinated to the requirements of the
individual's liberty...The one conviction on which free men can agree is that
orthodoxy is dangerous."
"Yet liberty and equality cannot be the highest values of a political system
because they relativize and ultimately destroy all other values. When we make
them our supremne norms, we have no set of objectively valid human ends that can
provide answers to the questions, 'Liberty for what?' And 'Equality in what?' We
therefore cannot have the communal beliefs without which, in the long run, there
is no community. In short, American society now lacks what Walter Lippman once
called the public philosophy...We are left with an unending battle between
conflicting claims to liberty and equality, and no publicly acknowledged
principle which to resolve the conflict."
The problem is, he says, that subjectivism and individualism are not
"neutral" philosophies. "The pluralist game will continue to be played, of
course, because there is no other game in town. But there is no need for it to
keep on being a confidence game in which one side proclaims its cause as
neutrality, and the other side is gullible enough to believe it. Societies
do face moral issues to which they must give moral answers...We shall
play the pluralist game more honestly, perhaps even with better results, if we
admit openly what the game is, and what stakes we are playing for."
Even in a pluralist society, he says, there is a public morality. "Divided
though it be, the community is a community by virtue of what its members have in
common. Among the things they hold in common are certain moral values and
principles." The values of the majority of the community determine the norms
that society will favor or even impose--either by pressure of opinion or by
force of law.
For example, civil-rights laws which single out homosexuals are not simply
"neutral" applications of liberty and equality. "To the extent that they are a
demand for public acceptance of homosexuality as a separate but equal way of
life, [they] pose an issue to which there is no neutral answer. This is a
demand that the public commmit itself to a particular view of the nature and
function of sex in human life. Faced with this demand, the public and its
government cannot commit itself to a specious neutrality by leaving the matter
to individual consciences...government is under constant pressure--to which it
frequently yields--to use its power to promote or enforce new norms in the guise
of leaving normative decisions to individuals. The net result is not no
norms, but different norms and reshaping of the institutions of
society."
Because our democratic society assumes it can uphold no rational standard for
a heirarchy of values, "we stipulate that all goals are equal...Justice thus
loses all substantive content and becomes pure form...The pluralistic society,
therefore, stands upon no moral principles, but is unified only by the
procedural principle of an official neutrality."
"The attack on social moral standards is most obvious at the present time in
the demand for 'gay rights' laws. The demand succeeds as often as it does
because in this country's current egalitarian mood, it is hard to mobilize
public sentiment against laws that only seem to forbid discrimination.
But the thrust of these anti-discrimination laws is toward a deep change in
social morality...
"Some like chocolate, some like vanilla. Some like Mozart, others prefer
heavy metal. Some like girls, some like boys. ..It is all the same because man
is a bundle of desires, and each man strives to satisfy the desires that he has.
Society's only task is [supposedly] to preside over the striving with impartial
neutrality so that we can all live together in peace."
In summary, Fr. Canavan says, "A pluralist society must perforce strive to be
neutral about many things that concern its divided citizens, but it cannot be
neutral about all of them. If it tries or pretends to be neutral about certain
issues, the pluralist game becomes a shell game by which people are tricked into
consenting to changes in basic social standards and institutions, on the
pretense that nothing more is asked of them than respect for the rights of
individuals. Much more, however, is involved: on the fundamental issues of
social life, one side always wins."
Updated: 3 September 2008
|
