Back in the 1990s, a lot of my attention,
particularly when I wrote about gays in the military and gay rights, concerned
the relationship between “fundamental rights” and the Constitution.
Today, George Will has a major column on p. A15 of
the Washington Post, “Democracy v. Liberty, or online “Progressives are wrong
about the essence of the constitution, link here. He starts about by taking issue with Stephen Breyer in his 2006 statement that
the Constitution is basically about “democracy”.
Will points out a basic dichotomy between
conservatives (of the libertarian kind) and progressives. He says that progressives view democracy as
a source of liberty, whereas libertarians, at least, believe that liberty
pre-exists the state and therefore democracy.
Progressives believe that democracy protects the
individual from “the strong”. Libertarians
believe that liberty should protect the individual from the majority, which is
strong in numbers, and perhaps solidarity.
How to those who are “different” fit into this? Liberals want to put “the divergent” into
immutable groups and guarantee their rights as derivative of some sort of
relative organizational strength, which again favors those in power. Conservatives, at least social ones, see the “divergent”
as mooches who can undermine the moral discipline of others and the ability of
everyone to take turns sharing sacrifices.
It’s on the last point that the far left and far right come
together. Remember the ideology of the
Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960’s? Libertarians want individual rights
to be absolute (which is usually a good thing for gay people for example) but
sometimes don’t see the sacrifice and discipline that makes today’s liberty
possible. Some of that “sacrifice” can
be emotional – the willingness to enter into and stay in relations that take
into account the needs of others and not just one’s own expressive aims. I
think the way free speech arguments work gets interesting – it seems to be an
absolute right, but the distribution of speech sometimes puts others
(especially parents) who have taken on more responsibility in some peril.
As I’ve written in my “Do Ask, Do Tell III” book, I
think that there is another way to put this dichotomy: individualism (that is, more or less absolute
liberty, the Barry Goldwater kind that can “shoot straight”) begets innovation,
but individualism also depends on inequality, even as hyperindividualism shuns
socially necessary interdependence. It
is this fundamental inequality that breeds instability, that makes interdependence
necessary and that can become so problematical for the “divergents”.
In the book, I also develop the idea that the way
the “divergent” individual balances his or her own expressive desires with the
practical needs of others in the immediate family and community becomes a moral
issue. Not everything is a matter of
choice and responsibility for choice, because we have all benefited from
sacrifices of others that we don’t see. I can go through many incidents in my
life, all the way back to boyhood but especially in the college-military years
and then more recently, with eldercare, where others could make demands on me
that I really could not make free choices about – because I “belong” to a
community. It’s adding up what others
really want that becomes difficult, because there are so many contradictions
among what “they” want. (Oh, there is no
“they”.) The extreme case is provided by
considering what use I would be in a society after a real catastrophe (like
some I have discussed here in book and movie reviews). Without the ability to belong, I would become
like the people I pass by and ignore with disdain.
No comments:
Post a Comment