David Brooks: How Democrats Can Win The Morality Wars

David Brooks has an interesting article this morning in the New York Times.

New York Times:

“The phrase “moral freedom” captures a prominent progressive moral tradition. It recognizes the individual conscience as the ultimate authority and holds that in a diverse society, each person should have the right to lead her own authentic life and make up her own mind about moral matters. If a woman decides to get an abortion, then we should respect her freedom of choice. If a teenager concludes they are nonbinary, or decides to transition to another gender, then we should celebrate their efforts to live a life that is authentic to who they really are.

In this ethos society would be rich with a great diversity of human types.

This ethos has a pretty clear sense of right and wrong. It is wrong to try to impose your morality or your religious faith on others. Society goes wrong when it prevents gay people from marrying who they want, when it restricts the choices women can make, when it demeans transgender people by restricting where they can go to the bathroom and what sports they can play after school.

This moral freedom ethos has made modern life better in a variety of ways. There are now fewer restrictions that repress and discriminate against people from marginalized groups. Women have more social freedom to craft their own lives and to be respected for the choices they make. People in the L.G.B.T.Q. communities have greater opportunities to lead open and flourishing lives. There’s less conformity. There’s more tolerance for different lifestyles. There’s less repression and more openness about sex. People have more freedom to discover and express their true selves.

However, there are weaknesses. The moral freedom ethos puts tremendous emphasis on individual conscience and freedom of choice. Can a society thrive if there is no shared moral order? The tremendous emphasis on self-fulfillment means that all relationships are voluntary. Marriage is transformed from a permanent covenant to an institution in which two people support each other on their respective journeys to self-fulfillment. What happens when people are free to leave their commitments based on some momentary vision of their own needs?

If people find their moral beliefs by turning inward, the philosopher Charles Taylor warned, they may lose contact with what he called the “horizons of significance,” the standards of truth, beauty and moral excellence that are handed down by tradition, history or God.

A lot of people will revert to what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls “emotivism”: What is morally right is what feels right to me. Emotivism has a tendency to devolve into a bland mediocrity and self-indulgence. If we’re all creating our own moral criteria based on feelings, we’re probably going to grade ourselves on a forgiving curve.

Self-created identities are also fragile. We need to have our identities constantly affirmed by others if we are to feel secure. People who live within this moral ecology are going to be hypersensitive to sleights that they perceive as oppression. Politics devolves into identity wars, as different identities seek recognition over the others.

The critics of moral freedom say that while it opens up lifestyle choices, it also devolves into what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” When everybody defines his own values, the basic categories of life turn fluid. You wind up in a world in which a Supreme Court nominee like Ketanji Brown Jackson has to dodge the seemingly basic question of what a woman is. I don’t blame her. I don’t know how to answer that question anymore, either.

Under the sway of the moral freedom ethos, the left has generally won the identity wars but lost the cosmology wars. America has moved left on feminist and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and is much more tolerant of diverse lifestyles. But many Americans don’t quite trust Democrats to tend the moral fabric that binds us all together. They worry that the left threatens our national narratives as well as religious institutions and the family, which are the seedbeds of virtue. …”

I have two criticisms though.

The first is that there isn’t a progressive tradition of moral freedom. Instead, it is more like there are a series of progressive experiments. A century ago, the only people who lived this way in America was a tiny cultural vanguard in a few bohemian urban enclaves in New York City and Chicago. It was artists and other non-conformist malcontents in places like Paris in the late 19th century who pioneered modernism which is the sensibility that the Self and the pursuit of self absorption and self-expression should be elevated to the highest of all goods. The core idea here is that the individual pursuit of aesthetic lifestyles are more important than morality. In contrast, the Victorian era was dominated by confident moralism.

This worldview arrived in the United States from Western Europe in the 1910s. It rose with progressive liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s. It was popularized by Hollywood celebrities and a cultural vanguard of writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.L. Mencken and all the new magazines that date back to that era like The New Yorker. It wasn’t until the 1960s though that the modernist counter-culture, which can be traced back to the avant-garde, filtered down through elites and permeated the Baby Boomer generation which was the first generation that was raised on television and to attend college en masse. It has sunk deeper and deeper roots into our culture since the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, what had previously been a minority adversary culture became mainstream culture.

The triumph of modernism in mainstream culture unleashed a whole train of social experiments: feminism, gay marriage, contraception, abortion, miscegenation, mass immigration from Third World counties, multiculturalism, “identity politics” and most recently the “trans” craze. The ultimate outcome of this experiment is unknown. No one knows if a culture can be permanently run on the basis of these ideas. There are many reasons to believe that it will prove to be too destabilizing and will end in a correction. These changes are too just too recent and unproven to be called a “tradition.”

The second criticism is that the modernists can be as intolerant as traditionalists. Wokeism, for example, is extremely intolerant. It is puritanical. It is important to remember that modernism started out as an adversary culture rooted in the avant-garde. Thus, the enemy or outsider or the Other has always been White Christian America, specifically a negative image or memory of Victorian America and people with traditional values. The modernists defined themselves against Victorianism. The Victorians were racists. They were antiracists. The Victorians were sexists. They were feminists. The Victorians were moralists. They were hedonists. The Victorians were nationalists. They were globalists. The Victorians were narrow minded bigots and nativists. They were cosmopolitans. The modernists abandoned God which they replaced with the Self. They also jettisoned traditional Christian morality, but replaced it with all the new -isms and -phobias which were derived from Freudianism. This is how you get to a place where motherhood is “slavery” and butchering your own child is a glorious “choice” which should be celebrated by society, but “transphobia” and “misgendering” people (those who self-absorbed, obsessed with their “true self” and experimenting in pretending to be the opposite sex) are deeply immoral. The LGBTQ flag is always expanding as new novelties and lifestyles are discovered and incorporated into the “community.”

I’m sure that people in the comments will be quick to point out the ascendance of modernism in American culture overlaps the decline of the WASP elite which used to rule America and the rise of the Jews. There is a lot of truth to this. I’m only describing the change in elite sensibilities and values here. There are people of all races including Jews who fall into the modernist camp or the traditionalist camp though. There are Jews who are deeply religious and have high birthrates and others who are more loyal to atheism, progressivism and modernism than, say, Israel. Those Jews are out marrying and having small families. As we noted the other day, the irony of the Great Replacement is that Jews who have championed it the most are replacing themselves faster than Whites. They believe their own bullshit.

Jewish power is waning in part because of the Great Replacement. You never hear this discussed by either Jews or White Nationalists. It is much more acceptable now to criticize Israel. The ADL isn’t nearly as powerful as it used to be. The Israel Lobby isn’t as strong as it used to be either because Jews are a declining force due to miscegenation and low fertility. They are becoming mixed race urbanite bugmen like Matt Yglesias and losing their religion and ethnic cohesion. If this trend continues, it will have massive implications for the sustainability of “progressive” culture.