Andy Schmookler responds:
Having spent much of the past twenty-five years engaged in engaged in conversations with people on both the political right and the political left -- on the radio, and online, as well as in Q&As at my speaking events -- I've been pretty well marinated in the ways of thinking of different components of the moral and political culture.
But when it comes to the attitude toward value that I attribute to secular (and mostly liberal) culture, I don't come up with a single one I might use that would carry the necessary freight well enough to make my beginning with it effective.
A few examples that come to my mind, however, include:
- Teaching students (in the 70s, and then again in the oughts) who said things like, "Though what the Nazis did at Auschwitz is not what I would have done, given my values, it did correspond with their And so it was right for them."
- Conducting a conversation on Wisconsin Public Radio on the subject of "Judgment," where callers would say that no one had a right to question anyone else's moral judgments, since they were only a matter of opinion. It seemed that the only moral judgment that they were willing to assert as valid was that it was wrong to be "judgmental."
- When I began talking about "The Concept of Evil," http://web.archive.org/web/20160501133604/http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?page_id=26 back in 2005, and continued to do so for the next decade, I encountered a great deal of resistance in secular/liberal/intellectual circles. The objections took various forms, some of which were allayed when I made it clear that I was not interested in labeling individual human beings as "evil," but was talking about a visible and coherent "force" at work in the world that spreads a pattern of brokenness. (About which much more later in this series.) But among the objections was the idea that there is no such thing as "evil" because "good" and "evil" are just archaic notions referring to nothing that's actually "real" in the world.
Perhaps even more important are the ubiquitous and subtle ways that this attitude manifests itself in the secular/liberal world: a huge reluctance to condemn anything on the other side; an impulse to be "even-handed" no matter how asymmetrical the realities of the situation; an insistence that all moral positions be given respect--all of these founded on a notion that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, that all moral positions should be respected because they are only our opinions.
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April Moore:
Very interesting. For one thing, I find it fascinating that values can emerge from a system without values.
Andy Schmookler responds:
Yes, the phenomenon of "emergence" is a fascinating thing. Going back within the scientific picture before the emergence of value in a world previously without value, there is the emergence of life in a world presumably hitherto lifeless. Going back still further is the mystery of how it is that, presumably in the Big Bang, "something" emerged where there had been nothing.
That mystery -- how matter and energy, time and space, along with a set of "laws" that ordered how they worked -- could come into being ex nihilo is completely mind-boggling to me. Nothing any physicist I've read or spoken to about it in the least solves this mystery. But the subsequent phases of emergence that lead to our human situation in the world seem comprehensible enough to me.
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Karen Berlin:
Thank you for sending yet another engaging, intellectually thought-provoking and well written piece. I am grateful for your ability negotiate great depth of content with effective economy of words. You said a lot well in a concise and compelling manner.
My one caution, or reservation concerns your comment about the "blindness and weakness" of Liberal America in these times. This may be a "judgement" statement which will cost you readership. I am a liberal activist of deep faith, as are many people I know. Because I know you, I do not take offense, but restrictive bi-categorization may be a turn off some readers and limit your opportunity to take them further in this knowledge quest.
Some religious people may feel disenfranchised from your writing. Affirming religious frameworks as a natural phenomena in the human experience is helpful and invites people of faith like me to keep reading to see how your insights will compliment or challenge my current structure of beliefs.
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