Wednesday, July 18, 2012

More Righteous Laws and Less Righteous Men

Recently I heard that the fatherless rate among African Americans is 72%. And while statistics can be dubious, this one seems accurate enough (checked it out on several sites).

Theodore Dalrymple, in his book, Life at The Bottom, discusses similar trends in England, especially among the underclass of all races.

It is disturbing to all of us to consider the number of young men in gangs, the growth in prison populations, the growth of various addictions, high school drop out rates, divorce, abortion, abandonment of the young, on and on. We seem to be at a watershed moment in the history of this nation.

The election of 2012 is interesting to me in that it is a war not between men, but between ideals. Is the solution to a degenerating culture reinforcement by various legal interventions of the state, or is it necessary for leaders in the state to herald something deeper than the state itself. One man in this election favors what philosophers have termed "positive law." His faith in the power of the state to solve our problems can only be regarded as unwavering. For him, we come together in the marketplace of ideas and create our own ideals and then enforce them by law. We are the engineers of an evolving culture. There is no "natural law" that arbitrates opinions and calls us internally to something higher than mere public will. The core problem with positive law, of course, is that it denies our inherent dignity as people made to have intuitive moral contact with God. In other words, to the positive law advocate, there is nothing inherently special about man that enables him to govern himself by force of internal restraint. There is no internal restraint; there is only fear of punishment and promise of reward. There is only the external leverage of law and the power that wields it!

The liberal sentiment is that people don't want to eat right, so they should be taxed into it. They don't want to give their wealth to the poor, so the government should make them. Some people don't think food, shelter, healthcare and the like are rights of citizens, so the government will persuade them by simply granting these privileges by direct fiat. Dalrymple's point is that if indeed food, shelter, healthcare, cable services in low cost housing, even entertainments for prisoners are to be seen as the rights of citizens, then none of us should feel surprised when people begin to simply demand them without gratitude or responsibility. Our welfare society proclaims that the able among us should do more, but what if in doing so we reduce the number of able people? How are we doing at creating men and women of civility, grace, intelligence and generosity? If we transfer billions from the rich to a black community that is plagued by fatherlessness, will it solve the problem? Transfer all the wealth in the world to men and women of all races without character and the problem will proliferate. Is this really so controversial? So what government program is going to fix that?

The liberal idea today seems to be that since individual human beings cannot be trusted, we must turn them over to the guidance of the intelligentsia. God no longer speaks (through natural law), but smart people do. They must assume the role of parenting the rest of us, and constructing a society that will be in our best interests, even if we can't quite see it. So why should parents in the underclass care to provide moral guidance to children when clearly they are not as wise as the government, and the government pledges to take care of the moral education of their children anyway, and to give them food, shelter, healthcare, etc? Perhaps Aldous Huxley's vision should in fact be applied, in which the state abolishes parenthood altogether in the interest of creating a less volatile, more homogenous culture for everyone. If God is dead, and clearly individuals can't be trusted, then we must place our trust in the state.

Dalrymple says that the welfare project in England is responsible for a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, and yet poverty has increased. It is surprising that instead of calling people to their inherent natural responsibilities as human beings (which would involve bringing God into the discussion), we instead manufacture new laws. We create a society that goads and herds people to its conception of the good, but also curiously crushes their intuitive sense of the good and thus any desire for it. We are multiplying righteous laws but not righteous men! We want Donald Trump's money, but could not possibly care less whether Donald Trump becomes a generous man.