The paradox of progressivism

The paradox at the heart of progressivism can be expressed very simply: the more absolute one's commitment to equality, the higher one's status.

This has a cognitive corollary: the more perceptive one's understanding of the barriers to equality, the higher one's status.

So, commitment to equality becomes the basis of thinking one is a member of a moral and cognitive elite. Equality is, strangely enough, an excellent ideal for such elitism because there are so many different dimensions along which equality can be pursued (income, gender, culture, race, sexuality ...) that one can always find another dimension along which to demonstrate the superiority of one's moral commitment compared to more benighted outlooks.

Hence the well-known cognitive intolerance of the conspicuously compassionate and ostentatiously tolerant.

It also, because it is status on the basis of one's commitment to a better future, an outlook which tends to be profoundly anti-historical. The past becomes a record of follies and failures which is to be transcended by the glorious future. That past is not a record of achievement (outside the tradition blessed with such moral commitment and understanding), still less is it a store of lessons (since it lacked the moral and cognitive understanding now achieved). The more transformative that moral and cognitive understanding is held to be, the more that is true.

Which makes it a profoundly dangerous outlook, all too willing to discard the weary learning from the past and to dismiss information or perspectives that might undermine that sense of moral and cognitive superiority. It produces a schizoid "cosmopolitanism" which is all too willing to appreciate other cultures, but not critique them; all too willing to critique its own culture, but not appreciate it. Full of knowing but lacking understanding.

Yet, if one defines virtue against what are profoundly successful societies, one is going to produce a lot of failure. And, what is possibly worse, have a greatly attenuated ability to identify, let alone learn from, past failures, since such can always be put down to the lack of the current (unsurpassed) level of moral and cognitive understanding. While to acknowledge them threatens the very sense of moral and cognitive elitism which provides the profoundly satisfying sense of status in the first place.

All of which become mechanisms whereby highly intelligent and knowledgeable folk can promote disastrous policies and block effective ones. Not a happy place for a polity to be in.

Proposition 8 case and equal protection of the law

This extends a comment I made here, at a post by a Catholic philosopher on the decision by Judge Walker overturning Proposition 8, the Californian referendum to ban same-sex marriage. (A useful précis of Walker J’s decision here.) The post defended natural law claims (including that same sex marriage was not ‘marriage’) and attacked notions of liberal neutrality.


The conflict over extending equal protection of the laws to the same-sex attracted and oriented has all happened before, in various ways. The notion that the law should be predicated on the notion of One True Sexuality is about as sensible as it should be predicated on One True Religion. It is striking how many of accusations against GLBTI folk mirror previous accusations against Jews (they are against God, corrupt any institution they join, prey on children, are engaged in a conspiracy against righteousness, adhere to their path out of moral perversity, etc) and how many defences for denying them equal protection of the law are also much the same claims (it is against tradition, undermines the Christian basis of society, etc).

A massive study (pdf) of US sexual behaviour by the CDC found that about 90% of those surveyed identified as heterosexual. Which means 10% did not. The reasons they did not varied, but the human reality is that humans are diverse in sexuality and gender identity. If one says "there is a proper form of the human—heterosexual—and improper forms—everything else" then that has legal consequences. But if one says "there are no improper forms of the human, people are simply citizens" that has consequences too. And, yes, of course denying there are no improper forms of the human is not neutral to the claim that there are but this is not exactly striking news. The neutrality that equality before the law is based on is not neutrality between claims but a provisional neutrality between persons (in the absence of actions against the life, property, etc of others).

We are past denying equal-protection claims because people are the "wrong" religion, race, gender and are now moving on struggling over denying claims because people are the "wrong" sexuality. Everyone who defended previous denials of equality always had "a theory", typically theories with metaphysical groundings. But the theories always failed in the end against the "just folks" claim. Which is where Walker J's judgment ultimately comes down on. The same-sex attracted/oriented are "just folks" too and entitled to equal protection of the law.

Like many judges who have been upholding gay rights, Walker is a Republican appointee. Which suggests that law has its own dynamic. As, indeed it does: the widening dynamic of people being “just folks”. (That the Californian Governor and Attorney-General have both filed to have Walker J rescind his delay in the effect of the judgment so that the State of California can return to issuing same-sex marriage licenses is its own straw in the wind.)

ADDENDA The muted Republican response in an election year is another straw in the wind.

The one true ...

A question: how long will it before requiring laws to be structured according to the One True Sexuality are going to seem as quaint (at least outside the Islamic world) as requiring them to adhere to the One True Religion?

A cross at Auschwitz and a mosque near Ground Zero

I have been aware of the controversy in the US about the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero but not following it all that closely. But a post by Maverick Philosopher has crystalised my thinking on the matter.

He cites a very useful analogy with Carmelite nuns taking over an abandoned building next to Auschwitz to pray for the souls. This was taken to be an attempt to Christianise a place of profound Jewish suffering. Pope John Paul II asked the nuns to move.

An even better analogy is the controversy over erecting a large cross as Auschwitz, a controversy that James Caroll considers at length in his book Constantine's Sword. Given that the Shoah is the end-point of centuries of Jews being killed for failing to follow Christ, the use of Christian symbols at the site is profoundly inappropriate, even offensive.

Yes, the Nazis killed Jews for racial rather than overtly religious reasons, nevertheless the Shoah is essentially a great big pogrom. One done by a modern European state with modern technology and organisational capacity to be sure, but it follows the pattern of a pogrom--it starts with vicious rhetoric and legal persecution of the Jews, the killings begin slowly, peak in an orgy of death when whole communities are wiped out but is erratic in its impact (in some areas, everyone is killed, other places they are driven away, or killings are sporadic and interwoven with theft and extraction of labour) and then drops away dramatically.

Nazi Jew-hatred was a secularisation of centuries of Catholic (and Orthodox) preaching, extending back to the C4th based on the "wicked" failure of God's Chosen People to accept Christ. Indeed, under the accusation of Deicide, the cross was a symbol of Jewish "evil". To erect a cross as a marker at Auschwitz is simply monstrously inappropriate.

I fail to see how a mosque at Ground Zero is any relevantly different, particularly since 9/11 was an explicitly jihadi act, one done for explicitly religious reasons, so the connection between religious thought and history and mass murder is direct.

ADDENDA Two Canadian Muslims label the proposed mosque a provocation and include their own striking analogy. A prominent American Muslim is quoted as being against the proposed mosque. While a wicked suggestion, which made me laugh, is proposed.

FURTHER A comment on the Mosque near Ground Zero controversy which works for me:

... while religious freedom permits this mosque, building it so close to Ground Zero is like building a Militia Movement Recruiting Center next to the Oklahoma City Memorial and saying, “Hey, it’s just to promote dialog and understanding.”

The motivating questions of politics

Writing my post on trust, power and status, it occurred to me that much of politics can be understood by attending to the underlying motivating question of particular political outlooks.

For example, the motivating question of libertarianism is: how can personal liberty be protected and expanded? This leads naturally to a concern with government action since the resources, coercive power and reach of government make it the most obvious actual or potential enemy to personal liberty.

(I do not straightforwardly identify as a libertarian because I do not agree with either the trumping primacy of that question or characterising government primarily as a threat to personal liberty. The latter due to the paradox of politics: the state is needed to protect us from human predators but the state itself is the most dangerous of all human predators, a paradox that can never be solved, but only managed.)

The motivating question of progressivism is: how can I be virtuous? This concern with intent easily slides into status-seeking: into conspicuous compassion, ostentatious virtue and other forms of moral vanity. After all, if people seeking to be virtuous congregate together and develop agreed notions of what it is to be virtuous, then “thinking like us” becomes an easy path to “being virtuous”. You are straight into beliefs as status markers.

Much of the “quality” media is all about being virtuous as a common motivator for journalists and their audience and—not a small point for media organizations—gives them something to sell: opinions as markers of virtue. Public broadcasting, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald are all in this market. Academe is rife with it.

The motivating question of radicals such as Orwell and his modern biographer and admirer Christopher Hitchens is: how can tyranny be best exposed and opposed? (Hitchens’s notorious atheism connects directly to this, since he clearly regards religion as a great engine of oppression and tyranny: and there is certainly much to be said for such a perspective.)

It is no accident that Hitchens has developed the same deeply problematic relationship with modern progressivism as Orwell did with the progressivism of his time. For “being virtuous” progressivism easily develops into a tendency to excuse “good intention” tyranny—whether Stalin then or figures such as Castro now. But if one opposes tyranny per se, regardless of its alleged intentions, then such excuse-making for tyranny is odious. Indeed, something to oppose and become a trenchant critic of (as Orwell did and Hitchens has).

It is also why one sees folk on the right claiming that, if Orwell had lived, he would have left the Left. If one sees the main apologists (or even advocates) of tyranny as being on the Left, it makes perfect sense to presume Orwell-the-enemy-of-tyranny would have left the Left, particularly given he was such a trenchant critic of the progressivist Left. For myself, I am much more dubious (despite the example of Hitchens and others), since Orwell’s socialism seems to me very deep-rooted in his world-view and his personal history of anti-fascism would have undermined any such identification of the Left with tyranny, and hence any such shift in personal politics. (Hitchens has the experience of living through the collapse of command economics and of members of the Left making excuses for fascism, and fascism equivalents, which changes the dynamics somewhat.)

The motivating question of folk such as Beveridge, Fred Halliday, Norman Geras and similar folk is: how can the situation of the marginalised be improved? This turns out to often be a very similar motivating question as how can tyranny be best exposed and opposed?, since, like the tyranny question, it is focused on consequences and the marginalised are typically the first victims of tyranny.

Thus we get the Euston Declaration Left: it is a coalition of those whose central concern is with consequences (particularly the consequences of tyranny), rather than with being seen to be virtuous, and so is very much opposed to the politics of intent.

How can the situation of the marginalised be improved? has often been the original motivating question of economists—a pattern of personal history that Ronald Coase is a notable, but hardly unusual example. Economics is, after all, a fairly natural discipline if one is interested in improving people’s material conditions. With folk such as Coase, their analysis of how social mechanisms work lead them into a different directions than those who explicitly, or implicitly, accept Marxian-grounded notions of social dynamics. For a question about ends is also a matter of means. Different views of human nature and social dynamics will provide very different answers to the same over-arching question.

The typical conservative question is: how can the achievements embodied in existing society best be preserved? With more optimistic conservatives adding or even extended?, though such optimism is not a natural part of conservative sentiment.

Which is a major reason I do not identify as a conservative. Such extension strikes me as eminently possible: indeed, something the long-run history of Western civilisation encourages optimism about, provided one is genuinely building on its achievements, not undermining them. Hence conservatives in retrospect seem continually to have been on the “wrong side” of political debates.

The other reasons for not so identifying are the ones Hayek identified in his “Why I Am Not A Conservative” essay. Without a sense of direction for policy beyond preservation, one is reduced to merely attempting to slow down the direction others seek to push society. More broadly, there are criteria by which social institutions can be judged beyond whether they have existed for x period of time. Criteria that give directions for public policy to head in.

Liberals tend to combine the protection and extension of liberty question with another. So prudential liberals such as Edmund Burke or George Reid combine the liberty question with the conservative question. Radical liberals such as John Stuart Mill combine the liberty question with the anti-tyranny question. Social liberals such as Keynes or Alfred Deakin combine the liberty question with the help-the-marginalised question.

The personal over the political
Moderates or centrists can be seen as people who do not have a particular over-arching question. Or, perhaps, have a meta-question: which of the motivating questions is currently more urgent? The relative urgency of the various questions will have a big impact on which of the offered answers seems the most persuasive.

Why might they have such a meta-question? Because their motivation is non-political, in the sense of politics is a means for something more important to them. Questions such as the extend liberty, oppose tyranny, help the marginalised, preserve achievement questions (which is hardly an exhaustive list) are concerned with the global direction of society. They are motivating concerns that people with strongly ideological approaches to politics have.

But most people are not strongly ideological, even though they may identify themselves as supporting particular broad policy positions. They are more focused on personal questions such as: how can I protect my family? what will make my family prosper? what will make me and mine safer? what will make me and mine richer? Politics thus is a means serving these, to them, more basic, ends.

Such an instrumental notion of politics can be very much motivating people within the political arena. Plenty of people in politics have been, and are, primarily motivated by questions such as how can I gain, maintain, extend my power? how can I get richer? Whether power-seeking is a means or an end in itself (and, even if it is a means, to what actual ends?) are very live questions about any politically active person.

Which is why I find analyses of popular approaches to politics and public opinion that stress the notion of people using as cues and as markers so plausible. That just seems to be what people would, and do, do, given the difficulty in judging actual motivations and assessing how politicians and political groupings would affect one’s concerns. It also makes expressive politics make sense: signaling one’s concerns is a rational form of behaviour.

The political as personal
Including, of course, signaling virtue. What is striking about the “how can I be virtuous?” question is that it is a personal goal able to be not merely shared, but jointly achieved, while manifesting in overt political concerns. It makes it a hybrid: something that looks ideological but is best understood in terms of common personal (indeed psychological) dynamics. One should not expect too much intellectual or ideological consistency but, rather, something more like the dynamics of fashion: indeed, a series of moral fashions. (With particular concern at being “clearly” more virtuous than most folk: especially within your own society, where status games really count.)

Which provide a set of targets with avenues of approach for more ideological folk to aim at. Comrade of Lenin and victim of Stalin (a common double), Willi Munzenberg perfected precisely that strategy and its associated techniques. Osama bin Laden has tried his hand at it while Tariq Ramadan is quite adept at it.

I have long been dubious about the “self-loathing” characterisation of progressivist views: it seems to be much more clearly motivated by a sense of moral and cognitive status driven by a (shared) concern to identify as being virtuous. And it is, after all, terribly virtuous to be concerned with the sins of one’s own society. Which provides a big button for those in conflict with said societies to aim at, and they have. That their practices and intentions may be much worse becomes beside the point for the motivating dynamic, however relevant it might be for more serious moral judgment. But that is the difference between hijacking the language of morality and being morally serious:

... here is my central thesis. If there is no truth, there is no injustice. Stated less simplistically, if truth is wholly relativized or internalized to particular discourses or language games or social practices, there is no injustice. The victims and protesters of any putative injustice are deprived of their last and often best weapon, that of telling what really happened. They can only tell their story, which is something else. Morally and politically, therefore, anything goes.

As long as folk get to feel virtuous (and, of course, really clever and perceptive).

Trust, power and status

Continuing my critique of the "corporations as great threat" nonsense, one of the basic confusions one sees is the equating of pro-market with pro-business with pro-corporate.

The important distinction here is between free enterprise (allowing commerce to flow freely due to low transactions costs: particularly minimal barriers to entry and well-defined and enforceable property rights) and private enterprise (making money from privately-owned assets). "De-regulation"—lowering barriers to entry and other transactions costs—restrains the power of corporations because it maximises the level of competition they face. It is regulatory interventions that raise transactions costs (including barriers to entry) that typically increase corporate power by reducing the competition they face. So, being in favour of low transaction costs (particularly barriers to entry) is not about "trusting" corporations, it is about not trusting them. Indeed, minimising the need to trust power-holders (including, of course, officials).

What I object to about the "corporations as great threat" nonsense is precisely its notion that there are institutions and power-holders that are worthy of trust because they are inherently virtuous (in deliberate contrast to corporations, whose portrayal as inherently vicious makes anti-corporate politics clearly the path of virtue). That is the wrong dynamic. The question is: what restrains power, what makes it responsive to the wishes of others?

But, of course, if one is in the status-and-power game, it is much preferable to express things in terms of the wickedness of others and so the (stated or implied) virtue of "people like me"—particularly "people who think like me" since then agreement becomes a matter of selling a sense of virtue, and one with minimal cost.

Purported monopolies of virtue are no better (and, indeed, can be rather worse) than other monopolies.

The propaganda model

In a blog post on the forthcoming Australian election (via), journalist and QUT researcher Derek Barry expressed the notion that corporations are bad, complete with Chomskyan hyperlink:

The problem for journalism is that most journalists are employed by corporate media. The single biggest threat to democracy is the corporation itself with its profit motive subsuming all other motives to the fatal detriment of the body politic. That means large numbers of lobbyists, PR flacks and lawyers working only to make more money for their company. People who don't see society, only consumers.

The linked essay, a 2003 retrospective on Chomsky’s famous Manufacturing Consent by his co-author Edward Herman, is excellent for illustrating precisely what is wrong with the Chomskyan analysis of media.

Being really clever
Starting with rejection of the model being taken to be a sign of failure to understand, not that the model might be an unsuccessful analysis:

Because the propaganda model challenges basic premises and suggests that the media serve antidemocratic ends, it is commonly excluded from mainstream debates on media bias.

In fact, the problem is that it critiques the media for not taking positions which are very much at one end of the spectrum of opinion in the US: there are plenty of conservative critics of mainstream media who challenge various basic premises (but clearly, not the correct ones) and imply it serves anti-democratic ends.

But that, of course, implies that the current spectrum of opinion in the US has some benchmarking legitimacy. This is very much not the view underlying the propaganda model. The belittling concept of the general population involved is stated nicely up front:

The exclusion of the propaganda model perspective is noteworthy, for one reason, because that perspective is consistent with long standing and widely held elite views that 'the masses are notoriously short-sighted' (Bailey 1948: 13) and are 'often poor judges of their own interests' (Lasswell 1933: 527),

There is a large literature about popular disinterest in, and ignorance of, details of policy or even structures of government. This is not the same, however, as saying people do not know their own interests: they may have good reason to be largely disinterested.

But, if most people are ignorant, stupid and misled, the opinions of the public provides no benchmark for journalism or for appropriate public policy. Not only is one freed from considering the possibility people may have good reasons for the opinions they have, but one immediately gets cast as a member of the cognitive elite—those folk who really understand. This is a potent combination. One can see much of the appeal of the Chomskyan analysis of media right there.

It is true that in this, as in other parts of the model, various caveats and complications get added in. But these operate to shield the thesis from contrary evidence, since any such just becomes “covered” by the caveats. The appeal of the thesis is clearly driven by those central ideas—fairly simple (or even simple-minded) ideas—that the caveats act to shield from criticism.

Then we move on to:

Clearly the manufacture of consent by a 'specialized class' that can override the short-sighted perspectives of the masses must entail media control by that class.

This control being, of course, corporate: thus, it is very much an ownership-driven model. This is also stated up front:

What is the propaganda model and how does it work? Its crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); and they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment.

This is a pretty simple-minded model of what ownership means in corporations. Not only are the general public ignorant and misled dupes of the corporate media control patterns, but journalists are agents of owners of corporations. So, now the Chomskyan analysis offers a sense of superiority over the general public and over journalists employed in corporate media: and, as we shall see, about journalist’s understanding of their own jobs. Agree with the Chomskyan analysis, and you are immediately inducted into a (indeed the) moral and cognitive elite! What a buzz, and so without effort too.

Including much in the way of analytical effort. Any consideration of the literature on problems of corporate governance, and of the role of managers—or, for that matter, audience appeal—gets dismissed as a mere bagatelle. Any matter of personal reputation among journalists, professional understanding, the rhythms of the job, it is all subsumed within the calculus of ownership and its consequences.

Well, that makes analysis simple, does it not? Simple-minded, even.
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The public option
What is more, we even have an obvious solution to these problems: do not have corporate media. Public broadcasting all the way! (So, if you accept the Chomskyan analysis and work in public broadcasting, you are a member of the moral and cognitive elite, and the solution!)

Of course, there is the small difficulty that the most relentlessly manufactured “consent”, the most relentlessly propagandistic media, has been in societies with no corporate (or other private) media at all. Clearly, being private or corporate is not the issue and abolishing or de-legitimising it is not the solution.

But, even in Western liberal democracies, there are a few issues with public broadcasting as a putative “solution”: such as the perennial complaints about narrow (and predictable) perspectives within public broadcasting. Theoretically, public media is owned by governments as agents of the sovereign people (you know, those ignorant and misled fools who do not really understand the important things at all). In practice, as with all institutions, public media is owned (in the economic sense) by those who control its attributes. Which, in the case of public broadcasting, is the staff. This is a general issue with government production of goods and services (including regulatory services), but it is particularly intense in the case of public broadcasting because of the barriers to direct government interference. Which means public broadcasting turns into self-selecting cliques producing material that manifests narrow and predictable perspectives. (Academe substantially suffers the same problem.)

So, work in public broadcasting and accept the Chomskyan perspective, and you get to feel morally and cognitively superior, part of the solution not the problem and justify selecting staff and allocating resources on the grounds of “sound” outlooks. How comforting.

Ownership and bad choice
Having “established” it is all ultimately about ownership, Herman moves on:

Political scientist Thomas Ferguson contends that the major media, 'controlled by large profit-maximizing investors do not encourage the dissemination of news and analyses that are likely to lead to popular indignation and, perhaps, government action hostile to the interests of all large investors, themselves included' (Ferguson 1996: 400).

The notion that various anti-business and anti-corporate notions have not got runs in mainstream media is bizarre. Environmentalism, for example, does rather well. (And yes, I understand that the environmentalism-corporate interaction is complicated, but that itself points out how talking about “the” elite rapidly gets problematic.)

Not that promoting popular indignation in general is not engaged in: consider FoxNews™ and radio shock jocks. Or the deep unpopularity of the GM, Chrysler and bank bailouts.

The propaganda model itself is stated quite clearly:

Its crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); and they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media also lean heavily on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and, frequently, overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses. Government and large nonmedia business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack.

Private ownership is evil and markets are malign. Of course, entirely left out are unions, advocacy groups, bureaucratic interests, and so on. Also left out are the effects of competition between media and between journalists. That is, after all, where FoxNews™ and the radio “shock jocks” got their go: competing against stale conformity.

But, of course, they appeal to the “wrong” opinions and what the ignorant and misled public think has already been massively discounted.

But, if we do not so discount people, we can note that, using polling data to grade Americans as fiscally conservative, moderate or liberal and socially conservative, moderate or liberal, about 30% of the American population is fiscally and socially conservative, by far the biggest block of opinion among the nine cross-tabulations. Only 11% are fiscally and socially liberal, yet such opinions clearly dominate mainstream journalism. In other words, media opinion is already generally significantly to the “left” of public opinion.

How can journalists be somehow “manufacturing consent” when dissatisfaction with mainstream media—in significant degree precisely because their opinions do not reflect their audiences due to being significantly more liberal (in the US sense) than them—is one of the driving forces of the modern American media market?

I agree with the analysis that British newspapers have held their readerships much better than American newspapers because they are not dominated by boring, cosy, local-monopoly newspapers whose journalism reflects narrow viewpoints out of step with their audience. In other words, that the media is more responsive to its audience the more vigorously competitive the media market is. But I am not in the business of deeming large swathes of opinion illegitimate (as it must surely be if it represents misled ignorance). Nor being ultimately uninterested in how markets, ownership and competition actually work.

Interest and ideology
Herman is clearly correct that interest in, and knowledge of, foreign policy tends to be much stronger among various elite groups than the general public, hence much media debate on such issues is members of various elites talking to each other. This is neither surprising (people responsible for things are likely to have views about relevant areas) nor, of itself, much cause for concern. The “delegation” role of elections cover this as well, after all and it is a debate “out in the open”. Indeed, one of the striking things about the US is how much discussion of foreign policy issues is directed to the intelligent lay public. It helps, for example, make Chomsky himself a best-selling author.

The propaganda model is, unsurprisingly, much concerned with ideology, claiming that:

The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to induce the media to support (or refrain from criticizing) U.S. attacks on small states that were labeled communist.

And American military interventions have never been controversial in the media? I am sure the Bush Administration would be amazed to hear how supportive the mainstream media was.

It is true that governments have an ability to rally opinion in crisis situations: but this has far more to do with the dynamics of crisis and soon dissipates. Particularly as information sources widen.

Having identified ownership, filtering and ideological factors, Herman explains that:

These factors are linked together, reflecting the multileveled capability of government and powerful business entities and collectives (e.g., the Business Roundtable; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; the vast number of well-heeled industry lobbies and front groups) to exert power over the flow of information. We noted that the five factors involved--ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and anticommunist ideology--work as 'filters' through which information must pass, and that individually and often in additive fashion they greatly influence media choices. We stressed that the filters work mainly by the independent action of many individuals and organizations; and these frequently, but not always, have a common view of issues and similar interests. In short, the propaganda model describes a decentralized and nonconspiratorial market system of control and processing, although at times the government or one or more private actors may take initiatives and mobilize coordinated elite handling of an issue.

Which explains so well dissatisfaction with mainstream media and the rise of FoxNews™ and radio shock jocks positioning against same.

Except, of course, they operate in a more conservative/libertarian perspective than the mainstream media. But, I forgot, the public are ignorant and misled fools so that does not count. (One can see how important it is to be able to select the right premises and discount inconvenient facts).

To illustrate how these filters work—in Herman’s words:

Propaganda campaigns can occur only when they are consistent with the interests of those controlling and managing the filters.

Herman cites the enormous media coverage given to Solidarity in contrast to the lack of coverage given to the Turkish military government’s suppression of union activism at the same time. This, apparently, demonstrates the operation of the anti-communist filter.

Nonsense. An authoritarian government suppressing unionism in a developing economy is, sadly, a repeated and common pattern. A union not under regime control, operating independently and defying a Soviet bloc government was unprecedented. (And, it turned out, a major step in the decay and dissolution of the Soviet empire.) The media attention to it was understandable at the time and, if anything, looks even more sensible in retrospect. If journalism is “the first draft of history”, the mainstream media was doing an excellent drafting job in its focus.

The alleged filter of anti-communism merely picks up (badly) on the dominant strategic framing of the period (US-Soviet interactions and rivalry) while appealing to the anti-anti-communism of much of academe (and elsewhere).

But, of course, if one carefully picks the comparisons, and wilfully ignores inconvenient parts of context of events, one can “demonstrate” almost anything. It is, for example, true that the Western media will generally report far more on something Westerners are involved in than something they are not, but not much flows from this other than that the Western media has Western audiences.

What sort of ideological filter explains that the Western media reports almost obsessively on Israel and Palestine, while brutal Chinese crackdowns on the Uighurs get little or no coverage? It hardly fits an “anti-communist” or an “anti-Muslim” filter. That the Middle East is a volatile region that provides much of the world’s oil surely explains much of the difference. But that makes what happens there generally more newsworthy than what happens in Sinkiang because it simply is more strategically significant. As was Solidarity in its context.

This begins look like nothing more than a complaint that the mainstream media does not cover things in the way Chomsky, Herman and co think it should. But, given how narrow a sliver of public opinion they represent—and that the media needs a paying (or at least saleable) audience—that is hardly surprising.

Oh, but I forgot, Chomsky et al are the moral and cognitive elite: they know how things really are and really should be looked at.

Convenient caveats
Herman tries to build in some protections against being criticized for simple-mindedness:

We never claimed that the propaganda model explained everything or that it shows media omnipotence and complete effectiveness in manufacturing consent. It is a model of media behavior and performance, not of media effects. We explicitly pointed to the existence of alternative media, grassroots information sources, and public scepticism about media truthfulness as important limits on media effectiveness in propaganda service, and we urged the support and more vigorous use of the existing alternatives.

But not the alternatives that actually sprang up, like FoxNews™ and shock jocks.

I am reminded of the quip Philip Jenkins quotes in his The Next Christendom about religion in contemporary Latin America:

the Catholic Church has chosen the poor, but the poor chose the Pentecostals.

Indeed, it turns out the masses are even more out of the loop than one might have thought:

The power of the U.S. propaganda system lies in its ability to mobilize an elite consensus, to give the appearance of democratic consent, and to create enough confusion, misunderstanding and apathy in the general population to allow elite programs to go forward. We also emphasized the fact that there are often differences within the elite that open up space for some debate and even occasional (but very rare) attacks on the intent as well as the tactical means of achieving elite ends.

If one is right out on one end of the spectrum of public opinion, then debate, no matter how vigorous in reality, becomes “not the right debate”, not “real” debate and has to be explained away. But, really, does this even remotely describe American politics and media during the Vietnam or Iraq wars?

And, if it does not for such central events in American foreign and military policy, why is it useful at all as an analytical model? (As distinct from a structure of polemic.) When Herman writes:

We never claimed that the propaganda model explained everything or that it shows media omnipotence and complete effectiveness in manufacturing consent. It is a model of media behavior and performance, not of media effects. We explicitly pointed to the existence of alternative media, grassroots information sources, and public scepticism about media truthfulness as important limits on media effectiveness in propaganda service, and we urged the support and more vigorous use of the existing alternatives. Both Chomsky and I have often pointed to the general public's persistent refusal to fall into line with the media and elite over the morality of the Vietnam War, the desirability of the assault on Nicaragua in the 1980s, and the merits of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, among other matters.

is he not giving the game away?

Moreover, one of the striking things about how American politics work is that public opinion seems to have more power than in other Western democracies as, for example, the persistence of capital punishment illustrates. Herman again engages in a large exercise in exclusion:

But the propaganda model does not suggest that local and even larger victories are impossible, especially where the elites are divided or have limited interest in an issue. For example, coverage of issues like gun control, school prayer, and abortion rights may well receive more varied treatment than, say, global trade, taxation, and economic policy.

I am not sure one could actually claim that there is such alleged greater variance. But, once again, the issue becomes what is left for the model to actually explain? Apart from policy outcomes and patterns of debate not being to the satisfaction of Chomsky, Herman and their audience?

This seems to what the model is left with:

The model does suggest that the mainstream media, as elite institutions, commonly frame news and allow debate only within the parameters of elite perspectives; and that when the elite is really concerned and unified, and/or when ordinary citizens are not aware of their own stake in an issue or are immobilized by effective propaganda, the media will serve elite interests uncompromisingly.

If the public generally does not care very much about an issue, then the people who do will have much more room to manoeuvre. This is surprising, how? Can we nominate any significant issue that does not provoke at least some debate in the mainstream media? It is simply not good enough to claim that it is not the “right” debate.

Elite dynamics
As for the model’s rhetoric about “the” American elite, there are polities with highly coordinated elites: any command economy, for example. There are the social mercantilist elites of Latin America. But it is not the extent of private ownership and market actions that provide such coordination: on the contrary, the more ownership is narrowed and markets constrained, the easier the creation and maintenance of a coordinated elite is. Hence, command economies, which largely abolish private ownership and market activity, have the most coordinated elites. Hence also the highly interventionist social mercantilism of Latin America produces highly concentrated elites.

Certainly, the propaganda model is an analysis that gives great status for not being in business: but it is not even remotely based on a careful analysis of social reality.

That the US might have something of an issue in division between an arrogant and self-satisfied elite and a frustrated and disenfranchised populace is a claim that is hardly the monopoly of the left. Angelo Codevilla’s recent essay, for example, is a strongly and passionately argued case for such. What distinguishes his analysis from that of the Chomskyan one is that Codevilla is far less patronising about his fellow citizens. He takes their perspectives and concerns as legitimate.

He is also much more aware of how academe, government bureaucracy, unions and advocacy organisations are themselves power networks. In other words, Codevilla has a much less simple-minded view of power in a mixed economy than the Chomskyan analysis uses.

But Codevilla’s thesis is still open to reasonable criticism about being somewhat too aggregative in its notion of there being “the” elite. Though, having a much less simple-minded notion of power and influence in a mixed economy, Codevilla can produce a much more sophisticated notion of how elites operate and how ideas are formed and propagated. But, then, a lot of the appeal of the Chomskyan analysis is precisely the way it makes academic-advocacy NGO-union-bureaucratic power networks largely invisible.

Repelling critics
Herman seeks to respond to various criticism, such as the “conspiracy theory” criticism:

We explained in Manufacturing Consent that critical analyses like ours would inevitably elicit cries of conspiracy theory, and in a futile effort to prevent this we devoted several pages of the preface to an explicit rejection of conspiracy and an attempt to show that the propaganda model is best described as a 'guided market system.' Mainstream critics still made the charge, partly because they are too lazy to read a complex work, partly because they know that falsely accusing a radical critique of conspiracy theory won't cost them anything, and partly because of their superficial assumption that, as the media comprise thousands of 'independent' journalists and companies, any finding that they follow a 'party line' that serves the state must rest on an assumed conspiracy.

This is disingenuous in the extreme. Propaganda is intentional and (typically) centrally coordinated. If Hermann and Chomsky did not want to be regarded as pushing a conspiratorial model, they should not have called it the ‘propaganda model’.

The reliance on being far more cognitively “with it” than others is pervasive. As, for example, in the treatment of journalists:

But, apart from the fact that we did speak with quite a few reporters, the criticism is inane. Are reporters even aware of the deeper sources of bias they may internalize? Won't they tend to rationalize their behavior?

That there are common views amongst many journalists is clearly true but, again, they are clearly generally more “leftward” than the general public. Suggesting there may be socialization and status issues involved is quite different from suggesting some internalized corporate-driven bias.

Herman dismisses the professionalism issue thus:

But professionalism and objectivity rules are fuzzy and flexible concepts, and are not likely to override the claims and demands of deeper power and control relationships.

One wonders if he would treat academic opinion in quite the same way. But notice how we are back in the ownership=pervasive power analysis. Surely the evidence is that peer relationships, and sense of status, are, in fact, much more important. Particularly given that public broadcasting—where journalists are less constrained by audience pressures—tends to display rather more concentrated forms of the trend of opinion among journalists.

Some of what is going on is problematising what are hardly surprising patterns:

Hallin acknowledges that 'the administration was able more often than not to prevail in the battle to determine the dominant frame of television coverage,' 'the broad patterns in the framing the story can be accounted for almost entirely by the evolution of policy and elite debate in Washington,' and 'coherent statements of alternative visions of the world order and U.S. policy rarely appeared in the news' (Hallin 1994: 64, 74, 77). This is exactly what the propaganda model would forecast.

Surely it is what any model which acknowledges that what government does, and why, is going to be a powerful framing for events in any political system is going to grapple with. What is striking in Western democracies—in many ways, particularly in the US—is how much such framings are contested, not how little.

The model says power matters—true, of course—but then is quite narrow in what forms and sources of power it considers:

But the propaganda model does start from the premise that a critical political economy will put front and center the analysis of the locus of media control and the mechanisms by which the powerful are able to dominate the flow of messages and limit the space of contesting parties. The limits on their power are certainly important, but why should these get first place, except as a means of minimizing the power of the dominant interests, inflating the elements of contestation, and pretending that the marginalized have more strength than they really possess?

How about obscuring other power networks? It is true, for example, that private sector unionism has been declining in the US, something of a general pattern in Western economies that occurs for reasons intimately connected to social and economic changes. But it is also true that public sector unionism has become increasingly powerful in driving American policy and politics.

Indeed, public employment in the US has increasingly become a device for enriching a privileged caste at the expense of the general public (and unionism, particularly in the US, is increasingly about organising for more of that).

About that audience
Herman notes the commercial pressures on newspapers and contemporary media:

The decline of public broadcasting, the increase in corporate power and global reach, and the mergers and centralization of the media, have made bottom-line considerations more influential both in the United States and abroad. The competition for advertisers has become more intense and the boundaries between editorial and advertising departments have weakened further. Newsrooms have been more thoroughly incorporated into transnational corporate empires, with budget cuts and even less management enthusiasm for investigative journalism that would challenge the structure of power (Herman and McChesney, 1997). In short, the professional autonomy of journalists has been reduced.

Technological change has put mainstream media under pressure, but primarily by providing alternative sources of information. This has been weakening their ability to frame public debate, not increasing it: as Dan Rather discovered.

Herman’s claim that:

Although the new technologies have great potential for democratic communication, there is little reason to expect the Internet to serve democratic ends if it is left to the market (Herman and McChesney 1997: 117-35).

is surely just bizarre. Yes, putting things behind paywalls reduces access but it is not market pressures but government ones which are the biggest dangers to free flow of information on the Internet.

The notion that being embedded in a market economy is a restrictive information “filter” is ultimately profoundly silly. On the contrary, it is patently a massive expander of information availability, as elementary comparison between polities and across time clearly demonstrates.

Herman also reads rather too much into the flow of intellectual fashions:

There is now an almost religious faith in the market, at least among the elite, so that regardless of evidence, markets are assumed to be benevolent and nonmarket mechanisms are suspect. When the Soviet economy stagnated in the 1980s, it was attributed to the absence of markets; the disintegration of capitalist Russia in the 1990s is blamed on politicians and workers failing to let markets work their magic. Journalism has internalized this ideology. Adding it to the fifth filter in a world where the global power of market institutions makes nonmarket options seem utopian gives us an ideological package of immense strength.

That attempts to systematically replace markets have all, without exception, been grotesque failures apparently has nothing to do with it.

And the claim about religious faith in markets does not sit so well a few years later: a global financial crisis, a major economic downturn, and this allegedly pervasive “faith” withered remarkably quickly.

While public opinion is massively discounted as a benchmark in the basic structure of analysis, it is cited as precisely such a benchmark when policies that the perspective underlying the model is against can be cast as unpopular. Again and again, the real complaint seems to be that the patterns of debate and policy outcomes are not congenial to said perspective rather than whether they conform to the patterns of public opinion. (Which, if it did, would shift media debate in a generally more “rightward” direction.)

The characterisation of alleged media uniformity on various issues also seems somewhat overstated. The notion that there may be good reasons to favour, for example, free trade over protectionism, is clearly discounted. If freer markets are never the correct answer, then clearly any movement in such a direction can only be “explained” as pathology.

But diagnosing what one finds ideologically frustrating as some pathology or moral failing is a pattern that has wider application—such as the tendency to criticise Australian voters for being “conservative”. Surely, the voting citizens of country that is one of the longest-running of modern democracies and consistently rates in the top 3 in the world on the UN’s human development index have a fair bit to be conservative about.

But the Chomskyan analysis is very useful. Academic-NGO-public service-union networks can point to the evil “corporates” as the “real” elite and completely deny their own status as power elites, congratulating themselves on their moral and cognitive superiority while discounting the views and wishes of the general public. The Manufacturing Consent model is great at manufacturing self-satisfaction and as propaganda, not as anything remotely resembling careful analysis of the social world in general or the media in particular.

Corporations as a threat to democracy

In a blog post on the forthcoming Australian election, journalist and QUT researcher Derek Barry has managed to express the notion that corporations are bad very clearly, complete with Chomskyan hyperlink (via):

The problem for journalism is that most journalists are employed by corporate media. The single biggest threat to democracy is the corporation itself with its profit motive subsuming all other motives to the fatal detriment of the body politic. That means large numbers of lobbyists, PR flacks and lawyers working only to make more money for their company. People who don't see society, only consumers.

Corporations are bad because they are motivated by profit, are based on a bad view of the world, have lots of money and so are the biggest threat to democracy.

Bit odd that democracy grew up in highly commercial societies then, isn’t it? Indeed, that the historical origins of modern elected representation was to give merchants a say.

If you are in business, you have to get consent for your income on a regular, even daily or hourly or moment-by-moment, basis. This is quite central to why commerce generally has a better record towards marginalised groups than politics or religion and why the politics of government-by-consent grew up in highly commercial societies.

Profit is just making more in sales than what it cost to produce/acquire/put together what one is selling. No economy can operate if one’s productive units do not make profits—that is, generate surpluses by creating more value than they consume.

Such surpluses are how one generates funds for the creation of capital, the produced means of production, and the prosperity of society is determined by how much capital it has operating per person and how effectively.

And if profits are bad, does that make losses good? Well, losses have value as a signaling mechanism (indeed, a great deal of value as such, which is why eliminating loss by providing guarantees can have such disastrous effects). But losses have value as signals because they are things to be avoided. And if losses have signaling value, so do profits.

So, on the face of it, “profits are wicked” (which means “productive surpluses are wicked”) is a nonsense pejorative, however common (indeed, clichéd). But notice how talking about ‘surpluses’ sounded so much better than ‘profits’? First, because ‘surplus’ has not had the ongoing campaign against it that ‘profit’ has had. Second, because profits are typically private and motivated by gain.

Well, so are worker’s wages. Most workers have as instrumental an outlook on working and being paid for it as business folk have on, well, working and getting paid for it. (Indeed, if anything, businessfolk are more likely to be engaged in an area they personally enjoy: remembering that managers are employees, not businessfolk in this sense.)

Much of the modern assault on profits as wicked is derived from the Marxist critique of the same. But that is based on a false theory of value and a spurious theory of exploitation which relies on playing games with the meaning of ‘labour’.

But such rhetoric as I quoted above is not about the realities of being in business, it is about the status of not being in business. Of not being engaged in grubby “profit”. It it is a case of “look at me, I am not motivated by grubby profit, but by Virtue!”

This is, of course, an old status claim: one that dates back at least to Plato and Confucius. And, as in those cases, it is a claim that is congenial to rival power groups: whether landed aristocrats, scholar-bureaucrats or priests and clerics, as the case might be.

Or, as in our time, conspicuous compassion within the (typically inner city) academic-advocacy NGO-public servant-union networks: folk who get status against commerce and power against markets. And who, clearly, have good motives, a proper understanding of the world and work in good institutions: they just ooze virtue and conspicuous compassion, unlike those wicked corporate folk.

It remains the sort of self-congratulation that is millennia old and does not get any better over time.

It is true that some corporations can have huge turnovers, but politics is not their prime activity. So they tend to engage in any political activity for commercial reasons. Thus, the more politics interferes in commerce, the more corporations engage in lobbying. Politics drives lobbying, rather than the other way around.

Jonah Goldberg, in the sensible bit of his book Liberal Fascism (the main thesis of the book I strongly disagree with), gives an excellent example of this. Microsoft™ used to have a minimal lobbying presence in Washington. Then the US Justice Department went after Microsoft™ in an anti-trust suit. Microsoft™ now mounts a major lobbying operation in Washington.

The more interventionist public policy is, the more official discretions matter, the bigger the return (in profits gained and losses avoided) there will be in lobbying and the more lobbying there will be. Lobbying is the legal side, corruption the illegal side, of the market for official discretions. If you want to reduce lobbying and corruption, reduce the ambit of official discretions.

This is what the UK did, leading to its later C19th and early C20th reputation as a remarkably corruption-free polity. C16th and C17th England had a fairly high level of corruption. But—in the later C18th and early C19th—there was a massive purge of interventionist regulations under the influence of classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The result was a dramatic drop in the level of corruption, an effect that percolated down society.

In Australia, where is there the most political corruption? In land use cases, since official discretions there are so pervasive and so valuable. Particularly at the local government level, as that is the level of government where oversight is poorest. (The extensive official discretions over land use also have other ill effects.)

Command economies are pervaded by official discretions (as all attempts to replace markets and voluntary activity have to be). This is why—once the revolutionary fervour wears off—command economies rapidly become extremely corrupt.

To advocate strongly interventionist government policy and then complain about corporate lobbying is to engage in laughable misdiagnosis. But very useful misdiagnosis, if you are in the business of rival politics.

Since politics is not corporations’ main activity, the resources they allocate to it tend to be significantly less than rumoured or imagined. Indeed, the academic-advocacy NGO-union networks dispose, directly or indirectly, of significantly more politically-directed resources than does business. (And far more than small business.) But pointing loudly at “evil corporations” is very useful. For it is very convenient for rival power networks to direct attention to “evil corporations” and away from themselves. It is easier to hide what you are: particularly from yourself. (Status claims based on alleged moral superiority rather need that sort of self-blindness.)

We all clearly much prefer living in societies where profit-seeking private corporations are thick on the ground. Indeed, this is a very widespread preference, as global migration flows demonstrate. This is not an accidental feature, because such societies are also prosperous, liberal and free precisely because of (not despite) having large and vibrant private sectors.

What folk are really complaining about when they jump up and down about how wicked corporations are—including what a “threat” they are—is the existence of rival politics and rival points of view. The notion that corporations are “the greatest threat to democracy” is based on status-claims and power-seeking, it is not reality or evidence based.

ADDENDA See also my later post on trust, power and status.

The oppressiveness of God

Elizabeth Anscombe was an ardent and effective defender of orthodox Catholic doctrine in mainstream academic philosophy. Her essay Contraception and Chastity was originally published four years after, and as a defense of, Humanitae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on contraception and human sexuality.

The essay is, as you would expect from a philosopher of Anscombe’s skill and standing, a well-argued defense of the natural law sexual teaching of the Catholic Church.

The key framing of the essay, indeed of this whole mode of thought, is expressed as follows:

What people are for is, we believe, like guided missiles, to home in on God, God who is the one truth it is infinitely worth knowing, the possession of which you could never get tired of, like the water which if you have you can never thirst again, because your thirst is slaked forever and always. It's this potentiality, this incredible possibility, of the knowledge of God of such a kind as even to be sharing in his nature, which Christianity holds out to people; and because of this potentiality every life, right up to the last, must be treated as precious.

People, and their moral obligations, are defined in terms of God.

Which means they are not defined in terms of themselves, in terms of the human, but of something beyond the human. Which leaves open the possibility of defining people as being outside the properly human. Or as having “betrayed” their humanity by failing to conform to this defining purpose, or its derivatives.

It also means moral obligations are defined by criteria beyond the human. One can “fail” the test of morality due to considerations that have nothing to do with how considerate or respectful your behaviour is towards your fellow human humans.

The great potential for oppressiveness this has is obvious and is attested by plentiful historical experience.

In Anscombe’s essay, this grounding in the extra-human expressed through two salient features. Sex is not defined by its experienced reality—either among humans or in nature—but by its alleged defining purpose (reproduction: the purpose that connects sexuality to the creative impulse, the only way in monotheism sex connects us to the divine). Anything that falls outside that defining purpose is thus anathema: regardless of its human reality (and any role in catharsis, expressing love or intimacy, or as pleasure must be bound within that purpose). As Anscombe writes, in traditional Catholic teaching:

all artificial methods of birth control were taught to be gravely wrong if, before, after, or during intercourse you do something intended to turn that intercourse into an infertile act if it would otherwise have been fertile.

The second, and consequence of this, is that Anscombe has to work at making sure love is defined as only being “proper” if it falls within this defining purpose. Love is not defined by its human experience: human experience is judged by extra-human criteria. This has the very convenient effect (for doctrine and sacerdotal authority) of putting bounds on the “love thy neighbour” precept.

All of which has various consequences, including that humans who fall outside this defined “proper” nature are defined as being outside the realm of the “properly” human (as the Vatican makes quite explicit). “Love thy neighbour” gets doubly subverted: by the redefining of ‘love’ (in all its forms, confining it to within legitimating purpose) and the redefining of the human (and so ‘neighbour’).

But there is no single set of ways of defining God’s purposes, the purposes that trump the human. Just as Catholic thought defines the queers—those who do not fit with the binary identification of sex and gender, the demand that humans be defined by their genitals: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, intersex—as outside God’s purposes, so Muslim thought defines Christians as being (in part) outside the ambit of God’s purposes: as being, through their failure to accept Muhammad as God’s Prophet, in revolt against the wishes of God.

Just as both Christian thought and Islamic scripture define Jews as similarly being (in part) outside the ambit of God’s purposes. The more Christianity subverts “love thy neighbour”, the more the commandment not to use God to strip people of their moral protections is subverted, the more its behaviour converges with Islam because the more the authoritativeness of God operates to trump mere human claims.

But this is a game anyone can play. This claim of “I have a theory, and you are to be punished for failing to conform to my theory”.

Anscombe is invoking a tradition that claims that this is not merely a matter of revelation, of scriptural authority. On the contrary, it is a matter of natural law, of the metaphysical structure of the universe. Now, the universe is the creation of God, so it still leads back to Him. Nevertheless, it is about how things are in a structure-of-things sense. As Anscombe writes:

In fact there's no greater connexion of "natural law" with the prohibition on contraception than with any other part of morality. Any type of wrong action is "against the natural law": stealing is, framing someone is, oppressing people is.

Tell that to the Jews and the queers, but let’s move on:

"Natural law" is simply a way of speaking about the whole of morality, used by Catholic thinkers because they believe the general precepts of morality are laws promulgated by God our Creator in the enlightened human understanding when it is thinking in general terms about what are good and what are bad actions. That is to say, the discoveries of reflection and reasoning when we think straight about these things are God's legislation to us (whether we realize this or not).

This “legislation” including how the universe is. (Such as reproduction being “the purpose” of sex.)

Natural law theorists, such as Edward Feser (a clearer and more effective presenter of Catholic natural law theory than Anscombe), insist that they are engaged in moral deductions from the metaphysical structures of the universe.

The problem with this is that, when one examines the conclusions of natural law theorists across time, they produce the conclusions one expects from their time and place. So Aristotle produces conclusions that fit in with C4th BC Greece, Aquinas that fit in with C13th Latin Christendom and Feser, George and Finnis conclusions that fit in within the ambit of contemporary moral conclusions. As we can see in their attitudes to, for example, slavery, human bondage, the role of women, the appropriate legal treatment of sex acts, contraception, infanticide, abortion, charging interest. Natural law moral theorising is not an exercise in “moral deduction” at all, it is an exercise in using a mode of reasoning that allows the conclusion to select its premises.

Very useful for a system of religious doctrine to be sure, but not one that justifies escape from the problems of defining the nature of the human, and moral obligations, in this extra-human way.

What natural law theorising, in its trumping-authority-in-the-structure-of-things mode, does provide a link to, however, is secular ways of doing exactly the same thing. What Nazism and Leninism have in common, for example, with such religious modes of thought is not being “religious” per se, but in setting up structures and authorities that trump the human. Not in their Godlessness, but in their substitute Gods, their substitute trumping authorities.

A common feature of these moral framings—precisely because each framing is deemed so utterly authoritative—is that people who fall outside its definition of the “properly human” can only escape from within the framing (and if the framing permits it). That is, they have to play that game, they have no claims against the framing. Jews have to become Christians or Muslims, Christians have to become Muslims, queers must fight their own nature, “class enemies” have to embrace the dictatorship of the proletariat and so on. With racism, of course, one cannot escape the framing: at best, one can become a “good nigger” and accept one’s inferiority.

And, of course, such structure gives great power and authority to those who are the “guardians of the framing”, who are the “gatekeepers of righteousness”. Hence its appeal to those who see themselves as such and its intimate connection to elevated claims of “guardianship”. To elevated concepts of priesthood and infallible Popes, to the Will of the Fuhrer, to various Great Leaders (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim, …). Plato has a lot to answer for.

So, if one wants to understand what is it about Catholic teaching that seems so oppressive, it is that it is extra-human in its claims and groundings and so is substantially at war with the human. But it is hardly alone in that.

About Elena Kagan

The process of confirming a US Supreme Court Justice has became an intensely political process.

Elena Kagan seems something of odd choice for Supreme Court Justice despite being (if not for all that long) Solicitor-General, hence worries about her “lack of form”, so people look to her hiring record to get hints and worry about such matters such as her First Amendment views. Unsurprisingly, people examine her thesis for clues about her judicial philosophy.

Given the importance of the US Supreme Court, it is understandable that there should be debates about the nominee. This compilation of links on the nominee provides some sense of the debate and interest. One can track the various stories folk want to tell about the nominee. People have even angsted about her sexuality.

What caught my eye is that Kagan is the third least popular Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork (the most unpopular, followed by Harriet Miers: Bork and Miers are the two failed-to-be-confirmed nominees of recent decades). Among the nominees from Robert Bork on, the most popular have been Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor. If one goes for net support—vote for less vote against—then the three with the most clearly supported were Ruth Bader Ginsurg, John Roberts and Clarence Thomas: Kagan is still the third least net supported after Miers and Bork. Kagan also has the third highest undecideds after Miers and Bork. She just does not positively excite folk in general. So, appealing to something which resonates with popular sentiment is not a reason to nominate her.

That she is Jewish seems to be largely beside the point: on the IQ evidence, three Jewish members of SCOTUS is about right. Though, if she does get confirmed, having three Jews and six Catholics on the Supreme Court will be something of a major marker of the decline of the WASP elite. But she is the epitome of the Harvard-Yale domination of the peak of American government.

That she is a woman is marginally more interesting, but after Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, that is less exciting that it would previously have been.

So, a bit of a blank slate in terms of judicial “form” and philosophy: if the nominee is a bit puzzling, then one looks at who did the nominating. It is pretty silly to try and class President Obama as a closet socialist or secret Muslim (though it would be good if he would refrain from patronising Israelis about such matters). It is much more sensible to label him as the Chicago corporatist he fairly clearly is: albeit an academically-minded Chicago corporatist. (Which is not the same as being fascist, despite claims to the contrary.)

Kagan is a politically-minded academic (and academic administrator). Is she a corporatist? Is she someone who thinks things should be managed, by the right sort of people? Who knows what is expected? According to this little vignette in a recent essay by Angelo Cordevilla, yes:

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Worried yet?

And a little less surprising as a nominee, perhaps? Or that her nomination does not resonate with the wider American public all that well. But it resonates fine with the right sort of people.

ADDENDA A much more detailed piece which makes a similar point.

Pig legs and Thomist moral reasoning

This is extends a comment I made here.


In ethics, Thomism or Catholic natural law theory is a system of reasoning whereby moral conclusions congruent with whatever is convenient for Catholic doctrine at the time are deduced from the metaphysical structure of the universe.

The Thomist view on sex is that the inherent function of sex—what brought it into existence—is reproduction, so sex can only be used according to the form of reproduction. The originating function of sex determines what is the proper, natural, way to engage in sex. Men and women were brought into the world for each other and only in their complementarity can moral erotic relationships exist.

This reasoning thus reaches the conclusion desired from the metaphysical characteristics of the universe: sex and gender must conform to the simple binary identification of remaining as born and only having sex with the opposite sex within marriage based on us being fully defined by our genitals. This excludes all the queers (gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, intersex) who do not conform to this simple binary identification. But it (at least, it does in the modern, amended, version) allows married couples past conception age to continue to have sex (since it is the reproductive form that counts, as that is congruent with the defining function of sex, not whether conception is possible).

The mechanics of sex thus become a major moral issue because sex can only properly happen by the form which conforms to its defining, which is to say its originating, the reason why it exists, purpose.

Any sexual activity that fails to conform to that reproductive form is using sex against its originating purpose. So, no blowjobs, no anal sex, no masturbation, no contraception that interferes with the natural process, no sex within the same gender: the only permitted intentional orgasms come from a penis ejaculating into a vagina connected to an unimpeded uterus. That sex in nature has lots of other functions does not matter: they are not evidence, they are malfunctions and malformations.

Fairly clearly, this is using the conclusion to select the premises. One simply focuses on that part of reality that conforms to the desired conclusion and dismisses the rest as improper: hence the ability to “deduce” from the metaphysical characteristics of the universe the desired conclusions.

To see how opportunistic this is, consider the case of the pig leg. The inherent function of a pig leg is to move the pig around, which would seem to ban bacon, ham and roast pork, given they involve irretrievably frustrating the pig leg from carrying on the function which brought it into existence. When we make and consume bacon, the pig leg is not being used according to the form that arises from its originating function.

Clearly the pig leg can perform other functions than moving the pig around but, then, so equally can sex perform other functions than reproduction. Certainly, we have to eat to live, but we are not compelled to specifically consume pig legs. It is just tasty and convenient that we do so.

While we can use other things than pig legs to get tasty nutrition, sex provides catharsis and intimacy in ways that generally lack equivalent substitutes. Whatever difference one is going draw between making bacon and non-reproductive sex, it is not going to turn on originating purpose.

The real difference between the originating function of sex and the originating function of pig legs is that Catholic theorists are looking for ways to restrict sex (for reasons I discuss in my recent post on the role of God in moral discourse), but they are not looking for ways to restrict food. (If originating purpose determines proper use, we should only eat things which can continue to function when we harvest the eaten bit, or which can no longer perform their original purpose. It is also hard to see how evolution can be a proper process, since it is all about finding new functions.)

The religious taboos are driving the reasoning, not the metaphysical structure of the universe. Which, as noted, is the trick with such "natural law" moral reasoning and what makes it so doctrinally useful: it picks on the aspects of reality it finds convenient and simply dismisses any divergence as "improper". (That this then ends up creating “improper” humans in significant numbers each generation is just too bad; they grow up as isolated individuals in a sea of "proper" humans, so have historically been very easy targets.) If the conclusion gets to choose its premises in that way, it is hardly surprising that it ends up "deducing" from the metaphysical structure of reality whatever conclusions are currently congenial for Catholic doctrine.

But it is also a specific example of a more general issue. When we theorise, we abstract away from reality. In doing so, we can abstract away from the reality of people’s humanity. Which is precisely what Catholic natural law doctrine does, it abstracts away from the reality of human sexual diversity thereby, as I noted previously, creating categories of people who should not exist—the queers: all the people who do not conform to the binary identification of sex with gender.

Since they clearly do exist, generation after generation, the response is to deem them metaphysically flawed, for the theory says they ought not to exist, and require them to conform to the theory, at whatever the personal cost (and blame them when they do not so conform). Their inconvenient existence is then a burden placed on them: the theory is trumps. This is, of course, an approach we see in other ideological systems. It is oppressive—even murderous and tyrannical—there too.

Defining bigotry

Bigotry is the unilateral denial of moral protections to a category of people: unilateral because it does not flow from any specific acts by them transgressing against other people’s moral protections.

Since it is about denying moral protections to people who have not individually transgressed against the moral protections of others, the net effect of acting on bigotry is to decrease the ambit of moral constraint and therefore increase the level of immoral behaviour. Since it is about denying people moral protection, bigotry is, in fact, a moral claim: a claim about the ambit of moral constraints, about the status of people’s membership in the moral community.

So, bigotry is a way of claiming to defend morality while acting to undermine it by narrowing and/or lessening membership of the moral community. Bigots always claim to be defending moral decency, doing so by identifying a group who are outside (in whole or in part) its protections due to some flaw in them—thereby making them a threat to moral decency—not in the framing that excludes or otherwise diminishes them.

The more such framing is contested, and the less it is enforced, the more bigotry diminishes. The more uncontested the framing is, and the more it is enforced, the greater the level of bigotry.

This is why bigots often attempt to drive excluded group or groups out of the space of public debate: if they are allowed to present themselves as “just folk” then the moral claims of exclusion are likely to decay. The greater the sanctions imposed against such action in the public space, the easier it is to maintain a structure of exclusion. The more such sanctions decay, the harder it is to do so.

Since the denial of moral protection is unilateral, in that it is not based on specific transgressions against the moral protections of others, it has to be justified. In particular, the excluded have to categorised as some sort of threat: a threat of moral importance, even to morality itself. The smaller the minority involved, the more this has to be done, otherwise it is just a large minority monstrously bullying a small and vulnerable minority. Typically, they are held to be a profoundly corrupting influence in some way: that they will, if not excluded and repressed, act to undermine some basic structure or structures of society. Or that what they do or are is offensive, or otherwise malignly contradictory, to some basic principle or authority.

There will be thus the notion that they are, in some sort of way, a moral contagion: whether by converting others, by infecting their moral sense or by an enhanced propensity to immoral behaviour in general. That the flaw in them that justifies their exclusion will manifest in more pervasive moral flaws: even in a complete rejection of moral constraints.

They are thus turned into a threat to moral decency, which makes their exclusion not unilateral after all, but a defence of moral decency.

Any of these attitudes can be internalised. When Bishop Desmond Tutu was asked what was the worst thing about apartheid, he replied “the way it makes you doubt that you are a child of God”.

But, regardless of whether it is internalised by the object of bigotry, full bigotry leaves its object no escape while one remains in that category. Everything they do and say is tainted, without standing or, at least, irredeemably lesser. They are not permitted to escape their framing: all the problems are in them and what they do, not in how things are framed.

Which is at the heart of bigotry’s evil: it undermines or destroys the possibility of moral conversation and common moral restraint. For such conversation presupposes sharing some common moral plane when, to the bigot, equality itself is an insult. You do not understand the logic of bigotry unless you understand the reality of the insult of equality. The more committed to the bigotry, the more matters become subordinated to hate and exclusion and to rage at anything that undermines the notion that equality is an insult, that you do share a common humanity. Bigotry uses the language of morality to profoundly subvert the very structure and function of morality.

The role of God in moral discourse

The salient role of God in moral discourse is to operate as a completely trumping moral authority against whom no human claims have standing.

The standard use of this trumping moral authority is to justify stripping categories of people of their moral protections.

The standard form of this justification is to declare the existence of that category of persons is a moral flaw in the order of the universe which is the fault of the members of that category.

So, Islam claims that everyone is obligated to accept that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His Prophet: failure to do so is a grievous error which can only be fully resolved by submitting to these revealed truths. Hence Christians, Jews and other “people of the book” have accepted the truth of the One God but not the truth that Muhammad is His Prophet. That makes them worse than Muslims (who have accepted both) but better than polytheists, atheists and so forth who have accepted neither declared truth: they have not even acknowledged the One God.

The existence of full infidels is a moral flaw, the existence of partial infidels is also a moral flaw (though not as bad and it is better if they are under the rule of Islam, and so have submitted to the rule of the laws of God) but, in both cases, the flaw is in the people themselves for failing to acknowledge these revealed truths. The obligation of Muslims is to work towards a future where these flaws no longer exist. (Which means, of course, that apostasy—rejection of either or both of the previously accepted two truths—is treason against the fundamental purpose of Islam, the aim of history itself, and the sovereignty of God, so punishable by death.)

Islam may have incorporated this logic in its fundamental principles, but it did not even come close to inventing the basic structure.

Centuries before Muhammad was born, Christians had developed the same logic against Jews and pagans. Jews were the Chosen People who had produced the Messiah but failed to follow Him. That was a profound failure on their part—indeed, not merely a rejection of God’s purpose, but of their reason for being the Chosen People. Worse, in order to not force Christians to face the embarrassment of—when the Empire became officially Christian—accepting allegiance to, and responsibility for, a Deicide State (given Jesus was killed by Roman soldiers according to a Roman style of execution under the authority of a Roman official), Jews were held to be guilty of killing the Messiah, the Son of God, and thus of Deicide.

Jews were, however, treated better than pagans, for they did at least accept the One God. Jews may have been a repressed and despised morality, but paganism was utterly illegitimate and increasingly treated as such.

Nevertheless, the failure of God’s Chosen People to accept the Messiah they had produced was a profound flaw in the cosmic order, one that was the fault of the Jews themselves. It also provided an explanation for the embarrassing failure of God’s Chosen People to follow the Messiah they had produced: it was their wilful moral perversity in refusing to follow the revealed truth. It was all their fault, a fault they could assuage only by accepting the truth of Christ.

In just the same way that Muslims later claimed that the embarrassing failure of Jews and Christians to follow the Prophet who was the completion of their tradition was all their fault, a fault they could only assuage by accepting the truth of the Prophet being the seal of the Prophets. Indeed, Islam took the principle further than Christians did, since Christians at least acknowledge that the Jews had it basically correct until Christ came along and provided a new Covenant. Islam, by contrast, claims that God’s message has always been the same, the Jews and the Christians just wilfully distorted it. Which made the failure of Jews and Christian to become Muslims all the more egregious.

In both cases, the principle was drawn that it was clearly outrageous to treat those who did accept God’s revealed truth as morally or otherwise equal to do those who did not. Hence the Muslim notion of dhimmis being derived from the Christian treatment of Jews under the Christian Roman Empire.

One can see the structure of the argument clearly. God is the absolutely trumping moral authority against Whom no moral claims can be made; God has purposes revealed in the universe; failure to follow those purposes is a wilful failure which is the fault of those who so fail; it reveals their profoundly flawed moral character; a flaw that can only be assuaged by repenting of their error. In the absence of such repentance, it is outrageous to treat those who conform to God’s purposes as the moral, social or legal equal of those who wilfully fail to do so.

So, the Muslims applied the argument to Christians and Jews, the Christians applied the argument to Jews. Who did the Jews apply the argument to?

The queers. (I.e. those who fail to conform to the strictly binary conception of sex and gender.)
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And everyone hates the queers
The classic version of this structure of reasoning, later adopted by the Christians, was Philo of Alexandria’s marriage of Platonic natural law theory with scriptural Revelation. It was built into the structure of the universe created by God that the purpose of sex was reproduction, that sex was legitimate only between males and females, a purpose confirmed by scriptural Revelation. To have erotic desire for one’s own sex was a profound flaw, a failure to conform to the natural order and binding scriptural injunctions. To act upon such erotic desires was an abomination, a profound betrayal of God’s purposes (as manifested in the natural order and scriptural injunctions). So clearly, the scriptural punishment should be followed and they should be put to death.

To put it another way, God really, really cares about the mechanics of sex so the mechanics of sex is not merely a religious issue, it is a profound moral issue and so should be a legal issue—indeed, a capital crime: as it was for centuries in Latin Christendom and still is in much of the Muslim world.

The connection between this argument and its application to the Jews is not merely some reasonable inference. We can see it operating quite directly in, for example, the preaching of St John Chrysostom, who takes Philo’s reasoning against queers and then applies to the Jews.

So, the pattern is that the Jews apply the reasoning using God to strip a category of person (the queers) of their moral protections on the grounds that it is their fault for failing to adhere to God’s purposes, the Christians then apply the take reasoning and apply it to the Jews themselves (and the queers). The Muslims then take the same reasoning and apply it to the Christians, the Jews, and the queers.

So, the one thing that can unite the Abrahamic religions in Jerusalem itself, is that they all hate the queers: they all claim that God finds their aspirations—and any acting upon those aspirations—hateful. The Jews then apparently do not notice that the Christians and Muslims apply the logic to them, the Christians apparently do not notice that the Muslims apply it to them.

The queers, they’re different.

Actually, no, really, they are not.

The dynamics of vulnerability
Indeed, not only does one get exactly the same accusations being mounted against the queers as against the Jews (they betray God’s purposes, they prey on children, they corrupt any institution they touch, they are engage in conspiracies against the righteous and God-fearing, they are agents of the evil one, to treat them as equals is an insult and a betrayal of basic traditions of society) but, across history, Jew-hatred and queer-hatred display similar intensities in hatred because they share two essential characteristics.

In both cases God—the ultimate trumping authority against whom no claims can be made—is used to justify stripping them of moral protections. And they are a small minority, so very vulnerable: the cost of engaging in hatred of them is low. The combination of vulnerability and that the moral authority being cited is absolute in its authority leads to range of hatred from the casual to the intense.

Both the Jews and the queers fall foul of the dynamics of picking on small and vulnerable minorities. For who, after all, is more vulnerable than people who are a few percentage points of society? This vulnerability is even more intense for those who come into their sexuality and gender identity as isolated individuals in an overwhelmingly heterosexual family and social milieus—Jews are at least raised in Jewish families, and, until the Holocaust, being Jew was never an explicit capital crime.

In both cases, a small and vulnerable minority has to be characterised as profoundly corrupting, otherwise it is just a very large majority monstrously bullying a small and vulnerable minority.

They also both fall foul of the dynamics of monotheism. In the case of the Jews, the dynamics of hijacking a revelatory tradition (particularly given its notion of a single, authoritative view of reality): in the case of the queers, the sexual and gender dynamics of monotheism.

With the One God, sex is not part of the divine except in its creative (i.e. reproductive) aspect. So sex—except as reproduction—does not connect us to the divine, it separates us from the divine. So, the mechanics of sex becomes a Very Big Issue that gender exists to manifest. Hence sex that is explicitly not reproductive, indeed fails to conform to the purpose of having the two genders, does not merely separates us from the divine, it defies the divine. One is “betraying” both one’s sexual nature and one’s gender nature. Hence Zoroastrianism (as a proto-monotheism) also anathematises same-sex activity (indeed, classes it as demonic), despite not sharing any scriptural tradition with the Abrahamic religions.

By defining gender and sex purely in terms of reproductive role, monotheism thus designates categories of people who should not exist (those whose sexual orientation or gender identification does not conform to the notion one’s psyche is properly defined by one’s genitals). Clearly, the defining of gender in terms of reproductive role is false: in particular, same-sex attraction and orientation is part of the human. But a theory with the authority of God is taken to completely trump the mere existence of queers. No human testimony counts against God. Their existence becomes defiance, and thus their fault. Monotheists become possessors of a theory of human nature whose “obvious truth” is much more important that other people’s mere existence, for it is a theory with the authority of God.

As for the dynamics of hijacking a revelatory tradition, both Christians and Muslims claim to represent the completion of the prophetic tradition of the Jews. So, the failure of the Jews to follow along in said completions is embarrassing and only explicable—given the “obvious” truth that they do represent the completion of said tradition—in terms of wilful failure. There is nothing wrong with the Christian or Muslim revelations, only the Jews for not following them.

But, here’s the thing about the wilful-failure-to-adhere-to-absolutely-trumping-moral-authority argument. It is perfectly able to be secularised.

The secularisation of excluding flaws
Jew-hatred and queer-hatred have obviously been directly secularised, with spurious “science” used to justify hatreds derived from religion.

But this notion of wilful failure to conform to the proper structure of reality is, after all, precisely the grounds on which Leninists claim the right to tyrannise, appropriate and kill. The completion of history is the absolutely trumping moral authority against which no human moral claims are permissible. Failure to adhere to the clear truth of the Marxist revelation (sorry, “scientific analysis”) of the underlying dynamics and purpose of history is clearly a wilful failure. Hence …

In particular, the labour theory of value, and its concomitant theory of exploitation, creates classes of economic agents who shouldn’t exist. Now the labour theory of value is false and the theory of exploitation a product of a false theory of value and a conceptual shift game. But that just increases its parallel with the monotheist theories of sex and gender.

And the grounds on which the Nazis operated. The Aryan race is the pinnacle of humanity, there are no moral claims to be made against its profound authority. Anything which frustrates the success of the Aryan race (the achievement of necessary lebensraum, the preservation and intensification of its purity) is a wickedness with no standing. Hence …

Now, it is true that Nazism had categories from which no redemption was possible, while Leninism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism all permitted the possibility of exiting from your grievous failings. But, in practice, that made much less difference than is often claimed for it. It all still justified stripping categories of people of their moral protections up to, and including, mass murder. (In the case of queers, since they are scattered throughout human populations—which makes them particularly vulnerable to profound isolation—the most “mass” the murdering gets is homicidal moral panics, but that is a result of the dynamics of scattering, not some difference in the dynamic of hate: as the concentrating effort of the death camps illustrated.)

Contesting humanity
It is all still about contesting people’s basic humanity and claim that their failure to conform to “proper” humanity is their fault: either for wilfully “betraying” their humanity or being deeply inherently flawed in their humanity—or even not being “really” human in the first place. You can tell where a society is on the bigotry scale by which groups it is acceptable to contest the basic humanity of, and to what degree.

So, in modern Western society, it is no longer acceptable to contest the humanity of blacks, Jews or women: to imply they have betrayed their humanity or are some lesser form of the human. But it is still widely acceptable (though increasingly less so) to contest the “proper” humanity of the queers.

Sometimes this is done explicitly, as in the Vatican’s categorisation of homosexuals as metaphysically flawed (“objectively disordered” due to being oriented to an “intrinsic moral evil”). Sometimes, it does in a way that is only implicit, or even entirely unconscious.

“You are different, why should you be included?” is the argument for maintaining various exclusions. The more contestable the existence as “proper” versions of the human, the weaker the arguments have to be to “satisfy”. If the ordinary humanity of queers was uncontested, the argument would be “we are human, why should we be excluded?” and excluding people on the basis of their sexuality would seem as outrageous as doing in on the basis of religion, skin colour or hair colour.

The claims of queers are discounted because they are taken to be outside some defined notion of how humans are, or “properly” are. The presumption of illegitimacy is so traditional, it is invisible, as is the harm it causes.

For example, the way it is taken as perfectly reasonable to make same-sex acts morally problematic. That this then requires the same-sex attracted and oriented to be at war with their own nature is taken to be beside the point. That is just an unfortunate consequence that they have to deal with (and is their fault for being that way in the first place). Their nature and aspirations are secondary to worrying about the mechanics of sex.

Yet the mechanics of sex is not a moral issue: it is a religious taboo issue, but it is not a moral issue, for it does not violate life or property, it does not interfere in how other people live their lives: so it does not violate people’s moral protections.

Issues of rape, consent, adultery, infection, protection of minors, integrity and so on apply to sexual behaviour generally, but not to same-sex behaviour specifically. Same-sex activity violates certain claims about how people ought to be, but that is a different matter. Same-sex activity is simply part of what it is to be human, given that humans are sexually diverse.

The notion that, for example, government policy can change human sexuality is deeply silly. Government can punish people for being different: that it is very good at. But it cannot change human sexuality. In particular, it cannot change the reality that humans are sexually diverse.

But, if that sexual diversity is taken to be illegitimate, if society is taken to require adherence to a norm of how “real” humans are, then the difference is taken to outweigh being human, because one is not human in the “proper” sense, and so can be excluded.

Hence, letting same-sex oriented people serve openly in the military is taken to be “social engineering” when it is the exclusion that is social engineering: attempting policy that is at war with how people are.

The notion that marriage has to be “defended” from the queers is precisely a notion that they are an improper, illegitimate, corrupting force: on the “outside” of “proper humanity”. But what is being defended are notions of masculinity, femininity and sexuality which are false: for it is precisely because they are false that the contrary cases which prove they do not, in fact, define the human have to be excluded, belittled, de-legitimised.

Same-sex marriage is taken to be an “experiment in human nature”, when it is insistence that law ignore the fact that same-sex couples exist, build lives together and even raise children which is the “experiment”. A longstanding one that has clearly failed: people remain sexually diverse. A failure that imposes all sorts of costs on families: alienating parents from their children, making adolescence for an isolated and vulnerable group much more traumatic than it needs to be, encouraging people to hide from their own sexuality in cover or desperation (or simply forced) marriages. But these are failure and costs that have been traditionally hidden, because the harm to people whose existence is illegitimate is hidden, or massively discounted, harm. That only occurs because of the people who “should not exist” and so is their fault. Just as that this “natural” option of presuming heterosexuality while repressing, denying or excluding same-sex relationships rests on brutal repression of preceding traditions is equally invisible.

When the Hawaiian governor recently vetoed a civil unions bill because it was creating civil unions an equivalent of marriage and therefore should be decided at referendum by the voters of Hawaii, she was explicitly—by the example she cited of opposing views—stating the legitimacy of the notion that heterosexuals should have more rights than homosexuals: that to treat them as equal was offensive. Since this view is taken as legitimate, deciding whether to treat queers as proper versions of the human, thus full citizens, and so entitled to equal protection of the law was contentious, hence the voters at large needed to do it. (Just as, not all that many decades ago, treating Jews as the legal equals of Christians was regarded as outrageous and offensive.)

Taking it that institutions should legitimately acting as if queers do not exist, as if their existence is illegitimate, is the default option, the “natural” option. Operating off a (false) theory of what defines gender and which treats the existence of millions of people who are living proof it is false as a unfortunate reality to be repressed.

What has changed is the ability to repress and discount. The traditional ancien regime used judicial (and private) violence to make sure such burdens remained socially invisible. As that repression recedes, the claims for status as ordinary human beings steadily work to the surface. But that is hardly an unfamiliar pattern. It is also an interactive one. The tradition of exclusion was imposed by brutality, maintained by brutality and is collapsing as the necessary enforcing brutality is being withdrawn.

To put it another way, the previous withdrawal of moral protections is now itself being withdrawn.

The function of morality
We have morality so we can live together. The underlying issue is not how people ought to be (that cannot be established pre-moral judgement), but how people ought to act given how people actually are. Given how people actually are, how should we behave towards each other? Morality exists to provide us with moral protections: constraints on behaviour so we can live together. Stripping people of moral protections attacks the function of morality, since it casts people outside the moral community.

Which, we can presume, is not likely to be done to the powerful, but only the (relatively) powerless, since we particularly want the powerful to be bound by moral protections. (Back to Jews and queers being small minorities.) But it is also what makes the authority of God so perilous: absolutely trumping authority must trample those of mere people, mere mortals. A morality that takes human claims as central—that starts with how people actually are, rather than taking their existence as contestable—that is more likely to be humane, in all senses. It is also more likely to be a morality based on how people actually are, rather than a theory of how they ought to be. Conversely, the absolutely trumping authority of God makes is so much easier to authorise discounting of people as they are, since the authority of God is so trumping.

Since morality is about moral protections, what offense against moral protections does people being homosexual do? Particularly given that sexual orientation is established either at birth or very early in infancy (so we are talking literally about human nature as it actually is)? None, that is specific to same-sex acts. That some people are same-sex attracted and oriented violates certain claims about how people ought to be, but that is a different matter.

What harm does anathematising homosexuality do? A great deal. It alienates parents from their children, makes adolescence much more traumatic than it needs to be, drives people to undertake various destructive actions to hide from, or deny, their own sexuality, creates a miasma of fear and dishonesty. This without even considering the horrific punishments periodically imposed on individuals for engaging in homosexual acts. (How many same-sex acts is one person being burnt alive “worth”?)

There is no “homosexual problem” just as there was no “Jewish problem” or “black problem” or whatever. It is entirely a construct of certain theories about people and society, not how things actually are.

But if your existence is illegitimate then the notion that it is anathematising homosexuality—the denying of moral protections—which is the moral problem is invisible since any problems with flow from an illegitimate existence are “those people’s” problems for existing.

Signalling “virtue”
What anathematising homosexual acts and homosexuality does do is that it signals one’s sense of virtue: that one is one of God’s people, a defender of “decency” against those people. All the things that anathematising Jews did for Christians (or still do for many Muslims). Virtue, identity, status: all in one package and without actually having to give anything up.

It is a potent brew for preachers, clerics and priests to sell. So they do. That organised religion has a tendency to anathematise homosexual acts just proves the same-sex oriented are an easy (i.e. isolated and vulnerable small minority) target for clerics and priests to pick on to act as moral gatekeepers and sell effortless virtue against.

Just as it was easy to do so against the Jews. Hence one gets anti-gay activists selling effortless virtue parading themselves as “heroic” defenders of “moral decency” against the nefarious corruption of the queers, just as there were anti-Jewish activists who sold themselves as exposing and opposing the malevolent conspiracies of the Jews.

With “what God wants” as the ultimate trump card, authorising it all and discounting any human misery caused on the way through. Misery that is the fault of those who have failed to conform to “God’s purposes”, the purposes of the absolutely trumping authority against which no human claims count.

ADDENDA One way to read the second principle of Gospel Christianity—love thy neighbour as thyself—is that it bars using God to deprive people of their moral protections. Hence the utility of Philo of Alexandria's exclusory logic to priests and preachers acting as "gatekeepers of righteousness" in justifying denying people the status of being moral neighbours. It is precisely when the love-thy-neighbour principle is subverted (as has obviously been the case with Jews and queers) that the behaviour of organised Christianity converges with that of Islam—as I noted here—because then the authority of God is not balanced by anything that gives human claims effective standing.