Another Alisdair McIntyre Sighting.

Andrew Hagen, who I have been led to believe is a good old fashioned liberal, was pondering Gay Marriage recently and has come out against it. I find this line of reasoning promising:

Now, however, the gay movement is attempting to take control of marriage, one of the pillars of society, the institution that raises children. Subverting and taking control of one of society's most precious, cherished, and revered institutions is not what a civil rights movement is supposed to do. Taking control of marriage through judicial decisions that run counter to legal, logical reasoning is unhelpful to society. It will open the door to judicially strike down any and all moral decisions made by our state legislatures. It will end society's ability to regulate itself. It will lead down a slippery slope of terrifying consequences that will eventually force the cutting of the tie between marriage and society. Marriage would be informal and short-lived. Divorce would be casual and convenient. True marriage would continue to exist, but only in abbreviated form. More and more would immorality and wickedness become acceptable. We would enter into a moral dystopia, a stage of decadence that only Caligula could love.

We are running off the cliff that Alasdair MacIntyre describes in his book, After Virtue. We are entering a time when morality itself is questioned. At a time when our society faces threats external from terrorists that emanate from the civil war within Islam, our society is turning against itself. The result will be either devastation and a new dark age, or perseverance and a society better able to take on greater, higher challenges. Let us work and sacrifice untiringly for the brighter future, the one where our values and our liberty are preserved. I suppose this marks me as halfways conservative, but at this stage in time I am left with the conclusion that this is a crisis, and we can either protect what we have and improve upon it, or we can lose the freedom and cultural inheritance bequeathed upon us by countless, voiceless generations who only wanted to give us a future with their meager gifts. Unapologetically do I defend this civilization of virtuous freedom. It is by far our most precious gift, and yet no one can see or touch it. Civilization only lives in our minds and hearts, and so for its vulnerability we are bound to either protect it honorably, or betray it and fall into ignominy and disrepute. If only it were readily and immediately apparent to all what was happening. Instead, people only slowly perceive what is coming, and without the advantage of historical knowledge and perspective are further blindered. Education and discussion are the needed solutions.

(emphasis added.)

We may be running off a cliff indeed. The problem, though, is between two approaches to social institutions. One approach places the emphasis on subjective feelings writ large. To such people, at an extreme, the injunction against murder boils down to "I don't like murder and you shouldn't also." (In truth, I'm not making this up. as McIntyre illustrates in the first chapter of After Virtue these folks actually existed.) Under this approach, all we have are feelings disconnected from the world and feelings are inherently equal and equally valid. Like esophagi, everyone's got them.

The alternative, according to McIntyre, is the classic teleological approach whereby we define the virtues of a thing according to its ends and uses. "Thou shalt not murder" because, well, a virtuous man - a man of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance - just doesn't go around murdering people.

McIntyre depicts the conflict as a conflict between Nietzsche and Aristotle. Nietzsche claimed to be an immoralist. His great philosophical contribution was essentially psychological. Man was an animal. Virtues didn't exist. The good life was to be lived by the artist who would define his own values and move beyond good and evil. Aristotle, in contrast, believed that there were virtues. The good life was lived by living the virtuous life. Virtues could be explained as something more than mere emotions.

Ironically, you get the clear impression that American Constitutional law is Nietzschian in the area of the personal life. Consider the the famous "mystery of life" passage which a plurality of the Supreme Court gave us in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992) :

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under the compulsion of the State.

Trust me, after listening to twelve hours of lectures on Nietzsche, the "mystery of life" passage is quintessential Nietzsche. Which makes sense since if you (a) move to an officially atheistic philosophical position and (b) deny that there can be any ordering of virtues sufficiently important for society to favor over another ordering of virtues - that virtues are essentially in the eye of the beholder - you not surprisingly end up at nihilism. And the greatest nihilist was in fact Nietzsche. (You can see the way the deck is stacked in the "mystery of life" passage by its assumptions. An Aristotelian might say that the "heart of liberty" is found in the formation of people who exercise to a greater or lesser extent the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude.)

In a similar fashion, you can see the tension in Andrew Hagen's post. Gay marriage, as he points out, is a personal issue. But it's also a public issue. The fact that it's personal doesn't place it into a nihilistic, value free zone. But in modern America that's a tough argument to make.

Glad to see, though, that "right wing postmodernism" is gaining a hearing on all ends of the political spectrum.