On Sunday mornings, some people go to church, some go hiking with their family, some go to a protest, and some go to brunch. All of those are equally valid moral choices. I would go so far as to contend that they are equally virtuous as well.
Government exists to ensure a modicum of order, infrastructure, and safety net provision such that individuals can partake in whatever various activities they choose. There is no such thing as a thick ‘common good’ that justifies limiting individuals’ freedom to do as they please so long as they aren’t violating others’ rights, and there is certainly no common good that requires brow-beating people into making particular cultural choices.
Over the last several years, there has been a rise of religious integralism led by people like Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermuele that seeks to use the power of the state to transform society so as to make it reflect a socially conservative vision of ‘the common good.’ They have a vision in their heads of what human flourishing looks like and they think it is totally acceptable to use the state to advance that vision. It is hyperbolic and unfair to call their vision “The Handmaid’s Tale” but their vision is a step in that direction. Whenever and wherever freedom leads people to make choices they don’t approve of, these integralists’ desire is to limit that freedom by whatever means necessary.
Simultaneously, there are has been a rise of avowedly radical leftism that seeks to use either the power of the state or weaponized social pressure to transform society so as to make it reflect a postmodernist critical theory vision of ‘the common good.’ It is hyperbolic and unfair to call their vision “Harrison Bergeron,” but their vision is a step in that direction. Whenever and wherever there is inequality, these leftists’ desire is to use the state or heavy-handed social pressure to eradicate that inequality, at whatever cost to liberty.
What unites the integralists and the critical theory left is that they both hold to the breathtakingly arrogant position that they know what is best and that their vision, if implemented over the objections of individuals and liberal democratic political culture, will yield some quasi-utopian paradise where everyone is free so long as they want to make the “right” choices and everyone is equal insofar as they’ve all been compelled to become carbon-copies of each other. Both of these haughty, zealous visions of a thick common good threaten liberty and each must be firmly stood against. What’s more, if the right becomes driven by the Sohrab Ahmari vision while the left becomes driven by the Angela Davis vision, America cannot help but be at war with itself. It is not just the case that each, if given power, would turn America un-American, it is also the case that the parallel and concomitant growth of those two visions rips the social fabric of America into rival illiberal camps. They feed on each other. They are each so afraid of the other, so angry at the other, that they would rather set fire to the country than give an inch to those they fear and despise.
Validity and Virtue
It is important to note here that there is a difference between validity and virtue. I am not arguing that Christians have to accept the argument that church and hiking are equally virtuous, even if that is what I think. Indeed, given that church attendance is a core tenet of their faith, asking them to do so would be asking them to essentially renounce one of their core beliefs. That is decidely not what I am doing here. Likewise, many progressive activists, even if they are not themselves attending a protest every weekend, do hold fast to the notion that there is something more virtuous about protest than brunch. I am not asking them to abandon that belief either, even if I disagree with it. What I am arguing against is the authoritarian instinct to use either social pressure or government coercion to compel others to participate in actions that one considers particularly virtuous. We do not have to accept that each other’s choices are equally virtuous (though politely minding one’s own business is usually a smart move), but within quite broad bounds, we do need to accept that each other’s choices are equally valid.
The Three Great Psychological Needs
Before we return to the matter of brunch, protest, and church, we must take a brief detour. Psychologically, people generally need three things: independence, belonging, and meaning. Virtually everyone wants some amount of independence; almost no one wants to be told what to do literally all of the time. Virtually everyone wants some amount of belonging; almost no one wants to live like a hermit off-the-grid in the forest. Virtually everyone wants some amount of meaning in their lives; almost no one wants to feel like their life has no impact. What creates a myriad of tensions and trade-offs is that these three different needs often work at cross-purposes. Many actions or choices that increase one of those will decrease one of the others. Something that increases a person’s experienced belonging will often decrease their experienced independence for example.
Moreover, people differ a lot in terms of how much of each they need. I tend to be very high on need for independence, quite low on need for belonging, and in the middle on need for meaning. Some other hypothetical person might be very high in need for meaning, in the middle on need for belonging, and low on need for independence. These differences between people’s psychological needs helps explain why people can find each other so baffling and frustrating at times. To a person with a low need for independence, a person with a high need for independence can come across as selfish while they in turn might view the person with a low need for independence as weirdly docile. To a person with a low need for belonging, people with a high need for belonging can seem oddly obsessed with their status within groups. To a person with a high need for belonging, people with a low need for belonging people can seem socially deficient. To people with a high need for meaning, people with a low need for meaning people can appear adrift and shallow. To people with a low need for meaning, people with a high need for meaning can seem like zealots.
For a lot of people, religion gives them a sense of meaning and belonging. For others, organizing or attending a protest makes them feel that they are doing something worthwhile and that they are part of something that is bigger than themselves. For some people, their group of friends whom they meet for brunch is their tribe. I wish nothing but the best for the churchgoers, the protesters, and the brunch crowds but for my family and I, weekend hikes in the woods are fun, special times together. I know it’s corny but there is deep satisfaction in those hikes.
The Paths to Madness
In America, everyone gets to be their own person and do their own thing. This ‘live and let live’ attitude should be uncontroversial. Sadly, it is not.
There are those who would explode into a paroxysm of outrage at the “privilege” of holding brunch and protest in equal regard. There are others who, with just as much vehemence, would denounce the spiritual emptiness of seeing hiking and church as similarly virtuous moral choices. To each of them, there is a thick common good, a vision of what society ought to look like, and a set of heresies that must be stamped out. It is not enough for them that their choices be treated as valid; what they want is a society that relects their values and their sense of what is virtuous. My suspicion is that both the hyper-woke and the integralists both tend toward very nigh need for belonging and meaning but low need for independence. These totalizing ideologies give their adherents that sense of belonging and meaning that they crave, but they also breed arrogance, intolerance, and radicalism. According to these collectivist zealots, they know what justice is, they know what will lead to human flourishing, and it is up to them to shape a society that compels conformity to their vision.
These extremists on the left and right understand each other quite well and in some respects think about politics in very similar ways. They are both driven by first principles and deeply held values rather than a consequentialist problem-solving approach to politics. They both really like the idea of ‘fighting.’ And they’re both frustrated by, and indeed a little baffled by, bourgeois liberals. The zealots don’t really get liberals, and if they do get us, they see us as spiritually empty because we're not fighting for anything- we just want to go to brunch and we don't want to hit a big pothole on the way there, and we would ideally like for the cost of that brunch to not rise by 7.9 percent in a single year while our wages only go up 2 percent.
There are certainly grains of truth within these more zealous ideologies. It really is the case that there are numerous horrible forms of racial discrimination that need to be addressed. It really is the case that religion can provide some people with comfort and stability. The problem is that the adherents of these ideologies- importantly, this does not include most people who actually go to protests or church- have become so dedicated to evangelizing their values and to making society reflect those values that they adopt aggressive stances.
Exhibit A on this is Adrian Vermuele’s essay “Beyond Originalism” that quite literally calls for Christian authoritarianism. Among other theocratic passages, Vermuele argues that the claim “that each individual may ‘define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever after. So too should the libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology—that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech, that ‘one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,’ and so on—fall under the ax. Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go.”
Read that paragraph again and try to contemplate the totalitarian nature of Vermuele’s political vision. In trying to build a Heaven on Earth, he would gladly make it a Hell for anyone who wants to make choices he disagrees with.
Exhibit B is this photograph, from just a few months after that essay came out, during the protests of summer 2020. It shows a group of protesters, fists in the air, threateningly demanding that random people minding their own business stop what they are doing and start giving the raised fist gesture too or else. It is one thing to protest police brutality. It is quite another to do it as a mob in this hyper-aggressive manner.
This missionary zeal gives these groups the ability to amplify their voices in political discourse well in excess of their numbers. Numerically speaking, the hyper-woke and the religious integralists are both tiny minorities of the overall population and yet…..a lot of people would think twice before openly saying that they see brunch as equal to church and protest, even though on any given Sunday most people do something other than go to church or a protest. Refusing to nod along to these groups’ orthodoxies risks being on the wrong end of a witch hunt and so the cautious thing to do is nod publicly and roll your eyes privately.
Air Cover and Humility
Let’s stop nodding publicly and rolling our eyes privately. The center has to hold. We have to give each other air cover. We have to speak out against political excesses, particularly against the excesses of our own sides. What can help with this is that new alliance between libertarians and progressives.
A libertarian-progressive viewpoint starts from the presumption that different people have different preferences and that it is both arrogant and the first step toward authoritarianism to assume that one’s preferences are the ‘correct’ ones or that you understand someone else’s situation better than they do. People have diverse ideas about what will bring them independence, belonging, and meaning. It is the government’s role not to shape society so as to promote one particular definition of the common good or worse still a thick common good where everyone is presumed to be a member of some societal team first and an individual second. Rather, it is the government’s job to create space for individuals to decide for themselves how they want to pursue happiness. It is not that a libertarian-progressive cares nothing for belonging and meaning, it is that they have the humility to respect others’ choices about what constitutes the good life including whether to go to a protest, church, brunch or the hiking trail on a Sunday morning.
There is such thing as the private sphere, where individuals get to make their own choices unfettered by collectivist notions or by others’ opinions of what is or is not virtuous. Politics is about what government does or does not do to solve tangible problems. It is not about building utopias. Beware those who have too much ‘vision.’ That way lies madness and tyranny.