Quick thoughts on "ideologically-neutral procedural virtues"
Watching the reaction to a recent SCOTUS decision
I stole the title phrase from Edward Hamilton… more on that in a moment.
About a month ago I had a post on logical reasoning v. relational reasoning. Essentially I argued that many people on the Left really do not think through issues in a logical way, but rather identify whom they think are the Good People and whom are the Bad People, and then make sure their beliefs are those of the Good People. And then they suffer great mental confusion when they see Muslims, whom they have previously identified as Good People, start protesting LGBT curriculum in schools as if, by golly, they actually believe the principles of Islam or something. But you are Good People, supporting the beliefs of the Bad People! That’s like white supremacy or something! Does not compute!
As you’ve likely heard, about a week ago the Supreme Court finally ruled that no, the state of Colorado cannot compel a website designer to create websites for same-sex “marriages” in violation of her own beliefs. Justice Gorsuch elaborated on the sort of principles at stake here.
Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty. The government could require “an unwilling Muslim movie director to make a film with a Zionist message,” or “an atheist muralist to accept a commission celebrating Evangelical zeal,” so long as they would make films or murals for other members of the public with different messages. Equally, the government could force a male website designer married to another man to design websites for an organization that advocates against same-sex marriage.
Legacy media, it seemed to me, by and large handled this setback by just lying to their readers and viewers about what the case decided, regularly using language about “refusing LGBT customers” as if the web designer here would have also refused to design a website promoting fishing if the guy who wanted the fishing website was homosexual. But there you go.
The Reaction
But I was really struck by the reaction of many on the Left to the ruling, because what you saw over and over again on social media was something like,
“OK Christians, now I’m going to start refusing your business too if I have a problem with it. What do you think about that? Huh? Huh?”
Now what is interesting here, is that the people saying this seemed to really think they had a gotcha here, like “you’d never actually support this principle if it inconvenienced you!”. But of course, nearly everyone reading this is thinking… that’d be fine. You don’t want my business, refuse my business. I would definitely extend to you the same right of refusal I claim for myself.
What is happening here is that folks on the Left are not reasoning from principle, they are reasoning from good people v. bad people… and they think you do the same thing. They seem to recognize that you’re ostensibly putting forth a general principle out there, but they think you’re just running a scam on them. You don’t really believe it because, well, they never really believe it, they cannot comprehend that anyone actually thinks that way. You’re just trying to protect your own and harm the other, just like they act to protect their own and harm the other.
In much shorter form, I wrote the above on Twitter and got a couple of good replies, and I wil end with those.
And finally,
I feel sorry for them. Theirs is a pitiable existence, and their rages speak of terrible suffering—a malady of the soul.
The deepest despair here is how the rapid reversal on civil liberties suggests that they were always an opportunistic weak-side argument all along, incapable of putting down roots. Most of the people writing this stuff -- Franken was born in 1951, he's a Boomer! -- lived through decades of the ACLU defending free speech for the KKK.
The expectation of sufficient pedagogy for the cultural Left should be pretty high here, but *none* of it is surviving after less than a decade under their institutional hegemony. ("Less than a decade" for things like Wall Street and the military, I mean, obviously academia has been dealing with this shocking reveal of illiberalism since at least the 90s!)