Raising the Standard of Moral Clarity

Readers may notice how I occassionally suggest that the United States represents "the good" in the world. I mean this in the sense of the universal concept of good in the universe, of a moral being, either Platonic or Christian, and I'm convinced that America's history bears it out, that we have indeed embodied the notion of the "City on a Hill."

I'm routinely attacked by lefties who say "Are you kidding? This country's going to hell."

I don't have much to say in response, because for all the ups and downs of politics, and for all the injustices that mar our history, no other nation has made as many strides toward providing equality and opportunity for more people in history, and our foreign policy has been the savior of the world for more than a half century. Who're ya gonna call? You know?

In any case, it turns out Susan Neiman's got a new book, Moral Clarity, that puts these things in perspective. In Gary Rosen's review, at the Wall Street Journal, he suggests Neiman's work is "A Reading List For Democrats":

The seemingly endless contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is, among other things, a referendum on that perennial question: What ails the American left? Is the problem a failure to offer clear alternatives to the corporate coziness of the Republicans, or is it a lack of cultural and religious sympathy with the heartland? Is it a matter of substance or style, of insufficiently "progressive" policies or bicoastal swagger? To this stale discussion Susan Neiman brings a new thought: The problem with our liberal elites, she insists, is lame metaphysics – a lack of philosophical nerve. What they need is a bracing dose of the Great Books.

An American philosophy professor who directs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, Ms. Neiman is a subtle and energetic guide to the unjustly maligned Western "canon." But she is not some kind of scold or stodgy traditionalist, wagging a disapproving finger at our fall from a golden age. She is, in fact, a self-conscious woman of the left. She knows that our own debates over political and economic fundamentals have intellectual pedigrees worth learning, even at the cost of long hours spent among the most formidable of dead white European males. Her interest in the Bible and Plato, Hobbes and Burke, Hume and Rousseau springs not from nostalgia or an itch to debunk but from a need to think well in the present.

The task that Ms. Neiman sets for herself in "Moral Clarity" is to rescue today's political left from its own philosophical handicaps. How can it be, she wonders, that "moral clarity" has come to be a catchphrase of conservatives while eliciting the knowing sneers of liberals? Why are irony, detachment and pessimism the favored modes of supposed sophisticates? Why is there such a fear of being "judgmental"? What has made firmly asserted ideals seem naïve if not dangerous?

Ms. Neiman points to many factors in the left's retreat from universal principles. The demise of socialism has played a role, as has despair over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. But the real source, she suggests, is a "conceptual collapse," a self-destructive descent into identity politics, postmodern theory and victimology. Her peers have become paralyzed, she writes, by the view that moral judgments are, ultimately, little more than "a hypocritical attempt to assert arbitrary power over those with whom you disagree."

I can hear the criticism of this thesis now: It's all a bunch of "dead white males," that this is Straussian totalitarianism, or that conservative academics are nothing more than classicist chicken hawks.

What I don't see among hard-left partisans in a grounding in universal values and conceptions of the ultimate good of the cosmos, secular or spirtual.

So, yes, there's a need for more reflection, for a weighing of costs and sacrifices for the purpose of a larger vision of the trajectory of human morality.

I don't think the Democrats embody that drive to deeper reflection.