civility

David French and Sohrab Ahmari: What Are We Debating?

Sohrab Ahmari has set off a bitter debate, but it’s not at all clear what that debate is supposed to be about.

Classical liberalism?

Civility?

President Trump?

The collected works of David French?

So far, it seems to be about all of those things put in a blender — which is not a recipe for maintaining useful distinctions. I’ll try to separate some of the discrete issues.

First, about liberalism: Often when people are arguing about it they are using different definitions of it. I don’t know that French believes that government has to aspire to strict neutrality about rival conceptions of the good life, or that it must abjure the promotion of virtue as a goal. I don’t know, either, that Ahmari denies that human dignity requires governments to refrain from coercing people to adopt particular religious beliefs or practices. So, again, I’m not sure what the argument is about.

Second, about civility, politeness, and so forth: Ahmari portrays French as begging liberals to respect conservatives’ freedom of conscience; French portrays himself as insisting that they do. While I think French’s description better matches his career history, the disagreement itself suggests that there is no necessary connection between classical liberalism and the political timidity Ahmari opposes.

Third, about French: His response to Ahmari makes a strong case (so far unrebutted) that his views have been misrepresented. On Twitter, Ahmari commented that he salutes French’s military service and legal advocacy; his argument, he suggests, is with a destructive form of liberalism. So is it Ahmari’s view that French embraces this form of liberalism as an intellectual matter, in what he has written, but has not lived down to his bad principles in practice? But then we hit the problem that Ahmari has not identified the false ideas in French’s work. (Ahmari more or less tells us that he’s not going to be concerned with specifying and refuting particular tenets, since he’s writing in opposition to a “sensibility.”)

Finally, there’s Trump — on whom every conversation in America, apparently, must ultimately focus. Over the last year and a half Ahmari has become much more supportive of Trump than he used to be, and he is criticizing French from this new position. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind after added reflection, and Ahmari has done it before on larger matters, as he describes in his recent memoir. But I think there are two oddities in Ahmari’s case that could stand still more reflection.

I cannot count the number of times that social conservatives have justified support for Trump by reference to the weakened state of their movement. Because the law and the culture have become increasingly hostile to religious traditionalism and traditionalists, they say, they were impelled to defend a deeply flawed man who would at least serve as a defense. If you’re a social conservative who’s unhappy about defensiveness and neutral principles such as religious liberty, you ought to be pushing back on this large strand of pro-Trumpist social conservatism. (As French has.) And if this pro-Trump sentiment is right, it suggests that a social conservatism that demands more than freedom for its adherents will fail.

The difference between French and Ahmari with respect to Trump is also elusive. It’s clear that French is more critical of the president than Ahmari is these days. Ahmari suggests that there is something rotten about French’s welcoming some developments that have occurred under, through, and thanks to Trump while maintaining this stance toward the president. But Ahmari still regularly offers his own criticisms of the president. So what amount or degree of criticism is acceptable before crossing the line? Surely the answer cannot be that all conservatives have to be exactly where Ahmari is on Trump at any given moment.

We should all be willing to listen to one another — if that is not too civil and naïve a thing to say — especially given our many shared convictions. I’m not “against Sohrab Ahmari-ism.” But I wish I had a better sense of what it is.

Cruz: GOP may block Supreme Court nominees indefinitely

In a vintage return to his confrontational style, Sen. Ted Cruz indicated that Republicans could seek to block a Democratic president from filling the vacant Supreme Court seat indefinitely.

After staking his endorsement of Donald Trump on a list of potential conservative Supreme Court nominees, Cruz said on Wednesday that there is precedent to limiting the Supreme Court to just eight justices. Last week, Cruz’s colleague, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), suggested the GOP should confirm President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, to avoid having to swallow a more liberal nominee under Hillary Clinton.

As is his nature, Cruz took a harder line when asked how Republicans would handle a potential Clinton nominee while campaigning in Colorado for Darryl Glenn, a longshot candidate for the Senate.

“There will be plenty of time for debate on that issue … There is certainly long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices. I would note, just recently, that Justice [Stephen] Breyer observed that the vacancy is not impacting the ability of the court to do its job. That’s a debate that we are going to have,” Cruz said, in remarks first reported by The Washington Post.

Cruz was unlikely to vote for any Democratic nominee given his conservative ideology, but his remarks could indicate a broader shift within the GOP to halt Democrats from shifting the court’s balance to the left. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said earlier this month the GOP would be “united” in blocking a Clinton appointment, remarks he later softened.

An indefinite GOP blockade of a Supreme Court nominee would almost certainly lead to an erosion in the Senate’s supermajority requirement. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has already suggested lowering the bar for Supreme Court nominee from 60 votes to a simple majority. Under Reid, Democrats changed the Senate rules to allow all nominees but Supreme Court appointments to be approved by a majority vote.

“We need to treat it like the constitutional crisis it will be if Democrats don’t take back the Senate majority,” Reid said on Wednesday night in an email to members of the liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “The Supreme Court could dwindle to 7, then maybe 6, Justices. It would turn our Justice system and our democracy on its head. The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves.”

Republicans have blocked from even holding hearings on the Garland nomination for more than seven months, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said the Senate will not confirm Garland in the post-election lame duck. In his last availablity on Capitol Hill before the election, McConnell refused to entertain the possibility that the Senate may be forced to entertain a more liberal judge next year, though there may be enough centrist Republicans and those deferential to presidential prerogative to confirm a justice like Garland.

Later Wednesday, Justice Clarence Thomas lamented that the broken confirmation process was a sign of larger problems. Speaking to The Heritage Foundation to mark 25 years on the Supreme Court, Thomas did not cite the Garland blockade but noted a decline in civil behavior.

“We have decided,” he said according to The Associated Press, “that rather than confront disagreements, we’ll just simply annihilate the person who disagrees with me. I don’t think that’s going to work in a republic, in a civil society.”

The Grounding Virtues of The On Being Project

Engaging others in a deeper way begins with inner work — grounding virtues before ground rules.

What we practice, we become. These six “grounding virtues” guide everything we do through The On Being Project. Virtues are not the stuff of saints and heroes. They are spiritual technologies and tools for the art of living. Click here to download a printout.

Words That Matter

We are starved for fresh language to approach each other. We need what Elizabeth Alexander calls “words that shimmer” — words with power that convey real truth, which cannot be captured in mere fact. Words have the force of action and become virtues in and of themselves. The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. Words are one of our primary ways to reach across the mystery of each other. As technology reframes the meaning of basic human acts like making and leading and belonging, the world needs the most vivid and transformative universe of words we can muster.

Generous Listening

Listening is an everyday art and virtue, but it’s an art we have lost and must learn anew. Listening is more than being quiet while others have their say. It is about presence as much as receiving; it is about connection more than observing. Real listening is powered by curiosity. It involves vulnerability — a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. It is never in “gotcha”mode. The generous listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own most generous words and questions.

Adventurous Civility

The adventure of civility for our time can’t be a mere matter of politeness or niceness. Adventurous civility honors the difficulty of what we face and the complexity of what it means to be human. It doesn’t celebrate diversity by putting it up on a pedestal and ignoring its messiness and its depths. The intimate and civilizational questions that perplex and divide us will not be resolved quickly. Civility, in our world of change, is about creating new possibilities for living forward while being different and even continuing to hold profound disagreement.

Humility

Humility is a companion to curiosity, surprise, and delight. Spiritual humility is not about getting small. It is about encouraging others to be big. It is not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone with a readiness to be surprised and delighted. This is the humility of the child. It is the humility in the spirituality of the scientist and the mystic — to be planted in what you know, while living expectantly for discoveries yet to come. The wisest people we’ve interviewed carry a humility that manifests as tenderness in a creative interplay with power.

Patience

Like humility, patience is not to be mistaken for meekness and ineffectuality. It can be the fruit of a full-on reckoning with reality — a commitment to move through the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. A spiritual view of time is a long view of time — seasonal and cyclical, resistant to the illusion of time as a bully, time as a matter of deadlines. Human transformation takes time — longer than we want it to — but it is what is necessary for social transformation. A long, patient view of time will replenish our sense of our capacities and our hope for the world.

Hospitality

Hospitality is a bridge to all the great virtues, but it is immediately accessible. You don’t have to love or forgive or feel compassion to extend hospitality. But it’s more than an invitation. It is the creation of an inviting, trustworthy space — an atmosphere as much as a place. It shapes the experience to follow. It creates the intention, the spirit, and the boundaries for what is possible. As creatures, it seems, we imagine a homogeneity in other groups that we know not to be there in our own. But new social realities are brought into being over time by a quality of relationship between unlikely combinations of people. When in doubt, practice hospitality.

To Deal With Trump, Look to Voltaire

Advice from the Enlightenment: In the face of crude bullying and humorless lies, try wit and a passion for justice.

We are living through a climate change in politics. Bigotry, bullying, mendacity, vulgarity — everything emitted by the tweets of President Trump and amplified by his followers has damaged the atmosphere of public life. The protective layer of civility, which makes political discourse possible, is disappearing like the ozone around Earth.

How can we restore a healthy climate? There is no easy answer, but some historic figures offer edifying examples. The one I propose may seem unlikely, but he transformed the climate of opinion in his era: Voltaire, the French philosopher who mobilized the power of Enlightenment principles in 18th-century Europe.

.. To those encountering him for the first time, Voltaire can look like a historical curiosity. His archaic wig and libertine wit seem to belong to a forgotten corner of the past. Moreover, he can be considered a conservative. He curried favor with the high and mighty, especially Louis XV. He was so deeply committed to the cultural system developed under France’s previous ruler, Louis XIV, that he would fail any test of political correctness today. And Voltaire opposed education for the masses because, he said, someone had to tend the fields.

.. So, forget the wig. But reconsider the wit. Nothing works better than ridicule in cutting bigots down to size. “I have never made but one prayer to God,” Voltaire wrote, “a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The first of the two most powerful weapons in his arsenal was laughter: “We must get the laughter on our side,” he instructed his auxiliary troops in the salons of Paris.

.. Ridicule works outside salons. We in America have Stephen Colbert on television. We had H.L. Mencken in the newspapers and Mark Twain in books. Yet wit can sound elitist, and Voltaire cultivated the elite, especially in his youth, when he celebrated wealth, pleasure and the good things of life. His poem “Le Mondain,” written in 1736, is an apology for worldly luxury — “the superfluous, a very necessary thing,” he wrote, in opposition to Christian asceticism.

That was Voltaire the young libertine. But now, in our contemporary crisis, I propose that we look also to Voltaire the angry old man. It was in his old age, during the 1760s and 1770s, that he wielded his second and most powerful weapon, moral passion.

In 1762 Voltaire learned about a case of judicial murder. The Parlement (high court) of Toulouse had condemned a Protestant merchant, Jean Calas, to be tortured and executed for supposedly killing his son, who supposedly had intended to convert to Catholicism. Not only were the suppositions wrong, but strong evidence pointed to Calas’s innocence.

To Voltaire, the case represented far more than a miscarriage of justice. It epitomized atrocities that had been inflicted on Protestants for two centuries. They had been slaughtered, driven out of the country, forced to convert to Catholicism and deprived of civil rights, including the rights to marry and inherit property within the law. Beyond the persecution of Protestants, Voltaire saw intolerance in general, and beyond intolerance, barbarism.

Voltaire seized his pen. He composed the “Treatise on Tolerance,” one of the greatest defenses of religious liberty and civil rights ever written. He also wrote letters, hundreds of them, to all his contacts in the power elite — ministers, courtiers, salon leaders and fellow philosophers, working from the top down and manipulating the media of his day so skillfully that he created a tidal wave of public opinion, which would ultimately lead to the recognition of rights for Protestants in 1787, nine years after he died.

Voltaire ended many of those letters with a rallying cry, “Écrasez l’infâme” — “Crush the vile thing.” For him, the meaning of “l’infâme” could be extended from intolerance to superstition and injustices of all kinds. The opposing notion of tolerance shaded off into broader values, including civility — the virtue that we need so much today and that Voltaire identified with civilization. Voltaire saw the triumph of civilization over barbarity as the ultimate good inscribed in the historical process. He made the message clear in his most ambitious work, “Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations”— “Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations” — a survey of world history that he first published in 1756 and revised and expanded until his death in 1778.

What more can we aspire to in the age of Trump? The opposition to bigotry and the defense of civil rights once again call for a commitment to the cause of civilization. They require moral passion seasoned with wit.