From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Oct 03 2002 - 12:03:05 MDT
I think this is a good essay by James Hughes, but IMO it overlooks an
important point:
> At some point in the 20th century progressives and civil libertarians
> lost the battle for the family. Not the actual battle, since members
> of America's families enjoy more freedoms and rights than they did 100
> years ago. But we certainly lost the battle over the term "family."
> Today the defenders of "family" are those who would deny the rights of
> marriage to gay couples and the protections of family to gay parents.
It seems to me that it wasn't so much that conservatives took over the
word, but that liberals abandoned it. Liberals did not defend family
values. They did not use the rhetoric of protecting the family.
Part of the reason, I think, is that an important element of the
conservative program was to give more power to families to make decisions
about child rearing and similar issues, and less power to the state (of
course with abortion being a major exception). But liberals have never
been comfortable defending the rights of individuals over the rights
of the collective. Fighting for families often means fighting against
the attempts by the rest of society to control what families can do.
Liberals abandoned the rhetoric of defending the family because it
amounted to opposing socialistic government control, in opposition to
their ideology.
So I disagree to some extent with James' diagnosis of this old problem,
and so I have a different spin on the new problem of who gets to use
the rhetoric of defending human dignity.
I agree in principle that people on all sides of the ideological
barricades can and should support human dignity. The problem is that
in many cases this is going to amount to the same battle, that of the
individual versus the state. Human dignity should mean giving humans
the rights to conduct their lives with dignity *by their own lights*.
It should mean that people are not slaves, are not forced to act in
accordance with some other person's decrees about what is dignified and
what is not.
What I see happening is that this time, it is conservatives who are
starting out on the wrong side of this issue. It is they who are
supporting the state and society, in opposition to supporting the
rights and empowerment of the individual. Conservatives want to set
up commisions to decide what is allowed and disallowed; they want to
look to social conventions and traditions to control what people can
do with their lives. They want to restrict research and to disallow
experimentation with new technologies. They want to use government to
control individuals.
This is the opposite of the situation with the family-values debate,
where conservatives generally supported letting people send their kids
to private school, or to have home schooling, and to choose whether to
vaccinate their children or not.
So liberals have an opportunity here, but to take advantage of it they too
will have to make some reversals in their rhetoric. They can't continue
to speak in collectivist terms if they want to defend human dignity in
opposition to the conservatives. The conservatives have already co-opted
the most widespread collectivist memes, like the bible and traditional
values. If liberals simply stick to their own collectivist ideas of
equality and absence of discrimination, distrust of technology and support
of environmentalism, they're not going to gain any traction on this issue.
Liberals must turn to the older ideas of defending human dignity as a
value in itself. Not to create more equality, not to protect Mother
Earth, but because man is the measure of himself and each man should be
free to develop his potentials to the fullest. It may not be comfortable
rhetoric for liberals, but conservatives have abandoned this memetic
position, and it represent a vacuum which liberals can fill.
I think James is right on the money when he says, "The concept of the
dignity of every person must then mean that we want every individual
to have the freedoms of nobles, rather than the constraints of serfs."
That's exactly the sentiment which can be successful in overcome the
collectivist urges of the conservatives. The question is whether
liberals and "progressives" are willing to adopt this position which
goes back to their classical roots, in opposition to much of modern-day
socialist-flavored liberalism.
Hal
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