Rebuilding our moral consensus
AEIdeas
Everyone at AEI knows that we were built on the concept of “a competition of ideas.” But that competition also requires something to come first: a clear moral consensus.
Think of an atom. The outer field of electrons is full of chaotic activity. Electrons are rapidly orbiting and moving in a constant buzz. What contains that chaos and gives it structure? The fact that the whole chaotic cloud orbits one central nucleus.
National debates over politics and policy need a shared center of gravity like the atom. The electrons are like specific policy arguments or particular ideas— constantly moving and hard to pin down. From a distance, the swirling debates can look like barely-contained chaos. But it is the nucleus, our shared moral consensus, that lends it all shape and purpose.
Twenty20.
If our public discourse has a shared moral nucleus, then all the second-order arguments that revolve around it have shape and purpose. But if we lack a moral consensus, the entire enterprise becomes unstable and unproductive.
Two core principles can form that kind of consensus in modern American politics:
1. The principle that all Americans—including the most vulnerable and marginalized among us—are dignified human assets to empower and enliven and not mere liabilities to manage.
2. The premise that America has historically been, and must continue to be a force for good in the world.
If politicians, policymakers, leaders, and intellectuals can stay focused on those two principles and remember that they supersede all their downstream disagreements, we can have a robust, good-faith competition of policy ideas without mistaking politics for a holy war of good versus evil.
But if they can’t? Well, that’s what’s largely going on today. The moral consensus is absent—and so the political battles have become ends in themselves.
Note that true moral consensus is very different from the kind of monotonous centrist compromise that some say would heal all our differences. The answer is not for left and right to compromise away their core principles in the name of implementing some least-common-denominator policy agenda. (Those tend to grow government without transforming people’s lives for the better.)
On the contrary, we must continue the fierce, rigorous competition of ideas and theories about how to achieve these objectives. Personally, I am confident that the champions of free enterprise and American strength can triumph in such a competition.
But this debate needs to be constantly infused with both explicit statements and implicit reminders of the two-part moral consensus that binds us all together. National unity and political progress depend on it.
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I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Brooks on his definition of the two policy principles essential to getting the country back on more stable moral and economic ground.
But, pace Mr. Brooks’ own recommendations in The Conservative Heart, I’m not sure a competition of ideas is the first step towards recreating a moral citizenry that respects the importance of a consensus above self-interest.
In The Conservative Heart, Mr. Brooks sets out first some first principles for the pursuit of happiness for self, and for others: Faith, Family, Community and Earned Success through work. It seems to me that the degradation of the first two cultural pillars has helped create the political climate we have today, in which both the left and the right perceive themselves as victims (of bankers or pro-lifers on the left, or bankers and illegal immigrants on the right). Politicians like Clinton and Trump expertly play upon voter fears, and we will see, as Mr. Brooks alludes, whether more taxes on the wealthy or more aliens shipped back to their country of origin improves life for their “victims”.
I think rebuilding moral character in individuals must precede its reemergence in politics, and that must begin where it began a long time ago–in churches and homes, and then into the public square.
If you agree in a free society, it is contradictory to declare what a ‘moral consensus’ must or should be, because whatever consensus a society reaches, like evolution, is spontaneous and non-random… not predetermined.
And like evolution it will constantly mutate depending on how conditions change.
Deciding what the moral consensus ”should’ be, means it is not in fact a consensus but the ideology of one person or a group.
To seek to prevent it changing, restore it or impose it is Fascism.
I don’t think it’s fascism to try and find some underlying principles that we can all agree on – to find some sort of common ground we can work with.
There has to be something to stand on, or we all fall down.
We do in fact share some underlying principles, however Mr. Brooks calls for a “moral consensus”. I would say, we have never enjoyed such a consensus, however, since our founding we have grown further from any such consensus in each succeeding generation. Why? Because we have become both less self-reliant and less religious as time has marched on. Without the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the ever reaching tentacles of the social welfare state morality has become ever so hard to identify. Hence, the term moral relativism. Before we can reach a moral consensus we must first agree as to what is moral. Is abortion moral? Is FORCING one man to pay for another’s health care or retirement moral?
I don’t share Mr. Brooks’ confidence in any of our institutions, church, home or government (least of all government) in leading to a moral consensus. In fact, I would argue each in its own way is opposed to such a consensus.
John B, I agree with you in principle and sentimentBUT! (a big butt). Isn’t also artificial and a mutation of ordinary evolution when the Hollywood culture machine, the American university system, and the overwhelming juggernaut of the MSM is doing their best to Synthetically impose a counter moral conseneus on our national mood/mind/sensibility?
The America these people envision (let alone left-wing politicians) and are actively propagandizing for is a perversion in and of itself. A very powerful one at that.
John Wayne’s America is long gone except in the longing of our hearts.
IMO, The word “asset” should not be applied to a person in the context of this article.
The word implies control or ownership; a slave is the asset of the owner, or an employed worker is the voluntary asset of a business.
The application in this article implies that the people are wards of the state.
Perhaps some are – they voluntarily exchange liberty for security – but some of us are not.
My initial response focused on the same term — asset — though for a somewhat different reason. Defining a person as an “asset” and making “human” a mere modifier betrays, I think, a deeply significant ethical choice about what a person is.
A friend of mine fought in France to clear Germans from towns and villages. One day his unit was ambushed while working their way down a street, and one of his comrades was shot and crying out from a 2nd-floor room across the street. The wounded man’s cries deeply affected my friend, who wanted more than anything, even more than his own life, to go to his comrade and friend. But he was an asset in a fire fight, and it wasn’t for him as a soldier — that is, as an asset in a battle — to decide that he was expendable. He protected himself and contributed to the fight until the German forces were neutralized. His friend died, which may well have happened even if my friend had reached and helped him.
My friend did the right thing, if I understand how an army works, but he had nightmares from the experience the rest of his days on earth, which were many. His fuller humanity, primarily his conscience, was incurably injured.
An asset’s fulfillment is complete and satisfied as a functioning entity in an economy, but a human being is only partly understood as that entity. This is what we’ve long intuitively referred to when speaking of a worker as a cog in a machine. Pretty soon, people can justify sweatshops and child labor, unless there is a controlling moral discipline that takes into account human fullness in more dimensions than the notion of a “human asset,” even a “dignified” one, can provide.
I and many would consider a lab rat a dignified asset, in that it is a living, sensate creature that can experience, among other things, both pleasure and suffering. To characterize a creature as a dignified HUMAN asset doesn’t elevate the creature’s value beyond its utilitarian
contribution. Indeed, in history, including U.S. government history — this is where we usually point at Nazi Germany but needn’t look that far — dignified human assets have been used as lab animals in medical testing.
I’m all for working at what I’m sure would be an always provisional small set of core values for our nation and society, but Mr. Brooks’s first principle would be meaningfully deficient.
It’s too bad our electoral college won’t allow an independent party. If it did, we would have certainly been able to reach a moral consensus long ago.
The writing of Isaiah Berlin – “The Power of Ideas” and Reinhard Bendix – “Embattled Reason”; can add insight to this discussion.
Sounds like the usual empty pieties.
Excellent article!
As always thank you for setting a positive and hopeful tone in what has become a divisive political discourse.
I see you argue for a shared moral consensus on the same page that on the sidebar Jonah Goldberg is highlighted. Jonah, of course, wrote a best seller that literally was entitled “Liberal Fascists.”
Is this consistent with building a shared moral consensus?