Author’s note: This is Part Three of a series of conversations with J. Budziszewski, a Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture and author most recently of Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy. See Parts One and Two here and here, and my review of the book here.
Questions and Answers
Your academic focus is the ethical basis of politics. If anything is seen as broadly unethical in our day, it’s politics. What do you mean by “ethical basis of politics”?
Without being able to talk about good and evil, or right and wrong, you can’t make any sense of what bad politicians, or immoral or even sociopathic politicians are doing. Sociopaths know that there is a good and an evil, too. They just don’t feel bad when they do wrong.
One law review article said, we know better than to try to bring moral criteria to bear for the evaluation of this law; we will use only utilitarian and pragmatic criteria. Don’t they know that utilitarianism is a moral theory? And that pragmatism is, too? These are theories that say that the greatest good is what brings about the greatest aggregate pleasure, and that the ends justify the means. Of course they are moral theories.
Some say, we’re not going to speak of morality; we’re only going to refer to economic criteria for evaluation. Well, to say that it is good to have wealth, or even to say that it is good to have wealth in measure for your needs, is a moral assertion. You’re saying that absolute destitution, squalor, and starvation are not good. As soon as you’re talking about good and evil, you’re in the domain of morality.
Politics is about trying to make decisions affecting our shared life for the community as a whole. It’s complicated, not only because there are a lot of people involved and they may disagree, but for a variety of other reasons, too. One is that all law, from this point of view, has a moral intention. But it doesn’t follow from that that it is appropriate for the law to try to coerce the individual to his private good. If Congress makes some laws against the adulteration of food, that pertains to the common good. If it says, we’re going to put you in jail for eating too much red meat, that doesn’t pertain to the common good; that’s the private good.
As I write in Pandemic of Lunacy, there are many people who say there’s no such thing as a common good. This fact makes politics more complicated and difficult, and so does the fact that there is a tension between your individual good and the common good. But these facts don’t imply that politics isn’t fundamentally about how we will live. Just as an individual has to say, “How shall I live?” the society acting together has to say, “How shall we live?” Having a republic means making that decision together, instead of just being under the thumb of some king or tyrant who decides it for us.
We Are All Snowflakes Now
Over the course of your teaching, the scope of what falls under politics has expanded dramatically. What has surprised you most about that?
How easily people fall for the idea that the purpose of government is to take care of all of our needs.
Suppose I have a problem. I start thinking, I want some big authority with a club to take care of this. It gets down to the smallest things. We’ve all become snowflakes: “I want the government to shield me from the warmth of the sun that might melt my flake.” For some it’s intolerable just to hear it said that a kid needs a mom and a dad.
That’s really startling. We used to be less fearful of argument. When I was in college, I had friends who were anarchists and socialists and capitalists and libertarians, Jews and Christians and nonbelievers. We would argue about these things forever. But to be insulted because someone doesn’t think the same thing that you do, and to think that you have to be protected from that? Or to burst into tears over it? That’s just bizarre.
It’s like a substitution of the state for God. As we move off our theistic moorings, something else comes in to fill that vacuum.
Yes, I think it’s also connected with God in another way too, an indirect way. Oftentimes young men — young women, too, but this is especially common among young men — if they don’t have a good relationship with their father, it’s very difficult for them to believe in God the Father. And so they want substitute fathers, and that has to do with God, too. They want the government not just to be a substitute God, but to be something like what their father maybe wasn’t but should have been for them. It’s not going to work.
We also have this idea that for every human problem, there’s a human solution. Marx once remarked that man never sets himself any problem except such as he can solve. That is deluded. And it will lead to ages and corridors of blood.
“Status Signaling” Compared with “Virtue Signaling”
On your blog, you have called wokeness “status signaling,” as opposed to “virtue signaling.” What did you mean by that?
My wife and I both enjoy the Dorothy Sayers mysteries. She was writing in another age of England, where men, especially of the upper class, thought that there were things a gentleman didn’t do. It wasn’t that they were wrong. It’s just that they weren’t done: “People like us don’t do that. It would be beneath my dignity as a member of this stratum, this social class, this milieu.”
We have attitudes something like that in this country, too, and wokeness is one of them. I saw a pair of bumper stickers on the right and left side of a back bumper. One said, “Save the laboratory animals,” and the other said, “I’m pro-choice, and I vote.” The driver wanted to save the little bunnies, and not have them hurt, for example, by having cosmetics put in their eyes for testing. But she didn’t want to save the little humans. There wasn’t much penetrating thinking about right and wrong there, but there was a very sharp awareness of what was acceptable in her milieu and of what attitudes would give her approval among people in it: “The people that I associate with would never say it’s wrong to have an abortion, or that it shouldn’t be a woman’s choice. That’s just not done.”
You can see this in Austin, a sort of ideological hothouse populated largely by woke professional classes. They’re all imitating each other and imitating each other’s attitudes. It’s about conformism. It’s much more about that than about conscience.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about intellectual authority in a democracy. By democracy, he didn’t mean political democracy, majority rule. What he meant was social democracy, where we don’t have inherited statuses anymore. We may all have different amounts of wealth, but we don’t have inherited statuses.
Now in an aristocratic order of society, people tended to look for intellectual authorities — for example they looked to the church, the wise man, the feudal lord, the king, or the bishop. But in a democratic order of society, everyone says, “They’re no different from me. I’m as good as you.” Every individual wants to think that he’s deciding everything for himself.
Tocqueville said that, in fact, no one can work everything out for himself. So what happens is that people accept the intellectual authority of the crowd. But they think that they’re not accepting any intellectual authority, because they don’t recognize the crowd as an intellectual authority. Why? Because each person views the crowd as just himself writ large: “That’s just me; we’re all alike.” And so they can deceive themselves into thinking that they’re bold, free thinkers, even though they are utter sheep.
Tocqueville says this makes public opinion unstable. You might suppose that following the intellectual authority of the crowd would lock us into some rock-hard consensus from which we never deviate. But that’s not how it happens. Look at birds. Birds flock not because they think, “I must flock,” but because they’re conformists. A bird sees another bird next to him fluttering, and he wants to flutter that way, too. This causes flocking, which for some species of birds results in swirling, kaleidoscopic movements with joinings and divisions of groups, what the specialists call “murmurations.” Public opinion can be like that — utterly conformist, and yet utterly unstable.
Tocqueville concluded that the need for intellectual authority is inescapable, but the authority of the crowd is a bad one. A democracy is not going to survive unless people have some source — he thought religion — of stable ideas about God, about man, and about our duties to God and to each other.
How to Stay Sane
You have written that the secular university does not insist that there is no God. However, one is expected to act as though, if there is a God, he would be irrelevant. You work in an environment where many, if not all, of the lunacies you dismantle in your book are treated as generally accepted knowledge. What keeps you sane?
I am a Christian. Now, it would be possible to reject all of the delusions and fallacies in the book without being a Christian. But on the other hand, could I reject them and remain sane in a society where everybody believes them? I don’t know if I would be able to remain sane very easily. Or maybe I’d remain sane, but despair. If I didn’t believe in God, if I didn’t believe that ultimately he wins, even if I don’t see his victory in the course of my own life or in the lifespan of my society, if I didn’t see that there is something more important than the culture, like the survival of the souls within it — if my only alternatives were naive optimism and pessimism — then I’d be a pessimist, or worse.
My faith and my partnership with others in faith is what keeps me sane.