I've been thinking lately about a pair of ideas that are very popular, but seem very odd, when in combination: natural law and communitarianism. The impulse to combine these most often arises from a conservative anti-statist mentality. We know, goes this line of thinking, that moral truths are fixed and in no way dependent on the consent of those whom they cover (much less socially constructed). Further, we know that the creeping advancement of the market and the state is hostile to the continuation of civil society and intermediate associations, and that neither the state nor the market may exist without centralization. Therefore, to be anti-state is to be in favor of smaller groups deciding their collective lives together.
However, these two concepts actually war against each other. The natural law restriction on communitarianism is akin to Henry Ford's old line "any color you want, as long as it's black"--a people may design their social institutions in any way they wish, so long as those institutions do not violate any of the immutable laws of human nature (were such a thing even possible). The communitarian pull emphasizes the importance of difference as a vital component of human flourishing.
I believe the problem here is a difficulty in addressing and responding to pluralism. For purposes of this post, I will use pluralism to mean something like "reasonable moral disagreement," as extended into the realms of ethics, law, politics, etc. The combination of universalist-natural law thinking with communitarianism makes it very difficult to accept pluralism to be true. The end result of this difficulty is that 'pluralism' is almost always read as 'relativism.'
Case in point: Rod Dreher writes a long post about the problems of the impulse towards humanitarian intervention. Having written a dissertation on this topic, I feel somewhat qualified to respond. Rod begins with a standard communitarian trope (Michael Walzer uses it frequently), that we should be careful of assuming our humanitarian impulses to be humanitarian, and not covers for expression of some other interest or desire. His example is a strange one:
If you come to this book thinking of the Comanches merely as poor, pitiful victims, it will set you straight. But if you come to this book thinking of the Texan settlers merely as brave, noble souls facing down the bloodthirsty savage, this book will also set you straight. In fact, Gwynne argues that the reason the Texans prevailed over the Comanches while the Spanish did not was because they were prepared to be as tough with the Comanches as the Comanches were with them.
I'm not yet done with the book, but so far, it seems to me that what both "tribes" (it is more helpful, I find, to think of the white settlers as one tribe among others) had going for them was an absolute belief in themselves as a people, and their mission to subdue the land and alien peoples within it. More darkly, they believed that the other was less than human. That whites saw Indians as subhuman is well known. I did not know that Comanches saw anyone outside the Comanche tribe -- whites, and other Indians -- as subhuman. If your enemy is not fully human to your mind, you can easily justify treating him with remorseless cruelty.
And both whites and Comanches did that to each other. The whites prevailed, of course, because they had greater resources, technological and otherwise. But that wasn't always the case. Comanche horsemanship was so spectacular -- Gwynne says they were at one point likely the best light cavalry on the planet -- and their skills at tracking and evading capture in the Plains environment so superior, that they dominated their territory. The Old West story, then, is a narrative of the clash of empires, in which one tribe was overcome by another tribe as tough as they, and eventually more powerful. This is a story you see over and over again in world history, throughout the globe: tribal cultures and civilizations believing unquestionably in their own righteousness, and in the subhumanization of their enemies, conquering others ruthlessly.
My friend David Rieff writes about how believing the lie about one's own intentions can lead to all kinds of trouble, re: intervention in foreign people's affairs. But what I find more troubling is the thought that one might be compelled to believe lies about the manifest destiny of one's own culture, and the humanity of the enemy, in order to survive as a culture. If you were a Comanche in 1850, you didn't have the luxury of being broad-minded and humanitarian towards the white man. He was coming to take your land, which would destroy your civilization. You had to fight; softness meant cultural extinction. So you fought the best way you knew how, which included gang rape of the enemy's women, kidnapping, and gruesome tortures. A broad-minded Comanche was a dead Comanche. (Similarly, if you were an Apache, you couldn't afford to stop to think about what the world must look like from the point of view of a Comanche.) If you were on the Plains as a white settler in 1850, you couldn't afford to be thoughtful and humane about the Indians. That would have been a great way to die. Perhaps your father ought not have moved you and your family out to the territory, but there you were, and you had to fight for your life. The only way you could do what you had to do to survive, and ultimately prevail, was to cast out all doubts about your people and their mission, and to harden yourself against the enemy.
Now, this is a strange argument in a number of ways. But what interests me most about it is how Dreher handles the disagreement between Texans and Comanches over who was on the right side. The fact that each side disagreed renders a universal viewpoint impossible. All that remains, on his account, are Comanches who believe their actions are justified, and Texans who believe the same. Any attempt to get perspective on this disagreement--his 'broad-minded' Comanche--is a recipe to get oneself killed. In a world where complete agreement is rendered impossible, there is no alternative but to accept the view of one's group. In other words, the presence of moral disagreement seems to imply relativism, rather than pluralism.
None of the objections he raises seem all that difficult to rebut. It is possible that, in a war, neither side is morally justified; it is possible to have a moral cause but fight a war in an immoral manner; one may certainly deceive oneself about one's relevant motives, but then, one can also work to make sure that is not occurring. That is to say, though it may well be the case that disagreement exists about the relevant moral principles, it is not an impossible (maybe not even a difficult) task to sort out who is right, and in what degree. Pluralism may make moral disagreements harder to resolve, but it doesn't render them impossible; groups may differ, but that does not mean we have to be non-judgmental about these beliefs.
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