Pay Attention, People

So, Eugene Volokh writes a brief navel-gazing meditation on the right wing's use of the phrase "moral relativists" to vilify liberals, and suddenly the more intellectual liberal blogs go into a tizzy of philosophical discussion on the meaning of "moral relativism", and why exactly that phrase doesn't really apply to liberals, or, for that matter to anyone, but we really should talk for some time about the contextual elements of morality and liberal values, and maybe have a public debate about it, and... and.. and... Aaaargh! Stop it! Just stop it!

You know what the right wing response would be to a charge like that (if the liberals in this country could get their act together to levy such a charge consistently)?

"What-ever. Now back to why all liberals hate America."

That's because they know the tag "moral relativists" doesn't really mean anything except to the target audience (who are their base and culturally susceptible swing voters), and they certainly don't care what it "really" means.

And what does it mean to that base? "Moral Relativist" means "Someone without any moral foundation. Someone you can't trust. Someone who doesn't have any sense of right. Someone who thinks them terrorists are just the same as our good American boys in uniform." None of that is true, but movement conservatives don't care whether or not it's true. It has the air of "common sensibility" about it that lines up with all of the other things that the right wing says about liberals.

So, listen up, liberal people. When the right wing says "Libruls are X", don't worry about how "X" ties to reality or some identifiable ideology or belief set you may share. It doesn't freaking matter. And for the love of Larry, don't waste precious cycles going around in circles in public trying to figure out what it really means.

It turns you into that wimp who spends hours obsessing about what some bully really meant by that name they called you, and whether you can change so that name no longer applies. That makes the bully important, and weakens you. And there's nothing that you can do that will prevent the bully from calling you names. Name calling is what bullies do. Figure out a way to shed one name, and they'll find another one for you.

There is plenty for liberals to learn from right-wing names for liberals: what right-wingers are trying to communicate, the belief system the right-wingers are trying to construct, what right-wingers are most worried about, where right-wingers are vulnerable. But there is absolutely nothing to learn about reality or your beliefs from that rhetoric. Nothing.

Comments

[clare]

Amen!

Enough already! I LOVE people who love and appreciate thought and language. But - your finely-tuned intellect is not of use in these situations. So what if the rhetoric is bullshit?- they aren't speaking to your finer self anyhow.
Fight fire with (smarter)fire! not critical analysis.

(Weren't any of you ever younger brothers or sisters?)

[Gareth]

I don't know, Paperweight. The election is important. John Kerry would be very foolish to make a speech saying he is a metaethical expressivist, but not a normative non-cognitivist. So far, I'm with you.

But this election is close (rather than the blowout for Kerry it would be in every other democracy on Planet Earth) for reasons. One of the reasons is that America's public culture is anti-intellectual and hyper-nationalistic, a bit like soccer coverage in other OECD nations. Another reason is that there are a whole lot of people who think that morality is morality because God said so, and he said so in the Bible (literally). And yet a third reason is that America's political left is intellectually confused, with much of it committed to a lazy identity-based relativism and little of it interested in hard-headed social democracy.

The question of how you generate a public morality without relying on divine revelation or inherited tradition is at the heart of liberalism. It's an important one to work out.

[paperwight]

I agree completely about the importance of generating a consensus of public morality, and do not wish in any way to disparage the project. It is, however, folly of the highest order to take the destructive rhetoric of the movement conservatives as the starting point for any portion of that constructive project. Nothing good can come of that.

[Chris]

That's what I said! ;)

Nice post. Someday, liberal intellectuals will learn that reasoned arguments never convince conservatives (or most liberals) anyway.

[Joseph Marshall]

"But there is absolutely nothing to learn about reality or your beliefs from that rhetoric. Nothing."

Balls.

Since you're a "curmugeon", I'm sure you'll appreciate my frankness.

Since you're young you'll have plenty of time to learn that even your ideological "enemies" have human shape and deserve human doubt.

Since you demand fundamental fairness and honesty from yourself, once you have learned that, it will be perfectly clear to you that you learn as much or more about yourself from listening to your adversaries and thinking about what they have to say, as you do from combatting them.

The knife gets sharpest when it is rubbed against the hardest stone.