What Do We Have That's Good?

About 1/3 of the way through the film Apollo 13 Ed Harris, playing the role of Mission Control Flight Director Gene Kranz, advises his staff on how best to help the Apollo astronauts currently stranded in space and with only a very small chance of making it home. He says they need to work the problem, not make things worse with guesses, and then think in terms of "status." Then he asks, "what do we have on the spacecraft that's good?"

I thought of that scene as I read NS Lyons's remarks from the recent NatCon event held in Brussels. There are elements of the speech we can and should commend, particularly the way Lyons calls his audience to adopt a constructive, positive posture toward social decay and to be the solution to many of the vexing problems afflicting our society today. Yet there are enough dissonant notes that one rather doubts the effect of the speech on its listeners will be nearly so constructive as some sections of it might lead us to hope.

The primary section I stumbled over while reading was this,

As has been so amply demonstrated by the police outside our very doors, dispatched to shut down this conference, for conservatives and other dissidents this state of affairs means escalating exclusion and persecution. The reality is that any “liberal neutrality” or “rule of law” once maintained by the state no longer exists – such restraint was an artifact of the old order.

To review: Local authorities in Brussels sought to shut down the conference. That is what Lyons is referencing when he refers to police outside the doors. But then what happened next was lawyers got involved, other governing authorities got involved, and the rather overbearing (to put it kindly) local government was overruled. The event went on as planned. So the mere fact that Lyons was able to stand on that stage and say that the rule of law maintained by a liberal state no longer exists is proof that the rule of law maintained by a liberal state actually does still exist. If it did not, he would never have made it onto the stage because the event would have been canceled.

This, I think, is what Stout has in mind when he says that if modernity really were as bad as critics like Lyons (and I myself in the past) suggest, those critics would not be able to address it in the way they do. They either wouldn't be able to see it themselves due to the extremity of the decay or they would not have the freedom to speak about it, again due to the extremity of the decay. That they can name certain failures in the liberal order and that they do have the freedom to name those failures publicly in quite severe and stinging ways is itself proof that the liberal order is working, to some degree.

I had a similar thought when I saw this tweet from my friend Michael Lynch commenting on the supposed failure of "constitutional limits":

Have constitutional limits been working lately, he asks. The only answer to the question can be "clearly yes." Were they not, the manufacturing of new rights that Lynch laments and mandating of their social recognition would be far more pervasive than they are. I well remember in the aftermath of Obergefell  when it was actually quite plausible that Christian institutions would face severe legal penalties for affirming orthodox views regarding sexuality. I wrote about it for us and so did Samuel James.

What has happened in the years since, however, is that this iteration of the Supreme Court has proven itself to be a staunch defender of religious liberty, effectively creating via SCOTUS rulings a kind of Fairness for All compromise on LGBT+ issues and religious liberty that treats sexual identity as a protected class and carves out a mile-wide ministerial exemption for people of faith. It's not my preferred outcome to all this, but of the plausible scenarios that were in play in 2016 many were far far worse than what we actually got—and the reason we got a relatively positive outcome is precisely because constitutional norms around religious liberty have held.

But I think we need to press the point further: It is undeniably true that there is much in our politics today that are not working as they should. Largely due to our media environment, congress has ceased to function as a legislative body with all its members choosing instead to engage in endless campaigning without ever really getting around to governing. The presidential race this fall will be contested by candidates old enough to remember the fall of Constantinople. Our voters, meanwhile, are similarly addled by the media environment that vexes our members of congress, but whereas our congress members are seeking to use that media environment to lift up themselves, our citizens are themselves being used by the media to enrich executives and tech overlords. One of the many deleterious downstream consequences of that tech formation is that our citizens have become isolated, suspicious, and angry, all characteristics highly corrosive of the virtues needed in democratic life. There is much to despair of in our politics.

What is striking, however, is that amidst all this decline and decay, it is actually our constitutional norms that have proven the most robust, as already described. That, in turn, suggests something else: The way back will not be through a "theocratic Caesar" or through revolutionary politics more generally. To take that route is to destroy the one thing that is working relatively well at the moment. What is needed, rather, is a way to push congress, the presidency, and American citizens themselves back toward the virtues and practices of healthy democratic life. That can sound rather vague and abstract, but there are relatively simple things we might do in keeping with such an agenda.

Democratic life at bottom is marked by a community of "reason givers," of people who give reasons and make claims to one another about the shape of their life together. This presupposes, of course, that all involved parties will actually listen to one another's reason giving and engage with it intelligently and carefully. What keeps us from doing that? Well, one answer is our media environment. If you want congress to again become a deliberative body that passes laws, one thing you could do is dramatically scale back the influence of media within the deliberative process. Begin by banning cameras from the chambers where debate takes place. Allow debate to be debate instead of theatrical performances to empty chambers intended only for the cameras that will beam the irrelevant pandering speeches to the voters back home. This move alone would radically remake our legislative bodies, ultimately wresting back control of our life together from media organizations and the politicians who would rather chase fame and fortune through a life of endless campaigning.

There are many other things we might do as well which would reenforce our liberal norms and further serve to restore and repair the fabric of American civic life. A renewed attentiveness to civics education in our schools would be a welcome development, for example, as would the spread of phone-free spaces in schools, churches, and so on. These are all small, simple changes that are within our power. They would have a measurably good effect on civic life. And none of them require fantasizing about theocratic Caesars (who, given America's political makeup, would inevitably get replaced by progresive Caesars anyway).

To be sure, there are ways in which our liberal norms are practiced imperfectly and are vulnerable. But we will not solve the broader public problems now facing us by lying about their relative health, gracelessly ignoring their lingering force even when they have a direct and positive affect on our lives, as in the case of Lyons back in Brussels, or adopting strategies for civic engagement outside of the rule of law which terminate only on questions of power and friends and enemies.