So’s Your Old Man
By STANLEY FISH“Presumably,” Pitts retorted with obvious sarcasm, Barbour “would be equally non-judgmental if his state were to consider similar honors to Osama bin Laden, convicted spy Robert Hanssen or Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.”
Just what is Pitts demanding here? He is demanding that Barbour earn his right to be non-judgmental with respect to Forrest by being willing to extend the same generosity to bin Laden, Hanssen, Harris, Klebold and literally thousands of others. You can withhold judgment in this instance, he is saying, only if you would also withhold judgment in all arguably equivalent instances. What Pitts is urging (implicitly) is not the condemnation of Ku Klux Klan founders, but the principle that condemnation or the withdrawal from condemnation must be evenhanded. You get the right to say something critical of what someone of the opposite party said or did only if you would be similarly critical when members of your own party said or did something similar. And you get the right to refrain from criticizing some only if you will also refrain from criticizing others.
This is a familiar move in political argument (it is related to the tu quoque, or “so’s your old man” move). We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush — he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?
I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair.
Back in the heyday of the culture wars, conference organizers were often faulted if those invited to participate did not represent the full variety of views in the field. Many responded by adding a token something or other to every panel. Again the better move would have been just to say that we’ve gathered here to elaborate what we believe to be the right position, and to require us to give time and space to positions we reject and think worthless is to require us to value process over substance; and we won’t do that.
Of course, valuing process over substance is the essence of liberalism, a form of thought and political organization that begins with a strong sense of the intractability of disputes at the level of belief and proceeds to turn everything it can into a question of procedure: Were all voices heard? Was the decision made on neutral grounds and without taking into considerations matters of race, gender, economic status, ethnicity, etc.? (Sounds good, doesn’t it?) Kant showed the way when he observed that “men have different views on the empirical ends of happiness . . . and their will cannot be brought under any common principle . . . harmonizing with the freedom of everyone.’”
The solution? Remove beliefs from the political agenda — we’re not going to vote on them or distribute goods on their basis — and come up with a formula for keeping them at bay while respecting the rights of citizens to have them. Kant again: “In order to organize a group of rational beings who together require universal laws . . . but of whom each separate individual is inclined to exempt himself from them, the constitution must be designed in such a way that the public conduct of the citizens will be the same as if they did not have such evil attitudes.” And how do you do that? By making it a requirement that laws neither reflect the ideological view point of one party nor marginalize and/or stigmatize the ideological viewpoint of some other party. Only pass laws to which persons of any viewpoint could assent: “No one can put anyone else under a legal obligation without submitting simultaneously to a law which requires that he can himself be put under the same kind of obligation by the other person.” This seems admirable, but what it means is that moral judgment is forever deferred and made subordinate to the supposedly greater good of allowing all viewpoints to flourish. (Why that is the greater good I have never been able to understand.)
If you thus give up the right to win the ideological battle and drive your opponent from the field, you and he can occupy a space of agonistic civility — you have your beliefs (now called opinions) and I have mine — in the marketplace of ideas; you will trade the possibility of total victory for the status of formal equality and you will thus do your part in keeping the marketplace perpetually open, which is, finally, what liberalism wants to do and is all liberalism wants to do. You say the Ku Klux Klan was and is bad, I say it speaks to some genuinely held interests (see “Birth of a Nation”); let’s agree to disagree heartily without declaring either of our views beyond the pale.
Leonard Pitts thinks that the Klan and its views are beyond the pale – “a man who betrayed this country, founded a terrorist group and committed mass murder is a man unworthy of honor” — but he also thinks – this is his mistake — that it is an argument against the honoring of the Klan’s founder that Haley Barbour would probably not give Osama bin laden the same benefit of the doubt he seems willing to give to Forrest. (Of course, Barbour is just playing the familiar game of political equivocation.) To which I say, what does Osama bin Laden have to do with it? Bringing him and the other symbols of wrongdoing in just takes the pressure off the core moral question — was and is the Klan evil — and turns it into a question of formal equivalences. (Are you also willing to be fair to . . . ; the list is endless.)
At bottom, Pitts’s case against honoring Forrest is that he was a bad man dedicated to realizing a bad cause. Just say that, and don’t mess it up (and dilute it) by playing the “gotcha” card, by challenging Barbour to display his liberal bona fides and accord equal treatment to everybody. That’s not what the moral life is about.
