The Unforgivable Parochialism of New Yorkers

Years ago, during the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, Molly Ivins wrote about the parochialism of New Yorkers who could write, as Noam Chomsky did, "I can't imagine anyone who doesn't support a nuclear freeze."

Molly paused to collapse in hysterical laughter, then noted the preponderance in Texas of vehicles with bumper stickers reading "Nuke 'em Till They Glow."

Her point was that Chomsky and most big-city liberals simply had no idea what life was like surrounded by wingnut freakazoids.

It's even more true today, illustrated most recently in this interview with a New York City historian who thinks we can solve debates over abortion and religion by just talking calmly with the freakazoids.

Obviously, he's never met one.

Christine Smallwood in The Nation:

In October historian Tony Judt gave a lecture at New York University, where he is a professor and director of the Remarque Institute, on the fate of Western social democracy .... Disparaging both extreme left- and right-wing solutions, Judt makes a case for social democracy, advocating a new conversation about our collective responsibilities as citizens, humanists and human beings. --Christine Smallwood

Where is religion in Ill Fares the Land? You remark that "most people" have dispensed with it, but certainly in the United States it hasn't gone anywhere.

One of the things that struck me over the course of the last twenty-five, thirty years, probably because I got very involved in Eastern Europe, was that there was no reason or principle why religion and what I think of as a sort of socially responsible state should be remotely incompatible. What's missing from public conversation and public policy conversation is precisely a sort of moral underpinning, a sense of the moral purposes that bind people together in functional societies. And part of the attraction of someone who otherwise didn't appeal to me in the least--like, say, Pope John Paul II--was how he managed to connect with young people. Whether it was in Eastern Europe or Latin America or wherever, his was the sense of an absolutely, unambiguously, morally noncompromising view about what is right and what is wrong. It seems to me that we need to reintroduce some of that. We need to reintroduce confidently and unashamedly that kind of language into the public realm. And not expel it, so to speak, into church for Sunday. It's not only on Sunday that some things are right and some things are wrong.

In my second marriage I was married to someone who was a very active American feminist and very anti the antiabortionists. I would find myself listening to her angrily say that abortion is a good thing and these people are crazed fascists and so on, and I'd think, This conversation is taking the wrong turn. What you have here are two powerfully held moral positions, incompatible socially, backed by different perspectives. But it's not a question of one of them being immoral and the other being moral. What we need to learn to do is conduct substantive moral conversations as though they were part of public policy, so that abortion is a terrible thing and a necessary thing, and both statements are true. You see what I mean? With decent medical services and proper prophylactic facilities and real contraceptive education and proper support for young people, particularly in poor areas, abortion would not be nearly as big an issue as it is. Then you could learn to think of difficult moral issues as part of social policy rather than just screaming at each other from either side of a moral barrier. Then we could reintroduce what look like religious kinds of conversations into national social policy debates.

I come from a very religious background, and it seems to me that people on the left are so embarrassed about the language of morality that they've ceded the ground to the right.

I totally agree. I think it's a catastrophe for both sides. What it means for the left is that it's got no ethical vocabulary. What it means for the right is that it smugly supposes that it's got a monopoly on values. Both sides are completely wrong. There used to be a tradition of left-wing ethics, Orwellian if you like, or pre-Orwell. I'd like to say parenthetically that I come out of a sort of secular dissenting Jewish background, but one with some of the same thoughts of the old dissenting churches--Christian, Jewish--of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which there was a natural correspondence of social values and ethical criteria. And the divorce between them has been one of the disastrous results of the last half-century. I'd love to contribute to re-forming that link.

Read that again:

With decent medical services and proper prophylactic facilities and real contraceptive education and proper support for young people, particularly in poor areas, abortion would not be nearly as big an issue as it is.

Are you fucking kidding me? What does he think is preventing "decent medical services and proper prophylactic facilities and real contraceptive education and proper support for young people, particularly in poor areas"?

Anti-abortion fanatics, that's what. The single obstacle to providing exactly the services that would prevent abortions is the hysterical opposition of anti-choice repugs and freakazoids to a single penny of tax dollars going toward sex education, contraceptives and other abortion-preventing activities.

That's right, Mr. Historian Who Has Apparently Never Been South of TriBeCa. You can't talk sense to people whose goal is to prevent the talking of sense.

Ditto for this jaw-droppingly naive fantasy:

"I come out of a sort of secular dissenting Jewish background, but one with some of the same thoughts of the old dissenting churches--Christian, Jewish--of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which there was a natural correspondence of social values and ethical criteria. And the divorce between them has been one of the disastrous results of the last half-century. I'd love to contribute to re-forming that link."

And I'd like to take you, Professor Judt, to just one Sunday service in a mainstream Baptist church in Kentucky, where the "social values and ethical criteria" begin and end with forced childbirth and stoning of homosexuals. Go ahead - just try to re-form that link. You won't last 30 seconds.

As for this inexcusable bit of moral equivalency, shame on both Judt and Smallwood:

I come from a very religious background, and it seems to me that people on the left are so embarrassed about the language of morality that they've ceded the ground to the right.

"I totally agree. I think it's a catastrophe for both sides. What it means for the left is that it's got no ethical vocabulary. What it means for the right is that it smugly supposes that it's got a monopoly on values. Both sides are completely wrong."

Name three "people on the left" who are "embarrassed about the language of morality." Name one, other than your two smug selves.

Where I live, the high ground of morality, not to mention its vocabulary, belongs completely and exclusively to us liberal Dirty Fucking Hippies.

The only thing we "cede" to the wingnut freakazoid "right" is the completely bankrupt IMmorality of hate: racism, misogyny, corruption, greed, destruction, warmongering and torture.

Better "historians," please.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....