The Decent Thing: A Disquisition On The Sine Qua Non Of Public Discourse
by Francis W. Porretto

Your Curmudgeon is a traditionalist who thinks the Judeo-Christian inheritance has made the United States what it is, with a greater degree of efficacy than any other factor except political freedom. The empirical evidence is overwhelming that the social norms of Christendom -- responsibility, continence, sobriety, modesty, and familial privacy -- lead to a far better life, in surroundings of greater cleanliness and security, than any other pattern tried by Man.

Does that mean it would be desirable to enforce those norms by law? No. As George Washington put it in 1796, government is not reason nor eloquence, but force. As Frederic Bastiat put it a half-century later, law is the formal statement of how government's force will be used. Force can only deny and destroy. When used to impose a cultural norm, it tends to destroy that norm, while simultaneously empowering the worst sort of snoops and busybodies to appoint themselves guardians of others' virtue.

A lot of liberals left with the first paragraph. Even to nod approvingly toward the Judeo-Christian tradition will trigger their condemnation. It's so pervasive on the left side of the spectrum to denigrate the Judeo-Christian norms that when a man announces himself as a liberal, one may simply assume he'll get around to casting aspersions on Christianity before the conversation is over. Perhaps not onto Judaism; that's not exactly chic.

A lot of conservatives left with the second paragraph. To recognize virtue and not to try to impose it on others with the force of law strikes most of them as contradictory, incomprehensible, perhaps a revelation of insincerity. If the use of law to promote virtue and prevent vice sounds a bit Saudi Arabian, well, it's in a good cause. If it winds up doing the opposite while simultaneously destroying all privacy and autonomy, well, at least it "sends a message."

Anyone still listening?

Recently, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania kicked off a political dustup by speaking against the proposition that there ought to be a federally recognized right to commit homosexual acts in private. For his remarks, many have pilloried the senator as a homophobe, although from their text it's perfectly clear that he was stating a legal position and not a preference. Still he did imply with his comments that a right -- in political terms, a guarantee of government protection against forcible interference -- to do things the majority would consider shudderingly disgusting was something to be granted or withheld by the State -- and by extension, that all rights, whatever their applicability, descend from grants of government indulgence.

Still more recently, William Bennett, former Secretary of National Drug Policy and author of several books on the virtuous life, has been at the center of a cyclone for his high-stakes gambling. Those who've attacked Bennett have done their best to portray him as a hypocrite, while effacing the facts that Bennett's gambling has been entirely legal, that Bennett has never opined that it should be illegal, and that Bennett's gambling has harmed no one. Yet Bennett himself has been in the front ranks of the coercive moralizers, at least when the subject is drugs -- a subject no more scandalous, for some, than the sort of compulsive gambling to which Bennett is prone.

Running through both these affairs, we can see a red thread: the implicit notion that government ought to be involved in choosing among human vices, permitting some and forbidding others according to shifting consensus about the greater good of that anonymous but ever-present super-entity we call Society.

A third recent controversy deserves mention as well: the "tobacco industry settlement," in which the giant American tobacco firms agreed to pay a truly gargantuan amount of money -- about $250 billion -- to various state governments as recompense for the harm suffered by smokers. That settlement has put those state governments in a most peculiar position. They've acquired a huge stake in the health and profitability of the tobacco companies, since, if those companies fail, the payments to the state governments will cease. So the states now find themselves hoping and praying for the success of the very companies whose behavior and products they condemned, and which they sued for gigantic damages.

If the contradictions haven't driven you insane yet, your Curmudgeon would love to hear from you.

What's missing from all the Sturm Und Drang is any sense of what would be decent, which is to say: what would be appropriate for any person of good quality and good conscience to take onto his own shoulders, and the omission of which would be grounds for private action such as ostracism or a boycott.

The central political question of our time -- indeed, of all time -- was posed by 19th Century social analyst Herbert Spencer: "What is the proper sphere of government?" He wasn't the first to ask, but he was the first to mount a thorough exploration of what government had tried to do, and when and where it had failed....

The rest can be found on Porretto's site, "Palace of Reason." It's well worth your time.