The Unwritten Constitution: Why Roe Matters

 

I was at my wife's grandmother's place in New York when I saw a news flash on my phone that Roe vs. Wade had been overturned. Even as I had been expecting this result ever since the opinion leak, this still came as a shock to me. Throughout my life, Roe was one of those facts about American political life. Yes, Republicans dreamed of getting rid of Roe, but there was no way it could actually happen. As someone who has moved around a fair bit along the choice vs. life spectrum over the course of my lifetime, I have long found the passions aroused by abortion to be mysterious. Consider the no longer hypothetical situation we are in now with the end of Roe, what has actually changed about abortion law in America now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe? In truth, almost nothing. Here in California, abortion is as legal as it ever was. For those women living in states that are now banning abortion, what has changed for them is that they might have to spend a few hours on a Greyhound bus. Getting rid of Roe is not going to stop anyone from having an abortion so why did liberals and conservatives spend nearly fifty years fighting over Roe?

The key to understanding the importance of Roe lies in thinking of it in terms of an "unwritten constitution." No one ever interprets a text without a set of assumptions that serve as interpretive lenses for how to read the text. Conservatives are certainly correct in pointing out that, unlike the right to guns which the Court just protected, the Constitution never says anything about a right to abortion. That being said, this does not necessarily mean that it should be easier to buy a gun than to get an abortion. It all depends on what sort of unwritten constitution you believe in. If one does not approach the Second Amendment with the assumption that gun ownership is essential to citizenship in a free society then the right to bear arms becomes nothing more than a quaint text that should not be allowed to get in the way of public safety. From there it is easy to say that the Second Amendment only refers to members of militias carrying Eighteenth-century-style muskets. 

On the flip side, if you assume that the purpose of the Constitution is to allow people to pursue their own happiness in defiance of established sexual mores, then it does not matter if the Constitution never actually says this, this is what the Constitution really is. (Note that the Constitution says nothing about a right to pursue happiness. That is in the Declaration of Independence.) 

As strange as it may sound, it is the unwritten constitution that carries the greater authority. You can argue with a written text and attempt to limit it in all sorts of creative ways. The unwritten constitution is meant to be so thoroughly embedded in the thinking of society that it should be impossible for members to think in any other way. In fact, what is not written can serve as bait to draw out the heretic into revealing that they do not share the fundamental assumptions of the rest of society. For example, do you believe that the First Amendment establishes a "Separation Between Church and State?" If you said yes, you are factually incorrect. The Constitution says no such thing. As with the pursuit of happiness, that was Thomas Jefferson, who was not even part of the Constitutional Convention. If you are of a liberal disposition, this fact should not matter. On the contrary, the conservative who points this out has simply demonstrated that fail to appreciate the "soul" of the Constitution, i.e., they do not accept the unwritten liberal constitution. 

The battle over Roe was never really about abortion but the unwritten sexual revolution constitution that, following in the footsteps of Griswold, it furthered. In essence, the Court was saying that it was an essential right for young women pursuing college and a career to be able to have pre-marital sex without having to worry that, if something were to go wrong, they might have to choose between marrying the father or becoming single mothers. If you are committed to building a society where there is no stigma attached to women pursuing careers and having pre-marital sex then it is going to be necessary to remove the stigma attached to abortion by not just making it legal but enshrining it as a constitutional right in a similar sense as being able to stand outside the White House waving signs.  

When I last visited DC, I made a point of taking my son to see the wide variety of people protesting. It did not matter that I personally disagreed with many of these people. I accept that all of them, even the "smelly weirdos," were doing something positive. It is essential for me that we live in a country where it should be thought of as perfectly normal and uncontroversial to stand outside the White House and say bad things about the president. Note that if you were to tell me that none of this is in the Constitution, which only says that people can assemble to seek redress but not to insult politicians, you would be correct but you would also be demonstrating that there is a larger "soul" to the Constitution that you do not comprehend. 

Being able to publicly say bad things about elected officials (as opposed to strongly implying that you would not be particularly bothered if they were murdered) is part of my unwritten constitution. The idea that the secular state must be backed by a broadly religious society with strong families and a conservative sexual morality is also part of my unwritten constitution. By contrast, the sexual revolution is not part of my unwritten constitution.        

An easy way to see the role of the sexual revolution constitution in Griswold and then Roe is to consider what should be an obvious question. If people have the right to make decisions with their own bodies and in consultation with their own doctors, why is there no constitutional right for drug use or to sell their organs? To accuse people on the left of hypocrisy is, in a sense, to miss the point. There is no deep narrative entrenched within the mainstream left where drug use and organ selling become essential to who people are and to take their place as citizens. By contrast, birth control and abortion have this larger narrative that is more important than any technical legal arguments, which only serve to justify the sexual revolution constitution after the fact. 

Similarly, one can point to the claim of protecting women's rights. The Constitution does not offer special protection for women. The sexual revolution constitution, by contrast, does. In the narrative of the sexual revolution, women are a group oppressed by traditional sexual mores. In order for the Constitution to remain legitimate, it must be read in terms of the sexual revolution. Anyone who argues that the Constitution has no category of women's rights may be factually correct but they have also demonstrated that they are not embedded within the assumptions of the sexual revolution. 

It should be noted that it is possible to want abortion to be legal to a large degree without wanting it to be a constitutional right. I would consider myself to be within this camp. There are lots of things that I want to be legal but not to be expressed directly as constitutional rights. For example, I want adultery to be legal and oppose any attempt by the government to punish infidelity. Similarly, I want marijuana and even heroin to be legal. That being said, I do not wish for them to be declared constitutional rights. To do so would be to accept an unwritten constitution where extra-marital sex and drug use are accepted as positive actions in the same sense as peaceful protesting. 

I am fine with the Supreme Court saying that the federal government has no authority over what people do with their bodies as long as they are not causing physical harm to others. The right of people to pursue their own good in their own way as long as they are not causing physical harm to others is part of my unwritten constitution. This will lead to the de facto legalization of adultery and drug use. Once this has been accomplished, we can discuss whether this constitutional right to bodily autonomy includes abortion or whether fetuses, in some sense, count as living beings with a right to not be murdered.      

Certainly, in the short run, I do not expect the number of abortions nationally to drop. The importance of the Dobbs decision is that it takes away the moral high ground from the left. They no longer have the grounds to claim that abortion is a constitutional right. That being said, I do not expect leftists to back down and soften their rhetoric. On the contrary, we should expect an all-out attack on conservatives for daring to not accept the constitution of the sexual revolution and upon the legitimacy of the Supreme Court for acknowledging that there can be another framework for reading constitutional law. With the overturning of Roe, the stakes have been raised over the sexual revolution constitution. Either we must accept that a group of Gileadists has conspired to take over the Supreme Court and destroy the Constitution in order to enslave women into marriage and motherhood or that the Supreme Court was taken over in the mid-20th century by leftists who rewrote the Constitution in order to enshrine the sexual revolution and that this unwritten constitution has now been rejected. Either way, I expect that there will be little room to make the practical good-faith compromises that might create a workable legal framework for abortion

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In Support of Actual Nation-States: A Response to Yoram Hazony's Virtue of Nationalism

In the previous post, I spoke about my leaving conservatism for libertarianism and even anarcho-capitalism while recognizing that, in certain subtle ways, I remain tied to aspects of conservative thought. Yoram Hazony is a thinker well-positioned to challenge my turn against conservatism as he is the kind of conservative that I am still attracted to. He comes from the classically liberal Burkean tradition. He is remarkably nuanced and avoids the obvious anti-left polemics that dominate conservatism today. This comes from him having actual conservative beliefs as opposed to simply hating the left. Finally, Hazony is a serious Jewish thinker committed to making Jewish tradition relevant to the Western political discourse.

I would like to, therefore, take this opportunity to respond to Hazony's most recent book, The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony's goal is to defend nationalism, as embodied in the nation-state, as an essential component of the classical liberal tradition. This is opposed to the nationalism equals racism view that has come to dominate the post World War II West. For Hazony, nation-states are the only alternatives to the extremes of tribalism, which cannot recognize individual rights and empires based around universal ideals that are compelled to eliminate all opponents. Like a good Burkean, Hazony opposes attempts to build political systems out of pure theory. Instead, states need to arise from the ground up based on the experiences and traditions of the particular group in question. I agree with Hazony's basic argument. I would simply apply it in a very different manner. For example, I fail to see how the United States as a whole could be considered a nation-state any more than the European Union. The United States should be considered a universalizing empire. Therefore, in the name of the nation-state, I call for the United States to be split up into culturally unified sections that could plausibly claim nation-state status.

What is a meaningful nation? I would say that it is the largest group which so encompasses one's identity that self-sacrifice becomes not only possible but even expected. Take the family, for example. Imagine that some billionaire tried to bribe me to walk out on my wife and kids so he could move in and take my place. I would turn him down despite the fact that everyone would be better off if I agreed. The reason for this is that my identity is so wrapped up with my family that to take that away would effectively make me a different person to the extent that I might as well kill myself.

Let us widen this sense of identity to a religion/ethnicity like Judaism. Any close study of the history of Jewish martyrdom reveals that many of the best-known examples, such as the Crusades, violated Jewish Law. (No, Judaism does not allow you to murder your children and burn the synagogue down around you in order to avoid falling into the hands of Christians.) So, historically, people have been willing to die for Judaism less because they were particularly religious but because Judaism was fundamental to their identity to the extent that apostasy effectively became a form of suicide.

Now, in a post-Holocaust world, it is unlikely that Judaism, either as a secular culture or as a religion, can survive the combined threats of genocidal anti-Semitism and the modern demand for assimilation without the State of Israel. This makes Israel a functional nation-State. Jews across the religious spectrum and whether they actually live in Israel or the diaspora, recognize an obligation to sacrifice for the sake of Israel for without it there can be no more Judaism. (Note that I am defending Israel's right to exist and engage in self-defense. This is not a blank check to deny Palestinians the right to create their own nation-state.)

How about the United States? Imagine if someone offered you a well-paying job if you abandoned your American citizenship and became a Canadian. How much of your identity is wrapped up in being an American (or whatever country you are a citizen of) to make such an abandonment the equivalent of suicide? I think that people on both the left and right really do identify with a country, red and blue America respectively. Republicans and Democrats see their voters as the "real Americans" and the other side as people who happen to live in the United States, who, unfortunately, enjoy the legal privileges of citizenship. This leads to both sides pretending to be patriotic while simply hoping that one day that other America will disappear, resolving the conflict.

As I have mentioned previously, unity has a tendency to turn into an intellectual trap where what is really meant is that everyone should agree to do things my way. Unity is only meaningful when it becomes an end in itself to the extent that we are willing to do things the other person's way. Supporting a unified America means that it is so important to you that America remains a united country that you are willing to surrender to whatever major political party (Republican or Democrat) that you hate more and give them complete control. By this standard, there are few genuine Americans.

A step in the right direction would be to simply divide the country into several regional countries. Let us admit that Americans in the Mid-West, the West Coast, the South, and New England do not obviously have more in common with each other than with people in Canada or Mexico. It is unreasonable to expect New Englanders to lay down their lives to protect the South's version of America but I expect them to be willing to die for New England. Divide the country and almost all of our political, social and cultural conflicts would be solved. California would have abortion and gay marriage and Mississippi would not. People would be free to be perfectly apathetic about politics because there would be no threat that a few thousand votes would send their country in a direction they would find that objectionable. I encourage readers to take a look at Colin Woodard's American Nations, which tells over the story of American history as if the United States were a collection of different countries making alliances and in competition with each other. If we really are a collection of different nation-states, then why not make it official and stop pretending that the United States is anything other than an attempted universal empire.

Defending the nation-state is often used as a reason to tighten borders and restrict immigration. Breaking the United States down into regional nation-states should actually make them more friendly to immigrants. For starters, it would be in the interest of all the new states to attract like-minded individuals from the rest of the former United States as this would allow for more self-consciously ideological states. So, for example, the South should want to attract religious conservatives from the newly independent California, who fear that they will be forced to bake gay wedding cakes. This will allow the South to grant smaller pockets of territory to those Southern liberals who cannot be bribed into leaving for California a state of their own. From there, it is only a small step for the South to want to market itself as the place of refuge for Christian conservatives from around the world. Since Christianity would be written into the Constitution of this new state as the official religion (hopefully with some degree of tolerance for non-Christians), only people comfortable pledging loyalty to such a state would want to come so there would be no threat of immigrants hostile to local values. On the contrary, immigrants could be embraced as the true embodiment of the nation, people who were already such Southerners that they felt compelled to move to the South. Such a state of affairs could further be strengthened by eliminating the welfare state. If there are few government-funded social services then no immigrant is going to want to come in order to take advantage of them.

This is in contrast to our present situation where Republicans and Democrats have different values, want different countries, and, therefore, desire different sets of immigrants. They both also desire to use the welfare state to support their particular tribes. Hence both immigration and welfare become weapons in the unnamed civil war ruining our political discourse.

To understand Hazony's blind spot for existing states, it may be useful to look at another set of eighteenth-century thinkers, besides Burke, that loom behind him, the authors of the Federalist Papers. For Alexander Hamilton and company, the chief alternative to the Constitution they had to argue against was dividing the new United States up into individual states or perhaps three regional groups. Their main argument against this position was that each faction would be trapped into pursuing its own particular interest as opposed to the general welfare of the country. The problem with this argument is that if there is no general consensus that could be agreed upon by separate countries then there can be no agreed-upon common good whatsoever.

In practice, the common good of the Federalist Papers was simply taking the welfare of Hamilton's New York Federalist bankers as the pretended welfare of the country. It turned out that Jefferson and his Republican farmers could be equally disingenuous. Despite his objections to federal power, once he became president, Jefferson was perfectly willing to engage in the Louisiana Purchase despite his lack of constitutional authority to do so. Furthermore, the Louisiana Purchase was not to the benefit of the entire country as it was detrimental to Federalist business interests, turning the American economy away from the Atlantic coast and trade with Europe. In the end, trying to maintain a unified country has meant that the United States has been racked by sectional differences, even leading to the Civil War.

Hazony supports the nation-state as an alternative to petty tribes and universal empires. The problem is that he fails to offer clear distinctions between the three. How big does a tribe have to become in order to be a nation-state and how much does ideology have to mix with culture for the nation-state to become an empire, particularly as in the case of both Judaism and the United States, ideology and culture are hopelessly intertwined? Hazony tries to paint the United States as an English Protestant nation that managed to assimilate a variety of other cultures. I fail to see America as a unified nation-state. It is simply too big and diverse. By contrast, I see Israel as the model nation-state as it offers something specific, a Jewish homeland, that cannot be matched by any other country. By contrast, what can the United States give me that Canada cannot? Hence, it makes sense for Jews to die for Israel in ways that it does not make sense for Americans to die for the United States. The solution is for the United States should be divided into parts that are culturally unified enough that everyone could get behind one particular vision that is worth sacrificing one's personal interests.

In Support of Public Schools Teaching Intelligent Design and Other Nonsense II

Baruch Pelta has responded to my earlier post. I think it is important to note that he is unwilling to openly come out and support the legitimacy of public schools; essentially he is "agnostic" in regards to this issue. He does raise two arguments. One, allowing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design would violate the separation of Church and State. Two, it is possible to make a distinction between religion and other ideas as demonstrated by the fact that we have a separation of Church and State. Finally, Baruch asks that I define what I mean by "liberty."

If we are going to have public schools, I do not object to these schools teaching children, as a historical fact, that Jesus is their Savior as long as this directive does not come from the government itself and no public funds are specifically earmarked for this purpose. The reason for this is rooted in how, as a libertarian, I understand the role of government. Government only has a legitimate interest in protecting people from direct physical harm. A teacher, even one working in a government funded school, standing up and trying to convince students to accept Jesus causes no physical harm. Therefore it is of no interest to the government. (If the teacher were to hand out bonus points to those who accepted Jesus then that would be a different matter.) The fact that non-Christian students might be uncomfortable in such a situation and feel left out is irrelevant. This is what it means to live in a free society. You open yourself up to every manner of non-physical torment and you must learn to live with that and accept that the government cannot in any way be used to help you in this matter.

As to the issue of Church and State, it is important to keep in mind that it is not a legitimate legal concept, but a letter from Thomas Jefferson wrongfully brought into play in the twentieth century. Regardless of that matter, I understand the Constitution's establishment clause to apply to all ideas. Outside of a belief in the legitimacy of the legal system itself, the government has no businesses declaring any idea to be true or false. This goes for Jesus dying for the sins of the world, evolution and the Holocaust. I am even willing to go so far as to argue against tolerance education. The government may tell white supremacists that they need to follow the law and not murder blacks and Jews, but the government has no business telling these people that they should support a multicultural society as something positive.

As to the definition of liberty and how it might apply to children; I understand liberty as the ability to pursue your own good in your own way as long as you do not cause direct physical harm to others. As J. S. Mill pointed out, this concept does not apply to children as they are deemed as lacking the mental capacity to engage in the give and take of ideas. Children are placed under the control of guardians who therefore also take up the liberty that the child would have exercised if it were an adult. The only limit on this is that the guardian cannot cause direct physical harm to the child. That would bring the attention of the government which would have the right to step in and remove the child and place it in an environment where it would be less likely to suffer direct physical harm. (Think of the libertarian government as a deadly trip-wire alarm system. As long as no one is being physically harmed, the government is silent to the extent that you should not even realize that it is there. The moment that someone steps on the wire and causes direct physical harm to someone else, all of a sudden the government springs into existence and takes out the offender, with physical violence if necessary.) Part of the social contract we sign is that we allow people to come to harm through their ideas. This includes their children, whom they have the right to raise according to these ideas. If someone thinks that sweatshops or even brothels are good places for a child to receive an education then so be it.

This might sound funny coming from an Asperger, but I see Baruch as suffering from a lack of a theory of mind. (See Neurotypical Mental and Emotional Handicaps.) This goes back to our original discussion about parents raising their children. At a physiological level, Baruch simply does not get that there are other people out there who believe differently from him and are equally convinced of their beliefs as he is. Baruch thinks that it is so obvious that he is right that if he repeats his arguments or has the government step in and support him as being right, those other people will eventually come to their senses; Christians, Haredim, and white supremacists will suddenly realize that they are superstitious intolerant bigots, apologize to Baruch for being such naughty children and go home. Of course when those people follow this same line of thinking and try to use government to support their ideas against Baruch then that is them being intolerant and trying to impose their values. In the real world there are true and false beliefs (gravity being a good example) and those beliefs have consequences. In the politics of a free society there is no true and false. There are just people's opinions and a system designed so that these differing opinions do not turn into people killing each other over them.

On a final note, let me give a shout out to Baruch Spinoza, a fellow opponent of public schools, who has joined in on the debate.

When Lesbian Nazis in Bell-Bottoms Attack: The Historical Debate Over Morals

I would like to continue discussing the role of theism in morality. Earlier I argued that theism is necessary for morality not because people cannot be moral without God, but because the very act of making statements about morality requires distinctively theistic assumptions about the nature of the universe. When I say that slavery is wrong, I distinctively need to be saying something more than I "personally" believe that slavery is in "bad taste." In order for there even to be a conversation I need to be arguing that there is some sort of universal law, recognized even by slavers, that opposes slavery.


When I posed this argument to James Maxey on his blog he responded:

Today, many cultures regard killing and theft as bad stuff, but if you were a Viking or a Hun or a vandal, it was your day job. Rape is an especially heinous crime today, but the Roman Empire had a foundational myth that boasted of stealing women from neighboring lands and raping them. Slavery is way up at the top of the no-no list, but we revere men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who bought and sold slaves. We hold in such moral esteem that we put their faces on our money. Today, ethnic cleansing is regarded as a war crime, but see how far the Cherokee get if they start arguing we should give back Georgia and North Carolina, taken from them by force in well-documented history, by men who have statues erected to them in our nation's capital. If morality is composed of universal principles, did we just get lucky in stumbling onto them in the last fifty years or so? Had all men who existed before now been abject failures in the eyes of the universal moral authority? Or do morals change as people change?
 Personally, I welcome the idea that human morals are constantly being changed by humans, for humans. For the most part, it looks like our ability to change our moral attitudes has resulted in a kinder, fairer world for blacks, women, children, not to mention you and me, than the world we would live in if some moral authority had fixed what was right and what was wrong at some point in the distant past.


Before I continue I would like to thank James for treating me in a respectable fashion during our various back and forths. He is also an extremely talented novelist and I urge readers to check out his Dragon Age books. Beyond the issue of morality, as a historian, I find James' statement to be objectionable. He brings up the issue of slavery in the United States. His narrative of how slavery ended is that values simply changed. What this ignores is the debate that went on in American culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where abolitionists challenged the rest of society as to how they could tolerate slavery when slavery contradicted the principle of "all men are created equal," a principle that even ardent slave owners claimed to believe in. Remember, it was Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, who put these words into the Declaration of Independence as a founding principle of government. It is certainly possible to justify slavery while still maintaining some form of "all men are created equal," but it requires an extensive background in classical political theory and risks rendering the entire premise meaningless. Supporters of slavery were put on the defensive, both in terms of what they had to say to society and to their own children, and, over the slow course of decades and centuries, they lost this debate. They lost the debate over slavery and eventually they even lost the debate over segregation. This debate relied upon the assumption that there are core moral truths, without which there could have been no debate. The distinctively religious nature of this debate was not a coincidence. 


There are practical implications as to these differing models as to how we come to our moral beliefs. As with fashion, popular morality is subject to change. Those who attempt to fight the shift in fashions are no different than those who expect society to respect the absolute validity of their holy books. The religious fundamentalist who believes that women should dress a certain way because his holy books say so is going to be in trouble when he comes against people who reject either his interpretation of his books or reject their authority completely. James and I can only grin when this person tries to get his daughter to dress in a certain way by beating her over the head with his book as she, in turn, rejects that book and proceeds to pursue alternative modes of dress, such as bell-bottoms, and even alternative lifestyles. This scenario ceases to be funny, though, when our daughters, in addition to deciding that women and bell bottoms are hot, read Mein Kampf, watch Triumph of the Will, decide that these Aryan values speak to them and want to become lesbian Nazis in bell-bottoms. What is James going to tell his daughter; that he personally is a liberal, but he recognizes that values change and that he will respect her lifestyle choices no matter what, even if it means becoming a bell-bottom-wearing lesbian Nazi? I will be able to tell my daughter that before she comes in to lecture me about my moral duty to accept her no matter her lifestyle choices, she has to accept the concept of universal morality and explain how her Aryan supremacy beliefs are consistent with this universal morality. Do that and I'll throw in the bell-bottoms and lesbian parts. Fail to do that and I will throw her out of my house, disown her as my daughter and, if the situation calls for it, put a bullet in her head.  

I do not question whether individual atheists, like James, can be moral. I do have my doubts, though, as to the plausibility of creating a society of moral atheists and for atheists to pass on their morality to their own children. I know that I have no control over the changes in fashion and sexual mores (maybe bell-bottoms will come back in fashion). I cannot even hope to have a discussion about fashion, let alone win it. I do hope, though, to be able to talk to my children about moral values and there is even a chance that they might listen so that even if they make different lifestyle choices from mine they will frame those choices in the same universal laws that I strive to live in accordance to.

Neurotypical Mental and Emotional Handicaps (Part III)

(Part I, II)


Neurotypicals do not think of human beings as isolated minds. They operate on an Aristotelian "man is a political animal" model. Of course, even to talk about models, when dealing with neurotypicals is misleading because their method of thinking is a rejection of precisely the sort of abstract universal rule creation necessary for models. Neurotypicals tend to only think of human beings in terms of their interrelationship with others and the society building that results from this. This method of thinking emphasizes, not abstract rules, but arbitrary codes of behavior that serve to further the desired relationship. The neurotypical does not ask whether an action is in keeping with universal ethical imperatives, but whether it is good manners, whether, given one's place in a given social structure, it is acceptable to do something to someone else who in turn occupies their place in the social structure.

It should be obvious from this that, one, the neurotypical mind sets itself up for hierarchal non-democratic social structures. There is no reason for a neurotypical to reject hierarchy particularly as he strives to gain a favorable position in it. If one wonders as to the slow progress of democratic reform it can be placed on neurotypicals. It is the Asperger mental universe that insists that the world be governed by universal rational law applied equally to everyone as much as possible. All beings capable of a certain baseline of rational thought (including neurotypicals who reject their mental heritage) are welcome to this society as equals. Equality is inherent in that one is either capable of a baseline of reason or one is not. People like Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith were most likely Aspergers; whether or not they were in fact, their thinking was distinctively Asperger. Even today, most people struggle with the notion that political rights only exist in so far as man is a creature of reason, capable of contemplating universal laws and thus coming to form rules for all to live by. Modern liberalism is an attempt to force the concept of rights into a neurotypical social thought structure. Rights are said to belong to groups and defend social relations. For example, we now have the concept of gay rights and that they have some sort of right to have their social interaction of getting married recognized by the government and society. (Not that I object to gay marriage in of itself.)

The other thing that should be clear is that the neurotypical mindset is incapable of a "theory of mind." In the neurotypical mental universe, there is no such thing as individual minds. All minds exist in relationship with other minds. I have lived my life with the realization that other minds are not like mine. If I have one thing it is a theory of mind. With no hope of understanding other minds, I place my faith in reason as the only thing that can allow for the meeting of minds necessary to build a society. Neurotypicals, living in a world where people, at least on the surface, have similar minds, are not confronted with the life experiences to tell them otherwise and have no reason to form a theory of mind in the first place. Confident in the belief that everyone else is fundamentally like them they hoist their emotions on other people. These similar emotions are the product not so much of the similarity of minds, but the relationship network that passes on otherwise arbitrary sets of rules and expectations.

I would like to end with a word about emotions. Why should I not strive to be sensitive to other people's emotions? To an extent obviously, I do make an effort. To do otherwise would be social suicide. What I refuse to do is grant moral legitimacy to emotions. One has no right to consider emotional hurt as a legitimate wrong or to counter with physical actions that could not otherwise be justified. I grant that this is an extreme position, but to say otherwise would set me up for blackmail. I am outside the relational thought structure of neurotypicals and do not understand the emotions that come from it. To say that I have to take such things into account means that I have to live my life jumping at the shadows of things I do not understand and being forced to accept whatever value other people put on their own emotions. To make things worse, since my emotions run on such a different track, as they are outside of a relational thought structure, I can never expect other people to take them into account. Thus, I would find myself enslaved to other people's emotional concerns at the same time as everyone else becomes exempt from taking my emotional concerns into account. I would de facto be relegating myself to a subhuman station; my emotional concerns being of less value than that of others. Either my emotions count the same as everyone else's or no one's emotions count. Since the former is not practical, the only ethical solution is to say that no person's emotional concerns are of any value outside of their own head.

The only thing that can create meaningful relationships between people and ultimately create a just society is reason as we submit ourselves to universal laws that apply to all people in all times. This is not Asperger supremacy. On the contrary, the authority of reason comes from the fact that it is universally accessible. This includes neurotypicals. Neurotypicals, despite their mental defects, are not beyond the saving grace of reason and are welcome to join the society of reasonable and rational beings.

Insanity at the Texas School Board

Last month I posted on the Texas school board and its attempt to turn history textbooks into conservative Christian propaganda tools. There is more on this popping into the news. It is somewhat heartening to see that the insanity is not just from the right. The Democrats on the board, all minorities, wanted to insist that Tejanos killed at the Alamo be listed by name. They also wanted to insist that hip-hop in addition to rock and roll be listed as an important cultural achievement. To be clear I do not support history being taught exclusively as a laundry list of dead white males. When talking about the Alamo (in of itself more important as a cultural symbol than as a historical event) it is worthwhile to point out that not everyone inside was a WASP. That does not mean that we should be memorizing names. There are more important names from nineteenth-century American history to memorize. A parallel example would be the case of Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre. Yes, he was a black man and he was killed. I would certainly encourage teachers doing the Boston Massacre to bring up Attucks and ask students to consider what having a black man listed among the dead tells us about Boston society of 1770. Should Attucks be a name that students should make the effort to memorize? No.

Of course, since this board has a 10-5 Republican majority, the important insanity to consider comes from them. The board has felt the need to remove Thomas Jefferson from the question: "Explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present." The question now reads: "Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Sir William Blackstone." First off, I should acknowledge that I was not familiar with Blackstone and had to look him up. He was an eighteenth-century English legal scholar. Let us acknowledge the purpose of this change. The board wants students to understand the religious element in the rise of modernity. I certainly support this, but what the board is doing is making the entire question meaningless.

The question, around which I teach modern history, both Jewish and general European, is how our secular society came about. Granted this very question is not as simple as most people assume; medieval society was not nearly as religious as popularly portrayed and modern society is not nearly as secular. That being said, once we get through defining what we mean by religious and secular, we are still faced with how we moved from the more religious society of the Middle Ages to our more secular society. As readers of this blog already know, this story is certainly much more complex and interesting than people all of a sudden becoming "rational" and rejecting "religious" superstition. While it is important to talk about the religious motivations of thinkers like John Locke, we should not be side-stepping modern secularism. Like him or hate him, Jefferson stands at the center of this modern divide, particularly within the American context. He wrote the Declaration of Independence and coined the term "wall separating Church and State."

Sticking Thomas Aquinas into this negates the entire question of modernity. Yes, Thomas Aquinas was an important medieval political thinker, in addition to his theology, and his work continues to be relevant. That being said, if you are going to understand this modern world of ours, one of the first things you have to acknowledge is that there is a giant wall called the American and French Revolutions separating us from the Middle Ages. I would add that there is a second wall of the early modern Reformation. John Calvin is one more thing that separates us from Aquinas; he is also, though, separated from us by the same Enlightenment revolutions that separate us from the Middle Ages. As such, while deserving of his own question about the role of theocracy and democracy, he should not be part of the modern political thinkers.

Again I challenge readers; either you are in favor of ideological government boards or you are in favor of the teaching of history. The only way that history or any other subject can hope to be taught in a responsible manner is if government is out of education.