A Tale of Two Moralities
It was the most judgmental of times, it was the most permissive of times; it was the most virtuous of times, it was the vilest of times; it was the age of God, it was age of Satan. These Dickens mimics doing anything for you?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 13, 2011
On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations,
What does that even mean?
to listen to each other more carefully,
No, listening to each other has nothing to do with either morality or imagination…
to sharpen our instincts for empathy,
Well empathy is certainly moral, but there’s nothing really imaginative about being empathetic.
and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”
That’s a little bit imaginative, I suppose, but hopes and dreams are empty vessels—they have no morality unto themselves.
Those were beautiful words;
No, that was nonsensical feel-goodery. Morality is positive. Imagination is positive. Moral imagination must also be positive. No, jackass, it is complete gibberish.
On second thought, I may be too generous. If I were to read into it and actually assign a meaning to President Obama’s phraseology, I would argue that a “moral imagination” necessitates expanding our definitions of morality in creative and atypical ways to understand each others’ justifications for actions that would otherwise be immoral. For example, we should not pass judgment on a clearly troubled young man when he turns sociopathic and engages in a violent rampage against women and children. Instead, we should seek to understand his motivations, feel his pain, and seek to remedy the social woes that exacerbated his inner strife. After all, the forces that warped his soul to commit these acts warps our soul as well. If we empathize honestly enough, could you say for certain that you, given his position, would not have been driven to the same madness?
So which is it, Obama (or Krugman, for that matter)? Nonsense, or a moral equivalency for mass-murder?
they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.
Those desirous of reconciliation don’t boo the political opponents at a memorial service for murder victims.
But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are.
No arguments here. The American right is the champion of liberty, and the left is the standard-bearer for the failed model of European socialism and an ever-expanding government.
For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best;
Which is convenient, from a guy urging that massive government intervention is the best way to spur on businesses, that income redistribution allocates resources most efficiently, and that spending is the only determinant of economic growth. Of course, everything from history to common sense tells us that businesses are stimulated by minimal government oversight, that the market allocates resources most efficiently, and that production is the most important factor in economic growth.
If your ideas were so bitterly wrong, you’d want to make the argument moral instead of pragmatic too.
it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs
Except the left has shown time and time again that the only thing that it believes in is moral relativism.
over what constitutes justice.
…He’s just now figuring out that our differences are philosophical?
And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences —
We mitigate and resolve those differences every night around the dinner table when we talk to our families, when we engage the news, when we listen to talk radio, at work and at home, every day we resolve these differences by forging ideologies for ourselves.
something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
Of course he’s talking about limiting speech. How else would you describe “keep[ing] expression…within bounds?” Is flag-burning “within bounds?” Who sets the bounds for expression? If the First Amendment wasn’t designed to stand against idiotic impulses like this, what was it designed for?
What are the differences I’m talking about?
You just upended the First Amendment. I’m more concerned about why any writer would advocate limitations on speech than your allegations of social malady.
One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy,
Except when the government decides that it’s not.
but one in which society’s winners are taxed
By which you mean punished, chastised, and disincentivized.
to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
It’s only right, the left believes, for the government to mandate that the affluent help the less fortunate. The verbiage, of course, takes us to the absurd implication that poverty is a matter of bad luck. Meanwhile, Krugman completely leaves out the nuance of voluntary gifting: charity. This isn’t about the wealthy doing what’s right—overwhelmingly, they do. Americans are more charitable than any other nationality on the planet. What’s more, the American right is significantly and undeniably more charitable than the American left. When people begin to believe that it is the role of government to level the playing field and impose equity, they lose the initiative to remake the world to meet their own assessments of right and virtue. Let’s call this Reason #1 that liberals are immoral people.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft.
The vehicle of government mitigates the criminality, but not much else. You are still taking from Peter to pay Paul (sometimes literally). The belief isn’t that Paul’s need is not great, nor is it that Paul should not be given sustenance; the belief is that our government was conceived to promote liberty above all other values. It is therefore neither the responsibility nor the right of the government to allocate money, regardless of the motives.
That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric:
Busted. Meanwhile we as a country have completely ignored the violent knee-jerk of wacko liberal eco-terrorists because we understand that this violence is not the goal of the global warming movement. Their craziness takes a completely different shape.
many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
Krugman acts like this handful of “activists on right” is the first group to ever believe that excessive taxation and regulation are antithetical to liberty and therefore tyrannical. Anyone who has even a semblance of understanding for the motivations for the Revolutionary War understand that taxation and representation were virtually the only grievances that the colonies had with England
There’s no middle ground between these views.
Even as much as I prefer division and partisanship as a means of resolving conflicts, this is absolutely asinine. Neither the founders nor anyone on the modern right is an anarchist. We all agree that there exists some role for government. We all even agree that government has the right to tax and spend. The question has always been how much, and for what purpose. The middle ground between these positions is virtually limitless.
One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care.
We’re trillions of dollars in debt. We are not wealthy.
The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
To his credit, there’s not a better way to describe the individual mandate of Obamacare.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not,
…are filling the airwaves with their drivel because they have built a myth around their own hazy recollections of the glory days.
pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it.
Also a myth. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan say otherwise. Ford and Nixon notwithstanding.
As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
Who? When? Where? I have seen none of these analysts assessments. Every analysis of Obamacare from the right that I’ve seen has viewed the bill as an unmitigated monstrosity.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not.
I’m relatively sure that’s why the Republicans read the Constitution on the floor of the House. That document, which liberals insist is not to be taken as scripture, is the source of legitimacy. If one side believes that the source of their legitimacy is “malleable” or a “living document,” then how can we trust a legitimate use of power?
When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.
I wholeheartedly agree. Right on. Can we finally drop the idea that bipartisanship is a virtue?
Regular readers know which side of that divide I’m on.
Embrace the Divide! (Requisite branding efforts)
In future columns I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the right to keep it” crowd.
In future lambastings of your columns, I will no doubt spend a lot more time pointing out that your pointing out of hypocrisy and logical fallacies is baseless and shallow, that your mockeries are more juvenile than mine (quite a feat), and that you are advocating ideas whose only merit is the mindless deference to the collective.
And I’ll also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own efforts.
Is this a mission statement, or are you actually going to try to defend these absurdities?
But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.
In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.
Except that it’s resolved; the courts have agreed that outright bans on abortion are unconstitutional because they violate a patient’s right to privacy. (Yes, the advocates of this decision are the ones taking naked pictures of you at the airport and demanding that all medical records be compiled in a federal database.) Of course, they’re wrong, but it’s resolved.
Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.
Yeah…where are you going with this, champ?
What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.
Is he really advocating that the abortion debate be a model for our national discourse?
Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that.
Everyone but Sarah Palin.
What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric
Paul Krugman always wins the Buzzword Challenge.
encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.
There has been no escalation in violent rhetoric. This is another one of those myths that has been completely rejected by anyone with a functioning bundle of neurons in their head. For God’s sake…they made movies about assassinating President Bush!
It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”
“I want to know whose ass to kick”
“I want you to argue with them and get in their faces”
-President Obama
We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.
No, I don’t want reconciliation. I want victory. I don’t want my views to assimilate with your views, Paul Krugman. I want everyone to reach a consensus that you have nothing of value to offer them, that your ideologies enslave them to a government and a false morality. You are wrong. Your words do not carry the weight of truth. Your voice can not claim the merit of self-honesty, and the things that you value aren’t worth the price you are determined to make us pay.
In short, fuck off, Paul Krugman.
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