“In my experience, university-educated people believe that staying within the protocols of consent and good intentions absolves a person of moral responsibility for any suffering they might inflict in their personal lives.  ‘Who have you hurt without meaning to?’ is a hard question for anyone to answer honestly, but decadence makes it harder.”

-- Helen Andrews, First Things

In several previous posts, here and here, I’ve suggested that Liberalism is an “upstairs” morality, an ideology of the cultural elites.  Since the old view of Liberalism as the voice of the little man dies hard, we should consider the economic elites too.  What we find is that those who identify themselves as Liberals are consistently much more likely than other Americans to belong to the wealthiest income group.

As always, there are wrinkles.  For example, according to a 2004 study by the Pew Research Center, “business conservatives” are also mostly wealthy, while the “faith and family left” tend to be relatively poor.  But the group Pew calls business conservatives turn out to be socially liberal, while the group it calls the faith and family left turn out to be socially conservative.

So although it would be misleading to say that economic Liberalism is the preferred ideology of the wealthy, social Liberalism is.

Governments must often base policy on information from scientific experts.  In order to protect the environment, for example, one must know what is happening to it.  Is the global atmosphere actually warming?  If so, is such warming a cyclical event or a long-term trend?  Is it influenced by human activity, and can anything be done about it?  In the meantime, whatever may be happening to the climate of the earth, the climate of debate passes through swings of its own; we tend to forget that a scant two generations ago, the great concern among scientists was global cooling.

Although the Church speaks with authority about morals and doctrine, she knows she has no special competence in science.  In the popular view, she is antiscientific.  On the contrary, all too often Church officials jump on the latest scientific bandwagon just because the scientists whom she consults have jumped onboard already.  At various times she has been assured by penologists that prisons rehabilitate, by psychologists that sexual abusers who have undergone therapy can be safely returned to active ministry, by biologists that the hypothesis of natural selection explains macroevolution, by political scientists that simple transfer of wealth to the governments of poor nations will make poor nations richer, and by economists that forgiveness of debt on a huge scale would not cause moral hazard.  Each of these matters is at least open to question, but the Church too quickly accepts the confident pledges of her expert advisors that they are beyond debate.

A case in point:  The Church goes beyond calling for the protection of the environment.  It takes planetary warming so much for granted as to cite it as one of the reasons for dialogue with the members of other religions.  As a statement of the International Theological Commission on the search for universal ethics incautiously declares, “The good of the species appears as one of the fundamental aspirations present in the person.  We are particularly conscious of it in our time, when certain perspectives such as global warming revive our sense of responsibility for the planet as well as for the human species in particular.”

This particular endorsement of the global warming scenario – there have been many -- was composed before the explosion of the “Climategate” scandal at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, England, in which the content of leaked email messages gave strong reason to believe that researchers at the CRU had colluded to manipulate data, interfere with the peer review process, and punish outside scientists who dissented from their conclusions.  Though official investigators drew milder conclusions, even they criticized the University for a “culture of withholding information.”

In the meantime it has become clear that the vaunted “consensus” of the scientific community concerning the warming of the planet is more like a powerful but contested opinion.  What actually happened at the CRU may take years to sort out, but the event is a salutary reminder that communities of experts are much like little polities, with their own gatekeepers, their own ways of withholding and distributing resources, their own publicity machines, their own ways of policing consensus, and their own ways of punishing dissent.  This is especially true in fields like climatology, where the data are messy, the modelling methods highly sensitive to minute changes in assumptions, emotions run high, and the distinction between scientific theory and political ideology is easily blurred.

Scientists themselves -- except when they hold minority opinions -- are often remarkably oblivious to the possibility of bias and groupthink, viewing their disciplines as immune to the foibles of the world, perfectly in harmony with the ideal of rational inquiry.   Members of the Church would do well to remember that just as there are fads, prejudices, and irrational convictions in the nonscientific world, so there are in science.

Considering how many years ago the Puritan tribe died out, why do Liberals still take the trouble to bash them?  They do it because they are so much like them; they aspire to the same place in society.

True, Liberalism is an odd sort of Puritanism.  You may sleep with anyone, but you had better not forget to recycle.  You may have an abortion, but you had better not think of wearing fur.  Much of this is what the psychologists call compensation.  I am indignant about the killing of seal babies because I have killed my human babies.  Compassion for little animals shows that I am a Nice Person after all.

The cardinal point of similarity is that Liberals seek the same kind of psychic income that Puritans used to receive.  They crave the satisfaction of knowing that they are Nice People, and of knowing that everyone else knows just who the Nice People are.  The indispensable credential for being Nice is to hold Liberal opinions.

True, it doesn’t seem Nice to be smug, and Liberals aren’t good at hiding this feature of their character.  But they do have a mode of concealment which wasn’t available to Puritans, because Puritans confessed to having moral principles, and Liberals don’t.

Us?   Sanctimonious?  You can’t be serious.  Don’t you know that our cardinal principle is non-judgmentalism?  The judgmentalists are those other people -- the moralists, the prigs, the prudes, the haters – who should all go straight to hell.

“Decent” is one of those interesting words with multiple meanings.  It can mean “honest and moral,” it can mean “good, though not the best,” and it can mean “fitting to be shown or talked about in public.”

Decent folk find it uncomfortable to hear mention of unseemly things.  Their response to what is morally offensive is the same as their approach to bad manners:  The frozen smile that ignores it into oblivion.

In general, this response is a good thing.  It is one of a decent society’s ways of preserving purity and defending against indecency.

But it is not well adapted to more troubled times.  When society is awash in indecency, the decent do not want to hear of it.  The greater the need to speak of it, the less they desire it spoken of.  When persons of good will urge the vocal defense of what shreds of good remain, the decent are inclined to shoot the messenger.

A certain difficult delicacy is therefore necessary, a certain discretion about when to speak and how, even when one is urging virtue -- something which does not come easily to those who grieve over the ruin of Joseph.