Opposition Addition: The American Scene

The American Scene is a group blog, my favorite writers on it are Noah Millman and Reihan Salam (I also read a fair number of Peter Suderman's reviews).  Since it's a group blog with a changing cast it's no surprise that it can be a bit uneven at times, so caveat emperor there as with any group project.

I'd been meaning to add them for a while and a Millman piece I liked just came up, so now's as good a time as any.   He's responding commenting on the debate resulting from a Damon Linker post:

Linker’s whole project – “the liberal bargain” – rests on the proposition that absent a neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments you inevitably get social conflict. I pretty much disagree with that proposition whole-hog – I don’t think liberalism is (or can be) a wholly neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments (indeed, I think this partly because I agree with some of liberalism’s metaphysical commitments); I don’t think such an arbiter would enable you to avoid social conflict (what would compel the loser to abide by the verdict?); and, for that matter, I think you can have devastating social conflict without any real disagreement about metaphysical commitments (those metaphysical commitments themselves may in many cases be “superstructure” rather than “substructure”).

Myself, I would like to see a liberalism that is both more confident and more humble about its own truths. More confident: don’t defend the sexual revolution by saying, “why not?” but by saying, “here is what we have gained – here is the positive good, here are the virtues of the life we now lead.” Don’t attack creationism by saying, “that’s smuggling sectarian religion into the public square” but by saying, “science is a magnificent human achievement that you are defacing, and science matters too much to me to stand idly by while you do that.”

I tend to agree with this in no small part because Linker's argument cuts both ways.  Here he is criticising the particularly argumentative brand of new athiests (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.):

The most thoughtful atheists--let's call them liberal atheists--have always understood that the impossibility of negative proof is a crack through which the gods, no matter how ruthlessly banished from the human world, forever threaten to return. These atheists--whose ranks include Socrates, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Albert Camus, and Primo Levi--responded to their lack of certitude, to the invariably provisional character of the beliefs by which they oriented their lives, in a supremely philosophical way: with equanimity. Accordingly, they did not go out of their way to act as missionaries for unbelief.

I'm no fan of Dawkins or Hitchens because I disagree with some of their arguments and because they're fraking obnoxious.  However, I can't see why athiests evangelizing is any worse than any other set of beliefs seeking to spread itself.  They can obviously go to far, but so can everyone else and everyone else has a longer tradition of being obnoxious.  I think the need to exclude such evangelism comes from having a pluralistic civil religion as the neutral arbiter Millman refers to above.  I think that approach has its uses as kind of a shorthand that saves us from having to argue from first principles every time.  Nonetheless, we must be able to make those arguments; I rather strongly believe Millman's closing point:

Cultivation of skepticism and doubt will never be enough; you’ll need actual alternative certitudes to push against to be sure that you actually know anything. And, if you’re really a liberal, you have to leave open the possibility of being convinced that one of your liberal truths is actually, well, false.

That's part of my rationale for having an opposition blogroll.