These are disorienting times for social conservatives. It has been hard enough to rally Americans on such contentious issues as abortion. Now we can’t even seem to agree on the moral status of perjury.
It appears to be a time to seek instruction from authors who promise to tell us about morality and virtue, as do Harry Clor in Public Morality and Liberal Society and Jean Yarbrough in American Virtues.
In some ways, these books are indeed refreshingly removed from Clinton scandal fever. Both reflect years of study, and both were bundled off to their respectable academic publishers before anyone heard the name of Monica Lewinsky. Both authors teach political philosophy at small liberal arts colleges (Clor at Kenyon, Yarbrough at Bowdoin), and neither seems to have any ambition to mobilize the multitudes.
Harry Clor’s Public Morality and Liberal Society is a sustained effort to explain why curbs on pornography are not inconsistent with liberal principles. To defend the enforcement of pornography statutes, Clor offers a patient, carefully reasoned account of “public morality,” by which he means not moral norms for the conduct of public affairs but a morality of private conduct that has “public status, recognized as an ethos of the community.”
He starts with the point that, insofar as pornography is an incitement to lust, it is almost by definition an enemy of self-control. And the political community, he explains, has an interest in nurturing self-control:
Our kind of polity depends substantially upon mutual respect among citizens; persons who view each other pornographically, or as mere objects and opportunities for self-gratification, are unfit for any sustained cooperation in the conduct of civic affairs.
Clor is aware that criminal sanctions are not enough, but “the crucial object,” he writes,
is not that all vice be stamped out but that the existence of communal standards of decency is to be publicly affirmed. What finally counts is people’s confidence that we live in a moral community or at least that we ought to.
Lest it appear to be an arbitrary abridgment of private rights or an arbitrary extension of private preferences, public morality for Clor must be linked to fundamental truths about human life. So Clor devotes a chapter to the feminists who protest pornography as degrading to women but have difficulty acknowledging that it is degrading to human beings as such. Another chapter takes aim at such legal philosophers as Ronald Dworkin, who defend pornography on the ground that government must never impose a policy that lacks “respect” for any citizen’s “choice” of lifestyle. As Dworkin sees it, this neutrality is required by respect for human dignity. Clor protests that it actually denies human dignity by treating impulses and compulsions as though they were reasoned choices.
Clor readily triumphs over such extreme positions. But his approach leaves him hostage to his own eagerness for political validation. Denying the law’s power to enforce a morality that lacks widespread support, he offers marital fidelity as an example of a norm that has dissipated beyond the possibility of correction. He is willing, however, to defend laws against public nudity (a staple of public-morals regulation in most states) as still sustainable under the “ethic of public decency.”
“Decency” in this precise sense is what’s invoked by the polite inquiry, upon entering a dressing room, “Are you decent?” and it may still have broad support. But Clor is not very instructive about its significance. After all, Aristotle (whose account of the virtues is repeatedly invoked by Clor) didn’t object to athletes’ competing in the nude. Far from expressing universal human practices, our traditional notions of decency have roots specifically in Jewish and Christian scriptures, which take a dim view of human self-sufficiency and natural perfection.
Clor steers his argument far from such inquiries. He is so anxious to place his argument on abstract philosophical grounds that he even avoids the word “sin” (along with any discussion of gay rights, abortion, or other divisive issues).
This leaves him with an account of public morality that may not quite capture what those who care most deeply about it actually believe. And for those who don’t care, it may be even less compelling. In seeking political status for moral standards, Clor retreats to those that are widely shared — and he ends with something so thin that it makes no substantial demands and promises no great rewards.
Of course, Clor is struggling against powerful tides of moral skepticism and confusion. Jean Yarbrough’s new study of Jefferson, American Virtues, seems to promise instead the bracing confidence of a simpler era. More than any other leading figure of the American Founding, Jefferson thought about the moral temper of civic life. He was perhaps the most learned of the Founders, among the most worldly and varied in his experiences, and he devoted time and study to moral philosophy. Yarbrough, although not entirely uncritical, offers Jefferson as a worthy instructor for an America she views as much in need of moral instruction.
Here too, however, the reader is forced to wonder whether the medicine is strong enough. Like Clor, Yarbrough worries that assertions of personal rights have been carried to destructive extremes. One of her central claims is that the contemporary mania about rights would be much reduced if we attended to what Jefferson actually had in mind.
He was not, Yarbrough insists, doctrinaire about property: He deliberately omitted it from the list of “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence, because he thought property rights might sometimes have to give way to communal needs. On the other hand, he would not have sided with contemporary welfare-rights advocates, because he thought people could only be happy as productive citizens contributing to their communities.
As Yarbrough sees it, Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” embraced not only material comfort and security but also a participation in public affairs and an expression of the human impulse to “benevolence.” Reconstructing Jefferson’s moral philosophy from his extensive correspondence and voluminous notebooks, Yarbrough argues that Jefferson drew much from the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, who stressed the connection between individual happiness and “sociability” or “sympathy” with the well-being of others. We miss the subtlety and richness in his thought, she claims, by associating Jefferson simply with the individualist doctrines of John Locke.
But, even in Yarbrough’s account, Jefferson’s “benevolence” proves undemanding. He was quick to assert that self-interest should overcome it. He was so impatient with mystical “spiritualism” that he rewrote the life of Jesus to delete any reference to the supernatural. He deplored the “degrading” religion of the Old Testament, Yarbrough says, because he resented its preoccupation with duty to God.
Jefferson did not take an ambitious view of civic duty, either. He seemed to think that the impulse to self-government could be satisfied easily. He detested the aristocratic pretensions and martial virtues of the ancient world, praising instead the simple ways of American farmers. He looked to “republican spirit” in the people to overcome what he regarded as faulty institutions and dangerous tendencies in the government.
Yarbrough does not conceal the contradictions in Jefferson’s life. And they were many. He expounded the virtues of frugality and economic independence while entertaining on such a lavish scale at Monticello that he was perpetually near bankruptcy and left crushing debts to his heirs. He spent considerable time with Greek and Latin texts, working out a moral philosophy that he thought of as an adaptation of Epicureanism. But he advised his grandson and nephew not to waste time on such studies, having convinced himself that his conclusions would come to others quite naturally. Opposed to slavery, he was too deeply in debt to free his own slaves and does not seem to have encouraged his heirs to agonize about the problem.
Jefferson’s political contradictions are even more startling. He could attack Federalist intolerance and clerical bigotry, while insisting that his own University of Virginia exclude Federalist professors and Tory philosophers. He could celebrate the good sense of ordinary people, while icily commending a state educational system designed to “rake the geniuses from the rubbish.” He could say a good word for Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts and deride “sanctimonious reverence for the Constitution” but still demand prosecutions for seditious libel when critics threatened his own administration. While condemning slavery in principle, he remained a strong supporter of the state’s rights that were, as he was well aware, the constitutional shield for Southern slavery.
So much inconsistency begins to raise doubts not simply about Jefferson’s personal integrity but about his underlying seriousness. He seems to have been remarkably adept at reconciling high-sounding ideals with unpleasant realities, and Yarbrough concedes that his “sunny view of human nature and his faith in progress often led him to slide over tensions” in his own moral doctrines. Jefferson’s “easygoing morality,” she suggests, perhaps “masks a certain flatness of soul” and perhaps indicates a moral vision that “lacks a tragic dimension.”
In Yarbrough’s view, however, Jefferson’s special “quality of hopefulness” has much to do with his enduring appeal. “As his namesake William Jefferson Clinton understood, Americans have always preferred the bridge to the future,” she declares. “It is part of the American character to believe that the best days are still to come and Jefferson, more than any other Founder, speaks to this longing.”
Can anyone read this now without wincing? Can anyone remember Clinton’s chirping in his second inaugural address about the “bridge to the future” and not wonder whether those hopeful, contemporary Americans have now begun to appreciate life’s “tragic dimension”?
Both Harry Clor’s Public Morality and Liberal Society and Jean Yarbrough’s American Virtues are thoughtful, scholarly books that try to articulate the grounds for a somewhat conservative or soberly centrist American moral consensus. If that makes them seem timely, it also makes them seem inadequate at this moment. Both books deserve to survive to a time when they are not quite so burdened by unhappy associations of the Clinton era.
HARRY M. CLOR
Public Morality and Liberal Society
Essays on Decency, Law and Pornography
Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 235 pp., $ 17 paper
JEAN M. YARBROUGH
American Virtues
Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People
Univ. of Kansas Press, 256 pp., $ 35
Jeremy Rabkin teaches constitutional law at Cornell University.
