Damn this chicken is good: a manifesto for a new liberal consensus

Every blogger is entitled to go off-subject once in his life to write the rambling political manifesto he is dying to write. -Erasmus of Rotterdam

The most defining moment in my life was turning away from evangelical Christianity. It's been more influential than the Marine Corps, than college and graduate school, than thirteen years of work as a translator, than traveling or marriage or fatherhood. Nothing has as deep an impact on who I am as the fact that I used to be an evangelical and now I am not. There are few things in the world I claim to know. Trying to understand the world only convinces me that I know very little. The only thing I feel confident about is that the cosmology and epistemology of American evangelicalism are flawed and false. It's not much to go on, but I guess I've felt that at least knowing one thing that wasn't true was as good a bedrock to build on as any.

Which leaves me with a big problem

You'd think that if the only thing I was sure of in the universe was that evangelicals were wrong, I'd be pretty dead-set against the Republican Party, which is heavily influenced by them. I realize, of course, that not every Republican is an evangelical. Probably not even the majority of Republicans belong to one of Protestant churches that teach that the Bible is the literal word of God. But their presence does loom heavily over the entire party, influencing every bit of the Republican platform. Republicans aren't majority evangelical, perhaps, but the party can accomplish little without them. This is why Donald Trump, who never in his many days in the public eye once did anything to suggest, either in word or in deed, that he particularly cared about God's word, made restrictions on abortion one of his first priorities as President. His populist appeal to middle America, where most evangelicals live and where a Christian view of Islam has power, may also inform his recent immigration policy decisions.

So yeah, you'd think I'd be dead-set against Republicans. I am, sort of. I'm registered as a Democrat, although that's partly because here in Maryland, if you ever want your vote to matter in anything local, you have to have a Democratic ticket. And I tend to break with Republicans on those issues that spring most directly from religion, like abortion. But reality has a way of slowing my roll before I claim support for Democrats too enthusiastically.

It's the chicken

Remember when Chick-Fil-A was the bane of all orthodox liberals? You don't? You mean the news cycle in America completely leaves story lines dead once they've moved onto the next thing? Here, let me refresh your memory:

        Fair and balanced memes, a hallmark of liberals since Al Gore invented the Internet

In the summer of 2012, Chick-Fil-A CEO Dan Cathy made a couple of statements indicating he thought about same-sex unions the way every person who believes the first chapter of Romans is the inerrant word of God thinks about them. This led to an LGBT-rights-groups-led attempted boycott that probably backfired. In the short term, the failure of the boycott was related to a Christian-led counter-boycott "buy Chick-Fil-A" campaign, but in the long term, it had everything to do with something far more fundamental: their chicken is good.

It's more than that, actually. Chick-Fil-A is the only fast food place I go to where I regularly feel welcome. I don't know how employees working for between 9-11 dollars an hour summon the will to seem enthusiastic about selling me nuggets, but they do, almost every time. They handle much larger crowds than I see at Wendy's or McDonald's or wherever, and they do it quickly and accurately (usually). The place is clean. My son asks for Chick-Fil-A every other day. So I go there a lot.

(Side note: I knew a whole family that worked at Chick-Fil-A when I was in an evangelical youth group. My strong guess is that through a combination of evangelical networking and shibboleths uttered during interviews, a fairly high percentage of Chick-Fil-A workers are Christians on the evangelical side.)

Christianity was the West's good chicken for a long time

Other things being equal, as Hobbes pointed out long ago, life is nasty, brutish, and short. Modernity is used to saying things like, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we have robot butlers?" We expect a technology-driven utopia. But for most of human history, managing a society where people scraped by with enough to eat, weren't destroyed by natural disasters, famine or war, and enjoyed some level of social order were enough to far exceed expectations. Life in nature is fragile. For slow-developing animals like humans who rely on all the factors that go into the agricultural cycle, it's more fragile still, despite our many cognitive advantages. So when something works in a society, when it manages to stave off the grimness of life just a little bit, it tends to stick around.

By modern standards, Christianity fell down often as a social system, measured in the secular happiness it brought to those living beneath it. This is a fact Christians have to deal with. They cannot simply write it off by saying the Catholic inquisitors or the Puritan witch-burners weren't "real Christians," anymore than I can claim Democrats who go off half-cocked aren't "real Democrats." Something about Christianity encouraged those kinds of social ills, just as something about what is called liberalism encourages uninformed smugness. These sorts of evils are part of the equation when weighing the social and political benefits of Christianity as an ideology. But weighed against the time in which Christianity became ascendant, it brought many vast improvements. It urged rulers to consider the poor. It urged closing arenas where gladiators fought. It promulgated education. And while some Christian thought lent itself in wicked apologia for slavery, other earnest theologians also argued against it, and eventually won their argument.

I wrote an essay for the Elie Wiesel Ethics Competition in 2000, called "Existentialism and Chocolate Milk," in which I tried to invent an ethics for a post-Christian world. I essentially re-adopted 90% of Christian ethics, and said we should follow them based on the shared human condition of having been given a moral code by a God who didn't follow it himself. It was ethics as spite, if you will. It probably wasn't terribly sound, but it now occurs to me that it was an acceptance that a lot of Christian ethics work fairly well. (I got an honorable mention for it, thus beginning a long writing career of nearly being good enough.)

Skeptics often deny the benefits to Western society Christianity brought. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, said the only benefit he was aware of that Christianity brought to the world was an improvement in the calendar. This just isn't fair. I don't believe Christianity is a complete social road map. That's not how it was built. And an ideology created thousands of years ago is woefully incomplete to guide us through a modern, technology-driven society. But we don't need to be overly dismissive of its historic benefits. The very tolerance we now accuse conservatives of lacking grew, in part, from Christianity. It also grew from a humanism that was regarded with suspicion from Christian orthodoxy when it emerged, and that humanist tradition ought to be the one we are more attuned to in the modern world, but that humanism very much grew out of Christianity.

Without this man...

We might never have had this man. (Thomas Paine. Don't Google it. It's Tom Paine.)

Some of those benefits survive to this day in the very conservatism we liberals all swear we hate

There are a zillion definitions of conservatism and liberalism. Any can be right in various contexts. I'm using the following:

Conservatism is more of a disposition than a philosophical principle. It is the assumption that things got to be the way they are for a reason. It is a fear that changing things too fast without considering the outcomes can be dangerous. It is the reasonable understanding that every action has unforeseen outcomes. A conservative is fundamentally cautious.

Liberalism is a disposition to question received wisdom, to ask why something that was thought good yesterday is still good today. It doesn't worry as much about possible unforeseen outcomes, figuring the only way to tell is to try. A liberal is fundamentally optimistic.

If a society is pulled too far in a liberal direction, it descends into anarchy. No policies last long enough to build reliability. If society is too conservative, it fails to improve, and it is eclipsed by societies more willing to experiment.

Really, one could be a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican. Trump, with his disdain for received wisdom and willingness to push ahead with never-before-tried policies, may be the most liberal President in American history. And maybe some of this is good: who of us hasn't thought that the government could use a good reboot now and again? What makes him dangerous isn't that he's an ultra-conservative; it's that he's far, far too liberal. Moreover, it's the dangerous kind of liberalism that doesn't carefully and rigorously defend its logic for changing course.


Liberals and conservatives need each other to keep society healthy. I'm not sure why my Facebook feed is full of both wishing for the extinction of the other.

Dubious recommendation for a re-branding

The organization where I work is currently in the middle of a huge re-branding process. Although the leadership constantly assures us that the re-branding and re-naming of things is just the outer shell of what's meant to be an inner change, the changes of names have been the only actual result I've been able to see. So it's probably a terrible idea to suggest liberals re-name themselves. This is particularly true since liberals have also tried a recent re-branding, giving themselves the name "progressives." This is a good try, and it has the advantage of looking to the future, where I think liberals' willingness to improvise holds an advantage. But I think the term has already been taken over by a sect of liberals who aren't representative of the core principles of the group: the anti-vaxxer, anti-GMO, anti-science crowd.

I therefore recommend that the group of people who insist on reason as the basis of social decisions call themselves humanists. Those currently calling themselves conservatives ought to change their name, too: people who aren't that worried about the ecological future of the planet can't really call themselves conservative. But I leave that to them.

Neither the term "liberal" or "conservative" is correct in any way to describe the groups they apply to in modern America. Both groups have taken on agendas over the years that don't jibe with a consistent philosophy. I'm recommending the group that is currently called "liberal" fix this for themselves, in the meantime altering the make-up of the group.

The new humanist consensus

The amorphous mob that currently calls itself "liberals" should start to call themselves "humanists." It can include people who are, by nature, conservative. It can include people who are, by nature, liberal. These are just personality traits, not political philosophies. Humanists are united by the belief that we should look to human reason to solve our problems. It is a group that can include Christians. It is a group that can include atheists. Humanism included nearly all the founding fathers.

What would a humanist consensus look like? This post is already too long, so I'll be as brief as possible in tracing a few characteristics.

-It will be a coalition of intellectuals from what are now the Republican and the Democratic sides, who realize that with reason under attack, their common approach to thinking is more important than their differences in how that approach might lead them to different conclusions.

-Humanists will adopt principles to which they adhere with the strength of religious conviction, because political movements are, sociologically, like religions.

-Among these convictions are that we will never use unsound logical principles such as ad hominem or strawman attacks, even if we believe they might be effective in winning support. We believe the damage in abandoning logical principles outweighs the temporary gain of winning an argument. Elections come and go. You win some, you lose some. We are strategic, not tactical. Politics as  confrontation may allow tactical victories, but strategically, truth always loses. If the goal is to advance truth, then politics as confrontation is a flawed strategy.

                        This, Kevin from Facebook. This is the kind of thing we DON'T say. 

-At the same time, recognizing the need for pragmatism, we will etch out for ourselves a logical approach on when to be ideological and when to be pragmatic. We will let people disagree with us on matters that don't effect political choice. If someone disagrees with us about whether homosexuality is a sin, we do not object to this as long as this belief does not lead to supporting curtailing the freedom of homosexuals. Other people disagreeing with you does not hurt you.We may also decide that things like demanding people be able to use whatever bathroom they want are symbolically disturbing to some people, that the idea is not yet ripe, and that it may cause a voter backlash, so it's possible to put the idea to the side for a time.

-We will emphasize that we only need agree on limited things. Christians can think we're going to hell. We can think they're deluded. Doesn't matter. We're focused on the secular good, which happens to be a thing we can agree on. The less you require articles of orthodoxy, the more people you can bring into a coalition.

Chocolate milk, chicken, now pudding for desert. As in, the proof is in it.

If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?-The Newsroom

Ups and down are part of political life. I suspect they are, in part, a result of humanity's herd instinct that suspects it's dangerous to lean in one direction for too long. So losing one election, or a few, is nothing to be concerned about. But liberals having been losing for so long, it's become a tradition. 

I failed to rebuild morality for a post-theocratic world in my essay 17 years ago. I'm sure I've failed now. Reason is also failing in the world right now. Reason cannot lose.

People can be reasonable in almost all areas and fall down in a few. I know many people much smarter than me who are also evangelical Christians. It is my belief that they are simply wrong in this one area, although they are right in many others, including areas where I am wrong. I need to work together with these people. That doesn't happen through insulting them, or ignoring their many accomplishments. They make damn good chicken. We should be so lucky to prove our worth.