From Letters to the Editors of Mirror of Justice

Back when The New Yorker didn't run a Letters to the Editor section, Spy Magazine used to run a feature called "Letters to the Editor of The New Yorker."  Since my good friend Rick's other blog, Mirror of Justice, doesn't have a comment section, for reasons I fully accept, let me use this space to call attention to and respond to a recent post of his at MoJ.  Rick reprints a description of a recent lecture on Catholic voices in the public sphere by Helen Alvare, including the following passage describing the speech:

Alvaré suggested that we hammer home two points that ought to be obvious but aren’t: Most Americans are religious in some fashion, and few people are motivated by purely secular considerations to become . . . well, better people. This is why liberalism’s standard prescriptions for addressing various social problems—especially unwanted pregnancies, births out of wedlock, STDs, and family breakdown—just don’t work.

I have some questions about both of these statements.  On the first score, I'm not sure what it means to say that few people are motivated by "purely secular considerations" to become better.  I suppose it depends on what you mean by "purely secular," but I am not sure that it is true that few non-religious people are motivated by non-transcendent considerations to become better people.  I take it, incidentally, that this is what Alvare means.  If she just means that because most Americans are religious after a fashion, then sheer numbers dictate that few Americans are motivated to become better people by secular considerations, that may be true as a matter of mathematics but also fairly meaningless.  It certainly won't tell us how many non-religious people, as a percentage of the non-religious, are motivated to become better people.  It also does not tell us how many religious people are successfully motivated to become better people by non-secular considerations.  Again, much of the work may actually be being done here at the definitional level, but if we take her comment more seriously than that, then I am not sure she is right.

The other proposition also demands some inquiry, I think.  

To begin with, in fairness one should note that liberalism's "standard prescriptions" for addressing "social problems" are actually quite capacious and varied.  It is not necessarily inconsistent with liberalism, for example, to advocate social norms against sexual promiscuity, a preference for sex within marriage, and so on, although not every liberal would agree with these norms. 

Second, I'm not sure what the words "just don't work" mean here.  Does this mean they don't work at all?  Clearly that can't be so.  Does it mean instead that they don't work well?  I would still question this.  One might argue that they however well they work, they also carry costs that outweigh their benefits; that, for instance, birth control has contributed to women's social emancipation but has also carried many unanticipated costs in terms of STDs, social anomie, and so on.  That may be true, but it will take a lot more heavy lifting to prove this point than this excerpt seems willing to provide.  It is also, of course, a point that can be generalized much more widely.  We could say the same thing about the unintended consequences of, say, advances in electronics and industrial technology, which have been emancipatory but also had countless unintended consequences; but it would seem silly, or at least too hasty, to say that these advances "just don't work" as responses to social conditions.

Finally, if this proposition is going to be meaningful, it seems to imply some kind of comparison.  The question should be, how well do liberalism's "standard prescriptions" work as against some other set of prescriptions?  That strikes me, again, as a complex question.  Some other mechanisms for social amelioration may (or may not) do better than "liberalism's standard prescriptions" at addressing "unwanted pregnancies, births out of wedlock, STDs, and family breakdown."  But fairness dictates that we acknowledge that those non-liberal prescriptions may themselves result in other unanticipated consequences or costs.  It might be that, say, strong non-liberal prescriptions in favor of binding marriages and against non-marital sexual congress will deal well with "births out of wedlock" and "family breakdown."  But is also possible that the same prescriptions could lead to increases in marital and non-marital rape, child abuse, poverty, the subordination of women, job and wage discrimination, and so on.

I am not at all asserting that this is the case.  And, of course, it is clear  that most people who argue for non-liberal "prescriptions" for addressing "social problems" do not want to see any of these side-effects occur.  (I take it by the same coin that Alvare would agree that the vast majority of liberals do not want to see unwanted pregnancies, STDs, family breakdowns, and so on.)  My point is that asserting that the standard liberal prescriptions for social problems "just don't work" strikes me as an unwarranted strong statement.  It is certainly one that cannot be met with a nostalgia for periods in which other mechanisms of dealing with social problems were employed, unless one is willing to fully consider and count the often serious side-effects that accompanied those prescriptions.  Maybe that should make both sides more willing to see both liberal and non-liberal efforts at social reform as an ongoing, evolving, iterative and potentially cooperative process of social learning, instead of a forced, once-and-for-all choice between one or the other mechanism for addressing social concerns.