Coercing Virtue Read Free

experiences anything less than a comfortable material life. The same attitude may extend to the cultural and psychic components of life. It is not entirely clear whether this view is an aspect of the socialist impulse or whether it is merely the inevitable attitude prevalent in an affluent, technologically advanced society in which comfort and convenience have become the primary goods. Whatever the explanation, an exaggerated solicitude for the feelings of people is to be found in the jurisprudence of activist courts. It is by no means an undifferentiated solicitude, however, and it contains a strong ideological component. The comfort of some often requires the discomfort of others, and the gavel falls in favor of those the New Class favors.
    The discredited economic theory of socialism ismerely one manifestation of a strong preference for the universal over the particular, and the most universal and least individualistic social principle is equality. Economic inequality being beyond reach, the attack turns to “lifestyle” inequalities, to a demand that we cease judging people and their actions according to the traditional moral scale. Traditionalists denounce this approach as moral relativism, but it is not that at all. Cultural socialists have their own moralities, often enforced with a fierceness unknown to upholders of the old moralities. That fanaticism is manifest in what we call “political correctness.” “Nonjudgmentalism” is the first step toward a harsh judgmentalism in the service of a different morality. The war is religious in the intensity of belief, particularly on the liberal side, and because it is about the definition of virtue, morality, and the proper way of living.
    The demand for radical autonomy, of which radical feminism is a component, is often phrased as a struggle for human liberation. Kimball sums up the effects of the “spirit of liberation” that exploded in the 1960s. His description is bleak, but not, I think, exaggerated:
    That ideology has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment industry,and popular culture; it has helped to subvert museums and other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: it has perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.
    This list illustrates the tendency of autonomy and liberation to turn into uniformity and coercion once traditional or bourgeois values have been discredited and displaced. The rigid conformity of thought and speech now enforced in many colleges and universities is but a single example.
    The one institution noticeably missing from Kimball’s recital is law. In discussions of cultural warfare, law is usually overlooked. Perhaps that is because law is viewed as a separate discipline, its movements, disputes, and modes of reasoning peculiar to itself. This view is obviously inadequate. Law is a key element of every Western nation’s culture, particularly as we turn more to litigation than to moral consensus as the means of social control. Law is also more crucial today because courts have become more overtly cultural and political as well as legal institutions. Courts have played major roles in most of the pathologies Kimball lists, both by breaking down the traditional legal barriers societies have erected against degeneracy and by offering moral lessons based on the emancipatory spirit. In a word, courts in general have enlisted on the liberal side of the culture war. They areinfected, as is the New Class to which judges belong and to which they