We Must Expand the Powers of Our Imagination: A Response to Philip Clayton

Last updated on: June 18, 2010 at 1:21 pm by Timothy Dalrymple

We Must Expand the Powers of Our Imagination: A Response to Philip Clayton 2010-06-18T13:21:00-04:00 Timothy Dalrymple

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Two days ago I published an article entitled, “Is the Tea Party a ‘Social Justice’ Movement?” One point of the article was to point to the ambiguities in the concept of social justice; but it also contended that the Tea Party movement is no less noble in its intentions than many liberal political movements that are anointed with the ‘social justice’ oil.

Philip Clayton is kind enough to engage my article here. Clayton holds the Ingraham Chair of Theology at Clairmont University, and he has done excellent work on the intersection of science and religion. My doctoral supervisor, Sarah Coakley, had many fruitful interactions with Clayton, and I have benefited from his writings as well. He took a dual PhD at Yale in philosophy and theology, and worked with Louis Dupre, one of my favorite interpreters of Kierkegaard. Clayton maintains a nice website and blog here.

I also thank Clayton because this is an opportunity for a more “liberal” and a more “conservative” Christian to practice the kind of charitable dialogue that we so sorely need in our highly polarized western society. Clayton’s response is a fine demonstration of why we need to give one another more of a benefit of the doubt.

Clayton has a little too much fun with what he calls “the rhetorical set-up,” and what I would call “what actually happened the morning I attended the Tea Party rally.” He rightly notes that I am critical of a liberal aristocracy that mistakes the trappings of intelligence with the actual possession of it. Yet he goes further than I did – or ever would – in his reconstruction of my argument. To wit:

To our worship of external trappings — we only care for the “fashions of the illuminati” — Dalrymple opposes the good “common sense” of the Tea Party members, who, as if to prove the point, march on Boston Commons. The logic is clear: Good guys, bad guys. “Liberal aristocracy” versus the genuinely intelligent. And by implication, the real movement for social justice versus the selfish, self-serving liberals.

What I find so ironic about this is that it is actually Clayton who is constructing the black-and-white dichotomy for which he condemns me. I certainly never allege that the liberal elite only care for intellectual trends and trappings, just as I would never claim that this is a simple matter of good guys and bad guys, selfish versus unselfish, and the genuinely versus the seemingly intelligent. This says more about Clayton than it does about me. I do not believe that it has to be good on one side and bad on the other, in the same way that I do not believe that our policies have to favor either the poor or the rich. We’re more or less the same, and we’re in this boat together. Two notes are important to make here:

I have too many liberal friends I love and respect, and too many conservative friends I love and respect, to believe that either of them are predominantly “bad,” “selfish” or unintelligent. My motto is that neither party has a monopoly on good ideas and good intentions. What I am objecting to in this case is the vilification of the Tea Partiers as racist, selfish, ignorant and deluded. The Tea Party movement has been slandered and caricatured by many progressives (including progressive Christians), and those slanders and caricatures are wrong. It is not good/bad, unselfish/selfish, and intelligent/unintelligent. Those who engage in liberal social justice ministries, even when I believe they are mistaken, by and large do so out of genuine concern for the greater good. Yet here is the point: so do those who engage in conservative social-political movements.
It is interesting, then, that Clayton interprets my defense of Tea Partiers to mean that those who oppose them are “bad,” “selfish” and unintelligent. Clayton has fallen into a zero-sum game here: if liberals are compassionate and intelligent, then those on the other side must not be, or vice versa. This is the kind of dichotomous thinking we need to move beyond. While I do believe that liberal elites discount the intelligence of ordinary people because they value too highly the trappings of an elite education, and are not sufficiently open to the variety of intelligence’s expressions, I do not believe that this makes liberals bad or selfish or unintelligent. That would be absurd.

Clayton then points to my own affiliations with Harvard, as though this means that I should not critique the intellectualist afflictions from which it suffers. I will not be teaching there in the coming year, as it happens, since I have just moved, but that is beside the point. In all of his excellent writings on science and religion, Clayton has shown that he is more than capable of understanding nuance. So I’m sure he will appreciate: I value intelligence and formal education. Yet I do not believe they should be over-valued, as though the possession of a degree can supplant the need for practical experience, or as though anyone who does not possess a degree or express intelligence in these ways cannot qualify as intelligent, competent or worth hearing.

I also fear that an advanced degree is often a matter of cultivating the habits, the mannerisms, the fashions, and the disdains of the academic elite for the unlettered. It need not be so. Directed properly, and approached with the proper suspicion of academic authority, an advanced education can be a beautiful and liberating thing. Yet a graduate degree in the humanities too often is less an education than an inculcation into the prevailing ideologies of the day. The generation of academics who grew up committed to the proposition that we should “question authority” have become the authorities who do not want to be questioned.

Clayton goes on to say:

“Dalrymple argues that the Tea Party is a “social justice movement” because “Tea Partiers are perfectly willing to accept the need for moderate taxation and social services.” This is certainly not the message that is being broadcast…”

Actually, I argued that the Tea Party is a social justice movement only according to the General definition, which alleges that a social justice movement (in the versions of Michael Novak and Jim Wallis, respectively) is a collective action for the common good, or “standing up for the poor.” Yet the way in which Tea Partiers pursue the good of our society, including the poor, is not by advocating moderate social services but the humbler, less indebted, more streamlined government that they believe will better serve us all.

Progressives tend to believe that advocating the common good, or the good of the poor, must take certain forms, such as increased government services or wealth redistribution and so on. Yet Tea Party conservatives do not believe that increased government services are ultimately in the interest of the poor. The increased expenditures and deepened deficit, the formation of a culture of long-term dependency, the expansion of government with all the inefficiencies and potential for corruption it presents, would neither help the poor nor anyone else. In the conservative vision, then, it would be better for government to grow smaller than it presently is, to leave more money in the hands of those who can invest and innovate and create jobs, to create the space for private enterprise to replace government bureaucracy, and to provoke more self-dependence and initiative.

Clayton may disagree with that ideology. Yet whether he or I agree with it is not the point. The point is that this is a difference not of who cares for the poor and who does not, but of different ways of envisioning and pursuing the common good. In other words, just because Clayton does not agree that a smaller government would better serve the good does not mean that he cannot acknowledge the similar motivations, and even the intrinsic rationality, of those who do so believe.

Furthermore, Clayton should know better than to trust “the message being broadcast.” The vast majority of us receive our information on the Tea Parties through an interpretive filter of articles, columns and news reports, yet these are selective and inevitably interpretive. It is best to look to actual data, such as the recent New York Times poll of Tea Party supporters. According to the poll, 62% of Tea Party supporters believe that the benefits of Social Security and Medicare outweigh the costs; only 33% thought they cost more than they are worth (see question 59). And 59% of Tea Party supporters are in favor of the federal government requiring health insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions (Q 57).

As I will explain further in the next two installments in the series, the picture that emerges from the data is that Tea Partiers are generally happy with a government that provides not only military and policing services but also basic social services such as Social Security and Medicare. These are not anarchists. They are not John Galts. They believe there should be a safety net for those who genuinely cannot stand on their own. Yet Tea Partiers are wary of when government largess begins to foster a culture of corruption and welfare dependency (Q 62). They want the government to grow smaller by cutting waste and cutting some of the less essential social services.

Finally, while Clayton portrays Tea Party opposition to the recent health care reform as evidence that they are “decidedly hostile to those who are cast-outs in our society,” the answer should by now be obvious. This is a difference of philosophy and not of moral quality. It is simply wrong to amass the compassionate on one side of the issue and the hostile on the other, as though everyone agrees this health care reform would be for the greater good and one group is simply too selfish to allow it. I will also address social issues such as race and immigration later, but it should be noted that almost eighty percent of Tea Party supporters said that they are most concerned right now with economic and not social issues. They are not generally inclined to believe that we must pursue policies either that serve the poor or that serve the rich; they are inclined to believe, rather, that a less intrusive government, a government that spends less and gathers less, is in the interest of all.

We need to expand our powers of imagination. We find it difficult to enter into the mindset of the opposition, difficult to believe that they are actually concerned about government spending and accountability; thus we infer that they must be motivated by hostility or bigotry. We need to dispense with the presumption that those who disagree with us on what the common good should look like, and how we should pursue it, do so on the basis of hostility and ignorance. So my point is not to defend everything that every Tea Party leader has said. And I am certainly not interested in saying that those who oppose the Tea Party are foolish, selfish or “bad” (whatever that might mean). Rather, my point is to say that the Tea Party movement has been unfairly slandered, and we as Christians Left and Right should stand for the truth.

Again, my thanks to Philip Clayton for discussing the issue.

T. Dalrymple

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