Washington, DC has a new political ritual. A progressive official or appointee will be in front of a congressional committee, and a conservative politician will ask, “Can you define ‘woman’?” The question is politically salient because its answer is controversial.
Several different implicit theories of sex and gender are swirling through society. For some, male and female are biological categories into which one is born. For others, they are social constructs. One is a man or a woman because society has assigned that role. In the past this conflict could be finessed by making a distinction between sex and gender, the former being biological while the latter is social. More recently, however, we have new answers to the question. Perhaps male and femaleness are a property of one’s mind or perhaps one’s will. One is a man because one feels like a man or one is a woman because one chooses to be a woman.
What’s striking to me about this debate is that it is fundamentally metaphysical. People are disagreeing about the ontological status of sex and gender. There are concrete policy debates about medical care or educational policy, but in many ways I think that these debates are mainly proxy fights in a wider ontological war. Hence, positions tend to form around metaphysical accounts of gender rather than judgments about particular situations. In a real sense, the culture wars aren’t really about culture. They are about ontology.
This is bad.
It isn’t bad because the ontological question is stupid or unimportant. It is bad because politics is just not a very good way of doing metaphysics, and metaphysics has a very poor political track record. In many ways, the debates over gender remind me of fights over the nature of the soul and soteriology that motivated the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Those were fights about the fundamental nature of reality and the human condition. They were often played out in very arcane battles over nuances of language, but they also had concrete implications about who wielded power against whom. The politics centered on those metaphysical debates ultimately led to a century or more of viciously destructive wars.
I think that the solution to our culture wars is the same as the solution to the religious wars: liberalism.
Liberalism is a form of politics that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion. It was premised on a few basic commitments. First, politics could not settle the metaphysical questions. Accordingly, politics had to be chastened. In place of Christendom, Zion, or the godly commonwealth, politics was to aim for the less inspiring pursuit of peace, prosperity, and personal freedom. Second, everyone got to continue to have metaphysical debates about God and the soul, but the new rules required that one accept the irreducible fact of pluralism. Society was going to be premised on deep-seated and irreconcilable disagreement. And that was going to be just fine. Third, because we don’t fully trust ourselves not to let our metaphysics get nasty and political, we are going to place constraints on the state’s power. There are going to be a lot of individual rights, and collective coercive action is going to be institutionally hard. This is going to make pursuing the best possible outcome according to the lights of any particular ideology really hard. Everyone is going to lose politically most of the time.
Mere liberalism is out of fashion. The right has rediscovered the temptations of political solidarity around nation and identity and the joys of wielding political power against one’s cultural enemies. The left has decided that the supposed neutrality of the liberal order is a sham that props up unjust social arrangements, social arrangements that can only be dismantled by deploying the power of the state more self-confidently.
Whatever the merits of these critiques, they are political pipe dreams. They both have ambitious programs of social control and transformation. Neither has any hope of creating the worlds that they imagine, in part because those worlds are ideological simplifications and therefore imaginary will-o’-the-wisps. At a more fundamental level, these are big, transformative programs that would require very high levels of trust to be institutionally plausible. Our society lacks such trust, and both approaches tend to erode trust rather than foster it. They just aren’t going to happen. That’s less comforting than one might suppose. The Counter Reformation was also a doomed political project, but that didn’t keep it from working much political mischief.
The great virtue of mere liberalism is that it is possible. It offers a pretty simple solution to the culture wars. Live your life. Have your belief. Make your arguments. Let the other guys do the same with their metaphysical beliefs. Everyone gets treated with tolerance and dignity. Concrete questions of how we coexist are just that: concrete questions. They shouldn’t be seen as proxy fights in a metaphysical debate to be won in the battle to advance one’s ontological position. Rather, they are about finding a practical modus vivendi in the face of disagreement that one shouldn’t expect to disappear any time soon.
One of the weaknesses of liberalism is that it tends to imagine everyone as a fully formed adult. It thus doesn’t always do a great job thinking about children and moral formation. This gets particularly acute given a system of public education in which children are given into the care of state employees for a large chunk of their childhood. The temptation to advance one’s metaphysics in the public schools is almost impossible to resist. The problem is that given a genuine pluralism of metaphysical positions, victory in the public schools is impossible. Every success breeds backlash. The best that can be hoped for is an inculcation of mere liberalism itself, but that means accepting pluralism and remaining agnostic on metaphysics.
Mere liberalism, however, is probably too thin of a moral and metaphysical gruel on which to raise children. What’s a liberal politics to do? It seems to me that the best response is to respect families. Absent evidence of extreme abuse, politics should butt out of parenting. This means that parents’ medical decisions for the care of their children should be left to parents. For example, states shouldn’t be in the business of banning medical transitioning procedures based on a particular metaphysics of gender. It also means, however, that parents get to reject particular metaphysical positions. Schools shouldn’t, for example, be in the business of withholding evidence that kids are transitioning from parents. If there is a real danger of abuse, then just staying quiet about pronouns is too little. If there isn’t, then it’s too much.
This is not going to be a really satisfying outcome for a lot of people. It will get some things wrong. Indeed, it will probably get a lot of things wrong. Metaphysical beliefs have real world consequences, and those consequences are going to be mixed. People will get hurt. But I have a hard time seeing what the alternative is supposed to be. I certainly have a hard time seeing that total “victory” (whatever that might mean) for a particular metaphysical position is likely as a political matter. It’s a big country and people disagree. They disagree a lot. That’s not likely to change. I suspect, however, that a consensus around mere liberalism is within the realm of possibility. If it’s not, then I fear that we are doomed to a rather darker future. I’m encouraged by my conviction that most voters aren’t metaphysicians, and that the default political convictions of an awful lot of people across the political spectrum are basically liberal.
If I’m right, that’s good news. A messy regime of live and let live is much to be preferred to a constant war over ontology.
Until next time,
Nate