Changing The Minds Of Judges

THE DAY AFTER the president’s endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment, Rush Limbaugh was livid. It made him feel powerless, he said, to realize that an unelected court in Massachusetts could change the age-old definition of marriage and the president could do nothing about it.

Sure, Rush said, we can pass a constitutional amendment to protect marriage from the depredations of the left, but “we can’t amend the Constitutions every damn time a rogue court or an out-of-control judge decides to start violating his oath of office.”

But why do the judges do it? The reason, according to Thomas Sowell, is simple. Judges want to be liked: not, of course, by the American people at large, but among their legal peers and liberal friends.

The remedy is obvious. We must change the culture. We must fill the world with our ideas. We must create a world in which judges would feel embarrassed to legislate from the bench. They would fear the disapproval of their friends. They would fear the arched eyebrows at the next bar association dinner. But how do we get there from here?

The truth is that we have a little problem. F.S.C. Northrop in his Meeting of East and West pointed it out fifty years ago. Wonderful as it is, Anglo-American democracy under the rule of law is based on three hundred year old ideas that cut no ice with modern minds burning with a compassionate rage against oppression and marginalization and a dogmatic demand for relevance. Who did these modern minds turn to? They turned to Germans.

It was Kant who took up Locke and Hume’s problems and solved them with his transcendental idealism. It was Kant who first suggested that matter and energy are interchangeable. His suggestion led to Einstein’s equation. It was Schopenhauer who first developed a theory of unconscious motivation. His work led to von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious and thence to Freud and modern psychology.

Other German thinkers were just as brilliant, but not so beneficial. The ideas of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche are imperishable, but they gave us socialism, communism, fascism, and eventually postmodernism. We need to develop taxonomy of German thinkers that can differentiate the beneficial from the merely brilliant. Stable Germans are safe around children and animals, but radioactive Germans should be handled only with care, for as liberal environmentalists have taught us, you can’t be too careful with radioactivity.

Stable Germans are thinkers like Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jung, Wittgenstein, Mises, Hayek, and Voegelin. Radioactive Germans are thinkers like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Stable Germans blended harmoniously into the Anglosphere. Radioactive Germans inspired the insurgents who turned the academy into a left-wing echo chamber.

With the stable Germans we can construct a narrative that starts where Locke and Hume left off and that builds a bridge to the conservative icons of the late twentieth century. And we can fence off the lefty chaps, the ones that inspired the nuclear explosions of bolshevism and fascism, into an enclosure marked “Danger: Radioactivity.”

But wait! How come Freud is in both lists? Because 150 years after Schopenhauer, conservatives still don’t have a decent psychology, and it is killing us. We must take Freud away from the left and build our own modern psychology.

Fortunately, the heavy lifting has already been done. Americans Clare Graves, Don Beck, and Ken Wilber have devised a developmental psychology that finally makes sense to conservatives. It is called (unfortunately) Spiral Dynamics. It says that there are all kinds of people in the modern world, but that principally there are impulsive red victims, purposeful blue believers, creative orange adventurers, and compassionate green communitarians. It’s hierarchical in that red impulsives grow up to be blue purposives, blue believers grow up to be orange creatives, and orange egos grow up to be caring communitarians.

Here’s a question. If your caring green communitarians try to cut out the evil orange corporate entrepreneurs and the rigid blue Christian fundamentalists, guess what happens. The theory predicts that the lefties will regress society back to a red hell of pure power.

Here’s another question. If the government operates a welfare state that assumes that everyone is a red victim, a red exploiter, or a compassionate green social activist what happens to society?

Here’s a question. If judges redefine marriage for the convenience of orange sexual experimenters and kick purposeful blues, who believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, in the teeth, what happens?

That’s what we want the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to think about.

That’s what we want the friends of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to think about.

So Rush Limbaugh doesn’t get to feel powerless.

And the president doesn’t have to spend his political capital on a constitutional amendment.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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