Why You Can’t “Pass Go” on a Chessboard

Election night 1992—a night of jubilation for the victors, despair for the losers, and relief for us all. One could almost hear the collective sigh of 250 million Americans when the shrill conflict was over. I found myself reflecting on Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation that politics has become “civil war carried on by other means.”

Politics has always been a rough-and-tumble affair, of course. But never before have I seen voters so disenchanted. Never before have I seen such a deep vein of anger running through the body politic.

It defies any simplistic explanation.

No doubt there was anti-incumbency fever. But we knew the solution to that was to toss the rascals out—which is what we did to hundreds of public officials. No doubt there was worry over the economy—something very real to men and women out of work. Yet compared to other industrialized nations, our recession was mild. Inflation and interest rates are at 40-year lows.

And the international front gave reason for rejoicing. The cold war is over; around the globe nations are racing to adopt Western-style democracy.

The Embrace Of Despair

So why were voters so frustrated?

The real explanation lies deeper, in our loss of a moral vision. The American experiment in limited government depends on a pre-existing moral order, on shared convictions about what is true, right, and just. As Aquinas said, there can be no law without moral consensus.

Historically in the West, that consensus was informed by Christianity. But Enlightenment thinkers, intoxicated with human autonomy, sought a new basis for morality in Reason alone.

It soon became clear, however, that Reason does not speak with a single voice. What one philosopher confidently pronounced as the dictates of Reason, the next just as confidently refuted.

Eventually philosophy crossed what Francis Schaeffer called the “line of despair”: It gave up hope of ever finding a rational basis for ethics, and reduced morality to the expression of feelings and preferences.

Moral statements were drained of all claim to truth. “Murder is wrong” was translated as “I don’t like murder,” or “I’d prefer you didn’t murder.” This is the emotive theory of ethics, and it is the operative theory in America today.

But emotivism spells the death of reasoned political discourse. For it gives up any objective criteria of right and wrong. Political debates are reduced to a clash of private preferences.

Warring sides can’t even agree on how to define terms.

A Muddled Family Feud

Consider the muddled debate over the definition of family. After the Murphy Brown episode, Hollywood celebrities took every opportunity to offer their fuzzy notion of the family. Channel-hopping one night I came across Angela Lansbury (star of “Murder, She Wrote”) on Arsenio Hall, pontificating that a family is “anyone we’re close to.” The audience thundered its approval.

The other side raised the banner of “family values” but seemed unable to define it. At the Republican convention, Barbara Bush (apparently hoping not to offend anyone) said, “However you define family, that’s what we mean by family values.” Later Dan Quayle told reporters family values are fostered by low airline and phone rates. In one of the presidential debates, candidates were asked straight out, “What is a family?” Not one gave a direct answer.

The public was left with the impression that the whole controversy was a shouting match between glitzy, with-it progressives and nostalgic reactionaries hankering for the 1950s. Without a clear definition, the debate never moved past square one.

Ironically, a mere 30 years ago no one would even have asked what a family is. It was understood that there is a moral order in the universe, which prescribes certain patterns of behavior—a timeless ideal upheld by successful societies everywhere: the family as a lifelong union between a man and a woman, where children are nurtured and civilized.

In a fallen world, of course, there are families that fail to meet the norm. But acknowledging that people do not always meet a standard is quite different from giving up standards altogether—which is what our culture is doing.

And not only in the area of the family. The emotivist theory of ethics has undermined any appeal to objective standards in public life—whether the issue is economics or euthanasia or the environment. As a result, our political debate has lost its center of gravity; it reels from side to side without any hope of resolution.

A Cultural Appomattox

Politics, you see, is like a game: It needs a common set of principles both sides agree on. If you and I are playing chess, we can resolve any arguments by consulting the rule book. But if you play chess while I play Monopoly, how can we resolve our disputes? There are no common rules applying to both of us, no final court of appeal.

With morality reduced to individual feelings, society is left with no moral principles—no “rule book”—to which we can all appeal. Political debate becomes interminable. Each side tries to dominate merely by raising the decibel level, with clichés, sound bites, and personal attacks.

This is the real reason voters feel so frustrated. Terms like emotivism or subjectivism may not be part of our everyday vocabulary. Still, we all sense that we have lost something—that politics has become shrill and shallow because it is no longer tied to deeper principles of what is true, right, and just.

Journalist E. J. Dionne puts his finger on it in his book Why Americans Hate Politics (Simon and Schuster). Americans have lost a vision of the common good, he says, and we are in the throes of a “cultural civil war.” Americans hate politics for the understandable reason that we hate civil war.

How can this civil war be ended? What can bring us to a cultural Appomattox?

The church. It is the one institution capable of drawing people beyond the clichés and slogans, and of pointing them to an objective morality—one based ultimately on God’s own holy character.

Nothing less will revive civilized political debate. Nothing less can end America’s civil war.

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