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January 18, 2005
Thomas Fleming is not everyone's
Thomas Fleming is not everyone's cup of tea. Editor of the self-described "paleo-conservative" journal Chronicles, his views are guaranteed to give almost anyone something to get mad about. Liberals will find his attacks on abortion and homosexuality distasteful; conservatives will be non-plussed by his rejection of the free market, global interventionism, international capitalism, and almost everything Bush stands for; I myself am most put off by his explicit anti-feminism. So I began The Morality of Everyday Life with some trepidation, despite the obvious attraction of the title for me. I found its argument fascinating, convincing, informative and--perhaps most surprising of all--scrupulously fair. Fleming essentially calls for a return to a pre-modern ethic in which our primary loyalties and affections are reserved for those closest to us: our immediate families, then our neighborhood, then our community, and so on. He derides the Enlightenment tradition of objectivity and universalism as dangerous myths that encourage us to sacrifice the real lives of those around us for the sake of abstract ideals. If this sounds like Nel Noddings or Carol Gilligan's "ethics of care," that's because Fleming, as he admits, shares with these (feminist) thinkers a belief in the moral priority of blood ties over theories of justice. He differs from them, however, in his belief that such an ethic is not the sole purview of women--though his ur-example of the morality of everyday life is in fact "mother-love." Fleming also encourages us to return to medieval casuistry, in which the specifics of each moral dilemma are taken into consideration, rather than trying to fit moral questions into larger categories, and he embraces literature as a particularly nuanced representation of the way real ethical complexities are navigated: "Ordinary people," he suggests, "seem to need a nontechnical casuistry that accords the real problems of everyday life the serious attention they deserve, an attention often (though certainly not always) denied them by academic philosophy."
In this book, whatever he may profess elsewhere, Fleming does not seek to defend the positions that make him so controversial, though he mentions them frequently. Instead, his target is the Enlightenment and the kind of international humanitarian impulses that have given rise to the bombing of Kosovo and the "liberation" of Iraq. Causes in general, even those dearest to Fleming, take backseat to our duty to live faithfully and lovingly as members of our families and local communities. I find this at once an enormously compelling idea, given my belief that so much of what makes life meaningful and worthwhile is located in the everyday--and an unnerving one, particularly in the face of the tsunamis (our era's earthquake of Lisbon), which cry out so urgently for a sense of shared humanity. But don't feel you have to go into this book seeking to be convinced. As Fleming himself says, "Even if readers end up rejecting these arguments as eccentric or irrelevant to modern life, I hope they will return to the mainstream of liberalism with a clearer knowledge of what the older tradition represents. One cannot rationally hold an opinion without considering the alternative." Unlike many who have made such claims, Fleming really is being "fair and balanced" here; he engages in no sneaky logical fallacies, he's equally hard on the left and the right; he acknowledges exceptions to his claims; and he often cites as background material texts that challenge his view as well as ones that support it. This argument struck me, all other merits and flaws aside, as being in amazingly good faith, and I recommend approaching it in the same spirit.
Posted by Miki at January 18, 2005 06:42 PM