Double Aspect

In my last post, I argued that Adrian Vermeule should not be honoured in academic settings, because his intellectual project is opposed to what academia ought to stand for. Reactions were pretty predictable—Bluesky liked it, Twitter not so much. But one feature of the Twitter response might be worth a comment: namely, the reaction of some Vermeule-sympathetic accounts to what I said about the abortion issue.

One of the examples of Professor Vermeule’s anti-academic attitude, I said, is the way in which he wants to make pro-choice thinking “abominable” and to expel it from the realm of what is even debatable in polite society. To which his fans say—well, of course he does. What’s wrong with that? “Pre-born” babies are being exterminated, and this should no more be debated than slavery.

If you are simply trying to establish your street cred in the common-good world—as many of these accounts evidently are, considering they thought it was necessary to tag Professor Vermeule in their responses to me—then fair enough. Richard Hanania’s essay on “The Based Ritual” explains what is going on here. But if this is meant as an actual argument, then it is not nearly as clever as the people making it imagine.

For one thing, it is very much akin to the sorts of arguments the woke left is in the habit of making, both in form and in structure. In form, because of the way it relies on word-games, trading on the emotional strength of the question-begging assertion that what is being destroyed in an abortion is a baby, albeit “pre-born”. One can—and should—acknowledge that the other side of this debate plays very similar games with its obstinate insistence on referring to abortion as “reproductive healthcare”, but that’s the point. It’s games whichever side plays them. We are used to the left doing it, and especially the woke left, which has devoted its best years to language policing. Hence homeless people become “unhoused” and women were made into “birthing persons”. But now, just as parts of the left are at last trying to move away from this nonsense, some of the people who used to mock it seem to have decided that it was, after all, a jolly good idea. The pre-born babies are their very own birthing persons.

As for the structure of the argument, it is no different from the erstwhile claims that opposition to supposed anti-racist policies or theories was intolerable and grounds for banishment from polite society. There too, facile equations to slavery—or at least to Jim Crow—came thick and fast and were used as conversation-stoppers. And again, the people who used to recognize that such rhetoric is nothing more than bullying, and doesn’t persuade even if it succeeds in silencing, have now decided to resort to it.

This brings me to the second and ultimately more important reason why these arguments are far less clever than they might seem. It sounds noble to say that certain issues are not up for debate, that certain moral truths are beyond discussion. But that simply does not work in the actually existing world, where any number of things that ought to be beyond debate regrettably are not. This was the case of slavery for most of humanity’s existence, after all, and it was debate and discussion that created the conditions for its eventual eradication from the law and from the realm of what needs to be discussed and debated. (Of course, armed force, whether that of the Union armies in the US Civil War or of the Royal Navy interdicting slave trade, were necessary too. But the wielders of this force first had to be persuaded and stirred into action!)

To be sure, we wouldn’t want to re-stage the Lincoln-Douglas debates today. We would hope that the issue has indeed been settled once and for all. But while there are some issues that have been so settled—and even they have, unfortunately, a way of becoming unsettled again, as the common-gooders’ own endeavours to call into question such certainties as the separation of church and state show—it will not do to treat issues that are, as a matter of fact, contentious as if they were settled. Lincoln did not have the luxury of doing so with slavery in the 1850s, and the common-good crowd doesn’t have the luxury to do so with abortion today. If they want to make it undebatable, they first have to win the debate. Then, and only then, can they take a break.

The fact that they are seemingly unwilling to do this hard work might mean one of two things, neither of them good, but one of them rather frightening. One possibility is that this crowd is just fundamentally unserious. They enjoy posturing and trolling, but they are not prepared to work to change the world in accordance with their stated ideal. If so, we should simply ignore them. The other possibility though, the scary one, is that they are in fact committed to bringing about change, but by means which dispense with persuasion entirely—that is to say, by deceit and force. Deceit first, to get themselves into positions of power without their intentions being debated—for example, as bureaucrats in an administration elected on a wave of populist sloganeering. Force, then, to coerce people who disagree with them into obedience and, they hope, since they are great believers in the law’s pedagogical effect, eventual assent.

I do not know which of these possibilities is more likely or better describes the majority of what may well be a disparate group. Nor do I particularly care. The second possibility is sufficiently plausible to deserve to be taken seriously. Democracy too is one of those things that did not seem like it needed to be debated, but now it is in fact debated and must be defended. Professor Vermeule and his followers are its enemies—or should be treated as such—because they act like it. As I have argued in my last post, we must tolerate them and respond to them, but we need not pretend that they are engaged in a deserving and commendable intellectual enterprise.