Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Perhaps the most obvious example of moral distance between the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right is the Singerian, Malthusian, anti-humanism granted ideological prestige by the left. Such anti-humanism certainly has a prominent place in the Barack Obama administration: in the persons of John Holdren and Cass Sunstein and the myriad radical abortionists appointed by him.

The most recent example of this is Cass Sunstein. At What’s Wrong With the World, they have engaged in a nice conversation on this man’s radical equivocations on the dignity of human personhood. A very sharp contributor by the name of Lydia McGrew has shown what’s wrong with Cass Sunstein’s idea to grant the legal right to sue, and thus to give the status of personhood under the law, to animals.

A “paleo-conservative” by the name of Maximos has tried to refute Lydia’s concerns on the same blog. If you read the combox of Maximos’s post, you’ll see that Lydia very summarily handles his “defense,” if we can call it that, of Sunstein.

The whole debate between these two contributors on that blog points to the problematic political stance that has been taken by “paleo-conservatives” since the Bush years. In their desire to oppose the Iraq war, and so forth, they have become more sympathetic to the contemporary left than to the “neo-conservative” right.

Now, granted all the problems with the “neo-conservative” right, it is exceedingly problematic to see a moral equivalence between the neoconservatives (who have given us decent supreme court appointments in the past 8 years, and who make the likes of Leon Kass — rather than Peter Singer — public voices of moral authority) and the new left.

It all hinges on the nature of the person, as David has been right to show. What is often unnoticed with the contemporary left is their uniform tendency to diminish the onotological status of the human person. Indeed, the reductionist programs of research into the brain in the contemporary academy are fed by and feed the political programs of contemporary leftism. Peter Singer is no anomaly in the contemporary academy. And his view of the person is at home on the left much more so than on the right — David Frum, or Rod Dreher, or David Brooks notwithstanding.

The Barack Obama administration has, in fact, given us an instructive example on this point. Cass Sunstein’s legal theory in defense of animal rights shows that the person does not have for him  a unique, unrepeatable, ontological dignity by virtue of his embodiment of a rational and free nature.