Author: Crowhill Report

… what is likely to move the country towards large-scale adoption of personal morality and decency?

I put this question to Noman recently, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Religion starts with the awareness of your own sins and shortcomings, and it calls you to repentance. A person who genuinely “gets religion” has decided to change. He turns his eye inward, and he starts to see all his flaws in a new light, against a strict standard by an impartial judge who can peer into his soul. He becomes very concerned with being kind, fair and polite — not to win points on Twitter, but because that’s the right thing to do. He treats the opposite sex with respect. He doesn’t gossip. He knows that he shouldn’t believe things because they’re convenient, because many of the things he now believes are not convenient at all. He also believes that all people have dignity because they are created by God.

He might also latch on to some really stupid adjuncts that come along with this change, but beneath it all he is a different kind of man.

There is, of course, a minority who “get religion” and then become fire-breathing crusaders who are anything but fair, kind and polite. Unfortunately, they often rise to positions of influence, just as narcissists and jerks become presidents of companies. The fire breathers are one of the downsides of a religious revival.

But in my experience, and in my reading of past revivals, the majority who are effected by religion — the pew sitters — have a newfound sense of personal morality, and while that may not completely transform them, it forms the hook on which appeals to decency can be hung.

That’s what’s lacking right now. There is no underlying desire for people to care whether they’re behaving morally or not. At least not in the traditional sense of “behaving morally.” For most moderns, “behaving morally” means “advocating for my group” rather than conforming to a more neutral and objective set of shared values.

“Decency? To them? They don’t deserve decency. They’re evil! Crush them!”

Now that I’ve given some color to the topic, I put the question again. Aside from a religious revival, what social force is going to rescue us from the ugly divisiveness that’s getting deeper and more dangerous every day?

P&C drink and review an export stout, then call in special guest Longinus to help evaluate some short stories by Hemmingway, including …

• A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
• The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
• The Killers
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Hemmingway’s stories broke new ground in several ways. The trio review and discuss.

This episode is part of the “shortcut to the classics” theme, where the boys read short works from major authors.

I just heard a story about life in Arizona, which is (so I was informed) one of those states where almost everyone is armed. Or could be.

They’re also very polite.

What a surprise.

Democrats’ calls for ‘unity’ in transition ring hollow

Trump met crippling resistance after 2016 election

BY ROWAN SCARBOROUGH THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Starkly different tales of two presidential transitions have played out in Washington.

In 2016, Democrats, Obama administration officials and liberal media moved quickly to target President-elect Trump. Over 73 days, there were calls for impeachment, a resistance movement, attempts to infiltrate the Electoral College, false opposition research and FBI surveillance, a Washington Times examination shows.

Four years later, liberal Democrats and media are urging Republicans to rally around presumptive President-elect Joseph R. Biden and his “unity” message.

We value free speech very highly in this country, but it isn’t an absolute. There are limits to free speech.

There’s also a distinction in American law between restrictions the government can place on speech, and restrictions other people can place on speech. So, while the government might not be able to fire somebody for being a communist, a private firm could.

We’ve recently seen many serious attacks on free speech — mostly from the woke left. People lose their jobs and their livelihoods because they dare to say something the woke mob disagrees with.

(For the record, in the past we’ve seen similar threats from the right.)

For some inexplicable reason, we’ve allowed this to happen without challenge.

I think it’s fairly obvious that there is a range of opinions people should be able to express without fear of retaliation, and there are other opinions that are unacceptable in civilized society. For example, it’s no longer acceptable to advocate slavery.

The problem we’re struggling with is how to define the boundaries. What opinions are acceptable, and what are unacceptable?

If you listen to the woke mob, anything they’ve decided to reject in the last five minutes is a hanging offense. This is clearly madness. It puts whoever can make a stink on Twitter in the driver’s seat.

Still, there needs to be some sort of standard. It needs to be relatively objective, and it needs to respect free speech as well as evolving standards of decency. There are things that were acceptable to say in 1720 that are no longer acceptable.

Here’s an idea for how to do that.

Let’s say we pick a group of people who are believed to be representatives of decent society.

• Supreme Court justices (federal and state)
• Senators
• Governors
• Tenured professors at major universities

Imagine that we establish a rule that if you say something that is consistent with what 2 or 3 of those folks have said in the past five years, you’re in the clear. You can’t be fired for expressing such a view.

In time, everyone in the culture would learn to understand and respect that as the acceptable bounds of free speech.

There would have to be some tinkering here. For example, even if three Senators say that Google is a horrible stain on America, Google should still be able to fire employees who say that. So the lawyers will have to adjust things a bit.

But I think that something along these general lines could be adopted as a standard for free speech. It respects the voice of the people — since they elect governors and Senators — and it would define what “reasonable speech” means, and provide a safe haven for it. It would also place a limit on unreasonable speech, and allow for evolving standards of decency.