The stimulating conversation continues in the comments over at Hang Together (“Freedom must mean more than freedom to mention coercion”). From my latest:
Stop thinking about laws for a moment, and just think about the attempt to tell truth, in speaking or in writing. When the listeners differ about the meaning of the text, their natural and correct recourse is to the author. When the listeners differ about the truth of the text, they will have to appeal beyond the author to something that both the author and they find intelligible–to an understanding that is communicable, in principle and therefore (even if only partially) also in practice. If we deny that communicable understanding of reality is intelligible and binding on the conscience, then we destroy the principle of authority and the utility of language.
The cohesiveness of a society, the realization of the formal principle of any society, whether a nation-state or a bridge club, requires that such a denial not take place–and *specifically* that particular positive assertions of the formal principle of that society be made on the understanding that some intelligible reality is implicated in those assertions. You can make a game about a fantasy, but you can’t make a game in which the rules are a fantasy.
And because Creation itself is a text, and ontology an allegory of the Creator, and our study of it is an apprehension of revelation, it is inconceivable that we should separate the recourse to the Author from the history of the text or the resolution and understanding at the End. No, there is no endless deferral; just repeated evasions of a constantly repeated, constantly unfolding, singular Truth.
And if we insist on treading down the intergenerational communication of what we have understood of an intelligible reality, either recklessly (as unthinking moderns so often do) or in principle (as Satanists, anarchists, and their Progressive/Romantic stooges incessantly do)–if we reject tradition–then we put ourselves in the camp of those Paul says the servant of the Lord must correct patiently:
23 Have nothing to do with stupid, senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. 24 And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to every one, an apt teacher, forbearing, 25 correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth, 26 and they may escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.
(source: 2 Timothy 2:23-26 RSV-CE)
I’m not saying that rhetorical appeal to tradition, especially not a merely authoritarian appeal, is useful when you’re dealing with those who do not share the tradition or do not recognize the author-ity/jurisdiction of the author/legislator. What I am saying is that you cannot have a functioning society that does not find those things–so if we actually believe we are irremediably divided on these issues, it behooves us to figure out how to have multiple societies that overlap as little as possible. And in the meantime, we will have to fight rearguard based on current understandings, without regard for consistency, because we have taken it for granted that consistency is meaningless or impossible.
You can argue that a meaningful consensus–a reality-based, authorized, communicable understanding of an intelligible reality–exists to undergird meaningful authority in society (to legitimate government), or you can argue that we need to restructure society while fighting a rearguard action, but there is no possibility that you will convince me, or succeed in fact, by asserting the possibility of subscribing to a society in which meaningful authority is not possible and rearguard action is to be endlessly deferred in hopes of a bright terrestrial, secular future. Not going to happen. Never has, never will. It is not a possibility for human creatures.