That horrific nonsense from Singer reminds me of something.

I’ve received some fascinating email regarding yesterday’s post on conservatism and hypocrisy. Most of it, alas, is too long to put in the Corner.

But a point that I keep returning to in my correspondence with some readers on this point is that I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that one of the defining differences betwen liberals and conservatives — of a certain type at least — is the way they approach the “problem” of internal contradictions in a given society. Singer comes from a branch of thinking which despises contradiction. He defends his horrible policy conclusions by saying they were reached by logical deduction and that he’s a “consistent” philosopher. All of that is debatable, but to a certain extent irrelevant. Just as Chesterton tells us that the purely rational man will not fight nor marry, the perfectly “rational” society of Peter Singer will countenance infanticide and inter-species “dating” all in the name of having perfectly consistent standards.

I believe in consistent standards, but they need to be drawn from something other than a sterile rationalism which does not take certain tanscendent moral precepts as givens. Singer doesn’t take the sanctity of human life as a given. He doesn’t give the the taboo of human-animal sex as a given. He finds the messy contradictions and hypocrisies of organic society offensive to his intellect. The problem is that any real society must have internal contradictions. It must be immune to the impulse of pure rationality. But like an obsessive compulsive who washes his hands so much they end-up bloody and raw, the obsessive-planner is convinced that just a bit more tweaking, a bit more data, will yield the contradiction-free society. There’s a serious argument that it was this obsession with the rational not the obsessive irrationalism of anti-Semitism, which led to the Holocaust.

With important caveats, liberal pluralism and traditional conservatism once shared the view that society was too complicated to be made entirely rational.

This consensus started to change in the 1920s and shattered under FDR. Today, I think the acceptance that there will always be contradictions, trade-offs and animosities even in the most successful societies is largely — though not entirely — a conservative trait. (Marc Cooper has an outstandingly good essay in the current Atlantic [no link] demonstrating that not all liberals feel this way). Was it not Bill Clinton who called every choice which might create a winner and a loser “a false choice”?