The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis

I'll keep my review short. Simply put, Professor George, a former student of John Finnis at Oxford, has created one of the best defenses of the Catholic Natural Law tradition, with no appeal to Divine Revelation -- which is an important point to make since your average skeptic considers Christian ethics as relying primarily, if not solely, on "irrational" faith. The book is primarily concerned with the effects of ethical subjectivism on legal/social matters; however, George nearly covers the whole gamut of ethical issues, including abortion, homosexuality, and contraception -- all in a clear, succinct manner. The first chapter alone is worth the purchase of the book; it is certainly one of the best essays I have read on the truth of Natual Law orthodoxy and Theistic Moral Realism, including a refutation of Atheistic Moral Realism (a la Iris Murdoch) via a debate with Josh Dever, who represents what George calls "liberal orthodoxy." In order to get the most out of this book, one should also read George's 'Making Men Moral,' a defense of the social conservative position (e.g., communities banning pornography). If one enjoys George's work, he should also check out other books published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). ISI is one of the leading organizations promoting conservative thought in academia. Their list of books is quite impressive.

In The Clash of Orthodoxies, a limpidly written and deftly argued collections of essays, Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and one of the most important natural-law philosophers of our time, wants "to show that Christians and other believers are right to defend their positions on key moral issues as rationally superior to the alternatives proposed by secular liberals and those within the religious denominations who have abandoned traditional moral principles in favor of secularist morality." He triumphantly succeeds in this ambitious endeavor, and as a result our understanding of the cultural and moral struggle that convulses our country is vastly enriched. To select one example from the numerous ones available in the book, Professor George's essay "The Concept of Public Morality" is a masterly clarification of an area that has become a terrible intellectual mess, a situation engendered by the reckless libertarianism of both the left and right. For instance, pornography is now an unavaidable part of our daily lives, and Professor George rightly contends that "where pornography flourishes, as it does in our own culture, it erodes important shared public understandings of sexuality and sexual morality on which the health of the institutions of marriage and family life in any culture vitally depend. This is a classic case in which the accumulation of apparently private choices of private parties has big public consequences." The stability (or what little stability is left) of what Professor George calls our "moral ecology" depends on the restoration of this kind of understanding in the place of the prevailing relativism that thwarts any serious reflection on the notion of public morality. Professor George brings to all the complicated questions he explores a fairmindedness coupled with a moral position utterly devoted to the cause of life and the vindication of human dignity. This view is in emphatic opposition to the culture of death that is at the center of secular orthodoxy. He summarizes his view with characteristic precision and elegance: "It is the liberalism . . . of the rule of law, democratic self-government, subsidiarity, social solidarity, private property, limited government, equal protection, and basic human freedoms, such as those of speech, press, assembly, and above all, religion. This . . . is a decidedly old-fashioned liberalism -- if you will, a 'conservative liberalism.' It is the liberalism of Lincoln and the American founders, of Newman and Chesterton, of the Second Vatican Council and Pope John Paul II: A liberalism of life." Professor George makes his case for this "liberalism of life" with uncommon rigor and clarity. As America inevitably confronts complex moral and political issues that seriously threaten to undermine our humanity, the thinking found in The Clash of Orthodoxies is precisely the orthodoxy needed to advance a rational culture of life.

I can say without qualification that the Clash of Orthodoxies is one of the most important books of the last decade in the area of moral theory. There is simply no better reasoned case for the culture of life and no better examination of the philosophic heart of the debate between that culture and the many anti-life commitments of secular liberalism in contemporary America. In short, The Clash of Orthodoxies is an indispensable book, and it should be read by anyone who has an interest in engaging the moral arguments at the center of public discourse on the momentous topics of the culture of life. Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, one of the most prestigious political science chairs in the country; he serves as director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a dynamic new program centered at Princeton University and dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in constitutional studies and political thought; and he holds advanced degrees in law and legal theory from Harvard and Oxford. As one might expect, George's defense of traditional moral values evinces a high degree of philosophic sophistication, rivaling that of any moral theorist writing across the political spectrum today, and he is more than a match for liberal and leftist moral theorists such as John Rawls and Peter Singer. Even so, no potential reader of this book should allow George's philosophic sophistication to give him pause. Indeed, the Clash of Orthodoxies manages simultaneously to communicate the essential core of the philosophic disputes at the center of the culture wars today and yet remain at a level easily accessible to the general reader and thoughtful non-specialist. Another virtue of George's books is its overarching fairness. George is painstakingly accurate, fair, and perhaps even overly charitable in his exposition and critique of the views of such prominent secular liberal individualist moral theorists as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. In fact, George demonstrates the extraordinary level of his commitment to a truly rigorous conception of fairness and accuracy in political debate by including in his book the full text of article-length critiques of his own work (rather than mere summaries or selective quotations) by liberal scholars such as Josh Dever and James Fleming, a practice almost unheard of in a book of this sort. Moreover, George's highly sophisticated philosophic analysis of liberal thinkers such as John Rawls suggests he understands those thinkers as well or better than they understand themselves. George's erudition and razor-sharp analytic mind, at times, are breathtaking. The scope of George's book is quite broad, and it is well organized into three sections, involving the "clash of orthodoxies" in the public square, in the courts, and in the Catholic Church. Each of the three sections is further sub-divided into discrete but related and complementary essays, which are ideal for di

Here is a "man bites dog story": A brilliant, no-holds-barred defense of Judeo-Christian morality against orthodox liberal secularism by a professor at a mainstream-indeed Ivy League-university. With infanticide-advocate Peter Singer on the left, and Robert George on the right, Princeton must be an interesting place these days!One of the great virtues of Professor George's book is that it makes it clear that our culture faces an unavoidable choice between a "brave new world" governed by the utilitarian ethic championed by Professor Singer, and a renewed dedication to our nation's founding principles of natural law and natural rights. George cogently sets out the intellectual case for a return to our principles. A key feature of The Clash of Orthodoxies is the author's demonstration that secular liberals, notwithstanding their claims to be operating on the basis of "pure reason," ultimately appeal to emotion, rather than rationality, in defending abortion, euthanasia, sexual liberation, and other causes they favor. He provides compelling arguments to show that Judeo-Christian beliefs in such areas as the right to life and marriage and sexual morality are rationally superior to liberal ideas. He concludes with an illuminating chapter defending the idea that faith and reason-far from conflicting with each other-are "mutually supporting." George is the very opposite of a "dogmatist." In fact, in a very unusual move, his book includes essays by two liberal professors who sharply criticize his views, together with George's powerful responses to their criticisms. These exchanges are models of vigorous but entirely civil exchanges between people who disagree over the great moral issues of our time. The Clash of Orthodoxies is a splendid book. It will teach ordinary citizens how to think well about important topics. It will also teach them to question "the secular orthodoxy."

Here in Princeton, New Jersey there are a lot of highly educated people, including especially university professors and graduate students. Sometimes they share their viewpoints with the rest of us by pasting bumper stickers to their cars, usually older model Saabs or Volvos. I saw one the other day: "I do my part to keep the religious right angry." It conveys a widespread understanding among liberal elites that religious conservatives are not motivated by reason, at least not in their opinions about social issues, like abortion, euthanasia, and gay rights, which, from time to time, are the subject of public debate. Rather, they work from "prejudices" unthinkingly imported from their traditional religious beliefs into the political arena. Liberals believe that these conservatives would impose--not persuade or convince because their positions are not based in reason--their religious belief on the reasonable majority. A new book by Princeton professor Robert P. George, The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI Books, 2001) challenges this understanding of religious conservatism. George, a Harvard and Oxford educated philosopher who holds the McCormick Chair of Jurisprudence once occupied by Princeton demigod Woodrow Wilson, sets out to make the case that the moral views of conservative Christians (often shared by observant Jews and other believers) are rationally defensible. Actually, he even goes farther, arguing throughout this 300-page work that "Judaeo-Christian moral teaching can be shown to be rationally superior to orthodox secular moral beliefs." A remarkable thing about The Clash of Orthodoxies is its accessibility. George attained his high standing in the academy by writing books and articles addressed to scholars in highly specialized areas of law and philosophy. In this latest work, however, he addresses the wider public. The Clash of Orthodoxies is a pleasure to read. It is lively and engaging, and avoids academic jargon and unnecessary technical analysis. (When one senses that the details of an argument have been sacrificed for readability, one can go to his own and others' scholarly works which are cited in the numerous endnotes and which discuss a point in far greater depth.) On the other hand, John Grisham has nothing to fear. This is not a beach reading. This is an analytical work; it takes up the thorny perennial questions of how we organize our lives together--issues of life and death, rights and freedoms. And the author does not take the easy way out by recourse to rhetoric or facile reasoning. Counterarguments to traditional morality's answers are consistently engaged. Professor George's brand of conservatism owes little to the pundits, politicians and journalists on the right. The author is genuinely interested in a debate on the merits; he eschews partisanship and always argues in a spirit of goodwill. The Clash of Orthodoxies will do much then to enhance the quality of public debate on controversial issues such as