Normative events

Some years ago it struck me how much current political opinion and theory depend on appeals to normative events. We can’t do or say X because of the Holocaust, or because of Fascism, or because of the Civil Rights Act. Events close off certain political and moral options.

This mode of argument is far more common on the American left than on the American right, since the latter tends to make appeals to general principles of human nature, or the long sweep of tradition, rather than to particular, fairly recent events.

In this respect, as in so many others, “liberal” order and liberal theory are faint echoes of Christianity, because Christianity’s politics and ethics takes its shape from the Normative Event to end all Normative Events, the incarnation of the Son of God.