Over on The Corner they’re taking potshots at libertarians with the predictable invocation of Emerson’s dictum that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But as Glen Whitman once pointed out to me, back when we were roomies in Manhattan, that just ain’t what Emerson meant. In other words, he wasn’t saying there was something wrong with having a consistent set of principles—treating like cases alike. Look at the full quotation:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.
Emerson was offering some much better advice, to wit: don’t let pride prevent you from changing your mind. Don’t feel that you have to keep defending the same position just because that’s the position you’ve always held. The notion that there’s something wrong with consistency within one’s own views at a given time—the idea, in other words, that you should just arbitrarily apply a principle in some cases but not in others, is pretty bizarre, and I can’t think of anything to recommend it.
What they really mean, of course, is not anything quite this stupid: they go on to talk about weighing social costs and benefits. What they ought to be arguing, then, is that we should consistently apply the principle of allowing free private behavior if and only if the social costs don’t exceed the benefits, or some more nuanced version of that principle.
So why the red herring about consistency? Well, because conservatives aren’t terribly rigorous about applying that principle consistently either. If they did, they’d have to grapple with uncomfortable questions like: “do you really think the social costs of gay marriage are greater than those of gambling or alcohol? Can you demonstrate this at the same standard of evidence you’d demand of someone who sought to ban those other things?” And if we consider abortion, it’s pretty clear that no showing of social benefit from permitting it would be allowed to outweigh the “cost” they see abortion as imposing: the life of the fetus is supposed to act as a trump, not one more factor to weigh in the balance. Ironically, bagging on consistency allows conservatives to engage precisely the sort of “foolish consistency” that Emerson was concerned with: the kind that immunizes your instincts and prejudices, the views imbibed at momma’s knee, from critical scrutiny.
