Transcendental Goods

Charles Murray discusses art, accomplishment, faith, and doubt.

Nick Gillespie & Ronald Bailey from the April 2004 issue

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Murray: I am sympathetic to the idea that a society needs something other than laws to make it work. I'm very Burkean in that regard. I think that there are a variety of ways in which that can be supplied. I think that the rigidly secular approach is pretty thin gruel in this regard. Let's say you are aggressively secular and I pose the question, Why should I refrain from using you for my ends, using force if necessary? What is the ultimate reason why this is wrong?

At the end of the book, I say we're coming out of our adolescence as a society. I believe that we are going to be wiser 100 years from now as a species than we are now. I think we'll create a synthesis of old wisdoms and new.

reason: Why aren't you a conservative?

Murray: Too many conservatives are too happy to mess with me in ways I don't think they have any right to mess with me. I don't think it's any of their business, anybody's business, if I want to use drugs. I do use a drug. I use alcohol. I enjoy it thoroughly. I don't think that the government ought to be in the business of encouraging or discouraging marriage, for example. I think that healthy social institutions almost invariably come from leaving them alone rather than messing with them.

reason: What motivates you? You don't believe in God, yet you're writing all these books.

Murray: For whatever reason, I am hopeful, and so here is what I do. I am genuinely an agnostic. I genuinely would like not to be an agnostic, and so I go to Quaker meetings, and sometimes I sit in silence and just think, as we're supposed to think, although I find my [thoughts] wandering at that point. But I take a Bible along with me, and I read it because I don't read the Bible ordinarily. That sort of encapsulates what motivates me.

I take all of these issues very seriously. If I'm a betting man, what do I think the odds are that the cosmos has a meaning and I have a place in it? Probably 80/20 against. But by God, I glom onto that 20 percent.