Having complained about the “ruralist” takeover of the Republican Party, Helen Rittelmeyer is not someone you would not immediately with praising “red state” culture, but then the way that she goes about it almost makes you wonder whether she is delivering a left-handed compliment in her response to this:

Let’s put aside the question of whether or not New Yorkers really question their moral assumptions (although if someone else wanted to take up this line of argument, I wouldn’t stop them) and simply look at the end result of this Blue State skepticism. Most of the time, it’s some variation on the harm principle under which the most important ethical question becomes “Does it increase everyone’s happiness?” What could be less sophisticated?

Contrast this with the moral decision-making of a Red Stater who has unquestioningly accepted a truckload of inherited traditions (the clod!). He has to weigh love of country against love for his brother serving in Iraq, not to mention Christian morality, which has a thing or two to say about war. Or he might have to consider family loyalty versus the desire to do something about his sister’s alcoholism. Or loyalty to his wife versus passionate love for another woman. Cheating songs are a sign of moral sophistication (insofar as they take seriously both the sacred vow and true love), and I dare you to name one Blue State genre of music that can boast as many cheating songs as country [bold mine-DL].

Moral philosophy is hard. If every ethical question could be boiled down to some hedonistic or utilitarian calculus (I’m looking at you, cultural libertarianism), it would be easy. Maybe Red Staters don’t respect Socrates as much as they should, but that doesn’t change the fact that, in a world where urbanity is synonymous with cultural liberalism, they’re the only side of the culture war that needs him.

If I read this right, Ms. Rittelmeyer is saying that it is lack of utilitarianism, competing obligations and an abundance of temptation that confer moral sophistication.  She has taken the social disorder and family instability that drives many lower-middle class people in “red states” towards the politics of order and stability and turned it into a kind of complex moral reasoning.  For the sake argument, assume that New Yorkers, Angelenos and Chicagoans and the rest do not question their moral assumptions–how many people ever really question their moral assumptions?  Having cross-cutting obligations and complicated relationships is not the same as reflecting upon the nature of justice and knowing oneself.  If it was absurd to say that an unexamined life was worth living, as the “red state” correspondent claimed, it is perhaps even more absurd to say that a complicated life full of conflicts is one that has been examined.  It is also not clear that all “blue staters” are simply utilitarians, but almost certainly have their own sets of conflicting obligations and their own “truckload of inherited traditions,” which may include utilitarian ethics and liberal politics.  Consider: she says that “red staters” have unquestioningly inherited their traditions, but she says this by way of illustrating how unquestioning “blue staters” are, so which is it?           

On the music question, I am no expert but it seems to me that hip-hop and R&B must have a large number of songs that address the question of infidelity, and if they do not compare to country songs in this respect they are probably close.  Are these “blue state” genres?  I am not sure that they are, since you can find listeners for them all along the old Route 66 corridor, but they seem to fit the bill.  Turning to film, we can find cautionary tales about infidelity set in metropolitan areas in the oeuvre of Michael Douglas, and I think if you turn to television you will find other forms of entertainment that have great fun mucking about in the swamp of moral turpitude and conflicting obligations (e.g., Nip/Tuck, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, etc.).  If these are the criteria for a culture that prizes self-knowledge, “blue” America is likely to meet them as well as “red,” but I think all of this misses something important. 

Worldliness and competing loyalties do not define moral sophistication, but simply define our condition in this world that all of us share.  Whatever moral sophistication we are going to find, it is not going to be found in questioning assumptions but in fulfilling our obligations.