Freedom -- the liberation of desire from restraint by other people's understanding of the good -- is central to liberalism. It follows that liberalism is incoherent. The problem is that freedom has to be freedom to do something in particular, and goals conflict. As a result some particular goals, and thus some freedoms, have to be chosen over others. So freedom cannot be an ultimate standard. A substantive understanding of the good always comes first. The writings in this section discuss the contradictions, and the tyrannies and obfuscations, that arise when the attempt is made to put freedom first.
A slightly edited version of the following essay, originally entitled "Liberalism, the Transcendent, and Restoration," appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of Modern Age. It is also available in Danish and Czech.
The disappearance of the radical left is a sign that in principle it has reached its attainable goals. While no one admits it, what we see around us is the victory of the Revolution.
Politics today is radically secularist and antiparticularist. It aims to dissolve what is left of traditional society and construct a universal form of human association that will constitute a technically rational system for the equal satisfaction of desire. Religion is to be banished from public life, ethnic and gender distinctions abolished, and a worldwide order established, based on world markets and trans-national bureaucracies, that is to override local differences in the name of human rights, international economic development, and collective security.
Contemporary liberalism expresses and supports that new order. Not all members of our ruling elites adhere to liberalism, and it draws support from outsiders as well. However, our elites determine its content, and it promotes their interests. It sets the terms of discussion, defines what is considered progress, and establishes the general principles of cooperation upon which our elites base their claim to rule.
Supporters of the new order see it as historically and morally necessary, and thus as compulsory regardless of established views and habits. Since modern governments claim to base themselves on consent, the public must be brought to accept it. Managing opinion and keeping perspectives that oppose fundamental public policies out of mainstream discussion have therefore become basic to statecraft.
Genuine opposition comes not from the left but from reactionary and restorationist groups that exclude themselves from respectable politics by rejecting liberalism and the left. Today's dissidents are particularist -- traditionalist, fundamentalist, populist, or nationalist. Beyond that, they are antisecularist and antihedonist. They reject a system of politics that bases social order on human desire, because they reject the view that lies behind it, that men make morality for their own purposes.
Today all things are justified on the grounds that they help men get what they want. Those who recognize an authority superior to human purposes are seen as dangerous bigots who want to oppress others in the name of some sect or arbitrary principle. As a consequence, fundamental political discussion no longer exists. Politics today is divided between an outlook that presents itself as rational and this-worldly, and absolutely dominates public discussion, and a variety of dissident views that speak for goods higher than human desire but are unable to make effective their substantial underlying support. The conflict is never discussed seriously since it is considered resolved; the ruling liberal view is accepted as indisputable, while dissent is considered confused or worse.
The dominant outlook believes itself peculiarly tolerant and all-inclusive. It is not. The error results from a misconception of politics and morality that is essential to liberalism. Liberalism claims to leave religious and moral issues, at least those it identifies as personal, to individual judgment. The theoretical ground for doing so is neutrality as to ultimate commitments. As the Supreme Court has put the matter, "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992, 505 U.S. 833, 851.
Liberals assert that widespread religious and moral disagreement today makes such neutrality the only possible approach to public life. While they sometimes speak of common values, when pressed liberals return to the necessity of letting people choose for themselves. All that is required, liberals say, are a few formal principles, such as equality and self-ownership, required for differing purposes to co-exist.
Liberalism draws enormous strength from its ability to get such claims accepted. They are nonetheless false. Few societies have been liberal, while moral disagreement is common to all societies of any size and complexity. Moreover, contemporary liberalism no more accepts disagreement than other views do. To the contrary, it is based on a particular understanding of morality with pervasive implications for the whole of life that it enforces against other more reasonable understandings.
What makes liberal claims seem plausible is not any inability of current moral views to achieve dominance but changes in the way in which dominance is established and maintained. Liberalism is at home in today's world. Its strength is its ability to use new methods of dominion that rely less on physical repression than on homogenization and centralization of social life, destruction of independent institutions and moral habits, and maintenance of the illusion of open inquiry and popular rule.
The fact is that modern conditions make neutrality among moral views less important. When our rulers today do battle with the religious and moral habits of the people, our rulers win. "Political correctness" shows that it is now possible to establish as authoritative moral views that are profoundly at odds with long-established understandings, as long as those who dominate public discussion are committed to them.
The present situation results in part from the enormous power that mass communications media put in the hands of a small elite that can flood the world with the opinions of chosen experts and swamp critical thought with trivia and soundbites. That power makes molders of opinion -- media people, entertainers, experts, educators -- integral to government; our rulers control opinion because those who control opinion are among them.
The influence of a small class over opinion is aided by growing centralization of intellectual life. The republic of letters has become less republican; thought and what counts as knowledge are no longer left to chance or individual initiative. Intellectual life is now carried on by a largely state-supported bureaucracy comprising academics, foundations, think tanks, arts officials and so on. News reporting and analysis are in the hands of professionals employed by a few large organizations. The young are reared largely by mass-market entertainers and an increasingly unified state education system. The effect has been to do away with intellectual independence and make dissident views seem provincial, ignorant or insane. The few places dissent exists freely, such as talk radio and the Internet, are socially marginal, lack discipline and coherence, and are seen as centers of "hate" that threatens everything decent.
Beyond the support it receives from those who control publicity, the strength of liberalism in an age of publicity is its "stealth" quality. What the neutrality of liberalism amounts to is its ability to keep the substantive moral views it enforces invisible, thus removing moral disputes from politics and so preventing challenges to its own positions from even being raised. That quality gives liberalism an advantage in public discussion that has so far been insuperable.
Moral decisions are unavoidable in politics, and a government that claims to leave them up to the individual is engaged in deception. Man is a social animal who needs government because voluntary cooperation is not enough for common goods. Views vary on the goods government should support; since differences mean conflict the law must decide among them. Between the choices abortionists provide and the lives Operation Rescue defends neutrality is impossible.
To enforce a definite view of the matter, as government must if it is to act coherently, is to enforce a particular understanding of morality. Enforcing morality is difficult, and every government looks for alternatives to force in dealing with moral disagreement. Different governments emphasize different means, traditionalist states stressing common adherence to what has long been settled, theocracies and ideological regimes persuasion by authority, republics mutual persuasion among the citizens. All these are ways of reducing the number and intensity of disagreements by dealing with their substance, a process that is difficult but necessary if government is to promote goods held in common. Liberal governments assert they can do without such a process because they keep moral disputes out of politics while leaving their substance untouched. They claim allegiance not because they promote common goods but because they let everyone pursue his own preferences without interference.
Looking for ways to let each man go his own way might amount only to recognition of the difficulty of moral agreement and the importance of arrangements that ease cooperation when agreement is minimal. When so understood liberal views are an aspect of practical wisdom consistent with almost any reasonable understanding of the goals of politics. A sacred monarchy with an established church would, on this view, be liberal if when possible it preferred accommodation to force.
Contemporary liberalism is not so limited a view. It is a comprehensive governing philosophy that determines the whole of public morality. While it sounds permissive, comprehensive solutions are usually intolerant in practice and liberalism is no exception. Contemporary liberalism sets forth categorical demands it calls "rights," and rejects balancing principles such as respect for natural tendencies and settled understandings. Without balancing principles abstract demands expand without limit. As a result, liberal standards have become all-embracing to the point of tyranny. Liberal neutrality, which began as a patchwork of limitations on government power, has become applicable to social practices generally and thereby oppressive. If to be liberal is to be willing to accommodate other views, contemporary liberalism is no longer liberal.
Accommodating other views involves relating them to larger shared truths. Liberalism cannot do so because it establishes a closed moral system. The social contract with which liberal thought begins makes morality a self-contained system defined by logic and human will. Man is the master, the good what men choose, and social institutions arrangements set up for men's purposes. There is no larger truth in which all participate, only an open-ended and never-ending process of social transformation on behalf of changing desires.
That process overrides all other things and makes liberalism as peremptory and unreasonable as desire itself. Liberalism today denounces deviations from its principles as oppressive, no matter how long-established and widely-accepted, and insists that they be eradicated. The result is enormous expansion of government, weakening of principles like local community that are needed to keep government accountable, and huge destruction from uprooting fundamental social practices, for example those relating to the relations between the sexes.
In spite of claims of neutrality, liberalism establishes an enforceable official morality that supports a definite way of life. It makes demands for moral reconstruction that are necessarily intolerant. Civil rights law, with its determination to eradicate "stereotypes" -- habitual ways of thinking -- is intrusively moralistic and ends in incessant re-education campaigns. Antiharassment rules aim to control the thoughts expressed in every public place. Public education is nonstop moral propaganda. Even health and safety have become crusades involving extensive regulation of daily life. Where there were once religious tests, Sunday closing laws, and laws against blasphemy, there are now diversity programs, the Martin Luther King holiday, and speech codes. The advance in tolerance is hard to discern.
The development of liberalism has reversed its original principles. Rather than let society control the state, a more ambitious liberalism now makes the state control society. Freedom of speech and opinion have therefore become suspect. Religious people are felt to be a threat, because ways of life have public implications and public action that relies on nonliberal moral understandings violates neutrality. Simple assertion of traditional sexual morality is treated as oppressive because it creates informal obstacles, if only the force of opinion, to the satisfaction of personal tastes. To refuse to rent an apartment to an unmarried couple is illegal even though it is only refusal to facilitate an arrangement one believes wrong. Even Christmas greetings are an affront.
The actual function of the liberal insistence on neutrality is to stifle debate. To the extent they have concrete implications, moral objections to liberalism are rejected out of hand as intolerant and divisive, so resistance becomes impossible. Distortion of language complements suppression of speech. "Hatred" and "intolerance" now include all serious opposition to liberalism. "Inclusiveness" insists that others be tolerant to the point of abandoning their principles and even identity while rejecting accommodation in its own case. "Diversity and tolerance" mean thought control; "human rights" aggressive war; "openness" shutting the door to recognition of differences; "getting government out of our bedrooms" training children to use condoms.
Stifling debate stifles moderating principles. The ultimate consequences are likely to be overreaching and the collapse of liberalism, but in the meantime its triumph is unlimited. Mere conservatism -- caution and good sense regarding changes -- is no longer a restraint.
Simple mainstream conservatism is the view of reasonable men attached to what is established but willing to accommodate new developments. It has much in common with liberalism, and is well-suited to moderate it if anything is. Both are this-worldly views that distrust absolutes and value reason and experience. The basic difference is that simple conservatism accepts settled habits and expectations as a guide to what is reasonable, while liberalism tends toward something more abstract. That difference leads to others. Conservatism accepts social habits that carry forward nonliberal understandings; if dogmatic religion and authoritative aspects of family life are socially accepted it tends to support them. However, simply as conservatism it is indifferent to truth, and in the end treats religion and moral tradition as negotiable interests.
Those put off by the hedonism implicit in liberal neutrality but unable fundamentally to break with it become conservatives, because conservatism seems to leave room for transcendent attachments. The refuge has proved temporary. Simple mainstream conservatism treats social practices and understandings as final authority, and cannot take transcendent claims seriously. It therefore reduces religion to a combination of traditional observances and optional private belief. In the end, religious belief that must stay private evaporates, because it can apply to nothing, and traditional observances become socially unacceptable because they have a public element that comes to seem a violation of the equal standing of irreligion. What remains is an aggressively secular public order in the construction of which conservatism has cooperated.
In time liberalism remakes conservatism in its own image by forcing it to give up everything distinctive for the sake of consensus. Simple conservatism must rely on things that are not seriously in dispute, and it cannot defend those things against attack because the fact of their being attacked makes them useless to it. Liberals will not stop attacking whatever is nonliberal. The triumph of increasingly radical forms of liberalism was therefore inevitable, a triumph that reached its climax in the '60s.
The triumph was not over conservative doctrine, which had always been weak in public life, but over conservative habits that prevented liberalism from realizing its inner logic. Key events included the school prayer decisions, the civil rights laws and the sexual revolution. The first made the social order utterly this-worldly, the second abolished historical in favor of constructed community, and the third made family life a purely voluntary and private affair. John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) marked the new status of liberalism as a comprehensive rational system, and the end of any need to take non-liberal attitudes and practices seriously except as injustices to be eradicated. Since then to say something is a "deeply rooted social stereotype" has been to discredit it. So decisive has the triumph of radical liberalism been that no attempt to reverse the prayer decisions, civil rights laws or sexual revolution has had the slightest chance of success. To take such attempts seriously has been to put oneself outside serious public discourse.
The triumph of radical liberalism has made moderate conservatism, which assumes a social order defined in fundamental ways by non-liberal attitudes and practices, an empty position. A desire to seem thoughtful and aspirations toward something less thin than liberal ideology may lead public men to use the language of conservatism, but the substance is gone. Mainstream conservatism grumbles, drags its feet, and tries to moderate the disruption caused by implementing liberal demands, but it cannot deny the justice of those demands or deprive them of ultimate victory. It cannot even talk about them in language very different from that of triumphant liberalism.
Not only moderate conservatism but all serious public opposition to liberalism has vanished. Opposing stances can find no footing. What opposition from the left remains tends toward irrationalism. Communitarianism proposes a centrally-managed nondiscriminatory particularism that is hard even to imagine. Popular conservatism and the religious right cannot think or act coherently, in part because they cannot sustain a style of argument different from that of their opponents. Neoconservatives note that liberalism rejects the loyalties to God, country and family needed to sustain a free society, but tend to view such things as a sort of noble lie to be kept firmly subordinate to the liberal order; the effect of their activities is to integrate dissidents into that order, thus taming antiliberal impulses.
Nor can libertarians effectively resist liberalism. Libertarianism is less intrusive than managerial liberalism but cannot offer a real alternative. Like liberals, libertarians deny transcendent authority and demand social reconstruction on rational hedonistic lines. The moral subjectivism of their movement makes its opposition to government intervention a matter of preference rather than principle. Its treatment of property as morally fundamental is inconsistent with subjectivist treatment of social institutions as constructions for human ends, and when put forward as an objective moral principle seems arbitrary. Libertarianism is therefore likely to remain the special cause of a small but vocal minority, although retaining influence as part of the shifting and unprincipled compromises that constitute contemporary liberalism.
The dominance of liberalism, the apparent impossibility of reforming it, and the absence of credible opposition has led some to say openly -- and many to assume implicitly -- that we have reached the end of history, that since liberalism is utterly dominant and cannot essentially change it has won for ever. That conclusion mistakes the imaginative limits of liberals for the limits of reality. Until quite recently the advance of liberalism did seem inevitable. It alone seemed able to maintain the voluntary cooperation needed for social peace and efficiency. Once an issue had been raised any non-liberal resolution seemed irrational. All liberals had to do was dramatize what they considered oppression and victory was assured. In the absence of public transcendental principle "let them do what they want" -- the basic liberal principle -- seemed the only way to avoid implicit or open civil war.
That has changed with the triumph of liberalism as a ruling rather than critical philosophy. Victory is its downfall, because it must now give answers rather than criticize those others give, and that it cannot do. "Let them do what they want" cannot be a governing philosophy, so in order to govern liberalism is forced to tyrannize and lie. Lack of moderating principles means that it cannot help but overreach, eventually catastrophically.
Analysis suggests that the vices of liberalism are intrinsic and irremediable. Conceptual arguments are often shrugged off in politics on the grounds that life is complex and in practice particular circumstances matter more than abstract implications. The objection is weak in the case of contemporary liberalism. Modern conditions tend to simplify human society and turn it more and more into a formless aggregate, without race, sex, class or nation. Liberalism encourages that process, and tells bureaucrats and judges to govern the resulting fine-grained chaos by universal principles. Formal rules and institutions thus become the leading principles of order in an otherwise incoherent situation; in such a setting conceptual problems become practical very quickly.
Such has been the case with liberalism. One defect in principle that has caused far-reaching practical problems is the inability of liberalism to deal with conflict in a principled way. Politics cannot be based simply on human goals, because human goals do not tell us what to do when they clash. A resolution based on what particular men want is merely the triumph of one will over another. Even a resolution based on balancing desires or following those that are strongest only subordinates some desires to others unless the method of resolution expresses a moral truth that transcends desire itself.
Liberalism proposes formal principles such as "to each his own" or maximizing total satisfaction. It is hard to see how such principles, even if universally acceptable, could give answers that are definite enough to live by. How, for example, can all possible satisfactions -- Plato, Chinese checkers, pornography -- be added and compared when they differ so enormously? And how can it be determined what is "one's own"? Whether it is an imperial throne or property in one's body, a thing is one's own only if others recognize it as such, a necessity that shows that property is not a simple pre-social conception.
Arbitrariness in resolving disputes is thus intrinsic to liberalism. Nor is arbitrariness the only problem. The good is the substantive principle of morality, and a fatal flaw in liberalism is its defective theory of the good. The need for a particular definition of the good can not be sidestepped by ignoring goods in favor of wants. "Goods" are simply possible objects of rational action, and "the good" is whatever general quality it is that makes something worth pursuing. To treat desire as the thing that determines rational action is to identify the good with what is desired. The liberal theory of the good is thus hedonism.
Hedonism is a bad theory, even if it can be made to yield determinate results, because we are not at bottom hedonists. By giving us "whatever we want" liberalism fails precisely to give us what we want. Our good, and for that matter the things we desire most deeply, depends on what we are, and we are rational and social. Man does not desire to get what he wants simply as such; he wants what he wants, but also wants to recognize it as good, as desirable because it contributes to a scheme of life the validity of which does not depend on his desires alone.
As rational beings, we are not satisfied unless our lives are based on an understanding of what goals are right that rests on something that gives it enduring validity. Nor, as social beings, can we be satisfied unless that understanding is shared. The problem is not merely theoretical. If goods other than pursuit of individual pleasure are understood as purely individual goals, with no right to social support, they wither. Marriage is not simply what two people choose to do privately. It involves objective duties and thus social definitions; to define it as the chance parallelism of two wills, each with its own purposes, is to destroy it. Even disinterested love of truth and beauty needs common support to become more than the fragmentary possession of isolated visionaries. Liberalism disrupts that support by denying public recognition to any good but satisfaction of desire. A conceptual problem in liberalism, its inability to prefer one goal to another, thus leads naturally to family breakdown and sordidness in public life.
The problems go farther. Man is social, and community requires the common goods liberalism denies. If I say that I am American the claim is insignificant unless Americans are united by something that they recognize collectively as good. In liberal society, however, the only thing that can be recognized in common as a substantive good is the goal implicit in all individual desire, the ability to get what one wants. That ability is most readily recognized in the form of money, power and success, and liberalism therefore turns society into an assortment of individuals related by those things. Under such conditions men lose substantive connection to others and with it their sense of who they are; personal identity becomes a matter of bank balances and shifting private fantasies, and the individual, for whose sake liberalism was invented, evaporates.
Identifying the good with the desired destroys the things that make freedom worth having. Liberalism frees children from parents, women from men, the poor from charity, inferiors from superiors, all so each can do what he wants. By making our connections to others insubstantial, however, it deprives actions of effect and we end with the trivial freedom of irresponsibility and impotence. Freedom becomes indistinguishable from willfulness. We value liberty because it enables us to choose and realize goods, but if no goods are objective it loses objective value and becomes just another personal taste. How can choice be so important, if what is chosen matters not at all? Or if it is choice itself that matters, why isn't willfulness the greatest virtue? As anyone who deals with aimless teenagers will attest, such issues have practical consequences.
A further radical defect in liberalism is that while claiming rationality it makes rationality impossible. Rationality presupposes standards that transcend actual desires. If man has no standard higher than himself, he has nothing by which to judge his own conduct, and ethical thought disappears. Liberalism claims to let us create our own standards but might as well claim to let us flap our arms and fly. Our good is not something we make up. We can clarify our good but not choose it, act significantly within a moral world but not call it into existence. When liberalism tells us to create our own moral world it turns its back on the public moral world needed for choice to have meaning.
The cult of creativity, in moral life as elsewhere, comes from consciousness of a void that must be filled somehow, fraudulently if necessary. It is that void that is at the center of liberalism. A parallel case is provided by art, in which a cult of creativity resulting from loss of confidence in goods like beauty that transcend the artist has ended in art that is empty of content, obsessed with technique, and dominated by the same forces, foreign to it, that dominate liberal society -- money, success, and the politics of mindless aggression and rebellion.
The irrationality intrinsic to liberalism causes it continually to raise questions it cannot deal with and so must suppress. Examples are everywhere: if every society must be intolerant in defending its leading principles, how reasonable can it be to make intolerance the sole object of opprobrium? If government is to give us what we want, do we really want hedonism? If I have a right to pursue my desires, and I desire to live in a society guided by traditional understandings, do I have the right to pursue that goal politically? If not, why is an environment free from racism and sexism a worthier goal than one free from atheism and from immorality as traditionally understood? Such questions cannot be avoided as a practical matter, and liberalism requires them to be resolved by neutral principles that take no position on the content of the good life.
The requirement cannot be met, although there have been a variety of proposals for meeting it. Some have claimed that liberalism grants freedom unless the action interferes with others in a concrete and particularized way. Hence, for example, the right of sexual expression overrides the right to an environment in which traditional standards prevail.
The response is inadequate, if only because liberalism does not accept it in its own case. For example, liberalism accepts land use controls and laws against littering that protect only general aesthetic interests. Prohibitions against highway billboards go so far as to ban speech simply because it offends. One man's smuggling, tax evasion or use of leaded gasoline may benefit him a great deal without having a demonstrable effect on anyone else. And someone who does not want to work with blacks is likely to be affected far more profoundly by a requirement of nondiscrimination than a black man who might otherwise have to find a job elsewhere. Like other people, liberals recognize that law may forbid intangible injuries, and it may justly defend a beneficial system of conduct or suppress a harmful one, even when individual infractions do not cause identifiable concrete damage. These principles rationally allow legal support for traditional morality. Offense to moral sensibilities is an injury that tends to make men morally callous and so weakens a social order based on self-government. Why is it worthy of more protection than other acts that injure both individuals and society?
Another response is that interference with conduct is particularly objectionable when the conduct is close to the heart of what makes us what we are. To make this response liberals must propose a theory of essential human nature. Such theories are no less contentious than theories of the good. Does acting on sexual impulse make us what we are, or living in accordance with common moral understandings that promote stable personal relationships? One answer would make restrictions on sexual conduct objectionable, the other lack of sexual restraint, and there seems no neutral way to choose between the two.
Such issues go to the heart of liberal public morality. Liberalism deals with them by suppressing their discussion and imposing its own answers by default. The practical result is like that of establishing any dogmatic principle as absolute: liberals speak of divisiveness and extremism rather than schism and heresy, and forbid questioning the being, attributes and significance of sexism or the Holocaust rather than those of God, but specific differences do not affect the similarity of system.
Liberalism -- an attempt to create a wholly this-worldly system based only on logic and the human will -- thus ends in obscurantist tyranny and so refutes itself. That result is necessary because logic and human will cannot be combined to yield authority, and to rule liberalism must somehow steal authority. It therefore demands submission to arbitrary principles and conclusions. It insists on controlling everything that affects public life, including the human soul. It responds to criticism by silencing the critic. It destroys concrete freedom by centralizing power, by undermining standards that make free social life possible, and by destroying our connections to others and so making us dependent on universal systems utterly beyond our control. And in the name of giving us what we want it denies us everything worth having.
When judged by day-to-day experience, such conclusions may seem to go too far. "Tyranny" sounds exaggerated, other phrases like "soft totalitarianism" yet more so. In America, after all, there are no secret police and few government spies. The judiciary is independent and private property safe. Trials are public and procedural safeguards observed. Anyone can run for public office on any platform, and write or say what he wants without fear of prison or confiscation. Tenure protects scholars with unpopular-- even conservative -- views. Informal restraints on thought, expression and action appear matched by similar restraints in other societies. And above all, life is comfortable. The differences between the American regime today and the regimes usually called tyrannical or totalitarian are thus fundamental.
Nonetheless, the differences should not mask similarities that are also fundamental and justify some similarity of descriptive language. Tyranny is irresponsible government not limited by law or binding custom; totalitarianism is tyranny based on an all-encompassing theory that is the private property of a ruling elite. On those definitions medieval governments, for example, were neither tyrannies nor totalitarian; they were limited by law and custom, and the Christian outlook that justified them was in the hands not of the king but of the church, a body distinct in fundamental ways from secular rulers, often at odds with them, and bound by authoritative texts and traditions and ultimately the will of God.
In contrast, modern America inclines toward totalitarian tyranny, at least if one recognizes the nature of liberalism as a self-contained and all-embracing scheme for life in society, the sole right of the ruling elite to interpret it, and the barriers to political action at odds with it. On fundamental issues, America is governed by a liberal elite whose power is not limited by law because the courts are part of the elite and what the courts say is the law. Affirmative action, mass immigration and the exclusion of religion from public life illustrate the power of that elite to force fundamental changes over strong and rooted opposition from virtually the entire people.
Such power is tyrannical. Because man is a social animal, tyranny can inhere in the relationship between an irresponsible ruling class and social institutions as well as that between a government and the individual. A man who arbitrarily imprisons me or confiscates my property is a tyrant. Ruling elites that destroy the social institutions and relationships that make me what I am, that attack the family and abolish gender distinctions, ethnic ties, and traditional moral standards, that drive religion out of public life and tell private associations what members to choose and why, are also tyrannical.
Imprisonment and exile are punishments because they deprive a man of his social setting. Intentional destruction of that setting is plainly worse. Genocide is said to include intentional destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups. Liberalism does that to all national groups by abolishing the constituents of nationality. How can that be acceptable? When everyone must praise such actions as incontestable demands of justice, when it is all but impossible to make protests heard and critics are treated as enemies of humanity, when the existence of any higher standard is denied, the tyranny, however maintained, takes on a totalitarian quality.
Such complaints may still be thought overblown. The limitations on opinion, expression, association and popular self-rule can no doubt be explained away. Attacks on fundamental institutions may seem to have certain benefits, since all institutions have their injustices and corruptions. Life is still pleasant for most people, as long as they relax and concentrate on individual pursuits -- "sit back and take a breath," as Mrs. Clinton has suggested. Nonetheless, there are plain grounds for concern about the future. Irresponsible power corrupts. Free government requires a settled widespread distribution of power, as well as cohesion among the people at large so they can hold their rulers to account. Today's liberalism destroys both.
At present liberalism does not physically destroy anyone, except Serbs, the unborn, and -- increasingly -- the old and useless. Possibly the tally should also include murders and suicides resulting from deteriorating social order, and some of the Russians who have drunk themselves to death since the fall of Communism, but the point need not be insisted on. Whatever its record to date, liberalism is one of several modern political movements that deny human nature. It makes human nature a matter of human choice and technology, as communism made it a matter of economic evolution and fascism of human will and national struggle.
In each case the motive has been to eliminate human nature as an obstacle to re-creation of the world. The difficulty has been that destruction in concept of fixed and rooted human nature has led repeatedly to the concrete destruction of very large numbers of actual human beings. The sequence seems natural. If "man" does not exist, why should it matter whether men exist? Liberals do not take the threat of such inferences seriously, but it is not clear why. If "human" is content-free, so it becomes a social classification the point of which is determined politically, and if it is irrational to recognize a radical difference in rights between a man and a dog, both of which seem to be the emerging liberal views, the stage seems rather clearly set for horrors. In the absence of a reliable way to hold government to account, the horrors may not remain forever a matter of debatable interpretation. Soft totalitarianism may turn to hard.
Whichever may lie in store for us, tyranny -- especially totalitarian tyranny -- cannot last. Liberalism will destroy itself in practice as well as theory. Tyrants must be prudent, but liberalism cannot be prudent forever. It makes human desire the measure and so has no place for unpleasant facts. The consequences are everywhere; liberalism depends on competent elites, for example, but is reluctant to recognize human differences and so institutes affirmative action programs that make it impossible to deal with issues of relative competence. It cannot justify nonconsensual authority -- parental authority or even ordinary moral standards for example -- and so feels bound to undermine it as oppressive whatever the consequences. The resulting disorders permeate social life, and as the generations succeed each other make orderly government progressively harder to maintain.
Further, a philosophy based on independent individuals pursuing their own interests cannot deal with issues that go beyond one's life as a self-interested individual -- reproduction and child-rearing, loyalty and sacrifice, life and death. Such issues are fundamental to social survival, but liberalism can only treat them as matters of individual preference. The consequences are suicidally low birthrates, children growing up without parental care, and an army that cannot take casualties. If such things endure, and it is hard to see what within liberalism can stop them, they will mean the end of liberal society.
The choice, therefore, is between a liberalism that must deny its own principles to rule, thus leading to corruption, obscurantist tyranny, and eventual collapse, and a system explicitly based on authoritative transcendent goods. A system of the latter kind might be liberal in many ways, but it would reject freedom as a ultimate standard, and in present-day terms would be radically illiberal. A system of transcendent goods grounding a way of life is in effect a religion; the choice is therefore between the reign of force and fraud (perhaps disguised and perhaps not), and recognition of the religious basis of society and government.
The fundamental question of politics is which religion shall be established. Authority must be based on a common understanding of principles superior to the human will that are rooted in the nature of things. To the extent it tries to be principled liberalism itself cannot help but answer such questions. In spite of claims of neutrality, American law today embodies a religious understanding. It excludes from public life views that take transcendent religion seriously, in substance treating them as false. It cannot get by without a conception of the world and the source of moral obligation, however, and it finds both in man the measure. It makes human genius the principle of creation and individual will the source of value. Such an outlook is religious, the religion of man as creator and judge of all things. As the response to ultimate concerns that silently motivates our public order it is our established religion.
It is a religion that fails to deliver, ultimately because it makes no sense. By trying to abolish the mystery at the heart of things it succeeds only in making all things incomprehensible. It makes man the measure, but men are weak, mutable, prone to error, and at odds with each other. Incoherence leads to incoherence: liberal neutrality is not neutral, liberal tolerance is intolerant, and liberal hedonism denies our desires. Since liberalism has grown practically self-destructive not even its established status can be a reason for supporting it. It must be rejected and replaced; it will not last in any event, and it will be better if it is rejected rationally, with consciousness of why it failed.
The rational way beyond liberalism is to discuss the questions it avoids and cannot answer. Intellectually, liberalism cannot survive their free discussion; a function of "political correctness" and the centralization of intellectual life is to keep them from arising. Both modern communications technology and the liberal demand for free expression make it difficult to suppress such questions altogether, however. When the practical strains on liberal society become severe enough the intellectual flaws of liberalism will begin to tell. As a self-contained system poorly rooted in reality, liberalism could fall apart like Soviet Communism or the one-horse shay of New England Calvinism.
Once liberalism goes, what then? Even a bad system of thought is unlikely to be abandoned unless there is something to replace it. A religion cannot be chosen like a suit of clothes. The religion of a people is determined by any number of things, sub- or super-rational, and is less a matter of choice than of recognition. It is nonetheless determined somehow or other. Man needs a life in common with his fellows and common life requires a common understanding of the nature of the world and man's place in it. Our public life, to the extent it exists, is now based on a religion that is hard to make sense of, harder to believe, and in the end relies on deceiving self and others. It will be replaced. Until that happens a better public life will be in process of formation. All those who look for a better future can do now is prepare for it by holding themselves apart from the existing system of things, asking the basic questions from which all religion springs, joining with others in answering them, and questioning those who support the present stateof affairs. The rest is in God's hands.
It turns out that upwardly-mobile Republican Catholic Justice Kennedy was going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 1992, but ended up casting the decisive pro-Roe vote. It seems that Blackmun, O'Connor and Souter brought him around by working him over in private.
Because of the switch, the Casey decision ended up reaffirming Roe. The basis of the decision was "stare decisis" -- standing by what's already been decided. The Court said they wouldn't reverse what they had done because once they have spoken on an important issue public controversy should come to an end: "the belief [of the American people] in themselves as [a people who 'aspire to live according to the rule of law'] is not readily separable from their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to decide their constitutional cases and speak before all others for their constitutional ideals."
One of the many odd points about Casey is that it also announced as central to liberty a "right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." So even though we can understand ourselves only by accepting without reserve the power of the Supreme Court to decide issues like abortion, each of us individually retains the right to decide the meaning of everything whatever. Both public institutions and individuals have unlimited power, it's only objective moral law that's powerless.
Maybe the episode shows something about how the Supreme Court works as an institution, that it acts to maximize its influence and it represents what's respected among people who are well-placed and influential nationally. For those reasons it will always tend to promote centralization and the replacement of traditional and informal institutions by rationalized and bureaucratic ones. It will be very difficult to change the overall result by changing the membership of the Court. To get confirmed a conservative normally has to be a bit fuzzy on principle and much more concerned with "listening" and "learning," which as a practical matter mean fitting in with the dominant trend and voting institutional and class identity rather than supposed convictions -- especially on important issues where pressure can be brought to bear. Kennedy could get confirmed where Bork could not. Someone like Scalia is always going to be the exception.
A correspondent passed on the following comment by another reader of my essay "The Tyranny of Liberalism":
I read the first part of the article, but I am not going to read the rest, though I did skim through it. It is so bad that it is not worth the time. The first part of the article is basically a giant strawman argument against "liberalism" that largely misunderstands liberalism and liberals. This article, like many other pieces by social conservatives, makes the same mistakes that Critical Theorists, Critical Legal Studies scholars and other leftwing thinkers make when they attack liberalism. It would seem that the Right and the Left don't understand the Center. Liberalism does not purport to be neutral on issues of morality. And it is clearly not only about the satisfaction of desires. Any criticism built upon such assumptions, like this article, shows a deep ignorance about liberal thought. A quick reading of serious liberal thinkers like Rawls, Nozick (libertarians are liberals in the broad sense), and Dworkin, or of more mainstream liberal sources, would demonstrate this to any remotely fair reader. If anything, the criticisms the author makes are far more applicable to capitalism than to liberalism. It is the defenders of capitalism who try, more than any others, to portray that system as neutral. Perhaps one day social conservatives will learn what Marx compellingly argued 150 years ago -- that the creative destruction of markets celebrated by so many does far more to undermine traditional value systems than any version of liberal or Liberal political thought ever could.
My response:
Thanks for forwarding. It's always helpful to know how what one says appears to others.
It seems to me that the problem is that the "liberalism" I discuss is less liberalism as opposed to libertarianism or capitalism, or the specific thought of particular thinkers, than liberalism as a longstanding tendency of thought and institutional development that tends ever more to treat individual preferences as the source of value and those preferences together with formal logic and means-ends reasoning as the basis for a complete system of social morality and politics. It seems to me OK to call that grand tendency "liberalism" because the thinkers and movements called liberal are, it seems to me, its best and most successful representatives and they forward that tendency in an ever more comprehensive and thorough way.
All of which would probably also seem like nonsense to your correspondent. On issues like these people most often don't understand each other unless they already almost believe the same thing. Also, it's easier to see grand patterns if you're outside a tendency than if you're within it. If you're within the views of outsiders seem like uninformed fantasy. Such is life.
As to more particular points:
- Locke, Mills, Rawls etc. are very useful witnesses to liberalism but they do not define what it is for analysis any more than particular thinkers who favor and promote any other large and long-lasting social movement define what that movement is for analysis. One must step back and ask what it all amounts to, what the decisive principles really are, and where it's all going.
- Libertarianism and capitalist ideology seem to me less developed forms of liberalism. In other words, I agree with liberals who call themselves progressive and consider classical liberals reactionary, frozen in time, stuck on old-fashioned dogma etc. The point of that belief is that both classical and contemporary liberalism are stages in the development of the implications of common fundamental understandings and aspirations, with contemporary liberalism a more developed stage.
- Everybody thinks he's at the center. What's ordinarily called liberalism is admittedly more stable and cautious than other forms of progressive and leftist thought. Still, there's a question whether liberal theory is able adequately to take into account the whole range of human characteristics and concerns so that it can continue to provide a tolerable setting for people to live. Basically, my view is that since the 60s and especially since 1989 liberalism has become too comprehensive and ideological, partly because it's had no serious principled competitors. So far as I can tell the step-by-step manner and strong connection to institutional practice that makes it seem centrist to its adherents just means that it's all the more effective in leading us all over a cliff. Like the mills of the gods, in comparison with Leftism liberalism grinds slow but exceeding fine.
Once again, thanks for forwarding. The comment raised important issues, although naturally I don't agree with the formulation or conclusions.
What is tyranny? There are obvious examples, but like other obvious things it can be hard to say what's there when you press the point. Is PC tyranny? The patriarchy? Determinate being as such? All those things can seem horribly oppressive depending on which way you're pointed. Like every other judgment, a judgment that something is a tyranny depends on your overall scheme of what makes sense, what's worth while and what life should be like. If something suppresses the type of life that allows free play to the things you're attached to and approve of, it's a tyranny from your point of view. Here's a dialog I wrote a while ago going into what's meant by "liberal tyranny":
Alter: So why do you say there's a liberal tyranny in America today? So far as I can see you can pretty much do or say what you want.
Ego: But am I free to live the way someone would want to live?
Alter: What do you mean? Whatever you think is right you can do so long as you don't break any laws and don't interfere with what other people are doing.
Ego: That's not true though. For example, I think it's right to raise my children to love their country, respect adults in authority, and do what's right. That's a problem though if the country has adopted bad principles and the adults in authority--teachers, people on TV, whoever--insist on them and say people who teach their children the opposite should be ignored. It's next to impossible if it's a democratic country based on big organizations and mass communications so that there's no place to hide unless you turn your family into hermits. And I don't think it's right for most people to be hermits. So in fact I can't live the way I think is right.
Alter. That's crazy though. You're just saying you want things set up to favor whatever you happen to like because that makes your life easier. If they were, that would leave someone else out in the cold who likes something different. What makes you special?
Ego: I'm not special. I just think the "traditionally virtuous" life is better than the "inclusively tolerant" life. I'll argue the point with you if you want. Look, you can't judge whether a government is good or bad if you ignore its purposes. If a society favors the worse life over the better life it's a bad society. If the favoritism is intentional and official, its government is evil. And if the government tries to make the worse way of life universal by universal interference--forcing all social institutions to organize themselves that way, training children that way in spite of parental objections, inventing special rules to defeat opposition--then it's tyrannical.
Alter: But "tyranny" doesn't mean a government that supports things you don't like, it means a government that does oppressive and lawless things and doesn't let the people do anything about them.
Ego: My personal feelings aren't the issue. We're trying to make a moral judgment--what is a tyranny--and that requires some other moral judgments. You can't say what's oppressive without saying what the good and normal things are that make up a human life, so you can tell whether it's good or bad that the government suppresses this, that or the other. As someone once said (me, in fact):
A man who arbitrarily imprisons me or confiscates my property is a tyrant. Ruling elites that destroy the social institutions and relationships that make me what I am, that attack the family and abolish gender distinctions, ethnic ties, and traditional moral standards, that drive religion out of public life and tell private associations what members to choose and why, are also tyrannical.
Now maybe you think I'm just wrong about the things that make up a normally good life. You can't say it's all just a matter of taste, though, because if you do you can't talk about good or bad government at all. Because everything is to somebody's taste. And as to lawlessness and suppression of popular resistance, there's the judicial response to Proposition 2 in Colorado and Proposition 187 in California, and judicial impostion of "gay marriage" in Massachusetts. The courts will always come up with whatever is needed to keep the program on track and be applauded for it. I call that situation lawless and tyrannical, because I call the program a bad program that's at odds with what makes for a good pattern of human life.
A first-rate summary of why making individual autonomy the ultimate political standard doesn't work: The Tyranny of Liberalism And Its Evil Root: Individual Autonomy as the End of the State. Sample quote:
"[N]o polity could be grounded in an ideology, which is nothing more than an aspect of a cultural inheritance about which one has become obsessive. Philosophical theorizing transmutes this aspect into the whole of experience: All history is the story of class struggle, or gender struggle, or race struggle, or a struggle for individual autonomy. In a country in the grip of an ideological style of politics, as the former Soviet Union was and America is today, a protracted cold war is necessarily waged against its own cultural inheritance."
The piece is by paleoconservative philosophy professor Donald W. Livingstone. For a more sociologically-oriented piece, also very good, that touches on similar themes see Allan Carlson's Individualism and Its Discontents.
How seriously should anyone take complaints that American society is “totalitarian”? After all, people here can mostly say and do what they want. Elections are free, the press uncensored, the police and courts comparatively honest and law-abiding, person and property generally secure. Education, religion and culture are as independent of outside control as their practitioners are willing to make them.
The statement thus seems too extreme to justify. Nonetheless, there is truth in it, at least as a matter of tendency. “Totalitarian” does not mean “extremely violent.” What it means is suggested by Mussolini’s statement that “everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.” The basic point of totalitarianism, then, is not that the state should use overwhelming brutality, it’s that the state by its very nature overwhelms opposition -- that it is the supreme source and embodiment of everything spiritual and moral, so that opposition to it is illegitimate and even meaningless.
The word thus refers most fundamentally not to inhuman methods but to an inhuman understanding of the nature of social existence that has emerged in the wake of the disordering of tradition and “death of God.” Any social order that recognizes no spiritual or moral authority transcending human desire, and that accepts the modern technological outlook, tends toward that understanding and therefore toward totalitarianism. Advanced liberalism does not explicitly say that it is the source and embodiment of spiritual and moral order, but it denies validity to all spiritual and moral order that lies outside itself -- it insists that such order can only be a purely private taste -- and that comes to the same thing. American institutions have quite generally adopted advanced liberal principles and committed themselves to rooting out all others. It may thus be said that while the bulk of our practices are not yet totalitarian, our ideals as officially stated have become so, and to the extent we “live up to” them we become totalitarian.
The problem is quite fundamental. Liberal modernity is analytical and individualistic, while man is a social being who becomes human through participation in a shared social order. Since wills conflict, the order must possess an authority that transcends the wills of individuals. Otherwise, it would not be an order at all.
If no such order is given by nature or God, man must nonetheless construct one. However, collective man can only construct something so fundamental in a figurative sense, through the slow growth of consensus and tradition. In the modern world, that process has been disrupted. Only a small and cohesive group can hope to reach agreement and act decisively on fundamental issues.
Under such conditions, the absolute human requirement that there be social order means that some such group must be given sufficient power to decide what the order is and establish and maintain it. To give a small and cohesive group such power, while denying that there is any higher standard by which to judge their actions, is to turn that group itself into the ultimate standard. It is to authorize it to remake human reality and so make itself a substitute for God.
It is the conversion of governing elites into a sort of this-worldly God that is the essence of totalitarianism. As Mussolini says, “nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value” outside the order the ruling group creates and controls. It follows that in principle neither natural nor divine law can set a limit on what they do. As a consequence the general run of humanity is reduced to insignificance except as material to be worked on.
In what sense, however, can a constructed social order transcend individual wills? After all, if God is dead there is no natural law that subordinates the individual will to collective decisions. The transcendence the public order possesses can therefore consist only in the deference it actually receives from those subject to it. Several reasons come to mind why it might receive that deference:
What distinguishes hard and soft totalitarianism is the degree of reliance on various of the foregoing. Hard totalitarianism relies on fear, soft totalitarianism more on the other factors. That makes it harder for it to extinguish human elements at odds with its totalitarian outlook and policies. On the other hand, the difficulty leads to closer attention to various systems of manipulation that show some promise of greater effectiveness than terror. Under communism people knew they were being lied to and respect for the classics survived. Under advanced liberalism, people are cynical but they don't disbelieve what they're told and they have no respect whatever for intellect.
The similarities between soft and hard totalitarianism are fundamental. Both are total regimes, in the sense that each feels called upon to remake human life comprehensively, in accordance with abstract principles and without regard to restrictions other than the ones they impose upon themselves. In both regimes rulers and ruled accordingly differ fundamentally, since the latter essentially count as raw material for the reconstructive schemes of the former. And in both the rulers deny that any of these things are so, and claim to base their power on the will of the people.
The argument so far has been quite abstract. How do these principles play out concretely in real life in America today? The basic objection to the managerial liberal order is that it destroys what makes us human and reduces us to the level of animals. Our rulers are willing to recognize that we want things and suffer, but not that our free participation is needed for realization of moral order. The latter is to be brought about by the correct and thorough administrative implementation of the schema upon which the regime is based. The role of the people is to be "tolerant" and "open to change" -- in short, to do as they're told and like it.
The situation is symbolized by the difficulty professional philosophers now have distinguishing us morally from dogs. The difficulty arises from several tendencies that tend to abolish the setting in which a fully human life is possible:
All these injuries are in a sense ideal. Some people might like to be freed from the shackles of family, culture and good manners, and so not view them as injuries. They might prefer the life of a well-tended domestic animal to that of a human being. Still, our custodians are not in fact gods, and we are not beasts. Acting as if things were so has consequences that are harder to shrug off than ideal injuries. Those consequences are the stuff of our commentary on current events here at
Turnabout.
To suggest a few of the consequences: One that is more important than it appears is “bowling alone”, the radical decline in membership in social and civic organizations in recent years. Another is the replacement of normal systems of friendly and voluntary cooperation among neighbors, colleagues and fellow-citizens, based on common habits, understandings and commitments, with the carrot and the stick. The collapse of educational standards is yet another. Then there is the obvious brutalization of culture and a radical increase in misbehavior. And even if those can all be shrugged off or explained away, an utterly decisive consequence in the long run is the physical disappearance of the peoples who buy into liberal modernity through their failure to reproduce themselves. None of these things is as dramatically cruel as the Great Terror, but collectively they mean the degradation of souls and the destruction of a people and a civilization. And there can be few things more worth fighting than that.
A friend sent me a copy of a note he had written arguing against the neoconservative claim that the liberalism dominant today in the academy, the Democratic Party, and the New York Times is the illegitimate result of smuggling (bad) Leftism into (good) pre-60s liberalism. My response:
I agree with your overall argument. The distinction between the moderate left (liberalism) and the leftist left doesn't last. Moderation is a style and not an independent self-sustaining principle. It can't support itself indefinitely when the authoritative principles (freedom and equality) make logically unbounded demands and there's nothing transcending them to keep them in their place. In the 30s there was the tag that communists are democrats in a hurry. I think there was something to that.
I'd say the process goes as follows:
- First, all authoritative concepts of the transcendent (e.g., established religion) get tossed.
- That means that desire is the only thing that can really be authoritative.
- The political good therefore becomes liberation of desire (freedom) and then satisfaction of desire (promotion of prosperity and the welfare state).
- Since all desires are equally desires they are all equally authoritative. Therefore equality becomes an additional standard. The result is first a demand for economic redistribution, then "civil rights" legislation, and finally a generalized and enforceable principle of "tolerance" -- the principle that the only legitimate desires are ones that accept the equal value of all other desires that accept equality.
- The foregoing is radically at odds with all existing societies but nonetheless metaphysically necessary. Continuing progressive social change therefore becomes an absolute demand of morality.
- How fast and how radical you think the change should be depends on a variety of personal factors -- how cautious you are, how concrete or abstract your thinking is, how well-integrated you are with the current set-up, and so on.
- The ultimate implications of the principles are the same in any event, and are inconceivably radical. The cautious, well-integrated and concretely-minded find that alarming, so they find ways of avoiding the conclusion and refusing to recognize obvious implications of their own principles. Since cautious, well-integrated and concretely-minded people tend to run things that kind of obfuscation becomes official doctrine.
- When radical implications nonetheless arrive (PC suppression of thought, "gay marriage," and so on) the cautious, well-integrated and concretely-minded men in authority are reduced to insisting that the innovations are "mainstream" or instances of "social change," where saying something is "social change" somehow makes it absurd or a sign of psychological disturbance to contest it.
A liberal might object that my complaints about liberal intolerance and tyranny are really only complaints that liberalism is the political outlook on which Western institutions are now based. As such, it does what any dominant outlook does: it defines itself as truth and other outlooks as deceit, malice or ignorance, and then acts accordingly. What's unusual about liberalism, he might continue, is not that it finds ways of suppressing other views but that the methods it uses are so gentle.
I suppose I'd respond to such an objection in two ways. My first point would be that there's nothing unusually good about the ways in which liberalism maintains its dominance. The Spanish Inquisition is not the universal form of all other possibilities. For example, traditional understandings about sex and gender were on the whole maintained by a network of habits and understandings that controlled what people did without much direct reliance on physical force. It was possible to go to jail for sodomy, but in Europe it's possible to go to jail for downplaying the importance of the Holocaust.
Besides, gentle means have disadvantages like everything else. Controls not enforced from outside must be internalized. Perfect freedom can exist only through the abolition of thought. The Anglo-Saxon countries have always been famous on the Continent for political freedom, and also for stupidity, hypocrisy and philistinism. The two have been related. One of the things that's made the development of liberalism possible has been the development of better means of suppressing independent thought--the extension and centralization of formal education., the mass media, the bureaucratization of knowledge and cultural life generally. Those developments have made it much easier to define those who reject liberalism as not only wrong, but as ignorant, socially marginal, and somehow weird.
My second major point would be that the objection defends liberalism against the charge of tyranny at the cost of giving up its claim to automatic superiority. If its claim to superiority is that it lets 100 flowers bloom its defense cannot be that when it treats everything but liberalism as a weed to be grubbed out it's only doing what all dominant views do. So to the extent liberalism relies on the claim that it's no different from other views it must defend itself on grounds that make it directly comparable to other views. It must claim, for example, that its own substantive understanding of the human good--that it consists in maximum equal satisfaction of desire--is superior to others that have been advanced.
A couple of years ago I wrote an essay on The Tyranny of Liberalism. Now I have a sequel that I'm revising because it didn't get published where I wanted. I thought I'd post it here to see if anyone finds it interesting enough to comment:
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON LIBERAL TYRANNY
by James Kalb
Many people find something deeply oppressive about the world advanced liberalism has given us. Some have particular objections. Affirmative action has victims, even though they get little media coverage. Others complain about restrictions like political correctness. Many complaints, however, are obscure. People feel stifled, but cannot say just how. They make jokes or sarcastic comments, but when challenged have trouble explaining themselves. When there is a public issue, it is liberals who have the last word. It is very difficult, after all, to object seriously to efforts to promote equal freedom.
The persistent feeling that something has gone wrong nonetheless needs to be accounted for. What is it that bothers a truck driver who complains bitterly about liberals? Is he only objecting to change, to loss of an unjustified status, to people who are different from himself? Or does he sense that he has been deprived of something essential that accepted ways of thinking about politics hide from view?
To accuse liberalism of tyranny seems absurd. The goal of liberalism, after all, is to enable all of us to control our own lives as much and as equally as possible. Abortion is the right to choose. Welfare gives access to things needed for the exercise of ordinary choices in daily life. Affirmative action tries to give women amd blacks the same practical options white men have. Gay marriage gives equal rights to nonstandard intimate relationships. There are objections to such things, but at first glance they hardly seem despotic. Critics used to complain that liberalism was relativistic and permissive. How can they now call it dictatorial?
Moderates and neoconservatives sometimes view tyranny as a risk created by one-sided pursuit of liberal goals. They worry, for example, that centralized control of social life isolates the individual, even when the control is ostensibly in the interest of his freedom and well-being, and that insistence on making social life measure up to simple abstract principles weakens practical safeguards such as the widespread distribution of power. Those concerns suggest that liberalism may go too far, but not that its aims are anything but admirable. All liberalism needs, it seems, is a little modesty.
The problem is not just lack of prudence, however. Liberalism--at least advanced liberalism, the kind that matters today -- is the attempt to make equal freedom to do as one chooses the ultimate goal of political and moral life. That attempt is necessarily a failure, because to treat freedom as an ultimate goal is to misconceive it. Individual self-rule can be an important element of a social order that is oriented toward substantive goods such as human virtue, but it cannot itself serve as the basis of order.
The reason is that basic liberal concepts like freedom cannot define themselves without reference to superior goods. Freedom is freedom to pursue some goal, but we make sense of our goals by reference to a larger scheme that tells us what things are, how they relate to each other, and what they are worth. Things are precious to us because we recognize something in them that does not depend on us and cannot be had for the asking. Treating our goals as a final standard simply because they happen to be our goals turns the entire procedure of choosing goals and pursuing them into a pointless waste of effort. Why chase after something whose only value is that we have decided to chase it? Wouldn't it be more rational to become a Buddhist whose one desire is liberation from the burden of having goals at all?
The inability of basic liberal concepts to define themselves has practical political consequences. Consider free expression, which liberalism seems to guarantee equally and absolutely to all. Expressive freedom is at the heart of liberalism, because it has to do with meanings, and liberalism must leave meaning--the significance things are understood to have--up to the individual. Anything else would subject men to a spiritual authority outside themselves, and that would utterly negate liberal freedom. As the Supreme Court points out, "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992, 505 U.S. 833, 851.)
In a liberal society, freedom of expression is therefore expansive and open-ended. Liberalism lets you say, write and publish anything you want on topics that have traditionally been held sacred. It allows you to attribute any significance to anything, and call anything art that you present as such. You can smear dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, and if you mean it as art you can have the result hung in a museum and treated respectfully by critics. Nor is freedom of expression limited to speech, the arts and the written word. It extends to "lifestyle," to the expressive aspects of how we live. In the case of sex, for example, freedom now trumps moral principles that have always seemed fundamental to the family and so to social order itself. Whatever the practical effects of sexual freedom, to oppose it would be to prescribe the meaning of something that touches us deeply, and for liberals that would be an outrageous act of oppression.
It is true that the appearance of absolute expressive freedom is not altogether accurate. Like other systems liberalism finds ways of suppressing views that undercut its dominance. Even in scholarly settings, expressive freedom may not include freedom to say plausible and important things about sensitive topics such as group differences. More importantly, meaning cannot be expelled altogether from public life. Equal freedom, it has been concluded, presumes equal dignity, and respect for equal dignity has come to limit expression no less than respect for royal and ecclesiastical dignity once did. You can burn a flag but not a cross, debunk Martin Luther but not Martin Luther King.
Nonetheless, one could argue that the goal of equal freedom remains genuine and coherent in spite of such restrictions. Everyone recognizes that freedom must be limited to keep the freedom of some from violating that of others. Why, someone might ask, does compelling respect for another's dignity violate freedom more than compelling respect for his property or physical integrity? Do not freedom and dignity depend on each other?
The answer depends on how far the demands of dignity go. In advanced liberalism they go far enough to eliminate all but trivial freedoms. Liberal dignity, which consists in the equal respect due each individual, has come to require equal respect for the meanings individuals place on things. Expressive freedom must be granted to all equally. Since meanings are a matter of individual choice, none can be treated as superior to another. Treating them differently would, for liberals, be simply showing their proponents different degrees of consideration with regard to the things they hold most dear. It would be burdening the freedom of some to assert their own conception of things for the sake of expanding that freedom for others.
Advanced liberalism thus tries to give all attributions of significance equal status. What you make of things is not to be preferred to what I make of them. That principle is limited somewhat by the need for common standards in public life. Contemporary liberalism therefore insists on general respect for the law, at least when the law has been brought into line with liberal thought. It also insists on acceptance of human dignity and equality as liberals understand them. Those whose understandings are different must accept liberal rule even though they are not treated as legitimate participants in public life. Nonetheless, many meanings, for example many of those connected with religion and the fine arts, are neither necessary nor directly opposed to the liberal regime. It is intended that such attitudes, values and beliefs fall within the scope of liberal freedom, and it is on the breadth of that freedom, its acceptance of the broadest possible range of optional meanings, that liberalism stakes its claim to superiority.
An objection to liberalism that shows it to be radically self-defeating is that the requirement of equal freedom for each of these optional meanings can be satisfied only by suppressing all of them. The problem is that expression is directed at others, so to express a view is at least to a degree to impose it on others and suppress their contrary views. If some say "Merry Christmas" and observe Mothers' Day those who reject Christianity and traditional gender roles are put at a disadvantage. If I am allowed to make a speech, you must put up with an environment in which my attitudes get more attention than yours. The very purpose of the speech is to create such an evironment! The consequence is that for expressive freedom to be equal it must radically limit expression of the views it protects; to do otherwise would be to license the energetic or culturally powerful to impose their meanings on others.
Advanced liberalism thus proves itself self-defeating. In the name of freedom to choose one's own meanings it either makes all meanings compulsory, if they are necessary to the liberal regime, or forbids their public expression. Liberal ideology and views that support it therefore become unquestionable dogma. To dispute them would constitute "hate" and "intolerance." They are the inevitable content of public celebrations and holidays, of all education that is not strictly technical, of respectable religion, and of art, most notably officially-subsidized art that proclaims its own adventurousness. All other ethical, aesthetic and cultural matters must be kept strictly private or otherwise trivialized.
Liberalism thus leads, in accordance with its own principles, to a pervasive spiritual tyranny. Its principle is choice, but in the end the only choices it can permit are personal consumption decisions among things that from a public standpoint are interchangeable. If more were permitted, the choices of some would impose on others and thus violate equal freedom. Burger King's "have it your way," the right of each individual to choose independently among preset choices that the established system finds equally easy to provide, is the epitome of freedom in an advanced liberal society.
Nor does advanced liberalism recognize any external limit on its pursuit of its goals. Like other philosophies that attempt to reconstruct society on simple principles, it eventually tries to extirpate whatever it does not command. In the absence of substantive contrary principles, the insistence on equality of meanings becomes comprehensive and rigorous. Its conception of freedom and equality trump even common sense--"deeply rooted social expectations," as the phrase now is. What seem like remote theoretical consequences of its principles eventually become very practical, and 300 years after John Locke they confront us everywhere.
Advanced liberal society therefore suppresses Christmas and promotes Kwanzaa, gives equal status to pop culture and the classics, abolishes dress codes and instructs children in alternative sexualities, all while making arrangements to keep such things from affecting anything that matters. Equal respect becomes an equality of compulsory irrelevance indistinguishable from equal contempt. We end with perfect freedom to flail about in a vacuum; perhaps more accurately, since the system does require us to respect the conditions of its functioning, the perfect freedom a gear in a machine might have to choose the color it is painted.
Liberal society, like any other, tells us what we are as well as what we can do. It claims to let us be what we choose, but forbids us to be anything specific with a recognizable value, because that would deny the equal value of others. There can be no heroes, because heroes call cowardice and mediocrity into question, no honest men, because honesty denigrates the stratagems of the oppressed. Distinctions in moral worth, after all, correspond to social hierarchies. "Respectable" once had to do with the middle class and "honn�te homme" with the aristocracy. How can such distinctions be allowed in a liberal society? We are therefore allowed public recognition only as employees and consumers, as nodes in a universal network of production and consumption that makes us all manageable and mutually equivalent, individuated only by bank balances, organizational charts, consumption choices, and personal idiosyncrasies of no public importance.
Modern freedom leaves us nothing definite and solid and becomes freedom to choose nothing. Cheap and easy travel seems a fine thing until TV, world markets, mass tourism and immigration make all places alike. The same principle applies to radical freedom generally. If we can be whatever we want we can be nothing in particular. Limitless versatility seems to offer us things that are new, exciting and satisfying, but the glitter dissipates as we approach the reality and find that nothing significant has changed. The consequences are anxiety, depression, and addiction to intoxicants that distract us from our eternal imprisonment in a featureless here and now.
Advanced liberalism in fact imposes on us the greatest possible moral deprivation, loss of what we are. What, after all, am I? A man, someone with definite connections, history and moral character, a member of this family and that people, an adherent of some system of ultimate understandings that defines the world and my place in it. A liberal regime recognizes me as a citizen only to the extent I agree that none of these things matter. I am allowed to give them whatever private significance I want, but the permission is all but meaningless since the goal of the regime--equal freedom--requires that the effect of such private preferences be reduced to the vanishing point.
Of course, the abolition of personal qualities cannot be the whole story. To understand ourselves and others we must be something or other, and what we are depends on the principles that order our world. Public authority necessarily has moral as well as practical influence. In liberal society the highest authorities are money and bureaucracy, the abstract forms of social power that order and reconcile the desires liberalism is committed to favor equally. A liberal world is therefore one in which the authoritative social reality, the thing by reference to which we are what we are, is a hierarchy of money, power and influence that excludes all substantive values and so is strictly quantitative. To the extent we are social, self-realization thus becomes equivalent to pursuit of financial and hierarchical superiority. Careerism becomes an ethical absolute.
Advanced liberal society is thus pervaded by an obsession with money, power and position that it must disguise and deny, a spiritual force that is all the more fascinating because of its irrationality, emptiness and radical opposition to the society's proclaimed morality. That force is experienced as irresistably powerful as well as demonic and obscene. It returns us inwardly to the primitive state in which the sacred and the accursed are one, in which the fundamental spiritual problem is separating ourselves from the evil to which we are irretrievably bound, and the necessary response is denying it and transferring it to another by driving out the scapegoat--the man who rejects freedom and equality, the "bigot," the "hater," the "extremist."
This collapse into irrationality is the spiritual side of a tyranny that destroys what it claims to value most highly. The liberal state is centered on man but attacks what he is and denies what he cares most about. In the name of tolerance it insists on constant re-education. It serves humanity by rooting out the qualities--natural inclinations, concrete loyalties, aspirations toward the transcendent--that make us human. It abolishes freedom, culture, religion and private life for the sake of securing those things to all. It makes thought and speech offenses. It takes children from their parents to re-educate them morally and religiously. It adopts policies whose function is the practical destruction of family life, communities and whole peoples. It comprehensively supervises private associations--universities and cultural institutions like all others--and tells them whom they must admit and in what capacity, and requires them to adopt the practical abolition of ethnicity, gender and religion as their own highest goals.
The advanced liberal state is able to do these things almost invisibly because of the very scope of its ambition. It is to ordinary tyranny what conquest is to common theft. It does not bother with instances but seizes whole institutions and the very principles of their being. Old-fashioned tyrannies invaded households, confiscated estates, proscribed eminent men and exiled dissidents. Advanced liberalism does better--it abolishes the family, redefines property, eliminates eminence through quotas and sensitivity training and destroys every homeland by eradicating all particularities. By abolishing all sense of an authority that transcends human institutions it makes its ruling class a self-contained absolute. What could only be a dream for the emperor who built the Great Wall, burned the books and slaughtered the scholars is today becoming reality.
Modern liberalism makes opposition almost metaphysically impossible. Because it dominates the bureaucracies of knowledge and communication it is able to make effective criticism impossible by redefining facts, moral standards and even language. Objections cannot be recognized. If need be, language and even the authority of logic and truth are sacrificed to avoid doing so. People feel something has gone horribly wrong but cannot say what. All authorities tell them they are wrong; those who persevere in disagreement cut themselves off from the world and can only be classified as crazy or evil.
The advanced liberal state is nonetheless considered the normal and only legitimate form of government. Nor is it simply forced on an unwilling public. Everything in modern life favors it. Material prosperity and technological prowess make up for the weakening of human relations. Its readiness to make use of what remains from the past (while they last) mask its moral and cultural consequences. The electronic media aid its destruction of fixed character by their constant fragmenting and reformatting of experience. Experts support it because it makes expertise the key to human happiness, elites because it increases their power, the middle classes because it alone is respectable, those at the bottom because it takes away their shame and supports them economically. All men desire it as they desire intoxicants, because it presents an illusion of limitless choice that allows them to deny life's limitations.
More than anything, the strength of advanced liberalism is due to its application to social and moral life of the technological principle of defining what is wanted, and rationally organizing resources to achieve it. That principle is the basis of "social policy." It gives liberalism the weight and prestige that goes with the success of modern natural science, as well as enormous power to destroy competing principles of authority. It can not give universal success, however. The features that make the technological principle effective on its own ground make it destructive as a principle of morality. It succeeds with material objects by reducing issues to numerical terms and solving them one at a time, ignoring considerations of quality and context. Liberalism attempts to do the same in the moral realm. It promises happiness by satisfying particular desires, ignoring their value and the overall setting in which they operate. As a consequence, the happiness it promises can only be illusory.
The exclusive concern of liberalism for equal satisfaction of particular desires means that it has no place for the connections that define us and make us social. Those connections--sex, family, culture, class--are based on human particularities, and inevitably give some advantages over others. Since they are fundamental to what we are, they can not be wholly voluntary. They thus fall short of liberal standards of freedom and equality, and a liberal regime must try to eradicate their practical importance. That attempt inevitably fails, because life must go on as it can. Men and women still form couples, parents look after children, common background leads to common interests and enterprises, and the rich, well-placed and powerful have dealings with those who are less so. The effect of liberalism is that the public standards that once helped civilize such relationships to some degree, and bring them into relation with the whole range of human concerns, can no longer exist because the legitimacy of the relationships is no longer recognized. When distinctions of sex and class are abolished there can be no gentlemen. The consequences are manipulation, faithlessness, aggression and resentment in public and private life.
What then is to be done? Something so catastrophic must be fought in a thousand ways. As always, everyday life and politics are the immediate battleground. While theory can make advanced liberalism seem invincible and monolithic, it can only show tendencies. Life is more complicated and ambiguous, and there is always a great deal practical to do here and now.
The battle is very much one of the intellect and spirit. Liberalism permeates established institutions and ways of thought so thoroughly that it can be difficult even to present the issues clearly, let alone carry out an effective counterattack. Those who oppose advanced liberalism must therefore deal with basic questions. What is liberalism? How does it work? What are its strengths and weakness? What alternatives are there? We have argued that the fundamental character--and weakness--of liberalism is that it turns freedom and equality into ultimate standards. The most effective intellectual response to it, the response from within, therefore requires that we point out what is needed to make freedom and equality worth having and consistent with substantive goods.
That response very quickly takes us to the heart of liberal morality and sets us in opposition to it. To matter, freedom must be part of a world of common goods and meanings that transcend particular desires and show what choices are worth making. For the recognition to be concrete enough to be useable it must reflect a particular culture, and for it to be stable and effective it must take some definite institutional form. Freedom therefore requires things that are very like ethnocentrism and established religion, at least as currently and broadly construed. In the absence of such things, transcendent goods become personal prejudices, and what particular men want the only possible standard. The consequences of such a state of affairs have become all too familiar.
Further, if freedom is to matter we must be something definite. For it to matter that I am doing something it must matter that I am doing it. Without substantive personal identity to anchor freedom and make it part of a continuous course of conduct by a stable moral agent, freedom cannot be distinguished from whim. Nor can it have a specific owner to defend it, and must therefore remain at the mercy of government officials, whether Supreme Court justices or welfare administrators. Freedom worth having and capable of defense therefore requires that each of us have a settled personal character recognizable by ourselves and others.
To be distinctly our own, and be capable of effective action, that character must include definite roles and spheres of authority that we and others understand as attributes of who we are. In the absence of such particularities, which give us each a limited but definite place in the world, there is no settled basis for reciprocal influence and exercise of authority. Society becomes a formless aggregate of individuals in which the alternatives are the simple domination of the weak by the strong that liberalism fears, and the mutual isolation and impotence it imposes as a remedy.
Freedom worth having thus requires something rather like the things now classified as classism, sexism, role stereotyping and so on. It requires rejection of the determination to eradicate all discrimination that in recent years has come to be viewed as basic not only to the American regime but to human rights and moral decency generally. Rejecting advanced liberalism thus requires changing something that it is unique in putting at the center of morality. If institutions other than the bureaucratic and market arrangements upon which liberalism relies are to play a role in ordering social life, then distinctions such as ethnicity, class and gender that those arrangements treat as irrelevant must be allowed to affect conduct. "Political correctness"--insistence on liberal standards of moral decency--must therefore be rejected more fundamentally than its respectable opponents now imagine.
That conclusion is difficult for many to accept. The strength of liberal tyranny is its ability to destroy the conditions for freedom to exist, so that it becomes hard to imagine an alternative or interpret opposition as anything but an attack on fundamental decency. The family may be necessary to political freedom, and sex roles to the family, but if the family is deprived of its functions then sex roles are too, and they appear to be simply a means for maintaining an arbitrary inequality. In a liberal state irresponsible centralized government even comes to seem an intrinsic moral good. Any distribution of power from the center, after all, increases the strength of some more than others, and to tie the distribution to human nature and established habit, as it must be if it is to serve as a reliable counterweight to central power, is to reproduce traditional power relationships. Such relationships, like all power relationships, have an abusive and irrational side, and in any event violate liberal freedom and equality simply by existing.
Our aim, however, must be the best life attainable and not utopia. Current conditions present difficulties, and perfection is unattainable, but we must attempt to go forward. Recovery from advanced liberalism requires rebuilding traditional arrangements that it has destroyed, and that cannot happen overnight or altogether by plan. Blueprints are useless; workable institutions arise through discussion, mutual accommodation, and the experience of life together. A necessary first step, however, is abandonment of the dogmatic attempt to suppress natural inclinations and rooted habits of the kind that any tolerable order of things must accept as basic to social existence. Even that first step will require radical changes in what are now taken to be our highest moral aspirations. To the extent rigid political correctness makes such changes impossible, even discussing the problems openly is an important step forward.
Guys like Julius Caesar and Hegel got places by dividing things into three parts, so I thought I'd do my own three-part division of liberal tyranny:
In thinking about these things -- caring, tolerance and inclusiveness -- it's important to note that they're treated as ultimate goods that together constitute a sort of religion, so that it's illegitimate for anything else to limit them. Their demands can therefore be expected to expand without limit. That is what we are now seeing around us.
Here's another way to state the problem with liberalism: Judith Sklar speaks of the "liberalism of fear," Leo Strauss says modern politics tries to build solidly by aiming low, and I say moderns try to come up with machines based on principles that can be fully grasped and give reliable results. Put those points together, and it seems that the basic liberal impulse is to base government on a few simple principles designed to prevent evils like slavery and religious persecution, and also to promote basic material goods like prosperity. Government, the thought is, should be rendered controllable and harmless by strictly limiting it. Goals other than the political goals of liberalism can then be treated as matters of luck or private choice and effort.
In order to make sense, such a system depends on a distinction between public and private that treats the great majority of human concerns as purely private. If the theory is to keep it simple then things have to be kept simple. That hasn't lasted, though, because man is too much a social being for public and private to be separated to that extent:
The net effect is that liberalism, which was supposed to make us safe and free and guard our dignity by restricting government to a few basic concerns, ends by making those concerns the only ones allowed to matter socially. To enforce that principle government has to crush all other concerns. It has to remake our attitudes and habits in unprecedented ways with the use of unprecedented power that makes it impossible for government to be answerable to anyone except a few experts and ideologists. The people, who were to be the rulers, are instead turned into a mass of unconnected individuals who have to keep quiet about what's dearest to them for fear of making things more difficult for those who differ.
What is liberalism?
The view that equal freedom is the highest public standard, and that society should be a rational arrangement to put that standard into effect.
How can liberalism be tyrannical?
"Tyranny" is usurped and abused power. The goals of liberalism are comprehensive, and it views them as a simple matter of justice and rationality. It rejects social and religious traditions, and understandings of society and human nature, that set final limits to those goals. Liberalism is therefore progressive, it always wants more, and it recognizes no ultimate limiting principle. Its demands become ever more far-reaching and the means it uses more and more comprehensive and intrusive.
If all that is so, it seems obvious that at some point liberalism will become tyrannical. When it does its preference for step-by-step reform will obscure the radicalism of what it is actually doing.
How does the tyranny of liberalism come about?
What are examples of liberal tyranny?
What are some consequences of liberal tyranny?
The tyranny of liberalism is mostly a tyranny of ideas. It's not completely disembodied, of course. Like every tyranny it's run in a way consistent with the tyrants' power and profit. The professional and managerial classes and bureaucratic and financial interests that maintain it benefit from the conversion of informal traditional arrangements into bureaucratic and market institutions. It's the ideological justification for their rule.
Still, the means are mostly gentle. Diversity coordinators and federal judges may act badly but on the whole they're not physically terrifying or brutal. They believe in what they're doing, and people believe them or anyway don't know how to resist what they say. The basic problem is that the advanced liberal state always wins because even people who object to it have trouble rejecting its claims coherently. After all, it bases itself on freedom and equality, so those who oppose it presumptively favor slavery and oppression.
The key strength of the advanced liberal state, however, is that it likes to have things run by experts, and today expertise is what we understand by knowledge. The question an expert asks himself is "what setup will provide information that allows the situation to be controlled in a reliable and verifiable manner?" If that's the question, then informal traditional solutions automatically lose, they follow their own invisible principles and are neither knowable nor controllable from the standpoint of an outside professional, and rationalized value-free bureaucratic solutions automatically win.
Hence atrocities like social policy that promises everything and never works. Hence, for example, the preference in fighting AIDS for the condoms-and-technical-info approach used in say Thailand over the moralistic abstinence-and-fidelity approach used in Uganda or the kowtow-to-the-Catholic-Church approach used in the Philippines, even though the latter seem to work much better. "Family values" -- the habits and understandings that make families stable and functional -- can't be administered, so how can they possibly play a role in social policy?
Since the advanced liberal state has locked-in support from institutional knowledge, opposition becomes ignorant and irrational by definition. If you don't like advanced liberalism you don't want knowledge to rule. To make any kind of reasoned argument against it you have to appeal to what's accepted as knowledge, but that's the very thing that's biased against you, not (of course) in its details or rigorous implications, but nonetheless in its tendency and the grand public conclusions of its accredited representatives. That's why whenever conservatives try to make an argument they put the discussion on their opponents' ground, equality, freedom, tolerance and whatnot, and very soon either give away the show or stop being rational.
Since the organization of knowledge seems to be so much of the problem, what's needed to counter the advanced liberal state is evidently a counter-organization of knowledge. But how? The obvious institutional setting for such a counter-organization is the Catholic Church. It's the only institution with the size, tradition, civilizational status and international reach to do such a thing. It claims a special relation to knowledge, that's the meaning of its claim to a special teaching authority, and it ought to be willing to step up and make that good when there's a need. Besides, the current organization of knowledge began (many argue) as an attack on the Church, so why not counterattack at a time like the present, when the need is great and fundamental weaknesses in the enemy's position have become obvious?
If everything that should happen did happen we wouldn't always be in such a pickle. Just when modernity was reaching a turning point, so a counterattack could begin in earnest, along came Vatican II, aggiornamento and ressourcement. It turned out that what those things mostly meant in practice was letting administrators and experts formed on the modern secular model run everything, either because they were up-to-date or because they were biblical scholars who could tell us what all those sources were really all about. (Not surprisingly, they turned out like everything else to be raw material for the project of controlling current situations in a reliable and verifiable manner.)
Vatican II as implemented was a flop from which the Church is struggling to recover, so there's a limit what is likely to happen institutionally. Still, "one word of truth outweighs the whole world," "a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step," and, as they say, We Are Church. If constituted authorities like Bill Moyers, Larry Summers and the University of Notre Dame don't take the appropriate steps then it's up to the rest of us. So here's the concept:
Here are a couple of comments on another weblog that touch on something I wrote and raise a point worth discussing:
[Participant A:] There is a subtle, all pervasive form of control that perhaps has no precedent in human history. Like Orwell's state, liberalism changes the way people view reality itself, it changes the language and as a result certain ideas become unthinkable. Not in the sense of them being banned by public fiat but in the sense of being buried and disappearing from existence.
[Participant B:] Do you think that's really more than the normal condition of life?--I mean, one's culture always limits the way one sees the world.
It seems to me the current situation really is special, not because it puts us in a situation in which many things have already been decided before we come on the scene, but because the manner in which the decisions are made, and the decisions themselves, are remarkably stupid. They deny the reality and value of our highest and most basic concerns, like truth and love. They don't take into account obvious basic features of human life but try to suppress them (for example, distinctions and connections that have to do with sex and ethnicity). The result is that the principles that now govern our public life become not only stupid but relentlessly oppressive.
Here's what has happened:
The nature of man is to do, know and love. The current public order, which claims all knowledge and the right and duty to reform all human relationships, says we can't know, and love makes no sense because self-interest and power are the only realities and words like love are just rhetoric anyway, so we should do what we're told except for the safe and harmless private amusements that it treats as our ultimate good. Why shouldn't I call something that denies and destroys what is best in us oppressive and tyrannical? What else can one call it?
Autonomy means "self-rule," and liberalism makes it the supreme political goal. The coherence of classical liberalism depends on its ability to find a meaning of autonomy that promotes discipline and small government. On the face of it, that should be easy. After all, ruling yourself is a discipline, and external government is its negation. The problem is that there is no such thing as self-rule in general. Men rule themselves in different ways depending on what they are trying to do. Napoleon and St. Francis both ruled themselves, but to very different effect. There are some who rule themselves by voluntarily submitting to the rule of a superior. Others try hard to "loosen up"--discipline themselves to be less disciplined. One could even choose drift and thereby turn idle impulse into a mode of self-rule.
Autonomy can thus be made into anything at all. To make autonomy simply as such the ultimate standard implies nondiscrimination among the various shapes it might take, because ultimate autonomy cannot be subjected to a goal or standard other than the one each chooses for himself. It follows that consistent with its basic commitments liberal government can favor no goal or system of discipline over any other. To the extent such things conflict peace must be made on neutral principles that do not favor one possibility over another. However, goals conflict in enormously complex and comprehensive ways. Maintaining peace among them without favoritism requires an extraordinarily active and wide-ranging public authority. Big government is therefore not a perversion but the natural outcome of putting autonomy first, and therefore of liberal first principles.
Libertarians--updated classical liberals who want to reverse what liberalism has become--try to avoid the conclusion by demanding that autonomy be self-supporting. You can do what you please, but must pay your own way. The problem with that response is that it requires a system of property rights that is independent of any system of values someone might choose. It's hard to know what that might be. Any system of property rights requires a law of nuisance--you can't use your property in ways that are unreasonably burdensome to others. What can that mean though? I suppose it would include making a stink or racket, or paving my land so every time it rains you get flooded. But how about making something ugly or saying something annoying that can be seen or heard off my property? Planting trees on my land that ruin the view from yours? Failing to plant trees when that ruins the local feng shui? Depending on what people find an unreasonable burden, nuisance can mean anything at all.
Tort law, another necessary feature of any system of property, is still more open-ended. It requires that I compensate those I injure, but what constitutes a compensable injury--slander, alienation of affections, intentional infliction of emotional distress--can't be defined apart from the way of life within which it arises. The definition necessarily expresses moral favoritism because it must take the side of some particular way of doing things.
What follows is that realization of the things that make people choose classical over contemporary liberalism--the combination of freedom, minimal government, self-rule and self-discipline--requires abandonment of a defining feature of liberalism, the refusal to recognize particular substantive goods as socially authoritative. Classical liberalism can preserve what's good in it only by in effect accepting established religion or the equivalent. But if liberalism accepts established religion as fundamental to social order, is it still liberalism?
Paul Craig Roberts has a useful column summarizing recent studies on the relationship between guns and violence. Not surprisingly, the studies show that widespread gun ownership reduces violent crime by enabling law-abiding citizens to respond appropriately--that is, immediately and forcibly--to violence and the threat of violence.
So why the widespread vehement opposition to private gun ownership? The basic reason is that liberals do not believe that people can or should be expected to govern themselves. Autonomy is the supreme liberal value, but liberal autonomy means freedom from moral judgment and is poles apart from self-government. In sexual matters, for example, it means the right to be licentious rather than the obligation to draw distinctions and exercise restraint.
Hence liberal opposition to the institutions through which people govern themselves in daily life. Such institutions subject freedom to a web of informal standards and restraints. To liberals, they are therefore oppressive. Marriage means wife-beating. Parental authority means child abuse. Patriotism means xenophobia. Local social cohesion is discriminatory. And ordinary moral standards are bigoted and hateful. Autonomy means you can use your freedom any way you wish, and no one has the right to criticize you for it. With that as background, isn't it natural to assume that private gun ownership means that every argument over a parking place will turn into a shootout? If people have the right to have guns at all, how can they be expected to use them one way rather than another?