[My inaugural post at What's Wrong with the World is unusually long. Leave us say that after many years away from blogging, I have a lot on my mind.]
“It is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this ‘progressive’ age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most ‘progressive’ people in it.” GK Chesterton, Heretics
“We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit [a] vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision…” GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The advanced liberalism of our age combines a remarkable zeal for what is called Progress with a rejection of any standards superseding Man’s desires. I intend to use the words liberal and progressive in a somewhat sloppy way in this post, because for all practical purposes the liberalism of the mid-20th Century has been replaced in America by the Progressivism to which it owes its original existence, and in fact that “regress in Progress” was in my view necessary. It was necessary not only because the problems which liberals attempted to solve could never be solved by their preferred means and were therefore bound to be judged, at some point, to be insufficient half-measures; but also necessary because of what Jim Kalb identifies in his book The Tyranny of Liberalism as the absence of any internal or intrinsic limiting principle to political liberalism.
It is often said that the problem with progressives is that they don’t clearly know toward what they are progressing, and in the case of most flesh-and-blood liberals, this is certainly true. But it would be a mistake—indeed, it is a mistake often made on the right—to leave it at that and to suggest by our silence that the problem with Progressivism simply is a lack of vision. In this respect the quotes I’ve cited by Chesterton leave out something crucially important, which is that liberalism does advance according to a discernible logic and a working set of core assumptions. Thus it would be more appropriate to say that the vision is left largely unstated—and must be, because the whole rhetorical appeal of liberalism is that it promises the end of any external constraints on the human will—but that the workings of Progress move toward a definite goal or end state is observably true.
Because liberals are so often opaque and even confused about the end state toward which they supposedly would like to progress—in fact they are in my experience extremely hostile to any pressure you might place on them to articulate that state, and frequently will become agitated and put out if pressed on the topic—it has largely been left to conservative commentators like Jim Kalb to work out what precisely is the end goal of political liberalism. This frequently entails a process of working backwards from the end goals of liberalism in such a way as to explain the policy choices we see them pushing everywhere, and to explain such phenomena as political correctness, by which we mean the unspoken assent by every member of polite society to a set of unquestionable assumptions, without stating explicitly what those assumptions are but sensing, without being told, when he might be coming close to transgressing them.
Some say the problem is one of ordinary honesty. That is, liberals generally know what they really want, but are unwilling to tell us frankly what it might be. In the concrete case of particular political figures, academics, or public intellectuals, this is certainly true. But the problem reduces to one of active deception in only a limited number of cases, and in my opinion the most powerful force corralling the liberal masses into line is the mundane influence of social and political partisanship. Stated simply, liberalism advances in the practical political realm in spite of its evident radicalism because people on the political left are flatly unwilling ever to admit that the policy being pushed by Political Figure X is as radical as it appears to be, or even that it is a liberal policy per se, insisting instead that it is merely an extension of universally agreed-upon and obvious values.
Thus while it would have been impossible during the campaign season of 2008 to convince Candy that President Obama intended to force Catholic hospitals to provide free abortifacient coverage to its employees, Candy would nonetheless defend to her dying breath the notion that nothing could be more fair, sensible, and obviously in keeping with the demands of justice than the HHS mandate once it had been proposed by her man, though she was perfectly unaware of the urgent necessity of the policy only a week before the it was made public. The point is that Candy can intuit that the policy is an extension of liberal principles identified by Kalb, such as the free and equal satisfaction of desires; all that is wanting is for some liberal politician or academic, in whom she has some political or social investment, to announce his intention to impose that extension into law. What would have been denounced as the raving fantasies of the Paranoid Style only a day before, becomes an obvious requirement of justice merely by its being advanced as a real policy proposal. This dynamic is possible only because advanced liberalism has a rationale to which people feel constrained to offer general consent, even though they have no idea why.
One normally encounters this timely shift in attitude hand-in-hand with a downright gasp-inducing lack of self-awareness, as was on display in EJ Dionne’s astounding claim that it was the (solidly Democratic and generally Obama-adoring) US Catholic Bishops who were acting out of partisanship when they moved to oppose the administration’s new rule. That Dionne was carrying water for a liberal Democrat administration, and that he was doing so in direct contradiction to his supposed Catholic identity, seems rather obvious to any fair-minded observer. In Dionne’s case we may speculate without knowing for certain that as a member of the liberal opinion-shaping class, a perverse sense of professional obligation is at work here; but even for your common man on the street it is probably the case that something like party identification or the demands of one’s social circle exerts an extremely strong pressure to conform to every new liberal demand. Why their wills yield so reflexively to this pressure can be explained simply by considering the new policy as an extension of core liberal principles which, having no intrinsic limit whatsoever, are taken to be right and necessary even if they were completely unimaginable a week before.
Liberals often object with great heat and umbrage that there are of course rational limits which adhere naturally to liberalism’s predations. We just haven’t reached them yet, we are assured, and any rank injustice to which we might point is the work of overzealous enlisted men in the field, so to speak. But other evidence, besides the incremental acquiescence of its adherents, for the lack of any internal controlling mechanism abounds. An all-embracing, atmospheric inexactitude with respect to goals is often presented as a virtue in itself (as in the Johnson campaign’s 1964 statement that, “I just want to tell you this—we’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few”). At other times, the goals are stated in facially ludicrous terms, betraying a basic intolerance of any rational or externally-imposed constraints (as in the call by FDR’s National Public Resources Board in 1943 for the official recognition of “rest, recreation, and adventure” as an individual right to be supplied, somehow, by the federal bureaucracy). A quick perusal of the daily news shows that after running short on formal political inequalities to remedy, liberalism prowls ever-more avariciously for ever-tinier and ever-more trivial dragons to slay, until practically anything, from a child’s drawing to the convenience of male posture in the bathroom, becomes a political concern requiring the liberal state to swing heroically in on the chandelier. It is my contention that were liberalism based on true principles, this would not be the problem that it is; at a minimum, it would not lead to amoral absurdities and irrational inquisitions that leave the shame-faced liberal with no basis for objection except to plead that, of course, one mustn’t go too far.
But how, we may ask, can one go too far in the direction of “progress?” Of course he can’t, leaving us with the reasonable suspicion that it is the liberal program itself, and not merely its overzealous application, that is the problem. It is liberalism, not “political correctness gone too far” that is implicated. And because, as a matter of common experience, whatever is thought “too far” one week might be considered “not nearly far enough” in the next, we also have the lived reality that such unprincipled protestations cannot possibly last, and will soon be abandoned, at first with a regretful sigh that “That’s the way the world is now,” but soon with indignation and bafflement that any other state of affairs ever could have obtained in civilized society.
One of the worst affects all this has is on the intellectual probity of the common person, who constantly must either assent to things he does not believe, or adjust his belief to the requirements of the current state of Progress. This must have a wearying and entropic affect on the spirit, not least on the person attempting to live and think otherwise to the current state of liberal orthodoxy. Caught in a discussion with a basically agreeable and seemingly rational liberal on some newly-harvested fruit of liberal insanity, trying to remind him of all the indignant protestations that “Of course, the right is always fear-mongering—nobody seriously would contemplate forcing Americans to recognize a homosexual union as a marriage, much less punish him for refusing to do so,” the traditionalist can feel real sympathy with Winston Smith, as he lay in the dungeon of the Ministry of Love, attempting to convince O’Brien that what they both knew to be true only a moment ago still was true:
'It exists!' he cried.
'No,' said O'Brien.
He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O'Brien turned away from the wall.
'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.'
'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.'
'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.
Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph.
And so it goes. The devoted liberal really does not remember the time when he believed Ted Kennedy’s protestations that the 1965 Immigration Act would never upset America’s ethnic composition (more fear-mongering by the practitioner of the Paranoid Style, naturally), and he most certainly does not remember his own warm relief at hearing that America would go on just as it had been. It is possible for me to imagine that my young liberal friend from the office really does not remember his angry insistence that I was being "paranoid," only a year before his open embrace of the very thing I was warning him against. It is also possible to imagine that a combination of partisanship and an unconscious knowledge of the social costs of deviation from the liberal program induces him to pretend that he does believe some new and absurd thing, while knowing that he does so because he is a craven.
Whatever the case, it is evident that a principal casualty of this constant, bewildering shifting of goal posts is not just the demoralization of principled conservatives. More importantly we may observe a diminishment in the capacity or even the desire for intellectual honesty, and an active preference for obvious lies, which results (for example) in the constant, maddening insistence by liberals that they do not wish to make American into a European Social Democracy, while assiduously advocating exactly that (particularly in the academy, where such advocacy is often perfectly explicit). When a whole people is trained either to the passive acceptance of or the eager participation in lies, it is the human soul that suffers first, and suffers worst. It is this that makes the constant seeking out and explication of the animating principles of contemporary liberalism absolutely vital.
Comments (36)
You mean something like "Hope and change"? The goal hoped for, the terminus changing toward, are of course left unsaid. Fully half the country would have rejected it out of hand, and of the other half, only 20% would have embraced those goals on their merits (such as they are), rather than on the attestation of their liberal mind-leaders.
Sage, I think the second is more apt than the first, especially the "free and equal satisfaction of desires". The education system together with the media/entertainment industry have degraded the average person's sensibilities and reasoning capabilities about the differences between the desirable and the possible, so that they are willing to accept a politician's word that a desirable goal is achievable merely by determining to set laws in favor of it. This is probably less of a direct object of the people in those industries than a "happy accident" thereof, but it is a highly conformable accident: by having great masses of people unable or unwilling to bring to bear the attention span, dedication, and intellectual vigor needed to understand reality on its own terms, they perforce must accept a version or story that is bottle-fed to them, and this great mass of people are custom made for perpetuating those very same edutainment industries. But a leading facet of that is people unwilling to forego satisfying the appetites for a moment to seek after higher goods, people without any self-restraint or fortitude for more difficult endeavors. In short, they want to believe the easy lies because those lies let them give free rein to their appetites. Lying politicians feed that cycle by keeping the bread and circuses operating.
Posted by Tony | February 26, 2013 8:12 PM
A consistent aspect of liberalism is the denial of political nature of man by which man lives in particular self-ruling authoritative moral communities.
Progressives are wont to reject the particularity and thus long for a World State and the libertarians reject the authoritativeness.
This denial entails denying the difference between a neighbor and a stranger.
Here the stranger is to be understood in the sense of Kipling's poem The Stranger.
Posted by Gian | February 27, 2013 5:58 AM
The liberal has lost faith and delight in law. From a recent article in The Public Discourse by Michael Hannon:
Our antinomianism finds its roots in the so-called “Enlightenment,” in thinkers like Rousseau who said that the law destroys moral duties, or Hume who thought that political society is merely the product of fear and force, or Kant who believed that action impelled by law is “heteronomous” and therefore morally indifferent at best, or Hobbes who taught that law is the enemy of human liberty, even when necessary for human security in the great “war of all against all.” While none of these philosophers advocated anarchy or lawlessness, still none could be said to approach the law with anything like the reverence of Valjean, or the delight of Aristotle. In their various ways, these thinkers accepted the need for law only reluctantly, envisioning law as essentially opposed to virtue and freedom, even if accidentally necessary to prevent more serious mischiefs.
And unfortunately, although they lived and perhaps ordered better than their principles gave them reason to, our own founding generation was colored by this same confusion about authority. Thus John Adams’s warning that “the only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty,” and his contention that “all projects of government, formed upon a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, and virtue, firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions.” Thus also James Madison’s belief that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” and Patrick Henry’s claim that “the Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, [but] an instrument for the people to restrain the government, lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” And thus Thomas Jefferson’s wish that the American Revolution “be to the world . . . the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves.
Posted by Gian | February 27, 2013 6:12 AM
One interesting question that arises from this interesting post (thanks, Sage!) is whether the leaders themselves know what new atrocity they are going to perpetrate very long before it comes into the realm of practical politics in the world. In some cases, one almost guesses that they don't. By "very long," I mean years or decades. Our present administration, for example, gives very much the picture of making up new nonsense and horrors as it goes along. Hence, the entirely manufactured mandate for free birth control, which I never remember hearing even the most man-hating feminist _mention_ twenty years ago.
This feeling of ad libbing does begin to make one suspect a kind of ultimate nihilism in their "principles." Their animating "principles" are either so incohate ("hope and change") or so dreadful (the murder of the unborn and the elderly) that in the end it seems like they believe in nothing in some positive sense: believing in Nothing. Wanting to tear down and destroy for its own sake.
Anymore, it's a kind of relief to encounter even a politically passionate lefty who genuinely loves anything positive for its own sake, whether it be mathematics or stamp collecting. Such a person has an almost old-fashioned air about him. He hasn't dissolved into pure ideology. Yet.
Posted by Lydia | February 27, 2013 9:22 AM
Agreed, though in some cases they assuredly do. An example I considered including was the President's wholly false and transparently fake opposition to gay marriage, which I heard cited by several black callers to various radio shows as reason enough to mark him down as a moderate. Is there any indication that Obama lost a single one of these voters--or, say the Catholics for Obama types--when he suddenly! omygosh! flipped his stance a couple months before election day 2012? Everyone from the top down knew years in advance this was coming, as they assuredly knew regarding gays in the military, women in combat, etc.
But there is with this administration a definite sense that certain cabinets, having been headed up and staffed by radicals, are being allowed to just run wild. I'm not sure even Obama was prepared for the Holder DOJ's announcement that it intended to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian court in New York city, certainly the single stupidest and most brazen instance of overreach by a Democrat administration I've ever seen in my life.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | February 27, 2013 10:54 AM
This lefty (I don't know if I am "passionate" anymore since I limited my participation in political issues) loves baseball, long-distance running, and anime as her passions in addition to some scientific interests. But I am a "confused commenter" that I will just go away and hurt myself in my confusion.
Posted by Black_Rose | February 27, 2013 12:20 PM
You mean like N.I.C.E., right? Well, my guess is that the true sources of the movement know exactly where it is headed, having been liars and murderers from the first. The leading men and women who are at one step removed from that, the Frosts, are also aware. The rank and file, in my estimation, (and to the diminution of their guilt) have instead swallowed "the big lie" about it all - they have lied to themselves so often that they find it not difficult at all to be lied in this way.
Posted by Tony | February 27, 2013 4:31 PM
I thought liberals at least believe in social and economic progress or perhaps technological progress. Liberals tend to believe that traditional social institutions are impediments.
Posted by Black_Rose | February 27, 2013 4:55 PM
Black_Rose, you're making our point. Liberals are in favor of "progress" and that traditional social institutions are "impediments".
Well, what you call "progress" (whatever that means) we call "going bad" in Narnia.
Posted by MarcAnthony | February 27, 2013 5:32 PM
Sage, I absolutely agree with your point that political loyalty creates an unprincipled slippery slope. I also think that cuts both ways. For example, neocons are part of the Republican party establishment now and whether other conservatives agree with them or not, conservatism as a political movement includes an aggressive foreign policy stance.
It is my contention that were liberalism based on true principles, this would not be the problem that it is; at a minimum, it would not lead to amoral absurdities and irrational inquisitions that leave the shame-faced liberal with no basis for objection except to plead that, of course, one mustn’t go too far.
I will take that as an apology for the abuses of the Inquisition.
Posted by Step2 | February 27, 2013 8:51 PM
You rather miss much of the point. There is a perfectly sound basis from within Christianity to criticize the kinds of abuses you probably have in mind. The liberal must looks outside liberalism to find some principled basis on which to object to the predations of political liberalism, as is more and more evident all the time. Liberals literally have no control over the insanity that ratchets up in the name of their pet ideology daily, and always eventually come around to supporting it.
To quote Chesterton again, orthodoxy never said that a prince could not be damned.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | February 28, 2013 12:12 AM
I think liberals are more willing to articulate an endgame with other liberals, with conservatives they become politically defensive and don't want to "concede" this or that prejudice that conservatives have about them. This is part of the reason why our public "debates" are about 95% BS that neither side is sincere about. Of course conservatives do this too--sometimes Cons are accused of really wanting to say end Medicare or SS. I for one will happily admit that I want to lop Medicare and SS off at the knees, but no politician would ever say that, and with good reason: they would be considered a freak of nature by the conservative rank and file, to say nothing of the liberals. This despite the fact that many conservatives would actually not mind the end of these programs, though they may not actually know it yet.
So in the average person you have this conflict of prejudice and principle that functions as the restraint on progress. The HHS mandate example is one, another is that most gay marriage supporters today sincerely have no intention of supporting incest or polygamy, despite their stated principles offering no opposition to these things. In this case they don't feel the force because the principles are really just BS intended to rationalize a desired outcome--gay marriage. If incest became fashionable, they would do a 180 without any reflection that they had done so and would recycle the old principles or invent new ones. Winning is all that matters.
A useful shorthand for what "Progress" is is "those things done by liberals, and by extension Democrats" Reagan certainly changed a lot of things, but you'll never hear those things defined as progress, even when they are begrudgingly admitted to have been necessary or useful changes. We're mostly dealing in political tribes at this point.
Posted by Matt | February 28, 2013 10:15 AM
Sage, I finally got a minute to look up this post by Ed Feser which yours reminds me of:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/12/evolution-of-liberalism-and.html
The five stages of liberalism, per Ed:
He has a depressing parallel set of five stages of "conservative" response, which I'll let you read in his post for yourself.
Posted by Lydia | February 28, 2013 3:26 PM
This may seem irrelevant, but I also point out that there is exactly ONE principle that the Left has, and will never abandon. The comment that our "Inquisition basher" offers us demonstrates it clearly.
The principle is this: "There is no difference between negligence/failure/weakness and hypocrisy." They are Pelagians. Therefore, if you fail to meet your own standards, then you never meant to uphold them. I believe that this is one of the main enforcement functions behind the insane "company loyalty". It is a meta-principle, therefore not privy to the great unwashed. Though if you stand outside the box long enough, you feel it's lash often enough to observe it in action.
However, this rule doesn't apply if you are not caught, nor does it really apply to the "Super 'Men'"; that is, those who are the golden leaders. Because they are experts, they are closer to perfection, therefore, the (unwritten) rules don't apply to them.
It's easier to enforce this when no one is exactly sure what the rules are. It reminds me of nothing more than _Paranoia_ the RPG. It works so well.
Posted by Talitha | February 28, 2013 5:00 PM
Sage: "Because liberals are so often opaque and even confused about the end state toward which they supposedly would like to progress—in fact they are in my experience extremely hostile to any [very slight] pressure you might place on them to articulate that state, and frequently will become agitated and put out if [very gently] pressed on the topic—it has largely been left to conservative commentators like Jim Kalb to work out what precisely is the end goal of political liberalism."
I share the same experience. And there are other countless folks who have too.
Have you ever physically turned on the light for someone in a room, and they bellowed at you to turn off the light? Darkness does not like the clarity of light.
Posted by Truth Unites... and Divides | February 28, 2013 5:44 PM
I have a guilty admission to make concerning "liberal principles." It isn't clear to me that there is one set of principles that all liberals actually hold that lead to all the insane conclusions that liberalism/leftism comes to.
Take a principle like "everyone must be equal." If one takes that with strict literalness, it appears prima facie to mean that everyone must have equal outcomes in all areas, and of course it leads to insane conclusions. It's a universal solvent. We must be at war with reality to make all distinctions disappear, which makes it impossible to have a society or to do anything worthwhile.
Now, there _are_ liberals who appear to hold to something like that, something that extreme. Thus, they are on the side of the criminal against society, always finding excuses for him, trying to make the distinction between "law-abiding citizen" and "criminal" disappear. Thus, they are at war with gender distinctions, doing everything they can to push them under the rug and make men and women appear as identical as possible, or even to make women appear better, in any areas they regard as beneficial or creditable. They are at war with educational standards, with competitive games (everyone must receive a prize), with standards of beauty and morality. They love ugly "music" because it breaks down aesthetic standards. Once the distinction between man and woman is broken down, the distinction between heterosexual relationships and homosexual ones must be broken down. And so forth. Along the way we get murder and horror galore--for example, "abortion rights" are now required so that women can have as little connection to babies as men do.
On the other hand, there are liberals who have a much more limited type of principle, such as "economic differences should be greatly reduced" or something of that kind. While I think they are completely wrong economically, I'm not sure I can correctly find a principle that lies behind that which would lead to the insane consequences of the more sweeping principle. They may not even lay claim to any more radically egalitarian notions. Therefore, they can still, in a sense, consistently go about their other tasks, be tough teachers with high standards, love beauty and hate ugliness, even be pro-life. They may even be pro-life because, as I once saw someone say, "Being pro-life is the truly liberal position. It's really standing up for the little guy." Or they may be gender egalitarians but only up to a point. Is this really an inconsistent position, or is it just based on a different set of concrete ethical intuitions from the ones I hold?
In other words, is it really true that every partial liberal, old(er)-fashioned liberal, or liberal who still has standards is inconsistent at some level? Or is it rather that "liberalism" or even for that matter "leftism" is a "family resemblance term" rather than a term that refers to a definite set of totally destructive ideological principles?
Posted by Lydia | March 1, 2013 11:41 AM
I am going to go out on a limb here and propose an idea I haven't thought through completely. So if it doesn't make sense, I'll take it back off the table.
There is one sort of liberalism that you get from supposing, down at the bottom of the bedrock premises, that man is not an integratedly social animal. That is, yes, he ends up functioning in societies because out of the many evils to be faced, fewer of them come your way when you live in society: it's the less evil option, and for that reason alone is to be considered worthwhile. This liberal, however, does in fact view that man has a nature, that man is a reasoning being (as distinct from the animals), he has a nature that calls forth certain needs, desires, and responsibilities in concert with that rationality. For this kind of liberal, the state is an evil, but it can be justified by making sure the state is designed with constraints to protect the inherent (pre-social) freedoms of the human person, freedoms that are irreducible to and irreconcilable with any social obligation: the state (as such) is at war with the individual.
There is another sort of liberal doesn't believe that there is such a thing as human nature at all. He may be a materialistic atheist who doesn't believe that ANYTHING has a nature, that all is reducible to mere stuff moving about, and whatever meaning we notice comes from being made up out of whim from our own imaginations. Whether he goes that far or not, though, he doesn't think there is such a thing as "human nature", and thus he doesn't think that man is distinct from the animal kingdom, that man has a rational soul, that man's striving for certain goods (like beauty and nobility) amounts to anything more than puffery and nonsense, that every possible "good" that you might desire is purely subjective, purely arbitrary, purely relative to you and you alone. For this liberal, there is no specific end goal for men because every man decides his own goals for himself, and then re-decides them at every moment as he changes. There cannot be, in his view, any root principle that closes off something that some person desires as "not allowable", because there is nothing that makes a desired thing "wrong", only achievable or not.
It is probably unfortunate that we call both groups by the term liberal: they may often be fellow-travelers much of the time, but not out of any congruency of principle.
Posted by Tony | March 1, 2013 7:04 PM
I suppose you are familiar with Jonathan Haidt's five factors of morality (harm avoidance, fairness, purity, ingroup, and authority), which he seems to argue that they possess an evolutionary basis. You have score differently than liberals due to different genetic propensities (I do not know how heritable these dimensions are) and different environmental exposures.
Lydia, I actually think most liberals do not adhere to your caricature of "equality". Since liberals score highly in "harm avoidance", I would suppose that most liberals regard one's material welfare more important than the social mores of the community and the hierarchical structure of various social and economic institutions. For example, liberals typically advocate the state to act on the behalf of vulnerable individuals by intervening in an impersonal and amoral political economy --- the marketplace --- through regulations and redistributive transfers. Liberals tend to perceive the world systemically and see the influence of omnipresent economic forces acting on the individual. The influence of these forces reduces ones sense of agency in the economic and therefore reduces one's culpability and responsibility for their decisions. A dimension of progress in the liberal sense is to mitigate these forces, so people could be "free" to pursue personally fulfilling non-economic activities and not be economically or socially alienated. Conservatives would retort that this would cause a "moral hazard" and encourage others to live degenerate, hedonistic, slothful lives at the largess of the state and/or vitiate the dynamism of entrepreneurial activity enabled by the marketplace.
However, due to their focus on economic issues, typical disdain for "traditional" morality, and celebration of individual autonomy, most liberal are oblivious to the dangers and addictive nature of pornography, for instance.
====
Tony, I comment that liberals who view that "man has a nature, that man is a reasoning being (as distinct from the animals)" would be social contract orientated while those who "doesn't believe that there is such a thing as human nature" would tend to be utilitarians. Rousseau and Rawls are examples of the former.
Posted by Black_Rose | March 1, 2013 9:29 PM
I think that there are some rather severe shortcomings in trying to understand political / ethical theory in terms of Haidt's 5 factors. For one thing, "harm avoidance" cannot be even understood until one claims to be able to say what harm means, and it becomes infinitely more complex, (too complex for the theory) when you factor in different degrees of importance to different kinds of harm - a hierarchy of goods, that is, because a hierarchy that includes loyalty to the family or "ingroup" and respect for authority uses those goods to determine harm. In any case, the whole theory rests on social psychological assumptions that are, at best, extremely debatable (indeed, are heavily debated), and thus the theory itself is just a hypothesis looking for help. You won't find much help for it here.
Liberals who advocate state acting on behalf of individuals to redistribute goods from another to those who are poor are harming the rich individuals from whom the state takes. That cannot be done without assigning different values to different harms in the hierarchy of goods (and evils). And that hierarchy isn't much susceptible to the "5 factors" analysis. There is no basis for claiming that the "harm avoidance" leads to identifying material welfare more important than other aspects of one's welfare, including emotional, spiritual, etc. Harm is harm, until you have a hierarchical value system you can't put material harm before or after any of the others. What you are saying, rather, is that materialist liberals rank material good higher than other forms and material harm more significant than other harms, because they have a presumption about the relative weight of material good over other forms of desired goods.
Posted by Tony | March 2, 2013 10:44 AM
The root of all liberalisms is "I will not serve" -- individual autonomy. Hence the Enlightenment's rejection of Church, tradition, prejudice, etc., as grounds of authority. Liberalism, in that it provides no foundation or standards higher than the individual human conscience, will always be self-devouring and at the same time tyrannical, as Kalb says. The variations in the different manifestations of liberalism have to do with how the ideas are worked out and applied, and how much Christian/classical intellectual and moral capital is still at work in them. "Classical liberalism" is still liberalism, and it thus carries with it the Enlightenment taint of individualist autonomy even if in a somewhat less virulent form. Until we conservatives start to look back a little further in our self-evaluation we're going to continue to matter less; we need to realize that some of our own DNA is liberal, and therefore self-devouring.
From Mark Mitchell, The Politics of Gratitude:
~~~American leaders on both the right and the left have, at various times, expressed their conviction that things are progressively improving, even as they lament the slippage that occurs when the opposition is in power. Ronald Reagan famously claimed that it is “morning again in America.” Talking heads on the right regularly equate progress with economic growth and argue that if the federal government would simply step aside, a new era of prosperity would dawn. Commentators on the left argue that if conservative culture warriors would stop prying into the private lives of others, peace and happiness would advance significantly. In recent years, it is impossible not to hear politicians, on both the left and the right, speak of “moving forward” or “moving ahead.” Apparently, they all assume that forward is the only reasonable direction and that things will get better if we continue to press onward in the same direction. In other words, the doctrine of progress seems deeply embedded in American political discourse.
If partisans on both the left and right express themselves primarily in terms of individual rights and think of politics in terms of an underlying and open-ended progress, then we don’t really need the term “conservatism” at all. Both sides are firmly rooted in the soil of progressive liberalism. They agree about the purpose of government (to protect individual rights) and the direction of history (progress). They may disagree about which individual rights to privilege and what specifically constitutes progress, but these are really in-house debates among liberals.
We are at this point confronted with a startling question: is conservatism a term that is useful or meaningful in the American context? At best “conservatism,” as it is generally used today, seems to represent merely one shade of liberalism. When the issue is framed in this manner, the raging debate between “conservatives” and “liberals,” while dealing with important matters, is really a series of tempests in one particular political teapot. The foundational questions have, it seems, been laid to rest. All sides are committed to the fundamental ideas of individual rights and progress.~~~
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2012/11/the-politics-of-gratitude-scale-place-and-community-in-a-global-age/
Posted by Nice Marmot | March 3, 2013 2:30 PM
NM, I like a lot of individual points that Mitchell makes in this article, but I remain unconvinced about the overall thesis.
Seems to me that individual "rights" of a sort are necessarily implied by subsidiarity, and this principle is not one that is at all a position that was vacated by the liberals, nor is it in the least a principle that can be used to further liberalism (except poorly and accidentally). Considered in one sense, subsidiarity taken to its ultimate expression SIMPLY IS a reference to individual rights: if a matter is one of *individual* concern, then it is rightly decided at the individual level and higher entities ought to stay out.
Going in the other direction, (if you assume subsidiarity is applied downwards), upwards in government there has to be some sort of structure beyond the local. Or rather, you have a choice of 3 options: (a) you can limit government to purely local, and deal with infinite wars of infinite complexity with your 500 other polity neighbors within 1 day's car ride and never know what peace means (see: ancient Greece, medieval Italy); or (b) you can nationalize or world-ize government so that there is only one entity, one government; or (c) you can use subsidiarity to have both local governments and higher-up governments, where the higher-up ones only deal with higher-up issues and keep their sticky fingers out of local matters. Obviously, since the late medieval times the trend has been against (a) because continuous warfare is not a human way of life. (b) was the option chosen in late medieval times where the great nation-states came to be out of smaller entities, because they gave some relief to constant war - at a cost of course. The subsidiarity option was tried for the first time with America, and I find it difficult to ascribe that as a "liberal" choice as such, since with subsidiarity the principle of federalism is that local government retains local concerns, allowing foreign security (for example) to be not a purely local issue. (Of course, if you define all matters to be local matters, then all higher governmental forms are against that version of conservatism, but of course that's just begging the question.) Since Mitchell's vision is
it seems to me that a federal system that keeps local concerns under local control is within his framework.
Alternatively, you could say that the states themselves are too big, too much like the nation-states of Europe, too opposed to Mitchell's localism. That might be so, but the formation of nation-states was well under way before liberalizing theories or politics were drummed up, and so the formation of the states (under the colonizing pressure of old European powers) can hardly be ascribed to liberalism.
My impression is that Mitchell has a good set of points to work with, but he drew too strong a conclusion from that base. The fact that many elements of today's conservative body incorporate this or that degenerate form of idea opposed to true conserving doesn't mean that conservatism itself was just defective from the start. It certainly makes no sense to say that merely stating a definite principle to the common defense of tradition is to buy into the liberal outlook, or you would have to call St. Thomas Aquinas a liberal. (You might say I never agreed with that Burkean objection to "speculative knowledge.")
Posted by Tony | March 3, 2013 10:22 PM
Tony,
Are wars inevitable consequence of not having an overarching Govt? Aren't the princes in the state of nature and not war. I suppose you believe with Pinker that violence is gradually and steadily going down. But Pinker's analysis has been severely criticized as you may be aware. He is simply animated by anti-Christian animus.
You do not sufficiently emphasize the matter of sentiments. Govts and States are not arbitrary entities to be so designed, depending on one's preferences. Texas is not sovereign now because the Texans feel themselves to be Americans first. And that's why the European project has stalled.
There can be no strict fool-proof division between higher matters and local matters. It has been emphasized by Hadley Arkes at Claremont Review that there is no local matter in which the Federal Govt may not legitimately interfere. It is a matter of judgment and not of procedure.
Posted by Gian | March 4, 2013 10:22 PM
No human moral evil is inevitable in the strict sense - every war has at least one side choosing evil, (sometimes both), and no such choice is inevitable, because they can always choose not to do that evil. In the practical sense, contest and dispute is inevitable, leading often to violence unless one side is overwhelmingly powerful or unless there is a higher authority to arbitrate. I don't need to speculate on when the "often" turns the corner into "generally", under what conditions, for me it is sufficient to look at examples of history and see that it is often enough.
No, absolutely not. And this comment is another showing of why you are not a conservative, Gian. Violent contest between states (whether city-states or nation-states) is not "the state of nature", they are always, in every single case, the result of at least one leading decision maker making immoral choices in going to war - and THAT'S no "natural state." Man is not by nature designed for sin. Man is by nature is designed for society, and for confraternity, not for violence. Depraved, damaged human nature, due to original sin, finds unjustified violence comes much easier than virtue, but he cannot call his malicious violent inclinations "natural" in the sense that he ought to follow them.
Since I haven't read Pinker on the subject, I doubt that you would be right in saying I "believe with Pinker". Possibly, Pinker believes with me. In any case, I think that violence (like virtue and vice) undergoes local and regional variation, not any permanent trend in one direction. When the people are virtuous and have virtuous decision makers in government, it is possible for violence to go down, but not automatically because it depends on other parties as well. Historically, it is certainly the case that the people inside the US have experienced a vastly lower level of internecine violence than most other (similarly sized) regions and groups of states over a 220 year period. But they have also dealt with pretty close to at least one war per generation since the founding of the country. That's a lot lower than, say, Napoleonic Europe, but not necessarily a *reduction* as such.
Posted by Tony | March 4, 2013 10:53 PM
Aren't the princes in the state of nature and not war.
You misunderstand me and I think you misunderstand "the state of nature" as it is used in political theory.
The "state of nature" is not a state of war.
As Locke has it, the individuals exist in state of laws, i.e. under some sovereign entity, that he calls a Prince.
Princes mutually exist either in a state of nature (i.e. in a peaceful state) or in a state of war.
Since the sovereign entities "Princes" do not have any superior laying down law to them, they are said to be in a state of nature (and not a state of laws) when they are actually not fighting each other.
Similarly, when two individuals are fighting as in violence, they are in a state of war.
But when they argue, as in a court of law, they are in a state of laws.
Thus, the state of laws is natural for individuals while the state of nature is natural for princes.
The state of war exists when irrationality overwhelms rationality i.e. it is unnatural.
Posted by Gian | March 5, 2013 3:18 AM
If it were true that "Princes" or sovereign powers are in a state of nature rather than a state of laws because they have no law over them, then it would remain the case that they have no law over them when they are at war, and being "at war" or "at peace" would not change whether they are under another law or "in a state of nature". The two categorical perspectives are distinct from each other.
But in fact all sovereign powers are at all times under another law: both divine law and natural law are over and above every polity, every prince and power. This is the reason why it is wrong for princes to go to war with a peaceful neighbor to obtain more territory, for example. Every war has at least one power in violation of higher law.
Even apart from the vague and implicit natural law, and the divine law that we receive by revelation, there is - as St. Thomas points out - a "law of nations" that is above each individual nation. There are generally agreed points of international behavior that are a kind of law, even though they are not law in the perfect sense. This is why, for example, ambassadors are granted protected status. In order for countries to have the possibility to operate without simply setting to war each and every time they find they have interests in opposition, they need to be able to interact on another field than that of war, and that other field - that of parley and negotiation and treaty - must needs have some sort of rules about it. This is part of the law of nations. Which is all to say that just as general natural law finds concrete expression in typical human laws against murder and theft, so also the general natural law finds concrete expression in specific rules of international behavior that are above each sovereign prince.
But when they argue as at a treaty room, they are subject to the law of nations, as all nations are at all times. No power is without a higher law, except God alone.
Posted by Tony | March 5, 2013 6:16 AM
"The fact that many elements of today's conservative body incorporate this or that degenerate form of idea opposed to true conserving doesn't mean that conservatism itself was just defective from the start."
I think you are correct, Tony. I would say, however, that today's mainstream conservatism has incorporated more actual liberal ideas than we may want to admit. But I certainly do not hold that everything calling itself conservative today has been corrupted. I'd agree with Mitchell though in his questioning of whether the term itself is at this point too vague to be really useful. After all, both Sean Hannity and I call ourselves conservatives, but there's a lot we don't hold in common.
I think your characterization of two varieties of liberals is correct, if they're viewed as being on a sort of continuum rather than as discrete types.
Mitchell's article is actually a excerpt from the intro to his recent book, which I bought a couple weeks ago but haven't read yet. I will be interested to see how he fleshes out the various ideas he puts forth.
Posted by Nice Marmot | March 5, 2013 12:47 PM
NM, I do agree with Mitchell's point about the utility of the term "conservative". Actually, I think that the same applies to the term "liberal" as well, both for the bifurcation of 2 sorts (or degrees) of liberals I depicted above, and also because the expression itself has its source in things we DON'T ascribe to the modern liberal at all, such as the expression "liberal education", referring to the education suited to a free man. And "liberal arts", which refer in the concrete to the trivium and the quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, etc.
And I agree that many conservatives have gone some distance toward liberalism, more than they realize. I have been pointing out for a while now that if a politician came along spouting Kennedy's policies, he would be generally considered well to the right of mainstream liberalism. The yardstick has moved a long, long way in 50 years.
Posted by Tony | March 5, 2013 6:50 PM
Tony,
Nations are not under the law of nations, in the same way an individual is under the laws of his nation.
You are not appreciating the difference between a sovereign justice and arbitrative justice. The law of nations consists partly customary, of good behavior between nations, and partly treaties between sovereign powers. By definition, nothing lies above a sovereign (leaving aside divine law that is extraneous in this context).
There is no superior authority that may penalize a sovereign power for a violation of natural law or the law of nations. If there was, the power in question would not be sovereign.
when they argue as at a treaty room, they are subject to the law of nations,
no. The law of nation is like the rules of civilized intercourse of persons. The parties agree to it, implicitly or explicitly. The consequence of this law being violated is the end of the civilized intercourse but nobody would drag the culprit to a court of law.
Posted by Gian | March 5, 2013 10:59 PM
"Extraneous" according to whom? You? Well, you can say, but how about backing it up?
In my book, God's sovereignty cannot be extraneous because all human law derives its fundamental source from God's authority (normally through the channel of natural law, but not always). If you sever human law and human authority from God as its source, the world-picture you get is severely different from the great Christian tradition on law. In fact, what you get is legal positivism: that the HUMAN sovereign can make any laws it wants, and by definition that law is authoritative.
I recognize and grant that the law of nations is not "over" human sovereign powers the way those human sovereign powers are "over" lesser magistrates. There is indeed no human agent able to restrain the human sovereign while he remains sovereign. That is, by the way, why I said that the law of nations is not a "perfect" law, it is not law in the perfect sense. There is, however, a higher authority that can indeed penalize a human sovereign: both the natural law and the divine law can bring this about. The natural law makes it so that (for example) a sovereign who repeatedly debases his currency will undergo an inflationary reaction - there is nothing he can do to prevent this penalty in natural law. Still more obvious is it that God can rein in a human sovereign.
If you always keep in mind and use the term "human sovereign" for the princes of this world, you will find it easier to avoid falling into the trap of legal positivism, because included in the term is the implicit truth that every human sovereign rests on another power, is not absolute in itself. God is the only absolute sovereign. A human sovereign is by definition a qualified sovereign. Humans ALWAYS receive their power from a higher source, and ALWAYS remain accountable for it to that higher source. There may be no human on Earth that can properly chastise a sovereign prince and authoritatively (on his own fiat) make it stick, but God can do it either directly, through nature, or through a large body of men acting in concert (though without immediate authority).
Posted by Tony | March 6, 2013 8:35 PM
"if a politician came along spouting Kennedy's policies, he would be generally considered well to the right of mainstream liberalism."
True. On the other hand, contemporary conservatives would probably find much in Kirk and Weaver that would strike them as "liberal." To me, some of the most interesting political and economic writing being done today is by those scholars, many of them Catholics, who are trying to think outside the standard old left/right dichotomy -- David Schindler, Patrick Deneen, Christopher Shannon, William Cavanaugh, etc.
Posted by Nice Marmot | March 8, 2013 9:39 AM
Good piece which includes discussion of the varieties of liberalism:
http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/the-perils-of-neutrality/
Posted by Nice Marmot | March 11, 2013 10:07 AM
NM, that's an interesting article. Lot of good material there.
I am more than a little puzzled that the writer's conclusion is applied broadly to "constitutional democracy"
when the main thrust of the discussion and criticism is rather about a sliver, one out-thrust of constitutionalism, liberalism, which he says is not the entire constitutional tradition:
It would seem that the argument critiques (and, in summary form does a good job of showing how to demolish) standard liberalism that is centered on that sort of procedure constitutionalism that does not need any particular view of man as such. But constitutionalism is larger than that, and includes forms that do not depend on such a premise. The author does nothing to attack the larger concept of constitutionalism as such, so his conclusion is probably too broadly stated. It should be that "liberal constitutional democracy" will not survive long term because the ideology that gave it birth also gave birth to its inherent self-defeating defects.
Posted by Tony | March 12, 2013 12:20 PM
**I am more than a little puzzled that the writer's conclusion is applied broadly to "constitutional democracy"**
My surmise is that Frohnen would apply his conclusion to the 'democratic' rather than to the 'constitutional' side of that tandem, in that he would find constitutionalism per se not strong enough to counter the long-term unsustainability of democracy. But whether he thinks all democracy is ultimately "liberal," of that I'm not sure.
Posted by Nice Marmot | March 12, 2013 12:55 PM
I suspect you are right, and he is probably ambivalent about whether democracy itself is inherently liberal - he certainly doesn't devote space to arguing the issue directly.
Posted by Tony | March 12, 2013 6:55 PM
You may find this interesting as well, Tony:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/philosopher-of-love-587/
('liberalism is self-devouring' with a vengeance -- I'm somewhat new to Schindler, but this is intriguing stuff)
Posted by Nice Marmot | March 13, 2013 5:45 PM
NM, I only read a few issues of Communio, and while I respect the overall level of intellectual commitment to the Church in it, I found it very difficult to respect the authors' apparent readiness to theologically experiment with novel ideas that had few apparent connection to the teachings of the Church, the Fathers, etc. Such as von Balthasar's weird thesis that Christ "became sin" not only figuratively, or legally, but literally. Or the notion that the root origin of the Eucharist as the body of Christ is the Church which is also the body of Christ "first" so to speak. Or, indeed, the tenor of some statements about Christ revealing man to himself leading in the direction of suggesting that man does not actually have a nature as such, (because he cannot be known in his nature). I think that these experimenters, like De Lubac etc., even if they themselves never went beyond the boundaries delimiting formal heresy, helped open up the pursuit of novel ideas to others who had no such qualms.
Still, Schindler's intuitions about love as the root of reality are extremely good.
Posted by Tony | March 13, 2013 9:49 PM