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Utopian Forgetfulness of the Depth (Part I)

Customary Liberal Silence

Discussion of an existential depth to our discourse inevitably engenders a degree of methodological discomfort. This is particularly the case among theorists whose occupation is in dealing with the discursive level of argu­mentation. What cannot be detected through the medium of language can scarcely be detected at all, let alone rendered transparent through the meth­ods of analysis. Without the theoretical equipment to examine experiences and symbols, most contemporary philosophers are content simply to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that “what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”1 More recently, many have also abandoned even the notion that coherent discourse is possible because of the incommensurability of all starting points. Largely overlooked is the possibility that the starting point lies in the existential resonances that can be reconstructed on the basis of their discursive elaborations.

The neglect of the experiential becomes politically significant when it converges with the customary liberal silence concerning its own foundations. It has been deeply impressed upon the liberal mind frame that its particular construction is specifically designed to prevent the resurfacing of the question of foundations. Minimal liberal order was to guarantee public peace by avoid­ing the kind of divisiveness that arises when ultimate questions are posed. Contemporary liberal theorists are, as they acknowledge, not departing in the slightest from the practice of insisting that the public good is too important to be jeopardized by the injection of such uncertainty. The demand to bracket ultimate philosophical or religious questions is not only a methodological exigence but also in line with the long-standing inclinations of the liberal tradition.

A crisis arises, however, only when liberal society begins to believe its own rhetoric. Silence concerning its roots is mistaken for the absence of any underpinnings. The notion is indulged, contrary to the warning of George Washington in his Farewell Address, that the moral and political order can be sustained without the benefit of any deeper spiritual impulses.2 Gradually it becomes accepted that the state has no role even in encouraging the formation of virtues that are desirable or indispensable in its citizens and leaders. Eventually it becomes impossible even to discourage those tendencies that render the citizens and their leaders callous and cruel toward one another. When the crisis explodes publicly, it is greeted with shrill hectoring about values from public figures who have up to then displayed no sustained interest in the formation of virtue.

We have already examined the nature of the crisis of confidence in its theoretical and practical dimensions in Chapter 1. The inability to mount a coherent defense of liberal principles undermines any forceful attempt to instill them in social and political practice. The second chapter [not shown here—ed] took issue with the all-too-ready characterization of this collapse of liberal formulations as spelling the outbreak of civil war carried on by political means. I tried to show that the disintegration of the theoretical enterprise was not equivalent to the disintegration of the liberal impulse and that the demise of some of its supporting virtues was not tantamount to the dissolution of liberal democratic order. The liberal construction continues to function, albeit less confidently and less consistently, because it embodies an authoritative moral truth that resonates with the deepest intimations of who we are. That existential resonance has always been the source of its appeal.

We must now examine what prevents a recognition of the experiential movement that is powerfully, if inarticulately, the indispensable basis for the liberal tradition. Why is it so difficult for liberals to acknowledge that they are drawn by a vision of the good? The discomfort is palpable in the many injunctions against “ontology” or against the raising of “metaphysical” questions, for there is more than an inability to find a satisfactory resolution of such difficulties. There is an abiding unwillingness within the liberal tradition to acknowledge the depth of the moral impulse from which it springs. This is evident in its reticence concerning its own historical antecedents but is more significant in the refusal to countenance its own dependence on virtues that it does not and cannot create.

What is it that prevents liberal theory and practice from returning to the experiential sources from which a renewal might emerge? Is there not something strange about a tradition that when pressed to defend itself is unwilling to acknowledge the roots of its own convictions? That is the deepest level of the crisis that has been building within the liberal ethos for at least a couple of generations. A crisis is characterized not so much by the breakdown of established patterns of order as by the failure of forces that ought to restore and renew it so that it may rise to the challenge of the time. Is it the case that the moral impulses behind liberal political order have ebbed to such a point that they cannot be rejuvenated? Or is there a peculiarity of the liberal tradition that restrains their open reassertion? Such are the questions that now impose themselves.

Liberal Invincible Rightness

Perhaps the first factor militating against a serious reflection on the liberal tradition’s own existential depths has been the long-standing liberal coolness toward theory. Liberal democracy is a practical political symbolism developed by practical political individuals. Relying on their own intuitive sense of what is right, they were principally concerned with finding a means of translating their convictions into actual political life. They were successful because their construction resonated with the immediate sense of what is right in a great many other human beings. No one needed any elaborate defense because it never occurred to anyone to question the meaning of the truths they held to be “self-evident.” The truths’ self-evidence was sufficient.

For long stretches of liberal political history, that has continued to be the case. Without the germ of self-doubt, liberal tradition continued in the conviction of its own invincible rightness. It was impervious to the kind of skeptical subversion with which we are familiar because that kind of critique had never found an opening through which to insinuate itself in the liberal soul. It was not that liberal theory and society were unfamiliar with Marx or Bakunin or Nietzsche or the kind of radical perspective that their critique represented. It was simply that the genealogical analysis of its principles was not seriously admitted as a problem for the liberal understanding itself. Their questions had not yet managed to dislodge the self-assurance of the liberal mind.

The pattern is perhaps best exemplified in the most eminent liberal states­man of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill. It fell to him to mobilize the resistance to the totalitarian juggernaut of Nazism and to sustain a bastion of liberal freedom from which the victorious countermovement could eventually be launched. Yet despite this formidable effort, and most striking in a man of Churchill’s undoubted literary and rhetorical capabilities, there was scarcely a word that explained why a liberal order is superior to a fascist one. What was it that made that heroic effort of resistance worthwhile? The question simply does not arise. Indeed, it can hardly arise because it is taken for granted as so obvious as not to deserve serious consideration. Only from the retrospect of our own fractured polity does it seem like a question to which we would like to hear a persuasive response.

So long as there was no hesitation about the self-justifying truth of liberal principles, an elaborate defense was not only superfluous but might even invite the germ of self-doubt it was intended to repulse. It is better not to engage in reflection that is bound to be less secure than the tangible common sense of practice. It might even be said that the more liberal a society became, the less it was given to reflection on the justification for its liberal convictions. The historic liberal democracies, such as Britain or the United States, have long been noted for their lack of interest in theoretical or philosophical concerns. Tocqueville observed the singularly practical bent of most U.S. citizens and the unlikelihood of original philosophical reflection emerging within such an environment. The liberal tradition as a whole has been so bereft of major theoretical exponents that almost a century separates John Stuart Mill and John Rawls without the appearance of a figure of comparable intellectual stature.

In this regard liberal democracies have been victims of their own practical success. Not requiring an extensive philosophical elaboration for their prin­ciples, they continued with remarkable stability and assurance until the day dawned when they would have to give an account of their convictions. That was the jolt of the encounter with the revolutionary movements. Pressed to defend the modest faith that had constituted liberal civilization, they found that they were indeed hard-pressed to articulate a coherent defense. It was not that they no longer had convictions but that, having taken them for granted for so long, liberal societies lacked the intellectual means to render them transparent. This realization has today rebounded on a liberal practice that is no longer as certain as it once was and correspondingly more prone to confusion in action.

Yet it is hard to blame liberal statesmen and liberal writers for this con­dition. How could it be otherwise? They are like the Romans whom they admire so greatly, incapable of apprehending the gap between their own constitutional order and the best regime. They do not have that Greek sense of the difference between the two that irrevocably sets philosophy in tension with politics. To the liberal mind, theory and practice are a seamless whole. The practice is the best exposition of the theory, and the theory adds little essential to the practice. There is a characteristic complacency about the liberal arrangement that has for so long basked in the assurance of its own rightness that it has become incapable of viewing itself with any critical distance. Without that element of reflexivity it lacked the perspective from which to understand the critiques posed against it and eventually the comprehension from which to develop a response to them.

Among even the most self-conscious liberal thinkers, such as the American Founders, one scarcely finds any extended reflection on why human beings ought to be accorded their inalienable rights or why consent of the governed is the fundamental principle of political rule. The reasons are taken as so self-evident that no one could seriously question them. From that surety of conviction there naturally arises the sense that liberal order rests on nothing more fundamental than itself, that it is a self-contained symbolism that represents the most elementary common sense of the human race. Forgetful of its own particular historical sources, in a civilization formed by the conjunction of philosophy and revelation, liberal politics begins to assume that it rests entirely on its own immediate self-evidence.

The liberal order is not inclined to reflect on the extent to which it presupposes a particular understanding of the human being or of the order of reality within which it exists. Yet it is clear, as James Madison acknowledged, that liberal democracy or republican government, as he generally named it, rests on a quite specific understanding of the human condition. “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circummspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form” (Federalist Papers, no. 55). Madison does not elaborate on what those virtuous qualities are and whence they are derived nor what expectation we might have concerning the prospects of remediating the degree of depravity in the human race. All of that is simply taken for granted as the parameters that are well understood by the audience he addresses. In fact, they are presuppositions that are derived from the philosophic Christian understanding of an order of right by nature that is also in tension with an abiding proclivity to wrong in nature.

Neither Madisonian liberal republicanism nor any other brand rests on its own two feet. Beneath it lies a whole complex of assumptions about ourselves and the world in which we live. It is the degree of agreement about those assumptions that eliminates the need for explication, to the point that they are often forgotten in their invisibility. But they are there and become manifest when the geologic plates of consensus begin to shift. The result can then be as shattering as an earthquake when the fragility of our public order is suddenly exposed. More frequently, the slow imperceptible process of change works a transformation of the mores of society that only later registers in consciousness. One day we wake up to discover, perhaps in the reactions of our children, that we are living in a different world.

At that point we become aware of the extent to which our liberal order had depended on a larger worldview whose demise it could not easily survive. We begin to understand that the crisis is not so much a crisis of liberal politics as it is a crisis of the philosophical assumptions that had made its principles appear so self-evident. The liberal superstructure has fallen because the moral and spiritual convictions on which it had rested have been shaken. It is no longer possible to regard the liberal way as the invincibly right one for all mankind. Perhaps it is no longer even valid for us? Without the sense of an order beyond itself in terms of which its rightness can be seen, liberal democracy loses the landmarks that hold it fast. If it rests on nothing but itself, liberal order rests on nothing.

The Illusion of Progress

The factor that has prevented liberal self-understanding from recognizing the need to attend to its own foundations has been the illusion of progress. When the philosophic-Christian presuppositions had sunk below the level of articulate discourse, becoming bare, silent presuppositions, then it was possible for a variety of distorting influences to shape the context as well. One of the most potently seductive was the idea that the burden of moral struggle would gradually be relieved through the inexorable effect of progress. The attraction of this myth is perennial since the human condition imposes the necessity of struggle as the price of growth in every age. Inevitably, the painful nature of the requirement invites imaginations of its abolition. What renders such perennial musings so fatal in the modern period is that, in the absence of the rationality derived from philosophy and Christianity, they are not subjected to critical examination. Indeed, the fantasy of progressive self-perfection can even clothe itself in the residual appeal of salvation history.

The effect of such apocalyptic fantasies in the most militant branch of modernity, the ideological movements of revolution and totalitarianism, has been disastrous. When the construction of second realities gets underway, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the first reality of the world we inhabit. Normal moral restraints cease to be effective as the second reality insulates the believer from the inhibitions that can usually be counted on to place a limit on the perpetration of evil. A boundary has been passed in which all things are possible and all possibilities are permitted. The practical effects are not only the inhuman cruelty countenanced on a grand scale but also the equally catastrophic inability to act on the basis of a rational grasp of cause and effect. Actions that are taken within the framework of an illusory second reality have a multitude of unintended consequences in the real world. All of this is familiar in the moral nightmare of totalitarianism and the peculiar practical obtuseness that gave such societies the air of a lunatic asylum.3

A more moderate form of the same disorder also manifested itself within the liberal horizon. While not as convulsive as the apocalyptic visions of revolutionary transformation, the idea of the progressive perfection of the human race had some of the same distorting effects. Pressure to sustain the moral struggle against evil and the sense of the contest as a perennial feature of the human condition were removed. It would now be enough to allow nature and history to do their beneficent work; it would no longer be necessary to legislate and govern on the basis of the idea that human nature would remain pretty much the same in the future. Instead, we could build on the less strenuous assumption that the inexorable moral improvement of the race would continue. The twentieth-century holocausts have been a shocking reminder of the depth of depravity of which we are still capable. And the steady moral deterioration of liberal societies has finally begun to disabuse even the most complacent of liberal progressives.

On the pragmatic level, too, the experience of three global conflicts in the twentieth century as well as the endless proliferation of regional and civil wars has worn off most of the luster of progress. Compared to the colossal blunders of liberal statesmen after the two world wars, international relations are now more likely to be conducted in an atmosphere of sober realism. Gone are the comforting illusions that the human race has progressed to the point that unspeakable cruelties are no longer possible. We know that they are continuing even today and that the future is unlikely to be qualitatively different from the past. The best that can be expected is that a beneficent conjunction of forces might restrain the most inhumanly destructive ten­dencies within and between states. We are not moving toward any paradise within history.

Yet the dream of progress dies hard, and it is undeniable that a kind of progress does occur within history. The very notion of history suggests something progressive; otherwise, what is the point of remembering what is significant in the past? It is also not simply progress within the fairly narrow range of science and its technological applications. The most significant aspect of history is the history of the emergence of order, fragile and reversible as each advance is. Clearly, the eruption of the great spiritual movements, philosophy and the world religions, are of this type. Liberal order itself, I will argue, represents an advance within such a frame of reference; it is not simply a compromising response to the disintegration of the medieval Christian order. But liberalism, like the ideological movements it has opposed, extrapolated its own limited progress into an infinite future. It forgot that no historical advance escapes the fate of the history that brought it forth, in which nothing remains forever and no achievement overleaps the bounds of the human condition.

Modern Liberals

The difficulty in maintaining this balance, especially in the modern context that is virtually defined by the orientation toward a greater future, is well illustrated by the contemporary liberal disorientation. Only those thinkers who have taken the full measure of the totalitarian possibility of modernity, as it has been actualized in the twentieth century, have managed to slough off the last remnants of the myth of progress. There is not the slightest hint of an expectation of the moral improvement of humanity in the urbanely austere reflections of Michael Oakeshott. Even Friedrich Hayek, who wishes to preserve his self-identification as a classical liberal and is prepared to endorse a faith in the capacity of reason to effect an improved quality of life, never suggests that this might be part of an inexorably ascending movement of history. His faith in the creativity of freedom is tempered by his witness of the horrors of which it is capable, a nightmare he was among the first to denote as “the road to serfdom.”

Other thinkers, generally those whose ruminations remain within the parameters of liberal democratic politics, still betray the lingering influence of the idea of progress. Again, [John] Rawls provides a measure because he has been one of the very few with the theoretical range to make most of his presuppositions visible. By attempting a comprehensive theory of justice, rather than the more conventional small-scale work on “problems,” he inevitably exposes more of the links that hold the liberal worldview together. Not surprisingly, one of the essential elements has been a certain uncritically accepted notion of the malleability of human nature. What human beings are, he insists, is not to be determined on the basis of our own social and political experience, because we would then be describing merely the kind of individuals who happen to arise from the institutional structures of our own time.

Instead, we should look to the possibility that some of the most intractable moral shortcomings, such as envy or domination, might not be so prob­lematic under different social circumstances. Rawls builds into his thought experiment not only the weak assumption that most people will want more rather than less of the primary goods but also the assumption that individuals in the original position will be relatively disinterested in one another. That is, their own happiness will not be substantially affected by the happiness or unhappiness of others.

Rawls refers to this as “the special assumption I make” that is necessary to make the decisions of each to maximize his or her access to primary goods fully rational. “The parties do not seek to confer benefits or to impose injuries on one another; they are not moved by affection or rancor. Nor do they try to gain relative to each other; they are not envious or vain” (A Theory of Justice, 144). Rawls justifies this unusual assumption on the grounds that he is con­structing an ideal theory. Once it is completed, he promises to return to the question of whether it will work under conditions where it is likely that human beings are envious and vain. But he does not even wait until the end of the book to dispose of that concern. He goes on to indicate that he does not believe that envy and vanity will be realistic problems under the conditions specified in the theory of justice. The principles of equal liberty and inequality benefiting all will, when they are put into practice, “lead to social arrangements in which envy and other destructive feelings are not likely to be strong. The conception of justice eliminates the conditions that give rise to disruptive attitudes. It is, therefore, inherently stable” (144).

Apart from the problem of how we move from the theoretical ideal to its application, a formidable challenge given the acknowledged incompatibility between the assumptions of the two of them, there is an even deeper diffi­culty. Rawls is asking us to accept the progressivist premise that human nature is susceptible to such institutional determination. Now the degree of moral progress to which human nature is amenable is itself an empirical question. There is no need to erect any absolute limits. Even if we knew what they were, we would not know where to place them. What is required is a modest quantity of skepticism that insists, in the absence of any countervailing evidence, that we should not expect human behavior to markedly differ from the range of our ordinary experience. Are not envy and vanity and the desire to dominate more deeply rooted temptations than Rawlsian liberalism seems to suspect? Do we not sense them as possibilities that can perhaps infect even our most noble aspirations? It might indeed be nice if the darkness of our ulterior motives could so easily be dispelled.

But it is not so easily dismissed, and one is struck by the baldness of Rawls’s assertion that “men’s propensity to injustice is not a permanent aspect of community life; it is greater or less depending in large part on social institutions, and in particular on whether these are just or unjust” (245). This seems an extraordinarily rash assumption on which to base a moral and political order, and the unease it provokes is not relieved when he finally does address the translation to the actual world. After explaining that a perfectly just society is an ideal that rational beings would desire more than anything else, Rawls suggests that the obstacles to its stabilization in practice are all tractable. He still recognizes that instability of one kind, our ability to count on justice as a predictable dimension of our social relations, will be removed through the existence of a sovereign. But Rawls assumes the deeper instability of the human heart, what he calls our “sense of justice,” will be remediated through the progressive movement of reality itself.

There is a quaintness to many of the passages in the last chapters of A Theory of Justice as Rawls reaches back to the old-time faith that had sustained liberals in the past. He invokes the shade of Mill to valorize the expectation that as society develops, individuals converge toward the recognition “that society between human beings is manifestly impossible on any other basis than that the interests of all are to be consulted.” As with Mill, the hope expands into the eschatological vision of a perfected state that “leads the individual to desire for himself only those things in the benefits of which others are included.” Searching around for confirmation of this aspiration, Rawls finds it again in another nineteenth-century faith, evolution. The progressive emergence of a sense of justice can finally be understood as part of the larger cosmic process by which order emerges from chaos. “The theory of evolution would suggest that it is the outcome of natural selection; the capacity for a sense of justice and the moral feelings is an adaptation of mankind to its place in nature” (501-3).

The temptation to extrapolate from the fragile island of order, imagining that it will be extended infinitely into the vast sea of disorder that surrounds it, is virtually irresistible to some of the leading liberal thinkers. Ronald Dworkin in the closing pages of Law’s Empire similarly invokes the move toward “utopian theory” (408). Again it is defended on the grounds of theoretical completeness, necessary for the full unfolding of the picture of law as integrity, a principled means of reaching agreement between individuals who may disagree about a great deal. “This purified interpretation speaks, not to the distant duties of judges or legislators or any other political body or institution, but directly to the community personified. It declares how the community’s practices must be reformed to serve more coherently and comprehensively a vision of social justice it has partly adopted, but it does not declare which officer has which office in the grand project” (407). Not indeed that there is anything untoward in such aspirational rhetoric within an author’s vision, it is more what is omitted that is the chief source of the distortions. Dworkin, like Rawls and a long line of liberal forebears, seems to suggest that all that stands in the way of the realization of the dream of integrity is its rational elaboration. Once it is explained, its persuasive logic will be compelling.

There is little of the sense of caution that would temper the eschatological expectations. The possibility that human society may never actually aspire to, let alone achieve, the pure idea of law is simply not entertained. This is defended even at a time when its stunning unreality can scarcely be avoided. After a half century of expanding concern with social justice, involving a steady enlargement of the liberal guarantee of rights over an ever widening range of activities and individuals, we are further than ever from a stable moral consensus. This is not to deny that the expansion of civil rights, enforcing the liberties of groups who had not hitherto enjoyed the full protection of the laws, and the development of a network of welfare and security arrangements that sustain greater real individual liberty have been a positive benefit. They have, and that is precisely the point of their limitation.

The enlargement of liberal guarantees and opportunities does not consti­tute a step in the progressive emergence of the eschaton. It is simply one fairly tangible set of improvements that have been made in a concrete legal and institutional structure that may or may not be able to sustain them materially and morally. One of the most significant factors tending toward their degeneration has been just the sense of false assurance promoted by the progressivist dream itself. If the process of maturation and self-responsibility is part of the autonomic movement of history, then there is no necessity to undertake the arduous effort to inculcate and practice the virtues themselves. We can simply wait for history itself to perform the task. This is what makes the shock of the collision with reality all the more traumatic. Liberals are typically astonished to discover that the generation that has grown up under its less demanding tutelage is less responsible and caring than any prior generation.4

It is particularly incomprehensible that a generation that has grown up with less disadvantages than any previous one should exhibit patterns of behavior that can be regarded only as pathological. The epidemic of lethal violence coursing through our society can partly be explained by the easier availability of the means of violence. A very large part can only be accounted for by the increased callousness toward the suffering of others. As members of a liberal society we are appalled to discover that the cumulative solicitations for the rights and autonomy of individuals have only spawned greater indifference and irresponsibility. A mushrooming of out-of-wedlock births can surely not be blamed on a lack of information; it is more plausibly explained by a widespread disregard for the welfare of those for whom we are responsible. Nor can the surge in white-collar crime and socially condoned cheating of all types be attributed to a lack of material and psychic privileges. Examples can be multiplied indefinitely, apparently without plumbing the depths of liberal naiveté and also without gaining much more than a sense of superiority to it.

It is enough to note that liberal reflection appears particularly helpless when confronted by the contradiction between its expectation of progress and the reality of its history. The myth of progress has served to insulate it from the awareness of this divergence and has prevented liberal societies from taking the realistic steps required by the objectives it intends. Expanding individual liberty without the correlative moral discipline does not promote autonomy. In most human beings, it only encourages self-serving irresponsibility. Liberal philosophy has always harbored a weakness in lacking a vocabulary of virtue. But it is only the dream of progress that has allowed the liberal philosophy to overlook its own deficiency altogether by reassuring us that the evolution of humanity itself will take care of our moral improvement. The self-deception is palpable in that most transparent of contemporary liberals, Richard Rorty.

Much of his not inconsiderable rhetorical flair is employed in the demon­stration that there is no noncircular defense of liberal principles of morality. He acknowledges that this means that the public consensus, on which our life together is based, depends on the presence of pervasive social feelings of solidarity. Yet these are feelings that we are not well able to promote. At bottom they arise from the hope that Rorty is right that there is a moral progress “in the direction of greater human solidarity” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 192). When pressed to explain how such a hope might be realized and to reflect on the means by which solidarity toward the sufferings of others might be engendered, he can provide no further illumination than that it happens. The identification with humanity he characterizes as “the self-doubt which has gradually, over the last few centuries, been inculcated into inhabitants of the democratic states—doubt about their own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation, curiosity about possible alternatives” (198). It is a characterization that smacks of nothing so much as the concern of the comfortable for the distressed, more designed to relieve the conscience of the former than the suffering of the latter. Nothing suggests that the solidarity will become anything more than a salve. The ambivalence of the liberal abhorrence of cruelty cannot finally be eliminated.

Hollowness of Liberal Construction

It is this apparent hollowness of a liberal polity unable to acknowledge the depth of its own convictions that has caused so many of its critics to conclude that it is beyond remediation. The idea that a liberal order can be sustained in the absence of the virtues indispensable to its existence, is a conceit so incredible that it hardly deserves to be taken seriously. How can we expect that respect for the dignity and rights of one another can continue if there is no way of teaching that human beings are deserving of dignity and respect? Why would anyone accept the right of all to “equal concern and respect” if there is no way of explaining the source of such a conviction? Can we have any realistic hope that rights will be observed if we cannot make the reasons for them even minimally plausible? How can virtues be promoted if we can no longer teach them?

Virtue has long been the Achilles’ heel of the liberal disposition. The awareness that a liberal public order depended on a fund of moral capital that it was not well-positioned to augment but could readily draw down, has been present as far back as we care to trace the beginning of the formulation. It has even given rise to an uneasy tension between two traditions within liberal reflection: pluralist self-interest and republican virtue. The latter, which goes back to the Florentine and English republicanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has had a continuing influence through the American founders and the various strands of communitarian thought all the way up to the present.

The former, pluralist individualist perspective, also has a long historical lineage from the rising commercial bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century up through the federalists, the progressives and the liberal pluralists of our own day. Quite often the split has been less between individuals than within individuals, as the pulls of self-interest and of virtue seem alternately more or less reliable foundation of order. Madison is a classic illustration of a thinker in whom both sides exist in uneasy alliance.5 The decisive aspect is that the tension has never been fully confronted within the liberal tradition itself.

Without such a clarification in principle the result has been an inexorable drift toward the easier of the two poles, self-interest, with only fitful reminders that the liberal order is also sustained by a certain level of virtue. The reason is that without an incontrovertible defense of virtue its proponents have always been compelled to beat a tactical retreat before the more vocal claimants of the liberty of self-interest. It has been astoundingly difficult to make the case within liberal societies that one ought not press all of the rights to which one is entitled. The notion that there may be higher moral claims has not generally won the day. This is why liberal societies present that seemingly irrational configuration so noticeable to outsiders such as Solzhenitsyn.6 They seem to be composed of individuals who share nothing except the impervious conviction that their rights must be served at any cost, no matter who else is affected or how the long-term welfare of all may be undermined.7

The identification of the morally right with the legally right should come as no surprise, although it does, to a society that sees it daily played out in the courts to which it looks as the final arbiters of human life. There is, of course, nothing final about the judgment of the courts, except in the practical sense that they have the power to settle disputes. In fact litigation is a very clumsy means of resolving the innumerable differences that arise between human beings who, long after the case is over, must continue to bear their responsibilities in relation to one another.8 Litigation is quite incapable of capturing the depth, complexity and subtlety of human relationships and ought only to be a blunt instrument of last resort. The effect of turning to it as the first resort for all disputes has been to create the idea that all of our responsibilities can be reduced to legal ones. But what of the responsibility of parents to love their children? Or of friends to be loyal to one another? Or of each of us to help our neighbor?

None of the depth of moral life can be contained in the formality of the courtroom. Nor apparently can it be fostered readily by the institutions of liberal democracy. More than anything else it has been the inability of liberal societies to develop any institutional means of transmitting its own virtues that has precipitated the crisis. Few more pathetic pictures can be imagined than this image of liberal self-assertiveness utterly incapable of sustaining its own claim to authority. Small wonder that it gives the impression of being hopelessly inept, attempting the dizzyingly impossible task of maintaining itself in the air without any visible means of support. It would surely come crashing down more frequently than it does, were it not for the great many invisible bases of support that emerge to sustain it from a variety of conventional and traditional sources. But by itself liberal democracy seems hopelessly incapable of existence.

This is the aspect that has made it from the start such an easy target for its critics. None perhaps caricatured the liberal balancing act so wickedly as Jeremy Bentham in his scathing dismissal of the language of rights. ”Natu­ral rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.” Marx too could find nothing of sub­stance in the liberal assertion of abstract rights. He regarded the invocation of rights as an instrument by which “the political community is degraded by the political emancipators to a mere means for the preservation of these so-called rights of man, the sphere in which man behaves as a communal being is degraded below the sphere in which man behaves as a partial being, finally that it is not man as a citizen but man as a bourgeois who is called the real and true man.”

Burke is, of course, the one who diagnosed the revolutionary destructiveness that lay at the heart of the liberal impulse as he beheld its most potent manifestation in the French Revolution. He recognized it as the expression of the bare abstract assertion of rights. On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.11 

 

Notes

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.

2. Washington had concluded his historically self-conscious “Farewell Address” in 1797 with the following penetrating observation:

“And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in the exclusion of religious principle.” This might even be considered the consensus of the American founding generation, despite the secular overtones of the political order they created and the noted detachment from conventional Christianity many of them evidenced. Predictably, John Adams declared in his first year as vice president: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other” (quoted in Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 79).

But even Jefferson, who became notorious for his remark that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” could go on in the context of his most dread-filled reflections on the institution of slavery to ask: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” (Notes on the State of Virginia).

The young Alexander Hamilton too could inveigh against the alleged atheism of Hobbes with similar conviction:

“Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed, that the deity, from the relation we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever” (quoted in Hadley Arkes, Beyond the Constitution, 64).

3. Voegelin, “The End of Modernity,” chap. 6 in New Science of Politics; and Eric Voegelin, “The Eclipse of Reality,” in What Is History and Other Late Unpublished Essays, pp. 111-62. A more recent perspective is furnished by Vaclav Havel’s brilliant analysis of the nature of an ideologically constructed reality in his essay “The Power of the Powerless.” And Martin Mahlia details both the cumulative Soviet dislocation from reality and the ideological blinkers of Western social scientists attempting to understand it in The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia.

4. There are few more powerful demonstrations of the intimacy of the connection than that provided in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed. It is an account of the revolutionary outburst fomented by a tiny cell of extremists but sustained by a much larger circle of liberal sympathizers who abdicate their responsibility for the consequences. The relationship is epitomized by that between the father, Stepan Verkhovensky, a leading liberal intellectual, and his son, Peter, the most merciless and fanatical of the revolutionaries (288).

5. Reflecting on the question of what is to prevent the majority, through the House of Representatives, from exercising its will without regard to the rights of the minority, Madison responds that such tendencies will be obstructed by “the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and, above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America — a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it” (The Federalist Papers, no. 57). On the other hand, Madison is even better known for the concern he lavished on the problem of factions in the new republic, a problem he defined as occurring when there are “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” (Federalist Papers, no. 10). See also the even better known discussion in Federalist Papers, no. 51.

6. See particularly the “Harvard Address,” A World Split Apart.

7. Even insiders are having second thoughts about the irresistible liberal impulse, as they begin to weigh its tendency to override all values that do not reinforce or conform to it. Commenting on its tendency to undermine many traditionalist perspectives, William Galston provides the following metaphor: “Think of a society based on liberal public principles as a rapidly flowing river.  A few vessels may be strong enough to head upstream. Most, however, will be carried along by the current. But they can still choose where in the river to sail, and where along the shore to moor. The mistake is to think of the liberal polity either as a placid lake or as an irresistible undertow” (Liberal Purposes, 296). An extensive critique of the liberal proclivity to encourage the unrestrained assertion of rights is contained in Mary Ann Glendon Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse.

8. The problem is well illustrated in the infamous “Baby M” case where the biologi­cal mother was unwilling to surrender her child in accordance with the terms of the surrogate motherhood contract. The New Jersey judge decided the case on exactly the same lines as any other breach of contract dispute, requiring compliance strictly to its terms. Legislatures have since moved to render such contracts unenforceable, but the case provided a chilling glimpse of judicial reductionism in action (In Baby M. 217 N.J. Super. 313; 525 A.2d 1128 [March 31, 1987]).

9. Jeremy Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies: Being an Examination of the Declara­tion of Rights Issued during the French Revolution,” 53.

10. Ibid., 147.

11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 87-88.

 

This excerpt is from The Growth of the Liberal Soul (University of Missouri Press, 1997). It is the first of two parts, with part two available; also see “The Growth of the Liberal Soul”: part one and part two” and part three.

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David Walsh is the Chair Board Member of VoegelinView, President of the Eric Voegelin Society, and Professor of Political Science at Catholic University of America. He is the author of a three-volume study of modernity: After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (Harper/Collins, 1990), The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Missouri, 1997), and The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge, 2008). His latest book is Politics of the Person and as the Politics of Being (Notre Dame, 2015).

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