MODUS MORTUS

A Heretic Amid the Hibiscus: A gardening enthusiast is rejected from a Garden Club for expressing her opinion against the war in Iraq. (DONNA SCHAPER, 5/02/03, NY Times)

I don't know that I will ever receive a formal letter of rejection from the Coral Gables Garden Club. I know of the rejection only because one of my sponsors for membership told me. The reason had nothing to do with the quality of my flower arrangements. Nor did it stem from my spotty record as a tropical gardener. (I am a pretty good Northern gardener, but the tropics have stumped me more than once.)

The reason offered to my sponsor for my rejection was that I was "too liberal." The club members have a point: I spoke out against the war in Iraq, and I've been arrested for protesting against other wars and marching for abortion rights and racial justice.

With this rejection, I thus join Tim Robbins in this strange season: he was disinvited to a Baseball Hall of Fame event on similar grounds. I join Susan Sarandon, who was disinvited by the United Way of Tampa Bay for antiwar comments. I join the poets who were disinvited to the White House because they might have embarrassed the president. At least I am in good company.

Being blackballed by the green-thumb crowd--blue-haired or otherwise - is a sobering experience. [...]

Gardening is my hobby. I wanted to join the club because its members know stuff I want to know. I'm not going to get in, but I have learned something in the process. A good gardener--even a liberal one--can't take this sort of rejection on her gardening kneepad. She takes off her gloves, puts down her shears and stands up.

Here's another case, though less extreme than yesterday's, whereby we see that modern notions of tolerance require not only that you be allowed to deviate from societal norms but that everyone acknowledge the legitimacy of your deviance. Thanks to conservative critics of multi-culturalism and moral relativism, it's well understood why this kind of tolerance is dangerous to the moral health of the culture. Less well understood--even by conservatives, but especially by libertarians--is the political threat that this form of tolerance represents, as it serves the interests of the State.

The mercurial British philosopher John Gray has made the statist case for tolerance most forthrightly, -ESSAY: TWO LIBERALISMS OF FEAR (John Gray, The Hedgehog Review):

THE ROOT OF LIBERAL THINKING is not in the love of freedom, nor in the hope of progress, but in fear--the fear of other human beings and of the injuries they do one another in wars and civil wars. A liberal project that seeks to diminish the fear that humans evoke in one another is open and provisional in its judgments as to the institutions that best moderate the irremovable risk of social and political violence. It does not imagine that any one regime is the only legitimate form of rule for all humankind, and it does not assess political regimes by the degree to which they conform to any doctrine of universal human rights or theory of justice. It rejects the view--which in the United States is treated as an axiom of political discourse?that democratic institutions are the only basis for legitimate government. It views democracy as only one among a range of legitimate regimes in the late modern world and does not subscribe to the Enlightenment hope--revived recently by Francis Fukuyama--that peoples everywhere will converge on democracy as a political ideal.

The original and best exemplar of this liberalism of fear is Thomas Hobbes. In Hobbes, the principal obstacle to human well being is war. Wars arising between practitioners of different religions are to be feared the most. They are the most destructive of the human good and generate a war of all against all in which no sovereign power exists to keep the peace.

Writing in a time of religious civil wars, Hobbes was clear that, aside from the human passion of vainglory or pride, the chief impediment to a modus vivendi was the claim to truth in matters of faith. On no account should the sovereign make or act upon any such claim. The sovereign does not hold to any worldview but seeks to craft terms of peaceful coexistence among the divergent worldviews that society harbors. Here the liberal project is not a plan for universal progress, but a search for peace. In this liberalism of fear, the institutions of the state are not what is most terrifying. What is most to be feared is the condition of anarchy in which human life is ruled by the summum malum?death at the hands of one?s fellows. A liberal state is one that aims to deliver its subjects from this evil. Today, there will be many who deny that such a project could embody liberal thought in any of its many varieties. Yet a reasonable argument can be made that this liberalism of fear is, in fact, liberalism in its most primordial form.

Such a liberalism of fear may seem to late moderns unambitious and timid, lacking in noble hopes for the species. For that very reason, it is the liberalism that speaks most cogently and urgently to us, that addresses the needs of a time whose ruling project is peaceful coexistence among diverse and potentially antagonistic communities and regimes. This Hobbesian liberalism of fear is inherently tolerant of diversity in polities and communities, because of its indifference to private belief. The authority of a Hobbesian state does not derive from its embodying any doctrine or creed, but only from its efficacy in promoting peace. In early modern times, this meant ruling without partisan regard to the religious beliefs of subjects. A Hobbesian state is not bound to attempt to disestablish or to privatize religious practice.

In a late modern context, the Hobbesian indifference to private belief has an application to ideological commitments. In our historical context, a Hobbesian state does not make allegiance to political authority conditional on subscription to any creed. A peace-making state can hope to command the allegiance of the religious and the irreligious, those who share Enlightenment hopes and those who do not. It can be accepted as legitimate by communities and cultural traditions that are not, and will never be, "liberal." The original liberalism of fear does not aim to subject the late modern world to democratic institutions. It recognizes a democratic regime as one among many devices, potential and actual, for containing and moderating conflict, but it denies that democracy has any universal authority.

Hobbes's liberalism of fear can be contrasted sharply with a second fearful liberalism--the anti-statist liberalism, grounded in theories of universal human rights or justice, which is the ruling orthodoxy of contemporary political philosophy. Nearly all liberal theory today is a program for limiting the state. Yet, in the conditions of late modern societies, anti-statist liberalism is bound to issue in a significant enhancement of the state's most purely repressive functions?without, however, significantly enhancing the security of the citizenry. Conversely, regimes that aim for peace and are not burdened by an agenda of anti-statism may be better able to assure their subjects security without enhancing the state's repressive role. The demonization of the state may have been unavoidable during the totalitarian period that spanned much of this century. As we near the century's end, it has become unreasonable.

This second liberalism of fear--the liberalism of Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick, Hayek, and many others--which is a liberalism of fear of the state, does not serve our needs in a time in which the state is a desperately fragile and often inefficacious institution. The state must be rehabilitated as an instrument of individual well being and the common good. We must not look to the institutions of the state for universal rights, strong communities, or moral regeneration. To do so risks some of the worst evils of the age. Neither should we regard it with such suspicion that we strive to limit it by foolish doctrines of minimum government. We must rehabilitate the state as a protective institution. This rehabilitation, Hobbesian liberalism, duly amended, may be able to achieve.

Cede enough authority to the central government, to the point where the only relationship remaining is that between indiividuals and the state, and give up the idea that we life or the culture should have any end, any meaning that we might pursue, substitute instead an exclusive concern about the means by which we exist, i.e. quietly, and you can realize the secure and peaceful liberal epoch. Many people, maybe even most, will be temporarily satisfied to swap their freedom for this kind of security, transcendent ideas for material comfort. All that is required is that we forget the question of why we live and focus instead on how we live. But the proposition that this can be very satisfying in the long run seems damned dubious. Rather, one would think that Nietzsche, as so often, perceived things correctly when he said: "[M]an would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose." Or, as John Updike put it: "The fact that we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly." And so, having abandoned the idea of building a good society in favor of one that is void of purpose, we should be little surprised when cultures embrace that very void and shuck off traditions, ethics, morality and the like just as quickly as they can. We look at the decadence of the modern West and think it an unfortunate side effect of prosperity and freedom, but wonder how it's possible that the states of Europe, in particular, have become so bureaucratic and unfree and see their prosperity slipping away. In fact, the decadence has become their purpose and the freedom was swapped long ago for the security of the Welfare State. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2003 4:13 PM