BROTHER CELLA IN GOOD COMPANY:

The Liberal Spirit in America (Peter Berkowitz, August 2003, Policy Review)

It was not foreordained that “liberal” would become synonymous with progressive politics as it has in the United States. Witness the career of the term in Europe, where it has come to designate something much closer to libertarianism. Yet neither is the equation of liberalism with progressivism an accident, for there is a powerful progressive thrust inhering in the liberal tradition. When it arose in the seventeenth century, before it acquired its name, liberalism, particularly that of Locke, sought to limit the claims of religious authorities in politics and the claims of political authorities in religious matters. As these ideas took root, as religion receded from the center of politics (and as science and industry developed and markets spread), individual freedom acquired more space, more individuals began to enjoy its blessings, and power shifted to those who had long been denied it. When it came into its own in the nineteenth century, liberalism, particularly that of Mill, sought to limit the role in politics of status, wealth, and sex by assuring through the state formal equality. The result was to accelerate the pace at which power shifted to the people and to spread the blessings of freedom more equally. And when, in the United States in the last third of the twentieth century, it became synonymous with the left wing of the Democratic Party, liberalism aggressively sought to limit the role in politics of poverty, race, sex, old age, illness, and disability by guaranteeing to all individuals a certain minimum level of material goods and moral standing. As this outlook merged in the United States with the conventional wisdom, the press for freedom became indistinguishable in many minds from the improvement of social life through the push for equality in all ways and in all realms.

Yet there is more to the defense of freedom than progress in equality, as John Stuart Mill stressed in On Liberty (1859) and in Considerations on Representative Government (1861). Because moving ahead requires holding some things still, because freedoms won must be preserved, and because its improvement as well as its preservation depends upon citizens with particular skills, knowledge, and qualities of mind and character, a free society always requires a party of order as well as a party of progress. Hence, conservatives, who take a special interest in freedom’s limits and its material and moral preconditions, are properly seen as belonging to the liberal tradition and in fact play an essential role in maintaining the liberal state. Generally speaking, where the right in American politics today differs with the left is not about the primacy of personal freedom but about the primacy of competing policies; that is, the care for which goods — those related to order or those related to progress — freedom most urgently requires.

And the difference over competing policies stems from a more fundamental disagreement between left and right about the primacy of the factors that menace freedom. Progressive liberals see inequality as the chief menace to freedom and government as an essential part of the solution. For libertarian liberals, who like progressives think that freedom yields progress and like conservatives stress that freedom depends on limits, it is government that is the chief menace to freedom, and the restraint of government is freedom’s essential safeguard. And for conservative liberals, both of the traditional and neoconservative variety, it is the excess of freedom and equality that poses the biggest threat to freedom, and government is seen as both friend and foe in the battle to limit freedom and equality on behalf of freedom and equality.

To maintain that liberalism constitutes our dominant moral and political tradition is not to deny the presence in America of competing traditions. Biblical faith, for example, remains a powerful force in the lives of many Americans. And even for the larger numbers who no longer organize their lives around sacred scripture and worship, biblical faith, through the impact it has had over the centuries on our moral concepts and categories, influences the scope and direction of our imagination and informs practical judgments, often in ways that rein in freedom’s most ambitious and reckless claims. Morever, anger, pride, envy, ambition, honor, love, and a host of other passions that dwell within us are inflected by, but resist reduction to, our love of freedom.

Nor is arguing that many of today’s progressives and conservatives are equally members of the liberal tradition and pillars of the liberal state to imply that if everybody were to sit down together, talk things over civilly, and sort through the issues reasonably, we would discover universal agreement on all the important questions. This is a popular conceit among professors, who can’t bear the thought that the problems of politics are not amenable to conclusive resolution through rigorous reasoning (by them) and rational discourse (under their direction). Yet the lesson that emerges from an examination of the liberalism that we share suggests that the professors who dream of disinterested deliberations and ideal speech situations grounded in self-evident premises, governed by objective and necessary rules, and issuing in unassailable public policy choices have drawn exactly the wrong conclusion.

To be sure, agreement on basic liberal political institutions is as broad as is agreement on liberalism’s fundamental moral premise: the natural freedom and equality of all. Who opposes representative institutions, separated powers, an independent judiciary, a free press, and legal guarantees of freedom of belief, speech, and association? However, the very scope of agreement among partisans about the lineaments of self-government brings home the permanence of disagreement in the politics of a free people. Theory teaches both that a balance must be struck between the claims of order and the claims of progress and that theory itself cannot specify the proper balance that we, in our peculiar circumstances, must strike. This is partly because theory does not determine the weight to be given to the competing goods that the party of order and the party of balance promote. It is also because that job falls to flesh-and-blood individuals, given to self-seeking and ambition. Nor can theory, once the balance has been struck, replace the need for such individuals to find ways to cooperate in maintaining it.

A liberal spirit conduces to the task of maintaining free institutions. Such a spirit is tolerant of opposing opinions and choices, which means that it is prepared to respect the rights of individuals with whom it disagrees and of whose conduct it disapproves. It is generous, both in seeking to understand what is true in other people’s beliefs and in looking for the shared humanity in their diverse and indeed divergent strivings. And it is capable of restraining immediate desire in the interest of satisfying higher or more comprehensive desires. The exercise of these virtues enables citizens to ease the friction, take advantage of the opportunities, and handle the responsibilities that arise, amidst the frenetic motion, in a free society.

Where do the virtues that compose such a spirit come from? Will free societies always have such a spirit in sufficient supply? Thinkers on the left, particularly those influenced by Kant, such as John Rawls and Judith Shklar, have argued that free societies are in a sense self-sustaining: The experience of living under free institutions fosters in citizens a liberal character. Thinkers on the right, especially those who take their bearings from Tocqueville and Aristotle, such as Gertrude Himmelfarb and Harvey Mansfield, warn that free societies contain the seeds of their own destruction: The experience of freedom leads to a voracious desire for more of it, steadily severing individuals’ attachment to family and faith, which they contend are the most reliable sources of the liberal spirit’s virtues.

In fact, when properly formulated, these two opinions reflecting the optimism of the left and the pessimism of the right should be seen as opposite sides of the same coin. Free institutions do tend to teach toleration, generosity in the understanding of others, and self-restraint in the short term for the sake of long-term self-interest. But undisciplined and unbalanced by other principles, freedom causes toleration to metamorphose into rigid and unconvincing neutrality between competing goods. It transforms generosity in the understanding of others into the presumptuous conviction that one has understood other people’s beliefs and needs better than they have and therefore should legislate so as to bring their conduct in line with their true interests. And it opens the door to excessive focus on calculating the best means for the satisfaction of desire, which soon crowds out calculations about the satisfactions found in fulfilling one’s duty and eventually renders invisible the claims of duty that transcend calculation.

Can Conservatives Be Optimists? (Paul J. Cella III, 11/04/2003, Tech Central Station)

I do not feel like a pessimist. I am not wracked by despair, or doubt about the unparalleled nobility and worth of our civilization, despite all its manifest flaws. I do not expect catastrophe. I expect slow decline. My sense is that our vitality has left us; that we are a spiritually diminished people; that we are living on habits of enterprise and virtue borrowed from a previous age of vigor when our material achievements were properly recognized as secondary and fleeting; and that, even as we depend on these habits, all the creative action of our own age is to discredit and traduce their principles. The contempt for history palpable around us is suggestive evidence of this -- college students cannot correctly identify the century in which the Civil War was fought; children's textbooks are expunged of most anything controversial, meaning most anything interesting. When a nation cuts itself off from its own past, something subtly dreadful has occurred. A civilization cannot long survive on habit alone, cannot long sustain the sort of wild and maniacal hacking at the principles of those habits, to which we so often bear witness. Our culture has come to despise the organic sources of its vitality, as when we refer scornfully to great men with terms of glib abuse like "dead white males"; and those who value their own heritage have become the outsiders.

I say I expect decline. That is very different from saying I regard it as inevitable. If ever there was an abused word, it is that one. I certainly believe that the decline I anticipate can be arrested if men set themselves against it. If a man were to awake from a long and torturous fever-induced nightmare, and discover with a start that he is rushing wildly toward a precipice, all he need do is stop; having committed his will to simple survival, his vista opens wide from there. He need not thoughtlessly turn, almost as if beguiled by a new fever, and march precisely backward in his own wild steps. To his left may extend a daunting though ultimately navigable path along the mountainous crags back to his home; to his right may open a broad and primordial forest, imposing but by no means malicious, through which he can arrive at the home of his fathers. He may even find it necessary and desirable, after careful deliberation, to attempt a risky descent off the cliff before him, anticipating that below, perhaps, there is a solid road around the mountains or the forest; and for this he will need sturdy and reliable equipment, which upon consideration is readily available all about him, though most of it was dreadfully concealed by shadows and monsters in his nightmare. The point is that what he must not do, what in fact only a man of terrible insanity would do, is commit to a fatalism about his rush toward oblivion, or fancy somehow that oblivion is desirable, and plunge headlong in silence.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (Albert Jay Nock)

As a man of reason and logic, I am all for reform; but as the unworthy inheritor of a great tradition, I am unalterably against it. I am forever with Falkland, the true martyr of the Civil War,--one of the very greatest among the great spirits of whom England has ever been so notoriously noteworthy,--as he stood facing Hampden and Pym. 'Mr. Speaker,' he said, 'when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.'

The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot (Russell Kirk)

[C]hange and reform are not identical, and...innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of Providential social forces.

Who's Yelling ‘Stop!’ Now?: Look who is standing athwart history now. (Jonah Goldberg, 5/02/00, National Review)

In the 1955 charter of National Review, William F. Buckley defined conservatism as the willingness to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do."

Conservatives need never apologize for trying to slow "Progress".

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 5, 2003 12:42 AM