YANKEES' GREAT BIG ADVENTURE:

Renewing Our Experiment in Ordered Liberty (Michael S. Joyce, September/October 1998, Religion and Liberty)

In his breathtaking new book, A History of the American People, English historian Paul Johnson writes, "The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.… The great American republican experiment … is still the first, best hope for the human race" and "will not disappoint an expectant humanity."

It is often noted that outside observers of the American experiment tend to express a more profound appreciation for the remarkable achievements of our nation’s Founders than we do ourselves. Burke and Talleyrand, Gladstone and Tocqueville, Thatcher and Maritain have all marveled at the truth of a proposition that, before the exceptional birth of freedom here, had been considered at best, problematic: that the people have the capacity to govern themselves.

Following this well-trodden path but with a somber note of caution, is Pope John Paul II. When Lindy Boggs, the newly designated United States ambassador to the Vatican, recently came to present her credentials, John Paul took the occasion to remind her that our great experiment in self-government left America with a "far-reaching responsibility, not only for the well-being of its own people, but for the development and destiny of peoples throughout the world." John Paul then embarked upon an eloquent review of the fundamental principles upon which American self-government is based. The Founding Fathers, he noted, "asserted their claim to freedom and independence on the basis of certain ‘self-evident’ truths about the human person: truths which could be discerned in human nature, built into it by ‘nature’s God.’ Thus, they meant to bring into being, not just an independent territory but a great experiment in what George Washington called ‘ordered liberty’: an experiment in which men and women would enjoy equality of rights and opportunities in the pursuit of happiness and in service to the common good."

It was outrageous enough, to contemporary sensibilities, for John Paul to connect self-government to the notion of eternal human attributes implanted by God. But he then went further, suggesting that self-government did not imply simply freedom to live as one wishes but, rather, the capacity to fulfill one’s duties and responsibilities toward family and toward the common good of the community. The Founding Fathers, he noted, "clearly understood that there could be no true freedom without moral responsibility and accountability, and no happiness without respect and support for the natural units or groupings through which people exist, develop, and seek the higher purposes of life in concert with others."

In this remarkable discourse, John Paul identified several critical features of American self-government: that it is rooted in a view of human nature governed by self-evident truths that are fixed forever in the human person by "nature’s God"; that the political consequence of human truth is an irrefutable case for self-government, so long as our freedom is shaped and ordered by moral and civic virtue; and that we come to be fully human, fully moral, and fully free only within "natural units or groupings"–family, neighborhood, church, and voluntary association–which we form to pursue the higher purposes of life.

How does this sophisticated understanding of self-government compare with our own understanding at home? Ours, I regret to say, tends to be a rather superficial, political view. To us, self-government means simply doing whatever we, collectively as citizens, choose to do. We see in John Paul’s message, however, second and more substantial understanding of self-government–that it must mean, as well, our capacities as individuals for personal self-mastery, for reflection, restraint, and moral action. And here is the critical, uncomfortable fact: In a well-ordered republic, government of the self is necessary for government of society to work.

Yeah, but the liberty is so much fun and requires so little of us, while the order is damned difficult and requires us to behave like adults...

MORE:
A Defense of "Culture Wars": A Call for Counterrevolution (PETER KREEFT, Catholic Education Resource)

To make a better society, we need better policies and plans, but these in turn must be based on better principles. Here is a set of very old principles that has worked in the past. Here is a set of ten statements that summarize what Jews, Christians, and Muslims — and rational pagans like Socrates, Aristotle, and Cicero — have always believed about morality.

They are not a Ten Commandments, a specific set of laws. They are about the status of moral laws. The specific content of moral law is a matter of wide agreement between nearly all cultures and all religions. Justice, charity, self-control, wisdom, courage, loyalty, honesty, and responsibility are universally praised; and injustice, hatred, violence, foolishness, cowardice, betrayal, lying, lust, greed, and irresponsibility are universally blamed — at least they have been until recently. (After all, lust, greed, and irresponsibility sell products very effectively. An addict has little sales resistance.)

The following statements about morality would be enthusiastically embraced by Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Muhammad, Socrates, Confucius, Ghandi, and Buddha, as well as by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.

1. Morality is necessary for society to survive. The alternative is barbarism, decadence, and chaos.

2. Morality is not sectarian (religiously) or partisan (politically). It is both universally known and universally binding. We all know in our hearts what good and evil are, and we are all responsible for living the way we know we ought to live.

3. Morality is natural, or based on human nature. There is a “Natural (moral) Law”. Morality is discovered, like stars, not invented, like games. It is not man-made, arbitrary, and changeable. Its laws are intrinsic to human nature, as the laws of hygiene are to the nature of the body or the laws of physics are to the nature of matter.

4. Morality is liberating, not repressive. For it is a set of directions given for the purpose of making our human nature flourish and helping us to reach our full potential. A law like “don't drink poison” is not repressive to your health. Poison is.

5. Morality takes effort. Like love, morality is work, not feeling. It is a fight against the forces of evil in all of us. Today it has become a fight against forces in our culture.

6. Morality gives meaning and purpose and direction to life. It is a road map. Without a map, we wander aimlessly, hopelessly.

7. Morality gives human beings dignity. Its basis is the intrinsic value of the human person. It commands us to love people and use things, not use people and love things. People are ends, things are means.

8. Morality is reasonable. It is not blind but intelligent. It perceives a real difference between good and bad actions and lifestyles. It “discriminates”. (Discrimination between people as good or bad may be foolish, but discrimination between acts as good or bad is simply moral sanity.) We are a nation born in a struggle for freedom, so we continue to value personal freedom very highly, and rightly so. But we cannot have freedom without truth. A surgeon cannot free you from a disease without light to operate by, accurate X rays, and a knowledge of anatomy. Moral skepticism is the death of freedom.

9. Morality is not simply about “freedoms” and “rights” but about duties and responsibilities. Victor Frankl says the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast should be completed by a Statue of Responsibility on the West.

10. Morality is not legalistic. Its essence is not a set of rules but a vision of the good life and the good person; not only laws but also character. No set of rules will work without personal virtues. Morality is about how we can be real heroes. It's about how to avoid flunking Life despite getting A's in all your courses.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 15, 2003 7:37 AM