Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes (Ernst Roets, May 12, 2024, European Conservative)
[Charles] Taylor’s remarkable book Sources of the Self was published in 1989—sixteen years before Revenge of the Sith. The book deals with the history of modern identity and the way we think about who we are. Even though Taylor does not claim to champion either liberalism or conservatism, he cautions throughout about the risk of modern disengagement. The disengaged self is an individual who has lost contact with his community, culture, and tradition, predominantly under the pretext of being an independent individual.
Taylor claims to endorse a certain version of the modern conception of freedom, while also expressing concern that a certain—we might even say, mainstream—strand of the modern conception of freedom is in important ways becoming unendurable from a philosophical perspective. The modern conception of freedom has become, in Taylor’s words, a “deeply confused” one. This is because it is built on two cornerstones that cannot be reconciled with one another.
The first is that the modern conception of freedom is primarily driven by a (new) conception of what constitutes the good. Where the traditional Western view teaches that freedom is bound up with the recognition of the common good within the context of the community, the modern view teaches that freedom is the result of liberation of the individual. It teaches, thus, that freedom of individual choice is the ultimate good that must be pursued. The second idea that underpins the modern conception of freedom is that it is ‘good’ to repudiate qualitative distinctions and to reject constitutive goods as such. The notion here is that it is not desirable for anyone to decide on anyone else’s behalf what constitutes the good, as this is something to be decided by every individual for themselves.
The problem here is that the former is in itself a qualitative distinction of what constitutes the good, while the latter claims that one should not work with qualitative distinctions of what constitutes the good. If the former is true, the latter cannot be true, and if the latter is true, the former cannot be true. Put differently, if it is indeed true that individual choice is the highest form of the good, then one cannot simultaneously claim that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with. And if it is indeed true that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with, then one cannot simultaneously claim that individual choice is the highest form of the good.
Or, to put it even more bluntly, to claim that every individual should decide for himself what constitutes the good, is not reconcilable with the idea that individual freedom is indeed the ultimate good. The liberal claim that individual freedom is the ultimate good is the logical equivalent of Obi-Wan’s claim that only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Of course, it is precisely because liberalism requires that our law-making be participatory and that all laws apply universally that it is neither absolutist nor individualist. Indeed, it is rather disinterested in individual freedom.
