The Tyranny of Liberalism
James Kalb
Summer 2000
The disappearance of the radical left is a sign that in principle it has
reached its attainable goals. While no one admits it, what we see around
us is the victory of the Revolution.
Politics today is radically secularist and antiparticularist. It aims to
dissolve what is left of traditional society and construct a universal
form of human association that will constitute a technically rational
system for the equal satisfaction of desire.
Religion is to be banished from public life, ethnic and gender
distinctions abolished, and a worldwide order established, based on
world markets and trans-national bureaucracies, that is to override
local differences in the name of human rights, international economic
development, and collective security.
Contemporary liberalism expresses and supports that new order. Not all
members of our ruling elites adhere to liberalism, and it draws support
from outsiders as well. However, our elites determine its content, and
it promotes their interests. It sets the terms of discussion, defines
what is considered progress, and establishes the general principles of
cooperation upon which our elites base their claim to rule.
Supporters of the new order see it as historically and morally
necessary, and thus as compulsory regardless of established views and
habits. Since modern governments claim to base themselves on consent,
the public must be brought to accept it. Managing opinion and keeping
perspectives that oppose fundamental public policies out of mainstream
discussion have therefore become basic to statecraft. Genuine opposition
comes not from the left but from reactionary and restorationist groups
that exclude themselves from respectable politics by rejecting
liberalism and the left. Today's dissidents are particularist --
traditionalist, fundamentalist, populist, or nationalist. Beyond that,
they are anti-secularist and antihedonist. They reject a system of
politics that bases social order on human desire, because they reject
the view that lies behind it, that men make morality for their own
purposes.
Today all things are justified on the grounds that they help men get
what they want. Those who recognize an authority superior to human
purposes are seen as dangerous bigots who want to oppress others in the
name of some sect or arbitrary principle. As a consequence, fundamental
political discussion no longer exists. Politics today is divided between
an outlook that presents itself as rational and this-worldly, and
absolutely dominates public discussion, and a variety of dissident views
that speak for goods higher than human desire but are unable to make
effective their substantial underlying support. The conflict is never
discussed seriously since it is considered resolved; the ruling liberal
view is accepted as indisputable, while dissent is considered confused
or worse.
The dominant outlook believes itself peculiarly tolerant and
all-inclusive. It is not. The error results from a misconception of
politics and morality that is essential to liberalism. Liberalism claims
to leave religious and moral issues, at least those it identifies as
personal, to individual judgment. The theoretical ground for doing so is
neutrality as to ultimate commitments. As the Supreme Court has put the
matter, "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own
concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of
human life." Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992, 505 U.S. 833, 851.
Liberals assert that widespread religious and moral disagreement today
makes such neutrality the only possible approach to public life. While
they sometimes speak of common values, when pressed liberals return to
the necessity of letting people choose for themselves. All that is
required, liberals say, are a few formal principles, such as equality
and self-ownership, required for differing purposes to co-exist.
Liberalism draws enormous strength from its ability to get such claims
accepted. They are nonetheless false. Few societies have been liberal,
while moral disagreement is common to all societies of any size and
complexity. Moreover, contemporary liberalism no more accepts
disagreement than other views do. To the contrary, it is based on a
particular understanding of morality with pervasive implications for the
whole of life that it enforces against other more reasonable
understandings. What makes liberal claims seem plausible is not any
inability of current moral views to achieve dominance but changes in the
way in which dominance is established and maintained.
Liberalism is at home in today's world. Its strength is its ability to
use new methods of dominion that rely less on physical repression than
on homogenization and centralization of social life, destruction of
independent institutions and moral habits, and maintenance of the
illusion of open inquiry and popular rule.
The fact is that modern conditions make neutrality among moral views
less important. When our rulers today do battle with the religious and
moral habits of the people, our rulers win. "Political correctness"
shows that it is now possible to establish as authoritative moral views
that are profoundly at odds with long-established understandings, as
long as those who dominate public discussion are committed to them.
The present situation results in part from the enormous power that mass
communications media put in the hands of a small elite that can flood
the world with the opinions of chosen experts and swamp critical thought
with trivia and sound bites. That power makes molders of opinion --
media people, entertainers, experts, educators -- integral to
government; our rulers control opinion because those who control opinion
are among them.
The influence of a small class over opinion is aided by growing
centralization of intellectual life. The republic of letters has become
less republican; thought and what counts as knowledge are no longer left
to chance or individual initiative. Intellectual life is now carried on
by a largely state-supported bureaucracy comprising academics,
foundations, think tanks, arts officials and so on. News reporting and
analysis are in the hands of professionals employed by a few large
organizations. The young are reared largely by mass-market entertainers
and an increasingly unified state education system.
The effect has been to do away with intellectual independence and make
dissident views seem provincial, ignorant or insane. The few places
dissent exists freely, such as talk radio and the Internet, are socially
marginal, lack discipline and coherence, and are seen as centers of
"hate" that threatens everything decent.
Beyond the support it receives from those who control publicity, the
strength of liberalism in an age of publicity is its "stealth" quality.
What the neutrality of liberalism amounts to is its ability to keep the
substantive moral views it enforces invisible, thus removing moral
disputes from politics and so preventing challenges to its own positions
from even being raised. That quality gives liberalism an advantage in
public discussion that has so far been insuperable.
Moral decisions are unavoidable in politics, and a government that
claims to leave them up to the individual is engaged in deception. Man
is a social animal who needs government because voluntary cooperation is
not enough for common goods. Views vary on the goods government should
support; since differences mean conflict the law must decide among them.
Between the choices abortionists provide and the lives Operation Rescue
defends neutrality is impossible.
To enforce a definite view of the matter, as government must if it is to
act coherently, is to enforce a particular understanding of morality.
Enforcing morality is difficult, and every government looks for
alternatives to force in dealing with moral disagreement. Different
governments emphasize different means, traditionalist states stressing
common adherence to what has long been settled, theocracies and
ideological regimes persuasion by authority, republics mutual persuasion
among the citizens. All these are ways of reducing the number and
intensity of disagreements by dealing with their substance, a process
that is difficult but necessary if government is to promote goods held
in common. Liberal governments assert they can do without such a process
because they keep moral disputes out of politics while leaving their
substance untouched. They claim allegiance not because they promote
common goods but because they let everyone pursue his own preferences
without interference.
Looking for ways to let each man go his own way might amount only to
recognition of the difficulty of moral agreement and the importance of
arrangements that ease cooperation when agreement is minimal. When so
understood liberal views are an aspect of practical wisdom consistent
with almost any reasonable understanding of the goals of politics. A
sacred monarchy with an established church would, on this view, be
liberal if when possible it preferred accommodation to force.
Contemporary liberalism is not so limited a view. It is a comprehensive
governing philosophy that determines the whole of public morality. While
it sounds permissive, comprehensive solutions are usually intolerant in
practice and liberalism is no exception. Contemporary liberalism sets
forth categorical demands it calls "rights," and rejects balancing
principles such as respect for natural tendencies and settled
understandings. Without balancing principles abstract demands expand
without limit. As a result, liberal standards have become all-embracing
to the point of tyranny. Liberal neutrality, which began as a patchwork
of limitations on government power, has become applicable to social
practices generally and thereby oppressive. If to be liberal is to be
willing to accommodate other views, contemporary liberalism is no longer
liberal.
Accommodating other views involves relating them to larger shared
truths. Liberalism cannot do so because it establishes a closed moral
system. The social contract with which liberal thought begins makes
morality a self-contained system defined by logic and human will. Man is
the master, the good what men choose, and social institutions
arrangements set up for men's purposes. There is no larger truth in
which all participate, only an open-ended and never-ending process of
social transformation on behalf of changing desires.
That process overrides all other things and makes liberalism as
peremptory and unreasonable as desire itself. Liberalism today denounces
deviations from its principles as oppressive, no matter how
long-established and widely-accepted, and insists that they be
eradicated. The result is enormous expansion of government, weakening of
principles like local community that are needed to keep government
accountable, and huge destruction from uprooting fundamental social
practices, for example those relating to the relations between the
sexes.
In spite of claims of neutrality, liberalism establishes an enforceable
official morality that supports a definite way of life. It makes demands
for moral reconstruction that are necessarily intolerant. Civil rights
law, with its determination to eradicate "stereotypes" -- habitual ways
of thinking -- is intrusively moralistic and ends in incessant
re-education campaigns. Anti-harassment rules aim to control the
thoughts expressed in every public place. Public education is nonstop
moral propaganda. Even health and safety have become crusades involving
extensive regulation of daily life. Where there were once religious
tests, Sunday closing laws, and laws against blasphemy, there are now
diversity programs, the Martin Luther King holiday, and speech codes.
The advance in tolerance is hard to discern.
The development of liberalism has reversed its original principles.
Rather than let society control the state, a more ambitious liberalism
now makes the state control society. Freedom of speech and opinion have
therefore become suspect. Religious people are felt to be a threat,
because ways of life have public implications and public action that
relies on non-liberal moral understandings violates neutrality. Simple
assertion of traditional sexual morality is treated as oppressive
because it creates informal obstacles, if only the force of opinion, to
the satisfaction of personal tastes. To refuse to rent an apartment to
an unmarried couple is illegal even though it is only refusal to
facilitate an arrangement one believes wrong. Even Christmas greetings
are an affront.
The actual function of the liberal insistence on neutrality is to stifle
debate. To the extent they have concrete implications, moral objections
to liberalism are rejected out of hand as intolerant and divisive, so
resistance becomes impossible. Distortion of language complements
suppression of speech. "Hatred" and "intolerance" now include all
serious opposition to liberalism. "Inclusiveness" insists that others be
tolerant to the point of abandoning their principles and even identity
while rejecting accommodation in its own case.
"Diversity and tolerance" mean thought control; "human rights"
aggressive war; "openness" shutting the door to recognition of
differences; "getting government out of our bedrooms" training children
to use condoms.
Stifling debate stifles moderating principles. The ultimate consequences
are likely to be overreaching and the collapse of liberalism, but in the
meantime its triumph is unlimited. Mere conservatism -- caution and good
sense regarding changes -- is no longer a restraint.
Simple mainstream conservatism is the view of reasonable men attached to
what is established but willing to accommodate new developments. It has
much in common with liberalism, and is well-suited to moderate it if
anything is. Both are this-worldly views that distrust absolutes and
value reason and experience. The basic difference is that simple
conservatism accepts settled habits and expectations as a guide to what
is reasonable, while liberalism tends toward something more abstract.
That difference leads to others. Conservatism accepts social habits that
carry forward nonliberal understandings; if dogmatic religion and
authoritative aspects of family life are socially accepted it tends to
support them. However, simply as conservatism it is indifferent to
truth, and in the end treats religion and moral tradition as negotiable
interests.
Those put off by the hedonism implicit in liberal neutrality but unable
fundamentally to break with it become conservatives, because
conservatism seems to leave room for transcendent attachments. The
refuge has proved temporary. Simple mainstream conservatism treats
social practices and understandings as final authority, and cannot take
transcendent claims seriously. It therefore reduces religion to a
combination of traditional observances and optional private belief. In
the end, religious belief that must stay private evaporates, because it
can apply to nothing, and traditional observances become socially
unacceptable because they have a public element that comes to seem a
violation of the equal standing of irreligion. What remains is an
aggressively secular public order in the construction of which
conservatism has cooperated.
In time liberalism remakes conservatism in its own image by forcing it
to give up everything distinctive for the sake of consensus. Simple
conservatism must rely on things that are not seriously in dispute, and
it cannot defend those things against attack because the fact of their
being attacked makes them useless to it. Liberals will not stop
attacking whatever is nonliberal. The triumph of increasingly radical
forms of liberalism was therefore inevitable, a triumph that reached its
climax in the '60s.
The triumph was not over conservative doctrine, which had always been
weak in public life, but over conservative habits that prevented
liberalism from realizing its inner logic. Key events included the
school prayer decisions, the civil rights laws and the sexual
revolution. The first made the social order utterly this-worldly, the
second abolished historical in favor of constructed community, and the
third made family life a purely voluntary and private affair. John
Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) marked the new status of liberalism as
a comprehensive rational system, and the end of any need to take
non-liberal attitudes and practices seriously except as injustices to be
eradicated. Since then to say something is a "deeply rooted social
stereotype" has been to discredit it. So decisive has the triumph of
radical liberalism been that no attempt to reverse the prayer decisions,
civil rights laws or sexual revolution has had the slightest chance of
success. To take such attempts seriously has been to put oneself outside
serious public discourse.
The triumph of radical liberalism has made moderate conservatism, which
assumes a social order defined in fundamental ways by non-liberal
attitudes and practices, an empty position. A desire to seem thoughtful
and aspirations toward something less thin than liberal ideology may
lead public men to use the language of conservatism, but the substance
is gone. Mainstream conservatism grumbles, drags its feet, and tries to
moderate the disruption caused by implementing liberal demands, but it
cannot deny the justice of those demands or deprive them of ultimate
victory. It cannot even talk about them in language very different from
that of triumphant liberalism.
Not only moderate conservatism but all serious public opposition to
liberalism has vanished. Opposing stances can find no footing. What
opposition from the left remains tends toward irrationalism.
Communitarianism proposes a centrally-managed nondiscriminatory
particularism that is hard even to imagine. Popular conservatism and the
religious right cannot think or act coherently, in part because they
cannot sustain a style of argument different from that of their
opponents. Neoconservatives note that liberalism rejects the loyalties
to God, country and family needed to sustain a free society, but tend to
view such things as a sort of noble lie to be kept firmly subordinate to
the liberal order; the effect of their activities is to integrate
dissidents into that order, thus taming antiliberal impulses. Nor can
libertarians effectively resist liberalism. Libertarianism is less
intrusive than managerial liberalism but cannot offer a real
alternative. Like liberals, libertarians deny transcendent authority and
demand social reconstruction on rational hedonistic lines. The moral
subjectivism of their movement makes its opposition to government
intervention a matter of preference rather than principle. Its treatment
of property as morally fundamental is inconsistent with subjectivist
treatment of social institutions as constructions for human ends, and
when put forward as an objective moral principle seems arbitrary.
Libertarianism is therefore likely to remain the special cause of a
small but vocal minority, although retaining influence as part of the
shifting and unprincipled compromises that constitute contemporary
liberalism.
The dominance of liberalism, the apparent impossibility of reforming it,
and the absence of credible opposition has led some to say openly -- and
many to assume implicitly -- that we have reached the end of history,
that since liberalism is utterly dominant and cannot essentially change
it has won for ever. That conclusion mistakes the imaginative limits of
liberals for the limits of reality. Until quite recently the advance of
liberalism did seem inevitable. It alone seemed able to maintain the
voluntary cooperation needed for social peace and efficiency. Once an
issue had been raised any non-liberal resolution seemed irrational. All
liberals had to do was dramatize what they considered oppression and
victory was assured. In the absence of public transcendental principle
"let them do what they want" -- the basic liberal principle -- seemed
the only way to avoid implicit or open civil war.
That has changed with the triumph of liberalism as a ruling rather than
critical philosophy. Victory is its downfall, because it must now give
answers rather than criticize those others give, and that it cannot do.
"Let them do what they want" cannot be a governing philosophy, so in
order to govern liberalism is forced to tyrannize and lie. Lack of
moderating principles means that it cannot help but overreach,
eventually catastrophically.
Analysis suggests that the vices of liberalism are intrinsic and
irremediable. Conceptual arguments are often shrugged off in politics on
the grounds that life is complex and in practice particular
circumstances matter more than abstract implications. The objection is
weak in the case of contemporary liberalism. Modern conditions tend to
simplify human society and turn it more and more into a formless
aggregate, without race, sex, class or nation. Liberalism encourages
that process, and tells bureaucrats and judges to govern the resulting
fine-grained chaos by universal principles. Formal rules and
institutions thus become the leading principles of order in an otherwise
incoherent situation; in such a setting conceptual problems become
practical very quickly.
Such has been the case with liberalism. One defect in principle that has
caused far-reaching practical problems is the inability of liberalism to
deal with conflict in a principled way. Politics cannot be based simply
on human goals, because human goals do not tell us what to do when they
clash. A resolution based on what particular men want is merely the
triumph of one will over another. Even a resolution based on balancing
desires or following those that are strongest only subordinates some
desires to others unless the method of resolution expresses a moral
truth that transcends desire itself.
Liberalism proposes formal principles such as "to each his own" or
maximizing total satisfaction. It is hard to see how such principles,
even if universally acceptable, could give answers that are definite
enough to live by. How, for example, can all possible satisfactions --
Plato, Chinese checkers, pornography -- be added and compared when they
differ so enormously? And how can it be determined what is "one's own"?
Whether it is an imperial throne or property in one's body, a thing is
one's own only if others recognize it as such, a necessity that shows
that property is not a simple pre-social conception.
Arbitrariness in resolving disputes is thus intrinsic to liberalism. Nor
is arbitrariness the only problem. The good is the substantive principle
of morality, and a fatal flaw in liberalism is its defective theory of
the good. The need for a particular definition of the good can not be
sidestepped by ignoring goods in favor of wants. "Goods" are simply
possible objects of rational action, and "the good" is whatever general
quality it is that makes something worth pursuing. To treat desire as
the thing that determines rational action is to identify the good with
what is desired. The liberal theory of the good is thus hedonism.
Hedonism is a bad theory, even if it can be made to yield determinate
results, because we are not at bottom hedonists. By giving us "whatever
we want" liberalism fails precisely to give us what we want. Our good,
and for that matter the things we desire most deeply, depends on what we
are, and we are rational and social. Man does not desire to get what he
wants simply as such; he wants what he wants, but also wants to
recognize it as good, as desirable because it contributes to a scheme of
life the validity of which does not depend on his desires alone.
As rational beings, we are not satisfied unless our lives are based on
an understanding of what goals are right that rests on something that
gives it enduring validity. Nor, as social beings, can we be satisfied
unless that understanding is shared. The problem is not merely
theoretical. If goods other than pursuit of individual pleasure are
understood as purely individual goals, with no right to social support,
they wither. Marriage is not simply what two people choose to do
privately. It involves objective duties and thus social definitions; to
define it as the chance parallelism of two wills, each with its own
purposes, is to destroy it. Even disinterested love of truth and beauty
needs common support to become more than the fragmentary possession of
isolated visionaries. Liberalism disrupts that support by denying public
recognition to any good but satisfaction of desire. A conceptual problem
in liberalism, its inability to prefer one goal to another, thus leads
naturally to family breakdown and sordidness in public life.
The problems go farther. Man is social, and community requires the
common goods liberalism denies. If I say that I am American the claim is
insignificant unless Americans are united by something that they
recognize collectively as good. In liberal society, however, the only
thing that can be recognized in common as a substantive good is the goal
implicit in all individual desire, the ability to get what one wants.
That ability is most readily recognized in the form of money, power and
success, and liberalism therefore turns society into an assortment of
individuals related by those things. Under such conditions men lose
substantive connection to others and with it their sense of who they
are; personal identity becomes a matter of bank balances and shifting
private fantasies, and the individual, for whose sake liberalism was
invented, evaporates.
Identifying the good with the desired destroys the things that make
freedom worth having. Liberalism frees children from parents, women from
men, the poor from charity, inferiors from superiors, all so each can do
what he wants. By making our connections to others insubstantial,
however, it deprives actions of effect and we end with the trivial
freedom of irresponsibility and impotence. Freedom becomes
indistinguishable from willfulness. We value liberty because it enables
us to choose and realize goods, but if no goods are objective it loses
objective value and becomes just another personal taste. How can choice
be so important, if what is chosen matters not at all? Or if it is
choice itself that matters, why isn't willfulness the greatest virtue?
As anyone who deals with aimless teenagers will attest, such issues have
practical consequences.
A further radical defect in liberalism is that while claiming
rationality it makes rationality impossible. Rationality presupposes
standards that transcend actual desires. If man has no standard higher
than himself, he has nothing by which to judge his own conduct, and
ethical thought disappears. Liberalism claims to let us create our own
standards but might as well claim to let us flap our arms and fly. Our
good is not something we make up. We can clarify our good but not choose
it, act significantly within a moral world but not call it into
existence. When liberalism tells us to create our own moral world it
turns its back on the public moral world needed for choice to have
meaning.
The cult of creativity, in moral life as elsewhere, comes from
consciousness of a void that must be filled somehow, fraudulently if
necessary. It is that void that is at the center of liberalism. A
parallel case is provided by art, in which a cult of creativity
resulting from loss of confidence in goods like beauty that transcend
the artist has ended in art that is empty of content, obsessed with
technique, and dominated by the same forces, foreign to it, that
dominate liberal society -- money, success, and the politics of mindless
aggression and rebellion.
The irrationality intrinsic to liberalism causes it continually to raise
questions it cannot deal with and so must suppress. Examples are
everywhere: if every society must be intolerant in defending its leading
principles, how reasonable can it be to make intolerance the sole object
of opprobrium? If government is to give us what we want, do we really
want hedonism? If I have a right to pursue my desires, and I desire to
live in a society guided by traditional understandings, do I have the
right to pursue that goal politically? If not, why is an environment
free from racism and sexism a worthier goal than one free from atheism
and from immorality as traditionally understood? Such questions cannot
be avoided as a practical matter, and liberalism requires them to be
resolved by neutral principles that take no position on the content of
the good life.
The requirement cannot be met, although there have been a variety of
proposals for meeting it. Some have claimed that liberalism grants
freedom unless the action interferes with others in a concrete and
particularized way. Hence, for example, the right of sexual expression
overrides the right to an environment in which traditional standards
prevail.
The response is inadequate, if only because liberalism does not accept
it in its own case. For example, liberalism accepts land use controls
and laws against littering that protect only general aesthetic
interests. Prohibitions against highway billboards go so far as to ban
speech simply because it offends. One man's smuggling, tax evasion or
use of leaded gasoline may benefit him a great deal without having a
demonstrable effect on anyone else. And someone who does not want to
work with blacks is likely to be affected far more profoundly by a
requirement of nondiscrimination than a black man who might otherwise
have to find a job elsewhere. Like other people, liberals recognize that
law may forbid intangible injuries, and it may justly defend a
beneficial system of conduct or suppress a harmful one, even when
individual infractions do not cause identifiable concrete damage. These
principles rationally allow legal support for traditional morality.
Offense to moral sensibilities is an injury that tends to make men
morally callous and so weakens a social order based on self-government.
Why is it worthy of more protection than other acts that injure both
individuals and society?
Another response is that interference with conduct is particularly
objectionable when the conduct is close to the heart of what makes us
what we are. To make this response liberals must propose a theory of
essential human nature. Such theories are no less contentious than
theories of the good. Does acting on sexual impulse make us what we are,
or living in accordance with common moral understandings that promote
stable personal relationships? One answer would make restrictions on
sexual conduct objectionable, the other lack of sexual restraint, and
there seems no neutral way to choose between the two. Such issues go to
the heart of liberal public morality. Liberalism deals with them by
suppressing their discussion and imposing its own answers by default.
The practical result is like that of establishing any dogmatic principle
as absolute: liberals speak of divisiveness and extremism rather than
schism and heresy, and forbid questioning the being, attributes and
significance of sexism or the Holocaust rather than those of God, but
specific differences do not affect the similarity of system.
Liberalism -- an attempt to create a wholly this-worldly system based
only on logic and the human will -- thus ends in obscurantist tyranny
and so refutes itself. That result is necessary because logic and human
will cannot be combined to yield authority, and to rule liberalism must
somehow steal authority. It therefore demands submission to arbitrary
principles and conclusions. It insists on controlling everything that
affects public life, including the human soul. It responds to criticism
by silencing the critic. It destroys concrete freedom by centralizing
power, by undermining standards that make free social life possible, and
by destroying our connections to others and so making us dependent on
universal systems utterly beyond our control. And in the name of giving
us what we want it denies us everything worth having.
When judged by day-to-day experience, such conclusions may seem to go
too far. "Tyranny" sounds exaggerated, other phrases like "soft
totalitarianism" yet more so. In America, after all, there are no secret
police and few government spies. The judiciary is independent and
private property safe. Trials are public and procedural safeguards
observed. Anyone can run for public office on any platform, and write or
say what he wants without fear of prison or confiscation. Tenure
protects scholars with unpopular-- even conservative -- views. Informal
restraints on thought, expression and action appear matched by similar
restraints in other societies. And above all, life is comfortable. The
differences between the American regime today and the regimes usually
called tyrannical or totalitarian are thus fundamental.
Nonetheless, the differences should not mask similarities that are also
fundamental and justify some similarity of descriptive language. Tyranny
is irresponsible government not limited by law or binding custom;
totalitarianism is tyranny based on an all-encompassing theory that is
the private property of a ruling elite. On those definitions medieval
governments, for example, were neither tyrannies nor totalitarian; they
were limited by law and custom, and the Christian outlook that justified
them was in the hands not of the king but of the church, a body distinct
in fundamental ways from secular rulers, often at odds with them, and
bound by authoritative texts and traditions and ultimately the will of
God.
In contrast, modern America inclines toward totalitarian tyranny, at
least if one recognizes the nature of liberalism as a self-contained and
all-embracing scheme for life in society, the sole right of the ruling
elite to interpret it, and the barriers to political action at odds with
it. On fundamental issues, America is governed by a liberal elite whose
power is not limited by law because the courts are part of the elite and
what the courts say is the law. Affirmative action, mass immigration and
the exclusion of religion from public life illustrate the power of that
elite to force fundamental changes over strong and rooted opposition
from virtually the entire people.
Such power is tyrannical. Because man is a social animal, tyranny can
inhere in the relationship between an irresponsible ruling class and
social institutions as well as that between a government and the
individual. A man who arbitrarily imprisons me or confiscates my
property is a tyrant. Ruling elites that destroy the social institutions
and relationships that make me what I am, that attack the family and
abolish gender distinctions, ethnic ties, and traditional moral
standards, that drive religion out of public life and tell private
associations what members to choose and why, are also tyrannical.
Imprisonment and exile are punishments because they deprive a man of his
social setting. Intentional destruction of that setting is plainly
worse. Genocide is said to include intentional destruction of the
essential foundations of the life of national groups. Liberalism does
that to all national groups by abolishing the constituents of
nationality. How can that be acceptable? When everyone must praise such
actions as incontestable demands of justice, when it is all but
impossible to make protests heard and critics are treated as enemies of
humanity, when the existence of any higher standard is denied, the
tyranny, however maintained, takes on a totalitarian quality.
Such complaints may still be thought overblown. The limitations on
opinion, expression, association and popular self-rule can no doubt be
explained away. Attacks on fundamental institutions may seem to have
certain benefits, since all institutions have their injustices and
corruptions. Life is still pleasant for most people, as long as they
relax and concentrate on individual pursuits -- "sit back and take a
breath," as Mrs. Clinton has suggested. Nonetheless, there are plain
grounds for concern about the future. Irresponsible power corrupts. Free
government requires a settled widespread distribution of power, as well
as cohesion among the people at large so they can hold their rulers to
account. Today's liberalism destroys both. At present liberalism does
not physically destroy anyone, except Serbs, the unborn, and --
increasingly -- the old and useless. Possibly the tally should also
include murders and suicides resulting from deteriorating social order,
and some of the Russians who have drunk themselves to death since the
fall of Communism, but the point need not be insisted on. Whatever its
record to date, liberalism is one of several modern political movements
that deny human nature. It makes human nature a matter of human choice
and technology, as communism made it a matter of economic evolution and
fascism of human will and national struggle.
In each case the motive has been to eliminate human nature as an
obstacle to re-creation of the world. The difficulty has been that
destruction in concept of fixed and rooted human nature has led
repeatedly to the concrete destruction of very large numbers of actual
human beings. The sequence seems natural. If "man" does not exist, why
should it matter whether men exist? Liberals do not take the threat of
such inferences seriously, but it is not clear why. If "human" is
content-free, so it becomes a social classification the point of which
is determined politically, and if it is irrational to recognize a
radical difference in rights between a man and a dog, both of which seem
to be the emerging liberal views, the stage seems rather clearly set for
horrors. In the absence of a reliable way to hold government to account,
the horrors may not remain forever a matter of debatable interpretation.
Soft totalitarianism may turn to hard. Whichever may lie in store for
us, tyranny -- especially totalitarian tyranny -- cannot last.
Liberalism will destroy itself in practice as well as theory. Tyrants
must be prudent, but liberalism cannot be prudent forever. It makes
human desire the measure and so has no place for unpleasant facts. The
consequences are everywhere; liberalism depends on competent elites, for
example, but is reluctant to recognize human differences and so
institutes affirmative action programs that make it impossible to deal
with issues of relative competence. It cannot justify nonconsensual
authority -- parental authority or even ordinary moral standards for
example -- and so feels bound to undermine it as oppressive whatever the
consequences. The resulting disorders permeate social life, and as the
generations succeed each other make orderly government progressively
harder to maintain.
Further, a philosophy based on independent individuals pursuing their
own interests cannot deal with issues that go beyond one's life as a
self-interested individual -- reproduction and child-rearing, loyalty
and sacrifice, life and death. Such issues are fundamental to social
survival, but liberalism can only treat them as matters of individual
preference. The consequences are suicidally low birthrates, children
growing up without parental care, and an army that cannot take
casualties. If such things endure, and it is hard to see what within
liberalism can stop them, they will mean the end of liberal society.
The choice, therefore, is between a liberalism that must deny its own
principles to rule, thus leading to corruption, obscurantist tyranny,
and eventual collapse, and a system explicitly based on authoritative
transcendent goods. A system of the latter kind might be liberal in many
ways, but it would reject freedom as a ultimate standard, and in
present-day terms would be radically illiberal. A system of transcendent
goods grounding a way of life is in effect a religion; the choice is
therefore between the reign of force and fraud (perhaps disguised and
perhaps not), and recognition of the religious basis of society and
government.
The fundamental question of politics is which religion shall be
established. Authority must be based on a common understanding of
principles superior to the human will that are rooted in the nature of
things. To the extent it tries to be principled liberalism itself cannot
help but answer such questions. In spite of claims of neutrality,
American law today embodies a religious understanding. It excludes from
public life views that take transcendent religion seriously, in
substance treating them as false. It cannot get by without a conception
of the world and the source of moral obligation, however, and it finds
both in man the measure. It makes human genius the principle of creation
and individual will the source of value. Such an outlook is religious,
the religion of man as creator and judge of all things. As the response
to ultimate concerns that silently motivates our public order it is our
established religion.
It is a religion that fails to deliver, ultimately because it makes no
sense. By trying to abolish the mystery at the heart of things it
succeeds only in making all things incomprehensible. It makes man the
measure, but men are weak, mutable, prone to error, and at odds with
each other. Incoherence leads to incoherence: liberal neutrality is not
neutral, liberal tolerance is intolerant, and liberal hedonism denies
our desires. Since liberalism has grown practically self-destructive not
even its established status can be a reason for supporting it. It must
be rejected and replaced; it will not last in any event, and it will be
better if it is rejected rationally, with consciousness of why it
failed.
The rational way beyond liberalism is to discuss the questions it avoids
and cannot answer. Intellectually, liberalism cannot survive their free
discussion; a function of "political correctness" and the centralization
of intellectual life is to keep them from arising. Both modern
communications technology and the liberal demand for free expression
make it difficult to suppress such questions altogether, however. When
the practical strains on liberal society become severe enough the
intellectual flaws of liberalism will begin to tell. As a self-contained
system poorly rooted in reality, liberalism could fall apart like Soviet
Communism or the one-horse shay of New England Calvinism.
Once liberalism goes, what then? Even a bad system of thought is
unlikely to be abandoned unless there is something to replace it. A
religion cannot be chosen like a suit of clothes. The religion of a
people is determined by any number of things, sub- or super-rational,
and is less a matter of choice than of recognition. It is nonetheless
determined somehow or other. Man needs a life in common with his fellows
and common life requires a common understanding of the nature of the
world and man's place in it. Our public life, to the extent it exists,
is now based on a religion that is hard to make sense of, harder to
believe, and in the end relies on deceiving self and others. It will be
replaced. Until that happens a better public life will be in process of
formation. All those who look for a better future can do now is prepare
for it by holding themselves apart from the existing system of things,
asking the basic questions from which all religion springs, joining with
others in answering them, and questioning those who support the present
state of affairs. The rest is in God's hands.
James Kalb
Summer 2000
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