Liberty And Virtue, H/T Geo. Washington
I ran across a very concise article at The Federalist that addresses a question that’s central to our current crisis right here at home in America. What should a true conservatism look like? Does Libertarianism—what I have termed the default, even if largely unwitting, position of both Right and Left in America—offer a way forward for conservatives? Or …
Libertarianism Had Its Moment But Is Ill-Equipped For The Task Of Saving America
Our cultural decadence and institutional rot can only be remedied by a movement unafraid to assert virtue throughout society.
I think most readers here will agree that we are at the point of needing to save America. I believe most will also agree that the patient’s condition is too serious to spend time going down rabbit holes, philosophical dead ends. I’ll paste in one section that gets to the heart of the issue: There can be no ordered liberty without a virtuous citizenry. If the Left has taught us anything, it’s that virtue is under organized assault and cannot be left to individual preference. Fortunately, we’re not working on a blank slate—our heritage of Western civilization offers us reasoned guides to the nature of virtue and how to inculcate virtue on a societal basis. Neutrality isn’t an option:
The Left Won’t Leave You Alone
Recent years have also made it clear that the left won’t leave you alone. Leftists have a missionary zeal to impose their mores upon society. …
Lavishly funded “diversity, equity, and inclusion” consultants infiltrated corporate boardrooms to inject racial identity politics into the workplace. Then the left came for your children, … There is nowhere to hide. Leftists insist on your acquiescence.
The left’s cultural aggression is a product of the right’s refusal to assert our own cultural values. Adherence to a neutral public sphere under the guise of secularism only creates a vacuum for the left to leverage the powers of the state to promote their own values. When the state stopped promoting traditional Christian values, the left filled the void by promoting cultural Marxism.
A less libertarian conservatism must leverage tools such as public school curricula, public television, military ethics training, and other professional training in the bureaucracy, etc. to educate Americans on traditional virtues.
Liberty Requires Virtue
Institutional rot and the left’s missionary zeal thus resurface a timeless wisdom: Liberty requires virtue. Absent said virtue, institutions and culture will inevitably culminate in tyranny and social disorder. In recent years, conservatives have relearned that a culture cannot sustain degradation without catastrophic effects to individual liberty. By contrast, libertarianism is at best agnostic on the need for a state to cultivate individual virtue.
Social righteousness as a prerequisite for liberty is an insight our Founding Fathers understood. In his farewell address, George Washington implored that America must be a virtuous nation for the republic to endure. He wrote:
… And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
Of course, libertarians and the left will accuse conservatives of wanting to enact a Christian theocracy, but that’s a lazy smear. Again, George Washington is illustrative. In his first annual address to Congress, President Washington wrote that Americans must understand the difference between order and oppression, and also liberty and licentiousness. He wrote:
… by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of Society; to discriminate the spirit of Liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last…
Libertarianism fails to heed Washington’s advice by mistaking all encroachments on personal behavior as oppression. On the contrary, the conservative appreciates that in a free society, the state must proactively promote social virtue to prevent society from descending into cultural degradation. Disorder and licentiousness inevitably result in tyranny.
All of this goes back to the basic philosophical errors that first took root in the West with the nominalism of the late Middle Ages. No matter the intentions of the nominalists, the logical development of their philosophy contained a radical skepticism that we see everywhere around us in the public life of our country. It is best embodied in the libertarianism of Anthony Kennedy’s famous “sweet mystery of life”, the conviction that the meaning of life is to be invented by each individual. That, of course, is a conviction that flows from nominalism’s radical skepticism: If the nature of reality—including the reality of human nature—cannot be known, then the very notions of morality and virtue are up for grabs. That leads to social anarchy—as we see—and there will always be tyrants to step in and restore order.
Key to this skepticism is the view that “freedom” is simply the ability to make a choice—regardless of the content of that choice. But our Western Christian heritage insists that the ability to choose is based in our rational nature and is directed toward the fulfillment of that rational human nature. Choices that are destructive of human nature are ultimately destructive of true freedom because they violate the purpose of the ability to choose that is part of human nature. To paraphrase Washington, “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can be maintained if we as a people succumb to this sort of agnosticism.” The foundation of liberty, as Washington saw, lies in the Christian vision of human nature rooted in reasonable belief. That vision allowed for the employment of true philosophical principles to build up governments with limited powers. But leaving power to the lowest common denominator, without societal, institutional guidance, is a recipe for disaster—precisely where we are headed.
To reinvent human nature has been the aim of the radical movement in the West, beginning with the philosophical errors of the late Middle Ages and proceeding with the rise of Liberalism and the demonism of the French Revolutionary spirit. It achieved academic orthodoxy with the German Ideology beginning with Kant. We in the West have cast ourselves adrift from the secure anchorage of human nature. To save America we must return to that safe harbor.
After meeting with Xi, Zhou once again called him a Communist dictator. Hmmm.
The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee
Communist Dictator Welcomes President Xi https://buff.ly/3MK3F3o
And speaking of China:
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”—John Adams
Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.—JPII
I've read countless articles like this over the years from works like the Federalist, and frankly, they irritate the heck out of me. Why are we still pontificating about "the nature of conservatism"? The Left is destroying the West and we waste our time in rarefied debates like this. We all know what virtue and morality are. We don't need high-faluting definitions from egg-heads like Victor Davis Hanson. G K Chesterton's statement that "Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles" is all the intellectual input I need at this stage. What we have to do know is actually go out and LIVE those morals and virtues. We can all start by using that wonderful word "No".