Conservative Liberalism

2009-02-27T04:40:00.001-08:00

Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Political Vocation: The following lecture was delivered on Monday evening, February 23, 2009, to a standing-room only audience in St. Basil’s Collegiate Church on the campus of the University of Toronto. (ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. CAP, CERC)

I think the message of Render Unto Caesar can be condensed into a few basic points.

Here's the first point. For many years, studies have shown that Americans have a very poor sense of history. That's very dangerous, because as Thucydides and Machiavelli and Thomas Jefferson have all said, history matters. It matters because the past shapes the present, and the present shapes the future. If Catholics don't know history, and especially their own history as Catholics, then somebody else -- and usually somebody not very friendly -- will create their history for them.

Let me put it another way. A man with amnesia has no future and no present because he can't remember his past. The past is a man's anchor in experience and reality. Without it, he may as well be floating in space. In like manner, if we Catholics don't remember and defend our religious history as a believing people, nobody else will, and then we won't have a future because we won't have a past. If we don't know how the Church worked with or struggled against political rulers in the past, then we can't think clearly about the relations between Church and state today.

We need to be very forceful in clarifying what the words in our political vocabulary really mean. Words are important because they shape our thinking, and our thinking drives our actions.

Here's the second point, and it's a place where the Canadian and American experiences may diverge. America is not a secular state. As historian Paul Johnson once said, America was "born Protestant." It has uniquely and deeply religious roots. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But the United States was never intended to be a "secular" country in the radical modern sense. Nearly all the Founders were either Christian or at least religion-friendly. And all of our public institutions and all of our ideas about the human person are based in a religiously shaped vocabulary. So if we cut God out of our public life, we also cut the foundation out from under our national ideals.

Here's the third point. We need to be very forceful in clarifying what the words in our political vocabulary really mean. Words are important because they shape our thinking, and our thinking drives our actions. When we subvert the meaning of words like "the common good" or "conscience" or "community" or "family," we undermine the language that sustains our thinking about the law. Dishonest language leads to dishonest debate and bad laws.

Here's an example. We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty -- these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it's never an end itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil. Likewise, democratic pluralism does not mean that Catholics should be quiet in public about serious moral issues because of some misguided sense of good manners. A healthy democracy requires vigorous moral debate to survive. Real pluralism demands that people of strong beliefs will advance their convictions in the public square -- peacefully, legally and respectfully, but energetically and without embarrassment. Anything less is bad citizenship and a form of theft from the public conversation.

Here's the fourth point. When Jesus tells the Pharisees and Herodians in the Gospel of Matthew (22:21) to "render unto the Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's," he sets the framework for how we should think about religion and the state even today. Caesar does have rights. We owe civil authority our respect and appropriate obedience. But that obedience is limited by what belongs to God. Caesar is not God. Only God is God, and the state is subordinate and accountable to God for its treatment of human persons, all of whom were created by God. Our job as believers is to figure out what things belong to Caesar, and what things belong to God -- and then put those things in right order in our own lives, and in our relations with others.

So having said all this, what does a book like Render Unto Caesar mean, in practice, for each of us as individual Catholics? It means that we each have a duty to study and grow in our faith, guided by the teaching of the Church. It also means that we have a duty to be politically engaged. Why? Because politics is the exercise of power, and the use of power always has moral content and human consequences.

As Christians, we can't claim to love God and then ignore the needs of our neighbors. Loving God is like loving a spouse. A husband may tell his wife that he loves her, and of course that's very beautiful. But she'll still want to see the proof in his actions. Likewise if we claim to be "Catholic," we need to prove it by our behavior. And serving other people by working for justice, charity and truth in our nation's political life is one of the very important ways we do that.

The "separation of Church and state" does not mean -- and it can never mean -- separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. That kind of separation would require Christians to deny who we are; to repudiate Jesus when he commands us to be "leaven in the world" and to "make disciples of all nations." That kind of radical separation steals the moral content of a society. It's the equivalent of telling a married man that he can't act married in public. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won't stay married for long.

2009-02-26T07:18:00.000-08:00

Homo Economus Christianus: a review of Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies - And Why They Disappeared. by Allan C. Carlson (Bart Fleuren, Clarion Review)

[A]llan C. Carlson sketches various movements in twentieth century Europe that—based on Christian values, the appreciation of the family, and agrarian forms of life—provided a way out of the false dichotomy between state-dominated socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.

Third ways, as Carlson describes them, are characterized by four prevailing features. First, they take private property as the basis of all economic relations. Holding and maintaining property in private possession is intrinsic to full human participation in the world. Therefore, socialism, although perhaps based on a legitimate concern for human wellbeing, is based on a false conception of human nature; the respect of private property is missing. Second, proponents of third ways seek to protect small scale business, agrarian and other “organic” forms of life, and the wellbeing of the working class against the dangers of laissez-faire capitalism. Third, third ways are geared at the preservation of the family as society’s cornerstone, and as the “chamber of liberty”[i] (Chesterton). Liberty should be protected against erosion from both the state and the market. The fourth and most distinctive feature of the third ways is their inspiration in a profound but practical Christian understanding of the human person, who belongs to the family, the land, and the community.

Although the term “third way” was coined by Leo XIII more than a century ago, it must be noted that in contemporary political theory it is not taken to refer to a Christian middle ground between the excesses of capitalism and socialism. Rather, it refers to the blend of social-liberalism advanced by the UK Labour Party under Tony Blair, the Democrats under Bill Clinton, and other progressive Western administrations of the 1990s.This social-liberal ‘third way’—which is intellectually indebted to the Cambridge sociologist Anthony Giddens—is a middle ground between capitalism and socialism. But it is based on a secular, rather than Christian, understanding of the human person.[ii] Distinctively, Giddens’ third way does not set the preservation of organic forms of life and the family as its main purpose but rather focuses on the advancement of technology, education, and social welfare. The weakness of such postmodern third ways is that they are not grounded in a constitutive understanding of the human person. They mostly look after the needs of the individual human body, not the whole person, and not the community.

The first and foremost merit of Carlson’s book, therefore, is to remind the intellectual and political community that Giddens cum suis were not the first to have offered a way out of the false dichotomy of capitalism or socialism. And second, Carlson shows that social-liberalism is not the only third way by demonstrating the relevance of a Christian conception of the human person for economic law and policymaking. The most important implication thereof is that human happiness consists in more than just the maximization of utility or pleasure: in addition to the socioeconomic variables of the market and the state, the human person and his distinctive natural rights and obligations—such as those regarding the family—constitute a third variable that despite its unquantifiable nature should be of decisive importance.

It's important to keep two things in mind here: first, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair faced the task of selling fundamentally Christian theories of politics to parties dominated at their upper levels by secular intellectuals, so their comparative silence about the sources of the Third Way are understandable; and, two, it's significant that the one is a devout Baptist and the other actually became a Catholic either while in office or shortly after leaving.

2007-09-12T07:43:00.001-07:00

The Age Of Political Theology (ADAM KIRSCH, September 12, 2007, NY Sun)

For a brief moment at the end of the Cold War, it was possible to believe in the end of history. With the defeat of communism, the Western world seemed to have arrived at a final, irrevocable belief that liberal democracy was the best form of government. If 1789 ushered in an era of ideological warfare, in which nations fought primarily in order to decide how men should be governed, then 1989 brought that era to an end. Today, however, the very phrase "the end of history," made popular by Francis Fukuyama, seems like a relic of an impossibly naïve moment. For in the post-Cold War euphoria, the political scientists forgot a truth that a novelist, Marcel Proust, enunciated long ago: Not all people living at the same time are occupying the same moment in history.

It took the West 500 years to reach our current consensus that messianic passions should be banished from secular politics. This does not mean that religious values have no role to play in public life. On the contrary, it was only by draining the theological fury from political debate that the West, and especially America, was able to harness the constructive power of faith, to make belief an ally of the secular order. America, to the confusion of many observers in postreligious Europe, is both the most religious society in the West and the most democratic.

Which is to fundamentally misapprehend, as so many do, what Mr. Fukuyama said in The End of History, not to mention the centrality of messianism to the Anglo-American model. First, Fukuyama:

The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world's two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants' markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair's yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in. the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.

Of course, the evolution will be seen to have ended no later than 1776, not with the Declaration of Independence so much, which, after all, was rather derivative of our English political heritage, but with The Wealth of Nations, which gave economics a coherent basis in accordance with the pre-existing ones for protestantism and democracy.

Second, Messianism, which the Western triumph is entirely dependent upon. What had to be banished was, rather, Utopianism. The latter, which entails the belief that Man can construct a perfect society, lies at the heart of Socialism, Nazism, Communism, and Islamicism--the various isms against which we've fought The Long War. The former, which assumes that Man will make somewhat of a hash of things until He comes, undergirds Christianity, Judaism and Shi'ism. It allows us to live as the "free men" described by Eric Hoffer:

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

*
This allows us to clear up the European confusion about why the postreligious have such trouble living as free men, but Anglo-Americans such ease. And, of course, the very fact of Europe's postreligiosity demonstrates that the End of History won't magically benefit everyone. Recognizing how state and society ought to be arranged will avail folks not if they do not maintain the faith that arrangement requires. Adopting the form of the End without the content can only make for a more comfortable death for secular societies. Only the Messianists, fittingly, have a hopeful future to look forward to.

(*) NB: Let us note, in passing, the delicious paradox implicated here, that those who claim to be absolutists on each of these values--libertarians, multiculturalists and egalitarians--are instead nihilists, who would make even an approximate realization of their own ends impossible.

2005-12-22T14:32:00.000-08:00

Europe: A History (Norman Davies)

Conservatism began to crystallize as a coherent ideology in conjunction with liberal trends. It was not opposed to democracy or to change as such, and should not be confused with simple reactionary
positions. What it did was to insist that all change should be channelled and managed in such a way that the organic growth of established institutions of state and society--monarchy, Church, the social hierarchy, property, and the family--should not be threatened. [...] Like the liberals, the conservatives valued the individual, opposed the omnipotent state, and looked for a reduction of central executive powers. Through this, they often turned out to be the most effective of would-be reformers, toning down proposals coming from more radical points on the spectrum, and acting as the go-between with the ruling court. The ultimate distinction between liberal conservatives and moderate liberals was a fine one. In many democracies, the large area of agreement between them came to define the "middle ground" of political life.

2005-12-02T07:02:00.000-08:00

(via Matt Scofield with thanks to James Panero):

Living with liberalism : a review of Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity by Daniel J. Mahoney (Robert Kraynak, December 2005, New Criterion)

When reflecting on the political options available to us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I often say to myself with a certain resignation, “Liberalism—it’s all we’ve got.” What I mean, of course, is that for anyone in the modern world who wants a sane and decent political order, the only realistic choice is liberalism in the classic sense—a regime dedicated to individual liberty based on democratic institutions (liberal democracy, in other words), with a social order shaped by mass culture and an economy driven by industrial and technological progress. Those who reject this order entirely—utopian dreamers, nostalgic reactionaries, anarchists—may get credit for defiant courage, but they usually wind up doing more harm than good. We are left with little choice but to live with liberalism and to make it as noble and as just as we can. [...]

[Daniel J. Mahoney, professor of political science at Assumption College] argues for something called “conservative liberalism,” which he finds in the political thought of such seemingly disparate figures as Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Charles de Gaulle, Raymond Aron, Aurel Kolnai, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Pierre Manent, and now Bertrand de Jouvenel. Mahoney’s thesis is that these figures are genuine lovers of liberty, but they are not “liberals” in the sense of embracing the philosophical liberalism of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, J. S. Mill, John Dewey, Isaiah Berlin, or John Rawls. Conservative liberals reject philosophical Liberalism because it fosters the “illusions of modernity”—a notion of autonomy which admits no higher authority than the human will (“the self-sovereignty of man”) as well as blind worship of progress that destabilizes society, undermines virtue, and tempts modern man with utopian ideologies that lead to totalitarian systems of government.

Instead of following progressive liberalism, conservative liberals draw upon pre-modern sources, such as classical philosophy (with its ideas of virtue, the common good, and natural right), Christianity (with its ideas of natural law, the social nature of man, and original sin), and ancient institutions (such as common law, corporate bodies, and social hierarchies). This gives their liberalism a conservative foundation. It means following Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Edmund Burke rather than Locke or Kant; it usually includes a deep sympathy for the politics of the Greek polis, the Roman Republic, and Christian monarchies. But, as realists, conservative liberals acknowledge that classical and medieval politics cannot be restored in the modern world. And, as moralists, they see that the modern experiment in liberty and self-government has the positive effect of enhancing human dignity as well as providing an opening (even in the midst of mass culture) for transcendent longings for eternity. At its practical best, conservative liberalism promotes ordered liberty under God and establishes constitutional safeguards against tyranny. It shows that a regime of liberty based on traditional morality and classical-Christian culture is an achievement we can be proud of, rather than merely defensive about, as trustees of Western civilization.

No one has made the case of conservative liberalism better than Professor Kraynak himself, in his own book. But this review is quite the best thing you'll read this month and just one more reason why the New Criterion is invaluable.