By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Safranek, John P. The Myth of Liberalism. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015. xvii + 270 pp.
This is a timely volume by an author who is both a practicing physician and a philosopher. Drawing upon both his professional experience and the perennial philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, he challenges the liberal zeitgeist which prevails in centers, high and low, throughout the Western world.
In the opening pages of his book, Safranek shows clearly that liberalism is not a coherent philosophy but is, rather, “a collection of causes marshalled under the banner of personal liberty by powerful social and political interests.” Liberty, equality, right, and nearly all other ephemeral liberal values, he says, are indistinguishable from desires. Personal freedom seems to be the paramount goal of modern liberal programs, notwithstanding its conflict with other liberal values.
Modernity may have begun with Machiavelli, but it is John Locke (1632-1704) who may be the real source of modern political liberalism. Putting Locke aside, Safranek focuses on liberalism’s later development in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and his mythical “war against all,” in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, and in John Stuart Mill’s dismissal of God as the source of a natural order. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the liberal’s understanding of “autonomy,” “equality,” and “rights.”
Safranek finds his own perspective articulated in Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, as developed by Aquinas and his modern disciples. This premodern tradition is premised on the mind’s ability to grasp certain basic truths about nature, human nature, and morality. “What we take to be the Western moral tradition,” he says, “is a distillation of centuries of reflection on human nature and human good.” Most contemporary philosophers seem oblivious of that accomplishment, and take no note of the premodern philosophers and theologians who have magisterially addressed the issues presently consuming the liberal’s attention. Unwittingly or perhaps deliberately, modern philosophers cast aside the accumulated wisdom of the Western world. Absent a God-given natural order to which one can appeal, a new order has to be created.
“By banishing talk of God and discussions of virtue and the good life from the public square, liberals have reshaped much of the Western world.” In doing so the liberal zeitgeist has deprived society of accepted moral standards and robbed citizens, especially the undisciplined, of the beneficial influence of time-sanctioned virtues, notably that of self-restraint. By destroying the higher things of life as traditionally understood, liberalism tragically undermines marriage and, by extension, family life, which Safranek calls “the nursery of moral, intellectual, and spiritual virtue.” In destroying the old, the contemporary liberal mind provides no guide with respect to happiness and self-fulfillment. “The contemporary liberal mind is sterile.”
In the present situation, Safranek holds out hope that a new aristocracy is in the making. The new aristocracy will emerge from intact families, in contrast to the historical aristocracies as found in Europe. The new aristocracy will not be based on property or material wellbeing but on virtuous family relationships. Children born into virtuous families will have an advantage from birth. Self-restraint will come naturally to them, enabling them to advance in the sciences and arts, and eventually into positions of leadership, when the liberal mind has exhausted its inherited moral capital.
John Safranek has widely researched his topic. Over the last half-century he has tracked the liberal mind in its many variations. Perhaps no one has shown better its influence than on the judiciary. By surveying decades of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Safranek can illustrate how many a malevolent idea has leapt off the page of a liberal text and become the law of the land. Examples come easily to him given his extensive research and decades of reflection, but these are too numerous to recount here.
This is seen especially in those chapters where Safranek is focused on “rights” and “equality.” In talking about equal justice under the law, he reminds the reader that the principle of justice is usually formulated as “giving everyone his due.” Yet, if recognizing that some may be due more than others violates the principle of equal distribution, what follows? The question of equality cannot be answered until a standard of comparison is stipulated. People are equally human, rational, and desirous, but unequal in many respects, such as intelligence, health, sex, mobility, ability to bear children, not to mention personal moral and intellectual virtue. In this context Safranek provides an insightful critique of the liberal’s use of ambiguous language. Terms such as “liberty,” “equal respect,” “public reason,” and “equal opportunity,” which people may think they understand and find unobjectionable, are turned around and given different meanings in support of the liberal objectives. He is particularly critical of John Rawls’s transformation of language in A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993).
While the book is replete with information that has policy implications, Safranek leaves the drawing of those implications to the common sense of the reader.
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