By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Foe of the inherited, symbolized by crown and miter, the liberal, although politely agnostic with respect to the existence of God, is a practical atheist hostile to religion and to religious education. Knowingly or not, he is likely to subscribe to a social determinism with allegiance to Emil Durkheim, if not Marx, and to a psychological determinism, notably advanced by Sigmund Freud. The liberal dogmas to which he subscribes have been translated into an educational philosophy by John Dewey and installed as official ideology of the secular state school.
The liberal mind does not hold itself accountable to a natural order, let alone to a divinely established plan governing nature and human nature. Lacking a sense of hierarchy, it denies difference among man, both with respect to native endowment and achievement.
Since many of its assumptions fly in the face of experience and common sense, its resort to totalitarian methods is inevitable. Whenever the liberal mind gains ascendancy, we find a tendency to suppress dissent. We do not need the example of a Stalin, a Mao, or a Xi Jinping when we have clear expressions of its suppressive tendencies in our universities and in the major media. Free discussion is anathema. Biased reporting and deliberate falsification unite the liberal journalist with the liberal politician.
The liberal mind is well aware of its enemies, and its will to power is not tempered by charity or chivalrous concession. It shields itself as well as others from its own vices by noble-sounding rhetoric and high-minded principles, foreign to its basic commitments. Its iconoclastic tendency with respect to the inherited is matched by its blind subscription to ephemeral goals, often based on questionable science, and a misreading of history.
The conservative mind, by contrast, finds its roots in antiquity. Its pantheon includes not only Christ Himself and the Apostle Paul, but Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and their modern disciples. It recognizes with Cicero the commonness of the human condition and the lessons to be learned from attention to “the kinds of lives our ancestors led.”
Livy spoke for Rome which by the first century BC was already conscious of its past. “What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this: that in history you have an infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and for your country both examples and warnings.”
Though all will admit that the present is shaped by the past, attitudes toward the inherited vary, and those attitudes in turn govern behavior. Respect for ancestry, heritage, or history determines concretely the emphasis placed on the study of history, languages, and art, and on the observance of religious and civic ritual.
Cicero, reflecting on qualifications for leadership in the commonwealth, made knowledge of and a respect for tradition a prime requisite for office. Such knowledge is required, for without it the aspirant to leadership would have no framework from which to judge. For to judge is to measure, to compare, to assess. Judging requires a standard against which a measure is to be taken. If standards are not to be trivial they will in some sense have to transcend the present and rest upon the best judgments available to mankind. If cultures are to be judged, if the manners and mores of a people are to be evaluated, there will have to be a means of achieving a perspective that will enable such an assessment to be placed.
For many the only basis for assessment, the only genuine basis for morality is religion. This is true for many Jewish and Christian thinkers and theologians, such as Brunner, Buber, Barth, Niebuhr, and Bultmann, who hold that without belief in God there is no reason for being moral. It is argued that only if we believe in God as a lawgiver can we come to believe that there is anything a man is categorically bound to do. It is argued that the moral use of obligation statements makes no sense apart from a divine law conception of ethics.
Quite apart from any profession of religious belief, the Greek mind of classical antiquity concluded that nature is intelligible, that its structure is revealed in natural laws, adherence to which makes for a successful life, indeed for a successful community.
Aristotle, for example, maintained that from a consideration of what a thing is in its tendential aspects, one can determine what is suitable for it — in other words, its good. From a consideration of what man is, one can determine what goods he ought to pursue. For Aristotle the supreme end of man is happiness, which consists primarily in intellectual activity, all other pursuits being subordinate or instrumental to that one.
In the political order, the quarrel between the liberal and the conservative is a quarrel about the nature of the good. The liberal favors the concept of procedural democracy wherein all claims of the good are considered equal, with the state favoring none. The issue may be framed as a question. Are we so intellectually impoverished that we cannot know what leads to human fulfillment? Biblical morality provides both meaning to life and a moral code. But apart from that we can learn much from classical antiquity about law, the common good, and natural virtue. Indeed much of the instruction associated with Catholic moral teaching is Stoic in origin.
By contrast the major beliefs, desires, and ideals of the liberal mind are pitted against the whole moral tradition of the Western World. In eschewing past standards of good and evil, the liberal mind has endangered the rule of law and also the very institutions which support the liberty we take for granted.
Its propensity to create socialist regimes in the light of its romantic notions of equality leads to expropriation through the graduated income tax and death duties. Equality is defined as equality of reward. Liberty is by its nature is non-egalitarian because men differ in intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance and all else that makes for success. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity cannot guarantee equality of outcome.
Equality of outcome can only be achieved through massive coercion. Utopian schemes that insist on the equality of citizens entail despotic authority. There is no method by which men can be free and equal. The propensity of liberal governments to redistribute assets inevitably subordinates group rights to individual rights,
Satisfying group claims necessarily enhances the power of the state that acts on their behalf. Welfare, with its sundry entitlements and spurious rights, removes family responsibility and the role of private charity.
With government interference in the lives of citizens greater than at any period in history, the conservative mind exists to challenge the liberal myths that have governed recent social and economic policy in the United States and abroad. The conservative mind, whether rooted in the Decalogue, in the Gospels, or in classical antiquity, is respectful of the wisdom, speculative and practical, which has led to the great cultural achievements of the Western World.
It is those achievements that we are called upon to defend against the destructive tendencies of the liberal Zeitgeist.
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