Retributive justice and the social contract

Joseph Bottum reflects on the forthcoming execution in Utah of double murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner, and wonders whether there is justification for this punishment. These paragraphs — especially the sections I have put in boldface — stand out for me:

A government has two legitimate goals in its justice system: the protection of the state’s existence, and the maintenance of ordinary, common justice for its people. And sometimes these may require the death of criminals—as in treason, for example, or when citizens cannot be protected from someone except by that person’s death.

But where comes the other kind of justice, the particular kind of justice that would justify the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner—not the ordinary justice of the social contract but high justice, the justice of God, the balancing of the cosmic scales? We want to see good people find good ends and bad people find bad ends. And God, and God’s agents, could carry out this justice.

Of course, the foundation of a modern democratic state, born of a social contract, is exactly that the state is not God’s agent. The early modern thrones got around the problem with a theory of the Divine Right of Kings, but we rejected all that. The ancient pagan cities held the sword of punishment because, in however confused a way, they believed in the supernatural foundation for the earthly city, but that, too, we dismissed. Ancient Israel had direct revelation, but modern nations refused to hold revelations for themselves.

Without some form of the divine, who has the right to pay blood with blood? Who has the authority to undertake high justice? Not us.

I myself am not necessarily a proponent of capital punishment, due primarily to its irrevocability in the not unlikely case of a miscarriage of justice. However, I strongly disagree with Bottum’s reasoning above. True, we may live in democratic states claiming to be based on a social contract, but there is ample reason — both biblical and otherwise — to question this claim. St. Paul writes to the believers in Rome:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due (Romans 13:1-7, emphases mine).

With all due respect to Mr. Bottum, those who believe, with the church of the ages, that our world belongs to God cannot simply accept at face value the foundational claims of democratic theories of governance. We may very well agree that democracy as a mere form of government is the best currently on offer, yet this need not entail a rejection of the Pauline understanding of government as servant of God, which it continues to be irrespective of the changed procedures for attaining public office. Nor does it call for acceptance of a contractarian understanding of government, which I would argue is an inadequate account of its origins. (See my 10 March post: Unlocking Locke.)

Forms of government come and go, but the divine mandate that government do public justice is a perennial one that is part of the very created nature of government and thus does not change with the times. This mandate on occasion may call for the shedding of blood, e.g., in cases of justified warfare and of the restraining and punishment of criminals. Again there may be good reason not to shed blood, and one hopes it will not be done too often. Nevertheless, one ought not to deny government the legitimate power of the sword based on a highly disputable contractarian account of democratic government.

Making too much of a good thing

One of the characteristics of an ideology is that it takes a genuine good and makes too much of it, that is, it effectively makes it into an idol. Thus it becomes difficult for those liberals emphasizing the validity of free markets to resist the temptation to claim a near universal efficacy for them. Case in point: Murray Rothbard, in For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, where we find this revealing remark:

Farrow's trenchant critique

The province of Québec is possibly the most secularized jurisdiction in North America, yet Montreal's McGill University boasts a dissident from the apparent post-christian consensus that took over that province during the Révolution tranquille of half a century ago. He is Douglas Farrow, Professor of Christian Thought in the Faculty of Religious Studies at one of Canada's premier universities.

The January-February issue of Touchstone carries an important article by Farrow, The Audacity of the State, whose title is an allusion to Barack Obama's book and his former pastor's similarly named sermon. Unlike many of today's opponents of the most recent stage of liberalism, which I have elsewhere labelled the "choice-enhancement state," Farrow is unwilling simply to fall back on an earlier, libertarian form of the ideology. This can be seen most clearly in his critique of John Stuart Mill's harm principle:

The power of On Liberty to overturn social and moral and religious conventions arises from Mill’s exciting and flattering suggestion that freedom will lead you into the truth. That iconoclastic gospel from the Romantic period still competes very successfully, tractable as it is to post-modern cynicism, with the older idol-smashing gospel of Jesus, that “the truth will set you free.”

Mill’s gospel takes no account of the creator/creature distinction, or of the fallenness of man. It takes no account of a freedom higher than freedom of choice, and gives no thought to how the truth of our own good will be recognized, or how that good will prove commensurate with the good of others. It is incurably romantic and naively optimistic. Most significantly, it fails to reckon with the fact that, in the absence of an overarching common good, based on a prior truth to which both the individual and the state are subject, the state must become the arbiter of all the competing goods of “free” individuals. It is not the individual who triumphs, then, in the appeal to a freedom that is prior to truth, but the state.

Behind Mill stands Rousseau, of course, whose rather more obvious statism Mill hoped to avoid. The basic premise of On Liberty is drawn from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that “liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not injure another.” And that dictum is in turn drawn from Rousseau, who got it from the Marquis d’Argenson, to whom we actually owe the harm principle: “In the Republic each man is perfectly free in all things that do no harm to others.” Rousseau’s intention in popularizing it was to downplay the obligations imposed by civil society, which he regarded as a corrupting more than a civilizing influence, especially in the form of family and church [emphasis mine].

One’s primary obligations would hereafter be understood as obligations chiefly to oneself, on the one hand, and to the state on the other. That is what the harm principle is really all about—the elimination of the oppressive middle term between the individual and the state. This begs the question, however, as to what does or does not harm another, and who will decide that. Both Mill and Rousseau have ideas about that, and one gets glimpses of Mill’s ideas in the final chapters of On Liberty. Only glimpses, mind you, because Mill’s ideas aren’t really very libertarian after all.

Farrow's astute analysis should be taken to heart by libertarians who think they are critiquing late liberal statism but in reality are doing no more than to facilitate its agenda over the long term.

While we're on the subject, you might wish to read Farrow's analysis of the latest chilling action of the government of his home province: The Government of Québec Declares War.

Bradley on liberalism

Anthony Bradley pays me the compliment of appealing to my Political Visions and Illusions in this post on the WORLDMag blog: Conservative vs. liberal. Here's Bradley:

Koyzis rightly points out that we all tend to waffle between idolatry and gnosticism in our political alignment. We are idolatrous when we believe that our political preference is the remedy for the world’s problems, and we are gnostic when we believe that competing ideologies are inherently evil. In an honest moment, I would confess that I do believe that my political ideology is right and all others are wrong because, at the end of the day, I think I’m always right. This is why I struggle with whether I am liberal or conservative. . . .

Liberalism starts with the fundamental belief in human autonomy, which means being self-directed and free to govern oneself in accordance with rules in which one willingly submits. The most basic principles of liberalism, according to Koyzis, is that everyone possesses property in their own person and must therefore be free to govern themselves in accordance with their own choices provided that those choices do not infringe on the equal right of others to pursue the same. Human persons should be free from coercion that favors one person or group’s preferences for another. As such, true liberals have a consistent aversion to government coercion in ways that conservatives do not.

I am pleased, of course, that Bradley appreciates my book. In response I would indicate that I am less concerned with what separates liberals and conservatives than I am with probing the spiritual roots of a number of ideologies, of which these are only two. In reality, liberalism and conservatism are not the opponents people generally think them to be. Liberalism is predicated on the assumption that all communities, including such basic institutions as state, church, marriage and family, are reducible to voluntary associations. Because conservatism is merely a tendency and, unlike liberalism, lacks a distinctive account of state and society, there is much overlap between the two. One can easily claim the conservative label and at the same time accept the contractarian account of the state. American conservatives, with their affection for their own founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence, are practically obligated to do so.

And, no, true liberals do not "have a consistent aversion to government coercion in ways that conservatives do not." At least not all of them do. This is the upshot of my tracing the development of liberalism through five stages beginning with the Hobbesian commonwealth, followed by the night-watchman state, the regulatory state, the equal-opportunity state and, finally, the choice-enhancement state. Because it is up to the parties to the contract to decide exactly what government should do, they are within their right to demand a full-blown welfare state, if they so desire. Yet they remain "true liberals," who simply take the logic of this position further than many professed liberals are willing to.

Bradley might wish to consider dropping altogether both conservative and liberal labels. If he admits that "there are some American conservative cultural traditions that America has benefited by extinguishing," then he may not be a conservative at all — at least not in the sense in which it is used on this side of the pond. Yet if he is willing to recognize, as I hope he is, that not all communities can be reduced to voluntary associations, he is almost certainly not a liberal either. At this point I refer him to the last three chapters of my book where I attempt to point to a way beyond the distortions of ideological thinking.

Canada's Grant family

Yes, after more than two decades, I still have my Canadian politics students reading George Parkin Grant's Lament for a Nation. It's not that I agree entirely with his argument. In fact, I think he severely shortchanges Canada's political institutions, as I wrote here five years ago: George Grant and the Primacy of Economics. Nevertheless, his views are worth taking seriously and grappling with.

It just so happens that Grant's nephew is the leader of the federal Liberal Party, a certain Michael Ignatieff, who has just published a book on his maternal ancestors, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada, an excerpt of which is published in Maclean's: Nation in progress. Robert Fulford thinks, not unreasonably, that Ignatieff is repackaging himself for the voters in this book: Ignatieff gives a shake to the family tree. Writing for Maclean's, John Geddes praises the book, perhaps too obsequiously: Michael Ignatieff’s ‘True Patriot Love’. In the Financial Post, Terence Corcoran claims that neither Ignatieff nor his late uncle had a real grasp of economics and markets: A true patriot of megaprojects.

Will this latest book endear Ignatieff to the Canadian public? Will he successfully convince them that his days as a rootless cosmopolitan are over and that he's finally returned to his roots? Or will they see this as a cynical ploy to gain political power in a country that has not been his for most of his nearly 62 years? Time will tell.

Ethnic nationalism and the 'normal' state

Given my family's painful experiences in the divided island of Cyprus, I have a continuing interest in the impact of the various forms of ethnic nationalism on politics. It is thus with considerable ambivalence that I read Jerry Z. Muller's Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. Here is the summary of the article:

Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.

I can readily agree with the first two statements, but the last one makes me uneasy. It's not so much that I think he's wrong empirically but that he is straining to find a good side to the massive uprooting of millions of people who lived on the "wrong" side of arbitrary borders. Is partition and what he euphemistically calls the disaggregation of peoples really the least bad option in many cases?

I can understand why Muller comes to this conclusion, but there are flaws in his argument. To begin with, his history is sometimes a little shaky. For example:

The conventional narrative of European history asserts that nationalism was primarily liberal in the western part of the continent and that it became more ethnically oriented as one moved east. There is some truth to this, but it disguises a good deal as well. It is more accurate to say that when modern states began to form, political boundaries and ethnolinguistic boundaries largely coincided in the areas along Europe's Atlantic coast. Liberal nationalism, that is, was most apt to emerge in states that already possessed a high degree of ethnic homogeneity. Long before the nineteenth century, countries such as England, France, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden emerged as nation-states in polities where ethnic divisions had been softened by a long history of cultural and social homogenization (emphasis mine).

The phrases I've italicized are problematic at best. France, for example, has always been linguistically diverse, including Basques, Bretons, Corsicans and vast numbers of speakers of Occitan or what has often been labelled the Langue d'oc in the south of the country. Homogenization was deliberately cultivated by the Bourbon monarchs over the course of more than two centuries and was continued by the post-revolution régimes. Much the same can be said of Spain, with its Castilian Spaniards, Catalan-speakers, Basques and Galicians. In this respect, José Ortega y Gasset is closer to the mark in recognizing that, historically speaking, the state has created the nation — at least in the west.

Yet the upshot of Muller's argument seems to be that the modern democratic welfare state depends on an internal homogeneity of the sort sought for and achieved by the ethnic nationalists of the 19th and 20th centuries:

These ethnically homogeneous polities have displayed a great deal of internal solidarity, moreover, facilitating government programs, including domestic transfer payments, of various kinds. When the Swedish Social Democrats were developing plans for Europe's most extensive welfare state during the interwar period, the political scientist Sheri Berman has noted, they conceived of and sold them as the construction of a folkhemmet, or "people's home."

The establishment of welfare states, with their pretence of implementing domestic social justice, seems to have come at the expense of creating millions of refugees — ethnic minorities, such as Greeks, Jews and Armenians, who were either more educated and entrepreneurially skilled than the majority population or became scapegoats simply because they were perceived to be "foreign." This seems a rather high price to be paid for "social justice" and it would appear to differ from Soviet-style communism only by degree rather than in kind.

I have a visceral distaste for Muller's argument, due primarily to the events of 1974 in Cyprus. Yet there may be something to it all the same. I quote Muller again: "Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer."

What if we were to understand this statement empirically instead of normatively? In my own Political Visions and Illusions I argue that accepting the idolatrous worldviews undergirding the ideologies will inevitably have social and political consequences. This is what I attempt to demonstrate in discussing the five stages in the development of liberalism in chapter two of this book. When people come to believe the false gospel of nationalism, they will inevitably incur the negative results of so doing. This may include the partition of one's own country and the loss of one's home, as cruel and painful as that may be to the ordinary people caught up in this. I do not believe it can ever be a just option in the normative political sense. Yet I have to wonder whether it might effectively constitute a kind of divine judgement on those who persist in investing the nation with redemptive hopes.

This is all the more reason to confront nationalistic claims when they occur, recognizing the legitimacy of communal solidarity while challenging those who would subordinate the diverse loyalties properly characterizing ordinary human life to the jealous demands of the god of nation.

William F. Buckley (1925-2008)

The death of William F. Buckley, the last true conservative, is prompting numerous appraisals of the movement he helped found and of his own legacy for that movement and beyond. Among the tributes is this one by Robert McDougall, which is noteworthy for unintentionally illustrating the ambiguity behind the conservative label. According to McDougall, Buckley promoted "individualism and its democratic benefits," was a free spirit, respecting anyone "who strove to live life on his own terms," and "called for the decriminalization of drugs."

In short, Buckley's conservatism was of the libertarian variety and, in this respect, quintessentially American. As it turns out, "the scourge of American liberalism," as the late Arthur Schlesinger dubbed him, was as much indebted to the broader liberal tradition as his "leftist" compatriots. This explains in large measure why a movement with so little substantive content has had such difficulty defeating an opponent with which it has so much in common.

Understanding worldviews

Of the making of worldview books there is no end, to paraphrase Qoheleth. A new one has just been published by Anglican Youthworks in Sydney, NSW, Australia: A Spectator’s Guide to Worldviews: 10 Ways of Understanding Life, edited by Simon Smart. The book as a whole is aimed at the late secondary or early tertiary (post-secondary in North America) student. Each chapter is devoted to a major worldview, including Christianity, modernism, postmodernism, utilitarianism, humanism, liberalism, feminism, relativism, new age spirituality and consumerism. Although I am less than happy with the use of "spectator" in the title (I would prefer something along the lines of "participant"), I am pleased to have written the chapter on liberalism, at the invitation of the editor.

The latest from Comment

Check out today's article in Comment, Living with Liberalism: six strategies for faithfulness, co-authored by a certain obscure Upper Canadian political scientist and his part-time colleague. Here's a brief snippet to whet the reader's appetite:

For Christians living in North America, the notion of being in exile may not seem immediately relevant. To be sure, we are still a covenant people, but we are not defined by ethnicity or attachment to a particular piece of land. Nevertheless, Augustine's recognition that we are severed from the tranquility of order—and even our own recognition of the brokenness of our communities—should confirm the continuing reality of exile. The need to pray continually to the LORD for the larger communities in which we find ourselves—as well as acting on their behalf—is at the heart of living as a Christian in a society dominated by any secular ideology, including liberalism.

The sixties and the evolution of liberalism

Two years ago I came across this fascinating article by Bruce Bawer in The Wilson Quarterly: The Other Sixties, about that brief era wedged between the ostensibly mindless conformity of the 1950s and the turbulent "Sixties", with its drug culture, angry anti-war protests, and aggressive student rebellion against authority. The early 1960s roughly corresponds to the John F. Kennedy administration in the United States and its immediate aftermath, a time of idealism, a sophisticated blend of high and middle-brow culture, and widespread expectations for the efficacy of a variety of liberal reforms. It was the era of Kennedy's New Frontier, the Peace Corps, the New Math, and the quests to reach (literally) for the moon, to combat poverty and to end racial discrimination. Pope John XXIII headed the Roman Catholic Church, and the Second Vatican Council was bringing the winds of change into an ancient institution. Almost simultaneously European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere was being wound down, with high hopes expressed for these newly liberated nation-states. Setting the tone for the arts and entertainment were Jack Paar and The Dick Van Dyke Show on that still new medium of television; Leonard Bernstein's classic musical play, West Side Story; Julia Child's popularization of continental cuisine in a meat-and-potatoes culinary culture; and the fashionable Kennedies themselves. Films like The Apartment and Breakfast at Tiffany's began quietly to break sexual taboos, and Alfred Hitchcock's deliberately shocking Psycho marked a departure from his string of suspense hits of the previous decade.


Bawer's essay is less an analysis than a compelling evocation of an era marked at once by innocence and sophistication. As someone whose elementary school years coincided with this period, I believe he has done a good job of conveying to a contemporary audience something of its feel. Indeed Dick Van Dyke was (and remains) one of my favourite television shows, even if my juvenile mind did not quite grasp all of its humour at the time. I well recall the arrival of the New Math and other innovations in my own educational experience. Long before PowerPoint, overhead projectors were a fresh and exciting way to communicate knowledge to youngsters. Then there were Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Although my parents were moderately conservative Republicans — this was, after all, DuPage County, Illinois — I recall being told by them that those seeking equal rights for black Americans were unequivocally in the right. I have few memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis as such, but I do recall the global tensions characterizing the Cold War era and wondering whether my siblings and I would live to see adulthood. The idealism of the era was thus tempered by a vague and unprecedented fear for the future — a fear that at any moment our whole world might evaporate in a terrifying flash.

All of this began to change with Kennedy's assassination on friday, 22 November 1963, an event that marked a watershed for our generation. After that things were never quite the same. As I reached puberty a few years later, race riots were marring the landscapes of the major urban centres, and university students were protesting an Asian war that dragged on with no evident larger purpose. The sexual revolution unnervingly coincided with my own attainment of sexual maturity, and the entire culture seemed to be conspiring against the virtue of chastity, especially in the young. Rock music took on an increasingly hard edge, hair grew longer, and school dress codes went out the window as "nonconformist" young people donned the ubiquitous and standardizing blue jeans. The idealistic world in which I had been raised had been quickly supplanted by one where, despite the hope that "peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars," a bohemian ethos of "do your own thing" made the defenders of social institutions and their larger public purposes appear hopelessly "square." Bawer ends his article with the summer of 1967 and the hippies in Tompkins Square Park in New York — a poignant glimpse into the next era.


While Bawer's portrait of the early 1960s is unabashedly nostalgic, James Piereson has a much less rosy portrait of the period and its immediate aftermath: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up. Oswald was, of course, Kennedy's assassin, and Piereson argues that this professed communist and Castro sympathizer did more than anything else to discredit the moderate liberal reformism characterizing what would shortly come to be called "Camelot." The irony for Piereson is that many of the young who had been so enthralled by Kennedy's vision of a New Frontier would come a few years later to espouse doctrines not dissimilar to those animating his murderer under the guise of the New Left. Furthermore, while prior to 1963 liberalism in some fashion seemed to be in the ascendancy in the United States, with conservatism being relegated to the cranky right, the distortions of the late sixties and early seventies produced a reactive response that led to the rise of a new conservatism, initially under President Richard Nixon with his famous "silent majority," and eventually under Ronald Reagan after 1980. By the 1990s and into the first years of the 21st century the United States appeared to be permanently divided in a culture war between "red states" and "blue states," thus mirroring a much earlier development in the European continent following the French Revolution. The seeming liberal consensus of the early sixties had been replaced by hardened divisions over a host of issues, including abortion, marriage and homosexuality.

None of this could have been predicted in 1960. At that time the old New Deal coalition was still largely intact, although southern whites' loyalty to the Democratic Party was definitely eroding over racial segregation and civil rights. This coalition revolved largely around concrete economic issues — the very issues that had served to define the political landscape since the onset of the Great Depression a generation earlier. By this time the Republican Party had gained its reputation as the party of the "haves" and the Democratic Party was perceived to champion the "have nots." The industrial economy that had begun after the Civil War still characterized much of American life. A few miles from where I grew up the Elgin National Watch Company's factory was still standing and producing watches, as it had for nearly a century. In nearby Villa Park, the Ovaltine Company's plant was still producing its famous egg and malt-based beverage for the country. And the Union Stock Yard on the southwest side of Chicago continued to supply much of the meat that fed the region. Moreover, the country's transportation infrastructure still revolved around the railways, which fanned out in all directions from America's Second City. Famous passenger trains such as the Twentieth Century Limited and the Super Chief still rolled down the tracks towards their destinations.


By the middle of the decade all this was clearly changing. The Elgin Watch factory closed in 1965. Rail passenger service was mostly discontinued by the end of the decade, until Amtrak picked up the remnants in 1971. By the 1970s much of the old industrial infrastructure was, if not entirely gone, at least fading in significance for the larger economy, as increasing numbers of Americans found themselves employed in the growing service industries. So-called post-material values took over the two major political parties, especially the Democrats. By 1972 the transition was nearly complete. Once I had reached high school I was aware of living in a different world than the one I was born into. So much had things changed that the 1973 film American Graffiti could wax nostalgic about an era only a decade in the past. What had happened and why?

Francis Fukuyama argues, in The Great Disruption, that there is a causal connection between the changing economy and the changing social mores, with the former mostly effecting the latter. While this may not be precisely a marxist argument, it certainly shares with Marx the conviction that man is homo faber, man the producer, with concrete productive forces fuelling social and political change. In this account the shift from the industrial to the service economy in the 1960s disrupted the social mores that had held sway from the middle of the 19th century, leading in the short run to higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, higher crime rates and drug abuse, on the negative side, but at the same time expanded opportunities for minorities and women, and an increasing environmental awareness, on the positive side. Fukuyama's undergirding argument is historicistic in that it assumes that social mores are dependent on and appropriate to a particular stage in the productive process.

While I would not deny the material motives that Fukuyama points to, I myself have come to think that what happened four decades ago was in large measure due to the arrival of a crucial moment in the development of the liberal project that had begun in the 17th and 18th centuries. In my Political Visions and Illusions I trace the development of liberalism through five stages, beginning with the Hobbesian commonwealth, through the night watchman state, the regulatory state and the equal-opportunity state and finally to the choice-enhancement state. My argument is that the cultural shifts of the 1960s marked the transition between the fourth and fifth stages — from a focus on the expansion of material opportunities through state intervention to an emphasis on expanding the human capacity to choose, period. In the choice-enhancement state, government undertakes to maintain a benign neutrality towards a variety of personal lifestyle choices, ostensibly on the grounds of freeing individuals from oppressive constraints on their freedom. Hence Pierre Trudeau could claim that the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, a conclusion difficult to contest on the surface. Yet personal choices are not without consequences, not only for the individuals themselves but also for their immediate and extended communities. These consequences are by no means equal in their impact on the larger society, with some more evidently diminishing of human flourishing than others. Therefore, in order to maintain the illusion of equality of lifestyle choices, the state is called upon to compensate for these unequal consequences by means of the very welfare state programmes established during the previous stage of liberalism for different reasons.

Could Bawer's "other sixties" simply have been the high water mark, not of liberalism per se, but of liberalism's fourth stage, in which adherents believed it possible to bring its larger project to culmination while limiting the full working out of its inner logic? If so, then what happened in the mid to late sixties represented not really an abandonment of liberalism but the opening of a cleavage between those who wanted to push its logic further still (the radicals, hippies, &c.) and those who sought to return to an earlier stage of liberalism (the so-called conservatives). Because the conservatives were merely reactive and sought to turn back the clock on the liberal project rather than to posit a genuine alternative, they could never manage to secure a victory against a liberalism whose undergirding assumptions they themselves in large measure shared. Bawer's nostalgia notwithstanding, the "other sixties" could never have been but one brief, shining moment.

Russian church takes on liberalism

Igor Torbakov reports on the Tenth World Council of Russian People, and particularly on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church: RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH CHALLENGES "WESTERN" CONCEPT OF HUMAN RIGHTS. Torbakov charges the church with reviving the old threefold creed of Tsar Nicholas I: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality. This is from his report:

The Council's participants forcefully denounced a "distorted vision of human rights" that they claim has become prevalent in the West. Two aspects of the Western liberal concept seem to be particularly alien to Orthodox beliefs. First, the Council blasted the idea of "moral autonomy." The modern understanding of human rights postulates that an individual's moral autonomy can be limited only by the autonomy of other individuals: there is no supreme authority that can help distinguish between good and evil. Such a vision is unacceptable to the Russian Orthodox Church, which holds that turning the sovereignty and rights of a separate individual into an absolute value without the counterbalance of moral responsibility will lead to the demise of modern civilization.

The second controversial aspect of the European liberal model, according to Russian Orthodoxy, is its assertion that an individual's rights are superior to the interests of any collectivity. "There are values that are no less important than human rights," defiantly declares the statement adopted by the Council. "These are faith, ethics, [national] sacraments, Fatherland."

Not having seen a translation of the new Declaration of Human Dignity and Rights adopted by the Council, I cannot say whether Torbakov's fears are justified. However, if this report is at all accurate in its account of the two points mentioned above, then I admit to agreeing with these points, at least on the surface. On "moral autonomy," there are plenty of westerners who would resonate with the Council's expressed opposition, including Christians, observant Jews and professed communitarians. Neocalvinists would be numbered amongst the Christians in this group.

As for the second point, I too would oppose the notion that individual rights automatically trump the rights of communities. This is the crux of my disagreement with Michael Ignatieff's professed individualism. However, I would want to know whether the Declaration understands that in a healthy society the responsible agents, including communities, are always pluriform and ought not to be viewed as so many arms of the "Fatherland" or the national state. I would also wish to determine whether it makes a place for a legitimate sphere of individual responsibility. If it does not, then it may be guilty of tossing out the good with the bad in its efforts to combat liberalism.

Indeed, because the Russian Orthodox Church is well known to favour official restrictions on the work of Catholic and protestant churches within its "canonical territory," there is reason to suspect that the Declaration does not make a ringing endorsement of religious freedom. But until an English translation is published, we will not know this for certain.

Cere on Ignatieff

It seems McGill University's Daniel Cere has come to the same conclusion about Michael Ignatieff as yours truly, as indicated here: Not much new in Ignatieff's vision of liberalism, which is in fact virtually identical to that of the late Pierre Trudeau. Cere writes:

[F]or Mr. Ignatieff the basic institutions of civil society - family and religion - present serious threats to human freedom. His brand of liberalism tears down the firewall between the state and civil society. "Rights," Mr. Ignatieff argues, "are meaningful only if they confer entitlements and immunities on individuals; they are worth having only if they can be enforced against institutions like the family, the state and the church." Rights are to be used as swords against core spheres of civil society, not shields to protect them.

But here's the rub. Who gets to wield this powerful sword of rights against family and religion? Who else, but the righteous Liberal state through its courts and legislatures? In short, individuals are to be liberated by the coercive power of the state. The aggressive implications of this approach are outlined in Mr. Ignatieff's discussion of family culture in "The Rights Revolution," part of the Massey Lectures series. Mr. Ignatieff argues that we need to bring "rights talk" into the bedrooms of the nation. Rights, he insists, must be used to re-engineer society's most basic social relationships between women and men, parents and children.

This brand of liberalism wants to use the state to impose its own social vision on society: to create a society composed of autonomous individuals, freely forging, dissolving and reforging their relationships. In this view, the state must be constantly working to weaken those civil society institutions that get in the way of this free-wheeling individualism.

Although I cannot share Cere's apparent enthusiasm for John Locke and John Rawls, I believe he is correct to alert Canadians to the possible negative ramifications of an Ignatieff premiership.

Demography and 'patriarchy'

My good friend Richard Greydanus draws our attention to Phillip Longman's Foreign Policy article, The Return of Patriarchy. Longman argues that, in a society which spurns patriarchy, the birthrate inevitably declines. On the other hand, those conservative subcultures affirming patriarchy continue to have children and over the long term will overtake the ostensibly progressive people who are procreating at below replacement level. Greydanus is critical of this thesis, arguing that Longman has made population stability a golden calf. I doubt that's an entirely justified critique, and I suspect that the term patriarchy is posing something of an obstacle to a fair reading of Longman.

Jennifer Roback Morse makes an argument similar to Longman's but avoids this hot-button word. Her focus is the failure of the European welfare state, which, despite providing "economic subsidies to child-bearing", has been unsuccessful in pushing up the birthrate because it is "attempting to replace the father." If one focusses, not on patriarchy with its connotations of male domination, but on the crucial role of fathers in society, then Longman's thesis might be more easily heard.

While the welfare state need not be intrinsically anti-family, most of the existing models are indeed predicated on the assumption that individuals should be able to make choices in a variety of settings irrespective of familial and marital obligations. This corresponds to what I have elsewhere called the choice-enhancement state, the fifth stage in the historic development of liberalism. While the socialist welfare state is communitarian in focus, undertaking to protect the working class, as a class, from the abuses of the market, the late liberal welfare state tries to cushion individuals, irrespective of their lifestyle choices, from their destructive consequences. Thus the state is free to redefine even the most central of institutions, such as marriage and family, because it is naïvely assumed that the largesse of the welfare state will compensate for the inevitable social fallout of such redefinitions.

Yet in subverting family and marriage, the late liberal welfare state appears to be eroding its own undergirding foundations. Demographic collapse is one consequence of this, and a notable one at that. Others have noted the decline south of the border in support for abortion on demand, as the pro-choice segment of the citizenry steadily declines due to a failure to bring forth a generation to which to bequeath the pro-choice vision. One need hardly be guilty of making an idol of population stability for merely pointing out that a healthy civilization depends upon the existence of sufficient numbers of people to keep it going.

Although I am not a nostalgist for a premodern past, I sometimes wonder whether western societies went wrong in leaving marriage and family up to the devices of individuals. I myself am only two generations removed from arranged marriage. While I do not favour bringing this back, it is far from evident that the love match is a better basis for a healthy marriage. Over the long term can a civilization survive that leaves an institution so crucial to its perpetuation to the vagaries of individuals falling in and out of love? Does marriage become just one more lifestyle choice amongst others? And if so, does childbearing take on a similar status?

Perhaps it's time for Christians in particular to be more proactive in encouraging their young people to marry and in readying them for the responsibilities of marriage. Might a christian university such as Redeemer have a role to play in this? What about churches? In the past I might have played down such a possibility, but now I'm not so sure.

Marriage as public good

Here is a book that looks to be worth reading: The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals, edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Jennifer Roback Morse's essay looks especially good, as she argues that the weakening of marriage to a mere private contract began already some 40 years ago with the advent of no-fault divorce. Her analysis of how the attenuation of so basic an institution has led to an expansion of the welfare state accords rather well with my own diagnosis of the choice enhancement state, the 5th historic stage in the development of liberalism.

Feser on liberal tribalism

Given the topic of my last two posts, it would seem appropriate to call attention to this trenchant review by Edward Feser of Amy Gutmann's Identity in Democracy. Some years ago I wrote a review of Gutmann and Dennis Thompson's book, Democracy and Disagreement, so I know something of the flavour of Gutmann's argument. She is a proponent of what I have labelled the choice-enhancement state, the fifth, and thus far final, stage in the historic development of liberalism. In Feser's words, here is the dilemma posed by this brand of liberalism:

Liberals are, accordingly, criticized both for promoting too much freedom and for allowing too little. In particular, they are accused of attempting to impose, in the name of equal freedom for all ways of life in modern democratic societies, a radical egalitarianism that effectively allows no one to disapprove of anyone else’s way of life. But since almost any way of thinking and acting with any substantial content involves disagreement with some other ways of thinking and acting, this requires that the only point of view that can be allowed to flourish in a polity informed by the liberal-egalitarian ethos is the liberal-egalitarian ethos itself. Modern liberalism thus seems to its critics to be an incoherent mess, and to entail in practice the negation of liberty and equality as those terms are understood by everyone but liberals themselves.

Sound familiar? We just read something of this incoherence in Ferguson's CBC commentary. Gutmann tries to find a way out of this mess, but Feser judges that she has failed miserably. In fact, she flirts with the same sorts of measures Ferguson advocates. Feser's conclusion is to the point:

So should we conclude that the Catholic Church, say, ought to be forced to ordain women and that Catholic schools should be forced to teach children that there are alternative paths to salvation, regardless of what 2,000 years of popes have taught?

If we fear we know already how a frank and consistent liberal would have to respond, that is because liberals seem to have become exactly what they claim most to despise: a narrow-minded tribe of bigots, merely one “identity group” alongside others eager to impose their own idiosyncratic and highly contestable scruples on everyone else. Why the rest of us ought to regard such liberal tribalism as any better than the other kinds is a question to which Gutmann gives no answer.

Shaw's amusing freethinkers

Yesterday Nancy and I spent the day in lovely Niagara-on-the-Lake, an historic community not quite an hour away which served as the first capital of Upper Canada at the end of the 18th century. Now it is a scenic and heavily touristed town boasting beautiful parks and gardens, quaint horse-drawn carriages, 19th-century architecture and, most notably, the Shaw Festival. The Shaw Festival consists of a series of theatres presenting stage plays written either by George Bernard Shaw himself (1856-1950) or by other playwrights during the nearly century-long course of his life. The Festival has run from April through October every year since 1962.


Today in Literature

George Bernard Shaw

Yesterday we saw Shaw's You Never Can Tell, which was first performed in 1898. Although I've not made a study of Shaw and his writings, I find him a fascinating figure because he is in many ways the paradigmatic 19th-century freethinker who retained much of the charm and naïveté of his type well into a very different age. He was, of course, one of the leading figures in Britain's socialistic Fabian Society, along with the likes of H. G. Wells and Sydney and Beatrice Webb. Out of all Shaw's works, I have personally seen, in addition to this play, Major Barbara (at the Shaw and on the screen) and the cinematic version of Pygmalion. And of course everyone has seen the latter's musical version, My Fair Lady. I may have seen one or two others as well over the decades.

You Never Can Tell is a comedy populated by amusing and eccentric characters, its plot revolving around a search for a lost father, a dentist unable to make a living on his own devices, an unlikely romance between a cad and a woman with "modern" ideas and, last but not least, changing mores at the end of a bourgeois century. Despite being well acted, yesterday's performance got off to a somewhat slow start, but Shaw's witty dialogue successfully carried the second half.

One of the characters is Finch M'Comas, a one-time bohemian in his youth who, by the time he has reached middle age, has cut his hair and donned a suit to become the Clandon family's solicitor. Here is M'Comas responding to Mrs. Clandon on their first meeting in many years:

You reproached me just now for having become respectable. You were wrong: I hold to our old opinions as strongly as ever. I don't go to church; and I don't pretend I do. I call myself what I am: a Philosophic Radical, standing for liberty and the rights of the individual, as I learnt to do from my master Herbert Spencer. Am I howled at? No: I'm indulged as an old fogey. I'm out of everything, because I've refused to bow the knee to Socialism.

With my interest in political ideologies, I like this line because it illustrates the way one philosophical school, considered trendy by one generation, is so quickly supplanted by another in the next. Spencer's social darwinism may have seemed the cutting edge of progressive opinion when it was first articulated, but socialists had by the end of the century effectively sidelined it as retrogressive. One wonders from this line whether Shaw might have had an intimation that his own socialist commitments might one day be deemed old-fashioned and superseded by something new.

It is also worth noting that this play's freethinkers all appear to have independent means. Most seem not to have to work for a living, and those who do are in the employ of those who don't. The lesson? If you are wealthy enough, you can indulge in all the freethinking and lifestyle eccentricities you wish, simply because you have the material resources to support them and are freed from the poverty to which such quirks will inevitably lead those of ordinary means. How many colourful eccentrics would Shaw have found amongst the Welsh coalminers of his day or the striking Pullman workers a few years earlier in far off Chicago? Not many, I venture to say. In a society characterized by widespread affluence, might such eccentrics multiply endlessly, with freethinking becoming the norm rather than the exception? Perhaps. It certainly seems to be the case that our society is more tolerant than were previous generations of social experimentation because the latter appears — at least in the short term — to have few if any deleterious consequences for that society as a whole.

All the same, if extensive affluence makes everyone a potential eccentric, it cannot make everyone a George Bernard Shaw. Shaw's plays are worth reading and, if you have the opportunity, viewing on stage. If you're ever in southern Ontario, the Shaw Festival is the place to see them.

On liberalism, again

Some time ago I discovered a webpage containing a bibliography of articles relevant to Christianity and liberalism, including links to the articles themselves. Although it is titled, The Catholic Church & The Liberal Tradition - Contributions to the Debate, there is much of value to followers of Jesus Christ in other traditions as well. Incidentally, there is also a link to my own Christianity and Liberalism: Two Alternative Religious Approaches, published last year in the New Pantagruel. It seems that of writing on liberalism there is no end.

Consumerism and the choice-enhancement state

Our resident Latin-rite Calvinist has posted three intriguing pieces in a row, two of which address the impact of consumerism in our society, including the christian churches. Drawing on my colleague, Craig Bartholomew, who has written on the subject in a book called Christ and Consumerism, Mr. Joustra makes the following observations:

Consumerism is more than shopping, and more than economic habits. Some authors have placed consumerism as an ideological subset of individualism; that is our lifestyles of consumption focus themselves on our ego, in which our possessions serve as worshipers. However, the relationship in the current age has been reversed. No longer do possessions serve the individual, but, as one author notes, "consumption has now become the dominant faith and individualism, together with other subordinate commitments, serves it. Consumption is collectivist-individualist, nationalist-internationalist, the healer, the entertainer, the lover, the spiritual, the feeder and the consolation. It is the chief rival to God in our culture."

Although I do not treat consumerism per se in my Political Visions and Illusions, I wonder whether its political manifestation might not correspond to what I have called the choice-enhancement state, that is, the fifth and latest stage in the development of liberalism. There is an undergirding assumption in our culture that it is good for individuals to have an expanding array of choices set before them, much like a buffet table with a variety of edible delicacies to tempt the palate. Politically this assumption translates into two possibilities: (1) government should free up the economic marketplace to allow individuals to pursue their own rational self-interest; or (2) government should intervene to expand the number of choices available to individuals and to compensate for the inevitable negative side-effects of those choices. In any event, it is taken as axiomatic that governments should not pursue policies supportive of some choices over others, lest it become an oppressive legislator of the good life. That choice might entail obligations or responsibilities does not enter the picture. Over the long term this is a recipe, not for freedom, but ultimately for tyranny.

The future of liberalism

John Leo asks whether liberalism can survive? He argues that contemporary liberals have adopted the moral relativism of what I would call the choice-enhancement state while appealing to the legacy of the equal-opportunity state associated with Roosevelt's New Deal. Yet one wonders whether Leo's argument is with liberalism per se or only with its latest incarnation. Most American critics of liberalism cannot manage to mount a truly radical critique, assuming that turning the clock back to liberalism's earlier stages will somehow heal the disease. It won't.

Rogers' critique: a response

As promised, here is my response to James R. Rogers' brief review of my book. Three of his points would appear to call for some reply, which I shall try to keep as brief as the review itself.

First, liberalism is too diverse a phenomenon to be placed in what might be called a single worldview category, particularly one tarred with the label of idolatry.

To be sure, not every use of the adjective liberal necessarily implies an adherence to liberalism as an ideology. Even amongst ideological liberals, there can be no doubt that adherents claim to believe different things, especially with respect to practical policies. It is also true, finally, that real flesh and blood persons tend to mix and match from among the different ideologies somewhat eclectically. Yet for analytical purposes there is something to be said for treating ideologies in their "pure" forms. If I were writing the book again, I might emphasize the narrative structure of the worldviews underlying the ideologies, much as I did in my recent posts on John Locke's political philosophy. Such an approach might better illustrate the hazards of philosophical (and ultimately spiritual) eclecticism with respect to the ideologies.

There is much more that I could say on this point, of course, but I suspect that Rogers is simply averse to the notion that liberalism, which many Americans are inclined to identify indiscriminately with freedom per se, has deeper spiritual underpinnings and an internal logic which tends to move it in the direction of the leviathan state. But without a more detailed critique, I cannot say for certain whether this is the case.

Second, there is too little of Jesus Christ in my treatment.

My suspicion is that Rogers has been influenced in some fashion by Karl Barth. Barth was famously averse to the idea of a normative creation order and preferred to filter ethics -- and politics as well -- through christology. I did not see fit to spend a lot of time in a book about politics interacting with the great Swiss theologian, but as I was reading the relevant sections of his massive Church Dogmatics several years ago it struck me that Barth's ethics presupposed a normative understanding of creation even as he denied it. One could simply not come to the conclusions Barth came to on the basis of christology alone. Moreover, an emphasis on redemption without a solid grounding in creational limits and possibilities is likely to lead in an antinomian direction.

At the same time, although I am far from being a Barthian, my focus on the central biblical narrative of creation, fall and redemption in chapter 7 can only be understood within the context of the saving work of Jesus Christ. It is possible that Rogers' objection is not so much to a supposed lack of reference to Jesus Christ as to the notion that redemption in Jesus Christ is cosmic in scope and has concrete creational implications. But again I can only guess at this based on such brief comments.

Third, I have failed to flesh out the practical implications of my proposed christian democratic approach.

Although my initial instinct is to be charitable even to a critic, this third point is difficult to take seriously and would appear to come from either a fairly young scholar or someone in a more practically-oriented field or subfield. It is scarcely newsworthy that every book works within limits. The lack of a detailed legislative agenda flowing out of my proposed christian democratic approach simply means that the book represents an effort to lay theoretical foundations, which others may then proceed to flesh out. An author can hardly be faulted for not writing the book the reviewer wishes he had written.

However, as a matter of fact, much of this fleshing out has already been done and is currently being done by others, as Rogers himself could easily have discovered with a little more effort on his part. He would have done well to read some of the works listed in my bibliography to see how others in the neocalvinst tradition have drawn out policy implications. He might also have perused the website of the Center for Public Justice, whose on-going work my book is intended to support. Political Visions and Illusions was never intended to stand alone; it is rather part of a particular christian tradition of theory and practice. It is thus designed to complement the work of a number of people and organizations standing within this tradition.

More could be said, I suppose, but I think this is probably sufficient for now.