Scott Nelson’s review of The Roots of Liberalism might leave one to wonder whether smart people should bother to read my book. “The overly analytical reader … will search in vain for evidence of liberalism’s older intellectual tradition.” Again, I prefer “stories, anecdotes, and literature to a rigidly intellectual analysis.”
What Nelson omits to mention is that I devote one chapter on the impossibility of providing an intellectual justification for liberalism, and another two chapters on the ideas of the Scottish Moral Sense philosophers. Along the way, I also take aim at Kantian and Rawlsian liberalism.
There’s extensive literature on what a state must do if it wishes to be called liberal. Left unexplained, however, is why a state should care to do so. Political philosophers begin by assuming that everyone is equal and that we’re all endowed with a right to respect and say that liberalism follows from this. But where did the egalitarianism and rights come from? We’re more intelligent than animals, but then some of us are more intelligent than others and that points to inequalities rather than to equality. On any metric one can think of, what we’ll observe are differences and not similarities.
Nelson also fails to note that I take particular aim at the anti-liberals on the right, who indeed are the people who prompted me to write my book. For example, conservative John Kekes says that liberals have an “evil problem” because they believe that personal autonomy trumps virtue. We get to do what we want, however nasty that might be. But liberals needn’t believe this. John Stuart Mill explicitly denied it. The liberal gets to do this because he does not identify his creed with autonomy or think that the answer to evil is more autonomy. The overarching desideratum for liberals like Mill is not autonomy but the common good. What makes them liberals is their belief that personal autonomy is one element of the common good. As such, they are not required to answer the anti-liberal’s charge of immoralism. Rather, the onus of explanation lies with the conservative anti-liberal to tell us why he objects to totalitarianism, if autonomy isn’t a good.
Some on the right would have us believe that rational egoism might supply a foundation for liberalism. Montesquieu said something like that, and so did David Gauthier. The rational egoist thinks we should always act in such a way as to advance our self-interest. We shouldn’t lie, cheat, or steal because word will get out and this will ruin our reputation. However, this can’t explain why we should care about the unborn, the mentally impaired, or people we’ll never meet. Animal cruelty would be permissible. Rational egoism is the morality of clever sociopaths and doesn’t even count as a moral theory.
Randists on the right are rational egoists, but that doesn’t necessarily make them selfish. They might be better than their moral code, and many of them are. But the point is that, if they’re wholly selfish they can’t be faulted, not from the perspective of rational egoism.
Others on the right look to natural law. However, Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is principle is accepted by most moral philosophers, including “New Natural Lawyers” (NNL) such as Germain Grisez. But that leaves NNL with nothing better than rational egoism. As Grisez puts it, “one must do something good if he is to act intelligently at all.” NNL’s insular Catholic thinkers might have had second thoughts had they gotten out more often and recognized the overlap between their ideas and those of Ayn Rand.
Liberalism is not a brilliant idea. It is a set of understandings, hunches, and intuitions about how we should act and they inform our ideas about the common good, kindness, and fraternity.
If moral philosophy can’t tell us who is a rights-bearer, neither can it tell us what the content of the rights might be. To where then does one turn? My answer is the sense of empathy and benevolence shared by everyone save the sociopath, which the Moral Sense philosophers took as foundational.
From the fact that most of us feel benevolent, I can’t derive a duty of benevolence, not without violating the No-Ought-From-Is principle. No matter, however. In my search for the roots of liberalism, the idea of benevolence helps one get started. When I dug further, I found that liberalism began not with political philosophers such as John Locke but centuries before, in the sense of benevolence found in our culture’s institutions and longings. It’s not an ideology that stands above our practices and judges them, but a practice itself, and its content is found in the adventures of moral heroes and a literature about kindness.
The Code of Chivalry was a proto-version of the Geneva Convention. The nobility of individualism was something we learned in school from Pericles’ Funeral Oration. I found in the Jesuit Relations a catechism of liberalism. From stories about wanderers, I learned that everything begins with a Joseph looking for a manger, and that this is a source of liberalism. Cardinal Newman taught me that gentlemen were liberals, and Booker T. Washington gave content to the idea of large and liberal leaning. My instinct to laugh at Bergson’s machine men tells me that illiberalism is risible. From Pascal and James Hogg I learned to question Pelagians and those who think themselves justified sinners. The Judeo-Christian tradition taught us that women were not property to be sold in marriage, and that we were to be judged as individuals and not as members of a tribe. If the idea of equality doesn’t come from religion, I don’t know where it comes from. And yes, I learned more about social justice from Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the Little Match Girl than ever I did from any philosopher. Finally, the liberalism of the Founders, as restated by Abraham Lincoln, constitutes our identities as Americans and taught me that that which is not liberal is not American.
Liberalism isn’t buried in an irretrievable past. Rather, it’s embedded in the present, in actively remembered heroes such as the Black Prince and in the modern superheroes who are their exemplars. The dead don’t go anywhere. They’re all here, said Isaac Bashevis Singer. And so we live in a country populated by the liberal heroes we bring to mind, Washington and Lincoln, Eisenhower and John Kennedy. They’re real presences, and still with us.
Lewis Namier said that no great historical problem has ever been solved by a brilliant idea. But then liberalism is not a brilliant idea. Rather, it is a set of understandings, hunches, and intuitions about how we should act, and, while we can’t link them to a deeper touchstone of the good or place them in a philosophic literature, they inform our ideas about the common good, kindness, and fraternity. They come from a variety of sources: a general instinct of benevolence, religious belief, the way in which commerce softens our morals, nationalism, and many more. It’s not necessary to pick one of them as determinative or even to rank them. As one goes through them, however, one recognizes how profoundly Western culture is liberal and how much illiberalism cuts against the grain for its members.
Nelson was looking for one big thing, like Archilochus’ hedgehog. But that thing doesn’t exist, and like a fox, the liberal must know many things.
