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Over the last few days, I\u2019ve been reading Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar\u2019s interesting little book Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation<\/a><\/em>. What makes the book particularly compelling is the fact that it was written in 2014\u2014years before the \u201cpopulist turn\u201d that launched the UK out of the European Union and put Donald Trump in the White House. Biggar\u2019s volume is, at bottom, a Christian defense of the principles of liberal democracy\u2014but those principles are not exactly conceived in American terms.<\/p>\nIn particular, Biggar argues that one of the UK\u2019s key political strengths is its establishment of the Church of England as its national church. First, he notes (correctly) that all political decisions are traceable back to first principles with profoundly theological implications, and that it is far better for a government to be transparent about that fact than to attempt to mask it in secular language. Second, drawing on substantial survey data, he points out that there is surprisingly little public opposition to this sort of low-octane establishment, and that members of minority religious groups are likely to find the state\u2019s public embrace of religion\u2014even a faith not their own\u2014as far more reassuring than a state-enforced secularism (as in France). The net result of this dynamic, Biggar contends, is a polity steeped in latent faith that can properly ground any talk of human rights and values.<\/p>\n
Now, there are plenty of other things that could be said about the strengths or weaknesses of this model\u2014after all, UK citizens are not exactly packing the pews of England\u2019s historic churches. But in the context of American political thought, it\u2019s a fascinating issue to contemplate\u2014primarily because, thanks to the First Amendment, no one\u2019s ever put something similar on the table as an argumentative option.<\/p>\n
Along these same lines, I\u2019ve also been reading about the curious case of F\u00e9licit\u00e9 Lamennais, a French Catholic philosopher who argued simultaneously for ultramontanism\u2014the principle that the Pope is absolutely supreme over church councils and temporal monarchs alike\u2014and for a robust regime of civil liberties protections in any society governed by the Church. (His proposal was slapped down by Pope Gregory XVI\u2019s 1832 encyclical Mirari vos<\/em>.) This too strikes me as worthy of further investigation, primarily because it serves as proof-of-concept for a theologically informed \u201csoft integralism\u201d\u2014an acknowledgment that the state may have a role to play in promoting moral virtue (and even advancing Catholicism!) but that the state ought not rule with a heavy hand.<\/p>\n For those who\u2019ve been following the rift in American social conservatism for a while now\u00a0 (I hate to call the two camps the \u201cFrench\u201d and \u201cAhmari\u201d factions, but there you have it), these sorts of political ideas are real category-scramblers. In particular, they allow two important, interrelated hypotheses to be posed:<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019m certain that those in the Catholic integralist camp will write off this sort of talk as merely more \u201cliberalism.\u201d \u00a0For a lot of folks who take the \u201cliberalism is heresy\u201d line, it\u2019s obvious that the appeal of premodern politics is rooted in a general feeling of disgust with the perceived decadence of the contemporary world\u2014and so it\u2019s necessary to bring back the specific <\/em>pattern of morals enforcement that prevailed during the Middle Ages. In other words, it\u2019s either Pornhub or the Inquisition.<\/p>\n But obviously this is a false dilemma. Lurking beneath the surface of many debates over \u201cliberalism\u201d is some version of John Henry Newman\u2019s adage<\/a> that there is \u201cno medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity\u201d\u2014or, in this context, that there\u2019s no medium between nihilistic decadence and medieval totalitarianism. On this front, Biggar makes a particularly salient point that\u2019s worth reproducing in full:<\/p>\n Even medieval Christendom\u2014now a secularist byword for violent, authoritarian repression\u2014allowed public space for disagreement and tolerated the expression of controversial views. If that were not so, then there would have been no scholastic disputations in the universities. The difference between pre-modern Christian societies and contemporary liberal ones is a matter of degree, not kind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s worth pausing for a moment to let this insight sink in. The central questions of politics\u2014including \u201chow much freedom is too much freedom?\u201d\u2014simply can\u2019t be written off as manifestations of \u201cliberalism\u201d or a denial that there is indeed a common good. Rather, they are baked into politics as such.<\/p>\n And this means that you can\u2019t solve the problem of \u201cpeople misusing their freedom\u201d by reverting to a prior historical moment. As I\u2019ve written<\/a> before, the ideas that many intellectual historians associate with the rise of modernity\u2014the \u201cunivocity of being,\u201d nominalism, and so forth\u2014arose in the context of scholastic disputations.\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s a common refrain among critics of \u201cliberalism\u201d that modern-day infringements on religious liberty and other cultural pathologies are simply the \u201cunfolding of liberalism\u2019s inner logic.\u201d But historically speaking, one can make a good argument that secularization was actually the \u201cunfolding of medieval society\u2019s inner logic\u201d since these metaphysical debates were permitted to occur within the Church. The point being, there was nothing magical about medieval political structure that could prevent the rise of modernity. (I also can\u2019t resist noting that no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas thought<\/a> it didn\u2019t make sense for the civil government to ban prostitution. Tradeoffs between law and liberty are as old as time.)<\/p>\n This is why I increasingly think that it\u2019s time for conservatives to stop arguing about the merits of \u201cliberalism.\u201d The concept is simply being used too amorphously for any real progress to be made. What is usually referred to\u00a0<\/em>by \u201cliberalism,\u201d in the context of current debates, is something along the lines of \u201csecular humanitarianism\u201d\u2014which Daniel Mahoney has written<\/a> about extensively\u2014but \u201cliberalism\u201d is regularly used\u00a0<\/em>by its critics as a negative descriptor of any argument that makes reference to personal liberty or suggests that misuses of liberty are endemic to human society. Noted Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga once quipped<\/a> that the definition of \u201cfundamentalist,\u201d in functional terms, is \u201cstupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.\u201d At this point, \u201cliberal\u201d has regularly come to mean \u201cstupid sumbitch whose political opinions are slightly to the left of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately for everyone involved, most of the recent controversy along these lines has focused on a seemingly binary opposition between \u201cliberalism\u201d and \u201cthe common good.\u201d That\u2019s nonsense. All politics have a concept of the common good, whether or not they use those words. The libertarian who posits the Non-Aggression Principle as absolute has an idea of the common good. The progressive who builds her arguments around John Rawls\u2019s \u201cpublic reason\u201d has an idea of the common good. The conservative who wants to \u201cmake America great again\u201d has an idea of the common good. In fairness, this debate has gone on so long because of the presence of historically illiterate critics on the right who largely lack the vocabulary of classical political thought. But all of this should have fallen away with a very straightforward observation: all politics inevitably involves coercion at some point, and the criteria for determining morally just coercion reflect one\u2019s understanding of the common good.<\/em><\/p>\n Liberalism, on this understanding, is a direction <\/em>(toward less coercion), not a state of being.\u00a0<\/em>And so the questions of politics must focus on how much liberty a society can tolerate before it starts to break down.<\/em><\/p>\n This is a very old debate, of course. But it\u2019s not a conversation that many critics of \u201cliberalism\u201d seem very interested in having. And that isn\u2019t surprising, because it breaks down the binary good-versus-evil framing that their arguments rely on (and opens up the possibility of proposals like Biggar\u2019s and Lamennais\u2019s). Proposals like those, though, may be just what the conversation needs in order to move forward.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the last few days, I\u2019ve been reading Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar\u2019s interesting little book Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation. What makes the book particularly compelling is the fact that it was written in 2014\u2014years before the \u201cpopulist turn\u201d that launched the UK out of the European Union and put Donald […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3470,"featured_media":1082,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-political-theory"],"yoast_head":"\n\n