This will be the final post in this series. I will try to be brief and to the point. Thank you for reading it, if you did such a (strange) thing. The final objection I want to raise and reply to is this: Liberal society prevents (more) suffering (than illiberal society).
I think that it is this objection that most clearly reveals the greatest flaw of liberalism: the fear of death. That is to say, liberalism takes it on fiat that suffering is empty and, as long as it can be avoided and as long as “life”—this strange thing called life-without-suffering— can be prolonged, the better. This is a mistake that leads to the other critiques I have made of liberalism (the complete dependence on freedom as an end and the mistaken assumptions about the virtues of deliberation).
To understand the illogic of liberal society in regard to suffering we must realize that the very word has lost its meaning in secular, liberal society. (This is another problem, I will not mention here, with liberal society: it requires a political neutrality that undermines the possibility of real religious belief.)
To understand the meaning of suffering we need to return to the antiquity of the Church. When we read John Paul II’s seminal encyclical, Salvifici Doloris, we can find suffering put in an entirely different way. The meaning of suffering is not simply antagonistic to the flesh, but redeeming. The phenomenon of suffering that causes us to shrink away is not a liberal fear of death, but an older religious sense of reverence for the mystery of life.
This religious pause that haunts places—even States—of suffering is not fear, but a desire to commune in the mysteries of life, evil, and God. So, we do not run away from the gulag; the fascist State is not something we dismiss outright. Indeed, when we look closer, we find Exodus and Job—and Christ. We find a fecundity in places of suffering that is sterile in liberal society. We develop a certain morbid fascination for death: a hermeneutic of suffering.
Such a sense of morbidity is entirely absent from liberal sensibility. And liberal societies hope—indeed they try to fool themselves into thinking that it is the case—that they could clean the streets of the suffering of illiberality. Politics is mainly driven by a fear of death (and bankrupcy). But, in a politic altogether different from the dualism of liberalism and illiberalism we find the way things really are: we find creation.
It is my thesis that we should try to live there instead of in a liberal society and, if we look closely, we might find creation most present in cemetaries, prisons, oppresive States, war zones, and wilderness. Certainly not at the mall.
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