Last month
I
suggested that if society rejects transcendent standards and natural law,
then political and moral order become what those in power make of them.
Fascism and
communism show one way that can work out: the will of the charismatic and
powerful becomes the highest law. That view of political life is exciting and
dramatic, so it sometimes gets traction, but it soon runs into problems. Photos
of Europe in 1945 show how big those problems can be.
Liberalism—the
outlook on public life now dominant in the West—is much more sober. It appeals
to utility rather than charisma, and prefers the rationality of a system to the
excitement of battle. For the liberal, getting rid of transcendent standards
means deciding questions based on this-worldly practicalities, and rejecting the
idea of a natural moral order means affirming our ability to define for
ourselves what things are and what they mean to us. Such views are thought to
provide a safe, tolerant, and commonsensical solution to the dangers posed by
modern skepticism: not the fascist Triumph of the Will, but the liberal Triumph
of Choice.
The devil, though,
is in the details. Choices conflict, so the Triumph of Choice means nothing
unless we know which choices triumph. Liberalism tries to be principled, and
its moral skepticism means it can’t give the nod to the choices that are simply
better. It wants a neutral solution, so it ends up appealing to technical
effectiveness and the “do your own thing” attitude implicit in the triumph of
individual choice over collective will.
What it tries to
do, then, is set up a system in which individuals get as much as possible of
whatever they want within the limits imposed by the coherence and effective
functioning of the system itself. The nature and needs of the system then
provide a standard for deciding conflicts.
Those needs put a
premium on goals, like a career, that support the functioning of the system; on
pursuits, like consumption choices and private indulgences, that are easily
managed because they don’t much affect other people; and on acceptance of the
choices of others. So when there are conflicts, it’s the self-regarding,
efficiency-promoting, and tolerant goals that get the nod.
In a complex and
dynamic society, goals constantly conflict with each other in all sorts of
ways, and liberalism provides a clear principle for resolving the conflicts. In
addition, it’s progressive, which means that as time goes by it perfects its
system. So as liberalism develops, it subordinates disfavored to favored goals
ever more comprehensively.
The result is that
it eventually becomes tyrannical and therefore self-refuting. Religious freedom
provides an example. The liberal principle of neutral individual freedom has no
special concern for religion as such, but views it as one pursuit among many. For
that reason liberalism favors freedom of worship as a private activity much
more than freedom for religion to play a public role. So it seems to set
religion free, because it wants to set all activities free, but ends up
suppressing it, because religious concerns are too comprehensive and go too
deep to fit smoothly into a system of efficiently satisfied individual
preferences.
So liberalism
starts by rejecting government recognition of religious authority and insisting
on free choice and expression in religious matters. The First Amendment
represents that classical stage of development: the law can no longer support
any particular religious view, but it is still friendly to religious activities
and to the self-government and public influence of religious communities.
The development
does not stop there. Eventually liberals get concerned about features of
private life that they see as oppressive. They abandon their classical “limited
government” approach, and start to insist on subordinating recognition of
religious authority by private institutions to the purposes of the individuals
who rely on the institutions. One result is that the government comes to forbid
private discrimination on grounds related to religion. An employer who wants to
promote a Christian ethos in the workplace can’t preferentially hire
Christians, and a Catholic printer is not allowed to refuse to print programs
for a “gay wedding.”
Most recently the
demand that institutional expressions of religion give way to individual choice
has been extended to insistence that Catholic schools and hospitals provide
products, like birth control pills, that are at odds with Catholic teaching but
are thought necessary for the equal freedom and well-being of women. That
demand is based on the same liberal principle that has repeatedly been applied
in the past—subordination of collective to individual goals for the sake of
individual freedom, equality, and well-being (as well-being is understood by
the individual involved).
The uncomprehending
outrage at Catholic recalcitrance shown by prominent liberal commentators is
therefore unfeigned. It’s based on strong trends in political thought that are
neither new nor foreign. If the purpose of government is to promote life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with liberty and the pursuit of
happiness understood as the individual freedom to do as one chooses, then it
makes sense that the freedom of religious groups to act in accordance with
their ideals should give way to the freedom of individual women to choose how
they will live without any additional burden resulting from the nature of their
choices or their identity as women.
The Obama administration’s
actions are, of course, outrageous. The reason, though, is not that officials
are unprincipled but that their principles are narrow and lead to inhuman
results. In the end, their system has room only for goals that are strictly
private, goals people don’t much care about, and goals like career and
political correctness that support the system itself. Everything else is too
disruptive for the efficient neutral operation of the system, and has to be
rooted out in the name of freedom, which now means freedom from inconvenient
connections to other people and from higher goods that guide how we live
together.
When understood
that way, freedom becomes something no sensible and thoughtful person would
want. But how do we Catholics turn the situation around, when the whole trend
of public discussion seems against us? For starters, I think, we should argue
for our positions based on substantive reasons for holding them. If the main
argument we present is the American tradition of ever-greater freedom and
equality, we’re going to lose, because the other side can argue that too, and
their argument (not to mention their institutional and material resources) will
be stronger. The individualism of the usual American understanding of freedom
assures that result.
That doesn’t mean
that our argument should be, “Down with Thomas Jefferson!” or, “Long live the
Pope!” What it means is that we should insist on bringing into the conversation
a concern for natural law, for common goods that go beyond efficiency and
material prosperity, for the freedom of religious communities and other groups
outside the state, and for the roots of America in Christianity and of Western
society in Catholic Christendom. If other people can say that American life has
sometimes slighted things that deserved more attention, why can’t we?
We could, for example, say that the American Founding was an attempt to
realize goods such as subsidiarity and the general welfare in accordance with
divinely-based natural law, but the way our national understanding of such
things has developed has to be supplemented or it will defeat its own purposes:
instead of federalism, limited government, and subsidiarity we’ll get
centralized tyranny; instead of the common welfare we’ll get a way of life that
is sordid, selfish, and self-destructive. Such arguments are certain to provoke
outrage, and they won’t be winners right away, but they include more of the
realities of life than the opposing arguments, so they are likely to win in the
end. And in any event, if we continue to accept principles that at bottom are
anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, and anti-human, like a purely individualistic
understanding of freedom, we will be always be in a false position, and we will
always lose.