I very much look forward to your upcoming essay on Kalb.

I agree with you that one doesn’t necessarily need to read Aristotle through a Nietzschen lens however, I believe Arendt’s reading has merit. I realize that the traditionalism advocated by yourself and others at FPR in not Fascistic (In the Hegelian state worshiping totalitarian sense) but believe it is a distinct temptation to the traditionalist (Liberals must struggle with their own horrific temptations some of while you summarized nicely in your essay). This is but one direction a traditionalist could take in the leap of theory to practice.

While I would stop short of saying traditionalist attraction to fascism is defensible I would say it is understandable. It should be a goal of the traditionalist movement to distance itself from this form of barbarism and find common ground with the liberals on this at least.

I will say that the genius of liberalism is precisely what you see as its blindness and am happy to see that we share common ground on religious liberty even if for you it is the exception and for me the rule.

I am afraid that I failed to make myself clear on the question of moral fictions. What I was trying to say was that in fact rights are just as real as the good and that neither are fictions.

I look forward to your next piece and will not rejoin the debate until you have a chance to make your case further.

If I remember correctly it was Chesterton that said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” You have certainly not presented your case poorly and I am now more inclined to take seriously, if not agree, with the traditionalist position. You have picked a formidable dragon to slay, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

This conversation has also motivated me to take up a New Years resolution anew:

http://www.danhugger.blogspot.com

First of all, I agree with you that Guy has provided an excellent description of the attraction of liberalism. Why it is a flawed or deceptive attraction my Kalb essay (due to appear the second week of May on First Principles) will at least begin to consider.

Second, regarding fascism and traditionalism: I confess I find it hard to believe that you cannot distinguish between fascist claims that man is effectively nothing until he loses himself in the collective of the state, and the basically Aristotelian understanding that man, as a political animal, fulfills his telos through life in community. At the very least, man as political animal is a distinguishable concept from man as essential subject of the state. But further, to say man is a political animal presumes that the individual man has some kind of ontological reality that already exist and that is ultimately fulfilled in social life, whereas fascism’s particularly Nietzschean themes strongly suggest that man prior to a deliberate subordination to the state is not really man. Aristotle would say he is either an unfulfilled or frustrated man, but Nietzsche and fascism would suggest he was somehow sub-human. Interestingly, Hannah Arendt’s account of man as political animal distorts Aristotle by reading this Nietzchean theme into him; you are not alone (indeed are in good company), therefore, in your inability to make this distinction.

As a side note, far from denying the attraction of many wise traditionalists for certain strains of fascism, I think it was a very defensible attraction. Chesterton is a great example, for he could see much good in communism, liberalism, and fascism alike. Such modern ideologies were to him much what heresies are to any Christian: exagerated and severed expressions of partial truths that, insofar as they express the truth, are good. The only ideology he saw as patently indefensible was capitalism; it clearly aimed at no good whatsoever, he said.

Your final reflection on rights leads exactly where I want to head with the promised essay: you are certainly correct that we can point to at least one good that is unattainable if, in some restricted sense, it is coerced: the Christian assent of faith.

But here we find intimation of one historical blindness of liberalism. It universalizes the Christian requirement for freedom of conscience regarding religious belief while it does not universalize the good that makes such freedom an instrumental good. My contension with your account of this freedom, and the rights theory you use to describe it, is that it treats the freedom either as something necessary apart from any good or as a good in itself. I would say that such freedom only becomes intelligible in light of a specific vision of the good life for man — union with God. Your references to the Aztecs in an earlier comment suggests that, perhaps, in some other religions, such a sense of freedom of conscience as an instrumental good may neither be relevant nor even desirable. But liberalism and rights cut us free of a vision of the good toward the attainment of which freedom of conscience is an instrumental good, and therefore has led practically (and leads logically) to the view that certain acts are coercive and therefore a violation of rights, when indeed they would not be coercion in relation to the conditions that make the free assent of faith possible. To give one classic example, school prayer is not coercion, and yet liberalism has led to its being forbidden because it is not the Good to be made possible, but the “right” to be protected, that becomes the end of the liberal order.

I refer you again in closing to MacIntyre. For you betray the roots of your argument in what he terms “emotivism” when you say that rights are no more or less a moral fiction than the Good. Belief in rights is always a kind of voluntarism: a condition we approve but cannot defend we finally defend by asserting the reality of a “non-natural property” called rights. Thus, our defense ultimately reduces to an assertion of will: Rights are real!

When one speaks of the Good, at least in the ethical and political questions that have dogged this long line of comments, one is always speaking of a reality rooted in human experience and discernable by the reason. We all know that some people live better lives than others. Within a few generations, the human mind can put together a pretty clear image of what the good life for man is, and can evaluate individual instantiations of human life against that general teleological vision. It would take a fuller examination of the Good in general to show how it also is so verifiable (i.e. consideration of how a good garden hose, a good watch, a good life, and a good meal all have something real in common despite their having nothing in common as things). But I’m going to resign from this article, realizing that I have another to write before Thursday, certain that it has been a pleasure receiving, reading, and replying to all these queries, though less certain how productive has been of persuading anyone.

Excellent observation,

“The strength of liberalism as a state philosophy, it seems to me, is that it does not need to be right. In a sense, its strength is precisely that it has no conception of the Good. It’s weakness is then maybe that it forgets that it has no conception of the Good, and begins to imagine that freedom is an end (i.e., the Good) and not merely a means (an environment that allows communities and individuals to fashion and attempt to realize their own ideas of the Good life).”

I would add however, that liberalism merely recognizes that some goods must be chosen freely in order to be a part of the authentic good. It’s a question of limits to what elements of the good can be realized institutionally.

Another very engaging response. I look forward very much to reading your future essays concerning these issues.

I would point out in regards to the Duce’s statement that it is the most ideologically complete statement we have of Fascism from his book “Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions.” It is not merely a speech given to give a certain impression but a sustained presentation of a much misunderstood ideology.

You object to his position because, “It is very clear both grammatically and historically that what Mussolini intends by “man is only man” under certain conditions is that he means man is only man to the extent he “contributes” or submerges himself in larger wholes at the expense of himself.”

Yet it seems that this position is exactly what you argued for when you stated, “Man is intrinsically a social or political animal; his individual identity is formed by, tied to, and fulfilled only in, community. To speak, therefore, of the “interests of the individual” as if they stood in tension with those of “State” or “society” literally makes no sense; it creates separate entities and interests to describe what in fact is something organic. Community is organic because it has distinguishable parts, but none of those parts is in any meaningful sense separable from the whole (it would no longer be itself were it not part of something bigger than itself).”

Under this understanding man could only be man to the extent, “he “contributes” or submerges himself in larger wholes at the expense of himself.” How could he find meaning in any action otherwise according to the thinking of the traditionalist?

Now it could be legitimately argued that the fascists did not practice what they preached, or that they had the wrong idea about what the tradition was, but the ideological insight on which they built their political program seems identical to the traditionalists.

Many traditionalists had great sympathy for fascism, G.K. Chesterton in particular comes to mind. This is why fascism is such an essential question for the traditionalist. Why should this path be rejected? In what ways does this not represent an authentic return to tradition? I think you are right in your reading of Tocqueville and that he would be essential to such a discussion, but then again so would Chesterton and Pound.

I believe human rights to be no more and no less a moral fiction than the good. Maritain’s observation is of course correct. But could not the inverse be said of tradition? These are areas that have to be developed in both and are not a reason to dismiss either.

Your analysis of the two rights I mentioned seems to exclude certain possibilities in relation to the good.

For instance, what if any realization of the good in the realm of spirituality requires an individual to freely choose his faith? What if his faith is in fact inauthentic no matter what its content if it is not freely chosen?

What if man has a moral duty to speak his conscience? What if we have a moral duty to listen to all authentic expressions of conscience, by virtue of our shared experience as human beings, neighbors, and children of God, even if we know the content of that expression to be in opposition to the good?

These are of course what ifs but feel they both strike a cord with traditionalist ethics involving both religion and speech which would find not opposition within liberalism but may run afoul of a traditionalist who views these rights as merely moral fictions.

I don’t see how a traditionalist could be anything but a parrot, isn’t that an essential part of the exercise ;)

You provided two further substantive responses to my essay and the discussion between Saturday and this morning, and I’m going to offer very short responses to them for not only pragmatic reasons but because, as your last comment makes clear, much of your argument seeks to establish positions on questions that I have hoped to address more richly in future FPR essays.

One would expect that the objections to a very impressive political speech, including to the one you quote of Mussolini’s, will be located in the details rather than the broader questions. What I would object to, as a traditionalist, in this speech is a sentence very much to the point of our discussion: “In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution.”

It is very clear both grammatically and historically that what Mussolini intends by “man is only man” under certain conditions is that he means man is only man to the extent he “contributes” or submerges himself in larger wholes at the expense of himself. As T.S. Eliot might have said, “This is a morality of sorts, and perhaps a better one than that offered by liberals.” But it is not a good one. And it clearly does not comport well with the account of the human person my essay provided. My contention has been that you refuse to see that, that you persist in viewing reality according to the dichotomy of the individual and the society/collective. If you do not in fact view things that way — if, indeed, your comment above show as much and I have misread in my haste — then we are settled on this point and in basic agreement.

My intention was not to misrepresent your position, but to interpret it. I believe that the position you occupy does reduce the good to questions of procedural sovereignty, even if that is not what you believe it does. In a word, I believe such a reduction follows from the beliefs you set forth.

You quote Mussolini, however, to justify the definition of fascism as a “return to tradition.” One cannot accept that a political program is a return to tradition simply because its advocates make that claim on particularly rhetorically histrionic occasions. I don’t think it necessary to debunk fascist pretensions of somehow being “traditional,” since it is clear in their actions they were not, since it is clear in their ideology they were not, and since even fascism’s contemporaries could see this with no difficulty. Tocqueville, interestingly, prophesied the rise of movements like fascism as one where an attempt to restore the conditions prior to equality and modern state-centralization would be made specifically through an even more centralized state. What he intends in his speculation is that such a “restoration” of tradition would in fact be the propping of of incidental details of a past society with its central, most salient characteristics absent. Pretentions of a return to tradition, again, tradition do not make.

I would like to take up your question about the nature of politics elsewhere (I tearfully grant you that political science departments would not generally accept my definition of politics — but I could provide a list of political theorists in such departments who would). I would also like to address your support of rights. “Human rights” as a concept does grave harm in the way all “moral fictions” do. It attempts to prop up an already existent consensus about certain goods by putting a bad — indeed incoherent — argument beneath. Jacques Maritain, co-author of the UN Declaration of Human Rights once wrote something along the lines of “We’re all agreed what these rights are, but don’t ask any of us why we believe in them.” What was thought to be a productive practical consensus has in fact does great harm once the theory (theories) of rights was extended beyond conclusions on which everyone already agreed and took on a life of its own.

The two freedoms you mention, incidentally, are only good under certain very specific conditions, and are freedoms that are good in respect to certain ends — the Good — toward which human beings ought to move if they wish to be good men who have lived good lives. Independent of those ends, they are pernicious. And speaking of them as “rights” generally robs them of the coherence that only a purpose/telos can give them, precisely because it sets them free from any such purpose. Most discussion on “rights” ends up focusing not on the contents of the word (what are rights and what aren’t) but on the procedural sovereignty that a right per se grants to the one who possesses it. It therefore ratifies the individualistic anthropology of liberalism without shedding much light on the form of a good human life.

But this is not really my argument, it is MacIntyre’s. As someone has already observed, no small portion of my claims derive from his work, even though I hope they are not derivative of that work as would the voice of a parrot be purely derivative of his master’s.

I think this is the heart of it,

“Because he reduces all questions of the good and prudence to those of sovereignty, Dan rushes to identify natural law with natural rights, since “rights” here means simply principles or goods on which no one can decide anything besides the individual, and he insists — despite my best efforts to show this a mistaken lens — that to speak of society as organic is to leave the individual without “resource” against the dark force of the “collective.” But, I repeat, this bifurcation makes no sense.”

I don’t really know where to begin with this other than to assume you are arguing with someone else (Perhaps the demonic liberalism of your initial piece?). At no time did I make any attempt to reduce the good to sovereignty. I never said that society was not organic, in fact I admitted that this was a keen observation of the traditionalists and one that I accept. I never said that to do so would leave the individual without recourse against and collective. By putting the words recourse and collective in quotation marks I can only assume that you are attempting to match them to words (as well as arguments) that I have in fact never used. I only have a problem with viewing society as organic if that view is used to dismiss fundamental human rights. Answering a sustained argument against an option I do not hold and have not advocated is a rabbit hole I don’t see as a productive one to go down.

The real question is what harm did human rights ever do to anyone? In what way have them limited the traditionalists political options in pursuit of the good? Lets take two specific and widely held and uncontroversial examples of human rights as examples:

Freedom of Religion

Freedom of Speech

In what ways do these reflect a totalitarian system?

It seems to me that Dan’s church schism example, and his question of what the state does in that circumstance, can be characterized more simply as: what does the body holding a monopoly on coercive power do when the community divides (or even when any single individual disagrees with and does not wish to be bound by the community)? Is coercive power employed to enforce community values (whether by exiling dissidents or by forcing dissidents to conform) or does the state stand by and let individuals or groups diverge if the community cannot persuade them not to?

And if the state does not intervene, is this not in practice very similar to liberalism? Freedom does imply, after all, the freedom to bind oneself to a community, to choose to follow certain strictures of behaviour, and so forth. This perhaps gets at the point that what is being advocated under “traditionalism” is not a different way of organizing society in practice but a different way of talking about society – one that does not dismiss conceptions of a common good or the value of community.

The glaring danger in coercing any kind of community compliance is of course that communities very frequently make mistakes about what the common good is – the Aztec example has been used, and misogynistic gender stereotypes would be another. Values that were once widely considered good and proper are now regarded as abhorrent (e.g. slavery) – is there a plausible reason to believe our sensitivities will not continue to evolve?

The strength of liberalism as a state philosophy, it seems to me, is that it does not need to be right. In a sense, its strength is precisely that it has no conception of the Good. It’s weakness is then maybe that it forgets that it has no conception of the Good, and begins to imagine that freedom is an end (i.e., the Good) and not merely a means (an environment that allows communities and individuals to fashion and attempt to realize their own ideas of the Good life).

Of course, my believing that “being right” about what the Good is is all but impossible is a product of my own liberalism.

I must thank you again for a most thoughtful and engaging response and am glad to hear that you also believe R.J. to have been a most able representative of your school.

First on questions historical:

I was reluctant to employ the term fascism in this argument for the obvious reason that it has taken on a pejorative meaning apart from its historic and theoretical. I cannot fault you for dismissing it as merely, “a good way to scare the kids and make them good liberals.” But let me allow Il Duce to speak for himself,

“In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution. Hence the great value of tradition in records, in language, in customs, in the rules of social life. Outside history man is a nonentity. Fascism is therefore opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism; and it is opposed to all Jacobinistic utopias and innovations. It does not believe in the possibility of “happiness” on earth as conceived by the economistic literature of the XVIIIth century, and it therefore rejects the theological notion that at some future time the human family will secure a final settlement of all its difficulties. This notion runs counter to experience which teaches that life is in continual flux and in process of evolution. In politics Fascism aims at realism; in practice it desires to deal only with those problems which are the spontaneous product of historic conditions and which find or suggest their own solutions. Only by entering in to the process of reality and taking possession of the forces at work within it, can man act on man and on nature.”

http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm

I find his observations to be little different than those of the traditionalists. This is, I am sure you will agree at least a cause for concern, perhaps the makings of a good essay. Fascism in no way attempts to save the individual and is self consciously attempting to undo the damage it sees liberalism has done.

You are correct to point out the original Benedictines endeavors were not, of course, within a liberal society. But you are wrong to say that the Benedictines were merely an order in society. The were an order of the Catholic Church, and as such enjoyed its protection. As the Church’s temporal reign waned the Benedictines had their share of troubles. This is why I believe the Anabaptists are a better example for comparison in our age.

I can readily imagine a non-liberal society having spent time in both monastic communities of both the east and west and among old order Amish and Mennonites. They work but they work in a larger liberal political context. I’m sorry if you find my definition of political to narrow but I don’t believe you will find a political science department in the country that adheres to yours. This is due, in part, to the influence of liberalism over the centuries but I am a man trapped in the language of my time which I am afraid I cannot escape, not that any of us can. I have tried to frame my arguments not merely as a “who decides” which is an important question in all community life but also in terms of what can be decided.

I don’t believe all political forms apart from liberalism are authoritarian and have offered anarchism as a non-authoritarian form apart from liberalism. I have no problem at all with considerations of the good in politics. What I have a problem with is a discussion of the good that refuses to recognize the natural rights of human persons. The idea that one cannot have a discussion of the good in politics while recognizing human rights I find disturbing (In an ethical way), I also find it to be authoritarian (In a merely descriptive way).

The statement that liberalism is the most totalitarian of all does a great disservice to both Stalinism and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Does not justice always involve giving one ones due?

More later, I’ve kept a lady waiting long enough!

My goal in offering these categories is to be in fact as broad as possible. I believe, as you do, that traditionalism can embrace any one of these categories, however it is the belief of the author of the piece and R.J. that traditionalism is to its very core in opposition to liberalism.

What I mean by liberalism is merely the belief in the natural rights of man are, as James has stated, “the primary good after which society and government seek.” If a state or community were to violate those rights they would be in a very real sense illegitimate.

Libertarianism is but one of a variety of styles of liberalism. It is one interpretation of what those natural rights are. Despite their differences Barack Obama, John McCain, Bob Barr, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, and Cynthia McKinney are all liberals. They all believe that that natural rights of individuals are the primary good after which society and government seek.

For your specific questions there is no single answer that liberalism could give. The primary question that the liberal would be faced with in each of these issues would be one that would ask do these policies in any way violate the rights and dignity of the human persons involved.

The first question regarding unlimited immigration (or for that matter any immigration at all) would have to be framed in this way:

Do men and women have the right to live and work anywhere they please?

Likewise, the second question regarding English only education (or for that matter any mandated language of instruction in any classroom) would have to be framed in this way:

Do men and women have the right to pursue instruction in the language of their choice?

My personal answer to both questions would be that men and women do indeed have such rights. I realize however that this is not the only position a liberal could take.

An authoritarian would not examine such issues in such a way. Their arguments would be based on what is good for the polity. Since individuals have no interests or rights outside the polity. This is why Socrates drank the hemlock. He realized that the, “political experience which admits of no certainty but accepts the inherited experience of local communities and wise of those communities in such matters.” had found him guilty. Socrates found his being and fulfillment in the community and accepted their judgment. One may find an interesting liberal counter example in the words of Christ on the cross, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

To take on the briefer, no less substantial criticisms of my essay briefly:

Carl Scott and others inform me that the pose of a “pox on both their houses” approach is too easy and too imprudent, failing; further, it masks real differences between the governing political parties in our country. Thus, I am told at once that I have failed to appreciate the great good a “seat at the Republican table” might offer a traditional conservative, even as I am also told I have failed to appreciate the real improvements offered by the Obamanation. I am even told not to “bite the hand that feeds me,” but it is the more abstract hand of liberalism rather than the left and right ones of the major parties.

I would reply, first, that I did not know in writing this essay that the standard to which it should aspire was of a politic or prudent bit of rhetoric. I burdened my mind with nothing more than in writing the truth in a way that would be compelling for a mind already disposed toward the Good.

It is clear that the so-called “fusionism” between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives of the last thirty years has had only one good effect: it has made the Republican party a regular if inconsistent opponent of abortion, which is a vast improvement on its previous flirtations with population control and odd offshoots of “eugenics.” The Republican Party has done some good things in this regard; I can now imagine the end of abortion in the United States in our lifetimes — however dimly. But in exchange for that absolute moral good, it should be noted “prudentially” that state capitalism marches onward and continues to destroy real communities in our country (indeed most Americans can no longer imagine what it would be like to live in community rather than as a free-floating subject of the State), and that our entire economy’s structure drives us to, and is driven by, foreign intervention and entanglements that are often morally objectionable and almost always are conducive to making stable, autarchic, and contented families and communities a pipe dream rather than the normal condition on which most persons in history have been able to rely.

But I will take a seat at the Republican table, if I may have it. Indeed, I’m looking forward to taking one in the same room with Justice Allito next week.

I am told by a “scientist” of some kind two things: a) it is impossible to justify traditionalism without religious belief of some kind; and b) that, to a “scientist,” religious belief is implausible because familiarity with the “nuts and bolts” of biological life make the notion of creation seem “arrogant.”

Oh, my. With the first point, I am entirely in agreement. If one contends that it is possible to make any claim without some kind of theology operative at the foundation of the claim, one has simply not thought very hard about the basis of the claim. If one says, “An argument is invalid because it depends upon a theology,” then one has simply failed to understand that all questions are fundamentally theological. That it is possible for a thinker to be so superficial as to refuse this fact, I do not doubt; but let’s call superficiality what it is — superficiality and not “reason.” One must not ask, “To think theologically or not?”, because one is already thinking theologically. Rather, self examination requires enough probity to discover what theological grounding lies at the foot of my assumptions, and self-criticism requires asking whether it is the right one.

With the second, I can only protest that I am unsure of which nuts-and-bolts exclude the possibility of creation. For nature — all things — to be created, all that is required is that they should come from nothing, that each and every thing, including time, once was not. The contents of “that which is,” of reality, can’t speak meaningfully to whether they were created, but only, possibly and analogously, to the intelligence that gave them one form and one order rather than another. Since I spent my entire childhood around rather prestigious neuroscientists, most of whom were devout Christians, it has never occurred to me to see “science” and “religion” in meaningful opposition. It has occurred to me that one could see such an option if one has either a crude, perhaps arrogant, understanding of scientific reasoning or a bad — usually materialist — conception of what God “must be,” and therefore a bad theology.

Now, whelmed though I am by Dan and RJ’s comments, I want to essay just a few little claims; fortunately, I am relieved of any sustained argument precisely because RJ has said most of what I would want to say and has said it better than I could.

Dan’s comments became better grounded and more nuanced as he went along, and so it is tempting to pass over the indefensible historical claim that “fascism” was a return to tradition. That’s a good way to scare the kids and make them good liberals, but it is also, at best, false. Fascism is, among other things, the attempt to sacralize the State as the voice of a single national race. Its entire raison d’etre is not to return to tradition but to make its sovereignty absolute; it has precisely the same intellectual origins as liberalism, and shares this common origin because it is in fact one advanced form of liberalism: a form that says simply the freedom of the individual can only be surely attained if every last decision and thought of the individual is administered by a centralized, single, representative state. Fascism, like liberalism in its more moderate form, ultimately obliterates the individual it pretends to save.

A similar easy comment to target is one whose absurdity appears almost grammatically. I am told that the “Benedict option” of dropping out of society in protest is only possible in a liberal society. I am reasonably sure that the Benedictines were not fleeing from liberal society when they first submitted to the life of work and prayer. But, of course, let me just say that this phrase, which derives from the end of MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” has been misunderstood; it is doubtful MacIntyre there recommended anything like the unworldly moves of certain Protestant sects. The Christian religious and monastic orders — of whom the Benedictines are prototypical — did not view themselves as leaving society, but as leaving the “world” insofar as that term could be understood as the life confined to pleasures of the flesh. They were “orders” after all. Orders of what? Orders within or of society. As such they are, in a sense, far more worldly that the Protestant sects to which Dan refers.

But there are greater confusions than historical ones buried in Dan’s comment. It is clear that he cannot imagine a society that is not liberal society, i.e. a society held together by the laws of a managerial state ordered exclusively to procedural norms rather than to some telos of the common good. My essay challenged this view, and tried to get readers like himself to reimagine what community and society are. They are not reducible to the territory or bodies ruled by a state. Following naturally from this misconception, Dan also expresses a narrow vision of political action, which causes him to reduce all questions pertaining to the human good to questions of “Who decides?” It is natural that he should presume all formations other than those of liberalism are “authoritarian” because the only question that orders his thinking is that of sovereignty — and if that is the case, then any political form that is truly political will be authoritarian. As I said in the essay, liberalism is the most totalitarian of all.

Because he reduces all questions of the good and prudence to those of sovereignty, Dan rushes to identify natural law with natural rights, since “rights” here means simply principles or goods on which no one can decide anything besides the individual, and he insists — despite my best efforts to show this a mistaken lens — that to speak of society as organic is to leave the individual without “resource” against the dark force of the “collective.” But, I repeat, this bifurcation makes no sense.

In the “Hypothetical Church” example, Dan does not even address the question of what is the good of the various persons involved. He only asks “Who decides” what to do with the schismatics. But the procedures of how one might settle this or myriad questions could vary fruitfully from place to place and time to time, as RJ contends. The fundamental question, however, isn’t merely “who decides” but what are the goods at stake in this scenario? If the True Hypothetical Church were a “Heavens Gate” cult, then it would patently be in the interest of the individual and common good to control or eliminate that church as quickly as possible by means of whatever authority was available. The good of the human person isn’t reducible to the free exercise of his will, nor are the relevant questions about that good reducible to those of sovereignty and decision — much though liberalism tries to convince us otherwise.

You see, my essay wasn’t for a specific procedure of government authority, it was to argue that liberalism is malign because it tries to foreclose the questions that matter most for human beings in any society: What does a good life look like? How do we attain it? Since man is a political animal, these primarily ethical questions are political questions as well and have partially political answers. Dan clearly cares about these questions, and especially his later comments show an enviable engagement with them, but he cannot make productive statements about them simply because, again, he reduces them to matters of sovereignty.

As such, Dan’s claim that liberalism is not purely concerned with the freedom of the individual but with the freedom of the individual to pursue the good uncoerced seems patently false. Procedural liberalism by its nature forecloses the possibility of asking questions about and forming a shared vision of the Good in the public realm. As such, Dan’s statement tries to add what is a private question in liberal theory (“What is good?”) to what is the sole public or political thesis in that theory — “The purpose of the state is to free the individual from everything outside his individuality.” The assertion itself has a contradiction tearing at its seams — as, of course, does liberal theory in general: any good, including the purported liberal good of freedom, ultimately must coerce some individuals at some time. As my essay on “Leviathan” last week argued, and as my essay on James Kalb, which is due to appear soon, will argue, liberal theory isn’t merely destructive because it doesn’t pursue goods that I recognize; it is destructive because it is incoherent. And it is incoherent because it tries to substitute questions of procedure and sovereignty for questions of the nature of the good life for man.

Finally, Dan insists that natural law and prudence, as RJ discusses them, leave no way of adjudicating between human-sacrificing Aztecs and other, less ghoulish societies. He thinks that Rawls, like Kant, provided us universalizable maxims that are known by all at all times and that, therefore, these two worthies solve a problem that Thomism and natural law do not. Once again, he tries to insert a theory of procedure and sovereignty in place of one of ethics, of questions about the Good. But the weakness of this substitution is more glaring in an exclusively ethical context like this one than it is in the messier political context of the “True Hypothetical Church.”

What Dan wants is a non-human, independent judge to stand outside the historical Aztec and hypothetical “humane” societies and to show that there is a binding natural law imperative that insists one must decide in favor of the latter and that this decision is binding. Not to rehearse a tired argument (this is just MacIntyre vs. Rawls c. 1980), but the only such non-human judge is God, and God, in this sense, doesn’t provide a practical model for moral judgment. Far from looking down from the ether, each of us lives in a society with specific conditions that more-or-less allow us to see the Good. An Aztec who could witness the practices of his society and those of the more humane one may well decide that the latter clearly make possible the achievement of the Good, and a good life, whereas the slaughter of innocents does not. But there is no guarantee that this will happen, simply because one cannot expect someone to know more of the truth than he knows, even as one is capable of trying to reveal it to him.

The impotence of Rawls in this case seems obvious. What you are really saying is that if we could get Aztecs to think like Rawlsians, then they would no longer disembowel folks to serve their livers to the sun god. Fair enough; they might well, though, as RJ suggests, plenty of Rawlsians really use their transcendental ethical perspective as a means to assert the sovereignty of the individual will rather than its universally binding obligations, and so they do not reach the conclusions one might hope, e.g. that abortion is murder. What the traditional conservative argues is that the arrival at a Rawlsian ethics would in fact not be the product of trying to disembody and universalize one’s ethical thought, but would be the arrival at a particular morality after having undergone a particular and embodied journey called a tradition. As such, choosing between two competing claims about goods involves the very concrete activity of deliberating between the present, available options and seeing which one more likely would lead toward the form of the good life for man. To make such a decision, one must have a clear image of what such a happy life could look like, and this is not helped by independently conceived, universal maxims that do not take the particular character of that life as their starting point.

Hence, Empedocles urged me — rightly — to say, as it were, “Who’s right?” Liberals or traditional conservatives? But I don’t see this as a debatable choice. If one examines liberalism closely, one sees that liberals engage in the kinds of questions about the good that traditional conservatives foreground, but that liberalism a) misunderstands the Good, b) tries to conceal the political nature of the inquiry by making it universal rather than prudential, and c) tries to foreclose the prospect of meaningfully discovering the Good and conforming to it by reducing politics to procedural questions rather than substantive ones, and by therefore putting substantive questions exclusively into that most private of private spheres, the skull of the individual.