Can Liberty Survive Without a Soul?
It takes a serious intellectual to confront the fundamental questions. The number one problem today, Michael Lucchese has argued, is our “inability to connect the case for liberty to a larger, transcendent vision of life’s ultimate purpose.” The “liberal spirit of toleration” necessary for liberty, which “the West cultivated for 250 years or more,” is now so weakened that it seems Alexis de Tocqueville’s “darkest prophecies” for freedom’s future are coming true.
Today’s only hope is to “embrace a public philosophy that identifies both liberty and virtue as spiritual goods worth preserving.” But developing such a philosophy “only works when the institutions that make it up are free to embody a coherent account of the Good Life and shape their members according to it.” “The preservation of liberty” is “not simply an economic or political concern, but first and foremost” is “a moral one.”
Lucchese starts that moral story with Aristotle recognizing the beauty of virtue and good behavior. That liberal insight moves historically over time to George Washington and the belief that the state cannot “simply force citizens to become virtuous.” Indeed, “only love can inspire human beings to strive for the good in the highest sense,” although a “republican government could serve as a moral guardian for a community of love.” The problem, however, is that “most liberals of both the modern and classical types today are unwilling to make the case for freedom in the terms of this republican tradition.”
Tocqueville admired America’s constitution in part because our Founders understood exactly this. In Democracy in America, he wrote that federalism “can only suit a people accustomed, for a long time, to running their own affairs, a people among whom political knowledge has penetrated to the lowest levels of society,” that is to say, a liberally educated people. The sheer complexity of this system of overlapping sovereignties requires the people to exercise virtues like prudence and liberality to maintain the ideal of Union. If we cannot practice them, freedom itself will slip away. (RELATED: Chronological Snobs and the Founding Fathers)
“More than merely making the case for freedom on the grounds of materialism or efficiency, we must be bold to make it in explicitly ethical and moral terms.”
“For the true friends of liberty, then, deconstructing the apparatus of the leviathan state is the most important task ahead of us,” Lucchese concludes. “There is no central plan that can possibly make the people live well.” Deregulation and a renewed federalism are essential, but “More than merely making the case for freedom on the grounds of materialism or efficiency, we must be bold to make it in explicitly ethical and moral terms.”
The American Founders “inherited an understanding of this indivisible link between virtue and liberty” in the Declaration of Independence. Its liberty requires both political independence and a wider sense of self-government in the “institutions that actually shape our souls towards a common moral life: the family, the school, the church.” These are threatened by a “hostile and growing state but above all by our growing apathy towards society, virtue, and even freedom itself.” Lucchese then concluded that “perhaps the only way to rescue it is to remember that a republic must be a community of love,” what he calls a population adopting a sense of “virtuous liberty.” (RELATED: The Immediate Impact and Enduring Importance of the Declaration of Independence)
The Postliberal Mind Virus
Upon reflection a year later, rather than seeing an increased commitment to virtue, Lucchese writes that he sees a “postliberal ideology,” a “virus,” “blowing out the moral lights around us.” As an example of the problem, he cites an article by Chronicles magazine editor John Howting — who, he argues, downgrades the moral value of the American Founding itself. Lucchese interprets the editor as arguing that the Founding documents do not “in any meaningful way” tie us to our inherited values. He argues that the editor deprecates the Declaration as merely an “ordinance of secession from the British Empire,” and the Constitution as simply “an old list of laws and political compromises.”
Lucchese quotes the editor as comparing conservatives who celebrate the Founding as people “running into a fire to grab a drawer full of old legal documents” rather than ones “upholding the law or the principles it expresses.” The best way to understand this devaluation, Lucchese argues, “is to imagine a large manor estate that has been passed down through countless generations of our family,” now “burning down.” But that “burning structure is called Western civilization.”
“The problem with the postliberal ideological habit of mind, so manifest” in the editorial, Lucchese argues, “is that it disparages the specifically American political tradition. Politics has certain inherent limits,” as the editor acknowledges, but dismissing the checks and balances of the Constitution is self-defeating for those who would defend the Permanent Things that conservatives believe make civilization vital. The postliberal movement, seeking out new ways to impose a theory on our people, would plunge us headlong into a bitter competition for mere power that would altogether undermine good government.
Seeking that power will be “at the expense of the Constitution,” “knowingly or not,” thereby undermining its institutionalization in the American Republic. These critics may even “condemn the growing antisemitism, misogyny, and racism among young right-wingers; but it ought to be clear that their irresponsible rejection of the American Founding has given this rising hatred the niche it needs to fester.”
Yet, Howting’s complaint was that the problem was not the documents themselves but that today too many support the documents of the Founding without “upholding the law or the principles it expresses?” In other words, rather than a living tradition that upholds the transcendental principles set by the Founders, the documents are too often used instead to justify a “hostile and growing state.” In a later piece, he added, “Contrary to what my critics said, I deny that legal documents are worthless. They’re instruments that serve a purpose. Constitutions are made for the common good (the good life). If they do not assist us in that endeavor, we may have to alter or replace them, which, of course, the Constitution itself allows.”
As Lucchese himself conceded, the preeminent conservative philosopher Russell Kirk actually begins his discussion of virtuous liberty as prior to written constitutional documents. They can only become “the soul” of a people over time and perhaps only later memorialized into documents of virtuous liberty. Only then did the Declaration formalize America’s beliefs and experiences as the “culmination of the Western philosophic tradition.” The Constitution — “the most sagacious conservative document in the history of Western civilization” — followed that by transforming its balance of power core into “a kind of incarnation of that philosophy.” As a result, the Founding became “our surest guide to defending a way of life that is yet a living tradition,” a “prescription that alone can save a sense of civilizational continuity.”
Howting did take a swipe at “tools of wealth-getting” inhibiting fundamental values, arguing that the “core of our Western identity is not legal documents and tools for making money.” But, like Kirk, he identified important “other things that compose Western civilization: the great poets, the great ballads, the conquering of the new world, art, architecture, scientific advancement, heroes, and holidays,” nonutilitarian friendship, and classical education, concluding: “These are all fine things,” he concludes, “but the core of Western civilization lies in our faith and philosophy.”
Festering the Niche or Developing a Larger Transcendent Vision?
As Lucchese so eloquently explained in his earlier piece, the problem today is our “inability to connect the case for liberty into a larger, transcendent vision of life’s ultimate purpose.” And his proposed solution, again, was to utilize a “wider sense of self-government” composed of the “institutions that actually shape our souls towards a common moral life: the family, the school, the church.” And the Chronicles editor was similarly concerned about “the family Bible, the family album, and invaluable family heirlooms” going “up in flames.”
There must be room for agreement between the two. Lucchese was correct that good order is certainly threatened by a “hostile and growing state,” but he added that “above all” the threat comes from “our growing apathy towards society, virtue, and even freedom itself.” It was this new development that required a “transcendent vision of life’s ultimate purpose.” And it was that growing apathy toward religion, especially through unelected courts and government schools, that led Howting to propose “a rightful place” for these values in society, if a broad place.
As valuable as the Founding documents are, a supportive transcendence today requires a deeper and broader moral vision than one set by documents alone, even when one of the documents includes an often-ignored transcendent endowment by a Creator and his laws
The challenge to Lucchese’s “larger, transcendent vision of life’s ultimate purpose” today comes not so much from the nationalist right but from the much smaller Groyper right and primarily from the rationalist left. It was the philosophical inspiration for conservative liberalism, John Locke, who explained the roots of actual Western transcendency this way: “The philosophers showed the beauty of virtue” but they “left her unendowed” so that “few were willing to espouse her” until “the immortal weight of glory” made it real to common people, which belief ultimately culminated in a “concrete civilization based upon truths made plain.”
And a careful analysis suggests that the transcendent Western tradition based on moral virtue may be more viable than most moderns think.
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Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of a dozen books, including his most recent, Thinking About Freedom and Tradition: Understanding the Philosophers Who Make the Case for Western Civilization; The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order; and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles; and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.