(Revised 11/21) One of the basic differences between Social Conservatives and Social
Liberals lies in the former's belief that chaos will ensue once
traditional values and mores are completely jettisoned. As conservatives often
say, Liberalism, for all its contempt for traditional mores,
still lives off of the tradition's capital. And conservataives warn that once it is spent comes the
flood.
I used to be sympathetic to that argument,
but living in Seattle, which is about as secular liberal as it gets,
one has to be impressed that people live quite decent and orderly lives
without feeling the need for church or for a strict traditional moral
code. I think the worst thing that you can say about them is that they
are boring and rather one-dimensional, but they are very orderly,
fair-minded, and polite. American liberals are all Hobbes's children whether they realize it or not. Liberals live not in the fear of God, but in the fear of violence and disorder.
Secular theorists would argue against
the tradition's moral capital argument with some variation of contract
theory. Any reference to God or natural law is unnecessary. People
agree to control their impulses and to deal fairly with others because
they see it's in their best interest to do so. Liberals fear conflict and disorder, and they have been purged of the primitive, violent impulses mainly derived from the ancient sense of honor that they find so hard to understand driving behavior in premodern societies whether in the middle east or the local urban gang. People with
education and a certain level of bourgeois acculturation seem to
recognize this in a way that the uneducated underclass and populist
traditionals don't. Or another way of putting it is liberals have had the thymos squeezed out of them. Today's U.S Senate is a model Hobbesian society–a bunch of timid bourgeois joined together in for purposes of mutual self-preservation and risk aversion. The last thing one has come to expect from any one of them, with a few exceptions, is a spirited fight for principle.
Education and a certain bourgeois breeding,
which has little to do with religious values, has bleached the
primitive, violent passions out of the souls of educated whites–and
people of any color who become liberal bourgeois by acculturation. A white
liberal has come to mean having a certain "niceness"; they are people
who don't cause a ruckus. To use Plato's terms they're all about eros and have abdicated thymos–consumers not fighters. Guided by the utilitarian ethic which
admonishes them to seek pleasure and avoid pain, they are people who
generally calculate where lies the the path of least resistance and
take it. They don't want trouble, and "wild and crazy" for them is
almost always a pathetic affectation.
I think you could make the argument that secular bourgeois mores are
in some way dependent on the moral capital of premodern
Judeo-Christianity–secular society grew out of the Judeo-Christian
framework, after all–but the real question is to what degree it's
important for a society as a whole to be self-consciously grounded in
traditional religious values. By that I mean to what degree do you need
a constituency within a society that says, "This is what we think and
believe because this is what our wise ancestors thought and believed."
To what degree do we need people like that in a society to provide it
some ballast? I think the answer to that is complex, but I've come to
think they are needed less than conservatives want everyone to think.
Consumerism is a very potent anodyne, if maintaining order is all you
care about. The most disorderly people in society are not the irreligious,
but those who don't have a stake in the consumer society.
People
who behave do so because they have something to lose if they don't.
Acculturation into white culture in a consumer capitalist society is a
matter of economic status, not about religious belief or holding
traditional values. Those acculturated into white bourgeois culture
might think they hold traditionalist or religious values, but they are
peripheral to their central identity. Their character as human beings
is far more deeply shaped by their acculturation into consumer
capitalist culture, and their participation in a church has more the
function of belonging to a bowling or softball league than being
religious in any true sense of what it means to be religious. And the
people who prefer not to participate in a church are no different
regarding whether they behave well or badly when compared with those
who are religious.
I'm not knocking belonging to a Church–I belong to one; I
just want to clarify that while choosing to belong to such social
organizations provides some utility in working against social anomie,
belonging is not necessary for social order, and I would argue that these organizations
are meaningfully religious only to the degree that they in some way structure
sacred time and sacred space–in other words, provide a very real experience of a kind of life that transcends the current social arrangements and is to a degree subversive of them–ie that they are subversive of and a sign of contradiction toward Hobbesian social orders. For religion is only really religion if
provides a ritual structure that
celebrates or enacts the intersection of the sacred or divine world
with the everyday, profane world. To live only in the profane world is to be a prisoner, to be deeply alienated from Being, and in profound need of liberation, but not the kind of liberation usually imagined by Liberals, which for them primarily means liberation from the constraints of traditional mores.
So secular liberalism is not a problem for promoting
values that threaten to undermine social order. I will gladly debate
any social conservative who thinks that liberalism is the suicide of the west
and that the loss of traditional values and mores is a sign of the
West's moral decay, and that chaos is our future unless those
traditional values and mores are restored on a culture-wide basis.
Conservatives who really believe that social chaos is inevitable if
there is no restoration of tradition are people who need a homogeneous
social superstructure to give them a sense of personal identity. It's
atavistic tribalism in a society for which tribalism is dysfunctional. And that kind of tribalism is a far more likely source of disorder and violence than will ever come from the disorganized, timid, conflict averse children of Hobbes.
Nevetheless, the Liberal mind has created a political system that is far better adapted to life in a globalizing pluralistic world than anything conservatives have to offer. The conservative longing for a homogeneous society is dyfunctional in a world where mutual respect and ecumenism are far more
important values if social order is their main concern. The politics
that secular liberals have developed is really the best possible for
living peacefully in a pluralistic society. Tolerance is boring because
conflict is stimulating, but a society that reveres tolerance is more
pacific and easy to govern than a society that is riven by sectarian
rivalries.
Liberalism does not produce disorder in the
political sphere; rather it produces a flatness of soul in the cultural
sphere, a kind of complacency and docility of spirit that has adjusted
far too easily to the nihilistic comforts of consumerism, a
characteristic I have called elsewhere Seinfeld-Costanza Syndrome.
Some conservatives in the tradition of Richard Weaver, Whittaker
Chambers, Peter Viereck, and Willmoore Kendall insofar as this is at the heart of
their critique of the Liberal society have something important to say.
That's where the conservative critique of Liberalism has some bite, but
that's a minority position among movement conservatives. It's not
something that the Libertarian or Neoconservative wings care about.
It's not something that's widely acknowledged by the Christian right
defined by the Dobsons, Fallwells, and Robertsons. The only
conservatives who address it are crunchy cons and paleocons, and both
have little or no influence in defining public policy through the
Republican party.
But even if they did have influence, what
could they do about it in the political sphere? Nothing that would
work. The health of the broader culture is not a political issue; it's
a spiritual issue, and it needs to be addressed as such, and if there
is one place the state needs to keep its nose out of, it's spiritual
matters. A solution to the basic problem cannot be forced with
legislation or social policy. It has to work itself out in the cultural
sphere over time.
I agree with the conservatives who say that
Liberalism is living off of the capital of the tradition that they
reject, but that means that Liberal societies still live with the seeds
of that tradition lodged in the cracks of their shoes or in their pant
cuffs. At any time they might germinate and sprout. I see what we're
going through as a winter cultural phase–it's wet, muddy, and
unpleasant, but it's not the end; it's just a transitional step to what
comes next.
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