the New Pantagruel

Liberalism and Its Meaning for Christians

by James Kalb

iberalism has enormous power as a social reality. When liberals call themselves “progressive” they make it stick. Their views dominate all reputable intellectual and cultural institutions. Judges feel free to read liberalism into fundamental law, even without historical or textual support, because it seems so obviously right.

Nonetheless, many people resist the notion that something called “liberalism” can matter so much. After all, liberal views have changed over time and will change again. Everyone holds some such views, few people hold all of them, and most normal people who hold them cut back on them in various ways. Besides, the results attributed to liberalism can be attributed to other things, non-ideological social developments for example. So why not forget stereotypes like “liberalism” and look at particulars?

“there lives the dearest freshness deep down things no. 1”
(oil on canvas) by Kay Darling

In spite of such objections, grand principles such as those that characterize liberalism do matter, because they order our social world. How people understand things, and the basic principles on which they cooperate, make an enormous difference. Liberalism is the system of principles behind the social, moral, and political views that dominate our public life. People aren’t often completely aware of things as basic as the accepted principles of social morality. They state these principles variously, how they are applied changes over time, and a lot of what people do and say is at odds with them. Nonetheless, the principles are there and determine what happens in crucial cases when something important comes in question. Otherwise, understandings would be too much at odds for the community to endure.

Crucial cases and the principles that decide them determine the direction of events. At bottom, the liberal principles that have determined the direction of mainstream moral and political discussion in recent decades are quite simple. They hold that value is based on individual desire, and morality on the equal essential worthiness of those desires. It’s human preferences that make things good, and since preferences are equally preferences, everything thought good must equally be good. To think or act otherwise would be “judgmental.” Politics and public morality thus become focused on giving preferences as much and as equally as possible, and on supporting people in their efforts to satisfy their preferences. Freedom, tolerance, equality, and social welfare thus become the principles expected to prevail once something becomes a clear public issue.

What we’ve said so far is accepted by most people, at least in general terms. However, liberal principles also have implications that are less well-known and in the end mean the self-destruction of liberalism. Liberalism qua liberalism, with its exclusive emphasis on freedom and equality, is incapable of dealing rationally with questions of authority and power.

The difficulty is that when preferences clash, the liberal demand for equal treatment means in the end that the dispute has to be resolved by someone other than the parties, and the resolution has to pass itself off as something that isn’t a substantive decision. Anything else would be oppressive, since it would allow one party’s preferences to suppress another’s. That squeamishness about power makes normal political life impossible. A political issue, by definition, involves a conflict of preferences. Liberalism must therefore (at least ideally) depoliticize all serious political issues and determine them by an allegedly neutral process. It needs to rule by denying that power is being exercised, claiming in effect to be a system of power that rejects and opposes power.

The history of liberalism shows its reluctance to admit that government makes and enforces important decisions that might well have been made otherwise. Under classical liberalism, the need for a neutral resolution of all issues meant that everything had to be a matter of property rights. To answer a question you asked what the holders of the relevant property interests wanted. Today, the supposed neutrality of property rights is supplemented and when possible replaced by the supposedly less rigid and arbitrary neutrality of technicians, experts, consultants, therapists, ethicists, facilitators, social scientists, lawyers, transnational bureaucrats, and human rights advocates, all of them here to help us and none of them (supposedly) exercising significant discretionary power.

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