Emphasis added in red type by Abyssum.  Commentary added in {red type} by Abyssum.

I am deeply appreciative of Public Discourse for devoting nearly a week’s content to a discussion of my recent book, Why Liberalism Failed, and allowing me the opportunity to respond to three thoughtful and thought-provoking essays. A narrow window between the conclusion of a semester and impending travel abroad allows me to offer a too brief and unsatisfying response to three commentators and friends—Micah Watson, Sam Gregg, and Anthony Esolen—whose reflections each deserve and invite a lengthier response. I hope for another occasion allowing just that, preferably in person and with requisite refreshments.

Micah Watson generously praises my “lightning bolt of a book.” But, like so many of my more conservative critics, he seeks to tug me back into a sufficient appreciation of Locke, the Founders, and their handiwork, suggesting that the philosophical grounds of the Founding might be reconstituted. Yet we read in Sam Gregg’s response an implicit acknowledgement that Locke represents a longstanding tradition that stretches back at least to Scotus and Ockham (and, arguably, further back to Epicurus, if not the serpent). Gregg, it seems to me, has the stronger case. Locke does make occasional statements urging the discipline to master passing passions, but he does so mainly with a view to advancing an individual notion of happiness—what he understands to be “power” to act or not to act—which he equates with accumulation of pleasures, however defined. As any undergraduate at a top university knows, one has to exercise self-control in order to access a wealth of pleasures. This observation does not make Locke into Aquinas, nor our students into good Aristotelians.

If the Second Treatise is the text that especially informed the thinking behind the Declaration of Independence, it is Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to which one must turn to understand the radicalness of his utilitarianism, relativism, and voluntarism. As Gregg rightly suggests by linking Locke to the nominalist tradition, we find in that work an unequivocal echo of Hobbes’s denunciation of the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition that sought to delineate the objective nature of happiness and the attendant virtues, and we encounter an endorsement of a view that happiness is relative to the individual and its “attainment” is always comparative. Because happiness is defined in relation to others—and not an unchanging standard—Locke recognizes that we are inescapably “uneasy” and thus always engaged in a “pursuit of happiness.” He writes:

Hence it was, I think, that the philosophers of old did in vain inquire, whether summum bonum consisted in riches, or bodily delights, or virtue, or contemplation: and they might have as reasonably disputed, whether the best relish were to be found in apples, plums, or nuts, and have divided themselves into sects upon it. For, as pleasant tastes depend not on the things themselves, but on their agreeableness to this or that particular palate, wherein there is great variety; so the greatest happiness consists in the having those things which produce the greatest pleasure, and in the absence of those which cause any disturbance, any pain.

Watson seeks to rest his case for restoring the Founding on several passages that instruct a young person how, ultimately, to be successful in a materialist, relativist, and voluntarist world. As with the writings of Wendell Berry, if we understand the grain of the argument, we can agree or disagree with specifics, but we can’t finally deny its most fundamental teachings.

That said, Watson is entirely right in recognizing that at the time of the founding there was a deep reservoir of belief in the compatibility of liberal philosophy and those who valued “virtue and freedom, rightly understood.” A world thick with Christian practices and belief would have generally left the average person undisturbed by any thoughts of long-term threats posed by that philosophy to those beliefs and practices. But those with a longer-term view saw this threat clearly, throwing into doubt the philosophic “compatibility” of two contrary understandings of liberty, a deeper incompatibility that was discerned by keen contemporaries.

I would point to the sermons “Two Discourses on Liberty” delivered by Nathaniel Niles on the eve of the Revolution, in which he articulated the contradiction between Christian liberty and the Lockean liberty advanced by the more secular elite such as Jefferson. I would point to the prescient and prophetic concerns of the so-called “Anti-Federalists,” who discerned in the Constitution a threat to local liberty and a tendency toward “consolidation” that would ultimately pit the government (including the judiciary) against the people and lead to the undermining of civic virtue. And, of course, we can point to the remarkable analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville, who perceived the threats of “individualism” and statism arising from modern notions of “equal liberty” that echo the form of liberty articulated by Locke. If there was once a time that one could assume a degree of “compatibility” between Christian and Lockean liberty, that time is well behind us: the compatibility that now exists lies between our philosophy and ourselves.

In light of this challenge, Gregg asks whether I might endorse the idea that the Constitution might be “re-premised on non-voluntarism and non-utilitarian foundations.” This is indeed an attractive possibility, but one that requires a fairly revolutionary re-conceptualization of the nature of the Constitution. It was Madison who stated that “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on” to curtail the origins of faction, since—agreeing with Locke—there is no objective truth that can be called upon to adjudicate between contesting ideas of the good. Thus, to “re-found” the Constitution along lines compatible with the natural law would effectively attempt to achieve what was effected by Progressives in their philosophical (and ultimately judicial) reinterpretation of the Constitution.

Of courseit was far more likely for this “reinterpretation” to take place because (as I argue in my book), Progressivism is a logical outworking of Lockean liberalism in practice and over time. To read the Constitution against the grain is a possibility, but it would require a very different people that would itself require a different constitution. We run into the ancient Aristotelian conundrum: how does one solve the ethico-political puzzle in which a virtuous people needs to be fostered by a virtuous regime, while a virtuous regime can only come into being through a virtuous people? Because of the magnitude of the challenge of realistically bringing about such an outcome in a sprawling and internally incoherent corrupt imperial nation like America today, I more modestly suggest that, for most of us, our efforts are best expended fostering “counter-anti-cultural cultures” where we can, while also working toward conceiving a very different political order through new departures in political theory.  {I agree that our efforts are best expended fostering “counter-anti-cultural cultures” where we can, while also working toward conserving a different political order through new departures in political theory that are not tainted by inclusion of liberalism since liberalism by its very nature abhors stability which it regards as cultural rigorism.}

Anthony Esolen is the kind of reader any author wishes for: not only understanding the crux of my argument, but extending and deepening it through a sustained effort to show how my analysis is confirmed and demonstrated by elucidating the threat posed to liberalism by the apparently weak, yet immensely powerful, Little Sisters of the Poor. Their witness contradicts the most fundamental assumptions of liberalism, and it is such exemplars that must ultimately be brought to heel by a totalizing regime. But most revealing to me in reading his inimitable prose is the fact that Esolen is among the first readers to focus on parts of the book that have been almost entirely ignored in the dozens of reviews and essays about it: the “triumph” of liberalism through its fostering of an “anti-culture” and evidenced through its evisceration of liberal education.

The fact that almost every review has focused on liberalism as a narrowly political project, and sees the stakes lying in my interpretation of the Founding or Locke, suggests just how thoroughly our vision is narrowed and cramped by liberalism: if only we could light on the right political fix, we could solve all of the attendant and incidental problems of liberalism. I care deeply about politics—it is the discipline I have spent my adult life studying—but I also agree with Percy Bysshe Shelley (or Plato, for that matter), who wrote that it is the poets who are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

If we want a different politics, ultimately we must offer a different moral imagination for ourselves, our children, and theirs. I hope more professors of literature, music, theater, and teachers and parents of children will read my book, and help in turn to tutor the political theorists. But for any appreciative reader an author is rightly grateful, and for the generous and challenging comments of Micah Watson, Sam Gregg, and Anthony Esolen I am especially grateful.

Patrick Deneen is Professor of Political Science and holds the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. 

I have devoured Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, marking up one paradoxical truth after another. Or, perhaps, these are truths that are only regarded as paradoxical, because people are blind to those foundations of liberal thought that would explain why, for example, the champion of the unfettered “individual” smoking and riding his horse into the western mountains (or wearing pajamas while he trawls the internet for pornography of a peculiarly sterile kind) is the fraternal twin of the engineer of the all-competent and all-surveying state.

As I read, my mind turned to the controversy surrounding the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Obama administration’s attempt to sue them out of their consciences. Their offense was that they did not want to cooperate materially with providing artificial estrogen to women who wanted to fool or abuse the nature of their bodies, putting them on a pregnant-already setting while remaining childless. The Little Sisters of the Poor are Roman Catholic, and thus retain some residual respect for the created order.

Professor Deneen can explain to us why the attack on the Sisters was so persistent, and why those who call themselves conservative mounted so feeble a defense. This case touches on every one of the neuralgic contradictions that Deneen says have been built into liberalism from the beginning, so that it is no surprise that liberalism advances while actual human liberty recedes.

Religion, Relationality, and the Res Idiotica

It is no accidental result of the liberal order, but precisely its object, says Deneen, to create the res idiotica: a public space for broad individual expression and complete state control both of the collateral disorder and those cultural institutions that make a claim on a person’s allegiance. Those include religion, as a matter of course. We are mostly born into religious faith, as we are born into families, neighborhoods, and towns—or, at least, we used to be—and the virtue of piety demands that we honor those connections. That is meant as more than a formal admission of gratitude, such as we see on display, says Deneen, for a couple of minutes before a football game. These connections help to constitute a truly human being. For we are not Hobbesian atoms of self-will, not until liberalism makes us so. Not only has the “state of nature” or Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” never existed, human beings have ever been human by virtue of their relations with others, and by virtue of the bonds of duty and memory that these relations imply.

So then, the religious commitment of the Little Sisters could hardly count in their favor. It was instead rather like a small outpost of resistance, surviving the liberal onslaught. “Religion” cannot be tolerated unless it is recast as a simulacrum or reduced to a palimpsest—the residual impression of a religion that used to possess real flesh and bones and blood. Religion as a binding force must not be encouraged, because the liberal orthodoxy holds that nothing ought to bind us but a commitment to ever-increasing power over nature and to the space it clears for individualism. We may, as a function of that individualism, “choose” a religion, rather as we choose a shirt. In other words, religion must cease to be religion, and then it may be tolerated, so long as it does not get in the way of the unfettered choices of other people. There is, in such a system, no God at all.

Thus we find not only the unwillingness but the incapacity of the liberal order even to conceive that a human being might have a hierarchically determinative commitment to obedience, regardless of personal preference. In the liberal order, all such commitments are scorned as atavistic. Hence Deneen’s chilling account of a conversation with a liberal colleague in political science. The man opined that Amish youth must be set free even against their choices to return, after a year of trial in our world of libertas idiotica, to the rich religious and social communities that gave them life and purpose. Hence also the obviously counterfactual claim that the Little Sisters of the Poor would be “imposing” their Catholic faith on their secular employees. The Sisters, who wished merely to refrain from participating, in this one regard, in the regnant individualistic hedonism, threaten that hedonism by their implicit suggestion that God and not man must be the measure of all things.

What about their work? Surely the Sisters might be given credit for their selfless service to the poor? No, not so. Just as essentially placeless and faceless health insurance companies drove out of existence the local and personal arrangements whereby fraternal organizations and guilds once cared for their sick, their widows, and their orphans, so now the liberal state means to engulf all charities, or absorb them and assimilate them to itself. The old forms, again, preserved duties that extended across families and generations, so that I might feel duty-bound to take my turn in helping the people who once helped my father. The new forms entail no such duty. We must always keep in mind that the ideal liberal person, as conceived by such men as John Stuart Mill, is—as Deneen shows again and again—disentangled, dissociated, and disencumbered by prior commitments. What the Little Sisters do, then, is to get in the way of both the state and the individual. They get in the way, as it were, of the technocratic canalization of charity.

The Industrialization and Sterilization of Sex

We can now see, I think, that the specific content of the cause against the Sisters was also crucial. Deneen shows, I believe correctly, that the consumerism of the modern market and the consumerism of modern sex are both progeny of the liberal order. If you wish to raise a laugh, or to turn faces red with wrath, try suggesting that the congress of the sexes is both biologically and anthropologically what I have called “the child-making thing,” and that any realistic view of the act and its moral import must turn to the child who may be begotten by it, and back toward the parents and grandparents who brought into being the acting man and woman in the first place.

For liberalism, that is precisely the thing that must be denied at all costs. It implies the structural inequality of male and female in reproduction and in the care of infants and small children. It reminds us forcibly of those physical differences that underlie so much of our traditional divisions of labor. It is time-transcending, when the liberal order, as Deneen says, means to fix us in a “pastless present.” It is amnesiac, like a bottle of booze, but without the festivity. One should not wonder that the Little Sisters attracted so much opprobrium for wishing to refrain to hand out the sexual soma. It is rather to be wondered that judges and pundits did not demand that they be required to telephone the women in question to take their daily doses.

If it be objected that such drugs are merely a form of medication which ought to be made available to everyone who wants it, we might reply that that is not true, as a plain fact of the matter. The pills do not medicate. They do not prevent a communicable disease; they do not heal a sickness; they do not restore proper function to an organ. The problem, such as it is, is that the organs in question are quite healthy and are working rather too well for the wishes of the not wholly copulating couple. But medicine in the metastatic liberal order is not just for medication. It is for liberation, for the realization of the desires of the individual self.

That is why we are now seeing, much to the profit of pharmaceutical companies, the industrialization of sex and of sexual self-creation or self-negation, as even children are ushered into a world of utterly unfettered and therefore intrinsically meaningless choices. Amputation, mutilation, a series of plastic surgeries, and many decades of synthetic hormones—and everyone who counts in the liberal order profits; mainly the big players in high finance and ever more intrusive and perversely avuncular government.

Children and Culture

But children imply something else, too, something whose destruction by the liberal order is in keeping with the willed sterility of sex. Children imply culture. Liberals, both of the market and of Jabba the State, may speak a lot about “culture,” but they mean by it the thin-soil drift of mass consumption. They are robber barons, Deneen shows, stripping away the cognitive talent from once thriving communities to homogenize the cleverest of our young people, making them into “a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference toward shared fates of actual neighbors and communities.” Their indifference, or outright hostility, extends toward the hard-won moral, aesthetic, intellectual, and religious wisdom of the past.

The child is a forcible reminder that our life, if it is to be fully human, must transcend the few fretful hours in which we move upon earth. That is just what all of the liberal myths of the state of nature deny. We are blank slates, blank beings, for whom the past is a blank, and the selves outside of our choice of associations are blank. But “the disassembling of those cultural forms that tutor our presentism and instruct us that a distinctive feature of our humanity is to remember and to promise renders us at once free, and trapped by ‘brutish indifference’ to any time outside our eternal present.”

I am aware that we remain sentimentally attached to our children, as we are to our pets. Our barbarism, abortion excepted, is usually not cruel in ways that involve bloodshed or human sacrifice. But we do not allow children to have too great an effect on the really important business of life, which is, as Deneen shows, our clawing our way to the top of the cultural elite, an aristocracy far more radically removed from the poor, both physically and “culturally,” than any periwigged dukes in the days of Louis XVI could ever dream of being. We do not work on behalf of children, just as we do not work on behalf of our poodles and retrievers. We work, and have children, and demand institutions that will keep us in the workplace and away from our children, lest they distract us from that work. In the name of liberation, we cash in the liberty that ordinary human beings once longed for, the practical liberty to have the time and the means to be free from servile labor, so as to enjoy the goods for which we work, things that are good in themselves: a rich family life, most of all.

A Different View of Liberty

That family life should situate us in a place, among other families and in our local approach to eternity. It should endow us with a human time that does not merely count the digits on a clock. But to be so situated requires an utterly different view of liberty from what we have been sold in the mass market or in our mills of mass evacuation of the mind, heart, and soul—our schools, I mean. Cicero could have taught us about this rich and true liberty, or Aristotle, or the fathers of the Church. It is not defined by negation. It is not a freedom from duty, but a freedom for those duties, a freedom for civic engagement with your neighbors, and for the highest call of love, human and divine.

Such freedom requires, as Deneen shows, the ancient habits of self-restraint. These habits allow you not to remake the world according to your desires, which are always insatiable, but to accommodate your desires to the order of things around and within you. That is exactly the self-restraint, the dutiful modesty, and the gratitude that the liberal order denies, just as it denies the goodness of the natural world unless that world is subjected to our technological strafing, stretching, pounding, pumping, and pulverizing.

I will conclude with one more consideration, one that I trust will meet with Professor Deneen’s approval. It too is inspired by the Little Sisters of the Poor. There is a liberty that soars beyond the liberal’s vision of self-fashioning, and also beyond the classical vision of tempered and well-directed passions in the service of the common good. It is what Saint Paul calls “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” That liberty, more than any other, must terrify the worldling of the liberal on the left and the liberal on the right. That liberty does more than acknowledge a duty. It flings itself abroad when there is no duty; it binds itself foolishly in love; it is the freedom of a promise never to be retracted or hedged; the adventurous liberty of devotion, whereby man responds to and even imitates the grace of God.

Anthony Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and professor of English Renaissance and classical literature at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

Shortly after I was installed in the Co-Cathedral of St. Thomas in Tallahassee as the First Bishop of the new Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Monsignor William Kerr, Rector of the Co-Cathedral, showed me around Tallahassee and told me a lot about the history of that part of North Florida.

One of the things he told me was the history of the Catholic converts to the Catholic Faith, the Native Americans of the Appalachia Indian Tribe who had a number of villages in the area.  Those Indians were converted to the Catholic Faith by Spanish Franciscan Friars in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

I was shocked to learn from Monsignor Kerr that the villages and been destroyed and the Indians martyred by the English Governor Green from South Carolina, who, motivated by hatred of both Spain and the Roman Catholic Church marched south to Florida with an army composed of colonial troops and Creek Indian allies and ravaged the villages of North Florida.

Part of Governor Greens’s objective was the elimination of Spanish colonies in North Florida and also to enslave as many of the Appalachee indians as he could to bring back to the Carolinas to work on the plantations of the English colonies.

When Monsignor Kerr pointed out one of the sites of the Appalachee villages I said, “Lets buy the land and maybe someday we will be able to build a Shrine to the memory of the martyrs after Rome has beatified them.  We bought the land and soon afterward a non-profit organization was formed to promote the cause of the martyrs and to build the shrine.

The Cause has been approved by the Congregation for Saints in Rome and much progress has been made assembling the historical documents which will form much of the basis for the eventual beatification.

EWTN is going to air a documentary on the Martyrs of La Florida, watch this trailer and watch the documentary when it airs on EWTN.

The article below is very important.  Homosexual acts (not the orientation as such) have been, and will forever be, understood as so very serious because these depraved acts are sins that the The Church classifies among those evil acts taken directly against God, “against the Creator and Lawgiver” because these acts go against His Created order.  The following article therefore attaches great importance to understanding how erroneous the supposed teaching in the document known as Amoris Laetitia really is.

A priest explains how Amoris Laetitia was really written to ‘normalize’ homosexuality

 Amoris Laetitia, Catholic, Gay Agenda, Homosexuality, Pope Francis, Sodomy