Archive for July, 2012

Os Guinness and Freedom in America (cont.)

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Can America be Good Without God?

July 30, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

Maybe individuals can be “good without God” — but can entire societies? This is one of the burning questions undergirding Os Guinness’ A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. Guinness, in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, is a foreign-born observer of American culture and admirer of the audacity of the American experiment. A Free People’s Suicide examines American society and its slow and disastrous drift away from its historic moorings. The following is the second (see the first) in a series of posts that feature and reflect on an interview with Dr. Guinness.

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Os Guinness

You refer to a “golden triangle of freedom”: freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires freedom. We’ve discussed why freedom requires virtue. Does virtue really require faith? The question is often asked, “Can one be good without God?” The New Atheists are determined that the answer should be yes.

The Framers would disagree, at least when you speak of a society and not merely an individual. The Framers were very clear that every person, including every atheist, should be given freedom of conscience. But they were less sanguine about a society of atheists. John Adams comes very close to predicting postmodernism, without using the word. He describes a society that has no sense of any father to the universe, and no sense of an ultimate meaning, and he thinks such a society would bring itself down.

Put it another way: if you ask what will give you strong virtue, what is the inspiration for virtue, the content and the sanction of virtue, it’s quite clear that the strongest versions all come from some faith or another — not from atheism. We’re reaping the consequences of rejecting the realism of the Framers’ answer.

You quote Chesterton: “Men will more and more realize that there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything, and there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a center of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.” How do you see the rise of the New Atheism fitting into the development you’ve described, where Americans have abandoned the Framers’ concept of liberty, and the mechanisms the Framers put in place to safeguard liberty for later generations?

I think it’s not so much the New Atheists but the rise of postmodernism in the 1960s. That’s what’s given us fiction-based beliefs. At least the New Atheists were modernists in the sense that they may have borrowed Christian ideas, but they believed in them. What you have in postmodernism is the idea that all these beliefs, including freedom, are fictions. That came in in the 1960s and that’s far earlier than the New Atheists.

What is the role of the church? You say freedom needs to be sustained, and in order to be sustained it requires a source beyond itself. One could read this book and agree with quite everything without being Christian — but on the other hand it seems like there is a very clear place for the Judeo-Christian ethic. What’s the role of the church?

I personally think that the role that the Framers saw religion supplying is not being carried out by any religious community today. In other words, you have a crisis of authority in the church itself. That’s another part of the argument in the book. It’s not the business of government, but we do have a profound crisis in the church where Christians are not doing the job the Framers thought needed doing.

This is not in the book, but let’s put it more practically. For the first time in American history, there is no Christian tradition with moral authority in public life. For most of the nineteenth century, evangelicals played a very strong role. In the 1880s that role was picked up by the Protestant mainline, and they kept it until the 1960s. Since then you’ve had a friendly competition between the Catholics and the evangelicals, but now the Catholics have lost their moral authority through the pedophile crisis. Evangelicals have lost their moral authority through the extremes of the religious right, and now we can see this massive revulsion against the religious right by the millennial generation and many others. Sadly, they’re not only dropping out from the Christian Right but from the Christian faith altogether. But the fact is that, for the first time in American history, there is no Christian tradition with moral authority in the public square.

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Os Guinness on Freedom in America

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

America’s Slow-Motion Suicide

July 27, 2012 By  Timothy Dalrymple

What if freedom is its own worst enemy, and Americans’ abuse of their freedoms will undermine freedom in the proper sense and ultimately dismantle our society? This is the question posted in Os Guinness’ new book, A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future. Guinness, in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville or G. K. Chesterton’s “What I Saw in America,” is a foreign-born observer of American culture and admirer of the audacity of the American experiment. See the end of this post for more biographical information.

“There’s no question that what is loved supremely amongst Americans,” he says, “and America’s significance for the world, is freedom.” But the seeds of our greatness are also the seeds of our demise. A Free People’s Suicide is a powerful analysis of American society and its slow and disastrous drift away from its Constitutional moorings. The following is the first in a series of posts that feature and reflect on an interview with Dr. Guinness. Please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss later installments.

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Why the title, “A Free People’s Suicide?“

The title goes back to Abraham Lincoln. “As a nation of free men, either we will live free for all time or die by suicide.” Strong, free nations always bring themselves down. That’s going to be America’s problem. It won’t come down from foreign challenges but by internal corruptions, and in this case by the corruption of freedom.

This book concerns the audacity of the Framers’ view that freedom could last forever. They had an extraordinary system to do it, but the present generation has abandoned that system. Do we have something better? Are we dealing with unforeseen issues? Or are we drifting with complacency? I’m afraid the story is the latter. It saddens me that America is not living up to her own ideals. In the end, she will be judged not by the world but by her own ideals.

This book hits the market in the heat of an election season. Is this a partisan issue?

This is explicitly not a partisan issue. The corruption of freedom is worked out in different ways on either side of the aisle. The framers had a vision of freedom which, in isaiah Berlin’s terms, was not only negative freedom from but also a positive freedom to be. American freedom now is almost exclusively freedom from — freedom from interference or freedom from constraint — which is close to a practical libertarianiam. The liberal side says, “Get the government out of my body.” The conservative side says “Get the government out of all areas of my life.”

This is very different from the framer’s vision of freedom. Freedom for them, of course, was one word that incorporated honesty and patriotism and loyalty, and the nurturing of this freedom required virtue. So the issues I’m talking about in the book lie below the state of the union. I would say that this is not a partisan book, but the issue below the partisan issues that should concern Americans on both sides. The state of the union address very rarely addresses the true state of the union.

We often hear from politicians partisan, self-serving appeals to the Framers and our founding documents. Each side accuses the other of “shredding the Constitution.” You say you’re speaking of something more fundamental than the usual partisan debates. What is that fundamental thing? What was distinctive in the way the Founders thought of freedom and how it should be exercise and protected in the United States?

As I understand the American Founders, the most brilliant and daring idea they had was that it’s possible to create a free society that could stay free forever.

The founders were not merely revolutionary. They were rooted. They knew their classics, and they knew from writers such as Cicero and especially Polybius that no system ever lasted, and free systems are especially precarious because freedom is the greatest enemy of freedom. So they devised a system that would have antidotes built into it. I think their system was positively brilliant, and yet the present generation either totally ignores it or pretends that it has something better. I think modern American freedom is unsustainable.

Why is freedom its own worst enemy?

The paradox at the heart of freedom is that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom itself. Two things lay at the heart oft he conundrum. The first is political. As the French writer Montesquieu taught, freedom does not just depend on the structures of liberty, such as the Constitution or the Law, but it depends on the spirit of liberty. The structures you can put in place once and for all. But the spirit, you have to keep alive in the citizens from generation to generation. Clearly that is what is gone from America today. You still have the Constitution — but you’ve lost the spirit of liberty.

The other element is even deeper still. Freedom always requires a certain order, and the only ordering that’s appropriate to freedom is self-restraint. Yet self-restraint is precisely what’s undermined when freedom flourishes. So freedom destroys its own boundaries and very quickly becomes license and permissiveness, and that’s what’s happening in America today.

You call on Americans to cultivate the essential civic character needed for ordered liberty and sustainable freedom. What is America’s essential civic character? Or what does that look like for individual Americans?

The habits of the heart are even more important even than the law. I call it the golden triangle of freedom — and you can put it very simply. Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires freedom. It goes round and round. If you just take the first leg, freedom requires virtue; only a virtuous people are capable of freedom in its truest sense. So you have a stress, for example, on character. Leadership in a free society requires leaders with real character. Adams among others uses words like inimitable, indefeasible, all the words you would expect to line up in the category of freedom. But he uses it of the people’s right to know the character of their leaders. Modern Americans have abandoned that. You can take the Clinton impeachment when various intellectuals wrote in the NYT that character is irrelevant and what matters in a president is competence. You could have a president with the morals of an alley cat as long as they had competence. That’s the modern emphasis, and it’s working itself out in leadership, in the affairs of Wall Street and the banking industry, and so on. There’s a real crisis of what it takes to keep freedom going.

Are you not idealizing the Framers? What would you say to those who would object that we actually have greater freedoms today, and freedoms extended more broadly to all people, than we did in the time of the Founding?

The Framers had their blind spots. So their treatment of slaves and Native Americans and women were egregious mistakes of the Framers. The trouble is, the baby, the bathwater and all has been thrown out. I would say the Framers got religious freedom nearly perfectly right from the very beginning. There were no blind spots there, yet we’ve departed from that. and their view of the way freedom needed to be sustainable, and how it needed to be sustained, they had very daring answers that were almost entirely correct right from the start. We’ve abandoned those as well. So we need to distinguish carefully where we openly acknowledge the Framers were wrong, and where they were brilliantly right.

Os Guinness

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series based on my interview with Dr. Guinness. Please check back over the weekend and throughout next week for more. And check out Dr. Guinness’ book on Amazon.

The great-great-great-grandson of Dublin brewer Arthur Guinness, Os was born in China and observed the communist revolution there in 1949. Returning to England, he obtained his degrees from Oxford, including his D.Phil. in 1981 from Oriel College, and came to the United States in 1984. He has written or edited over thirty books, and many Americans will know Dr. Guinness through his work with the Trinity Forum and his appearances at numerous Veritas Forums at universities around the country, through his frequent (and extraordinarily eloquent) public speaking engagements, and through his writing.

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Individualism and Selfishness

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Against the Hippies: Or, In Defense of American Individualism

July 4, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple 23 Comments

 

Kurt Andersen’s piece in the New York Times today is in some respects a terrific column. But if you can spot the vast logical leap.

Not the best political philosophers.

Andersen recalls a time when he was confronted with the question, “Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?” Coming as it did at the Woodstock Writers Festival, the question implies a certain amount of self-congratulation. We progressives accomplished much of what we set out to accomplish when we were drug-addled hippies. We’ve brought about greater recognition for the rights of women and gays, greater equality between the races, greater protection of the environment, and of course the great “win” of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (?). Groovy. But then there’s a fly in the ointment. So why isn’t America one big commune by now? Or why is greedy capitalism, at least, so triumphant? The revolutionary aims of the sixties have prevailed in cultural matters. Why not in economic matters?

Andersen’s answer was a total buzz-kill: “What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.”

America’s founding documents defend our rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — what Andersen calls “individualism in a nutshell.” But the American propensity for individualism has been counterbalanced by moral, social and government constraints. Even when individualism burst through the bonds in stretches of rampant self-gratification (the Roaring Twenties are cited), economic crises or moral opprobrium restored the order, so that “a rough equilibrium between individualism and the civic good” has prevailed in American history. The same conformist pressures of “bourgeois social norms” that made beatniks rare made proudly money-mad “Ayn Randian millionaires” scarce as well. Thus, “What the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.

There are several things right about this analysis.

  1. Those who leap eagerly into a culture of sexual and pharmacological permissiveness today generally do not do so (if anyone ever did) for reasons of social and political transformation. They do so because they’re selfish and self-indulgent. It’s not an evolution of human society, or a liberation of consciousness; it’s a moral digression and an enslavement to our baser impulses.
  2. For all the ways in which social norms and taboos are reviled and caricatured in popular media, they served (albeit imperfectly) an extremely important function. Understanding that the human heart is inclined to sin and self-deceit, the Judeo-Christian ethic, when it permeates a society, produces forces to counteract our selfish inclinations and barriers to protect the young and the vulnerable.
  3. Finally, even those of us who do not wish to see the government as the means of redistribution can agree that we would like to see the ultra-wealthy engage in more voluntary redistribution of their own resources. I believe that one thing worse than the radical wealth disparity in our country is a government regime that enforces equality of wealth or something close to it — not because I want to protect the wealthy but because I’ve concluded that kind of regime is destructive of entire economies and societies. When the ultra-wealthy are unconstrained by an ethical code that elevates humility and service, that celebrates lavish materialism and crass excess, this is morally appalling and not worthy of admiration or envy.

So what’s wrong with Andersen’s argument? The equation of individualism and selfishness. These are not the same thing. To be sure, selfishness stands in tension with the civic good (except in those cases where one can harness selfishness to serve the civic good). Individualism, at least as Americans have traditionally understood is, does not. Laws that defend “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are in the interest of the civic good. When Andersen describes the equilibrium between individualism and the civic good, what does he image would happen if “the civic good” prevailed? Individualism (which, remember, is defined in a nutshell as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”) would be extinguished? That would help the civic good?!?

There are some simple distinctions that could be very helpful for a liberal- but open-minded person like Andersen. First, self-interest and selfishness are not the same. It is self-interested to work 40 hours a week in order to afford a home; it is not necessarily selfish. Second, it is not primarily selfishness or greed but some combination of self-interest and the desire to provide for one’s family that turns the wheels of the capitalistic engine. And third, individualism and selfishness are not even remotely the same.

Individualism, in its ideal American variety, is formed in two parts: a powerful assertion of individual rights and liberties, and an equally powerful assertion of individual duties and responsibilities. Based on a Judeo-Christian concept of the rational human self in relation to God, family, church, community and creation, American individualism emphasizes the individual’s moral conscience and faith over against conformity or compulsion, the individual’s industry and ingenuity, and the individual’s obligation to provide for himself and his loved ones and others around him in need. That kind of individualism does not stand over against the civic good.

So the next time someone tells you, Americans are too individualistic, your response should be, No, Americans are too selfish, and some no longer understand what American individualism means. The Germany of the Third Reich could have done with a bit more American individualism, and so could Mao’s China. So, for that matter, could the hippies of Woodstock, whose deconstruction of proper individualism unleashed the natural tendencies to selfishness and materialism (a selfishness and materialism that ultimately triumphed over the sixties economic program) and who promoted a political philosophy that actually sublimated (oppressed) the individual to the detriment of the civic good.

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