What Liberalism should be - a very brief credo

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. - Winston Churchill

I’d like to talk about true liberalism: the kind that a Marx would be against. Two things characterize this liberalism: emphasis on the individual over the collective and the free market. This blog will be very brief, but this is a credo that’s been fermenting in my head for a while.

There are five main institutions we should try to have: technology, free market, limited government (to protect freedom and our rights), rule of law, and an emphasis on personal autonomy.

The society that has these institutions seems to have the best material conditions. The main reason why this might be is because freedom itself is an institution. It is an axiom we start with.

But there are two main reasons why Americans are starting to forget that. First, they haven’t defined liberalism correctly - they’ve used the ideas of Ayn Rand, Rawls, and Nozick. Second, the discipline of social science doesn’t allow scholars to define it right. This was started by Marx, Freud, Durkheim, and the deconstruction of language. But this blinds them, because social science is secular, and the roots of liberalism are religious. Religion is an illusion to these guys.

John Locke and Adam Smith gave us the first great narrative for true liberalism. They both use religious language and concepts. But the second rival narrative came from Marx and Rousseau. Their main pillar was equality. Their view of art and science is strange: it doesn’t satisfy any human needs - it is an expression of pride. It deteriorates the ‘commune’, leads to consumerism, and so to dreaded capitalism. Locke, on the other hand, wants to make inequality an institution - not in terms of intrinsic worth, but talents, gifts, natural abilities, God-given endowments.

The 19th and 20th century socialists have agree with the second narrative: for distribution of wealth to be ‘fair’, for ‘equal’ opportunities, for reorganizing society into smaller communes. They don’t show us how this new economy will work, or really how to go from where we are now to where they want to go. What is common to all the socialists, though, is that the present system just doesn’t work. They show this by a moral critique, by labeling who the bad people are and who the victims are.

But true liberalism is about having what’s called a ‘civil association’; this civility is assumed in its economics, politics, and law. This association doesn’t have in mind the entire commune; it just prepares the soil to allow us to pursue what we want. Marx, Aristotle, Plato, and even Aquinas set out to absorb the individual into the commune. The community comes first, then the individual, says todays socialists and much of the Church.

Lets contrast. Socialists want the government to make the good of the commune the ultimate end, to absorb the individual into the commune, to serve the commune. True liberalism, though, wants to make personal freedom the ultimate end, in the context of civil association, based on a culture which allows individuals the freedom to choose to join communes if they want: communes such as religions, churches, schools, families, etc . . .

These voluntarily joined communes are true liberalism’s ‘spiritual capital’. This is the economical context in which we, in a society ruled by a government, approach, join, or shy away from the social institution of religion. That’s why we have so many religions here in America, instead of, for example, Iran, which has one religion, sponsored and made obligatory by the government.

The implication is that socialists, in the back of their minds, in their subconscious, in their philosophy of government and economics, haven’t made the switch from community being the ultimate end to individual freedom being that end. If community is the end, freedom is lost (along with true community); if freedom is the end, the community is saved.

I’ll finish my thoughts on this in the next blog.