The virtue in liberty
By Douglas Farrow | Published via Substack
For part one of this discussion, see here
We spoke of the madness that has infected the West, and of the demolition of the family as a cause of this madness. Here we are going to speak about recovery, through a return to first principles. “When a society is perishing,” counsels Leo XIII, “the wholesome advice to give to those who would restore it is to call it to the principles from which it sprang.”
Among these principles is the primacy of the family; which, he insisted, “has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty.” At least! “For, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature.” Or as Chesterton puts it in Eugenics and Other Evils, “the act of founding the family was an individual adventure outside the frontiers of the State.”
Another founding principle is the primacy of virtue itself, for, “since the end of society is to make men better,” says Leo, “the chief good that society can possess is virtue.” Virtue is the very thing the family should inculcate and, when healthy, does inculcate. The virtuous family benefits the whole of society, not only by providing new members thereof, but also by providing the kind of member society needs.
Observe, please, that we are not talking about virtue being inculcated by the state in the family, but about the family inculcating virtue in society and so also in the state. Nor are we talking about the state inculcating religion in society. A society foundering for want of virtue must look to religion, argues Leo, for only religion “can avail to destroy the evil at its root.” But inculcating religion, and so re-establishing Christian morals, “apart from which all the plans and devices of the wisest will prove of little avail,” is the task of the Church and of the family and of free associations of free men. What the state must do is respect that freedom.
It is crucial to keep this order in view. It is not only a salutary order but, in political terms, an ordo salutis. Church and family, free associations of families and citizens in society, then the state—not the other way round, as it is today. Today, the state partners with private corporations to coerce people without virtue into alliances without merit or benefit; except, of course, to those doing the coercing.
If free families and free associations of free men—especially working men such as formed the freedom convoys—are not at the heart of the resistance, there is no resistance. For advancing technology is rapidly giving the upper hand to those who instrumentalize the regulatory state to their revolutionary ends. Likewise, if the libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the Church itself, is not claimed even by the Church, then the freedom of families and of society is left unsupported and in great peril.
This is Lent. Are the churches repenting for their complicity in the destruction of lives, livelihoods, and the rule of law—both divine and human law—or are they still playing at self-justification? Are they asking forgiveness for running after false gods to relieve their ungodly fears? Or do they still imagine themselves innocent? Dare they even speak any more of the libertas ecclesia?
But let us leave aside controversy in the churches, the sort of controversy that gave rise to the present site. It is to a certain controversy in society itself that I wish to speak, a controversy between friends of freedom, or those who ought to be friends, between natural allies in resisting big government and the rise of communo-fascism. The controversy concerns the role of virtue in defending freedom.
The friends in question we may call libertarians and traditionalists, characterizing them thus: the former think love of liberty the one virtue that really matters politically; the latter think that liberty itself requires many virtues, if it is not to be supplanted by chaos and so give way to coercion. We must be honest about their differences.
When the libertarian encounters a traditionalist who resorts to religious authorities, as I have done in my opening gambit, he worries that it will come, in the end, not merely to a revival of virtue but to the imposition of religion. When he reads in Rerum novarum that “the main thing needful is to re-establish Christian morals, apart from which all the plans and devices of the wisest will prove of little avail,” he does not hear a pastor speaking, offering friendly advice to a struggling society, with a keen eye on the welfare of the working man. He hears rather an oppressor or potential oppressor.
When the traditionalist encounters a libertarian who thinks freedom can be defended simply by the love of freedom, he scratches his head and wonders what the libertarian thinks liberty is. Must liberty not be ordered? Does freedom not require form? Without form, how can freedom be something rather than nothing? The traditionalist thinks that virtue itself is freedom's most fundamental form.
Our second question, then, to put it in practical rather than philosophical terms, is this:
Can the traditionalist and the libertarian work together to defend freedom?
Bruce Pardy, who teaches law at Queen's, doesn't seem confident they can, though he thinks they should. Distinguishing between them under the labels “virtue people” and “freedom people,” he marks their differences as follows:
Virtue People believe that ... tradition, faith, family, responsibility, dignity, patriotism, community, and spiritual or religious conviction are the pillars upon which the West must be built... Laws, governments, and society, they believe, should promote the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
Freedom People don’t share this view... Virtues, they believe, are for individuals to work out for themselves. The primary accomplishment of the West ... is individual autonomy. The purpose of government is to secure individual rights to liberty. Freedom means the absence of coercion... Freedom means “freedom from.”
Virtue People believe in freedom too... But freedom means a different thing to them... The decline of the West is due to an excessive emphasis on individuality. Freedom ... means the disciplining of desire, which requires limits. Freedom is the liberation to act responsibly, to be transcendent, and to flourish virtuously. We become free, they would say, to the extent that our will becomes coherent with objective Good. Freedom means “freedom to.”
Freedom for the good, the beautiful, the true, is what virtue people seek. Freedom from the ideas of others about such things, or rather from their imposition, is what freedom people seek. “In the political sphere,” posits Pardy, “these two kinds of freedom are incompatible.”
Freedom People expect their governments to keep the peace and protect the individual—and otherwise to not interfere. Virtue People expect their governments to promote the Good with laws and policies. Virtue People support laws that prohibit behavior that is, in their view, immoral, damaging to human flourishing, or inconsistent with common good. Assisted suicide, prostitution, divorce, pornography, even heresy, just to start, shall not be permitted... [They] use laws to achieve their ends, and laws depend on force...
But Freedom People can be virtuous too. They can embrace faith, family, and community. They can disapprove of behavior, such as prostitution, that Virtue People would ban. However, Freedom People make a distinction that Virtue People are unable or unwilling to make. [They] see two different questions where Virtue People see only one. How should people behave? How must they behave? For Freedom People, the first is philosophical and personal. The second is legal and coercive. The answer to the first does not answer the second. Freedom People do not impose their moral judgments on others. They will not have others impose upon them.
Striking a chord played two centuries ago by J. S. Mill, Pardy adds:
Paradoxically, Freedom People have faith that Virtue People lack. They have faith in spontaneous order. If we leave people alone, they say, things will turn out fine. Individual decisions will coalesce into peace and prosperity. Virtue People do not believe in spontaneous order. They want their hands on the wheel, so that they can manage people to virtuous ends.
Freedom People will not be managed. They believe that the West’s problem is too little liberty. Virtue People believe that the problem is too much. Freedom People oppose the administrative state. Virtue People embrace it if it directs people to proper ends. Neither will sign on to the other’s project. Although they cooperate to resist the tyranny of the woke, they are not likely to succeed unless they reconcile.
While his sympathies lie with the freedom people, who insist upon a minimalist state, Pardy nonetheless hopes for reconciliation. For the state we know today is expansive, sprawling, interventionist to an extraordinary extent. It is crushing freedom in a runaway cycle of regulatory inflation and emergency rule. To overcome it will require every resource of those who refuse to be its wards, who regard themselves as citizens, not merely as subjects.
Bearing in mind that we are talking about freedom in the political sphere, not about freedom tout court, almost thou persuadest me, Professor Pardy, to become a libertarian. Yet I must reject this framing as prejudicial. To set virtue and freedom at odds will not do. It will not do either in theory or in practice.
The point about practice can be made negatively, by looking in the rear view mirror. As the intrepid Jeffrey Tucker observed in The Epoch Times, fellow libertarians were quick to take refuge in the overbearing state during the great covid storm, sacrificing their own first principles and betraying their neighbour’s freedom. Why was that, if not from want of virtue? From want even of the cardinal virtues, to say nothing of the theological virtues? All these were sadly lacking among libertarians, as also among many traditionalists, who had less excuse.
But the point can also be made positively, by observing that the political sphere is not less complicated than the private or personal sphere; indeed, it is rather more complicated. Pursuit of the common good, without which there would be no political sphere—or none that is legitimate—therefore requires an array of virtues, just as the pursuit of personal good does. Most fundamentally, it requires justice, but it also requires temperance, fortitude, and prudence, without which justice cannot prevail.
Let us reframe, then, in these terms: not freedom people and virtue people, but lovers of liberty and lovers of virtuous liberty. And let us say of the former that they seem to love only a certain benefit of virtue, a benefit they mistakenly imagine can be had without virtue itself—an effect, as it were, without a cause.
This reframing is urgent, for we have already arrived at a point where we must press awkward questions, both to ourselves and to fellow citizens. Have we still a common good in view? Do our governments still govern with legitimate authority? Do they govern at all, or are we being managed, not governed, by invisible and unaccountable bureaucrats? Have those in positions of power the least regard for the people, or are the people now their enemies? Why are the cardinal virtues so rarely found among them, and why do they despise the perfecting virtues of faith, hope, and charity? Why is a whole generation being raised that has scarcely heard of virtue? This is a generation indignantly focused on micro-aggressions while macro-aggressions are committed against it, even to depriving it of land to live on and houses to dwell in and food to eat. It is a generation in which monomania and self-mutilation, mayhem on the streets and murder in the clinics, are made to count as justice. It is a repentant generation, captivated by the prospect of “decolonization” while its very genes are being colonized without its knowledge or consent.
Lovers of liberty cannot hope to address by themselves the evils that now beset us. Their view of liberty is too thin, not too thick, to be persuasive. They need to join forces with lovers of virtuous liberty, who know how to thicken it, grasping causes without neglecting effects. Chesterton perceived their basic weakness:
The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom.
It was the eugenics enterprise, argued Chesterton, that tempted them to betray freedom. Enthusiasm for overcoming disease, disorder, and degeneracy trumped even the love of liberty, blinding them to the coup being effected by the rich and powerful and supposedly wise, who henceforth would direct their destiny. “The Eugenic State has begun,” he announced in 1922, predicting with uncanny accuracy its future growth and development. But we have spoken of that elsewhere and need not review it here or show again how it has brought us to the present point, to the crisis of liberty in which we are now embroiled. We need rather to get on with the task of facing that crisis with as much solidarity as possible. So let's pursue Pardy's reconciliation project by way of four mediations.
First mediation: Lovers of liberty are right that the administrative or interventionist state, with its saviour complex, does not support authentic freedom. Whether it leans left or right, is overtly or covertly religious, etc., is beside the point. To the degree that it aims to marshal the thoughts or organize the lives of citizens to some end of its own, it offends against freedom. That offence may be permissible in war, within limits, but only as an exception that proves the rule. Where frequent or endless war exists, a military-civil fusion results in which people are not free. The interventionist state thrives on war; war against whom or what seems hardly to matter.
On the other hand, lovers of virtuous liberty are right that authentic freedom is positive, not negative. It is freedom for before it is freedom from. Freedom from is merely derivative. Why do we value it at all, if not because we believe the human being to have a higher calling than the political sphere affords, a vocation that it neither assigns nor fulfills? The minimalist state is not desirable because men ought always to be free from their fellow men, but because they ought always to be free for their fellow men. It is not desirable because they ought to be free from men who play at being God, but because they ought always to be free for God himself.
The libertarian, as much as the admirer of Leviathan, is liable to find himself confused about this. If he brackets out one or both of the great commandments—if he fails to take into account that this higher vocation, which is the vocation to happiness, cannot be attained without the virtues requisite to loving God and the neighbour—he may even begin to suppose that the quest for happiness is grounded in himself. Does this leave him a strong position vis-à-vis Leviathan? On the contrary, if it is grounded in himself it only sets him over against every other self. And the solution to that, as Hobbes maintained, is Leviathan.
Second mediation: Lovers of liberty are right to think that there is more hope in spontaneous order than in coercive order. If man is made for happiness, he is made for freedom, and spontaneity belongs to freedom, though it requires a certain tranquility of order that affords a variety of opportunity for its exercise.
This is Augustine and Anselm, though the libertarian may think it just J. S. Mill. And therein lies the rub. For, unlike those worthies, Mill tried to base tranquility of order on the harm principle, which cannot be done. Mill taught us that there is only one great commandment, not two; that it is the second, not the first; and that, in the last analysis, it is negative not positive. From Mill, the libertarian learned to think that tranquility of order is itself spontaneous. Or rather, to think that we ourselves are the source of both order and spontaneity, when in fact we are the source of neither. God is the source. We are those who are privileged to participate in both. The libertarian thus shares with the liberal—even the comprehensive liberal who is by nature a eugenist, who also derides every appeal to God, dismissing it as Christian Nationalism—an unfortunate tendency to neglect created order. For the former, the worry is that talk of created order might somehow restrict individual liberty; for the latter, that it will restrict the coercive makeover of man in which he is currently engaged.
Over against this, lovers of virtuous liberty are right to assert that created order is the precondition both of virtue and of spontaneity, and that there never is tranquility where created order is disregarded. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” says Jesus. But according to Mill, as Gairdner points out in The Trouble with Democracy, the reverse is the case. You are free to make your own truth. Just there, alas, befuddled by a potent brew of nominalism and romanticism, you stumble into madness, a demonic madness that has now taken hold of our entire civilization, convulsing it to its very core.
Third mediation: Lovers of liberty are right to say that discouraging vice and encouraging virtue is the work of the people themselves, in the family or through free associations. They are right to say that this work is dangerous to share with the state, for the state lacks the human ethos of which these social compacts are capable. The state makes virtue over into whatever suits its own ends—or the ends of those who hold office—and vice into whatever does not. It also backs this with coercive power, which undermines both virtue and liberty. The same danger exists where corporations are concerned. The gravest danger of all exists where states and corporations align to create a controlling bloc, at once political and economic, ideological and censorious. This is the threat of which we are newly conscious.
Lovers of virtuous liberty will respond that, since we cannot do without states and corporations, we must put boundaries around both. (Separation of state and corporation is almost as important as separation of state and church, on which the latter insisted long before the former.) They will also make the obvious point that only a virtuous people can produce virtuous leaders, leaders likely to see that each does well the work that ought to be done within the limits that ought to be respected. Vicious people are much more likely to transgress the limits and to corrupt the work. Moreover, only virtuous people have what it takes to resist effectively those who do transgress the limits. Therefore a climate of public and private virtue is a desideratum.
Fourth mediation: Lovers of liberty are right to say that how people should behave and how people must behave are two different things, and to contend that the state should not turn should into must, whether by forbidding or commanding. It belongs to the state to establish by law, clearly and simply, what crime is, then to prevent or punish it; and to defend the borders within which the agreed order prevails. It does not belong to it to prevent or punish sin or foolishness or disorder in individual lives. Discouraging crime without discouraging vice may be a fool’s game, but the latter is not in the state’s remit. It belongs to family and church and civic associations. There must be no welfare state, no chaperon state, no saviour state on which the people become dependent.
Lovers of virtuous liberty will add that, without the virtue that makes charitable works truly charitable, either there will be no support for the weaker members of society or such support as there is will gradually become a political or for-profit function. The state will assume responsibility over housing, healthcare, and education; and, just so, over vast tracts of the human economy. Presuming to save us from ourselves, it will indeed be a eugenic state, self-selecting and self-electing. Operating with all the advantages of modern technology, it will be a biosecurity state, a panopticon state, policed from the core rather than the circumference. Which is pretty much what we are now seeing in Europe and in North America.
Those who grasp the role of virtue in establishing and preserving liberty, and of religion in establishing and preserving virtue, will not suppose that the state can be the source or guardian of virtue. But neither will they imagine the political or legal realm as a morally neutrally sphere. There is no such thing as a morally neutral state, just as there is no such thing as a religiously neutral state.
A people cannot exist without common objects of love around which they cohere, including the territory in which they dwell or seek to dwell. Confirming these objects is a moral exercise, for it reflects decisions about what is worth loving. It is also a religious exercise, tied to a deity or deities, with which its notions of virtue and vice are bound up. YHWH is not Baal. Jupiter, for all his vices, is not Moloch. The Holy Trinity is not the god of Arius or of Muhammad; nor is the Logos the Goddess of Reason. The culture that worships one is not the culture that worships another.
Similarly, a people cannot exist without some political order, and no political order exists absent moral and religious commitments. (This is as true in a secularist society as in any other; hence the double entendre in the title of a work I published twenty years ago as a first foray into these matters.) No political order exists, then, that does not forbid and permit; or, when permitting, incentivize or disincentivize. This often means encouraging certain virtues and discouraging certain vices. Which ones, by what measure, and by what means? Such are the questions, largely but not exclusively prudential, requiring answers.
The invitation extended to the lover of liberty by the lover of virtuous liberty is to help craft those answers. Since they agree that liberty is a common object of love, why should they not work at this together? To do that, they may need to settle the question as to whether the Goddess of Reason represents liberty or mocks it—whether indeed she represents or mocks reason, as she mocks religion. They may need to determine whether the Ten Commandments still belong at the heart of our culture and of our laws. They will not need to agree on all matters of moral theology or political philosophy, though it might help if they understood what in Christianity and Constitutionalism I called “the greater operation of liberty.” If they can agree, at least, that virtue is necessary to liberty they are off to a good start.
Am I asking them to embrace or reaffirm something like the republicanism of the American founders or, for that matter, of Cicero? Neither in outline nor in detail, but on a certain point of principle, yes. Was Benjamin Franklin mistaken when he said that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom”? Or Benjamin Rush, who likewise insisted that “without virtue there can be no liberty”? Or Gouverneur Morris, when he asserted “that morals are the only possible support of free governments”? Or John Adams, who contended that the American constitution “was made only for a moral and religious People” and was incapable of serving any other? Were such men misguided when they linked both virtue and liberty to religion?
They were misguided on some points, no doubt, not least in matters of religion. But those who prefer to follow Mill in his detestation of all religion save that of Comte, or simply to leave religion altogether aside, only enrol themselves among the abnormally innocent who, as Chesterton says in Eugenics, too easily fall prey to the abnormally evil. Leo, in his own work on liberty answering to Mill, was entirely right. On this point the American founders were right. Virtue is the precondition of freedom, and sound religion is the stay of virtue. Without it, either the vision of ordered liberty disappears or the will to hold to it evaporates under pressure.
But now, you will say, I am trying to convert Professor Pardy, or at least the libertarian of which he speaks. “Freedom, dammit!” Can we not be content with that simple exclamation?
It was quite something, I admit, to hear the new Argentine president utter those words at Davos, as the rallying cry of his anarcho-capitalism. Of course he was in the very den of anarcho-capitalists—not in his own Rothbardian sense, but in an equally literal sense. He was addressing those who have made a great deal of money in lightly regulated capitalist fashion and are now using that money in entirely unregulated ways to buy up politicians, journalists, university presidents, etc., so as to sow anarchy on the streets of our cities and towns, the better to effect their own will and to carry out their own programme of monetary control. Another name for this is disaster capitalism, if we take that to entail creation of disaster by the abnormally evil, or of the impression of disaster among the abnormally innocent, from which profit can be made and through which coercive power can be increased. Pharmaceutical fraud and climate fraud, censorship and cyber-security scares, are their current means. And war, of course, always war!
But just here I want to say something still more shocking than shouting “Freedom, dammit!” at the World Economic Forum. I want to say that the real prospect for reconciliation between the traditionalist and the libertarian, who really must unite against the purveyors of catastrophism, and against the communo-fascism that reigns in the deep state and rumbles ominously in the bowels of our bureaucracies, lies in a doctrine of peculiar interest to the traditionalist. That doctrine is original sin.
I say “peculiar interest” because everyone has such a doctrine, however implicit and unexamined; even the likes of Mill, whose false optimism about overcoming all the ills that beset man helped make men abnormally innocent. Best, then, to know something about it, for such a doctrine, when unexamined, is dangerous. We will pursue this in the third part, still in hopes of encouraging people, per Rerum novarum, to “unite their forces so as to shake off courageously the yoke of so unrighteous and intolerable an oppression” as now faces them.
Read the original version of this commentary at the publisher’s website here
Douglas Farrow is a professor of theology and Christian thought at McGill University.
