This was very good. It would make a good reading for a Civics class. I have one quibble and one substantive comment:
The quibble is that when you write "Liberal government does not exist to inculcate virtue or specific religious beliefs," you direct that against your conception of antiliberals wanting to mandate religion. It's not so much unfair as misleading to ignore the "liberals'" practice of mandating what amounts to the religion (as John McWhorter has termed them) of "wokeism".
What seems a substantive point that needs to be addressed is the treatment of emergencies. Although it's not a mathematical analogue to Goedel, it seems like every system of governance can encounter situations that can't be handled successfully within the system. John Adams may have thought he was confronting such with the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln obvious thought so with the suspension of Habeas Corpus.
By definition, this can't be planned for. I bring it up because one facet of our current troubles is the ease with which everyone slips into thinking that the rules don't apply because this is an emergency that the rules can't handle. It's not a philosophy, it's an attitude, or a just a weakness, and it turns everything into Flight 93. Because of that, I think that any explanation of the fundamentals of our liberal order meant for people of our time needs to highlight the issue and its dangers, in a way that I don't think was necessary in earlier ages.
"Antiliberals also argue that the liberal focus on rights reflects and drives an individualism that undermines social bonds and group solidarity. A system of rights gives short shrift to the responsibilities we have toward others and to the duties we owe them. Liberals point out that we do have a duty: to respect the rights of others. Antiliberals will reply that this conception of duty is too thin to sustain a decent society."
They'd be right, if that were the long and short of liberal individualism. Many otherwise thoughtful commentaries on the state of modern society deplore individualism as if it were the same thing as selfishness. However, the essence of individualism among thinking people is a sense of personal agency that leads naturally to a sense of personal responsibility. A mature liberal individualist -- even a maturing one, from the onset of reason -- looks at the world and at other individuals as if from a tiny seat in the eye of God. Dickens captures this perspective in A Christmas Carol, in the conversation between Ebenezer Scrooge and Marley's ghost. When Marley laments his own "life's opportunity misused," Scrooge falteringly argues, "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob."
"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"
Antiliberals are not exponents of benevolent duty so much as jealous conformists and disciplinarians. Liberals, including conservative ones, are the kind of individualist who faces the world with a sense of personal gratitude cum responsibility.
>>“They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
These words pose a deep challenge to those liberals who cannot in good conscience accept a Creator God: if religious belief is not the basis for individual rights, what is? This question is too vast to detain us here—but thoughtful liberals cannot avoid it without ceding the field to antiliberals who will provide their own answers.
---
The "God" mentioned in the declaration is not the Christian God, it is specifically "Nature's God." To understand what this meant at the time it was written, Matthew Stewart's "Natures God, the Heretical Origins of the American Republic" lays it all out. Nature's God is not a personal god, does not make moral laws, and people advocating Nature's God were widely considered to be atheists.
In alluding to "Nature's God," they were Deists, or pantheists. They weren't atheists, notwithstanding any tendentious claims (born of hubris, by others) to that effect.
I mostly agree with this - except for the "big difference remark.. The book I cited makes this abundantly clear. "Nature's God" is a deist trope, as are many other phrases used by the founders to sound religious and reassure Christians, without being so. Deists were not Christians, and the term "deist" was often used interchangeably with "atheist" at that time.
You don't get to claim them as atheists, even if their adversaries might have tarred them with that brush at the time!
I'm not a Christian, either. FWIW, I'm Jewish -- and, like the Deists (and like Spinoza, whom some atheists have also attempted to claim as one of their own), I maintain my own (albeit divergent) belief in God -- and that matters, thank you very much.
This was very good. It would make a good reading for a Civics class. I have one quibble and one substantive comment:
The quibble is that when you write "Liberal government does not exist to inculcate virtue or specific religious beliefs," you direct that against your conception of antiliberals wanting to mandate religion. It's not so much unfair as misleading to ignore the "liberals'" practice of mandating what amounts to the religion (as John McWhorter has termed them) of "wokeism".
What seems a substantive point that needs to be addressed is the treatment of emergencies. Although it's not a mathematical analogue to Goedel, it seems like every system of governance can encounter situations that can't be handled successfully within the system. John Adams may have thought he was confronting such with the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln obvious thought so with the suspension of Habeas Corpus.
By definition, this can't be planned for. I bring it up because one facet of our current troubles is the ease with which everyone slips into thinking that the rules don't apply because this is an emergency that the rules can't handle. It's not a philosophy, it's an attitude, or a just a weakness, and it turns everything into Flight 93. Because of that, I think that any explanation of the fundamentals of our liberal order meant for people of our time needs to highlight the issue and its dangers, in a way that I don't think was necessary in earlier ages.
Very thoughtful and helpful exegesis of the Declaration. Thank you Bill!
"Antiliberals also argue that the liberal focus on rights reflects and drives an individualism that undermines social bonds and group solidarity. A system of rights gives short shrift to the responsibilities we have toward others and to the duties we owe them. Liberals point out that we do have a duty: to respect the rights of others. Antiliberals will reply that this conception of duty is too thin to sustain a decent society."
They'd be right, if that were the long and short of liberal individualism. Many otherwise thoughtful commentaries on the state of modern society deplore individualism as if it were the same thing as selfishness. However, the essence of individualism among thinking people is a sense of personal agency that leads naturally to a sense of personal responsibility. A mature liberal individualist -- even a maturing one, from the onset of reason -- looks at the world and at other individuals as if from a tiny seat in the eye of God. Dickens captures this perspective in A Christmas Carol, in the conversation between Ebenezer Scrooge and Marley's ghost. When Marley laments his own "life's opportunity misused," Scrooge falteringly argues, "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob."
"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"
Antiliberals are not exponents of benevolent duty so much as jealous conformists and disciplinarians. Liberals, including conservative ones, are the kind of individualist who faces the world with a sense of personal gratitude cum responsibility.
>>“They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
These words pose a deep challenge to those liberals who cannot in good conscience accept a Creator God: if religious belief is not the basis for individual rights, what is? This question is too vast to detain us here—but thoughtful liberals cannot avoid it without ceding the field to antiliberals who will provide their own answers.
---
The "God" mentioned in the declaration is not the Christian God, it is specifically "Nature's God." To understand what this meant at the time it was written, Matthew Stewart's "Natures God, the Heretical Origins of the American Republic" lays it all out. Nature's God is not a personal god, does not make moral laws, and people advocating Nature's God were widely considered to be atheists.
In alluding to "Nature's God," they were Deists, or pantheists. They weren't atheists, notwithstanding any tendentious claims (born of hubris, by others) to that effect.
Big difference.
I mostly agree with this - except for the "big difference remark.. The book I cited makes this abundantly clear. "Nature's God" is a deist trope, as are many other phrases used by the founders to sound religious and reassure Christians, without being so. Deists were not Christians, and the term "deist" was often used interchangeably with "atheist" at that time.
You don't get to claim them as atheists, even if their adversaries might have tarred them with that brush at the time!
I'm not a Christian, either. FWIW, I'm Jewish -- and, like the Deists (and like Spinoza, whom some atheists have also attempted to claim as one of their own), I maintain my own (albeit divergent) belief in God -- and that matters, thank you very much.
If you believe in Spinoza's God, then I'm with you and Einstein.
Yes!
Thanks! (with no sarcasm this time) :-)