I’m coming to the end of this scattered series of essays inspired by Kenneth Minogue’s profound book on modern politics, The Liberal Mind. My thoughts have developed so that my understanding of liberalism has taken on a surprising form, but no form of liberalism seems to me plausible or rational.
I’ve taken a position that relationships are primary rather than concrete stuff. Even the flesh-and-blood of our bodies are secondary, or greater, forms of created being. God created this concrete world, this world of thing-like being, from some sort of abstract stuff hinted at in the work of physicists and then He shaped this concrete stuff into what He needed to tell His story, the story centered around the Son of God.
When God brought Creation into existence, He was acting with the full power of God.
When He began to shape the primary stuff, the Primordial Universe — which I claim to be manifested truths, He was working within the constraints of His own decision to create a specific Creation. We could say, analogically, that the Almighty was acting as a metaphysician in knowing the primary truths He’d manifested and a mathematician and physicist when He began to shape those truths in levels of increasingly particular being.
When He began to tell a story using this particular universe, the Almighty was acting as an author telling a tale of evolution and development of nonliving and living entities interacting, forming relationships.
Our freedom, and our rights such as they are in reality, are at the level of that story and not at the level of the thing-like stuff, our own bodies, which participate in that story. Our freedom and our rights involve relationships formed by human beings who are the result of a long and complex evolutionary process not yet over and are also the result of the evolution and development of human communities and also — of course — the result of development of that individual which is ideally dominated by complex, morally guided responses to the opportunities and problems of God’s Creation.
Once again, I quote Henri Bergson:
[W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work. [page 172, “Time and Free Will”, Henri Bergson, Dover Publications, 2001 reprint]
Here’s an interesting statement made by Kenneth Minogue in The Liberal Mind (2000 reprint by Liberty Fund):
[I]n considering the circumstances in which free independence is possible, we must observe that it depends to a very large extent on an intellectual interest in how things are, in contrast to the desire to make things conform to a pre-established plan. [Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind, 2000 reprint by Liberty Fund, page 151]
In making peace with reality and responding to it in such a way that we develop that artistic personality alluded to by Bergson, we achieve freedom. If we are in a community of like-minded human beings, we might well establish strong relationships of the sort which mandate that we acknowledge strong rights on the part of others and others will acknowledge strong rights on our part.
In an essay on the German school of history, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton referred to liberals as “promoters of secondary liberties” and I think he would have at least accepted for discussion my claim that freedom and an artistic personality are deeply connected, that is, my claim that this deep relationship between true art and a free life tells us where lies the primary liberties, those which conduce to a well-ordered human life, one in which the human being has become a person, forming relationships with the world which allow him to become a world of sorts, a morally purposeful narrative. Both world and person are unified, coherent, and complete in meaningful senses, being open to that which is still greater, that which encompasses them on a larger scale without compromising their existences as world or person.
Think of this as a fractal, if you wish. Human beings are a smaller version of a human community, similar to that community in a sense much like that used by mathematicians, that is, the smaller entity is `shaped’ the same as the larger. And that community is similar to the world, itself similar to the entirety of Creation. For those who’ve never read about fractal, I use it in the sense of having a complex structure where there are some smaller, similar entities within the largest. `Within’ is as important as `same shape’.
In this way of thinking, a civilization is something like a work of art just as a human person is. A large community, even if prosperous in some ways isn’t a true civilization without having true unity, true coherence, and true completeness. A human being, in the same way, isn’t a human person if he has not those traits.
Having those traits, that human person is free even if he lives a life constricted in many ways by either his fellowmen or by the environmental or economic or political conditions during his lifetime. That human person is aware of his accomplishments, his talents and limitations, knows of the difficulties of his life in a way that affirms his traits of personhood — unity and coherence and completeness. If political or economic or technological conditions are adverse, he might have only a very constrained freedom, maybe hardly any at all outside of his own thoughts, but his freedom is truly that unlike the false freedom of those exploited consumers who think themselves free because they can watch dirty movies.
I’m going to close my latest effort to plumb the depths of Professor Minogue’s book with a couple of quotes and a quick conclusion:
One cannot organize a work of art; nor write poetry to rule. The man who sets out quite deliberately to maximize his own happiness is likely to fail. Whilst one may, perhaps, be able to create vast pools of technicians at will, one cannot create political stability or a nation of mystics. There are many things in the world which we cannot attain simply because we want them; and some are beyond our grasp precisely because we want them too much. [Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind, 2000 reprint by Liberty Fund, page 157]
There are no means which serve the precise end of freedom, for freedom, like happiness, is not an end that can be pursued. [Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind, 2000 reprint by Liberty Fund, page 158]
Happiness of the mundane sort is most certainly not a bad thing in its proper place, nor is freedom of the obvious sort allowing us to move around and do those morally proper acts we should be and wish to do nor is it a bad thing to live in a human community in which we all behave towards each other in a way that corresponds to what traditional liberals labeled as rights of one sort or another. I can’t imagine a human life in this mortal realm where happiness is continuous nor one where we each and all move with morally well-ordered freedom. In fact, it’s often the case that one man’s happiness might conflict with that of a wife who wants the family to take common vacations but doesn’t enjoy fishing or hunting. We certainly haven’t worked things out so that there are no conflicts between the rights of a landowner who wants to divert much of the flow of a waterway to irrigate his crops and someone downstream who wants to keep a good flow of clean water moving through his swimming hole. The best we can do is perhaps take up the position I came to after reading some of the works of Frederich Hayek and some of the works of Thomas Sowell a number of years ago (I supplement and reword to my own slightly different overall viewpoint):
Some sort of well-ordered system of property rights might always create conflicts because of real and imagined injustices but that system will allow for a peaceful human community.
We can go beyond that, but the issue of property rights are clearly fundamental since they deal with food and mineral resources and other materials and transportation routes allowing us to feed and clothe ourselves.
I believe it to be a commonplace amongst lawyers and legal commentators that tough cases make for bad precedents and, hence, bad law. It’s also true that tough, outlying situations can make for bad understandings of human history or of Creation in general. Our Maker has clearly given us a world and a nature which lead to conflicts which must be worked out in non-optimal ways. The story which is our world, the physical universe seen in light of God’s purposes, goes on but it’s sometimes rough on the good and bad alike, sometimes especially rough on those who are trying to be friends of God, sometimes just as rough on those who are trying to lead virtuous lives for other reasons. Yet, it is possible to live our lives in a way that brings out “that indefinable resemblance [between our personality and our free acts] which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” By doing so, we have attained some measure of freedom, perhaps hard-earned freedom, in the strong sense that we have chosen our own moral path, one which embeds us in our own lives. For that is perhaps the real issue underlying this sort of discussion: there are far too many human beings who give little sign of being truly alive, of being active and free participants in their own travels through this mortal realm. This was pretty much the reason for Albert Jay Nock losing his faith in the doctrine of the immortal soul and then his Christian faith — since he falsely considered that doctrine a necessary belief for the Christian view of the resurrection.
While I don’t imagine I can dictate or even predict God’s acts, I speculate that those who will be saved will be those who have enough life, who can live with the dangers and blessings of freedom, so that they can share God’s own life. Those who can’t live freely in this true sense and those who’ve not developed their lives in this way, have remained human animals and may enter the eternal grave along with non-human animals, but the next paragraph raises a different possibility.
As I’ve speculated before: true freedom is beyond the capacities of created natures and can be obtained only if God blesses us with the gift of sharing in His own life. I’ve also speculated that we are saved as members of the Body of Christ and that raises more complicated possibilities of the freedom-lovers, or at least freedom-toleraters, amongst us being capable of providing to their more timid or more close-minded fellowmen what is needed for being part of that Body. This would mean that something of the sort could occur in this world but only by way of strong communities containing some significant percentage of freedom-lovers. In any case, the liberal arguments for some sort of rights, both those of 18th century lovers of freedom and those of 20th century lovers of centralized and intrusive governments, break down for those arguments assume some sort of uniform human nature which has an desire for freedom and for human rights which demand much of all. The percentage of those who love freedom so they won’t compromise even to save their own lives might be far too small to directly support any stable free society and might make for a relatively small Body of Christ.