After my last article, I was confronted by Mr. Green. “You crossed the line, bud. I hate to be the one to tell you, but it’s the truth.”
I asked what he meant, and he told me: “You were too hard on liberalism.”
It seemed a fair statement, so I thought it not unwarranted to explain more fully what I meant when I stated in my last column, at least at this moment in time, that liberalism seems to have outlived its usefulness, indeed, appears to me as a dead doctrine.
Before I begin, let me state that my critique is not against classical liberalism, i.e., the economic liberalism of Adam Smith or John Locke's focus on private property rights and voter rights. Rather, the liberalism I mean to discuss is that of modern times, the kind that’s given birth to the recent environmental disasters in California, which I believe is more a religion than a governing philosophy.
When I appraise the merits of modern-day liberalism, it all comes down to one word: substance.
The “Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy” defines “substance” this way: “a being whose essence naturally requires it to exist in itself; a being that has existence in itself and by virtue of itself as an ultimate distinct subject of being.”
Hence, it’s my argument that modern liberalism lacks the kind of essential being – the substance – mentioned above.
What do I mean by this?
Simply put, its essential substance exists in its relation to conservatism.
I say this because, as indicated above, liberalism originally served a positive purpose, in that it was a check on the fundamental, constitutional worldview of this country, which I would describe as natural law conservatism. This purpose was necessary because in a fallen world there is nothing – including natural law conservatism – that is practiced perfectly. Therefore, I would argue that such changes as workers’ rights, for example, or some of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, arguably wrought by the liberalism of the day, were of a positive substance.
However, despite the beneficial civil rights accomplishments of the ’60s, there seemed to occur a liberalism of morality – a movement away from the natural law conservatism mentioned above toward a moral system that to this day has not been fully defined. It’s for this reason that I say that modern-day liberalism exists more essentially in its opposition to conservatism and, for this reason, is a destructive, negative, non-substantive phenomenon.
This fact can be witnessed in the radical environmentalist policies in California, which devalue personhood in favor of the environment, and the transgender movement, which is also destructive of personhood. In this way, modern liberalism is like a branch sawed from a tree, after which it falls to the ground because it lost the trunk that held it up.
I tried to explain this to Mr. Green, who listened attentively for a time, then drew back with a confused look.
“What do you mean trees and branches and all that?” he said. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean that Nietzsche was correct about left-leaning philosophies being an outgrowth of Christianity,” I told him. “It’s just that the lifeboat has decided to sink the mothership. This insanity is responsible for the bad outcomes in places like California, where, by rejecting an available water supply for environmental reasons, they ended up setting a fish above humanity in the order of creation. It’s all out of whack, don’t you see?”
But I had lost him.
When I looked over he was trying to strike a match to light his cigar.
“Don’t you need a lighter?” I said.
Green shook his head. “I’ll get it in a minute,” he told me, still striking. But he didn’t get it. “I think my matches are all wet,” he said finally.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at allen@kellerlumber.net.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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