Discussion of an existential depth to our discourse inevitably engenders a degree of methodological discomfort. This is particularly the case among theorists whose occupation is in dealing with the discursive level of argu­mentation. What cannot be detected through the medium of language can scarcely be detected at all, let alone rendered transparent through the meth­ods of analysis. Without the theoretical equipment to examine experiences and symbols, most contemporary philosophers are content simply to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein's observation that "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."¹ More recently, many have also abandoned even the notion that coherent discourse is possible because of the incommensurability of all starting points. Largely overlooked is the possibility that the starting point lies in the existential resonances that can be reconstructed on the basis of their discursive elaborations.

 

The neglect of the experiential becomes politically significant when it converges with the customary liberal silence concerning its own foundations. It has been deeply impressed upon the liberal mind frame that its particular construction is specifically designed to prevent the resurfacing of the question of foundations.

Minimal liberal order was to guarantee public peace by avoid­ing the kind of divisiveness that arises when ultimate questions are posed. Contemporary liberal theorists are, as they acknowledge, not departing in the slightest from the practice of insisting that the public good is too important to be jeopardized by the injection of such uncertainty. The demand to bracket ultimate philosophical or religious questions is not only a methodological exigence but also in line with the long-standing inclinations of the liberal tradition.

 

A crisis arises, however, only when liberal society begins to believe its own rhetoric. Silence concerning its roots is mistaken for the absence of any underpinnings. The notion is indulged, contrary to the warning of George Washington in his Farewell Address, that the moral and political order can be sustained without the benefit of any deeper spiritual impulses.² Gradually it becomes accepted that the state has no role even in encouraging the formation of virtues that are desirable or indispensable in its citizens and leaders. Eventually it becomes impossible even to discourage those tendencies that render the citizens and their leaders callous and cruel toward one another. When the crisis explodes publicly, it is greeted with shrill hectoring about values from public figures who have up to then displayed no sustained interest in the formation of virtue.

 

We have already examined the nature of the crisis of confidence in its theoretical and practical dimensions in Chapter 1. The inability to mount a coherent defense of liberal principles undermines any forceful attempt to instill them in social and political practice. The second chapter [not shown here—ed] took issue with the all-too-ready characterization of this collapse of liberal formulations as spelling the outbreak of civil war carried on by political means. I tried to show that the disintegration of the theoretical enterprise was not equivalent to the disintegration of the liberal impulse and that the demise of some of its supporting virtues was not tantamount to the dissolution of liberal democratic order. The liberal construction continues to function, albeit less confidently and less consistently, because it embodies an authoritative moral truth that resonates with the deepest intimations of who we are. That existential resonance has always been the source of its appeal.

 

We must now examine what prevents a recognition of the experiential movement that is powerfully, if inarticulately, the indispensable basis for the liberal tradition. Why is it so difficult for liberals to acknowledge that they are drawn by a vision of the good? The discomfort is palpable in the many injunctions against "ontology" or against the raising of "metaphysical" questions, for there is more than an inability to find a satisfactory resolution of such difficulties. There is an abiding unwillingness within the liberal tradition to acknowledge the depth of the moral impulse from which it springs. This is evident in its reticence concerning its own historical antecedents but is more significant in the refusal to countenance its own dependence on virtues that it does not and cannot create.

 

What is it that prevents liberal theory and practice from returning to the experiential sources from which a renewal might emerge? Is there not something strange about a tradition that when pressed to defend itself is unwilling to acknowledge the roots of its own convictions? That is the deepest level of the crisis that has been building within the liberal ethos for at least a couple of generations. A crisis is characterized not so much by the breakdown of established patterns of order as by the failure of forces that ought to restore and renew it so that it may rise to the challenge of the time. Is it the case that the moral impulses behind liberal political order have ebbed to such a point that they cannot be rejuvenated? Or is there a peculiarity of the liberal tradition that restrains their open reassertion? Such are the questions that now impose themselves.

Liberal Invincible Rightness

 

Perhaps the first factor militating against a serious reflection on the liberal tradition's own existential depths has been the long-standing liberal coolness toward theory. Liberal democracy is a practical political symbolism developed by practical political individuals. Relying on their own intuitive sense of what is right, they were principally concerned with finding a means of translating their convictions into actual political life. They were successful because their construction resonated with the immediate sense of what is right in a great many other human beings. No one needed any elaborate defense because it never occurred to anyone to question the meaning of the truths they held to be "self-evident." The truths' self-evidence was sufficient.

 

For long stretches of liberal political history, that has continued to be the case. Without the germ of self-doubt, liberal tradition continued in the conviction of its own invincible rightness. It was impervious to the kind of skeptical subversion with which we are familiar because that kind of critique had never found an opening through which to insinuate itself in the liberal soul. It was not that liberal theory and society were unfamiliar with Marx or Bakunin or Nietzsche or the kind of radical perspective that their critique represented. It was simply that the genealogical analysis of its principles was not seriously admitted as a problem for the liberal understanding itself. Their questions had not yet managed to dislodge the self-assurance of the liberal mind.

 

The pattern is perhaps best exemplified in the most eminent liberal states­man of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill. It fell to him to mobilize the resistance to the totalitarian juggernaut of Nazism and to sustain a bastion of liberal freedom from which the victorious countermovement could eventually be launched. Yet despite this formidable effort, and most striking in a man of Churchill's undoubted literary and rhetorical capabilities, there was scarcely a word that explained why a liberal order is superior to a fascist one. What was it that made that heroic effort of resistance worthwhile? The question simply does not arise. Indeed, it can hardly arise because it is taken for granted as so obvious as not to deserve serious consideration. Only from the retrospect of our own fractured polity does it seem like a question to which we would like to hear a persuasive response.

 

So long as there was no hesitation about the self-justifying truth of liberal principles, an elaborate defense was not only superfluous but might even invite the germ of self-doubt it was intended to repulse. It is better not to engage in reflection that is bound to be less secure than the tangible common sense of practice. It might even be said that the more liberal a society became, the less it was given to reflection on the justification for its liberal convictions. The historic liberal democracies, such as Britain or the United States, have long been noted for their lack of interest in theoretical or philosophical concerns. Tocqueville observed the singularly practical bent of most U.S. citizens and the unlikelihood of original philosophical reflection emerging within such an environment. The liberal tradition as a whole has been so bereft of major theoretical exponents that almost a century separates John Stuart Mill and John Rawls without the appearance of a figure of comparable intellectual stature.

 

In this regard liberal democracies have been victims of their own practical success. Not requiring an extensive philosophical elaboration for their prin­ciples, they continued with remarkable stability and assurance until the day dawned when they would have to give an account of their convictions. That was the jolt of the encounter with the revolutionary movements. Pressed to defend the modest faith that had constituted liberal civilization, they found that they were indeed hard-pressed to articulate a coherent defense. It was not that they no longer had convictions but that, having taken them for granted for so long, liberal societies lacked the intellectual means to render them transparent. This realization has today rebounded on a liberal practice that is no longer as certain as it once was and correspondingly more prone to confusion in action.

 

Yet it is hard to blame liberal statesmen and liberal writers for this con­dition. How could it be otherwise? They are like the Romans whom they admire so greatly, incapable of apprehending the gap between their own constitutional order and the best regime. They do not have that Greek sense of the difference between the two that irrevocably sets philosophy in tension with politics. To the liberal mind, theory and practice are a seamless whole. The practice is the best exposition of the theory, and the theory adds little essential to the practice. There is a characteristic complacency about the liberal arrangement that has for so long basked in the assurance of its own rightness that it has become incapable of viewing itself with any critical distance. Without that element of reflexivity it lacked the perspective from which to understand the critiques posed against it and eventually the comprehension from which to develop a response to them.

 

Among even the most self-conscious liberal thinkers, such as the American Founders, one scarcely finds any extended reflection on why human beings ought to be accorded their inalienable rights or why consent of the governed is the fundamental principle of political rule. The reasons are taken as so self-evident that no one could seriously question them. From that surety of conviction there naturally arises the sense that liberal order rests on nothing more fundamental than itself, that it is a self-contained symbolism that represents the most elementary common sense of the human race. Forgetful of its own particular historical sources, in a civilization formed by the conjunction of philosophy and revelation, liberal politics begins to assume that it rests entirely on its own immediate self-evidence.

 

The liberal order is not inclined to reflect on the extent to which it presupposes a particular understanding of the human being or of the order of reality within which it exists. Yet it is clear, as James Madison acknowledged, that liberal democracy or republican government, as he generally named it, rests on a quite specific understanding of the human condition. "As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circummspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form" (Federalist Papers, no. 55). Madison does not elaborate on what those virtuous qualities are and whence they are derived nor what expectation we might have concerning the prospects of remediating the degree of depravity in the human race. All of that is simply taken for granted as the parameters that are well understood by the audience he addresses. In fact, they are presuppositions that are derived from the philosophic Christian understanding of an order of right by nature that is also in tension with an abiding proclivity to wrong in nature.

 

Neither Madisonian liberal republicanism nor any other brand rests on its own two feet. Beneath it lies a whole complex of assumptions about ourselves and the world in which we live. It is the degree of agreement about those assumptions that eliminates the need for explication, to the point that they are often forgotten in their invisibility. But they are there and become manifest when the geologic plates of consensus begin to shift. The result can then be as shattering as an earthquake when the fragility of our public order is suddenly exposed. More frequently, the slow imperceptible process of change works a transformation of the mores of society that only later registers in consciousness. One day we wake up to discover, perhaps in the reactions of our children, that we are living in a different world.

 

At that point we become aware of the extent to which our liberal order had depended on a larger worldview whose demise it could not easily survive. We begin to understand that the crisis is not so much a crisis of liberal politics as it is a crisis of the philosophical assumptions that had made its principles appear so self-evident. The liberal superstructure has fallen because the moral and spiritual convictions on which it had rested have been shaken. It is no longer possible to regard the liberal way as the invincibly right one for all mankind. Perhaps it is no longer even valid for us? Without the sense of an order beyond itself in terms of which its rightness can be seen, liberal democracy loses the landmarks that hold it fast. If it rests on nothing but itself, liberal order rests on nothing.

The Illusion of Progress

 

The factor that has prevented liberal self-understanding from recognizing the need to attend to its own foundations has been the illusion of progress. When the philosophic-Christian presuppositions had sunk below the level of articulate discourse, becoming bare, silent presuppositions, then it was possible for a variety of distorting influences to shape the context as well. One of the most potently seductive was the idea that the burden of moral struggle would gradually be relieved through the inexorable effect of progress. The attraction of this myth is perennial since the human condition imposes the necessity of struggle as the price of growth in every age. Inevitably, the painful nature of the requirement invites imaginations of its abolition. What renders such perennial musings so fatal in the modern period is that, in the absence of the rationality derived from philosophy and Christianity, they are not subjected to critical examination. Indeed, the fantasy of progressive self-perfection can even clothe itself in the residual appeal of salvation history.

 

The effect of such apocalyptic fantasies in the most militant branch of modernity, the ideological movements of revolution and totalitarianism, has been disastrous. When the construction of second realities gets underway, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the first reality of the world we inhabit. Normal moral restraints cease to be effective as the second reality insulates the believer from the inhibitions that can usually be counted on to place a limit on the perpetration of evil. A boundary has been passed in which all things are possible and all possibilities are permitted. The practical effects are not only the inhuman cruelty countenanced on a grand scale but also the equally catastrophic inability to act on the basis of a rational grasp of cause and effect. Actions that are taken within the framework of an illusory second reality have a multitude of unintended consequences in the real world. All of this is familiar in the moral nightmare of totalitarianism and the peculiar practical obtuseness that gave such societies the air of a lunatic asylum.³

 

A more moderate form of the same disorder also manifested itself within the liberal horizon. While not as convulsive as the apocalyptic visions of revolutionary transformation, the idea of the progressive perfection of the human race had some of the same distorting effects. Pressure to sustain the moral struggle against evil and the sense of the contest as a perennial feature of the human condition were removed. It would now be enough to allow nature and history to do their beneficent work; it would no longer be necessary to legislate and govern on the basis of the idea that human nature would remain pretty much the same in the future. Instead, we could build on the less strenuous assumption that the inexorable moral improvement of the race would continue. The twentieth-century holocausts have been a shocking reminder of the depth of depravity of which we are still capable.

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.

2. Washington had concluded his historically self-conscious "Farewell Address" in 1797 with the following penetrating observation: "And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in the exclusion of religious principle." This might even be considered the consensus of the American founding generation, despite the secular overtones of the political order they created and the noted detachment from conventional Christianity many of them evidenced. Predictably, John Adams declared in his first year as vice president: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other" (quoted in Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 79).

  But even Jefferson, who became notorious for his remark that "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg," could go on in the context of his most dread-filled reflections on the institution of slavery to ask: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?" (Notes on the State of Virginia).

  The young Alexander Hamilton too could inveigh against the alleged atheism of Hobbes with similar conviction: "Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed, that the deity, from the relation we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever" (quoted in Hadley Arkes, Beyond the Constitution, 64).

3. Voegelin, "The End of Modernity," chap. 6 in New Science of Politics; and Eric Voegelin, "The Eclipse of Reality," in What Is History and Other Late Unpublished Essays, pp. 111-62. A more recent perspective is furnished by Vaclav Havel's brilliant analysis of the nature of an ideologically constructed reality in his essay "The Power of the Powerless." And Martin Mahlia details both the cumulative Soviet dislocation from reality and the ideological blinkers of Western social scientists attempting to understand it in The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia.