The implicit liberal reasoning seems to be something like the following:

1. “Good” simply means “desired.”

2. All men desire only what they desire.

3. Therefore, all men desire only what is good.

4. Therefore, all men are morally good.

Mr. Kalb’s gloss on the liberal notion of goodness relates to Stanley Kurtz’s recent article on traditionalism versus liberalism, in which he argues that for liberals, desire—the act of desiring in itself—is a spiritual good:

“From a traditional religious perspective, the freedom of social liberals is simply the freedom to be enslaved by base desire. But for social liberals, desire itself has been spiritualized. We don’t hear much talk about the spiritualization of desire from say, libertarians. Libertarians are more interested in talking about their right to pleasure, than about what pleasure actually means to them. But everywhere in our society, you can see the signs that pleasure itself has taken on an almost religious aura.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz051203.asp

In connection with my comments on another page about neoconservatives as “right-liberals,” http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001425.html#5691, can we say that neocons’ moral views fit with the liberal endorsement of desire as the good as outlined here by Mr. Kalb? I suggest the following answer:

1. The neocons’ idea of the good was never transcendently based but sociologically based: the way of life of decent productive middle class people (e.g. the neocons themselves and their immigrant parents) defined the good.

2. The neocons have been giving up even that attenuated moral stand via their subscription to the sixties cultural revolution and bourgeois bohemianism. This however is not actually an abandonment of the sociologically based view of virtue. Their whole point is that modern, liberated attitudes and lifestyles have turned out to be compatible with career and a stable family life. Therefore, in their eyes, what the lifestyle of a hardworking lower middle class immigrant family was 70 years ago, the lifestyle of a bourgeois bohemian couple is today. Virtue is a matter of what “works.”

The upshot is that the neocons, while they wouldn’t endorse Mr. Kalb’s four-step liberal statement above, do not stand on radically different ground from it either. Stanley Kurtz comes to mind.

This is as attempt to think through these issues and I am open to criticism and suggestions.

I think what may be missing from Mr. Kalb’s gloss is the qualifier “political”. Plenty of liberals are and have been religious, have acknowledged the existence of an objective moral law, etc. If liberalism had attempted to deny such things outright it would never have been as successful as it has been. Liberalism is not tantamount to ontological atheism; rather it is a denial of political privilege to any particular moral opinion: all moral questions are to liberalism a matter of disputable opinion and thus are to be given equal weight in the exercise of political power.

Rather than treating desire as the one and only ontic good (Mr. Kalb’s gloss) liberalism treats as _politically relevant_, and as equally politically relevant across all individuals, only that which actual individuals happen to assert. In other words, for liberalism there is _politically_ no privileged access to (the knowledge and authority of) the good. All individuals equally assert their conception of the good as matters of unprivileged faith, and politically all such claims must be considered equal in order to avoid the tyranny of privilege. That isn’t quite as strong a claim as an actual equating of the good with the desired, and because it is not as strong a claim it has held up very well historically to criticism. Liberalism is not the denial of the good; rather it is the denial of political authority to any assertion of a privileged understanding of the good (including the privileged understanding represented by the traditional moral order).

It seems to me though that the position I describe is hidden in the one Matt describes, because man is a social animal.

The only way to make good on the requirement that no vision of the good — practically speaking, no desire — be privileged is to treat all desires as equally good. But in the long run people aren’t going to be able to treat all desires as equally good unless they believe them to be so. And that’s where we are today — it’s not good enough to tolerate homosexuality, you have to celebrate lifestyle diversity, and if you don’t you’re a bigot with no standing as a member of the political community.

I agree of course that the claim “we’re not abolishing religion (or whatever), we’re just disestablishing it” has been one of the great defenses of liberalism.

Some people say that your concience is in effect the desire for higher conciousness. If true then good is always manifest as dissatisfaction and desire. Mystics the world over often claim that the absolute nullification of all desire is one aspect of their most profound spiritual experiences.

At any rate no matter how good is defined we can’t define it independently of what we desire. What would be the point of calling something good if it left us unsatisfied?

I think that spiritual people claim that there is a conflict between satisfying petty desires and living a spiritual life. You cannot do both.

I used to be a moral relativist up until recently but I’m not any more, so I do agree with the idea of a “trancendently based idea of good” (as one commenter already put it), but to convince ourselves of the reality of trascendent good we have to examine our desires. Its no good for transcendent good to exist purely as an abstract idea in religious scriptures.

I suppose one way to look at it is that my description is of what the liberal, to himself, thinks he believes; whereas Mr. Kalb’s is a statement of the objective or de-facto view that the liberal actually holds in the given context of man as a social animal. Since man is a social animal the separation of politics from the objective good is not possible, but that is part of what the liberal believes himself to be doing nonetheless. (I was going to say that my description is a phenomenological way of describing the same object (liberalism) that Mr. Kalb is describing, but I could hear the sound of Mr. Auster’s editing pencil sharpening :-). The liberal doesn’t believe himself to be abolishing anything except tyranny (violations of equal freedom). In actual fact of course the liberal is abolishing everything except liberalism. Since nothing whatsoever in actual fact meets his abstract criteria the liberal is in fact establishing Nothing.

I think Matt and Mr. Kalb are respectively describing two distinct phases of liberalism. Matt is describing the original liberalism that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries in reaction to the religious wars. This older liberalism, as Matt very clearly stated, does not deny truth but, in order to avoid social conflict, tries to keep truth assertions out of the public square. Mr. Kalb is describing the modern liberalism of radical personal freedom and the denial of any truth higher than the wishes of the individual, as expressed most famously by the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

And, returning to my original article, my definition of liberalism seems close to Mr. Kalb’s; I am describing the modern liberalism that ontologically denies the existence of transcendent truth. Such liberalism replaces goodness with tolerance and inclusion. The function of tolerance and inclusion is to delegitimize any belief in higher truth or goodness which makes people seem unequal.

However, the above definition could also be fitted easily into Matt’s description of the older liberalism, that is, the liberalism that does not ontologically deny truth but that politically denies the right of transcendent truth claims to exist in the public square. Such liberalism changes a polity guided by a shared belief in transcendent goodness into a polity guided by tolerance and compassion. The function of tolerance and compassion is to delegitimize any public claims to transcendent truth which would make people seem unequal.

Where does that leave us? Are the two liberalisms really the same, since, as Matt and Mr. Kalb said, man is a political animal? A subject for another day.

I am not sure that time seperates the phases as much as perspective. I think that the modern liberal believes himself to hold the moderate epistemic-political position I articulated rather than the extreme ontological position articulated by Mr. Kalb — in other words not that transcendent moral truth doesn’t exist or that the good is equivalent to the desired; but that everyone has equal access to moral truth and therefore politically everyone equally has as much right to assert his own conception of it as everyone else, and that nobody has the right to assert his conception in such a way that it violates the equal political rights of others. It is correct that in fact (because man is a social animal) this reduces immanent moral truth to equivalence with the desired; but I don’t think that the average modern day liberal would agree with the proposition that the good is equivalent to the desired, period.

The phenomenological perspective is important because it is necessary to understand what the liberal himself actually believes that he believes in order to fully understand the objective consequences of his alliegences. It is also important if it ever becomes necessary to actually talk to him with an understanding of what he believes himself to believe; for example if one were to preach repentance from liberalism to liberals.

I’d agree that obfuscation of one’s position, even to oneself, is essential to liberalism. Also the need to see one’s own position as moderate and responsible and so be able to shrug off its obvious implications.

That is why, for example, the view that public agnosticism can be kept separate from private visions of the good, beautiful and true is able to coexist in contemporary liberalism with acceptance of the feminist view that the personal is the political. Each perspective is brought forward when needed by the particular situation. If you point out the contradiction it just shows you’re an ideologue with no understanding for nuance or ability to live with ambiguity.

The problem with the nuance and ambiguity, of course, is that in the long run men are logical — especially if they are liberals, given the liberal preference for making all things explicit and universalizable. So as time goes by the moderation evaporates, in fact if not in the liberal self-image, and what we’re left with is increasingly direct application to social life of fundamental liberal philosophical commitments.

I think Mr. Kalb and I are so close in our understanding that the nuance is likely to be lost on other readers. I don’t see the phenomenological perspective as only obfuscation to the self, though. My own thoughts and understandings have implications and consequences that I cannot fully grasp and control as objects of my will. We experience this all the time, but for some reason most of the people I encounter assume the opposite (that we exercise complete control in nominalist fashion the consequences of what we assert — in everyday language “nobody else can tell me what I believe or what I mean by my words”).

Therefore there is always a difference or gap between what I believe are the consequences of my own thoughts and the actual comprehensive consequences of my own thoughts. This is true for everyone always, not just for liberals here and now. So an understanding of the objective consequences of liberalism is incomplete without an additional understanding of the phenomenology of liberalism. The phenomenology is important even if only tactically, because if we can crawl into the enemy’s head and set explosives there (in addition to other places) so much the better.

Agreed that none of us altogether understands himself, his position, or his own thoughts, words and actions. Also, few or none of us altogether wants to know the truth about such things. Certainly we can’t be sure that we do. That’s why the Day of Judgement is an alarming conception. And I agree of course that in dealing with people in society you have to know how things appear to them.

Conceivably the distinction between Matt and me on this point might be that he’s emphasizing the possibility that even someone devoted through and through to the good, beautiful and true can only see through a glass, darkly. Such a person would not be obfuscating things to himself though. I’m inclined to consider that possibility irrelevant to serious contermporary liberalism but the point’s a fine one and I could of course be wrong.

Mr. Kalb, what do you mean by the “Day of Judgement conception?”

The notion that at some point — after death, for example — we will be judged by God and everything we have been and done will be made clear.

There are vaguely similar ideas in many religions. Some Tibetans believe in the “mirror of karma” in which one sees ones deeds presented to oneself after which one is judged by the “Lord of Death” who makes a pile of black beans and a pile of white beans and then compares. Some Romans imagined a judgement scene in front of Jupiter. I think it would be better if Judeo-Christian religion de-god-ified itself a little bit, just because if we involve God that directly it may demystify him too much. Within us, there is always a force pulling us toward higher conciousnes, which is sometimes what we think of as our concience, or sometimes a longing for something we cannot place even when we think there is nothing to be dissatisfied with. However, that force is normally overwhelmed by other forces. So I think that God can never really be present within our individual experiences, but the subtle force he exerts always is.

Note that I believe in reincarnation and a bunch of eastern stuff, so I also believe that its possible to ultimately blend into absolute reality by weakening all the forces that oppose the divine force. This is why Buddhism stresses the avoidance of passions and advocates moderation (even though Buddhism does not use theistic language).

I was asking the question because I wondered if you were refering to the future mundane event that some fundamentalist Christians believe in. I’m pleased to hear that that’s not what you were refering to.

‘Those who are compassionate when they should be cruel, will be cruel when they should be compassionate.’ Dare I suggest that it is too bad that no analogous statement is present in the core Christian scriptures?—liberal views on murderers, etc., being descended from Christian doctrine.

I’m not sure it’s correct to say that “liberal views on murderers, etc., [are] descended from Christian doctrine.” I would say those views are descended from certain passages of the Gospels, particularly Matthew 25 with its call for what seems like indiscriminate compassion as a spiritual imperative. But, as far as I’m aware, Christian doctrine—meaning the teaching of the Church coming from the Church fathers—has never endorsed that sweeping, liberal-style compassion. The Church supported criminal punishment and defended the social order. It was not until the late 20th century, under the present Pope, that the Vatican began to call for such things as open borders and an end to capital punishment.

My impression (sorry I don’t have the references) is that indiscriminately turning the other cheek has never been required of Christians other than in some minor sects, but has always been considered meritorious. I think Aquinas says something to this effect. With Protestantism there has of course also been a concentration on the Gospel texts themselves, so that the seemingly extreme statements there are ineffectually countered by subsequent traditions. If non-resistance to evil is considered unconditionally meritorious, there are lethal consequences when governments start acting “meritoriously” rather than merely in accordance with minimum moral standards, which was traditionally all anyone seems to have hoped for.

For the record, I’m not a Christian, but I would like to put in my two cents. The issue of punishing wrongs has been taken up by a bunch of religious thinkers. The conventional view is that it is not good to be the hangman but it is necessary that a hangman exist anyway. If karma (or cosmic justice of the Christian variety) is real, then people will be struck back at whether it is you that strikes them or someone or something else entirely. So the question becomes one of responsibility. i.e. is it your responsibility to do the striking back and is *that* a good or a bad act in itself? Roughly speaking it depends on whether or not a hangman is available or not. In a world of total lawlessness I would think it would be socially responsible to take justice into your own hands. Otherwise it is best to rely on the available instruments of law and order.

Having been doing a bit of reading on this subject, I would like to correct my above statement that indiscriminately turning the other cheek has never been required of Christians. It seems that prior to its association with the Roman Imperial power under Constantine, the Church as a whole had a radical belief in nonviolence, similar to that of the modern Quakers.

For instance, in Origen’s *Contra Celsum* (c. 250 A.D.) killing human beings *under any circumstances* is referred to as being prohibited by the “Christian lawgiver,” without any suggestion that this is a matter of controversy (and is explicitly contrasted with the Jewish belief). The early Christian position is described more generally in W.E.H. Lecky’s classic *History of Morals* (vol. 2). The original Christian position was modified, Lecky says, at two critical periods. The first of these was when the church acquired temporal power and responsibility in the late Empire. Even after this point, the Church retained a comparatively pacific nature, however: it took the early-medieval threat of Moslem invasion of Europe to produce a “military Christianity,” with its chivalric ideal.

The conclusions one draws from this will depend on whether one believes that the early Church represented an uncorrupted or merely a primitive form of Christianity.