THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: Liberty and Equality
Scruton, Roger
T H e P u R s u I T o f k n o w L e D G e Liberty and Equality American liberalism sacrifices the former to impose the latter, not to mention what it’s done to morality. by Roger scruton...
...As for morality, it bears the mark of those very things from which we are trying to escape: obligation, freedom, responsibility, commitment...
...And—as Judge Bork points out—a certain anti-religious venom can be discerned behind the ironically named “American Civil Liberties Union,” and behind its campaigns to interpret the “no establishment” clause as forbidding all acts of state-endorsed worship...
...y is this...
...Even when Robespierre fanatically promoted “the despotism of liberty,” it did not dawn on them that they were committed to a contradiction...
...If equality between sexes, races, or cultural groups requires affirmative action, and the regulation of admission procedures to educational and pro fes sional bodies, then that too is justified in liberal eyes...
...We cannot possibly live up to them...
...Equality is what remains of the religious vision...
...To our Victorian ancestors, a liberal was someone who valued individual freedom more highly than any social goal that could be imposed by the state, and who believed that individuals would solve their problems through their innate moral sense, provided only that the state allowed them to exercise it...
...The Soviet experiment illustrates this well enough...
...Why is the single-minded pursui n i s i e a e t : ess n i s u r u o f e n n s t i l a r o M his we have seen, and readers of The American qualitie y s i are o now o b etter b cared fo r h by st th t e state t . civil rights movement...
...But in the political sphere mistakes have consequences far worse than any to be found on an American plate...
...Thinkers like Rawls and Dworkin owe their success entirely to the wily sophisms with which they have been able to satisfy an eager public that there is some foundation in reason itself—or failing that, in the Constitution, which is after all Reason’s last appearance here below—for the view that the goal of life is equality, and morality entirely a matter of private preference...
...Liberalism has meant the constant expansion of the state, and the constant erosion of individual liberties, often—as during the French Revolution—under the pretense of advancing “human” or “civil” rights...
...That is perhaps why we are emerging into a new period of official censorship, in which the great shibboleth of equality must be protected at all costs from questioning...
...Yet it is everywhere to be observed that the advocates of human equality in the modern world— Liberals dislike all distinctions of condition that emerge from individual liberty...
...It is a small step to the prediction that a society of moral relativists, determined to impose equality wherever distinction might otherwise arise, does not guarantee its own reproduction...
...When Adam Smith made freedom central to his vision of the modern economy, he was clear that freedom and morality are two sides of a coin...
...by Roger scruton When the french revolutionists crafted their famous slogan—Liberté, égalité, fraternité— they were in a state of moral exaltation that prevented them from seeing any fault in it...
...It is an obstacle to comfort and consumption, a denial of present pleasure...
...And a vast literature has emerged—a kind of scholastic theology of unbelief— devoted to the task of making these two absurdities believable...
...4 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 Roger scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books...
...A free society is a community of responsible beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love...
...I have a banal answer to offer, namely, that these two characteristics are what is left of the moral sense when religion dies...
...The privatization of morality has led to a massive betrayal of the next generation—many of whom are disposed of in the womb, others of whom are cast off in childhood...
...The state can seize the assets of the successful and redistribute them to those who otherwise might fail...
...But it is illustrated in another way by the history of American liberalism...
...Wherever the liberal elite has established its hegemony, the dogma of equality may not be questioned...
...Again and again since those days, however, humanity has made the same mistake, dressing up the pursuit of equality as the true form of liberty, and advocating enslavement by the state as the “liberation” of the masses from the bonds of exploitation...
...We want to hide in Take away the belief in God, and individuality, freedom, and obligation all pose an existential threat to us...
...This elite, the new aristocracy, will interpret those rights in whatever way is needed 3 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 R o G e R s c R u T o n by the goal of equality...
...When people believe in a loving God, who is sovereign over each individual and concerned for us all, they easily accept that, while we are equal in the eyes of that great sovereign, we can be equal in no other freedom is an ultimate good...
...and not only here in America—are deeply suspicious of moral constraints, and wish to chase them from the law and from every other place in which they might find a foothold in society...
...It has often been remarked that the word “liberal” has come to mean something quite new in America today...
...But they retain a kind of caricature of the classical liberal position...
...In these circumstances people cling to the egalitarian agenda with renewed ferocity...
...We cannot possibly live up to them...
...30), the liberal elite claims ownership of the Constitution and all the rights laid down in it...
...If people, in exercising their free choice, set up all-male clubs, then the state is entitled to close those clubs down, or compel them to admit women...
...relativism what remains of freedom...
...In their eyes liberty was good, equality was good, and fraternity was good, so the combination was thrice good...
...The privatization of sexual morality is destroying the family and therefore the will to have children...
...lose all faith in a transcendental sovereign, they will pursue social equality and moral relativism It seems to me obvious therefore that, once people with a single passion, and be hardly able to distinguish the one goal from the other...
...They admit that individual freedom is an ultimate good...
...Both are unswervingly adhered to by those of little faith...
...They are often as immoralist as the Marquis de Sade in sexual matters, and their attitude to the cardinal virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice is that the matters once governed by these ineffective of equality so often combined with the view that, in morality, anything goes...
...It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint—for that is precisely the opposite of a society...
...We are surrounded by a wall of prohibitions: things we cannot say, things we cannot do, things we cannot oppose, things we cannot promote...
...Liberals dislike all distinctions of condition that emerge, as they inevitably will emerge, from individual liberty...
...As for the consequences, we are seeing them everywhere in the Western world, not only in America but in Europe too...
...For we are individuals, each with a path and a fate of his own...
...That is like saying lobster is good, chocolate is good, ketchup is good, so lobster cooked in chocolate and ketchup is thrice good...
...Of course, American cooking exemplifies that kind of mistake in ways that never cease to appall the discerning European palate...
...The state is the liberal’s idol, and it must not be contaminated by the enemy’s spells...
...And indeed, this is what we see—in Europe, but soon in America too...
...These are thinkers for whom the new, small, earthly god of equality has taken an immovable place on the near horizon, and for whom the old world of liberty and the hierarchies that stem from it has lost its transcendental meaning...
...from moral constraints...
...Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no longterm prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order...
...Only with the revolutionary tribunals—in which judge, jury, and prosecutor were identical and the accused deprived of the right of defense—did they see that the goal of equality requires the destruction of liberty...
...We have entered a new epoch, in which liberties are being extinguished in the name of freedom, and irresponsibility promoted in the name of rights...
...it is the best justification they can think of, for their being here on earth...
...It can prevent the formation of exclusive associations and in general impede the energetic, the attractive, and the life-affirming from uniting successfully with their kind...
...And the state is the most powerful of all the instruments ever devised for equalizing the human condition...
...But the ideological motive should never be doubted...
...The French had to go through a painful process of discovery before realizing what they had embarked on...
...It is often observed that liberals are either irreligious or of vacillating faith...
...Our most important attribute is freedom, and in the exercise of that freedom we bind ourselves in a web of obligations...
...We want to hide in the herd and surrender our freedom...
...In the end, to be a liberal is to believe in the supreme value of equality, and to work towards it by whatever means available...
...It can silence the critics of equality, and insist on official lies concerning the human condition so that the heretical view, that human beings are not all equal in merit or potential, ceases to be safely expressible...
...As Judge Bork trenchantly reminds us (p...
...The fate of Larry Summers, the Harvard president who publicly suggested that there might be “innate differences” between men and women, and who as a result was forced to resign, is but one very small instance of a widespread phenomenon...
...But there is another side to it, as Judge Bork also reminds us...
...And that sovereign is the state...
...For that is what equal treatment demands...
...If people refuse to recognize the legitimacy of homosexual unions, or try to exclude homosexuals from their places of work or education, then the state is entitled to step in and force them to change their ways...
...I don’t say that their arguments have not illuminated many questions of enduring philosophical significance —in the case of Rawls they clearly have...
...And when falsehoods have become socially necessary, so too has the persecution of those who question them—Judge Bork being himself a heroic instance...
...No attempt to impede this interference by invoking individual rights will ever succeed for long...
...the herd and surrender our freedom to a new and more earthly sovereign, who will ensure equal treatment for all...
...And at the same time the real prohibitions, which we conservatives wish to see kept in place since morality, and therefore the reproduction of society, depend on them, are being privatized...
...In America today a liberal is someone who advocates massive interference by the state in all economic activity, in schools and universities, in the institutions of civil society such as marriage and associations, in order to impose equality...
...Take away the belief in God, however, and individuality, freedom, and obligation all pose an existential threat to us...
...Duty, marriage, family, children have all become options that eccentrics might pursue for their own amusement, but which can be rejected by the rest with impunity...
...And yet we know it to be false...
...They admit that individual T h W h t d n a l a e D w e N e h t e c n i s d e n p a h s a h Spectat p or e don’t need to be reminded of wha e t charge...
...But only if interpreted in a new way, as the freedom from moral constraints...
...But only if interpreted in a new way, as the freedom J u n e 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 3 9 T H e P u R s u I T o f k n o w L e D G e respect...
...T H e P u R s u I T o f k n o w L e D G e Liberty and Equality American liberalism sacrifices the former to impose the latter, not to mention what it’s done to morality...
...Hence regulation of businesses, and the attempt to control and curtail the social impulse, will both be easily justified...
Vol. 41 • June 2008 • No. 5
