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Truth and Liberty: The Present Crisis in Our Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Michael Novak
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Extract

Few centuries have been as sanguinary as the twentieth. Leaving behind as their monuments the ruins of concentration camps and the work camps of the Gulag Archipelago, temporarily discredited, fascism and communism may have slouched into the shadows. Still, the forces of liberty have not succeeded in laying the foundations for a world of free republics. During the twentieth century, both in Europe and in the United States, the moral life of the free societies has been severely weakened. Families are a shadow of what they used to be. Traditional virtues and decencies, a sense of honor, and respect for moral character have given way to vulgar relativism. Thus, the dark underground river of the twentieth century has not been fascism nor communism but their presupposition: nihilism. And nihilism has not yet been abandoned.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , Winter 1997 , pp. 5 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1997

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References

1 SeeLewis, Michael on Allen, Woody, “The Very Last Lover”, The New Republic, 28 09 1992, p. 11Google Scholar.

2 Planned Parenthood v Casey, 505 U.S. 120 L Ed 2d 674 (1992). Russell Hittinger parsed the destructive notion of liberty at the heart of Casey: “One would seem to have a right to do or not do whatever one pleases” (“What Really Happened in the Casey Decision”, Crisis [September 1992], pp. 16–22).

3 In view of his earlier defense of nihilism, Camus sets forth, with some difficulty, his argument against Nazism, in “Letters to a German Friend: Second Letter,” Resistance, Rebellion and Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).Google Scholar

4 Schlesinger wrote, “The American mind is by nature and tradition skeptical, irreverent, pluralistic and relativistic ⃜ People with different history will have different values. But we believe that our own are better for us. They work for us; and, for that reason, we live and die by them” (“The Opening of the American Mind”, New York Times Book Review, 23 July 1989, 26). A good statement of Rorty's views on democracy can be found in “Taking Philosophy Seriously”, New Republic, 11 April 1988, p. 22, where Rorty writes, “No specific doctrine is much of a danger, but the idea that democracy depends on adhesion to some such doctrine is”.

5 For the testimony of Vaclav Havel and other East and Central European dissidents on the culture of the Lie, see Havel, et al. , The Power and the Powerless: Citizens Against the Stale in Central and Eastern Europe (Armark, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990).Google Scholar

6 Solzhenitsyn was quoting, in his 1970 Nobel prize lecture, an old Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the world”. Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 34Google Scholar.

7 Berlin defined negative liberty as “not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom”. See Berlin's, famous “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–72.Google Scholar

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9 Still, note the neat connection between the third concept of liberty and the liberal concept of “negative liberty”. The American regime permits liberty even to those who do not practice self-government, but are slaves (as all of us are in part) to their own passions. But it cannot survive unless a sufficient proportion of its citizens do practice self-government in their private lives, and so are prepared to practice it in public as well. If all are slaves to passion and interest, free institutions cannot stand. The state cannot command or coerce self-government in private life, but it can do two things: (a) it can avoid undermining it by its laws, its regulations, and its taxes; and (b) it can support it by structures of incentives and punishments.

10 For Russell, , see Why I am Not a Christian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), particularly pp. 14–15Google Scholar; Sartre&s views are developed in The Words (New York: George Braziller, 1964)Google Scholar; on Strauss&s relationship to Judaism, see Novak, David, ed., Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Critically Revisited (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).Google Scholar

11 Tocqueville wrote: “While the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare. Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it did not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof” (Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J. P., trans. Lawrence, G. [New York: Anchor Books, 1966], 292Google Scholar).

12 In Niebuhr's words, “Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944], p. xi).Google Scholar

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19 Paul, Pope John II, Centesimus Annus (Boston: Daughter's of St. Paul, 1991), #46.Google Scholar

20 Paul, Pope John II, Veritatis Splendor (Boston: Daughter's of St. Paul, 1991), #101.Google Scholar

21 Friedman's comments were part of a symposium on Centesimus Annus in National Review (24 June 1991). They were reprinted as “Goods in Conflict?” in A New Worldly Order: John Paul II and Human Freedom, ed. Weigel, George (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy, 1992), p. 77.Google Scholar

22 During the conference at which this paper was presented (at the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College, 18–20 April 1996), Professor Friedman emphatically renounced relativism: “I have no doubt that there is an absolute standard of truth, and that in any particular matter there is a truth to be recognized. But I don't know what it is. The overlooked element here is humility. We have to know we don't know”. And later, “I am not an atheist. I see the importance of religion, I respect it, I believe it has an important place in life, but I just do not see, I do not have belief myself, open as I am to it”. (Conversation with the author.)

23 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, with an introduction by Eliot, T. S. (New York: Dutton, 1958), #277.Google Scholar

24 See, e.g., Niebuhr's discussion on “Having, And Not Having the Truth” in The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 243Google Scholar: “The truth remains subject to the paradox of grace. We may have it; and yet we do not have it. And we will have it the more purely in fact if we know that we have it only in principle. Our toleration of truths opposed to those which we confess is an expression of the spirit of forgiveness in the realm of culture. Like all forgiveness, it is possible only if we are not too sure of our own virtue”.

25 Tocqueville quotes Cotton Mather: “Nor would I have you mistake in the point of your own liberty. There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected by men and beasts to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint.… But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good” (Democracy in America, p. 46). In the succinct formulation of Lord Acton, liberty is not to be defined as “the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought” (Selected Writings of Lord Acton, p. 613).

26 Bunyan, John, Pilgrim's Progress (New York: Viking Penguin, 1965)Google Scholar.