Touchstone
September / October 2018 issue
Liberalism Occupied
The Rise of the Gnostic Liberal State After Christianity
by Andrew Latham
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Post-liberalism. Beyond liberalism. After liberalism. In recent years, books
and articles with titles containing these and similar phrases have proliferated
at a breathtaking pace, reflecting a now widely held view that the
three-centuries-old liberal era is coming to (has come to?) a decisive end. To
be sure, these books and articles often differ significantly in their
respective analytical assumptions, political concerns, and practical
recommendations. But they share at least one common—indeed,
defining—commitment: a belief that, for better or worse, liberalism as a
political project is a spent force, and we had better prepare ourselves to
endure both its tumultuous death throes and the turbulence that will inevitably
accompany the birth of its successor.
But is this an accurate account of where we find ourselves today? Are we really
witnessing the demise of liberalism as a world-historical project? Are we as a
society actually slouching, via the way station of today's illiberal
liberalism, toward the Gomorrah of a definitively post-liberal world?
In a word, no. While it is impossible to gainsay the all-too-evident fact that
the liberalism of today is different from that of the seventeenth century, or
even that of the first half of the twentieth, claims that these differences are
profound enough to signify the end of liberalism underestimate liberalism's
ability to adapt itself to changing historical conditions and cultural
contexts. Just as liberalism manifested itself as "classical liberalism" in the
particular historical circumstances of John Locke's time and, in a very
different guise, as "New Liberalism" or "Social Liberalism" in the historical
context of John Dewey's time, so it is manifesting itself in distinctive ways
in our time.
The challenge today, then, is neither to autopsy liberalism nor to try to limn
the contours of some post-liberal political project assumed to be materializing
just over the temporal horizon. Rather, the task before us is to specify the
cultural forces at work within contemporary American society and to ask how
those forces are reshaping the way in which enduring or core liberal ideals and
values are being implemented. Once we have done this, it will become clear that
the problem today lies not with liberalism per se, but with the gnosticism that
in recent decades has replaced Christianity as the cultural matrix within which
the liberal project is embedded.
Defining Liberalism
Before we proceed, however, it is necessary to define this thing called
liberalism. As the English political philosopher John Gray argues in his
classic book Liberalism (1986, 1995), it is a mistake to approach this task as
if liberalism has a single unchanging nature or essence. It is better, he says,
to treat liberalism as a tradition of political thought that coheres around a
distinctive set of themes but that manifests itself quite differently in
different historical and national contexts. Gray then enumerates a number of
enduring leitmotifs that define the liberal tradition, three of which I think
are particularly important:
• Individualism—belief in the moral primacy of the person over and against the
claims of any collective;
• Egalitarianism—a commitment to the basic moral equivalence of all human
beings; and
• Meliorism—the conviction that the human condition can be improved through the
use of critical reason.
To Gray's list I would add one more. Drawing on the work of Pierre Manent, I
would include:
• Emancipation—a commitment to the liberation of the "sovereign human will"
from all constraining externalities.
While this commitment is not an exclusive property of liberalism (it is
evident, for example, in the thought of both Machiavelli and Nietzsche), it
does seem to me to be an enduring thread within the liberal tradition.
At one level, then, liberalism can be understood as a set of abstract concepts
or intellectual commitments. As Gray argues, however, in the real world,
liberalism is never simply a free-floating congeries of ideas or abstractions
taking the same form wherever it touches down. Rather, it assumes different
forms as it is implemented in different national settings or in the same
national setting at different historical junctures. French liberalism, then, is
distinct from British liberalism, and American liberalism in the seventeenth
century is different from American liberalism in the early twentieth. But, Gray
insists, these manifold varieties of liberalism are not "two or more traditions
or a diffuse syndrome of ideas." Rather, they are "separate branches of a
common lineage," "variations on a small set of distinctive themes."
This being the case, how can we account for the variations? Gray's own answer
to this is serviceable enough for his purposes: various crises in modernity
manifested themselves in different ways in different national and cultural
settings, each eliciting highly specific responses. For my purposes, though,
some refinement is required. In place of the somewhat nebulous claim that
variations in liberalism are triggered by "crises in modernity," my claim is
that in any given historical setting what we might label "real, existing
liberalism" is the product of the interaction of the abstract liberal vision
described above with the concrete social challenges of a given historical
moment—or rather with the aspirations and anxieties generated by those concrete
challenges—and with the wider culture.
Early America
Thus, for example, during the American Revolutionary era, "real, existing
liberalism" was conditioned by the core liberal principles articulated
above—individualism, egalitarianism, meliorism, and emancipation—along with the
principles associated with civic republicanism. These constituted the primum
mobile of the early American experiment in ordered liberty. But the way in
which these ideas were implemented was itself conditioned by the concrete
challenges confronting the liberals of the time—specifically, the threat posed
to individual liberty by a tyrannical political order, actual in the case of
the British state, potential in the case of the under-construction American one.
As a result, early American liberalism sought to advance its core principles by
devising a political system of negative liberty that both limited the power of
the state and created a robust zone of autonomy around the individual citizen.
The latter was secured by the rights to free speech, assembly, petition, and
the free exercise of religion.
Because politics is always downstream from culture, the "real, existing
liberalism" of the early national era was also shaped, inflected, and limited
by the wider cultural matrix from which it emerged. Left unchecked, as Alexis
de Tocqueville grasped all too clearly, the inner logic of classical liberalism
always tends toward more individualism, more meliorism, more egalitarianism,
etc., with the logical outcome being an atomized political and social order in
which all organic, natural, and pre-political human bonds are dissolved and the
sovereign human will is freed from all internal and external constraints. But
in the post-Revolutionary era, as Tocqueville also understood, this inner logic
was checked by America's "spirit of religion"—that is, by the admixture of
Christian natural law and biblical anthropology that underpinned and suffused
early American social imagery.
According to Tocqueville, foundational and largely unquestioned beliefs about
the sovereignty of God, the fallen and fixed nature of humanity, the
naturalness of marriage and family, the organic character of political
community, and the inevitability of hierarchy all worked to temper the
propensity to recast human nature and society according to the dictates of
unconstrained human will inherent in America's "spirit of liberty." The result
was a distinctively Christian liberalism that provided a socio-political
framework within which what Russell Hittinger has called "the three necessary
societies"—domestic society (marriage and family), the polity, and the
church—could, and did, flourish.
Twentieth-Century America
Fast forward to the opening decades of the twentieth century and we see a
similar dynamic at work in the Social Liberalism of John Dewey and the
progressive reformers. Once again, liberals sought to give effect to
liberalism's core ideals, only this time in the context of a new set of
anxieties raised by rapid industrialization, urbanization, rising inequality,
and what many progressives characterized as the moral degeneracy associated
with widespread poverty.
In order to address these new challenges—and drawing on novel ideas pioneered
in countries like Britain, France, Italy, and especially Germany—progressives
abandoned the principles of negative liberty and the limited state and embraced
instead those of positive liberty and its handmaiden, the interventionist,
administrative state. Limited government, the rule of law, and other hallmarks
of classical liberalism were to varying degrees replaced by new modalities of
rule that permitted the state to regulate more and more areas of life. American
society remained essentially liberal, only now the state had a whole new set of
political tools for perfecting that society.
Left unchecked, of course, this marriage of the liberal project to the
administrative state would inevitably have resulted in an authoritarian
political order in which all intermediary institutions were swept away by a
totalizing state committed to remaking human nature and society. This did not
happen, however. The reason: the "really, existing liberalism" of the first
half of the twentieth century remained embedded in an essentially Christian
cultural matrix that tempered and limited this dynamic.
Certain widespread beliefs, among them the conviction that human beings are
bearers of inalienable natural rights, that the nuclear family is a permanent
and natural institution, that the administrative state should not interfere in
domains reserved to the family and civil society, that Christians had a right
to enter the public square as Christians, and that freedom of religion was the
"first freedom" and thus entitled to robust protections, established guardrails
that limited what Social Liberals could even conceive of, much less accomplish.
Thus, though it differed in important respects from the Christian liberalism of
the Revolutionary era, a recognizably Christian liberalism—one that proved
conducive to Hittinger's three necessary societies of family, church, and
polity—also underpinned the progressive era.
Latter-Day Liberalism
Fast forward again to the late 1960s, and we see the inauguration of yet
another age of liberalism. Like the prior two liberalisms, this new form was,
in the first instance, the product of an attempt to give effect to liberalism's
defining ideals in the context of a specific set of challenges and
concerns—this time revolving around race, sex, sexuality, and the widespread
perception that American society had become stultifying and oppressive. Unlike
in the previous two eras, however, the working out of this dialectic in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first century took place not against the
backdrop of an ambient Christian culture, but against that of a progressively
post-Christian one.
As thinkers such as George Weigel, Archbishop Charles Chaput, Rod Dreher, R. R.
Reno, Anthony Esolen, Mary Eberstadt, and Pierre Manent have persuasively
argued in their respective idioms, this age has witnessed an almost complete
unwinding of what Hugh Heclo has called the double-helix of liberalism and
Christianity. Largely as a result of the long march through the institutions
carried out by cultural Marxists and other illiberal forces beginning in the
interwar years but progressing with increasing vigor into the 1960s, the
bedrock Christian anthropological, sociological, and political norms that had
so productively channeled and constrained liberalism in the past were first
challenged, then increasingly discredited, and finally largely marginalized.
The ultimate consequence of this unwinding was not only that it decisively
displaced the Christian customs, morals, and sentiments—what Tocqueville called
"habits of thought"—that had restrained liberalism in the past. It also, and
more consequentially, created something of a cultural vacuum—a vacuum that was
quickly filled by a form of gnosticism that had been gestating on the margins
of American society since the interwar years.
What were the defining features or leitmotifs of this newly ascendant
gnosticism? Scholars as diverse as Eric Voegelin, Hans Jonas, George Weigel,
and Robert George have offered answers to this question, but I think Gerald
Hanratty best sums up its key elements. According to Hanratty, gnosticism is a
tradition of political-theological thought that coheres around three basic
themes:
• Self-deification—the glorification and divinization of the human self;
• Prometheanism—the valorization of the human will's potential for heroic
defiance of arbitrary authority; and
• Vanguardism (my term)—the belief that human nature and society can be
perfected through the intervention of a spiritual and cognitive elite
possessing extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge.
There are other elements to contemporary gnosticism, to be sure. Professor
George, for example, has recently focused on the mind-body dualism inherent in
gnosticism to explain changes in gender and marriage norms. But while these
other elements can shed some light on the ongoing, relatively narrow—if
important—transformations in particular elements of liberalism, I find
Hanratty's focus on self-deification, Prometheanism and vanguardism well-suited
to the task of illuminating the broader transformation of liberalism as a
world-historical project.
The Effects of Gnostic Liberalism
Specifically, I would argue that, since the 1990s, the themes Hanratty
identifies have come to dominate the commanding heights of American culture
such that they now define and delimit the cultural context within which the
liberal project is being implemented. The result has been the opposite of the
dynamic tension between liberalism and Christianity that characterized most of
American history. Where Christian natural law and biblical anthropology had
tempered liberalism's core impulses, gnosticism now amplifies them, with the
result that we are now seeing the negative consequences that had always been
possible in previous eras but had not materialized thanks to the constraining
effects of Christianity.
Consider, for example, the effects of the interaction between liberalism and
gnosticism in the realm of anthropology. Prior to the mid-twentieth century,
the liberal emphasis on the moral centrality of the individual human person was
tempered by a Christian anthropology that enmeshed the individual in a web of
greater or lesser obligations to God, family, community, patria, and so forth.
In practical terms, this meant that individuals, while autonomous, were also
subject to both the sovereign authority of God and the dictates of natural law,
and therefore were not radically autonomous. In the earlier eras of Christian
liberalism, individualism was less about developing for oneself the kind of
"plan of life" that John Stuart Mill famously advocated than it was about
discovering the individual's unique role in God's divine order and liberating
the individual to play that role without hindrance.
Today's gnostic liberalism, however, is based on a radically different set of
anthropological assumptions. The admixture of gnostic self-deification and
liberal individualism has, over the past half-century or so, given rise to what
George Weigel calls the religion of the "imperial sovereign self." In place of
an embedded individual subject to divine authority and natural law, we see a
radically autonomous individual subject to no superintending authority
whatsoever. Where Christian liberalism involved a healthy commitment to human
dignity, gnostic liberalism involves an unhealthy worship of the individual as
a kind of divinity, a demiurge capable of fashioning and refashioning his or
her own (human) nature according to the dictates of the sovereign will.
Moreover, gnostic liberalism further assumes that in a just society, all
persons will be permitted to live according to their self-defined nature
without legal or moral hindrance.
The effects of the interaction between liberalism and gnosticism can also be
discerned at the sociological level. For instance, the interaction of gnostic
Prometheanism with the core liberal value of emancipation has produced what
Roger Scruton calls a "culture of repudiation"—that is, a culture in which
every constraining tradition, custom, norm, or taboo is rejected as oppressive.
During the eras of Christian liberalism, the liberal commitment to the
liberation of the "sovereign human will" from all constraining externalities
was tempered by the Christian notion that postlapsarian human society must
place limits on the sovereign will of the individual if society is not to
collapse under the weight of sinful human nature. But in the current era, the
tempering effect of Christianity on emancipation has given way to the
amplifying effect of Promethean valorization, in which the defiance of
authority is seen as heroic. The result has been the repudiation of any
societal limitations on the sovereign will of the individual and the rejection
of the culture through which those limitations have historically been
transmitted from one generation to the next.
A New Political Order
Finally, the convergence of liberalism and gnosticism in the contemporary era
has given rise to a new conventional wisdom with regard to politics. To begin
with, absent the moderating effects of Christian beliefs regarding humanity's
fixed and fallen nature, the current era has seen the pragmatic meliorism that
characterized real, existing liberalism prior to the mid-twentieth century
mutate into a utopian meliorism—a desire to perfect humanity and human society
so as to "immanentize the eschaton," as Voegelin famously put it.
In previous eras, the liberal idea that history was bending in the direction of
a cosmopolitan and rationalist future, in which social relations and
institutions would be built on reason rather than on culture, custom, or
tradition, was tempered by an essentially Christian belief that in a
postlapsarian world, "out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight
was ever made." The result was a form of liberalism that assumed that while the
human condition might be improved, it could never be perfected.
In the contemporary era, however, meliorism is no longer tempered by the
Christian notion that humanity is fallen and therefore imperfectible. Instead,
there is a widespread belief that a secular, cosmopolitan, and rationalist
millennium can indeed be realized. Human society can be perfected—that is, made
perfectly just, perfectly equitable, and perfectly free. And not only human
society—human nature itself, according to the canons of gnostic liberalism, can
also be perfected. Since, according to the utopians, our nature is not
unalterable, at some point in the future we should be able to apply emerging
technologies, eugenics, and even good old-fashioned re-education to finally
make straight the "crooked timber of humanity."
How will all this be brought about politically? The interaction of gnostic
vanguardism and liberal meliorism-cum-utopianism has given rise to the view
that the new order will be ushered in only when an enlightened elite is able to
construct a Leviathan-like state that will give it the power and means to
perfect society in the face of inevitable resistance from those who are less
enlightened or just plain evil. Such an elite will possess the esoteric
knowledge, the gnosis, that is needed to bring about our secular salvation, and
will exercise the leadership needed to immanentize its gnostic eschaton.
But if these elites are to succeed—if they are to accelerate the movement of
history in the direction of individualism, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and
rationalism—they will need to construct a state that is truly fit for purpose.
Whereas biblical anthropology and Christian natural law established the family,
civil society, and the church as natural and necessary institutions mediating
between the state and the individual, gnosticism recognizes no such natural or
necessary institutions. Indeed, the gnostic liberal state will need to free the
sovereign will of the individual from all these limiting institutions, while
also ensuring perfect justice and equality.
In order to achieve this utopian goal, the state will have to abolish all forms
of identity and thought that do not conform to this political project,
including particular attachments (like patriotism), "irrational" belief systems
(like Christianity), mediating institutions (like civic associations), and
forms of the family that have proven most stubbornly resistant to the more
revolutionary schemes of liberal thinkers throughout the modern age. Moreover,
the state will have to free itself from "outmoded" restraints like limited
government, individual rights (especially religious liberty), and quaint
notions of "toleration." If the gnostic liberal state is to right all that is
wrong with humanity, it must become what Giles of Rome sought to make the
medieval papacy: "a creature without a halter or bridle."
Our Task Today
At the beginning of this essay, I made the claim that we are not witnessing the
end of liberalism as the principal idiom and primum mobile of American
political life. What we are witnessing is the working out of the liberal
project in the distinctive cultural context of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. The ambient Christianity that had previously tempered
the more destructive tendencies within liberalism, and that had made it
conducive to Hittinger's three societies, has now given way to a form of
gnosticism that amplifies those very tendencies, and commensurately undermines
those three societies.
Thus, our current condition is neither the result of a betrayal of liberalism's
political origins nor the ultimate fulfillment of its logic. Rather, it is a
historically specific configuration of liberalism that is the result of the
deletion of the Christian DNA from the genome of liberalism and the insertion
of some gnostic DNA in its place. This being the case, the task before us now
is not so much to critique liberalism itself as to challenge the now-regnant
gnosticism within which contemporary liberalism is embedded.
Andrew Latham<https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/author.php?id=1116> is a
Professor of Political Science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
He has published articles in Touchstone, First Things, Commonweal, and Crisis,
plus many academic articles, a couple of scholarly books, and a novel, The Holy
Lance (2015), dealing with the Third Crusade.
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