The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch. — Stanley Fish
This line from celebrity literary intellectual Stanley Fish occurred to me in light of the controversy over the cartoons printed in Denmark which have sparked numerous protests in the Muslim world, some of them violent. Fish’s article was one half of an exchange with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who contends that Christianity is compatible with at least some forms of liberalism – understood broadly as a political system that protects individual rights and refrains from imposing a substanitve vision of the good life on its citizens. Though Fish is not himself religious as far as I know, his criticisms of liberalism have been picked up by certain “post-liberal” theologians, most notably Stanley Hauerwas.
The Hauerwas school of thought sees liberalism as, despite its claims to the contrary, imposing a metaphysic or a “narrative” that is at odds with and indeed undermines Christian faithfulness. In Hauerwas’ view, liberal modernity seeks to remake us into autonomous choosers, people who “have no story except the story they choose when they had no story” as he likes to say. For Hauerwasians, liberalism manifests itself in the political arena by making “freedom” or “choice” the highest value, and in the economic realm by its embrace of free-market capitalism (whether of the relatively unregulated U.S. version or of the tamer European social-democratic variety doesn’t seem to make much difference to these critics of liberalism). Some, like John Milbank, go as far as to accuse liberalism of being founded in an “ontological violence” – of positing egoism as a natural and normal part of the human condition, rather as a result of the fall as in Christian theology.
What the Danish cartoon controversy may indicate, though, is that the people who have the best chance of extirpating liberalism in our world are not likely to be civilized pacifistic theology professors. The notion that liberalism and its guarantees of freedom of speech, religion, etc. are anathema to a robust religious faith appears to have been embraced by many of the more radical elements in the Islamic world. Under these circumstances, the liberal idea that we often need to be protected from other people’s certainties starts to look pretty appealing. This isn’t to deny that post-liberals make salutary criticisms of (at least certain varieties of) liberalism – I agree that they do – just that before we write it off, we ought to see what’s most likely to be put in its place.
P.S. Just to forestall any confusion, I didn’t intend this to be some alarmist post about the “Muslim hordes bearing down on us,” ’cause I don’t really think that’s true. My point was the more general one that, whatever ills liberalism may cause, chucking liberalism is likely not the answer, because the forces of illiberalism are almost always worse, wherever they may come from.
But I don’t think that commits me to a kind of dogmatic come-what-may defense of liberalism. It’s possible that there are other ways of ordering political life that are just as legitimate, but among what appear to be our currently available options, liberal democracy looks the best to me.
A Thinking Reed 
Leave a reply to Eric Lee Cancel reply