One principle that today's intellectuals most passionately disseminate
is vulgar relativism, "nihilism with a happy face."
For them it is certain that there is no truth, only opinion: my
opinion, your opinion. They abandon the defense of intellect.
There being no purchase of intellect upon reality, nothing else
is left but preference, and will is everything. They retreat to
the romance of will.
Vulgar relativism is an invisible gas, odorless, deadly, that
is now polluting every free society on earth. It is a gas that
attacks the central nervous system of moral striving. The most
perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither
political nor economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture
of relativism.
Freedom cannot grow - it cannot even survive - in every atmosphere
or clime. In the wearying journey of human history, free societies
have been astonishingly rare. The ecology of liberty is more fragile
than the biosphere of Earth. Freedom needs clean and healthful
habits, sound families, common decencies, and the unafraid respect
of one human for another. Freedom needs entire rainforests of
little acts of virtue, tangled loyalties, fierce loves, undying
commitments. Freedom needs particular institutions and these,
in turn, need peoples of particular habits of the heart.
Consider this. There are two types of liberty: one precritical,
emotive, whimsical, proper to children; the other critical, sober,
deliberate, responsible, proper to adults. Alexis de Tocqueville
called attention to this alternative early in Democracy in America,
and at Cambridge, Lord Acton put it this way: Liberty is not the
freedom to do what you wish; it is the freedom to do what you
ought. Human beings are the only creatures on earth that do not
blindly obey the laws of their nature, by instinct, but are free
to choose to obey them with a loving will. Only humans enjoy the
liberty to do — or not to do — what we ought to do.
It is this second kind of liberty — critical, adult liberty — that
lies at the living core of the free society. It is the liberty
of self-command, a mastery over one's own passions, bigotry, ignorance,
and self-deceit. It is the the liberty of self-government in one's
own personal life. For how, James Madison once asked, can a people
incapable of government in private life be capable of it in public?
If they cannot practice self-government over their private passions,
how will they practice it over the institutions of the Republic?
There cannot be a free society among citizens who habitually lie,
who malinger, who cheat, who do not meet their responsibilities,
who cannot be counted on, who shirk difficulties, who flout the
law-or who prefer to live as serfs or slaves, content in their
dependency, so long as they are fed and entertained.
Freedom requires the exercise of conscience; it requires the practice
of those virtues that, as Winston Churchill noted in his wartime
speeches to the Commons, have long been practiced in these Isles:
dutiful stout arms, ready hearts, courage, courtesy, ingenuity,
respect for individual choice, a patient regard for hearing evidence
on both sides of the story.
During the past hundred years, the question for those who loved
liberty was whether, relying on the virtues of our peoples, we
could survive powerful assaults from without (as, in the Battle
of Britain, this city [London] nobly did). During the next hundred
years, the question for those who love liberty is whether we can
survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from within,
from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance
the work of the Father of Lies. "There is no such thing as
truth," they teach even the little ones. "Truth is bondage.
Believe what seems right to you. There are as many truths as there
are individuals. Follow your feelings. Do as you please. Get in
touch with yourself. Do what feels comfortable." Those who
speak in this way prepare the jails of the twenty-first century.
They do the work of tyrants.
You are, no doubt, familiar with the objection to this warning.
Its central argument goes like this: to accept the idea of moral
truth is to accept authoritarian control. But between moral relativism
and political control there is a third alternative, well known
to the common sense of the English-speaking peoples. It is called
self-control. We do not want a government that coerces the free
consciences of individuals; on the contrary, we want self-governing
individuals to restrain immoral government. We want self-government,
self-command, self-control.
If a people composed of 100 million citizens is guarded by 100
million inner policemen — that is, by 100 million self-governing
consciences — then the number of policemen on its streets may be
few. For a society without inner policemen, on the other hand,
there aren't enough policemen in the world to make society civil.
Self-control is not authoritarianism but rather the alternative
to it....
Liberty itself requires unprecedented virtues, rarely seen in
simpler and more simply led societies. Special virtues are needed
by self-governing peoples: calm, deliberate, dispassionate reflection;
careful, responsible, consequence-accepting choice. In self-government,
citizens are sovereigns, and must learn to exercise the virtues
of sovereigns.
The free economy, too, demands more virtues than socialist or
traditional economies: It demands active persons, self-starters,
women and men of enterprise and risk. It requires the willingness
to sacrifice present pleasures for rewards that will be enjoyed
primarily by future generations. It requires vision, discovery,
invention. Its dynamism is human creativity endowed in us by our
Creator, Who made us in His image.
And so, too, the pluralist society calls for higher levels of
civility, tolerance, and reasoned public argument than citizens
in simpler times ever needed.
No one ever promised us that free societies will endure forever.
Indeed, a cold view of history shows that submission to tyranny
is the more frequent condition of the human race, and that free
societies have been few in number and not often long-lived. Free
societies such as our own, which have arisen rather late in the
long evolution of the human race, may pass across the darkness
of time like splendid little comets, burn into ashes, disappear.
Yet nothing in the entire universe, vast as it is, is as beautiful
as the human person. The human person alone is shaped to the image
of God. This God loves humans with a love most powerful. It is
this God who draws us, erect and free, toward Himself, this God
Who, in Dante's words, is "the Love that moves the sun and
all the stars."
— Robert Novak
— Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine, January/February, 1996
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