Remarks from NRI’s Regional Seminars.
The following remarks, lightly adapted, were delivered by the author in New York City on March 6, as part of National Review Institute’s Foundations of Freedom Seminars series on the Importance of America’s Constitutional Pillars.
It’s good to be among my tribe. I have to say that’s a sad epitaph; I hope it doesn’t go on my tombstone that I am “the free-market priest.” I would hope that I would be one of many as other priests and seminarians think through the moral foundations of liberty. And that, in effect, is what we are to talk about. I thank the organizers and especially National Review, which of course I have cut my teeth on since being a kid. I thank the hosts and I want to say that these remarks are necessarily going to be brief because we have a constricted amount of time, and a lot of other very good speakers. And also because I was charged with the mission of provoking discussion, not merely to leave everyone silent.
I would like to present some overarching principles, some distinctions and clarifications, and perhaps philosophical, not to mention theological, foundations of the topic at hand: the basis of freedom. In the hope of providing, as I say, fodder for our discussion.
Lord Acton said that “liberty is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” Consider for a few moments how pregnant that statement is, how rich it is, and how complex and subtle it is. By that observation, he intended several things, most notably that the liberal idea results from “an intricate arrangement of a multitude of episodes, factors and persons and ideas.” These are the words of Gertrude Himmelfarb — a woman of happy memory to at least some of us here in this room. She summarized an interpretation of Acton in this regard.
It is thus good to recall that the American Founding Fathers did and did not see themselves as inventing the constitution of liberty in the latter part of the 16th century. One might add that rather they coalesced, they defined, they constituted the assertion that liberty is an inheritance of the wisdom of the ages. One might also add that in addition to the intellectual brilliance of this Novus Ordo Seclorum, it was also a profound humility that they displayed in not claiming it as their own brainchild.
But there’s another backdrop to all this that’s noteworthy and instructive to us, instructive to us as a via negativa. And I’m referring here to the French Revolution, or revolutions more precisely, and more specifically to the ideas and the presuppositions of that event that went into the building of it and its ultimate disaster. Here we will discover a number of fatal errors that are instructive to us, errors that the American experiment at its inception largely avoided perhaps up until the present moment. Among these errors was to see liberalism, in its classic definition of course, as achieved by egalitarianism. For the French came to see equality as the instrument for liberty, resulting in its becoming a passion yet lacking a clear philosophy.
Further, the French forgot or rejected or ignored the separation that Jesus made between the realm of God and the realm of Caesar. In his distinction when holding up the coin, and asked whose image was on it, Jesus said, “Render . . . unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). What he does at that moment is to offer, to us today and to history, two different forms of constraint on human activity (and here I would like to credit Richard, from whom I borrow this distinction). One constraint is essentially interior to the person, that is authority. The recognition that something is true and binding on me, not because someone is going to force me to do it, but because it is the right thing to do. It is the thing that enhances my liberty. It is the thing that encourages human flourishing.
This is distinct from power, Caesar, the external authority that also constrains our ability to act, but does so forcefully and does not require acquiescence, but simply constrains us by using law or power or prison. In the French Revolution, this would then lead to a confusion between patriotism and nationalism, as it is doing once again even today. And this becomes deadly to the extent that it confuses the vox populi with the vox Dei.
It would literally take libraries and libraries of books to document the details of these horrors, whether by ecclesiastical leaders or even more so by the secularist leaders who have implemented this notion of complete totalistic power. And this is the most important part of the American Revolution, which advanced the idea of the primacy of authority, not power, over the consciences, lives, and property of its citizens.
The American experiment proved to be much wiser. In its formulation of the division of powers, as we see it laid out in the founding documents — something those tempted by power, of course, tend to hate or manipulate or redefine. We see Acton’s own insight when he said, “It is only in securing the distribution of power that liberty is ensured.” We see this also embedded in the republican form of federalism that the Founders established.
Expanding on the distinction between Jesus’s God and Caesar, we can use the principle of subsidiarity to think more precisely about the legitimate use of power in society and the primary importance of authority as its complement. Subsidiarity both grounds the legitimacy of the state and limits its power. Subsidiarity basically says that the needs of people are best met at the most local level of their existence, that the people who should act on their needs would be first and foremost the people themselves or their family, or their extended family, or mediating institutions in society. But the principle of subsidiarity allows higher levels of social organization to intervene when there are severe dislocations in society overall.
But it warns that those interventions must be temporary and not normative, that they shouldn’t create things like a permanent welfare state to replace the role of the family, the role of society, and the role of business and generosity. This principle of subsidiarity is rooted in a more ancient understanding that we see first and foremost in the Old Testament, where God instructed Moses to divide his judging authority among elders in Israel to make more-accurate and well-informed decisions about what the people needed in their existence as a nation.
A rebirth of the tradition of self-government is what is desperately needed in our world, and particularly in our country, at this moment. We are confronted by a nihilist culture seemingly bent on a suicidal course, where reason no longer counts for anything, where life itself has been cheapened, where even (or perhaps because) human identity is obscured and confused. Yet the tradition of which I’ve spoken is today weakened, not only from the obvious seekers of power who seek to appropriate private property and establish socialist governance, but also among those who claim to be the exact opposite.
Yet when you identify the fundamental principles of those movements, of the movements of integralism or the tendencies toward theocracy in various forms, we know what we have to avoid. We have to eschew people who confuse a love of their country, patriotism, with the preeminence of the state to act. We must be on guard against those who see the creation of a good and virtuous society as primarily being introduced by a state. We must be on guard against the reincarnation of the very errors that the Founders of the United States, the writers of our founding documents, avoided by their appropriation of a more ancient tradition.
I think we can accomplish this to the extent that we recognize in ourselves the dignity that each of us possesses by virtue of our nature, and then to create compelling and winsome arguments, engaging those who are still willing and able to reason. We can argue that what is needed is a society most appropriate to the human person who is endowed by the Creator with unalienable rights not given to us by the state, but granted to us by nature and nature’s Author.
By reinforcing these ideas in the minds of young people today, I think we can reestablish the vigor that inspired the founding of National Review itself. We must stand athwart a new form of totalitarianism that would be no less deadly than the old form were it to get its grip on the United States. I thank you for the work that you are doing and in particular, for the work that National Review continues to do in helping to bring about this vision.