Initially, the liberal claim was to provide a political, legal, and economic framework in which assent to one and the same set of rationally justifiable principles would enable those who espouse widely different and incompatible conceptions of the good life for human beings to live together peaceably within the same society. Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere to… I have been wondering about this; using the language of the New Natural Law Theory (without accepting NNLT) can the good of social life be possible without taken into consideration higher "goods"? What if social life is founded upon a unity with respect to being oriented to the same higher goods? In which case, is social life not irremediably opposed to pluralism? Pluralism can only "exist" where there is no real community, especially because the place exceeds the proper scale. It seems that liberal ideology would not have been influential if not for the rise of the modern nation-state, racked by internal divisions (and external threats?).
Dr. Kozinski writes:
To me, America’s worship of freedom at the empty shrine bears a striking resemblance to the Church’s worship of the Holy Trinity in the Eucharist. First of all, like the Catholic Church, the empty shrine defines itself as both universal and particular: as a universal idea, that of equal freedom for all, and as a particular country with a particular history, the United State of America. Like the Holy Trinity, absolute freedom is transcendent, unlimited, and infinite. Discourse about freedom, like talk about the Trinity, is necessarily abstract, since to speak in a concrete manner about that which transcends any particular object would be to profane it by limiting it, a kind of idolatry. Since America is not only an abstract idea but also a real place, its worship is both immanent and transcendent, like the Holy Eucharist. The immanent body, blood, and soul of the Eucharist are a thirty-three year old Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, but these are inseparable from His higher identity as the transcendent and eternal Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. The immanent land, citizens, and government of freedom-worship are a 230-year-old regime located in North America, but these are inseparable from its higher identity as the very locus of transcendent and eternal freedom.Dr. Kozinski apparently accepts the Nationalist narrative; the First Amendment is for the protection of the states, it is not an absolute curtailment of religion's influence in the public life. It merely prohibits the Federal Government from appointing a state church that would be imposed on all of the states. It thus respects the states and their identity. Has there been a deliberate substitution of civic religion for true religion by certain politicians and ideologues? Yes, but it is questionable whether this was the intention of those who ratified the Constitution. (For now, I will not deal with the question of the attitudes of those who drafted the Constitution, like Madison and Jefferson, to official religion and religious liberty.) The dominance of liberal ideolgy may be an unintended consequence, not of the Constitution (or the federal union), which respected the rights of the states to determine the question of a state church for themselves, but of the instability of the states and the lack of true communities with stable identities. (The influx of new arrivals and immigrants, the lack of proper education, or rather, the assimilation of the Yankee mythos after the "Union" defeated the Confederacy.) This sort of ethnic pluralism allows liberalism to seem like a reasaonble way of handling differences in culture.
Granted, Anglo-American conservatism (or the Anglo-American political tradition) may be problematic with respect to some of the sources which are claimed for it. The supposed republicanism of people like Oliver Cromwell and those who opposed the Stuarts? The Glorious Revolution? The tension between republicanism and liberalism in the thought of the American founding fathers? Consequently, some are critical of the effort to recover and pass on Anglo-American republicanism; they favor looking to medieval European models for inspiration.
It may be that there is a mixture of republican and liberal elements in the thought of many of the premier American statesmen who were involved in giving form to the American states and the federal union. Might it be possible to separate a republican tradition be separated from the problematic elements, especially by returning to sources in classical antiquity and the medieval period? Can we not look to them as heroes even while admitting that they were wrong on certain points?
If the decay of the states and the loss of history and cultural memory continues, this may not really matter, but it seems impossible that we can "start from scratch," unless there is a great disaster which wipes out all bearers of tradition and artifacts of intellectual culture.
Related:
Rothbard's Rejection of the Old Order of Catholic Europe
Noam Chomsky, Destroying the Commons: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta
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