After Liberalism: Notes toward Reconstruction by James Kalb

Where Do We Go from Here?
Basic changes are unpredictable, and to say they will come is not to say what they will be. One possible outcome of present tendencies would be a collapse into radical particularism resulting in a Levantine-type society, one composed of inward-turning ethno-religious communities governed by weak, corrupt, and oppressive governments with no organic connection to the societies they rule. Under such circumstances, ineffective intellectual leadership and the need for an overall ordering principle would likely lead to common understandings that are crude but easily comprehensible. The obvious solution would be a simple and forceful religion, or an ideology functioning as a religion, that reflects the tendency toward strong particular loyalties and away from open-ended rational thought. The consequences of such an outcome can be seen in the Middle East.


We can do better than that. Ways of life are not predetermined by history or material conditions. Choices are possible, and the key to the revival of the social order is revival of the intellectual order by intellectuals and of ways of living by all of us.


It is hard for a political order based on abstractions such as freedom and equality to stay moderate and avoid anarchy or tyranny. To avoid both extremes, public life must be rational and open ended, but also ordered and coherent. To that end, principles that go beyond the limits of liberalism are necessary. What is needed are publicly valid explanations of man and the world—what things are, how they work, what they are for, and what is worth pursuing—that are more concrete and substantive than liberalism can offer but general enough to allow fruitful and open discussion.


The obvious and least disruptive way a better public order could emerge is for the West to revert to type. Liberalism depends on a heritage from the past to function at all—it depends on social capital it does not, itself, generate—and as mounting problems make that dependency more obvious, the advantages of the Western heritage are likely to become obvious as well. Other civilizations have followed cyclical patterns. Why shouldn’t the West do the same? At a philosophical level, the result might be a renewed acceptance among educated and responsible people of something like traditional natural law, a rational outlook that accepts essence and teleology and so enables us to discuss what things are and what they are for. Such a move would provide a substantive and historically grounded alternative to liberalism.

Wishful thinking? I don't see this happening because the problem is not intellectual but moral/spiritual, and so only "power politics" will play itself out (which does not exclude the possibility of a persecuted local Church ultimately being victorious).