The Religion of Liberalism, Or Why Freedom and Equality Aren't Ultimate Goals

The Religion of Liberalism, Or Why Freedom and Equality Aren't Ultimate Goals | An Interview with James Kalb, author of The Tyranny of Liberalism | Ignatius Insight | November 12, 2009

James Kalb, who holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Yale University, is a lawyer and independent scholar who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His book, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command, was published by ISI Books last year. He spoke recently with Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about conversion, liberalism, conservatism, and Catholicism.

Ignatius Insight: I've seen it noted that you are a convert to Catholicism, but I've not seen any details about your conversion. Can you talk a bit about your background and your journey into the Catholic Church?

James Kalb: My upbringing was mostly secular and suburban. We sometimes attended one mainline Protestant church or another. It was pretty sporadic and indefinite.

For a long time religion stayed that way for me. It seemed obvious that the concrete things around me weren't the whole story, that they had some larger setting that made them what they were. It was hard to say what that setting was though. You can't step back from life and see it as a whole.

I've always been skeptical and maybe a little inert by nature. I'm inclined to leave things undecided. So my conversion to Catholicism was a gradual thing. It was like the development of a tradition as I describe that in my book, with things slowly coming into focus through various insights and experiences.
 
There were also personal factors. Life has its bumps, and they shake us out of the belief that we can understand and control it on our own. Also, how do we understand our connections to others? What tells us what they are and what we should do about them? Questions like that can't be avoided, and you can't answer them without something outside immediate experience.

Eventually I found I wasn't able to make sense of the world apart from Catholicism. It seemed more awkward and artificial to stay outside the Church than to accept it. So for me conversion was a movement from confusion to clarity and reality, a matter of growing up and facing facts.

Read the entire interview...

Comments

[Brian]

I really wish that Kalb addressed the extreme traditionalist ideologies of, say, the Taliban and the Ku Klux Klan.

Does the book address those ideologies?

I want to understand.

[John Herreid]

What an odd question, Brian. A book on the dangers of one ideology doesn't have to be an encyclopedia on every single dangerous ideology in the world in order to be fair.

[Robert Miller]

Kalb's perspective is most welcome.

One of the things he points to, but doesn't quite say, is that what we call "conservatism" is, propositionally, nothing more than a form of Liberalism.

Now, I don't deny that many conservatives are motivated by pre- or anti-Liberal presuppositions. But I would argue that most conservative movements and parties today compromise with some form of Liberalism -- most often with its nationalist and/or economic branches -- either out of conviction, or out of a desire to find allies against Liberal internationalism and welfarism (behavioralism).

Today -- in the wake of the implosion of conservative parties during the last decade, most particularly the US Republican party -- people who are activated by Catholic principles of solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good, find few plausible allies among the Liberals who call themselves "liberals" (or the "Left") or the Liberals who call themselves "conservatives" (or the "Right").

Both varieties accept the legitimacy of the modern democratic secular state and the purpose of politics as a business of haggling over "rights". In contrast to this Liberal consensus, Pope B16 proposes in Caritas in Veritate the need for a global "regime" (not a state, but a kind of imperium) that can inspire, co-ordinate and if necessary arbitrate the actions of polities and economies in the direction of the goods of human flourishing, the common good.

I think B16 realizes he is taking a huge risk here. But he must state the clear truth -- the world today needs an imperium with the potential of becoming a sacrum imperium, just as it did at Christ's First Coming. Yet, we believe, that need also will be felt, in a perverse way, just before Christ's Second Coming. For B16, I believe, we can't ignore the signs of the times just because a reading of them must be, in light of what we see around us, profoundly ambivalent.