The Cosmopolitan Conservative

Has American liberalism lost its capacity to govern? I’m afraid so. Liberals can still win elections and propose realistic policies. But as a culture, liberalism has become insular and narrow-minded. It lacks the capacity for the generous appreciation of other points of view needed in a pluralistic society. That capacity is more likely to be found today among conservatives, particularly religious conservatives.

The parochial tendency of liberalism was evident to me at a nearby Ivy League institution during a consultation on the common good. Participants in our small group made intelligent comments about the details of the health-care legislation and the political process as well as finer points of political philosophy. Yet, for all their evident intelligence and goodwill, the group found it very difficult to conceive of the possibility that someone might object to the recent health-care legislation and do so on the basis of a commitment to the common good. They could not get their minds around the notion that a reasonable, morally serious person could worry about an expansion of the role of government in medicine.

I pointed out that congressmen tend to use the federal purse as a bank account from which to draw rewards for their constituents and supporters. I drew attention to potential budget-busting consequences and observed that, even if experts can introduce new efficiencies (a very big “if”), most of us don’t want our health-care decisions to be made by bureaucrats. I worried about the likelihood of rationing and the danger of federal funding of abortion.

Perhaps these concerns were wrongheaded. Conservative principles and intuitions don’t guarantee good judgments about public policies. But that’s not the point. When I ventured the criticisms, the good-hearted liberals fell back on stock phrases. Resistance to the bill is based on “special interests.” Critics are motivated by an irrational “fear” and a “blind” commitment to “free-market ideology.” They are “self-interested” and do not care about those who cannot afford insurance.

We’ve all experienced the liberal default to denunciation. Reservations about radical feminism? “Patriarchal.” Criticize multicultural lunacy? “Cultural imperialist.” Question affirmative action? “Racist.” Opposed to same-sex marriage? “Homophobic” or “heterosexist.” Worried that increased taxation will stifle economic growth? “Protecting the rich” and “indifferent to the poor.” The message is that anyone who questions liberal policies is either a bigot or out for himself, and probably both.

The decline of religiosity among liberal elites in recent decades has accentuated this parochialism. During the debates leading up to the revision of the general-education requirements at Harvard, some genuinely liberal faculty members proposed a required course on reason and faith, observing that students need to understand the religious ways in which the vast majority of human beings have and still think about First Things .

But it was not to be. Secular jihadist Steven Pinker insisted that faith “has no place in anything but a religious institution.” Concern for faith and its influential role in society “is an American anachronism,” and “the rest of the West is moving beyond it.” In other words, the Smart People who run the world needn’t waste their time with the beliefs that govern the lives of most of the folks who actually live in the world.

We’re all parochial to one degree or another, but few religious conservatives match Steven Pinker. One must go into the realm of extreme fundamentalism to find someone with his dismissive smugness. Conservatives who pronounce the study of Newton and Darwin to be a waste of time wield no influence at Hillsdale or Wheaton. Thomas Aquinas College is conservative by any measure, and its Great Books program includes the serious reading of Rousseau, Marx, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche, as well as many other modern critics of traditional moral and religious beliefs.

Liberals I know dismiss my observations by pointing to Michael Savage and other conservative provocateurs. But I’m interested in comparing professors with professors, not professors with rabble-rousers, and there the difference is clear: Liberal elites tend toward parochial narrowness, while conservative elites often manifest a cosmopolitan capacity to engage and appreciate, and even to be changed by, a variety of viewpoints. They exhibit the mentality necessary for exercising civic responsibility in a pluralistic society.

At least in part, this cosmopolitanism stems from the historical experience of modernity. Religious convictions no longer seem obvious or normal and are often regarded as eccentric, irrelevant, and even dangerous. Moral standards once thought obligatory have become optional, or are denounced as puritanical, Victorian, oppressive, hetero-normative, and so forth.

Although liberals like to think that those who remain conservative have somehow evaded or insulated themselves from these challenges, the reality is that conservatives have participated in modernity just as fully. Traditional social and religious views have often (though not always) been criticized for good reasons. We don’t want our daughters’ futures to be limited in the way roles for women were at the beginning of the modern era, nor do we mourn the passing of racial segregation and the indignities of Jim Crow.

As a consequence, sophisticated social and religious conservatives today are aware of the contingent and contested nature of their convictions. I can’t take my faith for granted, which is why, however certain I may be, I also don’t presume that others share my faith. The conservative, especially the religious conservative, recognizes that well-meaning, intelligent people have different beliefs, and they have to be taken seriously.

There is an agony in this awareness of contingency and pluralism. Religious faith binds our souls with profound and particular loyalties”to Christ, to the Torah, or to a body of teaching. The same holds for moral convictions that brook no compromise. It is natural that we try to convince and convert. It is an act of love, not aggression, to bring another to see and affirm deep truths about God and human destiny. But we also seek points of agreement in order to establish a modest, ad hoc commonwealth of conviction, a practical consensus able to meet the challenges of providing a free, just, and humane public life. These experiences”both the ardent efforts to convert and the cooler strategies for cooperation”teach lessons in solidarity, for one can neither convert nor cooperate at a distance.

Ideally, the liberal seeks a cosmopolitanism of impartiality, one that calls for “public reasons” that everyone can agree on. It’s a classical ideal of cosmopolitanism based on a vision of universal reason safely above the particular religious and moral beliefs that often serve as the source of discord and division. A laudable goal, perhaps, but in point of fact this ideal tends to undermine rather than promote solidarity. Those who imagine themselves to have attained the universality of reason preside at a distance, casting themselves in the roles of referee and judge responsible for determining whose reasons are “public” or indeed “reasonable.”

Or worse, they become cultural therapists, anointed experts in the supposed pathologies of conviction and cultural conflict. The therapeutic ethos receives support in present-day liberalism from a widespread skepticism that seems the opposite of older beliefs in universal reason but turns out to lead to the same governing mentality. We can’t know moral or religious truths, we are told, and to know that we can’t know creates the paradoxical imperative to denounce moral imperatives so that we can manage our differences in an “inclusive” and “nonjudgmental” fashion.

Judge or referee, therapist or manager, the liberal governs from above. This distance”the conviction that liberalism has somehow transcended the nitty-gritty of substantive debate and attained a higher outlook”is what allows the old-fashioned rationalists like Steven Pinker to ally themselves with postmodern skeptics in the liberal establishment. The liberal maintains his distance, exempting himself (or imagining himself exempted) from the agonies of the always morally, metaphysically, and religiously fraught content of important human interactions. It’s this insulating distance, along with a therapeutic understanding of those below them, that encourages unwarranted feelings of superiority. The liberal does not see the conservative as a man or woman with ideas and convictions to be engaged but as a person with prejudices and interests to be diagnosed and treated.

My convictions won’t let me remain at a distance. I want the whole world to confess Christ as Lord. I want everyone to believe in the sanctity of life. It’s the nature of robust religious and moral convictions to motivate us to plant our flags in order to claim territory. But to plant my flag I must come ashore. I must engage my fellow human beings face-to-face, for they are also trying to plant their flags. It’s a fraught encounter, of course, and a dangerous one, as history teaches us. But it’s also one that takes others with the utmost seriousness.

By my reckoning, this humanism of encounter, this cosmopolitanism of engagement, flourishes best within many of the achievements of modern liberalism”democratic accountability, rule of law, and rigorously protected civil rights”for they keep the encounters and engagements within proper bounds. Yet, important as those past achievements may be, as a mentality and climate of opinion liberalism today suffers from a self-insulating parochialism animating a governing elite that not only refuses to engage those who disagree but also is quick to turn to denunciation and caricature in order to silence challengers.

Hardly appropriate for a democratic society. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, understand and accept the obligation to participate in the agonies of disagreement that will always divide a pluralistic society. Much more fitting as part of a governing mentality in a democratic society.