Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods
A Response to Roger Partridge
Roger Patridge is a founder and senior fellow of The New Zealand Initiative and writes on public policy, constitutional law, and liberalism. He wrote an article over at Quillette, on Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods.
Patridge notes that the post-WWII Classical Liberal framework is failing and many attribute its failure to a lack of “strong gods” who can bolster Classical Liberalism with the Judeo-Christian worldview and its ethical corollaries.
At one level, I’d aver that the critics of Classical Liberalism are right, because while Classical Liberalism fosters openness, diversity, disagreement, freedom, feeling, and tolerance, however, when it is severed from its connections to its theological and metaphysical roots, it naturally deteriorates into a moral anarchy of competiting ideologies and identities. Without the glue of - something like - God, King, and Country to bind people together, the result is fragmentation and fratricide. This is precisely what post-liberal political commentators point out. And it is why they either want a return to the civil religion and patriotism of God, King, and Country, or else why they insist on a more post-liberal democracy framework (think of Orbán’s Hungary) that promotes a certain vision of values rather than the anarchic pluralism and tolerance of almost-almost anything goes.
So Patridge asks a good question.
But must liberal societies choose between meaning imposed through authoritarian religious or nationalistic beliefs on the one hand and moral drift on the other? Or is there a way to preserve social cohesion without retreating to the premodern certainties the strong gods’ advocates demand?
For Patridge, the answer is “no” for two reasons.