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notebook on liberalism and obsolesence

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Greg Gauthier 2022-08-28 22:49:16 +01:00
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content/post/the-one,-the-many,-and-the-liberal.md
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@ -143,7 +143,7 @@ But as I said before, Gods are very jealous things. They do not tolerate plurali
Maritain was fretting over the fact that Liberalism appeared to him to be a reaction against something he could not quite define, and feared the collapse of Liberalism in the face of the absence of that threat. He naturally sensed the diminishing presence of The One, and intuitively understood that without the natural tension between The One and The Many, The Many would consume itself in an orgy of purposelessness. Maritain was fretting over the fact that Liberalism appeared to him to be a reaction against something he could not quite define, and feared the collapse of Liberalism in the face of the absence of that threat. He naturally sensed the diminishing presence of The One, and intuitively understood that without the natural tension between The One and The Many, The Many would consume itself in an orgy of purposelessness.
To be sure, Maritain was a triumphal Liberal. His book is basically posing the question: "We're winning, but then what?" If what I have been saying so far is correct, then what you've won is either the anarchy of Hobbes, in which a war of every self-styled God against every other ends in complete catastrophe; or you've won the forced collectivization of mankind into a materialist eschatology, the likes of which Marx and others have tried to construct in place of religion. Charles Frankel puts the case in hopeful terms in 1955 for you: To be sure, Maritain was a triumphal Liberal. His book is basically posing the question: "We're winning, but then what?" If what I have been saying so far is correct, then what you've won is either the anarchy of Hobbes, in which a war of every self-styled God against every other ends in complete catastrophe; or you've won the forced collectivization of mankind into a materialist eschatology, the likes of which Marx and others have tried to construct in place of religion. Charles Frankel puts the case in more hopeful terms in 1955 for you:
> "The great problem... is to reconstruct the liberal tradition to make it applicable to an age of technical specialization, bureaucratized power, and mass movements.. .. The revival of liberal hopes depends upon their being attached to specific programs and definite objectives... For the revolution of modernity... has been a moral revolution of extraordinary scope, a radical alteration in what the human imagination is prepared to envisage and demand. ... it has set loose the restless vision of a world in which men might be liberated from age-old burdens, and come to set their own standards and govern their own lives" - Charles Frankel, The Case For Modern Man, 1955 > "The great problem... is to reconstruct the liberal tradition to make it applicable to an age of technical specialization, bureaucratized power, and mass movements.. .. The revival of liberal hopes depends upon their being attached to specific programs and definite objectives... For the revolution of modernity... has been a moral revolution of extraordinary scope, a radical alteration in what the human imagination is prepared to envisage and demand. ... it has set loose the restless vision of a world in which men might be liberated from age-old burdens, and come to set their own standards and govern their own lives" - Charles Frankel, The Case For Modern Man, 1955