The Illiberality of Liberals

Articulate a reasonable doubt in liberal company about things like: the genetic basis for homosexuality, the non-genetic basis for gender difference, the certainty and imminence of catastrophic man-made global warming, evolution as a mega-theory explanatory of all life, female rights to combat and priestly roles, or the moral urgency of gun control! The response: incredulity, indignation, righteous anger, intolerance, disgust! Why are liberals so illiberal, dogmatic, close-minded and intolerant? There are several reasons. Firstly, the human intellect craves certitude. The liberal mind, allergic to religious revelation, authority, tradition and certainty, is addicted to agnosticism, relativism, and deliberate metaphysical vagueness and indecision. Lost in such uncertainty, the human mind diverts its longing for certainty into alternate dogmatic systems, in this case a "scientism" that grants absolute certainty to theories that are, scientifically or rationally, vulnerable to doubt. Ironically, then, those who, despising dogma, pay tribute to reason and science, themselves unconsciously baptize debatable values and theories into truths that cannot be questioned or scrutinized. By contrast, those of us who unabashedly accept the certain existence of purgatory, guardian angels and devils, can entertain a more light-hearted, open-minded and skeptical attitude towards currently fashionable scientific theories. Secondly, the liberal mind, uprooted from tradition, authority and revelation, is insecure,dependent upon the limitations of subjective experience and argumentation, and therefore extremely vulnerable to doubt. Lacking the shelter and security of religious authority, it unconsciously creates its own system of repression that is all the more pernicious in that it is unrecognized. Contrast the Catholic system: we clearly, unambiguously claim divine inspiration for the papal-episcopal teaching; but the liberal imposes its authority more covertly through intolerance and moralistic indignation. Thirdly, the liberal mind tends to be agnostic about the supernatural and the afterlife, therefore life on this earth takes on an absolute urgency, unqualified by a secure Hope in the eternal and transcendent. Therefore, anxiety about things like global warming, the population explosion, or the atom bomb reaches a state of ultimacy. By contrast, believers subordinate all these concerns to the fundamental drama of sin and salvation. We lose little sleep worrying about our carbon footprint. Fourthly, liberals, of the right and the left, tend to be uprooted from concrete, local ties to family, Church, ethnic tribe, and the range of subsidiary communities and therefore pledge their allegiance to the autonomous individual in relation to the mega-state or the global-free-market. If the right professes a naive trust in the workings of the impersonal "market," the left is desperate to ward off chaos and death through the agency of an expansive, messianic, mother-State. "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem" we learned from the New Left in the 1960s. So, opposition to universal health care, gun control or mandatory provision of "reproductive services" is viewed as cooperation with evil. Fifthly, the liberal consensus is dominant, pervasive and unquestioned in academia, entertainment, the media and urban areas of both coasts. Liberals are unaccustomed to real debate and discussion on these issues. By contrast, conservatives in these environments are living in enemy territory and are used to dealing with the contrary positions. Lastly, the liberal mind is characterized by an emotionalism, a feminization (in a negative sense), a compulsion to personalize and a lack of virile objectivity, sobriety and abstraction. Theological and political issues are not argued in an objective, impersonal manner; rather, there is an immediate move to the ad hominem: concerns about the disvalues of sodomy are construed as homophobia and hatred; reservations about female priests can only spring from misogyny, ignorance, and chauvinistic arrogance; suggesting that entitlement programs will need to be cut back is seen as an intentional attack on the poor and helpless. Whether it is Chris Matthews pontificating on reporoductive rights, Senator Ted Kennedy lecturing nomine Alito on the activist role of the courts, or Father Roy Bourgeois condemning Vatican practice, we see emotionalism, refusal to acknowledge another viewpoint, and an incapacity for sober, detached analsis. Fortunate indeed, are we who have received the gift of faith, a shamelessly dogmatic faith, a gift we are especially celebrating in this Year declared by our Holy Father, in that our use of reason, science and wholesome doubt and questioning is purified and liberated from unrecognized dogmatism.