Walking Out on the Liberal Bargain

In light of the recent debate over at Front Porch Republic and First Things over localism and traditionalism, I feel it would do me well to formulate a logical argument against the "liberal bargain" of Mr. Damon Linker and its implications (I find that my knee-jerk revulsion at many species of modern politics is usually quelled once I've formulated my disgust into an argument against the politics). As Mr. Linker writes,

Like every other citizen, you must be willing to accept what I call "the liberal bargain." In my book, I describe this bargain as the act of believers giving up their "ambition to political rule in the name of their faith" in exchange for the freedom to worship God however they wish, without state interference. What does this mean, in practical terms? It means that your belief in what the Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches is irrelevant, politically speaking. It simply shouldn't matter whether or not you think that justice has a divine underpinning, anymore than it should matter whether you prefer Jane Austen to Dostoevsky. In a word, liberal politics presumes that it's possible and desirable for political life to be decoupled from theological questions and disputes.

Let us first begin with the end of that statement. Liberal politics does indeed presume that it is "possible" and desirable for political life to be decoupled from Theology -but before discussing desirability (which is more subjective) let us discuss possibility. First, Mr. Linker's use of "Theology" is to a degree disingenuous. Catholics do not demand that the Assumption of Mary be a creed of faith for every political official -and if by theology, we mean the nuances of internal theology, it should be pointed out that these questions almost never come out. The questions that -do- come out are horses of a different stripe -they are foundational, philosophical questions. Does God exist? Is the government obliged to follow natural law? Divine law? What is life? And so on. It would be more clear if we called these "metaphysical" questions.

By seeking to decouple Theology from political life, Mr. Linker is not proposing that we avoid the metaphysical questions or take a neutral stance on them. There is no avoiding metaphysics. He is merely disqualifying religious metaphysics in favor of a proposed secular metaphysical order -one that is neither patently true, nor widely accepted; one, furthermore, that does not allow for political arguments grounded in a religious metaphysics. The problem with such an order is best formulated by Dostoyevsky; it has no bottom. Fundamentally, the order relies not on its logical consistency (for the logical end of such an order is, as Ivan Karamazov said, that without God, everything is permissible), but rather on the "illative" sense of most people -that sort of natural, "common sense," teaching embedded in all of us that is not merely rational or merely moral but makes all believe that murder is wrong. The problem, however, is that while the order relies on the illative sense, it neither recognizes nor accepts that it does so and thus has no logical authority.

So the problem is that while Mr. Linker would wish to decouple Politics from Theology, his politics presupposes a nihilistic "theology" and ends up relying on a set of prejudices and emotions that imply a "theology" which it itself rejects. The problem with the liberal bargain, therefore, is that its metaphysics are mush. Mr. Linker writes that it shouldn't matter whether justice has a divine underpinning -but surely it matters because, if justice has no divine underpinning, then it seems to have no underpinning at all. Are we all supposed to go on pretending that the Emperor has clothes, all supposed to go on accepting the -effects- of justice while ignoring and reviling the causes that produce those effects?

The separation of human life into discrete categories is an acute problem of modern thinkers, it strikes me. They would have it that our life is a department store, with "Religion" in one aisle, "Politics" in the other, "Sex" in the other, "Family" in one, "Work" in the other, and so on, and that not mixing politics and religion, for example, is so easy a matter as making sure none of Religion's products stray over to the Political aisle. But life is not a department store -it is a journey and, therefore, a drama. It is a story. And in the story of our lives, as in any story, everything is connected, nothing happens alone, in the abstract, and everything has a purpose; what you think on Religion will affect all other sections of your life and, if it does not, then you have merely not thought.

The liberal bargain is not some compromise struck in an Istanbul spice market, as Mr. Linker would make it sound; rather it clothes within itself first a radical compartmentalization of our life, one that is grounded neither in reality nor good sense, and second, a radical secularization, one that grants the religious believer the ability to believe, but not the ability to take his belief seriously.

There is nothing to do on such a bargain than to walk out.

Yours, &c,