“The success of a society lies in enabling its members to imagine their own fulfillment within the context of the whole, and where this imagination fails, so does freedom. When I sense a contradiction between the law of my being and the law of my society, I feel trapped. Such a sensation is not at all uncommon in the small change of life. It may be a perennial accompaniment to other, more pleasant experiences of sociality. But when it is widespread and unrelieved, it produces acute symptoms of social collapse: conflict, suspicion, and violence.

“At the root of these is a failure in the communication of wisdom. ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend,’ the prophet was to tell his people, ‘keep looking, but do not understand.’ The prophet was enjoined to ‘make the mind of this people dull’ (Isa. 6:9, 10). The gross and uncomprehending mind, the eyes no longer capable of observation, are a feature of every profound social malfunction. Wisdom is our appropriation of the good afforded to humankind, inexhaustible, limitlessly open to participation, defining the relations of the other goods that we encounter and the communities that they sustain. Society fails in wisdom above all when it fails to comprehend its own communicated goods in relation to the supreme good — God himself, and also the Word and Wisdom of God which gives form to the universe of beings. Its structure of shared meanings becomes falsified, and it comes to be held together by a distorted idea of itself. This may take form as an overt ideology of the traditional kind, a legitimating theory based on claims for some class, race, or civilizational form. Or it may take form as the pretended refusal of an ideology — ‘pretended,’ because communities have to have some understanding of themselves: the understanding that there is no need for an understanding is the falsest of understandings, since it refuses to admit the very question that should never be refused, the question of how true it is. . . .

“A de-natured late-liberalism, shaping itself ideologically even to the point of religious persecution, indistinguishable in some ways from the Marxism it once combated, parts company with classical liberalism precisely at this point [i.e., in its failure to be open to criticism from some point outside itself]. The liberal tradition used to defer to a point of transcendence in the individual, something which social identity could not account for, something which gave the individual an independent point of view upon society. This was not a point of view ‘from nowhere’; it was a point of view from ‘the conscience.’ By instructing the individual that conscience had precedence over every social demand, the liberal tradition did not throw him back upon the chances of an untutored imagination. It presumed that conscience had a source beyond both society and individual, that it was more than an echo of social claims, more than a projection of individual dreams. It presumed this because of the monotheistic faith that lay at the heart of its logic. Until the early years of the twentieth century Augustine’s now controversial thesis, that there can be no ‘right’ in a society that does not acknowledge the right of God, appeared to be the incontrovertible bedrock of a liberal society. A polytheistic society negotiates multiple claims with no cohesion but what it can impose on them, so that, in effect, it enforces its own sovereignty. Late-liberalism, one may say, in taking up the banner of ‘pluralism,’ has made itself self conscientiously polytheistic.

“If modern (i.e., early and mid-modern) liberal societies were successful to any degree in securing their members’ cooperation and participation — and it is hard to deny them that — it was due to the moment of self-abdication instilled by their monotheistic faith. Through that religious moment they directed their members to become critical moral intelligences, and taught them to see themselves as answerable directly to God. So they envisaged themselves as open to authoritative criticism and correction, and this lay at the heart of the reconciliation they affected between individual and social identities. In the face of conflicting expectations and hopes, a liberal society could make itself answerable to pleas before the throne of God’s justice. This opened up a variety of self-understandings for the dissenter, who could assume the role of critic, prophet, even martyr — all categories that could be socially learned and socially acknowledged. Society could even move a dissenting member to sense its moral need, and so to respond to it not merely with revolt but with compassion.

“In abandoning their deference to the transcendent, late-liberal societies followed a perilous course. Losing the conciliatory strength of religious humility, they have gambled on securing majority support for a narrowly materialist and sensual sphere of public communications, inculcating by every means at their disposal the purely material expectations that would conform to them. This strategy of moral under-education presumes as impoverished a view of human nature as classic liberalism presumed an exalted one. In the long term it can only have the effect of creating alienation among the spiritually more alert, those to whom a society ought to be able to look for its renewal. And it must finally run aground on the fact that the sensual majority to which it appeals is no more than an abstraction. The discontent that any human being, gifted or ungifted, educated or uneducated, feels at being underestimated can, and surely must, erode the majority, generating high waves of inarticulate dissatisfaction. The warning is commonly enough heard that if liberalism does not look out for its own foundations, it may ‘provoke a reaction’; and such a warning is solemn enough, given what the loss of liberal traditions would mean. But the warning that needs hearing is more solemn still: by proceeding along its present lines, liberal society may deserve a reaction, because it is incapable of taking the spiritual capacities of its members seriously.

“The loss of wisdom that we have to fear, as the prophets have always said, is idolatry, the refusal to acknowledge God as the sovereign authority of any human society.”

— from Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005)

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