Confucianism - Freedom and democracy 2.0
Is Confucianism a religion?
I. Getting unstuck 1 - How can we talk with one another? Our small d democratic failure
It may seem ironic that humanists or the non-religious need a foundation for belief, but that is what I see as needed in America now. Liberals in any case need a way to talk with each other about morality and values. Secular liberals who are afraid of biblical references need a way to talk with some conservative Christians. This is a series of posts about giving secular liberals some Confucian ideas to use in exchanges with each other and with conservative Christians. Confucianism and early Christianity are virtue ethics. They share many beliefs about the means to good and moral behavior in the here and now. Confucianism can help liberals find meaning for themselves and help in communicating on big ideas.
The spirituality in Confucianism gives it a foundational leg up on other humanist traditions, including communitarianism, civic republicanism, humanism, and even the social gospel.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Well, ok, fine. Everybody knows the line. But that doesn’t work when the two parties - nay, the two cultures - want very different things. In American politics nowc, one side wants free education and health care for all. The other wants either to be left alone or put Jesus in the schools. Many on both sides would prefer to do something to others before having something done unto themselves.
There’s no shortage of articles warning about the decline of democracy in the US. We see it daily in loss of civility in discourse and in Congress and on the street. China scholar Lucian Pye warned us what can happen with loss of civility, civil society, and social capital. When strangers cannot cooperate, cannot communicate, then what is left in society is family and the government, with little in between. Scholars of democracy have the same warnings – Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in How Democracies Die and pundits on the left and right.
We have plenty of legacy civil society organizations now, but too many of them talk mostly among themselves. Few intermediaries cross political boundaries, leaving less room in society for alternative voices- even middle voices. Our current American polarization fits the pattern of decline – first civility goes, then civil society, then social capital, then democracy. Fundamentalists on the left and the right brook no compromise, no exchange of views. The very definition of democracy, the definition of traditional liberalism, the operating principle of traditional conservative politics, is finding a middle way to govern in pluralism. That middle ground now seems lost.
Conflicts are cast in terms of rights and morals – rights to one’s own definition of gender, morality of abortion, the morality of environmental pollution and climate change. These are tough issues, some of which need national and not local solutions. Tough issues are tough because they live at the intersection of beliefs about rights and morals, and that intersection is where our democratic arteriosclerosis lies.
Warnings on democratic failure from the right and left
In late 2016 New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told NPR's Terry Gross “We don't get religion. We don't get the role of religion in people's lives.” He went on to say – “I want to make sure that we are much more creative about beats out in the country so that we understand that anger and disconnectedness that people feel. And I think we can do much, much better.”
In this, Baquet was on the right track. In recent years, the left, particularly the woke and cancel culture of the progressive left has demonstrated how little some people really care about free speech and the marketplace of ideas for those without a politically correct label. There was a similar problem in the sixties, though not so virulent. Tribal infections don’t go away easily.
The right, particularly the religious right, has decades of problems with its own cancel culture - with science, facts, and truth-telling. We can start with the Scopes trial and the KKK, proceed to fluoridation, Reagan’s claim that trees cause pollution, young-earthers, birthers, and then Trump and the congressional GOP. Despite Trump’s lack of any moral or religious sense the tribal infection spread on the right under his tutelage.
Elements on the left and right now work pretty hard to destroy the civil society necessary to our democracy. If we are to preserve democracy, we must find ways to restore the civility and civil society that are the basis of trust. No political or religious movement can do that alone. Any hopeful future requires a joint effort. In short, liberals need conservatives to save democracy.
In The Decadent Society Ross Douthat tells us that we in the west are stuck – technologically, economically, socially, and religiously. What he means is that issues have become so complex, the interests both competing and intertwined, the polarization so hard, that the current state of civic tension could be a future normal – no “solution” to crises of abortion, poverty, jobs, homelessness, death penalty, schools and health care. Just sort of drift, with sniping and growing bad faith on all sides. That way democracy dies.
On the left and the right too much of our politics is defined by the “symbolic analysts” that Robert Reich defined, and the culture of the elites that Christopher Lasch described in his 1995 The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. This 20% or so of the culture is so divorced from the daily life of the rest that little remains in common. From a review by Scott London - In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life” …. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." Lasch charges that the fixation on opportunity and the "democratization of competence" betrays rather than exemplifies the American dream. "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue.
Michael Sandel makes a similar point. We all support a concept of merit. We want airplane pilots and surgeons to be the best they can be. Where America is failing, Sandel says, is in use of meritocracy to preserve elite position over time and generations via generous and sometimes informal rules, as with legacy admissions to universities. This is the American guanxi – who you know, or who your parents are, becomes more important that what you can do.
Democracy requires at least some civilized discussion and exchange of views, in the legislature, in the media, on the street. But hurling adolescent accusations and hateful words and hateful actions on all sides of any issue is so common that civil society and democracy are in peril. A nation this divided cannot stand, as Lincoln worried before another great crisis. We have lost perspective, honesty, respect for truth and for each other.
There is very little talk of virtue, civil society, trust, or personal obligations in major media or in politics or among the political intelligentsia. Of course there is plenty of such talk in minor venues, but we need national discussions.
This is first of a series of posts on finding a way to talk with one another. We need more virtue talk and less commercial talk and even less rights talk in our public discourse. More than people in any other country, Americans claim rights. We seldom claim responsibilities.
We say talk is cheap; but we have no other way forward. And much of the talk we are having now is proving to be very expensive in lost community. Of course, speech alone is not enough. But if we can begin again to bring language of virtue into public discussion, some of the ideas may sink into changes in behavior.
Where we are - and short definitions
We are encouraged by media and popular culture to see our domestic conflicts as those of two cultures, not unlike the two cultures described by C.P. Snow – in this case, liberals on one side, conservatives on the other, each side with its own bevy of extremists – progressives and wokeness on one side, paleoconservatives and the Christian nationalist right on the other. Perhaps this is a holdover from sixties polarization. Each culture derides the other for ignorance. Labels are always inaccurate, but I think this reasonably represents a concept of the divisions.
My fear is that Robert Kaplan was unwittingly talking about the US when he wrote Was Democracy Just a Moment? in the Atlantic in 1997. Quoting deTocqueville, Kaplan wrote that Americans, because of their (comparative) equality, exaggerate the scope of human perfectibility. Despotism is more particularly to be feared in democratic ages because it thrives on the obsession with self and one's own security which equality fosters.
In the past I used the term conservative in thinking about those on the right, particularly the GOP and its evangelical support. At this point in 2022, that is probably wrong. The GOP has become a radical libertarian party, a sovereign individual party if not an anarchist party. We no longer share a narrative of how the world works, how government works, how science or society works. There are few conservative members of GOP left – no one like a Dirksen or Rockefeller or George Romney. But for convenience I will still use conservative here to describe those generally on the right. I use the term liberal to describe a classic (American) liberal, concerned with individual freedoms and equality of opportunity. I use the term progressive to describe a wing of liberalism that has become nearly anti-liberal – focused on tribe and without the tolerance and charitableness characteristic of classically liberal thought.
Three conundrums for liberals
This work is addressed mostly to American secular liberals. If we are to find ways to communicate, to restore civil society, to preserve democracy, the work must begin with those who are most open to communicating. At least some American secular liberals fit that requirement more than any other segment of society.
These liberals must address three conundrums internal to the current liberal view of the world.
First is an excessive focus on rights and speech codes. Rights talk lacks a vision for society. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness sounds fine, but it doesn’t help us when rights conflict. We should remember that universal rights discourse is not much more than a century old, and in the US, really not much more than fifty years old, starting with civil rights. But we are now veering into notions of group rights and complications over whose rights will have priority in contested arenas and purity of speech acts. Democracy fails spectacularly when applied to societies of group rights but that is where progressives on the left are taking us. That sort of factioning is what Madison warned about.
A couple of examples –
Liberalism by definition means that government does not select a notion of the Good for all. That choice is left to the individual. But we are close to being hamstrung by conflicting rights claims that lead to excruciatingly fine parsing of language and intentions. Recently, long time New York Times science writer, Don McNeil was fired for using a forbidden word in a post about using forbidden words. You remember the firing of James Bennet, the NYT op-ed editor for deigning to post an editorial by Tom Cotton, a Trumpist in the US Senate. Opinion writer Bari Weiss was fired shortly thereafter for pointing out the hypocrisy of the free-speech loving NYT staff bullying their own colleagues over lack of sufficiently progressive opinions. This is not liberal. It is reactionary and illiberal.
I think political philosopher Michael Sandel provides an important insight into our current cultural dilemma. He suggests we seem unable to agree even on facts about the world. Lying and “fake news” notwithstanding, Sandel says we disagree about the facts because we disagree about the moral questions in politics, rather than the other way around. There is some truth in truth being in the eye of the beholder. Most of us don’t disagree about the need to control national borders. We disagree about the moral means to do so. Sandel’s view echoes Alasdair MacIntyre in his transformative book After Virtue. MacIntyre sees our political and even moral disagreements as simply a form of civil war, without any teleology against which to measure policy success. From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy -
MacIntyre claims that protest and indignation are hallmarks of public “debate” in the modern world. Since no one can ever win an argument – because there’s no agreement about how someone could “win” – anyone can resort to protesting; since no one can ever lose an argument – how can they, if no one can win? – anyone can become indignant if they don’t get their way. If no one can persuade anyone else to do what they want, then only coercion, whether open or hidden (for example, in the form of deception) remains. This is why, MacIntyre says, political arguments are not just interminable but extremely loud and angry, and why modern politics is simply a form of civil war.
Our secular age faces a dilemma. Many of us find it reasonable, if not necessary, to reject belief in God or at least belief in organized religion in favor of reason, science, and the ability of materialism to provide a better life. At the same time, many of us find secular modernity a step too far from beliefs in some fundamental truths. This is not simply the Can We Be Good Without God? argument and more than simply liberal v conservative, or even progressive v Christian nationalist. It is as Huang Yong argues in his review of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, an existential discussion about liberal and communitarian views of the world – are we sovereign individuals, owing nothing to anyone except those with whom we freely contract, or are we social beings to the core, and our humanity only develops in community with others?
Huang Yong. Charles Taylor’s Transcendental Arguments for Liberal Communitarianism. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 24:4, 1998. Available at https://www.academia.edu/10502597/_1998_Charles_Taylors_Transcendental_Arguments_for_Liberal_Communitarianism?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper
On the left, our fear to speak the truth plainly reminds me of speech controls in China. I faced a similar politically correct language conundrum teaching business school undergraduates in China in 2013. Coming out of the notorious CCP Document No. 9, faculty were warned against using any language, making any statements with which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might disagree. That would certainly include any discussion of the Great Famine or Tian’anmen or Taiwan. I had Chinese students and German students in the classes. The students from Germany supposedly came for an education, but in my Chinese economic history course I was not supposed to tell the Chinese students certain things. Remembering an old Marx Brothers routine (no, the other Marx), how would the Chinese students know what not to listen to in class unless I told them what not to listen to?
It’s a silly story about teaching in China in 2013. But it is real now in the US. Welcome to reactionary progressive language. Not so different from CCP approved language. Violators of speech codes are subject to removal, firing, demotion. Just as with CCP.
A second conundrum for liberals is that many agnostics and those who are simply non-religious don’t really have a way to structure existential meaning for themselves. Organizations like the American Humanist Association (AHA) and the Brights movement try to fill a gap. What they don’t provide is a perspective on why they propose policies and actions that they do support, beyond some focus on current sense of “rights.” There is no fundamental belief system or telos or goal. If rights only accrue to individuals, then how do we balance conflicting rights between two people? If rights are collective, we have the same conundrum. Who or what will be the arbiter of rights? Something larger than oneself, larger than a personal claim to wokeness, is needed.
There are humanist chaplains and services that try to bring a spiritual dimension to secularism but that personal path is not strong enough to sustain many of us through difficult times.
From the AHA website –
The AHA strives to bring about a progressive society where being “good without a god” is an accepted way to live life. We accomplish this through our defense of civil liberties and secular governance, by our outreach to the growing number of people without religious belief or preference, and through a continued refinement and advancement of the humanist worldview.
There is “what” but no “why” – why be good? Why be moral? Why these rights and not others?
Secularism can be spiritual, but it can also shut out new forms of experience. Charles Taylor pointed this out in A Secular Age. At some point, he suggested, secular people will again seek fundamental meaning beyond what can be provided through “defense of civil liberties and secular governance.” They will seek some acquaintance with the ultimate, some sense of the transcendent rather than only the immanent.
A third conundrum concerns intolerance for alternate views of morality. There is an assumption that the arc of history bends in the direction of American 21st century progressive liberalism, but that is an arrogance beyond the tolerance and respect that informed classic liberalism. Like it or not, there are plenty of Americans who don’t see that arc of history or are too worried about putting food on the table to care right now. What should liberals say to them?
So now what?
It may seem ironic that humanists or the non-religious need a foundation for belief, but that is what I see as needed. Are we going to go on parsing rights finer and finer until no one can speak for fear of alienating someone? Does progressive morality represent anything universal?
Liberals in any case need a way to talk with each other about morality and values and a way for secular liberals who are afraid of biblical references to talk with some conservative Christians. Confucianism and early Christianity are virtue ethics. They share many beliefs about good and moral behavior in the here and now. This is a series of posts about giving secular liberals some Confucian ideas to use in exchanges with conservative Christians.
Plenty of progressives and conservatives will not be reached with rational argument or communication skills, but communication must start somewhere. If 10% of progressives and conservatives can listen to what the other side is saying without putting up defensive walls, if 10% of liberals can get past stereotypes of the Other, we will have achieved something.
German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw what Christianity had come to from his concentration camp in Germany. He saw a Christianity that failed at its fundamental precepts of care and loving others. In a letter from jail, he wrote what seems even more appropriate to our time now than it was in 1943 -
We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious’…
And if therefore man becomes radically religionless—and I think that is already more or less the case (else, how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any ‘religious’ reaction?)—what does that mean for ‘Christianity’?
Religious institutions had transformed into instruments of the state or political party. The only way forward, Bonhoeffer thought, was through prayer and works. It is not enough to pray for change, as if asking God to do what He is supposed to do. Action in the world, to stand up for what is right, is necessary.
Historian and prolific author on religion Garry Wills makes the same argument – that a stale, sanctimonious and arrogant church is no place for the radical message of Jesus in the Bible. Wills reminds us that the model for a religionless Christianity is Jesus himself. Jesus did not intend to found a new religion. Christianity as we know it was not his objective. His life, teachings and actions were focused on creating a new kind of personal and community life in the midst of the old. He set out to transform human life in the midst of a great empire and to challenge those forces that oppress and divide people in every society. Writer Kurt Struckmeyer makes the same points at his Following Jesus website.
Some views on where we need to go – Harvey Cox, Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, Robert Bellah, Ross Douthat, Tu Weiming, Jonathan Haidt
Way back in 1965, Harvey Cox told us in The Secular City we needed a nonreligious interpretation of the Gospel to speak in a secular fashion about God. We meet God, he said, not just in religion or in church history, but in all of life, including its political and cultural aspects.
More recently, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, both religious conservatives and public figures, told us that evangelicals have overstepped reasonable bounds in their attacks on individuals and support for immorality. In City of Man - Religion and Politics in a New Era, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner describe the religious right as out of balance in the same way that secularism came to be out of balance in Mencken and Darrow’s day (though secularists do not seem to notice the parallel). They write that “in combination, various failings of the religious right – of tone, strategy, theology, and simple human sympathy – [have] abetted a social backlash that goes beyond politics.” For failings in tone, the authors point to Jerry Falwell, who notoriously compared liberal policies toward Evangelicals to those of Nazis toward Jews.
Wehner recounts a discussion with an evangelical pastor about the unholy alliance between evangelicals and Trump -
There are many reasons why young people are turning away from the Church, but my observation is, Trump has vastly accelerated that trend. He’s put it into hyperdrive…. for decades Hollywood has portrayed conservative Christians as cruel, ignorant, greedy, and hypocritical. For 20 years I have worked, led, and sacrificed to put the lie to that stereotype, and have done so successfully here … Because of how we have served the least of the least, city officials, school officials, and many atheists have formed a respect for Jesus and his church. And I’m watching all that get washed away.
Peter Wehner. The Cost of the Evangelical Betrayal. Atlantic Magazine online, July 10, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/white-evangelicals-gambled-and-lost/613999/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200710&silverid-ref=NjYzMDQzMDE1MDA5S0
In another article, Wehner quotes Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a large evangelical college in California - “The Church is in one of its deepest moments of crisis —not because of some election result or not, but because of what has been exposed to be the poverty of the American Church in its capacity to be able to see and love and serve and engage in ways in which we simply fail to do. And that vocation is the vocation that must be recovered and must be made real in tangible action.”
Religion relates us not only to God, but to each other. It is a binding force that need not require a transcendent Absolute. The binding is important, particularly so in a highly pluralist society.
The binding can come from religion, but it need not. What else do we share as a society, as a nation? Robert Bellah used the term civil religion in his seminal 1967 article. This religion, he said, was not an institutional body focused on worship of God, but a cultural agreement on what we honor – flag, national anthem, holidays, even a nation under God – and what we share as common beliefs – some elements of tolerance and community and ethics and even responsibilities. Even this seems to be eroding.
Robert N. Bellah. Civil Religion in America. Dædalus, Winter 1967 (96,1) Available at http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm
One can say civil religion is my primary concern in these posts – what can we share, how can we remember that what we share is worth preserving, and how to do that preserving.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat also told us in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics that America has become less Christian without becoming less religious. On this, he is spot on. Our organized religion and organized civility are both in decline, replaced by millions of individualistic choices on what to believe and how to act.
The world now is both modern and traditional, secular and religious, and liberals and conservative Christians in the US both need to understand that and find a way to connect with it. To retreat into secularism is no more of a solution than retreating into Benedict Option enclaves. Like it or not, everyone lives in a US that is pluralist – lots of competing ideas about what is right, and only democratic means of coordination. Focus on the Bible is an affront to much of the population and Jesus’ message of love contained neither a political program nor any mention of human rights.
Douthat opines that faith in the US is no less prevalent, but it has been channeled into three broad faiths that he terms secular, spiritual, and biblical. Public policy is broadly determined by the manner in which spiritual faith allies with either of the other two. In the long term, Douthat sees these three faiths either blending or congealing, with hope or hopelessness as a result. He also finds another possibility, a transform of big parts of all three faiths to something a bit less materialistic than most mainline religions today, less mysterious and anti-science than biblical faith, and at the same time a bit more grounded in in metaphysics than godless secularism. Douthat termed it Buddhist.
Confucian scholar Tu Weiming sees a vital role for Confucian ideas and values in this American crisis of faith. It seems odd that some ancient Chinese philosophy could be of use in this modern crisis. But the Confucian trinity of heaven, earth, and man is a way to bond some secular and religious Americans. Tu’s argument is that our western modernity - extreme individualism, hard privatization and capitalism, ignorance of transcendental values and meaning - needs a refresher (if not a cleansing).
Our national and international problems are no longer solvable by individual effort, and if solvable by prayer, well, prayer seems a bit too slow. We need more and better community and those perforce take us one human and humane step closer to the wider and more eternal concerns of Augustine’s City of God. As Tu says, the “separation between the defiled earth and sublime Heaven is rejected.”
Tu, Weiming, 2012. Confucian Spirituality in Contemporary China. In Fenggang Yang and Joseph Tamney, eds., Confucianism and Spiritual Traditions in Modern China and Beyond. Available at https://brill.com/view/title/18129?language=en
Confucian scholar Jana Rosker in Modern Confucianism and Chinese Theories of Modernization -
… for most modern Confucians, the solution to the present global crisis is to be found In placing morality at the center of human concerns. The main problems of human existence cannot be resolved by exclusively ethical, organizational, or contractual methods and approaches; instead, humanity must also find solutions that are rooted in a deep individual awareness of the importance of the ethical conditionality of human life. (Philosophy Compass, 2015)
She seeks a non-individualistic version of modernity, which could be a wish for all of us.
Modern Confucianism can be a resource for the non-religious and religious alike. This is a reaffirmation of the role of faith and at the same time a realization that our first commitment to each other must be to address our worldly problems here and now. Tu’s term for this Confucianism is spiritual humanism.
This is similar to the prescription coming from political philosopher Michael Sandel, instructor in the famous Justice course at Harvard. Sandel reminds us of the truth coming from Aristotle – that we are first and foremost members of communities. He sees the need to reintroduce virtue to our public discourse and emphasizes good faith efforts at communication to address our moral and political differences.
Communication is tough, but some social psychology may be able to move us a bit closer.
Research by Jonathan Haidt into moral modules lends a scientific voice to this discussion of political philosophy. Haidt defines six “moral modules” that shape our individual notions of morality and our notions of correct politics. He calls them fairness, avoidance of harm, loyalty, sanctity, respect for tradition and freedom from oppression. He sees liberals focusing on the first two of these in their definition of moral behavior; conservatives use those, but also emphasize the latter four as well, making discussion of morality across political divides fundamentally flawed in definitions. That is what Sandel says also. Haidt’s work, and that of Joshua Greene on moral tribes, provides a psychological basis for at least some of our ideas about morality. Our beliefs are deeper than simply what we like at the moment or what we were taught.
All Americans benefit from tenets of classical liberalism. We vote for leaders and want freedoms of speech, press, religion, and association and equality before the law. But liberalism has its fundamentalist detractors. One of the more scathing critiques of liberalism is from Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen in “Why Liberalism Failed.” Liberalism, he says, was supposed to “foster greater equality, defend a pluralistic tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty.” Instead, he says, it has generated titanic inequality, enforced uniformity and homogeneity, fostered material and spiritual degradation, and undermined freedom. Dineen becomes too strident, but his analysis of the lost promise of liberalism holds some truth.
Classical liberalism, with its notions of human political and moral equality and rule of law, has provided many benefits, but the current political version is currently not serving us well. Liberty once meant self-regulation in accord with reason. Dineen argues that liberty now has become identified with freedom from external constraints on human will, action, and the satiation of every kind of desire. The constraints on liberty as license through tradition, rites, and loyalties have weakened. Individual sovereignty means that civil society has suffered, with the consequence that there are fewer mediating institutions between the individual and the state.
I think Deneen overstates the case in Why Liberalism Failed. The ills he sees belong more to the progressive wing of liberalism than to the mainstream.
There is a hint of truth in what he says, though.
Civil society is fundamental to a pluralist American democracy. Without it, there is little to stand between the individual and the state. This is reminiscent of China now, which brooks no voices alternative to state power. Essentially, modern American liberalism has become a class war of the educated, secular, and wealthy against all others. The fear among conservatives is that “liberalism by fiat” will become the norm, government run by an elite that has no real need for democracy.
Dineen seeks a better world of politics and society – a humane alternative to “liberalocratic depostism” or a cruel authoritarianism. He says the outlines of such a theory are already discernable, reinforced by experience and practices essential for a humane life. For negative effect, Dineen quotes a G.K. Chesterton story about what could be the sovereign American of the far left or the far right, living as if alone on an island - “He had ample walking space, ample air, ample and even filling food. The only objection was that he had nothing to walk toward, nothing to feast about, and no reason whatever for drawing the breath of life.” One is reminded of Richard Cory.
In short, insufficient meaning to life. Meaning for most of us is found in relation with, in service to, others. This is Jewish, it is Christian, it is Muslim, and it is Confucian. For the non-religious, we must find a way to incorporate community in our liberalism. Dineen writes in terms that Harvey Cox, Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, Robert Bellah, Ross Douthat, Tu Weiming, Jonathan Haidt might support – that American democracy requires civil society, civil society requires virtuous behavior, and “the cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty.”
Unrestricted liberalism is not freedom, it is libertine. How to adjust our politics and our thinking is the goal.
Next: What is Confucianism?
