On the face of it, Enlightenment individualism is far less repulsive than other modern ideologies — it is much more truthful and principled than racism, and makes more modest claims than utopian collectivism. Its “body count” of innocents seems much lower than its competitors’. Much of what is healthy in American culture and politics can be traced to a rugged individualism based on people fiercely defending their rights. Individualism is a medicine that Europe desperately needed to burn out the tangled mass of privileges, unjust social hierarchies, and economic absurdities that it had inherited from feudalism.
Let us not underplay the evils of feudalism, as illiberal Catholic thinkers are prone to do — especially those who damn Enlightenment liberalism, and many of those who fancy themselves distributists. Alexis de Tocqueville, no fan of social revolution, painted this picture of feudalism during the presidency of George Washington:
Imagine being born into such conditions, with no way out. Imagine that your entire family had lived this way for centuries, looking with longing at the freedom enjoyed by your countrymen who happened to be born in the upper classes, or born in a city where serfdom was banned. Now you understand the appeal of classical liberalism.
By the 18th century, serfdom had been rolled back from large parts of Europe, but the subjugation to arbitrary and paternalistic authority described above depicts the lives of millions of people in Europe, from the fall of Rome until the Enlightenment. For hundreds of years between the first barbarian invasions and the widespread establishment of order, such a social system was no doubt the best men could do, but it had far outworn its necessity by the end of the Middle Ages; the survival of feudal privilege after that can be traced to inertia and upper-class self-interest. The rise of early capitalism beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries began to undermine the hereditary order of society and free up the productive energies of the West — in part by dismantling the suffocating monopolies enjoyed by members of guilds, who had the legal power to fix prices and quash competition.
Although clergymen often defended feudal arrangements — indeed, many themselves were feudal lords and benefited from them — they are clearly incompatible with the Christian idea of the person. Insofar as the Enlightenment and its individualism were committed to clearing away such residual evils from Europe’s oligarchical past, they were indeed putting Christian ethics at long last into action.
But man cannot live on medicine. And if feudal survivals can be seen as a kind of cancer, the individualism that cured it contained its own toxins, whose dangers only really began to manifest themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries. Individualism freed the serfs and helped free the slaves; in its contemporary, radicalized form, it also provided the logic for legal abortion. Add up all the unborn victims of abortion in the West since the 1960s and radical individualism begins to rack up its own body count. Drive the devil out the door and he will creep back in through the window.
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The ideology of individualism finds its roots in Thomas Hobbes, who saw man as fundamentally and irremediably selfish. For Hobbes, we are not by nature social animals. Instead, each one of us is a little would-be god, whose craving for absolute power is only tempered by crashing up against the claims of other aspiring deities — such that human life, without some external control, will end being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape this hellish “state of nature,” we contract with the state to suit our own self-interested purposes. These passions are morally neutral, and cannot be judged by any external standard — although they can bounce up against the wishes of someone else. Individual human beings ought to be seen on the model of atoms careening against each other in the void. Hence the law is a system of forces that helps to arrange the particles that make up a society into patterns, patterns that more effectively permit these atoms to remain in existence and exert their native force. In other words, individuals are free to maximize their pursuit of what they want, disregarding any moral law, subject only to the overweening power of the State.
John Locke took this radical premise and infused it with some of the moral content we recognize from the humanist view of man. As Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker document in Politicizing the Bible, Locke was a philosophical radical who schooled himself to caution. In private correspondence, he hinted that he rejected the claims of Christianity, but in his political writing he sought only to moderate them, to make a place for the churches as moral advisors in a society oriented toward maximizing wealth and technical progress. Christianity could be tolerated, so long as it was tolerant. (This left out Roman Catholics, whose political theory did not embrace religious liberty until the 1960s.)
Likewise, in discussing basic, secular ethics, Locke poured a new, thinner wine into bottles with medieval labels. Unlike the willfully provocative Thomas Hobbes — who earned himself public infamy alongside Machiavelli — Locke spoke the older language of the humanist tradition. He used the jargon of natural law. But he meant different things by the words.
The concept of natural law (or the “law of nature”) was an ancient one, derived from Aristotle and the Stoics, and Christianized by St. Thomas Aquinas. It traditionally meant the entire body of what can be known by reason alone, including what can be known about morality, without divine revelation. By reason, thinkers did not mean merely “experimental science” or mathematical deduction, but also included the results of philosophical argument. In this pre-Darwinian world, the notion that objects and processes in nature could be said to have a purpose (a “telos”) was taken for granted. Hence, reason tells us that the sex organs are clearly “intended” first for reproduction, and that marriage is a contract designed to regulate the bearing and raising of children. In what is now called “classical natural law,” thinkers argued that we could know by reason that God exists and that the soul is immortal, plus a great deal more. Aquinas even asserted that the Ten Commandments largely restated and gave revealed authority to moral truths that reason could turn up unaided. That robust tradition of natural law, though already under attack by Descartes, had been passed along in England by thinkers such as the Thomistic Anglican Thomas Hooker.
When Locke wrote his First Treatise of Government and Second Treatise of Government, he consciously used the older terms, like “law of nature,” when arguing for a distinctly new view of politics. Locke trimmed back the whole of what man can know about morality by reason to a truncated form of the Golden Rule: we cannot harm other individuals in their “life, health, liberty, or possessions.” This phrase sounds familiar, of course; the Declaration of Independence defines as “inalienable rights” the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a thoroughly Lockean list. Natural law — which for Aristotle, Aquinas, and most of the thinkers in the English legal tradition, had described a long list of virtues required for man to flourish — had been reduced to a safeguard for individual rights, and nothing more.
These rights make an excellent starting point, a non-negotiable bottom line of what the state exists to protect. A philosopher would call them “necessary but not sufficient” because they state essential elements of the common good, but do not go far enough. The fact is that few of the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence thought that defending Lockean rights was the only legitimate goal for government. Most of the signers were not Enlightenment deists, who rejected both biblical revelation and traditional notions of natural law, but rock-solid Protestants who were deeply convinced of original sin and considered religious faith indispensible for a free society to survive. As Samuel Gregg writes:
“Likewise Jefferson insisted without equivocation in his Notes on the State of Virginia that virtue “is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor.” Inspired in many cases by reflection on the writings of Romans such as Cicero and eighteenth-century philosophers such as Montesquieu, they spoke of virtues such as honesty, trust, and industriousness, but also of marriage and religion.
"Regarding the latter, they had few doubts about its centrality to free societies that took virtue seriously. In the year the American colonies declared independence, John Adams stressed in his correspondence that “Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.” Washington was thus hardly alone among the Founders when he proclaimed in his 1796 Farewell Address that public happiness could not be attained without religion or private morality.”
Most Americans, including those who founded the nation, expected the government to be guided by principles that exceeded Locke’s narrow account of the natural law, and to inform its understanding of natural rights with the wider and deeper wisdom gained from tradition, philosophy, and even religion. This explains why there was never any prospect in 1800, for instance, of extending marriage rights to same-sex couples — a proposal nowadays popular because it is seen as a logical extension of Locke’s single-minded preoccupation with defending the autonomy of the individual. Obscenity laws were widespread and strictly enforced — although no Lockean case could be made for them. Polygamy was and still is (as of this writing) banned in every state, even though it restricted the “liberty” of individuals to make their free sexual choices. The same logic applies to restrictions on prostitution, the sale of human organs, and suicide.
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From the founding well into the 1950s, marriage law reflected the interest of society in the protection of the family as a unit and the welfare of children, which stood in clear tension with the liberty of individual citizens to act however they wished. Then “no-fault” divorce laws applied the Lockean logic more consistently to the institution of marriage. The devastating impact of the collapse of stable marriage on the well-being of children throughout the West has been documented exhaustively by social scientists in subsequent decades. The children of divorce are much more likely to get pregnant out of wedlock, commit crimes, go to prison, earn lower incomes, suffer depression, be afraid to commit to relationships, and use illegal drugs. Locke’s ideas did for the Western family what Stalin’s did for Soviet agriculture. That alone should be enough to prove that Locke is not enough — and that in chemically pure form he can be poisonous.
A rigorously libertarian society that allowed abortion and deregulated marriage should also, logically, remove the state from every economic transaction among adults. No minimum wage or workplace safety laws could morally be imposed to block the pure autonomy of workers and employers; racial discrimination and every other form of bias would have to be protected as part of the absolute freedom of contract. People would be free to enter into slave contracts and gladiatorial games. No unemployment insurance, welfare, or other paternalistic programs would be funded by the taxpayer, who would pay a flat rate for basic services such as police protection — that is, if the anarcho-capitalists now dominant in libertarian circles had not convinced the citizens to disband the state itself, in favor of competing private enforcement agencies. Surely, the absolute liberty to redefine existence also implies the right to reject the state structure that currently exists and start up an independent alternative mode of protecting one’s rights. Why should the state we have inherited from our parents enjoy an arbitrary monopoly of deadly force?
Here is where irony grabs the steering wheel. No society has ever even tried to apply Lockean liberty consistently throughout every realm of life. Indeed, even as the West has become more morally atomistic, the role of the state in directing economic and social life has vastly increased, in part because the pathologies that arise from the breakdown of the family and other natural units of social order cause so much harm that worried citizens invoke the state to repair the damage. The troubled children of broken homes are placed in state-sponsored after-school programs and kindergartens in an effort to make them more productive citizens. The unemployable teens who drop out of school find themselves on the public dole, or else end up as part of America’s ever-burgeoning prison population. Single mothers whose “baby daddies” have abandoned them find in the government a generous absentee father. Even as the rhetoric of freedom (wrongly defined) is used to break down nongovernmental sources of authority — such as churches or families — the power and price of coercive authority grows. Modern Westerners have seen the grave deficiencies of radical liberalism, and instead of rectifying them by reasserting what natural law actually means, they have chosen to fill in the void by asserting an equally radical notion of equality. Citizens, then, must be free to live as solipsistic and self-destructive hedonists; but not all of them have the talent, wealth, or wit to pursue such a life. Some of them will flounder and fail. So it is our job as taxpayers to underwrite their lifestyles, to fund their lives and pursuit of happiness by surrendering some of our liberty — but only in economic matters. We are still free in the bedroom, which is where the “intimate and personal choices” all take place (according to the U.S. Supreme Court, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey), and that is what really matters.
Radical libertarianism would do less damage, of course, if the welfare state were abolished, and people were forced to sink or swim based on the outcomes of their own decisions. In such a starkly Darwinian order, people who used drugs, got pregnant out of wedlock, or otherwise failed to develop the basic bourgeois virtues, would quickly starve to death, or die from the lack of medical care they could not afford. A rough, reality-based code of self-reliance would emerge, while any charity offered would come from voluntary agencies such as churches — which would be free to demand that the people who took its benefits hew to a higher standard of conduct, make better choices, and develop the skills required for self-reliance. That is exactly what private Christian charities used to demand, with results that were far more transformative and respectful of the needy as full human beings than today’s value-neutral government handouts.
What the modern welfare state offers instead is the modern version of bread and circuses, but something worse. Even as destructive egalitarianism (which Tocqueville warned could be the downfall of democracies) promotes the growth of government as the wiper of every runny nose in society, the logic of radical individualism dismantles every structure aside from the state. We are left as isolated atoms, bereft of the support once provided by churches, families, and other institutions of civil society, completely dependent on ourselves or the agencies of the state.
Jason Jones is a producer in Hollywood. His films include Bella, Eyes to See, and Crescendo. Learn more about his human rights initiatives at www.iamwholelife.com.
John Zmirak is the author of The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism. His columns are archived at The Bad Catholics Bingo Hall. This column is adapted from Jones’ and Zmirak’s upcoming book, The Race to Save Our Century (Crossroad, 2014).
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