The Liberalism of the Benedict Option--Against Catholic Integralism?

An Austrian Monastery

The argument of Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option (2017) is fundamentally the same as Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed.  And like Deneen, Dreher's argument is incoherent, because while he claims to reject liberalism, his proposed alternative to liberalism is founded on the liberal principle of individual liberty by which social order arises through voluntary choice.

A few years ago, Deneen wrote an essay placing himself and Dreher on the same side of an intellectual debate among traditionalist American Catholics.  (Since then, Dreher has converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church.)   On one side, there were the Whig Catholics taking the position developed by John Courtney Murray that Lord Acton was right about Thomas Aquinas being "the first Whig," and that traditional Catholicism was compatible with the American tradition of liberal democracy, because liberal pluralism and religious liberty secured a home for Thomistic Catholics to live their Christian lives.  The proponents of this position included Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel, and others who wrote for First Things, the journal founded by Neuhaus. 

On the opposite side of this debate were the radical traditionalist Catholics--Dreher, Deneen, and others--who took the position developed by Alasdair MacIntyre that Thomistic Catholicism and American liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible, because the false anthropology of liberal individualism that sees human beings as essentially separate, autonomous selves destroys the conditions necessary for cultivating the natural and supernatural virtues in families, communities, and the Church.

Since Deneen wrote his essay in 2014, the journal First Things has moved away from Neuhaus's Whig Catholicism--Neuhaus died in 2009--and towards the radical traditionalism of Deneen and Dreher.  For example, in last October's issue, First Things published an article by Edmund Waldstein defending Catholic integralism, which Waldstein has summarized in three sentences:  "Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final end. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power." 

In particular, Waldstein recommends the medieval Catholic kingdom of St. Louis IX in thirteenth-century France as a historical model of a social order in which the temporal power of government was subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church.  Here then is a clear rejection of the modern liberal regime and endorsement of the medieval illiberal regime.

But what makes the argument of Deneen and Dreher so confusing is that while they reject modern liberalism, they also reject medieval illiberalism, because they want to build on the achievements of liberalism in promoting liberty, equality, and justice.  That's what I mean in saying that their argument is incoherent.

As I indicated in my previous post, Deneen condemns the medieval social order for its "practices of slavery, bondage, inequality, disregard for the contributions of women, and the arbitrary forms of hierarchy and application of law" (19, 23, 185).  Similarly, Dreher says that medieval Europe was "no Christian utopia," because "the church was spectacularly corrupt, and the violent exercise of power--at times by the church itself--seemed to rule the world."  And yet, "despite the radical brokenness of their world, medievals carried within their imagination a powerful vision of integration.  In the medieval consensus, men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning within the chaos" (25).

So, Dreher believes, medieval Christians had "a powerful vision of integration"--a metaphysical conviction that "meaning transcends ourselves and is grounded in God" (234)--but their medieval social orders failed to actualize that metaphysical vision of human beings living lives that are meaningful because they are part of a cosmos created by God with the promise of eternal life in Heaven. 

Liberal social orders must also fail to actualize that metaphysical vision of living in a sacred cosmos, because liberalism separates church and state, so that religious belief and practice become a private activity of individuals exercising their religious liberty, but without any public support from a political establishment of religion.

Through most of American history, Dreher observes, American Christians could be reassured by the thought that although there was a formal legal separation of church and state, there was an informal cultural consensus that America was a Christian nation.  Or as Neuhaus once said, even if America did not have a confessional state, it could have a confessional society.

In recent decades, however, Dreher laments, it has become clear that American Christians have lost the culture war--their Waterloo was in 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, thus rejecting the biblical teaching about sex and marriage.  Orthodox Christians are now a small minority, and America has become a post-Christian society.

The only choice left for Christians who want to live a Christian life in a post-Christian culture, Dreher argues, is the Benedict Option.  With this term, Dreher is echoing the famous last paragraph of MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981).  MacIntyre had told the story of how the ancient Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics had been lost, how the modern attempt to ground morality in a shared, rational, and purely secular basis had failed, and how this had left us with a chaotic degraded morality of emotivist hedonism and Nietzschean nihilism.  He then concluded by suggesting that we are living through a time like that of the Roman empire declining into the Dark Ages, when men and women of good will set out to construct "new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness."  Now, we today face a similar choice.  "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. . . . We are waiting not for Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict."

To think through what MacIntyre might be suggesting, Dreher tells the story of St. Benedict (480-543 A.D.) and the monastic tradition that he began.  Disgusted by the corruption that he saw in Rome under barbarian rule, Benedict turned to a life of prayer and contemplation, living for three years as a hermit in a cave.  After leaving his cave, he joined a monastic community, and founded twelve monasteries of his own.  To guide the monks and nuns living in such monasteries, Benedict wrote a book The Rule of Saint Benedict with rules for how each day in a monastery can be devoted to prayer, work, eating, fasting, and other orders of ascetic discipline, in which monks learn to live a holy life in this world to prepare for the eternal life to come in Heaven.  This guided the monastic tradition of the Middle Ages.

To show that this is a living tradition today, Dreher describes his time visiting the Monastery of St. Benedict in central Italy near Norcia--the modern name of Benedict of Nursia's birthplace.  This monastery was founded in the tenth century.  It was closed in 1810 under the tyrannical rule of Napoleon, who was trying to destroy the Catholic Church in the territories under French imperial rule.  The monastery was reopened in 2000 by some young American men who wanted to live the contemplative life of Benedictine monks.

Oddly, Dreher does not reflect on how this manifests the religious liberty secured by liberalism.  This monastery was closed under the illiberal rule of Napoleon, but then reopened under the liberal order of modern Italy.  Moreover, as Dreher indicates, all of the monks have voluntarily chosen to submit to the discipline of this monastery, because they want to live a Christian monastic life.  Therefore, the monastery is a voluntary association, which is possible in a liberal social order that secures the liberty for forming such voluntary associations.  So, if the Benedict Option is optional, if it's a product of individual choice without coercion, then it is founded on the liberal principle of social order arising by individual consent. 

Like the Amish children who choose to be baptized as adults and thus become members of the church, the men and women who choose to become monks or nuns are freely choosing to limit their choices by submitting to the rule of their religious community.

In his review of Dreher's book, Edmund Waldstein tells his story of how he became a Trappist monk in a Cistercian monastery in Austria as an illustration of Dreher's Benedict Option.  He came from a family of eight children, living in the United States and Austria. They were raised by Catholic parents, and they are all still practicing Catholics, because their parents took them to Mass everyday, prayed with them, and educated them to understand and appreciate the intellectual and artistic traditions of Christendom.  They lived in Catholic communities all their life.  Waldstein attended Thomas Aquinas College, a small Catholic "great books" college in California, and he sees the college and the community of families surrounding it as a Benedict Option Community.  All of this prepared him to seek out the monastic life.

But notice that the formation of Waldstein's Christian life was made possible by the freedom of liberal social orders in America and Austria--a freedom expressed in the free choices of his parents and of his siblings to live in Christian communities, and in his choice to live as a monk.  In fact, living the monastic life remains an option in liberal societies around the world, as indicated at the website with instructions for how one can become a Trappist monk or nun at one of the Cistercian monasteries in the United States.

Here is a video about the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, a Cistercian monastery made famous by Thomas Merton, who was a monk there:

It is hard, therefore, to understand Waldstein's scorn for modern liberalism and his Catholic integralist longing for the medieval theocratic monarchy of St. Louis IX, which suggests that he doesn't appreciate how he has benefited from the liberty secured by liberalism.

Now, of course, few people will choose like Waldstein to live in a monastery.  But Dreher points to many other ways that people can choose the Benedict Option.  He writes:

"Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option.  Secede culturally from the mainstream.  Turn off the television. Put the smartphone away.  Read books.  Play games. Make music.  Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or a group within your church.  Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists.  Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department" (98).

Even without living in a monastery, Dreher argues, parents can turn their home into a "domestic monastery."  A Christian family can have regular times of family prayer.  The family can have strict rules limiting television and online media.  The family can live in neighborhoods with other Christian families.  And the family's life can be organized around their church's worship services and around their private Christian school. 

Much of Dreher's book consists of his reports from interviewing people who live in local Christian communities of families.  One example is the community of orthodox Catholic families who live in one district of Hyattsville, Maryland.  They moved there so that they could live in a neighborhood with other Catholic families.  Many of them are rooted in St. Jerome Parish. 

In 2010, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., was planning to shut down the school attached to St. Jerome Parish because of the school's dropping enrollment and increasing debt. Parents organized to persuade the archdiocese to allow the school to be turned into a "classical Christian education school" based on a "Great Books" and Christian curriculum.  The new St. Jerome Academy was so successful that it has become a model for establishing other classical Christian schools around the United States.

But here, again, one sees the incoherence in Dreher's argument as soon as one notices that the flourishing of these Benedict Option communities depends on the liberal principles of tolerance and religious liberty that Dreher rejects as threats to Christian life.

In his chapter on "The Roots of the Crisis," Dreher writes:

"The U.S. Constitution, a Lockean document, privatizes religion, separating it from the state.  Every American schoolchild learns to consider this a blessing, and perhaps it is.  But segregating the sacred from the secular in this way profoundly shaped the American religious consciousness."

"For all the good that religious tolerance undoubtedly brought to a young country with a diverse and contentious population of Protestant sectarians and a Catholic minority, it also laid the groundwork for excluding religion from the public square by making it a matter of private, individual choice.  In the American order, the state's role is simply to act as a referee among individuals and factions.  The government has no ultimate conception of the good, and it regards its own role as limited to protecting the rights of individuals."

"When a society is thoroughly Christian, this is an ingenious way to keep the peace and allow for general flourishing.  But from the Christian point of view, Enlightenment liberalism contained the seeds of Christianity's undoing." (36) 

Notice Dreher's evasiveness here.  Is privatizing religion and separating it from the state a "blessing"? "Perhaps it is."  Religious tolerance brought some good--"to keep the peace and allow for general flourishing."  But it also "contained the seeds of Christianity's undoing."

Elsewhere in his book, however, Dreher declares that religious liberty really is "a blessing to us" (80). And he explains:  "Religious liberty is critically important to the Benedict Option.  Without a robust and successful defense of First Amendment protections, Christians will not be able to build the communal institutions that are vital to maintaining our identity and values" (84). 

So here it seems that rather than planting "the seeds of Christianity's undoing," the religious liberty in a liberal order is the critically important opening for the Benedict Option. 

Far from being anti-liberal, the Benedict Option is made possible by liberalism.

On Deneen (4): The New Testament Lockean Liberalism of the Amish--Political and Church Membership by Individual Consent

The argument of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed is incoherent.

He criticizes liberalism as a complete failure. But he also praises liberalism for its achievements in promoting the ideals of human liberty, equality, and dignity.  He also rejects the ancien regime for failing to achieve those ideals.  He criticizes liberalism for its fundamental principle of individual choice, and yet he also affirms individual choice as the ground of social legitimacy.  And in praising the good social life of the Amish, who have flourished in the American liberal order, he implicitly endorses liberalism.

"The achievements of liberalism must be acknowledged," Deneen insists, "and the desire to 'return' to a preliberal age must be eschewed.  We must build upon those achievements while abandoning the foundational reasons for its failures. There can be no going back, only forward" (182). The achievements of liberalism are in fostering the human liberty, equality, and justice that human beings long for, but which were not achieved in the preliberal age of the West, because of the "practices of slavery, bondage, inequality, disregard for the contributions of women, and the arbitrary forms of hierarchy and application of law" (19, 23, 185). Clearly, Deneen is rejecting all of the illiberal forms of order that have ever existed in the past history of the West.

So how can we build upon the achievements of liberalism "while abandoning the foundational reasons for its failure"?  "The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism," Deneen explains, "is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism--the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals" (31).  So we might think that Deneen wants us to reject this liberal idea of voluntarist social order by individual choice, because this is the foundational reason for liberalism's failure.

But, no, that's not what Deneen wants us to do.  He declares: "We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice" (41).  By choice! So he is not rejecting the idea of individual choice.  In fact, he recommends that we use the freedom of choice offered by liberalism to choose "new forms of community" (xv). "The development of new cultures is what requires conscious effort, deliberation, reflectiveness, and consent" (191).  By consent!  We can choose to consent to "self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities" (42).

Deneen observes: "Ironically, given the default choice-based philosophy that liberalism has bequeathed to us, what might someday become a nonvoluntarist cultural landscape must be born out of voluntarist intentions, plans, and actions" (192).  We can voluntarily choose to live in small local communities based on household economics, local exchange, and religious rituals; and "such practices will be developed within intentional communities that will benefit from the openness of liberal society" (196).  So, rather than overturning liberalism, the "new forms of community" will arise by individual choice within the free and open society created by liberalism.

What does Deneen mean in saying that the formation of new voluntary communities can lead to "a nonvoluntarist cultural landscape"?  Is he suggesting that once one generation of people voluntarily has formed new communities, later generations will inherit their social membership involuntarily?  As children reach adulthood in these new communities, will they be coercively denied any freedom to decide whether they want to stay or leave?

Deneen's reader has to wonder what exactly this new form of self-governing community based on individual choice looks like.  Deneen's only specific example of such a community is the Amish.  He praises the Amish for living in small communities organized around a few families bound together by their Christian religion, living a life of humility, simplicity, and reverence for their traditional moral order; and all of this based upon voluntary choice: when their children reach young adulthood, they must choose to be baptized and thus consent to obey the restrictive order of the church for the rest of their lives, or they must leave the community and live in the outside world (105-107, 188-94).  (The title of Alan Wolfe's review of Deneen's book in Commonweal is "Loving the Amish.")

Deneen refuses to admit, however, that since this Amish community is based on the Lockean liberal principle of social order through voluntary consent, and since the Amish life has flourished within the American liberal order, his praise for the Amish is implicitly an endorsement of liberalism, which contradicts his attack on liberalism.  Moreover, Deneen does not recognize that the liberalism of the Amish is their return to the liberalism of the New Testament Christians.

A good survey of the history of the Amish can be found at the website of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College and in the book The Amish by Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner, and Nolt (2013).  A good television documentary on the Amish was part of the 2012 season of the PBS "American Experience" series, which is available from Amazon.

The Amish trace their origins to the Anabaptists in sixteenth-century Europe. The Anabaptists belonged to the most radical side of the Protestant Reformation.  The were called Anabaptists (rebaptizers) by their critics, because they rejected infant baptism, and they baptized adults who had previously been baptized as infants in a Catholic or Protestant church. As early as 1525, in Zurich, Switzerland, Anabaptists were baptizing adults. They argued that there was no infant baptism in the New Testament, that no child could be born into church membership, and that only adults could consent to be baptized and thus freely choose to join the church as a voluntary association.

For the Anabaptists, this view of the Christian church as a fully voluntary organization was a return to the practice of the New Testament Christians, who did not use coercion to compel membership in the church, and who enforced obedience among members by punishing disobedience with excommunication and shunning, but without any coercive persecution.  They saw the violent persecution of pagans, heretics, and infidels by Catholic and Protestant churches as a violation of New Testament Christianity.  And thus the Anabaptists became the first modern proponents of religious toleration, religious liberty, and the separation of church and state.  They were also pacifists because they interpreted Jesus' Sermon on the Mount literally as teaching that Christians must love and forgive their enemies and turn the other cheek.

Although the Anabaptists accepted the Old Testament as part of the biblical revelation, they stressed the superiority of the New Testament as transcending the Old Testament, and thus they rejected the Mosaic theocracy and violence of the Old Testament, while emphasizing the voluntarism and pacifism taught by Jesus and the first Christians in the New Testament.

Because of this teaching, the Anabaptists were persecuted as heretics by civil and religious authorities.  Many thousands were killed.  And many were forced to hide or flee from persecution.

In 1693, Jakob Ammann became a leader in the Swiss Anabaptist church, and his followers were called the Amish.  To promote a community of disciplined humility rather than selfish pride, men were prohibited from trimming their beards, and both men and women were prohibited from wearing colorful clothing, jewelry, or cosmetics.  This was part of the Ordnung--the "order" of social rules governing life that each community would enforce.  This was combined with the New Testament rules for church organization adopted by the first Christians: membership in each church was voluntary, but once membership was freely chosen through accepting adult baptism, disobedience to the church's rules would be punished by excommunication and shunning, although the disorderly ones could be readmitted to membership if they repented and submitted to obedience.

All of this was affirmed in the Dordrecht Confession of Faith, which was written in 1632.  Candidates for baptism must affirm these eighteen articles of faith.  Running through all of these rules is a spirit of humble obedience, in which members must obey those with authority over them: children their parents, students their teachers, wives their husbands, members their leaders, and younger ministers their bishop.

In 1681, William Penn established the colony of Pennsylvania as an experiment in organizing a free society based on the Quaker principles of pacifism and toleration.  Agents of Pennsylvania in Europe advertised the attractions of immigrating to Pennsylvania--peace, toleration, and cheap land for sale.  By 1737, Amish began migrating to Pennsylvania.  Some five hundred Amish had migrated there before the Revolution.  Over the next two centuries, the Amish had migrated across North America--principally in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, but also into over 30 states and into Ontario, Canada.  By 1900, there were about 9,000 Amish in the United States.  Now, the population is over 300,000.

Following the example of the New Testament Christians, the Amish have no centralized formal church hierarchy.  Each church is self-governing.  There are no church buildings.  Rather, every second Sunday, church members meet in one family's home for church services and communal meetings.  Ministers and bishops are chosen by lot from a list of men nominated by the members.  These church leaders serve for life without any salary.  Each church constitutes a "district," and a collection of districts in a region constitute a "settlement."  Each district must be small enough in population (20 to 40 families) and area that everyone can walk or ride in a buggy to church meetings.

Although there is great variation in the social norms across districts and settlements,  There are a few core principles that govern almost all Amish communities.  Most fundamental is the principle of voluntary communalism.  While all church members have the freedom to express some preferences and individual differences, and while their membership in the church is a voluntary decision, their decision to take the baptismal vows as young adults constricts their subsequent range of choices.  Beginning at about age 16, young adults are free to leave the community if they choose not to be baptized as members of the church.  But once they become members, they are subject to church discipline, and to the ultimate punishment for disobedience--excommunication and shunning, which means not only separation from their family and their community, but also eternal damnation in the afterlife.

Part of that church discipline is enforcing the separation of the Amish from the moral and religious corruption of the outside world.  This includes avoidance of urban life and the luxuries that it affords. The badges of Amish separation from the world include plain clothing and household furnishings, horse-and-buggy transportation, refusal to draw electrical power from public utility grids, and refusal of technology such as tractors, television, radio, and computers.  The Amish engage in economic exchange and competition, but they try to avoid an excessive consumerism.  For most of their history, the Amish have lived as small farmers.  But in recent decades, most Amish have depended on non-farming enterprises and employment.

Separation from the world limits the Amish participation in politics.  They refuse to serve in governmental offices.  They rarely vote, except in local elections.  They pay their taxes, because Jesus did so.  They refuse to participate in the Social Security system or in any national health insurance program, because they think that insurance shows a lack of faith in God and in the mutual aid from one's community.  They refuse to accept any social welfare benefits from government.  As pacifists, they must resist military service.  When subject to the military draft, they have asked for "conscientious objector" status, which allowed them to do civilian service for two years.

They are also separate from the culture of feminism, divorce, and gender diversity.  They have preserved traditional gender roles, large families, and marrying within their Amish community.

They do not permit high school or higher education, because such advanced education is unnecessary for the simple lives they live, and because such education would promote an intellectual curiosity and questioning that would subvert the norms of humble submission to authority.  They do educate their children up to the eighth grade, so that they learn reading, writing, arithmetic, and some history.  After the eighth grade, children spend another two years in vocational training at home, learning from their parents.

In the 1950s, when state governments extended the compulsory schooling years to include some high school education, the Amish refused to comply, and many Amish fathers were arrested and sent to prison.  Finally, in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court in Wisconsin v. Yoder, unanimously ruled that this violated the religious liberty of the Amish as protected by the "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment.

Here we see how the American liberal order of protection for individual liberty has secured the right of the Amish to live the kind of communal life that they have chosen.  So while Amish communities might seem to be illiberal in their constraints on individual freedom, they are actually liberal in being founded on individual choice in joining the church and in being a voluntary association of American citizens.

The Amish are aware of their dependence on the liberty secured by American liberalism.  For example, one of the most widely adopted textbooks in history for eighth grade Amish children is Uria Byler's Our Better Country: The Story of America's Freedom (7th ed., 1990).  As the title indicates,  the book presents America as the one country that has protected the religious freedom of the Amish, and thus Amish children as American citizens should appreciate the worth of the American way of life in supporting the Amish church.

The Amish and Anabaptist tradition manifests the link between ancient New Testament liberalism and modern Lockean liberalism as founded on the principle of voluntarist individualism, by which both church membership and political membership arise from individual consent.

This link is evident in the writings of John Locke--"the first philosopher of liberalism," according to Deneen.  In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke cites the same New Testament verses invoked by the Amish to support religious liberty, toleration, and voluntary church membership.  Locke writes:

"Let us consider what a Church is.  A Church then I take to be a voluntary Society of Men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the publick worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the Salvation of their Souls."

"I say it is a free and voluntary Society.  No body is born a Member of any Church.  Otherwise the Religion of Parents would descend unto Children, by the same right of Inheritance as their Temporal Estates, and every one would hold his Faith by the same Tenure he does his Lands; than which nothing can be imagined more absurd. . . . No Member of a Religious Society can be tied with any other Bonds but what proceed from the certain expectation of eternal Life.  A Church then is a Society of Members voluntarily uniting to this end" (p. 28).

Notice that Locke, like the Amish and the Anabaptists, is assuming the position of the New Testament churches that were voluntary societies, as opposed to the practice after the fourth century by which church membership was involuntary and determined by one's birth.

Similarly, Locke in the Second Treatise sees political membership as voluntary:

"a Child is born a Subject of no Country or Government.  He is under his Father's Tuition and Authority, till he come to Age of Discretion; and then he is a Free-man, at liberty what Government he will put himself under" (sec. 118).

"Every Man being, as has been shewed, naturally free, and nothing being able to put him into subjection to any Earthly Power, but only his own Consent; it is to be considered, what shall he understand to be a sufficient Declaration of a Man's Consent, to make him subject to the Laws of any Government.  There is a common distinction of an express and a tacit consent" (sec. 119). 

For most Amish Americans, their consent to be subject to the American government is by the tacit consent of remaining in America once they reach young adulthood.  But their consent to church membership is by their express consent as young adults through verbally accepting the 18 articles of the Dordrecht Confession and being baptized.  Without such consent, the church has no authority over them, and they are free to leave the Amish community.  In this way, both their political membership and their church membership are based on the Lockean liberal principle of voluntary choice.

That's why I say that Deneen's endorsement of the Amish way of life is an endorsement of Lockean liberalism, which contradicts his criticism of liberalism.

Or would Deneen reply by arguing that even if Amish communities were originally completely voluntary, they have created "a nonvoluntarist cultural landscape" for their children?  Although the adult children are free to leave the Amish community, and some do in fact leave, isn't it true that having been reared by their parents and educated by their community in such a way that they have been molded for Amish life, and so living outside the community will be unbearable for most of them, doesn't this bias their choice towards life-long church membership?

How truly free is the decision of someone outside the Amish community to join it, or of someone born into it to remain in it as an adult or to leave?

Kraybill et al. (2013, 159-62) report that the number of outsiders who have joined and remained members of Amish churches is small--perhaps less than 100 since 1950.  Some of those who join Amish communities have become critics of modern society--like Deneen?--but then they direct their critical attitude towards the Amish themselves who seem not zealous enough in their Amishness.  Many of these converts eventually drop out.  Some of the converts come from troubled family backgrounds, and they are looking for some stable social order in their lives.  About half of the converts arrive already married, and most of the others are men who marry Amish women.  Some of the strongest converts are those who have arrived looking for a church that adheres to true New Testament Christianity.

On the other side of this, the rate of defection--native-born Amish leaving at adulthood--is highly variable (Kraybill et al. 2013, 162-70).  In the first half of the 20th century, defection in many communities was as high as 30% to 50%.  In the second half of the century, the rate of defection has generally dropped.  Today, it seems to be about 15%.  One explanation for this decline in defection is the elimination of the draft.  When Amish men were drafted, they were required as conscientious objectors to serve in civilian public service work for two years, which gave them exposure to modern urban life outside of the Amish communities, and thus some of them could be attracted by the opportunities of the world outside the Amish church.

Some liberal political theorists have objected that liberalism cannot properly tolerate an illiberal social order like the Amish church, because its severe constraints on the lives of its members are a denial of liberty.  But against this objection, one can argue that insofar as the Amish have chosen their life, this life is founded on the liberal principle of free choice.  Kraybill et al. (2013, 20) observe:

"If choice and its concomitant responsibilities are prized in American culture--if indeed the essence of being American is to have choice--then the Amish can truly claim an American identity.  If choice is the ubiquitous mark of modernity, then the Amish, like their neighbors, have been branded with this mark.  In fact, their fundamental notion of what it means to be a church community is based on the idea of voluntary adult membership, a concept that reaches back to their religious roots in the sixteenth century.  What could be more modern than the notion of choice in religious affiliation?"

"Yet Amish choices, ironically, restrict the range of individual choice.  They have chosen, in other words, to limit choice."

And yet, some liberal thinkers have complained that the Amish choice to limit choice is not a truly free choice (Mazie 2005).  After all, haven't Amish children been so tightly controlled by their parents and their larger community, and hasn't their education been so limited, that children reaching adulthood cannot make a fully informed choice?  This has led some liberals to criticize the decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder for not compelling a high school education for Amish children that might open their minds to the world outside the Amish community.  But this would seem to violate the liberal principles of religious liberty and the right of parents to rear their children as they choose.

The  best answer to this problem, as Mazie (2005) suggests, is to accept the fact that all life choices are constrained by one's familial and social circumstances.  Of course, our choices as adults will always be deeply influenced by our childhood rearing and by our social environment.  None of our choices is perfectly free from the influences of our social acquired temperament and beliefs.  But there is still some room for choice in a free society: 15% of those Amish children--and sometimes 30% to 50%--have chosen to leave their communities.

If 85% of the Amish children choose to stay and join the church, if they thus choose to limit their choices, doesn't that show how a liberal regime allows for what Friedrich Hayek called true individualism--the melding of individualism and community in the voluntary associations of civil society?

Kraybill et al. (2013, 100-101) suggest this idea of communitarian individualism in Amish society in quoting a comment by an Amish father: "The idea that the Amish people give up freedom of choice and let the community make them all the same is a myth. Granted, Amish life has a strong communal dimension, but this doesn't mean individuality necessarily withers away for us.  All it means is that we have another source of social strength and collective wisdom to help make choices for the betterment of all and ultimately for the good of self."

If this is so, then Deneen's attack on liberal individualism while praising Amish society is incoherent.

I must also say that there is a disgusting hypocrisy in Deneen's position. He praises the Amish for limiting the education of their children to an eighth grade education, and he scorns the elite universities of modern liberal regimes. And yet he has never joined an Amish community, and he is himself a product of elite universities--Rutgers, Georgetown, Princeton, and Notre Dame.  Does he have any plans for forming an Amish community in South Bend, Indiana?  If not, why not?


REFERENCES

Byler, Uria R. 1990. Our Better Country: The Story of America's Freedom. 7th ed. Gordonville, PA: Old Order Book Society.

Kraybill, Donald B., Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt. 2013. The Amish. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Locke, John. 1983. A Letter Concerning Toleration. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Mazie, Steven V. 2005. "Consenting Adults? Amish Rumspringa and the Quandary of Exit in Liberalism." Perspectives on Politics 3: 745-59.


Some of my other posts on New Testament liberalism can be found here, here, and here.

On Deneen (3): Does Liberalism Create a New Aristocracy Based on an Ignoble Lie?

Yes, Deneen claims, liberalism necessarily creates what he calls a "titanic inequality" (3, 139-40), which allows a small elite group of people with great wealth, power, and status to rule over society in a way that makes it impossible for those outside the ruling class to improve their desperately impoverished lives.

This new aristocracy or "liberalocracy" (152) depends on liberalism's ignoble lie.  In Plato's Republic, Socrates thought the legitimacy of the perfectly just city would depend upon teaching a noble lie:  people must believe that all people in the community are naturally equal in that they have all been born into the same family, but they are also naturally unequal in that each person has been endowed at birth with different talents and propensities corresponding to different metals in their souls: gold for the ruling class, silver for the soldiers and public officers, bronze and iron for the workers.  As Deneen explains in a recent article in First Things (April 2018), this is a noble lie, because it teaches noblesse oblige--the obligation of the nobility to rule for the common good of all and not merely for the selfish interests of the ruling class.  This is the teaching that supported the legitimacy of the older aristocratic order in medieval Europe: in the ancient regime, the hereditary aristocracy was supposed to rule for good of the whole community. 

By contrast, the new aristocracy of liberalism rules by an ignoble lie, because the liberal elites have been taught that they can pursue their own self-interest with no obligation to serve the lower classes.  But at the same time, the liberal ruling class has been taught that it is not really a ruling class, and so they must profess belief in radical equality and denounce the evils of "elitism," while hypocritically refusing to acknowledge their own elite status.  And so, for example, we see privileged students at the most elite universities violently protesting against speakers on campus whom they think are perpetuating inequalities of race, gender, and class, while ignoring the fact that their elite universities are themselves bastions of inequality.

Deneen suggests that Plato's noble lie is actually a truth, at least insofar as it recognizes "the fact of inequality" (First Things, 28).  Human beings really are unequal in their innate and acquired capacities and inclinations, and consequently every society will be unequal in its structure: some people will have greater wealth, power, and status than others.  The great political problem is how to prevent this inequality from causing class conflict by arranging the social order so that the ruling class and the underclass can cooperate for the common good of all.

In his article for First Things, Deneen explains how Plato's noble lie achieves this:

"Only if each group accepts each part of the 'lie,' as Socrates explains, is a kind of social contract achieved.  Elites and commoners both accept the part of the myth that does not appeal to them for the sake of the part that does.  Elites are distinguished in a society that justifies inequality; commoners are best off in a society that compels service of elites for the whole.  Instead of acting as warring parties, both sides work for the good of all."

As Deneen indicates, the ancien regime was an attempt to achieve this kind of social contract.  Can it work?  Deneen gives contradictory answers.  Sometimes he says yes, the ancien regime--or a "Burkean society"--can work:

"A Burkean society is organized for the benefit of the ordinary--the majority who benefit from societal norms that the strong and the ordinary alike are expected to follow.  A society can be shaped for the benefit of most people by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that secure the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can be shaped for the benefit of the extraordinary and powerful by liberating all from the constraints of custom.  Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary; today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong" (148).

Here it seems that in arguing against the liberal social order, he is also arguing for the illiberal social order as the alternative to liberalism.  But elsewhere in his writing, he contradicts this, because he says that the illiberal social order--the ancien regime or Burkean society--fails.

The illiberal regime fails, Deneen admits, because its ideal social contract cannot be achieved in practice.  He agrees with a remark in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century--quoted both in his article and as the epigram for his book--as saying that the aristocratic rulers of the Middle Ages failed to abide by their chivalric code of public service: "In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.  When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down."

Deneen also observes: "A vast disconnect once existed between the philosophy of the West and its practices.  The ideals of liberty, equality, and justice coexisted with extensive practices of slavery, bondage, inequality, disregard for the contributions of women, and arbitrary forms of hierarchy and application of law" (185).  So here Deneen actually agrees with liberalism's criticism of the ancien regime's social contract as a failure.

And yet while admitting the failure of the illiberal social contract, Deneen insists that the liberal social contract is also a failure, which leaves his reader frustrated by a negative critique without any positive recommendation.

But then the reader might wonder whether Deneen's negative critique of liberalism is supported by the empirical evidence.  As Deneen says, the Lockean liberal social contract depends on showing how equality and inequality can be combined in a society in a way that serves the good of all classes of people.  On the one hand, everyone should be equal in their natural liberty to pursue their happiness as they please, so long as they do not coercively impede the equal liberty of others to pursue their happiness.  On the other hand, this equal liberty will allow the differences in people's talents and inclinations to be expressed, so that there will be inequality in social outcomes: some people will have more property, power, and prestige than others.  This need not cause class conflict as long as there is enough equality of opportunity to bring about social mobility upward and downward, and as long as those people in the lower classes see ever growing improvement in the conditions of their life, so that they can live happy lives.

This Lockean liberal social contract contains at least four empirical claims about how inequality in a liberal social order will serve the common good of all.  Deneen argues that all four of these claims have been proven false.  But in making this assertion, he does not survey all of the pertinent evidence. In fact, he is completely silent about much of the evidence.


TITANIC INEQUALITY?

The first empirical claim is that the inequality in a liberal society will not be so great as to totally separate the ruling class from the underclass and thus create class conflict with no sense of a shared common good.  Deneen asserts that this is a false claim, because liberalism actually creates "titanic inequality--far outstripping the differences between peasant and king" (139).

Deneen does not present any historical evidence to support this assertion.  Actually, the evidence gathered by economic historians suggests that he is wrong about this, because the inequality in pre-modern illiberal societies was generally greater than in most liberal societies today.  Much of this research has been surveyed by Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson (2011), and it has been presented graphically by Max Roser here.

These scholars have estimated inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pre-industrial societies for which data were available, and they have compared these estimates with inequality in modern societies.  These pre-industrial societies did not have the sort of income distribution data that we have today.  But it is possible to gather data through constructing "social tables," where economic classes are listed with their estimated average incomes and population sizes.  This data can then be used to estimate a Gini coefficient of inequality--a statistical scale where 0 represents complete equality of wealth (no one having a bigger share than others) and 1 (or 100%) represents maximum inequality (one person having all the wealth).  Gini coefficients below 30 are considered indicators of low inequality.  Gini coefficients above 50 are considered indicators of high inequality.

If Deneen were right, we would expect to see a much higher Gini for the modern liberal societies than for the pre-modern illiberal societies.  But that's not what we see.  For the Roman Empire in the year 14, the Gini is 39.4.  For Italy in 2000, the Gini is 35.9.  For England and Wales in 1688, the Gini is 45.0.  For the United Kingdom today, the Gini is 32.4.  For France in 1788, the Gini is 55.9.  For France in 2000, the Gini is 31.2.

As compared with the pre-industrial societies, the modern liberal regimes here do not show "titanic inequality--far outstripping the differences between peasant and king."

Another way of judging Deneen's assertion is to look at the contemporary cross-country data on inequality.  Oddly, while Deneen claims to show the failure of liberalism around the world, he looks almost exclusively at the United States, making no attempt to look at evidence from other countries.  But if he is right about liberal inequality, then he should predict that the most liberal countries will have the highest Gini scores.  The evidence suggests otherwise.

As I have indicated in other posts, we can take the Human Freedom Index as an index of liberalism, because it measures both economic and personal freedom, with freedom defined as negative freedom (absence of coercion).  So we can look at countries ranked highest on the Human Freedom Index to see if this is correlated with high Gini scores.

Here are the rankings on the Human Freedom Index for the top 10 countries (with the Netherlands and the UK tied for 10th) and the United States.  The numbers in parentheses are the Gini scores, which I have taken from the CIA's World Factbook.

1. Switzerland (29.5)
2. Hong Kong (53.9)
3. New Zealand (36.2)
4. Ireland (31.9)
5. Australia (30.3)
6. Finland (21.5)
7. Norway (26.8)
8. Denmark (28.5)
9. Netherlands (28.6)
9. United Kingdom (32.4)

17. United States (41.0)

Now look at the list of the top 10 countries with the highest Gini scores--showing the greatest levels of inequality--with their rankings on the Human Freedom Index in parentheses.

1. Lesotho 63.2 (96)
2. South Africa 62.5 (68)
3. Micronesia 61.1 (no HFI ranking)
4. Haiti 60.8 (78)
5. Botswana 60.5 (78)
6. Namibia 59.7 (69)
7. Zambia 57.5 (112)
8. Comoros 55.9 (no HFI ranking)
9. Hong Kong 53.9 (2)
10. Columbia 53.5 (93)

Notice that 5 of the countries on the top 10 ranking for freedom have unusually low Gini scores (below 30).  Finland's Gini score (21.5) is the lowest Gini score for all 159 countries in the world!  Hong Kong is the anomalous case--ranking in the top 10 for both freedom and inequality.

Notice that of the 10 countries with the highest Gini scores, all--with the exception of Hong Kong--have very low rankings on the Human Freedom Index.

Here the empirical evidence for a high correlation between liberalism and low inequality seems clear.

There has been some degree of inequality in every human society that has ever existed.  Even the nomadic foraging bands famous for their egalitarian ethos show some inequality.  Some anthropologists have noted that while hunter-gatherers show little inequality in material wealth (such as household goods and land), they do show some inequality in embodied wealth (such as weight and hunting success) and social wealth (such as reputation and the size and quality of social networks), which can be transmitted by inheritance (Smith et al. 2010).  The anthropologists studying this have estimated that this creates a high bias in the life chances according to the parent's wealth: a child born into the top 10% in wealth of the population is five times as likely to remain in the top 10% as the child born into the bottom 10%.  They have estimated that the average Gini coefficient for these foraging bands could be around 25, which is similar to the Gini scores for liberal countries today.  So we might conclude that liberal societies are restoring the level of inequality found in the prehistoric bands that dominated most of our evolutionary history.

Deneen might want to dispute this evidence.  But we don't know, because he says nothing about any of this evidence.


PERMANENT INEQUALITY WITH NO SOCIAL MOBILITY?

The second empirical claim of liberalism that Deneen denies is the idea that a liberal society with equality of opportunity will allow people to move up and down the social structure, so that people will not be permanently fixed at the top or at the bottom.  On the contrary, Deneen believes, "liberalism and market capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have made dukes and earls of old blush" (140).

Deneen explains:

"Liberalism was justified, and gained popular support, as the opponent of and alternative to the old aristocracy.  It attacked inherited privilege, overturned prescribed economic roles, and abolished fixed social positions, arguing instead for openness based upon choice, talent, opportunity, and industry.  The irony is the creation of a new aristocracy that has enjoyed inherited privileges, prescribed economic roles, and fixed social positions" (135).

Just two pages before this passage describing "fixed social positions," however, Deneen speaks about "both upward and downward movement" in liberal societies that "leads all classes to share a pervasive anxiety," because "social status" is always "insecure" (133).  I see no way to resolve this contradiction.  But generally he seems to deny that there is any social mobility in a liberal regime.

As I have argued in other posts, the empirical data for economic inequality does not necessarily show a lack of equal opportunity for social mobility, because there can be a lot of mobility into and out of the top economic ranks of society.  Economists who study this have shown that over 50 percent of American households will be in the top 10 percent of income-earners for at least one year in their lives.  Over 11 percent of Americans will be among the top 1 percent of income-earners (people making a minimum of $332,000 per year) for at least one year in their lives.  94 percent of the Americans who join the top 1 percent group will keep that status for only one year.

Moreover, the factors that explain higher household incomes among Americans are not fixed over a lifetime, and they are to some degree a matter of personal decisions, which means that people are not forced to remain in one income bracket for their whole lives.  American households with higher than average incomes tend to be households where the members are well-educated, in their prime earning years (between the ages of 35 and 64), working full-time, and are in stable marriages.  Households with lower than average incomes tend to be households where the members are less-educated, outside their prime earning years, unemployed or working only part-time, and they are likely to be unmarried.

The New York Times has created some vivid charts on economic mobility in America based on a study of 20 million American children from 1980 to 2015, which shows movement up and down the class structure.

Deneen is silent about this evidence.

INEQUALITY WITH NO ECONOMIC IMPROVEMENT FOR THE LOWER CLASSES?

The third empirical claim of liberalism about inequality denied by Deneen is the argument that liberal inequality improves the economic life of everyone: the rich get richer, and the poor get richer.

Contrary to what Deneen says, the evidence supporting the liberal claim is overwhelming.

People live in absolute poverty when their income is so low that they cannot live a dignified life, because they live in grinding poverty.  For most of human history prior to 1800, almost all human beings lived that way.  Increasingly, very few people in liberal societies today live in such destitute conditions.  But even when those people with the lowest income in a society are living much better than the poor of the past, they can be living in relative poverty in that their income is much lower than others with higher incomes.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median American household income increased 5.2% in 2015 over 2014, which is the largest one-year increase since record-keeping began in 1967.  This increase in 2015 is shown at all income levels, including the middle classes and the poor.  From 2014 to 2015, there was a 1.2% decrease in the poverty rate, which is the largest annual percentage drop in poverty since 1999. So, on average, everyone's economic condition is improving.  Although the rate of economic improvement for the lower and middle classes in America has slowed somewhat over the past 30 years, there has still been improvement, and so everyone really is on average better off today than they were a few years ago.


In liberal societies, the number of people living in such destitute conditions of poverty that they cannot live dignified lives is approaching zero.  And so absolute poverty has been almost completely abolished.  This is happening around the world, as the level of global poverty moves towards zero.

The empirical evidence for this is summarized by Pinker in Enlightenment Now, by Deirdre McCloskey in her books on the "bourgeois virtues," and by Max Roser here.

Deneen ignores this evidence.


INEQUALITY THAT MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE LOWER CLASSES TO HAVE A HAPPY LIFE?

The fourth empirical claim by liberalism denied by Deneen is the idea that the inequality in a liberal regime need not impede the pursuit of happiness by those in the lower classes. 

Deneen assumes that inequality must make people in the lower ranks of society unhappy.  But this ignores the empirical evidence gathered by various scholars that people prefer unequal societies (Starmans, Sheskin, and Bloom 2017).  Laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children indicate that human  beings naturally favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that they prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.

Moreover, data from the pooled World Values/European Values Surveys, with 169 representative national samples in 68 nations, 1981 to 2009, and over 200,000 respondents indicate that inequality does not reduce happiness in advanced societies, and that inequality might actually be beneficial in developing countries (Kelley and Evans 2017).

Deneen does not look at any of this evidence.  He does consider, however, the evidence on happiness and social class in America gathered by Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  But even here, Deneen is selective in his reporting of Murray's empirical research, because Deneen is careful not to report points where Murray contradicts Deneen's argument.

As indicated in my previous post on Murray's book, he makes an Aristotelian and Thomistic argument that the end of all human action is happiness, and that we pursue happiness by satisfying our natural inclinations.  In applying this idea to America, Murray makes three general points.

The first point is that Murray shows how the American founders were successful in framing a liberal government that would secure the conditions for people at all levels of American society to pursue their happiness.  Up to the 1960s, Murray argues, the American pursuit of happiness was the same for all classes.  All were able to attain happiness by their accomplishments in the four major domains of life--family, vocation, community, and faith. 

Murray's second point is that beginning in the 1970s, there has been a divergence among white Americas. Those in the upper classes (identified by Murray as "Belmont") were still happy because they were successful in those four domains of life, but those in the lower class (identified as "Fishtown") were not as successful.  Those in Fishtown had higher rates of familial instability, joblessness, drug addiction, crime, and disorderly neighborhoods.  As a consequence, people in Fishtown were less likely to report being "very happy."

Murray's third point is that this gap between Belmont and Fishtown narrows or even disappears as the people in Belmont and Fishtown become similar in their achievements.  Among those with high work satisfaction and good marriages, 45% of those in Belmont and 30% of those in Fishtown report being "very happy."  Among those who also report high social trust and weekly religious worship, the difference totally disappears--both in Belmont and in Fishtown, 60% of these people report being "very happy."

Deneen reports the second point, but he is silent about the first and third points.  He does not report Murray's first point, because Deneen believes that the American founding--beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution adopted in 1789--established a liberal regime that made it impossible for Americans to properly pursue true happiness (101-102, 141-42, 161-73,188-89).  And so he doesn't want to recognize Murray's evidence that the American founding secured the conditions for people in all social classes to pursue and attain their happiness.

Deneen does not report the third point, because he does not want to consider the evidence for Murray's claim that the gap between Belmont and Fishtown can be closed when people in Fishtown develop the same social virtues as the people in Belmont.

Deneen's report of Murray also engages in a complete reversal of what Murray actually says.  Here's what Murray says: "A great many people, especially in the new upper class, just need to start preaching what they practice," that is, the moral virtues of stable family life (Murray, 305).  Here's what Deneen reports: "Fishtown is descending into social anarchy.  Murray has argued that Belmont simply needs to practice what it preaches--extol the virtues of virtue" (Deneen, 149).  Deneen's report is exactly the opposite of what Murray actually says!  I have no idea why Deneen does this.

Deneen must pass over Murray's first and third points in silence, because Deneen is trying to argue that the social disorder in the lives of many people in the white underclass of Fishtown is the inevitable condition for all people who live in a liberal regime like America.

Deneen's story about the America family is very different from Murray's.  According to Deneen, the American liberal regime initially destroyed the institutions supporting family life.  This led to "the instability of families regardless of social class," and then "the family could be reassembled along liberal lines," so that "the liberal family is reconstituted to serve as the launching pad for the autonomous individual" (150-51).  But this reconstructed "liberal family" can be achieved only among those very few elite Americans who live in the aristocratic families of Murray's Belmont.  The majority of Americans, who are not in the liberal ruling class, cannot enjoy the benefits of a stable family life.

Deneen's story is hard to understand, because if liberalism necessarily destroys all family life, as he says, then it is hard to see how there can be a "liberal family," which would seem to be a contradiction in terms.  Murray thinks a "liberal family" is possible, because he thinks that a liberal society allows for the cultivation of those social virtues that sustain successful family life.  As I indicated in my previous post, John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education shows how liberal parents can cultivate those virtues in their children.

Deneen presents no empirical evidence to show that his story about the American family is correct, and Murray's is wrong.

REFERENCES

Kelley, Jonathan, and M. D. R. Evans. 2017. "Social Inequality and Individual Subjective Well-Being: Results from 68 Societies and Over 200,000 Individuals, 1981-2008." Social Science Research 62: 1-23.

Milanovic, Branko, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2011. "Pre-Industrial Inequality." The Economic Journal 121: 255-72.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010. "Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter-Gatherers." Current Anthropology 51: 19-34.

Starmans, Christina, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom. 2017. "Why People Prefer Unequal Societies." Nature Human Behaviour 1: 1-7.