Liberalism: When Luther led liberalism against the church on one front, Voltaire did the same thing and with the same philosophy from an opposite front.

Liberalism and the Empowerment of Ignorance

By Daniel Schwindt 

If we had to summarize the frailty of man in one word, many of us would probably use the term “sin.” Man is “fallen,” we might respond. But to sin is simply to miss the mark. In what way does man tend to miss it?

To put the question differently, would it be more appropriate to describe fallen man as wicked, or could we say instead that he is merely stupid? Obviously both assertions are true: We all miss the mark quite frequently, both in thought and in behavior. But does the greater preponderance of our “woundedness” lie in our tendency toward immoral action, or, instead, in our innate ignorance?

Also, I should say that do not mean to deal with these questions theologically, but rather sociologically: I don’t want to talk about Aquinas’s hierarchy of virtues; I want to talk about the way we perceive ourselves and those around us. And judging by the rhetoric I hear daily, it seems that most of us readily think of ourselves as morally frail, yet we become violently indignant when anyone suggests that we might, in addition, have vastly limited mental powers. This leads me to believe that somewhere along the line we chose the “wicked” answer and rejected almost completely the possibility that the greater problem was an epistemological one. We denied the possibility that, when Adam fell, he landed on his head.

It is the argument of this essay that the preponderance of our human limitation can indeed be found in the intellectual sphere. Further, it seems that the conscious acknowledgment of this truth was the historical reality in traditional societies. Men of those times saw and accepted it with a humble realism, and they designed their sociopolitical framework accordingly.

At what point, then, did man’s opinion about man begin to reverse itself?

Undeniably, it occurred with the rise of that philosophy we call liberalism, which Milton Friedman aptly defined as “the intellectual movement that…emphasized freedom as the ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society.” (Milton Friedman,Capitalism and Freedom)

Although Friedman argued primarily for economic liberalism, his definition holds true whether the liberalism in question is economic, political, or religious. With the victory of this movement, there came a massive shift in regard to how man views his own limited state, and I believe that this change represents one of the most profound upheavals in the history of the world.

I will begin with an observation from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, which states the case well:

In contradiction to St. Thomas (and to Luther, after all) the Church often seemed to take the position that man is rather stupid than wicked. Protestantism, though rather pessimistic about the spiritual qualities of the ‘sin-cripple,’ nevertheless gave him the Bible without explanatory footnotes, trusting in his intelligence (or ‘inspiration’). Catholicism, on the other hand, frequently tended to adopt the view that a superficial half-education was much worse than no education at all, and thus in Catholic countries we saw (and sometimes still see) a large number of illiterates side by side with an intellectual elite of high standards. The Protestant goal of education is usually on of good averages—the optimum for democracy. In democracies there will always be resentment and contempt for the ‘highbrow’ and the illiterate, the intellectual and the ‘peasant.’” (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality)

I choose this example because Protestantism is one of the three fundamental liberal movements (the Enlightenment being the second, and Capitalism being the third). Through the Reformation this great shift in self-perception, by which man’s carnal weakness and mental strength both became exaggerated, can be viewed with great clarity. Only within the context of this new, individualistic, rationalized, subjective sort of religiosity could the focus of hamartiology become so obsessed with man’s “total depravity” while, at the very same time, laying on this same “totally depraved” soul the immense responsibility of interpreting scripture and discerning the truth of a thousand years of doctrine all by himself.

Yet we need to go further than just identifying historical transformations. We also need to examine the consequences, the most significant of which, in the case of liberalism, has been the unprecedented empowerment of ignorance as a social force.

.........................

Read more: ethikapolitika.org