READINGS
Begin with a critique of liberal thought from the Pope.
(Excerpts from John Paul II encyclical titled "The Splendor of Truth.")
"...Today's widespread tendencies toward subjectivism and relativism appear not merely as pragmatic attitudes or patterns of behavior, but rather as approaches having a basis in theory and claiming full cultural and social legitimacy...."...The individual conscience is accorded the status of supreme tribunal of moral judgement which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil.
"To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one's conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one's moral judgement is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in the conscience.
"But in this way, the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity, and `being at peace with oneself' so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgement...
"Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus express judgement about the right conduct to be chosen here and now.
"Instead, there is a tendency to grant to individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly.
From the words of John Locke in his letter on Toleration:
…the care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men. It is not committed unto him, I say, by God; because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another as to compel anyone to his religion. Nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people, because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace.
…the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.
SERMON
Liberalism is in a bad way these days. Although the problems began in the 60's, it was former president Reagan's liberal bashing and candidate Michael Dukakis' timid response to being labeled liberal in the 1988 presidential campaign which cast a shadow on the term liberalism. Add to that the relentless, unopposed attack of radio talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Contract with American juggernaut, few are willing to claim the liberal label. Strangely, liberalism is in a bad way just at the same time it has been successful beyond its wildest dreams. Who 100 years ago could have imagined the social progress that has been made in creating a more humane society? Social security and Medicare have transformed the experience of getting old. Workers compensation, OSHA safety regulations laws, labor standards and child labor laws have transformed the workplace. A social safety net protects women and children and gives them a path out of poverty. Who could have imagined the progress we have made in removing institutional segregation from our society? Surely the work is far from complete, but great undeniable strides have been made. No conservative who hopes to get reelected would dare propose to remove these programs that have widespread popular support.
Contrary to the conservative rhetoric though, liberalism is not primarily about social welfare. Liberalism first and foremost stands for the individual freedom. Liberalism stands for our right to live the life we choose without interference from the government, the church, or our neighbors. Each may worship as she chooses, speak his truth without fear of retribution, or discrimination based on gender, racial or national origin, religion, and sexual orientation. Each can expect toleration of her views which may not be shared by others. Each may experience the freedom to engage in economic activity and retain most of the product of their labor as well as the right to accumulate wealth and property. Any regulation of this pursuit should only be tolerated to serve the well-being of the whole rather than discriminate against the individual.
Liberalism is a positive, forward-looking philosophy that believes in progress. Rather than trying to shape political, social, and religious life into an idealistic historical model of the good, liberalism sees us progressively moving forward toward greater morality, greater productivity, greater justice as we evolve individually and socially.
If you have any doubt this morning whether you are sympathetic to liberalism, I would like to read one of the more concise statements of liberal ideology from a very familiar document:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Of course this passage comes from the Declaration of Independence from the pen of Thomas Jefferson, the flowering of a political philosophy defined by John Locke in England in the 17th Century.
The origins of liberalism is the rejection of the divine right of kings to rule the people and the power and prestige of the aristocracy. The word liberal comes from the name of the Spanish political party, the "liberales", which advocated constitutional government in Spain during the 19th Century. Although in England liberalism had a political dimension, it was the industrial revolution that gave the ideas steam. Liberalism championed the development of Capitalism which permitted productive individuals rather than privileged feudal lords to control the means of production opening the way to a vast increase in wealth.
The philosophy of liberalism grows out of Renaissance Humanism and Protestantism which sees the individual as central to secular and religious life rather than the Church. The advancement of scientific thought and economic forces revealed the weakness of the Church's truth claims in the physical world. This was especially true in the area of advancing technology, which extended knowledge where the Church had never even imagined it could go.
Our Liberal Founding Fathers rejected the divine right of the King or the Church to run our lives and favored instead limited government with separated powers to prevent tyranny. But the liberalism this country was founded on soon began to diverge into different camps: those who were in favor of bare bones government as Thomas Jefferson advocated diverged from those who saw a more active role for government such as Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson represented the voice of the rugged agricultural community which was self-sufficient and loosely associated, and Hamilton spoke with the voice of the urban community that required a great deal more government organization to facilitate building the public infrastructure cities required. Thus those we classify today as conservatives who would like to see much less government and lower taxes are really classical liberals, whereas modern liberals see an important role for an activist government to protect the individual. What really exists today in our political arena are two different schools of liberalism with different opinions on the size of government and its ability to affect social change!
There is one difference, though, that I wish to make the focus of my presentation this morning and that is in the area of values. The Christian Coalition and the Religious Right are a dimension of political conservatism today which is not liberal at all. The desire to limit individual freedom of choice in the area of reproductive rights and euthanasia, to regulate free speech and desecularize the schools does not come from classical liberalism. Ronald Dworkin, author of Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia And Individual Freedom puts it this way:
These are the deepest issues a civilization ever faces. They are of a quasi-religious nature…the critical question is whether a decent society will choose coercion or responsibility, whether it will seek to impose a collective judgment on matters of the most profound spiritual character on everyone, or whether it will allow its citizens to make the most central, personality-defining judgments about their own lives and deaths for themselves.
The ever evolving freedom of the 60's, 70's and 80's I think is a significant factor in the current social conservatism. The images of the free love of the 60's, alternative communes, flower children, rebellion against authority, kids in faded jeans and long hair or today leather jackets and spiked hair, eardrum shattering music played by polysexual mutants, the experimental use of drugs and iconoclastic behavior has pushed the limits of our societies' ability to tolerate difference.
At the root of this reaction against individual freedom, I believe, is a difference of faith. Whether it is the Imam inciting a Shiite crowd in Iran, the Pope speaking from the Vatican, or the anti-abortion picketer at a women's health clinic, supporting their words and actions is an appeal to the authority of revealed religion. "Behave as I say because the Bible says so." Liberalism rejects the authority of revealed religion to control public life which is enshrined in our constitution as the separation of church and state. It is important to understand why.
The concept of religious pluralism is still a very young idea and very vulnerable to critique, especially in a time when there is a perceived sense of moral and social disorder in the land. This nation has long struggled with the place of absolute truth in the context of a pluralistic society. As the values of liberalism seem to be on the ropes and civil liberties are threatened by the Religious Right, let us revisit one of the leading deep thinkers of American philosophy, some say THE American philosopher who spoke with strong liberal conviction His name is John Dewey.
Born in 1859 of Vermont farming stock, his father broke with family tradition and went into the grocery business in Burlington. John attended the public schools and then the University of Vermont where his interest in philosophy was kindled. Dewey had a voracious appetite for books and took great pleasure in reading and exploring new ideas. But his passion for reading didn't stop him from enjoying fishing and swimming on Lake Champlain just three blocks from his boyhood home.
After graduation, he taught high school for three years, then attended Johns Hopkins University to do post-graduate work in philosophy, getting his Ph.D. in 1884. His first teaching post was at the University of Michigan, where he developed an interest in the philosophy of education. He was concerned that advances in the newly emergent field of child psychology and the principles of social democracy were not finding their way into the classroom. Interestingly, these were also strong interests of his first wife, Alice, a former student in several of his classes.
Dewey is particularly interesting for us as a philosopher because he began his career a Neo-Hegelian idealist who believed that the sensible world reflected an absolute order. In this view, the world is an imperfect example of the perfection it seeks to emulate. Our goal as human beings is to understand and live in atunement with this greater truth outside lived reality. This view is related to the idea that the wisdom of God can come to us through revelation which describes the truth of the universe more perfectly than we can imperfectly grasp from human observation and experience. Basically, what is true and good on earth reflects the true and good of the universal order of being. We hear echoes of this philosophy in the words of the Pope I offered earlier. A universal absolute to which all life is modeled and should model itself is the prototypical conservative viewpoint.
After he moved to the University of Chicago in 1894 to become chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, his thinking began to change. Science was shaking the world with Darwin's Origin of the Species and advances in psychology were showing the mind much more determined by cause and effect than divine intervention. Moved by the power of scientific inquiry to reveal truth, he let go of holding the ideal of a rationally ordered universe emanating from Absolute Mind and embraced a more empirical, instrumentalist theory of the progress of knowledge which constantly evolved. He rejected the dualism of Absolute Mind and Nature for a theory that nature, encountered in scientific inquiry and ordinary life, is the ultimate reality and we are products of this nature who find their meaning and value in the here and now. We might recognize this as the faith of many Unitarian Universalists.
It was in Chicago that Dewey's social liberalism developed. The turn of the century raw, unrestricted industrialism and the negative effects on large segments of the cities' population moved him to serve as a trustee for Hull House, a settlement house in a Chicago slum area where he saw firsthand the plight of the poor, immigrants and minorities. It was at Hull House he met Jane Addams, the mother of the field of social work, and developed a warm, lasting friendship.
In 1904 he moved to Columbia University where he remained for 47 years until his death in 1952, generating an enormous amount of writing on topics such as epistemology, psychology, education, the fine arts and religion. His analytic skills made him a skilled social commentator writing for The New Republic on the issues of the day.
Dewey was not just a thinker, he was also a man of action. He played an important role in the "outlawry of war" movement after World War I, was one of the founders and first president of the American Association of University Professors, a charter member of the first teacher's union in New York City and an officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, among many other projects he undertook.
Dewey's political liberalism was well grounded in his philosophy. He believed that our values should arise from our experience, rigorously observed and analyzed. He was strongly influenced, as I have mentioned, by the power of the scientific method to uncover truth. This kind of search for truth could not be an individual pursuit alone, but required a scientific community which would replicate and verify one's findings. In science, one doesn't start with an Absolute Truth to be tested, rather, with hypothesis to be proved, experiments to run and evidence to be analyzed. Science starts with a method and uses that method to discover truth. Thus there is a constant progression in the accumulation of knowledge. At no point can one say one has "The Answer", as new answers are always being uncovered. Every theory proved is vulnerable to being refuted or modified with new experiments and evidence. Truth in his system of thinking isn't static, it is dynamic, it is progressive, it is open and evolutionary.
Dewey translates the pursuit of empirical scientific truth into the area of human values in what he describes as "value inquiry." Instead of beginning with a "revealed" understanding of human value, Dewey begins with human experience and evolves his understanding of value out of human experience. The greater the width and depth of our study of human experience, the greater the progress in understanding our human values.
Rather than using a biblical text as proof of God's intent in regard to abortion for example, Dewey would look at the issue pragmatically from a societal perspective, looking for both the good of the social whole and the individual as well as the unborn child. Dewey would try to answer the question from within the system rather than trying to appeal to authority outside the system. He would not listen to one voice or authority, but seek maximal participation in the investigation that tapped the widest range of human understanding. And whatever answer he would find, I suspect, he would not seal it forever under the imprimatur of truth, but rather publish it as our best understanding, always subject to future revision in the light of new evidence and insight.
I am in electronic correspondence with Dr. Howard Callaway, who is a scholar of Dewey's thought and sent me this observation:
Dewey differs from Hegel in rejecting the notion of the Absolute. We can go on producing better values and value claims, better pictures of the common good, for instance, including expansions in light of scientific-technological and cultural development. Still, we cannot predict how this will eventually turn out. History is open. History is no mere internal development of humanity or "spirit;" instead, it crucially requires our interaction with a reality never completely within our control or prediction.Dewey's idea of the good, as an actualization of human potentialities, is integrated into a modern social and political theory which takes better account of democratic developments.
Dr. Callaway's words bring us back to democracy, for which Dewey held a special sense of reverence. He had faith that our investigation of lived experience reflected on in an open democratic forum would guide us best toward the good and the valuable. I submit to you today that his faith in our individual intelligence, pooled wisely and rigorously together, is a root idea of liberalism which separates us from the absolutists who are gaining ascendancy today. In a pluralistic liberally conceived society, we cannot accept the rule of absolutism, and Dewey provides liberalism with a workable vision of how to seek resolutions for the value conflicts which divide us. It must be a democratic process in which there are no a priori right answers. It must draw on evidence which arises from our worldly existence. And it must be argued rationally and persuasively in the public forum. Ultimately the people must decide, seeking counsel from their reason and guidance arising from their own wisdom and understanding.
It was Dewey's faith in the organic evolution of truth through individuals in dialogue that invests great faith in us as participatory agents in the clarification of value and invests the democratic process with philosophical rigor. May our own faith in liberalism be strengthened this morning remembering one of its champions and the legacy of his thought which still serves the liberal cause today.
Copyright (c)1996 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore, All Rights Reserved.