The political
posts that have often filled this blog have led me bit by bit into wondering
how a Pagan perspective, taken seriously, changes the way we think about
politics and society.  The more I
delved into this, the more important the changes seemed to me.  My posts on Western irrationality and
on conservatism were the first installments.  But liberalism also takes on a new look.      

The initial
problem is that even more than conservatism, liberalism has lost its meaning
for many, and become for many simply an emotional word for ‘like’ or ‘dislike,’
usually the latter.  So a little
initial groundwork is necessary – but I promise – only a little.     

At its core,
Liberalism rests on a simple proposition with complex implications: the
individual is society’s fundamental moral and ethical unit.  Its classic statements are by John
Locke and in the Declaration of Independence.  Locke even argued for equality between the sexes to an
unprecedented degree, and also for children’s rights.  The American constitution made no reference to gender
qualifications for voting, and for some decades after it was adopted women and
Blacks voted in a number of northern states.        

The most liberal
of our Founders, such as Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington, were
concerned about the two areas where we contradicted our principles most
grievously: slavery and treatment of Indians, but unsure how to deal with
them.  But at this time even most
Southern leaders opposed slavery, and admitted they did not know how to end
it.  Slavery was ended in 7 of the
13 original states soon after its independence.  Our new country was liberal at its core.     

Today
liberalism has fallen on hard times. For one, liberalism has divided into
different camps, with members of each sometimes denying the others are even
liberals.  These main groups are
classical liberals (who allied with conservatives after World War II), and
egalitarian liberals concerned with equality and managerial liberals concerned
with good scientific management, who are quite different, but are associated
with Democrats.  Given that our
country was founded on liberalism, that so many ignorant Americans have made
the name a symbol for lack of patriotism is more than ironic.  America has increasingly been hijacked
by the ignorant, mostly on the right, but with plenty on the left as well.    

But what about
liberalism and Paganism?   
 In my
view liberalism’s basic principle of the moral primacy of individuals is a
secular statement in harmony with most spiritual teachings, including the most
profound Pagan ones.   All
people have value and no one is intrinsically superior to another.  But liberalism originated in a
Christian culture, and reflects both this general truth and the particular spin
a Christian understanding gave it.    

In my view this has been unfortunate.  Liberalism has been weakened by two key
assumptions imported from Protestant Christianity.      

First, individuals are
regarded as fundamentally distinct from one another – as separate souls.  With Locke and the Founding generation
this separation was moderated by their strong belief in an ultimately moral
universe.  Locke was a liberal
Christian, and most of our Founders were either liberal Christians or
Deists.  But as liberals became
more secular its atomistic framework led to an increasingly narrow emphasis on
self-interest as the appropriate standard for acting, with the ‘self’ defined
quite narrowly.  In a sense, the isolated
Christian soul survived in secular liberal thought, but without the theological
world view that gave it meaning and coherence.  This opened liberalism up to challenge by illiberals who
attacked its “selfishness.”  But
this selfishness was simply a secularized Protestant view of the individual who
stands alone before God.      

Second, liberalism also
accepted that the world existed as a pool of resources for people.  Only humans had moral standing.  Everything else on earth and above it
existed for humans to use.  The
world was like a giant candy store, if only we learned enough science to remove
the wrappers.     

This view fit nicely with the other main current in modernity, that
knowledge existed for power.  The
only difference between these two currents – and it is a crucial one – is that
liberals excluded people as appropriate subjects of power, and illiberal
moderns did not.  As a consequence,
to the degree liberals remained committed to the individual as having moral
weight, liberalism was immune to the turn towards nihilism that the rest of
secular modernity took. But it had little to offer in understanding how to
create a sustainable world once human power and numbers became so great as to
threaten the foundations of the future.     

So liberalism holds two ultimately
Christian ideas that from a Pagan perspective seem to me deeply false.  First, individuals are fundamentally
isolated from one another.  Second,
that we are surrounded by a world of objects without intrinsic value. We are in
the world but not of it.  It also
holds a Christian derived version of an insight that seems to me deeply true:
that individuals are the ultimate unit of social value and moral worth. 

Part II will explore the first problem
in liberalism from a Pagan perspective, and Part III will explore the second.