I recently read the book The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It – How To Get It Back by Andrew Sullivan. I had picked it up on the advice of a review in the New York Times Book Review, and found is fascinating. In the book, Sullivan outlines the case for the difference he perceives between traditional conservatism, to which he adheres, and the fundamentalism that has of late taken over the Republican Party in the United States.
The book describes the risks inherent in creating the first fundamentally religious political party in America. Sullivan discusses the many ways that Bush and his compatriots have moved far away from traditional conservative government: they have increased the government’s size and reach to new heights, have boosted government spending and the national debt to record levels, have condoned torture, have ignored laws passed by Congress, and have been indicted for bribery. In his view, traditional conservatives (after the model of Ronald Regan or Margaret Thatcher) support the idea of limited government, balanced budgets, individual liberty, and the rule of law.
A significant part of the book deals with his own religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic who is at odds with the current climate of fundamentalism prevalent in the Vatican. He says that doubt is at the heart of Christianity (and conservatism), and that this leads to a healthy skepticism. On the other hand, fundamentalism teaches that there is only black and white Truth – a gray area is unacceptable, based on natural law. This exists in any kind of fundamentalist state, Christian or Muslim. Sullivan argues in opposition:
…our religion, our moral life, is simply what we do. It is how we are. it cannot be reduced to a doctrine or a book, although it may find intermittent or even continual inspiration from both. A Christian, in other words, is not a Christian simply because he agrees to conform his life to some set of external principles or dogmas; or because at one particular moment in his life, he experienced a rupture and changed himself entirely. He is a Christian primarily because he acts like one. He loves and forgives; he listens and prays; he contemplates and befriends; his faith and his life fuse into an unself-conscious unity that both affirms a tradition of moral life and yet also makes it his own.
Conservatives allow people to live their lives with true freedom of choice, and it is not government’s job to impose a particular moral framework. The intention of the founding fathers was for the constitution to keep the government weak and also separate from religious morals and values. This separation is not acceptable to a fundamentalist because he:
…is always positing an external moral ideal that he must necessarily fail to attain – because he is human. it is outside himself and his job is to internalize it. Fundamentalism as a way of life is therefore as series of ruptures and reforms. It is a cycle of attempts to conform to an external, eternal ideal, and to repeat the process of sin, redemption and sin again indefinitely … For the fundamentalist, a human being’s internal compass, what he has absorbed simply by being who he is, is always suspect – because the self is sinful and must always be subject to correction from the outside. And so the fundamentalist learns to distrust himself, to wrest himself from certain habits, to conform what might have been his personality into a persona that is a vessel for something far greater than himself. Rather than learning from others, he may regards others a moral dangers, who themselves need constant monitoring and correction. And so he does what he can to lose himself in God, or rather in an idea of God, buried in an ancient text, or upheld by an infallible pope, imposed by other humans, and monitored by them.
That is not to say that morals and values have no place in society, but that they should be taught privately. Government’s primary job is to guarantee personal security so that that all citizens can equally enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Conservatives focus on means rather than ends, unlike a fundamentalist, and the key is the progress that we are making along a path that always has many different choices, and we need to have the freedom to choose from among them.
Of course, there are some of his arguments that I would take issue with. One of them is outlined here:
“There are many who often invoke the rhetorical bromides of “freedom” but, when pressed, acknowledge that no such thing really exists. The fundamentalist believes that humans have freedom – but only to choose the good; and he believes that a government dedicated to upholding that good, whether deduced from God or his own version of “nature,” has every right, and, in fact, a duty to ensure that as many citizens as possible achieve that good. And so laws are designed to encourage virtue and discourage vice. Freedom is limited and conditional. A socialist will argue that freedom is an illusion to those people who begin with a material disadvantage, and that the state must act to remedy such a disadvantage before freedom can truly exist. The poor are not free, he argues. Those who are at the bottom of the heap of human inequality deserve substantive aid to equalize the system. And so he wants a system of redistributive justice to ensure “real” freedom.
A conservative, in contrast, will be skeptical of both arguments. he’ll want to know from the fundamentalist who exactly came up with this “good.” He’ll ask why he should adhere to a view of virtue which is deduced from a religion he doesn’t share or from a “nature” he doesn’t recognize as his own. He’ll ask the socialist, in turn, why he is being forced to give up his own money and property for the sake [of] an ideal of substantive equality that sounds like a surreal fantasy to him … So what is freedom for a conservative? It rests, as Hobbes intuited, on being secure in one’s own physical existence, and in accepting the fact that others exist who are just as human as we are, and, in political life, deserve equal treatment under the law.
I would take much more of the socialist approach that he seems to regard as a fantasy land. Interestingly, my socialism comes directly from my own Christian faith, and a belief that a better world for all human beings is possible. In fact, I see it as a gospel imperative. Despite differences such as this, I do feel that he is someone that I could have a productive conversation with. This is certainly not a feeling I get from Republican fundamentalists, but also others in both parties serving in politics today.
