(a) Though it is true that some Catholics and Freudians (or post-Freudians) are to be numbered in the liberal army, there is often a little uneasiness, on both sides, on this score. On a mass scale, Catholics are comparatively recent recruits to liberalism. The older generation of bluestocking liberals are glad to welcome such impressive contingents to the camp of virtue, but they can’t help remaining just a bit suspicious; and this is in part because of a feeling that there is something wrong, from a liberal standpoint, with the Catholic theory about human nature and man’s fate. This feeling is strong enough to lead some liberals—like Paul Blanshard and his Committee for the Separation of Church and State—to steer altogether clear of Catholics. Nearly all liberals keep their ideological fingers crossed when they observe such a group as the Jesuits beginning to sound like liberals, as the American Jesuits have often done of late in the pages of their principal magazine, America. The wisest liberals are not surprised, and reassured in their own faith, when, after saying all the proper things about social reforms and right-wing extremists, America suddenly reverts, as it did in 1962, to reactionary prejudice when it has to comment on a Supreme Court decision banning prayer in public schools.
It is noteworthy that Americans for Democratic Action, one of the leading congregations of liberal fundamentalism, was at first most unhappy about the prospect of the nomination of the Catholic John F. Kennedy to the Presidency—even though scores of ADA members were soon to find themselves occupying high posts in the Kennedy administration. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., an ADA founder and leader, estimated that less than 10 percent of the ADA membership was pro-Kennedy at the start of 1960. In September 1959, a memorandum by Allen Taylor, director of the New York State ADA chapter, recorded: “Religion is the major element in the liberals’ doubt about Kennedy.”5
A Freudian, too, can disturb the liberal waters. Max Lerner is in practice a somewhat maverick ranger in the liberal formation, far less reliable than, say, his columnar teammate, James Wechsler. Occasionally Mr. Lerner gets way out of line with the liberal consensus.
(b) Many individuals professing belief in a religious doctrine of Original Sin, or such theories of human nature as Freud’s, give their view a modified or metaphorical interpretation that brings it sufficiently into accord with the requirements of liberal theory and practice—rather as believers in the Bible have been able to reinterpret their understanding of Genesis to reconcile it, psychologically at least, with the theory of evolution. This process is eased by the fact that general beliefs about human nature are not precise anyway; their meaning may be more to express attitudes toward life than to make verifiable assertions.
(c) Nonetheless, there undoubtedly are many cases where a given individual is logically committed by his religion or by psychological or biological theory to one view of human nature and by his liberalism to an incompatible view. Of such cases, we can only note that human beings are like that. They are seldom fully consistent in their beliefs; and are often committed to many a contradiction. To most people this is not particularly troublesome; they are usually not aware of the contradictions, and in any case they don’t take logical precision very seriously.
(d) However varied may be the combination of beliefs that it is psychologically possible for an individual liberal to hold, it remains true that liberalism is logically committed to a doctrine along the lines that I have sketched: viewing human nature as not fixed but plastic and changing; with no pre-set limit to potential development; with no innate obstacle to the realization of a society of peace, freedom, justice and well-being. Unless these things are true of human nature, the liberal doctrine and program for government, education, reform and so on are an absurdity. To this logical necessity, Chapter VIII will return.
2. The liberal ideology is rationalist. Professor Oakeshott, as I have mentioned, classifies liberalism as simply a special case of what may be called in general, “rationalism.” Reason, according to rationalism, is not only what distinguishes man in logical definition from other species, as Aristotle stated (though meaning something rather different by “reason”); reason is man’s essence, and in a practical sense his chief and ultimately controlling characteristic. Liberalism is confident that reason and rational science, without appeal to revelation, faith, custom or intuition, can both comprehend the world and solve its problems.
The liberal as rationalist is described by Professor Oakeshott: “He stands . . . for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of ‘reason.’ His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once skeptical and optimistic: skeptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his ‘reason’; optimistic, because the rationalist never doubts the power of his ‘reason’ (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action.”6
The rationalism enters into the definition of human nature, as Professor Schapiro explains: “In general, liberals have been rationalists [holding] the conviction that man is essentially a rational creature. . . . What is known as rationalism endeavors, by using reason, to subject all matters, religious as well as non-religious, to critical inquiry. The rationalist looks primarily to science for enlightenment. Reason . . . is his mentor. Hence, what cannot stand the test of reason is not to be accepted.”7 Professor Sidney Hook has squeezed the entire definition of liberalism into a single unintentionally ironic phrase: “faith in intelligence.”
3. Since there is nothing in essential human nature to block achievement of the good society, the obstacles thereto must be, and are, extrinsic or external. The principal obstacles are, specifically, as liberalism sees them, two: ignorance—an accidental and remediable, not intrinsic and essential, state of man; and bad social institutions.
4. From these doctrines of human plasticity and rationality and of the external, remediable character of the obstacles to the good society, there follows belief in progress: what might be called historical optimism.
The idea of progress had its purest expression during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but it is present in one form or another, along with one or another degree of historical optimism, throughout the family history of liberalism, from Francis Bacon and René Descartes to Senator Hubert Humphrey. If mankind would employ his method, Bacon promised, it would be able to “extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe”; disdaining “the unfair circumscription of human power, and . . . a deliberate factitious despair,” human life will “be endowed with new discoveries and power.”8 By his method, Descartes explained, any man, merely using the reason native to him as a human being, could discover all truths.9 The Marquis de Condorcet explains his purpose with aristocratic candor: “The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write, and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection. . . . Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us.”10
As it took charge of the French Revolution, the Jacobin Club announced “the reign of Virtue and Reason” not only over France but soon to spread over the entire globe; and Robespierre actually crowned the Goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral. (The young girl who was the Goddess’ fleshly avatar for the occasion subsequently disappointed her worshipers by marrying a rather ordinary fellow and producing several bouncing babies.) Robert Owen proposed a world convention that would “emancipate the human race from ignorance, poverty, division, sin and misery.” The British Fabian Society launched itself in 1883 “for the reconstruction of society according to the highest moral principles.”
In our own day, Americans for Democratic Action keeps the torch alight. The 1962 Program offers ADA’s self-definition as “an organization of liberals, banded together to work for freedom, justice and peace. Liberalism, as we see it, is a demanding faith [and] the goals of liberalism are affirmative: [not only] the fulfillment of the free