Nas eleições presidenciais americanas de 1964, coligaram-se em volta do candidato Republicano – Sen. Barry Golwater – um conjunto de correntes políticas diversas e, nalguns casos, aparentemente antagónicas, que vieram a constituir o moderno movimento conservador americano.
Alguns pensadores, nomeadamente Frank Meyer, procuraram criar uma base ideológica que desse uma expressão teórica à coligação eleitoral que tanto sucesso viria a ter nas décadas seguintes (
e que provavelmente só conhecerá o seu fim nas eleições de 2008 – eleições onde os Republicanos se preparam para nomear um candidato pro-choice)).
O
Fusionismo proposto por Frank Meyer viria a gerar um intenso debate entre
liberals,
libertarians e
conservatives. O essencial deste debate é descrito em “
Freedom and Virtue: The conservative-libertarian debate” (Ver Cap. Introdutório
aqui).
Numa anterior encarnação bloguística, fiz já referência a este livro e a este debate, embora já não subscreva tudo o que disse na altura
(a comparação deste post mais antigo com os actuais ilustra a decadência deste escriba).
O texto que de seguida transcrevo:
Freedom or Virtue, foi publicado na edição de 1 de Setembro de 1962 na
National Review. Este texto é considerado por alguns como a melhor crítica tradicionalista à proposta fusionista. Essencialmente, o autor - L. Brent Bozell jr. (ao qual dedicarei um post) – demoliu os pilares sobre os quais Meyer pretendeu erigir o seu fusionismo. (
Meyer respondeu a Bozell num artigo intitulado Why Freedom ?).
O artigo –
Freedom or Virtue ? - está escondido aí por baixo:
FREEDOM or VIRTUE ? [abridged]
L. Brent Bozell, jr
NAtional Review, September 1, 1962
Frank Meyer has labored earnestly in recent years to promote and justify modern American conservatism as a "fusion" of the libertarian and traditionalist points of view. His "Twisted Tree," though it read out of the movement that curious breed of anti-anti-Communist recently spawned by nihilistic libertarianism, was essentially a re statement of the thesis that a symbiosis of the two schools, if the contribution of each is properly understood, is not only possible but necessary. Meyer has been by no means alone in trying to keep order in conservatism's divided house. While he was perhaps the first to identify the contenders generically, and to name the terms for peaceful co-existence, he has been ably seconded by others, notably Stanton Evans, who has made Professor Morton Auerbach's allegations of right-wing schizophrenia ("Do-It-Yourself Conservatism?" NR, January 30, 1962) his special concern. Still others, less persuaded than Meyer and Evans of the theoretical cogency of fusionist apologetics, have helped, too—by bearing their misgivings in silence for the sake of conservative unity.
Now I venture no prediction about the political fate of the Meyer-Evans effort—either as to its ability to hold the conservative movement together, or, more to the point, as to whether it will succeed in midwifing the movement to power. After all, the Liberal collapse is creating a power vacuum into which almost anything might move. I do question, however, whether the libertarian-traditionalist amalgam, as the fusionists define it, is worth bringing to power. For I doubt whether a movement dominated by libertarianism can be responsive to the root causes of Western disintegration. And we should not make any mistake about this. A movement that can accommodate libertarianism's axiom is dominated by it: if freedom is the "first principle" in politics, virtue is, at best, the second one; and the programmatic aspects of the movement that af¬firms that hierarchy will be determined accordingly.
Let us, then, look at the argument by which the fusionists arrive at the primacy of freedom and see whether it is persuasive. If we find the argument wanting, it will then be time to ask whether the theoretical difficulties are worth fretting about.
"The conservative believes," Evans writes, "ours is a God-centered, and therefore an ordered, universe [and] that man's purpose is to shape his life to the patterns of order proceeding from the Divine center of life." Meyer calls this purpose "the transcendent goal of human existence." We may accept these two statements as a fair rendering of the "traditionalist emphasis." Evans adds (and of course Meyer agrees) that man is "hampered" in fulfilling his purpose by "a fallible intellect and vagrant will"—a condition some traditionalists would call original sin.
And now the transition to the "libertarian emphasis." Since he holds these root beliefs, Evans goes on, the "conservative's first concern is that man restrain his appetites by the imperatives of right choice—choice which can take place only in circumstances favoring volition." This is one of the two reasons, he explains (the other we will consider in due course), why "limitation of government power be-comes the highest political objective of conservatism." (The emphasis is mine.) Meyer puts the transition this way: the "fused position...maíntains that the duty of men is to seek virtue; but it insists that men can not in actuality do so unless they are free from the constraints of the physical coercion of an unlimited state."
The argument is fast, and we will do well to slow it down a bit. Note that there are three propositions implicit in what we have just read: A. Man cannot restrain his "appetites" meaningfully—i.e., pursue virtue—without choosing to do so. B. His ability to choose meaningfully and thus to restrain his appetites depends, to a significant degree, on external "circumstances." C. The more these circumstances favor the choice, the better he can restrain his appetites and so achieve virtue; and conversely, as these circumstances become unfavorable, the opportunities for virtue diminish accordingly—and theoretically they can shrink, as Evans' word "only" and Meyer's flat "cannot" suggest, all the way to the zero point.
For the moment we may accept proposition A as true: the sense in which choice may not be necessary to virtue is not germane at this point. Proposition B, however—that the choice necessary to virtue can be affected by external circumstances—deserves our closest attention. It is key: if it is true, then proposition C, with its corollary that limitation of government power should be considered the highest political good, is probably true also; while if it is not true, this particular argument for libertarianism falls to the ground.
Let us go back to Evans' contention that "man's purpose is to shape his life to the [divine] patterns of order" (or Meyer's variant, "the duty of men is to seek virtue") in order to make sure we understand their meaning. And let us ask them, why is this man's purpose and his duty?
I think there are two possible answers to such a question. One is that God desires—for its own sake—a human order that conforms to the transcendent order, and therefore that He measures virtue by the extent to which human action existentially reflects divine norms. But this answer is certainly not the one Meyer and Evans would give. Under such a view of things, man's concern is simply to establish temporal conditions conducive to God-approved human action, and while leaving matters to individual choice may be useful in some instance, there is no a priori need for freedom at all. The other possibility is that God wants man to "prove himself"—or, in Christian terms, to earn salva¬tion. This we may assume, until they tell us otherwise, is exactly Meyer's and Evans' meaning. (While there is a formidable taboo against using religious terminology in political discussions, we will do well to disregard it for the moment if we want to grasp the problem, at root a theologi¬cal one, that fusionists, and I think conservatives in gen¬eral, are ultimately concerned with.)
Now if earning salvation is what we are talking about, we will have to face up to the problem of whether it is possible for one man to damage another man's chances for it—e.g., by restricting the exercise of his freedom.
Christian teaching is generally to the contrary. How so? It postulates a free will. In doing so, it presupposes a psychological situation in which the intellect entertains conflicting "appetites," or "goods," as alternative courses of action—and turns them over to the will for selection. These alternatives are seldom, if ever, presented for judgment solely on their merits: the choice is invariably "loaded," in the sense that every good carries along with it a certain amount of baggage—the sanctions imposed by habit, education, laws and whatnot—that, in net effect, weights the scales toward one alternative or the other. The mystery of freedom which we feel, or take on faith, but cannot demonstrate is that in spite of these sanctions an element of spontaneity remains. And when this spontaneity (Christian teaching goes on) figures in the selection of the greater" good over the "lesser" one, as determined by each man's conscience, merit accrues and a step has been taken toward salvation.
But this is simply another way of saying that morally significant choice is a psychic event. The good will is the will that adverts to the "better" object as defined by conscience; and it does not cease to be good when it is unable, because of external circumstances, to convert that psychic com¬mitment into action. The good will of the man who wants to go to church on Sunday—and would if he could—is not defeated by the "circumstance" that the churches in his country have been shut down. Neither is his virtue dimin¬ished, nor his claim to salvation impaired. Moreover—a second dispensation—while the choice spectrum will vary widely from individual to individual both in quality and quantity (variances that can indeed be caused by external circumstances), such disparities are not significant in this context: the fact that the choices open to a Papuan are few and unappetizing to our own palates does not cheat him of reward—or penalty—for such choices as he is called upon to make.
What we are saying, then, is that the freedom that is necessary to virtue is presumably a freedom no man will ever be without. Morally significant freedom is merely an aspect of the human condition: it is indispensable, but it is also inalienable. The Soviet citizen is every bit as "free" to earn salvation as his American counterpart; he will "prove himself," or fail to, in an area that is beyond the reach of the KGB. And while there is nothing arresting about this presumption—surely it is among the most ordinary of theological commonplaces—it must have tremendous im¬plications for political theory.
For if moral freedom is beyond the reach of politics, surely politics has better things to do than making the preservation of moral freedom its chief preoccupation.
But perhaps we are moving too fast. Let us try to anticipate the fusionists' reply. They will not, I think, deny that salvation is what they have in mind. But they probably will protest that salvation was not all they have in mind. And the protest will very likely develop along these lines:
Granted that man's first purpose is to get to Heaven, and granted, too, that God's justice guarantees every man a fair opportunity to get there: still—God does not want to see a race of stunted men hobbling across the line. After all, man has some value qua man. He is brimming with potentiali¬ties for living, working, creating—for understanding: God made him that way; surely it is God's will that these potentialities be fulfilled. However—the voice of the Renaissance goes on—in order to explore, to understand, to realize these potentialities man must be free—free to walk the depths of hell or scale the pinnacles of sublimity on his own two feet. For society to try to assist man in this adventure, either with its hobbles or with its crutches, is to deny him the opportunity to be a whole man: a man. And by that token he is denied access to true virtue. As Meyer explains: "the simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil." (The emphasis is mine.)
Very well. Let us agree for the moment that virtue is not necessarily to be equated with the merit that qualifies for salvation—that there is, in other words, a second order of virtue, which we may call humanistic virtue since it constitutes the fulfillment of man's human nature. Let us, however, make sure we understand the rules of the game of this second realm, as they are understood by Meyer and others who would have us accept libertarianism's "first principle." The question of divorce will do as well as any other for this purpose. Meyer, one gathers from his writings, takes a sacramental view of marriage, and so considers the preservation of it to be a virtuous act. He is therefore qualified to help us solve the following problem:
X, an American, has tired of his wife; under the laws of his state, he has ample grounds for divorce; remarriage prospects are bright; his friends and professional associates would be sympathetic with the decision. Yet, after duly considering such factors, he decides against divorce on the grounds it is—"wrong."
Y, a Spaniard, has tired of his wife; Y is unable to get a divorce in his own country and to travel to France would impose a formidable economic burden; remarriage pros¬pects in Spain, in any event, are nil; anyway his religion forbids it—as does his whole tradition; what is more, he would face a heavy measure of social ostracism; in short, Y dismisses the idea without giving it a second thought. Query: by deciding to preserve his marriage, who—X or Y—has acted more virtuously? Meyer's answer (and who would disagree?): X of course. His decision was the tougher by far; Y's choice was almost reflexive, was not therefore really "free" at all.
And it follows—does it not?—that if we are seriously interested in maximizing opportunities for virtue, some-thing will have to be done about Spain. Her laws, traditions, customs interfere with freedom. They are "crutches"—kick them away. And in the United States, conditions are not entirely satisfactory either. We will want to make our own divorce laws even laxer. We will also want to launch a public education campaign (privately endowed of course) aimed at breaking down residual social prejudices; and perhaps, to help overcome the mechanical difficulties, a special fund could be set aside for periodic newspaper notices advising dissatisfied spouses of the most conve¬nient cut-rate agency or mail order house. We will do our best, in other words, to reduce the "constraints" of "superior power," confident that if Mr. X can stick by his guns under these conditions, he will really be virtuous. It is not that we favor divorce, mind you; it is just that we want virtuous men.
Is the reductio ad absurdum unfair? On the contrary: I submit that the inner logic of the dictum that virtue-not freely-chosen is not virtue at all leads inescapably to the burlesque of reason we have suggested. If freedom is the "first principle" of the search for virtue, if as Meyer writes at another point, it is "the precondition of a good society," then, by definition, there is no superior principle that can be invoked, at any stage, against the effort to maximize freedom—there is no point at which men are entitled to stop hauling down the "props" which every rational society in history has erected to promote a virtuous citizenry. (True, the libertarian view permits measures for preserv¬ing the public order—the argument that no man should have the liberty to deny another man liberty; our point is that it permits none for the purpose of encouraging and aiding virtue.)
The libertarian may object that it is only state props that he wants to dismantle—that those created by tradition, custom, religion, in other words, are permissible under certain conditions. But on his own showing he has no business making such a distinction. There are, of course, vital differences between "state" and "social" sanctions, but they have no bearing on the argument in question here—namely, that maximum freedom of choice is essen¬tial to individual virtue. For as we have seen earlier, restriction of free choice consists in sanctions of various kinds that accompany alternative courses of action as they are presented to the will. But the relative strength of these sanctions, obviously, is not necessarily a function of their source. Social disapproval can be as persuasive a deterrent against scribbling on walls as the threat of a legal fine; habit and education will often "load" the choice against stealing more effectively than the larceny laws. In short, libertarianism's first command—maximize freedom applies with equal vigor to all of society's activities; and the meaning of the command, in effect, is this: virtue must be made as difficult as possible. While only a few men, if any, can be expected to meet the challenge successfully, the proliferation of unvirtuous acts in the objective order is one of the prices that must be paid for the fulfillment of heroic man....
Now there is nothing to prevent the fusionists from arguing that this command is conducive, as Meyer puts it, to "a political and social order in accord with the constitution of being." But Meyer is not speaking of the constitution of being envisioned by the Christian metaphysic. If there is any metaphysical basis for such a view of life, it is the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre—the doctrine that man is all potentiality, i.e., all freedom. In the existentialist view, man has no inherent nature—no essence—and therefore no end other than to work out a nature from his potentialities, each man for himself. In the beginning, this is an optimistic view of life, full of the spirit of individual adventure and creativity, and it ends in despair because the burden of autonomy—since it is not ordained by the true constitution of being—is too heavy.
The Christian metaphysic, by contrast, attributes to man a preformed nature, one that is ultimately defined transcendentally in terms of his origin and destiny. Man's nature, moreover, is totally integrated with that of the rest of being, so that a common effort is envisioned on the part of all creation to conform to what Evans calls the "patterns of order." Man's nature is such, however, that he, uniquely among created beings, has the capacity to deviate from the patterns of order—to, as it were, repudiate his nature: i.e., he is free. So viewed, freedom is hardly a blessing; add the ravages of original sin and it is the path to disaster. It follows that if individual man is to have any hope of conforming with his nature, he needs all of the help he can get. That is why the role of grace is so vital to the Christian view of things, not only supernatural grace, but the natural grace that springs forth from man's constructs: his institutions, his customs, his laws—the ones that have been inspired by his better angel and that remain in time to give nourishment to all the human race. And that, in turn, is why the Christian view, which begins in despair, ends in optimism.
"Go...and teach all nations." These are the marching orders of Christianity, and, from a theological viewpoint, its central operational command. God's purpose, if we may put it so, is twofold: to give the widest possible access to supernatural grace—that is, to magnify the Christian Church; and to establish temporal conditions conducive to human virtue—that is, to build a Christian civilization. The latter purpose is the genesis and justification for the notion that Western civilization, being the historical fruit of the Incarnation—and so, in a manner of speaking, "God's civilization"—must be preserved at all costs, and itself magnified. There is not a drop of chauvinism in the idea, for it has to do entirely—as the classicists taught—with the relationship between the good commonwealth and the virtuous man. When a commonwealth builds according to the divine patterns of order, then it is in a position to help man conform to his nature, which is the meaning of virtue. The institutions the commonwealth promotes are the important thing—its family arrangements, its schools, its churches, the kind of government it has; for all of these combine to generate what Willmore Kendall calls its public orthodoxy.
Now to the extent a public orthodoxy tends to reflect the divine patterns of order, it also tends to encourage a virtuous citizenry. Of course such external induce¬ments to virtue can never be entirely, or even very, successful: to suppose that through man's artifacts the human race, or any member of it, can be perfected in history is to partake of the modern gnosticism upon which both Liberalism and Communism are grounded. But such inducements can ease the way to virtue. That is the reason for the marching orders.
Which invites reconsideration of an earlier question: Is worthwhile" novel at his book store, though—let us postulate such a weakness—if a well-advertised volume of pornography had not been banned by the state, he would have picked it up instead.
Now these acts are, in turn—a) reflexive, b) instinctive, c) coerced by state power. Yet each of them, in itself, is a virtuous act if man's virtue consists in conducting himself in conformity with his nature, with the divine patterns of order.
We may go further, since man will always have sufficient moral freedom, i.e., sufficient occasions for "proving himself'—and even for doing so heroically; and since these occasions are basically traceable to his corruption, the ideal to which man should aspire is to minimize such occasions—to develop the kind of character that will generate virtuous acts as a matter of course. For as the mystics tell us, true sanctity is achieved only when man loses his freedom—when he is freed of the temptation to displease God.
We may now turn to the second reason, on the fusionists' showing, why limitation of government power would be our "highest political objective." And we may agree that it is a "second" argument inasmuch as it proceeds from fundamentally different premises from those that posit political freedom as an absolute requirement for personal virtue. By the same token, however, it does not warrant the absolutist conclusions libertarians claim for it.
Mr. Evans put the argument thus: "...the reign of appetite is most destructive, and the incentives and opportunities for its exercise most plentiful, when fallible man is endowed with unlimited power over his fellow beings. If a man is corrupted in mind and impulse, he is hardly to be trusted with the unbridled potencies of the state." Evans adds that the American Constitution reflects this view inasmuch as it is "premised upon a deep distrust of human nature and [is] designed to curb its excesses."
Now if we may read "the reign of appetite" to mean the ascendancy of non-virtue in the objective order (as op-posed to the "reign" of personal sinfulness), then the argument that unlimited state power is conducive to that ascendancy is, other things being equal, unexceptionable. For now the argument is focused on the effects unlimited power is likely to have on those who exercise it, and derivatively on the damage they are likely to do the commonwealth they govern. And we are looking at nothing more than a restatement of Lord Acton's adage that "power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." But note that Acton did not try to convert this essentially prudential judgment about the dangers of government power into an absolute rule for restricting government power. He did not, that is to say—and neither should we—commit the elementary logical fallacy of turning the proposition, "the state that governs most will govern worst," into the proposition, "the state that governs least will govern best."
If the judgment is a prudential one, the question in every case will be: Will this grant of this power, in this instance, for this object, produce a net good for the individual members of the commonwealth? Such a question will take into account the objections libertarians regularly, and usually wisely, interpose to accretions of state power: government will do the job badly; one aggrandizement will lead to another; a concession today will make it harder to stand firm tomorrow; and so on. And a thousand times more often than not—given the kind of claims government makes these days—the prudent decision will be against the grant of power and in favor of leaving the individual and private groups on their own. But not always. The good common-wealth, taking the measure of its governors, and the prospects for their corruption, may charge them with, say, building roads, or maintaining a postal system, or passing anti-obscenity laws, or giving tax-exemption to its churches.
This is not to say (for I would hope not to be understood as endorsing theocracy) that the good commonwealth will charge the state with discovering and defining the elements of virtue. Rather, it will look upon the state merely as one potential instrument among many others for articulating and thus defending the community consensus about such things; and while prudence will dictate severe limitations even on this role, prudence does not go so far, I am saying, as to forbid acknowledgment of God's existence in the state's schools.
Once we have decided to view the dangers of state power as but one element among others—a very important one, to be sure—in a prudential judgment about the requirements of the good commonwealth, we have made considerable headway in our thinking about how to build such a commonwealth. We have, that is to say, liberated the discussion from the ideological straitjacket in which libertarian dogma confines it—the dogma about the "natural functions" of the state. These are, as Meyer never tires of telling us, [1] the preservation of domestic peace and order, [2] the administration of justice, and [3] defense against foreign enemies. Any activities beyond these three, according to the argument, are by definition—and so without further discussion—evil.
I do not think Meyer or the other fusionists will ever be able to explain to the uninitiated the mystery of the trinitarian state—except, possibly, in terms of the argument for heroic freedom we have already considered. They will certainly not be able to explain on the strength of an organic view of man and society why, e.g., it is "natural" for the state to lock up a thief, and "unnatural" for the state to launch a program against juvenile delinquency. Nor—assuming that what actually happens in the real world has some bearing on what is "natural"—can they realistically hypothesize future conditions under which the trinitarian concept will be adopted; nor point to any past moment in history when men have actually organized a society in this way; nor cite any serious thinker in back of the nineteenth century who has suggested men try to do so. In short, the dogma of ritualistic libertarianism is hardly less far from reality than that of ritualistic Liberalism, and it presents the same kind of barriers to acquiring wisdom about the good commonwealth.
This is perhaps the place to nail the notion, so often advanced by the fusionists, that the American Constitution is an expression of the libertarian-traditionalist compromise—i.e., that in the name of accommodating human nature, the Constitution underwrites the archly limited state. On the face of it, it is the purest fancy to suggest that American constitutional theory has anything in common with the libertarian teaching about the threefold function of the genus state. The individual American States, let us remember, marched into the Constitutional Convention with full sovereign powers—the three Meyer mentions plus several dozen others he does not; and the problem to which the convention delegates so brilliantly addressed them-selves was how to organize and distribute those powers so as to promote their most beneficial exercise. The framers' governing principle was, of course, the one often attributed to Madison: that concentration of power leads to its abuse. And the remedy they invoked was also Madison's: the way to block the pernicious ambitions of "factions," Madison argued, is to distribute power as widely as possible within clearly defined boundaries. (While it is true that subsequent judicial construction of the Constitution, making the Bill of Rights applicable to the States, seems to place some powers altogether out of bounds—even these proscriptions are not absolute, as a glance at the Constitution's amending clause will quickly verify.)
Under the American system of government, in other words, the genus state—with its municipal, state, and national offices, and its popular residuary—potentially has plenary powers. Felicitously, under the original concept, these powers were distributed in a fashion that closely approximates the principle of subsidiarity—the idea that the quest for the common good begins with the individual man and will ascend to increasingly collectivized levels only under necessity, and always with a prudential concern for the dangers of going higher. In short, much freedom was envisioned by the founders of such a system because freedom is highly useful in achieving the good common-wealth. But there is not a hint of the ideology of freedom in what they produced—not a word suggesting that freedom is the goal of the commonwealth.
It is a mistake to make demi-gods out of the framers, or to read as a piece of scripture what they wrote. But, as perhaps the only group of men in modern history to have set their minds to the task of constructing a common-wealth on the basis of prudence, and therefore free from ideology, they deserve considerable reverence, and are a fit object for imitation.
Existem vários livros sobre os mártires chineses e sobre o milagre da sobrevivência e crescimento da Igreja na China comunista nos últimos 50 anos (este, p.ex.). À semelhança do que ocorreu na Roma de Nero, também na China o sangue dos mártires tem sido semente de cristãos.
"Tu és Pedro, e sobre esta Pedra edificarei a minha Igreja, e as portas do Abismo nada poderão contra ela.
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