Blogging is still going to be very light over the next day or two. In the meantime, take a look at Prof. Fox on Red Toryism, John Schwenkler on the Linker-Bacevich debate, and Linker’s response to Prof. Deneen. My comment on the debate today is to note that Linker is correct that a society where freedom is rightly understood in terms of obedience would not be a liberal society, which is rather the whole point of conservatives’ critiquing the problems and failings of liberal society. Speaking for myself, it would be pointless to pretend that my understanding of freedom as obedience is not derived directly from Christian doctrine and specifically from Orthodox tradition. Whether this is strictly necessary or not in order to understand freedom in this way, its connection to traditional Christianity is hardly something that needs to be concealed or denied. In the end, this is what worries Linker about Bacevich and Deneen and the rest of us “radicals.” It is not that, as he claimed before, that we are hostile to “the human condition itself,” but rather to the disordered state of fallen human nature that a certain sort of liberalism celebrates as normal.

There is also Linker’s accusation that Bacevich and Deneen don’t really reject the “culture of choice,” but simply object to certain kinds of choices, which is a common refrain I have heard countless times in the often futile debates over “crunchy” conservatism. “You are just imposing your own preferences on us,” the criticism goes, which is what you would expect to hear from people who cannot grasp or do not accept that there is a natural order that is not concerned with whether you would prefer to live a certain way or not. There are limits built into our nature and into the nature of things that point to the cultivation of virtue as the sane course, but as long as we believe it to be in our power to manipulate and control nature we will delude ourselves into believing that these limits can be stretched indefinitely without consequences. Acting contrary to nature will bring its own costs, regardless of what one does or does not prefer.

Of course, there will have to be someone or some body enforcing discipline to a degree, and if Linker wants to water down and redefine authoritarianism enough to classify this as authoritarian I suppose he can do so. It is a measure of how limited and poor our understanding of politics is nowadays that the only thing Linker envisions as an alternative to laissez-faire morality is legalistic intrusion into personal behavior by the government. This fails to take into account the possibility of social regulation through customs and concepts of honor mediated through natural and religious institutions. Social stigma, reputation, protecting the family name–these are decidedly not part of the “culture of choice,” according to which none of these things has any real importance, but they are effective means of conditioning behavior without recourse to coercion or an appeal to the law.