The stock distinction between the Enlightenment’s twins—communism is violently coercive while liberalism allows freedom of thought—is glib. Any quick survey of images from the Pride parades will show, among the leather daddies and drag queens, a number of revelers wearing miters, wielding rosaries, and cloaking their cause in satirical imagery of the Church. “ The Liturgy of Liberalism.” Its basic thesis is that liberalism is a creed, replete with its own theology, eschatology, a central sacrament, and a whole anti-Christian liturgy. Log in or subscribe to join the conversation. The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societiesby ryszard legutko encounter, 200 pages, $23.99. Both embody the secularized soteriology of the Enlightenment, the narrative of Progress. Illiberal citizens, trapped without exit papers, suffer a narrowing sphere of permitted action and speech, shrinking prospects, and increasing pressure from regulators, employers, and acquaintances, and even from friends and family. Legutko is at his best when explaining, in the manner of Jon Elster, the subtle causal mechanisms that underpin this relentless drive for conformism, which constantly works to extinguish the illiberal. Communism and liberalism feature an odd and distinctive combination of historical determinism and radical Pelagianism. Liberalism needs an enemy to maintain its sacramental dynamism. 269. If ritual is rejected in theory, it will be aped in reality as a kind of compulsion. The forces behind the first Solidarity movement, on Legutko's telling, were not at all uniformly liberal. He thought that he was participating in a legal decision. “The liberal-democratic mind, just as the mind of any true communist, feels an inner compulsion to manifest its pious loyalty to the doctrine. (It is therefore impossible to acknowledge that such voters might have legitimate cultural grievances or even philosophical objections to liberalism.). Freedom is a zero-sum equation: Those who dispute or dissent are not coequal members of a society that values diversity of opinion, they are obstacles to progress, hypocrites against love. It is not the Tridentine Mass … Born in 1949, Legutko is a Polish philosopher and member of the European Parliament who was a dissident under communism and a high minister in the new Polish liberal-democratic state. An unknown error has occurred. Much ink has been spilled of late on the notion of the common good as the first orientation of society. More central to Legutko’s vision, however, is a different point: the essential loneliness of the liberal citizen, which becomes a powerful engine of conformism. The Pride marchers do not want, nor do they intend to stop at, mere freedom or equality. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville described the French Revolution as a religious movement: Ryszard Legutko has now expanded this idea into a book, but he corrects and improves upon Tocqueville in one critical respect. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville described the French Revolution as a religious movement: The ideal the French Revolution set before it was not merely a change in the French social system but nothing short of a regeneration of the whole human race. Born in 1949, Legutko is a Polish philosopher and member of the European Parliament who was a dissident under communism and a high minister in the new Polish liberal-democratic state. Magazine article First Things; A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life. The problem is not just that it might become a precedent and encourage reactionaries on other fronts. They are so error-prone, even from a technocratic point of view, at least in part because they are actually engaged in a non-technocratic enterprise that is pervasively ideological, in the same way that Soviet science was ideological. But liberalism is, above all, magisterial. The nations of Eastern Europe that, having rejected communism, ran pell-mell in the direction of EU-style liberalism betrayed each other and themselves. Repeating the tired canard that Church authorities only care about the public witness of its ministers when they are gay, which is demonstrably false, she reserves the brunt of her ire for the archbishop’s premise—that same-sex marriage is a public witness against the teachings and values of the Church. Under communism, citizens knew “they had to sever, if only verbally, all links with tradition, and to fill the empty space in their souls with the content of the socialist creed.” So too under liberalism: “The void ha[s] to be filled by a new identity.” Individuals forge this new identity by inventing and participating in ecstatic political rituals that aspire to combine perfect equality with perfect freedom. By using our website, you agree to the use of cookies as described in our, {{filterTypeLookup[searchItem.filterType]}}, {{searchTypeLookup[searchItem.searchType]}}, First Things; A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, Primary Sources (Literary and Historical), Full access to this article and over 14 million more from academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, Access to powerful writing and research tools.
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