The truth about freedom.

Catholic Insight has written repeatedly about the threats to Liberal Democracy which result from the current political and philosophical environment. To show that this is by no means a Canadian problem only, we reprint from The Tablet (March 31, 2001) a shortened, edited text of a recent address to British parliamentarians in London by the American Catholic philosopher George Weigel. (Reprinted with permission)

Five years ago, in his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Pope John Paul II described the quest for freedom as "one of the great dynamics of human history." That quest, the Pope insisted, is "not limited to any one part of the world", nor is it "the expression of any single culture". The worldwide reach of this movement, he said, confirms "that there are indeed universal human rights, rooted in the nature of the person, rights which reflect the objective and inviolable demands of a universal moral law".

How stands the cause of freedom, five years later? Democracy and the free economy are not machines that will run by themselves. The free society will only remain free if the virtues necessary for freedom are alive and well, in and among political communities. It takes a certain kind of people to make political freedom serve the ends of justice; it takes a certain kind of people to discipline and direct the remarkable energies set loose by the free economy. Without the habits of mind and heart that link freedom to truth and goodness, the free economy will produce what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the "permissive cornucopia", and democracy will decay into new forms of manipulation and oppression. That is why the primary mission of lay Christian leaders in the world of politics and in the international community is to teach, witness to, and embody the truth that freedom is not a matter of doing what we like, but rather of having the right to do what we ought.

Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, it seemed as if the cause of freedom, often identified with the democratic project, was irresistible. As I look out into the first quarter of the twenty-first century, however, it seems to me that the democratic project itself is under internal assault, politically, philosophically, and technologically.

Internal assaults

The political threat to the democratic future involves the increasing role of the unelected judges and international bureaucrats in settling basic issues of public policy. This practice diminishes and demeans democracy. The judicial and bureaucratic usurpation of politic on the life issues of abortion and euthanasia, and in the definition of marriage, is taking place on both the national and international places, often in response to activist non-governmental organisations which cannot achieve their goals through legislation. Through this process, wrongs are being proclaimed as "rights", and the tools of law are being deployed to do evil, to justify evil, and to compel cooperation with evil. Here is the clearest example to date of what John Paul II has warned against: democracies deteriorating into thinly-disguised totalitarian systems.

Philosophy

This political threat is closely linked to the philosophical threat to the democratic project, which is the prevalence in the public life of Western societies of a soft utilitarianism married to a concept of freedom as radical personal autonomy. But freedom-as-personalwilfulness, coupled with radical scepticism about the possibility of our knowing the moral truth of things, is ultimately incompatible with democratic self-government. If there is only "my truth" and "your truth", and neither of us recognises a transcendent horizon of truth by which we agree to settle our differences when our "truths" are in conflict, then one of two things will happen: either I will impose my will on you, or you will impose your will on me. Press that method of settling difference far enough, and we find ourselves, rather abruptly, at the end of democracy.

Biotechnologies

The political threat to the democratic future and the philosophical threat, often intersect in the many urgent questions posed for politics and the international community by the new biotechnologies. The Human Genome Project and related developments hold out the prospect of extending and enriching lives by early-detection techniques and precisely-designed vaccines, and ultimately correcting the genetic defects that lead to sickle-cell anaemia, Huntington's Disease, and various cancers.

Yet the new genetic knowledge and the power of the new biotechnologies also carry within them the temptation to re-manufacture the human condition by re-manufacturing human beings. Unless that temptation is resisted, the world will suffer the kind of dehumanisation that was once imagined only by novelists. Crossing the threshold of the twenty-first century, we face the mindless, soulless authoritarianism depicted in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

St. Thomas More

In confronting the challenge that this brave new world poses for human freedom, men and women in public affairs have a powerful model in St. Thomas More, recently proclaimed the patron of statesmen and politicians--and, by extension, the patron of all those engaged in public life. Contrary to the image created by the play and film, A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More was not a martyr for the primacy of conscience, if by conscience is meant freedom as radical personal autonomy. Thomas More was a martyr for Christian truth, the truth that man cannot be sundered from God, or politics from morality, as John Paul II put it last November.

Not all Christians are called to be "martyrs" in the strict sense of being called to suffer death for Christ and the Gospel. But all Christians are called by their baptism to be "martyrs" in the original Greek sense of "witnesses". Thus, Christian politicians, statesmen, and citizens engaged in the public debates that are the lifeblood of democracy are called to be witnesses to the truth about the human person, human community, human origins, and human destiny. In witnessing to that truth, in charity, we may hope to rebuild the moral foundations of the house of freedom--to persuade the political world of the twenty-first century that the future of freedom requires reclaiming and renewing the idea of freedom as a matter of having the right to do what we ought to do.

George Weigel is senior fellow, John M. Olin Chair in Religion and American Democracy, at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. His splendid biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope, is published by Harper Collins, 1999.