metonymy4u

In 1651 the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote in what we think of as the classical liberal tradition of political philosophy. His was the notion that humans require society because left to a state of nature we are incomplete–being fundamentally unruly, aggressive, unmanageable and miserable. Liberalism posits that the role of government is therefore to enforce an implied social contract by which people come together for mutual aid and protection against the forces of nature, including the un-tamed forces of other people’s desires and brutalities. Thus government and society liberate humans from the misery of their natural state and bestow the possibility of something more than “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” It is interesting to me how classical liberalism is in many ways a secular echo of the medieval Christian church. Because ever since St. Augustine, Christianity had also seen humans as living in a desperate state, badly in need of transformation, protection and salvation. The holy sacraments, like the social contract, are also here to save us from a state of incompleteness and sin. The traditional pillars of the church–baptism, submission, prayer, holy communion–all of these are aimed at enclosing the individual in a sanctified community protected from the untamable urges of human nature. Sin and nature are transformed by rituals proclaimed by the Christ whose universal (Catholic) church redeems the imperfect body through ritual washing and anointing, by regulating the calendars of existence, and by sanctioning communal feasting on the divine corpus itself. In liberalism no place remains for what the romantic authors of the 19th century ardently defended as an equally valid model of human nature: a nature that is itself worthwhile, vigorous, creative, and life affirming. A human nature that need not be transformed, sanctified, regulated, observed or redeemed from within or without. This is why romanticism is often the enemy of both liberalism and Christianity. They insult what romantics hold so dearly in their dreams of life. Life which is virtuous itself and to itself being alone, naked, vigorous and vital.