Slooooow start. But I'll keep trying! Thanks to you who extended your welcomes!
I have made reservations to be in Chicago July 8-10 to participate in the upcoming GiftHub conversation. I think I'm going to be the token conservative--even though I prefer to call myself a classical liberal if push comes to shove and I need a label! A remarkable friend of mine says that it doesn't make sense to attach one word to a point of view he has been cultivating for 70 years. I say amen to that, even though my own point of view is only just past the 40 mark!
So, what's a classical liberal, anyway, one might ask?
The best I can tell from inside here where I sit is that it's a point of view that holds human freedom to be at the center of man's experience of the world, and thus the firm foundation upon which beneficent social orders should rise. In this postmodern world, alas, we have to take our liberalism as radicals, thus back to its root and call our selves classical in order to compass Liberty's twin, Responsibility, in our philosophy. The moderns and post-moderns it seems would have the one without the other, thus uncoiling the double helix of human virtue.
Though we can find the roots of freedom in the most ancient of literatures, today's classical liberal would do just fine to hearken merely back to the 17th century and the insights of John Milton in his Areopagitica:
If every action which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?
Well, I suppose we can spend some time unpacking those sentences! Milton's "motions," by the way, are puppet shows. This site is ostensibly for musings about beneficence and the role of philanthropy in a free society. Not much better place to start than with Milton's rich verbiage.
If men are not free, what praise could be then to well-doing? (Does the happy taxpayer merit any true praise for such "philanthropy?")
Reason is but choosing. (Does denying the consequences of our choosings as a matter of our "rights" ultimately rob us of the essence of our humanity? Isn't the fundamental human right be to reap the fruits of what we sow--and hope for the grace of one who set aside his own rights to suffer on our behalf?)
We esteem not a gift which is forced. (Does the welfare state obliterate any possibility of true beneficence?)
For what it's worth, these are questions to which I hope to return in this space as I continue to read and reflect on making good.
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