On The Liberals And Their Programs

("Soup Kitchen" by Frankie Roberto via Flickr)

If there’s anything a college campus has a lot of, it’s programs. There’s a program for nearly anything. There’s a program to stop smoking, a program for getting free food, and even a program to distribute free tampons.

Moreover, there are also public awareness campaigns galore on college campuses, such as campaigns to promote awareness about sexual assault, domestic violence, and an endless number of other campaigns for nearly every social ill under the sun. The abundance of programs on college campuses demonstrate the Liberal’s over-dependence upon programs and interventionist approaches to solve human ills.

However, interventionism is not the way to change people’s behavior. Rather than intervening in someone else’s life to protect them from this or that by extension of an impersonal program, it’s through reinforcing participation in meaningful human relationships that lift people into wholesome living.

Let us consider: interventionism looks good, doesn’t it? In other words, when people are delivering food for the hungry or, uh, tampons to the needy, they look pretty busy doing it, don’t they? After all, they are hard at work! They must be doing something important.

While interventionism may look like it is doing good given how busy the interventionists are when doing it, in reality, it’s not impersonal administrative programs that lead people to change, but meaningful personal relationships.

However, here is an important distinction. While it’s likely nearly all relationships are important (except for harmful ones), there are none other so important to man as those natural relationships, namely, those relationships to his family, church, spouse and country. These relationships have higher meaning than others. It is in participation with these relationships of high meaning that affirm our humanity and shape individuals into wholesome human beings.

This is different than what Liberalism believes. Rather than see individuals as creatures embedded in the concrete social networks of life, the Liberal perspective sees it possible to chop up man into reducible elements and abstract categories, and to re-engineer him in whatever fashion the Liberal desires.

The Liberal does not see the individual as embedded within a social order or even duty-bound by nature to return service to this important order. Instead, the Liberal sees the individual as independent from these institutions. 

In this respect, Liberalism sees the “self” as the highest order and these social relationships (family, church, etc.) as oppressive to the autonomous self and from which the individual must find liberation. In this respect, nothing other than man’s own autonomy is the ultimate cause for which to live.

Therefore, it makes sense that the Liberal over-relies upon programs and dissemination of information, since it believes that if the individual could just get the right education and right supervision, then he could change without dependence upon these important relationships of family, church, spouse and state. 

However, people don’t change like this. Liberals are wrong about human nature. Man is not a separate autonomous chaff floating through society, but instead a being whose identity forms, in significant part, in relationship to special people and to these relationships of special quality.  

Therefore, it is a folly on the Liberal’s part to imagine man outside the context of these important relationships or outside the influence of their natural sway upon man. Man is not an isolated “self”, loosely floating around in society. Instead, his sense of self is by nature inseparably connected with his relationship to these important aspects of life.  

The real power to restoring man to wholeness is by restoring him to these important relationships rather than treating him a separable from them. Without recognizing the powerful influence of these significant relationships, man will always be out of whack and we will never deal with him as really he is: inseparably connected to others.

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Twitter: @jhescock12