How Secular Liberalism is Incoherent and Nihilistic

In Liberalism, freedom is defined negatively as: “freedom from constraint.” Individuals must be free to do whatever they want. Whether I can do whatever I want is the ultimate test of whether or not I am free.

This is very different from the Christian idea of freedom as the will being drawn toward the good. For Christians, being free means doing God’s will and thus fulfilling our true nature as His creatures. As Pope John Paul II put it, in accordance with the mainstream of the Christian tradition,

“Acting is morally good when the choices of freedom are in conformity with man's true good and thus express the voluntary ordering of the person towards his ultimate end: God himself, the supreme good in whom man finds his full and perfect happiness. (Veritatis Splendour, 72)

To obey the Word of God is to do that for which we were created and to find joy. But to go against the Word of God is to become enslaved to our appetites and to lose our freedom.

What I want to argue here is that the liberal notion of freedom is self-contradictory. Louis Groarke's article "What is Freedom? Why Christianity and Theoretical Liberalism Cannot Be Reconciled" (Heythrop Journal, XLVII (2006), pp. 257-74) is one of the best statements of why this is so.

Groarke argues that in liberalism, freedom is the first principle, the highest good. Freedom is defined as "freedom from constraint" meaning that an individual is free when he or she is able to choose whatever he or she wants without being coerced by anyone or anything.

As popularly stated, liberalism has two components: 1) the idea that freedom is non-interference and 2) the no-harm rule. In other words, individuals should be free to do whatever they wishso long as they do not harm others. The crucial problem is that there is no way to deduce #2 from #1. The no-harm rule must be derived from some substantive understanding of human nature and objective values. But this is just what Liberalism cannot do. And, to makes matters worse, not everyone agrees with the no-harm rule. Nietzscheans, for example, oppose such a restriction of individual freedom and the will to power. If I am superior and can get away with it, why should I not harm another person when it is to my advantage to do so? Groarke summarizes the dilemma:

"Theoretical liberalism champions freedom understood as non-interference as the ultimate value. If we do not impose order on society, however, some people will likely prey on others. Liberalism obliges us to intervene in order to curtail this natural chain of events. This seems paradoxical, however. If non-interference is the supreme value, we apparently can only preserve non-interference by interfering. It turns out, then, that liberal authors are not arguing for unlimited interference, but on the contrary for limited interference. But then non-interference cannot be the first principle of justice after all." ("What is Freedom?" 266)

Non-interference cannot be the first principle because if we have to decide when to interfere and when not to interfere, we must either do so arbitrarily (i.e. when the mob howls) or on the basis of some sort of principle that would be logically prior to a negative view of freedom and, therefore, would be our real first principle. This means that Liberalism is dependent on some other set of religious and/or philosophical convictions that citizens of a liberal democracy happen to hold and is dependent in two ways: first, to convince people that the strong should be restrained from preying on the weak, and second, to determine when to interfere and when not to do so. Liberalism, we must therefore conclude, is inadequate as a public philosophy. It leads to the culture of death and we can see evidence of this fact all around us.