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The Church and Liberal Democracy
81
We should not be too hasty in criticizing Arrow’s claim that the eco
nomic model should prevail for as many relations as possible, since he is
stating the profoundest assumptions of a liberal polity. For liberal polity is the
attempt to show that societal cooperation is possible under the conditions of
distrust. The very genius of our society is to forge a political and social
existence that does not have to depend on trusting others in matters important
for our survival. Thus to leave our destiny to the gift of blood from a stranger
simply becomes unthinkable.
Of course the more it becomes unthinkable to trust a stranger, the more
we must depend on more exaggerated forms of protection. But the human
costs of distrust are perhaps the most destructive. For we are increasingly
forced to view one another as strangers rather than as friends, and as a result
we become all the more lonely. We have learned to call our loneliness “ au
tonomy” and/or freedom, but the freer we become the more desperate our
search for forms of “community” or “ interpersonal relationship” that offer
some contact with our fellows. Even the family is not immune from this
development, since we now assume that children should have “ rights”
against the parents, as if the family itself were but a contractual society.28
In spite of our claim that the family is the bedrock of our society, the
family has always been an anomaly for the liberal tradition. Only if human
beings can be separated in a substantial degree from kinship can they be free
individuals subject to egalitarian policies. Thus we assume—and this is an
assumption shared by political conservatives and activists alike—that it is
more important to be an ‘‘autonomous person ’’ than to be a ‘‘Hauerwas ” or a
“Pulaski” or a “Smith.” For example, the Supreme Court recently held in
Planned Parenthood
vs.
Danforlh
that a husband has no rights if his wife
wishes an abortion, because “ abortion is a purely personal right of the wo
man, and the status of marriage can place no limitations on personal rights. ”29
Or, for example, Milton Friedman, the paradigm liberal whom we
mistakenly call “conservative,” claims that for liberals “ freedom of the
individual or perhaps the family, is our ultimate goal in judging social ar
rangements. In a society freedom has nothing to say about what an individual
does with his freedom; it is not an all-embracing ethic. Indeed, a major aim of
the liberal is to leave the ethical problem for the individual to wrestle with. ”30
But Friedman fails to recognize that the kind of freedom gained by the indi
vidual in our society is incompatible with freedom of the family. A society
that leaves the ‘‘ethical problem to the individual ’’ cannot engender or sustain
the virtues necessary for providing the individual or the family the power to
resist the state.31
Shorn of particularistic commitments essential to our public life, we
exist as individuals, but now “ individuals” is but a name for a particular unit