Liberal Talk Radio

With the accension of Benedict XVI, much attention has been focused on the man’s profound and abiding conservatism.

As usual, the media and conservative pundits are conflating “liberalism” — the philosophical idea that each person should be free to make his or her own utility-maximizing choices — with “Liberal” — the media-defined perjorative used to describe someone who clings desparately to the tired social policy ideas of the ’60s.

I’ve talked so much about how silly this conflation is that I won’t get any further into it here.

One thing that’s standing out to me lately, though, is that liberalism, at its core, comes from Protestant teaching that each individual is entitled to find his or her own path to God. So maybe it’s no wonder that a Catholic spiritual leader would have a problem with it. (Although it is ironic that so many leaders of the Religious Wrong are Protestants … it’s one reason I can’t take them seriously — they don’t know the basic history of their own faith.)

What is also true about liberalism is that liberalism is often equated with relativism. While it’s true that many Liberals are relativists, and while it’s also true that a logical consequence of the idea that each finds God on his/her own terms is the conclusion that no one person or institution has a monopoly on truth (thereby laying the foundation for a relativistic world-view), the fact is that for classical liberals, there are absolutes. And the basic one is this — has each individual maximized his or her happiness (and in so doing, maximized total happiness in society)?

Any government, individual, or institution that seeks to limit the individual’s choices in seeking happiness prevents the maximization of that happiness, and so we liberals can say definitively that these entities are “bad.”

Now, does that sound like a relativistic philosophy to you?