Liberal? Conservative? Wrong-Think?

Ed Feser is a treasure in philosophy.  He's reviewing a book, (Three Reformers:  Luther, Descartes, Rousseau) by Jacques Maritain--another treasure--and we find this passage from Feser, who notes Maritain's distinction between "person" and "individual."

...  In particular, [a political order] must recognize that the common good to which the individual is ordered includes facilitating, for each member of the community, the realization of his ultimate, eternal end in the hereafter.  Thus, concludes Maritain, “the human city fails in justice and sins against itself and its members if, when the truth is sufficiently proposed to it, it refuses to recognize Him Who is the Way of beatitude” (p. 24).

This refusal is, needless to say, characteristic of modern societies, both liberal and collectivist.  And unsurprisingly, they have at the same time put greater emphasis on human individuality than on human personhood.  Both do so insofar as they conceive of the good primarily in economic and other material terms rather than in spiritual terms.  Liberal societies, in addition, do so insofar as they conceive of these bodily goods along the lines of the satisfaction of idiosyncratic individual preferences and emotional wellbeing.  Collectivist societies, meanwhile, do so insofar as they regard human beings, qua individuals, as apt to be sacrificed to the good of the species of which they are mere instances.  (It should be no surprise, then, that Burke would famously condemn “the dust and powder of individuality” even as he condemned at the same time the totalitarianism of the French Revolution.  For individualism and collectivism are rooted in precisely the same metaphysical error.)...

 There's a hatful of "stuff" in there, no?  We think this is why Patrick Deneen is in a quandary about 'how to fix' the American experiment.  It certainly causes the problem with Z-Man, who talks incessantly about 'the dissident' without ever defining that person's objective.  It gives one pause to think, and re-think, that "Natural Law" debate, because neither side makes any sense at all unless there is a God, "Him Who is the Way of beatitude."

Oh, yes, and it reminds us that Christ is King, not only of the Universe, but of this world, now, just as the Cristeros and Pope Pius XI said.

And that's just a small out-take from a very useful essay.