Today's culture wars can be directly traced to the cultural transformations of the 1960's. As a matter of fact, that critical decade represented nothing less than a cultural revolution of sorts--a revolution Stanley Kurtz describes as "both a fulfillment and a repudiation of the vision of America's founders."
Kurtz makes his case in "Culture and Values in the 1960's," a fascinating essay published in Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic, recently released by the Hoover Institution Press. Edited by Peter Berkowitz, Never a Matter of Indifference is a thought-provoking collection of essays on moral character and democratic responsibility. Kurtz's essay adds historical context to the book's central thesis--that moral virtue is an absolute necessity in order for political liberty to flourish.
When Kurtz argues that the 1960's represented "both a fulfillment and a repudiation" of America's founding vision, he offers an important corrective both to those who would celebrate the 1960's as a time of unfettered liberation and to those who would curse the same decade as a time of absolute moral collapse. Kurtz, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, points to the Civil Rights Movement and the end of legal segregation as great gains for the society. The impetus toward racial equality was an example of what Kurtz labels "classic liberalism," based in respect for both human dignity and moral structure.
Nevertheless, the legacy of the 1960's is mixed precisely because "classic liberalism" devolved into something very different--an ideology that celebrates liberty without an accompanying respect for moral character. Kurtz wants to understand this exchange of classical liberalism for something far more radical. "If the movements that began in the 1960's have in some significant measure departed from classic liberalism, how are we to understand their inner rationale?," Kurtz asks. "What connects the ecology movement, for example, with movements for Civil Rights? And if classic liberalism suffices for many Americans, what has prompted them to set it aside?"
Very quickly, Kurtz moves to answer his own question. "I argue that the sixties ethos, and the transformation of liberalism it has produced, is best understood as a secular religion, and in many respects an illiberal religion." An illiberal liberalism? Kurtz argues that this new liberalism is no longer based in the concern for ordered liberty that framed the nation's founding.
The children of the 1960's betrayed the American vision by "becoming an illiberal religion," Kurtz asserts. This happened because "liberalism stopped being a mere political perspective for many people and turned into a religion."
Is Kurtz using the word "religion" merely as a point of exaggerated argument? "I do not speak metaphorically," Kurtz insists. "A certain form of liberalism now functions for substantial numbers of its adherents as a religion: an encompassing world-view that answers the big questions about life, dignifies daily exertions with higher significance, and provides a rationale for meaningful collective action."
Classic liberalism was primarily concerned with individual liberty, understood to be both protected and limited by an ordered structure of moral obligation. This view of liberty produced the American concern for freedom of speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty that has stood at the heart of the American experiment. True liberalism is not intimidated by the presence of competing voices, public debate, and different perspectives. That no longer characterizes today's illiberal liberalism, as best demonstrated in the ethos of political correctness.
As Kurtz explains, "The central mechanism of political correctness is the stigmatization of perspectives, many of them classically liberal, that run afoul of left-liberalism--a condemnation disproportionate to what might be expected in matters of mere policy disagreement." As the worldview of left-liberalism is turned into a functional religion for so many people, they now treat any disagreement as heresy to be eradicated. "This shift to ostracism in place of intellectual engagement in so many of our cultural debates cannot be explained as a mere conscious tactical maneuver," Kurtz explains. "The stigmatization of traditional perspectives can only be effective because so many are primed to respond to it in the first place."
