Dear Michael
Large scale principles are particularities We are alive and limited with a given range of experience
The thrust of our actions during this time has import We touch one person then another The point being that we ought not to try to declare precisely how all this happens Chance!!!!!! Is crucial unintentionally too As Piece says somewhere A nod here A touch there Words have consequences "all human affairs rest on probabilities rather than certainties" Being a liberal or conservative has consequences Symbols carry people along The thinker is the thought and Dr. Percy knew it
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Lauren, I don't think liberalism and conservatism are rotations but are rather fundamentally different postures toward reality. It's true that someone might convert (rotate) from one to the other in the event of a sea-change in beliefs, but that would not be rotation in the Percyan sense, which, as I understand it, is caused by boredom with one's current method of reentry (thus the need to rotate to a new one).
I think you're right, though, that Percy wasn't satisfied with simply categorizing people and then using that label as a means of pigeonholing them or, worse yet, dismissing them.
Janet, I never got the sense that Percy liked any categorical definitions. Which is not to say that he himself did not have any classifiable characteristics, only that he was leery of the tendency to reduce people to labels. The individual is always more complex than the set of labels that describe him--even if they are true as far as they go. , it's always tenuous (and probably unwise) to give one-sentence definitions of complex concepts like liberalism and conservatism, so there is, by nature of the concision, much elaboration, clarification, and nuance left unsaid. But I was responding to Janet's comment about Percy's having had seemingly contradictory views, some "liberal," some "conservative." My thought was that these litmus-test issues usually don't go deep enough, as a means of identifying a person's orienting beliefs, to be very useful. And that's why you can have apparent contradictions in the same man--because the surface-level litmus tests may appear to be opposed, even if the underlying convictions are not actually so. And this is what I was trying to address with my definitions: I was trying to get a level below (i.e. "the root") the knee-jerk label associations and identify the philosophical orientation that makes a person tend toward one or the other posture. Without belief in an objective moral order, there is little, if anything, to conserve, except individuality--that is to say, individual liberty. You could argue, I suppose, that this principle (of individual liberty) is, in fact, the objective moral code of liberalism, but that is something of an illusion, because individualism is subjective by nature, which means, among other things, that it is subject to change, depending on the influence of the age in which the individual lives; and in all ages, the will of some individuals is inevitably going to clash with that of other individuals. Out of this clash comes democracy as the liberal solution to government, whereby individual liberty is still the highest good, but conflicts are resolved by the will of the majority. And before the modern democracies came the preparatory Reformation, which was the liberal principle applied to Christendom, whereby the State would be eventually loosed from the bonds of the Church, and the individual would be eventually freed to make of his religion what he will ... as an individual. And so it has come to pass. We live in the age of the liberal principle. In that sense, we're all liberals. Shoot, the United States was founded on the idea, and we've taken now to exporting it, in its economic and governmental forms, for decades, so the world is being made in our image (though it doesn't always go so well with Islamic states ... or with Russia!).
My contention that Percy was a conservative, though, is based primarily on his conversion to Catholicism in 1947. By his own admission, he accepted that, in matters of faith and morals, the Catholic Church was the arbiter of truth. To my knowledge, he never retained for himself the liberty of choice to be at variance with any of those teachings. In other words, he was not an a la carte Catholic. Such submission to what he understood to be the objective moral order of things, the true nature of things, had an obvious and lasting effect on his life and his work. He had a thing outside himself that was the object of his personal liberty, the reason for his free will. By this subtle demotion of individual freedom to the role of means rather than of end, he took the path of conservation rather than liberality.
There's always more to be said, of course, but I've gone on too long already. Let me say, though, that I agree with your assessment of Percy's broad appeal. Seems like just about anybody who likes to think, likes Walker Percy. I thought I heard once that Tim Robbins was going to star in The Moviegoer. But that was back when he was Binx's age. Alas.
Karl, Thanks for your comments. Percy was, no doubt, a man living in the new South, and I think he liked to acknowledge that about himself just to make it clear, in case anybody wondered, that he did not retain any airs from having been to the manor born. And I agree that he stayed persistently clear of endorsing or identifying himself with either liberals or conservatives. An aversion to labels, I think. But one label he never avoided was that of Catholic. I would think that this is because he took it quite seriously. That is to say, I don't think he viewed the Church's teachings on faith and morals as "man's concoction." Rather, like most converts, and especially maybe those who converted before Vatican II, he saw the Catholic Church as a divine institution, though peopled by humans.
Regarding your definition of liberalism, it sounds more like what I would call progressivism or even evolutionism. Not that those three ideas are unrelated. I think liberalism, in its elevation of individual human liberty, grows faith naturally in the collective human experience as well--the idea that we are progressing or evolving as a species. But I think this belief is a result of liberalism and not its root. My reason for thinking that liberalism, at its root, rejects an objective moral order is that it simply must do so in order to give individual liberty its elevated place. If my obligation is to adhere to something outside myself, to a truth that exists indifferent to my personal preference, then my liberty is curtailed, and the fundamental principle of liberalism is thereby undercut.
Best wishes all,
Mike Larson
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Message: 1
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2015 21:17:16 -0400
From: Lauren Stacy Berdy < lauren.stacy.berdy AT gmail.com>
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
< percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Percy, liberal or conservative
Message-ID: < 5617159C.8000808 AT gmail.com"> 5617159C.8000808 AT gmail.com>
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I believe that Dr. Percy had what Marcel called
" the gift of presence"
he looked at us with unblinking eyes.
He knew that we humans, including himself, were all unique messy specimens.
He sucked crayfish with Klansman ( citizen council ) and he spoke up for
integration.
we were all equally in his sights.
Liberalism and conservatism are just rotations...yes? ( better than
everydayness!!)
Take gd care,
Lauren Stacy Berdy
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