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Mark T. Mitchell


  1. “The problem is obvious: Liberalism denies limits.” If the ‘problem’ is indeed that obvious, then conservatism must be the assertion of absolute limits to the exclusion of all else. The tension between the two is what makes the resultant culture vibrant. A culture with absolute limits cannot grow.

    • Bubba,
      No, I don’t think so. First, conservatism is not “the assertion of absolute limits to the exclusion of all else.” It is, though, the acknowledgement of the existence of limits and the attempt to respect them. Furthermore, plenty of “conservatives” today are suspicious of limits, which means that they are not as conservative as they might imagine. “I can to anything I want with my property, my money, my body, etc.” is not a sentiment unique to those on the political left.

  2. If you want to assert that “Culture is, at its heart, a complex array of limits,” you’re certainly free to do so. But you’ve put the cart before the horse; culture is not the limits, culture is the the result of mankind interacting with the limits imposed by Nature. It is a living thing that waxes and wanes. Granted, the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are ambiguous at best, especially when considering those who affix those labels to themselves today, but the gratitude and reverence you’re searching for is not antithetical to Liberalism.

  3. A culture is the set of principles, institutions and traditions which restrain the lusts, desires and whims of the person so that the person is emancipated from them and thus free to fulfill his duties, obligations and responsibilities to God, to Church, to family, to community and to associations which make up that community. Culture through family, church and pedagogical institutions helps the person gain character by acquiring, internalizing and living out the great virtues – the cardinal, the capital and the Christian. Character is by definition an imposition of limits on the individual. It is the way we come to see that we are creatures, mere and fallen creatures, in a created order.

    The anti-culture purposes to deconstruct the principles, institutions and traditions of culture so that the person, an autonomous individual in the anti-culture, is emancipated from the taboos and limitations of those principles, institutions and traditions so that those newly minted autonomous individuals, now outfitted with abstract rights and aided and abetted by an abstract corporation with a monopoly on power quite capable of leveling principles, institutions and traditions, are free to pursue their lusts, whims and desires, giving rise to the cult of personality.

    These autonomous individuals, these would-be Promethean selves, turn out to be estranged, alienated and shriveled selves, Hollywood and the gutters of our cities being full of them. It is little wonder that the vampire is the modern “hero,” the ultimate estranged, alienated and shriveled self, a parasite. The “Twilight” series is not nearly as evil as the anti-culture which it reflects.

  4. Gentlemen, this is me thinking out loud as much as anything else, but, to clarify, when we’re talking about limits, we’re ultimately referring to those boundaries God has placed, not the imposed limits of the Pharisee or his modern successors, correct? Simply put, Christian liberty consists of the ability to perform according to my design, not the licentious idea of absolute choice: “I can do whatever I want.” or “My rights and my rights at your expense.”

    A trout’s freedom is limited by the stream, but oh how that swift flowing water defines the very trout-ness of the trout! I suppose he could long for the treetops, but what would that result in, “freedom”? Obviously, a lot of flopping around and ultimately death.

    I guess that’s an adequate (if awkward) metaphor for our “culture” today.

    Anyway, thanks for you patience!

  5. David, I agree that the limits are those that Nature, or God if you prefer, has created, although we can and do place limits on ourselves. Neil Postman used the metaphor of the petri dish, that small container in which a culture grows in a soupy medium of nutrients. Planet earth is the container of the medium in which our various cultures grow. Ours is obviously not a monoculture. The growth and health of cultures is determined and ultimately limited by the media they grow in. Unlike the fuzzy stuff growing in the petri dish, we as humans can exercise a limited amount of control over the media in which we live. The health of our cultures reflects our decisions.

  6. I’m troubled by your redefinition of culture as a synonym for what is better known as a life of faith, apparently for no other purpose than to argue that we have culture and liberals have some other thing called anti-culture that has no reason for existing other than to . For one thing, our culture in the conventional sense, our way of life, is not strictly faith-based. It includes constraints and requirements that are not Biblical but have become hallowed by tradition. Since Mitt Romney’s candidacy has brought increased public attention to the insights of Joseph Smith, let me offer as an example one of Smith’s more infamous insights: the Bible does not rule out marriages of one man to two women simultaneously. The prohibition against polygyny comes down to us from Europe’s Pagan past, but it’s now a firmly established part of the Western Christian way of life.

    For another, if you spend any time with liberals, you find that they do not deny all limits in all aspects of life. They deny some of the limits conservatives value and would preserve, but they have limits of their own, a culture of their own, and to the extent that we deny this, we exchange an effective understanding of what we are up against for what amounts to a little bit of an ego boost.

  7. Oops. Dropped the end of that first sentence. I meant to say “I’m troubled by your redefinition of culture that turns it into a synonym for what is better known as a life of faith, apparently for no other purpose than to argue that we have culture and liberals have some other thing called anti-culture that has no reason for existing other than to undermine our culture, and thus give ourselves the double pleasure of feeling both superior and victimized.”

  8. “For another, if you spend any time with liberals, you find that they do not deny all limits in all aspects of life.”

    True, but their limits have no ground beyond the human, and thus are arbitrary. They reduce to either will-to-power or sentimentality.

  9. I should note that liberalism provides a kind of center here, where further to the left you get into the veneration more of equality than liberty.

    So here’s how I see it – what are originally two branches of the left, the liberty branch and the equality branch – are the two forces of anti-culture fighting one another. In American politics, (though not true of European politics) ‘liberty’ is a rightwing thing, whereas ‘equality’ is a leftwing thing. This holds an inherent conflict, since much of what is genuinely traditional is not necessarily pro-liberty… it is generally a force of limit or restraint on the one hand, and on the other of hierarchy and discrimination.

    The center party of our state generally accepts both equality and liberty as goods, for each wing of that party there is a reluctance about which the other wing’s good is accepted, but it is acknowledged that liberty creates innovation and wealth, and that equality provides for social welfare. While both sides of this coin think of themselves as diametrically opposed to the other, they in fact exist as kind of coherent, albeit conflicted whole.

    This is a whole which although it for the most part excludes radical left wingers — real communists, radical environmentalists, truly radical feminist, anarchist and homosexualist groups, and so on, it also excludes those to the right of center, libertarians and traditionalists. I’m not convinced wholly that Christian fundamentalists even are outside of the center party; their religious views may be extreme vis a vis the scripture, (and I mean Protestant fundamentalists) their politics ultimately fall into this liberty-equality spectrum of the center.

    My final thought is that liberty somehow does indeed become an actual feature of the Right here in the USA, but in what capacity? What has liberty to do with tradition and limits? How to unite these two strands of the Right – the libertarian and the traditional?

    Then again, maybe it’s the wrong question. Maybe us traditionalists in the US already are effectively libertarians. It’s a matter of where we hold the point of tension between liberty and restraint. The extreme libertarian believes in no limits, but this is actually a reactionary stance in our context. His desire for no limits is not positive, but negative; get the government out of our business.

    In short, it requires there to be some kind of concordat between libertarians and traditionalists. Most libertarians I know are fine with the limits traditional groups place on their members, as opposed to those in the center and left, who think of these things as unthinkable.

    Something to think about, anyway.

  10. We have to be careful to distinguish between the spirit of liberalism and the spirit of egalitarianism. I am very much an egalitarian, but very much opposed to liberalism and its idolatrous worship of negative liberty. The dilemma of order is quite obviously that it tends to privilege some groups over others. It is not surprising that the majority of writers on Front Porch Republic are seemingly white, heterosexual males. 9 out of 10 writers on the front page are white males with only one white female contributing. We white, heterosexual males (and I am one) have the most to benefit from a conservation of the status quo, and an appeal to order.

    Yet egalitarianism and communitarian ethics can co-exist and supplement each other nicely. For example, I follow queer theory and assert that sexuality/gender are socially constructed phenomenon, and that categories such as “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” are not reflective of reality, but rather serve to privilege one category over the other á la Derrida. Society should not care what the gendered-object of a person’s sexual affection is based upon their own gendered-bodied. However, I am also quite comfortable with social/cultural limits contrary to the edicts of liberal philosophy. I do not believe society should allow people to purchase other bodies for personal sexual use/gratification. And the societal limitation is based in the egalitarian declaration against inequalitarian power-relationships rooted in Marxist analysis.

  11. Culture also implies the pursuit of excellence, which of course is what is the foundation of “high culture”. A true culture set standards. THis is somewhat muddled inyour argument about “limits”. Some of what you call limits are really standards.

    In the pursuit of excellence all act an artifacts of “culture” are not equal. Bach and Lady Gaga do not inhabit the same level

    In this sense, the Liberal proposes a world where there are indeed limits–they have limited excellence.

    As an aside, Liberals are generally primitives and nihilists, and this beyond the reach of what you propose.

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