[DOWNLOAD] "Conservatism and the Cultural Roots of Ordered Liberty (Essay)" by Modern Age # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Conservatism and the Cultural Roots of Ordered Liberty (Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Reference,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 56 KB
Description
A recent Modern Age introduction (Summer 2008) emphasized "The Range and Originality of Conservative Reflection," and the introduction to this double issue might do so as well, Instead, it will focus on the contribution made by the varied pieces brought together here towards an apprehension of the principle of ordered liberty. Conservatives of every attitude and inclination value freedom of thought and action as the mark and privilege of rational human beings, but liberty only has meaning when it is experienced and lived by an ordered soul in an ordered society. Unless it is guided by prudence and justice and moderated by temperance, liberty becomes mere license, and a polity m which licentious men and women predominate will eventually descend into anarchy, the breeding ground of tyrants. It is crucial, therefore, that we continually recall the cultural roots of this authentic liberty m the mind and heart. Political arrangements, however wise, cannot produce virtuous men and women, but personal vice, sooner or later, will undermine any polity. In their diverse ways, all the authors in this issue provide a means for considering the cultivation of spirit that makes liberty worth having and preserving. Nothing is more crucial to our regard for personal freedom than our understanding of human nature and the human condition. In "Between Realities: Dawkins vs. Voegelin," Meins Coetsier applies the insights of one of conservatism's seminal twentieth-century thinkers to a perniciously reductive but widely and respectfully received account of mankind's origin and destiny. Coetsier maintains that Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, one of the chief polemics of an increasingly powerful "global atheism," depends upon ignoring what Voegelin terms the "flow of presence"--the experienced spiritual reality that permeates and transforms the world of meter readings and mathematical formulae, a world that only exists in terms of abstraction and mechanistic reduction that serve the convenience of human analysis and manipulation. When we see ourselves, however, as no more than a sum of such analytic elements, then we are neither worthy nor even capable of real liberty.