This is why the social conservatives always lose. In the end it really does not matter what Aristotle or Plato had to say about anything. It is about what people living in a period of time decide what it is they are going to do and then simply rolling over anyone who tries to stop them. A perfect example was the sexual revolution of the late 1960s. The arguments against non-marital sex were the same in 1969 as they were in 1963 (and occasionally one hears someone even try to make them now) but by 1969, very few people gave a damn about the arguments. They had decided what they wanted to do and it did not matter what anyone else thought.

The debate between Aristotelians and Libertarians is about the same as a debate between a man on the tracks waving his arms and a speeding freight train. The smart money is on the train.

I use libertarian in quotes because I think the current libertarian movement is not the same libertarianism that is being argued against in this article and the subsequent comments. The libertarianism here seems to be more of a straw man.

Last year I was invited to a meeting in D.C. for young “conservatives” (at 39, I was the oldest guy in the room). There were about forty very influential young people so I asked how many identified as social conservatives. Not one of them raised their hands. We’re completely losing this generation.

Another way to explain the difference is to see how they view bioethics. The Libertarian values Autonomy so he recognizes no authority outside of the self. In this scenario, redesigning human nature through biotechnology is permissible. The Social Conservative values human dignity and recongizes a transcendent reference point for it. Tampering with human nature then would be playing God.

That may be why Aristotle argued for smaller city-states. There is a scale to freedom according to nature, and to break that scale is to threaten freedom.

From what I can figure out of Aristotle, that scale is based on duty and authority. If you separate the two, you have broken the fundamental principle of freedom as, it seems to me, Aristotle and Plato, at least, thought of it.

In other words, if you give someone authority over something for which he bears no responsibility, he will be a tyrant.

If someone bears responsibility for something over which he has no authority, it’s hard to see how such a person is free.

Perhaps we can agree on this point and help Americans see how far we have wandered from these points.

A quick note about “subsidiarity” which was described above as “delegating a governmental task to the lowest, most local level possible.” Fair point, but stating it in this way might be a bit misleading. For one thing, it might give the impression that the “lower level” of which we speak is itself a governmental entity, in which case we are only speaking of different levels of government (analogous to a federal conception of national, state or provincial, and local). But families and business enterprises and churches and “voluntary associations” are not “parts” to which governments are “wholes,” to which the government (or state) can “delegate” responsibility. (As if the state is the true parent that delegates “parental responsibility” to parents because that just happens to be more convenient and functional.) Each has their own integrity, or their own “sovereignty” as the Kuyperian tradition puts it (a way of conceiving things, by the way, that Fr. Neuhaus not long before his passing suggested may capture his understanding of “mediating structures” better than the concept of subsidiarity), an integrity that the state must acknowledge.

In any case, “subsidiarity” in Catholic social thought doesn’t mean just to” delegate.” It means more fundamentally to “help” or “provide aid” to those “mediating structures” or, better, non-governmental societal structures (perhaps better “pre-state” societal structures). The legitimate task of government is to “help” them “be all that they can be,” but to do so in such as way as not to usurp their unique role or “callings”. So, to the libertarians we say that government has a normative and active role to play. To the Aristotelians with polis envy we insist that the polis is not the be all and end all, regardless of scale. We must insist that the family is not “part” of the polis, and the polis is not the family writ large. And besides, there is this little thing called the “Church.” “Two there are, not one there is.” Can a true Aristotelian abide that?