THE LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE: LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE

Morris R. Cohen, The Faith of a Liberal: Selected Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1946) (From "What I Believe": "The liberal views life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, but in which there is no guaranty that the new will always be the good or the true. Like science, liberalism insists on a critical examination of the content of all our beliefs, principles, or initial hypotheses and on subjecting them to a continuous process of verification so that they will be progressively better founded in experience and reason." Id. at 3, 8. "Unless men reason they remain sunk in blind dogmatism, clinging obstinately to questionable beliefs without the consciousness that these may be more prejudices. 'To have doubted one's own first principles,' said Justice Holmes, 'is the mark of a civilized man.' And to refuse to do so, we may add, is the essence of fanaticism." Id. at 9. If this is the criterion for 'being liberal,' then, quite sadly, twenty-first-century America is quite illiberal. Critical thinking, etc., are not values higher, only given lip-service. We are, in a real sense, living in an age of fanaticism. We need to re-embrace the Enlightenment! From "Three Great Justices": "[Holmes] was personally respected, but his rigor of thought was caviar to the general, and could not appeal to a profession that is engaged primarily inhaling the country's sines and is called learned only be traditional courtesy." Id. at 20, 23. From "Calvinism Without the Glory of God": "Now there are few doctrines so intellectually dishonest as doctrines concerning the rewards and punishments of the moral life. They may be well-intentioned people who say that virtue always leads to success and vice to misery. But it is an obvious and monstrous falsehood in a world where we profit by the good deeds of our parents and where millions are suffering unutterable tortures because of the deeds of foreign potentates. That those who suffer most have been wicked, and that those who triumph must have been virtuous, is one of the most inhuman beliefs in history." Id. at 72, 75. From "Democracy Inspected": "Men have always been more willing fight for their gods than to look at them too closely. This is certainly true of the modern god, Democracy. No modern subject, probably, has brought forth so much lyric liturgy and acrimonious debate devoid of illumination." Id. at 155, 155. From "The Dark Side of Religion": "One of the effective ways of avoiding any real discussion of religion or discriminating its darker from its brighter side is to define or identify to as 'our highest aspiration.' This is very much like defining a spouse as the essence of perfection or our country as the home of the brave and the free. Some particular religion, like some particular wife of country, may perhaps deserve the praise. But we must first be able to identify our object before we can tell whether the praise is entirely deserved. To define religion as out highest aspiration, and then to speak of Christianity Islam, or Judaism as a religion, is obviously to beg the whole question by a verbal trick of definition." Id. at 337, 339. "Religion strengthens superstition and hinders science or the spirit of truth-seeking" "Religion as an anti-moral force." "Religion and the emotionalize." "I mention Jonathan Edwards because his life and teachings enable us to turn the tables on religion by what [William] James regards as the great pragmatic argument in its favor. Accept it, Jams says, and you will be better off at once. As most religious condemn forever those who do not follow them, it is as risky to accept any one as none at all. And it is possible to take the view that they are all a little bit ungracious, too intense, and too sure of what in out uncertain life cannot be proved. Let us better leave them all alone and console ourselves with the hypothesis--a not altogether impossible one--that the starry universe and whatever gods there be do not worry about us at all, and will not resent our enjoying whatever humane and enlightened comfort and whatever vision of truth and beauty our world offers us. Let us cultivate our little garden. The pretended certainties of religion do not really offer much more. This is of course not a refutation of religion, or of the necessity which reflective minds find to grapple with it. But it indicates that there may be more wisdom and courage as well as more faith in honest doubt than in most of the creeds." Id. at 341-361).