Accidental Reading

 I had a doctor's appointment this morning to tweak the lenses from my cataract surgery.   I grabbed a magazine for the inevitable wait.  I thought it was the current Touchstone but it turned out to be the July/August 2023 number.  Don't ask me how that one got to the top of the pile;  I have no idea.

But what a happy mistake.  (I wanted to say felix culpa but that wasn't quite right.)  I was enthralled by Kevin Myer's article Ruler Over All: Notes Toward the Restitution of Christian Culture.  Do get a subscription which includes access to the archive.  Here's a sample:

T. S. Eliot saw presciently that liberalism was a self-destructive political philosophy. In The Idea of a Christian Society, he wrote: “[That] Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself is a possibility in its nature. . . . It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite.” Liberalism, he observed, is essentially negative. And then comes the longest sentence in Eliot’s short book:

By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for chaos.

Eliot also warned that Liberalism—by excluding from public life all substantive notions of the transcendent Good—could lead to what he called “totalitarian democracy.”

I think you should be able to access the whole thing here:  

https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=36-04-030-f&readcode=10951

Probably.  I hope.