Peter Copeland: Liberty decays without the illiberal virtues
Liberty without virtue is ruin, and only loyalty, reverence, and restraint can hold a free society together, writes Guest Contributor Peter Copeland.
Peter Copeland is a deputy director with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
As the greatest story ever told begins, pride came before the fall.
Adam and Eve, who had all they could ever want, were tempted to eat of the forbidden fruit. Far from the “enlightenment” caricature of a God who prefers ignorant slaves to subjects, the episode teaches a recognition of reason’s limits, of our dependence on others, and of gratitude to an order beyond our full comprehension.
Humility is the precondition of wisdom, and pride its ruin.
Modern liberalism forgot its roots and, somewhere along the way, chose to eat the forbidden fruit. It became characterized by the belief that we are sufficient unto ourselves, forgetting that its heady ideals of limitless freedom are not self-sustaining.
The health of our society depends on pre-liberal and even illiberal foundations, obedience, loyalty, order, reverence, piety, and purity, which liberalism has spent centuries eroding.
Pride cometh before the fall
Unlike the created order, liberalism did not arise ex nihilo. It presupposed vast stores of pre-liberal moral capital, the Christian moral imagination, the natural law tradition, and thick bonds of kinship and community.
Historically, the liberal order survived and thrived because illiberal norms constrained it: duty bound freedom, piety restrained pride, and thick commitments and vibrant civil societies sustained civility, common norms, and social trust. Tocqueville’s habits of the heart, and Burke’s little platoons.
The liberal anthropology, once a modest doctrine of limited government within a shared moral order, has hardened into a metaphysics of rebellion, the autonomous individual as self-legislator and moral lawgiver. It now assumes an ahistorical, self-sufficient subject who shuns custom, duty, and dependence.
The spirit of rebellion and unrestrained questioning turned liberty from a means to the good into an end in itself. Genuine freedom is self-mastery, not the liberation of passion from rightly ordered reason.
The cultural and moral consequences
We now live amid the ruins of this inversion. Our culture glorifies rebellion and celebrates the self-made individual untethered from family, faith, or nation.
Loyalty is not to family, friends, or place, but to abstractions that are projections of the autonomous self: career, personal “brand,” ideological identity. We move restlessly for jobs and credentials, uprooting ourselves in the name of choice and “autonomy.” The idols of economic and social mobility mean that we belong everywhere, and therefore nowhere.
Reverence has given way to cynicism, and the ideal of purity of heart and mind to soulless instrumental thinking that makes every thing and person into a mere tool for one’s own use, rendering us incapable of deeper feeling and bonds.
The body, once thought of as a temple, is now an amusement park, tattooed, medicated, Botoxed, commodified, and exhausted by the pursuit of novelty and self-display.
One might forgive the naïve jubilation of the 1960s, the lotus-eaters of whom Mr. Bonner speaks, who mistook degeneracy for enlightenment. But the consequences of that cultural and sexual (d)evolution are now undeniable: collapsing fertility, epidemic loneliness, family disintegration, and generations alienated from work, faith, and community.
As Mary Eberstadt argues in Primal Screams, the sexual revolution shattered the bonds of family and identity, leaving generations to search for belonging through politics, ideology, and self-expression.
The “primal scream” we hear today, the anxious cry for meaning in youth culture and politics alike, is the sound of orphaned souls groping for authority, tradition, and rightly ordered love that they have been denied.
The liberal virtues and their limits
We need not reject the genuine goods of the liberal inheritance: tolerance, openness, moderation, and a respect for conscience. But like all habits, they can be deformed by excess.
Many who arrive in Canada from cultures of rigid honour codes and suffocating kinship obligations soon realize they do not wish to trade one extreme for another. Liberty without order is no liberty at all.
Virtue lies in the mean between excess and deficiency. The challenge is not to choose between liberal and illiberal values but to order them rightly.
The Global Flourishing Study, a major longitudinal survey across more than twenty countries, shows that the strongest predictors of flourishing are not wealth or autonomy but stable families, marriage, religious participation, meaningful work, and strong community ties.
None of the top-ranking countries, except Israel, are highly developed economically, yet many are hopeful and ascending, unlike the decadent West whose moral and cultural energies are spent.
Across societies, those embedded in networks of faith, kinship, and civic life report greater purpose and trust, underscoring that flourishing is relational and moral, dependent on modest material security, but not on the boundless pursuit of choice, wealth, or mobility.
The moral and social necessity of illiberal virtues
What we need, then, is not a revolution against our social order but a re-ordering within it, a purification of our institutions through their illiberal roots.
The illiberal virtues, loyalty, obedience, reverence, piety, and purity of heart, cannot be derived from an ideology that exalts unrestrained freedom. They are learned only within a moral order that tempers and rightly directs our loves (ordo amoris).
We must be loyal not to the shifting fixations of ego, appetite, or opportunity, the next efficient choice, job, or social novelty, but to the rightly ordered loves of family, community, and the transcendent good that binds them.
Obedience to something beyond ourselves is not some sort of imposition on our teenage, navel-gazing spirit of unrestrained free-dumb. Without it, we become slaves to instant gratification and technological distraction, chasing novelty while growing lonelier than ever. Obedience is the foundation of restraint, of commitment, and to things that endure.
We cannot love rightly if we are not pure of heart, that is, meek: possessing strength and capacity yet exercising them with gentleness and restraint. This outlook, where intention and virtue matter, stands opposed to the crude, instrumentalist, and utility-maximizing logic that governs both our hyperliberal economy and culture.
People mistakenly think that they will be happy if only they can attain that next achievement or recognition, move here and then there, all the while failing to cultivate the dispositions that they hope to have when they get there.
The means must be conducive to the ends. As the Global Flourishing Study’s findings suggest, people do not ultimately seek greater wealth, endless GDP growth, or mere longevity, but to be loving, generous, and kind, to live in deep and meaningful relationships with others.
Yet such ends cannot arise from the self-interested rationality of the homo economicus, the liberal subject who treats freedom as licence and human ties as transactions. Flourishing requires commitment, to people, place, and tradition, and a moral orientation that orders freedom toward love.
Nor can we be truly reverent or pious if we refuse gratitude, seeing life as a series of rights and entitlements rather than as a gift. Piety is not superstition; it is the cultivated disposition of respect for that which gave us life, our parents, our nation, our God.
Freedom must be disciplined by duty, autonomy preceded by obedience. Policy and culture alike should cultivate dependence rightly ordered, to family, community, nation, and to the transcendent order that alone makes human dignity intelligible.
Our culture needs saving, and only the illiberal virtues that have been its bulwark can save it.
Peter Copeland is deputy director of Domestic Policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He worked as a director of policy and senior policy advisor to multiple ministers in the Ontario government.
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