In last week’s General Conference, Elder L. Tom Perry gave an address with the title, "What Seek Ye?" The speech is largely a collection of rather nice anecdotes about the gospel. In the middle of these anecdotes, Elder Perry offered what I consider to be a profound theological insight. He stated:
Developing nations of the world are becoming so secular in their beliefs and actions that they reason that a human being has total autonomy. An individual does not have to give an account to anyone or anything except to himself and, to a limited extent, to the society in which he lives.
Societies in which this secular lifestyle takes root have a deep spiritual and moral price to pay. The pursuit of so-called individual freedoms, without regard to laws the Lord has established to govern His children on earth, will result in the curse of extreme worldliness and selfishness, the decline of public and private morality, and the defiance of authority.
Such secular societies are described in Doctrine and Covenants 1:16: "They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world."
This citation obviously has a lot to say. For the purposes of our website, however, a few themes are worthy of mention. First, the postulate that individuals should be considered as having total personal autonomy is condemned in this statement. This idea of individual autonomy as a moral good is a major basis of classical liberal and libertarian thought; hence, by implication, Elder Perry is condemning thinkers such as John Locke, J.S. Mill, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and so forth. After all, he fundamentally rejects a basic postulate of these thinkers’ philosophy: the postulate that people should have total individual autonomy.
Second, Elder Perry acknowledges the existence of both public, i.e., collective, and private, i.e., individual, morality. In some discussions of economic policy, certain Latter-day Saints reject the notion that there can be such a thing as public, collective morality. If public morality is accepted, after all, it follows that government policy (embodying, in democracies at least, collective decision-making) can actually enhance a form of morality. Hence, government action to alleviate poverty can be not only morally acceptable but even necessary–for the sake of public morality.
I think you need to distinguish between a political philosphy that believes in limiting the power of government, and a moral philosophy that says there is no right or wrong outside of individual preferences. Political libertarianism does not imply moral libertinism.
I think Perry would have trouble with Ayn Rand, and maybe even J.S. Mill, but I don’t see why he’d have a problem with Locke or Hayek. (Although I admit my reading of the two is pretty spotty, so I could be wrong.)
In particular, he condemns the pursuit of “individual freedoms, without regard to laws the Lord has established.” I don’t understand him to mean that worldly governments should therefore take those freedoms away.
Ed,
The idea of “limiting the power of government” isn’t really a defining trait of libertarianism and classical liberalism. Every political philosophy but the different forms of totalitarianism believes in limiting the power of government. The differences involve what the proposed limits should be.
Libertarianism/classical liberalism is really distinguished by its emphasis on individual autonomy over duties to the group and the collective. The point that I’m making from Elder Perry’s quote is that an unlimited regard for individual autonomy leads to “the curse of extreme worldliness and selfishness, the decline of public and private morality, and the defiance of authority.” Collective action and collective decision-making are what is excluded by a libertarian focus on individual autonomy; these kinds of action are also called for by God’s law. He promotes collectivistic economics (we still have a remnant of this in our fast offerings) as a way of enhancing public morality.
That’s quite a jump you make there RT. History has shown that as governments move farther and farther away from valuing individual freedom over collective welfare the societies served by those governments move farther and farther away from a paradigm that includes God and religion. If you review statitstics on religious observance in the developed Christian world you’ll find that the most liberal (in the classical sense) regimes have the highest church attendance. Ireland, easily the most liberal country today, has the highest rate of religious observance. Just look at the difference between the US and Canada. In the US average weekly participation in religious observance is 21% while in Canada that figure is a mere 10%– Canada, that utopian home of universal healthcare and public assistance from cradle to grave. Based on emperical evidence, given the choice, I’m quite certain that the GAs would choose liberal democracy in the vein of the US or Ireland over social democracies like those found in Canada and Western Europe.
Putting emperical evidence aside, I think you completely misread Elder Perry’s statement. You seem to think he’s referring to a social sense of autonomy yet there’s no evidence in his entire sermon supporting such a conclusion. Rether, Elder Perry rails against what might be better termed moral relativism; that somehow mankind has no superior obligation to a Supreme Authority. It’s the refusal to acknowledge that moral certainty does exist that he’s repudiating. The very fact that he reinforced his analysis with that particular D&C passage should have provided ample guidance on the subject. To say this repudiates the work of Locke, Friedman, Hayek and others of their ilk is nonsense. There’s no support in this passage, or anywhere else, for the concept that church doctrine does not advocate the the greatest degree of civic freedom allowable without slipping into anarchy. The beauty of the political philosophies advocated by Locke, Friedman, Hayek, and others is that if allowed the freedom to make a choice, the vast majority of individuals will make the morally correct decision.
In addition, his references to “public morality” does not support the concept of a “public morality” beyond the collective morality of the individuals comprising a society. I’d like to see concrete doctrinal support for a concept of “public morality” the way you use it here.
Some of what you say, Paul, is a reiteration of debates we’ve had in other places. The original text clearly distinguishes between “public” and “private” morality. Public morality as simply the aggregate of private behavior seems an odd fit with Elder Perry’s overall concern with the collective decisions of a society (e.g., to embrace a privatized view of morality and moral decisions). I don’t think that there’s any reasonable reading of his text that doesn’t accept a notion of society as collectively responsible for collective decisions.
Your example of Ireland as a classical liberal country is totally misplaced. In fact, Ireland’s government has long provided special deference to Catholic belief and practice in a way that infringes on individual freedoms. Restrictions on divorce and abortion fly completely in the face of liberalism’s emphasis on indivdual freedom. But perhaps you only mean economic freedom? This is a terrific narrowing of the scope relative to the original ideas of liberalism.
But by looking only at contemporary societies, you are compounding your problem. In a broader historical perspective, we can clearly see that the most religious societies in history (which are now in the past) certainly had invasive, directive governments.
But, once again, I would assert that rejecting liberalism and its excessive emphasis on indivdual autonomy does not necessarily mean endorsing governmental controls. Anarchists within the socialist tradition, for example, would forcefully argue the opposite. The minimum idea is just to return to an emphasis on collectives and social (and economic) interconnectedness. The false notion that wealthy people become wealthy solely through their own efforts–and therefore deserve to own what they have acquired–can be set aside when we look at these broader social networks.