Long posts

"What haunts the West is the memory of liberty before it was redefined and then made an antidote to death. Indeed, the redefinition of this term led it to try and transcend the ultimate boundary on all life. Liberty thus construed becomes death, the destroyer of worlds. As Patrick Deneen has argued in Why Liberalism Failed, liberty in “ancient and Christian understandings” was “the condition of self-governance.” This required “an extensive habitation in virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline,” and “culture” was the way of life that grew around “extensive social norms” to this end “in the form of custom.” These are memories of a time before cultures and customs were presented as the opposite to liberty, rather than its necessary precondition."