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Abroad Our Critics Watch and Wait
In the Institute's 1995 book, Seedbeds of Virtue, James Q. Wilson, professor emeritus of management and
public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of The Moral Sense, discusses the ``balance sheet" of individualism and the ``culture of liberalism" in the United States:
``Abroad our critics watch and wait. The worlds of Islam and Confucianism scorn the choice we have made and wager that in time - a century or two - their way
will be proved superior. Their claims cannot be ignored.
Islam and Confucianism are alike in elevating the collectivity over the individual. The distinctive feature of Islam is its denial of any possible distinction
between religion and society, between church and state, and thus between religious law and secular law. Islamic law requires submission to God in the public as well as the private sphere. The consequence of this
submission is to elevate duties over rights. Though Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have certain properties in common, Christianity and Judaism were transformed by the Greco-Roman culture in which they were
embedded into religions that acknowledged, albeit slowly and reluctantly, a separation between church and state and permitted the emergence of a political philosophy based on the maintenance of a separate sphere of
individual rights. The post-Enlightenment Western intellectual could practice science, philosophy, or art divorced from religious authority, but the Muslim intellectual, at least in the fundamentalist view, cannot.
Confucianism is not a religion, but a doctrine that tells the superior man how he ought to live. The goal is the achievement of harmony, not the assertion of
individuality or the defense of rights. In contemporary society the Confucian ethic implies a reliance on authority and tradition more than on rights and contracts, a desire for harmony more than conflict, a
preference for group affiliation more than personal self-expression, and an instinct for nationalism over cosmopolitanism.
However different, Islam and Confucianism have in common an orientation - religious in one case, secular in the other - toward a larger collectivity. Their
ideas, like those of the Enlightenment, can also be radicalized, but their radicalism leads not to the ills of modernism but to the ills of traditionalism.
Today many in the West, and especially in America, look longingly at Islam and Confucianism. We sometimes envy the extent to which those worlds appear to
repress crime, eliminate drugs, revere families, and respect authority. Four strokes of the cane in Singapore were greeted with cheers in New York City and Los Angeles.
Some leaders in those cultures already believe that we have lost; not a few people in our culture may be inclined to agree. I think they are wrong. The skeptics
here and the boasters abroad may vastly underestimate the capacity of a free society to sustain what is truly human and to correct its own errors and vastly overstate the capacity of a communal society to liberate
the human spirit, establish political legitimacy, or sustain economic growth. Thirty years ago America was scorned as a nation that denied many of its own citizens full participation in its political life. We
changed. Twenty years ago America was criticized for its inability to sustain a manufacturing economy; American automobile companies and their workers, it was said, could no longer compete. We changed. Ten years ago
America was told that it had over-extended itself with military commitments that would bankrupt us. They didn't; we won the Cold War. Five years ago America was told that it had embraced an inefficient welfare state
and a cumbersome legal system that would inevitably suffocate individual initiative. Then there was an election, and we began to change.
The present challenge is more profound, for it is cultural, not economic or political, and culture is difficult, if not impossible, to change according to plan.
But the West has faced cultural challenges before. In the 1930s the leaders of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union dismissed the English and the Americans as timorous, effete people whose will to fight had been
eroded by bourgeois democracy and self-indulgent habits. They were wrong; it was they who failed.
The decadent, individualistic, intemperate West is always being underestimated. I believe that, costly as its embrace may be, freedom is man's universal hope;
its defense, his steady preoccupation. That hope will be easier to sustain and its defense more readily accomplished if all of us, but especially the intellectuals, recognize that the exercise of freedom presupposes
the maintenance of a natural moral order that deserves respect and reaffirmation, an order that arises from the familial seedbeds of virtue."
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