Freedom and the good

David Bentley Hart writes:

Democracy is not an intrinsic good, after all. Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, it is quite unamiguously wicked in its results...The only sound premise for a people's self-governance is a culture of common virtue directed towards the one Good. And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progessively conclude that al things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as 'nature', that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethcs, if it could be take to its logical end would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen... From 'In the Aftermath', p. 80

Hart puts his finger on something very real for Australian public discourse. The principles of political liberalism do not of themselves promote the good in the citizenry. Freedom is only beneficial when you have a culture of common virtue. Such a culture, if it ever existed (and actually, perhaps it certainly did), is but a distant memory... Moral outrage at pedophilia and Islamic terrorists are what we use to fill the blank space.