I’m currently reading a book entitled “The Civilization of the Middle Ages.” It’s well written and provocative in an academic sort of way, but the author lost me when he defended Innocent III’s use of the Inquisition in southern France. Where in the New Testament did Jesus advocate the use of torture to weed out heretics? Is coercion of belief really a core Christian principle? I must have missed that somewhere.
I bring this up because it is relevant today. Liberal values are under attack from two sides, in two different ways. Elements of the right want to use political power to legally impose their orthodoxy on the majority of Americans who don’t agree with them; the cancel culture left, on the other hand, is determined to use its presence on the internet to destroy the reputations of people who transgress its very different brand of orthodoxy. The rest of us are caught in the middle.
The two great attributes of liberalism are optimism and humility. Optimism, because the assumption is that the truth will prevail in an open marketplace of ideas; humility, because no one person or group is assumed to have a monopoly on wisdom. Our system has worked pretty well on that foundation for over 200 years. How much longer it will last, given the current trends, I cannot say.