Religious believers, religious conservatives, traditionalists, Natural Right Straussians and theists are mistaken, on Arnhart’s view, in thinking there are diminishing stores of moral virtue to be found in America, Western nations more broadly, and throughout a global liberal order partially emanating from the Anglosphere.
Perhaps some fusion of Scottish Enlightenment liberal thought (Adam Smith, especially), Lockean natural right, and Darwinian truth claims upon our origins are enough to maintain moral virtue in keeping individuals and ‘us’ upon a glide-path to progress.
Arnhart:
‘A bourgeois liberal society conforms best to human nature, because a liberal open society will secure both natural liberty and natural virtue–the liberty of individuals to develop those moral and intellectual virtues that express that ranking of the generic goods of human nature that constitutes the best life for those individuals.’
On that pesky God question:
‘To the question of why nature exists, or why it has the order that it does, there are only two possible answers. Either we say this is a brute fact of our experience: that’s just the way it is! Or we move beyond nature to nature’s God as the creator of nature, but then we cannot explain why God is the way He is. In looking for an ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained–either an uncaused or self-caused nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.’
Hmmm…
Related On This Site: Are the empirical claims demonstrating continued progress true? To some extent, I think, yes, they are. Timothy Snyder Responds To Steven Pinker’s New Book At Foreign Policy: ‘War No More: Why The World Has Become More Peaceful’
What about that old Church Of England belief via a lot of German Idealism? Repost-Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’
From Darwinian Conservatism-‘Smith and Strauss on Bourgeois Liberalism and the Philosophic Life’..
What about the Nietzschean influence and its attendant nihilism?:…From YouTube: J.P. Stern On Nietzsche Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’..
How might this relate to the Hegelian/post-Marxist project via ‘The End Of History’: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’…
Is value pluralism really enough?: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…