Andrew Sullivan reminds me why I love liberty

Andrew Sullivan has a post, today, that totally gets to the heart of why liberty and liberal values are a more honest accounting of human nature, its needs, its wants, its evils and its aspirations.

Islam's One-Hour Marriages

This story - about Islam's attempt to rationalize prostitution and make it into something holy that it is not - completely captures the heart of liberal values.

Liberal values are not meant to rationalize bad choices or bad situations, like selling your sexual wares or risking one's ding-a-ling and life, potentially, for a little hoochie-coochie.

What liberalism does is both get us honest about the universal and time-tested temptations that such opportunities offer, despite their unfortunate consequences, and the hypocrisy of middle class folks taking advantage of them, being tempted by them, regularly enjoying their benefits - readily available pornography is both the most open version of this and the most hopeful opportunity for middle class peoples to let go of their pretensions and hypocrisy - and then criminalizing, sanctioning, repressing, suppressing and otherwise punishing the very activities they often support or are sympathetic to in private.

Liberal values are about looking at our propensity to be tempted in the wrong directions, to acknowledge its presence and reality in our lives more honestly, and to offer us the freedom and the expecation and responsibility to choose wisely, even when we sometimes choose foolishly.

Liberal values acknowledge that fundamental to every choice we make, no matter the character of the society - free or repressed, liberal or illiberal - is our free will, to make good choices and to make bad choices. Liberal values acknowledge that bad choices might be made, but that better choices are made from those experiences.

Liberal societies are involved in one long bad choice, right now - to somehow expect that a more repressive direction that respects our freedom less can somehow be progressive in a free world where more freedom is the only real direction forward.

It is a bad choice we will learn from, I am confident (today; that hasn't been true, here, lately, as I have lost some faith in a world that has been seriously fucking me, lately). But, right now, we are rationalizing the bad choice. As we do in every generation. Until we learn our lessons, face ourselves more honestly, and move forward in the more liberalizing direction.

I have to say that for all of their faults (and liberal societies have many) this is the one thing that I am most proud of that I can count on in liberal societies - the likelihood of moving in the more liberal democratic direction, even while it sputters and fumbles and hurts a lot of people in the process. We fuck up a lot in liberal democratic societies, it's true.

But the great thing about liberal values is that they make it easier for us to face the fuck up once we make it.

That's why liberal values and liberal societies are great, despite their many shortcomings. Because they are the societies that most readily face their shortcomings. Because of the liberal values and the forgiving tendencies that go with them that allow us to face ourselves and one another more honestly and to take better responsibility for our faults.

And that is why I love liberty. Because it offers us the surest way to become more genuinely good people.

Love,
Ben