Page 65 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
from which you can choose ... or not. But if we don’t choose the meanings our governments choose, we may pay for it with a big chunk of our freedom.
Joni Mitchell put it like this:
When I thought life had some meaning, and I thought I had some choice,
I made some value judgments in a self- important voice.
Then absurdity came over me, and I longed to lose control.
But all I ever wanted, was to come in from the cold.50
In his 1987 philosophical blockbuster, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom put similar sentiments in even more painful, but also more exalted terms. “It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about,” he writes, including our own lives, families and cities. He continues:
Non-philosophic men love the truth only
as long as it does not conflict with what they cherish — self, family, country, fame, love. When
it does conflict, they hate the truth and regard as monster the man who does not care for these noble things....51
[Man]...is on his own. God neither looks after nor punishes him. Nature’s indifference to justice is a terrible bereavement for man. He must care for himself without the hope that good men have always had; that there is a price to be paid for crime, that the wicked will suffer. But it is also a great liberation — from God’s tutelage, from the
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