When I was younger, like many teenage boys I stylized myself as a libertarian. Dogged and fiercely independent, I thought that no one in the government had the right to regulate me or tell me what to do. When I surveyed the failures present around me, it seemed undeniable that everything the government touched fell apart. So, blaming these failures on our leadership and our leadership alone, I believed that no regulation was the answer.

This, I called freedom. I was promised by many self-proclaimed “conservatives” that an aloof “nightwatchman government” possessing just enough authority to police and defend the American people and nothing more was what the United States really needed. Little, short of anarchy, could be freer.

But as I grew older, I grew closer to the Lord and deeper into political studies. I discovered that “freedom” is not as straightforward as it sounds, nor is it wholly the essence of conservatism. For I learned through John Locke that there is a difference between liberty and license, and from the Federalists that “men are not angels.” I began also to see that many terrible actions throughout history have been committed in the pursuit of bare “freedom.”

By “freedom” we have entered an age of promiscuity and sexual sin which has caused immense pain and heartbreak and thoroughly corrupted my generation. By “freedom” many young men today have fallen into idleness and drug abuse, their places taken in our schools and workplaces by ambitious young women who by all metrics now outclass them. And by the same sentiment the fathers of many children have abandoned them and their mothers to live as islands adrift.

The most sobering instance of radical freedom in history was the French Revolution. Using the unforgettable slogan “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” the French people tore down the Church, their provinces, and even their calendar, which began again at year zero. Tens of thousands of men and women were executed through the Reign of Terror under a veritable police state. Their revolution displayed the depravity of mankind bare to all; the most sophisticated society on earth had, intoxicated by “freedom,” regressed into a murderous mob.

Une exécution capitale, la place de la Révolution (c. 1793) by Pierre-Antoine Demachy

Mankind has proven itself utterly incapable of living with freedom alone. Time and time again, the pursuit of liberty for its own sake has proven a direct path to brokenness and ruin. Name a utopian endeavor that has stood the test of time. Name the most righteous among us and prove to me that he has no sin. If one can, I will relent. But there is none.

The liberal left (which shares the root word of liberty by no coincidence) tell tall tales of the perfectibility of man, but they only deceive themselves and others. Man is nothing but fallen.

The highest purpose of government, therefore, is not to uphold freedom alone, but to enable the kind of freedom that comes from order. Recognition that there is a particular order inherent to the calling and flourishing of man, and an objective natural law by which he is acted upon, is at once the distinguishing facet of a conservative. Indeed, love of society and the desire to preserve its order is what drives the conservative mindset.

Without a conception of order, a society has no foundation to rest upon. The French Revolution, which deliberately undermined its foundation all at once, shows in particular relief the elevated dangers that come from an untethered people. There is no telling where a society that has taken such a radical step will land.

Few have explained the importance of order clearer than Justice Samuel Alito in, of all places, the court opinion which struck down Roe vs. Wade:

“License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of ‘liberty,’ but it is certainly not ‘ordered liberty.’ Ordered liberty sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests.”

It is this type of limited, responsible liberty to which the American Founding ascribed. It is why our Founding Fathers scoured through history to understand the mechanisms behind the rising and falling of every nation. It is why they meticulously debated over the mixing and balancing of power within our infant government during the sweltering summer of 1787, all with the depravity of man in mind. This is also, most interestingly, why the American Revolution was one of the only instances in history where a revolution was both conservative and liberal. Because classical liberalism, like conservatism, believed in limits, responsibility, and order.

The Declaration of Independence (c. 1819) by John Trumbull

But we have strayed far from classical liberalism. For too long, the Western psyche has forgotten its foundational understanding. As with anything, a philosophy becomes dangerous when taken to excess (just as to a Christian the line between practicing authentic piety and becoming a Pharisee is often dangerously easy to cross). Like a clipping of mint in a garden or a speck of leaven within dough, the seed of “liberty” at the heart of liberalism has over the centuries grown unwieldly and out of all proportion—so that it has corrupted the whole lot. Hence, why wise warnings of license have dropped away.

What do we instead see from the enlightened today?

We see the language of Marxism, which seeks the ‘liberation’ of the masses. Yet it is replete with themes like victimhood, class warfare, revolutions, and critical theory—the same themes as the French Revolution. Compare this to the language of conservatism, which welcomes all people high and low with themes of friendship, society, family, and order. Then ask, which has the better end in mind?

We see the godless idea of nihilism, which proclaims that the universe is dead, chaotic, and purposeless, lacking a telos. A philosophy that has made countless people mere atoms loosely tied like a string of Christmas lights. We read of nihilists like Nietzsche, who spoke of an age where mankind will be ‘beyond good and evil’ and liberated from such antiquated notions. But such an age, we have discovered since, is really just evil.

The depravity of Nietzsche’s flavor of liberty is excellently portrayed by the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (or Apocalypse Now for those more movie-inclined), who while concealed beneath the opaque canopy of the jungle uses his unparalleled skills to become the terrible master of its people. Conrad wished to show what a man untethered from natural law is really like.

Francis Ford Coppola’s interpretation of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, inspired from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness.

True freedom is not anarchy and chaos, it is ordered and principled. As Milton wrote, “To be free is precisely the same thing as to be pious, wise, just and temperate, careful of one’s own, abstinate from what is another’s and thence, in fine, magnanimous and brave.” This is also true through the law of God. Though it comes in the form of uncompromising commands, completely fulfills mankind according to his nature.

The American political and social system, therefore, is in desperate need of a correction by the conservative mindset, which alone can peel back the license of our age and return us to the state of ordered liberty expounded at our founding. We must be resolute and unafraid to proclaim this, which we know to be true.

Order and the Land

I will briefly close by connecting the idea of order to the land.

We have spoken of an inherent order within society and the constitution of man that makes absolute liberty dangerous in his hands. But it is within the natural ecological world, of all places, where the inherent order of things is most easily observed (and where all quite literally call it “natural” law!). Because corn does not grow in winter and two bulls will not make a calf, of course.

The idea of order before liberty is furthermore why I have grown more and more open to environmental regulations over time, though I often still instinctively balk at them. To be sure, prudence is merited in applying any regulation, and I personally believe command-and-control policies ought to be limited as much as possible. But nonetheless, I now believe that some degree of regulation is needed to avoid the tragedy of the commons, which is generated from inherent weaknesses in the human character.

To conclude, the keys to any true relationship, whether it be with God, in marriage, or in society, are limits, temperance, and respect. Yet liberalism divorces rights from obligations. It lies, like the serpent, by telling us that we can rule ourselves. But the act of ruling necessitates the task of limiting.

For it is as James Krueger states in The Disfiguration of Nature, “If we cannot use our own bodies, our own choices and freedoms, and our rights well, how could we expect that we will use the land well?” It is only by returning to the conservative idea of truth, order, and natural law that we will be able to regain the harmony we have lost.

By Evan Patrohay