A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. …
… The adjective is a pluralizing adjective. With regard to democracy, it implies that there is a right of opposition to the ruling party, which means that there have to be other parties.
Sometimes when someone asks what my political affiliations are, I answer, “I’m a conservative-liberal-soicialist-anarchist.” While I’m definitely trying to be funny, I’m also completely serious; I really do think that all those things can be true at the same time. Or at least that there are qualities of each that can be held together.
I’ve never gone very far in spelling out those qualities, in thought let alone in writing, but it would be fun and very helpful to do. That quote from Walzer, whose new book I have not read (yet), is a great start. And maybe indicates a more specific arrangement of words: I’m a liberal conservative-socialist-anarchist.
It’s worth quoting Walzer from the beginning of the interview:
If we imagine the kinds of battles that are going on over democracy…; if we imagine some of the long, old arguments about the role of vanguards in the forward movement of socialism; if we think about the battles that are now going on over nationalism in many parts of the world, where we are facing an increasingly illiberal version of nationalism—in all these cases, it seems that getting democracy right, getting socialism right, getting nationalism right really hangs on getting the liberal adjective in place and insisting on the qualifications that it brings with it. I imagine those battles as hanging on the value and the effectiveness of that adjective.
In other words, being a liberal means being humble before the world and generous toward others. And it is the necessity of humility and generosity. Far from any sort of squishy relativism, it qualifies the thing you stand for, however passionately.
In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis wrote that
courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.
Gilbert Meilaender, commenting on that line from Lewis, adds that
even if courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point, it is not the whole of virtue. It may be that courage must always be present if another virtue such as prudence or humility is to be consistently displayed in a person’s life. That does not mean, however, that nothing more than courage need be present. Evidently each of the virtues has its own objective end. Courage does not enter into the definition of the other virtues; rather, it is necessary to sustain them.
Courage is to virtue as liberality is to ideology. (And they overlap! But that’s another thought for another day.)