Henry, William. In Defense of Elitism. New York: Anchor, 1994: 140-1

The problem of free will sheds light on an intriguing conundrum about theological differences between liberals and conservatives. It is a commonplace observation that liberals believe in the perfectibility of man while conservatives believe in the endurance of original sin. Superficially, that would suggest that conservatives take a more understanding and indulgent view of individual lapses, while liberals take a more harshly judgmental one. In fact, we know, quite the opposite is the case. Much as conservatives may be resigned to the unattainability of moral perfection, they delight in rewarding individual surges toward (or punishing individual retreats from) that state of grace. Liberals, on the other hand, assume that this moral nirvana will be reached collectively rather than by individual striving. In the real world, therefore, liberals tend to treat moral lapses as the collective fault of society.

If the goal of elitists is to distinguish confidently between better and worse cultures, better and worse ideas, better and worse contributions to society, then surely that judging process must extend to distinguishing between better and worse behavior. On the matter of free will and personal responsibility, even lifelong liberals of an elitist bent are forced to find common cause with conservatives. It is not that the down trodden do not need or deserve help. It is that they will not have better lives until they are prepared on their own to embrace better values, not the least of which is self-reliance.

Much of the erosion in the sense of personal responsibility among the poor can be traced, I think, to the late 1960s, when the language of "entitlement" began to become pervasive in American culture. That was the era as well of the National Welfare Rights Organization, a now-defunct lobbying group that had lasting importance chiefly because of the use of the word rights in its title. As late as the enactment of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty programs just a few years before, it was generally accepted that welfare and other benefices from the state were not rights but charity, given voluntarily for the physical succor of the recipient and the moral succor of the donor. This sense of a voluntary transaction, one that might legitimately be terminated at any time, surely awakened at least some recipients to the awareness that they were ultimately responsible for their own fate. Once welfare became labeled a "right" or "entitlement," that change in rhetoric inevitably eroded the sense of personal duty to survive and improve.

A comparable effect has resulted, I suspect, from the rhetorical and actual emphasis on criminals' rights, indeed on all individuals' rights vis-a-vis "the state"-which in economic terms always means other individuals, who pay the bills. It is fashionable these days to deride Calvinism as having been a force for smugness of the comfortable and dismissal of the afflicted. But if one strips away the theological component, early Calvinists left us a residue of acute perception. In general, the world is a rational place in which winners on the whole deserve to win and losers deserve to lose. It is only for the exceptions, the lives that are strikingly unfair, that we maintain the mediating devices of social welfare.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu