Introduction

I would like to introduce two ideas that are essential to what I am calling the spirit of disobedience. These two ideas are simple enough to state but more complicated to demonstrate. They both involve old delusions of American liberalism. The first delusion is that liberal/left politics, in both theory and action, is somehow independent of a need for the spiritual. To the contrary, I think I can show that it has always, whether it has known it or not, been dependent on assumptions that are finally spiritual, and this goes for notoriously antireligious thinkers like Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant as well. The second point is related but runs in the opposite direction. That thing — Reason — that liberalism has always assumed to be a secular force, the gift of its Enlightenment heroes of science and philosophy, is also finally spiritual but in the worst possible sense, it is religious. Reason is that thing that liberalism has itself always claimed to despise: a baseless and destructive enthusiasm.