Fighting Pride and Prejudice, Protecting the Right of Conscience

Fighting Pride and Prejudice, Protecting the Right of Conscience | Carrie Gress | CWR



Robert George’s Conscience and Its Enemies is a primer in civics and a guide to addressing the cultural Leviathan.


The well-known plot of Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice revolves around a terrible mix-up by the heroine, Elizabeth
Bennet. The dashing Mr. Wickham convinces poor Lizzy that Mr. Darcy is a man of
malice, something she is already prejudiced to believe, in part due to his own
reserve. As such, she feels no remorse in refusing Mr. Darcy’s ill-fated (and
ungentlemanly) marriage proposal. Darcy, stinging from Miss Elizabeth’s
refusal, writes our heroine a letter to dispel Wickham’s lies. The rest of the
tale unfolds with Elizabeth discovering just how mistaken she had been.

What would have happened to Miss Elizabeth Bennet, one wonders, if Mr.
Darcy had decided to not write her that letter? What if, out of his own pride
and contempt for those “decidedly beneath him,” he had simply not bothered to
engage the truth?

In his latest offering, Conscience
and its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism, Robert
George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, pens
a new sort of letter from Mr. Darcy.

While it is difficult to collapse entire groups into the persona of a
19th-century gentleman, there are striking similarities that come to the
surface in George’s defense of those who believe in what James Madison called “the
sacred rights of conscience.” On the one hand, the “Wickhams” tend to use charm
and deception to convince their audiences of their moral certitude and high
ground, while the “Darcys” tend to say little until they get to the point where
they simply must say something (which is often too little too late).

“I have found that secular liberal views are so widespread as to go
largely unquestioned,” George explains in his book. “As a result, many in these
elite circles yield to the temptation to believe that anyone who disagrees with
them is a bigot or a religious fundamentalist. Reason and science, they
confidently believe, are on their side.”

Many Lizzys and Larrys of our day—the lo-fos (low-information voters)—are
ensnared in the culture that idolizes celebrity, charm, glamour, and polish,
communicated in the short sound-bite or tweet. These habits don’t provide room
for longer or deeper explanations that get to the truth. Unfortunately, their
avoidance of substance leads them to the Wickhams of the world while the Darcys
remain silent—or are persecuted into silence.

As George explains, through close scrutiny of the Wickham-types, we
learn “that it is their own views that are thinly supported—that are, as they
might say dismissively, nothing but articles of faith.”

And yet while many liberal arguments rest on shallow footing, when it
comes to issues of conscience— such as marriage, abortion, freedom of religion—George
makes it clear that conservatives are not the underdogs, that principled
positions have an intellectual pedigree worth defending that simply does not
match up to the emotive or baseless arguments its opponents make it out to be.

A primer on pressing issues

The book is divided into four sections.

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