A culture develops above all in awareness of nature’s limits, offerings, and demands. This awareness is not “theorized” but is a lived reality that often cannot be described until it has ceased to exist.3 Liberalism, by contrast, has aimed consistently at disassociating cultural forms from nature. The effect is at once to liberate humans from acknowledgement of nature’s limits while rendering culture into wholly relativist belief and practice, untethered from anything universal or enduring. The aim of mastering nature toward the end of liberating humanity from its limits—a project inaugurated
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