Liberals according to Theodore Dalrymple:

Vulgarity is for rightists, say vulgarians on the left.
The Sunday before the American election, the Observer in London published an assessment of President Bush’s legacy by several well-known American writers. One of them, Tobias Wolff, wrote: “When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W. Bush.”

Now, President Bush’s credentials as a conservative might well be questioned; but I take it nevertheless that he was elected preponderantly by conservative voters. Is there, in fact, a connection between being a conservative and having the selfish thoughtlessness (of the kind with which we are all familiar) that Wolff describes?

My guess is that there is no such connection, but rather the reverse. Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.

Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.

Which outlook is more conducive to good manners? It seems to me, a priori, the conservative rather than the liberal: for what can the daily personal conduct of a single man add to or subtract from the sum of human goodness or evil, happiness or misery?

This applies equally to churches. Mainline liberal churches are very keen on the UN’s MDGs and their leaders will even make buffoons of themselves in the hope, presumably, that the government will be blackmailed into acting in order to forestall an unsightly repeat performance. But ask a liberal Christian-manqué to personally exercise self-control and all one hears about is entitlement; if one is particularly unfortunate, prophetic entitelment. Theologically conservative churches, on the other hand, simply do things themselves to help people; take a look at the parish presentations at the first ANiC synod here.

Which brings us to the rudeness. During the examination of St. Hilda’s affidavit declarants, the lawyer for the ultra-liberal Diocese of Niagara, John Page, spent hours literally screaming abuse at his victims in an attempt to goad them into saying something they would regret.

If it were not for Fred Hiltz’s period of gracious restraint, who knows what it would have been like.