At the beginning of the 21st century, many scholars continue to insist, in an echo of Francis Fukuyama, that we are essentially at “the end of history”. In coining this expression in his provocative essay and subsequent book, Fukuyama maintained that it was “Inevitable” that every nation in the world would eventually gravitate towards a social system that was essentially democratic in its political processes and aspirations, as well as “capitalist” in its basic economic foundations. In his book, Fukuyama lamented the fact that this would mean that life became less interesting, and even somewhat of a lonely existence for the human person who would be left with little else in this world, save his rights.

Like all such grand civilizational theses, Fukuyama’s theory was the subject of much criticism. Political scientists, for example, noted that there is a world of difference between the ‘democratic’ and ‘free market’ character of a nation like Singapore, and other nations widely regarded as bastions of political and economic freedom. Other scholars such as Samuel Huntington stressed—and Fukuyama later conceded—that Fukuyama’s thesis seriously downplayed the pivotal role of culture. This did not, of course, prevent Professor Huntington from proceeding to write his own grand explanation for the course of contemporary history in the form of a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations, a work which in its turn has been criticized for apparent over-simplification.

The purpose of my brief remarks tonight is not to articulate my own grand theory of the nature and/or future of democracy and capitalism, or the relationship between the two throughout the world. Rather, this paper suggests that whatever form is take by democratic political systems and free market economies in the future will, to a large extent, depend upon the vision of man that undergirds them. At the present stage of history, it is unclear which anthropology of the human person will attain ascendancy in the West. Of course, there is only one true anthropology of the human person. We cannot hold, for example, that human beings are, by nature, pleasure-maximizing and purely material creatures as the utilitarians would have us believe, while simultaneously believing that we are spiritual-material beings called to a transcendent destiny but nonetheless capable of freely choosing to act in ways that are intrinsically evil. If this is true, then the issue of which anthropology of humanity will attain ascendancy in our institutions, such as the judicial system, and our broader culture such as literature and music, is vitally important.

What, then, are the views of the human person that currently shape our society? In one sense, they are innumerable, ranging from Aristotelian and Christian, to Marxist, feminist, and ecological. To simplify matters, however, I would like to propose that there are in essence two anthropologies that underlie so many of the debates that characterize our society. One is what Robert George and others have called ‘orthodox secularism’; the other is the Judeo-Christian vision. Broadly speaking, orthodox secularism involves fundamental rejection of Judeo-Christian teaching about the origins of the cosmos, the nature of man, and the essence of the moral life. According to the secularist orthodoxy, a child prior to birth—or some other marker event sometime before or soon after birth, such as the emergence of detectable brain–wave function or the acquisition of self–awareness—has no right not to be killed at the direction of its mother, no right, at least, that the law may legitimately recognize and protect. At the other edge of life, orthodox secularists believe that every individual has a right and sometimes a duty to commit suicide and to be assisted in committing suicide, should that person, for whatever reasons, prefer death to life, or if others consider their utility to have become defunct.

In short, orthodox secularism rejects the proposition central to the orthodox Judeo–Christian tradition of thought about issues of life and death: that human life is intrinsically, and not merely instrumentally, good and therefore morally inviolable. It therefore rejects orthodox Christianity’s condemnation of abortion, suicide, infanticide of so–called defective children, and certain other life–taking acts.

The secularist orthodoxy also rejects the Judeo–Christian understanding of marriage as a bodily, emotional, and spiritual union of one man and one woman, ordered to the generating, nurturing, and educating of children, marked by exclusivity and permanence, and consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, even if not, in every case, in fact. Marriage, for secularists, is a legal convention whose goal is to support a merely emotional union—which may or may not, depending upon the subjective preferences of the partners, be marked by commitments of exclusivity and permanence, which may or may not be open to children depending on whether partners want children, and in which sexual acts of any type mutually agreeable to the partners are perfectly acceptable.

Many scholars trace the origins of orthodox secularism to Descartes. But I think that a more substantial case for orthodox secularism’s intellectual progenitor can be made for the understanding of the relationship between reason and desire articulated by the Scottish Enlightenment thinker, David Hume. Hume, we recall, stated that ‘Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions, and may never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. On these grounds, Hume maintained that ‘it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger’. Similar premises underlie the ruminations of most secularist thinkers. The Oxford philosopher, John Mackie, for example, announces at the outset of his book on ethics that ‘there are no objective values’. His colleague, Anthony Kenny, has argued that practical reasoning aims at ‘the satisfaction of the reasoner’s wants’, and insists that wants themselves are not ‘an output of reason’. This amounts to stating that, at the level of basic first principles, no question of reasonableness can arise. There are only desires that are beyond questioning; practical reason can therefore only be understood in purely subjective (non-cognitive) terms.

Some view Hume’s understanding of reason and desire as liberating. The irony is that once you believe that reason is purely instrumental, you cannot believe in free choice. Robert George observes that ‘If reason is merely passion’s ingenious servant—if rationally motivated action is impossible because our ultimate ends are necessarily provided by feeling, emotion, or other sub-rational motivating factors—then even externally un-coerced action cannot be truly freely chosen. Rather, our actions are the products of—are determined by—such factors’.

Moreover, it is only a short step from accepting Hume’s anthropology of the human person to believing that wants in themselves are sufficient justification for particular choices. Such thinking contrasts sharply with the philosophical anthropology of the human person articulated by, among others, the Catholic Church. For figures such as Aristotle and Aquinas, being reasonable implies that people exercise their will informed by their reason. While our desires can cause us to want to act in certain ways, it is a mark of being human that such desires served the intellect. Indeed, it is seen as wrong to choose options whose shaping have been dominated by feelings—not feelings that support or are in line with reasons (as every reasonable action must be somehow emotionally supported)—that impair the rational guidance of actions.

In this sense, we see that orthodox secularism is far from being a ‘neutral doctrine’. It relies upon a distinct and highly debatable set of moral and metaphysical propositions concerning the relationship of consciousness to bodiliness, of reason to desire, the possibility of free choice, and the source and nature of human dignity. Secularist doctrine also contains very contentious views about what constitutes a person—views just as controversial as the Jewish and Christian outlook. This being the case, those who call themselves secular humanists ought to recognize that, like any other belief system, orthodox secularism stands or falls as a coherent doctrine depending on whether its propositions can withstand arguments advanced against them by representatives of other traditions.

So what, you might ask, is the significance of this basic opposition of anthropologies for Western societies with democratic political arrangements and free economies? The answer is that the debate is of fundamental importance. Neither democracy nor the free economy are self-sufficient. The manner in which they function, and their effects upon society, depends greatly upon the culture in which they exist. Hence, in a culture where a Humean-liberal anthropology prevails, it is likely that the only factor that will count when it comes to a democracy’s political deliberations are people’s ‘preferences’, no matter how crude or even obscene such preferences might be. In such a democracy, what matters will not be objective truths that transcend time, place, or culture, but rather the majority prefer. In such circumstances, there will be nothing to stop a majority from decreeing that certain categories of people are unworthy of life or to abolish a freedom as fundamental as religious liberty. The only reference point in a democracy characterized by such a cultural anthropology will be preference, and if such actions are what the majority prefer, then preference itself is the only required justification. In such a culture, of course, right reason and Revelation count for nothing.

The primary alternative anthropology to orthodox secularism would, however, increase the chances of modern democracy developing in such as way that it insists—like Aristotle, Aquinas, and the American Founding Fathers—that there are certain truths which suggest that certain acts are eternally right while others are always wrong, no matter how many people prefer that this was not the case. This does not means that such a democracy would be ‘unfree’, for the Judeo-Christian anthropology of the human person recognizes that, as a result of original sin, man is imperfect. Such a democracy will therefore make allowance for the fact that people will sometimes make the wrong choices, and indeed need a certain degree of space in which to make such wrong choices. It will, however, also be pluralistic insofar as we know that there are many good ways of pursuing good ends, not all of which may be pursued at the same time.

Like democracy, it is also the case that different anthropologies of the human person will direct the workings of free economies to quite dissimilar ends. The dominance of a Humean-liberal anthropology will facilitate a market that promotes rampant consumerism throughout society: consumerism being understood in this context as the habit of viewing the desire to have material things for their own sake, to the detriment of acquiring moral virtues. For if preference is supreme, then people will have no sense that they should be ordering their choices about what to buy and sell according to a hierarchy of goods. If, on the other hand, people make their economic decisions based, in part, upon recognition that, while material goods are important, it is also necessary to acquire moral and spiritual goods, then the market will, to a certain extent, reflect such choices.

Let me conclude, then, on this note. In so much contemporary discussion of the nature and future of democracy and capitalism, many if not most scholars studying these areas focus upon very specific questions. How much state intervention, for example, in the economy is permissible in a free economy? What constitutional frameworks produce particular outcomes in democratic systems? How ought power in a democracy be divided? How much tax should be paid by particular income groups? What percentage of GDP should be spent on social welfare?

All of these questions are terribly important and more than worthy of study, even for entire lifetimes. I would suggest, however, that the answers to such questions will be determined, in part, by the type of anthropology of the human person that scholars bring to bear upon these questions. If, like Peter Singer, we regard people as no more than utilitarian pleasure-maximizing machines, then the content of concepts such as that much over-used phrase ‘rights’ becomes entirely arbitrary and dependent upon whatever particular preference choice happens to be surging through the public consciousness at any one time. In such an eventuality, the implications for democracies with free economies will be profound. Indeed, the prevalence of phrases such as ‘preference rights’ which we hear increasingly echoed in parts of the academy and the public square, and the associated demand (for it is rarely a reasoned argument) that democratic systems promote and protect such rights, indicates the extent to which utilitarianism continues to encroach upon the public consciousness.

If, however, we believe, as I do, that the human person is a creature of incomparable dignity precisely because of humanity’s capacity to choose freely to accept a transcendent destiny as the only creature whom God has made in his own image, with reason and free will, then expressions such as ‘preference rights’ will suddenly appear somewhat shallow. It is true, nonetheless, that much of late modernity assumes that the admission of humanity’s dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom. Yet it is also one of the paradoxes of our time that humanity, who began the period that we call “modernity’ with a self-confident assertion of its coming of age and autonomy begins the 21st century fearful of itself, fearful of what democracy and free economies might be capable of, and fearful for the future. The long term stability of modern liberal democracies and market economies depends, more than ever, upon man being willing to acknowledge his creaturely limits and to enter into a personal encounter with God in such a way that we become more truly and completely ourselves. For until the modern world accepts that our anthropology as human persons is such that we must always strive to change ourselves from being the persons-that-we are into the person that we-ought-to-be, there is every chance that the human beings that inhabit democracies polities and free economies may well end up as the lonely unhappy creatures that Fukuyama somewhat despairingly believes will inhabit the earth in his imagined end of history