It seems that the difficult times we are passing through, especially with the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, have produced just the right intellectual climate to produce conceptual developments in Catholics perfectly suited to reaching the heady heights of the George Weigel Prize for Catholic Convenience. Phew! Even thinking at these heights is exhausting! And improbable as it might seem, we have another winner, in close succession with the others. The very golden site, of the American Principles Project has featured the work of one Carson Holloway in reference to the Mosque controversy. But in his defense of his view on the controversy, Holloway embroils himself spectacularly with some of the central philosophical issues of governance today. He manages to be at once so wide ranging and yet notably provincial that it takes your breath away. It also has won him the George Weigel Award. Here is is very special analysis in part:

"Viewed in this light, one might say that liberals are shocked by natural human partiality, and tend to attack it as xenophobia, because their own moral and political vision is skewed by a kind of unnatural xenophilia, a love of foreigners and preference for them. This surely does not get to the root of the matter, however, since one can hardly experience a genuine love for what is little known. In most cases the liberal’s reflexive protectiveness of foreigners requires no serious familiarity with them or affection for them. What is really at work is a kind of hostility to one’s own, a tendency that Roger Scruton has termed “oikophobia,” a fear of the familiar. To capture its political aspect, we might refer to it instead as a kind of liberal patriphobia, a fear of one’s own country and a fear of the love of one’s own country. I hasten to add that by this remark I intend no crude slander on the patriotism of American liberals. I intend only a candid statement of what I think every honest observer must admit: liberals are deeply suspicious of the love of one’s own, which they regard as both intellectually primitive and morally dangerous. In its place they embrace an egalitarian cosmopolitanism that suspects as unjust any preference for one’s own over outsiders, and even the very act of making a distinction between one’s own and outsiders.

Liberals act in these ways in part because contemporary liberalism is abstract and rationalistic in its philosophic roots. Liberals are still in important respects children of the Enlightenment and still hold dear its universalistic assumptions and aspirations. The Enlightenment hoped to usher in an empire of the “rights of man,” to establish society on the basis of what is owed to human beings as human beings, and accordingly rejected older, more partial loyalties—to clan, country, or faith—as merely arbitrary. To be sure, such loyalties are in some sense arbitrary and hence irrational. Objectively speaking, one man’s father is no more valuable than the next man’s, and the relationship between father and son is the work of chance and not choice. To that extent, one could contend that loyalty to fathers is merely arbitrary and irrational. From another perspective, however, one might contend that such loyalty is perfectly rational—in the sense that, while every man would admit that his father has no particular claims on the human race, every man would equally claim that a father does have a very powerful claim on the help and affection of his own son. Love of one’s own is unreasonable from the standpoint of an abstract rationality, but it is perfectly reasonable in the sense that it is embraced as normal and good by the common sense of the human race. If this is the case, then Liberalism’s reflexive suspicion of the love of one’s own turns out itself to be unreasonable and unjust. Respect for the rights of man may be the beginning of political wisdom, but it is not the end.

Liberal patriphobia also arises in part from liberals’ sensitivity to the historical traumas that have been inflicted on the human race through a disordered love of one’s own. In the European experience, Nazism and Fascism stand as sobering reminders of the enormous criminality that has been done in the name of a perverted patriotism. In America, the historical crime of slavery was initiated and defended on the basis of whites’ definition of Africans as alien and other, and hence as not possessed of any rights that demanded respect. Liberals are correct to be mindful of such injustices, sensitive to their causes, and alert to avoiding their recurrence. They err, however, in laying the blame for such crimes entirely at the feet of the love of one’s own as such. The real culprit is the excess of the love of one’s own, not to say an insanely inflated version of it. As St. Augustine remarked, the abuse of a thing does not take away its use; and it would be no less foolish to abandon the love of one’s own because of the excesses of nationalism than it would be to abandon erotic love because of crimes of jealousy.

Although well-intentioned in its origins, liberal patriphobia should be rejected as incoherent and morally dangerous. It is incoherent because it is what C.S. Lewis called, in The Abolition of Man, a mere moral innovation—that is, a novel teaching that rejects important portions of the moral tradition of the human race on which it is nevertheless silently parasitic. This was, in fact, Lewis’s criticism of Nazism. It wrenched from traditional morality the universally accepted principle that a man must love and serve his country, while at the same time it abandoned the equally venerable claim that justice requires that we respect the rights of all men, even those of foreign nationality. Modern liberalism simply reverses this error, denying that a man may especially cherish his countrymen while groundlessly insisting that he love the whole human race. In fact, modern liberalism learned its love for humanity from a traditional morality that also taught a heightened love for one’s own. If one principle is to be rejected, then both are groundless. If one is to be retained, then both have authority.

Liberal patriphobia is morally dangerous both in its direct and indirect effects. To the extent that liberals succeed in their moralistic denunciation of the love of one’s own, they debunk human sentiments that are perfectly normal, natural, and just, and they therefore directly desensitize men to duties of love and service that go beyond the minimum owed to all men in common. In the long run, liberal patriphobia cannot succeed precisely because it is up against a natural human love and humanity’s moral common sense. The indirect effect of the liberal denunciation of love of one’s own as xenophobia is to discredit the charge of xenophobia and rob it of all of its force. Given humankind’s sad proclivity to lurch from one irrational extreme to another, liberalism’s campaign against the love of one’s own threatens to wear out the charge of xenophobia and thus leave us disarmed in the face of real xenophobia when it arise"

With this truly ambitious analysis Hollway has reached the heights of contradiction necessary to win the Weigel award. Let us see why. It is important to win the award that the analysis both sound serious but be completely meaningless in terms of ultimate conceptual analysis. Hollway has accomplished this by combining a breezy summation of the views of liberals as being all mere children of the Enlightenment, with the suggestion, inexorably implied, that Conservatives have a more special relationship with the Enlightenment. The brilliance of it is in what he does not say. To make any sense at all, even on its face, he would have to believe that Conservatives, while agreeing with the Enlightenment goals of the Founders, do not coddle later interpretations of the same. Since his entire argument is based on defending partiality for a group, and since he is an American, this would also involve defending the Founders who at the very least must be seen to have at least physically lived during the Enlightenment period. Therefore, even though a Conservative might argue that the Founders were only a teensy-weensy bit influenced by the intrinsically liberal and cosmopolitan views of the Enlightenment, since they actually lived in the 18th Century, they could not have been completely uninfluenced at all.

This disquisition achieves the standard of magnificent meaninglessness for which the George Weigel Prize was established. The author's whole argument, being an American is premised on his group-partiality which of course, for him whose group is Americans, was famously created by the very liberal and cosmopolitan Enlightenment thinkers he simultaneously disparages. In other words, the group to which he would be partial is historically related to the very opposite view he is implicitly criticizing. It is assumed by the judges of the Prize that the author has a whole range of explanations of how he can maintain such a stupendously contradictory position. But the prize is for bluntly asserting it, and also finding a way to disparage --in a safe serious-sounding way! -- even the Enlightenment ideals that were used to defeat and legally prosecute the Nazis. Clearly the author has a massive talent for cultural meaninglessness. We congratulate Carson Holloway, the winner! And we applaud the Witherspoon Institute for sponsoring such scholarship!

Wow George you must really think a lot of yourself. Whatever "magnificent meaninglessness" was in Holloway's commentary you more than out did with your own "magnificent meaninglessness". So far everyone of your award winners doesn't hold a candle to you when it comes to contradiction and meaningless babble. No wonder the award is named after you.

....therefore I am clearly worthy of representing the George Weigel Weltanschauung.