This final section is where I think the bigger picture of how a Pagan perspective helps the modern world better address its problems comes together.  Look below the fold if you like political theory…

Liberalism’s
emphasis on equal rights applies to every human being equally.  This means it is an ethic for
interacting with strangers.  It
enables them to treat one another with respect, and with an assumption that
relations will be peaceful.  In
doing so liberalism has enlarged the circle of cooperation, weakened tribalism,
and so done great good for people as a whole.             

But for the same reasons liberalism as a philosophy of equal rights is
an insufficient philosophy for human relations as a whole.  Because it works so well when applied
to everybody, it works less well when applied to relationships which are not
between relative strangers.      

Let me give an example.  You are arguing with your lover.  In anger you say an epithet, and your
partner responds “You have no right to talk to me that way.”      

You
answer “I have a right to freedom of speech, don’t I?”  Your soon-to-be ex-partner answers
“Yes,” and walks out the door.     

Liberal rights are good guides for
establishing peaceful relations between strangers, but bad guides to
maintaining any kind of intimacy because they do not depend on any personal
knowledge of another, nor do they give good guidelines in such situations.  They are bad guides to parenting.  They are bad guides to friendship.  They are not foundations to relationships
once relationships have formed, tbut they are a good jumping off place because
(and I think this is vital) they are the form respect takes with strangers,
with people with whom we are not close.    And here we return to Paganism – or at least
those forms of Paganism with sensitivity to our living in a more-than-human
world.   

As primal
peoples have recognized for millennia, the proper way to relate to a living
world is with respect – and the kind of relationship we have with something
determines the kind of respect we should show.    

If liberalism’s approach to rights is how
we relate most appropriately to strangers whom we do no know, the it adds an
essential ethical insight that makes it possibly to vastly enlarge the sphere
of human cooperation, while at the same time clearly not being a foundation for
ethics as a whole.      

The old Pagan principle of respect is the fundamental relationship.  (Here I trun to an insight that is far older than Greece and Rome.)  Respect for the Gods, respect for the
earth, respect for the other-than-human, respect for strangers, respect for
parents, siblings, children, and friends. 
Depending on the relationships we have, the form of respect changes, but
its core does not.  We recognize
the independent value and worth of another.  They can never be appropriately treated as simply our
tools.  We owe others consideration
appropriate to the kind sof relations we have with them, but we always owe some
kind of respect.            

This
venerable Pagan perspective, with its roots to hunting and gathering peoples,
returns liberalism to the world. 
Once we realize that individuals are within the world this is a
necessary task.   When
liberalism is simply a (very important) illustration of a deeper principle, it
also integrates it with the world’s genuine spiritual traditions. Respect is
harmonious with love, care, and compassion, but asks less of us than that.  Respect can exist without these latter
qualities, but they cannot exist without there being also respect.     

I think this
Pagan perspective helps root liberalism more strongly in the more-than-human
world and frees liberalism from the two greatest drawbacks of its having
initially been formulated in a society that had outlawed non-Abrahamic
perspectives for millennia: that we are isolated from one another and that the
world is nothing more than a fund of resources.  We are always in relationship and are ourselves created from
relationships.  The respect we are
due is mirrored by the respect to which everthing with which we relate is
due.  Therefore the liberal idea
that the world is a fund of resources is simply wrong.  Completely and totally wrong.  But that is a belief connected to
transcendental monopolistic monotheism, not to liberalism.  Liberals have only really explored ethics in the human world, and taken for granted the view they inherited from dominant forms of Western Christianity that the rest of the world s of value only to th degree it serves us. (The Orthodox are a thousand times better than Western Christianity on this issue.)           

We need to relate to the world appropriately with respect, but not
because that means we will have more resources in the future.  That is a side benefit, like the
usefulness of friends being a side benefit of friendship.  If you are friends with someone only
because they are useful to you, you are not a friend.  The same applies to dealing with the rest of the world.  For myself, for example, at every meal
I thank what I consume, and not just the Goddess (though I thank Her to).    

This Pagan view is
one which I think is implicit in one way or another in any vision of Sacred
Immanence.  It is not only in
harmony with the best of modernity’s attempts to understand the human world, it
heals its greatest weakness that grew from its having arisen in a society
dominated by a religion of monopolistic transcendental monotheism.      

In short,
Pagan insights deepen, strengthen, and improve the core political perspectives
of both conservatism and liberalism. 
They strengthen the foundations of a free society, and the arenas in
which, in a democracy, people try and discover what is most desirable.  Equally importantly, I think this Pagan
perspective shows how both are essential aspects of any complex society, but
without reducing one to the other. 
We need liberalism to apply the moral impetus of helping make the world
a better place for people.  At the
same time, we need the conservative cautions to remind us we do not fully
understand even the human world. 
And we need a Pagan or other Immanentalist spiritual perspective to
putthose human  concerns in a
context bigger than they.