Wilson was a favorite essayist and political and social scientist, and his book, The Moral Sense, was an important one for me. In it, he identifies our moral sense, what some have described as “written on the heart”, as a fact of human nature, the primary enemy of moral relativism, and an essence that statist regimes of all stripes must defeat in order to attain sovereignty. He could not be described as a political conservative, but he certainly had conservative instincts, as evidenced by remarks such as these which resonate in current issues: “Our freedom does not depend on eliminating acknowledgements of the power of religion; it relies instead on the fact that for many generations we have embraced a secular government operating in a religious culture. That embrace will be weakened, not strengthened, by silly attacks on religiosity, stimulating the spiritual to question the seriousness of people who profess a concern for civil liberties”.
