Accept That Reality is Messy

Often there is no "line"

(Audio version here)

Humans, as a species, are messy. We are quarrelsome and individualistic, yet tribal apes. Consequently, we insist on having our own minds and disagreeing with each other and factionalising over it. The kind of ape we are is big-brained and capable of complex thought so the societies we build and the issues we fight over are correspondingly complex with multiple layers and many grey areas.

Humans, as a species, dislike messiness. We crave order, consistency and comprehensible frameworks that guide how we understand things and direct us in what to do about them. This trait of forming models to understand and navigate our world has served us well and given us a level of control over it not found in any other species.

This paradox in which we are a complicated and messy big-brained species which dislikes complexity and mess combined with our evolutionary history as social mammals which band together into tribes in competition with other tribes to thrive, survive and procreate presents some challenges.

Historically, human societies have mostly been hierarchical, ruled by a dominant moral orthodoxy with a simple story about who we are and what we must do: warlords, monarchs, dynasties, theocracies. Because we are quarrelsome and factional, none of these arrangements has ever satisfied everyone. Sooner or later, the ruling regime is toppled and another takes its place, usually in bloodshed.

How Liberalism Broke the Cycle

Liberalism broke this cycle more effectively than anything before it. It worked by accepting humans as they are: big-brained, complicated, disagreeable, individualistic, and tribal. Instead of trying to suppress those traits, it channelled them. Liberal societies protected individual liberty, created space for productive disagreement that fuels knowledge and conflict resolution, and developed democratic systems of government by consent. They have never done these things perfectly, but they have done them far better than regimes that are not liberal democracies.

Liberalism’s great strength is that it accepts and accommodates human messiness. In this way, it works better with human nature than any system that has ever existed. This rests on a simple definition of success: a society that allows ordinary people to live and raise families without enduring constant tribal warfare or submission to the dictates of rulers.

Yet the expansiveness and pluralism that make liberalism strong are also what make it vulnerable. A common criticism is that it lacks a vision of the ‘common good’ or a shared moral framework that many people crave. Liberalism offers no fixed answers or direction. Instead, it allows individuals to ask their own questions, shape their own answers, and choose their own paths, requiring only that they not impose their views and values on others.

Liberalism flourishes in times of stability, when people recognise the value of its pluralistic framework that allows for and mediates disagreement. In times of insecurity, however, our craving for order, certainty, and cultural conformity is more easily triggered. When threatened, people become inclined to seek the comfort of simple frameworks and shared narratives. They turn more readily to religious, traditional, or ideological stories, retreat into tribal groups, enforce conformity more harshly, and view outsiders with deeper suspicion. In such conditions, strongman leaders and authoritarian solutions often gain appeal.

In times of instability, people often blame liberalism’s freedom-centred pluralism for the messiness of human societies rather than recognising that societies of humans are inherently messy and that liberalism is a framework that accepts this reality and works to mediate it and resolve conflicts without violence. Critics see liberalism as too open and accommodating, and accuse it of having failed, usually because an authoritarian movement has arisen despite its existence. They insist that only their own brand of authoritarianism can suppress the rival one. History suggests otherwise. Humans consistently respond badly to authoritarianism, and every authoritarian regime has had a limited shelf-life. Yet each insists that theirs will be the one to tame social tensions and end culture wars. This is, in effect, a “Real authoritarianism has never been tried” argument.

In reality, liberalism — at its root, opposition to authoritarianism — has never and can never facilitate the rise of authoritarianism. Critics often point to the authoritarian tendencies of Critical Social Justice on the left, illiberal identitarian populism on the right, or Islamism, as if liberalism failed to prevent them from gaining cultural power or provided the grounds in which they could flourish. But none of these movements arose from societies that were strongly protecting individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, or viewpoint diversity. They arose where those protections had become weak or inconsistent and where illiberal ideas were met with complacent tolerance until they gained dominance.

It is not that liberals, (or defenders of individual liberty and democratic processes who do not refer to themselves as liberals, although they are) failed to recognise these ideologies as illiberal. They did. The problem is that too few people were willing to oppose them consistently across political divides.

This brings us to the urgent question: how can liberalism survive, regroup, and remain principled in the face of rising demands for neatness, certainty, and control that so easily slide into support for authoritarianism? I hear from more and more liberals who feel anxious, even despairing, about this. Yet the role of liberals has always been clear: to oppose authoritarianism in whatever form it arises. And it rarely arises in just one.

We are now living through a particularly troubling wave of illiberalism on many fronts. On the left, we have seen the authoritarian Critical Social Justice movement. On the right, illiberal strands of the “anti-woke” reaction often overlap with populism. Both are marked by postmodern or post-truth disregard for truth, and by attempts to impose their own vision of a “common good” on everyone else.

Tensions over immigration and Islam’s cultural compatibility with liberal democracy have also spiked. At their illiberal edges, these debates fuel ethnonationalism in the UK (sometimes drawing on postcolonial theory) and Christian nationalism in the US. Internationally, conflicts over Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine are polarising Western societies, with evidence that Russia is deliberately working to destabilise liberal pluralism. Meanwhile, the UK continues to see state interference with free speech, and in the US, constitutional rights and democratic processes face threats from the Trump administration. Attempts to defend liberty consistently are hampered by deep political polarisation.

These are exactly the conditions that drive people to retreat into tribal groups, cling to simple frameworks and shared narratives, and be drawn to authoritarians who promise solutions — at the cost of both principles and liberties. For many liberals in the West, this feels like the most unstable period in living memory, with more authoritarian movements demanding opposition at once than we have ever faced before. We, too, feel the pull of clear-cut moral principles to guide us. And the sheer volume of ideologically motivated bullshit, fallacious reasoning, and reality-resistant truth claims we are bombarded with is immense.

Where Is the Line?

It is essential to recognise that a drive for principled consistency and ethical clarity is not only compatible with liberalism, but indispensable to it. The danger lies not in seeking clarity, but in looking for simple, blanket rules in fabricated ideological narratives that deny reality and human psychology. The challenge is how to pursue ethical consistency while respecting freedom, tolerating disagreement, and accepting human messiness. As one of my thoughtful commenters wrote:

I have a bit of a libertarian bend and generally subscribe to the “live and let live”. What I grapple with is that sometimes there are things which don’t harm me in the here and now, but if they get normalised they would harm society (by my reckoning) in the long run. For e.g., if someone holds beliefs I find abhorrent, I agree that unless they break a law they can think and believe what they want. But if they raise their children with those same beliefs and preach to others, they will eventually impact the society my family and offspring will one day live in. Where do we draw the line of giving people autonomy as their beliefs aren’t “harming” any one else? What if the harm is being planted in seeds that will bear fruit later? I don’t know the answer to this.

This is a common refrain. “Where do we draw the line?”

The line for the liberal is always between these two clauses:

Let people believe, speak and live as they see fit // provided they do no material harm to anybody else nor deny them the same freedoms.

This does not make things simple. There are always grey areas about what can be considered to constitute material harm and about what represents a legitimate threat to freedom. Where is the line between the expression of hostile views about a particular group and incitement of violence against that group? At what point does an illiberal religious or political worldview that we must counter with argument become an extremist movement radicalising people into committing harmful actions such that membership of it constitutes conspiracy to commit harm? Are some ideas so productive of direct harm - Islamism, Nazism, the medicalisation of children as ‘trans’ - that excluding them from public institutions is simply a matter of safety?

Where is the line between freedom of speech and targeted harassment and abuse? When does an action stop being an exercise of freedom of association, consumer choice or legitimate protest and become illiberal organised political cancellation? How can we decide when an employer has exercised their own freedom to fire someone for their speech based on a legitimate risk to their reputation and when the risk has been created by political activists to pressure them to do so? When can we understand a mass response to a controversial statement as legitimate criticism that enables bad ideas to be beaten by better ones and when is it a social media ‘pile-on’ that functions to disincentivise further dissent and chill free speech?

There simply aren’t self-evident lines that can be neatly applied to every issue but this does not mean liberals cannot have principled consistency. We cannot realistically create a master flowchart that considers every variable in every case and situation. If we attempted that, we could never get everyone to agree with it. We have to accept the reality of human messiness while being consistent in our principles and thoughtful about how we navigate it. I will suggest one form of fallacious argument that we should not allow ourselves to be sucked into and five things we can bear in mind while addressing specific issues from a liberal perspective. (There will be many more and I encourage you to share them in the comments).

One thing we should absolutely not do is accept that the existence of complexity and messiness justifies creating illiberal blanket rules that target people expressing unpopular, offensive or politically inflammatory stances, but not causing direct and material harm. We are currently seeing a surge of fallacious reasoning that goes like this: “I can think of a somewhat comparable example in which you would agree that banning or punishing someone was reasonable and not authoritarian. Therefore, you have no grounds to object to me banning or penalising things contrary to my political beliefs. And if you object, you must also reject the first example.”

Examples presented to me include:

• If it’s reasonable for an employer to fire someone for saying black people are too stupid to be employable, then it’s also reasonable to fire James Damore for saying men and women differ in interests on average.

• If we don’t let people walk around entirely naked, then we can also ban them from covering their hair.

• If it is age-appropriate safeguarding to remove explicit violent or sexual content from school libraries, then it is age-appropriate safeguarding to remove books accurately depicting historical slavery or referencing the existence of gay people.

• If it would be reasonable for fire an engineer for wearing a KKK hood at work, it is reasonable to fire him for dangling his hand from his truck window in such a way that his figures form a gesture which has been associated with white supremacy.

• If it is a matter of safety to fire a hospital employee who called for another Holocaust while being responsible for preparing food for Jewish people, then it is also a matter of safety to fire a Home Depot worker who joked about wishing an assassin’s bullet had not missed Trump.

• If it is reasonable to ban fetish gear that exposes genitals, then it is also reasonable to ban men from wearing dresses.

If somebody raises one of these comparisons in good faith, it can be worth pointing out the crucial differences: between claims of racial inferiority and claims of psychological sex differences; between gratuitous portrayals of violence and accurate depictions of history; between intention and accident; between established decency laws and individual expression which do not contravene them; between a credible threat to safety and a tasteless joke.

In most cases, however, people making such false equivalencies are not interested in these finer points or considering issues thoughtfully on a case-by-case basis. They are deflecting to a different issue where censorship or penalties are more defensible because they cannot easily defend either in the case in question. One can spend half an hour explaining why the cases differ, only for one’s interlocutor to switch to a new “comparison” and accuse you of being immoral or stupid for not conceding. The aim is to exhaust and overwhelm good-faith challengers and discourage further debate.

If you do choose to engage, the best move is to reverse the demand: If they are unwilling to defend their authoritarian stance on the issue in question specifically, they should make a strong case for the equivalence they are claiming, because it is not apparent. If they really believe, for example, that claims of psychological sex differences in interests are equivalent to claims of racial inferiority in capabilities, they must explain how race is equivalent to sex, how interests are equivalent to capabilities, what evidence supports either claim, or why political agendas should take precedence over evidence. It is their responsibility to do the work of making a strong case for banning anything.

Dishonest authoritarians often try to use our concern for truth and principled consistency against us. We do not need to let them. If they wish to persuade us, they must come with evidence and reasoned argument.

Five Things to Bear in Mind

Quite a lot of messy complexity can be navigated by holding core premises, principles and strategies in mind. Here I suggest five.

1. Banning things does not work.

There is a common idea that liberals are idealists. Some critics say we are radical individualists who value freedom at all costs, indifferent to social consequences. Others dismiss us as woolly elitists who think that if we sit around explaining things reasonably for long enough, we can convince people to stop being authoritarian and all the problems will go away. Either way, the charge is that we are unserious about real problems.

Individual liberty is something that should be supported for its own sake and on principle. However, there is also a strong pragmatic argument for liberalism. Banning ideas has never worked. It doesn’t make them disappear. It drives them underground, gives them the glamour of forbidden truth, and leaves their adherents free to present them unchallenged within alternative spaces. By keeping bad ideas speakable, we can expose, debate, and discredit them. That is the only way ideas have ever died: by losing support in the court of public opinion.

People who think that banning ideas can make them go away would do well to look at the UK. Under the influence of Critical Social Justice, gender-critical and anti-immigration views were heavily penalised. People were fired, arrested, threatened, and no-platformed. Five years later, the UK is now dubbed “TERF Island,” and Reform, running on an anti-immigration platform, has surged in the polls, destabilising the two-party system. Whether or not one welcomes these developments, they demonstrate that attempts to ban ideas frequently serves only to strengthen them.

It is particularly frustrating as a liberal to have it frequently assumed that we oppose the banning and penalising of ideas because we do not realise how harmful ideas can be or because we agree with the ideas and want them to thrive. Sometimes liberals can fall into this error themselves and agonise over whether they really should set aside their support for freedom of speech in the face of a particularly egregious idea. This makes intuitive sense but does not work in practice. The opposite is true. It is precisely when ideas are most harmful that we need them out in the open, where they can be confronted, resisted, and stripped of power. This is not naive idealism. We do it because it works.

2. Think in Terms of a ‘High Bar’ rather than blanket rules or simple lines.

Because humans are complicated and messy, the societies we build and the ethical dilemmas we face are also complex and multi-faceted and a variety of views on them will always exist. We are not always able to set out theoretical frameworks that cover every eventuality and potential manifestation of every issue and draw clear lines that cover every possible variable.

We can, however, think in terms of having a very high bar for banning things and stick to the ‘harm’ principle. In the liberal conception of society, individual liberty is the default position and anybody who wants to say, “No, you may not say or do that” has the responsibility to make a strong and convincing case that unambiguous, material harm has been caused or will be caused by tolerating the beliefs or actions in question. That is; people are not expected to prove that they should be allowed to say or do anything. Those who think they should not be allowed to say or do it are expected to demonstrate harm if they want to justify coercion. In the words of John Stuart Mill,

[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise.

If the case for harm cannot be made, there is no justification for coercion. This does not mean accepting that the beliefs or actions do not present a problem or succumbing to moral or epistemological relativism and accepting that everybody has their own equally valid ‘truth.’ It means that the job of dispatching those ideas and associated behaviours remains in the realm of discussion, critique, argument and persuasion, not in the realm of state or social force.

3. Hold Ourselves to a High Standard

It is common now to hear people deplore the state of society and opine that liberalism has failed because illiberalism still exists and is increasingly gaining positions of power and prestige. “Where is this liberal society?” they ask, forgetting that they are society and failing to introspect honestly about whether they have been upholding liberalism.

Too often, we are inclined to think in top-down ways of society as a thing we live in and which owes us certain rights and freedoms rather than a thing we are and which we create with the culture we develop and the principles, norms and expectations we establish. As we get increasingly anxious about a certain manifestation of illiberalism on a political side which is not our own or which threatens our own values or way of life, we become prone to tolerating or condoning illiberalism on our own side or which does not threaten our own values or way of life. Then we outsource agency to political leaders and activist groups whose illiberal stances we don’t really support while speaking and behaving in ways which embolden them to become more illiberal.

It can feel futile, idealistic or naive to try, as an individual, to push back at rising surges of illiberalism by being visibly, vocally and consistently liberal, but if we want to live in a society where our individual liberty is respected, that is what we have to do. There is no other way. Liberalism cannot be established by illiberal means. We can all hold ourselves to high standards of ethical integrity when engaging with others and be thoughtful about how we are doing so. Ask ourselves, “Am I offering strong but legitimate criticism or am I trying to help cancel someone because I hate their political views?” “Am I being consistent or am I doing something I recognised as censorious when people on the other side did it to people who share my views?”

This can be more impactful than we might think. Every person who stands up for the freedom of belief and speech of someone with whom they disagree impacts a circle of people around them, influencing those who share their political views to do so in a more consistently principled way and checking those who are asserting them in illiberal ways, while making those who take an opposing view more inclined to return that favour. At the least, they do not contribute to the escalation of illiberalism and polarisation. We know from other social movements, including, most recently, the Critical Social Justice movement, that a relatively small proportion of people can significantly impact culture if they are vocal, visible and organised. The majority of us still hold liberal principles, but hold them passively as an expectation. We can each play a part in re-activating them.

4. Really Accept Human Complexity and Messiness

We humans, despite being messy and complicated, typically strongly dislike mess and complication. We crave order and simplicity. Further, we seem to expect it and believe that we can socially engineer it. Despite no society of humans ever in the history of our species having achieved a state in which everybody held the same beliefs, values and goals, we are constantly surrounded by factions of people who believe that they can and must get everybody on-board with their vision of shared values or a ‘common good.’

Despite having just lived through the Critical Social Justice movement’s attempts at this which included a multi-billion dollar industry to retrain employees’ unconscious minds and a multi-faceted Cancel Culture, many on the illiberal right now tell us that the problem was that we do not face enough social pressure to have shared values and a sense of the common good. They argue that we need to return to a society dominated by religiously or socially conservative beliefs, racial and religious homogeneity, restrictive gender roles and intolerance of sexual minorities. Not only will this not work to reduce differences of opinion and factionalism (as someone with an academic background in Christian history in England, 1300-1700, I can assure you of this), it will not work at all, because humans do not work like that and do not tolerate that. The ‘anti-woke’ backlash against the woke movement we now see is a clear example of this and it is foolish and blinkered to think there won’t be an anti-anti-woke backlash if its illiberalism continues.

Our tendency to have strong and differing opinions and factionalise over them exists in our evolved ape brains and cannot be addressed by socially engineering our environments to reduce differences. We can only work with the disagreeable aspects of our human nature by setting up systems which allow for people with different opinions to hold them, express them and live by them while committing to not imposing them on anybody else and settling disagreements via healthy and productive verbal debate rather rather than tribal warfare and democratic processes rather than successive authoritarian regimes. This governing system is liberalism.

Despite so many of us seeming to know this on an intellectual level and hold ‘live and let live’ values, we still seem to find it counterintuitive on a deeper level and this is intensified when we feel ourselves to be under threat. At these times, we are inclined to be drawn to authoritarian rhetoric and strongman political leaders as though they offer us some kind of protection. They do not and are, in fact, most likely to lead us back to times of tribal warfare and authoritarian regimes. To resist this, we have to fully appreciate the messiness and complexity of humans and consequently human societies and fight for the liberal governing system that works with that reality.

5. Do Not Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.

Liberalism becomes unpopular in times of heightened anxiety because it does not offer simple answers, blanket rules, clearly delineated ethical frameworks or a shared vision of the common good. This is a feature, not a bug. Liberalism is the governing system and ethical framework that has best advanced knowledge and enabled people with different ideas to live together and resolve conflict without bloodshed not because it is tidy and simple and perfect and provides all the answers, but because it’s the only one that works with the chaotic wiring of actual humans and enables them to find their own.

While authoritarian systems of government and societal norms provide a great number of “You musts” and “You must nots,” liberalism, at its root, has only one “You must not” which concludes with ‘harm other people or impose your own values on them.” This rule applies to the government and so protects individual liberty and enables government by consent of the governed. It applies to the law and so protects individuals from physical harm or theft of property. It applies to institutions of knowledge production and so facilitates open inquiry and the advance of knowledge. As a social norm, it enables tolerance and co-existence while also protecting people’s right to strongly disapprove of and criticise those who have different views and engage in robust and productive debate without violence.

This is not to say that we live in a society which is actually doing all this well! We are not currently doing it well and probably never will do it perfectly. There is always illiberalism and threats to or denial of individual freedoms within governments, laws, institutions of knowledge production and among different factions of humans living together. We are not a particularly liberal species. We are, however, a species capable of envisioning liberalism, setting up systems to facilitate it and getting a significant majority of people to commit to accepting their own right to believe, speak and live as they see fit, while not harming anybody else or denying them the same freedoms. The countries which have done this are known as liberal democracies and they are the most prosperous, advanced and pleasant places to live the world has ever known.

Liberals will always need to exist because illiberalism will always exist. It is our job to be alert to the rise of authoritarianisms and uncompromisingly assert that one “You must not.” We have not been doing very well at this in recent years and so we have seen the rise of unchecked authoritarian factions on the left and the right and in the form of intolerant Islam. This is not a reason to give up on liberalism and embrace whichever authoritarianism seems the least threatening. It is a reason to reinforce liberalism and be stronger in our defences of it while also recognising and being appreciative of the degree of individual liberty our societies still afford us. We may never achieve a perfect degree of liberalism in all spheres of life, but society works far better and is a much more pleasant place to live in when we hold this as an aim than when we do not.

Liberals on the left, right, and in the centre who oppose authoritarianism consistently, have an understanding of history and a wish to conserve the liberal philosophical underpinnings of western modernity must hold the line of liberalism. It does not give us clear and simple lines for every possible manifestation of every possible scenario and we will sometimes need to address things on a case-by-case basis, but this is inevitable because it accurately reflects the messiness and complexity of humans. Holding to liberal principles is not idealistic or naive. It is rooted in historical and geographical evidence of what has made the modern period better than the medieval one and what makes western liberal democracies better than illiberal authoritarian regimes.

A central part of that is a realistic understanding that messiness is the natural condition of human beings and societies. Liberalism’s durability and effectiveness comes not from neat simplicity and having all the answers but from its capacity to tolerate, manage, and navigate the messiness of any society of humans invariably containing factions that believe they have different answers. Any authoritarian movement which claims to be able to stamp out uncertainty with rigid rules and bring everybody on board with its own concept of the common good is either idealistically committed to a socially constructivist vision which does not map onto reality or lying to you. Humans will always have different ideas and they will always factionalise over them. The only system which has ever enabled humans with different ideas to live together without bloodshed and to harness these differences productively to advance knowledge is liberalism. This is because liberalism accepts that humans are messy. To accept that humans are messy is not to resign ourselves to chaos, but to commit ourselves to the only system that can manage this reality without crushing freedom.

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