Liberalism Is Not the Belief That Society Is Already Liberal

(I don't think you heard me the first 1000 times)

Photo by Luca N on Unsplash

Being a liberal and arguing for liberal values frequently involves being told that what we are arguing for is not already the social reality. It can look like this:

”We need universities to ensure academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.”

“But that’s not the real world! Universities are possibly the most politically biased and censorious institutions in the country!”

Or:

“Nobody should be made to undergo training in Critical Social Justice ideology and affirm things they don’t believe.

“But that’s exactly what is happening! It’s a whole industry!”

This is a peculiar phenomenon for two reasons.

1. People don’t generally dedicate time and effort to arguing for the creation of laws, systems or norms that already exist or which they believe to already exist. What would be the point? If somebody is arguing that there is a need for something to happen, you can generally assume they know it is not happening. Likewise, if someone says that people shouldn’t do something, you should really take from this that they know people are doing that thing. The oddest thing here is that this is generally understood and we very seldom see people misunderstanding words like ‘need’ and ‘should/should not’ in everyday, non-political contexts. We do not see this, for example.

“We really need some rain for the plants.”

”What are you talking about? It’s sunny and has been for a fortnight.”

or

“You shouldn’t leave your shoes on the stairs. Someone will trip over them.”

”Are you blind? My shoes are right there on the stairs!”

In these cases, it’s clear that the two speakers agree on the state of reality re: rain or shoes because this is not a complicated sentence structure. The tendency to tell liberals arguing for liberal things like freedom of belief and speech that those things are being denied in reality, as though stating a need for them did not already make it clear the speaker knows that, then, seems likely to be ideological. And yet…

2. This does not seem to happen to people speaking from other philosophical or political positions. The belief that liberals are people who believe society is already liberal is not mirrored in beliefs about people arguing from other frameworks. We do not, for example, see misconceptions that socialists are people who believe they live in a socialist system or that conservatives are people who believe society is satisfactorily conservative. In those cases, they are understood to be people who want to make society more socialist or more conservative because they believe that this is what it lacks and achieving it would make things better. This position is then typically responded to with straightforward agreement, qualified agreement or disagreement.

Why is it so hard for so many people to understand that liberals are people who want to make society more liberal and that their stated wish to do this is evidence that they already know that is lacking in that department?

I certainly wouldn’t bother spending all my time helping people address authoritarian Critical Social Justice in their workplace, university or child’s school if I thought that we lived in a society full of liberal institutions which valued individual freedom of belief and speech and viewpoint diversity. If we ever achieve that in my lifetime, I’ll give a sigh of relief and go off and do something else. I’ll probably return to the university that would then be happy to have me and argue for why I think people are being wrong about aspects of scholarship into late medieval women’s religious writing. There’s a reason I am not doing that and am instead arguing for greater academic freedom, artistic freedom, freedom of belief and speech more broadly and a greater appreciation of viewpoint diversity. The reason is because I know we have a serious lack of it and I think it is causing harm to the foundations of liberal democracies.

I don’t think we will ever achieve a perfectly liberal society, because we are not a perfectly liberal species. I think there will always be multiple illiberalisms in society and the liberally-minded from all over the political spectrum will always have to oppose them and try to do so consistently. Liberals historically have always had to do this - it is our raison d’etre - and until there are no authoritarian laws and no authoritarian moral orthodoxies trying to ban people from believing and saying certain things and/or compelling them to believe and say certain other things, we will continue to do this. Unless everybody in the world accepts the principle, “Let people believe, speak and live as they see fit provided this does no material harm to anybody else or prevents them from doing the same,” liberals will always need to exist and always need to try to make society more liberal. We’ll never entirely succeed, but we think a society that has a significant number of people dedicated to protecting the freedoms of everybody and opposing authoritarianism is a better place to live than societies that do not, so we keep going.

Perhaps it is the fact that liberalism offers no easy Utopian solution that will fix everything but only an endless struggle to keep persuading people to defend the freedoms of others with whom they disagree and reform laws and systems to protect those freedoms that makes some see it as a failing system. It’s hard work and it never stops because illiberalism never stops. It is easy to imagine that something more radical or revolutionary or reactionary or, in any case, simple, might do better than this endless process of countering rising illiberal ideologies and seeking to reform illiberal systems. I strongly doubt this because humans are not simple and they really don’t like being told what to think.

Those who say that liberalism has failed and that liberals should accept this and try something else miss the point that the end goal of liberalism is a liberal society and nothing except liberalism can move us towards that. Authoritarianism has definitely been tried before and it has never yet produced a society that a liberal would want to live in. It doesn’t even produce a society that most authoritarians want to live in because only one authoritarian moral orthodoxy can exist at a time. How sure are those who seek to ban some ideas and impose others that the authoritarianism they favour will be the one that wins out? Even if it does, how long will it last until another one topples it and uses the legal and social precedents they helped put in place against them, and liberal concepts of freedom of belief and speech start looking attractive again?

However, I don’t think most of the people who misunderstand liberalism to be the belief that society is already liberal are authoritarians. I think they are largely disillusioned liberals. I suspect that when they say “But that isn’t the real world!” to liberals who are not describing the real world but arguing for making the real world more liberal, they are expressing hopelessness that this could ever happen. I am not sure what else would explain this difference between the “disagreement” response to liberals and people from other philosophical or political positions. Surely, if critics were opposed to liberal values, they would say straightforwardly, “No, I don’t want that.” Instead, they say, “No, that isn’t happening.” I think this means “I despair that this will ever happen and think your arguments for it display an unrealistic optimism.”

If people who respond to those arguing for liberalism by pointing out the prevalence of illiberalism are motivated by despair that we can make society more liberal, they could be right. We may never succeed at increasing freedom of belief and speech protections, reducing the power and influence of authoritarian ideologues and fostering a culture with a greater respect for viewpoint diversity and robust debate. However, indulging this pessimism is likely to prove a self-fulfilling prophecy. A society will become more or less liberal depending on how many people living in it consistently defend, uphold and promote liberal values. I would ask anybody who wishes to live in a liberal society but thinks it is clear that they don’t to remember that a society is not just something they live in, but something they are and act accordingly.