Helen - I've followed you on and off since crazy 2020 Twitter days, and I've long appreciated your principled idealism. (Liberalism fundamentally entails optimism, after all.) I'm not sure how to describe it exactly, but you always manage to strike a tone that is both resolute and *kind*. A true balm for the soul amidst all the online discourse.
This is a wonderful essay. So clear and deeply thought through.
It seems to me that a great threat to liberalism is born of liberalism itself. Because, where it promotes egalitarianism by demolishing formal power structures inhibiting individual liberty, it cultivates informal structures that do the same.
For example: If everyone is formally permitted to attend university, then, all else equal, only those from the most stable and supportive backgrounds will be able to.
In a truly free market, there must always be poverty, because wealth will be freer to beget wealth, which ultimately governs control of finite resources, such as land.
Power differentials will always exist and will manifest themselves in one way or another. I believe the authoritarian left’s existence is primarily a rejection of natural power differentials, and an attempt to forcibly flatten them.
I value liberalism and have Enlightenment values running through my veins. But, in order to defend liberalism, we must promote a kind of acceptance that egalitarianism can never mean total equality. We must be aware of the cost, even while we believe it worth paying.
And, in order to defend it, we must recognise the nature of the forces that oppose it and why.
Thanks! Think I’m going to respond to this in a short piece later this week. The issue is how to accept differences that are not socially engineered and the natural result of these on people’s life outcomes while also upholding some sense of social responsibility and cooperation. Both from an ethical standpoint and from one that works with our innate sense of fairness. Nicholas Christakis’ book “Blueprint” is excellent on this. It argues, by looking at communities that have thrived and those that has failed - communes to shipwrecks - that we work best on a kind of ‘mild hierarchy.’ We seem to naturally want leaders and followers but also for leadership positions to be earned and not exploitative or dictatorial. We see this in chimps who will accept a leader based on his strength and leadership capabilities but if he is too domineering, they’ll gang up and kill him.
I’d say that we do not have to accept poverty as a result of enabling people to rise on their natural abilities and/or supportive family structures, but we do have to accept economic inequality. The poorest people in capitalist societies are still generally better off than the poorest people in other kinds of societies. But if the system is seen as exploitative, people will rebel against it. We came very close to having a communist revolution here in the UK during industrialisation but it was headed off by reforms which make the workplace safer, reduced hours to manageable ones for a living wage and the eradication of child labour. This annoyed Marxists who did not want workers to settle for this, but, in reality, most people will not be inspired to agitation and revolution if they have a decent quality of life and their families are thriving. I’d say that, as a left liberal, we can have the best of both worlds ethically if we enable free trade and meritocracy but also have some regulation to avoid exploitation and welfare systems to ensure that people who really cannot work have their basic needs met. Nearly everybody agrees with this although legitimate disagreements exist about where the line is between encouraging dependency and providing a safety net. For example, nearly everybody will say that we have a social responsibility not to let orphaned children or disabled servicemen starve to death because they cannot work, but after this, people vary widely. I think conservatives are prone to putting too much emphasis on individual responsibility and the left to putting too much on social responsibility.
Love this reply and basically agree with it all. I particularly agree that most people innately support the existence of some kind of safety net for the worst off. And, I think most people believe in the importance of personal responsibility.
I also wholeheartedly agree with “The issue is how to accept differences that are not socially engineered and the natural result of these on people’s life outcomes while also upholding some sense of social responsibility and cooperation.”
That’s basically what I was trying to say but you did it better.
Where I slightly quibble is that the poorest can be relatively wealthy in free markets.
On the one hand, it looks true. The poorest people today have gadgets and conveniences that kings would have dreamed of. Where we’re talking about products, you’re absolutely right.
The problem I see is in how wealth differences lead to monopolies of non-produced goods, particularly land.
We can’t make more land and everyone needs some, so the wealthiest can monopolise land and seek rents from it. I think this is what we’re seeing now in the west: people with reasonable jobs can’t afford housing because huge wealth disparities, and the purchasing power of the wealthiest, push the prices higher.
Yes, I think this can be resolved with free markets at the moment. We have this problem in London (not sure where you are) and somebody gave an excellent talk for the Adam Smith Institute about how developers could be allowed to build on grey areas and flood the markets with housing and want to do so but are being deterred by various policies. This would resolve the problem without government interference in rent caps, he argued. I approve this plan but recognise that, assuming he is correct, this is a solution for an immediate, measurable problem and the same problem could not always be resolved with practical policy and then we might need some government interference against monopolies. This would not be entirely liberal, libertarians would argue, with justification, but I am a liberal leftist and think that we do occasionally need to interfere with entirely free trade to prevent exploitation and monopolisation and I'd justify this on materialist grounds, not liberal ones. I'd also support disallowing patents to be placed on life-saving medications for this reason and argue for compensating developers of them well enough to incentivise doing that but not enable a system where only the wealthy could access necessary medicines.
Basically, I’m a liberal and a capitalist but with an almost pathological fear of rent-seeking monopolies of any kind. Even to the point of questioning intellectual property, but that’s another matter for another day.
But, the point being: I consider the social safety net an acknowledgment of the inevitability of monopolies to some extent, and a salve against their worst effects.
Because, if those developers get their way and flood the market with housing, it will still fall into fewer and fewer hands over time.
Of course, if the richest are happier to support the poorest, then no, we don’t have to accept poverty. But they don’t seem to be.
Perhaps because a social safety net requires social ties, and we barely even know our neighbours these days?
I published a libertarian argument against monopolies at Areo Magazine when I owned it but it's down now and inaccessible. I think this is a legitimate area for libertarian concern and think libertarians can be too narrow if they only focus on limiting state power.
The liberal idea that people should be free to believe, speak, and live as they see fit, so long as they cause no harm to others, relies on liberals using shame, disgust and power (where they have it) in authoritarian ways, in order to tackle those who are a threat to liberalism, in the most forceful way possible. Liberalism is, to some extent, the politics of being nice, and tolerating as much as possible, but liberals cannot afford to be nice and tolerant towards those who are illiberal and who do harm to others.
Supporting open borders - illiberal.
Supporting the rights of transvestic fetishists and autogynephiles to parade their paraphilias in public - illiberal.
Supporting short prison sentences for sex-offenders - illiberal.
Ignoring the will of the people - for example ignoring the change of mind on brexit or the opposition to mass immigration and islamification - illiberal.
Tolerating sharia law in any form at all in the UK - illiberal.
Allowing those men and women who cross-dress for reasons of poor mental health to ignore their poor mental health and leave it untreated - illiberal.
People who claim that liberalism ushered in illiberalism are fools. It was precisely that failure of liberals to use liberal pinciples to stamp out transgender ideology at the first sign of it's existence that ushered in illiberalism. It was a failure of liberals to do the second, equally important part of liberalism. Liberals cannot just allow freedom, they have to constantly fight to destroy and subdue those who are fundamentally opposed to liberalism, or liberalism dies, replaced by trans ideology's authoritarianism, alongside woke authoritarianism more widely, as well as woke's political ally and enemy - islamism. Or the hard left or right.
Surely communism is just as conservative as liberalism - it is equally possible to wish to conserve communism as it is liberalism?
The single biggest threat to liberalism is people who think they are liberal but are blind to the times that letting people believe, speak, live as they see fit, does significant material harm to others and denies others the same freedoms.
The tortuous and inconsistent motivated reasoning so common in currently popular arguments is both infuriating and depressing. I am sick of seeing people who believe themselves to be liberal oversee the end of liberalism by virtue of their tolerance of that which is destroying liberalism. "Anything goes" liberalism is not liberal, and the moral cowardice and intellectual vacuousness of those who fail to stand up to that which destroys liberalism must end.
It seems clear that many people see their own offended or disgusted feelings as prudish or illiberal, and this leads them to fail to use facts, science, reason and compassion to come to the rational and liberal position that the thing that leads them to feel disgust needs to be stamped out in order to ensure harm is not done to others.
It seems clear that many people have an inherent "anything goes until proven otherwise" position, leading to them to insane positions such as "drag 100% acceptable until proven otherwise" when they would not say the same thing about blackface, as opposed to "drag clearly does harm, so we need, at least, to talk about it and consider banning it" which is much more liberal.
"[there are] those who would enforce sex-based dress codes and gender roles claiming that to do otherwise is ‘degenerate.’" This is a disgraceful misrepresentation of the position of those who understand that every single person cross-dressing is a dishonest predator, a paraphiliac forcing non-consenting strangers to participate in the (inherently sexual) paraphilia, or a mentally ill person who is refusing treatment and instead demanding to have their mental illness encouraged. No liberal should tolerate such huge harms being inflicted on society by an authoritarian and anti-science, anti-reason, anti-truth minority. This is nothing to do with enforcing sex-based dressed codes, it is about punishing people who are destroying liberal society whilst being encouraged by people who think they are liberal but are not, for their complete failure to recognize their tolerance of illiberal authoritarian harms is the single biggest threat to the ideology they meaninglessly claim to support.
I wonder at what point these people would say "illiberal wokeness must be stopped now"? They are not willing to say "no" when liberalism is half destroyed? Will they only start the fightback after illiberal wokism has won, or will they say "no" sooner?
I wonder at what point these people will realize that it is people like me who are doing what they themselves claim to be doing.
You said - ""We are currently living with the consequences of no longer seeing the upholding of liberalism as a shared civic responsibility." 100%. This is something that will always be part of society, not least amongst the hard left and hard right who are not liberal. What is terrifying is seeing those who claim to be liberal arguing for liberalism's death by failing to use their own epistemological principles to identify what is a harm that cannot be tolerate in liberal society."
It seems to me that you, Helen, need to read and re-read your own words and actually apply them.
How should a society consider the harm part of the definition of liberalism?
“…let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it harms nobody else nor denies them the same freedoms”
Is it provided it doesn’t harm anyone immediately, in the near future or ever? People can hold beliefs that don’t do any damage in the short run but could cause trouble in the long run. An individual might be included to tolerate them as an upholder of liberalism or due to personal connection to the people holding them, but might be sowing the seeds of future trouble. (People that vote for perpetual government deficits know exactly what I’m talking about)
Yes, direct, material harm. This can feel counterintuitive to us when some ideas are so clearly horrible, but suppressing them has never been helped even aside from the individual liberty issue. That only gives them power. Lukianoff good on the ways in which suppression of the Nazis lent them the glamour of being the suppressed Truth They Don’t Want You To Know and escalated popular support. Got to keep all the ideas visible and counterable, especially the bad ones.
Fair enough; I may need to search for another philosophy for myself that considers potential future harm as well while balancing it out against a live and let live attitude.
To your point about Nazism though, let me play devil’s advocate. I dare say that suppression of it is much greater in Germany today than it was before their rise to power. If Lukianoff is correct, and the argument is that suppression helped them rise to power, we would expect the opposite lesson to have been drawn and less suppression today. But in Germany it is even banned to name your child Adolf; that speaks volumes on their approach to Nazism. And the direction of travel is further in that direction what with the calls to ban the AfD, which as of now operates legally. Unless we do not consider Germany a liberal state today I see a contradiction. But I suspect they think of themselves as one, or otherwise their calling of Hungary illiberal would be silly. 🤷♂️
Liberalism considers future harm as much as any other framework. It thinks the best way to minimise it is to keep all views speakable so you know about them and can also address them.
And no, Lukianoff does not claim that anything you suppress will gain power. He provides evidence that if you try to defeat a popular idea by suppressing it, that will help it rather than hinder it.
A more recent example from my own country. The UK. The two popular views that they tried to suppress hardest here were critical of gender identity and immigration. We’re now known as TERF Island, the laws have been changed and the gender clinics closed down. Also Reform, running on an anti-immigration platform has suddenly derailed our two party system and overtaken the other two parties. That definitely didn’t work.
And yes, we can say unequivocally that banning arguments for Nazism and trying to ban political parties is illiberal. It will almost certainly result in more support for the AfD. People who are being illiberal from the left frequently call illiberal forces on the right illiberal and vice versa. Almost no-one calls themselves illiberal.
The lifeline of liberalism is what it created in first place: reason as the way to know.
There is a philosopher in 20th century that is a true advocate for reason, and some great intellectuals making the case for reason. We need an army of them making the case for reason in the culture. Then liberalism has a chance.
As usual many thanks, Helen, for your overflowings. How do you keep coming up (down in your goldmine) with such rich new seams of thinking. The long and very recent history and finding bits of liberalism lurking still in the arguments of those while don’t get the full bhoona. Thus:
« The problem we have now is that people still have enough of an intuitive sense of liberal principles to call on them as a tool when their own rights are threatened, but not a sufficiently conscious and well articulated model of liberalism to stand up for it in its own right and do so as a shared, collective responsibility. »
Outstanding essay, Helen! I am still looking for a definitive "What is Liberalism" statement (similar to the Sharon Statement that outlined Buckley-style conservatism in the late 50s), and if I don't locate it, I will attempt to construct it, hopefully with your help. Your essay provided most of the material for it, I believe!
Now, for specifics:
"Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, who claimed that in the Middle Ages, “man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation” (1887)" - this echoed strongly a sentiment that I recently read in A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age, by William Manchester:
"The most baffling, elusive, yet in many ways the most significant dimensions of the medieval mind were invisible and silent. One was the medieval man’s total lack of ego. Even those with creative powers had no sense of self. ... To them their identity in this life was irrelevant. Noblemen had surnames, but fewer than one percent of the souls in Christendom were wellborn. Typically, the rest—nearly 60 million Europeans—were known as Hans, Jacques, Sal, Carlos, Will, or Will’s wife, Will’s son, or Will’s daughter. If that was inadequate or confusing, a nickname would do. Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like.
Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet, the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible.
Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning. There were no newspapers or magazines to inform the common people of great events; occasional pamphlets might reach them, but they were usually theological and, like the Bible, were always published in Latin, a language they no longer understood."
Indeed, for us, in this day and age suffused by the legacy of liberalism, such a mindset is "baffling and elusive," almost unimaginable - yet that's how most people lived for most of our history.
"The liberal drive is towards the removal of constraints and barriers" - I would amend it slightly to insert the word "artificial" before "constraints and barriers." Would you agree? It seems to me there are immutable constraints and barriers imposed on us by nature that do not allow equal outcomes for everyone, no matter how level the playing field is or how we restructure society to remove the perceived barriers and constraints. Different sexes have different proclivities; different individuals have different talents and abilities; inability to deal with those facts, and the desire to artificially overcome them, caused the periodic attempts by illiberal (and often totalitarian) means to change human nature. All such attempts would ultimately lead to the world of "Harrison Bergeron," would they not?
[As long as it is liberal principles that are being conserved,] "liberalism and conservatism can be recognised as overlapping principles that can be and are held by many people completely coherently" - brilliantly put; it is sad that such an obvious truth is not more widely recognized; the issue, I believe, is one of awareness - once reasonable people hear it expressed like that, they cannot but accept it. Indeed, "For conservatives who value cultural integrity, history, and tradition, defending the philosophical heritage of liberalism is entirely consistent with their broader value system."
"We are currently living with the consequences of no longer seeing the upholding of liberalism as a shared civic responsibility." - exactly right, and it starts parents relying on schools to turn their little savages into responsible citizens, while schools have abrogated that responsibility and are no longer teaching civics.
"people still have enough of an intuitive sense of liberal principles" - this reminded me of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, the very first chapter, when he talks about people quarrelling: "[one party to the quarrel] is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse." Lewis concludes the chapter by saying, "human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it." (even when they can't help but break that code of behavior on many occasions) Of course, he goes on to argue that the code was instilled in us by God, which I believe you'd disagree with; regardless, Liberalism cannot die out because it is part of our nature, just as the propensity for evil and for controlling other people is. Thus goes the eternal battle between Good and Evil.
There are too many quotes I pulled from this marvelous essay to discuss here. Great job, and thank you for keeping the liberal flame alive!
I think definitions of liberalism can be narrow and negative - let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it harms nobody else nor denies them the same freedoms - or expansive and incorporate many of the positive facets that have been developed directly from the negative principle and are to do with the positive goods that can come from encouraging and enabling people to engage in free trade and the free exchange of ideas and actively protect freedoms. Therefore, I see a wide range of views that can be considered liberal but which people may disagree on. For example, libertarians tend to see my support for progressive taxation as contrary to liberal principles and, to be fair, it is in that most 'laissez-faire" sense, so I don't try to argue that that is a pure freedom principle but a policy I support as a way to ethically enable meritocracy. I am also more of an individualist liberal than a utilitarian one in other ways so we can disagree among ourselves there too.
I intend to address the issue of 'artificial barriers' in a short piece later this week. I have just responded to someone else raising this issue with:
The issue is how to accept differences that are not socially engineered and the natural result of these on people’s life outcomes while also upholding some sense of social responsibility and cooperation. Both from an ethical standpoint and from one that works with our innate sense of fairness. Nicholas Christakis’ book “Blueprint” is excellent on this. It argues, by looking at communities that have thrived and those that has failed - communes to shipwrecks - that we work best on a kind of ‘mild hierarchy.’ We seem to naturally want leaders and followers but also for leadership positions to be earned and not exploitative or dictatorial. We see this in chimps who will accept a leader based on his strength and leadership capabilities but if he is too domineering, they’ll gang up and kill him.
I’d say that we do not have to accept poverty as a result of enabling people to rise on their natural abilities and/or supportive family structures, but we do have to accept economic inequality. The poorest people in capitalist societies are still generally better off than the poorest people in other kinds of societies. But if the system is seen as exploitative, people will rebel against it. We came very close to having a communist revolution here in the UK during industrialisation but it was headed off by reforms which make the workplace safer, reduced hours to manageable ones for a living wage and the eradication of child labour. This annoyed Marxists who did not want workers to settle for this, but, in reality, most people will not be inspired to agitation and revolution if they have a decent quality of life and their families are thriving. I’d say that, as a left liberal, we can have the best of both worlds ethically if we enable free trade and meritocracy but also have some regulation to avoid exploitation and welfare systems to ensure that people who really cannot work have their basic needs met. Nearly everybody agrees with this although legitimate disagreements exist about where the line is between encouraging dependency and providing a safety net. For example, nearly everybody will say that we have a social responsibility not to let orphaned children or disabled servicemen starve to death because they cannot work, but after this, people vary widely. I think conservatives are prone to putting too much emphasis on individual responsibility and the left to putting too much on social responsibility.
I am not altogether confident that liberalism cannot die. We did not have much of it for most of our history but I do think that now we have had it, it will be harder for it to die. Are women protesting hijab in Iran acting on a natural freedom impulse or drawing on liberal principles that have spread across the world and used to have more of an influence in Iran and can be seen to be accepted in other countries? A bit of both, I think. Social psychologists have addressed the evidence that we seem to become more liberal when we have a sense of security and can think about rights and freedoms for everyone but become more authoritarian when we feel threatened and then become inclined to try to stamp out dissent within our own groups and kick out other groups. Turning the heat down on our current polarisation would thus be key to enabling liberalism to thrive.
For my purposes of bringing together a broad range of liberals here, I set out these principles which go beyond the simple negative value but are still broad enough to have positive principles.
Helen - thank you so much for such an expansive, thorough answer! I really, really appreciate it, given your wide range of activities and the menagerie you live with 😄.
Given "a wide range of views that can be considered liberal," and a vastly wider range of perceptions of the label, to me, it becomes even more imperative to have a clear definition of what liberalism should mean. Thank you for providing a link to the post you launched this Substack with! It's another goldmine for the definition I will attempt to construct.
Thank you for the recommendation of Nicholas Christakis' book, I have already ordered it.
I look forward to your post discussing the "artificial barriers."
I think the term "exploitation" requires examination; it is a typical leftist term of choice: immediately affecting one's most basic emotions (not fair!) without providing any useful information. In a free market anchored in the rule of law, exploitation is impossible: the parties have to freely agree to the transaction (and few will willingly agree to be exploited), and competition ensures the terms are fair.
Likewise, "poverty" and, by extension, "basic needs" are complex subjects, and especially the societal obligation ("social responsibility") to alleviate and to provide. I published an essay on the first, "Is There Poverty in America," on my Substack, which argues in the negative. As to the obligation / responsibility, I prefer the Christian admonition, “He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise" to the socialist doctrine of redistributive taxation: have the government forcibly take “excess” income from the most enterprising and give it to whomever successfully jumps through arbitrary regulatory hoops. (which probably proves your point: "conservatives are prone to putting too much emphasis on individual responsibility and the left to putting too much on social responsibility."😳)
I want to argue with your last paragraph, but I can't! Your logic is unassailable. 😮 Kudos!
I don't really agree with your views Helen, you'd call me a 'right-wing illiberal'. But I must say this is the most coherent summary of your beliefs I've read from you.
However, I think your logic immediately stumbles with Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The true standard bearer for the kind of liberalism you're talking about was Barry Goldwater, not Martin Luther King. Yet Goldwater's positions are seen today as far-right extremist.
Maybe we can have 'true liberalism' back, but it would involve repealing Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Complimenti una lezione esaustiva del liberalismo. Dalla lettura, ho visto accennato ,il principio (popper ecc...) di come comportarsi con gli illiberale.
Un progressista liberale convinto,difronte alla crescente immigrazione di cultura profondamente ed irrimediabilmente illiberale ( in Europa gli immigrati mussulmani ritengono di vivere nella " terra della guerra" e di avere un "dovere religioso" di contrastare il MALE ,cioè tutto quello che siamo noi liberali)
Ora ,con il metodo liberale,non mi creano alcun DANNO, rientrano nel pluralismo ,ma in futuro? I nostri figli e nipoti ? Potremmo lasciargli una società dove una forte minoranza "tribale/comunitaria" ostacola il progresso conservare/progressista, che ci hanno lasciato i nostri genitori.
Helen - I've followed you on and off since crazy 2020 Twitter days, and I've long appreciated your principled idealism. (Liberalism fundamentally entails optimism, after all.) I'm not sure how to describe it exactly, but you always manage to strike a tone that is both resolute and *kind*. A true balm for the soul amidst all the online discourse.
Do liberals delete posts? Like the last 5 hours of posts?
I thought only Soviets did that?
This is a wonderful essay. So clear and deeply thought through.
It seems to me that a great threat to liberalism is born of liberalism itself. Because, where it promotes egalitarianism by demolishing formal power structures inhibiting individual liberty, it cultivates informal structures that do the same.
For example: If everyone is formally permitted to attend university, then, all else equal, only those from the most stable and supportive backgrounds will be able to.
In a truly free market, there must always be poverty, because wealth will be freer to beget wealth, which ultimately governs control of finite resources, such as land.
Power differentials will always exist and will manifest themselves in one way or another. I believe the authoritarian left’s existence is primarily a rejection of natural power differentials, and an attempt to forcibly flatten them.
I value liberalism and have Enlightenment values running through my veins. But, in order to defend liberalism, we must promote a kind of acceptance that egalitarianism can never mean total equality. We must be aware of the cost, even while we believe it worth paying.
And, in order to defend it, we must recognise the nature of the forces that oppose it and why.
Thanks! Think I’m going to respond to this in a short piece later this week. The issue is how to accept differences that are not socially engineered and the natural result of these on people’s life outcomes while also upholding some sense of social responsibility and cooperation. Both from an ethical standpoint and from one that works with our innate sense of fairness. Nicholas Christakis’ book “Blueprint” is excellent on this. It argues, by looking at communities that have thrived and those that has failed - communes to shipwrecks - that we work best on a kind of ‘mild hierarchy.’ We seem to naturally want leaders and followers but also for leadership positions to be earned and not exploitative or dictatorial. We see this in chimps who will accept a leader based on his strength and leadership capabilities but if he is too domineering, they’ll gang up and kill him.
I’d say that we do not have to accept poverty as a result of enabling people to rise on their natural abilities and/or supportive family structures, but we do have to accept economic inequality. The poorest people in capitalist societies are still generally better off than the poorest people in other kinds of societies. But if the system is seen as exploitative, people will rebel against it. We came very close to having a communist revolution here in the UK during industrialisation but it was headed off by reforms which make the workplace safer, reduced hours to manageable ones for a living wage and the eradication of child labour. This annoyed Marxists who did not want workers to settle for this, but, in reality, most people will not be inspired to agitation and revolution if they have a decent quality of life and their families are thriving. I’d say that, as a left liberal, we can have the best of both worlds ethically if we enable free trade and meritocracy but also have some regulation to avoid exploitation and welfare systems to ensure that people who really cannot work have their basic needs met. Nearly everybody agrees with this although legitimate disagreements exist about where the line is between encouraging dependency and providing a safety net. For example, nearly everybody will say that we have a social responsibility not to let orphaned children or disabled servicemen starve to death because they cannot work, but after this, people vary widely. I think conservatives are prone to putting too much emphasis on individual responsibility and the left to putting too much on social responsibility.
Love this reply and basically agree with it all. I particularly agree that most people innately support the existence of some kind of safety net for the worst off. And, I think most people believe in the importance of personal responsibility.
I also wholeheartedly agree with “The issue is how to accept differences that are not socially engineered and the natural result of these on people’s life outcomes while also upholding some sense of social responsibility and cooperation.”
That’s basically what I was trying to say but you did it better.
Where I slightly quibble is that the poorest can be relatively wealthy in free markets.
On the one hand, it looks true. The poorest people today have gadgets and conveniences that kings would have dreamed of. Where we’re talking about products, you’re absolutely right.
The problem I see is in how wealth differences lead to monopolies of non-produced goods, particularly land.
We can’t make more land and everyone needs some, so the wealthiest can monopolise land and seek rents from it. I think this is what we’re seeing now in the west: people with reasonable jobs can’t afford housing because huge wealth disparities, and the purchasing power of the wealthiest, push the prices higher.
Yes, I think this can be resolved with free markets at the moment. We have this problem in London (not sure where you are) and somebody gave an excellent talk for the Adam Smith Institute about how developers could be allowed to build on grey areas and flood the markets with housing and want to do so but are being deterred by various policies. This would resolve the problem without government interference in rent caps, he argued. I approve this plan but recognise that, assuming he is correct, this is a solution for an immediate, measurable problem and the same problem could not always be resolved with practical policy and then we might need some government interference against monopolies. This would not be entirely liberal, libertarians would argue, with justification, but I am a liberal leftist and think that we do occasionally need to interfere with entirely free trade to prevent exploitation and monopolisation and I'd justify this on materialist grounds, not liberal ones. I'd also support disallowing patents to be placed on life-saving medications for this reason and argue for compensating developers of them well enough to incentivise doing that but not enable a system where only the wealthy could access necessary medicines.
Basically, I’m a liberal and a capitalist but with an almost pathological fear of rent-seeking monopolies of any kind. Even to the point of questioning intellectual property, but that’s another matter for another day.
But, the point being: I consider the social safety net an acknowledgment of the inevitability of monopolies to some extent, and a salve against their worst effects.
Because, if those developers get their way and flood the market with housing, it will still fall into fewer and fewer hands over time.
Of course, if the richest are happier to support the poorest, then no, we don’t have to accept poverty. But they don’t seem to be.
Perhaps because a social safety net requires social ties, and we barely even know our neighbours these days?
Not really making a point; just waffling now.
Looking forward to your next piece!
I published a libertarian argument against monopolies at Areo Magazine when I owned it but it's down now and inaccessible. I think this is a legitimate area for libertarian concern and think libertarians can be too narrow if they only focus on limiting state power.
Oh, shame it’s gone down. If you find the text somewhere, would love to read it.
Found it. It's not solely about that but I think overlaps with your concerns. https://web.archive.org/web/20230201031733/https://areomagazine.com/2018/09/04/the-reluctant-leftist-pragmatism-and-liberty/
The liberal idea that people should be free to believe, speak, and live as they see fit, so long as they cause no harm to others, relies on liberals using shame, disgust and power (where they have it) in authoritarian ways, in order to tackle those who are a threat to liberalism, in the most forceful way possible. Liberalism is, to some extent, the politics of being nice, and tolerating as much as possible, but liberals cannot afford to be nice and tolerant towards those who are illiberal and who do harm to others.
Supporting open borders - illiberal.
Supporting the rights of transvestic fetishists and autogynephiles to parade their paraphilias in public - illiberal.
Supporting short prison sentences for sex-offenders - illiberal.
Ignoring the will of the people - for example ignoring the change of mind on brexit or the opposition to mass immigration and islamification - illiberal.
Tolerating sharia law in any form at all in the UK - illiberal.
Allowing those men and women who cross-dress for reasons of poor mental health to ignore their poor mental health and leave it untreated - illiberal.
People who claim that liberalism ushered in illiberalism are fools. It was precisely that failure of liberals to use liberal pinciples to stamp out transgender ideology at the first sign of it's existence that ushered in illiberalism. It was a failure of liberals to do the second, equally important part of liberalism. Liberals cannot just allow freedom, they have to constantly fight to destroy and subdue those who are fundamentally opposed to liberalism, or liberalism dies, replaced by trans ideology's authoritarianism, alongside woke authoritarianism more widely, as well as woke's political ally and enemy - islamism. Or the hard left or right.
Surely communism is just as conservative as liberalism - it is equally possible to wish to conserve communism as it is liberalism?
The single biggest threat to liberalism is people who think they are liberal but are blind to the times that letting people believe, speak, live as they see fit, does significant material harm to others and denies others the same freedoms.
The tortuous and inconsistent motivated reasoning so common in currently popular arguments is both infuriating and depressing. I am sick of seeing people who believe themselves to be liberal oversee the end of liberalism by virtue of their tolerance of that which is destroying liberalism. "Anything goes" liberalism is not liberal, and the moral cowardice and intellectual vacuousness of those who fail to stand up to that which destroys liberalism must end.
It seems clear that many people see their own offended or disgusted feelings as prudish or illiberal, and this leads them to fail to use facts, science, reason and compassion to come to the rational and liberal position that the thing that leads them to feel disgust needs to be stamped out in order to ensure harm is not done to others.
It seems clear that many people have an inherent "anything goes until proven otherwise" position, leading to them to insane positions such as "drag 100% acceptable until proven otherwise" when they would not say the same thing about blackface, as opposed to "drag clearly does harm, so we need, at least, to talk about it and consider banning it" which is much more liberal.
"[there are] those who would enforce sex-based dress codes and gender roles claiming that to do otherwise is ‘degenerate.’" This is a disgraceful misrepresentation of the position of those who understand that every single person cross-dressing is a dishonest predator, a paraphiliac forcing non-consenting strangers to participate in the (inherently sexual) paraphilia, or a mentally ill person who is refusing treatment and instead demanding to have their mental illness encouraged. No liberal should tolerate such huge harms being inflicted on society by an authoritarian and anti-science, anti-reason, anti-truth minority. This is nothing to do with enforcing sex-based dressed codes, it is about punishing people who are destroying liberal society whilst being encouraged by people who think they are liberal but are not, for their complete failure to recognize their tolerance of illiberal authoritarian harms is the single biggest threat to the ideology they meaninglessly claim to support.
I wonder at what point these people would say "illiberal wokeness must be stopped now"? They are not willing to say "no" when liberalism is half destroyed? Will they only start the fightback after illiberal wokism has won, or will they say "no" sooner?
I wonder at what point these people will realize that it is people like me who are doing what they themselves claim to be doing.
You said - ""We are currently living with the consequences of no longer seeing the upholding of liberalism as a shared civic responsibility." 100%. This is something that will always be part of society, not least amongst the hard left and hard right who are not liberal. What is terrifying is seeing those who claim to be liberal arguing for liberalism's death by failing to use their own epistemological principles to identify what is a harm that cannot be tolerate in liberal society."
It seems to me that you, Helen, need to read and re-read your own words and actually apply them.
What an amazing piece of work!
How should a society consider the harm part of the definition of liberalism?
“…let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it harms nobody else nor denies them the same freedoms”
Is it provided it doesn’t harm anyone immediately, in the near future or ever? People can hold beliefs that don’t do any damage in the short run but could cause trouble in the long run. An individual might be included to tolerate them as an upholder of liberalism or due to personal connection to the people holding them, but might be sowing the seeds of future trouble. (People that vote for perpetual government deficits know exactly what I’m talking about)
Yes, direct, material harm. This can feel counterintuitive to us when some ideas are so clearly horrible, but suppressing them has never been helped even aside from the individual liberty issue. That only gives them power. Lukianoff good on the ways in which suppression of the Nazis lent them the glamour of being the suppressed Truth They Don’t Want You To Know and escalated popular support. Got to keep all the ideas visible and counterable, especially the bad ones.
Fair enough; I may need to search for another philosophy for myself that considers potential future harm as well while balancing it out against a live and let live attitude.
To your point about Nazism though, let me play devil’s advocate. I dare say that suppression of it is much greater in Germany today than it was before their rise to power. If Lukianoff is correct, and the argument is that suppression helped them rise to power, we would expect the opposite lesson to have been drawn and less suppression today. But in Germany it is even banned to name your child Adolf; that speaks volumes on their approach to Nazism. And the direction of travel is further in that direction what with the calls to ban the AfD, which as of now operates legally. Unless we do not consider Germany a liberal state today I see a contradiction. But I suspect they think of themselves as one, or otherwise their calling of Hungary illiberal would be silly. 🤷♂️
Liberalism considers future harm as much as any other framework. It thinks the best way to minimise it is to keep all views speakable so you know about them and can also address them.
And no, Lukianoff does not claim that anything you suppress will gain power. He provides evidence that if you try to defeat a popular idea by suppressing it, that will help it rather than hinder it.
A more recent example from my own country. The UK. The two popular views that they tried to suppress hardest here were critical of gender identity and immigration. We’re now known as TERF Island, the laws have been changed and the gender clinics closed down. Also Reform, running on an anti-immigration platform has suddenly derailed our two party system and overtaken the other two parties. That definitely didn’t work.
And yes, we can say unequivocally that banning arguments for Nazism and trying to ban political parties is illiberal. It will almost certainly result in more support for the AfD. People who are being illiberal from the left frequently call illiberal forces on the right illiberal and vice versa. Almost no-one calls themselves illiberal.
That makes sense and I see that you are being consistent in your treatment of the Germany case. Thank you for the engagement!
Liberal: The requirement to engage in continual tribal warfare at work against opponents who either lie with word games or issue threats.
Illiberal: Sacking corrupt and dishonest people using critical theory to attack others.
The lifeline of liberalism is what it created in first place: reason as the way to know.
There is a philosopher in 20th century that is a true advocate for reason, and some great intellectuals making the case for reason. We need an army of them making the case for reason in the culture. Then liberalism has a chance.
As usual many thanks, Helen, for your overflowings. How do you keep coming up (down in your goldmine) with such rich new seams of thinking. The long and very recent history and finding bits of liberalism lurking still in the arguments of those while don’t get the full bhoona. Thus:
« The problem we have now is that people still have enough of an intuitive sense of liberal principles to call on them as a tool when their own rights are threatened, but not a sufficiently conscious and well articulated model of liberalism to stand up for it in its own right and do so as a shared, collective responsibility. »
Outstanding essay, Helen! I am still looking for a definitive "What is Liberalism" statement (similar to the Sharon Statement that outlined Buckley-style conservatism in the late 50s), and if I don't locate it, I will attempt to construct it, hopefully with your help. Your essay provided most of the material for it, I believe!
Now, for specifics:
"Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, who claimed that in the Middle Ages, “man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation” (1887)" - this echoed strongly a sentiment that I recently read in A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age, by William Manchester:
"The most baffling, elusive, yet in many ways the most significant dimensions of the medieval mind were invisible and silent. One was the medieval man’s total lack of ego. Even those with creative powers had no sense of self. ... To them their identity in this life was irrelevant. Noblemen had surnames, but fewer than one percent of the souls in Christendom were wellborn. Typically, the rest—nearly 60 million Europeans—were known as Hans, Jacques, Sal, Carlos, Will, or Will’s wife, Will’s son, or Will’s daughter. If that was inadequate or confusing, a nickname would do. Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like.
Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet, the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible.
Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning. There were no newspapers or magazines to inform the common people of great events; occasional pamphlets might reach them, but they were usually theological and, like the Bible, were always published in Latin, a language they no longer understood."
Indeed, for us, in this day and age suffused by the legacy of liberalism, such a mindset is "baffling and elusive," almost unimaginable - yet that's how most people lived for most of our history.
"The liberal drive is towards the removal of constraints and barriers" - I would amend it slightly to insert the word "artificial" before "constraints and barriers." Would you agree? It seems to me there are immutable constraints and barriers imposed on us by nature that do not allow equal outcomes for everyone, no matter how level the playing field is or how we restructure society to remove the perceived barriers and constraints. Different sexes have different proclivities; different individuals have different talents and abilities; inability to deal with those facts, and the desire to artificially overcome them, caused the periodic attempts by illiberal (and often totalitarian) means to change human nature. All such attempts would ultimately lead to the world of "Harrison Bergeron," would they not?
[As long as it is liberal principles that are being conserved,] "liberalism and conservatism can be recognised as overlapping principles that can be and are held by many people completely coherently" - brilliantly put; it is sad that such an obvious truth is not more widely recognized; the issue, I believe, is one of awareness - once reasonable people hear it expressed like that, they cannot but accept it. Indeed, "For conservatives who value cultural integrity, history, and tradition, defending the philosophical heritage of liberalism is entirely consistent with their broader value system."
"We are currently living with the consequences of no longer seeing the upholding of liberalism as a shared civic responsibility." - exactly right, and it starts parents relying on schools to turn their little savages into responsible citizens, while schools have abrogated that responsibility and are no longer teaching civics.
"people still have enough of an intuitive sense of liberal principles" - this reminded me of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, the very first chapter, when he talks about people quarrelling: "[one party to the quarrel] is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse." Lewis concludes the chapter by saying, "human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it." (even when they can't help but break that code of behavior on many occasions) Of course, he goes on to argue that the code was instilled in us by God, which I believe you'd disagree with; regardless, Liberalism cannot die out because it is part of our nature, just as the propensity for evil and for controlling other people is. Thus goes the eternal battle between Good and Evil.
There are too many quotes I pulled from this marvelous essay to discuss here. Great job, and thank you for keeping the liberal flame alive!
Thanks, Jonathan.
I think definitions of liberalism can be narrow and negative - let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it harms nobody else nor denies them the same freedoms - or expansive and incorporate many of the positive facets that have been developed directly from the negative principle and are to do with the positive goods that can come from encouraging and enabling people to engage in free trade and the free exchange of ideas and actively protect freedoms. Therefore, I see a wide range of views that can be considered liberal but which people may disagree on. For example, libertarians tend to see my support for progressive taxation as contrary to liberal principles and, to be fair, it is in that most 'laissez-faire" sense, so I don't try to argue that that is a pure freedom principle but a policy I support as a way to ethically enable meritocracy. I am also more of an individualist liberal than a utilitarian one in other ways so we can disagree among ourselves there too.
I intend to address the issue of 'artificial barriers' in a short piece later this week. I have just responded to someone else raising this issue with:
The issue is how to accept differences that are not socially engineered and the natural result of these on people’s life outcomes while also upholding some sense of social responsibility and cooperation. Both from an ethical standpoint and from one that works with our innate sense of fairness. Nicholas Christakis’ book “Blueprint” is excellent on this. It argues, by looking at communities that have thrived and those that has failed - communes to shipwrecks - that we work best on a kind of ‘mild hierarchy.’ We seem to naturally want leaders and followers but also for leadership positions to be earned and not exploitative or dictatorial. We see this in chimps who will accept a leader based on his strength and leadership capabilities but if he is too domineering, they’ll gang up and kill him.
I’d say that we do not have to accept poverty as a result of enabling people to rise on their natural abilities and/or supportive family structures, but we do have to accept economic inequality. The poorest people in capitalist societies are still generally better off than the poorest people in other kinds of societies. But if the system is seen as exploitative, people will rebel against it. We came very close to having a communist revolution here in the UK during industrialisation but it was headed off by reforms which make the workplace safer, reduced hours to manageable ones for a living wage and the eradication of child labour. This annoyed Marxists who did not want workers to settle for this, but, in reality, most people will not be inspired to agitation and revolution if they have a decent quality of life and their families are thriving. I’d say that, as a left liberal, we can have the best of both worlds ethically if we enable free trade and meritocracy but also have some regulation to avoid exploitation and welfare systems to ensure that people who really cannot work have their basic needs met. Nearly everybody agrees with this although legitimate disagreements exist about where the line is between encouraging dependency and providing a safety net. For example, nearly everybody will say that we have a social responsibility not to let orphaned children or disabled servicemen starve to death because they cannot work, but after this, people vary widely. I think conservatives are prone to putting too much emphasis on individual responsibility and the left to putting too much on social responsibility.
I am not altogether confident that liberalism cannot die. We did not have much of it for most of our history but I do think that now we have had it, it will be harder for it to die. Are women protesting hijab in Iran acting on a natural freedom impulse or drawing on liberal principles that have spread across the world and used to have more of an influence in Iran and can be seen to be accepted in other countries? A bit of both, I think. Social psychologists have addressed the evidence that we seem to become more liberal when we have a sense of security and can think about rights and freedoms for everyone but become more authoritarian when we feel threatened and then become inclined to try to stamp out dissent within our own groups and kick out other groups. Turning the heat down on our current polarisation would thus be key to enabling liberalism to thrive.
For my purposes of bringing together a broad range of liberals here, I set out these principles which go beyond the simple negative value but are still broad enough to have positive principles.
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/relaunching-the-overflowings-of-a
Helen - thank you so much for such an expansive, thorough answer! I really, really appreciate it, given your wide range of activities and the menagerie you live with 😄.
Given "a wide range of views that can be considered liberal," and a vastly wider range of perceptions of the label, to me, it becomes even more imperative to have a clear definition of what liberalism should mean. Thank you for providing a link to the post you launched this Substack with! It's another goldmine for the definition I will attempt to construct.
Thank you for the recommendation of Nicholas Christakis' book, I have already ordered it.
I look forward to your post discussing the "artificial barriers."
I think the term "exploitation" requires examination; it is a typical leftist term of choice: immediately affecting one's most basic emotions (not fair!) without providing any useful information. In a free market anchored in the rule of law, exploitation is impossible: the parties have to freely agree to the transaction (and few will willingly agree to be exploited), and competition ensures the terms are fair.
Likewise, "poverty" and, by extension, "basic needs" are complex subjects, and especially the societal obligation ("social responsibility") to alleviate and to provide. I published an essay on the first, "Is There Poverty in America," on my Substack, which argues in the negative. As to the obligation / responsibility, I prefer the Christian admonition, “He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise" to the socialist doctrine of redistributive taxation: have the government forcibly take “excess” income from the most enterprising and give it to whomever successfully jumps through arbitrary regulatory hoops. (which probably proves your point: "conservatives are prone to putting too much emphasis on individual responsibility and the left to putting too much on social responsibility."😳)
I want to argue with your last paragraph, but I can't! Your logic is unassailable. 😮 Kudos!
I don't really agree with your views Helen, you'd call me a 'right-wing illiberal'. But I must say this is the most coherent summary of your beliefs I've read from you.
However, I think your logic immediately stumbles with Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The true standard bearer for the kind of liberalism you're talking about was Barry Goldwater, not Martin Luther King. Yet Goldwater's positions are seen today as far-right extremist.
Maybe we can have 'true liberalism' back, but it would involve repealing Title II and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Complimenti una lezione esaustiva del liberalismo. Dalla lettura, ho visto accennato ,il principio (popper ecc...) di come comportarsi con gli illiberale.
Un progressista liberale convinto,difronte alla crescente immigrazione di cultura profondamente ed irrimediabilmente illiberale ( in Europa gli immigrati mussulmani ritengono di vivere nella " terra della guerra" e di avere un "dovere religioso" di contrastare il MALE ,cioè tutto quello che siamo noi liberali)
Ora ,con il metodo liberale,non mi creano alcun DANNO, rientrano nel pluralismo ,ma in futuro? I nostri figli e nipoti ? Potremmo lasciargli una società dove una forte minoranza "tribale/comunitaria" ostacola il progresso conservare/progressista, che ci hanno lasciato i nostri genitori.
Cordialità
Un amico dall'Italia .
Individuation likely only occurred among criminal outcasts in premodern times I would imagine.
The devil's finest cast out of heaven
Societies are sedentary and swarms or hordes nomadic.
Nomads where likely more individualistic being in constant conflict