Classical liberalism where it exists has always existed alongside community: neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and civil society - the sort of groups Tocqueville lauded. They are compatible with liberalism in the sense they are often chosen freely, and themselves honored liberal principles.
Loved this. Yes, I value liberalism so much precisely because I’ve experienced its opposite, and everyone I know who has escaped an authoritarian regime or culture similarly finds it miraculous and precious.
But when I speak to friends who grew up always having taken living in a liberal society for granted, I can see many have experienced it as excessive, or cutting them off from a source of community or goodness, or a source of value, or a sense of cultural cohesion or continuity, etc etc. I do intuitively grasp what they feel they’ve lost or missed out on - but I am not convinced that an illiberal society would necessarily deliver it any better (or at least, that even it it did, it’d come with a side of tradeoffs that they can’t envision and can be somewhat naive about).
I very much agree humans have both communitarian and individualistic / liberal instincts and that their importance can flex over time and in different contexts - but the loss of one is felt most sharply when it is being lost, denied or torn down. For me personally, having experienced both modes, I have found that living in a liberal culture still affords me the option to self organise into mutual communities and therefore, to find an optimal balance of individualism and community and to bind myself to strong values too - whereas living in an illiberal culture has been worse for not allowing that degree of flexibility.
I also notice that many people’s critiques of liberalism - say for example, the failures of policies relating to multiculturalism - are, in fact, down to allowing some *illiberal* and /or totalitarian expressions of culture / religion to take hold - but this is often in direct opposition to liberal principles enshrined in law so an alternative solution would be to consistently apply the rule of law, rather than either selectively allowing for authoritarian instincts to permeate if they’re done so by so-called oppressed classes or giving up on liberalism altogether. In a similar vein, I wonder if many people’s critiques of liberalism include things that have happened for all of human history, including in the most illiberal, authoritarian societies but are turbo charged more by technology and other factors - for example, if one believes abortion is a great evil of a liberal society, an authoritarian or illiberal or even religious society doesn’t necessarily preclude it given many have allowed for (sometimes forced) abortions / infanticides, and rates have been fairly stable across many different types of societies. Likewise, if someone is bothered about some of the sexual norms in liberal cultures, I wonder what they’d think of pornography use in some of the most religiously oppressive countries, or the ways elites have just tried to get around strict laws - like mistress / short term marital arrangements or laws for taking women as booty for spoils of war, or a class of prostitution that gentleman could make use of, etc. Nor do today’s illiberal/authoritarian countries escape other trends like falling birth rates. So I am not even convinced that a lot of the aims people want to pursue by turning post liberal will indeed be met in a post liberal world, if one were persuaded that the goals were good. And on the flipside, we’d be losing a lot that is taken for granted too.
A very thoughtful and thought-provoking response to Heath’s essay Helen. Thank you. Do you have any specific recommendations for child/young person-friendly books and/or other resources that could be useful for parents, teachers and young people themselves which might help to ‘ensure that nobody reaches adulthood without an understanding of what differentiates the modern period from the medieval one and the nature of the threat to liberal and democratic values that dominated the first half of the 20th century’? Sadly, given how ineffective decades of holocaust and anti-dictatorship education - including the very commonly organised school trips to former Nazi concentration camps - seems to have been in dispelling antisemitism and the attractiveness of certain types of ‘strong man’ politician, one wonders if books, movies, talks and trips etc. will ever be sufficient to inspire the majority of emerging adults to think hard about, fully understand and value liberalism and argue, let alone fight, for it. However, I guess and strongly agree that we should at least try.
Now there's an idea! I think there might be some mileage in providing more child-friendly editions of books originally aimed at a predominantly adult audience, such as Peter Frankopan did with his fantastic reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silk-Roads-History-World-Illustrated/dp/1408889935
Of course "liberalism cannot provide [us] with meaning, purpose, a shared narrative or an ethical framework." But this is because liberalism lives on a different cognitive plane from these other life essentials. I keep wondering how to name or describe this plane. Or we can say it's a another level of abstraction. It's the level of abstraction that can be embodied in things like rule of law and freedom of speech. "Principles" is the word Helen often uses here, but how to convey the notion of what principles are and how they live on a different plane from what your own values and beliefs?
What makes liberalism hard for people to understand is apparently a sense that groups who have different beliefs and systems of ethics do not belong in "their" society. (This would be true if "common good" is the only cognitive plane from which we can think about society.) But liberalism allows all of us to choose our own communities, groups, ethical norms, and cultures as long as these respect the freedom provided by the principles of liberalism. We don't need a centralized common good to provide meaning and purpose because it's better for individuals and groups to be free to offer these to anyone interested.
How can this notion of a higher level of abstraction be taught? Have any philosophers come up with good quotes and metaphors? As far as my reading goes, it all got started with a kind of wonderment at the huge diversity in human societies, cultures and ethics (Montaigne for example). Maybe I need to delve into the Federalist papers. The context for those was 1) we want something other than monarchy, which is a no one has really thought about much yet and 2) no one can agree how to do this, so let's come up with something that will let us continue to disagree forever but still build a nation and a few governments and legal systems to keep it going.
Maybe i'm wrong here, but it seems to me that liberalism _does_ tell people what and how to think. It just does so without a lot of confidence.
The best argument I can make for liberalism is that yes, Good is a real thing, but that it's fiendishly tricky to get right. Attempts to make the good explicit are always going to be flawed approximations. Any one approximation - wokism, a specific religion, communism, free market ayn-rand style -- any _one_ approximation is going to get things wrong. So our best bet for large-scale systems is to make them liberal, so that groups that are more effective gain power, reach the limits of their approximation, and then lose power.
I think liberalism is absolutely the wrong arrangement for, e.g. a family. It might be the only arrangement that can operate at a scale of hundreds of millions of people in a world with computers and airplanes. I don't think you can can have a coherent singular culture at that scale.
When we ask the question "what sort of social system we should live in," I think there's always an implicit assumption that there must be _one_ system. What liberalism allows is for a kind of meta-system that can evolve, as long as it allows the lower-level systems to have their place.
This sort of thinking ultimately tends to make everyone unhappy becuase it suggests a kind of federalism is ideal. Let smaller communities define their own norms and suceed or fail base don them. E.g., Don't have welfare at the federal level, let local communities figure that out for themselves.
My critique of the current global order is thus that that it _rejected_ liberalism in favor of technocratic managerialism. It doesn't let individual communities set and enforce their own norms. It mandates a singular monoculture and this violates liberalism.
I agree with all of that but I’d qualify the first sentence. Liberalism should and has advocated for itself confidently and still does in some places and not claimed not to. But there is a difference between telling people in an authoritarian way and arguing strongly for something. I hope I find that balance. I am always telling people what and how to think but I defend their right to disagree! And we don’t have a lot of confident liberals now.
> still does in some places and not claimed not to.
Yeah, this part is tricky because ideas don't have official voices. I'm referring to the pattern you noticed, where lots of people think liberalism is just evidently good and don't argue for it. In my school years (started high school in 1999), people asserted that liberalism was good because there wasn't really an true moral values, so we should all just get along.
I think the absence of an update to Rawls, and the general lack of belief in moral realism, has prevented people from being able to coherently make the case for why liberal societies are going to be better. It's hard to simultaneously argue that:
Classical liberalism where it exists has always existed alongside community: neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and civil society - the sort of groups Tocqueville lauded. They are compatible with liberalism in the sense they are often chosen freely, and themselves honored liberal principles.
Loved this. Yes, I value liberalism so much precisely because I’ve experienced its opposite, and everyone I know who has escaped an authoritarian regime or culture similarly finds it miraculous and precious.
But when I speak to friends who grew up always having taken living in a liberal society for granted, I can see many have experienced it as excessive, or cutting them off from a source of community or goodness, or a source of value, or a sense of cultural cohesion or continuity, etc etc. I do intuitively grasp what they feel they’ve lost or missed out on - but I am not convinced that an illiberal society would necessarily deliver it any better (or at least, that even it it did, it’d come with a side of tradeoffs that they can’t envision and can be somewhat naive about).
I very much agree humans have both communitarian and individualistic / liberal instincts and that their importance can flex over time and in different contexts - but the loss of one is felt most sharply when it is being lost, denied or torn down. For me personally, having experienced both modes, I have found that living in a liberal culture still affords me the option to self organise into mutual communities and therefore, to find an optimal balance of individualism and community and to bind myself to strong values too - whereas living in an illiberal culture has been worse for not allowing that degree of flexibility.
I also notice that many people’s critiques of liberalism - say for example, the failures of policies relating to multiculturalism - are, in fact, down to allowing some *illiberal* and /or totalitarian expressions of culture / religion to take hold - but this is often in direct opposition to liberal principles enshrined in law so an alternative solution would be to consistently apply the rule of law, rather than either selectively allowing for authoritarian instincts to permeate if they’re done so by so-called oppressed classes or giving up on liberalism altogether. In a similar vein, I wonder if many people’s critiques of liberalism include things that have happened for all of human history, including in the most illiberal, authoritarian societies but are turbo charged more by technology and other factors - for example, if one believes abortion is a great evil of a liberal society, an authoritarian or illiberal or even religious society doesn’t necessarily preclude it given many have allowed for (sometimes forced) abortions / infanticides, and rates have been fairly stable across many different types of societies. Likewise, if someone is bothered about some of the sexual norms in liberal cultures, I wonder what they’d think of pornography use in some of the most religiously oppressive countries, or the ways elites have just tried to get around strict laws - like mistress / short term marital arrangements or laws for taking women as booty for spoils of war, or a class of prostitution that gentleman could make use of, etc. Nor do today’s illiberal/authoritarian countries escape other trends like falling birth rates. So I am not even convinced that a lot of the aims people want to pursue by turning post liberal will indeed be met in a post liberal world, if one were persuaded that the goals were good. And on the flipside, we’d be losing a lot that is taken for granted too.
A very thoughtful and thought-provoking response to Heath’s essay Helen. Thank you. Do you have any specific recommendations for child/young person-friendly books and/or other resources that could be useful for parents, teachers and young people themselves which might help to ‘ensure that nobody reaches adulthood without an understanding of what differentiates the modern period from the medieval one and the nature of the threat to liberal and democratic values that dominated the first half of the 20th century’? Sadly, given how ineffective decades of holocaust and anti-dictatorship education - including the very commonly organised school trips to former Nazi concentration camps - seems to have been in dispelling antisemitism and the attractiveness of certain types of ‘strong man’ politician, one wonders if books, movies, talks and trips etc. will ever be sufficient to inspire the majority of emerging adults to think hard about, fully understand and value liberalism and argue, let alone fight, for it. However, I guess and strongly agree that we should at least try.
I should, shouldn’t I? But I don’t. I’ve just studied it and have no experience of teaching. Maybe I should write one?
Now there's an idea! I think there might be some mileage in providing more child-friendly editions of books originally aimed at a predominantly adult audience, such as Peter Frankopan did with his fantastic reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silk-Roads-History-World-Illustrated/dp/1408889935
Of course "liberalism cannot provide [us] with meaning, purpose, a shared narrative or an ethical framework." But this is because liberalism lives on a different cognitive plane from these other life essentials. I keep wondering how to name or describe this plane. Or we can say it's a another level of abstraction. It's the level of abstraction that can be embodied in things like rule of law and freedom of speech. "Principles" is the word Helen often uses here, but how to convey the notion of what principles are and how they live on a different plane from what your own values and beliefs?
What makes liberalism hard for people to understand is apparently a sense that groups who have different beliefs and systems of ethics do not belong in "their" society. (This would be true if "common good" is the only cognitive plane from which we can think about society.) But liberalism allows all of us to choose our own communities, groups, ethical norms, and cultures as long as these respect the freedom provided by the principles of liberalism. We don't need a centralized common good to provide meaning and purpose because it's better for individuals and groups to be free to offer these to anyone interested.
How can this notion of a higher level of abstraction be taught? Have any philosophers come up with good quotes and metaphors? As far as my reading goes, it all got started with a kind of wonderment at the huge diversity in human societies, cultures and ethics (Montaigne for example). Maybe I need to delve into the Federalist papers. The context for those was 1) we want something other than monarchy, which is a no one has really thought about much yet and 2) no one can agree how to do this, so let's come up with something that will let us continue to disagree forever but still build a nation and a few governments and legal systems to keep it going.
Maybe i'm wrong here, but it seems to me that liberalism _does_ tell people what and how to think. It just does so without a lot of confidence.
The best argument I can make for liberalism is that yes, Good is a real thing, but that it's fiendishly tricky to get right. Attempts to make the good explicit are always going to be flawed approximations. Any one approximation - wokism, a specific religion, communism, free market ayn-rand style -- any _one_ approximation is going to get things wrong. So our best bet for large-scale systems is to make them liberal, so that groups that are more effective gain power, reach the limits of their approximation, and then lose power.
I think liberalism is absolutely the wrong arrangement for, e.g. a family. It might be the only arrangement that can operate at a scale of hundreds of millions of people in a world with computers and airplanes. I don't think you can can have a coherent singular culture at that scale.
When we ask the question "what sort of social system we should live in," I think there's always an implicit assumption that there must be _one_ system. What liberalism allows is for a kind of meta-system that can evolve, as long as it allows the lower-level systems to have their place.
This sort of thinking ultimately tends to make everyone unhappy becuase it suggests a kind of federalism is ideal. Let smaller communities define their own norms and suceed or fail base don them. E.g., Don't have welfare at the federal level, let local communities figure that out for themselves.
My critique of the current global order is thus that that it _rejected_ liberalism in favor of technocratic managerialism. It doesn't let individual communities set and enforce their own norms. It mandates a singular monoculture and this violates liberalism.
I agree with all of that but I’d qualify the first sentence. Liberalism should and has advocated for itself confidently and still does in some places and not claimed not to. But there is a difference between telling people in an authoritarian way and arguing strongly for something. I hope I find that balance. I am always telling people what and how to think but I defend their right to disagree! And we don’t have a lot of confident liberals now.
> still does in some places and not claimed not to.
Yeah, this part is tricky because ideas don't have official voices. I'm referring to the pattern you noticed, where lots of people think liberalism is just evidently good and don't argue for it. In my school years (started high school in 1999), people asserted that liberalism was good because there wasn't really an true moral values, so we should all just get along.
I think the absence of an update to Rawls, and the general lack of belief in moral realism, has prevented people from being able to coherently make the case for why liberal societies are going to be better. It's hard to simultaneously argue that:
- good doesn't mean anything real
- liberalism is good