Postliberals and the Fear of Freedom

Criticism and coercion do not exist on a continuum and it is projection to think they do.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

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In a recent piece for The UnPopulist which I encourage you to read in full, Andrew Koppelman addressed “The Unbearable Intellectual Lightness of the Postliberal Being.” He looks at the claim that liberalism is a threat to religious liberty writing,

The core critical claim of postliberalism is that liberalism inevitably turns into its opposite; that what begins as an ideology of tolerance and free speech ends in repression.

and argued that “its case that liberalism must turn into its opposite is based on feelings, not theory or real world evidence.”

Indeed.

The claim that liberalism is to blame for the rise of illiberalism is fundamentally incoherent. The same mechanism is not posited to exist in relation to any other philosophical or ideological framework. We do not, for example, see people claiming that Christianity inevitably leads to atheism or that support of free markets invariably results in socialism. It is recognised that when Christianity gives way to atheism, this is caused by a decline in Christianity and that socialism can only take hold in a society that has abandoned its commitment to free markets.

It should be equally clear that when threats to freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of religion or any threat to individual liberty arises, it has been enabled by a failure to protect individual liberty and not as a result of consistently doing so. This is not a feature of liberalism but of failures to uphold it.

I have been accused before of indulging in a No True Scotsman fallacy with this claim but that is to misunderstand the fallacy. It gives the example of the statement “No true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” but the fallacy here is redefining ‘Scotsman’ as ‘someone who would never put sugar on his porridge’ rather than by his holding Scottish ancestry or citizenship. It is falsified by the existence of someone who meets all definitions of being Scottish putting sugar on his porridge. If we were to say, “No true Scotsman has Welsh ancestry and has always lived in Wales” this would simply be definitionally true. So, too, is the statement “No true liberalism is illiberal.”

This does not mean that no liberal can ever fail to live up to his or her principles, but that when they do, this can be pointed out to them and they can self-correct because we know what liberal principles are and what a failure to live up to them looks like. It looks like being illiberal: seeking to deny the individual liberties of others - their freedom of belief, speech, religion etc. If that individual does not self-correct and resume upholding those values, we can then say that s/he not being liberal for exactly the same reason that we can say somebody who eats meat is not being vegetarian. The same principle applies to political movements or governments. If they are suppressing the freedoms of others, they are being illiberal. The people opposing this and defending individual liberties will be the liberals.

There can be disagreement about what constitutes a denial of individual liberty. Some liberals argue that gun control or restrictions on recreational drugs or sex work denies individual liberty. Others disagree and argue that these regulations are to prevent demonstrable material harm to others which is the only grounds on which liberalism sanctions coercion. There are also grey areas when it comes to issues of freedom of speech and social sanctions. When does public criticism of an individual become cancellation that destroys livelihoods and reputations and stifles free speech? Where precisely is the line between expressing horrible views about a demographic that wish them ill and inciting violence against them? Applying liberal principles to complex social issues can be messy because humans are messy. Nevertheless, it remains true that, while a philosophy centred on the aim to protect individual liberty may not always perfectly achieve this, individual liberty is best protected when a majority of people have this aim.

The belief that liberalism will inevitably result in illiberalism is, therefore, incoherent. As Koppelman argues, it is not rooted in either the philosophy of liberalism or in real world evidence comparing the individual freedoms of those who live in liberal democracies with those who don’t. It is, indeed, based on feelings. It is, in my observation, rooted in intuitions which see freedom as inherently dangerous and corrupting and which see criticism and coercion as existing on a continuum. Both of these are inherently authoritarian.

The first of these fears - that liberalism can be dangerous and corrupting - considered in the context of religious freedom can be justified if one accepts the premise that one particular religion is correct and that a failure to enforce it results in the social acceptance of ‘sinful behaviour and consequent eternal damnation. The fear is that if people are not compelled to practice or at least respect one religion and are permitted to criticise that religion or argue against accepting it as true, increasing numbers of people will stop believing in it or regarding it as good.

This is a legitimate criticism of liberalism. We do want people to be free to both express and listen to arguments for and against the truth or goodness of all and any ideas and belief systems. We recognise that this process causes some ideas to become more widely accepted as true or good and others to decline in credibility or approval as a result of people evaluating and comparing them. This is the liberal concept known as the Marketplace of Ideas, and it is a feature, not a bug.

The belief that individuals are capable of evaluating ideas for themselves and forming their own conclusions and must be allowed to do so is a central feature of liberalism. It is not that we believe that individuals are all perfectly rational, unbiased agents who will consider ideas objectively based on evidence and sound reasoning. It is that when we set up systems which have that expectation, people are incentivised to make the best arguments they can for what they already believe. This is because others, who believe something different, will provide disconfirming evidence and make strong counterarguments. We are very good at spotting holes in arguments for claims we do not believe in. This kind of collaborative conflict is the best way of exposing truth claims which do not appear to be true and reasoning which is not reasonable and producing reliable knowledge and sound ethical reasoning.

There are always those who regard this cynically. They typically see the developments of the modern period during which this became an expectation very negatively. For critics on the identitarian left, the growth and dominance of the West on the world stage was characterised by colonialism and exploitation. The rise of Enlightenment rationalism, the Scientific Revolution, and the formation of liberal democracies was part and parcel of this and are thus white, Western, masculinist ways of thinking. For the critics on the right, those same developments led to secularism and turning away from religious and tribal values in favour of rational, scientific and freedom-centred ones and are thus divorced from divine truth and tradition and are degenerate, narcissistic and soulless. The first stance is postmodern, the latter postliberal. They differ profoundly in their vision of what an ideal world would look like, but they agree that liberals are standing in the way of it, and on that point, they are right. It is essential that we continue to do so.

The second fear is not straightforward authoritarianism that wishes to impose its own values on everybody else for their own good and that of society, but it is still rooted in authoritarianism. It is the intuition that there is a continuum where critique inevitably turns into coercion. If a liberal society allows criticism of, say, Christianity to go unpunished, it will eventually morph into repression of Christianity. This is, I believe, rooted in the individual’s own authoritarian impulses. For them, the belief that a certain set of ideas are bad leads naturally to banning or punishing the expression of those ideas. They therefore conclude that others must feel the same way. Why would anybody allow ideas they believe to be bad to continue to exist?

This is not a legitimate critique of liberalism. Liberalism is the philosophy defined by having a clear line which holds that only to prevent material harm to another can we justify coercion.

[T]he sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the 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. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

(John Stuart Mill, On Liberty)

This “harm principle” draws the line postliberals deny exists and consequently their critique fails. The tendency to see criticism and coercion as existing on a continuum is very common even among those who are not overtly authoritarian. It appears in assumptions that if one strongly disapproves of an idea, one must want to ban it or conversely that, if one is defending the expression of an idea, one must agree with it. This is deeply troubling and it manifests alongside the tendency of highly vocal partisans to appeal to liberal principles of freedom of belief and speech when it is their own views being threatened, but not when they are those of people with whom they disagree. When people do this, liberalism is not being defended as a set of freedom-centred principles in itself but used as a tool for furthering a specific political agenda. This is sometimes done knowingly and cynically for authoritarian ends, but more often, I suspect, it is a product of the motivated reasoning our species is prone to and people not giving enough thought to whether they are upholding principles consistently.

This is why it is so important for liberals on the left, right and centre to become more vocal and be seen to defend the principles of liberalism specifically and consistently within all contexts, not only when illiberalism threatens their own freedoms. For this reason, I will continue to defend use of the preface “I disagree with this person, but…” before defending their freedom to express their views. This annoys some liberals who feel there should be no need for what they see as a ‘disclaimer’ and it should be a given that we will defend people’s right to speak regardless of whether we agree with them. In our current state of political polarisation, this is clearly not a given and to reduce that polarisation and defend the principles of liberalism themselves, we need to be seen explicitly saying, “I oppose these views and defend the right of their proponents to express them.”

At the centre of that is the liberal line between criticism and coercion and the ‘harm’ principle, which can most simply be expressed as,

Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided this does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedoms.

This is ultimately what liberals seek to protect and we must make this explicit and model it consistently. Criticism and coercion are entirely different things. Liberalism protects the right to criticise absolutely and opposes coercion fundamentally. It makes the case that doing both of these things at the same time is the best way to protect individual liberty, produce knowledge and resolve conflict. History supports this thesis.

This brings us to the question of religious freedom. Liberalism is not a threat to it and is, in fact, its strongest protector. While some people may be genuinely philosophically vague and foggy on what liberal principles are, those who define themselves as postliberals whose central mission it is to subject liberalism to critique and dispatch it as an organising political philosophy should not be. Historically informed Christians should be particularly aware of liberalism’s role in protecting religious freedom. Some of the earliest defences of the individual’s right to evaluate, criticise, accept or reject ideas for him or herself that we now recognise as the seeds of liberalism came from Christian thinkers defending their own right to interpret scripture without state interference.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

This principle also became central to the founding of the United States, the only nation established explicitly on liberal principles and as a liberal democracy by dissident Protestants fleeing persecution in England. Its constitution decreed there shall be “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” alongside its freedom of speech protections as a central part of its liberal philosophy.

If the state or any faction of society attempts to deny a Christian’s right to believe, express or live by their faith, liberalism is the mechanism which says, “No, we cannot allow you to do that” and protects them from it. Any attempt to deny freedom of religion will be, by definition, illiberal. Such a threat may come from another religion, or from an atheistic authoritarian regime, or from progressives who wish to coerce religious believers to adopt progressive beliefs, but it will never come from liberals. Liberals are the strongest allies Christians have against anybody who wishes to deny them freedom.

The only way liberalism can be argued to pose a threat to religious freedom is if ‘freedom’ is redefined as giving Christians the ‘freedom’ to impose their religious beliefs on other people or granting them the ‘freedom’ from being likely to encounter dissenting or critical views. Again, liberalism would say “No, we cannot allow you to do that” and protect others from their authoritarianism. Unfortunately, some postliberal Christians appear to want precisely these special protections for their faith, and their apparent confusion about what liberalism is serves to obscure that.

Ultimately, the postliberal claim that liberalism will inevitably become illiberal relies on a mischaracterisation of liberalism, a projection of authoritarian intuitions, and a refusal to recognise the defining liberal distinction between criticism and coercion. It treats liberalism not as a philosophy with a clear central principle that only material harm justifies coercion, but as an ungrounded cultural mood that could slide into authoritarianism. But liberalism is not ungrounded. It is grounded on a firm line which prevents it from collapsing into illiberalism. When liberal principles are upheld, when the harm principle is understood, when criticism is protected, and when coercion is strictly limited to the prevention of material harm, religious freedom is most strongly protected. Where it is threatened, it is not because protections of individual liberty have been too robust, but because they have not been robust enough.

The central problem for postliberals taking this stance, I believe, is that liberalism does not seek to guarantee that any religion will endure. It seeks only to ensure that it may be believed, practised, defended, criticised, and rejected freely. The responsibility for Christianity’s survival therefore remains with its adherents, who must convince others that its truth claims are true and its moral values are good. This is not a flaw in liberalism but its defining strength, and it applies equally to all belief systems and moral frameworks. Liberalism has historically been the ally of religious dissenters, including Christians, and it remains their strongest protection today. Those who reject it in the name of defending faith are not correcting a failure within liberalism but abandoning the very framework that secures their freedom to believe at all.