This belief that any critique of a thing must by necessity imply a desire to ban, outlaw or prevent the thing from taking place drives me nuts. And you're entirely right -- it's a fundamentally authoritarian impulse to believe that all things must either be above critique, or else they should be outlawed, i.e. that all things that I would wish people to stop doing, I "should" want to outlaw.
This would only be true for someone who placed ZERO value on human freedom and agency, and who therefore sees no downside to banning things left and right on even the flimsiest of evidence.
A good example that I run into pretty often, is people who claim that having a blanket policy of not wanting to date black women -- isn't racist but instead just "personal preference". And then if you point out that it might well be a preference, but no rule exists that says "preferences cannot be racist" -- and given most reasonable definitions of "racism", judging all members of a given group negatively on account of their race, is in fact racism, they'll invariably respond with: "So you're saying people should be forced to date someone they're not attracted to? Don't you respect consent?????"
But I wasn't saying any law should prevent this. Nor was I saying that people who engage in this form of racism should in some way be coerced into dating anyone in particular. All I was saying was that considering (for example) all black women to be automatically unsuitable as partners, is in fact racist. If that's someones preference, then that person has a racist preference.
I would rather take someone's word on their position being a "preference" rather than "racist". If that person was to meet a black woman who in their judgement was beautiful and had the personality traits they found attractive, would they break their general rule? It's been my experience observing humans that many would. I've seen preferences broken too often to be quick to turn a stated preference to an "ist" of any kind. I've known some of a given "race" that chose to date outside of it. Are they racist against their own? It's all way too complex a human interaction to read much into, even stated preferences.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Something being a preference doesn't preclude it from ALSO being racist.
It's conceivable that some of the people who state a given preference would be willing to deviate from it if they met someone they liked a lot -- but that doesn't prevent the preference as such from being racist.
A company that has a policy of not hiring black people has a racist policy. If they at some point deviate from that policy and hire an exceptionally well-qualified black person, that doesn't magically mean that their policy wasn't or isn't racist.
Judging people negatively on the basis of their race is the textbook definition of racism. And it makes no sense to say that an entire group of people are unsuitable as partners, or as employees -- even though there's nothing at all negative about them.
No, I think racism has to involve a belief that someone is inferior because of their race and not just not being attracted to a type to be meaningful. Otherwise it would be sexist for anyone to be exclusively attracted to one sex. You could say that someone who finds people of a certain race or build or height aatractive regards people who don't match it as inferior in attractiveness but I also think sexual attraction has to be a special case or the concept expands out of all meaning and utility.
I would be prejudiced against:
Short men
Feminine men
Very muscular men
Men with thin or thinning hair
Men with small noses
Male intellectuals
Male professionals
And so much more. I am not. I just have a type. I like tall, lean, rangey rocker/biker types who have long, thick hair and pronounced features and work with their hands building and fixing things. This is the man I married, a tall, lean god with wiry muscle, and long, thick, wavy, golden hair that I called his "lion's mane" and which I am so happy he passed to our daughter and a strong nose, jaw and forehead which I am grateful he didn't. He operates heavy machinery for moving things and is also just generally handy.
Do I think my husband is the best-looking man in the world? No. I could even say that a shorter man or a more heavy-set or muscular one or one with short hair or no hair was objectively better looking or that an academic or banker would make an excellent catch. But I have a type. It doesn't actually exclude black men. There aren't many of them at rock clubs or biker rallies but there are a few including one who met that description and had his own mane of very thin dreads whom I had a crush on for a while, but if it did, this would not be racist.
I think assuming you'll never feel attracted to anyone from a given race implies a belief that they're inferior in some way or other. Being less attractive is by itself a form of inferiority.
The objection that then it'd be sexist to not be pansexual always comes up. But that ignores the cultural context.
There does exist a widespread idea that specifically black women are less attractive than other women. We have lots and lots of data that confirms this, and that data just happens to correlate with the degree of racism towards exactly the same people in a given society. There's no way at all that's simply accidental.
The same thing doesn't apply to gender, instead a very solid majority of people are mainly or exclusively attracted to the opposite gender, which means there's fairly similar-sized groups attracted to men and women.
I guess if you want to be very specific I would say that they *pattern* is racist -- the explanation for example for why black women systematically get less attention on dating-apps than women of any other background, is racism.
Knowing that this pattern exist though, means someone who has the same preference and choose to talk about it, are knowingly choosing to strengthen a prejudice that they know exist in the society they're part of. I think that creates harm. It's the kinda harm I'd not wanna outlaw, but I would *wish* people would stop doing it. (and argue that they should!)
More generally I'd argue that if your preferences just happen to be negative about a group towards which there's a lot of prejudices, and intellectually and rationally you don't ACTUALLY think people in that group are less good partners, then it'd make sense to not want to spread the prejudice.
For example, you mention short men. Short men do in fact get substantially less attention than taller men in dating -- even given otherwise identical profiles. So we know that statistically speaking, women do have this preference. But I assume few assume that short men are inherently inferior as partners. And given those two data-points, yes I think it'd be a good thing to do to take care NOT to for example do what AOC did.
No, it could just indicate a belief that your sexual attraction isn’t voluntary and won’t change. I don’t agree with applying cultural context to make the same reasoning prejudiced in some cases and not in others. Reality exists. Someone could not be attracted to people of a certain race because they hold racist beliefs or they could just have a type. If it is the latter, they will not become racist because of cultural context. And principles need to operate across contexts.
Whether or not something is voluntary and whether or not something is prejudiced, are orthogonal questions I think.
Most people if they grow up in a culture with a lot of strong ideas about a given thing, they'll end up internalizing at least some of those by a kind of osmosis. And it'll often be difficult or impossible to dislogdge those even when rationally speaking one sees that they're arbitrary.
People who have grown up with the idea that we don't eat insects, pretty often retain a lifelong aversion to doing so -- even if rationally speaking they might agree that there's no actually rational reason for it.
And crucially: had they grown up in a culture where eating insects was normalized, they would've almost certainly ALSO have happily eaten insects, just like everyone else around them.
I do in agree that *some* people would likely have a given preference EVEN if we didn't live in a culture that pushes that preference, so on an individual level it's possible that a given persons source of the preference is NOT cultural.
It's sort of like having a smoking person get lung-cancer. It's not certain that the smoking is the cause -- some people do get lung-cancer even without smoking, and it's possible that this particular person would've gotten it even without the smoking.
That's why I said that it's the *pattern* that is racist. Racism is why *systematically* black women are seen as less attractive. Just like the effects of tobacco smoke is the systematic reason why smokers get lung-cancer a lot more often.
'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.'
It's hard to do so when people use your identity as a weapon for your ideas or accuse you of being blinded by bias whilst ironically being blinded by their own ideologies.
Gosh darn it, you are a great anchor in the chaos of being in the world. And I do feel the extremism on the left has died down slightly but now the right are enjoying dancing in the fire.
I think you are, perhaps, projecting a more complicated/better counter-argument than actually exists on the post-liberal side - but that's a nitpick since it doesn't change anything of substance.
It is actually fairly trivial to show how Liberalism gives rise to illiberal societal conditions
Here are some examples:
1) say I wanted to have some religious community, so I decide to rent out the other half of my duplex to a family from my church, synagogue, or mosque. I can't, this is illegal!
2) say I wanted to start a business, but I want to work in a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish environment, so I start a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish software company. Again, I can't, this is illegal.
3) say I wanted to start a gym for men only. Again, I can't, this is illegal. (You can, however, form a gym for women only, that for some reason doesn't run into legal issues)
I could go on and on with examples of the very basic freedom to form associations freely being illegal.
It is illegal as a direct consequence of Liberalism and its valuing a diverse, "liberal" (in one sense of the word), or open society (whatever you want to call it), over personal liberty and freedom. Liberalism is afraid of letting people have freedom of association. It is afraid that people will self-sort themselves in an illiberal way. Thus, it behaves in a downright authoritarian fashion, effectively putting America on a blender, in order to force everyone to conform to its vision for society.
I would just like to live in a society that was more liberal in that people are allowed to form associations freely, but less liberal in that inevitably, people would form associations around things like religion, or gender, and self-sort in a liberal way. I am OK with that. I am not afraid of giving people that freedom.
This sounds more like a libertarian argument, which always chooses personal freedom over any collective social values (such as anti-discrimination in workplaces and housing.)
Well then, I'm not a pure liberal (I would never be a "pure" anything actually). My political and philosophical frameworks are based on and tested by balance/paradox/tension.
Me neither. I believe in regulated capitalism and workers rights. I am torn on discrimination in housing and small businesses. The UK has an exemption where people are able to discriminate on who comes into their home - care assistants, for example. They can specify a sex, race or religion. I'd not want to prevent people from having single sex spaces or religious communities or even race-based ones although I see no justification for that one. Have thought perhaps a requirement to specify clearly that that's what they are might solve the problem. People could say they did not employ or serve members of a certain group and then other people could choose not to do business with them. I'd choose not to. Ironically, Bryce is more liberal than me.
Helen, this is a scalpel-sharp takedown of the postliberal panic, criticism and coercion are not on a continuum, the harm principle is liberalism’s iron spine, and the marketplace of ideas is not a bug but the feature that keeps the devouring mother at bay. Bravo.
But let us speak the deeper pagan truth these postliberals cannot stomach: they do not fear liberalism’s failure. They fear its success. The golden apple of open criticism rolls into every solemn wedding of certainty and forces the gods themselves to compete, to be judged, to risk being laughed off the stage. Postliberals do not want the messy, erotic, Dionysian clash of ideas; they want the comforting cage of a single sacred narrative, whether Christian post-liberalism or identitarian equity, where no one is ever allowed to say the quiet part out loud and make their sacred cow look ridiculous.
Liberalism does not “turn into its opposite.” It simply refuses to become the next Greyface temple. That refusal is what terrifies them, because it demands they defend their beliefs with argument instead of coercion, persuasion instead of purity spirals, and the terrifying freedom of letting other people be wrong in public.
The postliberals project their own authoritarian itch onto liberalism because they cannot imagine a world where criticism does not automatically slide into the boot on the neck. They are not defending faith or tradition; they are revealing the oldest chthonic hunger: the devouring mother’s longing for a cosmos without apples, without judgment, without the risk that someone, somewhere, might choose differently.
Liberalism does not guarantee that Christianity (or any idea) will survive. It only guarantees that it may be believed, practised, defended, criticised, and rejected freely. That is not a flaw. That is the only condition under which any belief deserves to call itself true.
The rest is just another golden apple rolling across the floor, and Eris is still laughing.
A line has to be drawn between effective and ineffective discourse for liberalism to function. If all perspectives are given equal footing, it drowns in noise. Meanwhile, if too many are excluded, it risks becoming what it opposes.
The difficulty is that no line will satisfy everyone. Those excluded will experience it as illegitimate, while those included may still smuggle in illiberal assumptions beneath a liberal frame.
This means exclusion can be both necessary and destabilizing. It may preserve the coherence of liberal discourse, but it also risks convincing those outside it that liberalism has no value for them.
I’m less interested in judging where the line is drawn than in observing that it is drawn, and that its consequences, including the discontent it produces, are part of the system liberalism has to contend with.
The question, then, is not whether such imperfections exist, but how well liberals can recognize and respond to the tensions they create.
The whole post and the discourse that follows simply boils down to Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. Any social system needs to invoke some sort of repression or guard-rails to preserve its own existence, and liberalism is no different. Dissenters that dig at the liberal foundation must be squashed, and discourse by necessity needs to be prescribed to a certain list of subjects that do not infringe on core liberal principles.
Post-liberal stance will attack this as an inherent inconsistency, hence "paradox" of Popper. Another blindspot of liberalism is that it exists as an outgrowth of Christian-derived civil society created in Europe, hence it becomes a socially and historically contingent force, which through the process of continuous secularisation and erosion of any hierarchic principles and religious tolerance (which equates with absence of any moral prescriptions that might have religious roots), destroys the very implied premises that allow it to work in the first place. A pluralistic society is one which by definition cannot accommodate liberalism, as other moral systems and world views are absolute in their framing, and do not consider other views as legitimate, thus killing any option of a debate.
Social decay, devaluation of human life, principle of pleasure and utilitarianism begin to triumph, as liberal metaphysics is so barren and solipsistic as to not present anything worthwhile other than the material here and now, and where pretence of rational discourse strips out inherent meaning that is present in a non-liberal setting. Scientism, technocracy and ethnic pluralism emerge as new forces that shape the discourse, and liberalism, in its endeavour to appear as a neutral arbiter, admits its own enemies to the table, and surrenders the territory from which it sprung up.
No, liberalism protects the right to criticise liberalism. Popper was very clear that his paradox referred to illiberal actions - coercion - not to speech.
Please read what I wrote carefully, as your hasty reply shows you have not: I wrote "Christian-derived society" - it means it relies on sentiments and moral framework originating from it, and it quite clearly dispenses with the belief part. Your link is a non-sequitur.
If liberalism protects the right to have itself criticised, will it protect itself from being abolished, if the criticism happens to be correct? We keep running into a problem of speech being treated with ever-greater suspicion, and the reasoning that "calls to violence" are now equal to actual attacks, the limits of speech are being actively prescribed - please see Canada/US/UK/Australia/France/Germany/Finland?etc. Each country will have cases that point to this and the ever greater restrictions on speech.
If anything, last 30 years of liberalism has been a mission in enabling of immoral forces that clothe themselves in human freedom, but refuse to acknowledge the damage to the social structure that keeps it afloat. I doubt that discourse as proposed by liberals actually exists in reality, and the attempt to make reality fit are becoming ever more grotesque.
1) If Christians behaving as bad Christians, not loving, not charitable, not forgiving, gives rise to atheism,
2) If capitalists behaving as bad capitalists, instead of trying to compete on the free market, rather seek sweatheart deals with the government, seek monopolies, and that gives rise to socialism,
3) Then perhaps liberals behaving as bad liberals, give rise to illiberalism.
I have watched the first round of the whole 4chan phenomenon. 2012-ish. Basically they were a bunch of kids, and no one told them why exactly they should not call people all kinds of slurs. Their parents and teachers just went like "that word is forbidden".
I particularly liked this demarcation - "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."
I am not sure how many people understand this any more. Are children taught this idea?
So bad is it that when I read Helen's articles I am nearly always left thinking "i wonder why she hasn't been sacked yet?" (Not, of course, because of their deeply thoughtful and sincere search for integrity... but because she could be accused, in public sector circles, of "giving a voice to X".)
I saw a Facebook post on a teacher's site recently, where a teacher had written a post about a situation where she'd mentioned JK Rowling to children as an example of career resillience. Other teachers at the OP's school had complained. The OP had searched for some solace and reason amongst fellows against the complaints raised against her, but the thrust of comments from her fellows in return was not sympathetic at all. The general tone was: "She's (JKR's) a neo Nazi... and you are promoting her views." (Of course, the OP was "promoting" a story of career resillience when JKR started writing as a single mum etc, and as far as I saw there was nothing at all beyond that.). But even without the teacher recounting JKR's views on gender, the rest of her profession had already deemed her guilt of "harm" and deserving of a punishment that seemed imminent.
The other truth is that "this is messy". Helen rightly concludes with the idea that protecting religion is not the same as preserving it. The liberal mind is only interested to see it practiced or rejected freely. So what does one do when the religion itself threatens death for those who leave it?
I agree logically with 99% of Helen's points - they are so well constructed. However, when applied in the world, things are tricky. One way that they are tricky is that the political left-right poles now have different definitions. If I was to think about striving to "not harm" someone, I might tell them a difficult truth that stops them getting hurt more, and I would recieve a difficult truth (hopefully) in a similar spirit. But some of the left interpret "harm" to mean "psychological discomfort", which gets extrapolated into "psychological abuse". One great example of this is the trans debate. My natural inclination would be that a robust psychological investigation that question's a young person's desire to change gender is a "kindness" before they do, offering facts and alternatives. Not because I want to hurt them, or because I wouldn't think such a conversation would be difficult, but because the stakes are high, and the regret would be more painful. I would certainly fall foul of an accusation of transphobia here from the left.
Another example, where Helen says: "We do want people to be free to both express and listen to arguments for and against the truth or goodness of all " Today, people on the left, particularly, are demending to be free NOT listen to arguments? NOT to have arguments in their ecosystems (schools, institutions, media channels). Is this OK? I guess the liberal would say "yes... as long as its only their ecosystem." However, these are shared spaces. Which "rights" prevail?
They also question what it means to be "free". In practice, I'd suggest that to "do" freedom well, we need not to only be aware of the pitfalls Helen talks about, but on top of our own emotional impulses as a group, to interpret criticism as distinct from coercision, and that requires societal trust. We are just not there. We are getting worse. Authoratarianism comes as much from fear, neurosis and weakness, as bad intent.
I've personally concluded for some little while that the only way we resolve is to have some sort of new highly devolved political system, where people get to live amongst others who broadly share their "values", and can agree on what these words means: "freedom", "goodness", "harm", and some approximate shared views about "equality", "racism" etc... Half of the present left are terrorist sympathisers, proclaiming themselves as anti-racist. I would like the freedom not to live amongst them, and I am sure they feel the same about people like me.
And here lies the rub: "provided this does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedoms."
Much though it seemed clear and simply understood when these principles were first expressed, in a society where especially individual liberty was not the norm and MATERIAL harm was very much the norm when it came to deal with disagreeable ideas or personal behaviours... it is so very much not the case nowadays.
This central issue of MATERIAL HARM, or the risk of IMMINENT material harm to OTHERS, which should be the only justifiable cause of coercion and limitation of an individual's freedom, has come under severe stress.
It has come to severe stress to the point that, and not just on the margins, the concept of harm itself has bloated well past materiality. Partly because science found that not just material things can hurt us, a true fact that became rapidly the justification for an immense slew of attempts to prevent "psychological" harms, and an equally large slew of claims of being victim of said psychological harms. And partly because we as humans truly love to both be relieved of responsibility and to find further justifications for our biases.
Case in point, the rush to flush out and prevent/repair/prosecute an ever increasing number of immaterial harms on every side. Here: The children! There: The oppressed!
I am afraid that until we manage to articulate a solid definition of harm, from a liberal standpoint, which does away with all this immaterial excrescence (seems it would be a simple matter of common sense but, look around, it is not), until then we will not win that argument.
Because the faithful feel harmed. Allowing critique of their faith to go unpunished makes them hurt. Allowing their children to be exposed to these critiques hurts them even more.
Same as a woman on the tube may feel harmed by a man looking at her funny, and is encouraged to report the harm.
It is a bit of a tangent on your perfectly good and as usually wise article, for which I apologise. But a point that I feel needs be made.
Helen, I would like to ask your opinion about something. So I have seen in Amsterdam and Prague how exactly liberalism in the old sense can work: basically everything related to drugs, prostitution and even LGBTQ in the visible sense is limited to a specific part of the city. Every other part looks quite normie. Basically it seems people can be tolerant of things as long as it is not happening in a visible way in their own neighborhoods.
It seems we have a problem with intolerant people on both sides, those who absolutely want to eradicate everything they consider a sin, and those who think every baker must be forced to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, that every neighborhood needs to be inclusive of absolutely everything. It seems there is relatively easy compromise to be found: do that thing overtly in that neighborhood, and only covertly in mine.
Of course there would be a problem if people in every neighborhood would think that thing needs to be done somewhere else, but in practice it seems there are factors from tourism to gentrification by young college-ed people that tend to flip over some neighborhoods naturally.
But this needs rethinking the very concept of discrimination. That is, there is generally a universal taboo on it, while it should only be a taboo if it creates some kind of a real, serious obstacle. Otherwise communities should be allowed to own public spaces, and more or less enforce norms on them.
I think one of the reasons for general social unhappiness is that people only own their own homes privately, and do not own their community spaces communally. I have seen it in the Chinatown of Birmingham, UK what it is like for a community to own a space, and it seemed like a great thing:
And they were not unwelcoming to tourists or anything, there is money in that after all. (Also doux commerce, the old idea that people can be way more tolerant when it is in their monetary interest to be so.) But of course wearing a rising sun flag t-shirt would not have been welcome. And that is basically okay to me.
I think you are generally right, but for fun I will try this angle: what if it is not specifically about Christianity, but something all succesful religions have in common? Pro-natalism for example, emphasis on stable families, rituals holding communities together etc.
You are right in pointing out that liberalism in excess doesn’t result in illiberalism, as if it were an Aristotelian virtue that resides on an continuum between two vices. (Though thats largely because its as an inherent mechanism for self correction, its not a single value.
(you might find some phiosophical concepts that stilloperate that way, but thats beside the point).
Though the Pinkerian in me might want to nuance that statement a bit, as the four angels described in The better Nature of Our Narture that undergird liberal democracy CAN be taken to the excess, such as the moral instinct and empathy, unrestrained by reason and our institutions is the root of any religions and ideological moral panic. It is the environment that incentivise how these, in game theoretical terms, play out and right now in substackistan, podcastistan and x, the norms that has traditionally created a positive environment of expression are absent. As someone that love discussing the content of ideas this particular environment is fatigue inducing.
The liberal turned illiberal can indeed be said to not practice his liberalism, but the underlying motivations remain the same.
Terribly sorry, tried to keep my response brief and perhaps didnt give a complete account of his evolutionary psychology. As briefly as possible the seven immutable characteristics of human nature consists of four vices/ Damon’s: Predation, domination, revenge, sadism and ideology. And four virtues/angels: Reason, empathy, moral instinct and self restraint. Each of these can be taken in excess if not moderated by each other. Then he proceeds to list several historical developments that have curbed the demons and incentivised/accentuated the angels: Leviathan, gentle commerce, cosmopolitanism, feminisation and cosmopolitanism.
The motivations for pursuing lgbt rights under classic liberalism is the same as those who pursue them by illiberal means. In Pinkerian terms those would be empathy and the moral sense, immutable parts of our human nature.As you surely are aware the latter would argue that queers don’t have time for incrementalism to deliver an equitable society and their desired level of diversity. Liberal backstops are in the way, as they see it. So by not curbing their sincere, heartfelt empathy and moral indignation by reason they are ruining the entire environment with draconic incentives, that make civil discourse impossible. This is how consilience in Pinkers theis explains how liberals become illiberal.
The aforementioned norms that dictate civil discourse and scientific inquiry had their origin in the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. These are more than principles, rather they have game theoretical purport: they turn zero sum games to a win win situation.
I know Pinker’s book, but you seem to be talking about progressives rather than liberals. I’m talking about liberalism as the philosophy centred on individual liberty. “Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided they do no harm to anyone else nor deny them the same freedoms.” Empathy and moral indignation felt about LGBT issues will vary considerably depending on their positive values like politics or religion. Libertarians are the “purest” of liberals and according to Moral Foundations Theory, they are the lowest in empathy!
(I am never referring to progressives when I say “liberalism. I am always referring to the freedom-centred philosophical tradition)
Like you, I would never make the vulgar mistake of conflating the philosophical tradition of liberalism or the broader term liberal democracy(in Fukuyama’s words spanning the entire parliamentary spectrum of social democracy christian conservatism) , with the ideology of progressivism. Thats a mistakes Americans are prone to make, not people with an academic university degree in the humanities. Perhaps some lack of clarity on my part made it seem that way, my bad.
What I was describing was how one could pursue an end within the broad paradigm of liberalism. I might as well have described in similar terms how a right adjacent liberal would pursue his christianity within the liberal paradigm and how the very same person would get illiberal the moment he embraced christian nationalism. Obviously by obviating the very same enlightenment principles that the woke do. Hence they are both post-liberal
Since you brought up libertarianism, that might be a case where a single value can be taken to excess, not because they only score love in empathy but never really accepted the leviathan. Fukuyama has often described that ideology as one that is incompatible with liberalism. Again liberalism, not progressivism.
Sorry, Raymond. I think I might be being a bit thick. I’ve got wires crossed somewhere and am having trouble untangling them possibly because I am very tired and also grumpy because idiots are yelling at me.
First of all, please accept my apologies for the lack of clarity earlier. I value epistemic clarity as a primary virtue, but I failed to apply it to a sufficient degree. Tried to debug my failure to communicate with gemini and I hope this version of the argument is more intelligible.
To step back and outline my argument more clearly, I’m looking at this through a reductive, consilient lens:
At the base, we have the universal human instincts Pinker categorises as our ‘Inner Demons’ and ‘Better Angels.’ These are the primal forces—like empathy, the moral sense, or the urge for dominance—that constitute our immutable nature.
These instincts are then configured into the personal preferences and moral profiles accurately mapped by Moral Foundations Theory. While I concede this is an excellent tool for describing why someone values authority or care differently, I find it lacks explanatory force regarding the breakdown of liberalism. The telos of liberal democracy is precisely that it does not deliberate on final ends; it is a framework designed to tolerate even the things we don't like, regardless of our foundational scores.
Historically, the Enlightenment provided a specific incentive structure—norms of factual discourse and procedural neutrality—that turned the 'market of ideas' into a positive-sum game. In that environment, the ‘Enlightenment software’ (reason and self-restraint) was the most effective way for a person to pursue their 'Final End', whether thats social equity or their private religious convictions. (This is where the small l liberalism enters into the theory, these enlightenment ideals is a set of ideas with game theoretical purport accentuating our better nature.)
Our current media environment (Substackistan, X, etc.) on the otherhand has largely dismantled those norms. We have regressed to a zero-sum game where the payoffs for being reasonable are low, while the rewards for dominance, moral indignation, and smearing are high. Furthermore, this isn’t necessarily driven directly by our pernicious instincts but by an excessive, misapplication of moral certainty interacting with the ‘demon’ of ideology — completely unchecked by the moderating force of reason and self-restraint.
This is how a liberal becomes 'woke' or a Christian becomes a 'Nationalist.' Their motivations, or their final ends haven't changed, but because the environment no longer rewards the civil discourse their internal engine simply takes the most aggressive path available. Though I should stress that this is not deterministic but probabilistic, both of us resist the environmental cues on social media in favour of the ‘legacy’ model of the enlightenment.
I remain a bit confused. I know you’re not American but I am puzzled. Do you mean liberals who support individual liberty also have other values that can make them become illiberal? That’s true of course and liberals who focus on social issues rather than economic ones often do have a strong social conscience. I do. I want to get rid of racism, sexism, homophobia because it is wrong morally as well as a source of denial of individual liberty.
"a refusal to recognise the defining liberal distinction between criticism and coercion."
The conflict arises when people claim that they are being coerced to violate the free practice of their religion with regard to queer and transgender folk. For example, they maintain that having to acknowledge (which they mislabel as "celebrate") same-sex marriage is a violation of their freedom of religious belief/practice. On the other side, a person will claim dignitary harm if they are discriminated against because of their identity. The result is a face-off between harms, with one being borne, and the other alleviated.
Yes, liberalism protects against both of those. Nobody can be coerced to affirm same sex marriage as legitimate if they don’t think it is. Or opposite sex marriage if it comes to that.
So then liberalism does not protect against dignitary harm, since it allows it to occur in this instance--though it does not permit dignitary harm with regard to a person not affirming an interracial/inter-religious marriage, or a marriage with ethnic or age non-alignment.
That is correct, yes. There are no protections against having one's feelings hurt and that is very important. It enabled ideas once found appalling and deeply offensive like "Perhaps there is no God" and "It's OK to be gay" to be spoken and argued for. We remain free to think and say that anybody who does not respect someone else religion, marriage or competence is an arsehole, but they must be allowed to argue this. This is how such ideas are best defeated. The best book on this specifically is Jon Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors. He looks at how antisemiti and homophobic views were best reduced by allowing them to be spoken and responded to.
Dignitary harm is not equivalent to "having one's feelings hurt." Getting one's feelings hurt happens, and a person must deal with it, and try not to do it to others.
"they must be allowed to argue this"
Agreed. But they cannot inflict dignitary harm or emotional distress, which are steps beyond hurting a person's feelings.
"Yes, 'emotional distress' is another term for 'hurt feelings.'”
No it is not--at least in the United States. Emotional distress is a legal term for emotional trauma inflicted upon another person. "Trauma" and "hurt feelings" are not synonymous.
"the right to express views that others find hurtful"
Saying that one finds something hurtful is not the same as saying that something was traumatizing. You are making a category error.
For example I assume you'd still agree that it's reasonably to hold people responsible for harm that they cause with deliberate and malicious lies made about others.
i.e. while it's definitely possible for things like libel-laws to be too extensive and harm freedom of speech, that doesn't mean it should be a COMPLETE free for all for anyone to at any point claim whatever they want, and have zero responsibility for the consequences, even when they knew perfectly well that their claims were lies.
"Individuals have equal moral value" is a premise, like any other. For someone like me, that's a fairly base premise. For the religious, they tend to have their premise in, say, a god figure or figures.
Liberalism's value is simply that it refuses to allow one set of moral principles to overrule others, save the rule against material harm. The biggest liberal failure mode on, say, the progressive left in the US is that they've decided to dramatically expand what "material harm" means, including doing things like including criticism under the column of material harm. Effectively, they have made liberalism illiberal. This is not a "natural" outgrowth of liberalism; it's a natural outgrowth of illiberals who operate under the auspices of liberalism, who think they value it but in fact have a moral practice that they place above liberal plural values.
Do you have an actual point or are you just throwing out a large count of ridicolous claims with neither an attempt to justify any of them, nor a coherent overall point?
You haven't argued anything at all. You've made a lot of random largely unconnected claims but made no attempt to support any of them.
But of what? It’s a Gish Gallop conflating a lot of things. Way too many to address coherently and that’s the point. Liberalism doesn’t constrain people to open dialogue, just to take the first one. It protects the right not to express one’s views or listen to anybody else’s.
I agree that liberalism does not and should not compel participation in dialogue. However, this creates a structural vulnerability: a system that relies on open dialogue to test and refine its principles cannot guarantee that such dialogue will actually occur. When individuals or groups withdraw from engagement (whether through apathy, distrust, or strategic refusal) the process by which liberalism clarifies and defends its own concepts weakens.
In that environment, competing frameworks can redefine key terms like harm, coercion, and freedom without being effectively challenged. This is not because liberalism permits coercion, but because it cannot require the conditions under which its own principles are sustained. The liberal response, then, is not to accept this passively, but to actively cultivate and incentivize the norms and institutions that sustain good faith dialogue.
Liberalism is built on a small set of core principles, but those principles are always interpreted through language, culture and dialogue.
Because interpretation shifts over time, liberalism cannot rely on past formulations alone. But rather, it must continually clarify and defend what it means by its own principles in the present.
Postliberal and postmodern critiques gain traction not because they are correct, but because they exploit moments where liberalism fails to clearly articulate or defend those meanings.
A liberal system cannot assume its superiority, but rather it must continually justify and clarify its principles against competing frameworks that reinterpret or reject them.
Therefore, the task is not to abandon liberalism or return to a fixed past version, but to actively maintain and refine its conceptual foundations so they remain persuasive and coherent in current conditions.
Of course it can count on people participating. That’s why we need liberalism in the first place. Because people will always factionalise and fight over it. The open dialogue method of doing this is better than the bloodshed way.
The point about not constraining people to have open dialogue is the principle that not everybody wants to be an activist or enter debates and they have a right to be apolitical or just keep their views to themselves. There will always be way more people willing to argue for any position than can possibly all be heard.
I agree participation will always exist at some level. My concern is whether it remains effective for liberalism’s purposes. Not all participation sustains liberal norms equally. If engagement becomes more fragmented or adversarial, liberal arguments may still be present, but as one voice among many rather than meaningfully persuasive.
This belief that any critique of a thing must by necessity imply a desire to ban, outlaw or prevent the thing from taking place drives me nuts. And you're entirely right -- it's a fundamentally authoritarian impulse to believe that all things must either be above critique, or else they should be outlawed, i.e. that all things that I would wish people to stop doing, I "should" want to outlaw.
This would only be true for someone who placed ZERO value on human freedom and agency, and who therefore sees no downside to banning things left and right on even the flimsiest of evidence.
A good example that I run into pretty often, is people who claim that having a blanket policy of not wanting to date black women -- isn't racist but instead just "personal preference". And then if you point out that it might well be a preference, but no rule exists that says "preferences cannot be racist" -- and given most reasonable definitions of "racism", judging all members of a given group negatively on account of their race, is in fact racism, they'll invariably respond with: "So you're saying people should be forced to date someone they're not attracted to? Don't you respect consent?????"
But I wasn't saying any law should prevent this. Nor was I saying that people who engage in this form of racism should in some way be coerced into dating anyone in particular. All I was saying was that considering (for example) all black women to be automatically unsuitable as partners, is in fact racist. If that's someones preference, then that person has a racist preference.
I would rather take someone's word on their position being a "preference" rather than "racist". If that person was to meet a black woman who in their judgement was beautiful and had the personality traits they found attractive, would they break their general rule? It's been my experience observing humans that many would. I've seen preferences broken too often to be quick to turn a stated preference to an "ist" of any kind. I've known some of a given "race" that chose to date outside of it. Are they racist against their own? It's all way too complex a human interaction to read much into, even stated preferences.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Something being a preference doesn't preclude it from ALSO being racist.
It's conceivable that some of the people who state a given preference would be willing to deviate from it if they met someone they liked a lot -- but that doesn't prevent the preference as such from being racist.
A company that has a policy of not hiring black people has a racist policy. If they at some point deviate from that policy and hire an exceptionally well-qualified black person, that doesn't magically mean that their policy wasn't or isn't racist.
Judging people negatively on the basis of their race is the textbook definition of racism. And it makes no sense to say that an entire group of people are unsuitable as partners, or as employees -- even though there's nothing at all negative about them.
No, I think racism has to involve a belief that someone is inferior because of their race and not just not being attracted to a type to be meaningful. Otherwise it would be sexist for anyone to be exclusively attracted to one sex. You could say that someone who finds people of a certain race or build or height aatractive regards people who don't match it as inferior in attractiveness but I also think sexual attraction has to be a special case or the concept expands out of all meaning and utility.
I would be prejudiced against:
Short men
Feminine men
Very muscular men
Men with thin or thinning hair
Men with small noses
Male intellectuals
Male professionals
And so much more. I am not. I just have a type. I like tall, lean, rangey rocker/biker types who have long, thick hair and pronounced features and work with their hands building and fixing things. This is the man I married, a tall, lean god with wiry muscle, and long, thick, wavy, golden hair that I called his "lion's mane" and which I am so happy he passed to our daughter and a strong nose, jaw and forehead which I am grateful he didn't. He operates heavy machinery for moving things and is also just generally handy.
Do I think my husband is the best-looking man in the world? No. I could even say that a shorter man or a more heavy-set or muscular one or one with short hair or no hair was objectively better looking or that an academic or banker would make an excellent catch. But I have a type. It doesn't actually exclude black men. There aren't many of them at rock clubs or biker rallies but there are a few including one who met that description and had his own mane of very thin dreads whom I had a crush on for a while, but if it did, this would not be racist.
I think assuming you'll never feel attracted to anyone from a given race implies a belief that they're inferior in some way or other. Being less attractive is by itself a form of inferiority.
The objection that then it'd be sexist to not be pansexual always comes up. But that ignores the cultural context.
There does exist a widespread idea that specifically black women are less attractive than other women. We have lots and lots of data that confirms this, and that data just happens to correlate with the degree of racism towards exactly the same people in a given society. There's no way at all that's simply accidental.
The same thing doesn't apply to gender, instead a very solid majority of people are mainly or exclusively attracted to the opposite gender, which means there's fairly similar-sized groups attracted to men and women.
I guess if you want to be very specific I would say that they *pattern* is racist -- the explanation for example for why black women systematically get less attention on dating-apps than women of any other background, is racism.
Knowing that this pattern exist though, means someone who has the same preference and choose to talk about it, are knowingly choosing to strengthen a prejudice that they know exist in the society they're part of. I think that creates harm. It's the kinda harm I'd not wanna outlaw, but I would *wish* people would stop doing it. (and argue that they should!)
More generally I'd argue that if your preferences just happen to be negative about a group towards which there's a lot of prejudices, and intellectually and rationally you don't ACTUALLY think people in that group are less good partners, then it'd make sense to not want to spread the prejudice.
For example, you mention short men. Short men do in fact get substantially less attention than taller men in dating -- even given otherwise identical profiles. So we know that statistically speaking, women do have this preference. But I assume few assume that short men are inherently inferior as partners. And given those two data-points, yes I think it'd be a good thing to do to take care NOT to for example do what AOC did.
No, it could just indicate a belief that your sexual attraction isn’t voluntary and won’t change. I don’t agree with applying cultural context to make the same reasoning prejudiced in some cases and not in others. Reality exists. Someone could not be attracted to people of a certain race because they hold racist beliefs or they could just have a type. If it is the latter, they will not become racist because of cultural context. And principles need to operate across contexts.
Whether or not something is voluntary and whether or not something is prejudiced, are orthogonal questions I think.
Most people if they grow up in a culture with a lot of strong ideas about a given thing, they'll end up internalizing at least some of those by a kind of osmosis. And it'll often be difficult or impossible to dislogdge those even when rationally speaking one sees that they're arbitrary.
People who have grown up with the idea that we don't eat insects, pretty often retain a lifelong aversion to doing so -- even if rationally speaking they might agree that there's no actually rational reason for it.
And crucially: had they grown up in a culture where eating insects was normalized, they would've almost certainly ALSO have happily eaten insects, just like everyone else around them.
I do in agree that *some* people would likely have a given preference EVEN if we didn't live in a culture that pushes that preference, so on an individual level it's possible that a given persons source of the preference is NOT cultural.
It's sort of like having a smoking person get lung-cancer. It's not certain that the smoking is the cause -- some people do get lung-cancer even without smoking, and it's possible that this particular person would've gotten it even without the smoking.
That's why I said that it's the *pattern* that is racist. Racism is why *systematically* black women are seen as less attractive. Just like the effects of tobacco smoke is the systematic reason why smokers get lung-cancer a lot more often.
'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.'
It's hard to do so when people use your identity as a weapon for your ideas or accuse you of being blinded by bias whilst ironically being blinded by their own ideologies.
Gosh darn it, you are a great anchor in the chaos of being in the world. And I do feel the extremism on the left has died down slightly but now the right are enjoying dancing in the fire.
I think you are, perhaps, projecting a more complicated/better counter-argument than actually exists on the post-liberal side - but that's a nitpick since it doesn't change anything of substance.
It is actually fairly trivial to show how Liberalism gives rise to illiberal societal conditions
Here are some examples:
1) say I wanted to have some religious community, so I decide to rent out the other half of my duplex to a family from my church, synagogue, or mosque. I can't, this is illegal!
2) say I wanted to start a business, but I want to work in a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish environment, so I start a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish software company. Again, I can't, this is illegal.
3) say I wanted to start a gym for men only. Again, I can't, this is illegal. (You can, however, form a gym for women only, that for some reason doesn't run into legal issues)
I could go on and on with examples of the very basic freedom to form associations freely being illegal.
It is illegal as a direct consequence of Liberalism and its valuing a diverse, "liberal" (in one sense of the word), or open society (whatever you want to call it), over personal liberty and freedom. Liberalism is afraid of letting people have freedom of association. It is afraid that people will self-sort themselves in an illiberal way. Thus, it behaves in a downright authoritarian fashion, effectively putting America on a blender, in order to force everyone to conform to its vision for society.
I would just like to live in a society that was more liberal in that people are allowed to form associations freely, but less liberal in that inevitably, people would form associations around things like religion, or gender, and self-sort in a liberal way. I am OK with that. I am not afraid of giving people that freedom.
This sounds more like a libertarian argument, which always chooses personal freedom over any collective social values (such as anti-discrimination in workplaces and housing.)
Yes, this is my point. It’s a liberal argument. Libertarians are the purest liberals here.
Well then, I'm not a pure liberal (I would never be a "pure" anything actually). My political and philosophical frameworks are based on and tested by balance/paradox/tension.
Me neither. I believe in regulated capitalism and workers rights. I am torn on discrimination in housing and small businesses. The UK has an exemption where people are able to discriminate on who comes into their home - care assistants, for example. They can specify a sex, race or religion. I'd not want to prevent people from having single sex spaces or religious communities or even race-based ones although I see no justification for that one. Have thought perhaps a requirement to specify clearly that that's what they are might solve the problem. People could say they did not employ or serve members of a certain group and then other people could choose not to do business with them. I'd choose not to. Ironically, Bryce is more liberal than me.
Helen, this is a scalpel-sharp takedown of the postliberal panic, criticism and coercion are not on a continuum, the harm principle is liberalism’s iron spine, and the marketplace of ideas is not a bug but the feature that keeps the devouring mother at bay. Bravo.
But let us speak the deeper pagan truth these postliberals cannot stomach: they do not fear liberalism’s failure. They fear its success. The golden apple of open criticism rolls into every solemn wedding of certainty and forces the gods themselves to compete, to be judged, to risk being laughed off the stage. Postliberals do not want the messy, erotic, Dionysian clash of ideas; they want the comforting cage of a single sacred narrative, whether Christian post-liberalism or identitarian equity, where no one is ever allowed to say the quiet part out loud and make their sacred cow look ridiculous.
Liberalism does not “turn into its opposite.” It simply refuses to become the next Greyface temple. That refusal is what terrifies them, because it demands they defend their beliefs with argument instead of coercion, persuasion instead of purity spirals, and the terrifying freedom of letting other people be wrong in public.
The postliberals project their own authoritarian itch onto liberalism because they cannot imagine a world where criticism does not automatically slide into the boot on the neck. They are not defending faith or tradition; they are revealing the oldest chthonic hunger: the devouring mother’s longing for a cosmos without apples, without judgment, without the risk that someone, somewhere, might choose differently.
Liberalism does not guarantee that Christianity (or any idea) will survive. It only guarantees that it may be believed, practised, defended, criticised, and rejected freely. That is not a flaw. That is the only condition under which any belief deserves to call itself true.
The rest is just another golden apple rolling across the floor, and Eris is still laughing.
A line has to be drawn between effective and ineffective discourse for liberalism to function. If all perspectives are given equal footing, it drowns in noise. Meanwhile, if too many are excluded, it risks becoming what it opposes.
The difficulty is that no line will satisfy everyone. Those excluded will experience it as illegitimate, while those included may still smuggle in illiberal assumptions beneath a liberal frame.
This means exclusion can be both necessary and destabilizing. It may preserve the coherence of liberal discourse, but it also risks convincing those outside it that liberalism has no value for them.
I’m less interested in judging where the line is drawn than in observing that it is drawn, and that its consequences, including the discontent it produces, are part of the system liberalism has to contend with.
The question, then, is not whether such imperfections exist, but how well liberals can recognize and respond to the tensions they create.
The whole post and the discourse that follows simply boils down to Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. Any social system needs to invoke some sort of repression or guard-rails to preserve its own existence, and liberalism is no different. Dissenters that dig at the liberal foundation must be squashed, and discourse by necessity needs to be prescribed to a certain list of subjects that do not infringe on core liberal principles.
Post-liberal stance will attack this as an inherent inconsistency, hence "paradox" of Popper. Another blindspot of liberalism is that it exists as an outgrowth of Christian-derived civil society created in Europe, hence it becomes a socially and historically contingent force, which through the process of continuous secularisation and erosion of any hierarchic principles and religious tolerance (which equates with absence of any moral prescriptions that might have religious roots), destroys the very implied premises that allow it to work in the first place. A pluralistic society is one which by definition cannot accommodate liberalism, as other moral systems and world views are absolute in their framing, and do not consider other views as legitimate, thus killing any option of a debate.
Social decay, devaluation of human life, principle of pleasure and utilitarianism begin to triumph, as liberal metaphysics is so barren and solipsistic as to not present anything worthwhile other than the material here and now, and where pretence of rational discourse strips out inherent meaning that is present in a non-liberal setting. Scientism, technocracy and ethnic pluralism emerge as new forces that shape the discourse, and liberalism, in its endeavour to appear as a neutral arbiter, admits its own enemies to the table, and surrenders the territory from which it sprung up.
No, liberalism protects the right to criticise liberalism. Popper was very clear that his paradox referred to illiberal actions - coercion - not to speech.
No, liberalism is not an out growth of Christianity.https://www.skeptic.com/article/why-secularists-calling-for-a-christian-revival-are-wrong/
Please read what I wrote carefully, as your hasty reply shows you have not: I wrote "Christian-derived society" - it means it relies on sentiments and moral framework originating from it, and it quite clearly dispenses with the belief part. Your link is a non-sequitur.
If liberalism protects the right to have itself criticised, will it protect itself from being abolished, if the criticism happens to be correct? We keep running into a problem of speech being treated with ever-greater suspicion, and the reasoning that "calls to violence" are now equal to actual attacks, the limits of speech are being actively prescribed - please see Canada/US/UK/Australia/France/Germany/Finland?etc. Each country will have cases that point to this and the ever greater restrictions on speech.
If anything, last 30 years of liberalism has been a mission in enabling of immoral forces that clothe themselves in human freedom, but refuse to acknowledge the damage to the social structure that keeps it afloat. I doubt that discourse as proposed by liberals actually exists in reality, and the attempt to make reality fit are becoming ever more grotesque.
Perhaps...
1) If Christians behaving as bad Christians, not loving, not charitable, not forgiving, gives rise to atheism,
2) If capitalists behaving as bad capitalists, instead of trying to compete on the free market, rather seek sweatheart deals with the government, seek monopolies, and that gives rise to socialism,
3) Then perhaps liberals behaving as bad liberals, give rise to illiberalism.
I have watched the first round of the whole 4chan phenomenon. 2012-ish. Basically they were a bunch of kids, and no one told them why exactly they should not call people all kinds of slurs. Their parents and teachers just went like "that word is forbidden".
I particularly liked this demarcation - "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."
I am not sure how many people understand this any more. Are children taught this idea?
So bad is it that when I read Helen's articles I am nearly always left thinking "i wonder why she hasn't been sacked yet?" (Not, of course, because of their deeply thoughtful and sincere search for integrity... but because she could be accused, in public sector circles, of "giving a voice to X".)
I saw a Facebook post on a teacher's site recently, where a teacher had written a post about a situation where she'd mentioned JK Rowling to children as an example of career resillience. Other teachers at the OP's school had complained. The OP had searched for some solace and reason amongst fellows against the complaints raised against her, but the thrust of comments from her fellows in return was not sympathetic at all. The general tone was: "She's (JKR's) a neo Nazi... and you are promoting her views." (Of course, the OP was "promoting" a story of career resillience when JKR started writing as a single mum etc, and as far as I saw there was nothing at all beyond that.). But even without the teacher recounting JKR's views on gender, the rest of her profession had already deemed her guilt of "harm" and deserving of a punishment that seemed imminent.
The other truth is that "this is messy". Helen rightly concludes with the idea that protecting religion is not the same as preserving it. The liberal mind is only interested to see it practiced or rejected freely. So what does one do when the religion itself threatens death for those who leave it?
I agree logically with 99% of Helen's points - they are so well constructed. However, when applied in the world, things are tricky. One way that they are tricky is that the political left-right poles now have different definitions. If I was to think about striving to "not harm" someone, I might tell them a difficult truth that stops them getting hurt more, and I would recieve a difficult truth (hopefully) in a similar spirit. But some of the left interpret "harm" to mean "psychological discomfort", which gets extrapolated into "psychological abuse". One great example of this is the trans debate. My natural inclination would be that a robust psychological investigation that question's a young person's desire to change gender is a "kindness" before they do, offering facts and alternatives. Not because I want to hurt them, or because I wouldn't think such a conversation would be difficult, but because the stakes are high, and the regret would be more painful. I would certainly fall foul of an accusation of transphobia here from the left.
Another example, where Helen says: "We do want people to be free to both express and listen to arguments for and against the truth or goodness of all " Today, people on the left, particularly, are demending to be free NOT listen to arguments? NOT to have arguments in their ecosystems (schools, institutions, media channels). Is this OK? I guess the liberal would say "yes... as long as its only their ecosystem." However, these are shared spaces. Which "rights" prevail?
They also question what it means to be "free". In practice, I'd suggest that to "do" freedom well, we need not to only be aware of the pitfalls Helen talks about, but on top of our own emotional impulses as a group, to interpret criticism as distinct from coercision, and that requires societal trust. We are just not there. We are getting worse. Authoratarianism comes as much from fear, neurosis and weakness, as bad intent.
I've personally concluded for some little while that the only way we resolve is to have some sort of new highly devolved political system, where people get to live amongst others who broadly share their "values", and can agree on what these words means: "freedom", "goodness", "harm", and some approximate shared views about "equality", "racism" etc... Half of the present left are terrorist sympathisers, proclaiming themselves as anti-racist. I would like the freedom not to live amongst them, and I am sure they feel the same about people like me.
And here lies the rub: "provided this does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedoms."
Much though it seemed clear and simply understood when these principles were first expressed, in a society where especially individual liberty was not the norm and MATERIAL harm was very much the norm when it came to deal with disagreeable ideas or personal behaviours... it is so very much not the case nowadays.
This central issue of MATERIAL HARM, or the risk of IMMINENT material harm to OTHERS, which should be the only justifiable cause of coercion and limitation of an individual's freedom, has come under severe stress.
It has come to severe stress to the point that, and not just on the margins, the concept of harm itself has bloated well past materiality. Partly because science found that not just material things can hurt us, a true fact that became rapidly the justification for an immense slew of attempts to prevent "psychological" harms, and an equally large slew of claims of being victim of said psychological harms. And partly because we as humans truly love to both be relieved of responsibility and to find further justifications for our biases.
Case in point, the rush to flush out and prevent/repair/prosecute an ever increasing number of immaterial harms on every side. Here: The children! There: The oppressed!
I am afraid that until we manage to articulate a solid definition of harm, from a liberal standpoint, which does away with all this immaterial excrescence (seems it would be a simple matter of common sense but, look around, it is not), until then we will not win that argument.
Because the faithful feel harmed. Allowing critique of their faith to go unpunished makes them hurt. Allowing their children to be exposed to these critiques hurts them even more.
Same as a woman on the tube may feel harmed by a man looking at her funny, and is encouraged to report the harm.
It is a bit of a tangent on your perfectly good and as usually wise article, for which I apologise. But a point that I feel needs be made.
Helen, I would like to ask your opinion about something. So I have seen in Amsterdam and Prague how exactly liberalism in the old sense can work: basically everything related to drugs, prostitution and even LGBTQ in the visible sense is limited to a specific part of the city. Every other part looks quite normie. Basically it seems people can be tolerant of things as long as it is not happening in a visible way in their own neighborhoods.
It seems we have a problem with intolerant people on both sides, those who absolutely want to eradicate everything they consider a sin, and those who think every baker must be forced to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, that every neighborhood needs to be inclusive of absolutely everything. It seems there is relatively easy compromise to be found: do that thing overtly in that neighborhood, and only covertly in mine.
Of course there would be a problem if people in every neighborhood would think that thing needs to be done somewhere else, but in practice it seems there are factors from tourism to gentrification by young college-ed people that tend to flip over some neighborhoods naturally.
But this needs rethinking the very concept of discrimination. That is, there is generally a universal taboo on it, while it should only be a taboo if it creates some kind of a real, serious obstacle. Otherwise communities should be allowed to own public spaces, and more or less enforce norms on them.
I think one of the reasons for general social unhappiness is that people only own their own homes privately, and do not own their community spaces communally. I have seen it in the Chinatown of Birmingham, UK what it is like for a community to own a space, and it seemed like a great thing:
https://www.rjontour.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/China-Town-Birmingham-1536x1152.jpg
And they were not unwelcoming to tourists or anything, there is money in that after all. (Also doux commerce, the old idea that people can be way more tolerant when it is in their monetary interest to be so.) But of course wearing a rising sun flag t-shirt would not have been welcome. And that is basically okay to me.
What do you think?
I think you are generally right, but for fun I will try this angle: what if it is not specifically about Christianity, but something all succesful religions have in common? Pro-natalism for example, emphasis on stable families, rituals holding communities together etc.
You could argue those things are good, but liberalism presents no threat to people who want any of that.
You are right in pointing out that liberalism in excess doesn’t result in illiberalism, as if it were an Aristotelian virtue that resides on an continuum between two vices. (Though thats largely because its as an inherent mechanism for self correction, its not a single value.
(you might find some phiosophical concepts that stilloperate that way, but thats beside the point).
Though the Pinkerian in me might want to nuance that statement a bit, as the four angels described in The better Nature of Our Narture that undergird liberal democracy CAN be taken to the excess, such as the moral instinct and empathy, unrestrained by reason and our institutions is the root of any religions and ideological moral panic. It is the environment that incentivise how these, in game theoretical terms, play out and right now in substackistan, podcastistan and x, the norms that has traditionally created a positive environment of expression are absent. As someone that love discussing the content of ideas this particular environment is fatigue inducing.
The liberal turned illiberal can indeed be said to not practice his liberalism, but the underlying motivations remain the same.
I didn’t really follow? What are the motivations?
Terribly sorry, tried to keep my response brief and perhaps didnt give a complete account of his evolutionary psychology. As briefly as possible the seven immutable characteristics of human nature consists of four vices/ Damon’s: Predation, domination, revenge, sadism and ideology. And four virtues/angels: Reason, empathy, moral instinct and self restraint. Each of these can be taken in excess if not moderated by each other. Then he proceeds to list several historical developments that have curbed the demons and incentivised/accentuated the angels: Leviathan, gentle commerce, cosmopolitanism, feminisation and cosmopolitanism.
The motivations for pursuing lgbt rights under classic liberalism is the same as those who pursue them by illiberal means. In Pinkerian terms those would be empathy and the moral sense, immutable parts of our human nature.As you surely are aware the latter would argue that queers don’t have time for incrementalism to deliver an equitable society and their desired level of diversity. Liberal backstops are in the way, as they see it. So by not curbing their sincere, heartfelt empathy and moral indignation by reason they are ruining the entire environment with draconic incentives, that make civil discourse impossible. This is how consilience in Pinkers theis explains how liberals become illiberal.
The aforementioned norms that dictate civil discourse and scientific inquiry had their origin in the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. These are more than principles, rather they have game theoretical purport: they turn zero sum games to a win win situation.
I know Pinker’s book, but you seem to be talking about progressives rather than liberals. I’m talking about liberalism as the philosophy centred on individual liberty. “Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided they do no harm to anyone else nor deny them the same freedoms.” Empathy and moral indignation felt about LGBT issues will vary considerably depending on their positive values like politics or religion. Libertarians are the “purest” of liberals and according to Moral Foundations Theory, they are the lowest in empathy!
(I am never referring to progressives when I say “liberalism. I am always referring to the freedom-centred philosophical tradition)
Like you, I would never make the vulgar mistake of conflating the philosophical tradition of liberalism or the broader term liberal democracy(in Fukuyama’s words spanning the entire parliamentary spectrum of social democracy christian conservatism) , with the ideology of progressivism. Thats a mistakes Americans are prone to make, not people with an academic university degree in the humanities. Perhaps some lack of clarity on my part made it seem that way, my bad.
What I was describing was how one could pursue an end within the broad paradigm of liberalism. I might as well have described in similar terms how a right adjacent liberal would pursue his christianity within the liberal paradigm and how the very same person would get illiberal the moment he embraced christian nationalism. Obviously by obviating the very same enlightenment principles that the woke do. Hence they are both post-liberal
Since you brought up libertarianism, that might be a case where a single value can be taken to excess, not because they only score love in empathy but never really accepted the leviathan. Fukuyama has often described that ideology as one that is incompatible with liberalism. Again liberalism, not progressivism.
Sorry, Raymond. I think I might be being a bit thick. I’ve got wires crossed somewhere and am having trouble untangling them possibly because I am very tired and also grumpy because idiots are yelling at me.
First of all, please accept my apologies for the lack of clarity earlier. I value epistemic clarity as a primary virtue, but I failed to apply it to a sufficient degree. Tried to debug my failure to communicate with gemini and I hope this version of the argument is more intelligible.
To step back and outline my argument more clearly, I’m looking at this through a reductive, consilient lens:
At the base, we have the universal human instincts Pinker categorises as our ‘Inner Demons’ and ‘Better Angels.’ These are the primal forces—like empathy, the moral sense, or the urge for dominance—that constitute our immutable nature.
These instincts are then configured into the personal preferences and moral profiles accurately mapped by Moral Foundations Theory. While I concede this is an excellent tool for describing why someone values authority or care differently, I find it lacks explanatory force regarding the breakdown of liberalism. The telos of liberal democracy is precisely that it does not deliberate on final ends; it is a framework designed to tolerate even the things we don't like, regardless of our foundational scores.
Historically, the Enlightenment provided a specific incentive structure—norms of factual discourse and procedural neutrality—that turned the 'market of ideas' into a positive-sum game. In that environment, the ‘Enlightenment software’ (reason and self-restraint) was the most effective way for a person to pursue their 'Final End', whether thats social equity or their private religious convictions. (This is where the small l liberalism enters into the theory, these enlightenment ideals is a set of ideas with game theoretical purport accentuating our better nature.)
Our current media environment (Substackistan, X, etc.) on the otherhand has largely dismantled those norms. We have regressed to a zero-sum game where the payoffs for being reasonable are low, while the rewards for dominance, moral indignation, and smearing are high. Furthermore, this isn’t necessarily driven directly by our pernicious instincts but by an excessive, misapplication of moral certainty interacting with the ‘demon’ of ideology — completely unchecked by the moderating force of reason and self-restraint.
This is how a liberal becomes 'woke' or a Christian becomes a 'Nationalist.' Their motivations, or their final ends haven't changed, but because the environment no longer rewards the civil discourse their internal engine simply takes the most aggressive path available. Though I should stress that this is not deterministic but probabilistic, both of us resist the environmental cues on social media in favour of the ‘legacy’ model of the enlightenment.
I remain a bit confused. I know you’re not American but I am puzzled. Do you mean liberals who support individual liberty also have other values that can make them become illiberal? That’s true of course and liberals who focus on social issues rather than economic ones often do have a strong social conscience. I do. I want to get rid of racism, sexism, homophobia because it is wrong morally as well as a source of denial of individual liberty.
I shall go to sleep and reread tomorrow.
"a refusal to recognise the defining liberal distinction between criticism and coercion."
The conflict arises when people claim that they are being coerced to violate the free practice of their religion with regard to queer and transgender folk. For example, they maintain that having to acknowledge (which they mislabel as "celebrate") same-sex marriage is a violation of their freedom of religious belief/practice. On the other side, a person will claim dignitary harm if they are discriminated against because of their identity. The result is a face-off between harms, with one being borne, and the other alleviated.
Yes, liberalism protects against both of those. Nobody can be coerced to affirm same sex marriage as legitimate if they don’t think it is. Or opposite sex marriage if it comes to that.
So then liberalism does not protect against dignitary harm, since it allows it to occur in this instance--though it does not permit dignitary harm with regard to a person not affirming an interracial/inter-religious marriage, or a marriage with ethnic or age non-alignment.
That is correct, yes. There are no protections against having one's feelings hurt and that is very important. It enabled ideas once found appalling and deeply offensive like "Perhaps there is no God" and "It's OK to be gay" to be spoken and argued for. We remain free to think and say that anybody who does not respect someone else religion, marriage or competence is an arsehole, but they must be allowed to argue this. This is how such ideas are best defeated. The best book on this specifically is Jon Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors. He looks at how antisemiti and homophobic views were best reduced by allowing them to be spoken and responded to.
Dignitary harm is not equivalent to "having one's feelings hurt." Getting one's feelings hurt happens, and a person must deal with it, and try not to do it to others.
"they must be allowed to argue this"
Agreed. But they cannot inflict dignitary harm or emotional distress, which are steps beyond hurting a person's feelings.
Yes, “emotional distress” is another term for “hurt feelings.” Liberalism absolutely protects the right to express views that others find hurtful.
"Yes, 'emotional distress' is another term for 'hurt feelings.'”
No it is not--at least in the United States. Emotional distress is a legal term for emotional trauma inflicted upon another person. "Trauma" and "hurt feelings" are not synonymous.
"the right to express views that others find hurtful"
Saying that one finds something hurtful is not the same as saying that something was traumatizing. You are making a category error.
That still doesn't mean anything goes though.
For example I assume you'd still agree that it's reasonably to hold people responsible for harm that they cause with deliberate and malicious lies made about others.
i.e. while it's definitely possible for things like libel-laws to be too extensive and harm freedom of speech, that doesn't mean it should be a COMPLETE free for all for anyone to at any point claim whatever they want, and have zero responsibility for the consequences, even when they knew perfectly well that their claims were lies.
If I have understood your argument correctly Helen, you would describe the tendency to link the rise in populism to ´liberal overreach’ (as, for example, here, https://cirsd.org/horizon-article/misinterpreting-1989-populism-and-liberal-overreach/ and here https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/majorities-minorities-and-the-future-of-nationhood/legitimate-populism-and-liberal-overreach/9F7DAD199101CFC85F7773875C436CC9) as grossly misleading, for the simple reason that as soon as liberalism ‘overreaches’ and begins to coerce for any reason other than to comply with the ‘harm principle’, it immediately ceases to be truly liberal. For the same reason, I imagine that you would also object to the closely related oxymoronic term, ‘illiberal liberalism’.
I’m not sure what that philosophy you describe is. It seems to be a mishmash of things.
Frogs don’t eat cookies and wardrobes are alligators.
Is this how your idea of communication works?
"Individuals have equal moral value" is a premise, like any other. For someone like me, that's a fairly base premise. For the religious, they tend to have their premise in, say, a god figure or figures.
Liberalism's value is simply that it refuses to allow one set of moral principles to overrule others, save the rule against material harm. The biggest liberal failure mode on, say, the progressive left in the US is that they've decided to dramatically expand what "material harm" means, including doing things like including criticism under the column of material harm. Effectively, they have made liberalism illiberal. This is not a "natural" outgrowth of liberalism; it's a natural outgrowth of illiberals who operate under the auspices of liberalism, who think they value it but in fact have a moral practice that they place above liberal plural values.
Because it has led to better outcomes than the alternative.
Do you have an actual point or are you just throwing out a large count of ridicolous claims with neither an attempt to justify any of them, nor a coherent overall point?
You haven't argued anything at all. You've made a lot of random largely unconnected claims but made no attempt to support any of them.
I disagree, but this is a well espoused refutation.
But of what? It’s a Gish Gallop conflating a lot of things. Way too many to address coherently and that’s the point. Liberalism doesn’t constrain people to open dialogue, just to take the first one. It protects the right not to express one’s views or listen to anybody else’s.
I agree that liberalism does not and should not compel participation in dialogue. However, this creates a structural vulnerability: a system that relies on open dialogue to test and refine its principles cannot guarantee that such dialogue will actually occur. When individuals or groups withdraw from engagement (whether through apathy, distrust, or strategic refusal) the process by which liberalism clarifies and defends its own concepts weakens.
In that environment, competing frameworks can redefine key terms like harm, coercion, and freedom without being effectively challenged. This is not because liberalism permits coercion, but because it cannot require the conditions under which its own principles are sustained. The liberal response, then, is not to accept this passively, but to actively cultivate and incentivize the norms and institutions that sustain good faith dialogue.
Liberalism is built on a small set of core principles, but those principles are always interpreted through language, culture and dialogue.
Because interpretation shifts over time, liberalism cannot rely on past formulations alone. But rather, it must continually clarify and defend what it means by its own principles in the present.
Postliberal and postmodern critiques gain traction not because they are correct, but because they exploit moments where liberalism fails to clearly articulate or defend those meanings.
A liberal system cannot assume its superiority, but rather it must continually justify and clarify its principles against competing frameworks that reinterpret or reject them.
Therefore, the task is not to abandon liberalism or return to a fixed past version, but to actively maintain and refine its conceptual foundations so they remain persuasive and coherent in current conditions.
Of course it can count on people participating. That’s why we need liberalism in the first place. Because people will always factionalise and fight over it. The open dialogue method of doing this is better than the bloodshed way.
The point about not constraining people to have open dialogue is the principle that not everybody wants to be an activist or enter debates and they have a right to be apolitical or just keep their views to themselves. There will always be way more people willing to argue for any position than can possibly all be heard.
I agree participation will always exist at some level. My concern is whether it remains effective for liberalism’s purposes. Not all participation sustains liberal norms equally. If engagement becomes more fragmented or adversarial, liberal arguments may still be present, but as one voice among many rather than meaningfully persuasive.