Why Liberalism Failed Page 3

  Even if we do not speak in these terms any more, the modern scientific project now dominates what we regard as useful and rewarding inquiry. Yet nature seems not to have surrendered. As the farmer and author Wendell Berry has written, if modern science and technology were conceived as a “war against nature,” then “it is a war in every sense—nature is fighting us as much as we are fighting it. And . . . it appears that we are losing.”4 Many elements of what we today call our environmental crisis—climate change, resource depletion, groundwater contamination and scarcity, species extinction—are signs of battles won but a war being lost. Today we are accustomed to arguing that we should follow the science in an issue such as climate change, ignoring that our crisis is the result of long-standing triumphs of science and technology in which “following science” was tantamount to civilizational progress. Our carbon-saturated world is the hangover of a 150-year party in which, until the very end, we believed we had achieved the dream of liberation from nature’s constraints. We still hold the incoherent view that science can liberate us from limits while solving the attendant consequences of that project.

  Meanwhile, we are increasingly shaped by technology that promises liberation from limits of place, time, and even identity. The computer in every person’s pocket has been shown to change the structure of our minds, turning us into different creatures, conforming us to the demands and nature of a technology that is supposed to allow expression of our true selves.5 How many of us can sit for an hour reading a book or simply thinking or meditating without an addict’s longing for just a hit of the cell phone, that craving that won’t allow us to think or concentrate or reflect until we’ve had our hit? This same technology that is supposed to connect us more extensively and intimately is making us more lonely, more apart.6 Devices increasingly replace humans in the workplace, apparently granting us liberty but making us our technology’s ward and helpmeet. And advances in the manipulation of nature inevitably raise the possibility of remaking humanity itself, potentially pitting Humanity 2.0 against those who refuse or can’t afford to shuck version 1.0.7

  What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is instead transforming us, making us into creatures to which many, if not most of us, have not given our “consent.” It is making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism supposed was our nature in that “state of nature” that existed before the coming of civilization, law, and government. Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.

  Liberalism’s success today is most visible in the gathering signs of its failure. It has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities—unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will. The autonomous self is thus subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation. Yet our liberation renders us incapable of resisting these defining forces—the promise of freedom results in thralldom to inevitabilities to which we have no choice but to submit.

  These tools were deployed to liberate individuals from the “givenness” of their condition, especially through “depersonalization” and “abstraction,” liberalism’s vision of liberty from particular duties, obligations, debts, and relationships. These ends have been achieved through the depersonalization and abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state and the market. Yet while they have worked together in a pincer movement to render us ever more naked as individuals, our political debates mask this alliance by claiming that allegiance to one of these forces will save us from the depredations of the other. Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market.

  Thus the insistent demand that we choose between protection of individual liberty and expansion of state activity masks the true relation between the state and market: that they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism. For all the claims about electoral transformations—for “Hope and Change” or “Making America Great Again”—two facts are naggingly apparent: modern liberalism proceeds by making us both more individualist and more statist. This is not because one party advances individualism without cutting back on statism while the other does the opposite; rather, both move simultaneously in tune with our deepest philosophic premises.

  Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cultures, traditions, places, and relationships, liberalism has homogenized the world in its image—ironically, often fueled by claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.” Having successfully disembedded us from relationships that once made claims upon us but also informed our conception of selfhood, our sense of ourselves as citizens sharing a common fate and as economic actors sharing a common world, liberalism has left the individual exposed to the tools of liberation—leaving us in a weakened state in which the domains of life that were supposed to liberate us are completely beyond our control or governance. This suggests that all along, the individual was the “tool” of the liberal system, not—as was believed—vice versa.

  The most challenging step we must take is a rejection of the belief that the ailments of liberal society can be fixed by realizing liberalism. The only path to liberation from the inevitabilities and ungovernable forces that liberalism imposes is liberation from liberalism itself. Both main political options of our age must be understood as different sides of the same counterfeit coin. Neither Progressivism’s faith that liberalism will be realized when we move forward toward the realization of liberalism’s promise nor Conservatism’s tale that American greatness will be restored when we reclaim the governing philosophy of our Constitution offers any real alternative to liberalism’s advance.

  The past can instruct, but there can be no return and no “restoration.” Liberalism has ruthlessly drawn down a reservoir of both material and moral resources that it cannot replenish. Its successes were always blank checks written against a future it trusted it could repair. Conservatism rightly observes that progressivism’s destination is a dead end, and progressivism rightly decries conservatism’s nostalgia for a time that cannot be restored. Conservatives and progressives alike have advanced liberalism’s project, and neither as constituted today can provide the new way forward that must be discerned outside our rutted path.

  Nor does reflecting upon what follows liberalism’s self-destruction imply that we must simply devise its opposite, or deny what was of great and enduring value in the achievements of liberalism. Liberalism’s appeal lies in its continuities with the deepest commitments of the Western political tradition, particularly efforts to secure liberty and human dignity through the constraint of tyranny, arbitrary rule, and oppression. In this regard, liberalism is rightly considered to be based on essential political commitments that were developed over centuries in classical and Christian thought and practice. Yet liberalism’s innovations—ones that its architects believed would more firmly secure human liberty and dignity—which consisted especially of a redefinition of the ideal of liberty and a reconception of human nature, have undermined the realization of its stated commitments.
Moving beyond liberalism is not to discard some of liberalism’s main commitments—especially those deepest longings of the West, political liberty and human dignity—but to reject the false turn it made in its imposition of an ideological remaking of the world in the image of a false anthropology.

  A rejection of the world’s first and last remaining ideology does not entail its replacement with a new and doubtless not very different ideology. Political revolution to overturn a revolutionary order would produce only disorder and misery. A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.

  When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he observed that Americans tended to act differently from and better than their individualistic and selfish ideology. “They do more honor to their philosophy than to themselves,” he wrote. What’s needed now is not to perfect our philosophy any further but to again do more honor to ourselves. Out of the fostering of new and better selves, porously invested in the fate of other selves—through the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice, and small-scale democracy—a better practice might arise, and from it, ultimately, perhaps a better theory than the failing project of liberalism.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Unsustainable Liberalism

  THE deepest commitment of liberalism is expressed by the name itself: liberty. Liberalism has proven both attractive and resilient because of this core commitment to the longing for human freedom so deeply embedded in the human soul. Liberalism’s historical rise and global attraction are hardly accidental; it has appealed especially to people subject to arbitrary rule, unjust inequality, and pervasive poverty. No other political philosophy had proven in practice that it could fuel prosperity, provide relative political stability, and foster individual liberty with such regularity and predictability. There were plausible grounds why, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama could declare that the long debate over ideal regimes had ended, and that liberalism was the end station of History.

  Liberalism did not, of course, discover or invent the human longing for liberty: the word libertas is of ancient origin, and its defense and realization have been a primary goal from the first forays into political philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome. The foundational texts of the Western political tradition focused especially on the question how to constrain the impulse to and assertions of tyranny, and characteristically settled upon the cultivation of virtue and self-rule as the key correctives to the tyrannical temptation. The Greeks especially regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity, with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-governance in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance governed the souls of citizens; and self-governance of individuals could be realized only in a city that understood that citizenship itself was a kind of ongoing habituation in virtue, through both law and custom. Greek philosophy stressed paideia, or education in virtue, as a primary path to forestalling the establishment of tyranny and protecting liberty of citizens, yet these conclusions coexisted (if at times at least uneasily) with justifications of inequality exemplified not only in calls for rule by a wise ruler of a class of rulers, but in the pervasiveness of slavery.

  The Roman and then medieval Christian philosophical traditions retained the Greek emphasis upon the cultivation of virtue as a central defense against tyranny, but also developed institutional forms that sought to check the power of leaders while (to varying degrees) opening routes to informal and sometimes formal expression of popular opinion in political rule. Many of the institutional forms of government that we today associate with liberalism were at least initially conceived and developed over long centuries preceding the modern age, including constitutionalism, separation of powers, separate spheres of church and state, rights and protections against arbitrary rule, federalism, rule of law, and limited government.1 Protection of rights of individuals and the belief in inviolable human dignity, if not always consistently recognized and practiced, were nevertheless philosophical achievements of premodern medieval Europe. Some scholars regard liberalism simply as the natural development, and indeed the culmination, of protoliberal thinking and achievements of this long period of development, and not as any sort of radical break from premodernity.2

  While this claim is worthy of respectful consideration, given readily evident continuities, nevertheless contesting claims that a significant break occurred between modernity and premodernity—specifically that a novel political philosophy arose in distinction to premodern forebears—has considerable warrant. Indeed, the very institutional and even semantic continuities between classical and Christian premodernity and the modern period that eventuates in the rise of liberalism can be deceptive. The achievement of liberalism was not simply a wholesale rejection of its precedents, but in many cases attained its ends by redefining shared words and concepts and, through that redefinition, colonizing existing institutions with fundamentally different anthropological assumptions.

  Liberty was fundamentally reconceived, even if the word was retained. Liberty had long been believed to be the condition of self-rule that forestalled tyranny, within both the polity and the individual soul. Liberty was thus thought to involve discipline and training in self-limitation of desires, and corresponding social and political arrangements that sought to inculcate corresponding virtues that fostered the arts of self-government. Classical and Christian political thought was self-admittedly more “art” than “science”: it relied extensively on the fortunate appearance of inspiring founding figures and statesmen who could uphold political and social self-reinforcing virtuous cycles, and acknowledged the likelihood of decay and corruption as an inevitable feature of any human institution.

  A signal hallmark of modernity was the rejection of this long-standing view of politics. Social and political arrangements came to be regarded as simultaneously ineffectual and undesirable. The roots of liberalism lay in efforts to overturn a variety of anthropological assumptions and social norms that had come to be believed as sources of pathology—namely, fonts of conflict as well as obstacles to individual liberty. The foundations of liberalism were laid by a series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.

  Three main efforts undergirded this revolution in thought and practice. First, politics would be based upon reliability of “the low” rather than aspiration to “the high.” The classical and Christian effort to foster virtue was rejected as both paternalistic and ineffectual, prone to abuse and unreliability. It was Machiavelli who broke with the classical and Christian aspiration to temper the tyrannical temptation through an education in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies of “imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.”3 Rather than promoting unrealistic standards for behavior—especially self-limitation—that could at best be unreliably achieved, Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the quest for glory. He argued further that liberty and political security were better achieved by pitting different domestic classes against one another, encouraging each to limit the others through “ferocious conflict” in the protection of their particular interests rather than by lofty appeals to a “common good” and political concord. By acknowledging ineradicable human selfishness and the desire for
material goods, one might conceive of ways to harness those motivations rather than seeking to moderate or limit those desires.

  Second, the classical and Christian emphasis upon virtue and the cultivation of self-limitation and self-rule relied upon reinforcing norms and social structures arrayed extensively throughout political, social, religious, economic, and familial life. What were viewed as the essential supports for a training in virtue—and hence, preconditions for liberty from tyranny—came to be viewed as sources of oppression, arbitrariness, and limitation. Descartes and Hobbes in turn argued that the rule of irrational custom and unexamined tradition—especially religious belief and practice—was a source of arbitrary governance and unproductive internecine conflicts, and thus an obstacle to a stable and prosperous regime. Each proposed remediating the presence of custom and tradition by introducing “thought experiments” that reduced people to their natural essence—conceptually stripping humans of accidental attributes that obscured from us our true nature—so that philosophy and politics could be based upon a reasoned and reflective footing. Both expressed confidence in a more individualistic rationality that could replace long-standing social norms and customs as guides for action, and each believed that potential deviations from rationality could be corrected by the legal prohibitions and sanctions of a centralized political state.