Why Liberalism Failed Page 4
Third, if political foundations and social norms required correctives to establish stability and predictability, and (eventually) to enlarge the realm of individual freedom, the human subjection to the dominion and limits of nature needed also to be overcome. A “new science of politics” was to be accompanied by a new natural science—in particular, a science that would seek practical applications meant to give humans a chance in the war against nature. Hobbes’s employer, Francis Bacon, encouraged a new form of natural philosophy that would increase human empire over the natural world, providing for “relief of the human estate” through the expansion of useful applications of human knowledge.4 A revolution in modern science thus called as well for overturning such philosophical traditions as Stoicism and Christian emphasis upon “acceptance” in favor of belief in an expanding and potentially limitless human capacity to control circumstance and effect human desires upon the world.
While none of these thinkers was a liberal, given their respective reservations regarding popular rule, their revolutionary reconception of politics, society, science, and nature laid the foundation of modern liberalism. A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity. Liberalism’s ascent and triumph required sustained efforts to undermine the classical and Christian understanding of liberty, the disassembling of widespread norms, traditions, and practices, and perhaps above all the reconceptualization of primacy of the individual defined in isolation from arbitrary accidents of birth, with the state as the main protector of individual rights and liberty.
The liberal adoption of these revolutions in thought and practice constituted a titanic wager that a wholly new understanding of liberty could be pursued and realized by overturning preceding philosophic tradition and religious and social norms, and by introducing a new relationship between humans and nature. What has become the literal “Whig” interpretation of political history widely holds that this wager has been an uncontested success. The advent of liberalism marks the end of a benighted age, the liberation of humanity from darkness, the overcoming of oppression and arbitrary inequality, the descent of monarchy and aristocracy, the advance of prosperity and modern technology, and the advent of an age of nearly unbroken progress. Liberalism is credited with the cessation of religious war, the opening of an age of tolerance and equality, the expanding spheres of personal opportunity and social interaction that today culminate in globalization, and the ongoing victories over sexism, racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and a host of other unacceptable prejudices that divide, demean, and segregate.
Liberalism’s victory was declared to be unqualified and complete in 1989 in the seminal article “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, written following the collapse of the last competing ideological opponent.5 Fukuyama held that liberalism had proved itself the sole legitimate regime on the basis that it had withstood all challengers and defeated all competitors and further, that it worked because it accorded with human nature. A wager that was some five centuries in the making, and had been first instantiated as a political experiment by the Founders of the American liberal republic exactly two hundred years before Fukuyama’s bold claim, had panned out with unprecedented clarity in the often muddled and contested realm of political philosophy and practice.
A main result of the widespread view that liberalism’s triumph is complete and uncontested—indeed, that rival claims are no longer regarded as worthy of consideration—is a conclusion within the liberal order that various ills that infect the body politic as well as the civil and private spheres are either remnants of insufficiently realized liberalism or happenstance problems that are subject to policy or technological fix within the liberal horizon. Liberalism’s own success makes it difficult to sustain reflection on the likelihood that the greatest current threat to liberalism lies not outside and beyond liberalism but within it. The potency of this threat arises from the fundamental nature of liberalism, from what are thought to be its very strengths—especially its faith in its ability of self-correction and its belief in progress and continual improvement—which make it largely impervious to discerning its deepest weaknesses and even self-inflicted decline. No matter our contemporary malady, there is no challenge that can’t be fixed by a more perfect application of liberal solutions.
These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue. Not only is this malady increasingly manifest in all social interactions and institutions, but it infiltrates liberal politics. Undermining any appeal to common good, it induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized polarization for a citizenry that is increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns. Similarly, the “cure” by which individuals could be liberated from authoritative cultures generates social anomie that requires expansion of legal redress, police proscriptions, and expanded surveillance. For instance, because social norms and decencies have deteriorated and an emphasis on character was rejected as paternalistic and oppressive, a growing number of the nation’s school districts now deploy surveillance cameras in schools, anonymous oversight triggering post-facto punishment. The cure of human mastery of nature is producing consequences that suggest such mastery is at best temporary and finally illusory: ecological costs of burning of fossil fuels, limits of unlimited application of antibiotics, political fallout from displacement of workforce by technology, and so forth. Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.
Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability. The increased focus upon, and intensifying political battles over, the role of centralized national and even international governments is at once the consequence of liberalism’s move toward homogenization and one of the indications of its fragility. The global market displaces a variety of economic subcultures, enforcing a relentless logic of impersonal transactions that have led to a crisis of capitalism and the specter of its own unraveling. Battles in policy areas such as education and health care—in which either the state or the market is proposed as providing the resolution—reflect the weakening of forms of care that drew on more local commitments and devotions that neither the state nor market can hope to replicate or replace. The triumphant march of liberalism has succeeded in at once drawing down the social and natural resources that liberalism did not create and cannot replenish, but which sustained liberalism even as its advance eroded its own unacknowledged foundations.
Liberalism has been a wager that it can produce more benefits than the costs it would amass, all the while rendering liberal humanity widely insensate to the fact that the mounting costs are the result of those touted benefits. Thus most today view this wager as a settled bet, a question whose outcome is no longer in question. Yet the gathering evidence, once seen clearly as not circumstantially generated but arising directly from liberalism’s fruition, reveals that the bookie’s collector is knocking upon the door. While we have been slow to realize that the odds were in favor of the house, the damning evidence arising from liberalism’s very success affirms that only blinkered ideology can conceal liberalism’s unsustainability.
The strictly legal and political arrangements of modern constitutionalism do not per se constitute a liberal regime, but they are animated by two foundational beliefs. Liberalism is most fundamentally constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast:
1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. These two revolutions in the understanding of human nature and society constitute “liberalism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition of “liberty.”
LIBERAL VOLUNTARISM
The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals. This argument was first articulated in the protoliberal defense of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, human beings exist by nature in a state of radical independence and autonomy. Recognizing the fragility of a condition in which life in such a state is “nasty, brutish, and short,” they employ their rational self-interest to sacrifice most of their natural rights in order to secure the protection and security of a sovereign. Legitimacy is conferred by consent.
The state is created to restrain the external actions of individuals and legally restricts the potentially destructive activity of radically separate human beings. Law is a set of practical restraints upon self-interested individuals; Hobbes does not assume the existence of self-restraint born of mutual concern. As he writes in Leviathan, law is comparable to hedges, “not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way”; that is, law restrains people’s natural tendency to act on “impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion,” and thus always acts as an external constraint upon our natural liberty.6 By contrast, liberty persists “where there is silence of the law,” limited only insofar as the “authorized” rules of the state are explicit.7 Only the state can limit our natural liberty: the state is the sole creator and enforcer of positive law, and it even determines legitimate and illegitimate expressions of religious belief. The state is charged with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy; in so doing, it “secures” our natural rights.
Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous. Liberalism begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly dependent on whether those relationships have been chosen, and chosen on the basis of their service to rational self-interest.
As Hobbes’s philosophical successor John Locke understood, voluntarist logic ultimately affects all relationships, including familial ones. Locke—the first philosopher of liberalism—on the one hand acknowledges in his Second Treatise of Government that the duties of parents to raise children and the corresponding duties of children to obey spring from the commandment “Honor thy father and mother,” but he further claims that every child must ultimately subject his inheritance to the logic of consent, and thus begin (evoking the origin of human society) in a version of the State of Nature in which we act as autonomous choosing individuals. “For every Man’s Children being by Nature as free as himself, or any of his Ancestors ever were, may, whilst they are in that Freedom, choose what Society they will join themselves to, what Common-wealths they will put themselves under. But if they will enjoy the Inheritance of their Ancestors, they must take it on the same terms their Ancestors had it, and submit to all the Conditions annex’d to such a Possession.”8 Even those who adopt the inheritance of their parents in every regard do so only through the logic of consent, even if it is tacit.
Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision, particularly once the child-rearing duties are completed. If this encompassing logic of choice applies to the most elemental family relationships, then it applies all the more to the looser ties that bind people to other institutions and associations, in which membership is subject to constant monitoring and assessment of whether it benefits or unduly burdens any person’s individual rights.
This is not to suggest that a preliberal era dismissed the idea of individual free choice. Among other significant ways that preliberal Christianity contributed to an expansion of human choice was to transform the idea of marriage from an institution based upon familial and property considerations to a choice made by consenting individuals on the basis of sacramental love. What was new is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships became dominated by considerations of individual choice based on the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader consideration of the impact of one’s choices upon the community, one’s obligations to the created order, and ultimately to God.
Liberalism began with the explicit assertion that it merely describes our political, social, and private decision making. Yet it was implicitly constituted as a normative project: what it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had to displace a very different form of human self-understanding and experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently about themselves and their relationships. Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not any particular conception of the “Good.”
Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claim merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors, but in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships seen as fungible and subject to constant redefinition, so are all relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism encourages loose connections.
THE WAR AGAINST NATURE
The second revolution, and the second anthropological assumption that constitutes liberalism, is less visibly political. Premodern political thought—particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature as part of a comprehensive natural order. Humans were understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and thus humanity was required to conform both to its own nature and, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which it was a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing.
Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It displaced first the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and later the notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences and humanity’s relationship to the natural world. The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—insisted that man should employ natural science and a transformed economic system to seek mastery of nature. The second wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief in the idea of a fixed human nature with belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress. These two iterations of liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—contend today for ascendance, but we do better to understand their deep interconnection.
The protoliberal thinker who ushered in the first wave of liberalism’s transformation was Francis Bacon. Like Hobbes (who was Bacon’s secretary), he attacked the ancient Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of nature and natural law and argued for the human capacity to “master” or “control” nature—even reversing the effects of the Fall, including even the possibility of overcoming human mortality.9
Liberalism became closely bound up with this new orientation of the natural sciences, and it embraced and advanced as w
ell an economic system—market-based free enterprise—that similarly promoted human use, conquest, and mastery of the natural world. Early-modern liberalism held the view that human nature was unchangeable—human beings were, by nature, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be harnessed but not fundamentally altered. But this self-interested, possessive aspect of our nature could, if usefully harnessed, promote an economic and scientific system that increased human freedom through the capacity of human beings to exert mastery over natural phenomena.
The second wave of this revolution begins as an explicit criticism of this view of humanity. Thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx, from Mill to Dewey, and from Richard Rorty to contemporary “transhumanists” reject the idea that human nature is fixed. They adopt the first-wave theorists’ idea that nature is subject to human conquest and apply it to human nature itself.
First-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives,” who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies. Today’s political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between these two varieties of liberals. Neither side confronts the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature defended by the preliberal tradition.
Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. Its two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity.