The Age of Liberalism – my title notwithstanding - is not dead yet. The ideas that lit up its 18th century youth..... individual liberty and pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, progress through shedding of superstitions and replacing them with science and reason......are still, three centuries on, very much our Western philosophical lodestone. These ideas, forged in The Enlightenment, are ones that the vast majority of Westerners would view as axiomatically Good; right across the political spectrum from Left to Right.
Now it is not my intention to rain on this parade of Enlightenment Goods....they can after all be credited with giving us three centuries of the most amazing human flourishing....the best mankind has ever known. My purpose is to explore certain ‘Bads’ that the Enlightenment seems also to have birthed and to suggest that Liberalism may have, in our time, reached a kind of inflection point wherein its ‘Bads’ may now be starting to outweigh its ‘Goods’.
Enlightenment ideas benefitted – paradoxically – from the very persistence of traditions and social norms against which they had set themselves.
One essential part of the argument I want to lay out is that a part of the success of those Enlightenment ideas was that they hugely benefitted – paradoxically and unwittingly – from the persistence of traditions and social norms against which they had set themselves. These long pre-Enlightenment Classical and Christian traditions underpinned the new ideas and nourishedthem even as they were Progressively being eroded and supplanted by them. Enlightenment Liberalism was, in other words, unknowingly eating the very seed corn that sustained it.
My sense of Western Liberalism’s three-hundred-year history as having traced the long arcing trajectory of a Greek tragedy is a conception that arises mostly from my own musings down the years. But it has been honed more recently by reading Patrick Deneen’s 2018 seminal tome Why Liberalism Failed. My own 70 year journey from youthful, semi-detached disciple of Social Justice to Burke/Oakeshott conservative has, I like to believe, given it a reasonably broad perspective.
The 18th Century Enlightenment can be conceived of as an exciting youthful experiment. Liberating oneself - from adherence to ancient scriptures, from tribal loyalties, from physical and spiritual hierarchies - and releasing one’s ego to pursue highly personal, individual dreams. Such an exhilarating adventure! And a very productive one too; witness the industrial revolution with its amazing quirky inventions and wealth-creating enterprises. Also, an explosion of the creative arts. But it is important to remember that this was no great liberation of the toiling peasantry. It was the dream-child of an intellectual elite and emerging bourgeoisie. La Liberté was a very alluring abstraction for those classes....but in reality a somewhat exclusive one. A future where those toiling masses might also want their Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of it is an outcome the Enlightenment philosophes could never have imagined.
In its original 18th c. form, The Enlightenment was conceived of as an idealised mental universe comprised purely of ideas, thoughts and feelings capable of ‘reasoned’ articulation. The downside was the exclusion from this heavily circumscribed mental universe of all transcendent, spiritual and inchoate aspects of human experience. But then - in the early 19th c. - came the intellectual counter-movement of Romanticism. This was a philosophy that valorised emotion; the subjective experience of the individual....his passions and preoccupations, real and imaginary. Our post 19th c. collective mentality in the liberal individualist West is a fusion of the two. We, in 2024, inhabit a culture of deep-seated pre-conscious habits of mind resulting from the huge dissemination of these Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies across a general population most of whom will have little or no explicit consciousness of either of them.
……a long slow secular clock was ticking on our Age of Liberalism
In the foreword to Liberalism Failed, the book’s basic argument is presented as being “not that liberalism has been hijacked but that its elevation of liberal autonomy was wrong from the start.” I think this mistakes things in an important respect. It would be foolish and curmudgeonly to set at nought Western Liberalism’s hugely fruitful symbiosis of the Philosophes’ soaring flights of Liberté and the Romantics’ soaring ego-driven individualism. Where the default Enlightenment narrative is defective though is in failing to take proper account of how this symbiosis crucially depended on the continuance of deep-rooted pre-Enlightenment social mores.... the soil on which these new shoots had grown. Only a few foresaw how, in a longer time frame, there might be trouble ahead. (19th century French aristocrat political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville was famously one of those). Loosening the ties that bind is one thing; spinning off and becoming entirely unmoored from them is quite another. In other words, a long slow secular clock was ticking on our Age of Liberalism. [There is an irony, I think, that Wokeness has become the label for a censorious, virtue-signalling scolding by means of which its adherents presume to ‘enlighten’ the rest of us benighted deplorables.]
One of Deneen’s central themes in Why Liberalism Failed is that it effectively redefined the nature of liberty to mean almost the opposite of its ancient time-honoured meaning. In its pre-Enlightenment conception, he argues, it was a learned self-governance through which one liberated oneself from base and destructive passions. Its modern conception, by contrast, emphasises the freeing of oneself from constraints....a shuffling off of yokes, both personal/psychological and societal/traditional:
“The achievement of liberty required constraints on individual choice.....not primarily promulgated by law....but through extensive social norms.....Liberalism reconceives liberty as the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms. Ironically [he then adds] as behaviour becomes unregulated....the state must be constantly enlarged through an expansion of lawmaking.”
Perhaps the biggest problem with the modern conception of liberty is that the freedom it promises is perhaps not, when it comes down to it, something that most people particularly want. They would rather fit in because a herd instinct is inherent in human nature. It is a not uncommon observation, among Liberalism’s sceptics, that most people - whatever their nominal IQ - have group-think tendencies. The need to be liked, to go with the flow etc is just too overriding. So you get our post-1960s paradox....the phenomenon of copycat 'individualism' which began in the 60's with the 'hip' denigration of so-called 'boring' 1950's so-called conformity.
As recent Chinese history has shown, your average human being would appear to be far more exercised by a prospect of greater prosperity than one of greater freedom. In the words of the acerbic early 20th c. American commentator H.L. Mencken“The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.”
A CULTURE OF NARCISSISM
The Enlightenment’s re-imagining of Liberty was no sudden, about-face break with tradition. The two conceptions coexisted in tandem throughout the 19th century and most of the 20th. And coexisted, I think, in a reasonably fruitful tension.
When I was growing up in the '50s there were still some remnants of the old Christian moral sense that everyone (including oneself) has a Good Side and a Bad Side. That while we are all capable of good deeds, we are all of us also prone to sin and error and must be schooled into making ourselves worthy. A Yeatsian ‘centre’ comprising Liberalism’s twin-conceptions-of-liberty was still holding....just about.
In the following decades, I and my Boomer generation have lived through a radical unravelling - a ‘falling apart’ - of that moral/philosophical centre. Seen it spin off centrifugally into the head-scratching absurdities of 21st century Woke hyper-liberalism. Key to this, in my view, has been the entry into the bloodstream of the Western collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self-love....one that needs correcting via the pop-therapeutic embrace of something called Self Esteem. In the post-60’s decades, self-esteem’s central importance to healthy personal development became axiomatic right across the moral/philosophical spectrum from Left to Right. So much so that the potential adverse consequences of ‘liberating’ this self-esteem from its more self-deprecating sister concepts self criticism and personal responsibility rarely featured in our late 20th century Western moral/philosophical discourse.
This observation by British philosopher John Gray hits the mark, albeit tangentially. Speaking of the now-unfashionable Sigmund Freud he writes:
“his unforgivable sin was in locating the source of human disorder within human beings themselves....[he] offered a way of thinking in which the experience of being human can be seen to be more intractably difficult, and at the same time more interesting and worthwhile, than anything imagined in the cheap little gospels of progress that are being hawked today.....He is rejected now for his heroic refusal to flatter humankind”.
‘Self love’ sounded all very well in the 1960s but its downstream consequences have been huge. Consequences that can perhaps be encapsulated in Chistopher Lasch’s famous Culture of Narcissism formulation. In order to grasp the full measure of this ‘falling apart of the moral/philosophical centre’ one must confront the fact that its consequences have pervaded not just some wokeified, so-called ‘elite’ but (at least in some degree) our Western collective consciousness as a whole. [* see note 1 below]
Adverse consequences?....let me count the ways:
1. An insidious, creeping shift in the Overton Window framing our Western moral/political discourse. Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone (or something) else to blame for each and every one of your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as a 'victim'. Ooh that feels nice!.....now where's my therapist? And who needs to be cancelled? People drunk on their own virtuous self-esteem don't like to give 'free speech' to anyone who might challenge them. Moreover ‘The System’ should be attending to your every need or anxiety. You meanwhile should be entertained and should know your rights so you can complain about said ‘System’.
2. A gradual reduction in the social mores and inhibitions that form a big part of how a civilisation holds criminality and licentiousness in check. When you valorise each and every kind of liberty, you 'liberate' some human appetites that would be better repressed. [* see note 2 below]
3. There has - in recent times – come to be a partial, if back-handed, recognition of this malaise even on the Progressive Left. It takes the form of a kind of cognitive dissonance whereby an undiminished belief in maximal self-assertion coexists (in a parallel mental universe) with outrage at increasing levels of licentious, irresponsible and self-destructive behaviours. But without any causal link being recognised.
4. Then there has been the spawning of a vast industry that medicalises not just real depressive illness but also everything and anything that used to be seen as just the inevitable trials and tribulations of life’s rich tapestry. And yet there would seem to be no evidence that this great ’mental health’ project has, in reality, resulted in any increase in the sum total of human happiness. (I would suggest that for most of us, beyond the hyper-charged roller-coaster of youth, mature adult experience tends to teach that the quantity of happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant.)
The following snippet from the Britannica Kids Dictionary strikes me as a fair take on what The Enlightenment means to Western publics today...assuming they have heard of it:
“Enlightenment thinkers applied science and reason to society's problems. They believed that all people were created equal. They also saw education as something that divided people. If education were available to all, they reasoned, then everyone would have a fair chance in life.”
An ideal of a citizenry as rational, empirical-evidence-driven, independent-minded beings; made so through the agency of education....Yes this is the philosophical keystone on which the citadel of Western liberal democracy has been built. But, for many of us, the evidence - especially of recent times – leads us to see this as a vain hope because contrary to human nature. A fairytale. I suspect that most mature adults would – if the proposition was put to them straight – at least partly acknowledge that humankind typically is only selectively rational. To quote again from H L Menchen - that great master of the withering epigram - “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
….many have come to think that the massive expansion of tertiary education has spread more ignorance than enlightenment.
And education?....only a fool would rubbish it per se. But many of us on the intellectual Right have come to the conclusion that the massive late 20th c. expansion of tertiary education has spread more ignorance than enlightenment. Regular readers will know that I have written at length about the wholesale capture of the humanities and social science academy by hyper-progressive dogmas. But quite apart from that, it also needs to be recognised that the intellectual modus vivendi is not for everyone....and in the wrong intellectual ‘soil’, the development of high-end intellectual skills can have more downsides than upsides. An enhanced ability with ratiocination and verbal articulation can paradoxically engender an enhanced sophistry in the defence of inherently irrational but emotionally seductive cherished opinions. Witness how entire generations of the (presumably high-IQ) university educated have been seduced by empirically absurd but fashionable fictions about race discrimination and gender fluidity.
I’ll finish with this ….(also from philosopher John Gray):
“At present, liberalism is not so much a political philosophy as a chronic form of cognitive dissonance. It seems progressives lack the capacity to learn from experience – which is the necessary precondition of progress...... One reason Trump’s victory was so sweeping is that the liberalism on which he waged war is so relentlessly crankish. .....The hosts of “knowledge workers” mass-produced by ideologically captured universities were exposed as knowing nothing. The future of this class is bleak.”
[* note 1 above] This is something that many on the New-Right seem to absolve from inclusion in their indictment of our current hyper-liberal madness.
[* note 2 above] Adducing empirical evidence to ‘prove’ this would, however, take a whole essay in itself and is a subject very muddied by ‘progressive’ capture of criminal justice systems and hence of the kinds of data that they generate.
This article was taken from Slouching Towards Bethlehem Substack: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/