Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen

[whitecoast]

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen
Hey all, I wanted to share an interesting book I came across awhile back, but finally got around to reading called Why Liberalism Failed. It is written by a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame named Patrick Deneen. I think what I enjoyed the most about it was how it managed to unite and tie together a lot of observations I and others I’ve read have made about the nature of political development and progress from the early modern age all the way to the present. The author ties together much of the political observations of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau; he continues this thread all the way through to John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, and other advents of the modern industrial state of the late progressive era; finally he ends in the present culture’s fascination with “marginalized” identities, enormous economic and cultural inequalities, increasingly globalized capital and markets, and widespread military interventionism in the name of spreading freedom and democracy.

A related SOTT article relating Putin’s criticisms of liberalism recently hit the mass media to the collective shuttering of elites, academics, and journalists everywhere, which I thought was amusing timing for the sharing of this thread also.

What is Liberalism?
One thing that I enjoy about the book is that Deneen does not examine political philosophy in isolation from anthropology, and openly acknowledges the variegated understandings of human nature and culture influence perspectives on how we ought to engage with politics and toward what ends. Very often when you read a book about “Liberalism” it is often contrasted with conservatism, libertarianism, or possibly even feudalism or fascism.

The backdrop against which this analysis of Liberalism takes place is, in fact, the notion of Liberty as understood and practiced by the republics of Greek and Roman antiquity. And the chief goal of Liberty in antiquity included freedom from tyranny, but this notion of tyranny was applied to one’s passions as well as an external ruler. Tied into this idea of Liberty was the importance of self-mastery and the training of the virtues to better participate as a citizen of the polis. Contrasting this was Liberalism's notion of the free and autonomous individual cast against the arbitrary and controlling nature of culture and the natural world itself.

As Deneen writes in the introductory chapter:

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 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. 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.

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.

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. 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 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
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 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.

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
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conclusion
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.

Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires. This kind of liberty is a condition of self-governance of both city and soul, drawing closely together the individual cultivation and practice of virtue and the shared activities of self-legislation. A central preoccupation of such societies becomes the comprehensive formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of self-rule.

Liberalism instead understands liberty as the condition in which one can act freely within the sphere unconstrained by positive law. This concept effectively brings into being what was merely theoretical in its imaginary state of nature, shaping a world in which the theory of natural human individualism becomes ever more a reality, now secured through the architecture of law, politics, economics, and society. Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy in which the threatened anarchy of our purportedly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. With humanity liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

Ironically, the more completely the sphere of autonomy is secured, the more comprehensive the state must become. Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state. Hobbes’s Leviathan perfectly portrayed those realities: the state consists solely of autonomous individuals, and these individuals are “contained” by the state. The individual and the state mark two points of ontological priority.

Chapter Two: Uniting Individualism and Statism
On this latter point, Deneen devotes and entire chapter outlining that both the expansion of individualism and statism occur concurrently to dismantle the local and particularlized cultures of people. And this collective movement and end-result is a product of a dialectic between the two factions of liberalism: the left-wing "progressive liberals" and the right-wing "classical liberals," which superficially appear to be locked in heated battle but in reality both cooperate to increase the power of the state and the power of individuals (as actors in a market) to the detriment of the natural world and traditional cultures.

Classical Liberalism

This might be a surprising claim, since the philosophy of classical liberalism appears to suggest the opposite: not that the state helps to create the individual, but rather—according to social contract theory—that individuals, free and equal by nature, through consent bring into existence a limited state. Hobbes and Locke both—for all their differences—begin by conceiving natural humans not as parts of wholes but as wholes apart. We are by nature “free and independent,” naturally ungoverned and even nonrelational....

For both Hobbes and Locke, we enter into a social contract not only to secure our survival but to make the exercise of our liberty more secure. Both Hobbes and Locke—but especially Locke—understand that liberty in our prepolitical condition is limited not only by the lawless competition of other individuals but by our recalcitrant and hostile natures. A main goal of Locke’s philosophy is to expand the prospects for our liberty—defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites—through the auspices of the state. Law is not a discipline for self-government but the means for expanding personal freedom: “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”3 We accept the terms of the social contract because it will actually increase our personal liberty by eliminating customs and even laws that can be thought to limit individual freedom, even while expanding the prospects for human control over the natural world. Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by which he means our liberation from the constraints of the natural world.

Far from there being an inherent conflict between the individual and the state—as so much of modern political reporting would suggest—liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection: its ideal of liberty can be realized only through a powerful state. If the expansion of freedom is secured by law, then the opposite also holds true in practice: increasing freedom requires the expansion of law...

Thus one of the liberal state’s main roles becomes the active liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions. At the forefront of liberal theory is the liberation from natural limitations on the achievement of our desires—one of the central aims of life, according to Locke, being the “indolency of the body.” A main agent of that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which not only to realize existing desires but even to create new ones we did not know we had. The state becomes charged with extending the sphere of commerce, particularly with enlarging the range of trade, production, and mobility.... Eventually, however, this project becomes a main driver of liberal imperialism, an imperative justified among others by John Stuart Mill in his treatise Considerations on Representative Government, where he calls for compulsion over “uncivilized” peoples in order that they might lead productive economic lives, even if they must be “for a while compelled to it,” including through the institution of “personal slavery.”...

The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order. The imposition of the liberal order is accompanied by the legitimizing myth that its form was freely chosen by unencumbered individuals; that it was the consequence of extensive state intervention is ignored by all but a few scholars. Few works have made this intervention clearer than the historian and sociologist Karl Polanyi’s classic study The Great Transformation.6 Polanyi describes how economic arrangements were separated from particular cultural and religious contexts in which those arrangements were understood to serve moral ends—and posits that these contexts limited not only actions but even prevented the understanding that economic actions could be properly undertaken to advance individual interests and priorities. Economic exchange so ordered, Polanyi argues, placed a priority on the main ends of social, political, and religious life—the sustenance of community order and flourishing of families within that order. The understanding of an economy based upon the accumulated calculations of self-maximizing individuals was not, properly speaking, a market. A market-place was understood to be an actual physical space within the social order, not an autonomous, theoretical space for exchanges conducted by abstracted utility maximizers....

From the dawn of modernity to contemporary headlines, the proponents and heirs of classical liberalism—those whom we today call “conservative”—have at best offered lip service to the defense of “traditional values” while its leadership class unanimously supports the main instrument of practical individualism in our modern world, the global “free market.” This market—like all markets—while justified in the name of “laissez-faire,” in fact depends on constant state energy, intervention, and support, and has consistently been supported by classical liberals for its solvent effect on traditional relationships, cultural norms, generational thinking, and the practices and habits that subordinate market considerations to concerns born of interpersonal bonds and charity. This process was repeated countless times in the history of modern political economy: in efforts to eradicate the medieval guilds, in the enclosure controversy, in state suppression of “Luddites,” in state support for owners over organized labor, and in government efforts to empty the nation’s farmlands via mechanized, industrial farming. Claiming that the radical individual imagined by liberal theory was a “given,” liberal practice advanced this normative ideal through an ever-burgeoning state that ceaselessly expanded not in spite of individualism, but to bring about its realization.

Progressive Liberalism

One of the consequences of the political, social, and economic dynamism unleashed by classical liberalism was the widespread sense that it had underestimated the capacity for human transformation as well. Dewey, for example, in his short book Individualism, Old and New, praises the “old” liberalism for its success in “liquefying static property” of the type that was prevalent in feudal times, and for eliminating the local bases of social life as the economic and political system became visibly more national and “interdependent.” He dismisses the “romantic” individualism that had animated the American belief in self-reliance (here echoing Frederick Jackson Turner’s observations that the age of the American frontier had come to a close), instead calling for recognition that it was empirically true that Americans were now part of a “social whole” from which no individual could be understood to exist in separation.

Herbert Croly similarly saw a transformation taking place, particularly in the national system of commerce, culture, and identity. But this national system was still animated by a belief in Jeffersonian independence even as in fact it reflected new forms of interdependence. He called for the creation of a “New Republic” (the name of the journal he cofounded) that would achieve “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.” Democracy could no longer mean individual self-reliance based upon the freedom of individuals to act in accordance with their own wishes. Instead, it must be infused with a social and even religious set of commitments that would lead people to recognize their participation in the “brotherhood of mankind.”

While one may see collectivist economic arrangements in these thinkers’ practical recommendations—Dewey, for instance, calls for “public socialism,” and Croly writes in support of “flagrant socialism”—it would be mistaken to conclude that they do not endorse the inviolability and dignity of the individual. A consistent theme in both men’s work is that only by eliminating the cramped and limiting individualism of “old liberalism” can a truer and better form of “individuality” emerge. Only complete liberation from the shackles of unfreedom—including especially the manacles of economic degradation and inequality—can bring the emergence of a new and better individuality.

The apotheosis of democracy, they argue, will lead to a reconciliation of the “Many” and the “One,” a reconciliation of our social nature and our individuality. John Dewey writes, for instance, that “a stable recovery of individuality waits upon an elimination of the older economic and political individualism, an elimination that will liberate imagination and endeavor for the task of making corporate society contribute to the free culture of its members.” While we will have to wait for the complete elimination of old liberalism to know fully how that reconciliation of “individuality” and “corporate society” will be achieved, what is clear from these central and formative arguments of the progressive liberal tradition is that only by overcoming classical liberalism can true liberalism emerge. The argument still continues over whether this represents a fundamental break with, or fundamental fruition of, the liberal project.

Conclusion
Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom.... While “conservative” liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community. And while “progressive” liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of “manners and morals,” preferring the open marketplace of individual “buyers and sellers,” especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as “consumers”—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than “citizens”—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all.

Creating the Individual
At the heart of liberal theory and practice is the preeminent role of the state as agent of individualism. This very liberation in turn generates liberalism’s self-reinforcing circle, wherein the increasingly disembodied individual ends up strengthening the state that is its own author. From the perspective of liberalism, it is a virtuous circle, but from the standpoint of human flourishing, it is one of the deepest sources of liberal pathology....

As naturally political and social creatures, people require a thick set of constitutive bonds in order to function as fully formed human beings. Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state. Nisbet saw the rise of fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities....

Today’s classical liberals and progressive liberals remain locked in a battle for their preferred end game—whether we will be a society of ever more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever more egalitarian members of the global “community”—but while this debate continues apace, the two sides agree on their end while absorbing our attention in disputes over the means, thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges of the classical practices and virtues that they both despise.

The ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical liberalism and the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism end up reinforcing each other often go undetected. Although conservative liberals claim to defend not only a free market but family values and federalism, the only part of the conservative agenda that has been continuously and successfully implemented during their recent political ascendance is economic liberalism, including deregulation, globalization, and the protection of titanic economic inequalities. And while progressive liberals claim to advance a shared sense of national destiny and solidarity that should decrease the advance of an individualist economy and reduce income inequality, the only part of the left’s political agenda that has triumphed has been the project of personal and especially sexual autonomy.

Chapter Three: Liberalism as Anticulture

In this chapter Deneen discusses the evisceration and replacement of traditional cultures with Liberalism's own simulacrum of culture. Traditionally culture was a series of markers of generational customs, practices, rituals, and adaptations grounded in local and particular settings. The advent of the philosophy of liberalism, seeing most aspects of culture as backwards, arbitrary, exclusionary, and so on encouraged looser communal bonds and facilitated the dismantling of local cultures in favor of integration into wider national and consumer markets.

The dual expansion of the state and person autonomy rests extensively on the weakening and eventual loss of particular cultures, and their replacement not by a single liberal culture but by a pervasive and encompassing anticulture. What is popularly called a "culture," often modified by an adjective -- for instance, "pop culture" or "media culture" or "multiculturalism" -- is in face a sign of the evisceration of culture as a set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings. As Mario Vargas Llosa has written, "The idea of culture has broadened to such an extent that, although nobody has dared to say this explicitly, it has disappeared. It has become an ungraspable, multitudinous and figurative ghost." The only forms of shared cultural "liturgy" that remain are celebration of the liberal state and the liberal market. National holidays have become occasions for shopping, and shopping holidays such as "Black Friday" have become national holidays....

The Three Pillars of Liberal Anticulture
Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experience -- nature, time, and place -- form the basis of culture, and liberalism's success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.... The simultaneous heady joy and gnawing anxieties of a liberated humanity, shorn of the compass of tradition and inheritance that were the hallmarks of embedded culture, are indicators of liberalism's waxing success and accumulating failure. The paradox is our growing belief that we are the thralls to the very source of our liberation 0-0 pervasive legal surveillance and control of people alongside technological control of nature. As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes. The anticulture of liberalism -- supposedly the source of our liberation -- accelerates liberalism's success and demise.

Anticulture and the Conquest of Nature
In its earliest articulation, liberal anthropology assumed that "natural man" was a cultureless creature, existing in a "state of nature" noteworthy for the absence of any artifice created by humans. For the protoliberal Hobbes, the state of nature was explicitly the sphere where no culture was possible, because it lacked the conditions in which stability, continuity, cultural transmission, and memory could exist....

While today we can still speak of differences of "nature" and "nurture," even the possibility of a divide between these two would have been incomprehensible to preliberal humanity. The revolutionary nature of the break introduced by liberalism is discernible even in the very word "culture." "Culture" is a word with deep connections to natural forms and processes, most obviously in such words as "agriculture" or "cultivate." Just as the potential of a plant or animal isn't possible without cultivation, so it was readily understood that the human creature's best potential simply could not be realized without good culture. This was so evidence to ancient thinkers that the first several chapters of Plato's Republic are devoted not to a discussion of political forms to to the kinds of stories that are appropriate for children.... Far from being understood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners were understood to be derived from, governed by, and necessary to the realization of human nature.

A core ambition of liberalism is the liberation of such appetites from the artificial constraints of culture -- either to liberate them entirely as a condition of our freedom, or, where they require constraint, to place them under a uniform and homogenized governance of promulgated law rather than the inconsistent impositions of vagaries of diverse culture. While liberalism describes itself mainly as an effort to constrain and limit government, its earliest architects readily admitted that a powerful and often arbitrary government -- acting upon "prerogative" -- was necessary to secure the basic conditions of freedom and its requisite stability. From the outset, proponents of liberalism understood that cultural constraints over expression and pursuit of appetite were obstacles to the realization of a society premised upon unleashing erstwhile vices (such as greed) as engines of economic dynamism, and that state power might be required to overturn cultural institutions responsible for containing such appetites. Today, with the success of the liberal project in the economic sphere, the powers of the liberal state are increasingly focused on dislocating those remaining cultural institutions that were responsible for governance of consumer and sexual appetite -- purportedly in the name of freedom and equality, but above all in a comprehensive effort to displace cultural forms as the ground condition of personal liberty. Only constraints approved by the liberal state itself can finally be acceptable. The assumption is that legitimate limits upon liberty can arise only from the authority of the consent-based liberal state....

Culture is the convention by which humans interact responsibly with nature, at once conforming to its governance while introducing human ingenuity and invention within its limits and boundaries.... Industrial processes like [the industrialization of agriculture under high-input monocroping] ignore the distinctive demands of local culture and practices and rely fundamentally on the elimination of existing farming cultures as the essence of agriculture. While purportedly forward-looking, this approach of profoundly presentist and placeless.

A culture develops above all an awareness of nature's limits, offerings, and demands. This awareness is not "theorized" but is a lived reality that often cannot be described until it has ceased to exist. Liberalism, by contrast, has aimed continsistently at disassociating cultural forms from nature. The effect is at once to liberate humans from acknowledgement of nature's limits while rending culture into wholly relativist beliefs and practices, untethered from anything universal or enduring. This aim of mastering nature toward the end of liberating humanity from its limits -- a project inaugurated in the thought of Francis Bacon -- was simultaneously an assault on cultural norms and practices developed alongside nature.

Liberal Timelessness
More than a system of government or legal and political order, liberalism is about redefining the human perception of time. It is an effort to transform the experience of time, in particular the relationship of past, present, and future. Social contract theory was about the abstraction fo the individual not only from human relations and places but also from time. It depicts a history-less and timeless condition, a thought experiment intended to be applicable at any and all times....

Once again, however, liberal theory posits a form of existence that contradicts what most people’s actual experience was before liberal society brought its “natural” conditions into existence. Only with the ascendancy of liberal political orders does the experience of history in its fullest temporal dimension wane, and a pervasive presentism become a dominant feature of life. This condition is achieved especially through the dismantling of culture, the vessel of the human experience of time.

The development of progressivism within liberalism is only a further iteration of this pervasive presentism, a kind of weaponized timelessness. Like classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particularly tradition and custom. While widely understood to be future-oriented, it in fact rests on simultaneous assumptions that contemporary solutions must be liberated from past answers but that the future will have as much regard for our present as we have for the past....

This transformation of the experience of time has been described in terms of two distinct forms of time: whereas preliberal humanity experienced time as cyclical, modernity thinks of it as linear. While suggestive and enlightening, this linear conception of time is still premised on a fundamental continuity between past, present, and future. Liberalism in its several guises in fact advances a conception of fractured time, of time fundamentally disconnected, and shapes humans to experience different times as if they were radically different countries.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted the connection between the rise of liberal orders and the experience of fractured time. He observed that liberal democracy would be marked above all by a tendency toward presentism. In its egalitarianism and especially in its rejection of aristocracy, it would be suspicious of the past and future, encouraging instead a kind of stunted individualism. Aristocracy, Tocqueville wrote, “links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link. … Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

A better way to understand culture is as a kind of collective trust. Culture is the practice of full temporality, an institution that connects the present to the past and the future. As the Greeks understood, the mother of culture—of the Nine Muses—was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Culture educates us about our generational debts and obligations. At its best, it is a tangible inheritance of the past, one that each of us is obligated to regard with the responsibilities of trusteeship. It is itself an education in the full dimension of human temporality, meant to abridge our temptation to live within the present, with the attendant dispositions of ingratitude and irresponsibility that such a narrowing of temporality encourages. Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.

Liberalism as Nowhere and Everywhere
Liberalism valorizes placelessness. Its "state of nature" posits a view form nowhere: abstract individuals in equally abstract places. Not only does liberalism res on the anthropological assumption that humans are from no one -- emerging, as Hobbes described, "from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other" -- but that we are from nowhere. The place where one happens to be born and raised is as arbitrary as one's parents, one's religion, or one's customs. One should consider oneself primarily a free chooser, of places as of all relationships, institutions, and beliefs.

This is not to say that humans who are more firmly embedded within cultural settings don't sometimes set out for new pastures. But liberalism sets a distinctive and radically placeless "default" that begins as theory but eventually reshapes the world in its image....

This placeless default is one of the preeminent ways that liberalism subtly, unobtrusively, and pervasively undermines all cultures and liberates individuals into the irresponsibility of anticulture. No thinker has more ably discerned the deracinating effects of modern life than the Kentucky farmer, novelist, poet, and essayist Wendel Berry. An unapologetic defender of community in place, Berry regards community as a rich and varied set of personal relationships, a complex of practices and traditions drawn from a store of common memory and tradition, and a set of bonds forged between a people and a place that-- because of this situatedness -- is not potable, mobile, fungible, or transferable. Community is more than a collection of self-interested individuals brought together to seek personal advancement. Rather, it "lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restrain, compassion, and forgiveness...

Communities maintain standards and patterns of life that encourage responsible and communally sanctioned forms of erotic bonds, with the aim of fostering the strong family ties and commitments that constitute the backbone of communal healthy and the conduit of culture and tradition. Communities thus chasten the absolutist claims of "rights bearers"; for instance, Berry insists that they are justified in maintaining internally derived standards of decency in order to foster and maintain a desired moral ecology. He explicitly defends the communal prerogative to demand that certain books be removed from the educational curriculum and to insist on the introduction of the Bible into the classroom as "the word of God."
Modern politics, as Barry has pointed out, is impatient with local variety, particularly when it does not accept the modern embrace of material progress, economic growth, and personal liberation from all forms of work that are elemental or that forestall mobility and efficiency.... Echoing Giambattista Vico, an early critic of the deracinated rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, Berry defends what Vico named the sensus communis. Such "Common Knowledge" is the result of the practice and experience, the accumulated store of wisdom born of trials and corrections of people who have lived, suffered, and flourished in local settings.... There is then, in Berry's thought, a considerable respect for the dignity of "common sense," a nonexpert way of understanding the world that comes through experience, memory, and tradition, and is the source of much democratic opinion that liberalism typically dismisses.

The Death of Culture and the Rise of the Leviathan
While our main political actors argue over whether the liberal state or the market better protects the liberal citizen, they cooperate in the evisceration of actual cultures. Liberal legal structures and the market system mutually reinforce the deconstruction of cultural variety in favor of a legal and economic monoculture-- or more correctly-- a mono-anticulture. Individuals, liberated and displaced form particular histories and practices, are rendered fungible within a political-economic system that requires universally replaceable parts....

Long-standing local rules and cultures that governed behavior through education and cultivation of norms, manners, and morals came to be regarded as oppressive limitations on individual liberty. Those forms of control were lifted in the name of liberation, leading to regularized abuse of those liberties, born primarily of lack of any sets of practices or customs to delineate limits on behavior, especially in the fraught arena of sexual interaction. The federal government, seen as the only legitimate authority for redress, exercised its powers to reregulate the liberated behaviors. But in the wake of disassembled local cultures, there is no longer a set of norms by which to cultivate self-rule, since these would constitute an unjust limitation upon our freedom. Now there can be only punitive threats that occur after the fact. Most institutions have gotten out of the business of seeking to educate the exercise of freedom through cultivation of character and virtue; emphasis is instead placed upon the likelihood of punishment after one body has harmed another body.

This immorality tale is the Hobbesian vision in microcosm: first, tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then we see that absent such norms, anarchy ensues (“the state of nature”). Finding this anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate within the context of ongoing communities, and have replaced these things with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms. And now, lacking any informal and local forms of authority, we are virtually assured that those abuses will regularly occur and that the state will find it necessary to intrude ever more minutely into personal affairs (“Prerogative”)....

Laws and norms once existed to shore up the local mortage culture, forbidding banks to open branches in communities outside those where they were based, premised on a belief that the granting and accepting of debt rested on trust and local knowledge. These laws, and the culture they supported, presupposed that "the bankers' interest and the interests of the larger community are one and the same.".... By 2008, the financial industry was stripped bare of any such culture rooted in nature, time, and place..... Liberation from the confinements and limitations of local market cultures brings not perfect liberty but the expansion of the Leviathan. The destruction of culture achieves not liberation but powerlessness and bondage..... [Without] the guiding standards of behavior that were generally developed through cultural practices and expectations, liberated individuals inevitably come into conflict. The only authority that can now adjudge those claims is the state, leading to ian increase in legal and political activity in local affairs that were once generally settled by cultural norms. Liberal individualism demands the dismantling of culture; and as culture fades, Leviathan waxes and responsible liberty recedes.

Parasitic Liberalism
Evidence of our anticulture surrounds us yet is pervasively denied. Liberalism extends itself by inhabiting spaces abandoned by local cultures and traditions, leading either to their discarding or suppression or, far more often, to their contentless redefinition. Rather than produce our own cultures, grounded in local places, embedded in time, and usually developed from an inheritance from relatives, neighbors, and community—music, art, storytelling, food—we are more likely to consume prepackaged, market-tested, mass-marketed consumables, often branded in commercialized symbolism that masks that culture’s evisceration....

Under Liberalism, "culture" becomes a word that parasitizes the original, displacing actual cultures with a liberal simulacrum eagerly embraced by a populace that is unaware of the switch. Invocations of "culture" tend to be singular, not plural, whereas actual cultures are multiple, local, and particular. We tend to speak of such phenomena as "pop culture," a market-tested and standardized product devised by commercial enterprises and meant for mass consumption. Whereas culture is an accumulation of local and historical experience and memory, liberal "culture" is the vacuum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated, memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place....

While cultures are many and varied, their common features almost always include a belief in the continuity between human nature and the natural world.; the experience of the past and the future as embedded within the present; and assurance of the sacredness of one's place, alongside with depths of gratitude and responsibility to the care and preservation of one's places. Liberalism was premised upon a rejection of each of these constitutive aspects of culture, since to recognize continuity with nature, the debts and obligations attending the flow of time and generations, or a strong identity with one's place was to limit one's experience and opportunity to become a self-making author.

(To be continued.)

 

[whitecoast]

Chapter Four: Technology and the Loss of Liberty
A chapter on the direct and indirect effects of surrounding ourselves with advanced technology, and how the liberal order constructs a society in which technology develops more or less unfettered by any direct concerns for its direct and indirect effects on people and society (providing it’s not overtly killing us in obvious ways).

[In addition to dystopian science fiction] a host of academic studies and works explore the ways in which we are subject to the transformative effect of our technologies. A paramount example today maybe found in anxious descriptions of how the internet and social media are inescapably changing us, mainly for the worse. Several books and studies describing the measurable baleful effects of these technologies have found a ready audience well beyond the usual academic circles.... We are, [they argue] becoming more shallow, not simply in a superficial way, but physiologically. The internet is making us dumber....

These recent works follow in the tradition established by critics of technology who emphasize the way that technology changes us and, in particular, destroys long-standing ways of life, attacking the very basis of culture.... Preindustrial forms of culture and social organization used tools no less than technocratic societies [one author writes] but the tools they employed "did not attack (or more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization." The tools adopted by a Technocracy, by contrast, constantly transform the way of life.... often destroying cultural practices or supplanting them with technologies.

Perhaps an even deeper anxiety arises from the belief that there is an inevitability to technological advances that no amount of warning about their dangers can prevent. A kind of Hegelian or Darwinian narrative seems to dominate our worldview. We seem inescapably to be either creating our own destroyer or, as Lee Silver writes in Remaking Eden, evolving into a fundamentally different creature that we have reason to fear becoming....

Technology does not exist autonomous of political and social norms and beliefs, but its development and applications are shaped by such norms. Liberalism introduces a set of norms that lead us, ironically, to the belief that technology develops independent of any norms and intentions, but rather shapes our norms, our polity, and even humanity, and inevitably escapes our control.

The old-order Amish are often regarded as a society with a phobia toward technology, but this view reflects a preliminary misunderstanding of technology-- in particular an incapacity to recognize that the technology that is adopted by that culture reflects a prior commitment to certain social ends, just as liberal adoption of technology seeks to effect its own distinctive ends....

To me, one of the most powerful examples of this criterion is the decision to eschew insurance, on the grounds that our form of insurance is premised on maximum anonymity and minimal personal commitment.... I am insured against a variety of tragedies but wholly off the hook for any personal responsibility or obligation to anyone else in the insurance pool My only obligation is a financial transaction with the company providing the insurance....Certain Amish communities ban members from purchasing insurance. Rather, the community itself is the insurance pool: members seek to foster a community where it is everyone's shared responsibility and obligation to make someone who suffers a loss "whole" again. We regard our condition as one of freedom, whereas from the standpoint of liberal modernity, adherents of Amish culture are widely perceived to be subject to oppressive rules and customs. Yet we should note that while we have choices about what kind of technology we will use -- whether a sedan or a jeep, an iPhone or a Galaxy, a Mac or a PC -- we largely regard ourselves as subject to the logic of technological development and ultimately not in a position to eschew any particular technology. By contrast the Amish -- who seem to constrain so many choices -- exercise choice over the use and adoption of technologies based upon criteria upon which they base their community. Who is free?

Rather than being chosen, our technologies will arise from a dynamic we no longer control, and further enlarge a system over which we have only the faintest grasp. If our airwaves are increasingly filled with dramas about a technological apocalypse, many of those also posit a shadowy and unknown distant power that seems to pull the strings even when we think we are autonomous. Think of The Matrix, that quasi-Platonic film that put into image the suspicion that we are prisoners in a cave whose images are controlled by puppeteers, but which we believe to be reality itself.

Our "culture of technology" was premised, from the very start, on a false definition of liberty, and now it seems to be leading us ineluctably into a condition of bondage to the consequences of our own fantasy.

Chapter Five: Liberalism against Liberal Arts

Deneen also blames the degeneration of the liberal arts and study of the classics on Liberalism itself as well. The classical liberals reject it because it isn't STEM (i.e. directly related to controlling nature or facilitating industry/commerce); the progressive liberals safeguarding it but generally pick away at it because its teachers and students, increasingly bereft of the culture and understandings of the classics, seem to increasingly project the evils of their society (as they perceive it) onto the classics. The two together lead to an increasing indifference or demonization of the past and so further exacerbates the placelessness and presentism of Liberalism.

Before the advent of liberalism, culture was the most pervasive human technology and the fundamental locus of education. It was the comprehensive shaping force of the person who took parting in, and would in turn pass on, the deepest commitments of a civilization. As the word itself intimates, a culture cultivates; it is the soil in which the human person grows and -- if it is a good culture -- flourishes.

But if liberalism ultimately replaces all forms of culture with a pervasive anticulture, then it must undermine education as well. In particular it must undermine liberal education, the education that was understood as the main means of educating free persons by means of deep engagement with the fruits of long cultural inheritance, particularly the great texts of antiquity and the long Christian tradition....

Liberalism undermines liberal education in the first instance by detaching the educational enterprise itself from the shaping force of culture as the exercise of living within nature and a tradition, instead stripped bare of any cultural specificity in the name of a cultureless multiculturalism, and environmentalism barren of a formative encounter with nature, and a monolithic and homogeneous "diversity."...

Liberalism further undermines education by replacing a definition of liberty as an education in self-government with liberty as autonomy and the absence of constraint. Ultimately it destroys liberal education, since it begins with the assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free. Under liberalism, the liberal arts are instruments of personal liberation, an end that is consistently pursued in the humanities, in the scientific and mathematical disciplines (STEM), and in economics and business. In the humanities, liberatory movements based on claims of identity regard the past as a repository of oppression, and hence displace the legitimacy of the humanities as a source of education. Meanwhile, the subjects that advance the practical and effectual experience of autonomy—STEM, economics, and business—come to be regarded as the sole subjects of justified study. The classical understanding of liberal arts as aimed at educating the free human being is displaced by emphasis upon the arts of the private person. An education fitting for a res publica is replaced with an education suited for a res idiotica—in the Greek, a “private” and isolated person. The purported difference between left and right disappears as both concur that the sole legitimate end of education is the advance of power through the displacement of the liberal arts....

The collapse of the liberal arts in this nation follows closely upon the redefinition of liberty, away from its ancient and Christian understanding of self-rule and disciplined self-command, in favor of an understanding of liberty as the absence of restraint upon one's desires. If the purpose of the liberal arts was to seek an instruction in self-rule, then its teaching no longer aligns with the contemporary aims of education.... Above all, the liberal arts are increasingly replaced by "STEM," which combines a remnant of the ancient liberal arts -- science and mathematics -- with their applied forms, technology and engineering, alongside increasing demands for preparation for careers in business and finance.... Liberal education came to be seen as irrelevant for the pursuit of modern liberty, particularly as understood as that liberty secured by military power, science, technology, and the expansion of capitalist markets to every corner of the globe....

Those best positioned to defend the role of the humanities at the heart of the liberal arts -- members of the professoriate -- on the one hand lament this collapse but blame it on administrators and "neoliberalism." They fail to see how the treatment of the humanities is more deeply a reflection of the liberal order... The professoriate in the liberal arts has failed to contest, let alone resist, the dominant liberal trends because of a pervasive incapacity to correctly diagnose the source of the forces arrayed against the liberal arts...

The left's answer was unexamined acquiescence. In response to these tectonic shifts, those who labored in the humanities began to question their place within the university.... Did it make sense any longer to teach young people the challenging lessons of how to use freedom well, when the scientific world was soon to make those lessons unnecessary? Could an approach based on culture and tradition remain relevant in an age that valued, above all, innovation and progress?

These doubts within the humanities were a fertile seedbed for self-destructive tendencies. [Post-structuralism and Postmodernism] and other approaches, while apparently hostile to the rationalist claims of the sciences, were embraced out of a need to create "progressive" knowledge. Faculty could demonstrate their progressiveness by showing the backwardness of the texts; they could "create knowledge" by showing their superiority to the authors they studied; they could display their anti-traditionalism by attacking the very books that were the basis of their discipline.

In an effort to keep pace with their counterparts in STEM disciplines, the humanities became the most conspicuously liberative of the disciplines, even challenging (albeit fecklessly) the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise. Natural conditions -- such as those inescapably linked to the biological facts of human sexuality -- came to be regarded as "socially constructed." Nature was no longer a standard in any sense, since it was now manipulable.... If humans had any kind of "nature," then the sole permanent feature that seemed acceptable was the centrality of will-- the raw assertion of power over restraints or limits, and the endless possibilities of self-creation.

Today the liberal arts have exceedingly few defenders. [Progressive liberals] are now more interested in advancing the cause of egalitarian autonomy, now arrayed against the older liberal norms of academic freedom and free speech in the name of what some call "academic justice" and greater campus representation. While a rallying point is the cry for greater diversity, [such a project] in fact creates ideological and cultural homogeneity on every campus.... the only substantive worldview advanced is that of advanced liberalism: the ascent of the autonomous individual backed by the power and support of the state and its growing control over institutions including schools and universities.

Conclusion
Understood as a training in limits and care for the world and particular places and people, a liberal education -- properly understood -- is not merely a form of liberation from "the ancestral" or nature but an education in the limits that each imposes upon us necessarily to live in ways that do not tempt us to Promethean forms of individual or generational self-aggrandizement or the abusive effort to liberate ourselves from the limits and sanctions of nature. Particularly in an age during which we are becoming all too familiar with the consequences of living solely in and for the present and disconnected from "ancestral" concerns for living within our means -- whether financially or environmentally -- we would be well served to move beyond the extreme presentism of the contemporary era. We should instead seek a reinvigoration of an idea of liberal education in which we understand liberty to be the condition in which we come to terms with, and accept, the limits and constraints that nature and culture rightfully exert. As commended by ancient and religious traditions alike, liberty is not liberation from constraint but rather our capacity to govern appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty -- liberty from enslavement to our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world. In short, needful is the rescue of liberal education from liberalism.

Chapter Six: The New Aristocracy

The sixth chapter is about inequality, social stratification, and long-term demographic changes that increasingly hollow out rural areas in favor of more urban citydwellers. Thinking a lot about the “bicoastal economy” in the US and the elite EU contempt for the Gillettes Jaunes a lot here, and how the traditional and IT mass media more or less see it as their mission to wrangle “deplorables”.

While both sides in our current anticulture wars advnace the liberal project of statist and market deracination and liberationism, achieved through expansion of individual autonomy and the Baconian project of conquering nature, studetns are wholly shaped to be working pieces within this system of "liberation." Increasingly today's students enter college solely with an aim to its "practical" application, by which is meant its direct relevance to its economic and technical applications, wholly unaware that there is am ore capacious way of understanding "practical" to include how one lives as a spouse, parent, neighbor, citizen, and human being.

A two-tier system has arisen in which elite students are culled from every corner of the globe so that they may prepare themselves for lives of deracinated vagabondage, majoring only in what Wendell Berry calls "upward mobility." Elite universities engage in the educational equivalent of strip mining: identifying economically viable raw materials in every city, town, and hamlet, they strip off that valuable commodity, press it ina distant location, and render the products economically useful for productivity elsewhere. The places that supplied the raw materials are left much depressed coal towns whose mineral wealth has been long since mined and exported. Such studetns embrace "identity" politics and "diversity" to serve their economic interests, perpetual "potentiality" and permanent placelessness. The identities and diversity thus secured are globally homogeneous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference toward shared ties of actual neighbors and communities. This in turn induces the globalized irresponsibility that was reflected in the economic interactions that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis but which is assuaged by calls for "social justice," generally to be handled through the depersonalized levers of the state. On of the most powerful ways that liberalism advances is by implicitly encouraging globalized narcissism while perpetuating a pervasive belief in its own benevolence.
...

Classical Liberalism: Roots of the New Aristocracy
Liberalism was justified, and gained popular support, as the opponent of and alternative to the old aristocracy. It attacked inherited privilege, overturned prescribed economic roles,a nd abolished fixed social positions, arguing instead for openness based on choice, talent, opportunity, and industry. The irony is the creation of a new aristocracy that has enjoyed inherited privileged, prescribed economic roles, and fixed social positions. Even as liberalism's architects were not forthright about their ambition to displace the old aristocracy, they were not silent about their hopes of creating a new aristocracy. Widespread abhorrence of the old aristocracy blinded many who acquiesced in liberalism's ambitions, even as it positively appealed to those who believed they would join the new aristocracy....

Lock had admitted that one aristocracy -- whose rule is based upon inherited position and wealth -- will be replaced by another: what Jefferson was to call a "natural aristocracy" whose position is based upon higher degrees of "rationality" and "industriousness" than those in the general population.... This is liberalism's most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population's full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.... Lock's thesis was that ongoing and continuous growth of wealth and prosperity could function as a replacement for social cohesion and solidarity....

While noting that liberalism and market capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have made dukes and earls of old blush, Cowen argues that we are at the end of a unique period in American history, a time of widespread belief in relative equality and shared civic fate, and entering an age in which we will effectively see the creation of two separate nations.... Political leaders, he suggests, should consider erecting entire cityscapes of favelas with low rent and free internet, thus offering a virtual world of distraction from the grim poverty and spiritual desiccation that will become a permanent way of life for most citizens. Far from predicting that this dystopia will bring an end to liberalism and precipitate revolution against a social and economic system that re-creates the conditions of the old aristocracy that liberalism was supposed to overthrow, Cowen ends his book on this hopefully note: "We might even look ahead to a time when the cheap or free fun is so plentiful that it will feel a bit like Karl Marx's communist utopia, albeit brought on by capitalism. That is the real light at the end of the tunnel."

The second half of this chapter is devoted more to talking about the undermining of custom by the anthropology of liberalism, and how liberalism eventually necessitates the nonconformists of society to dominate and rule over and over-rule the majority to dismantle the cultural shackles.

Progressive Liberalism

[Classical liberal] politics was conceived as a defense of [natural] inequalities. Liberalism's second wave-- Progressivism --argued that the rampant inequality that first-wave liberalism so successfully advanced was, in fact, an obstacle to the realization of true selfhood. Later liberals agreed that the first wave of liberalism had successfully undermined the old aristocratic political end economic forms, but concluded that its very successes had generated new pathologies that needed a reinvented liberalism. Liberalism today is widely identified as the opposite of early-modern liberalism's encouragement of economic liberty and hence stratification, instead stressing the imperative for greater economic inequality.

But this embrace of economic equality was not intended to secure an opposite outcome to classical liberalism: rather, it sought to extend the weakening of social forms and cultural traditions already advanced by classical liberalism, with an end to increasing political consolidation. Under classical liberalism, this end could be achieved by limiting government's authority over individuals. For progressive liberalism, it was best achieved by empowering the state to equalize the fruits of an increasingly prosperous society while intervening more actively in the realms of church, family, and even sexuality.... The progressive effort to make economic disparities more equal (without actually ever equalizing them) is driven by a deeper liberal imperative to equalize individuals' opportunity to be liberated form entanglements with others, particularly from the shared cultural norms, institutions, and associations that bind a people's fate together.... The deepest irony is that while our politics today is manifested as a clash of classical liberals against progressive liberals, we have seen a steady advance in both economic liberation and personal liberation. This is because progressivism was never actually a foe of classical liberalism. Its true enemy was a kind of lived "Burkeanism": the way of life of much of humanity.

...Few liberals were more forthright than John Stuart Mill in insisting that this liberation (from any arbitrary and unchosen relationships, responsibilities, and locales) was essential to creating a new ruling class of wholly self-made individuals. In order to liberate these individuals from accident and circumstance, Mill insisted that the whole of society be remade for their benefit, namely by protecting their unique differences against oppressive social norms, particularly religious strictures and social norms governing behavior and comportment. Put another way, Mill argued that "custom" must be overthrown so that those who seek to liver according to personal choices in the absence of such norms are at greatest liberty to do so.

In contrast to the argument by Yuval Levin that "the Great Debate" was between Burke and Paine, the "culture wars" of our time have more to do with differences between intuitive Burkeans and forthright disciples of Mill. This may surprise some, since Mill is sometimes taken to be a friend of conservatism, particularly libertarians.... Writing at the dawn of the era of popular sovereignty, he acknowledged that public opinion might someday be translated directly into popularly mandated coercive government power; but at that moment, "the majority have not learnt to feel the power of the government [as] their power, or its opinions their opinions." What concerned him was not coercive law but oppressive public opinion.... Forms of oppressive "opinion" were mainly manifest in everyday morality-- what Mill witheringly criticized as "Custom." While Mill at times argued that a good society needed a balance of "Progress" and "Custom," in the main, he saw custom as the enemy of human liberty, and progress as a basic aim of modern society.

We live today in the world Mill proposed. Everywhere, at every moment, we are to engage in experiments in living. Custom has been routed: much of what today passes for culture-- with or without the adjective "popular"-- consists of mocking sarcasm and irony.... Society has been transformed along Millian lines in which especially those regarded as judgmental are to be special objects of scorn, in the name of nonjudgmentalism.

Mill understood better than contemporary Millians that this would require the "best" to dominate the "ordinary." The rejection of custom demanded that society's most "advanced" elements have greater political representation {I would argue this is strongly the case today, with disproportionate academic, cultural, and mass media industries being predominantly left-wing}. In less advanced societies, outright enslavement of backward populations might be necessary until they could be sufficiently set on a path of progressive advancement.

Americans, for much of their history, were not philosophically interested in Burke but were Burkeans in practice. Most lived in accordance with custom-- with basic moral assumptions concerning the fundamental norms that accompanied a good life.... Mill dismissed these behaviors as unthinking custom; Burke praised them as essential forms of "prejudice.".... Mill feared the tyranny of public opinion, expressed through custom, but Burke argued that the tyrannical impulse was far more likely to be found among the "innovators" and might be restrained by prejudice. It was the unshackled powerful who were to be feared, not the custom-following ordinary citizens.

Society today has been organized around the Millian principle that "everything is allowed," at least so long as it does not result in measurable (mainly physical harm). It is a society organized to benefit the strong, as Mill recognized. By contrast, a Burkean society is organized for the benefit of the ordinary-- the majority who benefit from societal norms that the strong and the ordinary alike are expected to follow. Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary; today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong.

Conclusion
The results of this civilizational transformation are everywhere we look. Our society is increasingly defined by economic winners and losers, with winners congregating in wealthy cities and surrounding counties, while losers largely remain in place -- literally and figuratively -0- swamped by a global economy that rewards the higher educated cognitive elite while offering breadcrumbs to shoe left in "flyover country." Trends observed decades ago by Robert Reich and Christopher Lasch, who decried "the secession of the successful" and the "revolt of the elite," are today institutionalized through family, neighborhood, and schools, and replicated by generational succession. Children of the successful receive preparation for entry into the ruling class, while those who lack those attainments are much less capable of affording, and insufficiently knowledgeable about, the basic prerequisites needed to push children into the upper echelon.

Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have ably documented the self-perpetuating class divided that permeates modern american society. Murray has shown through two fictional towns -- wealthy Belmond and down-at-the-heels Fishtown -- that the wealthy and powerful today enjoy family and marital stability, relatively low rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, and lower incidences of drugs and criminality, while on all those measures, Fishtown is descending into social anarchy. Murray has argued that Belmont simply needs to preach what it practices-- extol the virtues of virtue, rather than Millian "experimentalism" and relativism-- in order to instruct the denizens of Fishtown in what's needed to achieve success. Putnam has urged for greater government support for citizens who are being left behind economically, proposing a host of programs to help them break the chain of social decay.

Both ignore what empirical observation should suggest: this condition is not an aberration from healthy liberalism but its fulfillment. From the outset, liberalism held forth the promise of a new aristocracy composed of those who would flourish with the liberation of the individual from history, tradition, nature, and culture, and the demolition or attrition of institutional supports that were redefined as limits or obstacles to liberty.... Even as the liberal family is reconstituted to serve as the launching pad for the autonomous individual, a landscape shorn of widespread social networks leaves those without advantages to succeed in liberal society among the underclass. Compounding their disadvantage is the "secession of the successful," the geographic withdrawal of a social and economic elite to a few concentrated areas, siphoning away those who might once have engaged in local philanthropy and the building of local civil society....

Murray believes that only willful denial born of progressive prejudice prevents the elite from extolling the virtues of stable family life and the personal qualities that help them maintain their social status.... Where the aristocratic family's status was bound up in the land and estate -- hence emphasized generational continuity and primogeniture -- the liberalocratic family rests upon looser generational ties, portable credentials, the inheritance of fungible wealth, and the promise of mobility. Meanwhile the liberalocracy is studiously silent about the decimation of family and attendant social norms among among what Lock might have called "the querulous and contentious," since the liberated individual who is the fruit of liberalism dictates that these people, now relegated to the underclass, must bear the cost of disassembling the social forms and institutions that traditionally supported families even among the disadvantaged....

The "noble lie" (proposed by Plato) proposes a story by which the denizens of the "ideal regime"... at once believe in their fundamental equality as members of a common family and in the natural basis of their inequality. While Plato proposed the "ideal regime" as a philosophic exercise, liberalism adopted a version of the "noble lie" in order to advance a similarly constituted order, in which people would be led to believe in the legitimacy of inequality backstopped by a myth of fundamental equality. Not only would day laborers be encouraged to believe that their lot in life would continuously improve by their ascent in the advance of the liberal order, but more important, the liberalocrats who would be educated in a deep self-deception that they were not a new aristocracy but the very opposite of an aristocratic order. A primary vehicle has been a veneer of social justice and concern for the disadvantaged that is keenly encouraged among liberalocrats from a young age, often at the very educational institutions most responsible for their elevation into the elite.

Chapter Seven: The Degradation of Citizenship

In the seventh Chapter Deneen brings up the inherent tension between liberalism and democracy or popular representation in governance. The widening economic and cultural gap between elites and the underclass highlighted in Chapter 6 exacerbates this. Democracy is seen only as good thing if constructed in the context of Liberalism, and in a conflict between the two it is better to get rid of Democracy.

The term "liberal democracy" is widely used to describe the regime that today is regarded by most in the West as the sole legitimate form of political organization. "Liberalism" thus adjectivally coexists iwth the noun "democracy," apparently giving pride of place to the more ancient regime form in which the people rule. However, the oft-used phrase achieves something rather different from the apparent meaning: the adjective not only modifies "democracy" but proposes a redefinition of the ancient regime into its effective opposite, to one in which the people do not rule but are instead satisfied with the material and martial benefits of living in a liberal res idiotica. At the same time, the word "democracy" affords legitimation to the liberal regime from a populace whose purported consent stands in for a more robust form of citizenship. A degraded form of citizenship arises from liberalism's relentless emphasis upon private over public things, self-interest over civic spirit, and aggregation of individual opinion over common good...

The genius of liberalism was to claim legitimacy on the basis of consent and arrange periodic managed elections, while instituting structures that would dissipate democratic energies, encourage the creation of a fractured and fragmented public, and ensure government by select elite actors.... the true genius of liberalism was to subtly but persistently to shape and educate the citizenry to equate "democracy" with the ideal of self-made and self-making individuals-- expressive individualism --while accepting the patina of political democracy shrouding a powerful and distant government whose deeper legitimacy arises from enlarging the opportunities and experience of expressive individualism. As long as liberal democracy expands "the empire of liberty," mainly in the form of expansive rights, power, and wealth, the actual absence of active democratic self-rule is not only an acceptable but a desired end. Thus liberalism abandons the pervasive challenge of democracy as a regime requiring the cultivation of disciplined self-rule in favor of viewing the government as a separate if beneficent entity that supports limitless provision of material goods and untrammeled expansion of private identity.

Antidemocratic Liberalism
Liberalism's defenders are wont to note the dangers of democracy, particularly the threat of unconstrained majorities over the liberties of minoriteis. Prominent political observers such as Fareed Zakaria have noted the rise of "illiberal democracy" as a main threat to political stability, rights, and liberal political economy. In the wake of the rise of nationalist populist movements such as [Brexit and Trump], political theorist and WSJ columnist William Galston devoted a column warning that "the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy; it is illiberal democracy."

While the ancient philosophers typically relegated democracy to the category of "vicious" or "debased" regimes, today's leading thinkers retain a notional allegiance to democracy only to constraining it within the strictures of liberalism, arguing that liberalism limits the power of the majority and protects freedoms of speech and press, constitutional checks upon government.... Democracy is thus an acceptable legitimating tool only as long as its practices exist within, and are broadly supportive of, liberal assumptions. When democratic majorities reject aspects of liberalism... a growing chorus of leading voices denounce democracy and the unwisdom of the masses.... One such authority is Jason Brennan of Georgetown University, who has argue din a book entitled Against Democracy that voters are consistently ill-informed and even ignorant, and that democratic government thus will ultimately reflect the deficiencies of the electorate.... [to many classical and progressive liberals] it might be better simply to jettison democracy.

Concern over "democratic competence" of ordinary citizens has given rise not only to explicit critiques of democracy but to efforts to constrain democratic rule even by those who otherwise claim the democratic mantle. By one measure, progressive liberals appear strenuously to endorse democracy, and have been responsible for introducing many measures that increase more direct forms of democratic governance. Belief in greater direct popular control--evinced in such proposals as the initiative, recall, and referendum -- were evidence of Progressive Era belief in the wisdom of the multitudes.... However, at the same time, a seemingly contradictory urge was evinced by many of the same progressives. Accompanying calls for more democracy were concomitant calls for less popular influence over policy making. Progressives were behind movements for more professionalization in government, above all civil service reform, with accompanying examinations and reduction in the numbers of political appointees with administrations (thereby severing the very electoral connection that progressives elsewhere sought to maximize). Democracy was thus limited to the expression of preferences, the collection of individual opinions that could then be collated and inform expert crafting of appropriate policy by expert administrators.... Armed with objective data from the social scientists, a credentialed, bureaucratic elite was expected to take cues from [irrational and ignorant masses], and at times to lead and direct these same masses to accept objectively good public policy.
...
The very origins of mass democracy, then, appear to be bound up with efforts to minimize the creation of an engaged democratic citizenry... Classical and progressive liberals shared not only the ambition of constraining democratic practice and active citizenship but a substantive vision of what constituted "good policy."... Liberalism sought not the taming and disciplining of power, along with cultivation of attendant public and private virtues like frugality and temperance, but institutional forms of harnessing power toward the ends of national might, energy, and dynamism... While many conservatives today claim that the Constitution sought to preserve a federalism that would ensure strong identification with more local identities, the underlying argument of The Federalist contradicts this claim. The Federalist lays out the conditions that would ensure that the populace would come eventually to identify more with the central than with the local and state governments. Both Madison and Hamilton acknowledge that humans naturally have greater affection for that which is in nearest proximity to themselves, albeit with an important caveat (that people's loyalty would eventually drift to the better-run government).... [In Federalist 17, 27 and 46 [it is implied that larger electoral districts are more likely to draw larger talent pools and so the more central government would always acquire the most brilliant and ambitious individuals]....

To be a democratic citizen entitled one to the expansion of individual ambitions and experiences, and one's civic duty was fulfilled by supporting a government that constantly advanced forms of expressive individualism. "Progressives" thus have had little success reining in the expansion of the private realm devoted to increasing acquisition of property and economic power. "Conservatives" have likewise had little success thwarting the expansion of individual expressionism, especially thwarting the advance of the sexual revolution. If anyone wants to know why Republicans have failed to make the federal government smaller and to devolve power back to the states in significant ways... we should recognize that such a reversal would go against the logic and grain of the regime.... For all their differences, what is strikingly similar about the liberal thinkers of the Founding Era and the leading thinkers of the Progressive Era were similar efforts to increase the "orbit" or scope of the national government concomitant with increases in the scale of the American economic order...

Illiberal Democracy, Rightly Understood
Tocqueville observed practices of democratic citizenship that had developed antecedent to America's liberal founding. Its roots and origins, he argued, lie in the earlier Puritan roots of the American settlement, and in particular from the widely shared understanding of Christian liberty that he believed served as inspiration for the practices of democracy....

For Toqueville, he believed that there was a straight line of influence from the Puritan understanding of liberty to the democratic practices of the townships of New England that he witnessed during his travels through the northeastern states. Observing the practice of self-rule-- of a people imposing laws on themselves directly Tocqueville concluded that "the strength of free peoples resides in the local community. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science: they put it within people's reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it." He stressed it was the immediacy of the township that made its citizens more likely to care and take an active interest not only in their own fates but in the shared fates of their fellow citizens. By contrast, he noted a striking lack of attentiveness to more distant political centers of power, including both state and even more distant federal government, where only a few ambitious men might govern but which otherwise was of little concern to the active citizens within the township....

Today's liberal critics of democracy -- especially the emaciated forms of spectator politics that we call democracy -- in effect condemn the deformed and truncated demotic actions of a degraded citizenry that liberalism itself has created. Leading liberals offer such degradation as evidence for the need to further sequester popular energies, offering instead the satisfactions of the private realm which will be further secured by the distant operation of elected the plutocrats and bureaucratic functionaries of the liberal state... Today's liberals who call for encouraging democratic participation through more extensive forms of civic education focused on national politics neglect the extent to which their cure is the source of the tills they would redress. It remains unthinkable that redress of civic indifference would require efforts to severely limit the power of the central state in favor of real opportunities for local self-rule.

We should... not be surprised that even a degraded citizenry will throw off the enlightened shackles of a liberal order, particularly as the very successes of that order generate the pathologies of a citizenry that finds itself powerless before forces of government, economy, technology, and globalizing forces. Yet once degraded, such a citizenry would be unlikely to insist upon Tocquevillian self-command; its response would predictably take the form of inarticulate cries for a strongman to rein in the power of a distant and ungovernable state and market.... Liberals are right to fear this eventuality, but persist in willful obliviousness of their own complicity in the birth of the illiberal progeny of the liberal order itself.

Conclusion

Patrick says it best so I'll just let him do the talking.

Liberalism has failed because it has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them. The result is the systemic rolling blackouts in electoral politics, governance, and economics, the loss of confidence and even belief in legitimacy among the citizenry, that accumulate not as separable and discrete problems to be solved within the liberal frame but as deeply interconnected crises of legitimacy and a portent of liberalism's end times....

Liberalism's apologists regard pervasive discontent, political dysfunction, economic inequality, civic disconnection, and populist rejection as accidental problems disconnected from systemic causes, because their self-deception is generated by enormous reservoirs of self-interest in the maintenance of the present system. This divide will only widen, the crises will become more pronounced, the political duct-tape and economic spray paint will increasingly fail to keep the house standing....

End runs around democratic and popular discontent have become the norm, and backstopping the liberal order is the ever more visible power of a massive "deep state," with extensive powers of surveillance, legal mandate, police power, and administrative control. These methods will continue to be deployed despite liberalism's claim to rest on consent and popular support. Such a conclusion is paradoxical, not unlike Tocquevilles' conclusion in Democracy in America, in which he envisions democracy culminating in a new form of despotism....

Most people envisioning such scenarios rightly warn of the likely viciousness of any successor regime, and close to hand are the examples of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, and Russia's brief flirtation with liberalism before the imposition of communism.... While growing discontent in Western liberal democracies suggests that either outcome is a realistic possibility, neither is to be wished for in the form it is likely to take. Yet the failure of liberalism itself invites this outcome, even as the unwillingness of liberalism's defenders to perceive their own complicity in fostering widespread discontent among their fellow citizens only makes such a lamentable outcome more likely.

To assuage and mitigate the odds of a despotic or totalitarian revolutionary or reactionary upheaval, Deneen has several recommendations:

First, the achievements of liberalism must be acknowledged, and the desire to "return" to a preliberal age must be eschewed. We must build upon those achievements while abandoning the foundational reasons for its failures.

Second, we must outgrow the age of ideology. Of the 3 modern ideologies, only the oldest and most resilient remains, but liberals mistook the fall of its competitors for the end of history instead of the Pyrrhic victory it was. The gap between liberalism's claims about itself and the lived reality of the citizenry widens to the point that the lie can no longer be accepted. Instead of trying to conceive a replacement ideology (or returning to some updated version of of an alternative, such as renascent Marxism), we should focus on developing practices that foster new forms of culture, household economics, and polis life.

Third, from the cauldron of such experience and practice, a better theory of politics and society might ultimately emerge. Such a theory must eschew liberalism's ideological dimensions yet be cognizant of is achievements and the rightful demands it makes -- particularly for justice and dignity. The outlines of such a theory are already discernable, guided by liberalism's own retention of essential ocncepts from a preliberal age -- especially that of liberty -- and reinforced by experience and practice essential for a human life. This first step toward a new theory is the most tentative, but it faces in a confident direction, given the perpetual appeal of certain basic political ideals that have been present in the Western tradition since antiquity.

He then breaks these down into more detail, and ends with this conclusion:

Conclusion
The impulse to devise a new and better political theory in the wake of liberalism's simultaneous triumph and demise is a temptation that must be resisted. The search for a comprehensive theory is what gave rise to liberalism and successor ideologies in the first place. Calls for restoration of culture and the liberal arts, restraints upon individualism and statism, and limits upon liberalism's technology will no doubt prompt suspicious questions. Demands will be made for comprehensive assurances that inequalities and injustices arise from racial, sexual, and ethnic prejudices be preemptively forestalled and that local autocracies or theocracies be legally prevented. Such demands have always contributed to the extension of liberal hegemony, accompanied by simultaneous self-congratulation that we are freer and more equal than ever, even as we are more subject to the expansion of both the state and the market, and less in control of our fate.....

Perhaps there is another way, starting with the efforts of people of goodwill to form distinctive counter-cultural communities in ways distinct from the deracinated and depersonalized form of live that liberalism seems above all to foster. As the culmination of liberalism becomes more fully visible, as its endemic failures throw more people into economic, social, and familial instability and uncertainty, as the institutions of civil society are increasingly seen to have been hollowed out in the name of individual liberation, and as we discover that our state of ever-perfected liberty leaves us, as Tocqueville predicted, both "independent and weak," such communities of practice will increasingly be seen as lighthouses and field hospitals to those who might once have regarded them as peculiar and suspect. From the work and example of alternative forms of community, ultimately a different experience of political life might arise, grounded in the actual practice and mutual education of shared self-rule.

What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life. Not a better theory, but better practices. Such a condition and differing philosophy that it encourage might finally be worthy of the name "liberal." After a five hundred-year philosophical experiment that has now run its course, the way is clear to building anew and better. The greatest proof of human freedom today lies in our ability to imagine, and build, liberty after liberalism.

I really enjoyed the book, although I'm trying my best not to take everything at face value here, since I don't know what amount of this is contingent and what amount of this is actually the logical outcome (for example the rampant military interventions seems more like a Psychopath thing than a liberal thing). Even Barack Obama recommended the book, because even though he disagreed with a lot of it (hah!) he did acknowledge the erosion of community in our society is a growing problem.

BTW this was the Putin article was referring to earlier:

Putin Says 'Liberal Idea Obsolete': The Woke Suffer Existential Shock

I imagine a shocked hush descending on newsrooms across the western world; perhaps a disturbance in the woke forcefield had warned them in advance. Vladimir Putin had questioned liberalism. In an interview with the Financial Times ahead of the...

www.sott.net

 

[whitecoast]

Patrick Deneen gives a talk about his book and thesis here:

He also appears in an interview on a youtube channel I enjoy as well: