a partial defence of liberalism

Perhaps I should have called this a partial, somewhat reluctant, somewhat tentative defence of liberalism but here goes.

I used to be very critical of liberalism but living in the current illiberal age I must admit I’m starting to feel a twinge of nostalgia for old school liberalism. I’m not mounting a defence of economic liberalism, which I despise. I’m talking about social liberalism.

I try not to see political ideologies in terms of right and wrong or good and bad. Ideologies either produce satisfactory or unsatisfactory results. Liberalism in the classic meaning of the world is an individualist ideology. People in general either prefer ideologies that put the individual first or ideologies that put society first. You can’t have both. In order to have a society which gives freedom to the individual society has to make a few sacrifices. In order to have a society which benefits society the individual has to make a few sacrifices. On the whole I think that if you choose an ideology that puts the individual first you’ll have a more pleasant and more civilised society but social conservatives will no doubt violently disagree.

I’m not really concerned with trying to prove that individualist ideologies are better than collectivist ideologies. I’m merely trying to point out that it is possible to defend liberalism. At a time when liberalism is not just on the defensive but pretty much on the ground having the daylights kicked out of it I think it’s worth asking ourselves if liberalism was really so bad.

The period from 1945 to around the late 90s was a kind of golden age of liberalism. Liberalism really did seem to be working. It didn’t please everybody (no political system pleases everybody) and it wasn’t perfect by any means (no political system is perfect or even close to perfect) but it did seem to be working.

In 1945 there were still a lot of restrictions on personal freedom. Many were legacies of the very illiberal control freak Progressive Era (which was to a large extent the Christian moral reformism of the 19th century given a more political gloss) but by the 50s mainstream liberal opinion was moving towards the view that generally speaking people should have as much personal freedom as possible. They could live as they chose. There were of course some constraints on this freedom. You could have freedom as long as your freedom didn’t interfere with anyone else’s freedom. And reality also imposed certain constraints. If you thought it would be really cool to be a superhero or a vampire you would have to be gently told that reality was not going to accomodate your fantasy.

During the half-century golden age of liberalism most people seemed to be reasonably content. Social conservative were very unhappy. Which is a bit odd since that era was actually a golden age for social conservatives. If you wanted to have a strictly monogamous marriage and you wanted to have lots of kids and go to church every Sunday nobody was going to tell you that you couldn’t do that. You could raise your kids the way you wanted to. You could send them to Christian schools. If you chose to take a fairy extreme position, such as believing that sex for any purpose other than procreation was sinful, you could live that way. You could live a very traditionalist socially conservative lifestyle and many people did.

What went wrong and why did liberalism collapse? I’m inclined to think it was technology. By the 21st century both governments and private corporations had the technology to keep us under constant surveillance. And social media proved to be an extraordinarily effective tool for imposing obedience. There had always been crazy extremists. Every political movement has its lunatic fringe. Social media allowed the lunatic fringe, small but highly motivated, to accumulate immense power. Totalitarianism happened because technology made it easy and neither governments nor private corporations could resist the temptations of totalitarianism.

There is more to be said on the subject of liberalism, especially regarding the way in which very illiberal ideological positions are being sold to us as liberal positions (the trans agenda being a spectacular example) but that will have to wait for my next post.