Liberal intolerance is getting noticed

Kirsten Powers, a Democratic commentator, is bewildered that liberals, who are supposed to be committed to the value of tolerance, are increasingly intolerant of opposing views:

How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

James Kalb has written a response agreeing that liberalism is intolerant but setting out why this follows from liberal principles.

I'd like to follow on in the same vein. Liberalism is neutral in a limited way. It is neutral only in the sense that individuals are supposed to define their own subjective goods and respect the right of others to do the same. That viewpoint isn't really neutral as it assumes a number of things philosophically, for instance, that objective values can't be known, or agreed upon, or don't exist; and that individual goods can be understood separately from communally held ones.

But leaving that aside, liberalism's limited neutrality runs into another problem. If my main moral responsibility to others is that I tolerate their right to subjectively define their own goods, then that means that what fills the gap in terms of public moral standards are values of non-interference such as tolerance, openness, non-discrimination, inclusiveness and so on. These values then become the new standard of public good that people can be thought of as contravening.

It sounds odd, but liberals can then declare their intolerance of violations of tolerance. Here for instance is the right-liberal Jonah Norberg:

It is time for our liberal societies to stop apologising, to get back our self-confidence and state that tolerance and freedom is our way, and those who are out to destroy that deserve no toleration...We should force everybody to accept every other human being as a free and autonomous individual with the same rights as himself. That is the law of a liberal, open society...Everybody who wants to enjoy that society must conform to it. (The Age, 24/9/05)

Force, conform, liberal law, no toleration - these are the terms employed by Norberg who then states that his highest values are tolerance and freedom.

The contradiction is made worse by the fact that it is so easy to run foul of liberal tolerance on a variety of significant issues. For instance, under Norberg's "law of liberalism" I cannot defend any distinction in what men and women do in society. For instance, I cannot defend the idea that women should not be combat troops, as that would place a limit on how women might define their own good. Similarly, I cannot defend border controls as that restricts immigrants defining their own good; nor can I defend traditional marriage, as that limits all those who cannot accept heterosexual fidelity from defining their own good.

The liberal principle forces the outcome on a great many of the most serious issues to be decided in a society. Instead of defining my own goods, I end up having many of the most important ones defined for me by the procedural principle that liberals have established.

In the traditionalist view, it is better for at least some goods to be decided on by a community, in part formally, through a process of politics, and in part informally, through a process of culture and tradition.

That's because some of the most important goods I am likely to hold are aspects of a communal life; if a community does not uphold them, then they are lost as individual goods. You cannot respect the life of the individual, without taking seriously the goods embedded within the community to which the individual belongs.

Second, the outcome of what goods are upheld within a society ought not to be left to a procedural principle, such as that asserted by liberals. That's a curiously mechanical way to decide what goods will triumph in a society; it is also a way that fails to find a harmonious balance between competing goods, or to weigh the real merits of the goods under consideration.

I'll give a concrete example. Brendan Eich, a man with much success in the technology industry, was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla because some years ago he made a small donation to a campaign to defend traditional marriage.

That's how things work in a liberal system. There is an issue of whether two men or two women should be able to marry. The issue is decided on a procedural basis: the principle is that we should tolerate people self-defining their own good, therefore it is decided that homosexuals should not be limited in defining their own good and should therefore be allowed to marry. People who oppose this are thought to be contravening the tolerance principle and are therefore treated intolerantly.

That's not how things should be done. It is both too contradictory (intolerance in the name of tolerance) and too mechanical (decided according to a procedural principle). What should determine the outcome are questions to do with the nature of marriage itself as an institution; the purposes its serves; of what upholds it as an institution; and of how it fits within the larger order on which a society is based.

A more critical take than expected

How is liberalism presented in a work like The Oxford Companion to Philosophy? In a more critical way than I had expected. Here are some excerpts:

Liberalism. One of the major political ideologies of the modern world...Liberalism first emerged as an important movement in Europe in the sixteenth century. Today...it is the dominant ideology in many parts of the world.

Excellent. It is recognised here very clearly that liberalism is not only a political ideology, but that it dominates in many countries. It is effectively the state ideology in countries like Australia.

What we then get are two different explanations for the rise of liberalism, one favourable and one critical. The favourable one is that liberalism arose as a way of settling the religious conflicts of the Reformation:

both Protestants and Catholics accepted that the state could not impose a common faith ... Liberalism has simply extended this principle from the sphere of religion to other areas of social life where citizens have conflicting beliefs about the meaning of life. A liberal state does not seek to resolve these conflicts, but rather provides a 'neutral' framework within which citizens can pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life.

I've heard some liberals advance this kind of belief about liberal neutrality. It's not a view that's easily made coherent. First, it's not possible for a state to be neutral when it comes to conceptions of the good life. Second, the demand for neutrality undermines some key conceptions of the good life and privileges others (i.e. it pushes society in particular directions). Third, the reality is that the liberal state has imposed a set of liberal values on society, transforming society in radical ways, rather than remaining neutral.

The Oxford Companion also provides a more critical explanation for the rise of liberalism:

Liberalism's critics, however, argue that liberalism emerged as the ideological justification for the rise of capitalism, and that its image of the autonomous individual is simply a glorification of the pursuit of self-interest in the market. Liberalism replaced the web of mutual obligations which bound people together in ethnic, religious, or other communities with a society predicated on competition and 'atomistic' individualism.

It might well be true that the rising commercial classes found liberal ideas attractive because they tended to dissolve the older precapitalist order of society. But the connection to capitalism doesn't seem sufficient to me to explain why liberalism came to dominate.

The next criticism of liberalism is this:

A major challenge for liberal philosophers has been to explain why individual freedom should have priority over competing values such as community or perfectionism.

The phraseology here takes liberalism on its own terms. What liberal philosophers argue for is a particular understanding of freedom, one based on individual autonomy. So what needs to be asked is why liberals believe that individual autonomy should have priority over competing values such as community.

According to the entry, liberals give two main defences for prioritising individual "freedom". Kantian liberals believe that we are defined as humans by our autonomy and therefore to restrict autonomy is to treat people as being less than fully human:

Kantian liberals, for example, argue that the capacity for rational autonomy is the highest capacity humans possess, and so is worthy of inherent respect. To restrict someone's freedom of choice, on this Kantian view, is to treat them as less than a fully mature and responsible human being, and this is wrong, regardless of the desirable or undesirable social consequences that might follow.

As I've pointed out at this site many times, the undesirable social consequences of making autonomy the overriding good are many and severe. So severe that it would make a lot more sense instead to balance autonomy with a range of other goods. The Kantian approach is not without its critics:

This Kantian view has been very influential in the liberal tradition. However, it rests on a controversial claim about the nature of moral value and moral respect...many critics argue that using the state to promote the Kantian ideal of rational autonomy is as 'sectarian' as using the state to promote Protestantism.

Indeed. The modern liberal state, as noted above, is radically and intrusively ideological.

Critics of the Kantian approach argue that liberals should therefore avoid appealing to the value of autonomy, and instead defend liberalism simply as the only viable basis for peaceful coexistence in culturally and religiously plural societies.

Kantian liberals respond, however, that without appealing to the value of individual autonomy, there is no reason why coexistence between groups should take the form of guaranteeing the rights of individuals. Why not just allow each group in society to organise itself as it sees fit...

The Kantians have a point. If the underlying value of a society is "peaceful existence" then why would you adopt liberalism in the first place? Australia was a relatively unified society one hundred years ago. There weren't great schisms in society. If you had wanted a peaceful society, then it would have been best to let Australia develop along non-liberal lines.

Peacefulness doesn't catch the underlying dynamic of liberalism. After all, it's not as if liberals argue that society has unfortunately become so diverse and multicultural that peaceful existence is threatened and liberalism is required as a remedy. The liberal argument is very different. Liberals tend to argue that a traditionally unified society is boring or illegitimate and that such a society should be transformed by a deliberate policy of diversity or multiculturalism and that this more diverse society will add vibrancy etc.

There's one more criticism of liberalism that I'll finish on:

critics argue that the unfettered exercise of individual choice will undermine the forms of family and community life which help develop people's capacity for choice and provide people with meaningful options. On this view, liberalism is self-defeating - liberals privilege individual rights, even when this undermines the social conditions which make individual freedoms valuable.

In particular, what happens if making individual autonomy paramount dissolves communal institutions and identities? Is the freedom to be an atomised consumer as valuable as the freedom to live as a man, or as an Englishman, or as a husband and father?

In other words, there is likely to be a more significant freedom for the individual if autonomy is balanced with a range of other important goods, including those relating to family life and communal identity.

The Oxford Companion does make one last criticism of liberalism. It's a very good but lengthy one, so I'll leave it to a future post.

Identity lite

Liberals believe that they are creating a pluralistic society. If there is a multiplicity of social forms, then individuals can autonomously choose from these to self-determine their own lives.

But there's a catch. In practice, it's difficult to have significant and conflicting forms of social life and identity sharing the same space. And so liberals have to find ways to overcome this problem.

One way is to "privatise" serious forms of belief and identity. For instance, religion can be held to be a personal matter only, and not something that is to inform public life. But this then begins the process of making such belief matter less, of confining it to a more limited sphere and role.

The process is ongoing. For instance, a French High Commissioner declared recently that,

True integration will be when Catholics name their child Mohammed.

So it's not thought good enough for Catholics to accept that the public square will be secular. Now the test of a successful pluralism is that they identify with another religion closely enough to name their children after its prophet.

A serious religious identity has to weaken further, so that it is "fluid" and can mix with other religions.

See the problem here? Pluralism comes at the cost of a trivialisation of identity. Instead of the chance to participate fully in a significant tradition of your own, you get the "identity lite" option of participating at a level that doesn't draw too much of a line between different traditions.

There's a similar problem when it comes to an ethnic identity. There are plenty of liberal politicians who allow themselves to have an ethnic identity. But this is assumed to be a personal matter, not relevant to public policy.

If I remember correctly, Sir Robert Menzies, the long-serving Liberal Party PM, declared himself to be "British to the bootstraps". But he regarded this as merely a personal sentiment.

Former Liberal Party PM, John Howard, put it this way:

It's perfectly possible for an Anglo-Celtic Australian who sort of has a lot of reverence to the traditional institutions of the country, and the traditional characteristics of Australia, and to want to hang on to those, to be completely tolerant and colour-blind and so on.

This is the more "conservative" interpretation of pluralism and non-discrimination. It's hopelessly ideological. It requires limiting your identity to the personal realm, so that you can't make the defence of the mainstream tradition a part of public policy. And it requires a commitment to creating ethnic "pluralism" (mass immigration) and dampening or eroding the existing mainstream identity to fit in with such pluralism.

So this "conservative" approach is contradictory: you can't "hang onto" an existing identity and at the same time be ideologically committed to liberal pluralism.

And what are the more radical options? Consider what the leading politicians of liberal Sweden have to say on the matter:

Our prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said the following soon after he was elected in 2006:

“The core Swedish is only barbarism. The rest of the development has come from outside.”

Mona Sahlin, now the party leader of the Social Democrats, which is the largest party in Sweden with about 35% of the votes, said in 2002:

“I think that what makes so many Swedes envious of immigrant groups is, you have a culture, an identity, a history, something that binds you. And what do we have? Mid-summers’ eve and such ridiculous things.”

The party leader of the Center Party, who is in the current government coalition, said the following:

“It is really not the Swedes that built Sweden. It was people that came from abroad.”

This is an ideological attack on the mainstream Swedish identity. It's obviously untrue that others and not the Swedes developed Sweden. It is obviously a lie that the Swedish have no culture of their own. So why say such things?

One reason is that it weakens Swedish identity to the point of allowing pluralism. If the Swedes have no culture and did not develop their own society, then there is no common achievement that they might take pride in and sustain a positive sense of identity with.

So note what pluralism has led to in Sweden. Leading politicians there openly adopt a "we are nothing" attitude. It is not even an "identity lite" but a non-identity. The mainstream identity has been trivialised out of existence.

This is what an ideological commitment to pluralism leads toward. Without it, the mainstream might not be so accepting of being reduced to the status of one amongst many or the loss of their long-term viability, and there might be issues of successfully integrating the newly arrived "other".

I'm not suggesting that pluralism is wrong in all instances. But I think it's clear that the liberal approach to pluralism is misconceived. The end result is not to give individuals a multiplicity of significant beliefs and identities to fashion a life from, but to increasingly trivialise and undermine such aspects of life.

And what tends to replace them is a single, uniform commitment to liberalism itself. The pluralistic society becomes the politically correct one.