Liberalism's Success Breeds Moral Decline, Author Argues
Why Liberalism Failed
The author is Patrick J. Deneen, a professor in the political science department at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. He has also taught at Princeton University and Georgetown University.
The book is dense and the material runs long, so I’ll split my notes across several posts.
The Argument
Liberalism (or liberal democracy) emerged after the medieval aristocratic order and swallowed the world. In the 19th century a current hostile to liberalism took shape, and various alternative systems of rule were explored (communism among them), but liberalism defeated all of them and seized hegemony as the world’s sole political system. Even so, several distortions have surfaced one after another in recent years, and the time has come once again for liberalism to be shaken. The main points are “ever-widening inequality,” “individuals growing weaker while the state grows stronger,” and “moral decline.” The gravest concern is that these are not situations liberalism has failed to prevent, but situations liberalism’s very success has produced — liberalism was destined from the start to end up this way, yet the world has arrived here without discarding it or building a sufficient alternative, and left alone, it will keep going.
I’ll organize my notes here around “moral decline.”
How Impossible a Game Democracy Is
Plato, Socrates, the “noble lie.” The ruling class deceives the lower classes, and if it deceives itself as well, that is the ideal system. Liberalism was the realization of this.
Edward Purcell Jr. (1973) pointed to the low intelligence scores of soldiers during the First World War as a warning about democracy’s fragility. The decline in citizens’ education and the thinning of public spirit are exactly what liberalism’s success looks like. Having produced a foolish populace this way, the system grants people freedom alone while politics tilts toward elite leadership. Bureaucratic rule.
Aristotle described democracy as “degeneration.” Recent liberal elites have taken up that claim too. Voters are uninformed and ignorant, so isn’t a system fully managed by elites the ideal one?
Political Conflict as Strategic Entertainment for Wasting Energy
Progressive liberalism, for example, excludes classical liberalism and designs a new state that advances individualism through state intervention while insisting on staying entirely hands-off regarding morals and lifestyle habits.
Isn’t it time we noticed that both sides are ultimately doing the same thing?
The waste generated by exploiting this structure of conflict controls citizens, keeping their gaze from ever turning to the essence of the matter. The prime example is the periodic wasting of the populace’s energy through elections. People absorb themselves in choosing between one of the two major parties, and that gives them the feeling that everything has been settled.
The Fated Confrontation Between Liberal Democracy and Nature
Francis Bacon: the idea that humans dominate nature.
John Dewey: the savage and the civilized. The savage merely adapts to nature. The civilized overcome it.
Postmodernism holds that nature isn’t such a big deal and that we can escape its influence. Differences of race or birth therefore carry no meaning (this sounds good on the surface but gets the reasoning wrong). It becomes illegitimate for the defeated to blame anything else — they brought it on themselves. In other words, this affirms that those who are discriminated against are not entirely without fault of their own.
The 19th century: Rousseau, Marx, James Mill, Richard Rorty. Human malleability. Affirmation of biotechnology that improves human beings.
To triumph over nature, technological progress was deemed essential, and unleashing self-interest was deemed the correct path to advancing technology. As a result, the age of paying the price for technology’s triumph has arrived. And yet we still believe science will ultimately triumph over nature.
The Loneliness That Liberalism Brings
Stephen Marche: we are choosing to become lonely by preference. Separation into suburbs. Front porches disappear, backyard patios become popular.
Smartphones have made it extremely difficult to secure time for reading, reflection, and meditation. Technology that was supposed to connect us instead produces isolation. What was supposed to be freedom has left us feeling powerless, lacking confidence, and lonely.
Sherry Turkle on social media: connected yet lonely. It undermines the physical proximity and shared responsibility that community requires. We no longer even know how to build bonds.
Culture as a Prescription Drug
UC President Clark Kerr (1963) marked the disappearance of the university’s founding ideal, sifting research outcomes by whether they are useful or not.
Top universities were originally meant to serve as the front line of anti-culture.
What universities were originally “supposed to do”: study epics, masterpieces of tragedy and comedy, the reflections of philosophers and theologians, the Bible, and so on. Instead we have a curriculum built purely to produce the human resources the practical market demands.
“Refinement” requires cultivation (from its Latin root).
Aristotle, “Politics”: correct practices around food and sexual conduct must first be instilled as custom.
It is because of the convention we call culture that people can engage with nature responsibly.
Placing weight on custom over theory is itself one form of anti-culture as a countermeasure.
Do universities feel responsible for the Lehman Shock or economic crises? The ones who pulled the trigger were students who graduated from top universities with excellent grades, took jobs at top companies, and faithfully carried out the template they themselves believed was “good.”
Talented people are drawn in from the regions, processed by the university, and then exported to yet another place or country. The regions grow weaker and lose their strength.
The Liberal Arts
The liberal arts were originally meant to be what free people, liberated from various constraints, should devote themselves to above all. Now they are looked down upon, treated as a slave’s discipline. People do nothing but learn how to make money and the various techniques for doing so. Before the modern era, freedom was believed to be generated only at the end of a discipline in which one cultivates virtue by acquiring a liberal education. Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Cicero, Dante — all, despite their differences, intend the same thing. Human beings are not born free. Acting exactly as one pleases is, if anything, a state of servitude — selfish and in defiance of conscience.
Statements by America’s second president, and the mottos of early public universities at the nation’s founding, reveal a strong awareness of the liberal arts.
The Decline in the Quality of Character
Gratitude toward the past and obligation toward the future disappear, and pursuing immediate gratification becomes the norm. Far from being the source that cultivates virtue, “culture” collapses into synonymy with pleasure, vulgarity, and distraction, and overflows with harmful behavior aimed at self-maximization that promotes consumption, desire, and indifference.
Despising the past throws the present and ourselves into the trash bin as garbage, in the eyes of people of the future. Liberalism does exactly this.
Tocqueville, “the fragmentation of time.” It becomes difficult to build something toward a distant future. Gaining much in the short term suits human instinct, so it tends to be prioritized. Individualism makes it impossible to understand what one means to people of the future (the fragmentation of the chain).
Hobbes, “social contract theory.” Tradition and culture are excluded as illegitimate. Norms vanish and disorder follows.
Nicholas Carr: as time spent on the internet increases, synaptic rewiring in the brain progresses and patience disappears (people become irritated when screens don’t switch quickly enough). Decline in language function, memory, and concentration follows.
People turn to racism precisely because there is nothing else to confront — no healthy conflict between communities, no disagreement of opinion within a community (which, being within a community, must be reconciled). The only conflict left that’s easy to grasp is one based on skin color or race, so people turn to that.
When hearts drift away from democracy, politics comes to be perceived as something distant, a symbol of corruption. This stress gets directed into opposition movements, but those involved do not actually possess any alternative social philosophy — they are merely venting anger and resentment.
None of this stems from liberalism having been betrayed or left incomplete. It is a fully expected negative spiral in which the more faithfully liberalism is followed, the sicker things become.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/10/371/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.