|
Liberal neutrality
Is liberalism politically necessary, because there’s too little agreement on basics? That’s what is said. Any attempt to enforce non-liberal views, special recognition of a particular religion for example, would be hopelessly divisive and require unacceptable coercion. Religious establishments have been in decline for a long time, and serious attempts to re-impose them today soon run into terminal difficulties, as seems to be happening even in Iran. That’s the natural consequence of better education, more communication, and greater social diversity. Or so runs the argument. The argument seems plausible because liberalism claims to impose nothing special, and because religious establishments have been in decline. It also seems puzzling, because the liberal claim is clearly false. Like any other political order liberalism has principles that it insists on although they could easily be disputed. One need not point to things as extreme as Dutch anti-discrimination law, which is crudely totalitarian. One need only point to liberalism’s effect in making some things easier and others all but impossible. If liberalism is bad for family coherence, why shouldn’t those who value the family view liberalization as imposition of anti-family views on the setting in which they live, and thus not neutral but aggressive? After all, the “freedom” that once allowed children to work long hours in textile mills is now viewed as no freedom at all. Why shouldn’t the “freedom” that deprives children of family life, or husbands and wives of social support in holding each other to their marital obligations, be viewed the same way? Many people do feel that way, of course. Their views don’t get publicized, however, even if they manage to articulate them persuasively, and they invariably lose. Why is that? One reason is that the public apparatus of knowledge, publicity and decision is against them. Liberalism favors formal public institutions like bureaucracies, universities and the mass media as much as it disfavors non-rationalized traditional arrangements like the family and religious faith. It follows that accredited experts, authorities and other talkers as a class strongly favor liberalism, and it is their views that get publicity and take effect in the process through which decisions are made. Another is that the freedoms liberalism grants are immediate, and favor those who are active, while the limitations it imposes arise more indirectly, and mostly affect one’s ability to rely on others. The loosening of family ties is again an example. Liberalism therefore favors the strong and energetic at the expense of the weak and dependent. The social liberalism of the rich and successful is notorious; the reason antiliberal measures are divisive is that those who oppose them are those who are in a position to make a fuss. These considerations go to the justice of the liberal cause, not to its continued success. Regardless of justice, why shouldn’t liberalism
continue to be uniformly successful in the future as in the recent past? If liberal societies continue to function tolerably well, there’s no
reason it shouldn’t. The question is whether that will happen. Liberal societies have been enormously successful. It seems doubtful that their
success will last for ever, however, if only for the crude reason that they seem unable to reproduce themselves physically or morally. Beyond
that, the hysteria of the EU ruling classes and their inability to discuss or even think about basic issues is a bad sign. A society can survive a
great deal, but not the loss by its ruling class of the ability to think. And recent events in Holland suggest just that may be happening. Email entry |