The case for and against Liberalism

As a system that can stand on its own

Housekeeping: We just launched a new show, Run the Numbers, by the great CJ Gustafson of Mostly Metrics. Check it out. I hope this is the leading show for CFOs /finance folks among others and we’re to create more category-leading shows. We also re-posted my 1:1 interview with Vivek Ramaswamy.

The defense of liberalism

We’ve discussed liberalism quite a bit recently, we’ll do a recap here. The great problem in society is how you deal with conflict. We use markets to determine who has economic resources. We use democracy to determine who has political power. And we use science to determine who has truth. Quoting Jonathan Rauch from his great book Kindly Inquisitors which we’ve covered previously:

"A market game is an open-ended, decentralized process for allocating resources & legitimizing possession. A democracy game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing the use of force. A science game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing belief.

In biological evolution, no species is spared the rigors of competition—nor are the participants in capitalism, democracy, science. No matter who you are, you must conduct your business in the currency of dollars, votes, or criticism—no special fiat, no personal authority.

Much as creatures compete for food, so entrepreneurs compete for business, candidates for votes, & hypotheses for supporters. As in biological evolution, no outcome is fixed or final—nor is it in liberalism. There is always another trade, another election, another hypothesis."

There are a few objections to liberalism: 

The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who's right. 

The Egalitarian Principle: All persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect. 

The Humanitarian Principle: The first priority is "cause no harm."

Fundamentalists say that science is wrong. Egalitarians say that we are prioritizing science over other ways of knowing. Humanitarians say that certain speech is hurtful. Liberals say that subjecting ideas to public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right).

Fundamentalism is totalitarian (“Do what I want because I say so”). Epistemological egalitarianism justifies arguments like "creationism=evolution" Humanitarianism sacrifice society for an individual (e.g gay marriage took forever because people were offended by it).

"Under liberalism, you can do anything you wish to test a statement, as long as you follow the rules: 1- The system may not fix the outcome in advance or for good (no final say). 2- The system may not distinguish between participants (no personal authority)."

Those who worry about the death of liberalism worry that the old principle of the Inquisition is being revived: people who hold harmful opinions should be punished for the good of society. They worry that if speech is considered violence, so will science or math.

They also worry about epistemological relativism. Liberal science insists on freedom of belief and speech, but not freedom of knowledge. For example, Christian scientists who unsuccessfully treat their sick children with prayer are charged with manslaughter, while parents who try surgery aren't.

Liberal science is egalitarian. It's true that some people have been systematically denied access, but that represents not the failure of liberalism but the failure to embrace it. Shunning science for being used incorrectly is like shunning democracy because certain people couldn’t vote.

The reason liberal science is important is not because we're all liberal, tolerant people at heart—most of us aren't. In fact, we're all mostly fundamentalists at heart. We think we're right. Liberalism protect us from our totalitarian instincts —to demand people agree with us.

So yes, classical liberals reply, it’s true that liberalism can lead to certain kinds of illiberalism, but the solution is to reinforce liberal principles, they argue, not throw out the baby out with the bathwater.

The counter to that is, what if liberalism has a structural deficiency where it can’t defend itself. As we ended our last piece:

“For those liberals who are saying, no no no, we can be liberal, we don’t have to be communist: aren't you struck by the fact that so many smart American liberals went for communism in the 1920's and 1930's and didn't get really free of it until the 80's (American economics textbooks in the 80's still expected the USSR to surpass the US), and now so many smart American liberals have gone for equity-based progressivism without a second thought? In all seriousness, doesn't that suggest that communism then and equity-based progressivism now aren't violations of liberalism, but rather liberalism taken to its logical conclusions?

If these are battles of illiberalism vs liberalism, why does liberalism not have much stronger defense mechanisms? Why do so many liberals go for the illiberal positions so enthusiastically?

As Thiel says, perhaps liberals today are like the Marxists of decades ago who said ‘Real communism has never been tried’.”

Here’s an argument as to why, quoted from N.S Lyons’ great review of Fukuyama:

1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights.

2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights.

3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights.

4. Return to step 1 above and repeat

Here’s a longer-form argument, taken from a conversation I once had with the brilliant Eric Weinstein:

Imagine you are on the beach and see a very high net and a ball with two teams on either side of the net ready to play. Say three members each. I would naturally guess most of us would assume we were looking at beach volleyball.

We ask to join, but we quickly learn that the beach is in Southeast Asia where they have a different game entirely that shares the same basic equipment description called “Takraw”. It is a totally different game. Effectively martial arts volleyball played with the feet.

Well that is my impression of how critical theory discussions seem to work.

It’s not our game. But it is played with the same configurations. And because it looks similar, we are fooled into arguing with it under our rules. So, we are calling penalties under volleyball rules and they call penalties under Takraw rules. We walk away thinking they are beaten...but we find them popping champagne corks over their victories.

Moral: we are winning but only under our assumptions of the rules. This is not working simply calling their game and referees dumb.

We first have to acknowledge that their game is:

A) Different. It is focused on power. 

B) Parasitic on our game and on logic. 

C) Extremely fit in the Darwinian sense.

That is why it’s ingenius. Once those points are understood we can see that the problem is the difference in refereeing, rules, and the fact that both games are played in the exact same configuration. They both take place in Universities. They take place in journals. They are competitive at a fitness level in our traditional niche.

You can’t run their game (critical theory) and our game (liberalism) at once. Without our game being destroyed. And our game is the one that built all the infrastructure. It’s the house the master built. 

Our game: Linear algebra, law of the excluded middle, electron orbitals, code that compiles, repeatable experiments, Quantum Field Theory, electrical circuits....etc

Things that lead to hard notions of correct vs incorrect. Games that we can mostly self referee. It’s the scientific method as opposed to "lived experience". We don’t spend a lot of time in our game in conversations about whether a tiger is socially constructed or whether an electron is heteronormative because it is depicted as a hard little ball which denies its divine feminine nature as a wave. We don’t participate in conversations about decolonizing modal logic. And so we’ll lose every game refereed by critical theory folks. But we’ll win the same game when it is refereed and scored by our classically liberal folks. It’s all about the rules, the referees and the prizes to be won.

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The real reason liberalism is susceptible to illiberalism is because liberalism tries to achieve both freedom and equity and ends up sacrificing the former to try to achieve the latter. Freedom and equity are inherent tension, you can only optimize along one of these dimensions. Figuring out the efficient frontier is the task for societies that want to avoid the problems stemming from being too unbalanced on one side or the other.