This week’s Upstream is with Joe Lonsdale. This week’s Moment of Zen is with Michelle Tandler. This week’s Cognitive Revolution is with Riley Goodside. This is the second part on our series on liberalism. Liberalism is supposed to be about individualism and freedom from the state, but in this piece I want to discuss how liberalism has actually expanded the state.
Having thought about it, I really don't think you can justify the idea that liberalism is about increasing the importance of the individual relative to the importance of organisations of like minded people, gathering for a mutually agreed purpose. The growth of liberalism went along with - and can't be separated from - the growth of clubs, the growth of mutual aid societies, the growth of nonconformist churches and religions, the growth of organisations of all kinds that were explicity unaligned with the state.
If you want a word to describe rampant individualism that scorns the importance of human connection, that word shouldn't be liberalism. Particularly when you're invoking Locke and the origins of liberalism. I think the real history of liberalism, and its current reality, tells a different and more interesting story.
"When Christians wanted to change something, they prayed. When humanists want to change something, they pass a law."
Well, since God doesn't exist, passing laws and policies is a hell of a lot more effective at creating observable, meaningful change than thoughts and prayers! How effective and coherent said laws and policies are, of course, is a whole other matter entirely (e.g. NEPA, gun control laws).
"Their historical focus was on individualism as the best defense against the State, and their high point was resistance to 20th Century aggressive collectivism, but once the cold war ended those commitments to individualism waned as well. Freedom is most worth fighting for when there’s an enemy that doesn’t believe in it."
I dunno, I think one can argue that we have such enemies today, in the form of both the "woke" left and "dissident" or "traditionalist" right (e.g. Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher). I'm not convinced that excessive state power (which certainly needs to be more clearly defined) is due to anything but "mission creep" and a misunderstanding of liberalism - in one of the articles you linked to, it appears Legutko himself says just as much.
Not sure about this. The medieval European state was far more totalitarian than any modern liberal state. It tried to control what you wore, what you did in your free time, what you said, what you thought. And largely succeeded in doing so. The penalty for refusing to follow the state religion was death. Other organisations (guilds, religious associations, etc) weren't separate from the state, they were either part of it or they were persecuted.
The growth of liberalism was, pretty unarguably I think, linked to states for the first time allowing organisations to exist peacefully even though their aims were not supported by the state - or even where their aims were antithetical to the aims of the state.
And while modern liberal state are large, are they larger than the alternative? I think it's self-evident that China has a more powerful, more totalitarian state than the US, for example, and if your metrics for the size and power of the state are telling you otherwise, then that should lead you to view those metrics with a certain caution.
Possibly some of this is obscured by the fact that levels of taxation, for instance, have increased - but then the medieval state was constrained in its tax take by the poverty of its populace. If they could have taken more, they would have done; as it was, they took so much that their subjects were often on the edge of starvation. Or pushed over it.
👍The arc of history bends towards Big Brother😢
Having thought about it, I really don't think you can justify the idea that liberalism is about increasing the importance of the individual relative to the importance of organisations of like minded people, gathering for a mutually agreed purpose. The growth of liberalism went along with - and can't be separated from - the growth of clubs, the growth of mutual aid societies, the growth of nonconformist churches and religions, the growth of organisations of all kinds that were explicity unaligned with the state.
If you want a word to describe rampant individualism that scorns the importance of human connection, that word shouldn't be liberalism. Particularly when you're invoking Locke and the origins of liberalism. I think the real history of liberalism, and its current reality, tells a different and more interesting story.
"When Christians wanted to change something, they prayed. When humanists want to change something, they pass a law."
Well, since God doesn't exist, passing laws and policies is a hell of a lot more effective at creating observable, meaningful change than thoughts and prayers! How effective and coherent said laws and policies are, of course, is a whole other matter entirely (e.g. NEPA, gun control laws).
"Their historical focus was on individualism as the best defense against the State, and their high point was resistance to 20th Century aggressive collectivism, but once the cold war ended those commitments to individualism waned as well. Freedom is most worth fighting for when there’s an enemy that doesn’t believe in it."
I dunno, I think one can argue that we have such enemies today, in the form of both the "woke" left and "dissident" or "traditionalist" right (e.g. Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher). I'm not convinced that excessive state power (which certainly needs to be more clearly defined) is due to anything but "mission creep" and a misunderstanding of liberalism - in one of the articles you linked to, it appears Legutko himself says just as much.
Not sure about this. The medieval European state was far more totalitarian than any modern liberal state. It tried to control what you wore, what you did in your free time, what you said, what you thought. And largely succeeded in doing so. The penalty for refusing to follow the state religion was death. Other organisations (guilds, religious associations, etc) weren't separate from the state, they were either part of it or they were persecuted.
The growth of liberalism was, pretty unarguably I think, linked to states for the first time allowing organisations to exist peacefully even though their aims were not supported by the state - or even where their aims were antithetical to the aims of the state.
And while modern liberal state are large, are they larger than the alternative? I think it's self-evident that China has a more powerful, more totalitarian state than the US, for example, and if your metrics for the size and power of the state are telling you otherwise, then that should lead you to view those metrics with a certain caution.
Possibly some of this is obscured by the fact that levels of taxation, for instance, have increased - but then the medieval state was constrained in its tax take by the poverty of its populace. If they could have taken more, they would have done; as it was, they took so much that their subjects were often on the edge of starvation. Or pushed over it.