Some thoughts on liberal universalism

This entry was inspired by a coincidence of two pieces of writing that were published at more or less same time, late March-early April. David Goodhart’s essay on left and right appeared in Prospect, while Frank Furedi’s two pieces were part of his regular output.

Goodhart’s argument is about what the left needs to do if it is to recover the territory it has lost to right, but what is equally interesting (in this context) is his understanding of what being leftwing means in our time. To be fair, both writers are largely embedded in an Anglo-Saxon thought-world without being particularly aware of this, so Goodhart’s model of the left is far more UK-US centred than he recognises, but this is less important than it might seem, given that what happens in the US arrives in one form or another in Europe too, though frequently it arrives in the UK first.

In sum, Goodhart’s assumption is that liberal individualism is universalist, suspicious of national loyalties – indeed, they probably elide the distinction between national and nationalist – put individual freedom above collective loyalties and are uneasy with tradition, authority and the sacred. Further, he writes, those on the left “are usually deeply concerned with social justice and unfairness and also suspicious of appeals to religion or to human nature to justify any departure from equal treatment”. His definition of liberalism is committed to fairness and justice and, similarly, to eliminating harm and suffering; these are the two principal moral intuitions that he attributes to liberalism.  Conservatism adds group loyalty, authority and respect for the sacred. Note that his understanding of the last is remote from Durkheim’s sacralisation and is defined by Goodhart as being “about the idea that humans have a nobler, more spiritual side and that life has a higher purpose than pleasure or profit”. Durkheim’s concept of the sacred, for the record, is that every human collectivity will insist that certain areas are beyond evaluation, as taboo and as dangerous, sacralising them thereby. The left does this just as much as the right, so, by way of example, it is entirely taboo to claim that men and women are hard-wired for certain abilities, as it must be if all humans have the same cognitive equipment and the rest is epiphenomenal.

Goodhart identifies “sociocentrism” as a legacy of the past, one that he believes the liberal universalists treat with disapproval, as they logically must if they believe in a single humanity in which differentiation is insignificant. The problem is that such differentiation is not insignificant at all, far from it, indeed it keeps reappearing – having been expelled with a pitchfork, yet it always returns (tamen usque recurret, to quote the original). Basically group loyalty lives and universalism has no idea what to do with it. In a historical perspective, it never could. The thought that numerous individuals, if not all, prefer to come together in groups and form collectivities as a key constitutive element of their individual identities – the collective and the individual simultaneously – is not only real, but adds up to such a powerful challenge to liberals that they have preferred to side-step it.

That, however, is not where the gravamen of Furedi’s counterargument is located. His proposition is, in reality, far more damaging to the universalist liberals than their failure to accept the wider moral intuitions of the right. No, where the blow is devastating is in his charge (my formulation, not his) that if the liberals believe that they are living in a free society, one where individuals have extensive capacity to determine their lives and are endowed with agency – then, they are wholly and utterly mistaken. Furedi has long been a (fairly) lone voice in arguing that the state has established control over areas of life that have a far-reaching impact on individual freedom, the very thing that, per Goodhart, liberal democracy has provided.

Furedi’s charge is wide-ranging. He notes, inter alia, the creeping tolerance of intolerance – paradox or not – that certain forms of tolerance, like the identification of forms “hate speech” and racism, are suppressed, remarking, “the metaphor zero tolerance also implies notions of zero-judgment and zero discretion. These are policies that are meant to be applied arbitrarily and punish without regard to circumstances.” Then, there is medicalisation and consequent therapeutic intervention in people’s lives by social, psychological and medical professionals who impose their ideas on others without appeal. The secrecy of children’s courts in Britain and their complete arbitrariness is a particularly egregious example. The tendency to pathologise human relationships, notably as between men and women, is underpinned by “modern society’s intense suspicion of the way human beings conduct themselves in their relationships”. In effect, what Furedi is arguing, and this is irrefutable, is that the modern state is not only exercising growing vigilance over society, but has established an official vigilantism, thereby seriously eroding citizenship.

The rise of the UK’s surveillance state is another illustration of the same phenomenon, one that the liberals tend to ignore. There is a fundamental dilemma at the heart of this development anyway, the impossible trade-off between security and freedom. This is as clear an illustration of Isaiah Berlin’s incommensurability of certain values as one could hope for. The liberal left looks at it, maybe utters some feeble protests, tacitly sees that there is nothing it can do about it and carries on, preferring not to deal with such a radical contradiction and threat to liberal values. The foregoing can be extended in yet another direction. Liberal universalists are notionally committed to individual freedom and agency. This ought to mean that liberalism should be entirely hostile to schemes of social engineering. The evidence indicates that contrary. In many areas the state intervenes and liberals simply accept, if not, indeed, support it. The inconsistency is passed over in silence.

In one important respect social engineering projects have been a part of the left’s thought-world since the Enlightenment. There was and is a normative quality to liberalism, or if not a quality then certainly a temptation that liberals act as moral legislators of the universe, as cogently set out in Zygmunt Bauman’s Legislators and Interpreters. Until recently a central plank in the left’s platform was the redistribution of material goods relying on the state as rational actor to secure this. This appears to have been superseded by a shift towards the redistribution of values, but again relying on the mechanism of state power and mostly without countervailing mechanisms to empower society and the individual.

Then, whereas the old left focused on class as the primary cleavage, liberal universalism tends to forget about class, indeed it is uncomfortable with such cleavages, as it must logically be – all humans are human first and foremost, not members of a class or ethnic group or anything else that could be divisive. The result that, in consequence, the (new) liberal left ignores the reality and aspirations of a sizeable section of society is neither here nor there. This abandonment of these social strata explains their positive response to the blandishments of the populist left and right, something that the liberal left can only condemn.

Furedi remarks, further, that the emergence of  “the idea that human beings are damaged, that men are innately violent”, is a proposition that is untested and unproved, and for that matter directly contradicts the assumptions of human goodness that underlie liberal universalism. On the other hand, it is extremely helpful in legitimating the constant intervention, regulation and organising undertaken by the state, despite the self-regarding narrative of a commitment to democracy and freedom.

A couple of thoughts are worth adding to this debate. The first is about contingency. Neither the liberals nor the state regulators appear capable of recognising their contingency, their own time-bound and space-bound reality, which incidentally also means culture-bound. They act as if they genuinely did have access to the philosopher’s stone (with or without the help of Harry Potter), so their sincerity is not to be doubted. Except that sincerity is an aggravating condition, because it makes the bearers and agents of these ideas particularly resistant to counterargument. Try debating with a bureaucrat about the regulation in the name of which she is about to deny you something. No, there is no contingency around, those involved are acting in the name of an absolute and refuse to recognise that it has only been defined as an absolute in a thoroughly arbitrary fashion.

There is a deep-seated irony in all this. The liberal left sees itself as the legatee of the Enlightenment and as the guarantor and bearer of rationality in the world. This may be so, but there is one little problem. In the post-Enlightenment world there are not supposed to be absolutes, those went out with religion, did they not? Out through the door, back through the window, it would seem.

The reliance on there being “innate” qualities is also interesting, not to say alarming. On the one hand, liberalism (as defined here) excoriates racism and biological factors as the basis of difference and, for that matter, extends the concept of racism to pretty much anything that it dislikes. The acceptance of the innate, however, completely undermines this excommunication of the biological and, for all practical purposes, says that, yes, well, racism is dreadful, but then there are circumstances – we say what these are – when it’s quite ok. Note too that the alleged innate violence attributed to men is tacitly a feature only of whites; attributing it to blacks would really challenge one taboo too far. And that is what shows up not only the arbitrary quality of the enterprise, but its contradictory nature and, above all, its contingency, the one that its perpetrators will never recognise. Why should they, after all it provides them with a decidedly useful addition to their discursive armoury?

Sch. Gy.