The beauty and the beast of liberalism
There is a beauty to liberalism: a certain degree of
modesty and respect for our limitations as human beings, especially our
knowledge; a righteous scepticism towards the ability of bureaucracies and
control freaks to prescribe what is right and good for the rest of us.
In the real world of here and now however, liberalism has
jumped over the fence of moderation and is pronouncing here there and
everywhere what is best for everyone, actively prescribing huge changes in the
social fabric of modern societies while also, notably, demanding strict social
conformity.
It is perhaps worth invoking John Stuart Mill’s famous
‘harm principle’ here:
“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
This principle seems frightfully out of date now: as a platform for government, it is minimalist and clearly inadequate. But it also makes little sense when pressed up against the reality of modern life, in which we are compelled to do all sorts of things whether we are doing harm or not. Moreover, it is liberals that we find in the vanguard of attempts to control and compel us further down pathways of change.
Liberalism is now ideology. It uses the same language
found in Marxism and other ideologies, of inevitabilities, overarching societal
needs and a conviction that it has the answers. It has come a long way since
Mill.
For economic liberal ideology, you need look no further
than the powerful aviation lobby, which has done a job on the media, getting it
to accept without question that London airport expansion is inevitable and it
is only a matter of where – Heathrow, Gatwick, both, Boris Island?
As the former CBI head and trade minister Digby Jones
explained it on the Daily Politics (43 mins in) on 13th May, “the nation” “needs”
to expand both Heathrow and Gatwick.
“If you want Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle and to Frankfurt take the hub traffic, the best thing to do is don’t expand Heathrow....we need both.”“No is an answer, because the nation and especially the airlines and business, will know where they stand. The political class, because they want popularity, will have basically said, ‘let’s be a second-rate nation – over to you Germany.’ That’s what ‘No’ means.”
You can see the underlying contempt for democracy characteristic
of the ideologue, for the message here is that not doing stuff that people
don’t like is actually bad for us, the people. False consciousness isn’t an
exclusively Marxist idea.
It reminds me of a lovely passage in the former Labour
minister Chris Mullin’s diaries from 2000 in which he attends an IPPR seminar
on airport expansion at which a London Chamber of Commerce 'android' says:
"We can't afford to opt out of the
21st Century” - to which Mullin replies, "At this rate the 21st Century won't be worth living in."
Whether Britain’s destiny is to become one big airport
remains to be seen. At least it will be easy to leave. If being a second-rate
nation means being a democratic one untroubled by constant noise, pollution and
stress, then it doesn’t sound so bad.
The social liberal ideology of diversity is not a million
miles away from this, for it takes as a matter of faith a need for constant
change, to replace what is not diverse with what is. Superficially neutral on
forms, it favours change over sameness and familiarity, uprooting rather than
settling, rupturing rather than nurturing and maintaining. It is for fixing
situations by importing from elsewhere rather than respecting what we have:
growth by acquisition not organic.
As the Dutch Labour Party thinker Paul Scheffer has
written:
“It ought to go without saying that an open society is characterised by divergent outlooks, lifestyles and beliefs, but even in a liberal democracy there are limits: not everything that’s different is valuable. Embracing diversity indiscriminately is tantamount to protecting traditional habits and customs from critical scrutiny.”
That unthinking embrace reminds me of what the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz called: “a
vacuous tolerance that engaging nothing, changes nothing”.
There is a version of the good here. Deriving values from
facts, the ideology of diversity takes as its core value a mathematical
conception of variation. From an ethical point of view it is completely lacking
in content.
The economic and social forms of liberalism constantly
intersect, overlap and support each other in seeking to tear up existing forms
of life, creating change and forcing people and the wider natural world to
adjust or variously face existential defeat and actual extinction.
As Karl Marx put it rather well about capitalism,
“All that is solid melts into the air.”
We could do worse than revisit Mill’s original liberal
‘harm principle’ here; for though it leaves a lot to be desired as a platform for
government, it is rather more interesting and worthwhile when reconceived as an
ethical principle to help frame how we deal with diverse others. The idea that we should let
others do what they like as long as they don’t harm anyone else seems like a
pretty basic foundation for any decent society or state, not least one as
diverse as Britain today.
Take the Austin Mitchell affair
as an example of how this works. By invoking the word ‘rapists’ to describe
Pfizer’s approach to AstraZeneca, the veteran MP has drawn the full force of
conservative and supposedly liberal opinion demanding him to apologise,
including from his own Labour side. He is apparently offending against diversity, but this
is an abstract conception. In practice he has done no one any harm, with the
possible exception of Pfizer’s board of directors – and I think they are
perfectly capable of handling themselves.
At worst, he is ‘guilty’ of using language poorly, and if there is a
politician not guilty of that once in a while, I am yet to be made aware of
them.
The attempt to police speech in this way, attempted widely on the supposedly liberal-left of politics, is profoundly illiberal.
Thinking about the harm principle ethically puts the onus
on the individual and institutions to refrain from harming others. Good and
bad, harm and non-harming can be pretty subjective though, so in practice the
principle means holding back and letting things be when it is not clear and obvious
that harm is being done, or where there are reasonable competing conceptions of
whether an action is harmful or not.
If I insult your religion or your religious/non-religious
beliefs, I may make you feel bad, but I am not actively harming you; I am
attacking an idea. However if I attack you
for being religious, then I am stepping over a line, for I am attacking you and deliberately attempting to harm you;
you have a right to your beliefs and I am doing you harm by attacking you for
them.
A version of liberalism like this does not prescribe what
and how people should be, as long as they do no harm. It lets people be as they
are, and develop as they want to develop. It is therefore perfectly compatible
with existing and diverse forms of life, as it doesn’t privilege certain forms
over others but rather privileges ethical behaviour.
Ideological liberalism is very different, and arguably
tears up the foundations of what it means to be liberal. It does prescribe. It
imposes change, in economic and social life. It holds up diversity as a value
in itself. It seeks to irrupt existing
forms of life, to uproot what is rooted – land, people and the natural world –
to discontinue or discard them if necessary for a general good manifested in
the latest GDP figures for example. Both economic and social liberalisms as
manifested in our public life now are faith-based ideologies, intersecting and
complementary, and dependent on an ethic of sacrifice of the natural and human
world that is mostly kept hidden from view.
Comments
Post a Comment
All comments, however critical, will be accepted as long as they are not personal and/or abusive.