By “liberalism,” I mean a closely related set of systems of freedoms of a specific sort, those emphasizing and even `enforcing’ an individualism which in its moderate form is compatible with the traits of many northwestern Europeans and fewer other Europeans and—for the most part—far fewer others. [An example of enforcing individualism would be changes to property laws or inheritance laws to take away family powers and rights and create only judicial power and individual rights.]
In a sense, this essay is something of a fantasia, if not an outright fantasy, but it is a fantasia or fantasy which serves truth by writing of one decay process among several. For example, much of the larger-scale destruction of the West has been the results of actions taken not by economic liberals but rather by families or `gangs’ which are often from the established power-elite but sometimes from outsiders—there are feudal aspects but the modern West, until recently, has been too dynamic for any rigid feudalistic structure. Even the wealthy and powerful men who formed dynasties and companies of vassals lasting at least a couple of generations have had to compromise to some extent with a society dominated by liberals ranging from collectivist liberals to libertarians. There are many liberals lying between those extremes as well as a number of conservatives or traditionalists who hold some liberal beliefs even beyond the handful which are truths to be found in the Bible and other ancient writings or traditions. All of these liberals are ideologically closer to each other than they are to those who think in terms of family wealth and power.
In addition there is the complication that liberalism has likely proven to be of some use to those who are more family-centered or even feudalistic. Close-knit units would be devastatingly effective in a war-zone where the enemy soldiers were fighting as individuals seeking their own survival and their own prosperity.
I’ll bypass that greater reality to write of the liberalism of the early John D Rockefeller and the railroad magnates before they discovered how readily governments could be used to restrict access to markets. I’ll write as if the Rockefellers and Harrimans and Fords and Paynes and Whitneys and Walkers (including the Bushes) are naught but households from which individuals leave to pursue their own goals and interests and to which they return home to eat a good meal and socialize before resting up so they might pursue their individual careers or interests the next day.
Mostly, I’ll write of the liberalism of those conditioned to act as free individuals who truly “pursue their own goals and interests.” And I’ll freely admit that this liberalism has worked very much to seemingly good ends for much of the past few centuries. But freedoms were the goal and there were, and are, no logical constraints on the critique of power of communities over individuals (including the power of a ruling class over an enslaved class). The individual freedoms of liberalism became absolute moral goods, rather than goods within the moral order of greater communities, and many things, even marriages and the resulting families, were sacrificed to these greater goods. The decay processes powered by Western liberalism worked far more slowly than those powered by various flavors of Marxism but it remains possible the resulting decay was deeper and the path back to well-ordered and properly prosperous communities will be steeper and take longer to travel than the paths Russia and China are currently traveling.
Human being is what it is, what it was shaped to be by evolutionary forces acting in varying contexts throughout the world. Those evolutionary forces act in response to specific environments and not to select traits according to some philosophical program. If entities in this world are entangled with each other rather than being isolated, then we work from that point rather than ignoring reality and positing a complex entity created as if by magic, an entity born with a talent for freedoms not otherwise found in this world.
Of course, natural selection doesn’t force any living entity upon any one course. There will generally be more than one set of responses which can lead to survival of a family line. Along with the varying environments of the earth, this results in some variety of human traits. Anthropologists have found some general rules including these two which relate to agricultural activities and which seem to offer insight into the spectrum of human possibilities:
- Grain-farmers are relatively more individualistic.
- Rice-farmers are relatively more communalistic.
Northern Europeans are largely descended from populations which were selected in agricultural communities which depended strongly on grain. Northwestern Europeans are said by some modern anthropologists and geneticists to be even more individualistic than their cousins to the east in Northern Europe. It is even said that these Northwestern Europeans can be identified, perhaps defined, by their unique marriage habits—late marriages and higher rates of unmarried men and women and etc. Given such peoples, the political theories of Locke and Jefferson and others, the economic theories of Smith and others, and the resulting, full-blown Classical Liberalism of Bastiat and Mill and von Mises and many others, have strong initial plausibility. At the same time, we have to remember that these thinkers all lived in the modern age in which empirical exploration of this world was progressing rapidly and the most basic levels of reality were shown to be not quite, in some cases—not nearly, what they had been thought to be. This is a complex story in which some lines of empirical thought were adopted or at least celebrated only when useful to the political or cultural reformers or agitators of that day. On the whole, there was—to say the least—inadequate allowance for new discoveries about the nature of space and time and matter, human origins and the resulting nature of modern human beings, abstract and at least contingently absolute truths accessible to the human mind.
In broad terms, Christians and non-Christians in the West—including the main thinkers of Classical Liberalism have done their best to protect their favorite assumptions about this world, including human being, in order to protect their favorite doctrines. Sometimes, this protection was little more than willful blindness toward empirical knowledge not fully compatible with their favorite doctrines and sometimes that empirical knowledge seemed to strongly contradict those doctrines. Christians, following Augustine—see Lost in a Sexually Polymorphous Cosmos, saw men as creatures with a supernatural origin and a supernatural component and many modern intellectuals, including the main figures of Classical Liberalism continue to see men as having natures, minds and desires, which are universal and beyond the reach of what is merely empirical, especially when various local manifestations of human being seem to be outside the capture of a single universal model.
For most Christians, it’s true everywhere and always that men are fallen creatures with transcendental souls because Adam and Eve were ensouled and in a state of grace and we are merely dirtied images of such blessed creatures and thus men of all ages since that (admittedly mythical but “meaningful”) event are just as Adam and Eve were after their fall; so it is that Latin Americans and Africans are just potential middle-class Americans no different from the descendants of those who shaped this country to their inherited traits and the cultures and political systems developed by ancestors who were at least developing those traits; so it is that Christians no longer are content to go to impoverished countries to help those peoples to improve their lot and instead bring them over here that they might realize their true potential as American liberals; so it is that any Amerindians or Latin Americans or Africans who don’t take to our ways are defective human beings—see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for a discussion of this attitude on the part of the European colonists during King Phillip’s War.
For most modern liberals of all sorts, it’s simply the case that there was a time in prehistory when true human beings came to exist and they had minds immediately capable of accessing transcendental truths and desires which, very implicitly and even sneakily, assumed a certain type of human being; this all seemed to tell us that the only real human beings are those who take to life in a wide-open marketplace of individuals. Empirical reality enters only in the form of higher-level and highly stylized studies in history and sociology, levels and styles which could have been designed to hide such matters as the spectrum of human being: many Englishmen being highly individualistic and most Chinese being highly communalistic—apparently those from the south of China even more so. Englishman good, Chinaman bad.
Liberalism is mistaken, but it isn’t inherently an evil system, though any system can be made evil in implementation. It’s simply wrong in light of modern knowledge of human characteristics. And it has contributed to a great evil: the decay of the West including the premature decay of the very young United States.
In complex human communities—and their various smaller sub-communities familial and economic and political and cultural, moral order is made possible by a correct understanding of the nature of human morality including the location of moral knowledge and responsibility—family or local community or state or religious community? Laws and institutions, ways of doing business and ways of entertaining yourself in public areas, create disorder rather than order when they aren’t compatible with human being in the specific form it takes in that particular complex human community, such as Boston or San Francisco or the United States or the West as a whole.
Again, all human being is both individual and communal but there is a spectrum of those who are extreme individualists through various mixtures of individual and communal being and on to those who are extreme communalists, but even those at the extremes are a mixture or else truly pathological creatures. God’s plans clearly allow and might need various mixtures of individual and communal being in individual human animals. Much good and interesting and fruitful human being might well be found in the extreme regions of those who are radical individualists and those who are self-sacrificing communalists.
The countries of the West, most especially the United States, have instituted a form of economic organization to the benefit of only a small minority of the human race—at most. (A reminder of reality: it benefited still more those wolves in sheep’s clothing who entered the marketplaces not as individuals but as members of dynastic wolf-packs or other tightly-knit units.)
But liberalism in the economic domain wasn’t entirely an illusion, not by a long-shot, despite the tendency of some of the greatest of competitors to turn to such behavior as collaborating with politicians and regulators to restrict market entry—once those competitors were themselves established. Yet, liberalism did increase material prosperity in the West and that material prosperity spilled over even into many exploited regions in Asia and Africa and the Americas.
And that seems likely to be the judgment of history: the liberal beliefs and ways of behavior which developed in the West in the post-Medieval period brought great prosperity—so long as the foundations laid by those from earlier generations lasted. No known form of liberalism is capable of building a civilization or even a major community of any sort inside an existing civilization. At their best, liberals have provided cogent criticisms of specific abuses of communal power over individuals, but that negative power of criticism has led quite naturally to a license to attack any and all powers of communities over any and all individuals and those attacks have made one damned mess of the West and most of its communities and most of its individuals as well.