This will be the last of this series of posts on liberalism, although there will be one more post on the theme of “hatred of politics.”  After that, I hope to abandon political theory for a good long time, turning to other topics of interest.

For leftists, one form of their contempt for liberals is to claim that liberals are blind to 1) the violence that underwrites the societies in which they live and 2) to the fact that class conflict (or some other kind of conflict) is endemic to those societies.  Liberals are Pollyannas, simply unwilling to face up to the facts of violent oppression.  (Conservatives offer a version of the same argument when they say squeamish liberals leave the tough work of insuring social order to the police and the army—and then don’t have the police or the army’s back, but instead criticize them endlessly.)

Are leftists fatalists?  In other words, do leftists believe class conflict is always present, that all societies are ultimately reliant on oppressive violence?  If that is true, then liberals can be condemned as fact-evading and delusional, but are they to be faulted for trying to imagine societies in which conflict is muted?  The leftist, presumably, has a utopian vision of a violence-free society, but it is not present here and now.  What that leftist objects to is the liberal’s apparent belief that current society is not conflict-ridden or violent all the way down, with that conflict and violence permeating every single interaction within the society.

Leftists, it seems to me, face two dilemmas.  The first is that, if violence currently rules the roost, then it is only violence that is going to change the current order.  It is the liberal refusal to endorse such violence that (partially) motivates their scorn.  But, in fact, it seems to me that most leftists today (at least in the US) do not openly advocate revolutionary violence.  (The right—with its gun advocates and militias is much more likely to espouse violence.)  So the left can’t bring itself to embrace the means for change that its own political analysis appears to make mandatory—even as it scorns liberals for not being “radical” enough.  But leftist radicalism looks to me like posturing; it’s an attitude thing not any difference in tactics or actual behavior.

Second dilemma: this is a classic one.  Does the leftist utopia require everyone to be on the same page, for everyone to get with the program?  That is, does a conflict-free society have to eschew pluralism?  How do we imagine a pluralist utopia?

Before I get to that question, let me give a good instance of leftist confusion.  I have just finished reading James Bladwin’s The Fire Next Time.  In that text, Baldwin excoriates liberals precisely for their blindness to the violence that keeps blacks “in their place” in US society.  And Baldwin is highly skeptical that the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement will bear any fruit.  Yet, in the closing pages of his essay, Baldwin also writes that violence corrupts those who employ it—and urges instead a politics of love as the course that blacks should pursue.  Except that this praise of love leads directly into his closing threat that it will be “the fire next time” if America does not become more just.  So his whole essay is premised on a violent, fiery apocalypse—but there is no agent of this avenging violence.  It just somehow appears.

I think this basic move is repeated time and again in leftist writing.  Violence will be required to effect change—and that violence is invoked.  There is even a call for it in a kind of magus voice.  But there is rarely any descent into actual tactics or any attempt to identify a concrete agent of that violence or an appeal to any group of citizens to take up arms.  It’s as if the violence will occur naturally, the inevitable outcome of long prolonged injustice.  Violence as natural, not political.

That change can be effected by non-violent means—and that those means are quite specifically and purposively political—is the main stake in Dustin Howes’s book Freedom without Violence.  He wants to convince us that non-violent means can be effective—and, crucially, that they are the only means that will secure the outcomes we desire.  Like Baldwin in his sections of love, Howes argues that violence corrupts—and thus undermines the very justice and freedom it claims to be seeking.

Back to liberals.  They do not deny there is social conflict.  But they want to contain conflict to words.  (Rorty makes this point again and again in his work.)  A pragmatist view of democracy is to say democracy is a way to manage conflict.  Since everything in a democracy is up for debate, and since no political decision or institution is immune to becoming a subject of debate, there is good reason for everyone to stay within the game.  There is always the next election, the next legislative session, another day in court.  A vote only cuts off debate temporarily.  The losers can always take their case to the public—and work to win the next election.  The gambit is that the benefits of social peace are big enough to provide everyone with a reason to go along with decisions democratically arrived at.  (Again, we are in the land of trade-offs.  The benefits of peace weighed against decisions that I hate.  No guarantee that I—or anyone else—will choose peace.  There may come a decision that seems worth fighting for—literally, violently, fighting for.)

If we accept this pragmatic view of democracy, we can see why screwing with the rules, with democratic procedures, in a way to game the system so your side can hold onto power indefinitely is a formula for disaster.  If the losers in an election or a debate have no reason to believe they can win the next time around, they have no reason to remain players in the game.  At that point, their only reasonable course is to take to the hills and take to the various forms of rebellion that are not “within the rules or norms of democratic procedure.”  If those rules have been abrogated by the party in power, there is no course open but secession or rebellion or a fatalistic acceptance of injustice, inequality, and the death of democracy.

All of which leads to the final point.  Liberalism is about imagining a pluralist utopia, not a homogeneous one.  Just as liberals are all about trade-offs among competing, incompatible, values, so liberals are trying to imagine a polity that can encompass the widest diversity of peoples, of fundamentals values, and of ways of being in the world.  Conflict in such pluralistic societies is inevitable.  So it is not about avoiding or denying conflict.  It is about keeping conflict from erupting into violence.  One path is tolerance—which might be called “cultivated indifference” to the ways that others live.  Cultivated because indifference does not come naturally.  We are all busy-bodies and we are all outraged by the foibles of our neighbors.  We have to learn how to leave them be, to allow them to do as they please (so long, as the liberal J. S. Mill mantra goes, as they are not harming anyone but themselves).

But pluralism also entails, beyond tolerance (which is a negative virtue), the positive development of institutions, norms, laws, and social arrangements that provide a space for conflict to occur (a free press for example) or that mitigate it (by insuring equality before the law and the full operation of oppositional parties).  What looks to leftists and rightists, then, as liberal wishy-washiness, as the inadequate “radicalism” of liberals, is, in fact, a principled stance that says you should never wish for the annihilation of your opponent, of the person or groups with whom you disagree.  That is the formula for endless violence—and produces a world that we really wouldn’t’ want to live in.

 

This will be the penultimate entry in the series on liberalism.  I do want, in the final installment, to say something about liberalism and violence—which gets us back to Dustin Howes’s book, Freedom without Violence.

But today I want to talk about liberalism and solidarity (which leads onto democracy).  In one of the more confusing developments in the tangled history of liberalism, the extreme individualism that critics of liberalism usually ascribe to it as one of its chief sins has actually become a hallmark of conservatives.  It is liberals—as the term is used in common parlance—who are now the communitarians.  That explains why liberals, not conservatives, look to the social determinants of behavior—and it explains why liberals, not conservatives, advocate for “public goods,” for various social insurance schemes, and for the general responsibilities captured in a term like “social justice.”  Liberals, in short, try to inculcate a sense of the social whole that calls for attention to the needs of the most vulnerable.  And liberals have not been shy to use the vocabulary of “rights” as the lever by which to push states and societies to provide medical care, housing, food, minimum wages and other workplace protections, etc. etc.

Basically, the liberal sensibility, it seems to me, is that we are all in this together—and that human life can be made less terrible, more palatable, if we work together for providing, as far as is possible, the means for flourishing of all.  That’s why I value Martha Nussbaum’s (and Amartya Sen’s work) on capabilities so highly.  I think the effort to articulate what people require to live a good life is extremely important.  It tells us what, as a society, we should be aiming towards.

There are problems, of course.  I want to just suggest two of them here.  The first is the boundary problem.  Back to Rorty’s wish to expand the circle of concern.  Conservatives are communitarians insofar as they are nationalist.  They are willing to have the circle of concern extend to those like me.  Liberals usually shun nationalism because it functions as a mechanism of exclusion—telling us which people are not entitled to health care, social security etc.  (Of course, in the current American version of conservatism, a white nationalism co-exists uneasily with a meritocracy based notion that the poor deserve their fate.  It is far from clear that today’s ascendant conservatives are going to offer any protections against poverty for their poorer white supporters.)

Still, even if liberals manage to eschew nationalism, there is still the border problem because there is not one world society, but multiple societies.  By what mechanism or principle are we going to decide which people qualify for benefits and which do not?  How far, in practice, can we expand the circle as Rorry wishes us to do?  (And expanding the circle could also mean reaching out toward non-human life and its needs—something that seems more and more ecologically necessary and not just some act of moral grandeur.)  There are no easy answers here, just pragmatic makeshifts, all of which are, to some extent, unsatisfactory.  We are in area of trade-offs and compromises that Berlin’s value pluralism–married to a sense of what is currently possible–tells us is our fated habitation.  Liberals are routinely condemned for not occupying—either theoretically or in practice—the land of perfection.

The second issue is the vexed relationship of liberalism with democracy.  Leftist critics of liberalism have, especially in the last 25 years, liked to use appeals to democracy as their weapon of choice against liberalism.  Liberals, they charge, fear the demos because liberals are, in the final analysis, on the side of the status quo and of order.  Liberals fear the wide-sweeping changes that giving democracy its full head would bring into the world.  I guess it is a sign of my liberalism that I think the leftist proponents of democracy are far too sanguine.  They seem to assume to a fully unleashed demos would vote into place their leftist vision of how the world should be.  But the liberal is always haunted by the thought that one “should never put rights to a vote.”  Liberalism wants democracy tempered by a bill of rights that places certain guarantees beyond the simple will of the majority.  Some things are established as changeable only through a more arduous process of amendment.

My state, North Carolina, voted in 2011 (by a 60 to 40 % margin) to install as a constitutional provision the illegality of any marriage not between a man and a woman.  Installing discrimination into the state constitution is the exact opposite of how liberals desire constitutions to function.  But it is absolutely right to claim that constitutions are not democratic—if by democracy we mean that all social arrangements are decided by the vote of the demos.  A constitution establishes some basic rights and some basic procedures (rules of the game) that are meant to be immune to “normal” democratic processes.  So, yes, liberals can be accurately accused of not being fully democratic.  But, to the extent that a constitution prevents those currently in power from completely shutting the opposition out from competing in the political sphere, a non-democratic constitution is required to keep the partial democracy—its contested elections, its non-censored public sphere discussions–afloat.

Which circles us around to solidarity.  A sustainable democracy requires a baseline solidarity that acknowledges the equal right of every single one of us to be here and to be full participants in the agonistic contests that characterize democracy.  Suppression of anyone’s right to equal participation is antithetical to democracy–and the point is that you cannot count on the good will of today’s majority to keep them from stacking the deck in their favor as time moves forward.  You need to have some institutions, some agreements (constitutionally established, often in the form of prescribed rights) in place.  So it can’t be democracy all the way down.  Not a neat–or even especially happy–conclusion, but the neater idea of all democracy all the time is a recipe for the fairly swift end of democracy.

Another installment in my ongoing posts about liberalism.

I am continuing here my discussion of liberalism as a sensibility—as contrasted to a set of principled, non-contradictory, propositions or policy commitments.

The term ‘bleeding heart liberalism” was embraced by Richard Rorty in order to emphasize the liberal response to suffering.  For Rorty, liberals are most easily recognized as those who wish to use the political order to alleviate suffering.  It is sympathy with those who suffer and the willingness to understand that suffering comes in many forms—from economic deprivation to various kinds of social humiliation—that marks someone as “liberal.”  Conservatives, by way of contrast, will excuse suffering as “inevitable” or “necessary”—or, even worse, will look to identify reasons why the sufferer deserves his or her fate.  Conservatives at their worst are eager to inflict pain; at their best, they are mostly indifferent to the pain of others.  As someone recently said in the comments section of Brad Delong’s blog, the amazing and upsetting thing about current conservatives is that they are not happy with the rich in this country garnering more and more of the nation’s wealth.  Getting the lion’s share is not good enough for them.  They have to go out of their way to make the poorer 50% suffer.  It’s as if they cannot enjoy their own prosperity unless they know that others are in dire straits.

William James, in the first lecture of Pragmatism, famously distinguished between the “hard-headed” empiricists and the “tender-hearted” rationalists when he was arguing that “temperament” (a good synonym for “sensibility”) is the chief determinant of one’s philosophical outlook.  (He proposed pragmatism as a way to split the difference between the two.)  The empiricist looks to the facts, and does not believe that values are underwritten by the world.  It’s a jungle out there—and the chips fall where they may.  So buck up—and eat or be eaten.  James, with his obsession with “striving” and “zest,” could be attracted to this masculinist version of Darwin, even though James was also appalled by its more extreme embodiment in Teddy Roosevelt.  The rationalist, on the other hand, asserts that the universe itself is just—and thus guarantees that human dreams of justice will bear fruit.  Reason will prevail (in some long term) and reason is on the side of the angels.

The pragmatist alternative (at least as Rorty portrays it) is to say the universe is neither for nor against human desires.  Suffering is not inevitable—except in so far as we are creatures who die.  We are also creatures who are vulnerable to pain (the very basis of the problem of violence as Dustin Howes so crucially reminds us).  The issue is how we, as social beings, respond to that vulnerability.  The liberal ideal is to use human collective action and the institutional arrangements of human society to minimize suffering.(I will take up this theme in a subsequent post.)  Non-liberals exploit vulnerability to augment their own power and their own share of resources.  Non-liberals dress up their appropriation of more than their fair share with various kinds of appeals to “merit” or “desert”—or by the demonization of those who end up with a lesser share.

At the end of the day, a liberal like Rorty and a liberal like Martha Nussbaum end up in the same place.  But Nussbaum, like Kant, is a rationalist insofar as she believes that reason will lead us to take a liberal position.  (Rawls is also a rationalist, but of a rather different strips.  I am going to stick to Nussbaum for the moment.)  Nussbaum wants to ground her liberalism on universalism, on a version of Kant’s categorical imperative.  Only on the pain of self-contradiction (a pain that seems to bother very few in fact) can I gather to myself benefits that I deny to others.  And Nussbaum believes, following Aristotle, that she can identify as indelible features of human nature the “needs” that all humans share as well as the requisites—beyond need—of full human “flourishing.”  In this way, she can list the requirements a just society, a truly good society, must meet.  It’s an attractive vision, at least to this liberal.  But I am with Rorty when it comes to the foundational issue.

Rorty basically says that you can’t derive (in that rationalist, Spinoza-like, way) the lineaments of a just society through a rational thought process.  Rather, our sense of justice, of what a good society should provide, is an historical development, a set of responses to specific events and crises.  So, just like our various political institutions and our laws and notions of rights, are ad hoc expedients developed in response to various ills and opportunities, so our notion of what each citizen should receive has developed over time.  The very notions of parental leave or of homosexual marriage were unthinkable (quite literally) 150 years ago.  And the “rational” basis for advocating either of them is different from the “rational” basis of trial by a jury of one’s peers.  It doesn’t all hang together in some grand vision.

That doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that we should not attempt to define for ourselves what “human flourishing” means.  But we shouldn’t expect that our definition of flourishing will be endorsed by the universe or will be so “right” that it is valid for all time and all places.  Instead, we should fully expect “flourishing” to be a moving target, for new “needs” and “goods” to come to the fore.  Our understanding of flourishing is as fallible as any other piece of human knowledge—and the effort to identify some core “human nature” is misguided and vain.

Furthermore, Rorty is saying the appeal of liberalism is not to our reason.  It is to our sympathies.  So Rorty is on the side of Hume and Adam Smith, not with Kant and Nussbaum.  (Admittedly, the case of Nussbaum is complex, since her rationalist universalism is joined uneasily by her emphasis on the emotions.)  What liberals should aim to do is to expand the circle of those for whom we feel sympathy, those to whom we feel an obligation to alleviate their suffering.  The biggest obstacle to liberalism is parochialism, the seemingly stubborn tendency of humans to only care about the well-being of those fairly closely connected to them.

So, against the conservative scorn for bleeding heart liberals, Rorty says we would all be better off if the number of bleeding hearts were much greater—and if those hearts bled for more and more people, with the goal of finally embracing every member of the species.