And we're back

The newsletter returns, to a major crisis of liberalism

Hello everyone!

It has been nearly three years since I last posted here. There’s lots to talk about.

Let me first bring to your attention something I’m incredibly excited about. My new book, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies, will be published on April 21st of this year. I cannot wait to get this into your hands. It is available for pre-order now from your bookseller of choice.

Over the months ahead I’ll be doing some writing about the themes of the book. I want to begin here with a discussion of the broader context: the gravest crisis liberalism has faced since the first half of the 20th century. It may seem premature to characterize our situation in this way, but I don’t believe so. The illiberal tide rising around us has been unmistakable over the past decade, here and around the globe. The postwar international order is being dismantled by the country most responsible for its construction and maintenance. It is all too easy to imagine the collapse of American democracy, and I don’t feel the need to wait for horrors on the scale of the 1930s and 1940s to call this mess what it is.

Just why the liberal world has found itself in crisis is a matter of active debate. There are voices on the right arguing that liberalism was never a particularly good idea in the first place: that people need to be ruled, or that true fulfillment only comes through celebration of god and tribe and tradition. As someone who very much enjoys thinking for himself and making his own choices I find these arguments unappealing at a gut level, but they also fail to reckon with liberalism’s overwhelming record of delivering the goods. The world we seem determined to put behind us is the richest, most just, and most free that people have ever created, by miles and miles. Not free and just and rich enough! But we should allow ourselves to accept that with liberalism we really seem to be onto something.

This freedom and prosperity is profoundly good, it is worth remembering. It is good when people have enough to eat. It is good when people no longer have to worry about dying from diseases that claimed their ancestors. It is good to have access to more knowledge and art and opportunity. Liberalism’s victories are not empty ones! No god worth worshipping would demand that we give them up.

At the same time, I believe we have discovered a very serious flaw within liberalism, and it is one that liberalism’s defenders have difficulty perceiving. To see it, it helps to take a long-term perspective. The last great crisis of liberalism took place in a very different material context from the present one. People lived much closer to the edge of hunger. Political rights were much more limited and concentrated. Tyrannies emerged in the shadow of the First World War, which took millions of lives and left political and economic chaos in its wake. Illiberalism was reinforced by economic cataclysms far worse than the developed world has faced in our lifetimes.

Our crisis is a different beast. We’ve had our troubles, but they pale in comparison to those of a century ago. The world we are dismantling would seem an eden to the people of the early 1900s. This is not a crisis of material desperation. Instead, today’s illiberalism is rooted in the desocialization of large swathes of the population. And it is amplified into a dire threat by the cynicism and moral apathy of a very broad class of elites. A critical mass of us can be all too easily suckered, and a critical mass of us believe that only suckers make sacrifices for the greater good.

This is a deeply uncomfortable thing to have to confront. We lack a satisfying intellectual framework for making sense of it. It is so much easier to imagine that a political reform here or a social-media regulation there or a bit of economic redistribution over yonder is all that’s really needed. It is disconcerting to think that we may be confronting a frightening new social phenomenon which threatens to halt or reverse human progress. And honestly it would be much easier to just hope for the best and continue to pursue our own career and personal interests. Much of the liberal commentary about this crisis thus ends up taking too constricted a view of the situation.

We can’t afford to remain stuck this way, and it is time to push the discussion forward. One good place to start is a new book by Brink Lindsey, called The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. Brink is a scholar at the Niskanen Center and a friend, and he has been a source of insight and encouragement for me as I’ve worked on my book. He argues that John Maynard Keynes’s old prophecy — that once economic growth liberated us from material scarcity, our real troubles would begin — is now being realized. We can meet our basic needs, but we have no idea what to do with ourselves. Thirty years ago, it was a little hard to see how this might become an existential problem for the modern world. I don’t believe it is any longer.

Brink’s readers have not known quite what to do with his arguments. I’ll give you one example from a writer I like and respect, Jonathan Rauch, who responds by writing:

While modern capitalism certainly has its problems, I do not believe it is destroying itself, that “society is falling apart,” or for that matter that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” per Thoreau in 1854. (People have been worrying about the soul-destroying aspects of modernity for a long time.) If I did believe that society is falling apart, I would not believe that “intentional communities” and “pioneer archipelagos” could realistically solve the problem. When I read Lindsey saying his ideas are “potentially civilization-rescuing,” I see rhetoric that has gotten carried away with itself. When I reached his call for “another great awakening—a spiritual movement,” I wrote in the margin: “Good grief!”

I completely understand this reaction. Ten years ago, I would have said much the same. A decade of grappling with the world as it is changed my perspective. The flow of events is depriving us of the luxury of persisting in such skepticism.

Society continues to function, yes. Having lived through the deterioration in US governance over the past decade, how can we not take seriously the possibility that things will get much worse? How much of today’s critical institutional infrastructure has roots in social schemes that once seemed hopeless? Can we really look at history and deny the transformative power of spiritual awakenings? A grand democratic experiment that’s a quarter of a millennium old is in real trouble. We must expand the scope of our self-examination if we hope to address the weakness in liberalism that has been exposed.

What is that weakness? A good liberal society provides plenty of room to individuals to satisfy their preferences and build lives of personal meaning. That is all that some of us need, but it is not enough for enough of us. We evolved to cooperate, and that cooperation has always been rooted in stories that provide collective meaning and purpose. Material plenty doesn’t liberate us from the need for such things; on the contrary, it makes them more important than ever. And so the question we face is: how can a liberal society cultivate collective meaning? How can we forge a shared understanding of why any of this matters, what it means, what we’d like our future to be, and how we ought to conduct ourselves to achieve that? How do we do this without essentially conceding the future to fascists and theocrats? These are very difficult questions, but they are pressing ones.

Again, I very much understand if this approach feels daft or unconvincing. If I could fully persuade you in a thousand words, I wouldn’t have written a 300-page book! What I hope to do is convince you that there might be something in this line of thought worth picking at. I hope that you will have a little faith. Then we can see where that takes us.

It’s good to be back. Thank you all for sticking around or subscribing despite my silence. I intend to make it worth your while.

All views expressed here are mine alone.