Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

  Dewey traced his thought back to Francis Bacon, whom he considered the most important thinker in history. Bacon, he wrote in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, teaches that “scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.” The scientist “must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.”5 Today’s liberals recoil from such bald expressions of hubris, but rather than reject Dewey’s effort to eliminate culture toward the end of dominating nature, they are inclined to accept the liberal belief in human separateness from nature and insist upon the conquest of humanity—whether through the technological control of the natural world (“conservative” liberals) or the technological control of reproduction and mastery of the human genetic code (“progressive” liberals). A core feature of the liberal project is antipathy to culture as a deep relationship with a nature that defines and limits human nature.

  Liberal Timelessness

  More than a system of government or legal and political order, liberalism is about redefining the human perception of time. It is an effort to transform the experience of time, in particular the relationship of past, present, and future.

  Social contract theory was about the abstraction of the individual not only from human relations and places but also from time. It depicts a history-less and timeless condition, a thought experiment intended to be applicable at any and all times. The most obvious reason for this conceit—that we be invited to see its relevance in any circumstance, as Hobbes famously argues in pointing out such everyday activities as locking our chests and doors—obscures the deeper lesson that humans are by nature creatures who live in an eternal present. The conceit appeals not to some historical “social contract” that we must look back to for guidance but to the continual, ongoing belief that we are always by nature autonomous choosing agents who perceive advantage for ourselves in an ongoing contractual arrangement. Once again, however, liberal theory posits a form of existence that contradicts what most people’s actual experience was before liberal society brought its “natural” conditions into existence. Only with the ascendancy of liberal political orders does the experience of history in its fullest temporal dimension wane, and a pervasive presentism become a dominant feature of life. This condition is achieved especially through the dismantling of culture, the vessel of the human experience of time.

  The development of progressivism within liberalism is only a further iteration of this pervasive presentism, a kind of weaponized timelessness. Like classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particularly tradition and custom. While widely understood to be future-oriented, it in fact rests on simultaneous assumptions that contemporary solutions must be liberated from past answers but that the future will have as much regard for our present as we have for the past. The future is an unknown country, and those who live in a present arrayed in hostility to the past must acquire indifference toward, and a simple faith in, a better if unknowable future. Those whose view of time is guided by such belief implicitly understand that their “achievements” are destined for the dustbin of history, given that the future will regard us as backward and necessarily superseded. Every generation must live for itself. Liberalism makes humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its culmination has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of debt to be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of resources continues in the progressive belief that future generations will devise a way to deal with the depletions.

  This transformation of the experience of time has been described in terms of two distinct forms of time: whereas preliberal humanity experienced time as cyclical, modernity thinks of it as linear. While suggestive and enlightening, this linear conception of time is still premised on a fundamental continuity between past, present, and future. Liberalism in its several guises in fact advances a conception of fractured time, of time fundamentally disconnected, and shapes humans to experience different times as if they were radically different countries.

  Alexis de Tocqueville noted the connection between the rise of liberal orders and the experience of fractured time. He observed that liberal democracy would be marked above all by a tendency toward presentism. In its egalitarianism and especially in its rejection of aristocracy, it would be suspicious of the past and future, encouraging instead a kind of stunted individualism. Aristocracy, Tocqueville wrote, “links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link. . . . Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”6

  Tocqueville perceived the way in which “fractured time” generates individualism, which in turn would have profound social, political, and economic consequences as the underlying logic of liberal democracy advances. He fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human community. While a constitutive feature of an aristocratic age was the pervasive understanding of oneself as defined by one’s place in a generational order, a hallmark of democracy was to “break” that chain in the name and pursuit of liberation of the individual. While beneficial for individual liberation from generational definition and debts, the fractured experience of time was to have baleful political implications. Modern liberal democracies, Tocqueville believed, would have a powerful tendency to act only for the short term, thus to discount the consequences of their actions upon future generations:

  Once [liberal democrats] have grown accustomed not to think about what will happen after their life, they easily fall back into a complete and brutish indifference about the future, an attitude all too well suited to certain propensities in human nature. As soon as they have lost the way of relying chiefly upon distant hopes, they are naturally led to want to satisfy their least desires at once. . . . [Thus] there is always a danger that men will give way to ephemeral and casual desires and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may never achieve anything great or calm or lasting.7

  Tocqueville notes that the propensity to think only within the context of one’s own lifespan, and to focus on satisfaction of immediate and baser pleasures, is a basic “propensity in human nature.” To chasten, educate, and moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and familial structures, practices, and expectations. Liberalism stresses our liberation from continuous time as a basic feature of our nature, and thus regards such formative institutions, structures, and practices as obstacles to the achievement of our untrammeled individuality. The disassembling of those cultural forms that tutor our presentism and instruct us that a distinctive feature of our humanity is our capacity to remember and to promise renders us at once free, and trapped by “brutish indifference” to any time outside our eternal present.

  Tocqueville perceived that this same “brutish indifference” would manifest itself not only politically but economically as well. Dissolving the practices, along with the structures, that draw people out of temporal narrowness, he feared, would have the effect of separating people’s capacity to discern a shared fate. Fractured time, and the resultant escape into the “solitude of our own hearts,” would lead to self-congratulation and actual physical as well as psychic separation of those who were economically successful from those less fortunate. In effect, he predicted that a new aristocracy would arise, but that its “brutish indifference” born of temporal fracturing would lead it to be worse than the aristocracy i
t was replacing. “The territorial aristocracy of past ages was obliged by law, or thought itself obliged by custom, to come to the help of its servants and to relieve their distress. But the industrial aristocracy of our day, when it has impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in their time of crisis to public charity to feed them. . . . Between workman and master there are frequent relations, but no true association.”8 The fracturing of time is embraced as a form of freedom, a liberation especially of personal obligations we have to those with whom we share a past, a future, and even—ultimately—the present itself.

  A better way to understand culture is as a kind of collective trust. Culture is the practice of full temporality, an institution that connects the present to the past and the future. As the Greeks understood, the mother of culture—of the Nine Muses—was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Culture educates us about our generational debts and obligations. At its best, it is a tangible inheritance of the past, one that each of us is obligated to regard with the responsibilities of trusteeship. It is itself an education in the full dimension of human temporality, meant to abridge our temptation to live within the present, with the attendant dispositions of ingratitude and irresponsibility that such a narrowing of temporality encourages. Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.

  Liberalism as Nowhere and Everywhere

  Liberalism valorizes placelessness. Its “state of nature” posits a view from nowhere: abstract individuals in equally abstract places. Not only does liberalism rest on the anthropological assumption that humans are from no one—emerging, as Hobbes described, “from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other”—but that we are from nowhere.9 The place where one happens to be born and raised is as arbitrary as one’s parents, one’s religion, or one’s customs. One should consider oneself primarily a free chooser, of place as of all relationships, institutions, and beliefs.

  This is not to say that humans who are more firmly embedded within cultural settings don’t sometimes set out for new pastures. But liberalism sets a distinctive and radically placeless “default” that begins as theory but eventually reshapes the world in its image. As Thomas Jefferson articulated in the Lockean tuneup that preceded his drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the most fundamental right defining the liberal human is the right to leave the place of one’s birth.10 Our default condition is homelessness.

  This placeless default is one of the preeminent ways that liberalism subtly, unobtrusively, and pervasively undermines all cultures and liberates individuals into the irresponsibility of anticulture. No thinker has more ably discerned the deracinating effects of modern life than the Kentucky farmer, novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry. An unapologetic defender of community in place, Berry regards community as a rich and varied set of personal relationships, a complex of practices and traditions drawn from a store of common memory and tradition, and a set of bonds forged between a people and a place that—because of this situatedness—is not portable, mobile, fungible, or transferable.11 Community is more than a collection of self-interested individuals brought together to seek personal advancement. Rather, it “lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.”12

  Berry is not hesitant to acknowledge that community is a place of constraint and limits. Indeed, in this simple fact lies its great attraction. Properly conceived, community is the appropriate setting for flourishing human life—flourishing that requires culture, discipline, constraint, and forms. At the most elemental level (in an echo of Aristotle, if an unconscious one), community is both derived from and in turn makes possible healthful family life. Absent the supports of communal life, family life is hard-pressed to flourish. This is because family life is premised, in Berry’s view, on the discipline of otherwise individualistic tendencies toward narrow self-fulfillment, particularly erotic ones. He commends

  arrangements [that] include marriage, family structure, divisions of work and authority, and responsibility for the instruction of children and young people. These arrangements exist, in part, to reduce the volatility and dangers of sex—to preserve its energy, its beauty, and its pleasure; to preserve and clarify its power to join not just husband and wife to one another but parents to children, families to the community, the community to nature; to ensure, so far as possible, that the inheritors of sexuality, as they come of age, will be worthy of it.13

  Communities maintain standards and patterns of life that encourage responsible and communally sanctioned forms of erotic bonds, with the aim of fostering the strong family ties and commitments that constitute the backbone of communal health and the conduit of culture and tradition. Communities thus chasten the absolutist claims of “rights bearers”: for instance, Berry insists that they are justified in maintaining internally derived standards of decency in order to foster and maintain a desired moral ecology. He explicitly defends the communal prerogative to demand that certain books be removed from the educational curriculum and to insist on the introduction of the Bible into the classroom as “the word of God.” He even reflects that “the future of community life in this country may depend on private schools and home schooling.”14 Family is the wellspring of the cultural habits and practices that foster the wisdom, judgment, and local knowledge by which humans flourish and thrive in common and rightly claim the primary role in the education and upbringing of a given community’s children.

  Community begins with the family but extends outward to incorporate an appropriate locus of the common good. For Berry, the common good can be achieved only in small, local settings. These dimensions cannot be precisely drawn, but Berry seems to endorse the town as the basic locus of commonweal, and the region mainly in the economic and not interpersonal realm. He is not hostile toward a conception of national or even international common good, but he recognizes that the greater scope of these larger units tends toward abstraction, which comes always at the expense of the flourishing of real human lives. Larger units than the locality or the region can flourish in the proper sense only when their constitutive parts flourish. Modern liberalism, by contrast, insists on the priority of the largest unit over the smallest, and seeks everywhere to impose a homogenous standard on a world of particularity and diversity. One sees this tendency everywhere in modern liberal society, from education to court decisions that nationalize sexual morality, from economic standardization to minute and exacting regulatory regimes.15 The tendency of modern politics—born of a philosophy that endorses the expansion of human control—is toward the subjection of all particularities to the logic of market dynamics, exploitation of local resources, and active hostility toward diverse local customs and traditions in the name of progress and rationalism.

  Modern politics, as Berry has pointed out, is impatient with local variety, particularly when it does not accept the modern embrace of material progress, economic growth, and personal liberation from all forms of work that are elemental or that forestall mobility and efficiency.16 Berry is a strong critic of the homogenization that modern states and modern economic assumptions enforce.17 He is a defender of “common” or “traditional” sense, that sense of the commons that often resists the logic of economic and liberal development and progress. Echoing Giambattista Vico, an early critic of the deracinated rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, Berry defends what Vico named the sensus communis. Such “common knowledge” is the result of the practice and experience, the accumulated store of wisdom born of trials and corrections of people who have lived, suffered, and flourished in local settings. Rules and practices based on a preconceived notion of right cannot be imposed absent prudential consideration and respect toward common sense.18 This is not to suggest that traditions cannot be changed or altered, but, as Bur
ke argued, they must be given the presumptive allowance to change internally, with the understanding and assent of people who have developed lives and communities based upon those practices. There is then, in Berry’s thought, a considerable respect for the dignity of “common sense,” a nonexpert way of understanding the world that comes through experience, memory, and tradition, and is the source of much democratic opinion that liberalism typically dismisses.

  THE DEATH OF CULTURE AND THE RISE OF LEVIATHAN

  While our main political actors argue over whether the liberal state or the market better protects the liberal citizen, they cooperate in the evisceration of actual cultures. Liberal legal structures and the market system mutually reinforce the deconstruction of cultural variety in favor of a legal and economic monoculture—or, more correctly, a mono-anticulture. Individuals, liberated and displaced from particular histories and practices, are rendered fungible within a political-economic system that requires universally replaceable parts.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn clearly perceived the lawlessness at the heart of liberal orders—a lawlessness that arose most centrally from liberalism’s claims to value “rule of law” as it hollowed out every social norm and custom in favor of legal codes. In his controversial 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, “A World Split Apart,” Solzhenitsyn criticized modern liberal reliance upon “legalistic” life. Echoing the Hobbesian and Lockean understanding of law as positivistic “hedges” constraining otherwise perfect natural autonomy, liberal legalism is posed against our natural liberty, and thus is always regarded as an imposition that otherwise should be avoided or circumvented. Delinked from any conception of “completion”—telos or flourishing—and disassociated from norms of natural law, legalism results in a widespread effort to pursue desires as fully as possible while minimally observing any legal prohibition. As Solzhenitsyn noted,