Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Other books emphasize the contributions of the internet and the social media to changes in our social and relational lives, often for the worse. In her book Alone Together MIT’s Sherry Turkle assembles evidence that our pervasive use of modern social media doesn’t so much create new communities as it substitutes for the real-world communities that it destroys. Turkle reminds us that the root of the word “community” means literally “to give among each other” and argues that such a practice requires “physical proximity” and “shared responsibilities.” The growing presence of social media fosters relationships that avoid either of these constitutive elements of community, replacing that thicker set of shared practices with the thinner and more evanescent bonds of “networks.” Turkle is not simply nostalgic—she acknowledges the difficult and even awful aspects of community in earlier times. She describes the community in which her grandparents lived, for instance, as “rife with deep antagonisms.” But the same thickness that gave rise to such contentious relations, she writes, also inspired people to take care of each other in times of need. Turkle fears that we are losing not only that experience but also the capacity to form the thick bonds that constitute community, and that our attraction to social media at once undermines these bonds and provides a pale simulacrum to fill the void. Social media become ersatz substitutes for what they destroy, and Turkle seems pessimistic about the prospects for slowing this transformation. At best we can try to limit our children’s access to the internet, but Turkle seems resigned to dim prospects of fundamentally changing the current dynamic.3

  These recent works follow in the tradition established by critics of technology who emphasize the way that technology changes us and, in particular, destroys long-standing ways of life, attacking the very basis of culture. There is a long tradition of cultural criticism, ranging from Lewis Mumford’s critiques of modernism to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which emphasizes the way the “technique” of technology erases everything in its path in the name of utility and efficiency, and more recently to Wendell Berry, who has argued that machine technology has its own logic, which tends to destroy the practices and traditions of a community. Perhaps the most representative voice in this tradition is that of Neil Postman, whose book Technopoly—published in 1992—was suggestively subtitled The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

  In that book, Postman describes the rise in the modern era of what he calls Technocracy. Preindustrial forms of culture and social organization used tools no less than technocratic societies, Postman writes, but the tools they employed “did not attack (or more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization.”4 The tools adopted by a Technocracy, by contrast, constantly transform the way of life. Postman writes, “Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. . . . Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”5 From technocracy we have entered the age of “technopoly,” in which a culturally flattened world operates under an ideology of progress that leads to “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” The residual cultural practices that survived the era of technocracy now give way to a transformed world in which technology is itself our culture—or anticulture, a tradition-destroying and custom-undermining dynamic that replaces cultural practices, memory, and beliefs.

  What these critiques have in common is the supposition that our technology is changing us, often for the worse. We are the subjects of its activity and largely powerless before its transformative power. Our anxiety arises from the belief that we may no longer control the technology that is supposed to be a main tool of our liberty.

  Perhaps an even deeper anxiety arises from the belief that there is an inevitability to technological advances that no amount of warning about their dangers can prevent. A kind of Hegelian or Darwinian narrative seems to dominate our worldview. We seem inescapably to be either creating our own destroyer or, as Lee Silver writes in Remaking Eden, evolving into a fundamentally different creature that we have reason to fear becoming. Our popular culture seems to be a kind of electronic Cassandra, seeing the future but unable to get anyone to believe it. The culture offers entertaining prophecies born of our anxieties, and we take perverse pleasure distracting ourselves with portrayals of our powerlessness.

  One example of this genre of technological (as well as political) inevitability, albeit framed in a triumphalist mode, is the narrative advanced by Francis Fukuyama in his famous essay, and later book, The End of History. The book, in particular, provides a long materialist explanation of the inescapable scientific logic, driven by the need for constant advances in military technology, contributing to the ultimate rise of the liberal state. Only the liberal state, in Fukuyama’s view, could provide the environment for the open scientific inquiry that has led to the greatest advances in military devices and tactics. All others are inexorably forced to follow. Yet, in a book written only a decade later on advances in biotechnology and “our posthuman future,” Fukuyama acknowledges that this very logic might end up altering human nature itself, and as a result imperiling the political order of liberal democracy it had been developed to support.6

  Other works speak of technological inevitability as a result of forces embedded within the nature of reality itself. In his now-classic 1967 essay “Do Machines Make History?” the economic historian Robert Heilbroner depicts a logic within the development of history that pushed humans toward technological development. While societies might adopt those technologies at different speeds, nevertheless there is a form of “soft determinism” in technological development. Perhaps more forthright still is the argument found in Daniel J. Boorstin’s short book The Republic of Technology, published in 1978, in which he depicts technological development as following a kind of “Law” like that of gravity or thermodynamics. For example, “the Supreme Law of the Republic of Technology is convergence, the tendency for everything to become more like everything else.”7 The laws governing technological development thus inevitably shape our human world in an increasingly identical form—anticipating today’s suspicions that modern technology’s child, “globalization,” is a kind of inescapable unfolding.

  Whether told as praise or lament, this narrative of inevitability tends to grant autonomy to technology itself, as if its advances occurred independently of human intention and thought. It becomes a process inescapably driven by its own internal logic—or, to modify a phrase of Hegel’s, “the cunning of techne,” the unconscious unfolding of a technological Geist that leads inevitably to convergence and singularity, a fully technologized culmination of History with a capital H. It, too, perhaps has a slaughterbench that demands its share of victims in the course of its unfolding, but their sacrifice is justified by Progress to a better and even perfected future.

  I want to challenge, or at least complicate, these two related ways that modern humans have come to discern and portray technology—as something that shapes and even remakes us, and does so with a kind of iron law of inevitability. Doing so requires me to take a step back into an exploration of what Aristotle called “the master science” of all sciences—political philosophy—and try to discern the deeper origins of humanity’s new relationship to technology.

  THE TECHNOLOGY OF LIBERALISM

  As I have argued throughout, liberalism above all advances a new understanding of liberty. In the ancient world—whether pre-Christian antiquity, particularly ancient Greece, or during the long reign of Christendom—the dominant definition of liberty involved recognition that it required an appropriate form of self-governance. This conception of liberty was based upon a reciprocal relationship between
the self-government of individuals through the cultivation of virtue (whether ancient or Christian conceptions of virtue, which differed), and the self-government of polities, in which the governing aspiration was the achievement of the common good. Ancient thought sought a “virtuous circle” of polities that would support the fostering of virtuous individuals, and of virtuous individuals who would form the civic life of a polity oriented toward the common good. Much of the challenge faced by ancient thinkers was how to start such a virtuous circle where it did not exist or existed only partially, and how to maintain it against the likelihood of civic corruption and persistent temptation to vice.

  Liberty, by this understanding, was not doing as one wished, but was choosing the right and virtuous course. To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent. Liberty was thus the condition achieved by self-rule, over one’s own appetites and over the longing for political dominion.

  The defining feature of modern thought was the rejection of this definition of liberty in favor of the one more familiar to us today. Liberty, as defined by the originators of modern liberalism, was the condition in which humans were completely free to pursue whatever they desired. This condition—fancifully conceived as a “state of nature,” was imagined as a condition before the creation of political society, a condition of pure liberty. Its opposite was thus conceived as constraint. Liberty was no longer, as the ancients held, the condition of just and appropriate self-rule.

  The main political obstacle to be overcome was limitation upon individual liberty imposed by other people. The old political orders, previously devoted to the inculcation of virtue and the commendation of the common good, were attacked early on by Niccolò Machiavelli as “imaginary republics and principalities,” dealing in oughts rather than taking humans as they actually are. In order to unleash the productive and scientific capacity of human societies, a different mode and order had to be introduced—a completely new form of political technology that made possible a technological society. That form of technology was the modern republic—posited on the rejection of the key premises of ancient republicanism—and above all it rested on the harnessing of self-interest in both the public and the private realms in order to secure human liberty and increase the scope, scale, and extent of human power over nature.

  The precondition of our technological society was that great achievement of political technology, the “applied technology” of liberal theory, our Constitution. The Constitution is the embodiment of a set of modern principles that sought to overturn ancient teachings and shape a distinctly different modern human. It is a kind of precursor technology, the precondition for the technology that today seems to govern us. According to James Madison in Federalist 10, the first object of government is the protection of “the diversity in the faculties of men,” which is to say our individual pursuits and the outcomes of those pursuits—particularly, Madison notes, differences in attainment of property. Government exists to protect the greatest possible sphere of individual liberty, and it does so by encouraging the pursuit of self-interest among both the citizenry and public servants. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition”: powers must be separate and divided powers to prevent any one person from centralizing and seizing power; but at the same time, the government itself is to be given substantial new powers to act directly on individuals, both to liberate them from the constraints of their particular localities, and to promote the expansion of commerce and the “useful arts and sciences.”

  This new political technology developed to expand the practice of the modern understanding of liberty was designed to liberate us from partial loyalties to particular people and places, and make us into individuals who, above all, strive to achieve our individual ambitions and desires. Part of the new technology of modern republicanism is what Madison calls an “enlarged orbit” that will increase individual prospects for their ambitions while making our interpersonal ties and commitments more tenuous. One of the ways modern republicanism was intended to combat the ancient problem of political faction was not by commending public spiritedness but by fostering a “mistrust of motives” that would result from the large expanse of the republic, constantly changing political dynamics, the encouragement to “pluralism” and expansion of diversity as a default preference, and thus the shifting commitments of the citizenry. A technological society like our own comes into being through a new kind of political technology—one that replaces the ancient commendation of virtue and aspiration to the common good with self-interest, the unleashed ambition of individuals, an emphasis on private pursuits over a concern for public weal, and an acquired ability to reconsider any relationships that limit our personal liberty. In effect, a new political technology is invented—a “new science of politics”—that itself conditions our understanding of the purposes and ends of science and technology. Technology does not exist autonomous of political and social norms and beliefs, but its development and applications are shaped by such norms. Liberalism introduces a set of norms that lead us, ironically, to the belief that technology develops independent of any norms and intentions, but rather shapes our norms, our polity, and even humanity, and inevitably escapes our control.

  In light of this set of political preconditions to a technological society, we can reconsider the two dominant narratives by which we tend to think about our relationship to technology: that technology “shapes” us in ways that should cause regret and even concern, and that its effects are inevitable and irreversible.

  First, as we have seen, there is much concern about the ways that modern technology undermines community and tends to make us more individualistic, but in light of the deeper set of conditions that led to the creation of our technological society, we can see that “technology” simply supports the fundamental commitments of early-modern political philosophy and its founding piece of technology, our modern republican government and the constitutional order. It is less a matter of our technology “making us” than of our deeper political commitments shaping our technology. You could say that our political technology is the operating system that creates the environment in which various technological programs may thrive, and that the operating system was itself the result of a transformation of the definition and understanding of liberty.

  This recognition was acknowledged, if incompletely, in a widely discussed article that appeared in the Atlantic entitled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” Its author, Stephen Marche, begins in the usual manner, showing how a form of technology—Facebook in this case—appears to be contributing to greater instances of loneliness and corresponding feelings of sadness and even depression. The author views loneliness as a nearly pathological condition, rising to epidemic levels even as the use of social networking tools like Facebook has increased. Some 20 percent of Americans—sixty million people—say they experience unhappiness due to loneliness, he reports, and a vast array of therapeutic social services has arisen to attempt to combat this form of depression. “A matter of nostalgic lament has morphed into an issue of public health.”8

  Yet, Marche refreshingly avoids blaming Facebook for this epidemic of loneliness. Rather, he notes that Facebook, and technologies like it, have facilitated or even enabled a preexisting predilection—the long-standing American desire to be independent and free. Facebook is thus a tool that elicits loneliness from a deeper set of philosophical, political, and even theological commitments. As Marche points out, “Loneliness is one of the first things that Americans spend their money achieving. . . . We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.” Technologies like Facebook, he writes, “are the by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence.” That appetite, as I have argued, is itself the result of a redefinition of the nature of liberty.

  Consider a different kind of “technology”: how we inhabit the world through our built environ
ment. More than any other people, Americans have pursued a living arrangement that promotes the conception of ourselves as independent and apart, primarily through the creation of the postwar suburb, made possible by the technology of the automobile. The suburb, however, was not simply the “creation” of the automobile; rather, the automobile and its accessories—highways, gas stations, shopping malls, fast-food chains—permitted a lifestyle that Americans, because of their deeper philosophical commitments, were predisposed to prefer. We find other evidence of such precommitments beyond the automobile’s influence, such as the transformation of building styles documented in the architectural historian Richard Thomas’s remarkable 1975 article “From Porch to Patio.” Thomas describes a striking postwar transition in house styles in which the front porch, formerly the most prominent feature in the elevation of a house, disappeared in favor of a patio tucked behind the house. He describes the social and even civic role played by the porch—not only offering cooler temperatures and a breeze in the era before air-conditioning, but providing “intermediate spaces,” a kind of civil space, between the private world of the house and the public spaces of the sidewalk and street. The front porch, often sited within easy chatting distance of the sidewalk, was an architectural reflection of an era with a high expectation of sociability among neighbors. The back patio gained in popularity around the same time as the increased use of the automobile and the rise of the suburb—all of which created a built environment conducive to privacy, apartness, insularity, and a declining commitment to social and civic spaces and practices. These technologies reflected the commitments of modern republican liberty, but they did not—as is too often thought—make us “lonely.”9

  As a counterexample, one could pose social and cultural norms that govern the use of technology for different purposes and ends. The old-order Amish are often regarded as a society with a phobia toward technology, but this view reflects a preliminary misunderstanding of technology—in particular, an incapacity to recognize that the technology that is adopted by that culture reflects a prior commitment to certain social ends, just as liberal adoption of technology seeks to effect its own distinctive ends. Some of the decisions of the Amish—like their rejection of zippers—are incomprehensible to many of us, but what is most of interest is the basic criterion they use to decide whether to adopt, and more important how to adopt, technology in their society. All technological developments are subject to the basic question, “Will this or won’t it help support the fabric of our community?” It is believed that the automobile and electricity will not (though propane-powered implements are approved). To me, one of the most powerful examples of this criterion is the decision to eschew insurance, on the grounds that our form of insurance is premised on maximum anonymity and minimal personal commitment. For the price of a premium based on calculations of actuarial tables, I join a pool with others seeking insurance for a variety of objects or conditions, such as automobile, house, life, or health. When one of these areas suffers damage, I (or my heirs) can turn to the insurance company for some compensatory payment to make me whole again. The funds are drawn from the pool to which all the insured contributed, but we all remain wholly unaware of how, and to whom, payments are made. I am insured against a variety of tragedies but wholly off the hook for any personal responsibility or obligation to anyone else in the insurance pool. My only obligation is a financial transaction with the company providing the insurance.