Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

  Certain Amish communities ban members from purchasing insurance. Rather, the community itself is their “insurance pool”: members seek to foster a community where it is everyone’s shared responsibility and obligation to make someone who suffers a loss “whole” again.10 As the economist Stephen Marglin writes in his insightful book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, “The Amish, perhaps unique in twentieth-century America in their attention to fostering community, forbid insurance precisely because they understand that the market relationship between an individual and the insurance company undermines the mutual dependence of the individuals. For the Amish, barn raisings are not exercises in nostalgia, but the cement that binds the community together.”11

  I note this profound difference of approach to the question and use of technology between the likes of the old-order Amish and contemporary liberals not to urge that denizens of liberal modernity adopt wholesale the practices and beliefs of the Amish but to make a specific point. We regard our condition as one of freedom, whereas from the standpoint of liberal modernity, adherents of Amish culture are widely perceived to be subject to oppressive rules and customs. Yet we should note that while we have choices about what kind of technology we will use—whether a sedan or a jeep, an iPhone or a Galaxy, a Mac or a PC—we largely regard ourselves as subject to the logic of technological development and ultimately not in a position to eschew any particular technology. By contrast, the Amish—who seem to constrain so many choices—exercise choice over the use and adoption of technologies based upon criteria upon which they base their community. Who is free?

  In our remaking of the world—through obvious technologies like the internet, and less obvious but no less influential ones like insurance—we embrace and deploy technologies that make us how we imagine ourselves being. And in a profound irony, it is precisely in this quest to attain ever-more-perfect individual liberty and autonomy that we increasingly suspect that we might fundamentally lack choice about adoption of those technologies.

  To secure our modern form of freedom through the great modern technology of the liberal political order and the capitalist economic system it fosters, we ceaselessly need to increase our power and expand the empire of liberty. Concentrations of political and economic power are necessary for ever-increasing individual liberty. In contradiction to our contemporary political discourse, which suggests that there is some conflict between the individual and centralized power, we need to understand that ever-expanding individual liberty is actually the creation of a sprawling and intricate set of technologies that, while liberating the individual from the limitations of both nature and obligation, leave us feeling increasingly powerless, voiceless, alone—and unfree.

  This is felt keenly, and with ultimate irony, in the growing belief that we no longer control the objects or the trajectory of our technological world. As early as 1978, Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Republic of Technology that “technology creates its own momentum and is irreversible,” and that “we live, and will live, in a world of increasingly involuntary commitments.”12 By this he meant that we will no longer choose our technologies but will be inescapably drawn to those that make us ever more the creatures imagined by Hobbes and Locke in the State of Nature: autonomous, free, yet subjects of the very technologies that allow us the feeling of indepen-dence. Rather than being chosen, our technologies will arise from a dynamic we no longer control, and further enlarge a system over which we have only the faintest grasp. If our airwaves are increasingly filled with dramas about a technological apocalypse, many of those also posit a shadowy and unknown distant power that seems to pull the strings even when we think we are autonomous. Think of The Matrix, that quasi-Platonic film that put into image the suspicion that we are prisoners in a cave whose images are controlled by puppeteers, but which we believe to be reality itself.

  Maybe the deepest irony is that our capacity for self-government has waned almost to the point of nonexistence. In our current lamentations about a variety of crises—the civic crisis in which we seem to have lost the capacity to speak the language of common good; our financial crisis, in which both public and private debt, accrued for immediate satiation, is foisted upon future generations in the vague hope that they will devise a way to deal with it; our environmental crisis, in which most of the answers to our problems are framed in terms of technological fixes but which ultimately require us to control our ceaseless appetites; and the moral crisis of a society in which personal commitments such as families so easily unravel and are replaced by therapy and social programs—we fail to see the deep commonalities arising from the very success of our modern liberal project. We are certainly right to congratulate ourselves for the successes of our technology, but we are also right to worry about the costs of our technological society. Our “culture of technology” was premised, from the very start, on a false definition of liberty, and it now seems to be leading us ineluctably into a condition of bondage to the consequences of our own fantasy.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Liberalism against Liberal Arts

  BEFORE the advent of liberalism, culture was the most pervasive human technology and the fundamental locus of education. It was the comprehensive shaping force of the person who took part in, and would in turn pass on, the deepest commitments of a civilization. As the word itself intimates, a culture cultivates; it is the soil in which the human person grows and—if it is a good culture—flourishes.

  But if liberalism ultimately replaces all forms of culture with a pervasive anticulture, then it must undermine education as well. In particular, it must undermine liberal education, the education that was understood as the main means of educating free persons by means of deep engagement with the fruits of long cultural inheritance, particularly the great texts of antiquity and the long Christian tradition. To the extent that a fully realized liberalism undermines culture and cultivation into liberty as a form of self-governance, an education for a free people is displaced by an education that makes liberal individuals servants to the end of untutored appetite, restlessness, and technical mastery of the natural world. Liberal education is replaced with servile education.

  Liberalism undermines liberal education in the first instance by detaching the educational enterprise itself from culture and making it an engine of anticulture. Education must be insulated from the shaping force of culture as the exercise of living within nature and a tradition, instead stripped bare of any cultural specificity in the name of a cultureless multiculturalism, an environmentalism barren of a formative encounter with nature, and a monolithic and homogenous “diversity.” Its claims to further multiculturalism only distract from its pervasive anticultural and homogenizing impetus.

  Liberalism further undermines education by replacing a definition of liberty as an education in self-government with liberty as autonomy and the absence of constraint. Ultimately it destroys liberal education, since it begins with the assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free. Under liberalism, the liberal arts are instruments of personal liberation, an end that is consistently pursued in the humanities, in the scientific and mathematical disciplines (STEM), and in economics and business. In the humanities, liberatory movements based on claims of identity regard the past as a repository of oppression, and hence displace the legitimacy of the humanities as a source of education. Meanwhile, the subjects that advance the practical and effectual experience of autonomy—STEM, economics, and business—come to be regarded as the sole subjects of justified study. The classical understanding of liberal arts as aimed at educating the free human being is displaced by emphasis upon the arts of the private person. An education fitting for a res publica is replaced with an education suited for a res idiotica—in the Greek, a “private” and isolated person. The purported difference between left and right disappears as both concur that the sole legitimate end of education is the advance of power through the displacement of the liberal arts.

  LIBERALI
SM’S ATTACK ON LIBERAL ARTS

  The phrase “liberal arts” contains the same root as the word “liberty.” The liberal arts have their origins in a premodern world, hence are rooted in a premodern understanding of liberty. We who are the heirs of the liberal tradition are conditioned to believe in a definition of liberty that equates with the absence of external constraint. The social contract theories of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, who defined the natural condition of human beings as one of prepolitical liberty, tell us that we begin as creatures who are free, and we submit to the external and artificial contrivance of law only in order to achieve a measure of security and social peace. In Locke’s understanding, we submit to law in order to “secure” our liberty and “dispose of [our] possessions or persons as [we] see fit.”

  The liberal arts precede this understanding of liberty. They reflect, instead, a premodern understanding—one found in the teachings of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and in the biblical and Christian traditions, articulated not only in the Bible but in the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, More, and Milton. It is no coincidence that at the heart of the liberal arts tradition was an emphasis on classical and Christian texts by these authors. For all their many differences, they all agree that liberty is not a condition into which we are naturally born but one we achieve through habituation, training, and education—particularly the discipline of self-command. It is the result of a long process of learning. Liberty is the learned capacity to govern oneself using the higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of virtue. The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this premodern view as one of slavery, in which we are driven by our basest appetites to act against our better nature. It was the central aim of the liberal arts to cultivate the free person and the free citizen, in accordance with this understanding of liberty. The liberal arts made us free.

  For many years, this conception of knowledge lay at the heart of liberal education. It derived its authority from the faith traditions and cultural practices that one generation sought to pass on to the next. One sees it today on most campuses as a palimpsest, a medieval vellum whose old writing was erased to make room for new writing, but from which a trained eye can still read the ancient teaching. In the gothic buildings, the name “professor,” “dean,” and “provost,” the flowing robes that are ceremonially donned once or twice a year—these and some other presences are fragments of an older tradition, once the animating spirit of these institutions, now mostly dead on most campuses.

  One sees this older tradition—evidence of this palimp-sest—perhaps most vividly in the aspirational mottos and symbolic seals that educational institutions adopted as goals for themselves and their students. One representative motto is that of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, which was founded as American University in 1804, one of the first universities in what was then the unsettled West. Its original motto is still found on the university seal: Religio, Doctrina, Civilitas, prae omnibus Virtus: Religion, true learning, civility; above all, virtue. On the Class Gateway on one of the main approaches to campus is inscribed a sentence taken verbatim from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” These sentiments guided the founding of the nation’s public universities, which, in addition to contributing to the advance of science and practical knowledge, were above all charged with fostering virtue and morality.

  Another public university, the University of Texas at Austin, has emblazoned on its seal the motto Disciplina Praesidium Civitate, which is translated as “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.” These words are drawn from a statement by Texas’s second president, Mirabeau Lamar: “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy and, while guided and controlled by virtue, the noblest attribute of man. It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge and the only security that freemen desire.” This fuller statement, with its stress on the relationship of virtue, authority, and liberty, and with the overtones in the word disciplina not only of “cultivation” but of discipline, points to the conception of liberty as the achievement of hard-won self-control through the discipline of virtue. The image on the seal includes an open book on the shield’s upper field, showing the means by which this discipline of liberty is to be won: through education in the wisdom, the lessons, and the cautions of the past. The aim of such an education is not “critical thinking” but the achievement of liberty governed by the discipline of virtue.

  As these mottos attest, the older tradition sought to foster an ethic of restraint. It recognized that humankind was singular among the creatures in its capacity to choose among numerous options, and so in its need for guidance in that condition of liberty. This liberty, the ancients understood, was subject to misuse and excess: the oldest stories in our tradition, including the story of humankind’s fall from Eden, told of the human propensity to use freedom badly. The goal of understanding ourselves was to understand how to use our liberty well, especially how to govern appetites that seemed inherently insatiable. At the heart of the liberal arts in this older tradition was an education in what it meant to be human, above all how to achieve freedom, not only from external restraint but from the tyranny of internal appetite and desire. The “older science” sought to encourage the hard and difficult task of negotiating what was permitted and what was forbidden, what constituted the highest and best use of our freedom, and what actions were wrong. Each new generation was encouraged to consult the great works of our tradition, the epics, the great tragedies and comedies, the reflections of philosophers and theologians, the revealed word of God, the countless books that sought to teach us how to use our liberty well. To be free—liberal—was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education. And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being.

  The collapse of the liberal arts in this nation follows closely upon the redefinition of liberty, away from its ancient and Christian understanding of self-rule and disciplined self-command, in favor of an understanding of liberty as the absence of restraints upon one’s desires. If the purpose of the liberal arts was to seek an instruction in self-rule, then its teaching no longer aligns with the contemporary ends of education. Long-standing requirements to learn ancient languages in order to read the classical texts, or to require an intimate familiarity with the Bible and scriptural interpretation, were displaced by a marketplace of studies driven by individual taste and preference. Above all, the liberal arts are increasingly replaced by “STEM,” which combines a remnant of the ancient liberal arts—science and mathematics—with their applied forms, technology and engineering, alongside increasing demands for preparation for careers in business and finance.

  The American university slowly changed from the teaching of this older science to a teaching of the new. In the nineteenth century, a growing number of universities were established or began to emulate the example of the German universities, dividing themselves into specialized disciplines and placing a new stress upon the education of graduate students—a training in expert knowledge—and placed a new priority upon discovery of new knowledge. Slowly the religious underpinnings of the university were discarded and discontinued; while the humanities continued to remain at the heart of the liberal arts education, they were no longer guided by a comprehensive vision afforded by the religious traditions whose vision and creed had provided the organizing principle for the efforts of the university. In the middle part of the twentieth century, renewed emphasis upon scientific training and technological innovation—spurred especially by government investment in the “useful arts and sciences”—further reoriented many of the priorities of the university system.

  Liberal education came to be seen as irrelevant for the pursuit of modern liberty, particularly as understood as that liberty secured by military power, science, and technology, and the e
xpansion of capitalist markets to every corner of the globe. The idea of the university was passing out of existence, declared the chancellor of the University of California, Clark Kerr, in his 1963 Godkin Lectures, published later as The Uses of the University. In place of a form of education that was guided by a teleological or religious vision of what constituted an education of the best human being, he announced the inevitable rise of the multiversity, a massive organization that would be driven above all by the radical separations of the endeavors of the various members of the university aimed at providing useful knowledge to the military and industrial demands of the nation. He declared that “the multiversity was central to the further industrialization of the nation, to spectacular increases in productivity with affluence following, to the substantial extension of human life, and to worldwide military and scientific supremacy.”1 The aim of the new “multiversity” was to advance the Baconian project of human mastery over the world.