Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

  Above all, liberal education did not so much “liberate” students from the limits of their backgrounds as it reinforced a basic teaching embedded deeply within its own cultural tradition, namely an education in limits. Often this conception of limits—conceived most often as based in morality or virtue—was drawn from the religious traditions of the particular institution. Most classical liberal arts institutions founded within a religious tradition required not only knowledge of the great texts of the tradition—including and especially the Bible—but corresponding behavior that constituted a kind of “habituation” in the virtues learned in the classroom. Compulsory attendance at chapel or Mass, parietal rules, adult-supervised extracurricular activities, and required courses in moral philosophy (often taught by the president of the college) sought to integrate the humanistic and religious studies of the classroom with the daily lives of the students.

  Based upon a classical or Christian understanding of liberty, this form of education was undertaken with an aim to pointing to our dependence—not our autonomy—and the need for self-governance. As the essayist and farmer Wendell Berry has written, awareness of fundamental constraints of human action and behavior

  is not the condemnation that it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has for too long cut us off. Every cultural and religious tradition that I know about, while fully acknowledging our animal nature, defines us specifically as humans—that is, as animals (if that word still applies) capable of living within natural limits but also within cultural limits, self-imposed. As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as “earth” or “ecosystem” or “watershed” or “place.” But as humans we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied by neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, loyalty, and love.11

  An education based in a set of cultural conditions takes its lead from nature and works alongside it, through such practices as agriculture, craftsmanship, worship, story, memory, and tradition. It does not, in the model of the new science, seek nature’s dominion or capitulation. A fundamental responsibility of education, then, is the transmission of culture—not its rejection or transcendence. A proper regard for and transmission of culture seeks to prevent the willful and aggressive exploitation of nature and Gnostic condescension toward culture, just as it cautions against the sort of roving and placeless form of deracinated philosophy of the sort recommended by an education in “critical thinking” and implicitly commended by our encouragement of our students to define success only by achieving a condition of placeless itinerancy demanded by our global economic system.

  Finally, understood as a training in limits and care for the world and particular places and people, a liberal education—properly understood—is not merely a form of liberation from “the ancestral” or nature but an education in the limits that each imposes upon us necessarily to live in ways that do not tempt us to Promethean forms of individual or generational self-aggrandizement or the abusive effort to liberate ourselves from the limits and sanctions of nature. Particularly in an age during which we are becoming all too familiar with the consequences of living solely in and for the present and disconnected from “ancestral” concerns for living within our means—whether financially or environmentally—we would be well served to move beyond the extreme presentism of the contemporary era. We should instead seek a reinvigoration of an idea of liberal education in which we understand liberty to be the condition in which we come to terms with, and accept, the limits and constraints that nature and culture rightfully exert. As commended by ancient and religious traditions alike, liberty is not liberation from constraint but rather our capacity to govern appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty—liberty from enslavement to our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world. In short, needful is the rescue of liberal education from liberalism.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The New Aristocracy

  WHILE both sides in our current anticulture wars advance the liberal project of statist and market deracination and liberationism, achieved through expansion of individual autonomy and the Baconian project of conquering nature, students are wholly shaped to be working pieces within this system of “liberation.” Increasingly today’s students enter college solely with an aim to its “practical” application, by which is meant its direct relevance to its economic and technical applications, wholly unaware that there is a more capacious way of understanding “practical” to include how one lives as a spouse, parent, neighbor, citizen, and human being.

  A two-tier system has arisen in which elite students are culled from every corner of the globe so that they may prepare for lives of deracinated vagabondage, majoring only in what Wendell Berry calls “upward mobility.” Elite universities engage in the educational equivalent of strip mining: identifying economically viable raw materials in every city, town, and hamlet, they strip off that valuable commodity, process it in a distant location, and render the products economically useful for productivity elsewhere. The places that supplied the raw materials are left much like depressed coal towns whose mineral wealth has been long since mined and exported. Such students embrace “identity” politics and “diversity” to serve their economic interests, perpetual “potentiality” and permanent placelessness. The identities and diversity thus secured are globally homogenous, the precondition for a fungible global elite who readily identify other members capable of living in a cultureless and placeless world defined above all by liberal norms of globalized indifference toward shared fates of actual neighbors and communities. This in turn induces the globalized irresponsibility that was reflected in the economic interactions that precipitated the 2008 economic crisis but which is assuaged by calls for “social justice,” generally to be handled through the depersonalized levers of the state. One of the most powerful ways that liberalism advances is by implicitly encouraging globalized narcissism while perpetuating a pervasive belief in its own benevolence.

  Those who remain in the hamlets, towns, and cities are generally condemned to straitened economic circumstances, destined for low-wage and stagnant service industry jobs and cut off from the top tier of analytic-conceptual work that is reserved for elite graduates. They are rooted in economically deprived regions or survive on the outskirts of concentrations of elites, where they will struggle with inflated real estate prices either by overpopulating subpar urban housing or by living at a great commuting distance from work and entertainment. They generally own extraordinary and growing levels of debt, mainly college loans and mortgage debt, though the insistent demand that they participate fully in the broader economy as consumers doubtless leads them to accumulate other excessive debts as well. While there is always the chance that one of their children might move up the economic ladder—particularly via an elite college—in the main, fairly static differentiation now persists between the classes.

  The fact that there can be both upward and downward movement, however, and that competition has now been globalized, leads all classes to share a pervasive anxiety. Because social status is largely a function of position, income, and geographic location, it is always comparative and insecure. While advancing liberalism assures that individuals are more free than ever from accidents of birth, race, gender, and location, today’s students are almost universally in the thrall of an economic zero-sum game. Accusations of careerism and a focus on résumé building are not the result of a failure of contemporary education but reflect the deepest lessons students have imbibed from the earliest age: that today’s society produces economic winners and losers, and that one’s educational credentials are almost the sole determinant of one’s eventual status. Today’s students, in bondage to what the ancients would have called “servile education,” generally avoid a liberal education, having been discouraged from it by their parents and by society at large.
Liberalism spells the demise of an education once thought fitting for free people.

  A main lesson learned particularly at elite colleges is the set of cooperative skills needed to ensure competitive advantage over those who are not in the elite, while recognizing that even those cooperative relationships are conditioned by a competitive system. Friendships and even romantic relationships are like international alliances—understood to serve personal advantage. In his book Coming Apart, Charles Murray reports that while stable marriages are more likely to contribute to various measures of life success, those most likely to form stable lifelong marriages are those at the elite levels of the social ladder.1 Those in the lower tiers, meanwhile, are experiencing catastrophic levels of familial and social breakdown, making it all but impossible for them or their children to move into the upper tier. Elites are studiously silent about the familial basis of their relative success. Marital stability is now a form of competitive advantage for the upper tier, an advantage amplified by the insistence that family formation is a matter of individual choice and even an obstacle to autonomy. Having shaped the family in the image of the Hobbesian state of nature, its adoption by the strong is now one more tool for advantage over the weak.

  The educational system, transformed into a tool of liberalism, is also ultimately the systemic creation of a new aristocracy of the strong over the weak. Liberalism’s denouement is a society of deep, pervasive stratification, a condition that liberals lament even as they contribute in manifold ways to its perpetuation—particularly through its educational institutions. Liberalism’s success thus fosters the conditions of its failure: having claimed to bring about the downfall of aristocratic rule of the strong over the weak, it culminates in a new, more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights ceaselessly to maintain the structures of liberal injustice.

  CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: ROOTS OF NEW ARISTOCRACY

  Liberalism was justified, and gained popular support, as the opponent of and alternative to the old aristocracy. It attacked inherited privilege, overturned prescribed economic roles, and abolished fixed social positions, arguing instead for openness based upon choice, talent, opportunity, and industry. The irony is the creation of a new aristocracy that has enjoyed inherited privileges, prescribed economic roles, and fixed social positions. Even as liberalism’s architects were forthright about their ambition to displace the old aristocracy, they were not silent about their hopes of creating a new aristocracy. Widespread abhorrence of the old aristocracy blinded many who acquiesced in liberalism’s ambitions, even as it positively appealed to those who believed they would join the new aristocracy. Liberalism begins as a version of the Rawlsian Original Position, offering a veil of ignorance beyond which it is promised that there will be certain winners and losers. Rather than encouraging the embrace of relative economic and social equality, as Rawls supposed, this scenario was embraced by those of liberal dispositions precisely because they anticipated being its winners. Those inclined to deracination, rootlessness, materialism, risk taking, dislocating social change, and inequality in effect assured their own success, even as they appealed to the system’s likely losers by emphasizing the injustice of aristocratic orders.

  John Locke made clear that the new political and economic system he proposed in his Second Treatise of Government, liberalism’s foundational text, would result in a different ruling class. In one of its key chapters, “Of Property,” he divided the world into two sorts of persons: the “industrious and the rational” and “the querulous and contentious.” In the world of prehistory, he wrote, both kinds of characters might have existed in some number, but a subsistence economy marked above all by absence of private property made it impossible to tell them apart. In such a world, each person gathers only enough food and requirements for each passing day, and any differences of talent, ability, and promise are wholly unrealized. Locke offers the Indians in the Americas as an example of such a “pre-history”: subsistence societies in which neither “industriousness and rationality” nor “querulousness and contentiousness” can become salient. In such a world, a potential Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is so busy hunting or fishing for each day’s meal that his potential goes wholly unrealized.

  Yet if it were really true that the world had yet to distinguish between the two kinds of characters, Locke could not have described their existence. The world he is addressing is not, in fact, the one in which neither type of personality has been made manifest; rather, he describes a world in which the wrong people rule—namely “the querulous and contentious.” He writes that a caste of lazy, complacent rulers, whose position is inherited and who govern without competition or challenge, will above all manifest querulousness. He proposes to replace this group with another—those animated by “industriousness and rationality,” whose distinctive character is disallowed from full realization by the monopoly on wealth and power held by the querulous aristocracy.

  But why would the commoners, who hold no position of power or wealth under aristocratic orders, and whose prospects for ruling are no better under a new dispensation, support trading one ruler for another? Locke has essentially admitted that one aristocracy—whose rule is based upon inherited position and wealth—will be replaced by another: what Jefferson was to call a “natural aristocracy” whose position is based upon higher degrees of “rationality” and “industriousness” than those in the general population. The same arbitrariness that affords aristocrats position and status in an aristocratic society also applies to the unequal distribution of “rationality” and “industriousness.” The criteria for the ruling class change, but their arbitrary distribution remains.

  It is here that Locke invokes the example of the New World, arguing that a society ruled by the “industrious and rational” will increase the productivity and value of property and thereby increase the wealth of all:

  To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind: for the provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compass) ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common. . . . [Thus] a king of a large and fruitful territory [in the Americas] feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England.2

  With this passage, Locke admits that the new economic, social, and political arrangements will bring about pervasive inequality, but suggests that it is to be preferred to an inequality in which the “querulous and contentious” govern, since everyone will be in a better material position. Inequality can be made bearable by the increased wealth that will be enjoyed as well by lower-status citizens. But Locke also tells us that inequality under the new system has the potential for nearly limitless differentiation. A subsistence economy is noteworthy for almost complete material equality between ruler and ruled. The aristocratic order is marked by pervasive inequality of rank and status, but those differences are relatively immovable. The proposed liberal order, by contrast, is premised on an elastic and expansive condition of inequality based upon economic prosperity as the method of differentiation between the higher and lower orders. The means of assuaging indignities, slights, resentment, or anger at the widening gap between high and low, successful and ineffective, rulers and ruled, is the promise of ever-increasing material prosperity for every member of society.

  This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.

  Today’s classical liberals continue to advance this settlement as not only acceptable but worthy of celebration. Centuries after Locke, John F. Kennedy summarized this wager with the promise that “a rising tide raises all boats”—echoed often by
Ronald Reagan—suggesting that even the flimsiest and cheapest boat could benefit from tsunami-sized differences for those at the top and the bottom. A vital element of this prosperity was the aggressive conquest of nature, particularly the intensive extraction of every potentially useful resource as well as the invention of processes and methods that would increase immediate value, regardless of future costs and consequences. Locke’s thesis was that ongoing and continuous growth of wealth and prosperity could function as a replacement for social cohesion and solidarity. As the libertarian Friedrich Hayek understood, a society that embraces “rapid economic advance” will necessarily encourage inequality: “Progress at such a fast rate cannot proceed on a uniform front but must take place in echelon fashion.”3 Echoing Locke, Hayek recognizes that a society that advances rapidly and generates significant economic inequality will necessarily rely upon rapid and even accelerating advances in order to assuage discontent: “The enjoyment of personal success will be given to large numbers only in a society that, as a whole, progresses fairly rapidly. In a stationary society there will be about as many descending as there will be those rising. In order that the great majority should in their individual lives participate in the advance, it is necessary that it proceed at considerable speed.”4

  Hayek acknowledges that the liberal society will generate as much inequality as the order it replaced, or even more, but the promise of constant change and progress will ensure that everyone supports the liberal system. He is confident that even potentially titanic inequality—far outstripping the differences between peasant and king—will nevertheless lead to nearly universal endorsement of such a political and economic system.