Born in Horror: A Moral Reading of “The Liberalism of Fear”

September 19th, 2002. My sister and I were woken up in the early hours of the morning by the sound of heavy artillery. We soon learned from a French radio broadcast that the intense sound we were hearing in every corner of the house was the sound of mutineers pounding the compound of our distant neighbor, Mr. Émile Boga Doudou, then the Ivorian Minister of Interior. The assault lasted for several hours until the minister was assassinated. 

The Civil War which broke out on that day now seems like a very distant and sad episode in the history of an otherwise prosperous West African nation. I still vividly remember being ordered by my father to hide under a very narrow bed in the guest room when a gas grenade hit the entrance of our house. As the political situation in the country unfolded, and the rebel group went about killing other political figures, many Ivorian families were forced to stay home, barricade themselves, and occasionally venture out during the day to stock up on food. Fully aware of the danger, many brave Ivorians risked their lives to secure essentials in hopes of making it through the indefinite period of street warfare. 

Our worst fear in those terrible days was to fall victim to an unprovoked act of brutality. For most inhabitants of the Western world today the fear of being murdered by a band of marauding rebel soldiers is thankfully a thing of the past. Not so for other human beings in other parts of the world and inhabiting other slices of world history. 

In January 1942, a man who would later write under the pseudonym ‘Szlamek’ escaped the notorious Chelmno death camp in western Poland. In his confessions to the rabbi of the small town of Grabów, he recalled his experience sorting out the bodies of exterminated Jews, Roma, and other undesirables. The historian Mary Fulbrook pulls from his account to record the horrid screams of fumigated victims. ‘‘On pulling out the corpses, some families were so closely embracing each other that the guards had to order the Jewish gravediggers to cut their limbs’’ (Reckonings, p. 2). Cleaning ovens, showers, trucks, trains, and other repositories of Nazi hatred was psychologically and physically taxing. When wagon-loads of deported Jews arrived from other parts of Europe, German laborers often fainted after catching a whiff of the poisoned air emanating from the morbid interior of the trains. Most passengers were dead upon arrival and covered in excrement. Any child that made it alive from other locations was thrown, alive, into the blood-soaked pit (The Holocaust, p. 201). Three boys who miraculously escaped the death pit in Minsk found a way to evade capture by hiding in the belly of a horse. After two days, said one boy, we ‘‘climbed out, covered in blood, guts, and shit…half-insane’’ (ibid., p. 122). 

Few events in world history capture the depths of human depravity like the Holocaust. It is the moral catastrophe of the 20th century and the fundamental orienting event for an entire generation of post-war liberals. In her The Liberalism of Fear, Judith Shklar describes the Second World War as a ‘‘war that we forget at our peril’’ (p. 5). Today, online pundits misread the threat once posed by the advancing Nazis, and entertain with approval a world in which Britain lost the war to Hitler and his men. In a remarkable exchange between former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and former British Member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg, the American talk show host asserted that the United Kingdom ‘‘destroyed their empire and their country fighting this war, which they still pretend was a good idea, but it wasn’t.’’ When the mild-mannered Tory reminded Mr. Carlson that opposing ‘‘the greatest evil the world has ever known’’ was the right thing to do, the right-wing pundit hit back with an appeal to utility: ‘‘has the UK benefited from [entering the war]? Is it a better country than it was? We have had 80 years to assess, tell me the benefit.’’

Mr. Carlson seemed shockingly oblivious or indifferent to the menacing power of the Nazi regime. And yet it was plain as day to those who lived through the period and kept track of the Nazi government’s domestic policies and behavior prior to its annexation drive that an attack on Poland would spell swift moral disaster for Europe and for Jews in particular. This was not hidden: Hitler spoke openly of his desire to wage a merciless war of conquest, and encouraged his military leaders to fight without mercy. In August 1939, Hitler told a private gathering of his Wehrmacht commanders that the aim of war was not merely to gain ground but to ‘‘annihilate the enemy physically.’’ A week later, he invaded Poland. As predicted, the Nazis lost no time implementing their murderous plan. As Fulbrook narrates, the September 1939 invasion of Poland changed everything for small Jewish communities across the country. According to one witness account, the SS officers surrounded the communal bath and slaughter house in Mielec and proceeded to shoot everyone in sight. They poured petrol on the wounded and burned the bullet-riddled structure to ashes. Jews who had managed to survive the outbreak of war were stunned by the quickness of the Nazi persecution. The immediacy of the assault was so astounding to its victims that many decades after the invasion, Polish Jews were still left marveling at the fact that the Nazi slaughter took place ‘‘not in ’42, ’43, but ’39’’ (Reckonings, p. 88). 

The Nazis meant business. Killing Jews was not a side quest, but their very raison de vivre. To question whether it was ever appropriate for Britain to challenge Hitler’s regime is to downplay the seriousness of the Nazi threat. Media personalities such as Mr. Carlson forget, or perhaps choose to forget, that every single country the Nazi forces invaded during the course of war suffered a trail of devastation and misery. As far east as Mogilev, in modern-day Belarus, SS administrator Walter Mattner recalled that in October 1941 his squad was assigned the “exhilarating” task of shooting down truckloads of Jewish civilians, including women and their terrified children: ‘‘I aimed calmly and shot at the numerous women, children and infants,’’ he explained, knowing full well that ‘‘I also have two infants at home.’’ As he serenely emptied his gun, ‘‘Infants flew through the air in high arches, and we did them in already in midair before they [fell] into the pit and into the water.’’ Admiring the work of his hands, Mattner noted with excitement that Mogilev ‘‘lost again [Jews equal to] a number with three zeroes, but this is not a big thing here. I am actually happy, and many here say, that when we are back in the Heimat [homeland] it will be the turn of our local Jews’’ (The Holocaust, pp. 120–121). 

This cold-bloodness was not uncommon. Reinhold Felix, the man in charge of the Budzyń camp in Poland, used inmates as shooting targets. He even trained his six-year-old son to do the same (Reckonings, p. 96). Other perpetrators were not as cool. They seemed possessed by racist fury. The ‘death dealer’ of Kaunas, Lithuania, would walk around with an iron rod and bash the skulls of his victims. On one occasion he spent three-quarters of an hour beating forty five people to death with his signature crowbar. A witness reported that after each man had been killed the spectating civilians began to clap. The bloody exhibition only came to a standstill during the national anthem (The Holocaust, p. 126). 

Those who forget the murderous intent of the Nazi regime, and the glee with which they killed millions, are susceptible in our present times to grievous failures of imagination and moral evaluation. Unsurprisingly, a predilection for bad revisionist history is associated with a tolerance for modern-day injustices. The evident connection between historical knowledge and moral clarity is why liberals can be said to belong to the ‘‘the party of memory’’ (Liberalism of Fear, p. 15). The members of this party have had their politics shaped by the horrors of history, and as a result, have developed a mature distaste for cruelty. We may be many things as human beings, but one thing we can all agree with is that we all feel pain and are worried about being victims of cruelty. 

Liberals face up to these harrowing events, allow them to inform their political projects, and are motivated by them to either prevent such ugliness from happening again, or at the very least minimize the extent and duration of suffering (Liberalism of Fear, p. 15). To these liberals, cruelty and its cessation must be top of the agenda. Any liberalism worth its name must ensure that it is working to make human beings feel secure. That, in Judith Shklar’s opinion at least, is the ‘‘only defensible’’ meaning of liberalism (Liberalism of Fear, p. 4). Liberalism is that conviction—‘‘born in horror’’—that ‘‘cruelty is an absolute evil, an offense against God or humanity,’’ and must be mitigated by ensuring that the conditions of domestic and international law are set in a manner that can reliably protect people from abuse (Liberalism of Fear, p. 9). 

Having seen the terrible effects of war, I am deeply sympathetic to the notion that harm prevention must be at the forefront of liberal activism in the world. I also recognize that meta-ethical discussions about the ontological foundations of the liberal beliefs in ‘human dignity,’ ‘autonomy,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘rights’ are bound to happen when we confront those who do not share our Western lens. Taking such commitments by faith, or calling them ‘axioms,’ will be unsatisfactory to non-liberals, but so will be the inclination among pressured political parties to look the other way when human beings are being massacred and mistreated. Human beings need immediate relief from the oppression of powerful forces in society, which recurs again and again, not merely during exceptionally terrible periods such as the Holocaust.

The best, most reliable way to rescue humanity from careless cruelty is to establish a limited, democratic government that can hold the wielders of power in society accountable to an impartial and transparent system of law. Framers of such a constitution ‘‘secure the conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom’’ (Liberalism of Fear, p. 4). Liberals are of course not naive. They recognize that while limited government and the dispersion of power among jealous and countervailing powers is a necessary condition of liberty, it is often not sufficient to ward off the threat of wrongful action. Yet despite these well-known inadequacies, the sturdy protection of life and limb remain woefully unattended without constitutional rule (ibid., p. 20). The reason for this has once more to do with history. Shklar believed that it did not require much convincing to show that ‘‘that some agents of government will behave lawlessly and brutally in small or big ways most of the time unless they are prevented from doing so’’ (p. 19). The realities of human meanness are why such constitutional devices cannot be dispensed with if one is serious about preventing harm. Here again, history can vouch for the claim that state officials are less likely to take liberty with the lives of others if the rule of law is impartially, consistently, and universally applied to protect the rights of the weak against the predations of the strong.

It is difficult (some would say impossible) to do that well when law is inseparable from the dictates of one person. Concentrations of power are always a live threat to the ability of human beings to pursue their interests without fear or favor, but they take on a supremely intimidating form when located in the figure of an unopposed head of state. Matters grow worse if the same ruler is prone to exercise state power in a particularly arbitrary and mercurial fashion. The reason why dictatorships of this kind are such terrible arrangements is partly because these strongmen have control of the lever of government and its awesome asymmetric power. No single individual can stand against the determined will of an institution that is uniquely clothed with overwhelming force. 

The state’s awesome power is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the government ought to inspire a minimal level of fear in its citizenry in order to effectively restrain acts of criminality, but on the other, it is a plain travesty of justice for governments to terrorize citizens by ‘‘arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force’’ (Liberalism of Fear, 22).

Shklar did not wish to deny that social groups could do serious damage to an individual’s sense of freedom, or suggest, contra Alexis de Tocqueville, that the ‘tyranny of the majority’ was not an evil to be reckoned with. During the Bialystok pogrom of 1906, Jews had their stomachs slit open, stuffed with pillow feathers, and sown back again in an act of gruesome comedy. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who first coined the term genocide, grew up in the shadow of this massacre, and often wondered how humans could do such evil with impunity. Yet, when asked to think seriously about the problem of cruelty in the world, Lemkin identified state authorities as the most formidable agents of human suffering. According to Samantha Power, when twelve-year old Lemkin asked his mother why Emperor Nero fed Christians to famished lions, his mother replied that ‘‘once the state became determined to wipe out an ethnic or religious group, the police and the citizenry became the accomplices and not the guardians of human life’’ (A Problem From Hell, p. 20).

Shklar was familiar with this dynamic and was convinced that government-directed repression could do impressively more harm than other forms of coercion. Government power is not just more exceptionally effective, it is also far more extensive in its damage. While ‘‘the sources of social oppression are indeed numerous,’’ Shklar explains, ‘‘none has the deadly effect of those who, as the agents of the modern state, have unique resources of physical might and persuasion at their disposal’’ (Liberalism of Fear, p. 4). So understood, the peril of government power is not just that the intensity of harm tends to be greater when the state is the one acting on citizens, it is also that the spread of the harm itself is likely to touch a far greater number and variety of people. Given the visible existence of this far-reaching power, it is not surprising to learn that the liberalism of fear ‘‘worries about the excesses of official agents at every level of government’’ and ‘‘assumes that these are apt to burden the poor and weak most heavily’’ (ibid., p. 19). 

The liberalism of fear cautions us against not merely overweening state power, but the ideologies that drive the zeal-eyed to grasp for such unarrestable power. The trouble of course is that the visionaries who take on grand plans for ‘their’ country often have a high tolerance for human suffering, and can more easily rationalize the deaths of many as being part of the vital ‘struggle’ of the masses. There are also those who seek to shape the character of people by the ‘power of bloodshed.’ Following the October 7 attack some academics argued that the actions of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad actually saved the Palestinian resistance movement from a fatal lethargy. How else ‘‘can an oppressed people believe that change is possible,’’ asked one activist, if not through heroic acts of violence? To these militant voices, October 7 served the useful purpose of reanimating the revolutionary spirit of the Palestinian people and their supporters worldwide. 

Violence may seem senseless from a safe distance, especially to liberals in bourgeois neighborhoods, but the militant understands its crucial mobilizing power. Violence can awaken people from moral slumber and direct their energies toward strategic acts of resistance. As militant Leila Khaled explains, acts of violence can be designed ‘‘to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval.’’ This is a familiar argument in militant circles. Violence is presented as a possible antidote to the political passivity of the colonial subject. Shklar was immensely suspicious of such ‘‘ideologies of solidarity’’ precisely because ‘‘they are so attractive to those who find liberalism emotionally unsatisfying’’ and ‘‘who have gone on in our century to create oppressive and cruel regimes of unparalleled horror.’’ These political ideologies attempt to replace the ecstasy of formalized religion with their own form of secular ‘‘political spirituality,’’ often with deadly results (Liberalism of Fear, p. 30). 

In more recent times, both critics and defenders of liberalism have advanced the idea that liberalism is more than just a political doctrine, with the latter group arguing that it can even be a source of meaning in life (see Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life). What we might call ‘substantive’ liberalism regards the articulation of reasons for liberal political beliefs as an indispensable part of defending the substance of liberal ideals. Such a liberal may draw from his own religious and philosophical tradition to defend contested notions such as ‘equality’ and ‘human rights,’ and may lay a strong emphasis on the promotion of these ideas to elevate human existence. Shklar, on the other hand, is clear that liberalism refers strictly to a political doctrine, not a way of life (Liberalism of Fear, p. 3). ‘‘No form of liberalism,’’ she argues, ‘‘has any business telling the citizenry to pursue happiness or even to define that wholly elusive condition’’ (Liberalism of Fear, p. 28). 

Liberalism’s primary concern is not metaphysics, but mechanics: how can a society secure the conditions of a safe and cruelty-free existence? One can think of the liberal as the person who continually works to build, improve, and repair the system of law that allows human social life to continue without unsustainable levels of cruel bloodshed. He is a mechanic of sorts, one who is tasked with the unpleasant job of containing some of the unpleasantness of human existence. The starting point of all his activities is a recognition that there are a multiplicity of ways in which human beings (including himself) can both intentionally and unintentionally harm each other, and even that such moral devastation may sometimes, ironically, be caused by his desire to reduce human suffering. 

Thus before the liberal can venture out into the world acting on noble plans to protect others, he must first protect others from himself. The most common method of defangment is stringent accountability to the public rule of law. This is a feature of American constitutionalism that is a source of grief for ambitious innovators in the U.S. and a source of constant amazement and mocking contempt among foreign autocrats. As Dan Wang has observed, Americans are known in China as the ‘people who block themselves’ (Breakneck, p. 10). 

The liberal’s obstructing personality is well-known, but less appreciated is the fact that despite his detestation of excessive and unwarranted interference with the private affairs of civilians, the reason he lays all kinds of legislative barriers along the path of officeholders is precisely because he does not trust any man or woman, no matter how spectacularly competent or morally excellent, to exercise power without falling into unforeseen blunder. It is possible, for example, to bring about cruel outcomes by simply mobilizing people to action. History books are filled with cases of vandalism and molestation committed against foreigners and minority groups after a summon to war. 

Human beings are agitable enough. Liberals are not interested in exciting or activating individuals to a higher purpose in life, and have no wish to outline what this higher purpose might be. The historical record of this latter form of soul-crafting project is awfully grim. Such projects do not pay sufficient respect to the wishes of ordinary people. When President Nixon remarked that Mao’s ‘‘writings moved a nation and have changed the world,” the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party replied that he had “only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking” (The Great Transformation, p. 89). Behind this seemingly modest response is a frightening indication of the immense ambitions of this politician. Mao spent his career whipping up revolutions and creating deathly chaos. And yet, after millions died in his costly experiments, he still was not satisfied. One can see why liberals remain unashamed of constitutional laws and continue to rely heavily on elaborate constitutional mechanisms of control that are designed to frustrate the daring ambitions of political entrepreneurs. 

Liberalism’s anti-utopian streak is repellent to totalitarian ideologies that make absolute claims on the minds and hearts of individuals. Religious worldviews, in particular, tend to regard liberalism’s formalised disinterest in the spiritual formation of its adherents as breeding ground for wide-scale demoralization and vice. Shklar explains that in the eyes of its critics, liberalism ‘‘trusts the mechanisms for creating consent and ensuring fairness, without any attention to the character of the individual citizens or to that of the society as a whole’’ (Liberalism of Fear, p. 31). 

That is a recurrent and familiar criticism which misses the subtle moral promptings of the law. It also fails to recognize that liberalism’s grudge is not with moral education per se, but with the pretensions of the state to be the sole disciplinarian in the lives of free and equal people. This is fundamental: liberalism began, Shklar explains, ‘‘precisely in order to oppose the educative state’’ and its transformative ambitions for the lives of human beings (Liberalism of Fear, p. 32). 

Religious critics of liberalism also assert that liberalism itself is biased against religion, but this is simply bad intellectual history. Liberal ideals and sensibilities can be traced back to medieval scholasticism, and its concerns for the sanctity of human life and the reduction of cruelty are all expressions of its origins in the wars of religion. In addition, some of the most elegant articulators of liberal ideas, such as Erasmus, Grotius, Locke, Tocqueville, and Constant, were defenders of the importance of religion and its role as a formidable check on the power of magistrates. 

What liberals of all stripes—whether confessors or not—fundamentally object to is the deployment of theological doctrines, imagery, and poetics to celebrate, justify, or excuse acts of cruelty, and to exploit the weakest members of society. One need not harbor any religious animus, for example, to see the double monstrosity in using children as mine sweepers, and telling these same scared beings that the plastic keys on their necks will unlock access to the gates of paradise after they’ve been pulverized (A Problem From Hell, p. 184). Iran’s ayatollah Khomeini was reviled by liberals the world over, not primarily because he was a religious figurehead (one does not find a commensurate hatred for Pope John Paul II), but because he was the supreme leader of a theocracy that made a constant mockery of human rights. 

Some may argue that liberalism’s desire to eradicate cruelty is itself idealistic, and may in some instances lead to more, not less, suffering in the world, but that alone is not a reason to be careless about cruelty. Liberals are not oblivious to the realities of human rights enforcement. As much as liberals may wish to prevent harm, sometimes they arrive too late to prevent the massacre from happening. They recognize that the evil of cruelty will likely happen despite their best efforts. In those situations, the liberal ‘‘concentrates on damage control’’ (Liberalism of Fear, p. 18). Liberals cannot fully eradicate the evils of the world, but their mission remains clear: the ‘‘reduction of fear and cruelty’’ (Liberalism of Fear, p. 30). The pursuit of this goal must be heavily constrained by a faithful application of the procedures of international law and must be amenable to correction if it becomes clear that more harm than good is being produced. Still, liberalism insists that any ‘‘insult to the life and liberty of a member of any race or group in any part of the world’’ is a matter of grave concern, and must be addressed as urgently and soberly as possible. That’s what it means to put the problem of cruelty first (Liberalism of Fear, p. 38). 

As we look back at the events of the 20th century it is important to recall the uniqueness of even the most meager efforts to put an end to mass cruelties in territories outside of one’s national borders. This is an anomalous period of history precisely because the human default is to manage the crises closest to us, especially when funds are limited and public opinion is opposed to the sacrifice of its military professionals. The challenge for our age is to keep this humanitarian impulse alive in the face of growing efforts to narrow the sphere of human rights interventions. If the reduction of cruelty is central to liberalism, then a future where whole worlds are sealed off from international scrutiny and pressure through digital manipulation and diplomatic tactics would be a severe form of regression from the liberal achievements of the recent past. 

Featured Image is The Nazi extermination camp in the Rzuchowskie Forests, by Paweł Schmidt