The Joy of Liberalism

I regularly hear languages I don't understand. At work, at the park, on public transit, all over. There are billboards in characters I can't decipher—not bilingual billboards, but fully foreign-language signs. I see foods in grocery stores I don't recognize. Even brands I know are now marketing unfamiliar flavors in unfamiliar characters, like Lays “pickled fish” flavor potato chips (???). Whole neighborhoods, even whole towns, are oriented around immigrant populations.

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations

Me? I love it. I love seeing all different kinds of people living together. Not just flourishing as individuals leading their own lives, but thriving together in overlapping communities and collective enterprises. 

This is the promise of liberalism: cultures colliding under conditions of peace and productive cooperation instead of violence and subjugation. The drag queen and the niqabi riding mass transit ass-by-elbow is, unironically, the future liberals want. And yes, let’s engage in feminist critique of drag-queen manspreading and misogynistic dress codes. But we can do that without making assumptions or judgments on the subway.

This is the macro picture of liberal utopia: a boisterous mix of different kinds of people coming together not in spite of their differences, but because of them, because of the positive draw of variety and opportunity. At the individual level, the whole point of this dynamic intermingling of cultures is to generate more options, more possibilities for every individual to imagine, explore, develop their faculties and interests, and be able to live prosperous and fulfilling lives.

The dimensions of difference abound, from evolving common sense about gender and sexuality, to a cornucopia of confessional and philosophical niches, to an ever-changing palette of vocations, artistic expressions, and communities of interest. Liberalism is all about expanding opportunities in all these areas of life. We value freedom because we don’t always know the thing we will come to need and desire.

Not theory, but a feeling

We can use all kinds of theoretical frameworks to give bones to liberalism. Natural law can ground rights and freedoms in human nature. It can also justify hierarchy and oppression by that same method. Social contract theory can provide an impeccably logical basis for respecting free and equal persons. It can also justify all-powerful sovereigns or simply fail to translate analytical rigor from behind the veil to the messy anthropological realities of human history and social life. Utilitarians can rigorously respect the universality of welfare with non-judgmental indifference. This same indifference can hide malformed desires and exacerbate the neglect of populations on the underside of averages.

The point is that any number of clever theories can give a philosophical language to liberal ideas. It’s worth working these systems out. They can pump our intuition and provide insights we might otherwise miss. But it’s more a matter of style than aptness. No such theories are impervious to being used to undermine the very liberal values they are intended to sustain. Liberalism is not, at root, a set of propositions or a series of arguments. It is an impulse. 

The liberal impulse is always toward whatever allows individuals to develop and express their personalities and powers. It is always an impulse to respect the equal dignity of all human beings. To love the magnificent diversity of humanity. Tolerance and forbearance are liberal virtues, yes. But these are virtues in service of the deeper value of loving humanity. We merely tolerate and forbear when it is impossible to embrace the other with gladness.

More cynical forms of liberalism emphasize that we can never escape the libido dominandi—the love of domination. Try as we might, we can never progress beyond this human failing. These are the liberalisms of fear that accept a dark view of humanity and seek to minimize the harm any one individual or group can do to any other group or individual. Agonistic liberalisms balance the powers of competing classes to foreclose the potential for domination. 

Yet even these more jaded liberals are driven by concern for humanity. The horrors of the 20th century sharpened the sensitivity among some of the Cold War liberals to human suffering. Hope for utopia was lost because the plights of the oppressed, the refugee, and the disadvantaged became too vivid to ignore. Obligations of care and inclusion are the preconditions for a minimally decent society. The same liberal love of humanity that glories in the splendor of boom times drives human rights conventions and refugee treaties in dark times. 

Not the law, but love

Liberalism is often understood in terms of the institutions liberals favor. These are familiar: the rule of law, civil liberties, representative government based on broad suffrage, a wide scope for private productive property and a market economy, an independent judiciary, a professional government bureaucracy, an academy committed to free and rigorous pursuit of knowledge, and a robust civil society.

This is a fine list, but liberalism is not defined by it any more than it is defined by abstruse academic theories. Instead, such institutions arise from the pursuit of the fundamentally humanist liberal impulse. We build institutions that protect the individual, and nourish her capabilities to live, grow, and flourish as a truly human being.

Illiberal institutions are those that stifle the free development of human beings. You can make a list out of these too. Theocracies blunt the human connection to the sublime, turning the divine into a merely human tool for social control. Dictatorship, by man or party, concentrates power into the hands of the few and directly stifles the freedom of human beings to determine the contours of their lives, individually and collectively. Bigotry and discrimination directly assail human dignity. Corruption not only violates our sense of fairness and goodwill, but degrades the purpose of whatever institution it targets. Corruption in the judiciary corrodes justice; corruption in science slows the production of knowledge; corruption in business destroys trust. 

It may seem naïve to understand liberalism as a creature of sentiment. But sentiments are not irrational. They guide reason to suitable human purposes. The liberal sentiment is and should be prior to whatever intellectual scaffoldings we erect around it. As to theories, political parties, and institutions, let a thousand liberalisms bloom. The liberal impulse to celebrate human diversity calls for nothing less.

Featured Image is Jews in solidarity with Muslims ( and Mexicans, LGBT, womens' rights ... ) - placard on the anti-Trump ban march in London, by Alisdare Hickson