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Liberalism's Failures in Family Matters
Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax. I would like to bring up some criticisms of liberalism, and why I think societies that follow it as a singular goal will inevitably suffer from the problems we see (birth rate collapse, sex wars, etc.)
On a newsletter warning of the dangers of sports gambling, Oren Cass wrote:
The liberal ideal relies on many huge assumptions. Two of those assumptions are that people will choose things that bring themselves happiness and that externalities (or times when an individuals choices impact others) will be easy to detect and foreseeable. In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace. And maybe the executives of the sports gambling company and the 19 year old with a phone can consent to enter into a relationship where the 19 year old gives the executives all his money, but the 17 year old girlfriend did not consent to being beaten more often. (After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)
Another assumption of liberalism is that we enter into the world as individuals, without owing or being owed anything. Marc Barnes of New Polity wrote:
It's hard to believe, but the Enlightenment thinkers really thought that pre-historic humans didn't band together in family or social units. And this complete falsehood is somewhat required to make liberalism work.
The word "atomization" is thrown around as a negative. No one has friends to help them, we have apps that facilitate economic contracts with others to help us move houses or buy groceries if we're sick. Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but we're obviously not the same kind of human at all. Atomization is the founding assumption of Liberalism though.
Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.
But there are places where Authoritarianism is needed, particularly in family life. Parents have authority over their children. More than that, there is a pre-existing bond between parent and child to which neither consented. A child cannot consent to their parents before they are born. A parent has no idea what their child will be like before they are born. And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.
In the latest edition of Dr. Leonard Sax's The Collapse of Parenting, Sax describes a family that comes to him for help. The 12 year old daughter has suddenly shown signs of ADHD. Her teacher filled out a form indicating that the 12-year-old's concentration levels are off the charts in a bad way. The girl's family doctor prescribed her ADHD medication to help alleviate her symptoms. They worked, but also left her jittery with heart palpitations and anxiety symptoms.
Sax's first question to the girl's family is how well she slept. Confused, the parents said the girl slept ok, but when Dr. Sax drilled into the details the girl nonchalantly said she was on her phone until 1-2 AM most nights. "Of course, doesn't everyone?"
Dr. Sax told her parents to take her off the Amphetamines and instead keep the kid's phone in the parents' bedroom at night, starting 9 PM. The parents' response was, "Oh, no, we couldn't do that! She'd be so angry at us."
The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier. And Dr. Sax says that this is a very common example that he sees often at his practice.
In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children. Longitudinal studies show that kids who have strict but unloving parents grow up without knowing how to form loving relationships of their own. Kids that grow up with permissive parents are incapable of balancing a checkbook and make poor decisions due to a high time preference. The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict - a combination the Literature refers to as "Authoritative Parenting." Authoritative Parenting used to be the default, but among left-leaning families there has been a surge of parents fearing that they are overriding their kids innate preferences. Proper parenting is illiberal, and therefore immoral.
One young child arrived to the practice with a sore throat and fever for three days. When Dr. Sax asked the child to open her mouth, she refused. Dr. Sax looked to the mother, and said, "I need your help to examine your daughter, could you help encourage her to open wide?" The mother responded, "Her body, her choice."
The liberal order worked when it was founded on an illiberal order. When humans acted like humans most of the time, raised their children like humans, formed natural hierarchies like humans, liberalism worked fine. I think it falls apart when the government tries to impose liberal presuppositions on every-day human interactions. It falls apart when people think they are supposed to act perfectly liberal in every social interaction. A society based around consent instead of love (willing the good of one another) will fall apart.
I love liberalism, in a way. I love how it shaped American culture for hundreds of years. But I think the evidence points to a need for a safeguard somewhere, similar to the separation of Church and State. A separation of State and Hearth? Americans need to parent better than Rousseau.
Tocqueville famously believed that religion, particularly Christianity, was necessary in America to create and sustain our Democracy. It provided shared values. People had shared common ground beyond their mere desires which which they could identify what is good for all. There is a benefit to having an ultimate Authority, in Heaven, who everyone agrees to serve but who seldom gives specific commands.
Maybe the problem will resolve itself, as atheists fail to reproduce and the deeply religious take over again. Or maybe the cat's all the way out of the bag. But the evidence seems to point towards Liberalism being good but insufficient, and the next best thing needs to be figured out before we lose the goods of Liberalism as well.
This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing. I will engage as if you wrote libertarianism for this reason (not that you're making a mistake. It's likely me who is confused here)
This seems like what we'd call "brainrot" or "degeneracy". I started using this latter word almost 10 years ago after reading Nietzsche, and nobody else seemed to use it at the time, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the reason the word came back. Anyway, freedom is actually the freedom to command yourself, not the freedom not to be commanded. One should only seek freedom if they don't need being told what to do in order to succeed in life, if they don't use their freedom to destroy themselves.
We're deeply social by nature (and the most oversocialized lean left! They just want to socialize without taking responsibility for anything, which is why they want the government to do everything for them). It seems that being around a lot of other people is bad for you, for the same reason that social media is bad for you. People start competing and aiming for superficial appearances of what people value while neglecting what actually matters.
The advantage of libertarianism is that you can choose which group you want to depend on and have depend on you (living as a hermit for very long is almost impossible). People are only equal in value, that they're actually equal is a stupid idea. I also agree that family values are essential, and throwing them out is basically taunting darwinism to remove you from reality. I also don't see how anyone would disagree with "The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict".
I consider myself pro-freedom, and around my friends I give myself all the freedom that I want, and I give them all the freedom that they want, too. But this only works because we're all reasonable and because we can take responsibility for ourselves. Those who believe "freedom" to be the freedom to indulge in vices (because it seems unpleasant for them to resist unhealthy urges) cannot live like this.
I agree with your conclusion, but you can word it differently. We don't need "authority" but "coherence". The advantage of Christianity is that it gives value to things which are healthier than our random urges/impulses. The disadvantage is that you can lose faith in Christianity (but if you have a preference like vanilla ice cream, you don't care if there's no objective proof that it's good - you still believe in your own preference). We also need Reponsibility (this is one of Jordan Petersons core values too) and you don't have to call this "authoritarianism". Being overly lenient with others only works when they're being too strict on themselves. I feel like this might have something in common with "we praise those who degrade themselves and degrade those who praise themselves". We recognize the need for a balance. As long as internal control + external control > X where X is some threshold, the individual will turn out alright. To the extent that a person is able to control themselves, they've earned the right to be free from external control
The most common (and therefore correct, at least in American English) meaning of "liberal" in the US context is as a slur used by both the right and the left against the centre-left. Occasionally this extends to using "liberalism" to mean "whatever the US centre-left does". This is also slur-adjacent - the American centre-left generally call their own ideology "Progressivism" because their political tradition (with some degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice) goes back to the early 20th century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. There is a similar but different use of "liberal" and "liberalism" in British English (in this case not a slur - it is what we call ourselves) to describe the political tradition which runs through the British Liberal Party (1859-1988) and its predecessors and successors and their international imitators - there is a similar degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice that begins with John Locke advising William III and runs through to Earl Russel negotiating the Whig-Peelite merger and on to Nick Clegg and Justin Trudeau doing the things they do.
But @OracleOutlook, and the Economist (which he cites supporting it) and Marc Barnes (which he cites opposing it) are using "liberalism" in an even broader sense (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is also correct in both British and American English) - to refer to a whole panoply of mutually sympathetic political traditions based on ethical individualism, limited government, respect for a private sphere than includes religious belief, etc. All of British liberalism, American "liberalism"/Progressivism, Reagan/Thatcher conservatism, technocratic-elitist "One Nation"/"Rockefeller Republican" conservatism, and Cato Institute-style libertarianism* can trace their political traditions back to John Locke, and occasionally do so with pride. This is the background that mainstream political actors in the Anglosphere can not notice in the same way that fish don't notice that water is wet. (Many leftists, including the British Labour party, are swimming in the same water). Increasingly, it is the water that everyone is swimming in because the British won the 19th century and the Americans won the 20th.
But big-tent liberalism is not actually universal, even if it is foundational to Universal Culture. All the sub-varieties of liberalism would look at online sports betting and see "This is probably a vice, but that is a comment about private morality, not political morality. It may be so harmful that we need to ban it, but it should be legal by default because you only harm yourself." Most would cite to John Stuart Mill for justification. But a fascist, a communist, a Catholic integralist, a Christian fundamentalist, a Muslim fundamentalist, a Confucian, or a Lee Kwan Yew style technocratic-elitist would all ban it without a second thought, with "It's a vice." being sufficient justification.
* The brand of libertarianism being pushed by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and such-like is arguably not part of big-tent liberalism for reasons that this post is too short to discuss in detail.
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