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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Richard Hanania's recent article about how, according to him, this year has shown that liberalism is stronger than many had previously thought inspired me to wonder about what comes first, the liberalism or the success. I would guess that this question is probably meaningless since the answer is that they arise at the same time. At the very least, it is probably not as simple as the liberalism coming first and the success resulting from it.

I was wondering what people here would think about the matter so I will re-post my comment here:

I suspect that a common mistake is to think that liberalism is the state of being of a civilization in which most people support liberalism, whereas the reality is more that liberalism is the state of being of a civilization in which no authoritarian group has managed to completely dominate the others. I suspect that most people who consciously believe in liberalism would become dictators if they could. They do not think that they would, but if the avenues to total rule opened for them they would easily find rationalizations to make total rule by themselves seem altruistic - for example, "we need temporary authoritarianism with us in charge in order to guarantee the long-term survival of liberalism". So liberalism is not the state of being of a civilization which is populated mostly by actual liberals. It is the state of being of a civilization in which multiple competing wannabe authoritarian groups are managing to keep each other in check with none succeeding at gaining total power and completely dominating all the others.

And if this is true, then maybe it is worth it to revise the theory that liberalism leads to successful societies and to say that yes, that is probably true but it may be even more true that successful societies lead to liberalism. It takes a vigorous society to have multiple competing power centers none of which ever manage to come to completely dominate the others. On the other hand, for a society to have only one truly successful power center is a sign of weakness. Such a society lacks the vigor to produce more strong power centers, hence its politics becomes unipolar as one pole crushes the rest.

If this is true - not that I am convinced it is, but if it is - then it is easy to see why liberalism is associated with successful societies. Authoritarian societies are ones that are too weak to prevent themselves from being dominated by one single power center. Liberal societies by definition are those which have been strong enough to have multiple successful power centers that have endured.

liberalism is the state of being of a civilization in which no authoritarian group has managed to completely dominate the others.

The problem with this is that it is completely unrelated to the definition used (implicitly) by Hanania. He refers in the very first sentence, as well as in the title of course, to Fukuyama's The End of History, which was all about liberalism as a *particular set of ideas *which, in his view, most completely satisfies the human need, per Hegel, for "recognition" or dignity. It isn't so much about how power is distributed as it is about respect for individual autonomy and for individual 'conceptions of the good," as well as a more general presumption of individual liberty.

Now, it is certainly possible that those ideas tend to result in a society in which political power is distributed among different groups, and that, as you say, that results in more successful societies (though I don't think you define what "successful" means). But you need to explain why you think liberal ideas tend to discourage the development of a single power center.

PS: Also, when you say, "Authoritarian societies are ones that are too weak to prevent themselves from being dominated by one single power center," it is not at all clear what you mean by "weak" or really even by "societies," nor by what mechanism a "weak society" causes the development of authoritarianism.

The problem with this is that it is completely unrelated to the definition used (implicitly) by Hanania. He refers in the very first sentence, as well as in the title of course, to Fukuyama's The End of History, which was all about liberalism as a *particular set of ideas *which, in his view, most completely satisfies the human need, per Hegel, for "recognition" or dignity. It isn't so much about how power is distributed as it is about respect for individual autonomy and for individual 'conceptions of the good," as well as a more general presumption of individual liberty.

I think this problem is dissolved by seeing these ideals as equally (1) a set of ideas which satisfies the human need for recognition or dignity, and also (2) the terms of an uneasy truce between a series of more or less evenly matched would-be authoritarians. Two valid interpretations of the same phenomenon.

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