Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

We seem inescapably to be either creating our own destroyer or, as Lee Silver writes in Remaking Eden, evolving into a fundamentally different creature that we have reason to fear becoming.

The culture offers entertaining prophecies born of our anxieties, and we take perverse pleasure distracting ourselves with portrayals of our powerlessness.

I want to challenge, or at least complicate, these two related ways that modern humans have come to discern and portray technology—as something that shapes and even remakes us, and does so with a kind of iron law of inevitability.

Liberty, by this understanding, was not doing as one wished, but was choosing the right and virtuous course. To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent. Liberty was thus the condition achieved by self-rule, over one’s own appetites and over the longing for political dominion.

In order to unleash the productive and scientific capacity of human societies, a different mode and order had to be introduced—a completely new form of political technology that made possible a technological society. That form of technology was the modern republic—posited on the rejection of the key premises of ancient republicanism—and above all it rested on the harnessing of self-interest in both the public and the private realms in order to secure human liberty and increase the scope, scale, and extent of human power over nature.

in light of the deeper set of conditions that led to the creation of our technological society, we can see that “technology” simply supports the fundamental commitments of early-modern political philosophy and its founding piece of technology, our modern republican government and the constitutional order. It is less a matter of our technology “making us” than of our deeper political commitments shaping our technology. You could say that our political technology is the operating system that creates the environment in which various technological programs may thrive, and that the operating system was itself the result of a transformation of the definition and understanding of liberty.

Marche points out, “Loneliness is one of the first things that Americans spend their money achieving. . . . We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.” Technologies like Facebook, he writes, “are the by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence.”

Americans have pursued a living arrangement that promotes the conception of ourselves as independent and apart, primarily through the creation of the postwar suburb, made possible by the technology of the automobile. The suburb, however, was not simply the “creation” of the automobile; rather, the automobile and its accessories—highways, gas stations, shopping malls, fast-food chains—permitted a lifestyle that Americans, because of their deeper philosophical commitments, were predisposed to prefer.

architectural historian Richard Thomas’s remarkable 1975 article “From Porch to Patio.” Thomas describes a striking postwar transition in house styles in which the front porch, formerly the most prominent feature in the elevation of a house, disappeared in favor of a patio tucked behind the house. He describes the social and even civic role played by the porch—not only offering cooler temperatures and a breeze in the era before air-conditioning, but providing “intermediate spaces,” a kind of civil space, between the private world of the house and the public spaces of the sidewalk and street. The front porch, often sited within easy chatting distance of the sidewalk, was an architectural reflection of an era with a high expectation of sociability among neighbors. The back patio gained in popularity around the same time as the increased use of the automobile and the rise of the suburb—all of which created a built environment conducive to privacy, apartness, insularity, and a declining commitment to social and civic spaces and practices.

We regard our condition as one of freedom, whereas from the standpoint of liberal modernity, adherents of Amish culture are widely perceived to be subject to oppressive rules and customs. Yet we should note that while we have choices about what kind of technology we will use—whether a sedan or a jeep, an iPhone or a Galaxy, a Mac or a PC—we largely regard ourselves as subject to the logic of technological development and ultimately not in a position to eschew any particular technology. By contrast, the Amish—who seem to constrain so many choices—exercise choice over the use and adoption of technologies based upon criteria upon which they base their community. Who is free?

we embrace and deploy technologies that make us how we imagine ourselves being.

In our current lamentations about a variety of crises—the civic crisis in which we seem to have lost the capacity to speak the language of common good; our financial crisis, in which both public and private debt, accrued for immediate satiation, is foisted upon future generations in the vague hope that they will devise a way to deal with it; our environmental crisis, in which most of the answers to our problems are framed in terms of technological fixes but which ultimately require us to control our ceaseless appetites; and the moral crisis of a society in which personal commitments such as families so easily unravel and are replaced by therapy and social programs—we fail to see the deep commonalities arising from the very success of our modern liberal project.

As the word itself intimates, a culture cultivates; it is the soil in which the human person grows and—if it is a good culture—flourishes.

an education for a free people is displaced by an education that makes liberal individuals servants to the end of untutored appetite, restlessness, and technical mastery of the natural world.

Education must be insulated from the shaping force of culture as the exercise of living within nature and a tradition, instead stripped bare of any cultural specificity in the name of a cultureless multiculturalism, an environmentalism barren of a formative encounter with nature, and a monolithic and homogenous “diversity.”

the assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free.

in the biblical and Christian traditions, articulated not only in the Bible but in the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, More, and Milton. It is no coincidence that at the heart of the liberal arts tradition was an emphasis on classical and Christian texts by these authors.

Liberty is the learned capacity to govern oneself using the higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of virtue. The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this premodern view as one of slavery, in which we are driven by our basest appetites to act against our better nature. It was the central aim of the liberal arts to cultivate the free person and the free citizen, in accordance with this understanding of liberty. The liberal arts made us free.

The aim of such an education is not “critical thinking” but the achievement of liberty governed by the discipline of virtue.

the older tradition sought to foster an ethic of restraint.

The goal of understanding ourselves was to understand how to use our liberty well, especially how to govern appetites that seemed inherently insatiable.

the heart of the liberal arts in this older tradition was an education in what it meant to be human, above all how to achieve freedom, not only from external restraint but from the tyranny of internal appetite and desire.

To be free—liberal—was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education. And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being.

Long-standing requirements to learn ancient languages in order to read the classical texts, or to require an intimate familiarity with the Bible and scriptural interpretation, were displaced by a marketplace of studies driven by individual taste and preference. Above all, the liberal arts are increasingly replaced by “STEM,” which combines a remnant of the ancient liberal arts—science and mathematics—with their applied forms, technology and engineering, alongside increasing demands for preparation for careers in business and finance.

In place of a form of education that was guided by a teleological or religious vision of what constituted an education of the best human being, he announced the inevitable rise of the multiversity, a massive organization that would be driven above all by the radical separations of the endeavors of the various members of the university aimed at providing useful knowledge to the military and industrial demands of the nation. He declared that “the multiversity was central to the further industrialization of the nation, to spectacular increases in productivity with affluence following, to the substantial extension of human life, and to worldwide military and scientific supremacy.”1 The aim of the new “multiversity” was to advance the Baconian project of human mastery over the world.