Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology.

To call for the cures of liberalism’s ills by applying more liberal measures is tantamount to throwing gas on a raging fire. It will only deepen our political, social, economic, and moral crisis.

This political philosophy has been for modern Americans like water for a fish, an encompassing political ecosystem in which we have swum, unaware of its existence. Liberalism is the first of the modern world’s three great competitor political ideologies, and with the demise of fascism and communism, it is the only ideology still with a claim to viability. As ideology, liberalism was the first political architecture that proposed transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a preconceived political plan. We live in a society and increasingly a world that has been remade in the image of an ideology—the first nation founded by the explicit embrace of liberal philosophy, whose citizenry is shaped almost entirely by its commitments and vision. But unlike the visibly authoritarian regimes that arose in dedication to advancing the ideologies of fascism and communism, liberalism is less visibly ideological and only surreptitiously remakes the world in its image. In contrast to its crueler competitor ideologies, liberalism is more insidious: as an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diversions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself invisible, much as a computer’s operating system goes largely unseen—until it crashes. Liberalism becomes daily more visible precisely because its deformations are becoming too obvi...

Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more unbreakable than the ultimate unsustainability of ideology in politics. Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on falsehood about human nature, and hence can’t help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy. Either it enforces conformity to a lie it struggles to defend, or it collapses when the gap between claim and reality finally results in wholesale loss of belief among the populace. More often than not, one precedes the other. Thus, even as liberalism has penetrated nearly every nation on earth, its vision of human liberty seems increasingly to be a taunt rather than a promise. Far from celebrating the utopic freedom at the “end of history” that seemed within grasp when the last competing ideology fell in 1989, humanity comprehensively shaped by liberalism is today burdened by the miseries of its successes. It pervasively finds itself to be caught in a trap of its own making, entangled in the very apparatus that was supposed to grant pure and unmitigated freedom.

Citizens are more likely to be called “consumers,” yet the liberty to buy every imaginable consumer good does little to assuage the widespread economic anxiety and discontent over waxing inequality—indeed, the assumption by economic leaders seems to be that increased purchasing power of cheap goods will compensate for the absence of economic security and the division of the world into generational winners and losers. There has always been, and probably always will be, economic inequality, but few civilizations appear to have so extensively perfected the separation of winners from losers or created such a massive apparatus to winnow those who will succeed from those who will fail. Marx once argued that the greatest source of economic discontent was not necessarily inequality but alienation—the separation of worker from product and the attendant loss of any connection with the goal and object of one’s efforts. Today’s economy not only maintains and extends this alienation but adds a profound new form of geographic alienation, the physical separation of beneficiaries of the globalized economy from those left behind. This leads the economic winners to combine lamentations of economic inequality with sotto voce denunciations of the backward views of those who condemn globalization’s course. The losers, meanwhile, are consoled with the reminder that they are wealthy beyond compare to even the wealthiest aristocrats of an earlier age. Material comforts are a ready salve for the d...

Hedonistic consumerism

Citizens are more likely to be called “consumers,” yet the liberty to buy every imaginable consumer good does little to assuage the widespread economic anxiety and discontent over waxing inequality—indeed, the assumption by economic leaders seems to be that increased purchasing power of cheap goods will compensate for the absence of economic security and the division of the world into generational winners and losers. There has always been, and probably always will be, economic inequality, but few civilizations appear to have so extensively perfected the separation of winners from losers or created such a massive apparatus to winnow those who will succeed from those who will fail. Marx once argued that the greatest source of economic discontent was not necessarily inequality but alienation—the separation of worker from product and the attendant loss of any connection with the goal and object of one’s efforts. Today’s economy not only maintains and extends this alienation but adds a profound new form of geographic alienation, the physical separation of beneficiaries of the globalized economy from those left behind. This leads the economic winners to combine lamentations of economic inequality with sotto voce denunciations of the backward views of those who condemn globalization’s course. The losers, meanwhile, are consoled with the reminder that they are wealthy beyond compare to even the wealthiest aristocrats of an earlier age. Material comforts are a ready salve for the d...

See opioid epidemic...

One of globalization’s cheerleaders, Thomas Friedman, has defined it in just such terms of inevitability: It is the inevitable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into individuals, corporations and nation-states farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before.2 Whether people want the world “reaching into” individuals, corporations, and nation states is not a matter for discussion, for the process cannot be stopped. The economic system that simultaneously is both liberalism’s handmaiden and its engine, like a Frankenstein monster, takes on a life of its own, and its processes and logic can no longer be controlled by people purportedly enjoying the greatest freedom in history. The wages of freedom are bondage to economic inevitability.

At the moment of liberalism’s culmination, then, we see the headlong evacuation of the liberal arts. The liberal arts were long understood to be the essential form of education for a free people, especially citizens who aspired to self-government. The emphasis on the great texts—which were great not only or even because they were old but because they contained hard-won lessons on how humans learn to be free, especially free from the tyranny of their insatiable desires—has been jettisoned in favor of what was once considered “servile education,” an education concerned exclusively with money making and a life of work, and hence reserved for those who did not enjoy the title of “citizen.” Today’s liberals condemn a regime that once separated freeman from serf, master from slave, citizen from servant, but even as we have ascended to the summit of moral superiority over our benighted forebears by proclaiming everyone free, we have almost exclusively adopted the educational form that was reserved for those who were deprived of freedom. And yet in the midst of our glorious freedom, we don’t think to ask why we no longer have the luxury of an education whose very name—liberal arts—indicates its fundamental support for the cultivation of the free person.

Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.

Liberalism’s success today is most visible in the gathering signs of its failure. It has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities—unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will. The autonomous self is thus subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation. Yet our liberation renders us incapable of resisting these defining forces—the promise of freedom results in thralldom to inevitabilities to which we have no choice but to submit.

Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market.

Claiming to liberate the individual from embedded cultures, traditions, places, and relationships, liberalism has homogenized the world in its image—ironically, often fueled by claims of “multiculturalism” or, today, “diversity.” Having successfully disembedded us from relationships that once made claims upon us but also informed our conception of selfhood, our sense of ourselves as citizens sharing a common fate and as economic actors sharing a common world, liberalism has left the individual exposed to the tools of liberation—leaving us in a weakened state in which the domains of life that were supposed to liberate us are completely beyond our control or governance. This suggests that all along, the individual was the “tool” of the liberal system, not—as was believed—vice versa.

Interesting conclusion

The most challenging step we must take is a rejection of the belief that the ailments of liberal society can be fixed by realizing liberalism. The only path to liberation from the inevitabilities and ungovernable forces that liberalism imposes is liberation from liberalism itself. Both main political options of our age must be understood as different sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Conservatism rightly observes that progressivism’s destination is a dead end, and progressivism rightly decries conservatism’s nostalgia for a time that cannot be restored. Conservatives and progressives alike have advanced liberalism’s project, and neither as constituted today can provide the new way forward that must be discerned outside our rutted path. Nor does reflecting upon what follows liberalism’s self-destruction imply that we must simply devise its opposite, or deny what was of great and enduring value in the achievements of liberalism. Liberalism’s appeal lies in its continuities with the deepest commitments of the Western political tradition, particularly efforts to secure liberty and human dignity through the constraint of tyranny, arbitrary rule, and oppression. In this regard, liberalism is rightly considered to be based on essential political commitments that were developed over centuries in classical and Christian thought and practice. Yet liberalism’s innovations—ones that its architects believed would more firmly secure human liberty and dignity—which consisted especially of a redefinition of the ideal of liberty and a reconception of human nature, have undermined the realization of its stated commitments. Moving beyond liberalism is not to discard some of liberalism’s main commitments—especially those deepest longings of the West, political liberty and human dignity—but to reject the false turn it made in its imposition of an ideological remaking of th...

"image of a false anthropology"

Political revolution to overturn a revolutionary order would produce only disorder and misery. A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.

The Village

What’s needed now is not to perfect our philosophy any further but to again do more honor to ourselves. Out of the fostering of new and better selves, porously invested in the fate of other selves—through the cultivation of cultures of community, care, self-sacrifice, and small-scale democracy—a better practice might arise, and from it, ultimately, perhaps a better theory than the failing project of liberalism.

Yes!

It was Machiavelli who broke with the classical and Christian aspiration to temper the tyrannical temptation through an education in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies of “imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.”

These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest—a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue. Not only is this malady increasingly manifest in all social interactions and institutions, but it infiltrates liberal politics. Undermining any appeal to common good, it induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized polarization for a citizenry that is increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns. Similarly, the “cure” by which individuals could be liberated from authoritative cultures generates social anomie that requires expansion of legal redress, police proscriptions, and expanded surveillance.

The cure of human mastery of nature is producing consequences that suggest such mastery is at best temporary and finally illusory: ecological costs of burning of fossil fuels, limits of unlimited application of antibiotics, political fallout from displacement of workforce by technology, and so forth. Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.

Provocative.... But too drastic a conclusion

See Putnam

Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision, particularly once the child-rearing duties are completed. If this encompassing logic of choice applies to the most elemental family relationships, then it applies all the more to the looser ties that bind people to other institutions and associations, in which membership is subject to constant monitoring and assessment of whether it benefits or unduly burdens any person’s individual rights.

I mean... Kind of right?

Provocative... Needs supporting data

Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation.

First-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives,” who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies. Today’s political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between these two varieties of liberals. Neither side confronts the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature defended by the preliberal tradition.

Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires.

Christian, Buddhist, Stoic-stye virtue ethics

In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, superficially self-maximizing, socially destructive behaviors begin to dominate society.

Reality TV, video games, Social Media, streaming services...

In schools, norms of modesty, comportment, and academic honesty are replaced by widespread lawlessness and cheating (along with increasing surveillance of youth), while in the fraught realm of coming-of-age, courtship norms are replaced by “hookups” and utilitarian sexual encounters. The norm of stable lifelong marriage is replaced by various arrangements that ensure the autonomy of the individuals, whether married or not. Children are increasingly viewed as a limitation upon individual freedom, which contributes to liberalism’s commitment to abortion on demand, while overall birth rates decline across the developed world. In the economic realm, the drive for quick profits, often driven by incessant demands for immediate profitability, replaces investment and trusteeship. And in our relationship to the natural world, short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty becomes our birthright, even if it forces our children to deal with shortages of such resources as topsoil and potable water. Restraint of these activities is understood (if at all) to be the domain of the state’s exercise of positive law, not the result of cultivated self-governance born of cultural norms.

the endless quest for self-fulfillment and greater power to satisfy human cravings requires ever-accelerating economic growth and pervasive consumption. Liberal society can barely survive the slowing of such growth, and it would collapse if economic growth were to stop or reverse for any length of time.

The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis on “Right” over “Good”—is the embrace of the liberal human as self-fashioning expressive individual. This aspiration requires that no truly hard choices be made. There are only different lifestyle options.

In the material and economic realm, liberalism has drawn down on age-old reservoirs of resources in its endeavor to conquer nature. No matter the political program of today’s leaders, more is the incontestable program. Liberalism can function only by the constant increase of available and consumable material goods, and thus with the constant expansion of nature’s conquest and mastery. No person can aspire to a position of political leadership by calling for limits and self-command.

Grim

If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory and that it culminates in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied, then we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice, or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and the increasingly forcible imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state. Taken to its logical conclusion, liberalism’s end game is unsustainable in every respect: it cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back inexorably into a future in which extreme license coexists with extreme oppression.

IF

Both “classical” and “progressive” liberalism ground the advance of liberalism in individual liberation from the limitations of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relationship. Both traditions—for all their differences over means—can be counted as liberal because of this fundamental commitment to liberation of the individual and to the use of natural science, aided by the state, as a primary means for achieving practical liberation from nature’s limitations. Thus statism and individualism grow together while local institutions and respect for natural limits diminish.

A main goal of Locke’s philosophy is to expand the prospects for our liberty—defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites—through the auspices of the state. Law is not a discipline for self-government but the means for expanding personal freedom: “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”

Ick

The state does not merely serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing our capacity to engage in productive activities, especially commerce, it establishes a condition in reality that existed in theory only in the state of nature: the ever-increasing achievement of the autonomous individual. Thus one of the liberal state’s main roles becomes the active liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions. At the forefront of liberal theory is the liberation from natural limitations on the achievement of our desires—one of the central aims of life, according to Locke, being the “indolency of the body.” A main agent of that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which not only to realize existing desires but even to create new ones we did not know we had. The state becomes charged with extending the sphere of commerce, particularly with enlarging the range of trade, production, and mobility.4 The expansion of markets and the infrastructure necessary for that expansion do not result from “spontaneous order”; rather, they require an extensive and growing state structure, which at times must extract submission from the system’s recalcitrant or unwilling participants. Initially, this effort is exerted on local domestic economy, in which the state must enforce rationalization and imposition of depersonalized modern markets. Eventually, however, this project becomes a main driver of liberal imperialism, an imperative justif...

In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as a philosophical set of arguments is then instantiated in reality. The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order. The imposition of the liberal order is accompanied by the legitimizing myth that its form was freely chosen by unencumbered individuals; that it was the consequence of extensive state intervention is ignored by all but a few scholars.

As Polanyi pithily says of this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.”8 This process was repeated countless times in the history of modern political economy: in efforts to eradicate the medieval guilds, in the enclosure controversy, in state suppression of “Luddites,” in state support for owners over organized labor, and in government efforts to empty the nation’s farmlands via mechanized, industrial farming. It was, in complex ways, an underlying motive during the American Civil War, which, for all its legitimacy in eliminating slavery, also decisively brought the state-backed expansion of a national economic system, opposition to which was forever stained by guilt by association with southern slavery.9 We see its legacy today in the ongoing expansion of global markets through free-trade agreements ardently supported by so-called conservatives, often with the aim of disrupting and ultimately displacing native cultures that might be of concern both to Burkean conservatives and to Marxist-leaning critics of relentless globalization.10 The state’s role in enforcing the existence of a national market has been reinforced in recent years by efforts to roll back various state-based environmental standards—ironically, an activity most ardently embraced by “conservative” Republicans who are otherwise strident defenders of “states’ rights.”

Claiming that the radical individual imagined by liberal theory was a “given,” liberal practice advanced this normative ideal through an ever-burgeoning state that ceaselessly expanded not in spite of individualism, but to bring about its realization.

While one may see collectivist economic arrangements in these thinkers’ practical recommendations—Dewey, for instance, calls for “public socialism,” and Croly writes in support of “flagrant socialism”—it would be mistaken to conclude that they do not endorse the inviolability and dignity of the individual. A consistent theme in both men’s work is that only by eliminating the cramped and limiting individualism of “old liberalism” can a truer and better form of “individuality” emerge. Only complete liberation from the shackles of unfreedom—including especially the manacles of economic degradation and inequality—can bring the emergence of a new and better individuality. The apotheosis of democracy, they argue, will lead to a reconciliation of the “Many” and the “One,” a reconciliation of our social nature and our individuality.

Equality of opportunity only exists with a start on equal footing

The world portrayed by “Life of Julia” is an updated version of the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which there only exist individuals and the sovereign state—the former creating and giving legitimacy to the latter, the latter ensuring a safe and secure life for the individuals who brought it into being. The main difference is that while Hobbes’s story is meant as a thought experiment, “The Life of Julia” is meant to depict present-day reality. But the ad makes increasingly clear that its story is the very opposite of Hobbes’s: it is the liberal state that creates the individual. Through the increasingly massive and all-encompassing Leviathan, we are finally free of one another.

The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as “consumers”—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than “citizens”—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all.

THE dual expansion of the state and personal autonomy rests extensively on the weakening and eventual loss of particular cultures, and their replacement not by a single liberal culture but by a pervasive and encompassing anticulture. What is popularly called a “culture,” often modified by an adjective—for instance, “pop culture” or “media culture” or “multiculturalism”—is in fact a sign of the evisceration of culture as a set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings. As Mario Vargas Llosa has written, “The idea of culture has broadened to such an extent that, although nobody has dared to say this explicitly, it has disappeared. It has become an ungraspable, multitudinous and figurative ghost.”1 The only forms of shared cultural “liturgy” that remain are celebrations of the liberal state and the liberal market. National holidays have become occasions for shopping, and shopping holy days such as “Black Friday” have become national holidays.

Anticulture

The liturgies of nation and market are woven closely together (the apogee of which is the celebration of commercials during the Super Bowl), simultaneously nationalist and consumerist celebrations of abstracted membership that reify individuated selves held together by depersonalized commitments. In the politically nationalist and economically globalist setting, these contentless liturgies often take the form of two minutes of obligatory patriotism in which a member of the armed services appears during pauses in a sporting event for reverential applause before everyone gets back to the serious business of distracted consumption. The show of superficial thanks for a military with which few have any direct connection leaves an afterglow that distracts from the harder question of whether the national military ultimately functions to secure the global market and so support the construction of abstracted, deracinated, and consumptive selves.

3 pillars of liberal anticulture

The imperative to overcome culture as part of the project of mastering nature was expressed with forthright clarity by John Dewey, one of liberalism’s great heroes. Dewey insisted that the progress of liberation rested especially upon the active control of nature, and hence required the displacement of traditional beliefs and culture that reflected a backward and limiting regard for the past. He described these two approaches to the human relationship to nature as “civilized” versus “savage.” The savage tribe manages to live in the desert, he wrote, by adapting itself to the natural limits of its environment; thus “its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use.” A “civilized people” in the same desert also adapts; but “it introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the environment.”4 Dewey traced his thought back to Francis Bacon, whom he considered the most important thinker in history. Bacon, he wrote in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, teaches that “scientific laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborat...

The development of progressivism within liberalism is only a further iteration of this pervasive presentism, a kind of weaponized timelessness. Like classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particularly tradition and custom. While widely understood to be future-oriented, it in fact rests on simultaneous assumptions that contemporary solutions must be liberated from past answers but that the future will have as much regard for our present as we have for the past.

Those whose view of time is guided by such belief implicitly understand that their “achievements” are destined for the dustbin of history, given that the future will regard us as backward and necessarily superseded. Every generation must live for itself. Liberalism makes humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its culmination has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of debt to be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of resources continues in the progressive belief that future generations will devise a way to deal with the depletions.

Aristocracy, Tocqueville wrote, “links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link. … Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”6

Modern liberal democracies, Tocqueville believed, would have a powerful tendency to act only for the short term, thus to discount the consequences of their actions upon future generations: Once [liberal democrats] have grown accustomed not to think about what will happen after their life, they easily fall back into a complete and brutish indifference about the future, an attitude all too well suited to certain propensities in human nature. As soon as they have lost the way of relying chiefly upon distant hopes, they are naturally led to want to satisfy their least desires at once. … [Thus] there is always a danger that men will give way to ephemeral and casual desires and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may never achieve anything great or calm or lasting.7 Tocqueville notes that the propensity to think only within the context of one’s own lifespan, and to focus on satisfaction of immediate and baser pleasures, is a basic “propensity in human nature.” To chasten, educate, and moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and familial structures, practices, and expectations.

Virtue ethics

Tocqueville perceived that this same “brutish indifference” would manifest itself not only politically but economically as well. Dissolving the practices, along with the structures, that draw people out of temporal narrowness, he feared, would have the effect of separating people’s capacity to discern a shared fate. Fractured time, and the resultant escape into the “solitude of our own hearts,” would lead to self-congratulation and actual physical as well as psychic separation of those who were economically successful from those less fortunate. In effect, he predicted that a new aristocracy would arise, but that its “brutish indifference” born of temporal fracturing would lead it to be worse than the aristocracy it was replacing. “The territorial aristocracy of past ages was obliged by law, or thought itself obliged by custom, to come to the help of its servants and to relieve their distress. But the industrial aristocracy of our day, when it has impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in their time of crisis to public charity to feed them. … Between workman and master there are frequent relations, but no true association.”

A better way to understand culture is as a kind of collective trust. Culture is the practice of full temporality, an institution that connects the present to the past and the future. As the Greeks understood, the mother of culture—of the Nine Muses—was Mnemosyne, whose name means “memory.” Culture educates us about our generational debts and obligations. At its best, it is a tangible inheritance of the past, one that each of us is obligated to regard with the responsibilities of trusteeship. It is itself an education in the full dimension of human temporality, meant to abridge our temptation to live within the present, with the attendant dispositions of ingratitude and irresponsibility that such a narrowing of temporality encourages. Preserved in discrete human inheritances—arts, literature, music, architecture, history, law, religion—culture expands the human experience of time, making both the past and the future present to creatures who otherwise experience only the present moment.