Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Not only does liberalism rest on the anthropological assumption that humans are from no one—emerging, as Hobbes described, “from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other”—but that we are from nowhere.

Midwestern white anticulture

No thinker has more ably discerned the deracinating effects of modern life than the Kentucky farmer, novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry. An unapologetic defender of community in place, Berry regards community as a rich and varied set of personal relationships, a complex of practices and traditions drawn from a store of common memory and tradition, and a set of bonds forged between a people and a place that—because of this situatedness—is not portable, mobile, fungible, or transferable.11 Community is more than a collection of self-interested individuals brought together to seek personal advancement. Rather, it “lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.”12

For Berry, the common good can be achieved only in small, local settings. These dimensions cannot be precisely drawn, but Berry seems to endorse the town as the basic locus of commonweal, and the region mainly in the economic and not interpersonal realm. He is not hostile toward a conception of national or even international common good, but he recognizes that the greater scope of these larger units tends toward abstraction, which comes always at the expense of the flourishing of real human lives. Larger units than the locality or the region can flourish in the proper sense only when their constitutive parts flourish. Modern liberalism, by contrast, insists on the priority of the largest unit over the smallest, and seeks everywhere to impose a homogenous standard on a world of particularity and diversity. One sees this tendency everywhere in modern liberal society, from education to court decisions that nationalize sexual morality, from economic standardization to minute and exacting regulatory regimes.15 The tendency of modern politics—born of a philosophy that endorses the expansion of human control—is toward the subjection of all particularities to the logic of market dynamics, exploitation of local resources, and active hostility toward diverse local customs and traditions in the name of progress and rationalism.

Vonnegut, tending gardens

Echoing Giambattista Vico, an early critic of the deracinated rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, Berry defends what Vico named the sensus communis. Such “common knowledge” is the result of the practice and experience, the accumulated store of wisdom born of trials and corrections of people who have lived, suffered, and flourished in local settings. Rules and practices based on a preconceived notion of right cannot be imposed absent prudential consideration and respect toward common sense.18 This is not to suggest that traditions cannot be changed or altered, but, as Burke argued, they must be given the presumptive allowance to change internally, with the understanding and assent of people who have developed lives and communities based upon those practices. There is then, in Berry’s thought, a considerable respect for the dignity of “common sense,” a nonexpert way of understanding the world that comes through experience, memory, and tradition, and is the source of much democratic opinion that liberalism typically dismisses.

Delinked from any conception of “completion”—telos or flourishing—and disassociated from norms of natural law, legalism results in a widespread effort to pursue desires as fully as possible while minimally observing any legal prohibition. As Solzhenitsyn noted, If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everyone strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of legal frames.19 Solzhenitsyn cut to the heart of liberalism’s great failing and ultimate weakness: its incapacity to foster self-governance.

Right versus legal

Elite universities, and the educational system more broadly, are the front lines in the advance of liberalism’s deliberate and wholesale disassembly of a broad swath of cultural norms and practices in the name of liberation from the past. Two areas in particular are served and undergirded by the educational imperative to advance the contemporary anticulture: dissolutions of sexual and economic norms, both advanced in the name of liberation of the human will that is defined especially by consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking. The fact that each of liberalism’s two main parties—“liberals” and “conservatives”—views one of these activities as problematic and the other at the core of its commitments reflects the insidiousness and pervasiveness of liberalism’s advance.

As J. P. Morgan chief Thomas Lamont said of his business in 1928, “the community as a whole demands of the banker that he shall be an honest observer of conditions about him, that he shall make constant and careful study of those conditions, financial, economic, social and political, and that he shall have a wide vision over them all.”22

By 2008, the financial industry was stripped bare of any such culture rooted in nature, time and place—as were college campuses. Indeed, training at dorm parties and the fraternities of one’s college were the ideal preparation for a career in the mortgage bond market, and the financial frat party of Wall Street more generally. The mortgage industry rested upon the financial equivalent of college “hookups,” random encounters of strangers in which appetites (for outsized debt or interest) were sated without any care for the consequences for the wider community. Responsibility- and cost-free loans were mutually satisfactory and wholly liberating from the constraints of an older financial order. But much as on college campuses, these arrangements led to gross irresponsibility and abuse, damaging communities and demolishing lives. The response has been the same: calls for greater government regulation and oversight over the consequences of untrammeled appetite, with threats of penalties (rarely enforced) and a massive expansion of the administrative state to oversee a basic human interaction—the effort to secure shelter. Liberation from the confinements and limitations of local market cultures brings not perfect liberty but the expansion of Leviathan. The destruction of culture achieves not liberation but powerlessness and bondage.

Evidence of our anticulture surrounds us yet is pervasively denied. Liberalism extends itself by inhabiting spaces abandoned by local cultures and traditions, leading either to their discarding or suppression or, far more often, to their contentless redefinition. Rather than produce our own cultures, grounded in local places, embedded in time, and usually developed from an inheritance from relatives, neighbors, and community—music, art, storytelling, food—we are more likely to consume prepackaged, market-tested, mass-marketed consumables, often branded in commercialized symbolism that masks that culture’s evisceration. A stream of stories accentuates our increasing inability to do things for ourselves, from Matthew Crawford’s widely read and discussed account of the decline of shop class as an indicator of our widening ignorance of how to make and repair things to a recent report of declining sales and maintenance of pianos in the home, a consequence of the replacement of music played at home with mass-produced music.23

Whereas culture is an accumulation of local and historical experience and memory, liberal “culture” is the vacuum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated, memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place. A panoply of actual cultures is replaced by celebration of “multiculturalism,” the reduction of actual cultural variety to liberal homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native garb. The “-ism” of “multiculturalism” signals liberalism’s victorious rout of actual cultural variety. Even as cultures are replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity’s detachment from specific cultures. The homogenous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the retail world, “choice,” the more assuredly the destruction of actual cultures is advancing. Our primary allegiance is to celebration of liberal pluralism and diversity, shaping homogenized and identical adherents of difference, demanding and ensuring pervasive indifferentism.

Turkle reminds us that the root of the word “community” means literally “to give among each other” and argues that such a practice requires “physical proximity” and “shared responsibilities.” The growing presence of social media fosters relationships that avoid either of these constitutive elements of community, replacing that thicker set of shared practices with the thinner and more evanescent bonds of “networks.” Turkle is not simply nostalgic—she acknowledges the difficult and even awful aspects of community in earlier times. She describes the community in which her grandparents lived, for instance, as “rife with deep antagonisms.” But the same thickness that gave rise to such contentious relations, she writes, also inspired people to take care of each other in times of need. Turkle fears that we are losing not only that experience but also the capacity to form the thick bonds that constitute community, and that our attraction to social media at once undermines these bonds and provides a pale simulacrum to fill the void. Social media become ersatz substitutes for what they destroy, and Turkle seems pessimistic about the prospects for slowing this transformation. At best we can try to limit our children’s access to the internet, but Turkle seems resigned to dim prospects of fundamentally changing the current dynamic.3

Postman describes the rise in the modern era of what he calls Technocracy. Preindustrial forms of culture and social organization used tools no less than technocratic societies, Postman writes, but the tools they employed “did not attack (or more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization.”4 The tools adopted by a Technocracy, by contrast, constantly transform the way of life. Postman writes, “Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. … Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”5 From technocracy we have entered the age of “technopoly,” in which a culturally flattened world operates under an ideology of progress that leads to “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” The residual cultural practices that survived the era of technocracy now give way to a transformed world in which technology is itself our culture—or anticulture, a tradition-destroying and custom-undermining dynamic that replaces cultural practices, memory, and beliefs.

Rokos basilisk

Ancient thought sought a “virtuous circle” of polities that would support the fostering of virtuous individuals, and of virtuous individuals who would form the civic life of a polity oriented toward the common good. Much of the challenge faced by ancient thinkers was how to start such a virtuous circle where it did not exist or existed only partially, and how to maintain it against the likelihood of civic corruption and persistent temptation to vice. 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. The defining feature of modern thought was the rejection of this definition of liberty in favor of the one more familiar to us today. Liberty, as defined by the originators of modern liberalism, was the condition in which humans were completely free to pursue whatever they desired. This condition—fancifully conceived as a “state of nature,” was imagined as a condition before the creation of political society, a condition of pure liberty. Its opposite was thus conceived as constraint. Liberty was no longer, as the ancients held, the condition of just and appropriate self-rule.

As 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.” That appetite, as I have argued, is itself the result of a redefinition of the nature of liberty. Consider a different kind of “technology”: how we inhabit the world through our built environment. More than any other people, 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.

Achieving Loneliness

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. These technologies reflected the commitments of modern republican liberty, but they did not—as is too often thought—make us “lonely.”9

Some of the decisions of the Amish—like their rejection of zippers—are incomprehensible to many of us, but what is most of interest is the basic criterion they use to decide whether to adopt, and more important how to adopt, technology in their society. All technological developments are subject to the basic question, “Will this or won’t it help support the fabric of our community?” It is believed that the automobile and electricity will not (though propane-powered implements are approved). To me, one of the most powerful examples of this criterion is the decision to eschew insurance, on the grounds that our form of insurance is premised on maximum anonymity and minimal personal commitment.

Amish lessons

Certain Amish communities ban members from purchasing insurance. Rather, the community itself is their “insurance pool”: members seek to foster a community where it is everyone’s shared responsibility and obligation to make someone who suffers a loss “whole” again.10 As the economist Stephen Marglin writes in his insightful book The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, “The Amish, perhaps unique in twentieth-century America in their attention to fostering community, forbid insurance precisely because they understand that the market relationship between an individual and the insurance company undermines the mutual dependence of the individuals. For the Amish, barn raisings are not exercises in nostalgia, but the cement that binds the community together.”

Amish lessons

I note this profound difference of approach to the question and use of technology between the likes of the old-order Amish and contemporary liberals not to urge that denizens of liberal modernity adopt wholesale the practices and beliefs of the Amish but to make a specific point. 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?

Amish lessons

In contradiction to our contemporary political discourse, which suggests that there is some conflict between the individual and centralized power, we need to understand that ever-expanding individual liberty is actually the creation of a sprawling and intricate set of technologies that, while liberating the individual from the limitations of both nature and obligation, leave us feeling increasingly powerless, voiceless, alone—and unfree.

Maybe the deepest irony is that our capacity for self-government has waned almost to the point of nonexistence. 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. We are certainly right to congratulate ourselves for the successes of our technology, but we are also right to worry about the costs of our technological society. Our “culture of technology” was premised, from the very start, on a false definition of liberty, and it now seems to be leading us ineluctably into a condition of bondage to the consequences of our own fantasy.