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appetites. Far from being understood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners were understood to be derived from, governed by, and necessary to the realization of human nature. A core ambition of liberalism is the liberation of such appetites from the artificial constraints of culture—either to liberate them entirely as a condition of our freedom, or, where they require constraint, to place them under the uniform and homogenized governance of promulgated law rather than the inconstant impositions and vagaries of diverse cultures.
Modern, industrialized agriculture works on the liberal model that apparent natural limits are to be overcome through short-term solutions whose consequences will be left for future generations.
Today’s liberals recoil from such bald expressions of hubris, but rather than reject Dewey’s effort to eliminate culture toward the end of dominating nature, they are inclined to accept the liberal belief in human separateness from nature and insist upon the conquest of humanity—whether through the technological control of the natural world (“conservative” liberals) or the technological control of reproduction and mastery of the human genetic code (“progressive” liberals). A core feature of the liberal project is antipathy to culture as a deep relationship with a nature that defines and limits
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The resistance to human natural limitations is the progressive liberals expression of domination over nature
Like classical liberalism, progressivism is grounded in a deep hostility toward the past, particularly tradition and custom.
He fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human community. While a constitutive feature of an aristocratic age was the pervasive understanding of oneself as defined by one’s place in a generational order, a hallmark of democracy was to “break” that chain in the name and pursuit of liberation of the individual.
To chasten, educate, and moderate this basic instinct is the fruit of broader political, social, religious, and familial structures, practices, and expectations. Liberalism stresses our liberation from continuous time as a basic feature of our nature, and thus regards such formative institutions, structures, and practices as obstacles to the achievement of our untrammeled individuality.
The place where one happens to be born and raised is as arbitrary as one’s parents, one’s religion, or one’s customs. One should consider oneself primarily a free chooser, of place as of all relationships, institutions, and beliefs.
Our default condition is homelessness.
This placeless default is one of the preeminent ways that liberalism subtly, unobtrusively, and pervasively undermines all cultures and liberates individuals into the irresponsibility of anticulture.
Berry is not hesitant to acknowledge that community is a place of constraint and limits. Indeed, in this simple fact lies its great attraction. Properly conceived, community is the appropriate setting for flourishing human life—flourishing that requires culture, discipline, constraint, and forms.
Communities thus chasten the absolutist claims of “rights bearers”:
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.
Solzhenitsyn cut to the heart of liberalism’s great failing and ultimate weakness: its incapacity to foster self-governance.
“Eros must be raised to the level of religious cult in modern society. … It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality.’ The body must be the true ‘subject’ of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire.”20 The “subject” imagined in the “state of nature” is now the resulting creature and creation of liberalism’s educational system, at once claiming merely to respect the natural autonomy of individuals and actively catechizing this “normless” norm.
universities. Formerly understood to stand in for parents—in loco parentis, “in place of the parent”—these institutions dictated rules regarding dormitory life, dating, curfews, visitations, and comportment. Adults—often clergy—were charged with continuing the cultivation of youth into responsible adulthood.
Most institutions have gotten out of the business of seeking to educate the exercise of freedom through cultivation of character and virtue; emphasis is instead placed upon the likelihood of punishment after one body has harmed another body.
Just as the destruction of distinct campus cultures and their replacement by an increasingly laissez-faire jungle with distant administrative oversight have given rise to a “rape culture,” so too has “the market” replaced a world of distinctive economic cultures.
Laws and norms once existed to shore up the local mortgage culture, forbidding banks to open branches in communities outside those where they were based, premised on a belief that the granting and accepting of debt rested on trust and local knowledge.
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.
The mortgage crisis as hook up culture
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
Liberalism has taken a page from this insidious practice: under liberalism, “culture” becomes a word that parasitizes the original, displacing actual cultures with a liberal simulacrum eagerly embraced by a populace that is unaware of the switch.
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.
Gentrification described
Liberalism was premised upon a rejection of each of these constitutive aspects of culture, since to recognize continuity with nature, the debts and obligations attending the flow of time and generations, or a strong identity with one’s place was to limit one’s experience and opportunity to become a self-making author. Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual, and a major ambition and increasing achievement of liberalism was to reshape a world organized around the human war against nature, a pervasive amnesia about the past and indifference toward the future,
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the iron stirrup or the horse collar. Our intellectual and emotional relationship to that technology—both our wild optimism about the prospects of human progress and our profound terror about the apocalypse this same technology might bring about—are products of modern times.1
These movies and programs portray how, in our optimistic and even hubristic belief that our technology will usher in a new age of freedom, we discover in various ways that we are subjects to those very technologies.
physiologically. The internet is making us dumber.2
Yet, in a book written only a decade later on advances in biotechnology and “our posthuman future,” Fukuyama acknowledges that this very logic might end up altering human nature itself, and as a result imperiling the political order of liberal democracy it had been developed to support.6
Whether told as praise or lament, this narrative of inevitability tends to grant autonomy to technology itself, as if its advances occurred independently of human intention and thought.
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.
Liberty was thus the condition achieved by self-rule, over one’s own appetites and over the longing for political dominion.
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.
Its opposite was thus conceived as constraint. Liberty was no longer, as the ancients held, the condition of just and appropriate self-rule.
The main political obstacle to be overcome was limitation upon individual liberty imposed by other people.
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.
The political structure of a republic as a technological innovation
The precondition of our technological society was that great achievement of political technology, the “applied technology” of liberal theory, our Constitution.
This new political technology developed to expand the practice of the modern understanding of liberty was designed to liberate us from partial loyalties to particular people and places, and make us into individuals who, above all, strive to achieve our individual ambitions and desires.
Liberalism introduces a set of norms that lead us, ironically, to the belief that technology develops independent of any norms and intentions, but rather shapes our norms, our polity, and even humanity, and inevitably escapes our control.
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?”
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.
cultural specificity in the name of a cultureless multiculturalism, an environmentalism barren of a formative encounter with nature, and a monolithic and homogenous “diversity.”
Ultimately it destroys liberal education, since it begins with the assumption that we are born free, rather than that we must learn to become free.
In the humanities, liberatory movements based on claims of identity regard the past as a repository of oppression, and hence displace the legitimacy of the humanities as a source of education.
For all their many differences, they all agree that liberty is not a condition into which we are naturally born but one we achieve through habituation, training, and education—particularly the discipline of self-command.
The liberal arts made us free.
This liberty, the ancients understood, was subject to misuse and excess: the oldest stories in our tradition, including the story of humankind’s fall from Eden, told of the human propensity to use freedom badly.
At 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.
This is a major point here
And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being.
older science to a teaching of the new. In the nineteenth century, a growing number of universities were established or began to emulate the example of the German universities, dividing themselves into specialized disciplines and placing a new stress upon the education of graduate students—a training in expert knowledge—and placed a new priority upon discovery of new knowledge.
The university structure was reoriented to stress innovation and the creation of “new knowledge.”
The professoriate in the liberal arts has failed to contest, let alone resist, the dominant liberal trends because of a pervasive incapacity to correctly diagnose the source of the forces arrayed against the liberal arts.
