How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

When it came to it, he placed his Jewish loyalties over his British ones.

Unfair to generalize a conclujsion like this--more likely his judgement would be applied based on the circumstances

Berlin was going beyond the celebration of freedom, to the things it made possible, and basing his philosophy on them. They all mattered. Everything started with them. This idea was called pluralism.

People were all, in their lives, impacted by the tragedy of competing goods. Those who stayed single, for instance, lost the sense of contentment and reassurance that could come from starting a family. Those who started a family lost the excitement and vitality that could come from being single.

moral tragedy.

At their most severe, these tragedies were the result of something called incommensurable goods. These were values that were ‘equally ultimate,’ for which there was no common measure to establish a fixed way of deciding between them. They were often fundamental: liberty and equality, justice and mercy, freedom and belonging.

There would never be a day in which the problems of humanity would go away.

His theory of pluralism appeared to make freedom, reason and autonomy – the totems of liberalism – equal to everything else. They were just values, like all the others, no greater than honour, or strength, or beauty. If that conclusion was accepted, then very bad things happened. It opened the door to moral relativism

Berlin’s liberalism encouraged people to embrace the full varieties of life in whatever manner they wanted – whether it was patriotism, hedonism, duty, romance, charity or anything else. But the embrace of those values stopped the moment they challenged freedom, reason, autonomy or moderation. Because to undermine those values was to undermine the capacity to embrace values in the first place.

Berlin had given liberalism a human warmth.

Given the obvious possibility of disincentives in a system where a body was rating the products of its customers, credit rating agencies clearly needed extensive government oversight. But there was almost no attempt to regulate them.

Women gained control over their own body.

Not the ones who were killed in the womb, though

When people said they wanted to stand up for women, they were not talking about a desire to promote humans born with a certain biology. They were talking about a class of people who faced oppression because of how others saw them. They were members of the group ‘women’ because they all faced the same restrictions.

If cultural relativism was true, even the most despicable acts could be justified on the basis that they were culturally appropriate.

Berlin himself had teetered close to cultural relativism once or twice, but then he pulled back. It was wrong, he realised, to treat cultures as complete and self-contained, with thick insurmountable boundaries.

liberals found that they were talking increasingly to themselves, with little impact outside of academia. They were being ignored. Liberalism was no longer at the centre of political debate. Its place had been taken by a new form of political thought: identity politics.

there was something terribly dangerous about standpoint theory. If interpreted in a strict way, it suggested that groups were homogeneous. By saying that someone’s views were defined by their social context, standpoint theory implied that everyone in that social context thought the same way. It robbed people of their individuality.

The result of this failure was that the powerful within a group began speaking in the name of the powerless. That process happened in two ways: on the right and the left. On the right, it meant that older traditional figures in marginalised groups took control. On the left, it meant that progressive academics and activists secured an unchallengeable moral right to speak on behalf of everyone else.

‘adaptive preference.’ This described situations where people with few choices learned to become satisfied with those they had. Their ambitions shrank to fit their smaller horizons.

The painting must go.’ This attack suggested that only people of a certain identity could feel any commonality with those of another.

There was a willing audience for the message of the new left-wing identity politics. It was right-wing identity politics.

Asch categorised those who went with the group into three categories.

Super frustrating here not to have the proportion in each category

Bashar al-Assad, with help from Russia’s nationalist president Vladimir Putin, managed to hold on to power by murdering hundreds of thousands of his people.

Giving the Islamic State and al Nusra a free pass with this summary :/

When people began to realise this trend, they gave it a label: the echo chamber. It referred to an online space where a tribe would increasingly talk only to itself. But in fact this phrase was too modest. Echoes fade. These new tribal territories were more like feedback loops, in which messages contained did not fade, but increased in volume, becoming ever more extreme.

The YouTube algorithm was not based on how to make sure people came across alternate views so that it could preserve the health of liberal democracy. It was based, like that of other social media operations, purely on engagement.

This was useful to social media sites, because outrage was one of the most effective mechanisms for encouraging engagement. Alongside tribalism, the promise of an emotional response was the chief predictor of engagement.

Tens of thousands of people had been locked into this hell by the offshoring of the EU’s refugee responsibilities.

The EU was using Libya as a prison camp to prevent refugee flows.

‘We’re being forbidden to help people,’ charity ship captain Dariush Beigui said. ‘It doesn’t get more malicious than that. It’s one thing to say “people are drowning and I don’t want to help them.” It’s another to then forbid others from helping.’

Nationalism claims that liberalism represents the powerful. In fact, liberalism is the shield that protects the powerless. It is the safeguard for those who have no other defences. When it fails, there is nothing left. We’ve seen this in the past. And we’re seeing it again now.

Liberalism is not dead, as much as some people would like it to be. But it is in a battle for its life. What happens next is not set. It will hinge on what liberals do. That response will be based on two things: Confidence and humility.

if liberalism continues to falter, if it does not regain control over events, there is no limit to how badly wrong they can go.

Over the centuries, that long storyline established liberal values: the freedom of the individual, reason, consent in government, individual rights, the separation of powers, protection of minorities, autonomy and moderation.

compromise does not extend to our founding principles. The pillars of liberalism are non-negotiable. To undermine them does not enhance freedom. It destroys it.

The rise of nationalism did not start with the electoral success of its political parties. It started with the assertion of nationalist framing.

Today it is put forward by nationalism on the right and identity politics on the left. Sometimes it is expressed by people who are well meaning. Sometimes it is expressed by people who are not. The end result is nevertheless the same. Authority is handed to the group instead of the individual. Its members are homogenised and robbed of their individuality.

Leaders emerge who claim to speak on behalf of the group, by virtue of a mythical association.

That is the liberalism of the future. If there was ever a time for liberalism to let things be, it has passed. Liberalism is no longer in charge. Its task is not to maintain the world, but to change it. It must show the people who are targeted by nationalism and identity politics that there is a better way. We are not homogeneous with those like us, nor at war with those who are not.