A Reflection on Liberalism

The first few paragraphs of this brief reflection are on Liberalism, and the rest is a part of entry of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about Liberal Theory of Value and Metaphysics.  My argument is that we are in the grip of a FALSE DICHOTOMY around whose axis humanity for centuries has oscillated from one end to the other and destroyed the planet and itself. The ideal of Capitalism-Liberalism ended up to mass consumerism, deep inequality, and the pinnacle of Anthropocene, the coming 6^th mass extinction.  The Marxian-Communism ended up to Russia and China secular totalitarianism.  Both of these Liberal vs. Communist versions separated the ethical (what is a “good life”?) from the spiritual and consequently both rendered an empty glorification of “humanism”—which indeed has heralded and ended in hedonism and nihilism.

We say we need communes. There are two ends to human flourishing which come together in a libertarian socialism [not exactly in Chomsky's term] to overcome the dichotomy of the individual vs. community.

On the one hand, we need the principle of autonomy in legal and political terms, i.e., the principle of liberty or values of individuality have to be secured. However, on the other hand, we should be well aware of the common sense fact that the condition of growth of the individual is embedded in biosphere, our social inherent constitution and relationship, and how the principle of dependent origination and a spiritual thirst for connection to the source and universe or God is part of our individual existence on this planet: in this commune the particular individual and universal community are superimposed in a way that both keep their independence while they are completely interconnected: coincidentia oppositorum.

From the Fact that There Are Plurality of Ends or Goals For Humans, It Does Not Follow There Is No Common Ground or Our Plurality of Goals Are Incommensurable: Our Individuations Are Not Diverging Ends of Human Flourishing But Essential Converging Of and To Each Other of Diversity and Community.

Liberals ignore this common good or common ground and get lost in an ideal of individuality alien to our inherent connection to the earth and to God. Those who insist on Collectivism and our inherent connection to the earth [and to God] ignore the fact that the universal ONLY appears in individuals and so in order the universal expresses itself the individual has to be free from coercion of governments or speaking in the name of an authoritarian God, which commands and punishes [Separation of the State from Religions]. So I wrote about Commune that:

"A commune...yes that is what we want, not only for retirement but for life before retirement-with space for individuation, legally, politically, and spiritually--dissipative hegemony and cooperative defiance. It is a commune where we don't see the dichotomy of egoism and altruism, the individual and the community, obedience and disobedience, my self-interest and your self-interest [but we can apprehend them together-and-separate].

It is a commune which renders each individual legally and politically "autonomous" [against Fascism and Nationalism] and spiritually each individual is immersed in Buddha's dependent origination and the divine within and without [all religions of the golden rule and love, The Axial Age sages, including religions of the book]. Simultaneously we perceive our legal political autonomy and dependent origination similar to waves of light or water emerging brighter at the point of touch, where they intersect in commune [Social Justice and Equality against Capitalism], and the space of delivery a creative individual connected to the source [Liberalism against Fascism].

Liberal Theory of Value (from SEP)

"Turning from rightness to goodness, we can identify three main candidates for a liberal theory of value. We have already encountered the first: perfectionism. Insofar as perfectionism is a theory of right action, it can be understood as an account of morality. Obviously, however, it is an account of rightness that presupposes a theory of value or the good: the ultimate human value is developed personality or an autonomous life. Competing with this objectivist theory of value are two other liberal accounts: pluralism and subjectivism.

In his famous defense of negative liberty, Berlin insisted that values or ends are plural, and no interpersonally justifiable ranking among these many ends is to be had. More than that, Berlin maintained that the pursuit of one end necessarily implies that other ends will not be achieved. In this sense ends collide or, in the more prosaic terms of economics, the pursuit of one end necessarily entails opportunity costs in relation to others which cannot be impersonally shown to be less worthy. So there is no interpersonally justifiable way to rank the ends, and there is no way to achieve them all. The upshot is that each person must devote herself to some ends at the cost of ignoring others. For the pluralist, then, autonomy, perfection or development are not necessarily ranked higher than hedonistic pleasures, environmental preservation or economic equality. All compete for our allegiance, but because they are incommensurable, no choice can be interpersonally justified as correct.

The pluralist is not a subjectivist: that values are many, competing and incommensurable does not imply that they are somehow dependent on subjective experiences. But the claim that what a person values rests on experiences that vary from person to person has long been a part of the liberal tradition. To Hobbes, what one values depends on what one desires (1948 [1651]: 48). Locke advances a ‘taste theory of value’:

The Mind has a different relish, as well as the Palate; and you will as fruitlessly endeavour to delight all Man with Riches or Glory, (which yet some Men place their Happiness in,) as you would satisfy all men's Hunger with Cheese or Lobsters; which, though very agreeable and delicious fare to some, are to others extremely nauseous and offensive: And many People would with reason preferr [sic] the griping of an hungry Belly, to those Dishes, which are a Feast to others. Hence it was, I think, that the Philosophers of old did in vain enquire, whether the Summum bonum consisted in Riches, or bodily Delights, or Virtue, or Contemplation: And they might have as reasonably disputed, whether the best Relish were to be found in Apples, Plumbs or Nuts; and have divided themselves into Sects upon it. For…pleasant Tastes depend not on the things themselves, but their agreeableness to this or that particular Palate, wherein there is great variety…(1975 [1706]: 269).

The perfectionist, the pluralist and the subjectivist concur on the crucial point: the nature of value is such that reasonable people pursue different ways of living. To the perfectionist, this is because each person has unique capacities, the development of which confers value on her life; to the pluralist, it is because values are many and conflicting, and no one life can include them all, or make the interpersonally correct choice among them; and to the subjectivist, it is because our ideas about what is valuable stem from our desires or tastes, and these differ from one individual to another. All three views, then, defend the basic liberal idea that people rationally follow very different ways of living. But in themselves, such notions of the good do not constitute a full-fledged liberal ethic, for an additional argument is required linking liberal value with norms of equal liberty. To be sure, Berlin seems to believe this is a very quick argument: the inherent plurality of ends points to the political preeminence of liberty (see, for example, Gray: 2006). Guaranteeing each a measure of negative liberty is, Berlin argues, the most humane ideal, as it recognises that ‘human goals are many’, and no one can make a choice that is right for all people (1969: 171). But the move from diversity to equal liberty and individual rights seems a complicated one; it is here that both subjectivists and pluralists often rely on versions of moral contractualism. Those who insist that liberalism is ultimately a nihilistic theory can be interpreted as arguing that this transition cannot be made successfully: liberals, on their view, are stuck with a subjectivistic or pluralistic theory of value, and no account of the right emerges from it.

The Metaphysics of Liberalism (from SEP)

Throughout the last century, liberalism has been beset by controversies between, on the one hand, those broadly identified as ‘individualists’ and, on the other, ‘collectivists’, ‘communitarians’ or ‘organicists’ (for skepticism about this, though, see Bird, 1999). These vague and sweeping designations have been applied to a wide array of disputes; we focus here on controversies concerning (i) the nature of society; (ii) the nature of the self.

Liberalism is, of course, usually associated with individualist analyses of society. ‘Human beings in society’, Mill claimed, ‘have no properties but those which are derived from, and which may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual men’ (1963, Vol. 8: 879; see also Bentham: 1970 [1823]: chap. I, sec. 4). Herbert Spencer agreed: “the properties of the mass are dependent upon the attributes of its component parts” (1995 [1851]: 1). In the last years of the nineteenth century this individualist view was increasingly subject to attack, especially by those who were influenced by idealist philosophy. D. G. Ritche, criticizing Spencer's individualist liberalism, explicitly rejected the idea that society is simply a ‘heap’ of individuals, insisting that it is more akin to an organism, with a complex internal life (1896: 13). Liberals such as L. T. Hobhouse and Dewey refused to adopt radically collectivist views such as those advocated by Bernard Bosanquet (2001), but they too rejected the radical individualism of Bentham, Mill and Spencer. Throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century such ‘organic’ analyses of society held sway in liberal theory, even in economics (see A.F Mummery and J. A. Hobson, 1956: 106; J.M. Keynes, 1972: 275).

During and after the Second World War the idea that liberalism was based on inherently individualist analysis of humans-in-society arose again. Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) presented a sustained critique of Hegelian and Marxist theory and its collectivist and historicist, and to Popper, inherently illiberal, understanding of society. The reemergence of economic analysis in liberal theory brought to the fore a thoroughgoing methodological individualism. Writing in the early 1960s, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock adamantly defended the ‘individualistic postulate’ against all forms of ‘organicism’: “This [organicist] approach or theory of the collectivity….is essentially opposed to the Western philosophical tradition in which the human individual is the primary philosophical entity” (1965: 11-12). Human beings, insisted Buchanan and Tullock, are the only real choosers and decision-makers, and their preferences determine both public and private actions. The renascent individualism of late-twentieth century liberalism was closely bound up with the induction of Hobbes as a member of the liberal pantheon. Hobbes's relentlessly individualistic account of society, and the manner in which his analysis of the state of nature lent itself to game-theoretical modeling, yielded a highly individualist, formal analysis of the liberal state and liberal morality.

Of course, as is widely known, the last twenty-five years have witnessed a renewed interest in collectivist analyses of liberal society —though the term ‘collectivist’ is abjured in favor of ‘communitarian’. Writing in 1985, Amy Gutmann observed that “we are witnessing a revival of communitarian criticisms of liberal political theory. Like the critics of the 1960s, those of the 1980s fault liberalism for being mistakenly and irreparably individualistic” (1985: 308). Starting with Michael Sandel's (1982) famous criticism of Rawls, a number of critics charged that liberalism was necessarily premised on an abstract conception of individual selves as pure choosers, whose commitments, values and concerns are possessions of the self, but never constitute the self. Although the now famous, not to say infamous, ‘liberal-communitarian’ debate ultimately involved wide-ranging moral, political and sociological disputes about the nature of communities, and the rights and responsibilities of their members, the heart of the debate was about the nature of liberal selves. For Sandel the flaw at the heart of Rawls's liberalism was its implausibly abstract theory of the self, the pure autonomous chooser. Rawls, he charges, ultimately assumes that it makes sense to identify us with a pure capacity for choice, and that such pure choosers might reject any or all of their attachments and values and yet retain their identity.

From the mid-1980s onwards various liberals sought to show how liberalism may consistently advocate a theory of the self which finds room for cultural membership and other non-chosen attachments and commitments which at least partially constitute the self (Kymlicka, 1989). Much of liberal theory has become focused on the issue as to how we can be social creatures, members of cultures and raised in various traditions, while also being autonomous choosers who employ our liberty to construct lives of our own.