What’s Wrong with Liberalism?

Part Two: What’s to Be Done?

The Two-Percent Club

What can we do? And when I say “we,” I mean you, my readers, and me: a tiny few among the eight billion human beings treading the earth.

Little enough, you might say. And I would agree. But not nothing. And even if we can do little to save humanity from its collective blind stumbling toward the fields of Armageddon, we can at least refuse to add to the insanity that seems to govern our world.

We can each of us begin the long retreat – and a retreat it will be, either controlled or uncontrolled, relatively pain-free or catastrophic. Our civilization is heading for a crash landing, but it can be either guided landing or explosive collision. The first way may be fatal for some; the other way could be fatal for all. But I am sure of one thing: I would rather control it than have it control me. I suspect you may feel the same.

To give a modest example of what I am doing. First, I don’t pretend to myself it will have any calculable effect on the tragedies ahead, but it does at least assuage the guilt I feel as a human being partly responsible for our grim prospects. I am philosophically an Epicurean (technically, a Platonist Epicurean) and therefore base my ethics on my own personal happiness in this life. I believe I have one life, in this world; I do not believe in an afterlife (if there is an afterlife, I will deal with it when I come to it – and any perceived flippancy is altogether intentional!) And although I argue against liberalism, I am, congenitally, “liberal” in my own attitudes: I believe in the fundamental decency and peaceableness of most human beings as long as we are neither threatened nor tempted, both of which are the most aggressive triggers of human evil. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, and have no time for the reflexive paranoias of the conservative mind.

I laugh when I hear the definition of a liberal as someone who does not take his own side in a quarrel, because I sometimes see that impulse in myself, though I admit I can usually subdue it without causing myself too much pain. And, though I believe in the existence of evil – that force in the world that seeks destruction for its own sake, examples of which run from cancer to psychopathology – I also believe in the existence of good – in affection, kindness and love – and in their ultimately sovereign power: goodness is the heart of existence because it is existence, just as evil is destruction. I have what amounts to a religious faith in existence itself, though I have yet to meet an organized religion I can believe in.

As part of that faith, I believe I have a moral mandate to face the truth as I understand it and achieve peace of mind through moral courage and right action. I also believe that sereneties are mutually reinforcing: the more that you have peace of mind based on truth, moral courage, and right action, as you understand them, the more I will have it as well, and vice versa. (The careful reader will note that a keynote of liberalism is struck here; this is a moral truth of liberalism that can be, and I believe must be, kept. The individual will always be essential – whether it is an individual human being, ladybug, or blade of grass. But an individual can be essential without being sovereign; making the human individual sovereign is where liberalism made its greatest mistake.)

I believe I cannot achieve that peace if I know I am contributing to suffering in the world, which is why right action is essential. If I cannot stop contributing entirely, I can at least reduce it – and so I have set myself the goal of reducing my contributions to the world’s suffering in ways that do not contribute to my own suffering (which would, of course, defeat the purpose; becoming a self-flagellating saint is simply another way of contributing to the world’s suffering).

It is clear that the global economic system is endangering much of life on earth, including our own; therefore, I am reducing my participation in that system. And how do that better than by reducing my purchases? My overall goal is a modest one: to reduce purchases by two percent per year. At the end of ten years, that will mean an overall reduction of over 20 percent, since the percentages will be progressive. I already have an unusually small carbon footprint for an American, largely because I have never owned a car, I live in an unusually temperate climate, without either central heating or air conditioning, and I rarely travel by plane. All of these were accidental, so I can claim no personal merit, much as I would like to.

But what I buy for myself I have some control over, at least of “discretionary” purchases. And by binding myself to the two-percent commitment, I can at least feel I am not contributing to the unfolding tragedy of human life on earth.

This is a modest commitment I believe many above a certain level of income in the industrialized countries can make.

I call it “The Two-Percent Club,” and I welcome anyone who wishes to join me.

There is a saying that the single flutter of a butterfly’s wing in the Andes can affect the stock market in New York City. Perhaps the single refusal to purchase that little item in the supermarket you don’t really want or need may prevent the Arctic from melting in the summer, a fire from raging across the Amazon, or a winter polar vortex from icing states from Michigan to Texas. And when it is tens of millions of butterfly wings, a single breath might become a hurricane.

• Social Individualism

At the heart of liberalism is a great emptiness. Though it has a definition of “right” (as in “human rights”), it had no definition of the good; it claims that the “good” is basically whatever liberated individuals believe is their good. But this has led to the greatest evil of all: if I pursue my good in the present, even though it threatens to lead to the murder of tens of millions after I am dead, liberalism has nothing to say in response. It even defends it, by pretending the future will take care of itself. Its faith is blind. It disdains Christianity, but answers naïve faith with a gullibility that is both breathtaking and potentially suicidal for our species.

The existential evils we face have been caused, at least partly, by following the liberal ethos of letting individuals do what they want. Human beings are naturally predatory, and we are preying, at will, on one another, on earth’s other species, on earth’s resources – on the earth itself, with little or no sense of commitment to the future, because the only thing we know is that in the future we will be dead and after we are dead, we won’t care what happens because we won’t be there.

The idea that people care about the wellbeing of their children and grandchildren is questionable; once you have emancipated the individual from life on earth, the result is a nihilistic concentration on the present and personal, on me, on my satisfaction, here and now – and the devil take the hindmost. And the hindmost is the future of life on earth.

We can say, definitively, what evil is: the pursuit of destruction and death – and the greater evil yet is not of the individual but of humanity, and beyond that the genocide of species, when these are the result of our actions, actions that are free and therefore morally responsible.

Since we now can define evil so clearly, it has become easier to define the good.

The good is the whole. Existence is the good; life on earth is the good; the existence of human society is the good; the individual working within society, which exists within the earth’s ecosystem, which lives within the universe as a whole, is the good. Not at war with, but in cooperation with nature is the only way we have survived and, with luck, have thriven and flourished. Nature is our parent, we are her children, however rebellious. The delusion of our separation from, our conquest and our domination of nature will end – or we will end. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, if that happens, we will have deserved it. Perhaps, despite what the physicists and evolutionists proclaim, there is a moral order in the universe after all.

Liberalism is based in the idea of human rights, with an emphasis on “negative liberty” and the refusal of an overarching definition of “the good” beyond the choices made by individuals, as discussed by John Stuart Mill in his classic essays on liberalism, in particular the much-quoted “On Liberty.” (Note one of the central self-contradictions of liberal philosophy: it stipulates that there is no way to define “the good” in general terms – then proceeds to do just that: “the good” is allowing people to make free choices as to what they think is “good”! And what if they choose to give up their liberty to choose? Oh no, we can’t have that! They must be forced to be free, as Mill himself states without blushing – even defending the use of slavery to force societies to rise to the economic level where “choice” will be materially possible. Whoever realizes at this point that liberalism is a totalitarian ideology – as all ideologies are – will win my deepest gratitude.)

But there is another possible political philosophy that incorporates many key insights of liberalism while redirecting its central thesis; it is a philosophy based on a balance of rights and responsibilities and a definition of the good that does not place individual choice at its center: the good is the flourishing of the ecosystem of life on earth. And we know what that looks like from our experiences of two things: the extreme fragility of monocultural ecosystems (which we are creating through our dominance) and the adaptability and resilience of climax ecosystems, such as can be found in the Amazon and old growth forests.

Since we now can define the good, we can begin to construct a social and political order based on it and not on rights alone. The extremities of the liberal order – where “My freedom is your death” – are over. We can claim “No rights without responsibilities, and no responsibilities without rights” with a good conscience.

This is the basis of “social individualism,” which I propose as a successor to liberalism.

It is not a new idea – some claim it is the basis of the political order in countries such as Denmark, which has been called social democratic by Senator Bernie Sanders, though Danes deny the sweet aspersion. It is based on the idea that human beings are social creatures above all – though every human being is unique, with a unique identity, purposes and history, we are also interdependent within both society and the wider ecosystem of life on earth. We are born from other human beings into a living culture itself built across generations and centuries.

Everything we have, we have borrowed from others, from our DNA to our language, customs, education, to the food that nourishes us and the air we breathe. We are dependent beings living within networks of other dependent beings. Life on earth is an immense ecosystem of which we are only a part, though an essential part, both as species and individuals. We are not and cannot be completely autonomous beings absolutely separated from other people or other living creatures. The attempt to do so for an individual is suicidal; for a species, it can lead to ecocide: the destruction of our home, of the only place where we can live. 

In social individualism, individual responsibility is coupled with a network of social supports, for which we, as individuals, are responsible just as we are their beneficiaries; the supports cover education, health care, unemployment compensation, retirement, and the like. They are paid for through taxes, including a progressive income tax. No individual is solely responsible for his success, just as none is solely responsible for failure; the wealthiest, who have benefited most from society, also pay the most back.

Yet each individual acts as if what he does is the most important thing he can be doing at that moment. When he votes, his vote is the only one that counts.

There is a famous story about a rabbi who was asked by a student what was the most important thing he did. He paused and considered for a moment, and then said, “Whatever I am doing right now.”

The individual is expected to take as much responsibility for his life and his society as he is able to. He does this with the understanding that every individual will at times be dependent on others, beginning with childhood and including periods of illness, injury, and financial distress, old age, and the ultimate dependency of mortality and death.

The motto of social individualism is simple, if deceptively so: “No rights without responsibilities; no responsibilities without rights.” No one gets a free run, no right is absolute, and no one bears an exclusive burden – no one may be crushed at will beneath another person’s freedom. This overturns the liberal notion of both the primacy and equality of rights.

When rights conflict with obligations, obligation wins. Corporations would lose their identity as legal persons; shareholders would share in their company’s legal and financial liabilities; if you can take its profits, you can also take its punishment. Voting would be a legal duty rather than a right. No one would be allowed to trample on your rights because he employs you; just because you have a job and receive pay, you do not become a second-class citizen – or rather, not a citizen at all but a part-time slave. No one would be allowed to deprive you – and you would not be allowed to deprive yourself – of your rights, for example to free expression – by the same token, your right of free expression would not give you the right to destroy another person’s reputation or career. Non-disclosure and non-competitive agreements would be abolished. No contract would be legally binding that deprived either side of either obligation or right.

Such a legal and cultural regime might lead to changes in American society that would make it unrecognizable, I believe largely for the good. Note that I refer to “American society,” not the “American economy,” which is the fashionable way of avoiding the entire question of whether or not “American society” exists. Under social individualism there is no question: individuals exist within a network of other individuals, a network we call society, which lives within the broadest network of living creatures we call living nature or life on earth. Individual members of all species are existentially interdependent within these larger ecosystems: neither ecosystems nor individuals can exist without the other.

No-fault divorce might be abolished when children are involved: the obligation of taking care of children would override the rights of adults. There may be a need for the consent of a husband or parents for a surgical abortion. The inauguration of new technologies such as AI and machine learning and reasoning would have to be vetted for possible harmful effects on humanity and on the global ecosystem and constantly monitored for unintended consequences; in no case would the market be allowed as the final arbiter of humanity and life on earth. And, after detailed medical and psychological screening, assisted suicide might be available for anyone who is above a certain age and has no overriding legal obligations; no one should be forced to live a life that has become a torture of hopelessness and pain.

The anti-social individualism that has marked the hardest core of liberalism, especially in the United States, must, I believe, be defeated if we are to survive as a species. I believe this to be incontrovertibly true, but I am pessimistic how it will happen.

In the United States, whose cumbrous political machinery makes it difficult to handle national social crises or emergencies efficiently, major social changes in the past have only happened after disasters or threats thereof: the Civil War, the bloody labor strikes of the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the two World Wars, the Cold War, the crises of the 1960s, the climate crisis‒caused wildfires and polar vortexes of our time. Thus, I am afraid that, until the civilization built on liberal capitalist principles collapses, causing enormous suffering among the innocent, it will not transform into a society that has any chance of future survival.

Too many, both in the United States and in the globalized neoliberal economic order, are benefiting in the short term from a system that cannot ensure its own long-term survival. As humans – culturally and perhaps even genetically predisposed to living according to the short term and trusting the long term will take care of itself – we are sleepwalking toward catastrophe, laughing at the Cassandras when we hear them, and enjoying our dreams of security until the sun rises to display the abyss at our feet.

Yet we are free to prevent this catastrophe foretold, to transform our world, society, and ourselves, as humanity has done in the past countless times in countless lands and eras. We are not locked into our fate. The glory, the terror, the uncanniness of humanity is that we are free.

The question remaining to us is this one: how will we make use of our freedom? We can continue doing as we have, we can change some things, we can change many things, or we can change everything.

Or everything will be changed for us.

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Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet and critic as well as essayist. His most recent book, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021. He is also a founder and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.