What’s Wrong with Liberalism?
Part One: The Problem

Wonderful and terrifying are many things, but none more so than man.
—Sophocles

By Christopher Bernard

Liberalism: The First, and the Last, Ideology


Ideas have always mattered, none more so than the ideas we assume without being fully aware of them. In company with such contemporary political thinkers as Patrick J. Deneen (whose book Why Liberalism Failed sparked this essay, though it is based on thoughts I have explored, at least peripherally, at least since the 1960s, and whose book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future recently appeared), I would like to propose that, at the center of the many crises confronting the human species in the twenty-first century, lies an idea we take so much for granted it seems no more than reality itself; even more, that idea has become the foundation of our very sense of right, indeed of righteousness, whether we belong to the progressive left, the Trumpian right, or the middling center of the American political spectrum. To question it would seem not only irrational but morally wrong. It is beyond the pale for anyone to doubt it. Yet doubt it we may, and overturn it we must.

Because what drives many, if not all, of our crises – the climate emergency, collapsing biodiversity and the dangers to the global ecosystem, massive inequalities of wealth, neo-fascist political movements, the ongoing, even increasing, threats of nuclear and biological warfare, and the coming of artificial intelligence that, though it has been invented by and is entirely driven by humanity, threatens to destroy humanity – is precisely this idea. It is a political and social philosophy fully dominant in the world only since the fall of the Soviet Union, though its roots go back to the Renaissance.

This philosophy has various names, but the most popular, and the one with the longest lineage, is liberalism, at the core of which is the belief in the sovereign value of the individual over the social collective and of emancipation of the individual from all forms of non-consensual identity and obligation. In one word: the belief in freedom. 

Liberalism (and its economic counterpart, capitalism) has been called by such thinkers as Alexander Dugin (another critic of liberalism) the last remaining ideology, after the destruction of fascism in the 1940s and the collapse of Soviet communism half a century later. It is also the first ideology, the fundamental matrix of ideas from which much of what we call modernity was derived. Its roots go back to the 1600s, from Francis Bacon’s positing of the goal of knowledge as power and the dominance of humanity over nature, and Thomas Hobbes’s myth of the origins of political order out of an original chaos of violent individualism. 

It developed through Locke’s defense of human liberty, to the enshrining of liberal principles in the United States Constitution during the Enlightenment and the implementation of them in the capitalist economies of Europe and America through a blend of romanticized ideals and brutal realism that has come to define capitalist culture, and the flowering of liberal democracies that occurred periodically over the following two centuries. 

Liberalism faced and defeated communism and fascism in the twentieth century, at the end of which it was heralded as the only possible ideology for the future of humanity; the much derided “end of history,” about which the cynics, as so often, were proven right.

Today liberalism is once again being challenged – in one of history’s many nasty ironies, its economic driver is turning against it, in the various forms of authoritarian capitalism in China, Russia, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. 

Yet even the most authoritarian forms of capitalism are premised on assumptions at the core of the liberal ethos: the emancipation of human power and the sovereignty of humanity over nature. Humanity comes first: the world, the universe itself (or, to use a simpler word, nature), is a resource for human consumption and liberation – and nothing more. Or, when nature proposes itself as our ontological equal, even our master, setting limits to the human will to mastery – and, after all (a fact we like to forget), nature created us – at that point it becomes our enemy.

The result has been two and a half centuries of prosperity – a creation of wealth and an assertion of power – such as humankind has never seen, and hardly dared to dream, except by megalomaniac emperors and delirious poets. And we now know its dark result: our success is in danger of causing our own dethroning by forms of artificial intelligence that may come to dominate and even eliminate us, or an even more ignominious extinction as we poison the one planet we know can sustain life, with the waste products of our success: we are in danger of drowning (as my late partner often predicted) in our own faeces.

In another of history’s lessons in irony, two of the doctrines that define liberalism – equality and liberty – have led to their very opposites: levels of inequality never seen in history and a sense that we are locked into a destiny from which we cannot escape, whether it is the climate catastrophe or the dominance of humanity by AI, the rising of the oceans or the sixth great extinction. Never has it become clearer that your liberty is my tyranny and your success my destruction – and we are locked in a combat neither of us can win.

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How did this horrific, and, frankly, insane, outcome happen? I believe I can speak for most of my readers when I claim that none of us would have deliberately planned such an outcome simply as a result of living as we wanted. Even the greediest or most power-hungry or most frantically celebrity-seeking are not actually suicidal in my experience – though some are, clearly, psychopathic and would be doing themselves and the rest of us a service if they could be persuaded to undergo even the most interminable of therapies or secured in a humane mental institution.

The short answer is that liberalism made a bet – and lost. That bet was on the essential rationality of human beings (a bet, curiously, that the last liberals still standing, economists, still make, though with increasing desperation): that, if human beings are ensured equality of opportunity and liberty of thought, expression, and action, they will work out a set of arrangements for living together that will lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number – in the kindest of liberal dreams, for everyone. 

Liberals also convinced themselves that human evil – human selfishness, both of the individual and of the group, and the hatred and fear that result – is not radical or existential; that it is a result of faulty social and political arrangements and therefore can be corrected by the same means. And so what was important was getting those arrangements and the rules governing them right; with that, and an emphasis on liberty and equality as described above, society can only improve over time in its goal of decreasing human suffering and increasing happiness.

Liberalism is in many ways a beautiful, endearing, and almost childishly optimistic political philosophy and, as such, has much to recommend it. If there ever was a faith-based philosophy, it is liberalism. It makes many a religion look cynically materialistic. And there is in fact a great deal of human evil that can be neutralized through social and political reorganization. Liberal democracy, for example, has been far better than autocracy when it comes to stimulating human flourishing and decreasing human suffering, at least over that last two and a half centuries. There has been real progress – anyone who doubts it need only be shown the gigantic strides made in agriculture and medicine. If feeding humanity and curing and healing illnesses and injuries are in any sense good, then there is more good in our time than ever before.

Yet there is a problem here, as Plato’s Socrates pointed out: the fact we have saved more lives or made it easier to feed ourselves might have made it as much easier for human evil to prosper as human good. A man who almost died young from smallpox grew up to become a genocidal tyrant. A woman who almost died in childbirth or spent her life working the fields as a peasant later became a serial murderer, leaving behind a cemetery in her backyard.

Liberalism refuses to believe in the centrality of evil in human beings – and by “evil” I mean the delight in destruction, in death, for its own sake. Liberals believe, or pretend to believe, that evil is ancillary to human nature, an aberration, a sickness, or caused by crude political or social arrangements, and that it will disappear of its own accord when we get social and political organization right. 

Yet a central problem of liberalism is that, however much it claims to respect science – and in particular, biology, sociology, and psychology – it is dedicated to an understanding of human beings that has long been obsolete. And dedicated liberals refuse to accept this. They insist on believing that human beings, as a group, can be counted on to respect facts and reason, and they see society as an arrangement of individuals whose only obligation is to empower them to live according to their personal choices and create their own sovereign identities, and let them work out their relations between each other consciously, deliberately, contractually – and, to use a controversial term that has become increasingly yfashionable, transactionally.

And this theory of humanity can work well – under limited conditions: namely, during periods of widely shared prosperity. Once the prosperity is over, liberal assumptions, and the promises they promote, collapse, and liberalism is in danger of being replaced by its evil twin and successor: fascism, the political revenge of the losers of liberalism and its economic driver, capitalism. Liberalism and its failures led to fascism in the early twentieth century, and they are leading toward similar political responses today, in the early twenty-first; indeed, many parallels between the two periods are uncanny.

It is easy to forget that the fascism of the twentieth century also was a democratic ideology: it was democracy against liberalism. And this is proof, if proof is still needed, that democracy is not, and never has been, inherently liberal. There is nothing in democracy that guarantees the rights of individuals. It is not unusual for democracies even to vote themselves out of existence, as nearly happened in the first democracy, Athens, and later in Rome: it was just this catastrophe that Brutus and his co-conspirators tried to stop when they assassinated Julius Caesar. But history has not been kind to them: rather than admiring Brutus as the tragic hero he was, many of us pity the dead Caesar. 

This terrible consequence of democracy happened recently in Tunisia, where the “Arab spring” of 2010 began, and where it has now ended in a very bitter winter.

Liberalism (and capitalism) also made another bet: that nature would provide an infinite supply of resources to satisfy human wants. And then there was the presumption that human wants could be satisfied. 

Tragically for our species, these bets and presumptions have gone wrong. Human beings are not driven primarily by reason and facts; we are drive by passion: greed, lust, hatred, fear. Nature does not have enough resources to satisfy eight billion humans – and human desires, in any case, cannot be completely satisfied; they are forever driven beyond every conceivable limit because they are essentially imaginary and have little bearing in the limited world of matter and energy whose final law is entropy. Humans are limited and mortal creatures with unlimited minds: we wish for three things that we can clearly conceive, imagine, and desire but that material reality cannot provide: we want to live forever, we want to be young forever, and we want to love and be loved forever. We cannot have any of these things, and therefore, we invent fantasies that will give them to us, if we are virtuous or believing, after we are dead; or, bitterly and resentfully, we “accept reality” and go after substitutes – money, power, sex, fame. But these substitutes cannot satisfy us. And the material world, which can supply only these things, and only for the few, cannot satisfy us. 

But that is all that liberalism can promise. It tolerates all religions because, at heart, though it pretends to respect them, at heart it respects none of them. Liberalism sets us up for hope but leaves us with despair; it promises life but leaves us with death. Kind-hearted as it is, when approached for solutions to the human condition, all it can offer us is the same beautiful but empty illusions.

Capitalism, liberalism’s economic avatar, must grow or die. We now know that economic growth is the key threat to our physical survival on earth. Once growth becomes impossible, or exiguous in the extreme, capitalism will die a natural death. Unfortunately, it may take humanity with it, because capitalism is essentially amoral in its relentless pursuit of self-interest. The political and legal supporters of capitalism created the corporation and later (in the United States) named it a legal person, although it is nothing more than an imaginary entity with legal rights; it now drives much of the world’s economy even though it can, theoretically, succeed even if all human beings die in the process. The combination of the invention of artificial intelligence with the making of corporations legal persons makes AI’s conquest of humanity an almost inevitable outcome. 

Liberalism made another bet it appears to be losing: that there is a necessary link between liberalism, capitalism, and democracy. But, as already mentioned, capitalism no longer needs liberal democracy; in fact, it has long feared democracy and only partnered with it in the decades-long conflict with communism. Liberalism has been the basis of the increasing democratization of such capitalist countries as the United States; after the bond between liberalism and capitalism is broken, it may only be a matter of time before both liberalism and democracy go the way of fascism and communism, leaving behind what one might call “neo-feudal capitalism” before the possibilities of economic growth reach the limit of earth’s resources, and the most irresistible of forces meets the most immovable of objects.

So, what is the way out of liberalism and the preconceptions on which it is based, while retaining the real good liberalism helped grow and flourish? No one wants to return to any form of authoritarianism – except of course the authoritarians! No one wants to lose the hope of freedom and the decency of equality excepts for the monsters we have unwittingly bred. So, how can we root out the preconceptions of liberalism that have created the dilemmas we are facing, and build a new understanding of the world in which humanity must live, of the role of life in the world, the role of humanity in the ecosystem of life on Earth – and the role of the individual within humanity?

Prometheus and Pandora

The preconceptions of liberalism are deeply embedded in Western and now in world culture: they are rooted in medieval scholastic philosophy, in particular the nominalism of William of Occam (as noted by the controversial Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin), the materialism of Democritus, and, ultimately, Aristotle’s philosophical responses to Plato. Liberalism continued to grow with the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to display the nature of human choice and the power of human will when coupled with an empirical investigation of the world in the sciences and the practice of instrumental reason in modern technology. 

The result is that liberalism freed human powers as never before. Liberalism became the Modern Prometheus (as Mary Shelley subtitled her prescient romance Frankenstein). But it also let free the evils of humanity, in the doctrines of Bernard Mandeville’s notorious “Fable of the Bees” and Adam Smith’s doctrine of the invisible hand – and liberalism incautiously opened Pandora’s box.

It is an open question which of these will prevail, the heroes of Prometheus or the evils of Pandora. If the evils do, there will be no future for us of any kind. Or perhaps they will be locked in a stalemate until Earth’s limits are met and put a halt to the pathological growth of capitalism, causing the death of capitalism and its liberal ethos, if not worse for humankind.

In any case, whatever triumphs have been achieved by Prometheus’s heroes, once Pandora’s box has been opened, it is exceedingly difficult to force the evils back in again. In many cases, the heroic triumphs have become the evils.

Item 1: Liberalism has displayed definitively that our social, political, and cultural relations can be changed by deliberate acts of will. Once we realize that, it is impossible to see social relations of any kind as sacrosanct and unchangeable, even if that were the best attitude to have for most human beings in most times and places. 

Item 2: Liberalism has shown that our relations with nature can also be changed by acts of human will. This has the same effect: we can no longer see nature as sacred – that is, until we find a boundary in nature we dare not cross without threatening our own survival. This today may finally have happened, with the multiple threats to the global ecosystem caused by our own acts: it is not too far-fetched to see nature as taking revenge on the hubris of one of her creations. 

Item 3: Liberalism takes pride in its attack on the sacred in any form whatsoever. Everything must be secularized – which often means reduced to its smallest material roots. Only the lowest common denominator has intellectual respect: the quark, the string, the drives of selfishness, sex, aggression, fear. Contempt has become a driver of understanding, and reverence is ritually abused. The spiritual result is nihilism, just as the political result is fascism. And the philosophical result is the professionalized, weaponized sophistry of postmodernism when reason takes its final revenge: against itself.

Item 4: The faith that liberalism has cultivated in the scientific investigation of the world has undermined, not only that humans have a significant role to play in the universe, but even the belief that we are fundamentally rational beings: we now know we are not entirely in control of our own wills, let alone our emotions or even our perception of the world – even intelligence is only a web of illusions some of which have better practical impact than others. In fact, we may discover we are in principle unable to understand the world as it is, given the mysteries of quantum reality at the subatomic level and of dark matter and dark energy at the level of the universe, possibly even a multiverse that exists along dimensions we can only guess but never directly perceive. Physics and psychology may have boxed us into a corner from which there is no way out but the blind babblings of a character in a play by Beckett. 

We have gained an inordinate power over our world and yet, at the same time, or so it seems, an incapacity to understand ourselves, the world, or even what we are doing. The tragedy of our kind looms as the tragedy of life on earth.

One answer to our plight has been a reassertion of Platonism, which, in the west, has been a typical response to Aristotelian excesses: the modern form can be found in the fundamentalisms of Christianity and Islam and the renaissance of religion across the globe, though this “cure” is in many ways worse than the disease, an anti-Renaissance attempting to resurrect pre-modernity, just as the Renaissance sought (though with more salutary results) to resurrect antiquity. 

Another answer has been an attempt to found a political philosophy on the philosophy of Heidegger in a continuing attempt to undermine the supremacy of the sciences. 

Many of us are desperate for a master, be it a religious leader or a philosopher, and what better master than someone whose obscurities can mean whatever one wishes them to mean, and whose lack of integrity, intellectual and otherwise, has made postmodernists from Derrida and Foucault to Žižek and Butler possible? Heidegger is a sophist of unreason. That his philosophy did not shield him from the seductions of Nazism should have placed him under permanent suspicion. But as Cicero said long ago, there is no belief so bizarre it has not been held by some philosopher. He would have known how to judge modern philosophy. His laughter rings down the centuries, liberating in its strangely hopeful skepticism. Here was a philosopher who knew not to take himself too seriously.

We will not soon know for certain how a post-liberal world will function before liberalism collapses. And we already see the outline of the collapse in the crises cited. An actuarial table was recently published that gave the likelihood of humanity surviving by the end of the next century if the current crises facing it are not solved: the likelihood, according to the table, is five percent. The global civilization based on liberal and capitalist principles will likely have collapsed long before then. 

But just as an individual’s life results largely from choices, so is the life of a society, a nation, and a civilization.
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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.