Political Philosophy and Western Complacency
Do Western political philosophers assume that Western powers will always be in charge of the world?
I recently attended the Knox Lecture at my university, given by Professor David Enoch. It was an engaging and accessible lecture, which provoked a question in my mind. I didn’t ask it, neither during the Q&A, nor at dinner afterwards. This was partly lack of confidence on my part. But there is another reason. The lecture in effect told me not to ask it.
The title of the lecture was “Shameless Liberalism: a vision”. Enoch’s main point was that liberalism—meaning the liberal tradition in political philosophy (not the weird US usage)—has been crippled by a kind of shame. He then outlined a vision for how liberalism can recover its backbone.
Shameful liberalism, as Enoch sees it, is the sort of liberalism that tries to stay neutral wherever there is profound moral disagreement, as long as all sides are minimally reasonable. Enoch quoted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King characterising “a sort of quasi-liberalism, which is based on the principle of looking sympathetically at all sides”. Enoch criticised this sort of liberalism for shading off into relativism—a position so vile and contradictory, according to him, that avoiding it is what he called a basic “adequacy constraint” on political philosophy.
My question had a certain relativist flavour, so Enoch’s comment made me wonder if it was, as moral philosophers like to say, impermissible. I can’t discuss political philosophy if I don’t satisfy the basic adequacy constraint. Moreover, the power move of quoting the Rev. Dr. King made it difficult for me to take a critical view without appearing to align myself with opponents of the civil rights movement.
I still thought of my question, however, so I’m writing about it here, beyond the reach of all adequacy constraints.
Enoch’s vision of “shameless liberalism” is one in which people who are morally committed to liberal values (Enoch listed “wellbeing, liberty, equality, individualism, and personal autonomy”) shamelessly take sides in political conflicts and moral debates. They wield political power to promote their ideals and hold back only on grounds of prudence. There is no “looking sympathetically at all sides”, only the strategic decision to leave some battles as not worth the fight. Shameless liberals know they are right, morally speaking. They just sometimes choose not to act on this knowledge for pragmatic reasons.
My question was: Is shamelessness a sound basis for politics in a multipolar, multicultural, multilateral world? What scared me off asking it is that the three “multis” there could be construed as concessions to the dreaded relativism, dropping me below the adequacy constraint.
After all, my motivation comes from this question: What gives shameless liberals this confidence in their convictions, in the face of moral disagreement? As far as I can see, it is Enoch’s conviction that liberals have found the True, Correct Values—that the sanctity of liberty, equality, individualism, and so on has been revealed to them in the full light of moral truth.
His own example is a case where liberals hold political power alongside a “sexually conservative community”, who practice “sexually oppressive education”. The shameless liberal should feel fully licensed to want to change this practice on the grounds of a moral commitment to “wellbeing”. Meanwhile the question of what to do politically is purely a pragmatic one. If intervention will cause a terrible backlash, then maybe it’s not worth it. But if not, then the liberal should feel no shame about intervening to increase the community’s wellbeing through imposed sexual liberation. Of course it looks question-begging to justify this intervention on the grounds of “wellbeing”, which the conservative community would define differently. But so what? They are wrong, and liberalism is right. To doubt this would be shameful liberalism, veering off into relativism and philosophical death.
This is, of course, an instance where a lot rests on the choice of example. Enoch knew that he was speaking to an audience of left-leaning, socially progressive, lascivious academics—no question they’d cheer on the forced reversal of “sexually oppressive education”. If his example had been an indigenous community practising traditional healing in place of modern medicine, thus reducing its “wellbeing” on at least one measure, then perhaps shame would creep back more readily into the mind of the liberal considering intervention. But that isn’t the main motivation behind my question.
My main motivation is that I just don’t agree that there are moral truths thundered into the hearts of elect individuals, through those miraculous gifts of private revelation that contemporary philosophers call “intuitions”. Even if there were, I see nothing to justify the assumption that the true revelation comes particularly to WEIRD individuals, in the form of a particular list of sacred values that just so happens to coincide with the precise cultural inheritance of secularised Protestantism in 18C Europe. That seems like an astonishing coincidence. Why didn’t Moral Truth unshroud its holy face in the Confucian classics, as the Chinese conservative Jiang Qing comes close to suggesting, or to the Prophet Muhammad, or to the theorists of Pancasila, or within any other cultural tradition? Christian liberals, who view liberalism as the development of Christian ethics, can explain their declared insight into moral truth as the legacy of God’s entering history at one particular time and place. They have a coherent historical story to tell about why their values are the values. But secular liberals are trying to hold onto the miracle without the deity. The story makes no sense.
To this, I think, shameless liberals can really only make three replies.
They could claim that Western-style liberalism has been historically proven to be the ultimate moral truth. This of course requires not just a Whiggish but a full-blown Hegelian reading of history: unless history is the unfolding of the World Spirit there is no reason to infer moral correctness from an ideology’s achievement of political and cultural hegemony (helped along by the Maxim gun). There was some wind behind this sail back in the glory days of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History: this subtle book was given an unsubtle reading, in which Western liberal democracy emerged triumphantly as the last ideology standing. Now, of course, even the historical premise is shaky. The proud victors of the Cold War have degenerated into quagmires of bureaucratic sclerosis, narcissistic leadership, indifference to the rule of law, and smartphone zombie voters. Every day they look more like a Dead-End of History.
Shameless liberals could claim that their core value-judgements are in fact universally shared and not culturally specific. As far as liberal values go, that doesn’t seem a very plausible hypothesis. But if moral philosophers were really committed to it then we should expect to see them eagerly engaged in comparative philosophy to test the proposition. Instead, they remain araldited to a philosophical canon that might as well have been selected by somebody who stuck his fingers in his ears and sung hearty European folk songs any time another culture tried to speak. Talking universal while acting parochial is a combination that could be seen as chauvinism.
Finally, shameless liberals could say that the important thing is not that their values are correct but only that they are their values. Then the principle of shamelessness is a universalisable maxim: it enjoins everyone convinced of their own moral rectitude to go out and rectify the world, so far as their power permits.
But that is not a world I want to live in. I am happy, of course, to be held to the moral standards of a community—how else is communal life possible? But that is very different from having to live my life in constant worry about who might come a-rectifying.
What allows Western political philosophers to be cavalier about this, I think, is complacency about a rapidly eroding status quo. They see a world in which the great powers remain nominally liberal—hypocritically, but still nominally committed enough to have to listen to arguments grounded on liberal values. And they expect this to continue—or at least they don’t think about the prospect of it not continuing. I see no reason to think that the future belongs to nominally liberal powers. The powers rising fastest today have a very different, more distant, more circuitous historical relationship to the Protestant heresy known as the liberal tradition. They might end up committed to rather different values.
Given that, for those who care about liberalism, you’d think that now would be a good time to promote the norm that firm conviction in your own moral principles doesn’t license you to intervene among those who don’t share them, even if you have the power to do so, and even if doing so would not have bad strategic consequences for you. Even better would be a general norm of responding to moral disagreement by trying to really listen and learn from the other; of “being rendered finite by the presence of the Other”, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, rather than responding to all moral disagreement by immediately elevating oneself to the position of corrector.
Enoch thinks of this principle as a kind of shame. Maybe so, but we might be grateful for shame when it’s the only thing holding back others more powerful from intervening to morally correct us. Strikingly, Enoch’s lecture had no examples in which we were the ones being corrected by others esteeming themselves of superior virtue. This inability to see ourselves in any other role than that of the correctors is, I suspect, the effect of a Western fantasy of endlessly projected power. If we give up the fantasy then we can get to work on making the world safe for the morally correctable. One day, we’ll be the moral inverts asking for a bit of grace to see the world our way.
Really interesting. I have always felt very ambivalent on this point. My understanding is that classical liberalism justifies this position with the claim that its own content is not much other than negative freedom as the goal of living together with others - as long as I leave everyone else free to do as they please, my own views and practices are fine, as are yours. Liberalism only asserts this shamelessness that you describe so well with respect to practices that impinge upon negative freedom. The cultural relativist position that you nod towards is difficult because not all cultures respect the autonomy of the individual nor of other communities to practice their own ways of life, regardless of whether those ways of life interfere with the freedom of others or not. So, I can, as a liberal, adopt the tolerant position that all cultures are equally valid only up to the point at which, say, a culture practices as a rule the oppression of women. Then, to paraphrase Catherine MacKinnon, we have to recognize that all forms of oppression are going to have some sort of cultural ‘excuse’. Where this argument tends to stall is in the fact that liberalism always sneaks in other norms, individualism for example. But it’s difficult to imagine this respect for autonomy without some form of individualism. Here in Toronto, which is a very multicultural city in a fairly multicultural country, the experiment is ongoing. A number of years ago, many people were saying that it had failed. But I don’t find that here on the ground. It’s imperfect, for sure, but we are still holding fast to this idea that cultures can exist side by side, maintain their distinctness and their own sets of values even if these conflict, but also agree to the minimal requirement of ‘Canadianness’ - that everyone respects everyone else’s right to their own ways of life and beliefs (similar to France’s laicite - in theory if not in practice). I guess in my many years of thinking this through and living in different countries, I’ve never come across any better option! And I think that’s usually the justification, rather than any sense of it being intuitively right. It’s just the only viable way (that I can see) for different people and cultures to exist side by side.
Your question about the blind faith that Western powers will always be in charge is a valuable warning!
Thanks for this thoughtful piece, in any case.
This is small point, but Enoch gets King wrong. He absolutely does not think there are two sides to, for example, issues such as racial segregation. In fact, he spends a lot of time explaining why (for moral reasons) segregationists are morally wrong in their support of Jim Crow, and why the white moderates are morally wrong for not doing anything to overturn it. The idea that he would be some wishy washy relativist strikes me as a very wrong reading of King (and, I say this as someone who has just published the first book length work on his political philosophy). In fact, King does exactly what Enoch would like of so-called shameless liberals: he appeals unabashedly to liberal values - liberty, equality, etc - when he makes arguments against Jim Crow. So, don't worry, you can take a critical view of Enoch's argument without appearing to align yourself with opponents of the civil rights movement!