by Jeroen Bouterse
Even after discussing Daniel Chandler’s inspiring application of John Rawls in my previous column, I remain on the lookout for a book that delivers a sweeping, original and sound vision for the future of the liberal and democratic world, saves it from its social problems through policy proposals that are simultaneously transformative and unthreatening (enough for all interested parties to accept and implement them immediately), and provides a sure and painless path to undercutting popular support for illiberal and authoritarian politics. Ideally, it also solves climate change and ends factory farming, and does not require me personally to change too much. Disappointingly, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, only achieves some of these things.
Lefebvre’s argument is that it is possible to be a ‘liberal all the way down’. This possibility is not obvious. First of all, we may think of our society as liberal, but it is more accurate to think of it in terms of ‘liberaldom’, in the same way European societies used to be part of Christendom: dominant cultural expressions revolve around liberal tropes and sensibilities, but that doesn’t mean our society is unfailingly producing genuine liberals who strive to produce genuinely liberal social arrangements.
Second, it is commonly claimed that a liberal society doesn’t require its citizens to have a specifically liberal conception of the good. People with diverse conceptions of the good can (and rationally ought to) support liberalism precisely because it guarantees them the freedom and resources to pursue their own conception of the good life. Lefebvre does not object to this, but he thinks something is missing. A liberal conception of the good life does in fact exist, and it is both possible and desirable for people to pursue it.
A liberal view of what is good and valuable in life is not separated from liberal political values, but integrated in it. “The right is our good”, Lefebvre writes. In so far as liberalism as a political framework seeks to organize society along the lines of fairness, liberals are people who derive meaning from bringing a fair society closer. Again, there are other legitimate conceptions of the good life that can be in harmony with liberalism; but being ‘just’ a liberal does not mean trivial conformity to the status quo. It is a full way of life, in analogy to being a committed Christian or Stoic.
Lefebvre even provides, as a central part of his book, ‘spiritual exercises’ to help those committed to being such a liberal. One of these exercises is reflecting on John Rawls’s original position. In Rawls’s thought experiment, we imagine ourselves to deliberate on the principles of a just social arrangement under a veil of ignorance that hides from us any contingent knowledge about ourselves. Under those restrictions, it is rational to be as fair as we possibly can, since we don’t know yet what our position in society will be. Lefebvre says that this is more than a tool for reaching a conclusion in an argument; it is an edifying act, which helps us to attain “purity of heart”. The crypto-religious phrase comes straight from Rawls himself. If you learn to look impartially and fairly, it will not just be good for society; it will be good for your soul.
In the end, such integrity is what the system needs. Lefebvre compares present-day ‘liberaldom’ to the ancien régime: the many signs of wavering support for the current order do not allow us to make a prediction as to when and how it will end, but they do provide evidence that liberaldom is hypocritical and unstable. “It will eventually end in one of two ways: liberalism or illiberalism.” Liberalism needs its liberals to own up to the values that they already unconsciously or implicitly hold, and to commit to them fully.
Liberaldom and liberalism
I am torn about how to judge this proposal. On the one hand, I concur that there is substance to liberal values, that my liberalism doesn’t just denote my political philosophy, but also my perspective on life and other people. On the other hand, Lefebvre’s emphasis on individual psychology sometimes feels like a step back, towards precisely what liberalism was a step forwards from. Wasn’t part of the point that not all improvement comes down to the expulsion of private vices? When Lefebvre advertises how liberal spiritual exercises can “lessen the hold of pride and snobbery”, I think of dozens of generations of moralists everywhere who have tried to improve society by creating better people. Wasn’t liberalism the shining exception, showing how better institutions could be built for people roughly as they were?
If Lefebvre invites the comparison between ‘liberaldom’ and Christendom, he might accept the parallel between his proposals and the religious reformers of the 16th century (indeed, he appeals in passing to the Protestant notion of a priesthood of all believers). The reformers saw themselves as working with societies that were steeped in Christian rhetoric and sensibilities, but failed to live up to what genuine Christianity entailed. If the analogy holds, it would count as evidence against the idea that the contradictions, imperfections and hypocrisies in a society can in fact be resolved in a way that is implicit in that society; that a broken culture is an untrue version of a well-defined ideal. Rather than healing such a culture, every attempt at self-consistency will lead to a new version of the ideal, likely with its own inconsistencies and problems. The reformers all agreed that Christians should tap more into the humility, fear of God, faith in Christ, and reliance on Scripture to which Christendom already paid lip service. They also agreed that popery was unchristian (the present-day counterpart is talking about neoliberalism as an “illiberal hybrid”). Notably, their agreement on those matters was not enough to keep the Church together.
Lefebvre does not anticipate the conflicts reform can lay bare. When it comes to practical ethics he prefers co-opting examples of uncontroversial decency over pesky moral dilemmas. To him, what makes a liberal is the public-spiritedness of a Leslie Knope (the well-meaning government official in Parks and Recreation), or the conscious use of your talents to contribute to a fairer society (as by Jereka Thomas-Hockaday, a medical educator Lefebvre saw in an episode of Queer Eye, itself “a paragon of liberal culture”). It often looks as if what our society needs is not so much good liberals as simply good people. In that case, Lefebvre’s book does the not-entirely-trivial job of telling liberals that their worldview calls them to be good people; prioritizing a fair society allows and enables them to derive fulfillment directly from their contribution to the public good.
If being a good liberal and a decent person seem almost indistinguishable, Lefebvre considers that itself revealing. He mentions the case of an Australian university professor who was “effectively forced to resign” because of leaked emails in which he used (a lot of) racist slurs. Lefebvre’s litmus test for being a liberal is that, when you read these emails, you “think to yourself, ‘Wow, what a piece of shit’”. This reaction is so natural to us now that it can be “mistaken for plain decency”, but there is nothing self-evident about it, Lefebvre says. Words demeaning groups became taboo only relatively recently, and this happened because of deeper liberal commitments to freedom, integrity and self-respect for everybody. Our standards of decency are liberal.
Fair enough. However, I would hope liberalism also has something to say about people getting fired or pushed out for transgressions in communication they may have thought to be private. The apprehension I feel when reading about a racist “piece of shit” losing their job because their opinions were suddenly on public display is a gut reaction that I also identify as liberal. (In the Rawlsian original position, you don’t know whether you will turn out to be a racist piece of shit.) If I’m not completely wrong about that, then it is another piece of evidence that the sensibilities I picked up growing up in ‘liberaldom’ point at dilemmas and contradictions that will still be there after we have distilled genuine liberalism from liberaldom. It makes me skeptical of the spiritualizing, redemptionist rhetoric in Lefebvre’s book.
Reasonable people
Such rhetoric does not represent Lefebvre’s entire project; he also shows himself aware of problems intrinsic to liberalism, and willing to confront them. Though he believes meritocracy “distorts” liberalism, for instance, he is honest about its genuinely liberal ingredients, such as equal rights and individualism. What makes it a distortion is the way it compounds and entrenches inequality in a way that is clearly unfair. “Liberal freedoms have paved the road to injustice.” Liberals should work to remedy this, and one part of the process is to look honestly at themselves. They should be “reasonable” people in a moral sense of that word: using their rational capacities not to further or justify their narrow self-interest, but to improve fairness.
For example, higher-income earners should not make use of tax concessions which are put there “by the privileged for the privileged”. This is a non-trivial prescription: Lefebvre notices that almost everyone he knows in Australia who earns more than $45 000 per year partially avoids the higher tax bracket by diverting a part of their income to a lower-taxed retirement fund. We have here an interesting rule for behavior: you are not only supposed to support the abolishment of unjust systems; you should not take advantage of them while they exist. My initial response here was skepticism about such an atomistic approach to coordination problems. Will unilateral opt-outs like these really help mitigate the meritocracy trap?
Lefebvre would probably say that this question misses his point, which is not that society needs more suckers, but that if you are affluent, it is reasonable to spend less mental energy clinging to your money, and more becoming a good citizen. The main message of the book is that this is better for yourself: more rewarding, leading to fewer “toxic emotions and expectations”. Suppressing my initial cynical reflexes, I would say this is true. I am blissfully unaware of any tricks I could use to avoid taxes, and happier than I would be with more money and more time spent looking for deductibles. A necessary condition for my lack of interest in gaming the system is the luck or privilege not to live at subsistence level, but I like to believe it also involves willingness to play a different game than maximizing money points. I am grateful for a society I feel generally at home in, where I have access to drinkable tap water, libraries, and an internet that helps me think out loud without fear. Grateful, to use my favorite phrase in Lefebvre’s book, for the many “fragile fruits of civilizational labor that we mistake for the human condition”. Why would I not take an interest in the general well-being and improvement of such a society? Why on earth would I play a negative-sum game against it, wasting effort on avoiding paying at least the democratically agreed-upon part of my fair share?
Lefebvre sketches an attitude to social and political life that, when taken on by a lot of people, would be good for our societies as well as for them. I also understand why he identifies the basic ingredients of this attitude as liberal. Yet, for a book that is about liberalism all the way to the end, that provides a list of seventeen reasons to be liberal as well as an honest account of what traditional virtues are not encouraged by liberalism, liberalism often felt strangely interchangeable. Many of its advertised existential ‘perks’ – humility, grace, cheerfulness, tolerance – were indeed plausibly grounded in liberal ideas, but are similar nonetheless to those promised by basically any way of life that is not narrowly selfish or parochial.
I understand Lefebvre is writing for people who, because of their upbringing in liberaldom, are likely to be implicit liberals already; for many of us, the liberal way of life is the nearest meaningful way of life. He is also ‘liberal’ enough to say that he merely claims to defend a good way of life; not one that is better than others. There is room for non-liberals in the Parks and Recreation department. Still, I would have appreciated a little more apologetics, more compare-and-contrast with live alternatives. Utilitarianism, for instance, barely gets a mention in Lefebvre’s book; when it does, it is dismissed as a “nonliberal ideology” which puts its notion of the good ahead of what is right. I kind of get the philosophical distinction here – are you willing to sacrifice in favor of your own notion of the good other people’s right to deciding on it for themselves? – but I think it barely matters to the tame and ecumenical examples that populate most of the book. Lefebvre is not interested in showing how a liberal-all-the-way-down navigates questions of practical ethics differently from a committed Effective Altruist. He is less in the business of arguing and disputing than in that of inspiring.
To say that Lefebvre’s book didn’t meet all my expectations is to say little. It didn’t turn out to contain that blueprint for saving the liberal order, but then it didn’t promise to do that, and it turned out to be about something related but different. What it does do is provide an original and sound vision of what it can mean to be a liberal ‘through and through’. It calls on us to develop into reasonable people, and it provides ideas and practices that help with that. If it motivates people to become the kind of liberal it describes, that will be an unambiguously good thing.