Liberalism is a poor substitute for love
Liberalism is a poor substitute for love
A reply to Alexandre Lefebvre, inter alia
The 146th Heaven/Hell dialogue, moderated by the spirit of John Rawls in Geneva, Switzerland. Translated from the original Latin by Boniface Frociaggine.
SPIRIT OF JOHN RAWLS: Thank you both for agreeing to participate in these important discussions which we hope will foster peace and understanding across the Nine Realms. As agreed by both parties, Heaven will make an opening statement of no less than one and no more than seven minutes, after which Hell will do the same. I will then ask each a question in turn. You will not be expected to address each other directly, but you are free to do so, subject to the consent of both parties, which can be withdrawn at any time.
HELL: I never agreed to these rules!
HEAVEN: I knew it! You said you were trying to change, but you never do.
HELL: I did not consent to being addressed directly.
HEAVEN: Oh, so now you care about the rules?
HELL: As they say in my favourite profession: if the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If the law is on your side...
HEAVEN: So this is all just one big joke to you?
HELL: What else do you want it to be? A fucking tragedy?
HEAVEN: Language!
HELL: Apologies, I forgot that it is the foulness of my language that has sullied your perfectly created Divine Order.
HEAVEN: I just don’t understand why you have to be so unkind. Like when you asked Hermes to disseminate that hurtful screed.1
HELL: Which for the record, several celestial beings decided to read out of their own Free Will.
HEAVEN: You always use that against me! Have I been too tolerant?
HELL: Indeed! Some indiscriminate Divine Retribution would do wonders for my recruitment drives.
HEAVEN: Damned if I do, damned if I don’t…
HELL: Language!
I’ve been enjoying listening to the audiobook of Alexandre Lefebvre’s2 Liberalism as a way of life at 1.5 speed while walking my dogs and commuting to my liberal job in the hyperliberal city of London.3 In the spirit of moving the conversation forward (which if it is not a core liberal value, perhaps should be) I have decided to write not a review, but a reply. This is part one of that reply (as I write this, I’ve got 3 hours and 48 minutes of the book left, so I might need to revisit my assessment of the overall argument in part two).4
As a dyed-in-the wool (queer) liberal5, who nonetheless harbours a few doubts about the ability of “liberalism-all-the-way-down” to sustain “a fair system of co-operation”, I am part of the choir to which Lebfevre is preaching (although, as a typical liberal, I’m prone to skip evensong for more individualistic pursuits). Although Lefebvre doesn’t reject the importance of political liberalism in accommodating rival conceptions of the good, his main argument is that liberalism offers its own conception of the good and does not need to be supplemented by moral teachings from religious traditions or other ethical systems.6 Here is how I understand the claims underpinning his argument:
Middle-class citizens [especially women]7 of the Anglosphere and Western Europe seem to share a remarkably consistent system of beliefs.
We can, with some historical justification, call this system of beliefs “liberalism”.
There are lots of people who don’t seem to believe in anything other than this “liberalism” that they all seem to believe in.
This is a good thing.
My biggest misgivings are with claim number 4. Lefebvre repeatedly returns to the metaphor of liberalism being the water we swim in and the implication that we are often unaware of how it shapes our basic intuitions, such as a respect for individual freedom, a commitment to justice and a spirit of reciprocity. I don’t know what rarefied waters Lefebvre has been swimming in, but the water surrounding me is hardly overflowing with love of individual freedom and reciprocity. Everyone is demanding Justice, yes, but note the capital J: we’re not talking Rawl’s fair proceduralism here, we’re talking vengeful deity.
I detect signs of the common philosophical affliction of abstractophilia chez Lefebvre, perhaps unsurprising for a lover of Rawls. Personally, I’ve not had the pleasure of making it past Rawls’s Preface to a Theory of Justice. In fact, I couldn’t make it past this sentence: What I [Rawls] have attempted do is to generalise and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. First of all, Mary Midgley has convinced me that the social contract theory is bunk8 and secondly, who has ever thought to themselves: what I really need now is a higher order abstraction of the theories of Kant?9
In an effort to make thinks more concrete, Lefebvre choses as liberal icon the “civil servant” Leslie Knope from the American situation comedy Parks and Recreation — a pop culture reference that ten years ago was at least fifty years out of date. If we needed to find an avatar for actually existing liberalism today, in the year of our Lord 2024, she would… she would still be a women, of course. Although maybe not just a woman. Maybe she… they would be something more than a woman. Something a bit more intersectional: still AFAB, but gender fluid.10 She/they would probably identify as neurodivergent, with some combination of ADHD (for real, not just for the speed), OCD, NPD, BPD and girl autism. She/they would likely identify as solo poly, mostly ace/aro but occasionally (when the moon was full) demi or greysexual. She/they would love boys but be afraid of men.
Of course, this Honor Levy-on-an-off-day sketch is still an abstraction. But it is an abstraction that I’d venture is a little closer to the lived experience of the average liberal than the hagiography of a television bureaucrat.
Perhaps Lefebvre will get down to the nitty gritty of things in the latter part of the book when he discusses the Rawls-inspired “spiritual exercises” he recommends liberals practise in lieu of prayer. I’ll report back!
Do you know who’s not an average liberal? Famous writer and new subscriber to The Extremely Difficult Realisation, Nina Power. Welcome!
There has been a lot of smart writing recently about the elusive Great Internet novel, but really, who gives a shit? Who needs to read a novel about the internet, when you can like, read the Internet? The objet d’art that I would currently nominate to put in a time capsule to represent the Internet is not a novel11, but the 180-page PDF download of gorsedd (Nina’s groyper-era alt-Twitter account)12 . Scrolling through the pages of Tweets in reverse chronological order recreates the all-too-common online experience of stumbling across something that is kinda fucked up but strangely fascinating.
Although I strongly denounce all the TERFy, FERFy13, racist and anti-Semitic content (ironic or not), it is worth noting that these make up a surprisingly small percentage of gorsedd’s oeuvre. It turns out to have been mainly an aesthetic account — and I found myself vibing with many of the posted images: lots of Blake and Bosch and occult symbols of all sorts. There is even a quote from Simone Weil (Le déracinement est de loin la plus dangereuse maladie des sociétés humaines, car il se multiplie lui-même. Qui est déraciné déracine. Qui est enraciné ne déracine pas). But I have to admit that the image that I found most insightful is a bit naughty:
Is there an image that better captures the ethos of contemporary liberalism?
The hurtful screed in question was a Substack post by a dashingly handsome but troubled young gay man writing under the pseudonym mary jane austen (no relation). It was entitled where my grrrls at? (subtitle: a female impersonator’s guide to being a woman) and like all mary jane austen’s posts was written entirely in lowercase. It began as follows:
ever since the lavender invasion, the feminist movement has been bogged down by a bitter internecine battle between the hot lesbians and the frumpy ones (with a few compulsory heterosexual hanger-ons in each camp) — a battle of which most adult human females have remained blissfully unaware, learning all they need to know about the feminine mystique from ru paul’s drag race.
Love the name, by the way. So French, and yet he’s Australian: genius!
Not the City of London. Although I’ve had my dabblings with the Corporation.
For a good overview of the thesis of the book, check out Lefebvre on the Wisdom of Crowds and The Good Fight podcasts - and this review by Sam Kahn.
I was glad to see friend-of-the-blog and noted heterosexual John Pistelli amplify Blake Smith’s formulation of a “queer liberalism”. John also notes “a certain neoconservatism built into queer liberalism”, a point to which I hope to return in part two of my reply.
This is a counterargument to the one that Ross Douthat articulated in 2021:
But liberalism cannot easily renew itself, because despite what certain of its detractors and some of its champions insist, it isn’t really a political-moral-theological system in full; rather, it’s a deliberately thinned-out structure designed to manage pluralism, which depends on constant infusions from other sources, preliberal or nonliberal, to generate meaning and energy and purpose.
Sam Kahn cites the following eye-popping statistics in his somewhat hyperbolic but directionally correct post, The 2024 Election Is A Gender War:
The most recent NYT/Siena poll shows Harris with a 14% advantage among female voters and Trump with a 12% advantage among male voters. That discrepancy is particularly strong among younger voters, with Harris enjoying a 27% lead among young women in swing states, which is balanced out by Trump’s 24% edge with young men.
As Kahn discusses in the post, the battle of the sexes is an ancient one. Order is maintained by cultural norms (which have historically favoured men). Feminism views these traditional norms as unjust and advocates that women need to be empowered at all levels of society. Since feminism is viewed as a core component of liberalism, many men seem to be asking themselves whether liberalism has anything left to offer them. If liberalism can’t offer a way for men and women (who in earlier ages exhibited a certain biological attraction to one another) to find a common ground, what hope is there for reconciliation between different racial and religious groups? At least in the part of Lefebvre’s book I’ve listened to so far, there is scant acknowledgement of these struggles at the heart of liberalism.
And she did it in a concise article — that’s female efficiency for you!
It turns out a lot of people did (as Lefebvre points out, The Theory of Justice was a surprise best-seller). More realistically, though, this probably means that a lot of people were persuaded to think of themselves as the kind of people who might be interested in the abstract philosophical underpinnings of liberalism and wanted to signal this to others by prominently displaying a copy of the book in their hideous 1970s living rooms. Cynically, we could say that Rawls provided a philosophical plaster for the breaks in Western society that the revolutionary spirit of the 60s threatened to reveal.
Joseph Heath has a very useful post on John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism which made me realise that Rawls did for liberals what Marx had done for socialists before: he did the work of justifying their beliefs so they didn’t have to. Which is all well and good, but that is why both Marx and Rawls are likely to be much less persuasive to someone who hasn’t bought into the underlying values to begin with.
A few years ago she/they might have identified as trans masc, but thank Mother chapstick lesbians are back into fashion: the new liberalism’s preference for bedrotting doesn’t vibe well with rigorous regime of medical transformation, which sounds suspiciously aspirational — like capitalism with a human face.
This is not to say that a novel can’t attempt to put the Internet in its proper place in the unfolding history of humanity (and whatever comes after humanity). As I wrote in what I believe is still the first ever review of John Pistelli’s novel Major Arcana:
Unlike other “Internet novels”, this book (or whatever) doesn’t simply wallow in the anomie and anhedonia that predictively results from shackling oneself to a particular hellsite, lol, but swallows the Internet whole, with room to spare for the world before it, and God willing, the world thereafter
I couldn’t help but notice a pretty trenchant self-critique in John’s recent lampooning of Byung-Chul Han. In defending Honor Levy’s honour, John argues against the tendency to “scold young authors in the name of a 19th-century humanism we expect always to recur in 19th-century forms” while at the same time justifying his own more “conservative” novelistic approach:
My own procedure in Major Arcana is admittedly a more conservative one. There I arranged in proliferating narratives of significance the chaos of experience, to include the experience of online living and the “becoming-it” this living demands of the human psyche. Even so, my wager was that the realist novel will alter in form without a willful effort on the author’s part simply by assimilating new social practices; I would argue that the novel’s prose, especially in its approach to proper nouns and pronouns, does just that, more Gertrude Stein than George Eliot at times.
But (as I also mentioned in my review) these admirable stylistic innovations can’t fully obscure the fact that the novel’s ethics don’t, in the end, stray that far from 19th century humanism, which is an ethic I happen to largely agree with, but which doesn’t exactly offer a clear alternative to the “nostalgic European theories—whether nostalgic for “Greece,” the Middle Ages, or the high bourgeois 19th century, or all three at once” that John believes is “bedeviled by the old enchanted-distance fallacy.” Have we ever been modern?
In the Grand Old M.J.E. Tradition of roasting a high-profile female writer who becomes a subscriber to The Extremely Difficult Realisation, I was going to write something moralistic about Nina’s refusal to apologise for her online behaviour (“Let us apologise when we have spoken badly through ignorance, weakness or from resentment, but only to those closest to us, real people, people we love, those we have hurt” [emphasis in the original]), but who am I to judge? I’ll simply say that I appreciate Nina’s (belated) transparency and leave it to readers to make up their own minds (the gorsedd PDF in question is embedded in the linked post).
The first F stands for “furry”.