We live in the particular

A further reply to Alexandre Lefebvre

Hilma af Klint, The Swan (No 17), 1915.

I tried to like to Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism As A Way Of Life (LAAWOL) I really did. But the more I read, the more frustrated I became.

In part one of my reply, I wrote:

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.

The middle part of LAAWOL anticipates this objection and answers: ah, but you see, we don’t actually live in liberalism, we live in liberaldom (Lefebvre’s coinage after Kierkegard’s Christendom): we profess liberal values but few of us live up to them. Liberalism hasn’t failed, Lefebvre says, we have failed liberalism. But wait a minute, isn’t a way of life about what people do rather than what they say they believe in? The problem with trying to base your life philosophy on the early works of Rawls is not only that Rawls deals in abstractions — but that these are abstractions of the values that people say they hold, rather than what their actions reveal about what they actually find valuable.

Lefebvre admits that Rawls himself moved away from a comprehensive or perfectionist liberalism to a political liberalism which goes back to Mill in stressing the need to accommodate reasonable differences in conceptions of the good. (Even here Rawls sounds impractical to me — isn’t the problem with how unreasonable actual people tend to be in their beliefs and practices?) Lefebvre quotes Judith Shklar’s personal correspondence with Rawls in which she question his core assumptions:

The one issue that does puzzle me is the basic assumption on which you build your edifice: the implicit values of an actual political society. The task you then set for yourself is to draw out these imputations and make them explicit. The burden of historical proof then becomes very heavy. You cannot then evade the demand for demonstrable accurate historical evidence to show that these are indeed the latent values. How latent? How widely shared? How deeply held and by whom at what times? Remember that most of your citizens just now think that the Declaration of Independence is too radical for them and while this is a good time for the First Amendment, it is not always so. One can say that only religion is safe, because no-one cares about that any longer. And in a way what is left is all Protestant anyhow. Finally, your account of the conflicting beliefs and ideologies that can overlap may be out of date. It is not religion and even ideology that now separates us but race, language, gu-loathing and ethnic incommunicability. Does your model fit that reality? Or only one in which credal diversity was in question?

I couldn't have said it better myself. Yet Lefebvre continues, undeterred. His evidence for the claim that liberalism has shaped us to the core?

1. “We” instinctively reject illiberal behaviour: proving that we have internalised liberal values.

2. The ethical system promoted by a didactic TV show called The Good Place is non-theistic: proving that liberal values do not need any metaphysical underpinnings.

3. The reason that people engage in behaviour that good liberals disapprove of (such as watching coercive step-incest porn)¹ is because an insufficiently liberal world leaves people lonely and resentful, proving the circularity of Lefebvre’s arguments.

Lefebvre acknowledges that it has become unfashionable to make claims using the first personal plural (how dare he, a cis white man, presume that his intuitions are universal?), but he takes the liberty to do so anyway because he is confident that his intuitions and those of his readers have been similarly shaped by liberalism. His first example is that we no longer flinch when someone cusses or uses the Lord’s name in vain, but we are shocked when they use a slur that targets someone’s race, sexuality or other innate characteristics. No doubt most people in modern societies have internalised that it is bad to use a slur. But is there really a deep liberal consensus on how bad it is? Lefebvre talks about “the terrible power of slurs to make people hate themselves”, offending the core liberal value that everyone is entitled to self-respect. He quotes as gospel the anti-comedian Hannah Gatsby:

I built a career out of self deprecating humour. I don’t want to do that anymore, because do you understand what self-deprecating humour means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility, it’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to give myself permission to speak, and I will simply not do that anymore.

For a more recent example of the decline in the liberal sense of humour, see the TikTok by Troye Sivan where he complains about a rando making a joke about him going on Grindr while touring the US, admonishing them for engaging in both stereotyping and sex shaming and ending with “a general note”:

If you say twink when you mean faggot, that’s still a slur. That’s our word, I don’t think straight people should be using it.

Isn’t it a curious form of liberalism that talks about our words and your words and about self-respect as something so exceedingly fragile that it can be shattered by a mean remark? Compare Joan Didion’s discussion of the concept in 1961:

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Many mainstream liberals would probably dismiss Didion’s insistence on taking responsibility for one’s life as a “conservative talking point”. Others would argue that a certain type of self-reliance is not only compatible with liberalism, but indispensable for maintaining it. Isn’t the elevation of so-called “hate speech” to the level of blasphemy a prime example of what some consider to be the creeping illiberalism within liberal culture? For a book arguing that we need nothing but liberalism Lefebvre is remarkably silent about how liberalism by itself is supposed to help us adjudicate the conflict between liberal values. He cites John McWorther on the evolution of slurs without mentioning that he is the author of works such as Woke Racism. Indeed, reading LAAWOL, it seems that Lefebvre exists in a parallel universe where wokeness (and anti-wokeness) do not exist.

There is little consideration of the possibility that liberal values themselves can encourage people to use illiberal means for liberal ends (and how the slipperiness of the concept of liberalism contributes to this problem). Any problems in liberal societies are attributed to compromised forms of liberalism, including meritocracy and neoliberalism which are impure manifestations of liberalism since they are insufficiently generous.

But why should we be generous? Because Netflix tells us so?

Murdoch wrote that to understand a philosopher you must ask yourself: what is he afraid of? Lefebvre isn’t afraid of the Catholic Integralists, even if he spends a good portion of the book implicitly taking aims at them, postulating that one can be good without God (hardly a novel argument). He is afraid of those who, having rejected God, remain unpersuaded by Rawls’s beautifully crafted arguments, since they also reject the notion that all human beings are equal in dignity and worth — either in the name of science (The capacity for “human worth” is not distributed equally) or art (all those wannabe Nietzches). He has little to say about the proper liberal response to such ungodly threats to liberalism, choosing instead to write “self-help for liberals”. And by “self-help” he means “cope”. To put it bluntly: LAAWOL is the Benedict Option for liberals.

Lefebvre’s argument that we can be good without God is hardly a novel one. Critics of contemporary liberalism have no problem likening it to a religion — they simply argue that in acting like a religion, it is prone to the use the same illiberal tactics as the older faith, only more arbitrarily. Better Jehovah than Foucault, as Paglia said.

When he appeared on the Wisdom of Crowds podcast, Lefebvre didn’t deny that liberalism arose out of a broadly Christian tradition — but he claimed that it can now stand on its own two feet without all that metaphysical baggage. I agree with the narrow version of this claim, but I think it is a mistake to think that by severing this link, we can leave behind the problems that have always bedevilled Christianity (or any other religious tradition). Christianity has never came up with a fully satisfying Answer to Job, but neither has secular humanism (not for nothing did the philosopher Susan Neiman² write a book entitled Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy).

LAAWOL can be seen as an attempt at establishing the world’s most boring religion³: Christianity without God, Jesus, Mary, Satan, Heaven, Hell, the Old Testament, the New Testament, grace, visions, miracles, saints, icons, cathedrals, Bach, Blake... If Lefebvre is content with this basic bitch liberalism, I love that for him. But I for one reject this extreme form of Protestantism, this spiritual austerity. Rather give me the “maximalist” liberalism of friend-of-the-blog Becca Rothfeld.

I was reminded by the great conversation between friends-of-the-blog Daniel Oppenheimer and Kevin LaTorre on how a concept like “climate anxiety” takes the focus away from finding pragmatic solutions to the problem and centres it on managing your emotional response to the problem. Is now really the time to feel like a bad liberal because you send your kids to private school?

LAAWOL is written for those who believe in a queer-friendly fully automated luxury communist democratic republic of Palestine — if only in our dreams.

1. Lefebvre manages to write pages and pages of amateur psychoanalysis about the production and consumption of step-incest porn without mentioning Freud, which is quite a feat.

2. I’m beginning to notice a pattern. Philosophy may be the one field where the contribution by women has been vastly underappreciated. The post-modern divorce of Theory from Philosophy has been disastrous for both.

3. Say what you want about Islam, but it’s not boring.