Can liberalism win out?
Even at primary school I was taught that freedom and toleration are central to British values. one teacher put insulting cartoons of Edward Heath and Harold Wilson on the classroom wall. I was shocked. Why did the prime minister allow people to make fun of him so publicly? But my teacher explained to the class that this is what it meant to live in a free country. She pointed out that there were countries where freedom of the press and toleration of different opinions and different ways of life were not allowed, and we were lucky to be living where we are.
But I spent much of my childhood in a state of confusion. If I lived in a tolerant country, why, in 1968, did a classmate tell me that she thought Enoch Powell was right in his recent “rivers of blood” speech and the country had already let in too many black people? Other members of my class, whose fathers were manual or agricultural workers, or served in the military, agreed: too many immigrants. In the run-down part of North Kent, where she and I lived, we were probably yet to see any, apart from in news broadcasts, or absurd comedy caricatures on television. I should qualify that statement. We did know some immigrants: my own family. But at that time it would not have occurred to us that people with white skin could be immigrants too.
We are, it seems, a tolerant country, with a fair sprinkling of intolerant people, and this dual attitude goes back a long way. Consider Rosemary Ashton’s wonderful book Little Germany chronicling the lives of German exiles in the UK in the 1850s, including Karl Marx and his circle. Ashton points out that the UK was a haven for the defeated revolutionaries of 1848. Not only Germans, but from all over Europe rootless radicals came to our shores. Ashton reports that some were amazed that they didn’t even have to show their papers on arrival (though many would be tailed by the police). Some would go on to hold distinguished chairs at the universities, or go into business, but many, like Marx, remained relatively isolated, primarily writing for a politicized audience in the their home country. Ignored or ridiculed, they scraped a living however they could.
D. H. Lawrence once argued that the level of civilization that Europe had achieved in the period before the First World War was a thin veneer, repressing true human nature, which could erupt, with devastating results, at any time. What holds it down, perhaps, is the belief that intolerance is an illegitimate, minority view, which can be whispered to confidants but not broadcast widely. Yet (no less true for being a cliché) social media now erases the distinction between public and private ｅxpression and thereby opens up the once suppressed currents of intolerance into the public discourse – which further emboldens those who share such opinions to voice them. Views that could once only be hinted at in the most right-wing of the popular press, circulate widely and rapidly. A full palate of political views is there for the tasting.
I use the food tasting analogy deliberately. In his provocative work The Righteous Mind, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that all human beings have five “moral receptors”. We can all be swayed by considerations of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Moral dilemmas are often much less about “egoism versus altruism” than about conflicts of value. Consider same-sex marriages. Defenders appeal to harm and fairness: it is unfair if some people cannot celebrate their relationships in the ways others can, and it can also lead to personal, financial and social harm. Opponents often rely on an appeal to the sanctity of traditional marriage. Haidt argues that according to transnational surveys those on the Left give very strong weight to fairness and avoidance of harm, seeing less value in loyalty and virtually none in authority or sanctity, whereas those on the Right give roughly equal value to all. Consequently, those on the Right will often give priority to values that those on the Left regard as matters of superstition. Rational argument comes to an end where there are few shared values and assumptions.
One way in which this issue plays out is with the role of emotions in moral perceptions. Feminists have long argued that traditional moral philosophy, with its emphasis either on the maximization of utility or obedience to duty and the moral law, has inappropriately reduced morality purely to reason and rational calculation. The social psychologist Carol Gilligan introduced the “ethics of care”, affording emotion a powerful role in moral perception and motivation. This humanistic and insightful refocusing is very welcome, but it has also played into the hands of some conservative moralists who also argue that emotions can yield moral knowledge. The conservatives fasten not on love and sympathy but disgust. The bioethicist Leon Kass has argued that there is wisdom in repugnance, which cannot always be rationally articulated. This provides a licence for some on the Right to condemn such things as homosexuality and the peculiar habits of outsiders.
Those on the Left often regard arguments from disgust as no arguments at all. Martha Nussbaum has responded by using evolutionary theory to explain the role of disgust in human emotions, which, she suggests, is to keep us away from genuinely harmful substances, especially in the case of food and drink. The extension of disgust to practices that we do not like, but which will not harm us, she claims, is a form of “magical thinking” in which we assume that somehow anything that disgusts us will harm us. What follows from Nussbaum’s analysis, it seems, is that we need is to re-educate people to show disgust only at the genuinely disgusting, in the evolutionary sense. While the liberal reader of Nussbaum will nod away enthusiastically, it is arguable that Nussbaum is in danger of conflating Haidt’s distinct moral categories by reducing sanctity to harm. If sanctity is a value in its own right – one that we ought to care about – and disgust is how we express violations of sanctity, then there is a role for disgust, independent of harm. Sometimes, it seems, it can function as a way of reinforcing a type of group identity, and in that case it sets boundaries of what is in and what is out. Some conservatives may be disgusted by homosexuality, just as some liberals are disgusted by conservatives.
While liberals may argue that we should try to overcome rigid group allegiance, nevertheless it is common on both Left and Right to emphasize the importance of identity: who you are, where you came from, what you value. But if you are something, there are other things you are not. There are values, and sometimes people, you reject. What attitude should you take to “the other”: conversational partner, adversary, or enemy? And context shifts. Your opponent in the struggle to become party leader will be tomorrow’s colleague in government or opposition. Military ethics comes to mind: how you fight, so it is said, should be a model for how you will govern in victory. If to have legitimacy is to govern clean, you need to fight clean. The trouble now, as I noted above, is that instant communications from multiple sources of varying reliability means that we are in a phase of “no holds barred” political discourse. There is no such thing as a private conversation any more. You should say nothing unless you would be happy to have it set on your headstone. But no one can live by such a rule and we are drowning in a sea of ｅxpressions of outrage about what has been said or done by those in the public eye.
If a free country is one that allows anything to be said by anyone for any reason, what does this mean for politics? Before the rise of the internet, the media was a relatively stable beast. Newspapers, TV channels and radio stations rose and fell, but entry costs were high and the big players got the lion’s share of attention. But today, of course, a determined and talented individual with time on their hands can, in effect, become their own news channel. The proliferation of sources is overwhelming, and the absence of self-censorship means that social media now resembles playground gossip behind the bike shed, but broadcast by Tannoy.
Where do we go from here? In On Liberty John Stuart Mill gloried in the thought that in a free market of ideas the strongest and best justified would win out in competition. In other words, a genuinely open and free market in ideas does not last. Just as, for Marxists, after free market capitalism comes monopoly capital, a free market in ideas will eventually lead to the dominance of a few leaders. The law of the survival of the fittest applies here as well as anywhere. But the question is what it means to be “fittest”? For Mill it would be closest to truth and best supported with evidence and sound argument. But those who talk about the social media “echo chamber” have another theory; it means those that support and reinforce you in the view you already hold.
Most likely, evolution in ideas is multi-faceted: truth, fairness, confirmation of prejudices and probably other factors too, will all influence what lives and what dies. Any attempt to guide, recommend, police, censor or govern just becomes more noise competing for attention. A cacophony of views in a desperate struggle for survival is the new normal. Except that it is historical blindness to regard this as new. In the preface to De Cive (1642) Thomas Hobbes blamed the lack of progress in moral and political science on the fact that everyone felt entitled to express their own opinion, comparing moral thought to a public path, which “have never a seeds time, and therefore yield never a harvest”.
It has always been the dream of political thinkers to settle things once and for all; to derive a rational, just and above all stable order, spreading permanent peace and prosperity throughout the land, preferably throughout all lands. But in reality politics and stability are only travelling companions; sooner or later instability will break out. As Lawrence warned, intolerance can only be suppressed, never removed. We are where we are, and while there will be new, as yet unforeseen developments, a type of crisis – a crisis of toleration – is permanent. People will say and write awful things. Those who yearn for calm debate must channel their sanctimonious disgust into rhetorically powerful and rationally sound arguments. If effective, inch by inch the discourse might creep into a more tolerant and progressive phase.
Jonathan Wolff is the Blavatnik Chair in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government