The Agony of Liberalism: Part I. posted by Richard Seymour

Review of John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, Polity Press 2000

"You know, if I ever had to fight a dragon, I’d look at it from the dragon’s point of view" – Saint George, as depicted on The Young Ones.

1.
A liberal, according to the poet Robert Frost, is someone who cannot take his own side in an argument. Uncharitable as this assessment is, it does indicate one of the enduring strengths of liberalism, which is its emphasis on understanding other points of view, the importance to tolerance and allowing for the flaws of others as well as one’s own. John Gray, cites Voltaire on the matter:

"What is tolerance? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other for our follies."

The value of such insights is hard to miss in this increasingly intolerant age, and that isn't the only reason to invest in this book. About the author, I should tell you that he is an academic based in the London School of Economics. A prolific author, he was once an ardent Thatcherite and New Right intellectual. In the 1990s, however, increasingly apprised of the ugly side of free market fundamentalism, Gray exhibited an increasing interest in liberal ideas. It is his particular reading of these that causes him to reject neoliberalism. About the book, it will be obvious enough that it is a sympathetic reading of liberal ideas, if not an uncritical one. Liberalism's virtues are expounded with elegance, and at times a rather terse satirical cut. Nevertheless, Gray maintains that liberalism has a fatal fissure in its core – tolerance has been conceived, by various liberals, as either a rational means to consensus or as a means to modus vivendi, or human cohabitation. The former is universalist in its outlook, and does not for a second that there is objective truth to be reached. The latter, by contrast, is pluralist and interested in the peaceful coexistence of different sources of ethical value. Locke and Kant through to Rawls and Hayek advocate the regime of universalism, while Hobbes, Hume, Berlin and Oakeshott beg tolerance for different moral traditions. Conflicting judgements about ‘the best life’ can therefore either be seen as a symptom of error, or as an inevitable result of human difference. Gray adheres firmly to the pluralist view:

"The idea that the exercise of reason produces agreement is at least as old as Plato’s Socrates. Even so, there has never been much to support it. Reason can enlighten us as to our ethical conflicts. Often it shows them to be deeper than we thought, and leaves us in the lurch as to how to resolve them … The aim of modus vivendi cannot be to still the conflict of values. It is to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common. We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist."

"Many", take note, not all. One cannot imagine Voltaire offering his plea to someone who was in the process of slaughtering him (at least not with much conviction). Indeed, although Gray acknowledges this, it is precisely on the limits of tolerance that Gray is at his weakest for reasons I shall shortly come to. Gray does not deny that there are universal values – it is simply that they underdetermine moral choices. Peace and justice, however variously interpreted, are universal values – but when they conflict, which should prevail? Is war worse than injustice, for instance? And then again, the Israeli conception of justice fundamentally differs from that of the Palestinian. Doubtless, such differences may be rooted in self-justification. But justice itself "makes incompatible demands", since restitution to a community for a past wrong may be unjust to those living in the present. Therefore, "even if a conception of justice could be formulated that received universal assent, it would make conflicting demands about which reasonable people could differ."

This part of the argument is presented by Gray with considerable clarity, punctuated by occasional flares of brilliance, such as when he observes that "tragic choices cannot be eliminated from ethical life. Where universal values make conflicting demands, the right action may contain wrong … Then there is surely tragedy." The more sanctimonious voices in the current debate over the Iraq war, (particularly Martini-sodden journalists with an exaggerated sense of their own moralilty) would gain much by considering such a possibility. But how, then, to deal with conflicting ethical choices all of which exert valid claims on what is just? Liberals like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin assert that the solution to such a plurality is to establish a universal regime of justice, with basic liberties and rights applicable to all. That is, if one only has a rigorous and workable theory of justice, it is possible to resolve conflict between differing goods. Since, however, Gray argues that there can be different conceptions of justice which are incompatible but nevertheless have equal validity, such talk is considered hallucinatory and often dangerous. The best regimes are very different from each other, as are the worst, and the good may come in a variety of forms. (To be fair to Rawls, he did not dispute this: in his The Law of Peoples, Rawls attempted to formulate a system of philosophical norms compatible with political reality in which he distinguished different kinds of viable state, including the modern liberal variety but also ‘decent societies’ which are hierarchical but also allow for some involvement of their citizens, and he cites traditional Islamic societies as examples of that). It is also futile, according to Gray, to try to smother rivalries about what is good under the blanket of human rights - rights often conflict as well. Appeals to social justice don’t get us very far either since there is not an idea of fairness that is shared widely enough for a conception of social justice to be grounded in it.

Now, it is this value-pluralism that underlies Gray’s devastating assault on neoliberal orthodoxy in False Dawn (1998). Different groups of people require different economic circumstances to enable them to live ‘the good life’, and it is this above all else that inspires Gray to attack notions of the universal validity of market principles. In this book too, Gray takes on Robert Nozick, a libertarian liberal who believes that markets must be universal as a simple matter of justice. Property rights are not merely legal constructs or social conventions which work variously well in different societies – they are an imperative of justice. Gray retorts:

"Thinking of market freedoms in this way, as derivations from fundamental human rights, is a fundamental error. Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This … is true of all human rights."

Indeed, "markets are not free-standing" but are "highly complex legal and cultural institutions". The ‘negative’ liberties afforded by the functioning of the free market would be of limited value without the ‘positive’ liberties afforded by enabling institutions like the welfare state (this is a decisive break with Isaiah Berlin, in whose tradition he is working). But Gray’s target is not merely neoliberalism – it is any of the "dogmas of the Enlightenment" or of religion which think it possible or desirable to have a universal regime. Social-democrats, Marxists, neoliberals and fundamentalists of various stripes are all to be distrusted as proponents of a universalist regime. Even a moderate liberal like Rawls, so Gray argues, is wrong to think that it is sufficient that he is silent on the kind of economy which best fulfils the criteria of his theory of justice. His basic error is to think that there can be a single, transferable theory which will be workable under forms of capitalism and socialism – no such universally applicable model of justice exists. Similarly, Mill’s liberalism works best where he recognises the incompleteness and constitutive imperfectability of human understanding; it is Isaiah Berlin whose ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ makes the best contribution to modus vivendi, by understanding liberty as a means of allowing different goods to flourish rather than the best means of ensuring that the one true good will always prevail:

"Unlike most liberal thinkers, Berlin understood that liberty is not one thing, but many, that its various components do not all mesh together, but clash, that when they do conflict there is inevitably some loss and sometimes no solution that all reasonable people are bound to accept."

However appropriate it is for human beings to allow others their own cultural and moral norms, even though we may find them repulsive, there are immediate and obvious limits to such value-pluralism, as Gray implicitly accepts. Some regimes ought not to be tolerated, even if they have some claim to a notion of the good. Totalitarian regimes, for example. The one thing that is universally invalid for Gray is any ethical norm whose source is universalist in conception. And there are basic standards of human rights – conflicting or not – involved in Gray’s writing. The "worst regimes" are not okay in their particular context etc. There do seem to be universal values sustaining Gray’s pluralism, and this is for the perfectly excellent reason that human beings do share many things in common, a point often made against Peter Winch's rather extreme version of relativism. Our basic biology, for instance, our sensory range, our language capacity, our ability to feel pain, to love and to orgasm – all of these cut across cultural blocs and political coalitions. There are good reasons for thinking that some regimes will allow our common needs and capacities to be satisfied and developed better than others. Some ‘goods’ are incommensurable, as Gray avers. But at a certain point even good, tolerant value-pluralists like Gray have to take up arms on behalf of one and against the other, and there can be no doubt that what is at stake is a ‘better’ or ‘less-worse’ notion of the good. And that is likely to be rooted in what the young Marx called our ‘species-being’. If your local clergy consider themselves paragons of virtue while they molest children, value-pluralists will not feel compelled to accept this as another version of the good; the sexual abuse of children is wrong because of what we know about the universal human capacity for pain and degradation.

2.
The inconsistency which dogs anti-universalist, de-totalising postmodern philosophy is precisely its unwillingness to accept a hierarchy of normative claims. All narratives are equal under the sun, (except for the grand narrative). John Gray is not quite of that ilk. He accepts that some ways of life are of less value than others, and some choices are better than competing options; it is just that sometimes one is presented with what the philosopher E J Lemmon called the 'Sartrean dilemma'. Sartre tells of a student whose brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940. The student wanted to avenge his brother and to fight forces that he regarded as evil. But the student's mother was living with him, and he was her one consolation in life. The student believed that he had conflicting obligations. Sartre describes him as being torn between two kinds of morality: one of limited scope but certain efficacy, personal devotion to his mother; the other of much wider scope but uncertain efficacy, attempting to contribute to the defeat of an unjust aggressor. These are moral choices which are incommensurable because they appeal on different levels - they are not competing in a logical way, because they are both choices that could be right to a reasonable person.

Which is fine so long as one recognises that they are both only right insofar as they address universal needs. This being the case, it is surely possible to conceive of one (or many) broadly universalist regimes which satisfy our shared needs while allowing sufficient autonomy for individuals to pursue their own conflicting goals. Rawls’ challenge is more daunting than Gray seems to think in this respect since, if there is such a diversity of goods, everyone surely has a right to the kind of conditions in which they can make a reasonable choice; this is a universal right, and it doesn’t help to say that two such rights may come into conflict, since either we can make a reasonable choice between them or they can be compromised. The universalist regime of which I speak is, of course, socialism. I am thinking particularly of Norman Geras’ "Minimum Utopia" in which even apparently modest accomplishments such as ensuring everyone has adequate nutrition, shelter, healthcare and reasonable protection from harm would represent a revolutionary break with capitalism. It is both an enabling and constraining regime, in that certain choices not presently available under capitalism would become so, while choices that relate to property rights could become obsolete. Unlike Nozick’s treatment of the market, socialists would hardly claim today that centralised or decentralised planning is a universally applicable model based on a universal right. It is a means to an end, a way of allowing human beings to share control over their environment and therefore enjoy a kind of autonomy presently denied them. But socialists do claim that there are some minimal rights which are not respected under capitalism and which can only be fulfilled by establishing direct democracy. The right to participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect one’s life is the most obvious of these; and direct democracy is also conceived as a coercive instrument, preventing the unfair accumulation of wealth and power. One can imagine many convincing objections to such a universalist project, but value-pluralism would not be the best of them. Either, the socialist analysis is correct, and capitalism is an exploitative, unjust social formation, or it is incorrect – in neither case would value-pluralism be a relevant objection. It is not the kind of issue about which one can say that two entirely incompatible choices may both be rational.

Arguably, the best means of securing peaceful cohabitation is to ensure such conditions as will remove the likely causes of social tension. Inequality is such a cause (see, for example, Penny Green and Tony Ward, State Crime, 2003, in which one key cause of criminal behaviour by states is the intense social stress created by large inequalities of wealth). Yet, for Gray, the liberal cause of equality is precisely what is so fatal to liberalism and tolerance. It is the egalitarianism of liberalism that makes it intolerant of hierarchical social forms; indeed, for Gray:

"Ancient societies were more hospitable to differences than ours. This is partly because the idea of human equality was weak or absent. Modernity begins not with the recognition of difference but with a demand for uniformity."

This is such an obvious elision that one’s instinct is to read the passage again and look for a misprint, or a set of scare quotes – but, no, it is written as intended. Human equality is the same as uniformity. Parity is conflated with sameness. Such a trite formulation invites ridicule and does a disservice to the rest of the book. For example, Gray claims that social justice is not a sufficient appeal to resolve competing claims, because there is insufficient consensus on what is socially just (he appears to be influenced in this by Hayek who thought that the very idea of 'social justice' was meaningless, functioning as a rationalisation for special interests). This objection raises two interesting questions. Firstly should appeals to social justice be judged on their consensual appeal? If Toussaint L'Ouverture had accepted such an outlook, slavery might still be ubiquitous in the Southern hemisphere. Secondly, what would be a sufficient consensus to ground an appeal to social justice? Fifty plus one per cent? As it happens, opinion polls regularly show that a majority of people in this country consider the income gap too wide. A plurality think this can be solved by redistributive taxation. But even if such a venture was supported by noone but me and the dog, I could claim to be able to make a valid case for it in which it is not difficult to make a reasonable choice. This is not a 'Sartrean dilemma' for most people; such a policy is either just or unjust, and the same is true with most basic political questions of the day.

3.
Probably the most objectionable feature of the book for many liberals will be its stated intention of abandoning "the liberal project as a prescription for an ideal regime and adopt instead a conception in which the pursuit of modus vivendi among incommensurable and conflicting values is central." They may object for two reasons that I can think of, and many more that I cannot: firstly, because the liberal project is not about "a prescription for an ideal regime", but about creating minimal conditions in which diverse human beings can fulfil themselves; secondly, because Gray makes it crashingly obvious that what he means by this is the acceptance of regimes that many liberals might consider undesirable. (I am with the universalist liberals on both counts, with reservations. That is, I am for creating minimal conditions for human fulfillment but don't think the liberal order gets us very far in that, and I am in favour of opposing undemocratic regimes but differ with many liberals on the correct means of doing this).

On the latter point, I ought to say that Rawls makes his case against liberal universalism with the usual flair. In the chapter entitled 'Rival Freedoms', Gray sets out to debunk the Rawlsian "Greatest Equal Liberty Principle" which was in fact enshrined in the manifesto of the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 elections as "the maximum liberty for the individual commensurable with the freedom of others". What is wrong with this principle, Gray avers, is that it unwisely assumes that any reasonable person can know what the 'greatest liberty' is. Freedoms, however, conflict. All states have to make choices between rival freedoms, and not even liberal states can do so on the basis of liberal values. The notion of 'greatest liberty' is strictly indeterminate, and choices about which liberties to curtail are usually based on pragmatic considerations of human interest and a culturally specific notion of 'the good':

"Like non-liberal regimes, liberal regimes embody specific conceptions of the good life. The liberties they embody can be justified only in terms of those conceptions. Of course, no liberal regime embodies a single conception of the good. All embody a local settlement of the claims of rival ideals. The freedoms that any liberal regime protects are part of this settlement."

Rawls is accused of omitting very important modern freedoms from his list of central freedoms as a result of the inaptness of his theory, in which there is no space for radical choice among conflicting values. As an example, Gray cites the possibility of Catholics, Muslims etc asserting their cultural autonomy and liberty in being allowed to found faith schools. At the same time as these schools appear to maximise cultural autonomy, they are also exclusionary in that - for example - a homosexual man may not teach in one. I think I know how I would answer in this case, but the point is that Rawls' Greatest Equal Liberty Principle does not allow for such radical incommensurability. This charge has some justice in it. The matter of implementing liberal principles in such decisions is rarely as simple as Rawls seems to make it. On the other hand, the choice is probably not as difficult as Gray makes it appear - for example, he cites the choice between allowing racist speech and curtailing free speech. Both contain harm, and both could be seen as reasonable by different people. Yet, not every liberal holds free speech to be an absolute, and a consideration of the consequences in each case, as measured against liberal principles, could yield a decisive answer. Now, this is where Gray is wrong to say that liberal principles can have no place in determining which freedoms are privileged and which are not. Taking the example above, we can imagine how a consideration of the consequences would weigh differently in the scales of a conservative racist than in those of a liberal 'multiculturalist'. These cannot simply be reduced to manifestations of culturally-specific notions of 'the good' - one purview does a better job of maximising the domain of those 'universal values' which Gray admits exist than the other.

Gray does a good job, however, of exposing some of the weaknesses in classical liberal thought on liberty. Mill's 'one simple principle' (in On Liberty) that states or collectivities may restrict individual liberty only in order to prevent harm is met by the obvious answer that one has often to decide between harms. Just like the 'Greatest Happiness' principle, this one founders in a sea of indeterminacy. On the other hand, David Held made more or less the same point in Models of Democracy, so it isn't an original argument. Isaiah Berlin, to whom Gray owes many of his most effective argumentative weapons, is also taken to task on his argument for 'negative liberty' (freedom 'from' various things) against 'positive liberty' (freedom 'to' do/have/be various things). For one thing, Gray challenges the prioritising of liberty over other liberal values on the basis of value-pluralism. Freedom of the kind envisaged in value-pluralism is not merely freedom from coercion, but is also the freedom to be partially the author of one's own life. In other words, value-pluralism specifically includes the possibility of 'positive freedoms', of enabling institutions and social structures.

Nevertheless, we are back to the basic theme of Gray's argument when he says:

"Autonomy is not a good that can be accorded priority over other values and thereafter promoted. Just as there are incompatible negative liberties, so there are rival autonomies. When autonomy makes conflicting demands, they may reasonably be resolved in different ways. Autonomy cannot be hived off from other values. The line between autonomy and other values is frequently unclear. In many cases, goods that seem to be wholly distinct from autonomy shape the options in terms of which autonomy is defined."

Freedom means different things to an Indonesian than to an Australian, then, and sometimes certain freedoms may reasonably be curtailed in the pursuit of a specific, shared notion of the good. Gray seems to accept a distinction of the kind made by John Rawls between 'decent' hierarchical societies and criminally negligent or barbaric states. The former, although illiberal and often lacking the minimum of democracy, can be accomodated as local versions of the 'good', while the latter may sometimes be too dangerous to cohabit with. On the other hand, it is the goal of his neo-Hobbesian view to establish "a modus vivendi among goods and evils", as he puts it. States are not to be judged according to how closely they embody a particular value, but according to how well they negotiate between rival values. "Ethical life is commonly a shifting compromise between ideals", and it is better to work with this uncomfortable fact than extinguish in attempting to end it.

Such is not my view, but it is the considered argument of an intelligent conservative who has as much to recommend him in spite of himself as because of himself. Although frequently wrong, he is always illuminating. As a conservative, he is open-minded and receptive; as a liberal, he is honest enough to admit its exclusiveness, to admit what liberalism cannot maintain (namely, universalism). As a socialist, I take pleasure in having the opportunity to disagree with him.