The Price of Liberalism, 2: Division

Previously, I worried about the cost of liberalism in reduced fertility. It’s time for a second major cost of liberalism: reduced social cohesion.

1. The Need for Loyalty

Humans are selfish social animals. This means that, unlike the case of bees or ants, our cooperation is always in danger of degenerating into conflict, because each of us is genetically programmed to pursue our own interests, often at the expense of others. Moreover, even when our interests align, our judgments often conflict. We might agree that we all want economic prosperity but disagree about which policies or leaders are likely to produce that. So there is a standing temptation for people to behave uncooperatively, to work to defeat each other and undermine each other’s efforts. In the worst cases, you have actual violence.

Social loyalty—the sense of loyalty to one’s own society and its ways—is society’s defense against that danger. We need this defense because human beings are not smart and rational enough to agree on what the right institutions and policies are. So we need something that makes people put up with (what they regard as) the stupidity and degeneracy of the other members of their society. We have to be ready to say, for example, that even though the person who just got elected is obviously an incompetent asshole whom only a moron would vote for, we’re going to keep peacefully cooperating with such morons, for the good of society. We’re not going to try to burn down our institutions in order to get our way.

A rational person would do the game theoretic calculations and figure out that they should act cooperatively. But a typical human just feels a sense of social loyalty.

2. The Source of Loyalty

Hypothesis: We promote social loyalty, in part, by emphasizing the goodness of our society and the nobility of its fundamental ideals. We teach young children, for example, about how our country was founded on ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy. We teach them about the advantages of our form of government, the wisdom of its Constitution, and how our country has from its founding represented a beacon of freedom to the world. We go on to teach about admirable figures in our history, about the selflessness and honesty of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Notice that it’s not just a matter of dispassionately enumerating the benefits of living in our society; the education needs to form positive emotional associations with our society. (This is discussed in my colleague Ajume Wingo’s book, Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States.)

I received all those lessons in primary school. Of course, being an instinctive libertarian, I questioned many of them. But I retained an emotional appreciation for American ideals, such as those of freedom, equality, and innovation.

The propaganda is not only for children. Traditionally, we repeat to each other statements of appreciation for our society and its ideals, even as adults, to prevent each other from backsliding. Not that ordinary people are intentionally reinforcing each other’s social loyalty. But this might be a product of cultural evolution—cultures with a tradition of self-reinforcement tend to survive longer than cultures with no such tradition. So almost all cultures have such traditions.

If someone attacks our society, we instinctively punish that person, at least with social disapproval (if not actual legal penalties). Human beings learn how to behave, and even how to feel, from observing each other. So these traditions are self-perpetuating.

Only in recent years, they have collapsed. Now school children are taught that America is a despicable nation founded on hatred and domination. In the popular culture, attacks on the nation’s majority groups are becoming increasingly open and increasingly strident. The nation’s elites consider it offensive to praise their own society.

3. Undermining Loyalty

There are at least three reasons why liberalism undermines social loyalty.

3.1. Hypocrisy

Liberal values are unnatural for human beings. Basically, humans are biologically predisposed to be assholes—to oppress the weak, to hate foreigners, to admire authoritarian leaders. (Why this is the case is an interesting question for another time.) As a result, a society with explicitly liberal values will predictably be able to find many illiberal aspects of itself, especially of its history. Human nature pretty much guarantees that people in your society will have often acted illiberally. You will then have grounds to condemn your own society, from the standpoint of its own professed values. Obvious example: the founding fathers holding slaves at the same time that they loftily proclaimed that “all men are created equal”.

This problem does not so much afflict illiberal societies, because they can more easily live up to their own, illiberal ideals.

3.2. The Value of Self-Criticism

To some degree, self-criticism itself is a liberal value. It isn’t liberal to reflexively endorse one’s own society and its ways merely because they are one’s own. A good, cosmopolitan liberal should assess the value of his own society in a rational, unbiased way and call out its flaws. This is the only way to improve society, after all.

Illiberal societies don’t have this problem; illiberal values are consistent with dogmatically refusing to acknowledge any flaws in your society.

3.3. Freedom of Expression

Free expression is the most paradigmatic of liberal values. It means that we cannot silence people who attack our own society and its institutions. This is one of the great strengths of liberalism, because this criticism leads to reform, which makes the society better. This is why the world’s most liberal societies have been on the leading edge of human progress for the last two centuries.

The problem is, we can’t silence critics even if their attacks are complete nonsense. Suppose, for example, that someone is going around saying that this society is so utterly barbaric that its authorities regularly murder perfectly harmless people out of sheer hatred for their skin color, and the rest of society lets them do it because they are racist too. Suppose also that the government and a large portion of society perfectly well know that that is false. We still can’t suppress the people who are saying that, lest we abandon liberal ideals. We actually have to let people lie about us, even in the most malicious and invidious of ways.

You may have noticed some similarity between these hypotheticals and the current, actual situation of American society. A large portion of America’s intellectual class has for several decades devoted their lives to attacking their own society. What I have in mind here is not constructive criticism aimed at promoting identifiable political reforms. What I have in mind are attacks that seem motivated by resentment and aimed at provoking shame and resentment in Americans—shame on the part of the presumably dominant groups and resentment on the part of the presumably oppressed minorities.

The virulence of these attacks is not purely a product of liberalism. It is also in part an accident of history, due to the ideological uniformity that has grown up in American universities in the last several decades. This uniformity has produced increasing extremism, as academics compete with each other to make ever more extravagant displays of fealty to the common ideology. Progressivism began with reasonable critique of our society’s failures to live up to its ideals. Take that through several generations of increasing extremism and you get people expressing naked hatred for men, for white people, and for America in general.

We can’t silence these people, under liberal ideals. Granted, not all speech is protected, and some kinds of lies can be legally prohibited. But that only includes lies about relatively straightforward matters of empirical fact. Like if you’re selling a car, and you understate its mileage by 50,000 miles. It would not include, for example, the “lie” that Jesus was the son of God, or even that Trayvon Martin was a victim of racism. If we start prohibiting the latter sort of lies, we’re opening the door to the government prohibiting speech that criticizes the government’s own positions.

4. More Lies

It is not only leftists who are telling invidious lies, of course. The basic leftist lie is that America is fundamentally all about racism, sexism, and oppression. The right-wing lies include the likes of:

• Democrats don’t believe their stated political positions. They’re just lying about their views to gain power. E.g., they don’t believe in global warming; they’re just trying to come up with an excuse to give the government more power. They don’t believe in immigration either; they’re just trying to import more Democratic voters.

• Democrats stole the last election with rigged voting machines, etc.

• Everyone who criticizes Trump or makes any decision against his interests is purely politically motivated. The American court system prosecutes Republicans for purely political motives.

• The country is run by America-hating “globalists” who want to turn the country over to foreigners.

• Or it’s run by Satanic pedophiles.

• Or lizard-people.

These lies are also calculated to maximize resentment, division, and rage—they’re just aimed at a different group of people than the left-wing lies.

The two sides feed off each other: the more you catch the other side lying, the more you feel justified in counterattacking with equally scurrilous lies.

5. Solutions?

You know the liberal solution: “The solution to bad speech is more speech.” I.e., we just need to have people constantly debunking the lies of the extremists.

Not all the divisive content is lies, though. Some of it is merely a matter of deliberately choosing focus and spinning stories to maximize division. E.g., it’s not a lie that America practiced slavery. We’re not supposed to cover that up, are we?

No, but the historical facts could be taught in a less self-flagellating spirit. We might teach people that slavery was widely practiced around the world and throughout human history, including in the early days of our own country. Fortunately, we abolished it long ago, because it was incompatible with our fundamental ideals. That’s a better story (and a truer one) than the woke story that the nation was founded on racism as its core principle.

This liberal solution to the problem of loyalty-undermining speech might work … but only if these debunkers can gain a wide audience. If, for example, there were some non-partisan information sources that people of all ideological orientations would trust, then this could work. Increasingly, though, there isn’t. Increasingly, Americans sort themselves into separate information environments, each with relentless biases and no voices of dissent.

So I can, for example, debunk the Michael Brown myth all day (the myth that Michael Brown surrendered and then was gunned down by the police anyway just because he was black), but hardly anyone who has consumed that myth will ever even see my debunking. My article debunking the myth will be coded as “right wing propaganda”, which “nice” progressives don’t look at.

So I don’t know what the solution is. Perhaps the nation is doomed to collapse into chaos, and humanity’s experiment with liberal democracy will end.