On Friday, November 3rd, The Munk Debates held its 29th main stage debate, presenting the following motion: “Be it Resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right.”
Free trade, capitalism, and individual rights have remained foundational to liberalism, but more recent criticisms blame liberalism for problems such as growing inequality and political polarization. Has liberalism become a roadblock in the path of progress? Is a new guiding ideology needed to replace it?
George F. Will, foreign and domestic affairs columnist for The Washington Post, argued for the Pro side of the motion. Here is his opening statement from the debates.
Liberalism gets the big questions right to keep the peace. That’s the fundamental problem in politics—social peace.
Liberalism gets the big question right by leaving many big questions out of politics. Is there a God? How should we worship? What is virtue? How should we promote it? Should we have false consciousness purged and true consciousness inculcated? Liberalism doesn’t do that. Liberalism recognizes that the great problem of politics is that human beings are opinionated and egotistical. They like their opinions, and they have different opinions, yet they have to live together in peace.
Liberalism is often faulted as pedestrian and boring. I prefer to say it has heroic modesty. It does not presume to tell people how to find meaning of their lives in politics. Genuflecting at the altar of politics is illiberal and produces illiberalism. My debate partner, Jacob, is a devout Catholic. I describe myself as an amiable, low-voltage atheist. It doesn’t matter. We could live together in a liberal society because the government is neutral about such things.
Some people in politics say, “Let’s envision the best and pursue it.” Prudent classic liberals say, “Let’s define the worst and avoid it.” And Lord knows we’ve had enough of those. Classic liberalism, let’s define it with economy. It believes there is a settled human nature, and that natural rights are derived from that. Natural rights are rights that history teaches us are essential to the flourishing of people with our nature.
All illiberal politics in the last two centuries have begun by saying that there is no fixed human nature, that human beings are merely products of the culture they find themselves raised in, that malleability is the most important feature of human beings, and therefore, firm, hard-driving, coercive politics is justified to produce the proper consciousness in people. False consciousness must be gone, people must be conditioned. Speech must be limited because it does harm by giving people the wrong consciousness. The vocabulary of liberalism cannot cope with that. And when you go down that path, you wind up either with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia—or on a typical American campus today.
Another way that liberalism keeps the peace—and remember, peace is always the fundamental problem—is by having markets allocate most opportunity and wealth. The alternative is political power will allocate opportunity and wealth, and that way lies bitterness. That way lies an unhealthy high stakes of politics. Let impersonal market forces do these things, and you will not have the bitterness that comes from the ever-increasing high stakes of politics that determine who prospers and who does not.
Now, it is said that liberalism produces inequality. Indeed it does. If you say you are for liberty, you are for inequality, because people have different attitudes and aptitudes. Some people want to teach kindergarten, some people want to run hedge funds. Bless them all. But the rewards are going to be different, monetary and otherwise.
A classic liberal society says we want, above all, meritocracy. Careers open to talents. Obviously, any society is going to be governed by elites. The question in any mature society is not whether elites shall rule, but which elites shall rule. And the challenge of democracy is to get consent to be governed by worthy elites.
When I was young and the world was young, in the late ’60s, I taught at the University of Toronto, where a particular luminary at the time was C.B. Macpherson, a very fine political philosopher, whose subject of main interest was possessive individualism, which he did not much care for. I think possessive individualism is excellent. It is the direct descendant of Locke’s teaching from which most of our liberalism descends.
Possession is important because possessions give us a zone of sovereignty that is not dependent on state power. Possessive individualism matters, because when you step away from individualism, when you step away from the individual as the fundamental social unit, you find yourself where we are today with tribalism, with people defining their identities by their group memberships and a zero-sum scramble for preferences as one group throws elbows against another.
The fact is that liberalism produces, as no other political philosophy can, an open society, a churning society. Yes, it’s disorderly. That’s part of the fun. But as the great American poet Robert Frost said, “I do not want to live in a homogenized society. I want the cream to rise.” Classic liberalism is a recipe for getting the cream to rise.
