Friday, January 24, 2020

Chapter Review: The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism

The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism is chapter 1 of Michael Sandel’s 1996 book, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Sandel, a philosopher and Professor of Government at Harvard, is an astute observer of the human condition and America’s social and political predicament. His book asks questions[1] about why so many Americans are unhappy with government and each other and why the two parties are unable to make sense of America’s situation. Those question sound relevant today in January of 2020. Sandel understood in 1996 a significant part of why some people rebelled and voted to reject the broken system they saw in 2016.

One key argument that Sandel makes is that politics and morality cannot be disentangled. That argument goes against the liberalism ideology that arose in the 1950s and still dominates American politics today. The belief that politics is inherently and mostly a moral endeavor is one I came to myself in the last 18 years or so. That was based on empirical evidence from modern cognitive and social science. By contrast, Sandel arrived at his understanding based on his observations and how he logically analyzed society’s situation. Two different lines of inquiry point to the same conclusion.


The discontent
Sandel argues that two fears lie at the heart of modern American discontent. The first is that we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives (self-government), e.g., demographic changes are unsettling to some people. The second is that the moral fabric of family, community and nation are unravelling. These fear generate anxiety: “It is an anxiety that the prevailing political agenda has failed to answer or even address.” Sandel’s anxiety argument is supported by some evidence from recent empirical research indicating that many people are concerned about loss of status and social changes. The core of the anxiety argument is that feelings of loss of control or self-government and moral unravelling are products of the rise of a variant of liberalism that has come to dominate American politics since the 1950s.


The new ideology
Sandel describes the variant of liberalism that arose in the 1950s in America. Its origins date back to John Locke (1632-1704), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). The central idea of the American variant is that “government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse.” This ideological belief recognizes that people disagree about how best to live. Government and laws should therefore be neutral about what vision is best. Instead, liberty arises when government provides rights that respect people as “free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends.” Sandel calls this form of public life a ‘procedural public’ because government emphasizes fair procedures over particular ends.

Importantly, because liberalism conceives of people as free and independent, they are unencumbered by any moral or civic burdens or ties that they do not choose to accept. Sandel argues that this lack of moral and civic burdens and ties leads to the sense of disempowerment and anxiety that America is experiencing now. In short, liberalism “cannot secure the liberty it promises, because it cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires.” That is Sandel’s core complaint about modern American liberalism.


The old ideology
The modern liberalism variant replaced a republicanism ideology. That republicanism held that liberty depends on people sharing in self-government or self-rule. Unlike sharing in self-government under liberalism, under republicanism means citizens deliberate to define and shape the public interest and the people’s destiny. Unlike liberalism, republicanism asks of citizens that they acquire some knowledge of public affairs and have a sense of moral concern for the whole of society. Republican citizens are thus asked to acquire republican qualities of character and civic virtues. Republican government is tasked with cultivating qualities of character that self-government requires.

Thus, unlike the liberal citizen, the republican citizen is asked to take on moral and civic burdens that are inherent in self-rule.

Sandel points out that both liberal and republican[2] forms of governance have been present in America from the start but their influence has waxed and waned over various periods of time.


It’s about morals and social glue
Liberalism tends to shy away from engaging moral issues. That creates a sense of emptiness and anxiety because humans are moral creatures and politics is riddled with moral concerns. Liberalism doesn't provide a glue to hold people together and create a common sense of community. Liberalism doesn't promote a particular view and thus “liberal political theory insists on toleration, fair procedures and respect for individual rights.” People choose their own values, including anti-social and destructive values. That is moral relativism, which basically says, all morals and all ways of life are equal. Of course, the logic flaw there is that liberalism does support core moral values of freedom and fairness: “The relativist defense of liberalism is no defense at all.”

At least sometimes, probably usually, it is impossible to separate decisions about morals from political choices. Policy based on moral decisions can be unconscious decisions, but they are decisions nonetheless. Even a political choice that claims to be purely neutral about underlying moral issues cannot always (ever?) be neutral. In the case of abortion, a liberal can defend abortion arguing the woman’s right to choose and a right to privacy. That may seem morally neutral but it isn’t. It implicitly rejects the moral argument that the moral status of a fertilized human egg, a human fetus and a baby are all equivalent and thus abortion is murder.

Sandel makes the same case regarding the slavery debates between Abe Lincoln and Steven Douglas. Douglas argued the liberal point that since people disagreed over the morality of slavery, the central government should not decide the slavery issue. To do so would violate the constitution and risk civil war. Therefore, ignore the moral question and let the states should decide. Lincoln took the republican position and rejected that. He argued the question was inherently and unavoidably moral. Pretending to be neutral makes no difference: “Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about?” Even in the face of civil war, Lincoln understood that it made no political or moral sense to aspire to political neutrality.

In essence, what Sandel argues is that our current political ideology isn’t up to the task of socially gluing a complex, diverse country like the US together. If he is at least mostly right, then is republicanism an ideology that can do better? Sandel believes it could be.

In this 2-minute video, Sandel briefly touches on republicanism. He argues that wealth inequality erodes republican ideals, which require some sort of shared experience to help build a shared sense of community, social cohesion and the common good.





Footnotes:
1. Sandel’s book deals with complicated political theory and moral philosophy. It was hard for me to to read and understand. His style of prose in this book is dense, technical, academic. That is unfortunate. This insightful book deserves a wider audience that a simplifying rewrite might generate.


So familiar is this vision of freedom that it seems a permanent feature of the American political and constitutional tradition. But Americans have not always understood freedom in this way. As a reigning public philosophy, the version of liberalism that informs our present debates is a recent arrival, a development of the last forty or fifty years. Its distinctive character can best be seen by contrast with a rival philosophy that it gradually displaced. This rival public philosophy is a version of republican political theory. Central to republican theory is the idea that liberty depends on sharing in self-government.

2. Sandel acknowledges that republicanism has lead to bad things in the past that he calls “episodes of darkness.” He wrote in 1996, a time when government was still somewhat functional. American conservatives still mostly believed in facts and logic, although that moral standard was eroding. It would be interesting to know what Sandel thinks of our current situation and whether current conservatism is a toxic variant of liberalism, republicanism or something mostly different.

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