My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

The ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission. - Warraq, Ali and others

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker.

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy

An acquaintance of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote the following rough draft in imitation of Randall Kennedy's "My Race Problem—And Ours." With the former's permission:

"The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Ultimate success and happiness comes from leading a principled life, not in getting the upper hand. - Sally Forth, comics section of Seattle Times, Sunday, 2/18/2007

Affirmative action is "the just spoils of a righteous war." - Julian Bond

There is one thing someone who surveys the current political scene can be confident of, that people believe, or say they believe, that "liberal" and "left" mean much the same thing. As a liberal, I find this to be a problem. The left as it is now constituted does not have the values which characterized the old left: rationality and individualism, civility, toleration, privacy, impartiality, objectivity, generosity, public-spiritedness, optimism, humanitarianism, and equality. When I ask what I should think with respect to the social and political issues of the day, neither the left (nor the right) seems to offer guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory.

How, for example, should I think about white people? (I happen to be white.) The left seems to find that the cases of man's inhumanity to man fall disproportionately on Caucasians. Should I view white people as uniquely bad, and perhaps deserving of punishment wherever I find them? Should I see white people as guilty because of the history of slavery? Some conduct reflecting these sentiments has entered into everyday life. Many depart from what may be their usual candor and frankness when the reference is racial or ethnic minority groups or members. Many whites, Shelby Steele observes, have confessed to him "that on some occasion they have not said something they truly believed for fear of being marked a racist." An unwritten rule that "We must say only good things about these people" seems to be in effect. In remembrance of a regrettable past, the joshing and jostling and hurly-burly which characterizes our conduct with equals is forgone. An unnatural politeness, even solicitude takes over with respect to members of certain groups.

One answer is suggested by the example of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader said several things which guide me in my response to the injustices of the past. He said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." He did not draw a distinction between one group of humans and another. "God is not merely interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men," King said. "He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race." From such a perspective the problem with theories of group guilt is that it divides King's "human race" into two separate, unequal categories, one part burdened by accusation and shame, the other indignant, resentful, and inclined to feel justified in seeking retribution.

In a liberal society every person gets a fresh start. It was one of the goals of the civil rights revolution that blacks should no longer be asked to know their place, but should have as much opportunity for the full realization of their abilities as everyone else. Theories of racial guilt in practice means that some do not get a fresh start, free and clear, but will go through their lives being limited or targeted in visible or invisible ways because of the deeds of other people in another century. The problem of inequality which the civil rights revolution addressed is not solved by relocating the inequality from the formerly oppressed to the former oppressors, it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of inequality* in any form. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," King reminded us. "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

But what of the continuing problem of racism? Perhaps the descendants of the people who did these things will be less likely to act in prejudiced or unjust ways if their self-esteem and confidence is reined in by a sense of guilt for the past. I answer that "we should not cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy." [James Piereson] We will not be serving our fellow citizens well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. [Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, p. 196] Guilt is powerful. Its legitimacy derives from the care we take to establish it. For this reason liberal societies established the principle that a citizen is innocent until proved guilty, sought to maintain an independent judiciary, and honored due process and rules of evidence.

Instrumental guilt, guilt propounded in order to compel a course of action we deem desirable without a legitimate grounding in culpability, violates the fundamental rule of liberal societies that no one should be subject to the will of another. If I were to be found guilty of robbing a store, following a trial in which the rules of due process were observed, I could still count myself a free human being. My guilt, and any appropriate punishment resulting, would be a foreseeable consequence of my own actions freely taken. My deeper freedom—freedom from the arbitrary acts of another—would be unimpaired. White guilt, as Professor Steele also observed, is another animal; not a belief in one's guilt, but a vulnerability to being stigmatized as guilty because of one's skin color alone. It represents not a victory of anti-racism but a rebirth of racism in another form. It revives the ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission.

Another problem with theories of group guilt is that they impair the sense that in the end the society we live in is the result of what we all do and think. Senator Barack Obama recently observed that the achievements of the civil rights revolution are dimmed somewhat by a lessening of the sense of our common interests and goals. The liberal ideas which emerged around the time of the American Revolution included the conviction that cooperation and altruism create a better society and a better life than any of the alternatives. The sense that we are all in this together runs through King's thought as it runs through Obama's, as when he reminded us that injustice to one endangers all. Over and over again King asked the mainstream society to live up to its own stated principles. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" His work reflected the sustained theme that within each of us, regardless of our differences, is the possibility of a better person. Theories of group guilt go in the opposite direction to this positive theme. Where King sought to unite us, these theories seek to divide us. Where King sought to uplift us, theories of group guilt invite suspicion and distrust by some of those he addressed.

"The poor you have always with you" is a timeless problem of every society. When we phrase this problem as the contemporary left seems to, postulating a "dominant culture" and its relationship to those who are left out or disadvantaged, we are making a specific assumption about humankind and our life together. When instead we phrase the problem of poverty and injustice as Martin Luther King did, in terms of great principles which uplift and unite us, we are in the presence of a completely different vision of humanity. One worldview perceives the problem as primarily one of identifying enemies who have taken what is not rightfully theirs. It conceptualizes the problem of the poor and outcast, the have-nots, as the result of intentional wrongdoing by the haves; and it imagines the solution in terms of punishment and redistribution. By contrast the vision which animated the civil rights movement was that when we the people work together to further the public good, we all benefit.

The vision of political democracy has always been that the people themselves can constitute the government, because they have common interests which they can identify and work toward together. The democratic outlook may or may not be correct, but a politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. It is difficult to see how a better life for all can be achieved by a process which is primarily negative, such as identifying enemies to be deprecated and degraded. I have watched as the left has moved from attitudes resembling Martin Luther King's—attitudes of mutual respect and cooperation—to attitudes of opposition traceable to places in Central Europe which had never really known political freedom or democracy.

Sometimes, when I find myself in gatherings of the left, it seems that all I hear is a litany of negatives: "European, bad; white, bad; male, bad; corporations, bad; capitalism, bad—yet without any alternative suggested or a hint of what a world shaped as they think it should be would look like. This seeming vision of a world of enemies stands in sharp contrast to the principle of public-spiritedness. "The Americans, on the other hand," remarked Alexis de Tocqueville in his analysis of the democratic disposition, "are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state."

White people, the current left seems to say, committed foolish and terrible mistakes. They, and their European Civilization, despoiled the planet, polluted the skies, corrupted the earth with monstrous smoking factories, imposed the barbarism of colonialism on the third world, and enslaved a dark race. To prevent this from happening again, we must struggle against the people who committed such monstrous crimes, we must make them pay for what they did, and we must not aid and abet them by accepting or tolerating any aspect of them or their ways.

But King rejected the easy path of sweeping generalization and simple condemnation. When he received the Nobel Prize for Peace, Martin King said, "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history." As Randall Kennedy wrote, "a brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless."

If equality, in the form of the principle that no one is worse than anyone else because of their race, enabled Martin to end a century of Jim Crow prejudice, it cannot be a progressive principle to demonize white people or the civilization which originated the proposition that all men are created equal. There are no shortcuts: no group has a monopoly on virtue or evil.

The century of the American Revolution—the Eighteenth Century—was a heady time for liberalism. Voltaire, centuries early, wrote the appropriate response to the fanatics of September 11: "If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities." Across the Atlantic, the fledgling American republic's declaration of human equality enabled Martin King to create a revolution simply by asking their descendants to live up to their own stated principles. As Abraham Lincoln had realized a century earlier, Americans believe in uplift, and it is not a mistake to appeal to the better angels of their nature.

I can find no such high-mindedness in what the left has become.

(*) Correction. Originally read: "it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of equality in any form."(Revised by editor 11/18/13)