Defining Liberalism: An Overview

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

An overview in this case consists of general statements and analogies, with demonstration and support, in most cases, to be developed later. (Bacon's remark, in the Novum Organum, that "Since we agree neither upon principles nor upon demonstrations there is no place for argument," may be apropos here.)

As asserted in The Liberal Founding, "In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)" Liberalism and the outlook of the various flavors of the left are so fundamentally different that, in practical terms, there are no points of agreement between them, even though media discourse assumes that there are.

Public-spiritedness vs. class warfare:
For example, the most famous statement of the early left is the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Contrast this with the way the Constitution, as a representative liberal document, begins: “We the People.” One addresses a class; the other, the whole. In political democracy, which necessarily is about the public, not a subset of it, class-think is social, not political. Liberalism is public and civil (following the example of the Roman Republic before it); the left, in all its flavors, is instead social. For liberalism, rights are human rights (in 18th century terms, the Rights of Man); the left speaks of group rights (that is, class rights).

The Manifesto addresses a class (workers), implies an enemy class (the "bourgeoisie"), and issues a call to war. Likewise the modern left thinks in terms of "my community," rather than "the public." In the terms used by Rowley, above, it is particularist rather than universalist. It applies social standards (community values) rather than universal ethical principles. Contrast the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This addresses an Everyman, a citizen, as Hayek said (PDF), who has “political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions.” This is the language of a universalism which is about civility, cooperation and altruism, far different from the left's implied class warfare.

Win-win vs. zero sum: 
Everyone wins in the democratic order envisioned by Hayek immediately above. Instead of a culture war over differing "moral values," there is the deeper moral value represented by a tolerant civil order which protects the single person from social tyranny. (John Stuart Mill's term. Mill spoke of “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways.”)

An example is the liberal principle of freedom of speech, a civil right and thus an aspect of universal justice (Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."). There is an enlightened self-interest aspect whenever anyone's rights are protected, even the rights of someone I may not like very much: When my neighbor's freedom of speech is upheld I am more confident that I, too, cannot be censored.

But I have heard people on the left say that whenever one person gets something, someone else loses something (classic zero-sum reasoning); and give as example the case of a minority group member who hears a remark thought to be critical of the group to which he or she belongs. As John A. Flower wrote, "The elimination of hostile environments by limiting the freedom of speech of oppressor groups is determined to be necessary to remedy the wrongs visited upon historically oppressed groups."

Notice what this reveals? The left, at least in this situation, is not in favor of civil rights. An iconic civil right, freedom of speech, is subordinated to a vested interest, the feelings of a protected class. Political freedom is deemed less important than "group rights." In this sense the left is literally unprincipled. Instead of an ethical principle, instead there is something low and base: a mere social standard.

Defining Liberalism: Published Arguments for Liberalism

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

Former President Clinton at the Democratic National Convention:

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.

The former president echoes what Fritz Stern, a historian driven from Germany by the rising antisemitism of the Third Reich, wrote:

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development.

Contrast this with the implied social Darwinism of conservatives' so-called "tragic" view of reality:

5. [Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” [Emphasis added]

 
Clinton also said:

You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."

Or as an anonymous post in a newsgroup said, "Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power." "What works in the real world," Clinton said, "is cooperation."

The epigraph to this post lists four principles of liberalism: Universalism; the importance of the single person; egalitarianism; and the passionate desire for optimum outcomes. It omits the cognitive emphasis of liberalism, the devotion to what the Roman Cicero called "right reason."* As Martin Luther King put it:

"How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, ... An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. ... Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality ..." - Martin Luther King Jr.

To sum up, liberalism's characteristic "politics of kindness" is not just morally right and pleasing to the conscience, it makes human lives better. It is also the best public policy, because it maximizes human resources. Liberalism is not only the politics of political freedom, it is the politics of prosperity.
 
(*)Cicero wrote:

"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. ... Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly called punishment . . ."

Defining Liberalism: Hayek, Habakkuk and More

As noted in The Liberal Founding, liberalism may be described as the outlook of the Enlightenment, and should not be confused with the quite different outlooks of the various flavors of the left (or, of course, with that of the right).

When then-senator Obama visited Seattle, he said that we need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology (according to the media, the crowd cheered). The following material is offered in support of one of the aspects of liberalism: its cognitive emphasis; and its resistance to ideology.

 In "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (PDF), F. A. Hayek speaks of "liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas."* Those representative Enlightenment documents, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, are rife with ideas: Human equality, the right to liberty, to freedom of speech and (with the Fourteenth Amendment) to equal protection under the laws.

As Lincoln wrote, the manner of expression of the ideas should reflect their importance:

The Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language.

Compare this passage from ancient scripture:

Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,
so that one can read it readily.
For the vision still has its time,
presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;
if it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late. (Hab. 1:2-3; 2:2-4)

Thomas Paine (he who inspired the Founders) wrote:

The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court of Britain; he that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to "Defender of the Faith," than George the Third.

President Kennedy attested to the importance of carefully chosen language in a free society:

 In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life, [Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. ...
In 1938, Winston Churchill said dictators were afraid of the power of words, quote, "a state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure."

Ideology may be described as language in service of social opinion rather than reality (Robert Pirsig wrote "Truth stands independently of social opinion."). A good example of ideology is flat-earthism. It elevates a notion—the earth looks flat—above the "consilience of inductions" which tells the informed thinker that the earth is spherical: Time zones, satellite radio, airlines' great circle routes, circumnavigation, the longer summer days of northern regions, and many others.

As Timothy Ferris writes:

When ideologies were put into action, the results were disastrous. During the twentieth century alone, ideologically inspired regimes — mainly Communism and its reactionary brother, Fascism — murdered more than thirty million of their own citizens, mostly through purges and in the state-sponsored famines that resulted when governments adopted reforms based on dogma rather than fact. That this is not more widely known and appreciated, but instead is so often brushed aside as somehow irrelevant to the argument at hand, demonstrates the extent to which the dead hand of ideology still grips many a mind.

The Declaration proclaims, "Let facts be submitted to a candid world." Liberalism is founded on a commitment to the well-being of all humankind. But its methodology is to leverage evidence and reason—and what the Greeks called "winged words"—in the service of the public good. Paine's declaration is an example of both of liberalism's tools, ideas and language, in the service of the whole world: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness."

(*) A more complete version of the passage:

But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

What Children Once Read, And A Veteran On Vietnam

The Young Folks Library set of children's books includes Famous Myths and Legends, in which may be found Charles Kingsley's retelling of a Greek myth about Jason and The Golden Fleece, "The Argonauts":

[The young Jason is tutored by a magical being, Cheiron the centaur, whose "eyes were wise and mild." When the day was come, Cheiron said, "Will you promise me two things before you go?" Jason promised, and Cheiron said, "Speak harshly to no soul whom you may meet, and stand by the word which you shall speak."]

As Jason traveled it came to pass that:

On the bank of [the raging flood] Anauros sat a woman, all wrinkled, gray, and old . . . "Who will carry me across the flood?"

And Jason was going to answer her scornfully, when Cheiron's words came to his mind.

[Jason carries the old woman across, she whining and berating him all the while:] He lay panting awhile on the bank . . . but he cast one look at the old woman . . .

And as he looked, she grew fairer than all women, and taller than all men on earth; and her garments shone like the summer sea, and her jewels like the stars of heaven; and over her forehead was a veil, woven of the golden clouds of sunset; and through the veil she looked down on him . . . with great eyes, mild and awful, which filled all the glen with light. . . .

And she spoke–"I am the Queen of Olympus, Hera the wife of Zeus. As thou hast done to me, so will I do to thee. Call on me in the hour of need, and try if the Immortals can forget." [Emphasis added]

I think the grandeur of mythic vision, and the simple but solid ethical principles in, for example, Cheiron's advice to the young Jason, make it worth putting on the lifetime list.

***

The best selling novelist Nelson DeMille, who had served in Vietnam, spent some time in the communist regime there before publishing Up Country in 2002:

I avoided looking at Susan and said, “I wiped the blood off my knife on his pants, … and started walking away. I looked up and saw two guys from my company, who’d come to find me, and they’d seen some of this. One guy took my rifle out of my hand and fired three signal shots into the air. He said to me, ‘The rifle works, Brenner.’ These guys looked at me . . . I mean, we were all a little nuts by then, but . . . this was above and beyond nuts, and they knew it.” … “He looked at me and says, ‘How the f--- did you get into hand-to-hand with this guy?’” p. 410

I imagined Captain Tram and his comrades sitting in their bunkers or slit trenches at night, … hoping for a quiet evening. Meanwhile, six miles overhead, too high to be seen or heard, a flight of huge, eight-engine B-52 bombers all released their thousand-pound bombs. … Arc Light Strikes, they were called, and they transformed the earth below into a here-and-now hell, … 

We’d found hundreds of North Vietnamese here, lying down, staring up at the sky, blood running from their ears, nose, mouth, or wandering around like zombies. They weren’t worth taking as prisoners, they were beyond medical help, and we didn’t know if we should shoot them or not waste the time. p. 439

Truly great writing by a Viet War vet. He went back to modern Vietnam and describes the situation of those who fought on the American side–under the current shabby Communist North regime–with the same compassionate honesty; for example, the South Vietnamese fighter pilot reduced to peddling a rickshaw.

And Susan Weber is one of the great descriptions of a modern upscale expatriate woman in popular fiction. The conversations between the POV char. and her are smart and accurate.