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.