Liberalism Needs Community
But it doesn't need a "strong god" telling everyone what to do.
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The excerpt from Leo Strauss’ 1941 lecture on “German Nihilism”—reprinted last month in this column—pointed to the chief accusation against the liberalism of the pre-World War II period, an accusation that would lead many young Germans to support the Nazi movement. The essence is this: liberalism is not built around a core moral doctrine; rather, it enjoins toleration of different points of view as a means of lowering the stakes of politics. This is why we are often admonished in liberal societies to be “non-judgmental,” because judgment about “better” and “worse” implies that we occupy a morally superior point of view than the object of our criticism. Liberal societies are open to different points of view—they seek to be “inclusive.”
But, as Strauss points out, moral judgment is at the core of what it means to be human. We are moral animals with minds finely attuned to making judgments about “better” and “worse.” We rebel against a society where everyone is driven by a lazy self-interest, with no higher standards for action and no appreciation of human excellence.
Moral judgments are in fact what create human community. Rather than being infinitely open to other points of view, many people prefer to live in closed societies built around shared beliefs and passions. One of the longest-standing complaints about liberalism is that it provides only the weakest grounds for community. One can build a community around shared interests—that’s what a for-profit corporation is about—but the strongest communities are built around deeply-held beliefs.
The hatred of liberalism that drove young Germans in the 1930s towards National Socialism is what is driving people around the world today away from the post-1945 liberal consensus towards a variety of anti- or postliberal doctrines. According to R. R. Reno, editor of the magazine First Things, the liberal project of the past three generations has sought to weaken the “strong Gods” of populism, nationalism, and religion that were held to be the drivers of the bloody conflicts of the early 20th century. Those gods are now returning, and are present in the politics of both the progressive left and far right—particularly the right, which is characterized today by demands for strong national identities or religious foundations for national communities.
However, there is a cogent liberal response to the charge that liberalism undermines community. The problem is that, just as in the 1930s, that response has not been adequately articulated by the defenders of liberalism. Liberalism is not intrinsically opposed to community; indeed, there is a version of liberalism that encourages the flourishing of strong community and human virtue. That community emerges through the development of a strong and well-organized civil society, where individuals freely choose to bond with other like-minded individuals to seek common ends. People are free to follow “strong Gods”; the only caveat is that there is no single strong god that binds the entire society together.
These arguments were put forward during the 1990s and 2000s by the communitarian critics of liberal individualism, writers like Alasdair Macintyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel. Their principal target was the liberal theorist John Rawls, who in many ways defined the principal underpinnings of liberal doctrine in his generation.
As in the case of the ur-liberal John Stuart Mill, Rawls was centrally concerned with the protection of individual autonomy—the lone dissident or non-conformist voice that was threatened by social pressure to toe the line. For Rawlsian liberals, liberal societies needed to maximize human autonomy in all domains, not just by protecting individual rights against the power of the state, but by pushing back against social pressures for conformity as well.
The communitarians argued, by contrast, that individual autonomy is often expressed in terms of the desire to subordinate oneself to the constraints of community. This was most evident in the continuing religiosity of people in modern societies: they did not want to be protected from religion so much as to have the freedom to pursue religious belief as they choose. This was the understanding of religious liberty contained in the U.S. First Amendment: it was intended to protect the “free exercise” of religious belief. The United States and other contemporary liberal societies do not prevent their members from pursuing whatever strong god they choose. The only injunction is that that pursuit cannot impinge on other people’s ability to follow their gods.
The postliberal critique fails when it encounters the de facto diversity of contemporary societies. Sure, many people would want to subordinate themselves to a strong god. But there are many strong gods out there, and there is no agreement on which one to follow. Integralists like Adrian Vermeule or Patrick Deneen would like that god to be some version of traditional Catholicism, but how many other Americans would sign up for that? What about the Hindu or liberal Protestant or pagan gods that other Americans prefer to follow? R. R. Reno talks as if there is a larger metaphysical truth out there accessible to human reason, a truth that is denied by liberalism. Well, maybe. One could argue that some of the American Founding Fathers believed in a version of Aristotelian natural rights based on an understanding of human nature. But how many people would accept such a metaphysics today? And what becomes of natural rights in the face of developments like Darwinism and artificial intelligence?
Those desiring a return to strong gods and the community those gods foster have to deal with the fact that there are many potential strong gods out there, gods who do not agree with one another. This is above all true for the post-liberal Right. As Matthew Rose shows in his book A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, there is a sharp ideological split between conservative Christians and what one might call Nietzschean nihilists. The latter include progenitors of the contemporary alt-Right like Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, and Alain de Benoist, who blame Christianity for the decline of Western civilization. Taking a page directly from Nietzsche, they target Christianity’s assertion of the universal dignity of humankind as the fundamental error of modernity. They want a world where hierarchy is restored and the strong are no longer constrained by the weak. This explains the fascination of some on the alt-Right with pagan gods like Odin, or their interest in doctrines like vitalism.
Liberalism was created in the 17th century to deal precisely with the problem of the multiplicity of strong gods. At that time, it was sects following the same god—Catholics and Protestants—who were fighting it out in bloody European wars. It seems to me that the pragmatic justification for liberalism continues to hold today: it is a way of reconciling the conflicting strong gods that exist in diverse societies.
A healthy liberal society is not simply one that reduces conflict. A healthy liberalism is characterized by strong community, where people’s passions and interests cause them to band together in communities to pursue common interests. It is built around a vital civil society. In some cases, the desires of those communities conflict with the rights of their individual members. The communitarian critics of Rawlsian liberalism argued that the maximization of individual autonomy was not necessarily the highest good that trumped all other social goods. The power of the state should not be put, for example, behind the promotion of transgressive art that deliberately sought to offend the sensibilities of religious believers.
Moreover, a belief in liberal neutrality should not strip a society of a belief in and respect for virtue and excellence. The small-r republican interpretation of liberalism in fact put civic virtue at the core of the modern synthesis.
Critics of modern liberalism who believe that this doctrine has flattened the world and chased away all of its strong gods should open their eyes and look at what is happening in Ukraine now. That country has become a model of a heroic liberalism in which citizens have been enduring incredible suffering in order to preserve their freedom, both national and individual. It is a good reminder that liberalism will not survive without virtue, even if peace and security have made many contemporary residents of liberal societies complacent and overly focused on their own little private worlds.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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In 2012 in Concord, CA a group of us formed a nonprofit society called Neto Community Network, based on our common belief in and commitment to social and economic equity. Members have been from quite a range of social, economic, ethnic, religions backgrounds. We celebrate people who build our community in a range of ways and work together on community projects. We have seen what such a group of people connected by a common vision and civic beliefs can achieve.
When I began to grow interested in political theory, back in the 1980s, the field was dominated by the liberal-communitarian debate. But it eventually died down precisely because, rightly understood, this was always a family quarrel within liberalism, a matter of where to place the emphasis, rather than a battle between competing and incompatible positions. I would make a somewhat stronger claim for there being a larger truth accessible to reason than Fukuyama quite asserts in the middle of the essay (where he retreats into a few too many rhetorical questions). But he's absolutely correct that we will not achieve agreement on that truth, and if we were all compelled to adopt a single viewpoint on "the good," I fear it would not be the one desired by conservative postliberals. (Or by a regular old conservative liberal, like me.) Toleration remains the alternative to conflict and oppression.