Tolerating Freedom

Is a cancer growing in the bowels of liberalism?

Loren Lomasky from the June 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Should liberalism plead guilty to this charge? I believe it must. But rather than amounting to a confession of inconsistency, it is a badge of pride. No imaginable social order can square the circle. If I wish to be associated with someone who does not desire my company, then necessarily one of us will be disappointed. The way in which liberalism resolves such impasses is via the principle of mutual consent. One's freedom does not include a power to conscript others in one's design.

This holds true both for individual actors and for groups. It is a corollary of the requirement that exercises of liberty are permissible only up to the point at which they infringe the rights of others. Conyers is therefore mistaken in suggesting that liberalism is somehow friendly to individuals and to the state but hostile to intermediate associations.

Nor is it clear that Conyers is the sort of ally that associations want or need. In many states labor unions can compel membership but churches cannot. Does that imperil the latter's legitimacy? Just the opposite. Authority is, among other things, moral authority, and it is forfeited when affiliation is enforced at the business end of a cudgel. Nor is the prospect of numerous intermediate associations wielding coercive power attractive. The cover illustration of The Long Truce is Robert-Fleury's painting St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. It depicts members of the French Catholic sub-community lustily impaling on their swords members of the Protestant subcommunity. Does Conyers really take the persecution of the Huguenots to be an endearing slice of life from the Good Old Days? One fears that he might.

John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, is among the most articulate of contemporary political theorists. He is also one of the most perplexing. Gray has gone through more transmutations than the cast of Saturday Night Live. His earliest and best work was done as a liberal in the classical tradition. Even then, however, his propensity to oscillate among poles of influence was pronounced. John Stuart Mill was Gray's first liberal mentor but was then rejected in favor of F.A. Hayek, who was in turn displaced by Isaiah Berlin and then by Michael Oakeshott.

None could retain Gray's favor for long; each was held to be deficient for failing to supply unimpeachable liberal foundations. Eventually these turnings thrust Gray entirely beyond the orbit of liberalism. He announced himself to be a "postliberal," a pluralist, a devotee of Gaia, environmentalism's Earth personification. This leading British Tory Party public intellectual moved house to Tony Blair's New Labour just in time to bask in its coming to power. In a prolific string of books and op-ed pieces, he now regularly bashes globalization, especially America's malign influence thereon. In Two Faces of Liberalism, he returns to his favorite theme, liberal incoherence.

Liberalism, claims Gray, wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, it professes a doctrine of toleration, a willingness to allow a thousand flowers to bloom. On the other hand, it presents itself as the uniquely justifiable regime. All alternative forms of political order pale by comparison. Liberalism is, therefore, utopian; it tolerates no regime but itself.

The primary witness Gray subpoenas to validate the indictment is John Stuart Mill, who in his classic essay Utilitarianism introduces a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Mill's predecessor, Jeremy Bentham, had famously declared one mode of life to be as good as any other that affords a similar quantity of pleasure. The childish game of pushpin, said Bentham, is as good as poetry. But Mill rejected this valuational leveling, insisting that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity: Activities that engage individuals' higher faculties are infinitely preferable to mere bodily enjoyments.

According to Gray, this is not simply a harmless instance of Victorian snobbery; it is emblematic of liberalism's lack of hospitality to conceptions of the good that fall short of its own august standards. The case he musters in support of this accusation is underwhelming. It is true that liberal theorists hold a free society to be the best form of political organization, but this kind of judgment is hardly unique to liberalism. To advocate a theory is to hold it preferable to its competitors. The contrary isn't toleration; it is hypocrisy.

In any case, liberals historically have been remarkably open to diverse forms of institutional design. Shall the polity be parliamentary or presidential, bicameral or unicameral, federal or unitary, a republic or a constitutional monarchy? Each of these and innumerable similar questions might have a best answer in any particular society, but no prominent liberal theorist has ever declared that one size must fit all.

Moreover, liberals readily concede that liberal institutions cannot be successfully imposed on just any preexisting social stratum. The tree of liberty bears beautiful flowers, but its roots are delicate; they will grow only in suitable ground. Of all the great classical liberal spokesmen, none was more explicit on this theme than Mill himself. So liberals not only are hospitable to a multitude of liberal democratic forms but also willingly accord legitimacy to second-best regime types. If this is a species of "utopianism," it is unlike any other.

That Gray should choose to embark on an excursion into Mill's doctrine of higher/lower pleasures is bizarre. He knows full well that it was not intended as a pretext for sending pleasure police into people's houses to confiscate pushpin sets and replace them with bound volumes of Keats and Shelley. Mill was in part trying to address a problem in the philosophical theory of hedonism, its alleged inability to assign appropriate value to low-intensity but high-quality experiences.

Simultaneously he was endeavoring to combat aristocratic views that ordinary people need not receive an education in the fine arts and humane disciplines because they are capable of only the most basic enjoyments. Rather than exemplifying intolerance, Mill's higher/lower distinction bespeaks a desire to expand opportunities and secure greater social openness.

Utilitarianism is primarily a discussion of individual ethics, while On Liberty is Mill's most comprehensive and eloquent political manifesto. Gray pointedly declines to delve into this essay, for to do so would rip his thesis to threads. On Liberty explicitly insists that the state keep its hands off even low and self-destructive ways of life, provided only that the practitioners are not imposing them on unwilling others. Mill gives the example of polygamy in Utah, affirming both that it is a debased form of association and that it is nonetheless within the protected zone of self-regarding conduct. He could not be any clearer in expressing a commitment to tolerate all nonaggressive pleasures, both the higher and the lower.

Even when Gray has driven down dead ends in the past, he has typically made the trip provocative and rewarding. That is not true of the current excursion. Two Faces of Liberalism gives the appearance of being hastily tossed together and indifferently edited. Substantial passages are repeated almost verbatim one page apart; necessary distinctions are omitted or deliberately elided, characterizations of the views of other thinkers are sloppy and tendentious.

Nor is it clear who might be the intended audience for this volume. Gray drags into his discussion too many unexplained allusions to arcane theorists for a general readership to follow; if you happen not to know why Joseph de Maistre is important to the history of political discourse, you will be offered no hint here.

Yet because Gray for the most part supports his oracular characterizations of other thinkers by citing only his own previous writings, scholarly peers will see the book as failing to meet minimal professional standards. Two Faces of Liberalism is not a work of scholarship but a polemical tract. That is not its problem. Rather, the problem is that the polemics are embarrassingly clumsy.

Conyer's The Long Truce is, perhaps, worth reading for the various historical tidbits it presents lucidly and gracefully, and some will wish to peruse Two Faces of Liberalism to view the latest transmogrification of a once-gifted once-liberal thinker. Neither book even comes close to exhibiting a deep flaw in the doctrine of liberal toleration. They do demonstrate, however that the idea of a society structured on a principle of live and let live remains audacious enough to continue eliciting pained cries from those who are uncomfortable with individual liberty.