This is the third and final piece in a debate between Dr James Orr and Professor Stephen Hicks. This article is a response to the previous piece Stephen wrote in which he argued that “Liberalism Solves Everything” which can be found here.
A video of the live debate I hosted between these two great men can be found here.
I should begin by recording what a pleasure it has been to take part in these exchanges with an interlocutor of the calibre and generosity of Prof Hicks. Readers of this Substack will not need reminding how few universities today could or would facilitate such a fair-minded to-and-fro on the philosophical tectonics that lie beneath so many debates in the public square today. That those debates today too often resemble a dialogue of the deaf is a symptom of the failure of the academy to fulfil its essential function of modelling civil and illuminating disagreement on contentious questions that matter more than ever at this disquieting juncture in the long history of the West. It is one of the many strengths of Hicks’ contributions to our exchanges that he recognises that the differences between us are, against the backdrop of the radical progressive outlook we strenuously reject, primarily differences of emphasis, even if I am convinced where he is not that wokus pokus is liberalism on steroids.
Our opposing treatments of liberalism and conservatism have been somewhat broad-brush and we have each sailed close to caricaturing the other’s tradition. That liberalism elevates freedom above other values does not mean that it is a catalyst for social anarchy; at its best it understands that freedom needs foundations. That conservatism sees organically emerging hierarchies as a hallmark of any flourishing society does not mean that it repudiates liberty or rejects the moral equality of all.
On the contrary: it is because it is committed to liberty and equality that conservatism insists on protecting the guardrails that protect those ideals.
All that said, Hicks is wrong to suggest that freedom is liberalism’s only foundational value. What distinguishes liberalism from libertarianism is that it takes equality to be no less axiomatic. Equality is, after all, the moral ideal that animates liberalism’s opposition to hierarchy in society. That double commitment is not only perfectly coherent on liberalism but inescapable, since once one gives priority to freedom of choice one cannot justify why the free choices of every individual should not be treated equally. On what basis, after all, can one judge one free choice to be better than any other if the only salient consideration is whether or not a choice is freely made?
Hicks suggests that the discomfiting nuances in my Burkean talk of ‘fetters’ and ‘bonds’ should alert us to the errors of the conservative outlook. I do not think we should take this semantic approach at all seriously. In the first place, it should go without saying that fetters and bonds are good or bad depending on the context in which they are imposed. After all, every liberal grants the distinction Locke draws in his Second Treatise between the ‘state of liberty’ and the ‘state of licence’ and in doing so implicitly recognises that the ownership of property and the exercise of freedom must be fettered and bonded in some way if those rights are to be ordered towards liberty rather than licence.
Second, if Hicks thinks that the language enjoining restraint carries a sinister freightage, that is only because we have grown so accustomed to the Promethean posture of liberalism, one that treats any and every constraint on autonomy and agency as morally intolerable. That is why so many of the virtues that depend on recognising the limits of the self are vanishing from our culture. Loyalty, honour, obedience, humility, responsibility, moderation, trust: none of these virtues can take root in a society of individuals who refuse to fetter their egos and their appetites or who insist that the bonds that stitch any commonwealth together should be severed rather than strengthened.
Hicks repudiates the authoritarianism he associates with conservatism. But the truth is that without authority there can be no freedom. To secure any freedom worth having we must secure the right to freedom, but that can be achieved only if rights are underwritten by an authority that imposes limits on the freedom of all in order to ensure that the freedom of the few does not crush the freedom of the many.
It is not conservatism but liberalism that is complicit with authoritarianism, because the more one ranks the freedom of the self over its duties to others, the greater the need for an authority powerful enough to take up the responsibilities that liberalism forswears and to protect and police those freedoms for the sake of civic peace. The more freedom individuals are given to construct a self-identity that floats free of the anchoring ties of kinship, heritage, and community, the more the state is empowered with the authority to protect and police the choices that individual makes. That explains why—in Britain at least—the most atomised generation of young people in history is also the generation most inclined to an authoritarian future. Atomisation and authoritarianism are structurally complicit.
Conservatism, by contrast, has historically understood freedom not as the bare assertion of a person’s autonomy, but as an achievement—hard won and easily lost—of society as a whole. A free society emerges, slowly and fitfully, from the accumulation of historical narratives, inherited norms, unspoken conventions, constitutional principles, social distinctions, and communal identities that collectively explain why that society is so much more than a random agglomeration of solitary freedom-seekers. The only way to restrain authoritarianism is to safeguard these mechanisms, however inequitable or irrational they may appear at first glance, because they are the only means we have to sustain the social trust that make the tyrant redundant. It is an egregious error of liberalism to elevate above all else the self-determination of individual agents, not least because who I am as an individual is inseparable from how I understand myself in relation to others. Always and everywhere, human beings have yearned to belong to something greater than themselves. That is why my aspiration to freedom ceases to be intelligible if I force myself to pretend that I am not the inheritor of these criteria of right action, these tried-and-tested norms for human flourishing, this particular society with this particular history, and so on. Respect for tradition, as Chesterton famously framed it, is nothing more than the democracy of the dead, the refusal to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. On liberalism, though, the enabling conditions of a free society are only obstacles to freedom, ones that are ripe for subversion the next time the revolutionary kaleidoscope is shaken.
Hicks claims that the Renaissance, the Reformation, the early stirrings of feminism, and abolition of slavery are fruits of the fight for freedom. His implication is that these moral revolutions were inspired by an embryonic crypto-liberalism, as if any aspiration to freedom as a moral ideal is compatible only with the liberal outlook. But none of those movements can be explained even in part by any doctrine of liberalism. The Renaissance emerged not in spite of the tradition-bound hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but because of it (Michelangelo did not pay for the Sistine Chapel himself). Besides, that era is more accurately understood as the kind of exercise in retrieving tradition—specifically the artistic, literary, philosophical, and political traditions of Greece and Rome—that elsewhere liberals deplore in the quest for year zero. As for the Reformation, its leading figures saw themselves as recovering the pristine sense of Scripture and renewing the spirit of the Early Christians after the theological obfuscations and institutional corruption of Catholic Christianity. And the animating spirit of abolitionists such as Clarkson and Wilberforce was not a liberal yearning for self-determination, but rather a deep theological conviction, rooted in an ancient canon of sacred texts, that in a divinely created order freedom and equality are the rightful possessions of every human being. So Hicks’ potted history seems to me to underscore the opposite of what he infers from it, namely the enduring power of perennial principles as these are refracted through particular traditions, principles that can be realised only in the context of a stable and fine-grained social order.
It is a longstanding caricature of conservatism that it treats traditions as intrinsically valuable. But that overlooks the pragmatism of the conservative outlook, a pragmatism that resists liberalism’s utopian conviction that once tradition and order are eliminated a world of perfect freedom and equality will emerge. On the conservative view, traditions, like freedom, are instruments that are valuable only to the extent that they facilitate collective flourishing and consolidate social unity.
Conservatives take traditions seriously only because they recognise that they distil subtle answers to questions that are central to the human condition. That is not only a rational presumption, but one based on the bitter and bloody experience of attempts—typically undertaken in the name of freedom—to replace the finely tuned coordination mechanisms of custom and convention with grand coercive schemes that turn out to be far less equitable than what they overturned.
In the final analysis, the value that liberalism invests in individual freedom is arbitrary.
It is arbitrary in the sense that it attributes significance to the mere exercise of arbitrium (‘decision’) while remaining neutral on the moral status of the motive or consequences of the ways in which it is exercised. To do otherwise would be to take a stand on the meaning of the good and the right, but for the liberal that would contradict the freedom of every person to settle those questions privately. Hicks is right to conclude his final contribution to our exchanges by recognising the power of free societies to address the many and various challenges that confront us. But no society can be free if its members are free to do as they please. The freedom of a free society is the shared inheritance and achievement of a people, not the bare accumulation of options available to its individual members. Until liberalism rids itself of that fatal confusion, the civilisation that elevated freedom above all else will continue to watch it seep slowly away.
Wonderfully articulate and balanced. This whole “dispute” between freedom/innovation and the structures preserved by conservatism is of course without resolution and without end, as it needs to be confronted and processed by every generation and every society. Curiously enough it reminds me of when I was writing for “Inside Kung Fu” magazine forty years ago, when the trail-blazing iconoclasm of Bruce Lee was tearing through established foundations of “traditional” martial arts – many of which were about as traditional as the oldest of the current teachers, rather than having any genuinely centuries- or millennia-old inherited forms of practice. I tried explaining that “structure” didn’t mean “imprisonment” – although a cage is a confining structure, a ladder is a liberating structure, for example. It gives you the freedom to climb to the roof for a wider perspective, and then you don’t throw the ladder away or you just prevent someone else from having the same advantages. This didn’t do me a lot of good, as the young martial artists of the time were so drunk on their adoration of Bruce Lee that something that sounded like “criticism” from a “nobody” could not get off the launching pad of discussion. I was just trying to get people to think, not to tear down their idol. It seems pretty clear to me, actually, that Bruce Lee and his Jeet Kune Do philosophy will, in cultural and historical terms, probably be rated as on a par with Miyamoto Musashi and the Book of Five Rings, centuries from now. And of course he had to be somewhat polemical in order to establish his freedom-and-expression-based ideas. He certainly would not have been too stupid to understand my viewpoint. (His successor Dan Inosanto, in a quietly genius way, has managed to respectfully preserve and promote both useful structures and an utterly liberated philosophy at the same time.) But it will be there forever, this unresolvable tension between the established and the innovative, the “traditional” and the “free”, whether you ever go anywhere near martial arts or not.
This can pretty much be summed by saying conservatism sees a viable society as the result of societal evolution, that numerous concepts and ideas are experimented with and the most viable trade offs are embraced, with others constrained. However as societies reach a tipping point where growth ends and decline begins, the progressives endeavor to destroy the framework that has made the society so successful. Much of this is due to their distain for history, which they view as too constraining and a lack of consequential knowledge; IOW their ignorance of history precludes them from understanding why such constraints were put into place to begin with, so in essence they de-evolve society back into the Chaos from which it evolved. The final reality is as Jesus said, there is nothing new under the sun. All has been tried, the good ideas (positive net trade-offs) become the accepted norm and the so called unconstrained new ideas are actually the bad ideas (negative net trade-offs) that historically failed, but the reason for their failure has been forgotten, until they are re- instituted and the net negative consequences reemerge.