Why Liberalism Failed

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapter 6-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “Technology and the Loss of Liberty”

Along with the post-Enlightenment desire to liberate human nature from any restrictions and its desire to find a way to dominate and subjugate nature comes its obsession with technology. Deneen writes, “While we have always been technological creatures, our reliance on technology has distinctly changed, along with our attitude toward technology and our relationship with it” (91). While technology has always fascinated human beings, we now find ourselves in an unprecedented position where technology has become so powerful that it has come into question. Works of fiction are now questioning not if technology will play a part in liberating humanity, but whether or not it will in fact be the cause of humanity’s destruction.

Rather than being the subject that acts upon technology as an object, the roles almost seem to have been reversed in the 21st century: “We are the subjects of its activity and largely powerless before its transformative power. Our anxiety arises from the belief that we may no longer control the technology that is supposed to be a main tool of our liberty” (97).

In the ancient world, liberty was conceived as the power to do what one ought to do, and what one was meant to do, and so civic life was ordered around the good of the human being in themselves and to the common good of the community as a whole. Liberty, therefore, was the possession of the ability to make the right and virtuous choice. Modern thought has rejected this paradigm, however, and made liberty purely about the freedom to pursue any objective whatsoever. Technology has made this easier than ever before in human history.

What is more, not only has technology made it easier to pursue any goal imaginable, regardless of how wicked or antisocial it happens to be, but it is also changing human behavior by allowing our worst tendencies to be amplified and repeated ad nauseam. One extreme that should not be advanced, however, is the position that technology has a kind of all-encompassing power that humanity is unable to resist: In many ways, we simply create the technology that allows us to indulge our own poor taste.

The Amish societies are an interesting contrast to contemporary liberalism in this regard because of their skepticism regarding modern technology and their conviction that technology should only be adopted if it genuinely makes the community life better, not simply because it exists and it may be objectively better on some arbitrary scale of progress. As Deneen observes, “All technological developments are subject to the basic question, ‘Will this or won’t it help support the fabric of our community?’” (106). Liberalism discourages this question to the point of absolutely censoring it, and a genuine case could be made that technology has put human beings into bondage at an equal rate to those it has liberated.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Liberalism Against Liberal Arts”

Ironically, one of the things that liberalism undermines the most is education in the liberal arts. Again, the issue is the redefinition of what it means to be truly “liberal,” but liberalism also promotes its own version of what manner of education is important, as does any political theory. According to Deneen, under liberalism, “education for a free people is displaced by an education that makes liberal individuals servants to the end of untutored appetite, restlessness, and technical mastery of the natural world. Liberal education is replaced with servile education” (110-11). Modern liberalism stands in stark contrast to the assumptions of historical cultures and theories of education in its understanding of when (and how) human beings actually become free.

Liberalism starts with the assumption that human beings are already—and by nature—free in themselves, while classically this understanding was reversed: In the traditional view, human beings are affected by sin and ignorance and are made gradually free by education (especially education in virtue). The liberal arts are an education in how to grow in intellectual and moral virtue, whereas the servile arts are centered on creating productive and obedient citizens regardless of their personal virtue or moral worth.

The liberal arts originated in a pre-modern world, and so the idea of an education in the liberal arts often seems to the modern mind an education in being enslaved to outmoded ways of thinking and skills that no longer have any relevance for the modern world, dominated as it is by technology. The ethos of the liberal arts was one of cultivating wisdom in an environment of restraint, explicitly attested to by the countless universities founded when this tradition was at its zenith. Additionally, there was a reverence paid to the humanities, the fields of language, philosophy, theology, and the like. These were thought to be the fields of education that were most specifically human since they spoke to and educated most explicitly the highest parts of the human being: the intellect and the soul. As Deneen writes, “To be free—liberal—was an art, something learned not by nature or instinct but by refinement and education. And the soul of the liberal arts was the humanities, education in how to be a human being” (115).

However, as time went on and the liberal ideology began to penetrate the institutions of higher learning, things began to change:

In the nineteenth century, a growing number of universities were established or began to emulate the example of the German universities, dividing themselves into specialized disciplines and placing a new stress upon the education of graduate students (116).

Suddenly, colleges and universities began to shift away from the ideal of education for its own sake and toward a model of education in search of achieving some further end (typically something useful or profitable): “The aim of the new ‘multiversity’ was to advance the Baconian project of human mastery over the world” (117).

In the world created by liberalism, the goals of the liberal arts began to fade away; it no longer made any sense to stress these particular goals and goods when technology and the world it was shaping no longer required or desired them. In fact, the liberal regime of the new universities rewarded novelty and deconstruction, so not only were the classical methods of education cast aside and forgotten, but they were also in fact attacked and torn apart. Thanks to liberalism’s stress on progress and homogenization, the diversity of the works of history have been largely left by the wayside in favor of contemporary works alone. Even those who identify as politically conservative have largely lost their taste for the liberal arts, seeing in them nothing more than intellectual hobbies and not worth fighting for any longer in a world that no longer values them financially.

Chapters 4-5 Analysis

Deneen asserts that two of the most important aspects of liberalism and its effect on human beings and culture are the relationships that it encourages toward two of the most important things in everyday life—technology and education—and the fact that there are deep paradoxes in both.

In the first place, liberalism’s relationship with technology is paradoxical because it has encouraged the invention and implementation of the greatest technology that has ever existed while simultaneously completely removing the ability for human beings to ultimately use that technology well. As Deneen argued earlier, the modern theory of liberty does not encourage virtue—he even asserts that it actively militates against it by making it very easy to pursue individual goods and desires, to pursue pleasure simply because it is a free choice available at any moment, leading to The Loss of Individual Virtue and Self-Restraint. When people no longer cultivate virtue and self-restraint, when they are driven by a myopic view of what is good for them at the expense of the common good, their goals will become distorted.

In an era where technology is more advanced than ever, the availability of technology to fulfill our every desire can have unintended consequences. Take the ubiquity of the smartphone, for instance. There is a plethora of information suggesting that smartphone technology, coupled with the use of social media, is doing damage to young people and their social development. Scientific studies show that smartphone use and time spent on social media is directly related to higher rates of depression and anxiety. In contrasting liberalism’s unfettered desire for unchecked technological progress with Amish caution and skepticism, Deneen asks whether or not technology has now become a hindrance by being good for progress but bad for individuals and communities, suggesting that liberalism is enabling a faulty way of engaging with technology.

Second, liberalism’s relationship with education is similarly paradoxical thanks to the fact that it was the old system of education in the liberal arts that allowed the antagonistic theory of liberalism to come into being and flourish. The liberal arts were the foundation for education since the ancient Greeks and Romans: To receive an education in the liberal arts was to receive an education that allowed one to be free—to be liberated from ignorance and false desires and to live an unencumbered and virtuous life.

Contrary to that mode of living and education is liberalism, which has jettisoned the liberal arts for an education in the servile arts—fields of knowledge that only serve to make one fit for service, both to the state and to the economy. The old system never imagined The Loss of Individual Virtue and Self-Restraint; it assumed that human beings need education and training in virtue to become free. According to the modern system of liberalism, human beings are already free and they are in no need of training in how to flourish as human beings. The assumption is that all one needs to be happy is the freedom to choose. The ancients disagreed, insisting that happiness was the result of virtue and education.

To this end, universities have been slowly dropping the humanities from their curriculum for decades in favor of various courses and tracks in STEM fields. It is now quite common to see an institution drop programs in the arts or philosophy in favor of new programs in computer programming or pre-professional fields. Ultimately, the question goes back to what a society thinks about human nature and what the goal of human life should be. The ancients were convinced that human beings needed training in virtue and that virtue and care for the common good would in fact make one happy. Modern liberal theory sees human beings as individuals who need the freedom to make choices that will maximize their own potential even at the expense of their own community, once more evoking The Destruction of Organic Culture.