Apr 3, 2018 07:20 PM
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi...m-liberty/
EXCERPT: For liberals the recent transformation of universities into institutions devoted to the eradication of thought crime must seem paradoxical. In the past higher education was avowedly shaped by an ideal of unfettered inquiry. Varieties of social democrats and conservatives, liberals and Marxists taught and researched alongside scholars with no strong political views. Academic disciplines cherished their orthodoxies, and dissenters could face difficulties in being heard. But visiting lecturers were rarely disinvited because their views were deemed unspeakable, course readings were not routinely screened in case they contained material that students might find discomforting, and faculty members who departed from the prevailing consensus did not face attempts to silence them or terminate their careers. An inquisitorial culture had not yet taken over.
It would be easy to say that liberalism has now been abandoned. Practices of toleration that used to be seen as essential to freedom are being deconstructed and dismissed as structures of repression, and any ideas or beliefs that stand in the way of this process banned from public discourse. Judged by old-fashioned standards, this is the opposite of what liberals have stood for. But what has happened in higher education is not that liberalism has been supplanted by some other ruling philosophy. Instead, a hyper-liberal ideology has developed that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world. If a regime of censorship prevails in universities, it is because they have become vehicles for this project. When students from China study in Western countries one of the lessons they learn is that the enforcement of intellectual orthodoxy does not require an authoritarian government. In institutions that proclaim their commitment to critical inquiry, censorship is most effective when it is self-imposed. A defining feature of tyranny, the policing of opinion is now established practice in societies that believe themselves to be freer than they have ever been.
A shift to hyper-liberalism has also occurred in politics. [...] But there are some telling differences between these hyper-liberals and the progressives of the past. One can be seen in the frenzy surrounding the question of colonialism. [...] There are other features that distinguish hyper-liberals from progressive thinkers of previous generations. [...] However, indifference to facts is not confined to the alt-right and the hyper-liberal Left. It is pervasive among liberals who came of age at the end of the Cold War.
[...] Many who believe liberalism is in crisis have identified the underlying causes as being primarily economic in nature.
[...] It is at this point that the rise of an illiberal liberalism becomes politically significant. What happens on campus may not matter much in itself. Anxiously clinging to the fringes of middle-class life, many faculty members have only a passing acquaintance with the larger society in which they live. Few have friends who are not also graduates, fewer still any who are industrial workers. Swathes of their fellow citizens are, to them, embodiments of the Other – brutish aliens whom they seldom or never meet. Hyper-liberalism serves this section of the academy as a legitimating ideology, giving them an illusory sense of having a leading role in society. The result is a richly entertaining mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signalling self-righteousness – the stuff of a comic novel, though few so far have been up to the task of chronicling it.
[...] Yet the identity politics that is being preached on campus has effects on society at large. [...]
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) may seem an unlikely point of origin for an illiberal brand of liberalism. In the second chapter of that celebrated essay, the author presented a canonical argument for free expression:
While he never faced up to the contradictions in his thinking, Mill was fully aware that he was fashioning a new religion. Much influenced by Auguste Comte, he was an exponent of what he and the French Positivist philosopher described as “the Religion of Humanity”. Instead of worshipping a transcendent divinity, Comte instructed followers of the new religion to venerate the human species as “the new Supreme Being”. Replacing the rituals of Christianity, they would perform daily ceremonies based in science, touching their skulls at the point that phrenology had identified as the location of altruism (a word Comte invented). In an essay written not long before the appearance of On Liberty but published posthumously (he died in 1873), Mill described this creed as “a better religion than any of those that are ordinarily called by that title”.
Mill’s transmutation of liberalism into a religion marked a fundamental shift. Modern liberal societies emerged as offshoots from Jewish and Christian monotheism. The idea that political and religious authority should be separated is prefigured in the dictum of the charismatic Jewish prophet who came to be revered as Christianity’s founder: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. In seventeenth-century England, Milton defended freedom of conscience and expression as a condition of true faith, while John Locke saw toleration as a duty to God. When they claimed universality for these values they did so in the belief that they were divinely ordained. Mill and the secular liberals who followed him did not give up the claim to universality. They made it all the more strongly, and in a more radical form. What this meant for Mill becomes clear in the third chapter of On Liberty, “Of Individuality as one of the Elements of Well-Being”. Here, freedom no longer refers only, or even mainly, to protection from coercion by the law or other people – a system of toleration – but to a radical type of personal autonomy – the ability to create an identity and a style of life for oneself without regard for public opinion or any external authority. In future, only a single type of life would be tolerated – one based on individual choice.
It is a problematic vision, some of whose difficulties Mill glimpsed. A society that promotes individuality of this kind will iron out differences based in tradition and history; but since much of the diversity of human life comes from these sources, the result may be mass conformity. Again, in a society of the sort Mill envisioned, other religions and philosophies would be gradually eliminated. But if only one view of the world is acceptable, what becomes of intellectual diversity? This was not a theoretical risk for Mill. He found it exemplified in Comte, whose philosophy he came to believe led to “liberticide” – the destruction of intellectual freedom that comes when everyone is required to hold the same view. A hostile critic of liberalism who valued free inquiry only insofar as it was useful in weeding out irrational beliefs, Comte welcomed the rise of an intellectual orthodoxy with the power to impose itself on society. Mill was horrified by the prospect. He could scarcely have imagined that such an orthodoxy would be developed and enforced by liberals not unlike himself.
Mill’s religion of humanity has deeper problems...
MORE: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi...m-liberty/
EXCERPT: For liberals the recent transformation of universities into institutions devoted to the eradication of thought crime must seem paradoxical. In the past higher education was avowedly shaped by an ideal of unfettered inquiry. Varieties of social democrats and conservatives, liberals and Marxists taught and researched alongside scholars with no strong political views. Academic disciplines cherished their orthodoxies, and dissenters could face difficulties in being heard. But visiting lecturers were rarely disinvited because their views were deemed unspeakable, course readings were not routinely screened in case they contained material that students might find discomforting, and faculty members who departed from the prevailing consensus did not face attempts to silence them or terminate their careers. An inquisitorial culture had not yet taken over.
It would be easy to say that liberalism has now been abandoned. Practices of toleration that used to be seen as essential to freedom are being deconstructed and dismissed as structures of repression, and any ideas or beliefs that stand in the way of this process banned from public discourse. Judged by old-fashioned standards, this is the opposite of what liberals have stood for. But what has happened in higher education is not that liberalism has been supplanted by some other ruling philosophy. Instead, a hyper-liberal ideology has developed that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world. If a regime of censorship prevails in universities, it is because they have become vehicles for this project. When students from China study in Western countries one of the lessons they learn is that the enforcement of intellectual orthodoxy does not require an authoritarian government. In institutions that proclaim their commitment to critical inquiry, censorship is most effective when it is self-imposed. A defining feature of tyranny, the policing of opinion is now established practice in societies that believe themselves to be freer than they have ever been.
A shift to hyper-liberalism has also occurred in politics. [...] But there are some telling differences between these hyper-liberals and the progressives of the past. One can be seen in the frenzy surrounding the question of colonialism. [...] There are other features that distinguish hyper-liberals from progressive thinkers of previous generations. [...] However, indifference to facts is not confined to the alt-right and the hyper-liberal Left. It is pervasive among liberals who came of age at the end of the Cold War.
[...] Many who believe liberalism is in crisis have identified the underlying causes as being primarily economic in nature.
[...] It is at this point that the rise of an illiberal liberalism becomes politically significant. What happens on campus may not matter much in itself. Anxiously clinging to the fringes of middle-class life, many faculty members have only a passing acquaintance with the larger society in which they live. Few have friends who are not also graduates, fewer still any who are industrial workers. Swathes of their fellow citizens are, to them, embodiments of the Other – brutish aliens whom they seldom or never meet. Hyper-liberalism serves this section of the academy as a legitimating ideology, giving them an illusory sense of having a leading role in society. The result is a richly entertaining mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signalling self-righteousness – the stuff of a comic novel, though few so far have been up to the task of chronicling it.
[...] Yet the identity politics that is being preached on campus has effects on society at large. [...]
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) may seem an unlikely point of origin for an illiberal brand of liberalism. In the second chapter of that celebrated essay, the author presented a canonical argument for free expression:
the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
For some, all would be well if only we returned to these old liberal verities. But Mill’s argument has limitations. It depends on the premiss that truth should be valued as an end in itself – an assumption hard to square with his Utilitarian moral philosophy, according to which the only thing valuable in itself is the satisfaction of wants. [...]While he never faced up to the contradictions in his thinking, Mill was fully aware that he was fashioning a new religion. Much influenced by Auguste Comte, he was an exponent of what he and the French Positivist philosopher described as “the Religion of Humanity”. Instead of worshipping a transcendent divinity, Comte instructed followers of the new religion to venerate the human species as “the new Supreme Being”. Replacing the rituals of Christianity, they would perform daily ceremonies based in science, touching their skulls at the point that phrenology had identified as the location of altruism (a word Comte invented). In an essay written not long before the appearance of On Liberty but published posthumously (he died in 1873), Mill described this creed as “a better religion than any of those that are ordinarily called by that title”.
Mill’s transmutation of liberalism into a religion marked a fundamental shift. Modern liberal societies emerged as offshoots from Jewish and Christian monotheism. The idea that political and religious authority should be separated is prefigured in the dictum of the charismatic Jewish prophet who came to be revered as Christianity’s founder: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. In seventeenth-century England, Milton defended freedom of conscience and expression as a condition of true faith, while John Locke saw toleration as a duty to God. When they claimed universality for these values they did so in the belief that they were divinely ordained. Mill and the secular liberals who followed him did not give up the claim to universality. They made it all the more strongly, and in a more radical form. What this meant for Mill becomes clear in the third chapter of On Liberty, “Of Individuality as one of the Elements of Well-Being”. Here, freedom no longer refers only, or even mainly, to protection from coercion by the law or other people – a system of toleration – but to a radical type of personal autonomy – the ability to create an identity and a style of life for oneself without regard for public opinion or any external authority. In future, only a single type of life would be tolerated – one based on individual choice.
It is a problematic vision, some of whose difficulties Mill glimpsed. A society that promotes individuality of this kind will iron out differences based in tradition and history; but since much of the diversity of human life comes from these sources, the result may be mass conformity. Again, in a society of the sort Mill envisioned, other religions and philosophies would be gradually eliminated. But if only one view of the world is acceptable, what becomes of intellectual diversity? This was not a theoretical risk for Mill. He found it exemplified in Comte, whose philosophy he came to believe led to “liberticide” – the destruction of intellectual freedom that comes when everyone is required to hold the same view. A hostile critic of liberalism who valued free inquiry only insofar as it was useful in weeding out irrational beliefs, Comte welcomed the rise of an intellectual orthodoxy with the power to impose itself on society. Mill was horrified by the prospect. He could scarcely have imagined that such an orthodoxy would be developed and enforced by liberals not unlike himself.
Mill’s religion of humanity has deeper problems...
MORE: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi...m-liberty/