I’ve just received a new article from Unheard in my inbox, ‘Libertarianism Never Ends Well’ by Mary Harrington, December 23 2020.
The view set out in this piece correlates closely with the case for a moral ecology of the good I have been setting out for a quarter of a century now under the heading of ‘rational freedom.’ Stated concisely, ‘rational freedom’ holds that the freedom of each is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom of all others, and that no-one is truly free unless all are free in a public context. The view is committed to the creation of a genuine public community, grounded in egalitarian conditions to give the principle of self-assumed obligation material force and democratic content.
Rather than write at length on this theme here, I shall merely quote key passages from the article, say ‘I told you so,’ and direct those for whom the article strikes a chord to my work on ‘rational freedom,’ which is set out all over my website and Academia.
The article begins by referring to the arguments and struggles over freedom in 2020 — from both politicians taking it away and protestors riled by the loss of it. The question of the relation between autonomy and authority is one that is always posed in a public context. As social beings, human beings are inherently political beings seeking to address common affairs and resolve collective problems in a context of dialogue, disagreement, and negotiation. The problems become intractable the more that personal conceptions of liberty are perceived to be prior to public bonds, loyalties, and commitments. In this respect, the issues arises from the liberal ontology which falsely separates individuality and sociality as two integral aspects of human nature. The result is a notion of a morally and ontologically ultimate individual who is prior to society and hence a conception of liberty which is pre-social and pre-political. Such an individual is thus likely to understand each, any, and every collective entity and authority as potentially inimical to individual freedom and hence to be strictly delimited and constrained. Hence the predilection for ‘small government’ or no government at all. ‘Government’ here is alien, as is all common purpose and good as necessarily extraneous to the individual. The discrete individual of liberal thought contracts in to society and politics in order to protect, serve, and advance self-interest and is free to contract out for the very same reason. The result is a social order that is constantly at war within itself between notions of the individual good and the social good, between rational calculations of self-interest and sectional interest, between subjective preference and choice and the common good. The failure of modern society to muster the collective wit and will to address ‘externalities’ arising from the free market economy stem directly from this social atomism. Further, the inability to constitute commonality in anything other than abstract form also arise from the same source: atomism in the individualist market society proceeds hand in hand with the reconstitution of unity and universality in the political centralism of the abstract state above. (I analysed this process in my work on Hegel and Marx in 2001, references at the bottom).
Whilst there are those who are trying to establish commonality and public authority are trying to manage the crises and externalities arising from a market economy and its imperatives, there are still others who insist that we need more personal responsibility, rather than an attempt to enforce collective responsibility by way of coercive institutional (and moral) force. In being ‘free to choose,’ the uncoordinated, incremental actions of individuals generate an external collective force and constraint that, unchecked, becomes destructive of the social, moral, and natural ecology. How to constitute a legitimate, effective, and enduring authority embodying and articulating the common good is the key question. Unfortunately, the dominant approach has been to attempt to establish that authority within existing institutional parameters and on existing individualist liberal premises. The problem, as I wrote in my PhD these exactly twenty years ago, is not community and common good as necessarily inimical to individual freedom than the availability of commonality in other than abstract form: 'Though liberals criticise community as a vague concept (Rawls 1971:264), Marx's critique of 'separation' is developed to show that the problem with community is less one of its clarity than of its unavailability in other than the abstract forms of capital, money, the state, bureaucracy.’ ‘The 'rational' tradition carefully defines the clauses and conditions of community in relation to real individuals [to show] that the problem with community is less one of its clarity than of its availability in other than abstract form within modern asocial relations. The 'rationalised’ or alien forms of 'community' in modern society - capital, money, the state, bureaucracy - are parasitic upon and destructive of real community.’ In attacking the false and external commonality and universality of these reified constructs, there is a need to establish the 'true' community as one supplied by real individuals themselves as integral to their self-actualisation within specific social forms and relations. (Peter Critchley, Marx and Rational Freedom 2001).
I wrote those words twenty years ago and have been developing and enriching these themes on ‘rational freedom’ ever since. Articles such as this by Mary Harrington tell me that slowly but surely, some people are beginning to get it.
She proceeds by referring to a new book, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, by Matthew Hongolz-Hetling, which has the intriguing subtitle The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears). The book describes the real-life story of a group of libertarians who plotted to take over the town of Grafton in New Hampshire, moving there en masse, in 2004, and campaigning to liberate the community from statism, taxes, intrusive regulation and all constraints on individual freedom. Harrington notes that full-bore libertarians are more an American than an English thing, with the English tending to refer to ‘classical liberalism.’ Harrington writes of the ‘overlap between our individualistic, freedom-loving Anglo cultures.’ Classical liberalism, I would argue, is a self-conscious hypocrisy which espouses libertarianism in theory only to be wise enough to pull well short of the full blown thing in practice, for the not inconsiderable reason that it doesn’t work. ‘Classical liberalism’ itself only works with the full support of the state and centralised authority, at least to the extent that the freedom of ‘the economy,’ private property, and business are prioritised over all other aspects of life. Notions of an associational laisser-faire and ‘the big society’ are suffocated from the first by this unholy alliance of the state and capital as alienated social powers establishing constraint and commonality in external form. In being more principled and idealistic and less prudent and pragmatic, the American libertarians perform the admirable service of revealing the fallacies of libertarian freedom in practice. In other words, classical liberalism, as a libertarian freedom, works only as ideology covering a contrary practice, an anarchy of the rich and powerful, not as a political philosophy of the common good of social beings.
Hongolz-Hetling’s book, Harrington argues, concerns ‘the flipside of the West’s individualism: virtue and common values. Both tend to be overlooked nowadays, in our freedom-loving cultures either side of the pond; and yet both have were increasingly bandied about this year, as Covid-19 cases ascended to crisis levels.’
Having written on the need to recover and cultivate the virtues, to reconstitute the common good, and to reinstate values and the notion of a shared moral knowledge and truth as a condition of a healthy and flourishing public life, I feel that I am entitled to claim to be among the few who have analysed this central question in depth. The blockages that are apparent in contemporary culture have their origins here.
The Founding Fathers of the United States established a direct connection between virtue and the healthy functioning of a nation as the guarantor of freedom. As James Madison put it in 1788:
Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
Madison, Judicial Powers of the National Government
The character and quality of government matters, and is not a secondary consideration to individual liberty. In her article, Harrington refers to Anglo-American liberal and conservative sources. I go back to Aristotle as well as forwards to a continental view in which government is not alien and external to the governed, but a pooling of sovereign power. Government authority is not merely a condition of freedom, therefore, but a dimension of it. That notion is missing in Anglo-American liberal traditions, with the result that the notion of a shared commonality, publicity, and civility, as something more than an aggregate of the choices of self-interested individuals, goes missing too. For a government to support a free and flourishing society, Harrington argues, everyone needs to share at least a general idea of what a good person looks like. Character and the moral and social conditions of character-formation matter. I have, for this reason, criticized the antinomies of ‘liberal democracy.’ Liberal democracy is unravelling before our eyes – unravelling the moral, social, and ecological fabric in the process – and those whose mentalities and outlooks remain within that conception are paralysed and perplexed. Liberalism and democracy make for an uneasy alliance. The dissolution of morality into an irreducible subjective preference and choice – value judgements entails the loss of an authoritative moral framework able to support the issuing of moral imperatives. The failures of contemporary environmentalism offer a classic case-study of this issue. Liberalism affirms the right of each individual to choose the good as he or she deems fit, providing there is no harm to others, with the state and law as a neutral sphere holding the ring between competing claims. Many pressing for collective action vis the social and natural environment celebrate this liberal freedom as an emancipation as against notions of a singular good and moral code, prescribing the right action for individuals. Those who conceive themselves as radical and progressive typically take aim against organised religion and God. Those who also repudiate socialism and its supposed connections with state authority can also be identified as liberal. But this celebration of the emancipation of the individual from collective ties of government and politics, God and religion, comes with a downside that liberals and libertarians are unable to comprehend let alone address. The dissolution of the authoritative command and control frameworks associated with government, politics, and religion may appear to be an individual freedom, and is celebrated as such by advocates of hitherto marginalised, minority groups, but the same reasoning applies with respect to private property and economic power. The demise of God and organised religion is a dissolution of collective goods and common purposes superior to the claims of the self-choosing individual. That, as I argue to my atheist socialist friends, is the demise of socialism, too. Whilst collective interest and common purpose can certainly be reconstituted without God, it cannot be reconstituted without a common, overarching, authoritative moral and political framework. It is here that I point out that Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ refers not merely to God and religion but to that overarching framework. The dissolution of this framework is hugely important in that it makes it impossible to establish and sustain the habitus and infrastructure which is capable of supporting and nurturing shared values and virtues. An overarching moral framework and a moral infrastructure sustaining virtuous communities of practice and character are integral to freedom as a collective endeavour of happiness/flourishing beyond the vagaries of subjective choice. Those who continue to seek solution here along the lines of an enlightened self-interest are merely attempting to solve a problem within the intellectual and social parameters of its generation. The notion goes back to the eighteenth century and notions of natural reasonableness, sympathy, and sociability and was central to notions of the free market and the free interplay of self-interested individuals. The claim was that such interplay would issue in the public good without the need for authoritative moral codes and political commands. The individualism with which the nineteenth century is associated has its origins here. As the nineteenth century progressed, reformers and politicians sought to address the downside of that individualism in terms of social and environmental consequences. Marx criticized it as a self-cancellation.
In passing, I note that those who criticize Marx as outdated can themselves be found advancing enlightened self-interest and natural reasonableness and sociality as solutions. Whilst such thinking is often dressed up in terms of natural selection, it is not new thinking at all, it is a reversion and an evasion (an evasion of political economy and its critique, an evasion of asymmetries in power and resources within prevailing social relations.
Marx in the Grundrisse refers to the idea of natural sociability and reasonableness. Such a thing is only the beginning of analysis, not the end, not a given, but a product of social and historical development:
It has been said and may be said that this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And, certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations. Equally certain is it that inÂdividuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which it presently exists vis-a-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that they have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to individuals within specific and limited relations of production. Universally deÂveloped individuals, whose social relations, as their own comÂmunal relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes proÂduction on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiÂness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.
Marx Grundrisse 1973: 162-64
Marx comes to modern capitalist society and the way in which its emancipations of the individual from past ties and bonds appear as freedom, an appearance which bourgeois liberals continue to understand as freedom as such:
In the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, of distinctions of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up (at least, personal ties all appear as personal relations); and individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifÂference), free to collide with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom; but they appear thus only for someÂone who abstracts from the conditions, the conditions of existence within which these individuals enter into contact (and these conditions, in turn, are independent of the individuals and, although created by society, appear as if they were natural condiÂtions, not controllable by individuals). The definedness of indiviÂduals, which in the former case appears as a personal restriction of the individual by another, appears in the latter case as developed into an objective restriction of the individual by relations independÂent of him and sufficient unto themselves… These external relations are very far from being an abolition of 'relations of dependence'; they are rather the dissolution of these relations into a general form; they are merely the elaboration and emergence of the general foundation of the relations of personal dependence. Here also individuals come into connection with one another only in determined ways. These objective dependency relations also apÂpear, in antithesis to those of personal dependence (the objective dependency relation is nothing more than social relations which have become independent and now enter into opposition to the seemingly independent individuals; i.e. the reciprocal relations of production separated from and autonomous of individuals) in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master.
Marx Gr N1 1973: 163-65
In repudiating authoritative moral codes and political goals – God, religion, and the state – the view seems emancipatory but, as we should know from historical experience, replaces conscious ethical and institutional constraint with the external constraints of collective consequences and systemic imperatives (social dislocation, economic crisis, environmental destruction, as well as the need to facilitate accumulative processes). And it is here that the dominant liberal strain within contemporary environmentalism is revealed in all its paralysis and impotent. Climate action and the preservation of eco-systems and planetary boundaries is declared to be a ‘moral imperative.’ Such things may well be good ideas based on sound science and backed by a wealth of evidence, but they are not moral imperatives for the very reason that – with the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework (and the moral infrastructure that gives it appetitive and practical content) – there are no moral referents. Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ is the death of all other moral referents, whether Society, Humanity, Reason, Culture, Science, or Nature. None of these can serve as moral referents: abstracted from practice, they are merely empty signifiers reified to present an unwarranted certainty and authority. The result, inevitably, is not a genuine authority, but an authoritarianism that is most certainly inimical to individual liberty. The paradox is that libertarianism and authoritarianism are two sides of the same liberal coin, an abstract community erected to address issues arising from the freedom of the abstract individual. Within dominant forms of rationality premised on calculations of self-interest and dominant forms of morality affirming subjective choice and preference, notions of community and the common good can only be advanced in abstract forms, and will therefore be perceived as inimical to individual liberty and rejected quite rationally by individuals as such. To continue to assert demands for collective action, backed by a wealth of facts and figures, does nothing to invest a moral imperative lacking a moral referent with any more motivational and appetitive force. Lamentations to the effect that human beings neither know nor care (with respect to social justice, war and peace, ecological degradation) are an expression of incomprehension from those who continue to work within a liberal frame or think that ethics and politics as such can be outflanked by science, fact, and logic. Liberalism is premised upon a dualism of individuality and collectivity and is doomed to failure in attempting to resolve collective problems on individualist premises. As for ‘scientism,’ this is a rationalist delusion pure and simple, the product of a moral and political cowardice that seeks to legislate truth from The Empyrean heights they occupy, remote from people and power. Worse, such scientism brings into disrepute the very authoritative framework and its transcendent standards that need to be properly recovered and reconstituted if we are to find a way out of the impasse.
It is here that the anomalies of ‘liberal democracy’ are manifest. If individuals are free to choose the good as he or she deems fit, then there is no overarching good. Instead there is the public realm of state, government, and law as a neutral framework that is agnostic on the good. That liberalism is the dominant tradition of the modern age and, as stated, is celebrated as the liberation of individuals from the restraints of religion and government, from notions of common moral codes and laws. Fine. Now we come to the downside in terms of the collective social, economic, and ecological consequences of uncoordinated, incremental, self-chosen actions motivated by concerns of self-interest. It is here that those wedded to the dominant liberalism seek to advance enlightenment and reason in the form of fact, evidence, and information. In liberalism, there is no substantive good, only individuals choosing their own view of the good. Without an overarching notion of the good ordering and guiding individual choices, there is no need to pay attention to the virtues and their cultivation within communities of practice and character; individuals are free from such moral constraints. In a democracy, however, the character of the individuals composing the demos and the quality of the choices these individuals make is of crucial importance. Madison put this point in terms of republicanism rather than democracy when he argued that if there is no virtue among a population, then ‘no theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.’ But it’s the same point:
But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom… If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
In fine, there is a need to constitute communities of practice and character to cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues, something which presupposes the existence of a substantive conception of the good that can be known and which serves to order practical affairs and social arrangements. Here, the notion of the good as being a matter of personal subjective choice clashes directly with the tradition of cultivating the intellectual and the moral virtues. In shedding the overarching authoritative moral framework, we have lost also the moral infrastructure as the happy habitus for identifying, cultivating, and practising the moral and intellectual virtues. In these conditions, democracy is led more by the nose than by the nous, being an aggregate of unordered and uneducated subjective choices. Cue laments from those seeking collective purpose in politics that ‘not enough people know enough.’ The brute, blunt rationalism which those seeking to advance collective causes in politics is a demonstration of impotence and failure, arising from the bifurcations adumbrated above. The loss of moral referents (Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’), the loss of an overarching authoritative framework, and the loss of the habitus and infrastructure for cultivating virtues and values results in a systematic social and moral incapacity vis collective purpose and the common good. Liberals have been hoisted on their own petard and still, at this late hour, cannot see it, resorting to blunt rationalism, constant education and information, protest and ‘rebellion,’ scientism and naturalism, and pretensions of a ‘non-political’ and ‘amoral’ authority to bridge the gaps. It hasn’t been done, for the reason that it can’t be done. As Madison writes in Judicial Powers of the National Government: ‘To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.’ Reformers and progressives in the contemporary age are becoming ever more shrill, desperate, and hopeless in their politics as a result of being in the grip of a chimerical idea, either clinging to liberalism and its premises or seeking a workaround couched in terms of science and nature. They are willing to countenance anything and everything – including planetary engineering and planetary management as well as authoritarian austerian imposition – but reconstitute a properly authoritative moral and institutional framework and virtuous infrastructure. That reveals the extent to which the terms of right and left have been degraded in the modern political culture. There is a phoney right-left ‘debate’ and choice at present, between economic libertarians and cultural libertarians. Both sides celebrate the emancipation of the individual from collective forces, they merely target different enemies of ‘the open society.’ Economic libertarians promote and justify globalised economic practices which are implicated in economic dislocation and ecological degradation; cultural libertarians advance an ethical relativism which, in furthering the freedoms of particular identities, unravels and atomises communities. Either way, the result is an almost total inability of the free, enlightened, and classless individuals of the contemporary world to muster the collective wit and will to address the common forces and collective constraints unravelling the world.
In my work over the years I have gone out on a limb and argued explicitly for the reconstitution of an overarching and authoritative moral framework, supporting and buttressed by internal communities of virtuous practice and character. The case for rational freedom is made in terms of an internal and voluntary social self-constraint as against an external and involuntary constraint. By expanding the former, we diminish the latter. I have argued this case in terms of socialist thinkers like Marx. But it can be found in conservative thinkers. As Edmund Burke pointed out during the Enlightenment:
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
Burke, A Letter from Mr. Burke, to a Member of the National Assembly;: In Answer to Some Objections to His Book on French Affairs
Hence I state my argument in terms of ‘reclaiming socialism and reframing conservatism.’ Simplifying, both socialists and conservatives target alien power, but do so with different biases. If socialists can tend to target capital as an alien social power, they can come to build up the big state as itself an abstract alien power. Likewise, conservatives can tend to target the big state and bureaucratic forms of control and intervention whilst ignoring the huge external constraint that is imposed by capital, both physically and systemically. I put the two together.
As Harrington states simply: ‘the less virtue you have, the more official rules you’ll need.’ The lesser the capacity for internal self- and social constraint, the greater the need for external constraint. I mention this in terms of environmentalism and the need for climate action in light of what have been regrettably poor experiences in seeking to extend virtue theory into the field. Time again the responses have been the same – a rejection of overarching notions of morality, a rejection of substantive notions of the good (from people, note, who do precisely the same with respect to ‘nature,’ little realising that mere scientific statements of fact do not establish a moral referent), and a dismissal of virtues as idle.
Liberalism and scientism is a toxic mix. I note the extent to which environmentalists affirm an identity politics and celebrate the emancipation of marginal or repressed individuals from substantive conceptions of morality and authoritative moral codes – let’s just say religion – themselves exhibit a pronounced religiosity in their pronouncements. I could name names here, but shan’t because I can really do without exchanging pleasantries with people in the grip of zealotry and bigotry. People I know to be outspoken and vehement critics of religion also employ tools drawn from religion as weapons. They are big on ecological sin, seeking it and finding it everywhere. They have seceded from society and politics in order to better police and admonish people, identifying individuals as ‘carbon criminals,’ spreading guilt and shame, and demanding penance and threatening retribution. To paraphrase, Francis Bacon, when you drive religion out through the front door by pitchfork, it will come in by the back door, and in much worse form: this is religion obsessed with sin, threat, and punishment, demanding perfection and shedding mercy and forgiveneness with respect to our fallen natures. This intolerant religiosity entirely without redemptive possibilities and the sense of the transcendent takes histrionic form in order to compensate for the lack of a genuine ethical content – substantive notions of the good, genuine moral referents, authoritative moral frameworks capable of properly ordering actions to true ends; moral and intellectual virtues and their cultivation; communities of practice and of character; the common good. The dominant intellectual traditions have identified all of these things as potentially and actually repressive of individual liberty, difference, and otherness. That has left people without the moral means with which to address the common forces that govern the world as an ever-narrowing and increasingly destructive constraint.
Environmentalists are big on telling individuals to assume more personal responsibility with respect to their carbon footprint. The demands levelled on governments to act also amount to an admission that an unravelling social and planetary ecology is the state’s problem, and a problem of state authority. The state has a role after all, then. But what kind of role? Merely to address externalities? That these externalities are growing to the extent they are – and hence the demands upon the state - is a sure indication that all is not well in notions of the interplay of freely choosing individuals and enlightened self-interest. ‘Nature,’ it is evident, is not remotely enough. The attempt to advance controls within and without indicates the need for reconstituting the overarching and authoritative moral framework and its infrastructure. This micro- and macro-management is a form of police taking the place of a genuine polis, a form of external constraint and compulsion that individuals will experience as inimical to individual liberty. This is tacit recognition of the moral vacuum that lies at the heart of contemporary society. The dominant ethic of the modern age is individual choice and personal responsibility, the former generating collective consequences that utterly eclipses the latter. And all mainstream political traditions from right to left are bound and paralysed within that paradox, increasingly desperate and hopeless in the face of problems which demand precipitous and effective collective action. Failure to identify and address the roots of this paralysis and impotence will cause reformers to lose hope and, in desperation, advance explicitly authoritarian solutions. These are not solutions, merely statements of an abstract collectivity as the counterpart of the abstract individuality on which liberal society is premised.
Such people ought to read A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear. That book targets the libertarians:
Take the story of John Babiarz, one of the first libertarians to settle in Grafton and subsequently its one-man volunteer fire service. After extinguishing a fire on someone else’s property, Babiarz is ostracised by other libertarians for ‘statism’ — which is to say, taking any sort of coercive action in the public interest. But these obsessive opponents of state authority seem unable to address the question of how to protect the public interest if no ‘statism’ is allowed. They have no framework for considering those consequences of individual actions that ricochet far beyond one individual.
And for the Graftonites, the chief spanner in the works of self-organising freedom wasn’t even the risk of wildfires. It was another force of nature, one hungry not for flammable matter but garbage: bears. One Grafton resident wishes to feed doughnuts to the neighbourhood’s bears, but her next-door neighbour is terrified of being attacked by them. Should they both be left to do their thing? The instinctive libertarian answer to this is ‘yes’.
The libertarians apply their anti-statist principles to the growing problem of bears raiding bins, loitering around houses and eating cats, resisting any gesture at public bear management, because such things imply taxes. And their conception of liberty goes further still: they resist even socially-enforced bear management efforts such as rules about bear-proof rubbish bins. The consequences become increasingly, er, grisly as the book goes on.
In effect, then, they dream of a society that needs no ‘controlling power on will and appetite’, as Burke put it, either within or without. Albeit in slightly more constrained form, this was also the Cameron-era Tory stance: economic liberalism plus an aversion to giving people moral lectures of any kind.
It is evident that such maximal freedom produces not a flourishing community of self-organising individuals but the very opposite, a mutual cancellation ‘in which neighbour disputes triple over the six years following the libertarians’ arrival, while public infrastructure crumbles and bears grow bolder and more numerous.’ The fractious nature of 2020 didn’t come from nowhere. I wrote a number of pieces on the anger and the rancor of the year, gathering them together in one place on Academia. But I had seen it coming and had warned in previous years.
Having witnessed the events and animosities of this year, people may by now be seeing certain resonances with my central theme of ‘rational freedom’ by now. Whilst appreciating Harrington’s critique of libertarian freedom, my concern is not to bend the stick too far backwards to state an authoritarian freedom against it. This would be to remain firmly within the dualism of individuality and collectivity which derives from the false liberal ontology. Hence I combine a thoroughgoing critique of both libertarianism and authoritarianism (as developed in my recent critiques of an environmentalism that has proven incapable of developing a genuine commonality and publicity). In my thesis on Rational Freedom, I sought to reconstruct a tradition and a concept of 'rational freedom' around principles of reciprocity, mutual respect, communication, communality, and solidarity. The 'rational' here comprehends subjectivity as an intersubjectivity which secures the unity of the freedom of each and the freedom of all. As I wrote in my thesis (2001), ‘this rational tradition rejects the atomistic model of freedom as self-cancelling in equating freedom with unrestricted individual choice and the unregulated pursuit of self-interest.’ The 'rational’ conception defines freedom as conceivable only by locating individual interactions within a network of relationships.
Harrington wraps up her article by saying that 2020 has raised some pointed questions about the political scope for coordinated public response to a force of nature within our individualistic culture. She is referring to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the point applies to climate change and the environmental crisis. I have been raising those questions for a long time now. Contemporary civilisation is facing something much worse than a plague of bears, but the problem is basically the same – external constraints and collective forces imposing themselves destructively on society in the absence of the collective means and mechanisms for their control. Those means and mechanisms are not merely, nor even mainly, institutional and technical, but most of all social, moral, and psychic, pertaining to both personal and social responsiveness and responsibility. Calls for personal responsibility will not and cannot produce enough cooperation to be effective in the absence of what Harrington calls ‘strong shared values.’ Identifying these values and their basis and inculcating those values and embedding them in character and practice is key in guarding against both libertarianism and its external consequences and authoritarianism as a reaction. In the absence of a social identity which mediates between self-interest and social interest, the immediate good and the long term good, an untrammelled personal liberty on the one side generates collective consequences and pressures that in response generate demands for more stringent top-down controls, thus raising alarms and controversies among individuals caught between invisible and visible constraints as to whether the will be able to retain their freedoms, let alone extend and enrich them. Rational freedom is precisely about balancing autonomy and authority so as to extend, embed, and enrich freedom as a public happiness.
As Harrington concludes:
If we’ve had enough of state micromanagement, but it also turns out that, in the absence of shared values, ‘personal responsibility’ is just code for ‘I’m alright Jack’, then it may be time to reflect on the piece that’s missing for us as much as it was for Grafton’s libertarians: civic virtue. As the vaccine is rolled out into 2021, we might consider the question Hongolz-Hetling leaves hanging: is it even possible to rebuild a shared moral framework?
My work on ‘rational freedom’ has made the positive case for reconstituting precisely that overarching and authoritative moral framework as a condition for addressing the converging collective problems and crises besetting contemporary civilisation. Key to that reconstitution is the reconciliation of autonomy and authority, avoiding the constant lurch back and forth between individual and state, market and plan, ‘small’ and ‘big’ government and, in light of increasing crises and reactions to them, libertarianism and authoritarianism. The solution to the depredations of a libertarian freedom is not top-down authoritarian imposition and techno-bureaucratic management. Such imposition and management is merely the flip-side of the same liberal coin, an abstract individuality on one side, an abstract commonality on the other. Neither side is true to an integral conception of human beings as both free and social beings.
The failure to integrate autonomy and authority along the lines I develop in my work on ‘rational freedom’ ensures that we will, in all likelihood carry on further down the road toward the ‘total state’ that we have lived under during lockdown. The extent to which certain dominant voices within the environmental movement warmed to the idea of lockdown as a dry-run for an austerian climate regime, celebrating instances of the recovery of nature as well as the fall in carbon emissions, is not remotely encouraging. Not only does it indicate a taste for authoritarian imposition as the only pragmatic solution to climate crisis, it betrays an almost total ignorance of the social, economic, and psychological costs. That ignorance may well be born of a complete indifference to human beings and the human environment. It is not only the economy that has suffered under lockdown but the social fabric and mental health.
Experts from the realm of science and fact have far too much power in this matrix. I have been concerned this past year to criticise the way a cult of authority has been built around ‘the science’ to silence and suppress the autonomous creative voice of the citizen body. This is stealing sovereign authority from the people and investing it in a pre-political, and anti-political, realm. Politicians and decision-makers are being pressured more and more to ‘follow the science.’ This is utterly pernicious, putting politics – and people – on ice, subjecting the political realm to notions of a pre-political truth in the hands of a Guardian class. As I wrote in Being at One (2016) on Plato’s problem of the relation between truth and politics:
Plato argued for the figure of the philosopher-ruler to overcome political turmoil and ensure the prevalence of the common good. To many critics, though, this would be to put politics on ice. Neither truth nor the reality it applies to possess an independence of the individuals composing the demos. Here we have to make a choice between the one and the many, the philosopher-ruler and the rule of philosophy through popular agency.
As Benjamin Barber comments:
If truth is the object, philosophers will do for kings. But democracy begins where truth and certitude and final solutions disappear into the murky uncertainties of the human condition, and its temper is thus necessarily judicious. Plato was right in insisting on the need for temperateness and moderation in a well-governed people, but he was wrong in thinking that moderation takes the form of deference to truth or to its putative proprietors. It is the self-governing people who most need moderation, for they have nothing but moderation to remind them of the weakness and infirmities on which their self-government relies, and by which it is justified.
Benjamin Barber Strong Democracy 1984: 311
Barber’s words are superb on the relation between democracy, truth and judicious reasoning. The tension between an apodictic notion of truth and a judicious notion of truth is a tension between the claims of expert knowledge and the deliberations and decisions of a political community. Democracy does its best work when truth and certainty give way to our reasoned and practical attempts to deal with the uncertainties of the human condition. Aristotle understood well that the temper of politics and ethics is necessarily judicious, and I shall make great use of his emphasis on practical reasoning.
The case for democracy rests on the recognition of the facts of human fallibility and natural and social dependence, pointing to the shifting sands upon which claims to truth and certain knowledge rest. Such a view recognizes that the ontological status of all things is uncertain and that, therefore, beyond whatever foundations we may seek in moral referents such as Nature/God, whether in scientific reports and sacred texts, human beings as knowledgeable, practical, moral agents need to take ethics and politics into their own hands and govern their common affairs, for there is no one else and nothing else who will govern for us, only external collective forces that will govern over us.
We see here the danger of an elite or expert group of people who claim to speak – and legislate – with the voice of ‘nature’ as a moral referent. They are every bit as much a priesthood as those who once claimed insight into the voice of God. There was a time when people were inclined to believe them, but myriad false prospectuses in politics and public policy over the years has encouraged a popular scepticism. Politicians and decision-makers, however, are still inclined to ‘follow the science’ as best they can. Which isn’t very well, for the reasons that the temper of politics is judicious and that there is, therefore, no substitute for sound judgement. Subject to collective forces and external crises increasingly beyond control and comprehension, politicians are losing confidence, losing judgement, and following in adherence to a desperate belief in unwarranted certainty. This is what is worrying about Covid-19 and lockdown, that the pandemic will reinforce the tendency on the part of politicians and decision-makers to rely on expert authority as a crutch. Politicians continue to believe the experts as the people on the receiving end of an impossible austerity become increasingly sceptical and hostile. Either we reconcile autonomy or authority, or the split between libertarianism and authoritarianism will expand and intensify at extremes, neither of which is where anyone needs to be. It is the taste for authoritarian imposition and austerity that concerns me. It expresses a democratic pessimism that is itself rooted in the misanthropy that is never far below the surface in environmentalism. In these perspectives, everything in nature is a legitimate and healthy agent except human beings. Such people are austerians of the mind and of the heart, anyway, and seek every opportunity to normalize austerity.
As Evgeny Morozov warns, the success of technology in monitoring and containing the pandemic will 'entrench the solutionist toolkit as the default option for addressing all other existential problems – from inequality to climate change. After all, it is much easier to deploy solutionist tech to influence individual behaviour than it is to ask difficult political questions about the root causes of these crises.' (quoted by Klaus Schwab, Covid-19: The Great Reset). ‘Rational freedom’ is all about asking the difficult questions of politics and ethics, and not evading them by scientific statements and technological workarounds or by assertions of free choice and natural reasonableness.
The fact is that we are not hearing from those who have been broken by austerity, the people from the deindustrialized wastelands and ruptured communities of the 1980s, which have never recovered, the people whose complaints were ignored all through the globalising and liberalising agenda of the 1990s, the people who then bore the brunt of the decade and more of austerity that followed in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2007. Such people were not ‘left behind,’ implying that they would one day catch up, but were ‘left out.’ They are still left out. The only difference now is that there numbers are growing and are not so easily ignored. Such people can be abused and despised, as we saw in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and which continues in repeated claims with respect to the selfishness and stupidity of ‘ordinary’ people. But they can no longer be ignored. To the extent that people pushing an authoritarian and austerian agenda – whether in economics or the environment – continue to proceed over against such people, they are on a collision course with political realities. Statements that current political realities themselves are on a collision course with greater planetary realities changes does precisely nothing to establish the proper relation between politics and physics, between the human social world and the natural world, which is the only way out. Fantasies of authoritarian and austerian solution are merely the wet-dreams of tenth rate Platonists who flatter themselves that they have what it takes to form a Guardian class. At best, they will constitute a rescue squad which has to maintain itself by outright force in face of bitter and increasing libertarian resistance, the whole thing imploding to ensure the most draconian imposition of austerity in the form of natural necessity.
Austerity by authoritarian imposition will not work, merely breed an itching for a libertarian counter-revolution. It is the mediation which ensures a balance between autonomy and authority that matters, a mediation which is the appreciation in the phrase ‘freedom is the appreciation of necessity.’
Please see chapters 20-22 of my review of John Bellamy Foster’s The Return of Nature
(Materialist Dialectics against the rule of scientistic philosopher-kings; Bridging theoretical and practical reason; and Freedom as the Appreciation of Necessity)
There are millions of people whose lives have already been desperately impacted by economic and financial crises in recent decades, and whose lives have been made significantly worse by Covid-19. To preach a message of environmental austerity on top of this exhibits a breath-takingly inhuman political insensitivity. This is proof positive that as a serious politics, environmentalism is not even at the starting gate. The social and mental health of the population is being stretched to and beyond breaking point. I see them regularly in my job. I live among such people. Indeed, I am one of them. The calls for environmental austerity cut no ice here. The limitations of a ‘classless’ environmental ‘non-politics’ are apparent here in the differential class dynamics of crisis. To target and disrupt working class communities seeking social survival reveal something deeply worrying about the inherent class bias and basis of dominant environmentalism – it is bourgeois and liberal to the core, the idealistic and utopian, rebellion of the comfortable. The fetish that is made of peaceful, non-violent protest is the soft non-confrontational option of the entitled and the privileged. The cause is just, the end worthy, but the means are so deficient as to almost certainly be counter-productive. They and the powers-that-be may have seen in lockdown an austerian model that establishes a template for other collective problems. They pass the laws, distribute public resources (until the day comes when they run out in a bankrupted economy), get the compliance, get paid, and perform a triage on those who can be saved. The rest of us will be cast aside and left to drown. And we know this is true from the fact that people have been cast aside and left to drown for decades now. Brexit may well have been their last gasp. The abuse hurled in the direction of working class communities whose pleases and complaints have been ignored for decades indicates a complete lack of sympathy. It’s at this point I started to wonder whether the world has gone completely mad or whether I’d finally gone mad. Then I read articles such as this from Mary Harrington and I realize that the mainstream and its dominant liberal worldview really is deluded. That point also applies to those protesting and rebelling and demanding change and action, their demands for ‘system change’ being revealed on closer analysis to be the old reformism on steroids, taking authoritarian form on account of its manifest inadequacies. Such people are deficient in politics, their authoritarianism and austerian view being defined against libertarianism for want of any awareness of how to constitute the balance of autonomy and authority in a genuine public life.
Harrington concludes with respect to this ‘total state’ authoritarian solution:
Such a state would follow the Chinese template, assuming maximal responsibility not just for infrastructure, security, healthcare, law and justice but also our wellbeing, moral choices, even our happiness — and therefore claim the intrusive powers necessary to execute those duties.
Inasmuch as this vision is resisted, it tends to be by ‘classical liberals’ or libertarians who are less keen to make positive pronouncements on the nature and obligations of the good life than they are to defend our freedom to pursue it. But this isn’t enough. For Grafton’s church serves as metaphor for what will happen if we claw our way out of the Covid-era’s maximalist state, toward a polity with scope for personal autonomy, only to slump back into the indifferent embrace of an individualism without virtue.
I resist this authoritarian solution as vehemently as I do the libertarian conception of freedom. The ‘rational freedom’ I develop is designed precisely to avoid this endless swinging between libertarianism and authoritarianism, a swinging that, under pressure of growing crises, is now going to extremes. I can only give an outline of that view in a piece like this. If you want a simple view, all I can say that these are times that demand moral and intellectual courage and hard work – show it and do it!
The concluding passage of Harrington’s article may well become a fitting epitaph to these post-Christian times:
Already declining due to the fading of Christian belief, Grafton’s church was in disrepair before the libertarians arrived. Purchased by a libertarian and subsequently the focus of a years-long dispute over its tax status, the building grows more dilapidated before catching fire. Because the fire service in Grafton is by then so underfunded, the fire cannot be extinguished. What was originally built as architectural expression of the community’s shared religious views declines first to white elephant, then political football, then death-trap. At last it’s left a charred and collapsing hulk, emptied of use as gathering-point for anything larger than nesting birds.
As I write, the dominant voice is full of the Winter Solstice, studiously avoiding any but dismissive references to Christmas. Fine. I shall wish my Merry Christmases elsewhere, to those who appreciate such things. I am well aware of the extent to which this society of the deified 'I' will dissolve in a mutual indifference.
Let's see how far people will get with nature as a moral referent. It should be easy to muster the common wit and will to preserve planetary boundaries, seeing as we are all naturists now. That it hasn’t been, that instead the dissolution of an authoritative moral structure once centred on God has result in a mutual cancellation and paralysis in face of the objective consequences of subjective choice under the sign of sensuous immediacy suggests otherwise. And Nature could care less one way or the other.
But I shall leave my other outstanding concern with God and religion for another time. I am not mainstream; I have stood aside from the dominant views in this culture in full awareness that they are implicated in the societal and ecological unravelling. Those protesting this unravelling and urging action still do not see the depth of the crisis. People have started to repeat the phrase ‘existential crisis,’ no doubt inspired by Greta Thunberg. Such people are moral and political infants. The notion of existential crisis runs much deeper than mere physical survival.
My Academia page consists of my main works
You can also access these on the Books page of my Being and Place website
And on my Humanities Commons page
You will find my more in-depth and closely reasoned analysis of all that is covered above and more on the articles listed and linked on the Posts page of my website.
Selected works pertinent to the above:
And many more besides. I have given this question a lot of thought these past twenty years. The above refers to my academic work. Below is a selection of shorter, more closely reasoned, pieces from my Being and Place site.
I shall sum the main themes of in these posts as best I can and encourage those who agree with this article to investigate further: scientific and moral truth/knowledge; overcoming the fact and value dualism; the need to cultivate the inner motives; the need to combine the exteriority and interiority of things; the need for dialectic and disclosure to tease out truth; truth-seeking; the need to proceed from first principles and firm foundations; the necessity of virtue; ecological virtues as qualities for successful living; happiness as flourishing in a public context; nature via nurture; establishing the happy habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, acquired, and exercised; character-construction; establishing the character forming culture and discipline of family, work, community, place, and polity; character formation and social formation as integrating personal and social responsiveness and responsibility; co-responsibility; character and the common good; the cultivation of virtues within the forms of the common life; fostering creative human agency; the logic of collective action: resolving the paradoxes of individual freedom and collective unfreedom; overcoming alienating dualisms and separations; materialist dialectics; the moral sense of place; finding meaning through metaphor; the ethics of enchantment; economics, ethics, and ecology; sovereignty, subsidiarity, and democratic will; political control and the globalisation of economic relations; recovering the economics of the good; sustainable living; real growth and qualitative development; the qualitative dimension of wealth; the new economics of prosperity beyond the delusions of quantitative measures; the new path to prosperity: learning to collaborate and share; socially useful production; the cooperative commonwealth; the economics of purpose; The Republic in an age of moral ecology; Ecopolis; self-regulation and the virtuous eco-community; metaphysical recovery and reconstruction; giving practical force and democratic content to the terms of political and ethical discourse; ecological virtue; the need for behavioural and societal change to proceed hand-in-hand; a society of doers and of volunteers; the case for constituting a voluntary rational self-restraint as against the imposition of an involuntary external restraint; the commitment to a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than obedience to external directives; climate politics as the reconstitution of public life; The Republic in an age of social ecology; Green Republicanism against Anti-Political Extremism: a critique of the authoritarian, elitist, and coercive implications of the politics of non-politics; The case for a civic environmentalism and a moral ecology; rational environmentalism which steers beyond the twin reefs of scientism, culturalism, and naturalism; Individual Choice, Moral Responsibility and Collective Action - Changing Ourselves and Changing the World; communing together; beyond enlightened self-interest; the Field of Practical Reason; the need to foster moral capacity alongside technological capacity; political change as the key to addressing climate change; the need to foster the political will and motivation; the need to bridge the fields of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world) and practical reason (ethics and politics); the need to connect scientific knowledge and technological know-how with ethics and politics within the motivational economy of human beings: integrating ability, capacity, will, artifice, motivations; building the political will and legitimacy for collective (climate) action; the politics of love and of friendship; civics; civic engagement; establishing a genuine public community as against environmental philosopher kings and rescue squads; against eco-authoritarianism; politics for the restoration of ecological hope; the unity of social formation and character formation (the unity of personal and social responsibility); taking practical reason seriously; making facts existentially meaningful; fostering the springs of action; inspiring environmental action; eco-praxis; making eco-citizens; the global civil society movement; networking and communing; existential truth; ecological restoration as a restorying; fostering the inner motives and virtues for collective (environmental) action; giving rational freedom appetitive resonance and force; fostering transformative motivations within communities of practice and communities of character; communalism and democratic confederalism; for the healing: the need to bridge divides and build commonalities; reasons, emotions, and motivations; the ecology of hope; looking after the human (moral, social, political) environment; the need to pay attention to the health and quality of the human environment as well as the natural environment; good government and representative government; rational freedom, public happiness and virtue; against sophism in ethics and politics; pleonexia and public life; against the moneyed nihilism corrupting public life; reconstituting public life; free choice and state authority: for genuine common force as against the external collective force generated by subjective choice; repersonalisation, responsibility, and establishing society on the principle of self-assumed obligation; rehabilitating the ethical life; virtuous communities fostering habits of the heart; the quest for community, meaning, and belonging; restoring the moral compass; liberty and license as generating a collective unfreedom; beyond libertarianism; for civility, public life, and reason; a positive and lasting peace in the presence of justice; restoring trust and connection in a new social order; liberty as licence destroys freedom; truth matters and is a work of reason; the moral law; social action and internationalism; love and the just society; the survival of the most loving; resolidifying.
I have withdrawn from social media and its continuous repetition of shadows, as amplified echoes of long lost hope. I despair of people who remain in the shallows, far removed from the primary questions of ethical foundations, values, and virtues.
I don’t know who will hear this final comment, but I am sure that it won’t be the people who need to hear it. I received Harrington's article, dated today, 23rd December, 2020, at 2pm today, and set about writing a commentary on it. I could have just posted it on social media, with the comment 'I keep telling you this.' Instead I spent the entire day to 9pm writing a commentary on it. My point is that research, thought, and writing takes an awful long time to produce. So if any of my long lists of publications freak you out, then just know that each of them are the culmination of ideas that began years and years earlier. If you want serious answers in shorter time and simpler form, then you don’t want serious answers.