Professor Patrick Deneen, whose book "Why Liberalism Failed" was even endorsed by former president Barack Obama, shares his message on how liberalism is devouring itself in front of our very eyes. He was a guest speaker at MCC.

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Script:

Liberalism was created to solve a specific problem. That problem was the challenge of pluralism, the difficulty of achieving peace in European societies that were increasingly riven by disagreement about core beliefs, especially religious beliefs.

The philosopher John Locke proposed that the state could act as a neutral “referee,” allowing for the free expression of a variety of viewpoints and beliefs while curtailing public expressions of those beliefs only when they caused harm or political instability. In addition, it was believed that through such promotion of freedom and tolerance of belief, people would be able to craft their own life paths as they saw fit and, as a result, contribute to the peace and prosperity of society and power of the nation.

Liberalism thus proposed itself as a “container” of diversity, in two senses of this word.

First, it would “contain” the potential for diverse elements in society to descend into violent disagreement, an experience fresh on many people’s minds in the aftermath of the wars of religion. Liberalism provided a “container” in which these differing beliefs could coexist.

However, it also sought to “contain” belief itself. For liberalism to work, it demanded a primary allegiance to the regime of toleration itself. What this meant in effect was that each person was required to recognize for political purposes that one’s own belief was in the first instance merely opinion.

While at the outset the first “container” seemed to many supporters of liberalism to be the ideal resolution by which societies could at once secure peace and pluralism, the second form of “containment” over time caused the dissolution and breakdown of these very communities that were supposed to be protected under liberalism.

Cultural practices and religious belief came to be seen as merely “opinion,” and over time became viewed as arbitrary impositions on the liberty of individuals who no longer shared those opinions.

The liberty that was originally to be accorded to groups, religions, cultures, and traditions, was increasingly claimed by individuals in the name of their liberation from those groups and traditions. And the protector of this individual liberty became the liberal state, which ultimately was ordered not to the toleration of plural belief, but an intolerant stance toward those groups that propose restraints upon the freedom of the liberal individual.

The logic by which the “containment” of belief itself undermined these kinds of beliefs and communities has now made those who defend these traditions as representatives of “illiberalism.”

While liberalism was created in the name of giving space for, and respecting, these various forms of diversity today the disintegrating logic of liberalism is aimed squarely at those very practices and institutions that it claimed to come into being to protect: culture, religion, family, and the nation.

Ironically, liberalism today regards as suspect the very political unit that was believed to be essential for the securing of rights – the nation.

Early liberal thinkers believed that the nation was the most comprehensive form of political ordering that could be brought into being by consent, and the comprehensive organization that would ensure the individual liberty of its constitutive members.

However, today the nation is increasingly regarded by many as an arbitrary limitation upon that same liberty, particularly the right to complete mobility in a world that in the name of liberty seeks the elimination, in the name of liberty, of geographic, cultural, technological, and even linguistic distinctions.

In response, defenders of culture, religion, family and nation have arisen as a political force in opposition to these internal trajectories of the liberal project.

Some see themselves as recovering “original” liberalism, embracing the notion of a limited state that exists to preserve those forms of human organization. However, a growing number of leaders of various “populist” movements understand that they are protesting liberal logic itself, and thus, enter new waters in exploring different ways of grounding political society in distinction from the dominant liberal norms that have reigned for the last century.

As liberalism devours the sources of its own nourishment, the demands of human craving for belonging in a world of meaning, membership, and community reasserts itself.