Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’
Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion to give life meaning.
I.
In a recent essay for the New York Times, David Brooks lamented what he sees as the deficiencies of liberalism. Unlike religion, which Brooks believes has long satisfied the need for meaning and purpose in human life, liberalism has proven incapable of filling the “hole in people’s souls.” Liberal societies, he writes, “can seem a little tepid and uninspiring.” Liberalism “nurtures the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency,” but not the “loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love.” Although he considers himself a liberal, Brooks thinks liberal societies are lonely, atomised, and even selfish.
Brooks joins a growing list of public intellectuals who maintain that the principles and institutions of liberalism—democracy, freedom of speech and conscience, individual rights, and the rule of law—aren’t sufficient for societies to flourish. They believe society needs an anchor that goes deeper than liberalism—what Brooks describes as “faith, family, soil and flag.”
There are different expressions of this belief. In an article for the Spectator, journalist Ed West discusses a phenomenon he describes as “New Theism”—an intellectual movement pushing back against the rising secularism in Western liberal societies. In a recent essay for Quillette, the historian and author Adam Wakeling describes this phenomenon as “political Christianity,” which he defines as the belief that “Western civilisation has Christian foundations, and returning to those Christian roots can help protect Western values today.” Wakeling challenges both of these beliefs and argues that the “success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought: constitutional government, secularism, science, the rule of law, and human rights—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths.”
Adam Wakeling
Wakeling makes a powerful historical case for the role of Enlightenment thought—which often explicitly resisted religious dogma and authority—in the development of Western morality and institutions. He also offers a compelling argument for why secular Enlightenment principles are a sturdier political foundation for diverse liberal societies than political Christianity. However, many New Theists and disaffected liberals have concerns that go beyond social and political organisation—they’re focused on what they view as a crisis of meaning in Western societies.
New Theists don’t just believe that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the cornerstone of Western civilisation, they also argue that secular liberalism leaves people bereft of community and a sense of meaning and purpose. New Theists like author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative intellectual Douglas Murray, author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and historian Tom Holland all argue that the decline of Christianity will lead to nihilism, new forms of political tribalism, and a profound sense of spiritual emptiness in Western societies.
Liberals like Brooks are squeamish about this sort of cultural essentialism, so they make vague appeals to the need for “ultimate purpose,” “transcendent loyalties,” and the “most sacred cares of the heart and soul” without the stronger claim that a Judeo-Christian revival is necessary. Brooks shares the belief that something is missing from modern liberal society, even if it isn’t entirely clear what that thing is: “Many people find themselves spiritually unfulfilled,” Brooks writes, “they feel naked, embattled and alone.”
Brooks presents two versions of liberalism in his essay: one of these is “merely a set of neutral rules that allow diverse people to live together,” and the other is a “moral ethos … a guiding philosophy of life.” In his new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, Alexandre Lefebvre makes a case for the second version. While Brooks says the book gave him a “greater appreciation of liberalism’s strengths,” he also admits that it made him “more aware of why so many people around the world reject liberalism.” Lefebvre says his book is partly directed at the fastest-growing religious demographic in the United States and much of the West: the religiously unaffiliated. Like Brooks, he believes the decline of religion has left a spiritual vacuum, but he thinks liberalism is enough to fill it.
The New Theists, Brooks, and Lefebvre all agree that there’s a crisis of meaning in liberal societies. This view has become increasingly common as Western countries have gone through a period of rapid secularisation in recent decades. In 2000, 86 percent of Americans reported that they were Christian. Since then, the proportion has collapsed to 68 percent. Other indicators of religiosity have plummeted as well—while nearly two-thirds of Americans said religion was “very important” to them in 2003, 45 percent now say the same. Church membership was around 70 percent in 2000, but it’s now 45 percent. Since 2007, the proportion of Americans who say they’re atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” jumped from 16 percent to 28 percent.
A similar trend is sweeping Western Europe, which has seen significant declines in Christian belief. In Belgium, 83 percent of respondents to a Pew survey say they were raised Christian, but just 55 percent remain Christian. Many other countries have followed a similar trajectory: 79 to 51 percent in Norway, 67 to 41 percent in the Netherlands, 92 to 66 percent in Spain, 74 to 52 percent in Sweden. Every Western European country Pew surveyed followed this trend.
New Theists argue that this shift has left a cultural and moral void that has been crammed with surrogate religions. For example, in a recent essay titled “Why I am now a Christian,” Hirsi Ali cites the old canard (often attributed to G.K. Chesterton): “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” She says the “nihilistic vacuum” created by the loss of faith has become a “civilisational” challenge. She claims that this vacuum has been “filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma.”
Peterson, Murray, Holland, and other New Theists make similar arguments. Even Brooks believes the decline of traditional sources of meaning in liberal societies is one reason “authoritarianism is on the march.” He says citizens of these societies “grasp at politics to fill [a] moral and spiritual void.” He believes authoritarians are better at embracing “faith, family, soil and flag” than liberals. He concludes that “we have to celebrate liberalism while acknowledging its limits. … We need to be liberals in public but subscribe to transcendent loyalties in the depth of our being—to be Catholic, Jewish, stoic, environmentalist, Marxist or some other sacred and existential creed.”
New Theists believe traditional monotheistic religion is the only belief system that satisfies our need for meaning. In the absence of religion, Lefebvre says liberalism can serve this purpose. For Brooks, just about any fervently held belief besides liberalism will do. All these beliefs share the conviction that Western liberalism has been hollowed out by the decline of religious faith. They don’t just seek to fill the hole in their own souls with religion or some other existential doctrine—they assume that all their fellow citizens share their spiritual yearning.
II.
At the beginning of Liberalism as a Way of Life, Lefebvre invites readers to ask themselves a question: “Where do I get my values from?” Most people will probably come up with a number of answers: philosophers and novelists who have shaped their worldviews; moral heroes who have inspired them; the norms and institutions of the societies in which they live. Yet Lefebvre declares: “I’m willing to bet that you had no good answer.” He continues:
I say so with confidence because whenever I’ve pestered my students, friends, and colleagues with this question, they are almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: “from my experience,” “from friends and family,” or “from human nature.” … I reply that these are not suitable answers. Personal experience, friends and family, and human nature are situated and formed within wider social, political, and cultural contexts. So I ask “What society-or-civilization-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values?”
Lefebvre never explains why values must arise from a single “society-or-civilization-sized thing.” The answers his students gave were perfectly defensible—of course wider cultural and political contexts shape our experiences, as well as the attitudes and behaviour of our friends and family. But modern societies have been formed by millennia of human development, and it’s impossible to isolate one “thing” that can be described as the “source” of an entire society’s values. Lefebvre believes that thing is liberalism, which leads him to drastically overstate the role and universality of liberalism in human development.
In the broad sweep of human history, liberalism is a recent innovation—but Lefebvre credits it with some of our most basic instincts and behaviours. For example, near the end of the book, he lists several scenarios to illuminate the ways in which liberalism is “already in our bones.” “Next time you’re out shopping,” he writes, “try an experiment: cut someone off in line and see what happens.” He says liberalism “has a hold on” anyone offended by such unfair behaviour.
But the perception of fairness and unfairness are among the oldest human impulses—even chimpanzees and other primates have an innate sense of fairness. Lefebvre is too quick to dismiss the students who cite human nature as a potential source of their values. In his 1981 book The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, Peter Singer provides a compelling naturalistic account of where our ethics originated and how they have developed over thousands of years—from the kin-based and reciprocal altruism of the earliest societies to much larger forms of social organisation today. The earliest liberal philosophers often grounded their arguments in human nature—John Locke, the American Founders, and many other Enlightenment figures relied on the concept of natural rights to reject illiberal ideas like the divine right of kings and religious authority. These philosophers couldn’t have drawn their ideas from liberalism, as liberalism didn’t yet exist—at least not in its current form.
When Lefebvre credits liberalism with basic human emotions and behaviours that are present in every society and have been around for thousands of years, he reveals why his case for liberalism is too ambitious. And by insisting that there must be some “society-or-civilization-sized thing” that serves as the wellspring of our values, he echoes the hubris of those who believe this is a role filled by religion. Tom Holland says, “We swim in Christian waters.” Lefebvre says, “We all swim—we positively marinate—in liberal waters.” The belief in totalising doctrines that fully explain our ethical, social, and political lives is one liberalism has always sought to temper. By trying to turn liberalism into another such doctrine, Lefebvre undermines its central purpose as a set of rules, institutions, and norms that allow many beliefs and ways of life to coexist in democratic societies.
In his 2022 book Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama argues for a more limited conception of liberalism. He argues that the purpose of liberalism is to “lower the aspirations of politics, not as a means of seeking the good life as defined by religion, but rather as a way of ensuring life itself, that is, peace and security.” Fukuyama observes that there are “three essential justifications for liberalism”:
The first is a pragmatic rationale: liberalism is a way of regulating violence and allowing diverse populations to live peacefully with one another. The second is moral: liberalism protects basic human dignity, and in particular human autonomy—the ability of each individual to make choices. The final justification is economic: liberalism promotes economic growth and all the good things that come from growth, by protecting property rights and the freedom to transact.
None of these justifications has anything to do with satisfying some ultimate sense of meaning or purpose in citizens’ lives. As Fukuyama explains: “Liberalism lowers the temperature of politics by taking questions of final ends off the table: you can believe what you want, but you must do so in private life and not seek to impose your views on your fellow citizens.” Beliefs concerned with “final ends”—such as religions that claim to have a monopoly on truth and morality or ideologies like communism that purport to fully explain the nature and destiny of humanity—tend to make politics more dogmatic, divisive, and illiberal.
Liberalism is primarily concerned with “peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies,” as Fukuyama puts it. There are certain basic rules that cannot be violated in a liberal society (such as the state’s monopoly on violence), but more than any other system, liberalism allows citizens to live their lives as they see fit. Lefebvre believes liberalism can offer more than this. He draws a distinction between what he calls “political liberals” and “comprehensive liberals,” and he places himself in the latter category—those for whom liberalism is the “basis for a personal worldview, way of living, and spiritual orientation.” Lefebvre believes the citizens of mature liberal democracies are already living in a “liberal monoculture,” which has shaped them from birth to adopt certain assumptions about how to treat one another and organise society.
According to Lefebvre, “We who are liberal all the way down lack adequate models to understand how we came to be who we are.” He believes the model that most closely approximates comprehensive liberalism was developed by John Rawls, whose 1971 treatise A Theory of Justice, 1985 essay “Justice as Fairness,” and 2001 book Justice as Fairness: A Restatement are among the most influential works of modern liberalism.
Rawls’s conception of liberalism rests on the assumption of what he calls “reasonable pluralism”—the idea that citizens with competing values can live together under a shared political framework. According to Rawls, this framework is normative to the extent that it calls for citizens to be free and equal to the greatest extent possible under a fair system of cooperation. But because each of these concepts—freedom, equality, and fairness—is so open to radical divergences in interpretation, there can be many competing liberal doctrines. There are liberal conservatives and liberal progressives; liberal socialists and liberal capitalists; liberal Christians and liberal atheists. Liberals can derive a sense of purpose and meaning from vastly different worldviews—the only requirement is that they don’t foist these worldviews on anyone else.
Lefebvre acknowledges that liberalism produces “different and incompatible” definitions of the good life and ideas about how society should be organised. He cites the definition of liberalism provided by the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, which begins with the declaration that “Liberalism is more than one thing. On any close examination, it seems to fracture into a range of related but sometimes competing visions.” However, he believes this definition understates the extent to which liberalism underlies “so much of the culture we daily live and breathe.” The process of becoming a comprehensive liberal, according to Lefebvre, is a matter of explicitly reifying principles that most people in liberal societies already hold.
But Lefebvre’s recommendations for building a liberal “philosophy of life” aren’t novel. He encourages readers to be more tolerant. He recommends practising gratitude. He emphasises the cognitive dissonance that arises when our behaviour doesn’t reflect our values. He observes that people often hold conflicting beliefs and argues for the formulation of a more coherent worldview. He makes a case for empathy and perspective-taking. He says openness and curiosity have social benefits. Lefebvre believes liberals should make a more conscious effort to embody their liberal principles, but this amounts to little more than conventional wisdom and self-help with a liberal spin.
It’s unclear what Lefebvre hoped to achieve with Liberalism as a Way of Life. He wants to convince readers that liberalism is the “default morality of our time,” but liberalism produces no consensus on morality by design. He says liberalism is the “society-or-civilization-sized thing that may well underlie who you (and I, and we) are in all walks of life.” But the reason liberalism is so integral to the organisation of democratic societies is its role as a limited political framework that diverse members of those societies can agree to support. By insisting that liberalism is an all-encompassing worldview, Lefebvre risks squandering that universal appeal by creating a conception of liberalism that competes with religion and other sources of meaning.
Near the end of the book, Lefebvre explains why he believes it is time to elevate liberalism beyond its status as a political framework for promoting and protecting pluralism in free societies. He thinks liberalism must be something transcendent which “redeems” the drudgery of ordinary life. He even recommends liberal “spiritual exercises,” such as envisioning yourself behind Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and considering how you would organise society if you knew nothing about your own place in it. He worries that people won’t prove capable of finding meaning in their lives without a “comprehensive doctrine” like his version of liberalism. In other words, Lefebvre concedes the central point made by the New Theists—that there really is a hole in people’s souls as religious faith continues to decline.
III.
New Theists believe the hole in the liberal soul is God-shaped, and they know exactly which god should fill it. According to Jordan Peterson, the Bible is the “foundational document of Western civilization” and it contains a repository of narratives that are central to Western identity and morality. In his 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland writes: “For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom.” Whether we know it or not, Holland observes, the inhabitants of the West belong to a civilisation that is “thoroughly Christian.”
In a 2022 essay, Holland argued that secular humanism isn’t even a coherent concept. “If there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species,” he says of humanists, “it is the opening chapter of the Bible.” He continues: “To believe in the existence of human rights requires no less of a leap of faith than does a belief in, say, angels, or the Trinity.” He supports this claim by observing that 12th-century Christian scholars who “sought to fashion a properly Christian legal system … naturally turned to the Bible for guidance.” It is true that Christianity had a profound impact on the development of the rule of law in Europe, but this acknowledgment doesn’t require a leap of faith—it just requires an honest appraisal of the historical forces and conditions that gave rise to the earliest Western institutions.
A core element of New Theism is the insistence that political and moral development can’t exist outside a Christian framework. According to Holland, the emphasis on universal and inalienable human rights that underpinned the American and French Revolutions, for instance, was an attempt to “promote Christian teachings as universal” by dishonestly portraying them as “deriving from anything other than Christianity.” In the centuries that followed, Holland argues, “Christian concepts were re-packaged for non-Christian audiences” in the West, but the role of Christianity in the development of Western institutions and morality is now “scrupulously concealed.” He declares: “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.”
The idea that Christianity is suppressed or concealed in the West is absurd. In many European countries, citizens are required to pay taxes to the largest churches. In the United States, the official national motto is “In God We Trust.” The legislation designating this motto was signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and there’s little doubt about which God its authors had in mind—in the mid-1950s, 96 percent of Americans identified as Christians. The overwhelming majority of American presidents have been Christians, along with most members of Congress. Louisiana governor Jeff Landry just signed a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in all public-school classrooms (a brazen violation of the First Amendment). Although belief in Christianity has been declining in Western countries over the past few decades, it’s still the largest religion on earth, observed by nearly one-third of humanity.
There’s a reason Holland redefines humanism and secularism as Christian concepts. Criticism of religion played a major role in the development of Western liberal democracy, a historical fact that’s difficult to reconcile with his view that the West is fundamentally Christian. The word “Enlightenment” doesn’t appear once in Holland’s attack on humanism. While he briefly mentions Voltaire, he only does so to claim that the Western tradition of criticising religious authority can be traced to Martin Luther rather than the progenitors of Enlightenment humanism.
It’s true that Voltaire and Martin Luther were both critics of the Catholic Church, but the Protestant Reformation launched a century and a half of religious bloodshed in Europe—one of the great episodes of religious violence that Voltaire reacted against. The Thirty Years War directly or indirectly killed as much as a third of Central Europe’s population. This was also a period in which people were routinely tortured and killed for being insufficiently pious, worshiping the wrong God, or conducting scientific research. It’s no wonder that major Enlightenment figures such as David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire were such stern critics of religion, nor is it a surprise that the American Founders consulted their arguments and determined that a secular republic is the best form of government.
In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—which laid the foundation for the First Amendment to the US Constitution—Thomas Jefferson condemned as “tyrannical” the idea that a citizen must “furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors.” Citizens’ “opinions in matters of religion,” he wrote, should in no way “diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” Throughout the Virginia Statute, Jefferson appealed to reason and what he described as the “natural rights of mankind.” While he acknowledged that these rights may well come from a deity, he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, he rejected Biblical miracles, and he thought the doctrine of original sin was unjust. These beliefs played a significant role in Jefferson’s advocacy for religious freedom and what he described as a “wall of eternal separation” between church and state.
For Holland and other New Theists like Peterson, the secularism of early liberals like Hume, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Jefferson is a mirage—no matter how ferociously they criticise Christianity, they’re inescapably Christian. Just as Holland says Christianity is responsible for liberalism, human rights, and even secularism, Peterson credits Christianity with “Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil.” Peterson says the “fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition continue to govern every aspect of the actual individual behavior and basic values of the typical Westerner.” He even argues that it isn’t possible to be a genuine atheist and live an ethical life.
The New Theists claim that true atheists are figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Holland describes as the “most unsparingly honest … of modern atheists” because he “gazed unblinkingly at what the murder of … god might mean for a civilisation.” Peterson makes the same claim, observing that Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” presaged the emergence of fascism and communism; the “deaths of tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the death of God.” According to Holland, Nietzsche predicted that the death of God meant “Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated.”
Holland declared that the Nazis “understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity.” The claim that atheism is to blame for the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust has been made countless times by Christian apologists over the years. It ignores the fact that, whatever antipathy Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders had toward Christianity, the majority of German soldiers and citizens were Christians. It ignores the role played by millennia of Christian antisemitism in the formation of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. It ignores the collusion or active participation of many German churches. While there were heroic Christian opponents of Nazism in Germany, such as the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, groups like the German Christians supported the Nazis while many other Christian authorities remained silent.
Despite Nietzsche’s proclamation that God was dead in the late 19th century, there was no great movement away from Christianity in Germany prior to World War II. Immediately after the Nazis seized power in 1933—and less than a week after Hitler banned all non-Nazi parties—the German government signed a treaty with the Vatican. (The Catholic Church didn’t have an especially inspiring record on fascism elsewhere in Europe, either—Pope Pius XII supported General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and blessed his regime in 1948.) In a March 1933 speech, Hitler described Christianity as the foundation of German values. While it’s true that Hitler made this claim for political reasons and despite his own animosity toward Christianity, it demonstrates that he believed he had to appeal to the Christian faith of the German people.
Germany is the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation—one of the most significant events in the history of Western Christianity. It has as much of a claim to being a country forged by the Judeo-Christian tradition as any other in Europe, perhaps even more so. And yet, this rich Christian history and the presence of millions of Christians on German soil offered no bulwark against the descent into Nazism. New Theists attribute every Western achievement to Christianity and blame the West’s most cataclysmic failures on atheism. This is no surprise, as they have engineered a worldview in which everything moral is by definition Christian, and everything immoral is anti-Christian. But this obvious deck-stacking requires them to ignore the horrors of the distant past—the Crusades, the Inquisition, and 150 years of religious warfare in Europe—as well as the not-so-distant past.
Tallying up the number of Christians and non-Christians who committed atrocities in the 20th century is a pointless exercise. While many Christians served in the Wehrmacht and the SS during World War II—and many more embraced fascism around the world—there were also plenty of Christians who fought for the Allies and resisted fascism. Atheist philosophers like Nietzsche were anti-humanists who despised Christianity for its “slave morality.” Other critics of the faith like Spinoza and Voltaire were humanists who attacked the authoritarianism, superstition, and sectarianism that Christianity engendered. Western institutions and morality were clearly shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition, but New Theists refuse to acknowledge that the active resistance to this tradition played a major role as well. In fact, they refuse to acknowledge that secular morality is even possible.
Holland writes that the history of Christianity is the “story of the West, warts and all.” He believes the Western story will always be fundamentally Christian. But even if it’s true that Christianity produced the modern secular liberal state, why should we remain bound to its doctrines today? There are countless historical contingencies that are responsible for modern institutions, and we find many of them abhorrent. For most of human history, warfare was regarded as the highest calling to which our species could aspire—it was viewed as ennobling and inevitable, and it generated the large-scale solidarity and mobilisation necessary to form modern states. As the sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly put it: “War made the state and the state made war.” While there are some who continue to believe that warfare is vital for the soul of the species, the rest of us have grown up and now recognise that it’s immensely destructive, often futile, and worth avoiding wherever possible.
If the Bible is the source of our morality and institutions, why have we rejected so many of the behaviours it explicitly endorses, such as slavery and genocide? Why did the emergence of liberal democracy happen to coincide with the emergence of a political and philosophical movement against religious authorities and in favour of secularism and pluralism? These are the questions New Theists will need to answer if they expect their fellow citizens to accept their assertion that a Judeo-Christian revival is what Western liberal democracies need to flourish.
IV.
On 4 July 1776, the Continental Congress passed a resolution calling for the creation of a national seal for the new United States of America. The committee responsible for this task consisted of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, who enlisted the help of the Genevan philosopher and artist Pierre Eugene du Simitiere. While the creation of the Great Seal of the United States would take another six years, go through two more committees, and involve the work of over a dozen men, several elements of Du Simitiere’s original design could be found in the final version.
Among these elements was a Latin inscription that would serve as the United States’ de facto motto for 180 years: E Pluribus Unum, “Out of many, one.” But in July 1956, Eisenhower signed the bill which designated “In God We Trust” as the United States’ official motto. Although E Pluribus Unum originally referred to the thirteen colonies coming together as a single country, it could just as well describe all fifty states today. The motto is also an encapsulation of America’s historic diversity—its identity as a “melting pot” of different nationalities, cultures, and faiths. Given the rapid rise of irreligiosity in the United States—as well as the fact that “God” means very different things to different Americans—the original Latin motto, unofficial as it was, better captures the character of American society.
While diversity can provide benefits such as economic dynamism, the free flow of ideas, and cultural richness, it is also a product of liberal societies. When citizens are free to express themselves, organise politically, and worship (or not) as they see fit, they will naturally segment into diverse social and cultural groups. There’s a reason the top destinations for migrants around the world are liberal societies like the United States, Canada, and Germany—beyond the promise of better economic circumstances, migrants recognise that these societies are uniquely capable of assimilating new arrivals while allowing them to retain their identities. They don’t just seek economic freedom in the West—they seek political and social freedom, too.
Liberal societies are strong enough to be diverse—they’re capable of accommodating radically divergent viewpoints and ways of living under a single set of norms, rules, and institutions. The repression in illiberal countries isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign that the authorities are terrified of what will happen if minority groups organise politically to demand fairer treatment. Authoritarian rulers know that this sort of mobilisation can be contagious—if one group successfully agitates for more rights and freedoms, other groups will follow.
In his famous essay “The End of History?” published at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama observed that the “struggle for recognition” is a human universal. Our desire to be recognised as autonomous individuals worthy of equal treatment is a basic need. Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy would outlast its rivals because it is the only system capable of satisfying this desire by granting citizens equal rights under the law and giving them a say over how they’re governed. This has been true for hundreds of years, and we have every reason to believe liberal democracy remains the most sustainable form of government.
Matt Johnson
There’s an assumption at the heart of liberalism: purpose is what we make it. While many of liberalism’s critics insist that there must be some top-down source of purpose in contemporary democratic societies, this contradicts essential liberal principles like freedom of conscience, self-determination, and pluralism. But the idea that there’s no fundamental source of purpose or meaning in life can be destabilising, which is why it has always generated such powerful resistance.
There’s a long Western tradition of suspicion toward liberalism and its forebears. For example, the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century privileged emotion and spirituality over Enlightenment liberalism and secularism. Romanticism arose at a time when many artists and philosophers spurned the rapid industrialisation that was partly a product of the Enlightenment, because they believed it was creating a materialistic and spiritually vacuous society. Other anti-liberal figures like Nietzsche hated what Brooks describes as the “gentle bourgeois virtues” central to liberalism. The great totalitarian movements of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were categorical renunciations of liberalism.
It’s strange that many liberals today—citizens of the freest and most prosperous societies in human history—are willing to grant so many of the basic premises of liberalism’s historic foes. “People are not formed by institutions to which they are lightly attached,” Brooks writes. “Their souls and personalities are formed within the primal bonds to this specific family, that specific ethnic culture, this piece of land with its long history to my people, to that specific obedience to the God of my ancestors.” This paean to tribalism ignores how all the “primal bonds” Brooks listed have been responsible for many of the greatest atrocities throughout human history—from the European Wars of Religion to Nazism and the Holocaust. Of course, these bonds don’t always lead to such dark places, but liberalism is designed to keep them in check because they can be taken to such horrifying extremes.
The idea that people are more attached to specific families, ethnic cultures, lands, and Gods than they are to universal human rights and equality isn’t as entrenched as Brooks thinks. Recall Singer’s evolutionary account of where our ethics originate in The Expanding Circle. Beyond kin-based and reciprocal altruism, Singer argues that another evolutionary endowment is responsible for our expanding sense of solidarity and moral responsibility: reason. The moment humans recognised that their interests must be balanced with the interests of others, they began the process of developing ethical justifications for their actions. Singer likens this process to stepping onto an “escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.” The “expanding circle” in his title is a reference to the progression from solidarity with one’s own family to the tribe to the nation—and ultimately, to the entire species.
There was a time in human history when the family or the tribe would have appeared to be the largest units of social solidarity. But for thousands of years, human societies have become increasingly complex as a result of the powerful material incentives for cooperation. Moral development was a natural part of this process, as humans could not have made it this far without establishing rules for cooperation. In many ways, liberalism is the culmination of this process.
Liberalism has lasted for centuries because it is the only set of principles and practices that enables diverse societies to thrive. But liberalism is under threat today. From the emergence of an illiberal and zero-sum form of identity politics on the Left to the resurrection of blood-and-soil nationalism on the Right, the consensus on liberalism in many Western democracies is breaking down. There are powerful external competitors, too—China has managed to combine an illiberal political model with remarkable economic growth, and Beijing presents this model as a direct challenge to liberalism. While China faces severe demographic and economic problems, its ability to navigate these problems remains to be seen. Then there’s aggressive Russian imperialism, the ever-present threat of Islamism and jihadism, and the shift toward authoritarianism in Western countries like the United States and Hungary.
According to Brooks, the “central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism.” He believes liberalism can only prevail in this struggle if liberal societies return to the “transcendent loyalties” that gave earlier generations a sense of meaning and purpose. “People need to feel connected to a transcendent order,” he writes, “nice rules don’t satisfy that yearning.” Throughout his essay, Brooks uses deflated terms like “nice rules,” “gentle bourgeois virtues,” “individual utility,” and “merely nice and tolerant” to describe liberalism. He also criticises a version of liberalism that the vast majority of liberals won’t recognise: “In a purely liberal ethos, an invisible question lurks behind every relationship: Is this person good for me? Every social connection becomes temporary and contingent.” It will be news to most liberals that they are selfish utility maximisers whose relationships with friends, family, colleagues, and fellow citizens are merely “temporary and contingent.”
Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion or some other “comprehensive doctrine” to give life meaning. Despite all the freedom citizens of modern liberal democracies have to pursue lives they find fulfilling and meaningful, there have always been powerful illiberal forces in Western democracies, and people don’t need much of an excuse to abandon liberal principles and embrace sectarianism. Yet many liberals are providing just such an excuse by arguing that life in liberal societies is empty without religion or some other “existential creed.”
The idea that we’re responsible for making our own meaning can be daunting. While religious believers have established doctrines, traditions, and communities, millions of their fellow citizens must find their way to lives of purpose without this scaffolding. Those who call for a religious revival in the West never explain what this looks like in practice. Does it merely mean refilling pews? Or some version of integralism, in which the state and religion are fused? What about the millions of people who simply can’t believe? Thomas Jefferson opens the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom by observing that the “opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.” There’s a large and growing population of people in liberal societies who have followed the evidence away from religious faith, and they don’t need a surrogate faith to replace it.
The citizens of liberal democracies are fortunate to live in societies that afford them the luxury to have crises of meaning. In many other societies, and at many points in history, people faced more immediate crises: a king or a dictator who would kill them for believing the wrong thing; rival clans that would regularly raid their villages and destroy their homes; life at the mercy of nature, disease, poverty, and starvation. Liberal ideas and institutions like the rule of law, property rights and contract enforcement, and freedom of expression and conscience deserve much of the credit for the health, prosperity, and autonomy we enjoy today. The one thing liberalism can’t provide, however, is a sense of meaning and purpose—that’s up to us, and the responsibility of making our own meaning is a small price to pay. For many, it isn’t a price at all.
