It’s always interesting to get feedback on what I write. Positive or negative, online or in person, understanding how people view what I have to say is a measure (not the only one) of how effectively I’m doing it.
Sometimes, I come away with reactions that may challenge what I think, or that may point me in a different direction, or that might suggest a topic for further thought. Communication, after all, should always involve some form of reciprocation.
I’ve been voicing opinions on political matters since I was about 12 years old. Admittedly, my audience at that time was limited to those whom fate had delivered to my English or History class, and mightily bored they were by it. Continue on to today, and politics was always part of my worldview.
Something that has remained remarkably constant has been the appellation ‘liberal’. A liberal, or an adherent of liberalism. I think I used it as a self-descriptor in my early teens, and I’ve been more or less comfortable with it.
This is less true for so many of those who’ve crossed my path. ‘Die aanslag van die ANC en die linkse liberalistes’, was how one gravelly voiced schoolteacher defined the existential challenge facing South Africa in 1989. I doubt that to this gentleman, ‘liberalistes’ would have been anything other than ‘links’. And I also doubt whether he had in mind the works of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, or even the politics of Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert or Tony Leon (at that time contesting the parliamentary seat in Houghton). To be a ‘liberal’ in small-town Dundee in the late 1980s was often taken as a signifier of being effete, soft-headed, and naively idealistic. These were some of the more charitable critiques. Treacherous, disloyal and ‘in league with the Communists’ (probably with Satan too) were more common attributes.
Cue the mid-1990s, with a new set of political masters and their own assumptions. Liberals were now skulking apologists for apartheid, whose closet racism was more odious than the overt stuff of a generation before. Liberals were South Africa’s real problem, undermining the transformation agenda, sabotaging the new state, and injecting unwelcome alien ideas into public debate.
Some symmetry
Well, there was at least some symmetry between the old nationalists and the new…
More recently, I’ve been tickled by how the term ‘liberal’ is deployed as an insult by some of my readers (mostly readers, although I’m also tickled at those who gamely admit to not having read what I’ve written, but proceed to comment on it anyway). Here it seems we’re back in 1980s mode. Well, at least there’s a nostalgic value to it. (I remember a spoof in MAD magazine of the US religious right: ‘Liberal used to be a dirty word, and to us it still is.’ There is much wisdom in parody.)
In reply to this, I thought I’d set out some thoughts on what liberalism means to me, and why I’m happy with the name.
Etymologically, liberal has its origins in the Latin word ‘liber’, which means free. Think of liberalism in its essence as being about the exercise of freedom, taking as its starting point the individual human being as the bearer and object of that endowment.
Any set of normative assumptions is at some level arbitrary and a-rational, and I suppose this is the case for me and my own beliefs. I’m attracted to the idea of being able to explore the world and my place in it on whatever terms are acceptable to me, to make my own choices in life and to accept that others should be free to do likewise. ‘Diversity’ – one of the great hackneyed buzzwords of the present day – is infinite, and we should all be free to pursue whatever fulfilment appeals to us.
Hence also the notion of rights: that we carry certain entitlements by virtue of being human. And here I’m happy to delve into the historical and esoteric. The US Declaration of Independence put it eloquently: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
‘A necessary evil’
Of course, that’s rather abstract, and humans need the means to coexist with one another; we need mechanisms to make this possible. Society and governance in other words. So, some trade-off is necessary. A part of our freedom needs to be surrendered to make life in a community possible, but the danger is always present that the systems we establish for this can themselves become intrusive. Thomas Paine, the 18th-century thinker, got it right in my estimation: ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.’
For this reason, my preference is to limit the coercive power of the state over those subject to its authority. This is expressed in constitutional governance and the rule of law. State action should always be sparingly deployed, properly justified, impartially applied and strictly measured against a suite of foundational principles.
Does this mean ‘small government’? Not necessarily, although I’d say that this would be my default preference. I am also cognisant that in an era of mass society, responsibilities taken on by states have steadily grown. The size of a state and the roles it plays are contingent on the circumstances in which it finds itself.
From a pragmatic standpoint, the key is that whatever is done must be done effectively and efficiently. This frames an approach to South African politics that is quite tragic. The scale of the country’s problems would make a strong argument for state intervention, along the lines of an Asian developmental state. I have some sympathy for this. But before a state can be developmental (or ‘capable’, in current official parlance), it must be functional. South Africa barely qualifies. To argue for greater intervention is in effect to argue for spreading the dysfunctionality.
This has an additional implication: South Africa’s Constitution enshrines a range of socio-economic rights. While these were widely lauded as a major innovation and a model for the world – I’ve seen how South Africa’s example has influenced thinking elsewhere in Africa – the Institute of Race Relations was part of a small minority that warned against them. The point is that they needed resources and good policy to be put into operation, and unless these could be guaranteed, such rights could discredit the Constitution as a whole. The failure of large parts of the state risks doing just this. It’s a perilous situation.
Must in principle be limited
Liberalism recognises the importance of a private sphere. This follows from the idea that state power must in principle be limited, and people must be free to pursue lives outside its purview. One expression of this is a preference for private enterprise in economic matters.
This has a long pedigree in liberal history. Liberalism was identified in its emergence with the up-and-coming commercial class. This class held a status above the serfs, peasants and urban poor, but lacked the hereditary power of the aristocracy. Economic self-sufficiency – whether by building ships, smelting metals or practising law; in other words, creating wealth and rendering useful services – created the status of this class in society.
The incentive of private gain as a reward for prudently incurred risk and innovation is a good for society, in economic and social terms. It generates wealth and opportunities, and creates the conditions for independence from the state. This is a good in itself, for individual and societal prosperity, and also as a bulwark against overbearing government intrusion.
The private sphere is also critical to something more fundamental: what I’d call the ability to be fully human. None of us is an entirely political creature. We as humans experience the world in an infinite number of dimensions. We love. We are moved by art. We eat and drink for pleasure. We form relationships for stimulation and for companionship. We seek the Divine in religion. We are fascinated for good or ill by the unfamiliar, and seek to understand it.
Most chilling line
All of this demands the absence of coercive authority. It is the province of the totalitarian to attempt to regiment it. ‘The private life is dead in Russia,’ goes the most chilling line from the classic movie Dr Zhivago, describing the dystopia of a regime that sought to remake the world.
Indeed, I’d say that the origins of liberalism had a lot to do with religious freedom, the right to choose one’s God and to commune with Him as one chose, irrespective of one’s national loyalties.
At some level, I think that the good faith scepticism about liberalism (I’m not referring here to those who describe it as a mental illness) arises from what may be called the ‘liberal excesses’. This is something I’ve actually been sensitive to since 1987, when I read a piece in my father’s Time magazine entitled ‘The Netherlands: Tolerance Finally Finds Its Limits’.
The gist of that article – available online if anyone would like to check it out – was that a society that had deliberately pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable, and had adopted a non-judgmental, live-and-let-live approach to life, was finding that this came with severe downsides. Freedom can have its own costs; a disregard for convention by one can make life unpleasant for many.
I’d respond that liberalism assumes a society. It emphasises the individual as its unit of analysis, but it is not a philosophy of atomisation. Humans experience society as protective, liberating and oppressive. The individual must find his or her place in it: a complex process. Living harmoniously within any societal milieu can be difficult, sometimes impossible. Personally, I think it an overall positive that norms are challenged. A century ago, the prospects for women, for example, were far more limited than for men. (I’d add that some of liberalism’s critics on these grounds are in fact indebted to just this sort of disruption – think of the impact of Christianity as it spread through the Roman Empire, or of the Protestant Reformation, both of which upended existing social assumptions.)
State of mutual obligations
Yet for that, it seems to me that all of us owe some duty to the societies in which we live. (This is the principle behind taxes, to my chagrin…) I would characterise this as citizenship, a concept I’ve touched on in a few of my pieces. Belonging is a state of mutual obligations. There is nothing in my understanding of liberalism that condones licence.
This is also why I am in favour of citizenship being constituted on civic rather than ethnic foundations. The former offers the possibility of inclusion by one’s merits and actions, the latter by ties of blood and culture. In a society like South Africa, civic citizenship offers the only workable option.
Society (or perhaps more accurately, community) should be understood pluralistically. While we may be part of a common South African society, each of us should be free to – and in practice, do – participate in freely constituted groups. Political parties, churches, cultural associations. These are both an expression of and a guarantor of a free society. (This is why I’m very sympathetic to the existence of religious bodies.) And as far as I’m concerned, they have the right to the broadest discretion in deciding how to structure their membership and internal affairs (and one has to tread carefully here, as there are always going to be important exceptions to this rule). Provided membership is voluntary and uncoerced, this should in principle be so even where such groups hold beliefs out of synch with the state or society at large.
For closely related reasons, my views on free expression border on fundamentalism. I am deeply sceptical of claims to have ‘settled’ anything, still more so when I hear comments like ‘all decent people can agree’. To me, the ability to think and to express one’s thoughts is so much a part of the exercise of personal freedom, and of the practice of democratic debate, that I am loath ever to concede this principle, no matter how dreadful or offensive the content may be. And I caution that restrictions imposed even with the best intentions will have a tendency to acquire their own momentum.
‘Defending scoundrels’
The American writer Henry Louis Mencken got it right: ‘The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.’
So, is liberalism ‘the solution’? I’m probably too cynical now to believe in grand, overarching schemes that end history, but I am comfortable saying that it provides an important frame of reference for understanding our problems and useful tools for resolving them. Above all, it accepts the inevitability of dialogue and discussion, and in so doing provides space for solutions to emerge. We could use more of that in South Africa.
[Image: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]
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