Post #68: The Old Liberal School

30 Sept. 2023

“I can say that my political feelings and convictions have never undergone any change: I consider myself to be an advanced, but still a conservative Liberal, which I regard not only as a possible but as a rational and consistent phase of political existence.”

—Anthony Trollope, Autobiography

We commonly think of Edmund Burke as the founding light of modern conservatism, but he was very much a Whig, not a Tory. John Stuart Mill may be taken for the very embodiment of high liberalism, but much of what he had to say sounds stridently conservative today, though he was a certified radical in his day. Friedrich Hayek disavowed the conservative label, insisting that he was really an old-school liberal, even as the Thatcherites were brandishing copies of his Constitution of Liberty and announcing that “This is what we believe”—a doubtful claim, given what a subtle thinker Hayek was, but also remarkable, inasmuch as some of them, including Maggie herself, may actually have read the book. (The same was probably true, at the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, also a good book, but much thinner.) Jordan Peterson, when baited in the usual ways, will say more or less the same thing of himself.

Old Liberals are readers almost by definition, and valuers of their political traditions; that is most likely how they acquired their convictions in the first place, since very few are born or raised into them these days. They have perhaps the most formidable modern lineage, tracing their outlook all the way back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. They opposed the French Revolution, as Burke famously did, but embraced 19th-century reform, though seasoned with judicious misgivings. They have long since resigned themselves to the realities of mass politics, but they tend not to be overly fond of a system of government that looks no better than the least bad among the available options, and at any rate unprincipled almost by its nature (thus José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, for example). Mass-men they are not, but a small and select bunch making their lives, responsibly on the whole, near the edges of eccentricity and crankdom by some accounts.

Old Liberals are aware that Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh and that he was known to his contemporaries no less for The Theory of Moral Sentiments than for The Wealth of Nations. They have read some of the latter, at least, rather than going by the usual caricatures. “Capitalism” is a misnomer to them, a propaganda term coined by its enemies; they speak of free markets, voluntary exchange, and spontaneous order.

Old Liberals are not equalizers; they may permit public measures for poor relief, but they much prefer voluntary giving, and they will fight leveling tendencies every inch of the way. (Make all men equal today, and they shall all be unequal again tomorrow, as Trollope observes in the above context.) They are not usually disposed to champion or defend privilege proper—that is, legally entrenched advantage—but they will vehemently resist the ethos that goes with the new, thoroughly debased meaning of the term. To be wealthy, even by inheritance, is not the same as to be privileged. A trust-fund baby is not a peer of the realm.

Against the howling storm of contrary tendencies, Old Liberals remain adamant that we are not, as a matter of first principle, entitled to the belongings of anyone else—their earnings or savings, their investments and real estate, any more than their talents or their looks or their mates. It does not matter whether one deems these possessions earned or unearned, deserved or undeserved, adequate or grossly excessive. (“Too much and too little are treason against property,” as Burke puts it in his Reflections on the Revolution.)

That we should all of us be far more willing to share is true and important, as I have stressed in many of my posts, but almost everything that is so beautiful about sharing depends on it being done freely. It takes no great mental prowess to come up with designs that look like much-improved distributions to oneself (and perhaps a few others too), but an aptitude for such seductive fancies is no more a justification for bringing them about by force (if it could even be done) than my robbing someone at gunpoint can be justified by my then passing on the contents of his wallet to the needy, even if the money were to do demonstrably more good in their hands than in his. We might not shed tears over someone being ambushed in this manner on the way to whatever mischievous frolics happen to be in fashion among human being with too much money in their pockets; but that hardly makes the highwayman an agent of justice, which is the point at issue.

Whatever patterns may appear “socially just” to us, we would need to establish, as a precondition of unleashing our coercive powers in their service, whether we are really in a position to make such judgments in the first place, which is more often tacitly assumed than demonstrated convincingly. And even if we were satisfied at that preliminary level, it would still remain highly debatable whether enacting them by coercive means, with all the unexpected consequences that will invariably ensue, is really such a good, or such a just, proposition after all. Democracy may give us the leverage to do as we wish (even if things never quite turn out the way we would like), but voting our way into someone’s pocketbook—be it that of an individual, of a class, or of the great mass of our more well-to-do fellow citizens—does not magically become legitimate because we can easily entice interested majorities into considering it their natural right.

It was precisely this apprehension, that majorities of have-lesses were sure to form and help themselves, under the guise of legal fictions, to the good things of the have-mores, that gave democracy such a bad name from the days of Aristotle to those of the Founding Fathers. The advent of mass democracy and the dismantling of mixed constitutions in favor of popular ones has changed the tone beyond all recognition, and for a good many generations now, the enviers and resenters of other people’s wealth have been priding themselves on the supposed righteousness of their redistributionist designs. But the Old Liberal is not taken in. He knows a Robin Hood when he sees one, and a saver of the world with other people’s money, and he neither likes nor respects either type particularly, no matter how much Harvard may howl.

The business of the state is mutual protection—not equalization or moral improvement—with here and there a modest measure of judicious harmonization, perhaps. The attainment of perfection, if possible, is a private matter to the liberal, the ambition to form a new model man, a distinguishing mark of totalitarianism. The nanny state is an aberration, but even drastic measures for the maintenance of public safety can be compatible with high liberal principle—during outbreaks of pestilence, say, to give a textbook example. How all this is to be balanced in practice is less a matter of principle than prudence (or its absence), so long as the limiting considerations are borne in mind.

There are, accordingly, plenty of legitimate collective purposes that require funding, and reasonable Old Liberals will consent to letting some bear more of the burden than others simply because they can. Noblesse oblige, and so does richesse, to a point. But they will take a much more restrictive view of such purposes than is customary today, and they will point out that the same fixed percentage taken out of a high income is already a disproportionate burden, even before all kinds of other “progressive” devices get tagged on as soon as the floodgates have been opened.

Taxing at punitive rates the frivolities and fripperies favored by the rich, or affordable only to them, raises its own questions; but it is less objectionable inasmuch as it does not aim at wealth or redistribution directly. Such schemes do not bespeak particular evenhandedness on the part of the state, true; but the rich enjoy advantages enough and so long as they remain free to avoid or substitute out of the goods and services in question, taxes on them are much less problematic than confiscatory schemes aimed at high incomes or wealth per se. That there are better and worse uses of one’s means is evident and the state is not required to be strictly neutral between them (it never has been and it never will be, liberal or not: that potatoes and pencils must be taxed at the same rate as jewels and private jets forms no part of anyone’s political catechism), only moderate in its pedagogic and improving ambitions.*

How best to combine a principled attitude with effective revenue-raising is a devilishly difficult business that regularly disappoints on both counts. (Burke again: “Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience.”) The Old Liberal will not insist on any one pet project for setting right the mess that is taxation practically everywhere, Singapore perhaps excepted. It makes for such a sorry sight, to his mind, not on account of any particular personal selfishness (there are many men of modest means among them with no great fondness for the rich), but because the principles at work rarely recommend themselves to his judgment. The political staple of routinely imposing on others rates of taxation that one will not have to bear oneself (and this in the name of social justice!) is always, from the Old Liberal point of view, a highly suspect move, and no mark of virtue at all. (To think that rates on paper are ever decisive by themselves is, in addition, deplorably naïve, as if the richest—think of them what one may—were not also best placed to protect themselves, by means fair and foul, from any aggressive moves on their wealth.)

Conscientious Old Liberals do not deny the pervasiveness of human hardship, but they will protest against how the transition from abject rural poverty (the native human condition before industrialization) to the admittedly grim realities of factory work and rampant slum-dwelling has usually been portrayed—as if the grinding misery of the countryside were preferable from any perspective but that of passing train windows in first or second class. Urbanization is not a dark conspiracy against the poor and huddled masses, but an expression of their ambitions and aspirations as much as anyone’s; its deprivations should not be whitewashed, but they have everywhere been a bridge to better things, not by the judgement of visiting know-it-alls from more affluent parts or times, but by the wits of those who have known both sides and have had to stake their lives on one or the other, all over the world, for a good dozen generations now.

Old Liberals believe in equality of status for men and women—John Stuart Mill forced the first vote on female suffrage in the British Commons as early as 1867 (Disraeli, that old fox, abstained)—but they do not consider them the same, and they might carry the same logic into the relations of cultures and races, on a point of principle and intellectual honesty, though these days they may have to keep quiet about it lest they be shouted down and run out of town on a rail. Even so, they will not gladly countenance group rights, unless the case be truly compelling, if it can ever be so. They will refuse to give blind credit to all cultures equally, without careful scrutiny, though they are willing to consider all their contributions fair-mindedly, and they have a long and impressive track record behind them to prove it. It was Old Liberal enthusiasts, roughly speaking, who dug out the Mahabodhi Temple and Machu Picchu from oblivion, and who first interested Gandhi in the Bhagavad Gita, believe it or not.

Old Liberals take a hard line on free speech, but they can see both sides of the abortion debate and resent seeing it turned into a wedge-issue. They tend towards the skeptical, but without being averse to religious traditions. They do not think that one’s bedroom preferences are anyone else’s business, and they would neither crow about them nor countenance their becoming a subject of public inquisition. Ostentatious pride looks as misplaced to them here as the ascription of shame or persecution where no victims step forward. Public flag-poles they would reserve for symbols of state, not for expressing half-masted empathy with every ill in the world, for signaling virtue, or for pandering to ascendant interest groups, no matter how attractive their cause may be, or not.

Old Liberals will accept the need for public education and other state-funded institutions with varying degrees of unease and reluctance, but these are no panaceas to them, but pragmatic accommodations, and they are always wary of state take-overs that others applaud so eagerly. They called for the decriminalization of drugs and the abolition of mandatory military service (Milton Friedman, most notably) before anyone else who was not an immediately interested party. Warfare is not glorious to them (creative and productive activity is); but they recognize that bloodshed, hideous and baneful as it is, cannot always be avoided. At the same time, they suspect that major crises almost invariably lead to massive transfers of powers to the state, intended for emergency purposes only, that cannot easily be taken back later when the crisis has passed.

Old Liberals had a moment of triumph, briefly, in the years before and after 1989, but they lost ground again and have been very much on the defensive lately, as everyone knows. Even their flagship publication, The Economist, proclaiming liberal principles to the world since 1843, has been sounding noticeably limp on many core issues of the day lately, reserving its hawkishness mostly for the war in Ukraine, where Old Liberals of a more realist perspective on international relations, for all their dislike of Putin and Russia, would prefer a little more reserve. But Old Liberals have been in the game for a long time, and they’ve seen much worse these past three hundred years. They may have to make their tactical retreats before the raging multitude sometimes, but they are not conceding the fight. Dug in behind their time-honored positions, they can be smoked out here and there, no doubt, but they are a tenacious and resilient lot, and you can be sure that they will be back. It is not their great numbers that give them power, but their reading and their ideas, standing on the shoulders of giants, not just riding out the latest fads.

So far so good, or so bad, as the case may be; but now you will presumably want to know where I stand myself with respect to these curious museum pieces. Am I a member of their venerable if perhaps a little dusty-looking club? The slightly dated quality, the untimeliness even, does not bother me in the least; if anything it recommends them to me, as someone not at home in the twenty-first century, and barely the twentieth even, as I’ve mentioned before (Posts #13 and #40). I am charmed by the fact that there was once, in the nineteenth century, a German-speaking branch off the Old Liberal tree that went by the fine name of Freisinn, though I generally prefer the English-speaking part of the family. My main difficulty in picking sides is that, in stark contrast to what Mr Trollope reports, my own political feelings and convictions have undergone such drastic and continual change throughout my life that I cannot set much store by them at any given time, the present day included.

What I see when I look at the world of politics is, first and foremost, a degree of complexity so overwhelming that it ought ever to induce humility before all else. Commonly it does nothing of the sort, alas, since human beings have a deep-rooted habit of confronting what is beyond them by blatantly oversimplifying everything until it seems manageable by their diminutive parameters—hence forever approaching their affairs with an entirely unwarranted level of confidence, a kind of everyday hubris that I find disconcerting at best and disgusting at worst. If decades of study have left me knowing even a tiny bit better than others, it would only be in the spirit of Plato’s Apology, that is to say, in the sense of having a clearer understanding of just how little I can truly comprehend. Consequently, it has become my default position to find myself lectured by folks who patently do not know what they are talking about, but who, unimpeded by such self-awareness, proclaim with great fanfare and utter self-assurance answers to the great riddles of life and politics that only a degree from YouTube can make plausible.

If you shift your perspective by a mere degree or two in politics, you will see a completely different picture (the kaleidoscope effect that I have mentioned before in Post #15). In this world of shades and vapors, it is not often that one comes across something that seems a little more substantial and less dishearteningly wind-powered. When I do find a bit of solidity, there is usually an Old Liberal behind it who starts from a position of diffidence not unlike mine. Herbert Spencer may be more known for his strident social architectonics, and almost unmentionable today on their account, but in one of his delightfully witty and astute shorter essays, he expresses my bottom line on politics better than just about anyone else:**

When I remember how many of my private schemes have miscarried; how speculations have failed, agents proved dishonest, and marriage a disappointment; how I did but pauperize the relative I sought to help; how my carefully governed son has turned out worse than most children; how what I desperately strove against as a misfortune did me immense good, while the objects I ardently pursued brought me little happiness when gained; how most of my pleasures have come from unexpected sources; when I recall these and hosts of like facts, I am struck with the incompetence of my intellect to prescribe for society.

Whatever one’s discomforts with political scenes, it is not, of course, possible to escape them altogether. But one can try to keep a healthy distance, and the dimension on which I have probably moved away furthest from the worldview of the secular left under whose wings I grew up is just this changed sense of the value of such engagement (that is to say, the general lack thereof). Where others see a field of glory with evident rights and wrongs and good and evil clearly delineated, I can only make out a field of bones fiercely fought over by rival packs of hungry and confused hounds. If the peace can be kept, I would say today, it is already a lot; if there are any tender shoots of benign order and good government in addition, say your prayers of thanksgiving. By all means enjoy life and liberty wherever you can, and pursue happiness to the best of your ability; but do not ask for much from politics, and under no circumstances place your hopes or dreams where they do not belong and can only be disappointed.***

Enough now with the equivocation, you may thunder: when the chips are down, will you stand up and be counted with the Old Liberals or not? Dear me, I am so averse to group-think and peer pressure of any sort that I cannot easily join even the most congenial groups—witness my ambivalence towards institutional Vipassana, no matter how faithfully I have practiced with them, and with them only, and how much I admire and applaud their mission. For me it is not, as it was for old Groucho, a question of refusing to be a member of any club that would have me; I appreciate such invitations where they are forthcoming. It’s just that I cannot abide the thought of having to toe a party line, no matter how reasonable, and I would therefore prefer to go without the membership card and remain a bona fide guest. If I were put on the spot, however, and absolutely compelled to pick a label and a side, then “advanced conservative liberal” would sound about right to me.

*That seemingly frivolous spending can nonetheless be quite beneficial to societies, though not in any way intended by the splurgers, is argued most convincingly by Hayek in chapter 3 of his Constitution of Liberty. For his reflections on why he was not a conservative, see the postscript.

**The quotation is taken from part I of “Over-Legislation” (1853), the first such essay I have in mind; the other two are “Political Fetishism” (1865) and the rather unexpected “Morals of Trade” (1859), which turns out to be about just the opposite. All these have stood the test of time rather well, it seems to me. The harsher aspects of Spencer’s social statics I know only at such a distance that I cannot speak to them. I do not, at any rate, believe that what a writer says well in one part of his work is invalidated—in my own case, in Spencer’s, or any other—by the fact that he may also talk nonsense elsewhere.

***One would search my life in vain, I reckon, for any great political disappointment that might have occasioned my disillusionment. I grew up under the most optimistic political circumstances possible, just as the thick ice of the Cold War was thawing and the first flowers of long-awaited spring were shooting up all around me. I was a teenager in Berlin when the Wall came down, though to me that was not so much the highlight as the culmination of what had begun, much more excitingly, in Poland, in Hungary, and in the Czech Republic. Those times too had their troubles, but they were hardly such as to inspire gloom about politics. My sobering turn came, I suspect, from some especially thoughtful teachers at the end of high school, from three years at Thomas Hobbes’ old college, and even more from reading the Leviathan, though not until several years later. It was the Old Liberals, in other words, that changed my mind the bookish way, even if it may be disputed whether Hobbes can be included in their ranks, since the club proper did not exist when he wrote; he’s an honorary member, at the very least.