The war on woke being waged by the conservative media, along with a handful of Conservative politicians, offers us some consolation in these dismal times. The left-liberal juggernaut still ploughs on, ‘deconstructing’ our institutions, desecrating everything in its path, but at least its progress has been slowed. However, what is forgotten is that by their dogmatic adherence to the tenets of neoliberalism, the modern-day globalist revival of classical liberalism, modern conservatives have contributed as much to the destruction of our Judaeo-Christian cultural inheritance as post-Marxists brandishing historic victimhood, white guilt, gender theory, post-colonialism, and the rest of the paraphernalia of critical theory. Indeed, it sometimes seems that, in their shared attachment to borderless globalism, the two are working in tandem.
Few economists would dispute the unparalleled efficiency with which markets can organise productive resources to meet the needs of countless individuals by spontaneously coordinating their dispersed knowledge, skills, and entrepreneurial energies. Markets bring a host of other benefits too, at once rational and moral, by making the individual responsible for his actions. Friedrich Hayek elaborated these arguments with unparalleled eloquence in a series of classic works, beginning with The Road to Serfdom. By the same token, few economists would dispute that markets can also fail, sometimes spectacularly. Whether it be periodic slumps or crashes, the extortion of excess profits, as practised by Big Tech and the utilities, predatory lending by banks, or ‘negative externalities’ like pouring sewage into rivers, to give but a few examples, markets cannot be left to themselves. Moreover, by creating wants through advertising, the market makes of us mindless consumers locked into a perpetual rat race.
But even if markets worked with perfect efficiency, were cleansed of all advertising other than the strictly informative, and ministered only to our ‘authentic’ needs, a fundamental problem remains: the neoclassical model of the economy, according to which perfectly competitive markets maximise consumer utility or welfare, is allied with a classical liberal-neoliberal-libertarian vision of society in which the freedom of the individual to choose his plan of life, along with his values and beliefs, is judged paramount. The individual is elevated to the status of a morally and rationally autonomous being, or ultimate arbiter or ‘sovereign chooser’.
In one sense, our freedom to lead the life of our own choosing free from coercion is a precious gift. It is the crowning glory of a free society. Nevertheless, the market cannot furnish all our needs. Crucially, our deepest values, beliefs, and principles, the things that lend purpose and meaning to our lives, and that guide us in our everyday decisions, are by their very nature not things that we might browse and choose in the marketplace. For by what criteria and from what standpoint could we make the choice? No matter how much we reflect on them, or submit ourselves to cross examination by Socratic questioning, our values cannot be deduced or critically justified by the exercise of rational thought, for they are themselves the original premises, the archai, on which any reasoning must be founded. Our deepest values and beliefs can have only one source: the traditions, practices, institutions, customs, manners, arts, and standards of discrimination of a cultural inheritance into which we are initiated, and in which we are cultivated and formed. Yet it is precisely the appeal to a cultural inheritance, to custom and tradition, that is systematically undermined by modern liberalism.
The hubris of the sovereign chooser, of man the prime mover who can live by his small stock of reason alone, is already apparent in classical liberalism. For John Stuart Mill, writing in his celebrated essay On Liberty, the enemy to be slain was ‘the despotism of custom’ precisely because it stifled ‘the spirit of liberty’. The crucial thing was that a person should ‘choose his plan of life for himself’ because it is only in making a choice that the faculties of reason ‘which are the distinctive endowment of a human being’ are exercised. Hayek, the greatest exponent of Mill’s liberal individualism in the twentieth century, took up these themes in The Road to Serfdom. For Hayek, the grounding principle of liberalism is the priority of the individual over society, community, and state. Society is essentially a collection of individuals whose infinite variety of needs, values and ends cannot be represented by some imposed ‘social goal’, ‘common purpose’, ‘common good’ or ‘single end’; for the essence of individualism is that the individual should be ‘the ultimate judge of his ends’.
The advent of John Rawls and modern egalitarian liberalism marks in many ways a natural progression from classical liberalism that is suited to our radically democratic age. It has clear left-liberal leanings in that it promotes equality and social justice as cardinal political and moral principles. But the individualistic core of classical liberalism remains firmly in place, with autonomous individuals pursuing their own freely and rationally chosen ends. Indeed, to guarantee our individual freedoms, our inalienable human rights, the egalitarian liberal state adopts a scrupulously neutral public position concerning all beliefs, values, social norms, and conceptions of the good. Such is the nature of modern liberal democracy.
In his celebrated Theory of Justice, Rawls follows his classical liberal forbears in arguing that the path to the good life consists of a person’s rationally deliberating between alternative life plans, and selecting the one that best realises ‘his most important aims’, ‘his more fundamental desires’. But how are our most important aims, our fundamental desires, our deepest values, and beliefs, formed and cultivated if not by initiation into a cultural inheritance? A combination of psychoanalysis and cultural tourism is unlikely to do the trick. And yet it is precisely the transmission of this cultural inheritance that is abandoned when the modern liberal state adopts the position of neutral arbiter, and leaves everything to the sovereign individual.
Ironically, it was Hayek, later in his career, who recognised the crucial importance of initiating people into a cultural inheritance; indeed, his defence of tradition is one of the most powerful ever penned. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek qualified the radical individualism of his earlier The Road to Serfdom by emphasizing the vital importance of institutions, of ‘established habits and traditions’, and of the ‘unconscious patterns of conduct’ that mediate the common framework of beliefs, values, and morals without which a free society cannot function. For human nature is ‘very largely’ the result of these patterns of conduct ‘which every individual learns with language and thinking’. Moreover, this framework can never be proved ‘demonstrably true’ – that is, justified rationally – as the Enlightenment rationalists would have us believe, because it is the fruit of generations of experience. Hayek’s conclusion, that ‘a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society’, is positively Burkean.
Paradoxically, Hayek concludes The Constitution of Liberty by rejecting conservatism, which he associates with an authoritarian ‘fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces’, in favour of liberal individualism because he trusts to the ‘free growth and spontaneous evolution’ of society. His argument is that although a cultural inheritance is passed on ‘by learning and imitation’, the cultural inheritance has itself evolved through an adaptive process of social evolution, which selects as exemplars the institutions, values, habits, and so forth of the most successful individuals and groups. Indeed, for Hayek, it is the mechanism by which civilization grows and progress is achieved, even at the cost of the destruction of traditional patterns of life. But even if we accepted Hayek’s account of civilizational progress, the transmission of a cultural inheritance would remain the bedrock on which a free society is founded. And it is precisely this foundation that modern egalitarian liberalism, in harness with global neoliberalism, destroys.
Indeed, with this modern mutation of classical liberalism, we end up with the worst of all worlds. Instead of a leisured aristocratic elite, whose cultivated tastes and patronage sustain a high culture, we have a techno-elite of Big Tech billionaires and a new professional managerial caste who work all hours to maintain their elite lifestyles. And whereas the old elite class generally felt some sense of responsibility towards the rest of the population, a sense of public service or noblesse oblige, the new meritocratic elite has a winner takes all mentality and regards the masses with contempt. The old feudalism has been replaced by the new, but the new feudalism is the more sinister because, as Joel Kotkin argues in The Coming of Neo-feudalism, the advent of the digital revolution, data gathering, social media, electronic surveillance and artificial intelligence will enable those who control these technologies to control every aspect of our lives, our behaviour, and even our thoughts. Huxley’s Brave New World seems more prophetic by the day. Meanwhile, global markets undermine our customs, traditions, and institutions, our local loyalties and attachments, and our settled patterns of life, because these are hindrances to the free play of market forces. Yet for neoliberals, this dissolution of society into a mass of atomistic consumers is justified because the freedom of the individual, the sovereign chooser, is always paramount.
It may not be practicable, or desirable, in this era of democracy to reinstate a leisured aristocratic class. But the hallmark of a conservative ought to be that he wishes to transmit to future generations the traditions, pursuits, achievements, norms, manners, standards of behaviour, and loyalties, along with the institutions, that we most cherish and value – in other words, the Judaeo-Christian moral and cultural inheritance that has taken the distinctive form in these islands of English civilization. And if this cultural inheritance is to furnish the common framework of institutions, norms, customs and so forth on which a free society must be founded, as Hayek argued, the state must publicly endorse this inheritance as our common culture. A conservative ought also to recognise that central to any civilization is a hierarchy of tastes and standards of discrimination, that there are higher forms of culture and art that are necessarily the preserve of an elite, and that this is all to the common good. By the same token, a culture or civilization promotes certain ideals of public service, of virtuous conduct, of manners and sportsmanship, even of gentlemanly and ladylike behaviour. Again, this is not an argument for resurrecting a feudal or an aristocratic society. But since all societies, communes excepted, are stratified in one way or another, we might as well aim for a society that is, in T S Eliot’s words, ‘healthily stratified’ – in other words, civilized.
The final nail in the coffin of our cultural inheritance is signified by liberalism’s latest and final mutation, the extension of egalitarian liberalism to incorporate the ‘insights’ of post-Marxist critical theory. The outcome is the diverse inclusive multicultural society, in which hegemonic power structures are dismantled and bourgeois norms dissolved. Again, this could be seen as a natural progression, as individuals are liberated to assume a more radical transgressive form of freedom – choosing their own gender, for example – and oppressed minorities are empowered. And it is facilitated by global markets, which erase national boundaries and promote free movement across open borders. The difference is that whereas egalitarian liberalism merely abandons the transmission of our common culture, multiculturalism actively repudiates it. And yet conservatives who prosecute the war on woke cannot see that, by their blind adherence to the dogmas of neoliberalism, they are themselves complicit in the destruction of our free society. For when the bedrock of our Western civilization goes, our free society goes with it.
For Hayek, an émigré from Central Europe who witnessed first-hand the rise of National Socialism, the choice we faced was between spontaneous individualism and coercive collectivism. He could not have foreseen that our free society would be sacrificed on the altar of mutant liberalism.
Alistair Miller is our Assistant Editor
