(Pictured: A product of liberalism - Magna Carta, 1215)
Liberalism means many things to many people. It is a broad-church containing collectivists, radical egalitarians, and libertarian minimal-state intervention property advocates. This confusion, as stated by the Stanford Encyclopaedia of philosophy (including the Norther American use of the word), comes from the post-WWII renewed confidence in politicians, the seeming need at the time to redress the imbalances of capitalism, and most importantly a distrust in private property rights. In this sense then, new school liberalism is the anthesis of classical liberals such as Mill and Locke who saw property rights as foundational and mistrusted any form that state intervention that wasn’t to secure those rights. It has been said that new-school liberals like to talk about how to distribute the pie whereas classical liberalism’s theory of justice is a theory about how to treat bakers (Schmidtz, 2022). It would be helpful then, to not lump these groups in together, as they take some separating. This is the downside to using the word so liberally, if I can permit myself to use that word without infinite regress. What’s more, in using liberalism as a slur, Knowland commits a similar error to the Wokeists who insist that one is a Nazi for unintentionally misgendering someone. When you define something so broadly, it stops meaning anything. When you define it wrongly, you’re not talking about the same thing anyway.
So, allow me to define the species of liberalism that I want
to defend. A Hayekian concept of liberalism, with a sprinkling of Popper.
Liberalism, according to Hayek, “is concerned mainly with limiting the coercive
powers of all government, whether democratic or not”. That’s it. People must be
free to carry out their volitional free freely bound only by the law and the
government’s enforcement of it. Its true liberalism doesn’t tell you what to
do, what to think, or what to feel. It doesn’t tell you how to behave or why to
behave that way. But it trusts -because it knows- that once its rules are followed, good prevails
and evil is defeated. As Knowland correctly points out ‘autonomy is the citadel
of liberalism.’ But where Knowland goes wrong is in thinking that this means
anything goes. Knowland states that ‘the trans ‘woman’ is simply a man pursuing
the logic of liberalism to its conclusion, and demanding autonomy from biology
to ‘author’ himself as he chooses.’ This is false.
(Pictured: Friedrich Hayek)
Enter Karl Popper. Popper was a British-Austrian philosopher famous for popularising the criteria of demarcation separating science from non-science as well as insisting that knowledge, of which science is one part, advances by falsifiability. Popper said that we don’t create knowledge, as the rationalists believe, nor do we go into the world and verify or prove something to be true, as is the common misconception of science, but we falsify bad ideas by rigorous testing. Falsified ideas (bad ones) fall by the wayside. Unfalsified ideas (good ones) tend to stick around. Good ideas include the system which facilitates all other ideas. Good ideas include mathematical theorems, they include the respectful relationship between a father and a son and they include the computer on which you are reading these words, and all other forms of technological innovation for that matter.
(Pictured: Sir Karl Popper)
Liberalism accepts that people might choose to advance bad
ideas over good ones. They might cut off their genitalia and live as members of
the opposite sex due to a faddish trend, but the knowledge imbued within the system
tends to facilitate the aggregation of good ideas, over the long haul, unless the system becomes corrupted somehow.
Liberalism even allows for a conservative bias as it expects new ideas to
undergo a high threshold of falsifiability before being temporarily promoted
to the realms of knowledge, which expectation of its future demotion to the realms of falsity. Liberalism trusts that societies, on the whole,
most of the time, and in the end will refrain from throwing the proverbial baby
out with the metaphysical bathwater. Classical liberalism has no opinion on our
genitals, but it demands that claims related to them are subject to relentless examination and scrutiny. If new ideas fail to meet
this esteemed threshold, they are rejected outright. Wokeism specifically, and the decay of our cities more generally, has
befallen us not because of too much liberalism, but of the failure to pressure test
bad ideas.
These ideas have become dominant within our institutions
because of a failure to engage with past bad ideas.
Certain ideas became too politically sensitive, at first among polite conversation,
and then among all conversation. It led to the cancellation of academics like Richard
Murray was cancelled and treated terribly by academic and institutional elites
for a fairly vanilla book on differences between group. Now, biologists squirm
in their seats when talking about biological-based differences between men and
women. Research funding is impossible. Because we were unable to engage in a
marketplace of ideas, the market became rigged. This explains why the controversy
about a gender pay gap or differential outcomes between races. The blame is put
on societal injustice because no discussion regarding the grounds it’s based on
has been allowed to be had. We sealed off certain conversational topics like a
crime scene, we kept the sunlight away and now a hundred species of toxic mold
have flowered. We built a Jenga tower of lies and misinformation.
When ideas become undiscussable or taboo – an intolerant
system – new ideas are not allowed to instantiate themselves. Conservative
systems preserve essential knowledge, but they also preserve bad ideas which can
never be expunged, and they don’t allow for new and innovative ideas ever found
because of the axiomatic foundations of the system. When conservativism is
concerned too greatly, see Shariah law. When it’s not conserved enough, see
modern transgender activist priests conducting services in the Catholic church.
Our society is suffering not from an excess of liberalism, but from a failure
to apply liberal principles evenly or consistently enough. Good luck inventing
the microwave in pure patriarchy.
(Pictured: turning the 'knobs' too far; a lack of conservation in the Christianity)
Ignoring our biological instincts, our innate tendencies are
a rejection of foundational knowledge that need not invoke God or natural law. Like
the child psychologists who tell mothers to ignore the crying calls of their
babies, or the atomised cities we live in away from our close-knit families and
friends, we ignore foundational knowledge at our peril. Living in such a way is
an affront to instinctive knowledge and we can therefore say that such types of
knowledge constitute a good idea. It needs no special metaphysical category as
Knowland, due to his unwavering religious beliefs, wants to give it.
One final weakness in Knowland’s argument is the
conservation of a very bad idea: unquestioning loyalty out of a sense of duty to
one’s father. According to Knowland, a son has a duty to his father, regardless
of the morality of the father. What if the father is a violent, alcoholic drunk?
On his account, the duty is God-given. A father is a father is a father. Even
if that father is an abusive or dastardly one. This is where liberalism steps
in and so no – a bad father is a bad father is a bad father. It allows for a
way out of the cliched religious households with a God-fearing patriarch everybody
in the family hates and allows people to choose another way ---- in the freedom
of the knowledge that fathers, and sons are better off together. Perhaps
Knowledge needs more liberalism in his view. Not only is it wrong, but in
service to an ultimately inextricably service to natural laws, it’s also
alienating natural allies, and therefore a mug’s game.
(Pictured: In liberalism we trust. The truth will always set you free)
