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Are we all ultimately deep down liberals, but just can’t see it, or can’t bring ourselves to admit it?

I mean, are all of us, whether conservative, progressive, libertarian, Marxist, anarchist, actually liberals in practice, whatever our public rhetoric?

Yoram Hazony argues that “no human being ever attains a point of view that is ‘external’ to tradition. Instead, we approach the truth from within a tradition in which we were raised…”

He is mounting a defence of conservatism and in this specific context challenging the naive view that reason can overcome the particularities of context, tradition, culture, mores etc.

But Hazony’s entire thesis is predicated on the notion that the dominant tradition in places like Australia, America, Canada, the UK and Kiwiland is liberalism, i.e., a tradition that privileges universal rights, universal (and abstract) reason and the sanctity of individual choice (I think he is right).

He notes that there are, of course, “individuals who are embarrassed by their inheritance and immerse themselves in foreign ideas…”

But again, here, he is talking about liberals abandoning conservative tradition.

Strange Notions

I think the reverse is probably more accurate today, i.e., virtually every conservative in the West has been reared and inculcated in a culture of liberalism and some liberal discontents have embraced conservatism as a remedy and alternative to the liberalism into which they were born and raised.

It is worth asking what constitutes a “foreign idea” now in our contemporary Western cultures and societies. I don’t think conservatism could be characterised as a “foreign idea,” but I do think these days it is an “alien idea” for most people.

I think an implication of Hazony’s insight here about the way that we are born into political contexts which indelibly shape the kind of people we are, is that those of us who embrace an alternative paradigm at some point in our lives are really liberal converts, whether we know it or not.

Inherent Influence

The interesting thing to ponder here is the extent to which liberalism still lingers within the convert and shapes their conservatism, Marxism, libertarianism etc.

The very conceit that one can just choose a political ideology without any influence from the underlying culture or any other political ideology, which is to say pick, choose and swap political paradigms, is a classic idea of liberalism, namely, the free choice and individual determination fallacies.

One way of analysing alternatives to liberalism, like conservatism, is to look for the influence of underlying liberal ideas and then classify according to the type of liberal ideas operative in the conservatism confessed. If you look hard enough, you will find at least some liberal ideas working away within the contemporary conservative, for better or for worse (I don’t necessarily assume worse in every instance).

I’m willing to own up to this in the sense that I suffer from a seemingly ineradicable practical attachment to a hyper-individualism and over-reliance on rationalism — classic liberal traits.

In other conservatives, I see a massive emphasis on individual rights, freedom of choice and other liberal concepts that were either criticised in an older conservative intellectual tradition or balanced with things like “authority” and “constraints”. (Hazony, to his credit, presents a kind of old-school conservatism that talks about freedom AND constraints as mutually reinforcing, as well as loyalty and honour, including to those in authority and institutional leadership, and so on — ideas not so popular with today’s libcons.)

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Originally published on Dr Jonathan Cole’s page.
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Photo by Vincent M.A. Janssen.