Opinion | The Great Struggle for Liberalism
I’m a kind of individuals who subscribes to the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s doctrine: “Man’s seek for that means is the first motivation in his life.” To really feel at residence on this planet, folks must see themselves serving some good — doing essential work, loving others nicely, residing inside coherent ethical communities, striving on behalf of some set of beliefs.
The nice liberal societies that Zakaria describes expanded and celebrated particular person alternative and particular person freedom. However when liberalism thrived, that non-public freedom lay upon a basis of commitments and ethical obligations that precede alternative: our obligations to our households, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.
Over the previous few generations, the celebration of particular person freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Particularly after World Conflict II after which into the Nineteen Sixties, we noticed the privatization of morality — the rise of what got here to be referred to as the ethos of ethical freedom. People have been much less prone to assume that folks study values by residing in coherent ethical communities. They have been extra prone to undertake the assumption that every particular person has to give you his or her personal private judgment of right and wrong. Way back to 1955, the columnist Walter Lippmann noticed that this was going to result in hassle: “If what is sweet, what is correct, what’s true, is just what the person ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we’re exterior the traditions of civility,” he wrote.
Belief is the religion that different folks will do what they should do. When there aren’t any shared ethical values and norms, then social belief plummets. Individuals really feel alienated and underneath siege, and, as Hannah Arendt noticed, lonely societies flip to authoritarianism. Individuals eagerly observe the good chief and protector, the one who will lead the us/them wrestle that appears to offer life that means.
Throughout our present second of worldwide populism, the liberal custom is underneath risk. Many individuals have gone economically nationalist and culturally traditionalist. Around the globe, authoritarian moralists promise to revive the outdated methods, the outdated faith, nationwide greatness. “There are particular issues that are extra essential than ‘me,’ than my ego — household, nation, God,” Viktor Orban declared. Such males promise to revive the anchors of cultural, ethical and civic stability, however they use brutal and bigoted strongman strategies to get there.