In its Christmas edition, the Economist ran a leading article on the need for even more liberalism in 2017 – despite its many sets-back in 2016. I was struck by the passage:
As a set of beliefs that emerged at the start of the 19th century to oppose both the despotism of absolute monarchy and the terror of revolution, liberalism warns that uninterrupted power corrupts. Privilege becomes self-perpetuating. Consensus stifles creativity and initiative. In an ever-shifting world, dispute and argument are not just inevitable; they are welcome because they lead to renewal.
What is more, liberals have something to offer societies struggling with change. In the 19th century, as today, old ways were being upended by relentless technological, economic, social and political forces. People yearned for order. The illiberal solution was to install someone with sufficient power to dictate what was best — by slowing change if they were conservative, or smashing authority if they were revolutionary. You can hear echoes of that in calls to “take back control”, as well as in the mouths of autocrats who, summoning an angry nationalism, promise to hold back the cosmopolitan tide.
Liberals came up with a different answer. Rather than being concentrated, power should be dispersed, using the rule of law, political parties and competitive markets. Rather than putting citizens at the service of a mighty, protecting state, liberalism sees individuals as uniquely able to choose what is best for themselves. Rather than running the world through warfare and strife, countries should embrace trade and treaties.
This last paragraphs seems particularly significant. The article ends:
"... 2016 also represented a demand for change. Never forget liberals’ capacity for reinvention. Do not underestimate the scope for people, including even a Trump administration and post-Brexit Britain, to think and innovate their way out of trouble. The task is to harness that restless urge, while defending the tolerance and open-mindedness that are the foundation stones of a decent, liberal world."
The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland added to this steely determination:
"If liberal means holding true to the values of the Enlightenment, including a belief in facts and evidence and reason, then call me a liberal. And if liberal means cherishing the norms and institutions that protect and sustain democracy, from a free press to an independent judiciary, then call me a liberal. For those values are under assault just now, in a way few of us ever imagined."
And Nigel Biggar in The Times added to all this by reminding us that some at least of the Enlightenment's heritage came out of somewhere.
Truth, goodness, and beauty surely transcend time and place; no one culture has a monopoly of wisdom. Nevertheless, some values are more at home in one culture than another, more deeply embedded in its traditions of thought and enshrined in its law and institutions. The primacy of the individual over the state is arguably more entrenched in those western cultures shaped by Christianity than in those eastern ones shaped by Confucianism.
...................................
If, as I noted above, these points are significant:
- Rather than being concentrated, power should be dispersed, using the rule of law, political parties and competitive markets.
- Rather than putting citizens at the service of a mighty, protecting state, liberalism sees individuals as uniquely able to choose what is best for themselves.
- Rather than running the world through warfare and strife, countries should embrace trade and treaties.
There is surely a need for our education system to embrace these ideas, but it doesn't, at least not in any robust sense. That has also to be the case where an education system embraces sustainability.
Responses
Though somehow, under Neo-liberalism, power has been dispersed disproportionately to 'competitive markets' (corporate business) with an ever decreasing share of power for the 'rule of law' and 'political parties'. The agenda has been liberty from the restraints of laws and regulations for businesses, even if the liberty they benefit from compromises the liberty of individuals. I.e. freedom from polluted skies and waterways; freedom from longer working hours, wage exploitation, workplace discrimination; protection against mass accumulation of our digital footprints; protection against the destruction of natural environments that are important to our emotional and physical wellbeing; and so on and on. Put simply, old Liberalism was more about protecting individuals against discrimination based on race, age, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality and so on. In many ways neo-Liberalism is about freeing businesses up from pesky laws and regulations designed to protect these sorts of individual liberties - they are opposites. The great con trick of the last 35 years has been to present liberty for business and liberty for individuals as the same thing, when quite clearly they are not. Jonathan Freeland is a liberal, but is he a Neoliberal?
The word 'their' in this sentence from the Economist article is particularly pertinent:
'Do not underestimate the scope for people, including even a Trump administration and post-Brexit Britain, to think and innovate their way out of trouble.'
Shouldn't the word 'their' actually be 'our' here? (A Freudian slip on behalf of the Economist perhaps?) Surely it should be 'our' if we assume Governments are there to look after our collective interests in a democratic world? I have no doubt that Trump and all the billionaires that circle him are innovating 'their' way out of trouble, after all it is a pretty innovative move to run for President and assume the power to reset the rule of law in favour of your own needs. Trump and his hangers on (on both sides of the Atlantic) recognise that in a (globally) competitive market, US companies are increasingly un-competitive. The only way he can make them more competitive is to reshape the law in his favour - and now he can. I have very little faith that Trump is seeking to innovate 'our' way out of trouble, he is quite clearly demonstrating his desire to only steer his chosen ones out of trouble and will do it at the expense of anything or anyone 'non-American'.
A restless urge for reform certainly exists, what seems to be required is a far broader awareness that control needs to be taken back from 'competitive markets' (not from a 'protective state') and returned to political parties and the rule of law - a profound re-balancing effort is needed. It is wishful thinking at best to assume that citizens can't be controlled by liberated businesses in a competitive market and the education system is a great example of this.
Neoliberal reformers of education would argue that privatisation of the the education system in the form of academies, free schools, public schools and so on liberates individuals (as owners or employees of independent education institutions / businesses) to educate in a way that they see fit. But what it is doing is handing control over what and how we are taught in schools and higher education to the competitive market. Education is being shaped by the value systems of the businesses that control it. It is therefore not necessarily being shaped in the collective interests of individuals (or sustainability).
Political parties (and movements) need to get their act together and wrestle control back in education as in many other areas. Power will then once again be held in the hands of the many rather than the few. Maybe we need more Old Liberalism guided by empowered politicians acting in the interests of others and less Neo-Liberalism guided by autocrats like Donald Trump, Liam Fox, Iain Duncan Smith et al?
I second much of what Morgan so eloquently stated above. I'd further challenge the notion that liberalism is a bulwark against the concentration of power. That's nonsense when it comes to the accumulation of capital and its influence on the political system. What's liberalism's sustainable mechanism for preventing the unhealthy accumulation of capital which is now, and has always been, translated into political power? See: Piketty. Putting such mechanisms into place is a form of socialism (e.g., Piketty's global wealth tax idea). Does the contemporary liberal tendency (neoliberalism) have any interest in socializing capital? Quite the opposite. Because capitalist class relations.