COVID and the death of liberalism

[Aurelius]

https://unherd.com/2022/05/covid-was-liberalisms-endgame/

I don't find the parts about Hobbes and Locke particularly relevant, because I don't think managerial bureaucrats are thinking about, or care about, the varying Enlightenment-era conceptions of the state of nature. The overall argument is very good though.

Some key passages:

The Nineties saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasise the cognitive incompetence of human beings, deposing the “rational actor” model of human behaviour. This gave us nudge theory , a way to alter people’s behaviour without having to persuade them of anything. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this approach has been institutionalised, on both sides of the Atlantic. The innovation achieved here is in the way government conceives its subjects: not as citizens whose considered consent must be secured, but as particles to be steered through a science of behaviour management that relies on our pre-reflective cognitive biases.

Lockdowns kicked our social atomisation to a level we’ve never seen before. Loneliness profoundly damages our ability to orient in the world and distinguish what is real from what is in one’s head, as the work of Ian Marcus Corbin shows. With little shared material existence to provide an intersubjective anchor, we found what solace we could in disembodied interaction on social media. Screen time rose dramatically for all demographics. But such interaction tends toward the feedback loops and brittleness of merely verbally constituted tribes who have no skin in the game because they lack the shared, pragmatic interests of those who inhabit a real world together.

It has been said that, in its formalism and insistence on neutral procedures, liberalism has an “empty centre”, denuded of substantive commitments. But political life abhors a vacuum, and the center doesn’t remain empty. The good that was latched onto as a source of collective meaning during the pandemic was that of minimising deaths attributable to a single cause, never mind the wider field of harms done by the lockdowns outside this tunnel vision.

This collective purpose was of a peculiar, negative sort. It required us to deny positive, substantive goods that make life worthwhile, in particular those of human connection. Young children remained isolated or masked through two years of crucial social development; dying grandparents were denied the company of loved ones. The effect was a kind of enforced nihilism. We had to be actively detached, by police power if necessary, from sources of meaning that might call into question the bureaucratic fixation on a few narrow metrics.

Platonic psychology offers a useful point of reference for grasping the transformation Hobbes aimed at. Thumos, often translated as spiritedness, is the part of the soul prone to taking offence, and to making claims for one’s own dignity. That is because, more broadly, thumos asserts the value of things, creating the field for moral choice. If all goes well, it does this in dialectic with logos, the reasoning part of the soul. Working together in a well-ordered soul, they don’t merely assert, they are alert to the value of things.

The idea that emotion should have any positive epistemic role to play in grasping reality is foreign to modern thought. Pride can only be a source of partiality; to be “judgmental” is to be prejudicial. The ancient perspective offers a critical challenge, answering that reason without spirited evaluation fails to apprehend things in their true colours, because the lifeworld of human beings is shot through with value and cannot be adequately described in “neutral” terms that are value-free.

This is a very well-written piece about what I see as the fatal flaw of modern liberalism: its tendency toward a totalizing project of maximizing the "utility" of humans, as understood by statistical metrics legible to thumos-less bean counters deep within an impenetrable bureaucratic state. The result is a regime in which humans are simply replaceable and interchangeable utility-generating cogs, stripped of their inner lives, and in which soul and spirit are frowned upon. I don't see how in today's society liberalism can be separated from this tendency. To me liberalism is dying, and this is both thrilling and terrifying: we don't know what will replace it. It could be the kind of high-minded civic republicanism characteristic of the American founding, with the recognition that rights and duties, and society and the individual, depend on each other and are nothing without the other. Or it could be an even more totalitarian technological fascism. Or I could be wrong and we could keep hurtling toward pod-life "own nothing and be happy" fully-automated-luxury-communist hell.

[brucejoel99]

Liberal individualism has an innate tendency towards authoritarianism

Accepting the premise for the sake of the argument, this isn't exclusive to liberals. It's literally just a narrow application of the idea that people are the way that they are because it gives them a sense of control. The exact same can be said about conservatives when they don't value freedom of choice or consider a majority of the public's opinion on a political decision.

But fr, COVID wasn't our endgame. A one-world NWO government is. A pandemic was just the vehicle to get us there

[Alcibiades]

I find this genre of article exceedingly tedious. Aside from the pontificating on philosophy and social science that the author clearly doesn’t understand (embarrassing himself in an attempt to sound oh-so-intellectual), with Covid conspiracy theories chucked in for good measure, people have been predicting the death of liberalism for as long as it’s been around — and yet it persists as the most successful political system ever attempted.

[John Dule]

Interesting use of the summum malum to make the Hobbesian connection, but ultimately just a really bad reading of Hobbes. Hobbes' philosophy was more about articulating the relationship between man and government rather than justifying any particular actions taken by the government (especially the administrative state, which would be as alien to him as iPhones and Harry Styles).

[Blue3]

I don't see anything interesting or well-written about that article, and I still struggle to see the point of it.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

This is a very well-written piece about what I see as the fatal flaw of modern liberalism: its tendency toward a totalizing project of maximizing the "utility" of humans, as understood by statistical metrics legible to thumos-less bean counters deep within an impenetrable bureaucratic state. The result is a regime in which humans are simply replaceable and interchangeable utility-generating cogs, stripped of their inner lives, and in which soul and spirit are frowned upon. I don't see how in today's society liberalism can be separated from this tendency.

Like, even accepting this characterisation, in what sense is all this "liberalism"? It's just modern society. People want more wealth and to live longer and be happier, and elect governments and construct bureaucracies to make decisions for them that attempt to facilitate that. What even is the alternative vision of society? In what ways would the "high-minded civic republicanism characteristic of the American founding" be any different? Would there no longer be any specialist medical knowledge, so public health bureaucracies wouldn't exist? Would governments and the electorate no longer care about people dying en masse from pandemics, presumably because everyone is so virtuous and fulfilled?

When the theatres of London were closed for 14 months in 1592-3 due to plague, was that the "subterranean core of the liberal project" asserting itself attempting to "remake man"? Or just governments doing what they've always done during epidemics?  

The vibe I get is "society would be better if I was dictator and could force everyone do what I want and value what I value". Death of liberalism indeed.

[PSOL]

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

Well, based on what we define as liberalism and the general direction of the Chinese government, it may paint a complex and nuanced picture

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

'liberalism' is a term that has been dragged through mud by conservatives for decades, hence why it is much more electable to identify as a 'progressive' than as a liberal. So, by conservative logic, China is liberal.

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

Well, based on what we define as liberalism and the general direction of the Chinese government, it may paint a complex and nuanced picture

And this is the opposite stupid point. Horseshoe theory confirmed.

[PSOL]

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

'liberalism' is a term that has been dragged through mud by conservatives for decades, hence why it is much more electable to identify as a 'progressive' than as a liberal. So, by conservative logic, China is liberal.

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

Well, based on what we define as liberalism and the general direction of the Chinese government, it may paint a complex and nuanced picture

And this is the opposite stupid point. Horseshoe theory confirmed.

Nothing Xi is doing, from selling off of SOEs to presenting this cosmopolitan kitsch monoculture of Han people as the norm, is anything different from what liberals in Western Europe or the Anglophone do. You have no argument on how the CCP isn’t already towards liberalism enough to qualify for the moniker.

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

'liberalism' is a term that has been dragged through mud by conservatives for decades, hence why it is much more electable to identify as a 'progressive' than as a liberal. So, by conservative logic, China is liberal.

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

Well, based on what we define as liberalism and the general direction of the Chinese government, it may paint a complex and nuanced picture

And this is the opposite stupid point. Horseshoe theory confirmed.

Nothing Xi is doing, from selling off of SOEs to presenting this cosmopolitan kitsch monoculture of Han people as the norm, is anything different from what liberals in Western Europe or the Anglophone do. You have no argument on how the CCP isn’t already towards liberalism enough to qualify for the moniker.

Xi is an authoritarian mass murderer.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Nothing Xi is doing, from selling off of SOEs to presenting this cosmopolitan kitsch monoculture of Han people as the norm, is anything different from what liberals in Western Europe or the Anglophone do. You have no argument on how the CCP isn’t already towards liberalism enough to qualify for the moniker.

I don't think China has sold off SOEs in recent years, and if anything the current trend is towards greater party-state control over the economy. And I'll skip the whitewashing of recent Uyghur and other minority suppression. But even accepting your characterisation, a definition of liberalism as = private ownership + cultural homogenisation would seem to make almost every government in human history liberal, including e.g. Nazi Germany. But this is just entirely divorced from the way the term has been used and understood historically and today.

[Samof94]

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

'liberalism' is a term that has been dragged through mud by conservatives for decades, hence why it is much more electable to identify as a 'progressive' than as a liberal. So, by conservative logic, China is liberal.

TL;DR: "everything I don't like is the failure of liberalism"

Weird article. Since the first and harshest lockdowns have been in China, is the author claiming that the Communist Party of China is liberal?

Well, based on what we define as liberalism and the general direction of the Chinese government, it may paint a complex and nuanced picture

And this is the opposite stupid point. Horseshoe theory confirmed.

Nothing Xi is doing, from selling off of SOEs to presenting this cosmopolitan kitsch monoculture of Han people as the norm, is anything different from what liberals in Western Europe or the Anglophone do. You have no argument on how the CCP isn’t already towards liberalism enough to qualify for the moniker.

Xi is an authoritarian mass murderer.

Who is scared of a cartoon bear

[Independents for George Santos]

This is is a thought-provoking piece, if a tad dense for me since I'm rusty on my enlightenment-era philosophy and the early modern origins of small-l liberalism, but we're certainly hurtling towards the end of the post-war liberal order and COVID has accelerated that. Your point about utilitarianism is interesting to me, as in my recent dives into economic theory I've seen some try and salvage liberalism from simply maximizing arbitrary utility to instead more of a Rawlsian "original position" view of redistribution but perhaps that's more progressive than liberal in the classical sense. Returning to a sort of localized collective responsibility could also be a likely outcome rather than a massive collective of the commie bogeyman NWO variety. Honestly, I have no clue where we're going or if grand societal shifts are even possible at this point where we're all plugged-in. I'm just along for the ride and want to do the best for myself and for those around me.

[Beet]

The notion that liberalism treats humans as soulless interchangeable cogs is a centuries old criticism of it, but it is actually liberalism's greatest asset and strength. By sacrificing all sense of what is commonly called "humanity" in favor of the system, it actually represents the highest stage of fascism, and thus is ruthlessly efficient at crushing all its opponents.

[Asenath Waite]

The notion that liberalism treats humans as soulless interchangeable cogs is a centuries old criticism of it, but it is actually liberalism's greatest asset and strength. By sacrificing all sense of what is commonly called "humanity" in favor of the system, it actually represents the highest stage of fascism, and thus is ruthlessly efficient at crushing all its opponents.

wait, what?

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Just remember we always had plagues and we had polio and Chicken pox and there weren't any lockdowns, COVID is very similar to both diseases but since the Industrial revolution it's be polio and Chicken pox and HIV and now it's COVID

They always said that companies should always be prepared to go virtual in case of a Pandemic


COVID is another plague people immigration reform and secure the border and get rid of homelessness the Govt can eradicate diseases but they want to contiue giving athletes fat millions of dollars

What did Trump and McConnell do as soon as Pandemic was over not reform immigrants or section 8 but get sports back online

The Rs have been in control of the H and the only ones on section 8 are immigrants

I am not saying athletes should not get paid it should be 15/20M max not 45M they already have endorsement