What We Are To Each Other

Why I prefer liberalism's problems

In conversation with someone I said this: liberalism has its problems and also I greatly prefer those problems to the problems of what came before. In response, my friend asked me, directly: “why do you prefer liberalism to what came before”?

Here’s my response:

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I’m grateful that you asked me this, because the very fact that you asked me illuminates what I find preferable about liberalism to what came before it. What I prefer is something like a picture of what people are to each other.

Here is the condensed version. Liberalism’s fundamental model of human relationships is adult-to-adult. Two or more equals reason together, negotiate, persuade, and (crucially) give and withdraw consent. Neither one owes the other obedience as a standing condition of the relationship. Authority has to earn its place in the currency of reasons. The relationship between human beings, including those with authority, is ultimately a horizontal one.

Conservatism’s fundamental model is parent-to-child. A superior authority directs and instructs a dependent subordinate. The parent owes the child discipline and protection, the child owes the parent gratitude and deference. The relationship is vertical, and the verticality is the whole point. You don’t ask a parent to justify a rule to a toddler’s satisfaction before the toddler is required to follow it - that would invert the whole order of things, and it would generally be impossible.

As I see it this vertical, parent-child picture shows up in at least three registers in the conservative cosmos. There’s the literal register: the family as the basic unit, duties distributed by sex, the household as a small kingdom with a rightful leader. There’s the societal register: tradition itself is taken as a kind of parent to which all of us are children, owing it deference even and indeed especially when we don’t understand it. There’s the theological register, which is really the same move pushed to its limit. You and I would be depraved to claim we know better than God, to demand that He justify Himself to us as though we were His conversational equals. So what if something in us rebels against a commandment? The rebellion is just evidence of our fallenness. The parent-to-child relation, here, is the structure of reality itself.

I don’t think this picture is obviously false or contemptible, but I do think that the rosy version of it glosses over a great deal, and the gloss is where I want to push back.

The strongest conservative argument for authority-deference is an argument from survival. A practice that has lasted centuries has been tested against reality in ways no individual reasoner could ever hope to match. The accumulated wisdom of a civilization outruns the cleverness of any one person standing in the present. I do think there’s something to this. At the very least, I do think that part of growing up is realizing that not everyone who came before you was stupid or delusional.

That said, longevity is not the same as truth, and I think this is where the argument about survival smuggles a lot in that doesn’t look good when you look at it directly. Why a pattern survived is a separate question from whether it’s good, and survival has many causes that have nothing to do with goodness. A social pattern can persist as the self-image of the people who won - the victors get to call their arrangement “the natural order” and the arrangement gets to endure because they control the armies and the schools. A pattern can also capture something partially true and then preserve it in a grotesque, extreme form, the way a useful instinct can harden into a phobia. Some patterns are stable precisely because they’re efficient at dumping avoidable suffering onto people who can’t push back. A hierarchy that costs its losers everything and its winners nothing is, in a grim sense, very well engineered to last. Stability is evidence of something, but not always of what the conservative wants it to be.

None of that is a reason to torch tradition. It’s a reason for something more interesting: gratitude for the chance to reconstruct what worked, rather than simply inherit it whole. To sort the load-bearing walls from the decorative ones we keep out of habit. That sorting is exactly the adult-to-adult activity - sitting across from the past as something we can question, keep, amend, or release, rather than something we have to kneel before or die.

There are serious replies to this, of course. A more pessimistic conservative would say that humanity is too stupid, too weak, too corrupt to do that sorting well. Hand people the keys and they’ll drive into a wall. Others may critique the very idea of critique at all - We are born into languages, families, moral traditions, religious inheritances, and civic institutions that make deliberation possible in the first place and cannot hope to reconstruct them from nothing according to our present preferences. I take these replies seriously and grant them real force as counsels of caution. Adult-adult deliberation does indeed depend upon structures that were not the direct product of said deliberation. Reconstruction can go catastrophically wrong. Revolutions can replace a bad order with something worse. I take these arguments for humility in deliberation, not an argument against deliberation itself. It doesn’t tell us to stop reasoning together and resume kneeling. We can acknowledge debts to the past without offering the past a perpetual veto over what we can become.

History is full of institutions that once performed genuine services and later survived as vacant claims to deference: aristocracies that continued demanding privilege after their martial function had disappeared, religious authorities that preserved old hierarchies long after their original social setting had changed. The general danger is not tradition itself, but authority out-living the purpose that once made it intelligible. I can’t claim that liberal democracy is perfect, nor that it’s historically privileged, nor that it’s guaranteed to endure where the older orders failed. It too could ossify, its institutions could become husks collecting deference just like all the others. I can’t pretend to a view from nowhere. I was formed by the very order I’m defending, and I know it. I won’t, and can’t, claim that liberalism is true in some final, terminal sense.

What I will claim is narrower: gratitude for the conceptual tools I happen to have been handed. Part of taking those tools seriously is taking their limits seriously. Taking liberalism seriously means naming the ways the adult-to-adult picture can curdle into something thin, or lonely, or naive about power and then choosing those tools anyway. I choose them because they let me say all of this out loud to you, and let you answer back as my equal, and let neither of us close the conversation by appeal to anyone’s mere authority.

That’s the part I’d defend to the end. Not that we’ve got it right, but that we get to keep arguing about it, and neither of us may end the conversation merely by claiming the right to command.