Have you ever thought about how Westerners’ tastes in pornography provide a critical lens into the "ethical consensuses of our liberal age"? If so, you are not alone. While I can’t say that such an analysis has ever crossed my mind, Alexandre Lefebvre is with you, examining in Liberalism as a Way of Life that the reason step-family porn titillates us—oh, by the way, that’s the most popular category, by far—is because it brings those "ethical consensuses … about desert and effort, love and friendship, consent and desire … into a gray zone of negotiation and thrill."
Reservations about this conclusion aside, this is an ingenious case study in Lefebvre’s ambitious project to show that cultural left-liberalism already serves as a near-complete ethical system for Westerners who are "liberal all the way down." That is, whose sense of right and wrong is minimally shaped by forces like religion. What millions of Westerners do to serve their base impulses, free from others’ (or God’s) watchful eyes might tell us quite a lot about what principles and norms really shape our expectations and behavior.
Lefebvre, a Canadian professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, uses this and a few other examples to demonstrate that liberalism is already the water in which we all swim, or the air we breathe. By liberalism, Lefebvre mostly means the imperatives sketched by the leading political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls: that society ought to be generally free, fair, and cooperative. The basic guiding principles of contemporary Western societies are essentially "you do you" and "don’t be a jerk." Those are normative arguments we expect to resonate when raised; in Rawlsian terms, they serve as touchpoints of "public reason." Our most popular comedy, social commentary, and yes, porn, emerge from and play off implicit liberal values in order to surprise, inform, and excite us.
But Lefebvre recognizes that our institutions and social outcomes do not reflect a liberal reality, as they contain and reinforce many inequalities, and fail to lay the groundwork for all citizens fully to realize their freedoms. We thus live in "liberaldom," a culture defined by, yet failing to live up to, its stated liberal ethical commitments. To get us out of this simulacrum of liberalism and into the real thing, Lefebvre suggests that liberals-all-the-way-down should meditate on liberalism’s core principles, allow liberalism to shape their character, and trust that it will provide all they need to live a fulfilling life while building a freer and fairer society.
With Rawls as guru, Lefebvre suggests a regimen of contemplative thought exercises that can bring the liberal to virtue and happiness. Chief among these is returning to Rawls’s most famous thought experiment, the Original Position. In brief: Imagine you are a disembodied soul, about to enter a world in which you don’t know what characteristics you will have. What social and economic rules would you design, not knowing whether you would be male or female, black or white, pauper or prince? Rawls concludes that any rational person would arrive at the Difference Principle: Society should tolerate inequality only to the extent that it benefits the least well-off.
The more one contemplates that the Difference Principle is the ideal of liberal justice, Lefebvre posits, the more at peace we will learn to be with long lines at the DMV or public schools’ failures to challenge our gifted children. (He considers his ongoing choice to send his own children to private school a prime example of failing to live up to liberal ideals.) This is how we learn not to be entitled Karens, he writes, but to be grateful participants in a society that treats all as equals. We can train ourselves to be more pleasant individuals while nudging our society toward instituting liberal justice more extensively. Lefebvre proposes similar exercises that build on other key Rawlsian concepts, fashioning a quasi-religious practice out of our public reason.
This book and its exercises in liberal self-improvement are not written for me, as Lefebvre emphasizes throughout. I am not a liberal-all-the-way-down but an Orthodox Jew who relies on millennia-old teachings to orient me to the good and true. Lefebvre is clear that becoming one with our liberal intuitions is neither necessary nor sufficient for those who enjoy other sources of purpose to live more meaningful lives, though his Church of Rawls would surely welcome converts if we wished to trade in ancient transcendent faiths for a crisp immanent system of values and virtues.
Standpoint-based obstacles notwithstanding, even I can recognize more than a kernel of truth in the underlying cultural analysis and some of Lefebvre’s normative conclusions. There is no doubt that our public reason has been reduced to halfhearted liberal pieties, mostly about autonomy. Our institutions and outcomes do not neatly track the principles of freedom and fairness, for some illegitimate reasons (like bigotry) and some legitimate reasons, such as a long history of Westerners being shaped by non-Rawlsian principles like loyalty or economic growth.
Though Lefebvre explicitly disavows liberalism taking any view of the public good, his book reveals that it does, and it’s not a bad one—just a thin one: allow others to pursue their private goods. Even most conservatives take that as an adequate starting point because civilization requires, first of all, getting everyone to stop killing each other over our differences. And on the normative front, any philosophy that sees gratitude for our inheritance as a worthwhile goal is off to a good start. If those Ivy League ingrates calling for the downfall of Western civilization pivoted to Rawlsian liberalism and began to better appreciate the miracle of the West, we would all be better off.
Things begin to fall apart for the liberal-all-the-way-down as we uncover the devil in the details of what "freedom" and "fairness" mean and how they may be traded off against one another. For instance, if freedom means people can do what they want with their bodies, and fairness (under the Difference Principle) means health care should be free, do we have to legalize hard drugs and compel the non-addicts to pay for the massive health care costs sure to follow? Does this thin liberalism take a position on whether it is better to be an accountant than a heroin addict? On what grounds? Perhaps it comes down to which one sends his children to public school. Or perhaps we will need to supplement our liberal-intuitive public reason with some view of what a good life is while broadening our view of how our choices can burden or benefit others.
But the starker problem is that Lefebvre’s program seems calculated not to spread gratitude, but to squelch it. The whole concept of liberaldom is meant to highlight the omnipresent hypocrisy of the supposedly liberal West. Rather than training liberals to see the West as an amalgamation of traditions—some liberal, some anti-liberal, some non-liberal—which could cultivate an appreciation for the complexity of the past and the sense in the emergent order we see today, a habit of mind developed by constantly measuring our society against Rawlsian ideals trains them to see unfairness everywhere. There’s a place for liberal aspiration, certainly, and reflecting on our ongoing violations of the Difference Principle may provide a north star—but it would not instill gratitude at all—just the opposite. It’s more likely to convince young people that those who bequeathed these imperfect institutions didn’t care about fairness. They were exploitative and altogether not worth learning from.
This problem reflects a wider challenge in trying to use Rawlsian philosophy to cultivate virtue and meaning. The Original Position thought experiment begins from the idea that nothing we have is truly deserved. Being born generous, industrious, or kind is genetic luck, rather than a reflection of our forebears who made good choices in marriage, work, and moral instruction. Recognizing that what we have in life is in some way undeserved presents two main paths: You can be grateful to your parents and ancestors for their sacrifices (and to God for all the gifts, if you’re so inclined) or you can take your belief in moral randomness a step further and adopt the Rawlsian position that your forebears, too, only made good choices because of characteristics and circumstances they did not choose. History can be a mix of nobility and venality or a snowball of moral randomness entrenching advantages and disadvantages as it plows into the present day.
The latter group, the Rawlsians, quickly descend into a determinist-existentialist morass. What do I have to be grateful for, in a world predestined by molecular fate? What use is it to be good? There is no cosmic justice in an immanent belief system. Why not sink into hedonic pleasure and self-centeredness?
At bottom, then, Lefebvre offers only hedonism. Why strive to become pleasant? Because it feels nice to be pleasant. Service to others is rendered empty by the knowledge that you’re just fulfilling your genetic fate. Besides, it’s a drop in the bucket so long as liberaldom presents systemic obstacles to true liberal justice. Loyalty to family and friends, the kind of thing that might cause you to put your own kids in private school, is at best a distraction from universal equality. Each generation is detached from past and future and re-equalized according to the Difference Principle. If that’s liberal fulfillment, I’ll pass.
Liberalism as a Way of Life
by Alexandre Lefebvre
Princeton University Press, 304 pp., $29.95
Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.