Patrick Deneen on the collapse of liberalism
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- Опубликовано: 27 окт 2021
- Professor Patrick Deneen, whose book "Why Liberalism Failed" was even endorsed by former president Barack Obama, shares his message on how liberalism is devouring itself in front of our very eyes. He was a guest speaker at MCC.
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Script:
Liberalism was created to solve a specific problem. That problem was the challenge of pluralism, the difficulty of achieving peace in European societies that were increasingly riven by disagreement about core beliefs, especially religious beliefs.
The philosopher John Locke proposed that the state could act as a neutral “referee,” allowing for the free expression of a variety of viewpoints and beliefs while curtailing public expressions of those beliefs only when they caused harm or political instability. In addition, it was believed that through such promotion of freedom and tolerance of belief, people would be able to craft their own life paths as they saw fit and, as a result, contribute to the peace and prosperity of society and power of the nation.
Liberalism thus proposed itself as a “container” of diversity, in two senses of this word.
First, it would “contain” the potential for diverse elements in society to descend into violent disagreement, an experience fresh on many people’s minds in the aftermath of the wars of religion. Liberalism provided a “container” in which these differing beliefs could co-exist.
However, it also sought to “contain” belief itself. For liberalism to work, it demanded a primary allegiance to the regime of toleration itself. What this meant in effect was that each person was required to recognize for political purposes that one’s own belief was in the first instance merely opinion.
While at the outset the first “container” seemed to many supporters of liberalism to be the ideal resolution by which societies could at once secure peace and pluralism, the second form of “containment” over time caused the dissolution and breakdown of these very communities that were supposed to be protected under liberalism.
Cultural practices and religious belief came to be seen as merely “opinion,” and over time became viewed as arbitrary impositions on the liberty of individuals who no longer shared those opinions.
The liberty that was originally to be accorded to groups, religions, cultures, and traditions, was increasingly claimed by individuals in the name of their liberation from those groups and traditions. And the protector of this individual liberty became the liberal state, which ultimately was ordered not to the toleration of plural belief, but an intolerant stance toward those groups that propose restraints upon the freedom of the liberal individual.
The logic by which the “containment” of belief itself undermined these kinds of beliefs and communities has now made those who defend these traditions as representatives of “illiberalism.”
While liberalism was created in the name of giving space for, and respecting, these various forms of diversity today the disintegrating logic of liberalism is aimed squarely at those very practices and institutions that it claimed to come into being to protect: culture, religion, family, and the nation.
Ironically, liberalism today regards as suspect the very political unit that was believed to be essential for the securing of rights - the nation.
Early liberal thinkers believed that the nation was the most comprehensive form of political ordering that could be brought into being by consent, and the comprehensive organization that would ensure the individual liberty of its constitutive members.
However, today the nation is increasingly regarded by many as an arbitrary limitation upon that same liberty, particularly the right to complete mobility in a world that in the name of liberty seeks the elimination, in the name of liberty, of geographic, cultural, technological, and even linguistic distinctions.
In response, defenders of culture, religion, family and nation have arisen as a political force in opposition to these internal trajectories of the liberal project.
Some see themselves as recovering “original” liberalism, embracing the notion of a limited state that exists to preserve those forms of human organization. However, a growing number of leaders of various “populist” movements understand that they are protesting liberal logic itself, and thus, enter new waters in exploring different ways of grounding political society in distinction from the dominant liberal norms that have reigned for the last century.
As liberalism devours the sources of its own nourishment, the demands of human craving for belonging in a world of meaning, membership, and community reasserts itself.
Conservatives have resurfaced as reformed opponent of liberalism. While liberalism once seemed to represent reason now seem to advocate anarchy.
That's an ugly and unfair take on liberalism.
I prefer liberal anarchy to Christian authoritarianism.
@@tuckerbugeater for me, why collapse of liberalism. t I think its logic is wrong from the beginning. Liberals believe that human nature is inherently good. Wouldn't you say this is naive? On the other hand, post-Renaissance Western civilization has always been centered on human nature being evil, which is a modern power constraint ( check and balance) and a necessary condition for the birth of democracy. The logic behind it is that people are evil, national leaders are also human, and national leaders are also evil. Because they are evil, their power must be limited.
But if it is the logic that human nature is inherently good, people are good, national leaders are also human, and national leaders are also good, because they are good, so they will be good to the people, so they should strengthen their power and let them serve the people. (Confucianism It is the logic of the inherent goodness of human nature, and this kind of IDEAS has always been considered to serve the emperor)
And I think economic interdependence in liberalism is the stupidest IDEAS, look at EU and Russia, energy and economic interdependence caused the current inflation consequences. The war between UKRAINE and Russia did not avoid war because of economic interdependence (European and American sanctions).
@@Magnulus76 Liberalism will always end up in the hands of progressive who will inevitably trigger conservative and nationalistic forces.
@@tuckerbugeater Are you ready to farm your own food? Because we all know what happened in CHAZ in Seattle.
remek animáció, remek beszéd, köszönöm
This is wonderful work. I am grateful to Mr Deneen for such valuable guidance, and would encourage him to not leave this kind of presentation as a one - off. This piece is conceptually complex and dense, although quite clear, of course. Doing further versions of it will more fully actualise its good sense and make its complexities more familiar to those of us new to political theories. In other words, this important message may be better appreciated if the "general message" of this piece is repeated in different terms, extending some points perhaps and giving other examples. Do not be afraid of repetition. It was once a well recognised method of rhetorical exposition. Encore, Mr Deneen.
I agree.
I think our modern concept of Western liberalism was formed in opposition to its 20th century rivals, namely Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Imperial Japan’s own version of Nazism. Once WW2 ended with the defeat of Japan and Germany, and then the Cold War ended with Liberalism’s triumph over Communism, Western Liberalism reigned supreme and virtually unopposed. However, after ~30 years, we’ve seen what it has yielded in the U.S. and Europe: Mass migration from alien and incompatible cultures, below replacement native birth rates, the destruction of native cultures and social cohesion, a disastrous overall record of foreign policy, economic stratification, a rise in depression, mental illness and hysteria (i.e. LGBTQ lunacy, degeneracy, etc.). It’s no wonder that liberalism is now being called into question.
We need a new ideology. Or liberalism itself must be reformed.
As an intellectually and ideologically unaffiliated (as much as it’s possible) gay man I would propose for a compromise in regards of identity issues.
It needs to be acknowledged that people with different inherent/semi-inherent traits (racial attributes, sexuality or gender dysmorphia) entertain identity politics because they want recognition and respect and feel threatened by the fact (real or perceived) that they are not sufficiently protected or (and) represented in light of their inferior numbers and history of suppression. Mind you, suppression may not be because of the biases against your trait per se but because of the trends associated with that trait, for example modern gerrymandering in either blue or red states that aims to counteracts certain voting patterns for the sake of retaining power not for the sake of marginalizing either white conservatives or progressive urban dwellers per se.
Having established that, moderate conservatives can attempt to strike a national/state-level accord with centrists and moderate liberals without the need for armed coups, repression and apartheid-like policies.
The compromise could look like that: 1A) we can’t be colorblind society yet, so we won’t follow the steps of the French Republic (with its festering problems from that) for another 100 years so we should have good and detailed statistics on race and ethnicity in our country while that’s relevant . That would allow us to correctly identify inequalities, discuss and diagnose whether those have pervasive roots or not and adopt countering policies if needed; 1B) at the same time we can’t have forced equity with quotas and the like, we only target the root causes that are deemed pervasive; 2A) on the issue of homo/ bi-sexuality we acknowledge that it’s part of some people’s nature and are willing to accept their place in society *if* they a) adhere to the same social norms that the straight people have to adhere and b) they don’t try to bisexualize children by pushing ideologies in curriculums that proclaim that all people are bisexual and everyone should practice it. 2B) However teenagers (like 7 or 8 graders at lest) should be made aware that people with those traits exist and they are normal and are not to be subjected to bullying; 3A) on the subject of gender it should be said that transgenders exist and that boys *can* be considerate and gentle and that girls *can* strive for power and autonomy, even though statistically it’s rarer, in exchange for not indoctrinating children similarly to the issue of sexuality with an added provisos that a) gender affirmation operations are irreversible and must be decided upon by the adults themselves (18 or 21+), b) biological sex exists as a function of evolution and c) social gender norms exist as a function of historical and societal processes and should be examined carefully and honestly.
Of course it’s not a complete form of such an accord but merely a starting point from my perspective.
Liberalism is an extremely unstable form of governance. I think you rightly point out that liberalism, while 200 years old, has only had total control for a number of decades. The last time it had total control was during the French Revolution, and there is a reason that the French Revolution failed and that the "Committee of Public Safety" only lasted 2 years before a military junta took over the government.
We can see that the toleration and allegiance to an impartial 3rd party creates a power vacuum for sin to manifest. The wicked benefit most from our toleration and moral equivocation of evil at the expense of the virtuous.
It only took a number of decades for our entire group identity as a people and as a nation to collapse into individual communities that have equal belonging to ancestral land, and as a result, there is no longer the protection of the nation for the communities that built it.
It's not as if toleration of others did not exist in preliberal Europe. But toleration of evil is a new invention created by the void liberalism establishes within the heart of every man. And if it does not corrupt the good, it at least limits the good and creates a sense of arbitrariness that weighs on the soul.
I lost you when you described LGBTQ as a mental illness.
to understand the nation one has to understand that these early liberal thinkers did not equate it completely with "the state" as we do now, a nation was and in my oppinion still is a group of people with a shared culture, traditions, language and in most cases even ethnicity can't be excluded from this
these nations and nationalism stood against the existing multi nation empires, which we saw falling from the late 18th to early 20th century on
an example of a multi nation empire, despite it's form of government is afghanistan, a country that is torn between tribal identities and thus the only unifying identity was islam
thus the fact that liberalism has gone from the idea of a neutral playing field to a well defined ideological framework and in fact a framework that promotes "diversity" and "multiculturalism" is a big issue because that goes against the notion that people should only be governed by those who share their nationality, (not in the sense of citizenship but rather, culture, religion, language,...)
liberalism is also dying because the west is no longer the only factor in international relations, china, india, Japan, Russia, ..... even eastern europe and more and more dissenting groups within western europe, all of these advocate for an end to the notion of one acceptable ideological outlook
Thank you 🙏🏼
This might be the most suscinct diagnosis of the decline of western culture I have seen. Good job.
Well, at least , I think I’ve found a thinker of high quality
Excellent
Brilliant. I thought this was Prager U, also. If we could get Prager to promote Deneen, that would be good
I think what my country needs now is liberalism we can discuss about liberalism once we become closer to anarchy :D but right now what we need is private industry, social freedom and law that protects and judges people objectively.
"what we need now...*stuff*"
that's liberalism, bruv. Let go of the american-centric view of "liberal == the left"
liberalism encompasses everything from modern "western" democracy to 19th century Pax Britanica imperialism to scandanavian social democracy to early modern colonialism to the atlantic slave trade to Cold War era American realpolitik diplomacy to Regan and Thatcherite austerity to South American military juntas to the 21st century Anglo-American "war on terror". almost every mainstream political movement in the "first world" since the end of ww2 has been a subgenre of liberalism.
Is this like the tradcath version of PragerU
Yes
Made me lol
hopefully
I find this piece brilliant, though I cannot say i fully grasp it-that's a dangerous thing to admit, however.
What Obama said about the author's book: “In a time of growing inequality, accelerating change, and increasing disillusionment with the liberal democratic order we’ve known for the past few centuries, I found this book thought-provoking. I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.” I would not call this an "endorsement" as is stated above.
What would be the opposite of liberal democracy? Totalitarianism. Indeed, Pat Dineen wrote a follow up book to Why Liberalism Failed called "Regime Change" wherein his solution is basically a Catholic theocratic state. He supports the sacrifice of individual liberty to the collective mindset of the State which is the antithesis of what our Founding Fathers intended to create when they gave us rights as individuals.
It's chilling to read the comments that follow that applaud this video! Only those who have commented in foreign languages seem to understand how perilous this ideology is which is a sad commentary on the educational levels of many Americans who, btw, this speaker calls "commoners." His desire is to create what he calls an "aristopopulist" state wherein the elite Catholic thinkers like himself impose their mindset on the plebians.
Liberalism is an extremely unstable form of governance. Liberalism, while 200 years old, has only had total control for a number of decades. The last time it had total control was during the French Revolution, and there is a reason that the French Revolution failed and that the "Committee of Public Safety" only lasted 2 years before a military junta took over the government.
We can see that the toleration and allegiance to an impartial 3rd party creates a power vacuum for sin to manifest. The wicked benefit most from our toleration and moral equivocation of evil at the expense of the virtuous.
It only took a number of decades for our entire group identity as a people and as a nation to collapse into individual communities that have equal belonging to ancestral land, and as a result, there is no longer the protection of the nation for the communities that built it.
It's not as if toleration of others did not exist in preliberal Europe. But toleration of evil is a new invention created by the void liberalism establishes within the heart of every man. And if it does not corrupt the good, it at least limits the good and creates a sense of arbitrariness that weighs on the soul.
4:09 idk if it's just me or does AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA indicate a silent cry of help at the complete destruction of culture and norms and the fear of the liberal world order?
You are right . We must prevail upon Dr Deneen to continue.
Hol a magyar szinkron?
Az angol tankönyvben.
@@atee9210 A szótárakat se felejtsük el!
Egyik sem válasz a kérdésemre, egy magyar csatornán magyar videókat vártam.
@@arpadbenedek6716 Nehogy megtanulj egy idegen nyelvet, a végén még okosabb leszel.
Kedves Árpád Benedek! Fontos számunkra, hogy a videók magyarul is elérhetőek legyenek, mert valóban egy magyar orgánum vagyunk. Így a jobboldali ikonsorban elérheti a magyar feliratot.
Conservatism and liberalism aren't necessarily incompatible with each other. What gets tricky is when we start talking about progressivism, because it seems like a philosophy designed to combat conservatism and attack the traditions it protects. In the U.S., this drives conservatives to the right, and the worse the progressive policies are, the further right they go. This could legitimately lead to fascism, but it could potentially be fixed with reasonable reforms to political laws. To put this another way, liberals in the U.S. are so afraid of people with traditional values stifling their individual freedoms that they've begun to directly attack the traditions that keep the society stable, leading to more extremism in politics as both sides wrestle for control.
Most conservatives from the anglo-american sphere of influence have been almost exclusively part of the liberal tradition.
what we mean here isn't the popular American conception of "liberal and conservative" but the classical political science sense of the term.
the recentish rise of decidedly unliberal political conservatism in the "western" mainstream intellectual discoures is pretty novel in the context of the post-war era.
The notion of conservative meaning "anti-liberal" died in the late 19th and very early 20th century with the Romantics folks like John Ruskin.
Valaki szólhatna neki, hogy a magyar állam a többség felé a neo-liberális arcát mutatja, a civil szféra pedig politikai alapon van támogatva, vagy éppen vegzálva. A woke disztópia itt van, csak konzervatív csomagolásban.
Hülyeségeket ne írjál ! :D én elhiszem hogy 3 puzsér videó után azt hiszed szent grált talált
@@fikuszkukisz4617 ülj le egyes!
as someone who came of age in the era of peak American neocon power, hearing a cogent critique of liberalism that isn't coming from the far-left is a bit weird.
Weird like hooking up with your high school english teacher 20 years after graduating. She's not as good looking as a middle-aged divorcee with a drinking problem and a 3-pack a day habit as she was as a freshly minted 20-something college grad with no kids but it's still kinda hot.
Neoliberalism is also dying?
This was a nice video but the voices in my head tell me of ancient truths. i cant stop them and they wont stop talking thank you for the video i love you romantically.
with neutrality - TheCo-Mentor
I hope its over
This is a bullshit! Orban defend only one thing: his own power! Patrick Deneen is like Bernard Shaw, who loved Stalin's dictatorship. He talks exactly the same nonsense about Hungary. And just in case you hadn't noticed, Poland is already distancing itself from Hungary's policies.
Nice ad hom you attack the person rather than the argument
By the way Lee Kuan yew flourished economically and culturally under Singapore so there are other economic unions or other government institutions besides liberalism that can work you know 99% of all human history was living under a dictatorship the idea that liberalism is the end of history is absurd take China for example the regime is stable and it won't collapse
Liberalism has failed
Inviting this is disaster in the world stage from Afghanistan to his handlement of the economy and inflation and gas prices he's been a disaster
And I can tell you're not that smart liberal because whenever the Democratic people's will go against the liberal elites mysteriously it becomes a dictatorship because the Democratic people's will only manage when they vote for liberalism
Ez megint csak egy homályos, nem túl érthető videója az axiómának. Úgy érzem ezek a videók után, mintha egyszerű gondolatok lennének túlmagyarázva, hogy szofisztikáltabbaknak tűnjenek. Holott egyébként a PragerU egyszerűen és érthetően is adja elő a gondolatait. Meg kellett nézzem párszor mire megértettem, és hát tényleg eléggé belemagyarázós a lényeg. Annyit tudok mondani ezzel kapcsolatban, hogy az az állam, mely az imént felsorolt kulturális intézményeket elnyomja nyíltan, az már nem liberális. Hiszen elnyom valamit. Ha pedig szimplán semlegesen áll hozzá, az pedig a kívánt eredmény, hiszen pont azt szeretnénk, hogy az állam ezekbe ne szóljon bele semmilyen irányba. Szerintem az utóbbi történt. Amit ezek az illiberális vezetők nehezményeztek az az, hogy a KULTÚRA, mint olyan elvilágiasodott. Főleg a 68'-al induló mozgalmak, az ellenkultúra és a szexuális forradalom, valamint a polgárjogi mozgalom volt az ami ezeket a társadalmi változásokat beindította, és egy új kulturális paradigmát vezetett be, amiben többek közt ma is élünk. De fontos megjegyezni, hogy mindez kulturális változás és nem állami intézkedés volt. Az illiberális vezetők azon embereknek kedveztek akik ezt a kulturális változást nehezményezték, és kvázi az államot hívták segítségül, hogy közbelépjen, rendet tegyen és visszaállítsa a régi paradigmát. Ami azon túl sajnos, hogy hangot adott ezeknek az embereknek nem ért el semmit , sőt inkább kontraproduktív volt, hiszen az illiberális tengely még erősebben feltüzelte a progresszívakat. Egy szó mint száz kultúrharcot kell vívni, ha meg akarjuk javítani ezeket a normákat, ám amikor az állam hirdet kultúrharcot, az már nem az. Az zsarnokság.
It is once again, a very vague, not so comprehensive video from Axiom. After these videos, I feel like simple things have been overexplained, to make them look more sophisticated. Although, by the way PrageU is presenting it's thoughts simply and comprehensively. I had to wathch this video a few times in order to get the point, and indeed it is quite overexplained. All I can say in the topic is that the state, that opresses these cultural institustions openly is not liberal. Because it opresses something. And if it is simply regarding these as neutral, well, then that is the desired result, because we want exactly that from a liberal state, not to get involved in these things in any way. I think the latter happened. What these illiberal leaders have opposed, that the CULTURE itself had been secularised. Mostly the 68' movements, the counter-culture, the sexual revolution, and the civil rights movement were those, that started these societal changes, and introduced a new societal paradigm, in which we are still living today. But, it is important, that we point out, that these were merely cultural changes, not state interventions. The illiberal leaders were welcomed by those, who opposed these changes and called for the state to intervene, make order and restore the old paradigm. Which, besides giving a voice to these people, did not accomplish anything, in fact, it was counter-productive, because the illiberal axis encouraged the progressives even more. All in all, a cultural war must be waged, if we want to fix these norms, but when the state wages a culture-war, that is not a culture-war anymore. That's tyranny.
Ez hosszu
@@domonkossuranyi7453 Annyira nem. Csak angol verziót is írtam.
Ja ászt láttam grat
Semmilyen "túlmagyarázás" nem volt a videóban. A zavar abból eredhet, hogy a közbeszédben liberálisnak nevezzük a laissez-faire és a progresszív, ideológia-vezérelt gondolatvilágot is - pedig nem is állhat a kettő távolabb egymástól.
@@qpacman2 Ahh, köszönöm, valaki, aki érti