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Melanie Phillips and Western identity
Melanie Phillips, the British journalist, has made the Fortuyn murder an occasion for commenting on contradictions within liberalism. Her article is a good start, but she has a way to go before she escapes from the contradictions she discusses. It’s worth discussing the piece from that point of view, because it is representative of so much neoconservative thought. Phillips herself is a liberal, although a restrained one. As such she identifies her goal as true liberalism. For her that would include, as non-negotiable fundamentals, “the treatment of women, freedom of speech, the separation of private and public values, and tolerance of homosexuality.” However, she wants such things to be restrained by norms of sexual behavior, family values, moral self-restraint, and rejection of nihilism and libertinism. So it seems what she wants is classical liberalism with a mixture of late 20th-century developments in a moderate form: moderate civil rights, moderate feminism, moderate gay liberation, and moderate public agnosticism. The problem with her view is that while moderation is a good quality it needs something solid to moderate. One must therefore ask what this mixture of freedom, equality and restraint is going to be based on. Phillips’ answer: a common civic identity within which immigrants, whom the West will continue to welcome, can pursue their own culture and traditions. That sounds measured and serious, but it remains quite unclear where the civic identity is going to come from. It presumably won’t come from religious orthodoxy or ancestral traditions; that would exclude immigrants and abandon liberalism altogether. She does allow British traditions to win in case of conflict, but making something the default answer for pragmatic reasons is no way to preserve it as a constituent of identity. “Civic identity” sounds like something generated by liberal institutions themselves. No other source is apparent. If that’s so, then it can’t go beyond what’s implicit in those institutions. It’s hard to see, therefore, how it can lead to family values and the rest of it. The principles of liberal institutions are consent, fair procedures and equal treatment. All good things, in their place, but how do you extract things like marital loyalty and sexual restraint from them? Phillips neither avoids nor deals rationally with the contradiction. She says both that there should be norms of sexual behavior sufficient to support family life, and that one’s sex life is of no concern to others. Which is it? The insoluble problem she faces is that liberalism needs family values and other forms of restraint and self-sacrificing loyalty to survive. It can’t generate them, however, and it can’t let anything else—religious orthodoxy or ancestral tradition, for example—be authoritative enough to generate them without ceasing to be liberalism. It’s important for people to think about these things, and they have to start somewhere, so Phillips is to be applauded for her article. What
events are forcing her and others to recognize is that you can’t always be neutral. To have public order you must be able to assert something
non-neutral and make it publicly binding. But once that’s recognized liberalism will have a very hard time maintaining itself. If you can make
non-neutral principles binding, what in the end becomes of the arguments for liberalism in the West itself? The claim to neutrality has been
essential to liberal dominance. Those who recognize that it must be given up but want to remain liberals typically assume that liberalism simply
is the Western tradition. That’s obviously not so. The claim of neutrality has been essential to liberal victory over other Western traditions,
and if it gives up that claim it will eventually find itself very hard put to maintain its position practically. Email entry |