Thank you for this wonderful essay about the Liberal mindset. In my country this is illustrated by a certain Annalena Baerbock who produces one gaffe after the other, while damaging relations that might be important for Germany in the near future.
I wonder if this characterization is particular to the West or it's Liberal foundations. All these remind me of the debates that took place in China, Korea, and Japan in the 19th century: all these countries had entire classes who profited by sticking to the "norms" and doing what they were "supposed to do." While it's easy to think of the scholar-elites who could repeat the officially accepted notions of Confucian philosophy or whatever in proper eight legged essays, the same applied to the low ranking bureaucrats/public servants, merchants, craftsmen, and even peasants: do what you are supposed to do, kiss the right asses following proper rules and protocols, then you'll get your share according to your station. Certainly, there were innovations, but they were trite, superficial, and inconsequential: how much better can you write an eight-legged essay so that people think it's great while sticking to it's proper form and topics and arguments that "everyone" knew was right?
Even the arrival of the foreigners did not challenge this: the Jesuit missionaries and, later, Western merchants came originally as supplicants, without serious power with which they might dictate terms to the Chinese, Japanese, or Koreans. They wanted to cut deals with the locals and going along with the local norms was the best path going forward.
Still, the power disparity was slowly becoming evident, and, perhaps it's not too surprising that Japan, being both weaker (certainly compared to China) and more exposed (compared to Korea) came up with more ideas, including many practical ones, for dealing with the West. The Chinese, and, in a different fashion, the Koreans, did not perceive the threat for what they were: they were all about the "form," which they knew were right--because it had to be, as it was practically a major part of their identities, and the biggest affront by the foreigners as they gained power was that they were "barbarians" who did not respect the "form" and had enough power to could force the locals to do things differently, far more than the material deprivation.
Without the "form" that undergirded all aspects of how they saw the world and operated within it, they were lost and paralyzed for decades. (It also does mean that, when they eventually adapted to the Western ways, they became far more practical, even ruthless, as they did not respect the "Western forms.")
I think it's really the standard ritual of a stagnant, formerly stable but now eroding society facing external challenges, Western or Eastern, or whatever. Every society develops norms that are right tautologically and sustains itself by inertia: everyone believes them, or act like they believe them, because they form the standards by which it's members are supposed to operate and are rewarded/punished by others. But if "barbarians" march in and demand that they should be exempt from the norms and can force their way through, the foundation of the self-sustaining norms is broken.
If the problem is "too-calcified norms" that prevents people in leadership positions from imagining those who don't abide by them and react accordingly, being an "outsider" to the dominant set of norms is probably a huge advantage: Japan vis-a-vis China in 19th century or Russia vis-a-vis "the West" today, perhaps?
One pretty silly and minor example I had in mind for these "norms" are dress codes: there is no point to most of them, of course, but they matter to the degree that they are part of the "rules of the game" in a given institution and the adherence to them signal the willingness of the participants to respect them--the entire body of rules. If a Mussolini or a Fetterman refuses to abide by the rules just because and the entire institution acquiesces in cowardice, what other rules can a brash "barbarian" force to be renegotiated or even discarded altogether? Why should anyone else with their own cache not force their way similarly when it's exposed that the rituals were silly and nonbinding anyways! But if the rituals are pointless, how do we keep the "institutions" together?
The answer should be that a viable "society," one that has real internal cohesion in multiple dimensions that connects its members together, can come up with substitutes that will regain the respect of its members while adapting to new situations. An atomistic society, without a proper social glue, has trouble adapting when the existing set of rituals are shot down. All the more reason to cling to them regardless of the reality.
All cultures have norms. The norms of Nero’s Rome were. Castrate your slave and then dress him up as a woman and marry him. The barbarians had more traditional norms. Guess which culture triumphed.
I didn't say barbarians. I said "barbarians.". Of course barbarians have norms, and many years after they seemingly triumph, they'll be likewise become calcified with their people sticking to a set of outdated rituals "just because," while different "barbarians" emerge and throw them into confusion. Guess what's going on today: Yesterday's "barbarians" have become the 21st version of "late Chinese Empire" unable to understand why "barbarians" are not impressed by "eight legged essays."
The regime in Ukraine has to be freaking out. The pivot to Israel is stark. Zelensky's wife must be packing her expensive wardrobe and jewelry collection into trunks, all the while raging at her husband that "I told you we were all going to get killed by those Nazis" as he scowls over a mirror with lines. Both just pawns to the people who always know what's best. Maybe they'll get out alive. I mean, he'd really have to be stupid to go this far without an exit plan.
Even the "pro" Russian western war commentators have flocked to the Gaza war. The pivot is incredible and makes me wonder if its all just about the clicks.
This all gives me a headache. It is like they want me to believe whatever they say instead of my lying eyes actually see. And I do not, I am a monstrous hater and kick puppies as well.
Decades ago, I was told that the value of a Classical arts or a liberal arts degree in whatever was its teaching you how to think and learn, but just as how free speech and debate went from being an American liberal and leftist bedrock belief to something that is a hindrance, so has learning and thinking.
It looks like sometime after the federal government junked the one hundred and sixty years long American System, which created a wealthy, vibrant, and extremely capable country for the fifty plus years of Neoliberalism, the approval for actually being learned, wise, and most importantly thoughtful, was junked.
It does help me understand why it feels like I am having “conversations” with young children.
————-
Adding to my earlier comment above, I wonder if the MBA or Masters of Business Administration degrees that seems to have become so popular starting, I think, in 1980s. It seems to be a degree of how to make money by any means and not on how to actually administer or run a business. Add in the worship of quarterly profits, even at the expense of future viability of the company, and increasing promotion of slick, 2 dimensional, plastic like “literature” and general nonfiction in the past thirty years, as well as the arts and higher education, it would be strange if the ability to think deeply and long did not go away in the professional managerial class. Like how business degrees devolved into manipulation of numbers instead of running a company, much writing both in fiction and nonfiction has become as bad young adult literature or facile news and general interest articles often written, as is most legislation in Congress is and much of the local news especially television (not an exaggeration) by special interests, public relations, and lobbyists. Exposure to quality writing, honest research, and deep thought is missing. How can they know what that is?
Good article Aurelien. It encapsulates much of my thinking. Western countries have been in the drivers seat for centuries and have no idea as to how little they actually know about the world.
Like a lot of rich people they only hear from those who they employ who generally tell them what they want to hear or those who want something from them who also only tell them what they want to hear.
Its a closed circle and reality rarely penetrates until it can no longer be ignored or explained away.
This is an exceptional reading of the ‘Liberal mind’! THANK YOU - I really like this snapshot: “The Liberal tendency to impose prefabricated schemes on the world based on selective and often erroneous moralised readings of the past, and a priori assumptions about how the world works”.
I think you nailed it, mostly, but I think you discount the idiocracy factor in the west, though - a lot of the West's leaders are just mediocre intelligence to morons.
> The Liberal mindset as a whole, recall, sees itself as “practical”, and scorns long study and detailed analysis. It sees learning for its own sake as largely pointless, since it knows all the important answers anyway. Universities are only important for acquiring certificates an knowing where to find the detail: technical training is a joke, and for inferior mortals. So Liberal society admires the smart person rather than the intelligent, the quick-witted rather than the expert, the advocate who argues well on the basis of a quick scan, rather than the academic expert with deep knowledge.. It exalts the financier who makes a fortune out of speculating in pharmaceutical stocks above the doctors and researchers who have actually done the work.
I think this essay is an excellent one and I wholeheartedly agree with most of its points, but I have to dispute the idea that Liberal society is more enamored with wit than study. The entire working philosophy of Liberal institutions comes from a sort of credentialism that exalts the idea of study, the idea of the diploma and degree, the idea of the working paper and draft resolution, the idea of the study or fact-finding operation. In each case, there is a tendency towards more investigation, more analysis, more information, which, however removed it may be from reality, is itself reinforced by the corpus of other Liberal knowledge that surrounds it. The ultimate Liberal government is not democratic, where mass politics requires that wit and rhetoric be used in order to shape the public will—rather, this is the veneer placed over a bureaucratic or technocratic system, where decisions are developed and made by those selected to do so as a career due to their qualifications or credentials. Such a system is inimical to wit or "smartness," because such represents a sort of knowledge that exists outside of the institution and cannot be said to be granted by the credential, a sort of thought that does not belong to the Liberal and is alien to it.
So many of the failures of today's Liberal establishment come from an inability to engage in pattern recognition and to develop new models of thought from existing information, and the development of models ad hoc from observed information is the product of wit as much as it is the product of study. For all the study of history, international relations, and political economy can offer, you do not need to have a truly immense knowledge of them to build models that surpass the Liberal understanding of any one of them, even one deeply rooted in study, and this is the case because Liberalism can no longer be said to be a system of thought that actually responds to the existing reality that it purports to model. The ideological assumptions of Liberalism, as you have probably touched on before, are rooted in the interwar and post-WWII conceptions of the world in a way that was serviceable at the outset, farcical by the end of the Cold War, and is now largely divorced from reality. Such an ideology must be studied and taught to people, since there is no reasonable manner by which it may be understood a posteriori, no way by which somebody observing the world as it is today independent of preconception might be able to arrive at its conclusions.
Certainly, there are points at which deep study threatens Liberalism by contextualizing it and challenging its claims to objectivity and historiography, but one need only look at academia to see how rare that approach is. I simply find it hard to believe that we have a problem of too much wit and too little study when almost every "learned" person in the West is uncritically Liberal, while most of its Western critics are, to some extent, contemptuous of the "expertise" that can only be found in Liberal institutions.
OK, I take the point and if I could have written an essay twice as long I would have covered it. Essentially, I see Liberalism per se as having two different and in some ways contrary characteristics: a love of creating complex rules for others which specialists can then earn lots of money interpreting, and a personal preference for the gifted bullshit artist who quickly masters the problem and speaks rapidly and convincingly. It was said of Geoffrey Howe, Thatcher's Chancellor and a highly paid lawyer that he would read and master his brief in the taxi going to Court ;never having seen it before; That's the spirit of Liberalism.
As always, I find myself appreciating your take and simultaneously somewhat unsettled. I think I get and agree with the gist, but I am left wondering how it plays out 'in the facts'. Part of the very problem of the fog of war is that no one knows which facts will matter most, all approaches are a gamble (albeit not all equally so).
It seems the emphasis is put on facts, versus some kind of delusional 'know-it-allness', which I think is quite right, however I'd take the time to also stress that:
1) 'the facts' can only be pragmatically useful to those who have a theory or a 'normative goal they set out for'. You do mention this 'long term coherent visions of where they want to be', but it is not made clear how that relates to morals and normative narratives.
To re-phrase your take under this caveat: 'it is only when you know what you think that facts can enlightening, otherwise mere facts on their own or an overload of them is confusing'. Thatcher is probably a good historical proof of this: I thoroughly disagree with her politics, but she did it impose it on the country and the West as a whole, she had a vision and implemented it. Perhaps she meant "don't confuse me with more facts, I already know how to act"? I guess that is essentially what pragmatism is - a fine balance of theory, facts and action.
2) I agree with the obvious short termism and self-righteousness of the West, nevertheless, my own guess is that this itself is probably born from the hegemonic socio-political position the West currently occupies rather than from any essential/inherent moral or intellectual defect. That is, I think that if we are going to describe and explain rather than judge and condemn, perhaps we should do that for the West too?
Thank you Aurelien - this really helps to clarify why there is this ongoing difference between the narrative and what seems to be actually happening. It's a way of observing that can help to untangle the threads of a lot of seemingly "authoritative" analysis in other areas as well. Caveat emptor applies as much to information as anything else.
How can russia keep USA away from EU? I think that is not russian objective. It is more like Russia feeling threatened by continuing hostility and concluding that no peace is possible with west. Ukraine is russia in many ways and to turn that country against Russia is intolerable for russia. Same with Belarus,Moldova.
West is striving for world domination as u implied. ( permanent hegemony like an upper class and lower class in society)
Very good! In America we have the term "PMC or Professional-Managerial Class", which refers to technocrats: the people who run things, but do not own them. The PMC have large salaries, large houses, large mortgages and no real wealth. To me, these are the "Liberals" that you speak of. The word Liberal means so many things over the centuries that it is not useful any more, in the same way that "capitalism" can mean merchant, industrial, or financialized capitalism.
Thank you for this wonderful essay about the Liberal mindset. In my country this is illustrated by a certain Annalena Baerbock who produces one gaffe after the other, while damaging relations that might be important for Germany in the near future.
I wonder if this characterization is particular to the West or it's Liberal foundations. All these remind me of the debates that took place in China, Korea, and Japan in the 19th century: all these countries had entire classes who profited by sticking to the "norms" and doing what they were "supposed to do." While it's easy to think of the scholar-elites who could repeat the officially accepted notions of Confucian philosophy or whatever in proper eight legged essays, the same applied to the low ranking bureaucrats/public servants, merchants, craftsmen, and even peasants: do what you are supposed to do, kiss the right asses following proper rules and protocols, then you'll get your share according to your station. Certainly, there were innovations, but they were trite, superficial, and inconsequential: how much better can you write an eight-legged essay so that people think it's great while sticking to it's proper form and topics and arguments that "everyone" knew was right?
Even the arrival of the foreigners did not challenge this: the Jesuit missionaries and, later, Western merchants came originally as supplicants, without serious power with which they might dictate terms to the Chinese, Japanese, or Koreans. They wanted to cut deals with the locals and going along with the local norms was the best path going forward.
Still, the power disparity was slowly becoming evident, and, perhaps it's not too surprising that Japan, being both weaker (certainly compared to China) and more exposed (compared to Korea) came up with more ideas, including many practical ones, for dealing with the West. The Chinese, and, in a different fashion, the Koreans, did not perceive the threat for what they were: they were all about the "form," which they knew were right--because it had to be, as it was practically a major part of their identities, and the biggest affront by the foreigners as they gained power was that they were "barbarians" who did not respect the "form" and had enough power to could force the locals to do things differently, far more than the material deprivation.
Without the "form" that undergirded all aspects of how they saw the world and operated within it, they were lost and paralyzed for decades. (It also does mean that, when they eventually adapted to the Western ways, they became far more practical, even ruthless, as they did not respect the "Western forms.")
I think it's really the standard ritual of a stagnant, formerly stable but now eroding society facing external challenges, Western or Eastern, or whatever. Every society develops norms that are right tautologically and sustains itself by inertia: everyone believes them, or act like they believe them, because they form the standards by which it's members are supposed to operate and are rewarded/punished by others. But if "barbarians" march in and demand that they should be exempt from the norms and can force their way through, the foundation of the self-sustaining norms is broken.
Yes the different response of Japan as opposed to China has always fascinated me.
If the problem is "too-calcified norms" that prevents people in leadership positions from imagining those who don't abide by them and react accordingly, being an "outsider" to the dominant set of norms is probably a huge advantage: Japan vis-a-vis China in 19th century or Russia vis-a-vis "the West" today, perhaps?
One pretty silly and minor example I had in mind for these "norms" are dress codes: there is no point to most of them, of course, but they matter to the degree that they are part of the "rules of the game" in a given institution and the adherence to them signal the willingness of the participants to respect them--the entire body of rules. If a Mussolini or a Fetterman refuses to abide by the rules just because and the entire institution acquiesces in cowardice, what other rules can a brash "barbarian" force to be renegotiated or even discarded altogether? Why should anyone else with their own cache not force their way similarly when it's exposed that the rituals were silly and nonbinding anyways! But if the rituals are pointless, how do we keep the "institutions" together?
The answer should be that a viable "society," one that has real internal cohesion in multiple dimensions that connects its members together, can come up with substitutes that will regain the respect of its members while adapting to new situations. An atomistic society, without a proper social glue, has trouble adapting when the existing set of rituals are shot down. All the more reason to cling to them regardless of the reality.
All cultures have norms. The norms of Nero’s Rome were. Castrate your slave and then dress him up as a woman and marry him. The barbarians had more traditional norms. Guess which culture triumphed.
I didn't say barbarians. I said "barbarians.". Of course barbarians have norms, and many years after they seemingly triumph, they'll be likewise become calcified with their people sticking to a set of outdated rituals "just because," while different "barbarians" emerge and throw them into confusion. Guess what's going on today: Yesterday's "barbarians" have become the 21st version of "late Chinese Empire" unable to understand why "barbarians" are not impressed by "eight legged essays."
The regime in Ukraine has to be freaking out. The pivot to Israel is stark. Zelensky's wife must be packing her expensive wardrobe and jewelry collection into trunks, all the while raging at her husband that "I told you we were all going to get killed by those Nazis" as he scowls over a mirror with lines. Both just pawns to the people who always know what's best. Maybe they'll get out alive. I mean, he'd really have to be stupid to go this far without an exit plan.
I think the only safe place for Zelensky will be Russia. He'll be an unprotected target everywhere else.
Even the "pro" Russian western war commentators have flocked to the Gaza war. The pivot is incredible and makes me wonder if its all just about the clicks.
This all gives me a headache. It is like they want me to believe whatever they say instead of my lying eyes actually see. And I do not, I am a monstrous hater and kick puppies as well.
Decades ago, I was told that the value of a Classical arts or a liberal arts degree in whatever was its teaching you how to think and learn, but just as how free speech and debate went from being an American liberal and leftist bedrock belief to something that is a hindrance, so has learning and thinking.
It looks like sometime after the federal government junked the one hundred and sixty years long American System, which created a wealthy, vibrant, and extremely capable country for the fifty plus years of Neoliberalism, the approval for actually being learned, wise, and most importantly thoughtful, was junked.
It does help me understand why it feels like I am having “conversations” with young children.
————-
Adding to my earlier comment above, I wonder if the MBA or Masters of Business Administration degrees that seems to have become so popular starting, I think, in 1980s. It seems to be a degree of how to make money by any means and not on how to actually administer or run a business. Add in the worship of quarterly profits, even at the expense of future viability of the company, and increasing promotion of slick, 2 dimensional, plastic like “literature” and general nonfiction in the past thirty years, as well as the arts and higher education, it would be strange if the ability to think deeply and long did not go away in the professional managerial class. Like how business degrees devolved into manipulation of numbers instead of running a company, much writing both in fiction and nonfiction has become as bad young adult literature or facile news and general interest articles often written, as is most legislation in Congress is and much of the local news especially television (not an exaggeration) by special interests, public relations, and lobbyists. Exposure to quality writing, honest research, and deep thought is missing. How can they know what that is?
Good article Aurelien. It encapsulates much of my thinking. Western countries have been in the drivers seat for centuries and have no idea as to how little they actually know about the world.
Like a lot of rich people they only hear from those who they employ who generally tell them what they want to hear or those who want something from them who also only tell them what they want to hear.
Its a closed circle and reality rarely penetrates until it can no longer be ignored or explained away.
Thank you Aurelien🙏
This is an exceptional reading of the ‘Liberal mind’! THANK YOU - I really like this snapshot: “The Liberal tendency to impose prefabricated schemes on the world based on selective and often erroneous moralised readings of the past, and a priori assumptions about how the world works”.
I'm not ready to conflate liberalism with stubborn ignorance. I think conservatives are good as that too. And leftists.
I think you nailed it, mostly, but I think you discount the idiocracy factor in the west, though - a lot of the West's leaders are just mediocre intelligence to morons.
Long term planning, what a concept.
Ouch !!! - Eyeless in Gaza & every elsewhere.
> The Liberal mindset as a whole, recall, sees itself as “practical”, and scorns long study and detailed analysis. It sees learning for its own sake as largely pointless, since it knows all the important answers anyway. Universities are only important for acquiring certificates an knowing where to find the detail: technical training is a joke, and for inferior mortals. So Liberal society admires the smart person rather than the intelligent, the quick-witted rather than the expert, the advocate who argues well on the basis of a quick scan, rather than the academic expert with deep knowledge.. It exalts the financier who makes a fortune out of speculating in pharmaceutical stocks above the doctors and researchers who have actually done the work.
I think this essay is an excellent one and I wholeheartedly agree with most of its points, but I have to dispute the idea that Liberal society is more enamored with wit than study. The entire working philosophy of Liberal institutions comes from a sort of credentialism that exalts the idea of study, the idea of the diploma and degree, the idea of the working paper and draft resolution, the idea of the study or fact-finding operation. In each case, there is a tendency towards more investigation, more analysis, more information, which, however removed it may be from reality, is itself reinforced by the corpus of other Liberal knowledge that surrounds it. The ultimate Liberal government is not democratic, where mass politics requires that wit and rhetoric be used in order to shape the public will—rather, this is the veneer placed over a bureaucratic or technocratic system, where decisions are developed and made by those selected to do so as a career due to their qualifications or credentials. Such a system is inimical to wit or "smartness," because such represents a sort of knowledge that exists outside of the institution and cannot be said to be granted by the credential, a sort of thought that does not belong to the Liberal and is alien to it.
So many of the failures of today's Liberal establishment come from an inability to engage in pattern recognition and to develop new models of thought from existing information, and the development of models ad hoc from observed information is the product of wit as much as it is the product of study. For all the study of history, international relations, and political economy can offer, you do not need to have a truly immense knowledge of them to build models that surpass the Liberal understanding of any one of them, even one deeply rooted in study, and this is the case because Liberalism can no longer be said to be a system of thought that actually responds to the existing reality that it purports to model. The ideological assumptions of Liberalism, as you have probably touched on before, are rooted in the interwar and post-WWII conceptions of the world in a way that was serviceable at the outset, farcical by the end of the Cold War, and is now largely divorced from reality. Such an ideology must be studied and taught to people, since there is no reasonable manner by which it may be understood a posteriori, no way by which somebody observing the world as it is today independent of preconception might be able to arrive at its conclusions.
Certainly, there are points at which deep study threatens Liberalism by contextualizing it and challenging its claims to objectivity and historiography, but one need only look at academia to see how rare that approach is. I simply find it hard to believe that we have a problem of too much wit and too little study when almost every "learned" person in the West is uncritically Liberal, while most of its Western critics are, to some extent, contemptuous of the "expertise" that can only be found in Liberal institutions.
OK, I take the point and if I could have written an essay twice as long I would have covered it. Essentially, I see Liberalism per se as having two different and in some ways contrary characteristics: a love of creating complex rules for others which specialists can then earn lots of money interpreting, and a personal preference for the gifted bullshit artist who quickly masters the problem and speaks rapidly and convincingly. It was said of Geoffrey Howe, Thatcher's Chancellor and a highly paid lawyer that he would read and master his brief in the taxi going to Court ;never having seen it before; That's the spirit of Liberalism.
As always, I find myself appreciating your take and simultaneously somewhat unsettled. I think I get and agree with the gist, but I am left wondering how it plays out 'in the facts'. Part of the very problem of the fog of war is that no one knows which facts will matter most, all approaches are a gamble (albeit not all equally so).
It seems the emphasis is put on facts, versus some kind of delusional 'know-it-allness', which I think is quite right, however I'd take the time to also stress that:
1) 'the facts' can only be pragmatically useful to those who have a theory or a 'normative goal they set out for'. You do mention this 'long term coherent visions of where they want to be', but it is not made clear how that relates to morals and normative narratives.
To re-phrase your take under this caveat: 'it is only when you know what you think that facts can enlightening, otherwise mere facts on their own or an overload of them is confusing'. Thatcher is probably a good historical proof of this: I thoroughly disagree with her politics, but she did it impose it on the country and the West as a whole, she had a vision and implemented it. Perhaps she meant "don't confuse me with more facts, I already know how to act"? I guess that is essentially what pragmatism is - a fine balance of theory, facts and action.
2) I agree with the obvious short termism and self-righteousness of the West, nevertheless, my own guess is that this itself is probably born from the hegemonic socio-political position the West currently occupies rather than from any essential/inherent moral or intellectual defect. That is, I think that if we are going to describe and explain rather than judge and condemn, perhaps we should do that for the West too?
Thank you Aurelien - this really helps to clarify why there is this ongoing difference between the narrative and what seems to be actually happening. It's a way of observing that can help to untangle the threads of a lot of seemingly "authoritative" analysis in other areas as well. Caveat emptor applies as much to information as anything else.
How can russia keep USA away from EU? I think that is not russian objective. It is more like Russia feeling threatened by continuing hostility and concluding that no peace is possible with west. Ukraine is russia in many ways and to turn that country against Russia is intolerable for russia. Same with Belarus,Moldova.
West is striving for world domination as u implied. ( permanent hegemony like an upper class and lower class in society)
Very good! In America we have the term "PMC or Professional-Managerial Class", which refers to technocrats: the people who run things, but do not own them. The PMC have large salaries, large houses, large mortgages and no real wealth. To me, these are the "Liberals" that you speak of. The word Liberal means so many things over the centuries that it is not useful any more, in the same way that "capitalism" can mean merchant, industrial, or financialized capitalism.