As part of my job, I was able to travel to San Antonio the weekend before Thanksgiving to attend the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. This is easily the largest yearly gathering of academics in the fields of religious studies, theology, biblical studies and comparative religion. Lots of interesting people as you can imagine.
I work for a book publisher, so most of my time was spent manning our booth in the exhibition hall along with all the other publishers. One of the perks of these meetings, as anyone who’s attended will tell you, is that the publishers usually sell their books at deep discounts. Brazos Press, one of my favorite publishers, had a big display and they were selling everything at 50% off!
This was too much for your humble servant to pass up, so I picked up The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society by Murray Jardine and Anxious About Empire, edited by Wes Avram.
The Jardine book is nothing less than a sustained critique of liberal society, specifically its inability to articulate moral constraints on our technological power. According to Jardine, the most pressing problem facing modern Western societies is that we have attained this immense power to alter our environment (and increasingly ourselves), but the liberal political tradition, with its emphasis on neutrality and tolerance, has no coherent grounds for determining which uses of technology are good and which are bad.
Jardine traces the development of liberalism through three phases. First is classical liberalism, which he associates with John Locke and Adam Smith. Classical liberalism was concerned primarily with establishing a free market and a society based on the rule of law and free contractual exchange. The moral underpinnings of classical liberalism Jardine describes as a “secularized Protestant work ethic.” Thus the bourgeois virtues of thrift, sobriety, hard work, etc. become paramount.
The second phase of liberalism is “reform liberalism” or social democracy, New Deal liberalism, etc. In other words, what most of us mean by “liberalism” in the contemporary American political context. Reform liberalism has two major thrusts according to Jardine. The first is to stabilize and reform capitalism through regulation of the market and modest redistributionary policies. By the early 20th century it had become clear to nearly everyone that the laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century had resulted in large concentrations of unaccountable power in the form of corporate monopolies as well as staggering inequalities between the rich and poor. Thus a modified form of liberalism was needed to stabilize the system and stave off revolutionary movements like communism.
The other prong of reform liberalism, however, was a more thoroughgoing critique of the remnants of the old Protestant-bourgeois work ethic. Reform liberals of the second half of the 20th century pointed out (cogently, according to Jardine) that liberalism’s claims to creating a neutral public square were incompatible with publicly upholding the old bourgeois virtues. Those virtues, far from being neutral, actually favored the middle-class entrepeneurs and businessmen who were the ascendant class in the early phases of capitalism. So we get the counterculture and the attempt to sweep all remnants of traditional quasi-Christian/bourgeois morality from the public square. A truly “neutral” state cannot “privilege” any particular understanding of morality and the good life.
The third phase of liberalism Jardine christens “neoclassical liberalism.” This form of liberalism he associates with the rise of modern conservatism, but it is actually a form of liberalism in that it combines the moral liberalism of “second wave” or reform liberalism with the desire to return to the laissez-faire economic policies of classical liberalism. This is essentially Reaganism-Thatcherism or moderate libertarianism.
Jardine argues that the present-day “conservative” movement is actually a coalition between classical and neoclassical liberals. Both want less economic regulation than reform liberals, but the classical liberals still want to uphold the traditional bourgeois virtues while the neoclassical liberals (libertarians) tend to embrace a variety of moral relativism that treats all values as subjective. While classical liberals like Locke and Smith defended the market as the system that best rewards hard work and rationality, neoclassical liberals like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek argue that the market system is to be preferred simply because it allows for the maximum exercise of freedom, not because it rewards certain virtues. Since values are subjective, any infringement on choice constitutes an imposition of one person’s (or group’s) values on another. Here the neoclassical liberals join forces with modern liberals in embracing a moral skepticism that enshrines “tolerance” as the highest (only?) virtue.
The culture of this late stage of liberalism is what Jardine calls “expressive” individualism or consumerism. While the earlier phases of liberalism extolled production with their emphasis on hard work and thrift, expressive individualism sees each of us primarily as a consumer of goods, services and experiences, through which we express ourselves and fashion our own unique “lifestyle.”
Jardine sees the development of an expressivist culture as partly the result of the bounty of capitalism. In the older “utilitarian-individualist” culture, goods and services were advertised primarily with respect to how they would meet some preexisting need. But as production threatened to outstrip demand, advertisers shifted to a strategy of inculcating new needs in customers. This was done by promoting products in terms of how they would enable the consumer to attain a certain staus or image:
Early in the development of the consumer culture, advertisers realized that the best way to encourage consumption was to get people to think of themselves and others in terms of what they consumed or, more specifically, in terms of the personal image they projected through their consumption. Stated somewhat differently, advertising began to encourage what might bet be described as an aesthetic orientation, that is, an orientation where beauty becomes the most important aspect of human existence. People were encouraged to think of themselves adn others in terms of how aesthetically appealing they were. Whereas in premodern societies, people were judged on the basis of moral character, and in early liberal society people were judged on the basis of how productive they were (this standard of judgment itself being a distortion of Protestant conceptions of moral character), in a consumer culture people are judged on the basis of the aesthetic image they project. “Personality” becomes more important than character. If in early liberal society one was expected to be a productive person, in later liberal consumer society one is expected to be a beautiful person. (p. 90)
One has only to look at our near-worship of celebrities to see the truth in this statement. Jardine contends that both liberals and conservatives have made peace with the expressive-individualist culture. Both reform liberals and neoclassical liberals accept, at least in practice, the subjectivity of values and the foundational importance of self-expression and “choice.”
This also helps to explain why conservatives and liberals can both feel like the other side is winning. The liberals (and libertarians) have essentially won the battle for unfettered self-expression in the personal moral realm on such “lifestyle” issues as homosexuality, abortion, pornography, etc. So the conservatives perceive the country as on its way to hell in a handbasket. But the conservatives have essentially won the battle for a relatively unregulated competitive market economy, what liberals fear as the ascendance of big business and dog-eat-dog capitalism. What neither side realizes, Jardine says, is that these phenomena are the logical corollaries of each other and of the liberal expressivist culture. “Freedom of choice” has all but triumphed in both the economic and moral spheres.
In fact, this expressivist culture is what drives the movement for greater and greater tolerance:
[M]ost people in present-day Western societies are convinced that the status of moral ideas as subjective opinions does iimply one overarching moral standard, which is tolerance. If all values are relative, we should tolerate all actions except those that impose values. Again, as we have seen, this conclusion is logically incorrect adn indeed meaningless. Why, then, do som many people draw this conclusion? The answer lies in the aesthetic orientation of the consumer culture. If one understands the world in aesthetic terms, then tolerance becomes of the utmost importance, because tolerance allows maximum flourishing of aesthetic self-expression. (p. 97)
The problem with “tolerance” based on moral relativism is that, once we accept the subjectivity of values, there is no logical reason for preferring tolerance to intolerance! We are on the slippery slope to moral nihilism, which is as likely to lead to tyranny as to universal freedom.
Moreover, consumerism as a way of life is ultimately unsustainable. This is true not only for ecological reasons, but more importantly on the level of human relations. An expressivist-individualist consumer culture will inevitably, Jardine thinks, have three disastrous results. It will result in a general loss of competence as people are more concerned with consumption than with developing skills and virtues. It will lead to an increasingly competitive “winner-take-all” society as everyone strives to be one of the “beautiful people.” And, perhaps most destructively, it will make us literally incapable of replacing ourselves:
When the fundamental goal of human existence is aesthetic self-expression, children are likely to get in the way. Or, perhaps even worse, children may themselves be regarded as a form of self-expression, as we mentioned above. Leaving aside the possibility of “designer children,” less drastic manifestations of this mentality can be seen in the way many North American parents relentlessly push their children toward high achievement…. In either case, a complete lack of interest in children or an obsession with creating perfect children is not likely to result in large families. (p. 128)
The fundamental problem is that moral nihilism is implicit in liberalism’s DNA, so to speak. It is the inexorable outcome of a system that enshrines individual freedom as its foundational value:
Liberalism attempts to avoid the central question of premodern moral reasoning, that is, the question of how people should live, by taking as its basic principle individual freedom, and stating that every individual should be free to do as he or she wants, within certain limits, which themselves would be neutral in the sense that they did not favor any particular social group or impose any particular belief system or way of life on society. In attempting to establish those neutral limits, however, liberalism initially simply used remnants of premodern natural law formulations, which, when examined more carefully, clearly favored some people–the bourgeoisie–over others, and clearly promoted both a particular belief system and a particular way of life, which I have termed a secularized Protestantsim. In attempting to eliminate these biases and create a truly neutral system, liberal theorists eventually destroyed any conceivable moral standard. (p. 133)
It might be thought, then, that the solution involves a return to a robust pre-modern natural law ethic such as that of Aristotle. But this is impossible, Jardine says, because traditional natural law ethics presuppose a static natural order to which human beings should conform. The problem with this is that our technological power has given us the ability to alter the natural order (and with the advent of genetic engineering, possibly human nature itself). We no longer find the idea of an unchanging natural order credible, and so it can’t be a source of moral norms for us.
What is needed is a moral framework that can account for our creative powers, but also gives us a sense of limits on how we use those powers. This ethic Jardine claims to find in the biblical narrative and its cosmology and anthropology.
This is as far as I’ve gotten, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Jardine is going to try to show that the practices of Christian communities can offer a response to the moral crisis he finds at the heart of Western liberal capitalist democracies.
More to come…
A Thinking Reed 
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