Liberalism and the challenge of Radical Orthodoxy (part 2)

(For previous posts see here and here.)

Having argued that, pace Milbank, liberalism is not necessarily a manifestation of ontological violence or ethical nihilism, Insole turns to the more specific criticisms made by Milbank and fellow Radical Orthodoxist Graham Ward about social life in a liberal society. According to Milbank and Graham, says Insole, liberalism gives rise to a society characterized by “social atomism” – an extreme form of individualism that corrodes social bonds and leads to anomie, dislocation, anxiety, lonliness and alienation.

This has become such a common criticism of political liberalism that it’s become a truism. Which makes it all the more startling, and refreshing, that Insole actually responds by asking what the actual evidence for this claim is. Why, he asks, should we suppose that Milbank or Ward’s experince of the modern world is actually representative of the way many, much less most, people experience their lives?

Insole agrees that anxiety and lonliness characterizes some aspects of some people’s lives, especially perhaps urban professionals and academics. But that’s a far cry from saying they’re the pervasive and signature feature of liberal society. Moreover, he points out that those experiences accompany other experiences afforded by “thin” communities like opportunity, choice, and mobility. By contrast, there are many more “participatory” communities, where a greater sense of solidarity, sense of belonging, and shared values prevail. But these more participatory communities are also more likely to be characterized by conformism, surveillance, and intolerance of those perceived to be “different.”

His point is that both kinds of communities exist in liberal society and that both involve trade-offs among goods. To gain a greater sense of belonging and shared values I may have to give up some privacy and freedom. To gain choice and opportunity I risk exposing myself to lonliness and anxiety.

We might say that there are two sorts of ‘liberty’, which are incompatible, and that each bring their attendant problems. There is the liberty of the ‘city’. Around such ‘liberty’ we can gather such experiences, limitations and possiblities as loneliness, lightness, unpredictability, choice, anxiety and mobility. The ‘liberty’ involved in more cohesive and participatory communities – more provincial, traditional or rural – tends to gather around it such notions as participation, heaviness, belonging, predictability, routine, duty, surveillance, care, judgment, attention and immobility. Both modes of life have their own glories and own problems, but it is vital to acknowledge that one is not in any straightforward sense the cure for the other, although both can look like it when one is immersed unhappily in either extreme. The problems are attendant upon the possibilities, and one removes the former only by eliminating the latter. (p. 144)

Insole is here following an insight developed by the 19th century liberal Benjamin Constant in his classic essay “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of Moderns.” In the polis of the ancient world, Constant says, there was a much greater degree of participation in collective decision making by each citizen. But the trade off was that the public power over the life of the individual was near absolute. By contrast, in the modern state each individual has much less say over the workings of the state, but she has a much wider sphere of liberty wherein she acts at her own discretion.

The chief problem with Radical Orthodoxy, Insole thinks, is that it proposes a participatory community as the alternative and solution to what it takes to be the atomism of liberal society. He quotes a, frankly rather chilling, line from Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: “True society implies absolute consensus, agreement in desire, and entire harmony amongst its members, and this is exactly (as Augustine reiterates again and again) what the Church provides, and that in which salvation, the restoration of being, consists” (quoted on p. 142). Though Milbank avoids the charge of theocracy by making the Church rather than the state the location of his polis, it’s still not clear how it will avoid the dangers attendant to any participatory community.

My anxiety about the participatory solutions called for by Milbank and Ward is not that what they hope for is always impossible, but that there are non-accidental attendant dangers in seeking to build participation and unity, and that these dangers remain when the ‘building’ is symbolic and theologically literate. It is never politically advisable to work toward solutions whose prerequisite or goal is a radical transformation of the human condition, whether conceived individually or collectively. (p. 146)

Insole wants to characterize Radical Orthodoxy as a species of communitarianism – the idea that what we need more of is “thicker” communities that make claims on us and orient us around a shared vision of the good, and less assertion of liberal-individualist “rights” against public authority. Matters are complicated, though, by the fact that for Milbank, et al. the Church is not like any other community, but is the place where people are transformed and come to participate in the life of the Trinity. For Milbank the Church, not the state, provides “absolute consensus, agreement in desire, and entire harmony amongst its members.”

But we have to ask to what extent can or does the Church according to Radical Orthodoxy “transcend” the problems associated with “thick” participatory communities? Insole doesn’t address this question as much as I would’ve liked. Do Milbank et al. see the Church as susceptible to these problems? To what extent do they identify the visible Church with the invisible? To what degree does sin and failure still characterize the life of the Church?

However, this question of ecclesiology doesn’t necessarily affect Insole’s case for political liberalism. There’s no reason in principle why a liberal polity can’t encompass a variety of other communities of varying degrees of “thickness.” Of course, Radical Orthodoxists may complain that a liberal polity, by institutionalizing religious freedom, can’t help but make membership in thick moral communities more tenuous. But it’s hard to see what the alternative is, short of making one vision of the good publicly authoritative.

Political liberalism, then, is not committed to the view that there are no true comprehensive doctrines of the good, nor is it committed to the view that people are inherently selfish (and to approving of that selfishness). All it is committed to is that people are different and can reasonably hold incompatible views about the good. To recognize this requires, according to liberalism, that we refrain from imposing any one particular arrangement of values.

Insole quotes F.A. Hayek to good effect:

[Liberalism] merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist, scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s, that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends shoudl be supreme and not subject to any dictation by others. (quoted on p. 173)