(Once Upon A Time In Hollywood)
What happened when Matthew Crawford, a lifelong advocate of the joys of driving and author of Why We Drive, took a ride in one of San Francisco’s driverless cars? He sounded the alarm.
Last month, he joined Freddie Sayers in Oakland to talk about the global war on motorists, the beauty of tinkering, and Silicon Valley’s threat to human freedom. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Freddie Sayers: A few years ago, you published a book called Why We Drive — and in many ways, you were ahead of the times, because drivers all over the world are now pretty angry. In London, there appears to be a full-on “war on motorists”: with a new 20mph speed limit, and an Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). This motorist fury has spread to the Netherlands, to Spain, and to the truckers in Canada. It feels like drivers are forming some sort of coalition.
Matthew Crawford: You could also mention the gilets jaunes in France. And there have been protests about the German autobahn. The Germans have a saying that translates as “free driving for free citizens”. Then you also had this big fight between the London taxi drivers and Uber. It does seem like people’s attitudes towards driving have become a bit prickly, as though the political authorities somehow lack legitimacy. A lot of populist energy has become focused on the automobile.
FS: Quite often this is framed as a class thing. Drivers are presented as people who probably have all sorts of unsavoury political views and therefore if life becomes more inconvenient for them, it’s probably a shift in the right direction. But your book goes deeper than that: you suggest that the action of driving is existentially important.
MC: I like to start with the skateboard, or the bicycle: simple implements that extend and transform our native bodily powers. A bicycle becomes almost like a prosthetic, an extension of your body, fully integrated into your bodily habitation of the world. And I think something similar could be said of cars, especially relatively primitive and lighter vehicles, where there’s a lot of feedback from the road. A kind of directness of control. That’s why a lot of people get quite attached to the experience of driving. Nietzsche said, “joy is the feeling of your power increasing”, and I think that you can understand that not as a scary doctrine about power-seeking, but just as an insight into how some technologies seem to extend us out into the world in ways that are deeply pleasurable.
FS: So we’re not talking about political power increasing? It’s more of a sense of being alive?
MC: The absence of remote control is really a key part of that. The idea of driverless cars — the sense of being passively carried around — triggers a kind of revulsion about being a passenger. There are all kinds of dystopian movies where driverless cars feature and one of my favourites is WALL-E, where you have these grotesquely fat humanoid beings being ferried around in their hovering cars, slurping from their cupholders, and watching their screens with some sort of entertainment piped in from afar — their faces beaming with a sort of opiate pleasure. They seem to be slackened and completely safe, and somehow less than human. I think that’s a heightened or exaggerated picture of what disturbs us about this.
FS: And, dare I say it, unmanly? The passenger character staring at the screen is the opposite of a strong person using a machine.
MC: Yes, or even genderless. A sort of gender blob. I guess there is a kind of masculine ideal of self-reliance, certainly in America — and just moving about the world by the exercise of your own powers appeals to that. So even using GPS, which I admittedly use all the time, forces you to turn your brain off, and there’s a kind of passivity and dependence to that. And I think the push for driverless cars is an instance of this wider pattern. For the sake of convenience, and in the name of safety, we’re lured further into passivity and dependence.
FS: There’s a line that you write about beyond which technology stops enhancing life: instead of making you more powerful, it starts to make you more dependent. Where do you draw this line in the case of cars?
MC: I think intelligibility is a crucial thing. Can you, by inspection at least, imagine how the thing works? Does it invite your intervention? Does it invite the effort to understand it? Or is it completely opaque like the shimmering obelisk at the beginning of the film 2001 that the humanoids are all entranced by? There’s a deep intellectual pleasure in being a master of your own stuff, in taking things apart and trying to understand them. Tinkering is a kind of quasi-philosophic impulse.
The other feature that really rubs a lot of people the wrong way is this idea of remote control. It’s not so much that it’s digital. Conceivably, you could become an expert coder in the various software systems that run the car. But I think what people don’t want is a sense that they’re somehow geared into this bureaucratic machine that stands behind the technology.
FS: There’s also a practical sense that people want to have a car that works on its own, independent of any external network being operational.
MC: Right, and that cannot be disabled remotely. The trucker protests in Canada were mercilessly crushed by seizing the bank accounts of people who contributed money to the movement. Shortly after, the Canadians took steps to mandate that all trucks be remotely shut-off-able. So you can see that there’s a political taste for preventing any such occurrence again. This is one of those instances where I think a lot of Western leaders look to China enviously as a control society. And given the metastasising systems of surveillance and control in our own society, the car stands out as a last reserve of some kind of capacity to stand alone.
FS: More worryingly, electric and driverless cars can in theory be turned off or driven into each other by central command; in a wartime or crisis scenario, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see that this could be dangerous.
MC: At least in the US, we don’t have nearly the electrical grid that you would need to charge all these cars, according to the vision being laid forth. And of course, building that infrastructure isn’t glamorous, politically. The whole green energy mandate is this massive diversion of investment to party-aligned actors that will tend towards energy poverty, which will hurt the working and middle classes. And all this is part of a larger phenomenon of the party-state capturing transportation and energy policy.
FS: Do you think this anxiety is particularly strong in America?
MC: Yeah, when shit gets real, you’re going to want to hit the road and get the hell out of Dodge, right?
FS: This leads us to the question of what we should do about it, given that these technologies are already everywhere. What would a practical rebellion look like? How can we resist without simply being Luddite or reactionary?
MC: The first thing to notice is the feeling of futility that people have about putting up any kind of resistance. In San Francisco, you have street guerrillas putting cones on driverless cars to paralyse them. And you have quite a few cases of driverless cars impeding emergency vehicles because they stall out and need to be rebooted. Despite this, earlier this month, the California Public Utilities Commission approved to have driverless vehicles on the streets of San Francisco in large numbers.
It turns out that one of the four City commissioners is the former general counsel for Cruise: the equivalent of General Motors for self-driving cars. Hovering in the background here is this sense of a “corporatocracy”, where the will of citizens really doesn’t come into play. And, in fact, when Pew polls people about their attitudes toward driverless cars, the majority of them are not interested. They’re suspicious of it; they’d prefer to drive themselves. So this is not in response to consumer demand: you might say it’s a kind of for-profit social engineering.
FS: Perhaps also that faith in technology is central to an elite idea of progress? If you are on the wrong side of it, you are seen as a bad person.
MC: It’s an expensive solution to a non-problem. Humans are actually pretty good at driving. This is merely another case of a transfer of wealth: Silicon Valley trying to grab profits from Detroit; Waymo versus Ford. So, yes, there’s always a narrative of progress.
FS: What do you say to the counter argument: that while some people might enjoy driving, many people don’t. Driverless and convenient electric cars should open up hours in which we can be more creative, fulfilled, and productive?
MC: Sure, I feel the force of those arguments. I’m sure there are occasions where I would totally want the option of a driverless car. One of the difficulties is when autonomous cars share the road with human drivers: that has turned out to be a far harder engineering challenge than was anticipated a few years ago. We’ve arrived at the point now where in San Francisco, at night, when traffic is light, they’re allowing driverless cars. But there’s still a lot of breezy talk about outlawing human drivers in order to make the road more hospitable to driverless cars.
FS: You can imagine that being a serious proposal in a small number of years.
MC: What would you have then? You’d have the infrastructure of a city made hospitable to automation, including driverless cars; you’d have an urban operating system that’s essentially designed and installed by some cartel of tech firms — and you can be pretty sure they would not be amenable to democratic processes. Nor would the code be accessible to inspection. This is all very proprietary: it has to be because that’s what makes the “smart city” the next trillion-dollar frontier.
FS: And if you are considered transgressive by that private company, you won’t be able to get around.
MC: You can imagine terms of service that have all kinds of stipulations. And you can view this development as part of a long arc of high modernist urban planning that goes way back. Yet this aspiration to remake the city often creates model cities that nobody wants to live in because the human element is somehow squashed. The ethnographer Jane Jacobs wrote a beautiful book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she shows how a street works at a fine grain level as a social place. She describes how neighbourhoods get vacated by these planning schemes that are hatched from on high and render the city vacuous. I think we should revisit some of these critiques of modernist urban planning, by way of trying to get a handle on what the tech firms are up to with the smart city and driverless car.
FS: I think perhaps we accepted too readily this idea that not having to drive would be liberating. And this points to a larger question about technology: is convenience always better? If you’re liberated from the more fundamental, supposedly mundane aspects of living — feeding yourself, moving around, sorting your car out — is your life necessarily going to improve?
MC: If you go far enough down that road, the whole world begins to look like one big assisted-living facility. There’s a psychologist named Kelly Lambert, who’s done some interesting stuff on what she calls effort-driven rewards. She works with rats, but the idea is that we’ve evolved to secure our own basic physical existence, and when you make everything effortless, people become anxious and depressed. And of course, a lot of that leisure time will be filled with entertainments that plug us into the hive mind. Americans in particular don’t really know how to do true leisure — a Sabbath, a time of repose. We tend to fill up everything.
FS: Do you advocate trying to resist the relentless technological advance by living more simply? Some people are trying to feed their spirit by “unplugging” and trying to be more connected to the earth, more connected to nature?
MC: Well, this is the perennial question, isn’t it? That sort of romantic back-to-the-land or back-to-nature revolt against not just technology but technocracy — the entwining of these systems. People do want to escape it; to re-humanise themselves. I guess for some people, it’s back to the land — land, of course, is scarce and expensive — for some people, I think it’s tinkering and trying to get a handle on their own material existence and become self-reliant in various ways. We have people homeschooling, just trying to unplug from what feels like a voracious borg that feeds on individual agency.
FS: Is there a good version of that and a scary version, do you think? For some people it seems that their answer is to burn it all down, to destroy the “borg”, which starts to sound violent?
MC: I’m thinking of Fight Club, is that what you’re thinking of?
FS: More that if there are enough people who feel alienated by technology — and by this supposedly sophisticated way of living — they are going to come with pitchforks and try to destroy it. Do you think we should worry about that?
MC: I don’t see much prospect of the pitchforks coming out — we’re too well entertained. A whole other type of technology is going to enthral us. Through a combination of virtual reality and AI, I imagine we’ll be sucked into worlds that are not real. What I mean by that is that they are constructed worlds: constructed for profit, and engineered from afar. They will probably offer us some simulacrum of agency: I’m sure there’s a menu of different options for action within them. Maybe they respond to us; they will flatter us with a sense of mastery, perhaps. But the thing about real reality is that it surprises us. It is inexhaustibly rich; it can’t be represented to completion. It contains mystery. I say that both as a former physics guy, and as someone with intuitions that there’s a created order that has a benevolence to it, and some elements that aren’t fully graspable and masterable by us, and that I think of as a source of renewal. When you put yourself in nature or even in the built environment, the human environment, there’s always scope for serendipity and surprise, and renewing your sense of wonder in the world.
FS: How do we defend that? What are the micro rebellions that we can try to unplug? You talk about tinkering with your car. What should someone in a city do?
MC: Every time we meet face-to-face as we’re doing right now, we’re engaged in the permanent human possibility, encountering one another in a real way. And I think that will always be available to us. We often get a little too doomerish about the borg, especially when the ordinary pleasures of existence and of sociality remain available to us. We have to throw ourselves into that with courage and hope.
FS: Maybe this is finally a political fight that’s worth engaging in. Perhaps motorists should defend their right to drive whatever cars they want — and maybe, they’ll win.
MC: Yeah, Sign me up. We hereby inaugurate the freedom to drive movement.
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SubscribeOh wow, this was monumental in several ways. Firstly, it is great to hear from the proverbial horse’s mouth what this publication is about. I’d long suspected Unherd was set up to stand up for Liberalism as it has been understood historically. With this, it’s great to see someone calling for the separation of Progressivism from Liberalism to identify correctly those two, so we can reason on them correctly if nothing else.
Secondly, there’s great history and insight here. The delineation of British and French schools of Enlightenment is important. I love the various references and the observations relating things to today.
Finally, this feels to me like it is the first time someone came out forcefully in support of the English Protestant Christian tradition in a long time. I can imagine some people calling for this on these pages will be happy about that. It has a feeling of watching history unfold as a new chapter is being turned.
This closing remark reminds me of one observation. The last time people who were predicting the end of Liberalism were called Fascists. With great irony, today those who do the same prediction are called anti-Fascists.
They might call themselves anti-fascist, but we all know what they really are. If proof were needed, it was deemed easier, by those who wished to do so, spies and their masters, (sorry, that might be racist, I mean runners, bug*er, sorry, that’s probably ableist, and come to think of it homophobic into the bargain………good grief, I give up) to turn a communist into a fascist and a fascist into a communist than to convince those who were simply ambivalent or neutral.
Those who, “might call themselves anti-fascist,” put me in mind of the mob who were against Popery, but did not know whether Popery was a man, or a horse.
Great article and great comment!
I agree. It has put into words what I have been thinking for a long time but did not have the knowledge to express
Yes, the culture wars (and the value foundations of many governments) come down to what the meaning of Liberalism is and how the term has been perverted and highjacked by those who are fundamentally illiberal.
I have long said that politics is a circle with the hard right and the hard left meeting. Nothing has persuaded me to move from this opinion.
I agree with you. Those on the extremes have more in common. We have been calling illiberal progressives liberals which gives the false impression they are in the centre when they are in fact bordering extremism. This loss of the centre where moderates (aka two-sideists) are labelled harmful is dangerous. The stability of the political system is under threat where the two extremes may act in tandem to push it off balance.
Agree. It was said that it was easier to convert a Communist into a Nazi or the opposite than someone who was an individual who believed in liberty.
If we take East Germany there was those who were Communist in the 1920s, Nazis from late 20s to 1945 and then Communists post 1945.
In South America Jesuits became Marxists , hence revolutionary theology. Himmler may have fashioned the SS on The Jesuits.
I suggest Britain has enabled far more people to be individulas than any other nation. Barnes Wallis says the British genius for innovation is due to our individuality.
I suggest that Liberalism is the belief that the individual is more important than the state but requires people to have the the common sense to know when to forego freedom for a certain period in order for the common good. Liberalism requires common sense and self discipline of the body, mind and spirit. Liberalism can only occur where people have the freedom of choice: to be selfish and selfless: to be cowardly or courageous, cruel or compassionate, lazy or industrious, venal or honest and to learn from success and failure. Liberalism can only occur where humans have trained their bodies, mind and spirit to control their base desires. Communism and Nazism offers power to the inadequate. Worship the Party and have the power of life and death over humans and their minds.
The separation of progressivism and liberalism is long overdue. Too many liberal people are still caught up in a progressive group that does not reflect their views on life in the least any longer. However, they are afraid to speak up in fear of weakening their own political wing. This leads to many people taking the modern mad progressive mantle, when in reality, they would be clearly objected to it.
This is monumental in that it does not talk of one, single actual burning issue: talk of the vagueness of the word ‘liberal’ is angels dancing on the head of a pin. It is a way of avoiding identifying and fixing problems we see in the world, number one of which is: what is the Climate doing, and what can we do about it? Number 2 being: how can we best provide a Public Health system that allows people who are able to do what they are able? Does this concern make others label me a ‘progressive’ or a ‘liberal’, so they can safely go on to talk about something else? Who gives a flying fig.
Let’s confront some *real* problems in this world.
With respect, I disagree. It is the application of these two different approaches to ‘real’ problems, that is the nub of the issue.
A ‘classic’ liberal may, or may not, agree with all proscriptions on offer to deal with Climate Change, or Covid 19, or ‘social justice’; he or she, may, but will also recognise, because the classic position is built on debate, compromise and tolerance that: a. even if ‘right’, there is a responsibility to explain and persuade; b. the opposition may be right. Either way, the ‘opposition’ is ‘loyal’ snd just might be right; some humility is therefore called for.
A ‘progressive’ on the other hand does not accept any view except for their’s as correct. The opposition are ‘deplorables’, ‘fascists’, even ‘evil’; it follows therefore that their views not only have no value but, worse, as threatening to social coherence as heresy was to medieval and early modern Christians. It must be cut-out, extirpated; ‘cancelled’ in other words.
The issues you raise are real and ‘wicked’ and some of the solutions may be shared by both ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’, particularly if, like me, you believe in social democracy. But the approaches part company on certainty of solution and how we approach those who oppose us. I’m with both Cromwell, “Think it possible in the bowels of Christ, that you could be wrong?”, and Voltaire, “I loathe your opinions, Sir, but would fight to the death for your right to express it?”
With best wishes
Voltaire didn’t actually say that.
Thanks for the reasoned reply. I would agree if reasoned debate and compromise were the tools we use to arrive at solutions, at the popular level or in Parliament. But popular debate is almost non-existent due to its having to be done through the media, very little of which has ‘fairness’ involved in its axe-grinding; and Parliamentary debate is nullified when a Government ramrods its measures through without permitting proper discussion – witness Ms. Patel’s criminalization of basic freedoms such as the right to Protest.
Protest against vaccinations?
What about demonstrations which cause loss of money for certain people? One cannot sue unions who strike and cause people to lose money.
In 1950s there were peaceful demonstrations against nuclear weapons but this changed in the late 1960s.
If demonstrators took out insurance which one could claim against for all and any loss this would make them more acceptable.
Well put sir
All health is personal. There is no such thing as ‘Public Health’. Most people who make use of the N.H.S. are not actually ill (in the traditional sense).
For instance drug ‘addiction’ is not an illness at all, but a personal choice. It may produce ‘illness’ some way down the line, but the cause is not, and never has been, ‘ill-health’ but mere cupidity and self-indulgence.
I enjoy visiting the memorial to Dr John Snow, of North Street, York, which consists of a water pump with the handle removed. Dr Snow more or less pioneered epidemiology when he traced the source of cholera in London in 1854, by stopping people using the Broad Street pump. His work subsequently led to the provision of clean water supplies all over England, and pretty much eliminating cholera.
*That* is Public Health: community level decisions that improve every individual’s private health. So is vaccination against infectious diseases.
Between 1900 and the introduction of the single measles vaccine in 1968, measles mortality fell by over 99%. For whooping cough, 1957 and 95%. The same applies to all the infectious diseases, and in all cases, the rates were in decline at the point that vaccines were introduced. Public health was the star of the show, vaccines were a side gig.
I agree. For many people, one of the compensations of this period of rising fearfulness and tyranny has been finding common ground with those who, pre-2020, had been our sworn political enemies. It has sorted the classical truth-seeking liberals from the phony self-declared (and self-deluded) progressives and self-interested narcissists on both the left and the right.
I suspect that there are many prominent people who consider themselves to be exponents of progressivism who got into politics for all the right reasons who now feel desperately trapped by their own naivety to, and the top of their shop’s probable complicity in, the great evil that now abounds. Many may be unable to sleep comfortably at night, knowing that if their initial herd instinct to trust “the scientists” was wrong and the sceptics are right it is all going to come crashing down, hard, and directly on their head. And they see all the data, information, and analysis that we all see, and more: because they no doubt see the constituency office postbag full of letters telling of vaccine harms and of discrimination that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. To them, I would say: it’s time now to find the courage to break free, time to do the right thing, time to put a stop to this. All it would take would be a small number, perhaps just one, elected representative of the “progressive” left courageously to speak their truth and regain their integrity for this whole thing to start to turn around. They may even be able to lead their party out of the authoritarian oblivion into which it is headed.
I think ‘naivety ‘ is a key concept to attach to the ‘progressives’ and it is useful to clarify why -eg did their ‘education’ occur pre 2000? 1995 ? ie they had a proscribed vs a true open ended liberal education, and history and anthropology must have been sorely lacking. Their evangelical zeal and that naivety may be caused by a fear and inability to deal with the REAL world ???? etc etc
Yep I agree, and in that sense, who is truly culpable – the educator or the misguided student? Key thing – tempting though it may be – here is not for anyone to throw stones but to patiently build a way for people to start to engage with each other and with the truths they might have engaged with sooner had their educational or other circumstances been different. It may or may not happen, but in any relatively benign scenario we will have some kind of truth and reconciliation commission which will facilitate this.
Yeah but it is that ignorance and arrogance that functions to block those possible conversations – I am not clear if there is the possibility of conversation untill after the ‘Fall” – a bummer for all !
Thank you for this article Mr. Marshall. For the last half a decade we have been inundated with media articles and pundits lamenting the decline of “liberalism.” This modern “liberalism” that the politicians and pundits insist is so important, what does it have in common with the Classical Liberalism that has formed the basis of modern Western Civilization? Belief in the rights of citizens? Well… I mean as long as you say, do, and think the way we want you to. Understanding the limits of the expert class? TRUST THE SCIENCE! The recognition of universal human fallibility? Eh, depends on your race and pronouns. Understanding the limits of what government can accomplish? We will try it again but harder this time and throw more money and government force at it. Recognition of the nation state? Citizen of the world, baby! Equality under the law? It’s equity now. Sorry, but I will take Classical Liberalism with its Enlightenment values over Neoliberalism and its Postmodernist “values” any day.
The thing with Christianity being the cultural norm, even if the majority did not actually Believe – the people in power had been raised in it, they took on the morality of it – they would act in the Philosophy of Christianity as it was the culture.
This is why the Left have always been Militant Atheists. To make being a Christian seen as being backwards and prudish and superstitious, to make all the horrors of the past the fault of Religion, and so to end true Liberalism – As Liberalism required acting as if there was an ultimate, a structured good and evil, and so morality was always a force in everything. By reducing religion they got rid of good and evil, making it ‘correct and incorrect’, and that is absolutely a fluid concept. A society cannot function on ‘Correct and Incorrect, it can be led into evil without even knowing.
Bravo! To perceive the torture and killing of little Arthur recently, as something improper, incorrect or wrong, simply does not do it justice. Human beings are most certainly capable of wickedness and evil. We forget this at our peril.
I have been reading a lot of the original documents of America’s founding such as the Constitution, Federalist Papers, and the Antifederalist Papers. One of the things that really stands out to me is how they believed individual liberty, limits on government power, and representation of the people went hand in hand with a moral society. Note, they did not believe anyone who was not a good person did not deserve these things (particularly since they never trusted the idea of someone being the arbiter of deserved), but that for a country to get the most out of liberty, a moral citizenry was necessary.
The incredible arrogance of the ‘ death of God’ (ie some creator/higher being/s) is the same dynamic as ‘the Fall’ ie Adam/man knows best. And the classic ‘pride comes before a fall”……..
“I will take Classical Liberalism with it’s Enlightenment values over Neoliberalism and it’s Postmodernist ‘values’ any day”.
Bang on!
Unfortunately most of our politicians and civil servants don’t understand science, statistics and probability etc in any but the most superficial way as most have been educated in humanities. The result is they misunderstand and misuse “expert advice”. The whole revelation that the experts seem to have been asked to model the worst case scenario for covid rather than the ranges together with probabilities and did not seem to have modelled the potential effects of lockdown illustrates why they are simply incompetent to be in charge of scientifically based policy decisions.
Nor, of course, do they seem to have a proper grasp of classic liberalism that should underpin public life.
I don’t mind having an elite in charge provided they are in fact elite thinkers with a proper regard for the interests of the population in general. Clearly we don’t have that.
“The result is they misunderstand and misuse “expert advice”.”
They understood, they understood they needed to STFU and do as told. And so they did. And so the global economy teeters, about to plunge into chaos, and the students and young are messed up as they will pay for it all, and inflation is eating the wealth and savings of the working people as the QE Keeping interest Zero has forced them out on the risk curve of the Equities, or just Cash (Treasuries and Gilts paying about 5 – 7% negative interest with inflation). And when the Equities correct 70% the savings will all be harvested, and everyone impoverished, and thus become wards of the State, and thus client voters, and thus Neo-Feudalism.
This is a plandemic. The people in charge were just doing as told.
Watch this https://rumble.com/vr9t7m-uncensored-rfk-jr.-tells-shocking-truth-about-anthony-fauci.html a long talk by the guy who’s book has exposed Fauci for the monster he is – and the industry, and the government…. it is a very good video indeed…
Exceedingly well said.
Unfortunately most of our climate scientists don’t understand science, statistics and probability etc in any but the most superficial way as most have been educated in ecomarxism.
“One built on the empiricism of Hume and Adam Smith, the other built on the Rationalism of Descartes and Rousseau. The former, with its inherent modesty, is compatible with the Christian understanding of human fallibility, the latter is not.”
Read the Meditations, Marshall. Cartesian epistemology makes explicit appeal to the Ontological Argument. And it’s stretching things to describe Rousseau of all people as a rationalist, although I’m fully in agreement with you about the balefulness of the shadow he casts over Western liberalism.
“What we are seeing today being enacted in the name of liberalism is not liberal at all. Instead, let’s call it by the name which its proponents are prepared to use — progressivism. This is the creed which unites Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times. These are not traditional Liberals in any understanding of the term. They are Progressives.”
I agree. This is why I define wokeness as “the authoritarian pseudo-progressive usurpation of liberalism”.
Wow, Mr Marshall, best article in Unherd to date, well done, and sums up a great deal which I believe, although we diverge a bit after Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism, which I find one of the most pernicious philosophies, and with nihilism, existentialism, Marxism, Freudian Humanism, hardliner Atheism gave us, in Wiemar Germany, the Frankfurt School, who are the ‘Post’ school of thought, giving us all the horrors we see today. Post-modernist, Post-Liberal, Post-Structuralism, and the complete reversing of morality by this pernicious group working behind the doors through ‘Entryism’ to capture all the Universities, MSM, Tech/Social Media, and Government of all but the Right, and even they are being altered.
I always naturally lumped the Banksters in with the Industrialists, and the deeper Cabal of the Devos, WEF, IMF, Donor Class… and so on, with the ones above being the useful Idiots. Moving like CS Lewis’s fantastic Science Fiction book ‘That Hideous Strength’ to lock the world in a living, totalitarian, hell. I enjoyed your article so much more as you are one of that class – but wrote as you did.
I think this an excellent rational appraisal of liberalism. The reason these conclusions are disputed is the prevalence of “political atheism” by which I mean adopting a viewpoint to be accepted by the social influencers – bien pensant types I suppose. Genuine atheists who have reached that view via considered opinions would agree with the analysis of this article eg David Starkey (High Church atheist), Douglas Murray (Christian atheist) [self-descriptors].
I think people are afraid that if they accept these foundations of liberal society then they might have to give ground to traditional Christian moral principles too: faithful monogamous family life, sanctity of life, responsibilities to society before personal rights. I can’t see people being willing to give up their “freedoms” to live under these traditional constraints despite their proven benefits to society and children especially.
Progressivism has died. The new left is best described as fascist.
This is a brilliantly elucidated piece which I will recommend to my family and friends, encapsulating so well as it does where some (but not all) of us have gone wrong. Thank you for this piece and UnHerd which has been a brilliant light since its inception and a publication I am very happy to subscribe to.
Great article, thank you. To recapture the true meaning of “liberal” as a succesful social and political construct means doing what Mrs T and Keith Joseph (and others) did in the 1970’s, to promote and fight and win the intellectual debate, to give liberalism a proper academic, intellectual, and poltical grounding. It was that coherence, confidence, and the explanation of why a liberal society benefits all who live in it, that led to the Conservative successes of the 1980’s.
Those arguments need making again, and applying to our times, and fighting vigorously for. But who will lead the debate this time?
Many true liberals passively support the mad progressive agenda, simply because they are afraid of weakening their own political wing by speaking up against it. This leads to the impression that there is a vast majority that is convinced of whatever it is that left extremists are plotting on any given day. In reality, the majority of progressives may still be liberals who may actually be against the agenda that is perpetrated by their political wing. As it has been said before, the loud minority controls what happens, because it meets the unending tolerance of a public that is debilitated by affluence and materialistic distractions.
Good point – who do the sensible moderate Demos have to vote for ??
An important part of present-day Progressivism is Trans ideology which constantly spouts the absurd nonsense that “trans women are women”. This is reminiscent of “Four legs good, two legs bad” in Animal Farm, and we could laugh at it if it wasn’t for the extreme intolerance and fanaticism constantly displayed by its followers. Anyone who disagrees publicly can expect a torrent of vitriol and the risk of being hounded from their job. It’s an example of how free speech is under constant attack from so-called Progressives. There is nothing liberal about Progressivism.
One of two very informative articles today (the other being on Northern Ireland politics). If you haven’t come across it may I suggest that you try John Gray’s book The Two Faces of Liberalism which complements Paul Marshall’s analysis. Not an easy read as it is laid out in philosophical textbook fashion. However some years ago I came across it and it opened my eyes to why I, as a self identifying liberal, was feeling so uncomfortable with our so-called liberal culture. It’s quite short but is a penetrating historical philosophical study.
Great article!
Only thing I disagree with is that one can’t dismiss “progress” entirely. We no longer sell people as slaves, bate bears or publicly execute thieves in front of cheering crowds – surely this is Progress of sorts?
The error of the progressives is when they try to apply the scientific method to change human behaviour itself. Whether in Economics or Epidemiology, this does not have a good track record. See the failure of “Scientific Socialism” in the 20th century, and most likely the Covid-security state today.
the progressives biggest error is that they are ARROGANT – which will always lead to a fall because the arrogant wont/cant LISTEN and therefore are doomed to miss the truth. Problem is we let them take power a la Germany in the 30’s (an OTT analogy sorry but similarities).
Endorse every word of this.
A wonderful piece, superbly articulated.
Thankyou.
Excellent, thought- provoking stuff. The cult of individualism, an outgrowth of liberalism, has led to identity politics and the appurtenant race for victimhood status, because of the veneration offered to it by socialism. As the author points out, it demands “rights” without the concomitant obligations of community,.and almost inevitably leads to societal deconstruction.
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They believe in the rule of experts and in the authority of “the science”.
IMO, they have an exaggerated belief in science based on a facile understanding of the nature of science.
As far as I can see modern progressivism is closer to religious fanaticism than actual enlightenment liberalism which seeks to debate, reason and explore different ideas without fear. The Enlightenment was a rejection of religious dogma and it is to that concept we should return, *not* to the excesses of Christianity that it rejected. I don’t dispute our Christian heritage but that Christian heritage brought about the enlightenment in ways the writer does NOT acknowledge – through its brutality, authoritarianism and zealotry – all justified as the ‘will of God’.
This was a hugely encouraging article in reminding us that liberalism emerged from the matrix of reformation Christianity – although there were medieval legal antecedents. Patrick Deneen, the political philosopher from Notre Dame makes a similar point in his book, The Failure of Liberalism when he argues that Locke and Hobbes the fathers of modern liberalism were in effect assuming Christian and Classical notions of virtue when they in fact made the self interests of the individual the heart of the liberal message, whose weakness is now being exposed in the light of the mocking of virtue of any kind other than a purely politicised sort – the progressive problem. Self interest simply isn’t a sufficient basis for classical liberalism. We need a larger and deeper vision of the good.
A big bonus of Marshall’s article was the reminder of the Christian notion of the Fall – the imperfection of us. I think the Reformation got this a bit more – total depravity – than Catholicism and thus the separation of powers, free speech-thank you John Milton – etc. Voltaire in his Letters from England reported approvingly on all this.
I agree with Cheryl Jones that the Puritan and other zealotry needed Enlightenment taming but I don’t think reason is enough. The Enlightenment understands the good sometimes better than the religious but then has no basis for the good other than wishful thinking.
Excellent article.
The fascists of the future will call themselves the “anti-fascists”. Winston Churchill
Excellent clarifying essay thanks Paul- I am a classic Liberal with some conservative interests…
There is a special problem unique to political expertise. That is that the people most involved are also those least competent, because they are the most closed-mindedly opinionated and attitude-driven.
As as result even the language is hopelessly incompetent. Such words as right, left, liberal, democratic, no longer have any useful meaning, and yet people continue to use them as if they did.
A very good article, certainly from the UnHerd point of view. Like all articles it is doomed to making a simple statement from a complicated background.
I am an atheist; my parents were atheists and I think their parents were too. They, like me, believe that religions are phoney, merely a mechanism used by the UnHerd to control the Herd.
In our complex world today, religions probably cost more money and violence and sickness than Covid ever will and this is certainly true of the past. In India today Hindus fight Muslims – in fact, everybody fights Muslims. This, of course, is not because the Herd are nasty people, it is because the UnHerd are using the religions for their own political ends.
In the world today, religion has gone backwards. Muslim leaders still fight to control the minds of their flocks. Western leaders have to resort to other means – Scientism, Covidism, Environmentalism, etc. Unfortunately these things backfire and you get the birth of things like people painting themselves green – a reaction to the political lies.
Of course, it is easy to blame politicians. What else can you blame? But if UnHerders were to take over, what would they do to control the Herd? Stop lies? Preach religion from Downing Street? Say “God Bless The UK” after every soundbite?
Of course, this is why Communism persists like a bad smell. Communism is a wordy paradise for would-be UnHerders.
Don’t you believe – and have experience – of things that are beyond human knowledge and cannot be explained?
Such belief is not within religious belief systems – which are based on the life being experienced at the time of their formation – but since the beginning of time people have believed that there is something beyond human knowledge which directs their lives – seen from cave paintings to the worship of different Gods
Chris , it is not about religion per se , it is about some kind of higher power that created the conditions of life – and that there may be some dynamics to that which actually make our lives more meaningful etc -forget about organized religion but dont throw the baby out !
Ayn Rand’s books are just weird. How could anyone mistake these for a political philosophy or even representative of one?
They are political musings set in a future fantasy world and intended to provoke consideration. Not a political manifesto!
They are still weird, though
Interesting essay but for religion one really needs to read Christianity. Also, if one is honest one must acknowledge that Christianity is not rooted in liberty but in acts of political dissidence and self sacrifice. From that perspective the foundations of Christianity are a better fit for BLM and Defund than they are for preservation of the economic and political status quo.
Once established, Christianity sought respectability and security by distancing itself from its radical foundations and by converting and
co-opting the established elite.
The Vikings became Christians because Charlemagnes Christian empire provided the stability which enabled prosperity to develop. Christianity encourage learning and honesty which promotes wealth. The Labourer is worth his salt and the Parable of Talents encourage honest hard work. Pay what is God’s and pay what is Caesar’s promotes paying taxes.
I’m glad the author mentioned Rousseau in the list of ways to fail the test of liberalism, because I raised an eyebrow at the mention of Ayn Rand in that context earlier in the article.
Otherwise a very interesting article, one with which I agree.
I think we should be careful as to what we define.
The British Liberalism of the post 1660 is the establishment of freedom under the Law and protected by Parliament. From Anglo Saxon times there was no Divine Right of Kings unlike France inherited from Roman Empire. We had a Parliament which by 1295 AD set taxes and the aristocracy was subject to the Law. As late as 1780s, The French King was absolute, the aristocracy paid hardly any taxes and was free to to do much as it pleased: likewise the Roman Catholic Church.
What is generally called the Enlightenment is the revolt of French intellectuals against the Ancien Regime of France, which never existed in Britain.
Since the 1940s American Liberalsim has meant Socialism.
In the UK, Liberalism and early Socialism was based upon Non – Conformism. The City of London was for Parliament and was heavily supported by Puritans. From the 1700s The Industrial Revolution was largely a product of people educated in the Dissenting Academies. J Bronowski said the Industrial Revolution was Britain’s social revolution.
From the 1660s to the 1850s the British aristocracy supported technical development because it wanted to improve agricultural profits and it owned coal mines. The Duke of Bridgewater financed the first canal built by Brindley. There was no such close collaboration in Europe where the aristocracy kept themselves separate. When a child of the Earl of Russell family married a child of the Director of the East India Company it showed a connectionn between Whig Landowners and Whig City merchants
From 1789, French Liberalism has been anti- Roman Catholic.
Britain has an unusual alliance between Large Whig landowners, The City and Parliament against the Tories comprising small landowners ( squires ), The Court and Church of England. The Roman Catholics Dissenters kept of Politics until the 1830s. From the1860s, The Labour party gained the support of un and semi-skilled Labour.
Basically, England believed in Freedom and a lack of taxes or as Wilkes said ” Beef and Liberty “. The Freedoms Britons enjoyed in the 1780s were unknown in Continental Europe. People could speek and associate with a Freedom unknown elsewhere and if they could not vote, they could hurl abuse, vegetables, fruit and cats at the politicians during the hustings. Just look at 18th century cartoons !
The lack of a Police forces, standing army and an armed populace meant the aristocracy, Church and Monarch could not impose their will on the People, they could only persuade them. During all the wars, soldiers were volunteers. The main power was the RN manned by highly skilled cadres of officers and pettyy officers. This meant there was no fear of arrest for dissent.
Britons had the liberty to stick two fingers up to authority and say ” Foxtrot Oscar ” and then say ” What are going to do about it ?” combined with . the ability to fight to defend such liberties.
Today, Liberalism is the dictatorship of the self hating self righteous shallow effete intellectuals who loathe the liberty of the upstanding outspoken individual who refuse to be cowed and coerced.