This is a hard, exhausting time. But it’s also a pivot point. An idealistic generation is rising on the scene hungering to fill the spiritual vacuum their parents left them. There is a palpable desire for solidarity, to shake off an excessively individualistic culture.
In periods of tumult and confusion many people lose faith in systems of change. They feel it’s necessary to take the extraordinary action to tear down systems of power. For example, a Senate investigation concluded that from January 1969 to April 1970 — a period of tumult similar to our own — there were 4,330 bombings in the United States, which killed 43 people — averaging about nine bombings a day.
Today, thank God, we don’t have bombings. But we do have a lot of people on the right and the left who have lost faith in the institutions of free speech and open debate — the basic liberal order. They see that free speech stuff as a mask elites wear to preserve their power. They produce what is crudely called the cancel culture, they treat speech as violence, they attempt to ruin politically discordant people because of some tweets.
I defend liberalism because I think our core problem is ignorance and incompetence and not an elite conspiracy. The world right now is astonishingly complicated, our systems need reform. I don’t think one vantage point can grasp reality or devise solutions. We have to have the open exchange of views that is the essence of liberalism.
I am a liberal in a classical Enlightenment sense, but I can’t give three cheers for liberalism, or maybe even two. I understand why so many, and so many younger people, are rejecting it. Liberalism, as it emerged in the 18th-century Enlightenment, and as it was institutionalized in America, was based on several false or distorted ideas.
Liberalism was based on the idea that reason is separate from emotion, that we need to be dispassionate to see clearly. This is false. Emotions assign value to things and undergird reason. Because of this error, liberalism has often devolved into a detached, passionless rationalism.
Liberalism was based on the idea that the choosing individual is the elemental unit of society. It put great emphasis on individual autonomy. This is distorted. We’re also embedded creatures, members of families, and groups, shaped by our histories. Liberalism sometimes devolves into atomization, an alienated society of lonely buffered selves.
Liberalism assumed that people are primarily motivated by self-interest. This, too, is distorted. People are motivated by both self-interest and a yearning desire to lead a morally meaningful life. Liberalism often produces a disenchanted materialist realm.
By itself, liberalism is so thin it can’t even defend itself. When young people passionately demand racial equity, liberalism’s response is to protect free speech. Young people have a dream. Liberalism offers a neutral process.
Which is why the constitution of liberalism has to be supplemented with the morality of personalism.
One of the reasons that America is so angry right now is that there is so much dehumanization. Racism reduces a human being to a skin color. The first casualty in a culture, political or generational war is the willingness to see the full humanity of the other. In this moment, some people seem eager even to dehumanize themselves by reducing themselves to a simple label and making politics their one identity. “Speaking as a. ...”
If liberalism left little space for group identity, the current conversation makes group identity everything and leaves no space for individual conscience. You get all these absurd generalizations: White people believe this. Elites believe that.
Personalism is the belief that at the heart of any successful relationship, any successful organization and any just society, there is an earnest and ongoing effort to see the full depth and complexity of each human person.
Shadi Hamid struck a blow for personalism with a Twitter thread this week: “As a Muslim, an Arab, and a brown person, it always grated on me when people would assume things about me merely because of my ‘identity,’ largely an accident of birth. I cared about being Muslim and being Arab, and I was proud of my heritage. But that didn’t mean that I stopped being an individual. I was a writer who happened to be Muslim, not a Muslim who happened to be a writer.”
Personalism is about constructing systems where the whole person is seen and cultivated — schools where a child is not just a brain on a stick, hospitals where patients are not just bodies in beds, cities where cops see people, not “perps,” communities in which each person is seen as a rich interplay of multiple identities, economic systems that allow people to realize their full dignity as makers and earners.
Personalism judges each social arrangement by how well it fosters the kind of relationships that enhance the full complexity and depth of each soul. This awful year will be somewhat redeemed if we can end it with a sense of this kind of common morality, and if we can begin the hard work of reforming our institutions to be in line with it.
David Brooks
David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.