Liberalism in Dark Times - a book review
The answer to Cherniss’s initial conundrum is very simple: humanitarians are often sociopaths and sentimentalists, who are more predisposed to ideological violence than the average person.
A more detailed version of this book review will appear in our upcoming print issue for February, Issue XXVIII, which you may buy here when it is released. Subscribe here to receive future print issues!
Joshua L. Cherniss’s Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2021, $35/£28, cloth hb, 305pp + xvii) is an assessment of the plight of liberalism during the era of totalitarianism. He sets out his conundrum. “How do humanitarian idealists become butchers of human beings? How do they convince themselves that they are virtuous in their butchery?” (p. 1). Cherniss claims ideologically directed and morally justified ruthlessness is common to many outlooks but “there is a strong affinity between this tendency and anti-liberal politics […] there is a strong affinity between liberalism and a propensity to feel horror at political ruthlessness, and to regard combating it as a vital political task.”
Yet ruthlessness is distributed evenly across the political spectrum. It is the self-serving and force-concealing nature of liberalism to present itself as uniquely wedded to argument over force, consensus over division, democracy over autocracy, whilst at the same time using all the ruthlessness of the state to suppress dissent. Is it not a typical liberal democracy that bans books, imprisons dissidents, criminalises speech and demonises those suggesting religious and ethnic paths for statecraft? Is it not the liberalist policy to use representative democracy, to allow a supervening layer of control to prevent the majority population to gain its wishes and govern itself in its best interests? Is it not completely in accord with liberalist-scientist ideals for unelected, unaccountable nudge units to manage (and micro-manage) our everyday lives more invasively and pettily than any theocracy has?
Liberalism is just as unreasonable, self-serving and tyrannical as any other system of government, it is just more indirect in its methods. In the liberalist state, constraints are applied discretely – through managed opposition, demonising out-groups, educational programming, rewriting history, mass-media manipulation, nudge units, technocracy, secularism, and so forth – and done in ways that are not so much secretive as simply less messy, more efficient and easier to implement than the purges, gulags and military action that our managers find distasteful.
Nonetheless, a supporter of liberalism may argue, we should not judge an ideology by the failings of its supposed adherents but rather on its stated goals and its potential to improve the common lot. The principles Cherniss lays out – namely, “support for mildly redistributionist welfare state” (p.3), personal liberty, free market economics, social contracts, rule of law, limited government, charters of rights, democracy, toleration for diverse viewpoints – are not always implemented and the governing elite will not hesitate to contravene any implemented principles (or favour client groups that do so) should it prove advantageous. It seems fair to declare that the liberalist ethos is either an outright lie or one so barely implemented that it might as well be dismissed as what it so seemingly is: soft tyranny of technocracy implemented by the managerial elite under the guise of liberalist democracy.
With the most essential arguments against liberalism set out in their most basic forms, let us look at Cherniss’s arguments for the benefits of liberal principles. Cherniss sets out standard liberals from “tempered liberals” – those stoic individuals whom he describes as “morally robust and politically engaged” (p.9) and is essentially individualistic and not utopian. Cherniss nominates Reinhold Niebuhr, Albert Camus, Raymond Aron and Isiah Berlin as tempered-liberal thinkers, who addressed matters of ethos.
When Cherniss puzzles over “the peculiar horror of twentieth-century atrocities lay in the fact that some of the most ruthless proponents of terror were genuine philanthropists, motivated by passionate devotion to ideals of justice and liberation” (pp.16-7), he approaches territory already well covered by authors such of Solzhenitsyn and others. The idea that a philanthropist should be less capable of atrocities than the average man is obviously wrong; indeed, the ostentatious protector of the masses is more likely to murder indiscriminately and without remorse than anyone else, for he is a sentimentalist. A sentimentalist is a form of sociopath who adopts humanitarianism as a cause not to help humanity but to inflict misery and violence upon those he deems opponents. The humanitarian (who is also a sentimental sociopath) avoids thinking about the suffering of a particular man but instead reserves his ardour for social justice – the mass, the abstract man rather than the actual man.
That is how the characteristics of the humanitarian, sentimentalist, sociopath, social-justice advocate and equal-rights campaigner overlap very closely and are in no way in conflict, because these conditions or roles exist to provide for emotional gratification and allow a permissible outlet for violence and anger against others whilst retaining the impression of nobility for the subject. The answer to Cherniss’s initial conundrum is very simple: humanitarians are often sociopaths and sentimentalists, who are more predisposed to ideological violence than the average person.
Having set aside Cherniss’s erroneous premise (that liberalism opposes tyranny and does not use force), what can we find in Liberalism in Dark Times? It has sympathetic portraits of more self-aware liberalist thinkers of the twentieth century facing the challenge of anti-liberalist forces.
In the first of four case studies, Cherniss notes French Existentialist writer Albert Camus (1914-1960) expressed early support for, then quick volte face, on the matter of purging (in some cases executing) French collaborators following liberation, led to him writing the essay “Neither Victims nor Executioners”, which examined the effects of brutality on victims, perpetrators and witnesses. What led Camus to his hasty support of purging was a misapprehension about human nature. Camus had expected of people – once bonded into a group, harnessed to a cause of social justice and permitted to exercise extraordinary (and extra-judicial) means – that they would exercise restraint and discrimination, not foreseeing the inevitable unleashing of mankind’s latent savagery. The Rebel (1951) offers an analysis of the rebellious seeker of justice, including pitfalls. Cherniss’s overview of the moral messages of The Plague (1947) is exemplary. He sets out Camus’s priorities and acknowledgements of the compromises and failures every moral being – no matter how lucid or attentive – must risk.
French philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron (1905-1983) was a colleague of Camus’s at Combat. While both had a socialistic outlook, restrained by liberalism, Aron was more of a realist and detail man than Camus. In 1949, Aron proposed an alternative to totalitarianism and Machiavellian power politics, which he called “progressivism”, which aimed to improve institutions and respond to new situations to alleviate suffering rather than remaking the world anew. Obviously, in practice, Aron’s progressivism is simply socialism on three wheels rather than four. Aron admitted in contingent situations liberalists using extraordinary measures: “democracy’s survival depended on the ability of tough-minded elites to take drastic action, overriding both scruples and institutional constraints.” (p.121). These measures are commonly used and the liberalist state manufactures scares and crises to furnish the deployment of temporary and extraordinary exceptions.
The moral and Christian-directed critique of liberal capitalism made by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) led its originator towards socialism, seeing that as a more humanitarian alternative to the exploitation of workers under Henry Ford and less prone to finance-precipitated calamities of the Great Depression. In the inter-war period, he rejected pacifism and unequivocal condemnation of political violence under any circumstance – a consequentialist moral stand. Later, during the Cold War, he returned to liberalism, seeing liberal democracy as a defence against the infringements against personal liberty of subjects under Communism, while remaining critical of both liberal complacency and his own former positions he had subsequently renounced. He was a leading opponent of the Vietnam War.
Russian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) saw the early stages of the Russian Revolution as a child and saw the aftermath as a diplomat in post-war Moscow. His understanding of the impact of mob violence and technocratic totalitarianism caused him to grapple with the dilemmas of a liberalist wishing to preserve his values while being able to defend them against encroachment by extremists. Berlin saw Communism as a realistic response, and liberalism as an idealistic response, to the impulse to build a society based on common beliefs in the social-constructivist view of humanity and the necessity of social equality. Communists saw seizure of power and total control – dispensing with democracy and liberty – as an instant and decisive means towards their ends, with liberals working gradually and seeking consensus as they worked to similar ends.
Cherniss is clearly enamoured of his tempered liberals and they have admirable qualities, including honesty, fortitude, curiosity, tenacity and thoughtfulness. Even one sceptical of the liberal project can find appealing aspects in the figures discussed, none of whom could be called sentimental sociopaths. For liberalists, Cherniss’s book will be a tour of potentially inspirational figures. For those readers sceptical of the moral superiority or intellectual consistency of liberalism, Cherniss does not do enough to distinguish his tempered liberalism from other mainstream strains of liberalist thought to make his case persuasive, while never being less than serious, diligent and thoughtful.
