I published this in Epoch Times and wanted to share it with you all here, too. Looking forward to your comments!
Liberal elites delight in showing tolerance for things their neighbours cannot stand. Liberalism demands embrace where many people, by nature, might recoil.
However, even committed classical liberals and libertarians find some things beyond the pale, but they have lost the language to say why. Consider three examples.
The Halton District School Board ruled recently that an Oakville shop teacher be allowed to continue wearing his “large prosthetic breasts in class.” Dimensions aside, choice of attire necessarily falls outside the liberal ethos.
CBC Kids News, the “daily news service for kids in Canada,” made special mention last week of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s upcoming guest appearance on Canada’s Drag Race, another first for Canada. Trudeau’s appearance on a drag show is news enough; making sure kids know about it adds another twist. Nonetheless, liberalism has nothing to say about normalizing drag.
Last, consider the increased attention devoted to gender transition. We have a “no questions asked” approach with gender-affirming care. Some classical liberals raise alarms about children, but gender transition also falls outside liberalism. If therapy exists, then allowing transition is simply a debate about funding allocation.
Dress codes, drag, and transgenderism push the limits of liberal philosophy. These cannot be dismissed as aberrations of illiberal or progressive ideology. They are the logical outcome of liberalism itself.
American philosopher Tristram Engelhardt wrote that “Bioethics is a plural noun.” In “The Foundations of Bioethics,” Engelhardt argued we live in a world with many ethical systems. The Kantian pursuit of a canonical morality has failed: Reason alone cannot dictate dress codes or drag.
Liberalism thrived for several hundred years without an explicit canonical morality. It did so by sneaking in a Judeo-Christian ethic on the sly: A noble lie to keep the plebs at bay. But postmodernity exposed the ruse and rejected the insertion of morals without consent. No metanarratives allowed.
The brilliance of liberalism lies in being a thin philosophy. It is modest. Francis Fukuyama, well-known philosopher of liberalism, offers a simple definition in his latest book, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” Liberalism is individualist, egalitarian, universalist (true for all), and melioristic (progresses toward an easier life).
Fukuyama dilates on “liberal institutions that have come under attack.” These “include the courts and justice system, non-partisan state bureaucracies, independent media, and other bodies limiting executive power under a system of checks and balances.” He provides a long list of liberal blessings including private property, contract enforcement, (charter) rights, and many others besides.
However, liberalism cannot take credit for all that. Most “liberal institutions” predate liberalism—ancient roots out of which liberalism grew, not the other way around. No question, courts, private property, contracts, and families flourish under a canopy of liberal policy. But liberalism did not create these vital social elements on its own.
In 1955, William F. Buckley wrote that a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history yelling, Stop.” Today, classical liberals are yelling: Your prosthetics are outrageous. You cannot make me endorse drag. I refuse to call a boy a girl.
Frustrated liberals express a sentiment outside of liberalism itself. The sentiment falls beyond liberal philosophy.
Beauchamp and Childress wrote the first edition of their bible of biomedical ethics, “Principles of Bioethics,” in 1979. In it, they appealed to a “common morality,” without seeing any need to define or expand the concept. By 2019, their eighth edition struggled to find language for a concept liberalism forgot.
The search for language to express a sentiment is not new. Edmund Burke called it prejudice. A positive connotation of “prejudice” has died, but the concept survives in public life. It remains in the reflexes we use to solve innumerable problems. Consider going to work:
Am I expected to pass the stopped truck or wait?
Should I feel obliged to hold the elevator?
Was it rude for the secretary to not say hello?
Is it odd that the shop teacher wears “large prosthetic breasts?”
We find ourselves in a new, post-liberal era without words or signposts to guide us.
Although American political philosopher Patrick Deneen popularized the label in 2018 with his book “Why Liberalism Failed,” he only echoed what many others had been saying; for example, Philip Blond with “Red Tory” in 2010, and John Gray with “Enlightenment’s Wake” in 1995.
In “The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future,” British philosopher John Milbank, a pioneer in post-liberal thought, jumps to say post-liberal is not anti-liberal. We are simply in a new era of rediscovery. Moving forward requires language relevant to our time.
Until now, liberalism avoided on principle any meaningful comment on things such as dress codes, drag, and transgenderism. Liberalism relied on social consensus—a common morality, if you will—to guide behaviour. That consensus no longer exists. Popular theories such as woke ideology; equity, diversity, and inclusion; or critical theories rush to define a contemporary consensus. They offer new, illiberal ways of saying, “You just shouldn’t do that.”
Liberals face a stark choice. We can admit the limits of liberalism and start reinventing language to express social consensus, or we can allow a new consensus to be defined by illiberal reformers. Liberal tolerance fails without a shared sense of limits. Perhaps, it is time for liberals to pivot.
“Liberals face a stark choice. We can admit the limits of liberalism and start reinventing language to express social consensus, or we can allow a new consensus to be defined by illiberal reformers. Liberal tolerance fails without a shared sense of limits. Perhaps, it is time for liberals to pivot.”
Full disclosure-I am not a liberal. My politics and viewpoints are just to the left of Attila the Hun. One can imagine the minefields I must navigate daily as regards interactions with other medical professionals and hospital administrators-I do not include patients in this, as the power dynamic between physician and patient places them at a disadvantage and I am extraordinarily careful to constantly remind myself of this-ie, don’t take it out on the patients.
Liberals do not “pivot”. They are incapable of so doing. That action is not in their repertoire and applies more aptly to Federal Reserve Governors. Liberals, at least in the fields of medicine, are largely not given over to self reflection, humility, or having doubts.
How does one deal with a family medicine resident who is completely sleeved out from shoulder to wrist on both sides, with one side of their cranium completely shaved, and a minimum (by my count) of at least 10 facial piercings. Tongue not included. Obviously, that resident is trying to make a statement. I’m just not sure what it is. Long standing patients will say to me, “Why would you “inflict” that person on me”?
I’m open to alternative ideas. I try and keep an open mind, but not to the point where my brains fall out.
Thankfully, my own children have given me the solution. They make sure to surround themselves with the “unwoke”. My son works IT for a military contractor. Regardless of your opinion on working for such a company, they don’t do woke. It’s not in the company culture and never will be.
My daughter is in her final year of Business school at Peking University where the admission rate is significantly less than 1% of applicants. Again, they don’t do woke. It’s not tolerated. Chinese professors expect and demand a level of propriety that the above-mentioned resident is simply not capable of.
Similarly, I surround myself with “unwoke” individuals at work. Individuals who look at the missives sent by the CPSO, OMA, Royal College, CMPA, ONA, etc and shake their heads at the waste of bandwidth. Virtue signalling at its finest. How does one put on an evaluation that it would be in the resident’s best interest if they “grew up” and stopped begging for attention.
As an example this arrived in my inbox last week.
https://planetaryhealthaction.ca/
If I take this course, I will be able to
“Develop strategies to navigate, and reflect upon, the complex emotions evoked by the planetary health crises”
I’m all out of complex emotions. But it’s nice to know that Dr. Green has my back when it comes to the planetary health crisis.
There is no need for a “new” consensus. The wheel has already been invented.
“Pivot”-I don’t think so. Liberals are drunk on their wokeness. It’s not possible for such people to admit that there are limits to their behavior. Life being what it is, it doesn’t end well for them. It never does. Wokeness will simply collapse from its own internal strife. You just don’t want to be in the same room when that happens.
Forgive the rant, but I was “triggered” by your blog post and had to comment in order to protect the “safe place” in my head, where I live-Sarc
All kidding aside, it’s becoming an all consuming topic and as you say, if we don’t as a society get to place some limitations on this kind of behavior, then it will be done for us. Or on the other hand, I’m an antiquated dinosaur and probably need to let the “adults” in our governing bodies carry on with their righteous crusade of wokeness.
Quote from James Carville-Democratic strategist(I admit to being a political junkie-I’m far from being a democrat, but he’s a smart individual)
“You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.
Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud”
Appreciate the blog.
David
David … you were ‘triggered’ indeed. I hope I can trigger you more often! 😀
I really appreciate your thoughtful comments — far too many to respond fully in the same spirit. I’ll offer three thoughts:
1. Great pushback on the ability of some people to change their mind. Agree. I’d say it’s probably a human problem, not just a liberal one, but that still doesn’t explain why I’d bother writing about the topic (except to rant). Liberalism has been the air we breath for decades (maybe even a hundred years or more), at least politically. I’m writing to all of us who’ve grown up seeing it as self-evident. Although it can take several years to reorder our thinking, I’ve seen a number of people (including myself) awaken to a new (old) understanding of culture and politics (pun intended on ‘awaken’).
So, I’m hopeful. With work and winsome argument, I think most regular people remain open to seeing holes in their ideas and welcoming ways to plug them.
2. Your thoughts on education mirror others I’ve heard recently (more off-the-record than on). I think it warrants a post to open some space for people to share.
3. I was happy to see your comment that most people can see through wokeness now. I still worry that they do not know what else to offer in replacement: stoicism, honour culture, epicurianism, humanism, classicism, an invasion of non-Western Christianity … who knows.
Again, really enjoyed your thoughtful comments. These things require long conversations to work though, so I’m not surprised it takes a few paragraphs to express yourself on this.
Thanks again!
I am an old guy and sometimes think I may be getting Alzheimer’s Disease as I get somewhat confused about the different terms such as the exact meaning of wokeism and can’t usually understand the definition of right and left after it had nothing to with where they sat in the House. I think the biggest problem with understanding each other is that we seem to understand political correctness better than common sense and we really no longer can truly understand things that used to be absolute such as “truth” and death etc.
Nothing exists to bring us together such as values did in by-gone years. I think I understand what I am saying but perhaps no body else does. I love comments but maybe for full discussion we need a “Dead Poets Society”
“I am an old guy and sometimes think I may be getting Alzheimer’s Disease as I get somewhat confused about the different terms such as the exact meaning of wokeism”
I tend to approach the term “wokeism” in the same vein as I approach the term “pornography”.
In his concurring opinion in the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio case, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart delivered what has become the most well-known line related to the detection of “hard-core” pornography: the infamous “I know it when I see it”.
It seems to me that the comparison of pornography to wokeism is an apt one. Both are initially interesting to explore, but at the end of the day, one is left wanting. They are both fake, overdone, and disingenuous. What may have been a clarion call for “social justice” at one point in the past, has now morphed into a mockery of civilized behavior by those who wish to be self appointed gatekeepers for language and behavior.
For Dr. Barber;
On a lighter note, I was a resident in general surgery in Ottawa from 1983-87. It was a strong vascular section with you, Drs. Scobie, McPhail, Bouchard, Wellington, Waddell (apologies if I left someone out-it’s been a long time). I still remember Dr. Keith Scobie. He was quiet and deliberate in his dealings with patients and resident staff, but I lived in fear of the man. Screwing up was not something that you wanted to do on his service.
I can still remember the look he gave me when I inquired as to why he was closing a redo AAA with wire. Fun times. I eventually returned to the vascular component of surgery, but confined myself to those anastomoses requiring use of a microscope.
Great comment, Dr. Barber, and fantastic reply, David.
You make a solid point about ‘truth’ and ‘death’. Once an ideology denies reality, it can define itself however it wants. Indeed, changing the definition, and the words used, helps to keep opponents at bay.
All societies exist on a fabric of what they agree to uphold and denounce or prescribe/proscribe. For example, honesty (and its limits), civility and decency (what they mean and where they apply), and so on. And like you said, David, these words are hard to define in the same way we struggle to define pornography or art.
Thanks to both of you for posting! Readers love the comments.
Cheers
To David: no one left out, but Wellington and myself are the one two alive of the original six. We are both reasonably well. I was given the Honour of giving Dr. Scobie eulogy. On a side note I met Shawn at the meeting in Baddeck N. S. “Free Speech in Science and Medicine”.