Other thinkers, generally those whose ruminations remain within the parameters of liberal democratic politics, still betray the lingering influence of the idea of progress. Again, [John] Rawls provides a measure because he has been one of the very few with the theoretical range to make most of his presuppositions visible. By attempting a comprehensive theory of justice, rather than the more conventional small-scale work on "problems," he inevitably exposes more of the links that hold the liberal worldview together. Not surprisingly, one of the essential elements has been a certain uncritically accepted notion of the malleability of human nature. What human beings are, he insists, is not to be determined on the basis of our own social and political experience, because we would then be describing merely the kind of individuals who happen to arise from the institutional structures of our own time.

 

Instead, we should look to the possibility that some of the most intractable moral shortcomings, such as envy or domination, might not be so prob­lematic under different social circumstances. Rawls builds into his thought experiment not only the weak assumption that most people will want more rather than less of the primary goods but also the assumption that individuals in the original position will be relatively disinterested in one another. That is, their own happiness will not be substantially affected by the happiness or unhappiness of others.

Rawls refers to this as "the special assumption I make" that is necessary to make the decisions of each to maximize his or her access to primary goods fully rational. "The parties do not seek to confer benefits or to impose injuries on one another; they are not moved by affection or rancor. Nor do they try to gain relative to each other; they are not envious or vain" (A Theory of Justice, 144).

 

Rawls justifies this unusual assumption on the grounds that he is con­structing an ideal theory. Once it is completed, he promises to return to the question of whether it will work under conditions where it is likely that human beings are envious and vain. But he does not even wait until the end of the book to dispose of that concern. He goes on to indicate that he does not believe that envy and vanity will be realistic problems under the conditions specified in the theory of justice. The principles of equal liberty and inequality benefiting all will, when they are put into practice, "lead to social arrangements in which envy and other destructive feelings are not likely to be strong. The conception of justice eliminates the conditions that give rise to disruptive attitudes. It is, therefore, inherently stable" (144).

 

Apart from the problem of how we move from the theoretical ideal to its application, a formidable challenge given the acknowledged incompatibility between the assumptions of the two of them, there is an even deeper diffi­culty. Rawls is asking us to accept the progressivist premise that human nature is susceptible to such institutional determination. Now the degree of moral progress to which human nature is amenable is itself an empirical question.

There is no need to erect any absolute limits. Even if we knew what they were, we would not know where to place them. What is required is a modest quantity of skepticism that insists, in the absence of any countervailing evidence, that we should not expect human behavior to markedly differ from the range of our ordinary experience. Are not envy and vanity and the desire to dominate more deeply rooted temptations than Rawlsian liberalism seems to suspect? Do we not sense them as possibilities that can perhaps infect even our most noble aspirations? It might indeed be nice if the darkness of our ulterior motives could so easily be dispelled.

 

But it is not so easily dismissed, and one is struck by the baldness of Rawls's assertion that "men's propensity to injustice is not a permanent aspect of community life; it is greater or less depending in large part on social institutions, and in particular on whether these are just or unjust" (245). This seems an extraordinarily rash assumption on which to base a moral and political order, and the unease it provokes is not relieved when he finally does address the translation to the actual world. After explaining that a perfectly just society is an ideal that rational beings would desire more than anything else, Rawls suggests that the obstacles to its stabilization in practice are all tractable. He still recognizes that instability of one kind, our ability to count on justice as a predictable dimension of our social relations, will be removed through the existence of a sovereign. But Rawls assumes the deeper instability of the human heart, what he calls our "sense of justice," will be remediated through the progressive movement of reality itself.

 

There is a quaintness to many of the passages in the last chapters of A Theory of Justice as Rawls reaches back to the old-time faith that had sustained liberals in the past. He invokes the shade of Mill to valorize the expectation that as society develops, individuals converge toward the recognition "that society between human beings is manifestly impossible on any other basis than that the interests of all are to be consulted." As with Mill, the hope expands into the eschatological vision of a perfected state that "leads the individual to desire for himself only those things in the benefits of which others are included." Searching around for confirmation of this aspiration, Rawls finds it again in another nineteenth-century faith, evolution. The progressive emergence of a sense of justice can finally be understood as part of the larger cosmic process by which order emerges from chaos. "The theory of evolution would suggest that it is the outcome of natural selection; the capacity for a sense of justice and the moral feelings is an adaptation of mankind to its place in nature" (501-3).

 

The temptation to extrapolate from the fragile island of order, imagining that it will be extended infinitely into the vast sea of disorder that surrounds it, is virtually irresistible to some of the leading liberal thinkers. Ronald Dworkin in the closing pages of Law's Empire similarly invokes the move toward "utopian theory" (408). Again it is defended on the grounds of theoretical completeness, necessary for the full unfolding of the picture of law as integrity, a principled means of reaching agreement between individuals who may disagree about a great deal. "This purified interpretation speaks, not to the distant duties of judges or legislators or any other political body or institution, but directly to the community personified. It declares how the community's practices must be reformed to serve more coherently and comprehensively a vision of social justice it has partly adopted, but it does not declare which officer has which office in the grand project" (407).

 

Not indeed that there is anything untoward in such aspirational rhetoric within an author's vision, it is more what is omitted that is the chief source of the distortions. Dworkin, like Rawls and a long line of liberal forebears, seems to suggest that all that stands in the way of the realization of the dream of integrity is its rational elaboration. Once it is explained, its persuasive logic will be compelling.

 

There is little of the sense of caution that would temper the eschatological expectations. The possibility that human society may never actually aspire to, let alone achieve, the pure idea of law is simply not entertained. This is defended even at a time when its stunning unreality can scarcely be avoided. After a half century of expanding concern with social justice, involving a steady enlargement of the liberal guarantee of rights over an ever widening range of activities and individuals, we are further than ever from a stable moral consensus. This is not to deny that the expansion of civil rights, enforcing the liberties of groups who had not hitherto enjoyed the full protection of the laws, and the development of a network of welfare and security arrangements that sustain greater real individual liberty have been a positive benefit. They have, and that is precisely the point of their limitation.

 

The enlargement of liberal guarantees and opportunities does not consti­tute a step in the progressive emergence of the eschaton. It is simply one fairly tangible set of improvements that have been made in a concrete legal and institutional structure that may or may not be able to sustain them materially and morally. One of the most significant factors tending toward their degeneration has been just the sense of false assurance promoted by the progressivist dream itself. If the process of maturation and self-responsibility is part of the autonomic movement of history, then there is no necessity to undertake the arduous effort to inculcate and practice the virtues themselves. We can simply wait for history itself to perform the task. This is what makes the shock of the collision with reality all the more traumatic. Liberals are typically astonished to discover that the generation that has grown up under its less demanding tutelage is less responsible and caring than any prior generation.⁴

 

It is particularly incomprehensible that a generation that has grown up with less disadvantages than any previous one should exhibit patterns of behavior that can be regarded only as pathological. The epidemic of lethal violence coursing through our society can partly be explained by the easier availability of the means of violence. A very large part can only be accounted for by the increased callousness toward the suffering of others. As members of a liberal society we are appalled to discover that the cumulative solicitations for the rights and autonomy of individuals have only spawned greater indifference and irresponsibility. A mushrooming of out-of-wedlock births can surely not be blamed on a lack of information; it is more plausibly explained by a widespread disregard for the welfare of those for whom we are responsible. Nor can the surge in white-collar crime and socially condoned cheating of all types be attributed to a lack of material and psychic privileges. Examples can be multiplied indefinitely, apparently without plumbing the depths of liberal naiveté and also without gaining much more than a sense of superiority to it.

 

It is enough to note that liberal reflection appears particularly helpless when confronted by the contradiction between its expectation of progress and the reality of its history. The myth of progress has served to insulate it from the awareness of this divergence and has prevented liberal societies from taking the realistic steps required by the objectives it intends. Expanding individual liberty without the correlative moral discipline does not promote autonomy. In most human beings, it only encourages self-serving irresponsibility. Liberal philosophy has always harbored a weakness in lacking a vocabulary of virtue. But it is only the dream of progress that has allowed the liberal philosophy to overlook its own deficiency altogether by reassuring us that the evolution of humanity itself will take care of our moral improvement. The self-deception is palpable in that most transparent of contemporary liberals, Richard Rorty.

 

Much of his not inconsiderable rhetorical flair is employed in the demon­stration that there is no noncircular defense of liberal principles of morality. He acknowledges that this means that the public consensus, on which our life together is based, depends on the presence of pervasive social feelings of solidarity. Yet these are feelings that we are not well able to promote. At bottom they arise from the hope that Rorty is right that there is a moral progress "in the direction of greater human solidarity" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 192). When pressed to explain how such a hope might be realized and to reflect on the means by which solidarity toward the sufferings of others might be engendered, he can provide no further illumination than that it happens. The identification with humanity he characterizes as "the self-doubt which has gradually, over the last few centuries, been inculcated into inhabitants of the democratic states—doubt about their own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation, curiosity about possible alternatives" (198). It is a characterization that smacks of nothing so much as the concern of the comfortable for the distressed, more designed to relieve the conscience of the former than the suffering of the latter. Nothing suggests that the solidarity will become anything more than a salve. The ambivalence of the liberal abhorrence of cruelty cannot finally be eliminated.

 

Hollowness of Liberal Construction

 

It is this apparent hollowness of a liberal polity unable to acknowledge the depth of its own convictions that has caused so many of its critics to conclude that it is beyond remediation. The idea that a liberal order can be sustained in the absence of the virtues indispensable to its existence, is a conceit so incredible that it hardly deserves to be taken seriously. How can we expect that respect for the dignity and rights of one another can continue if there is no way of teaching that human beings are deserving of dignity and respect? Why would anyone accept the right of all to "equal concern and respect" if there is no way of explaining the source of such a conviction? Can we have any realistic hope that rights will be observed if we cannot make the reasons for them even minimally plausible? How can virtues be promoted if we can no longer teach them?

 

Virtue has long been the Achilles' heel of the liberal disposition. The awareness that a liberal public order depended on a fund of moral capital that it was not well-positioned to augment but could readily draw down, has been present as far back as we care to trace the beginning of the formulation. It has even given rise to an uneasy tension between two traditions within liberal reflection: pluralist self-interest and republican virtue. The latter, which goes back to the Florentine and English republicanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has had a continuing influence through the American founders and the various strands of communitarian thought all the way up to the present.

 

The former, pluralist individualist perspective, also has a long historical lineage from the rising commercial bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century up through the federalists, the progressives and the liberal pluralists of our own day. Quite often the split has been less between individuals than within individuals, as the pulls of self-interest and of virtue seem alternately more or less reliable foundation of order. Madison is a classic illustration of a thinker in whom both sides exist in uneasy alliance.⁵ The decisive aspect is that the tension has never been fully confronted within the liberal tradition itself.

 

Without such a clarification in principle the result has been an inexorable drift toward the easier of the two poles, self-interest, with only fitful reminders that the liberal order is also sustained by a certain level of virtue. The reason is that without an incontrovertible defense of virtue its proponents have always been compelled to beat a tactical retreat before the more vocal claimants of the liberty of self-interest. It has been astoundingly difficult to make the case within liberal societies that one ought not press all of the rights to which one is entitled. The notion that there may be higher moral claims has not generally won the day. This is why liberal societies present that seemingly irrational configuration so noticeable to outsiders such as Solzhenitsyn.⁶ They seem to be composed of individuals who share nothing except the impervious conviction that their rights must be served at any cost, no matter who else is affected or how the long-term welfare of all may be undermined.⁷

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.¹¹    

[This is part 2 of a four part article. Part 3 will appear next week. 

Part 1 may be read HERE.]

NOTES

(for fuller citations see the bibliography in Professor Walsh's book)