Taboo (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

TOWARD A NEW LIBERALISM

Regardless of pro-free speech editorials in Harper’s, The Economist, the Washington Post, or the New York Times, deeper generational currents are propelling our society away from cultural freedom.4 Modern liberalism has become corrupted, and we are in need of a rebalanced new liberalism. The goals of cultural socialism—achieving equality of outcome and protection from harm for historically disadvantaged identity groups—are worthy aims in moderation but are increasingly crowding out competing human values such as freedom, truth, community, and excellence. Just as economic liberals resisted and moderated the claims of economic socialism, those of us who are cultural liberals must find a way to push back against cultural socialism. The pursuit of cultural equality cannot come at the expense of our cultural wealth. Rather than levelling down successful social groups or trying to abolish boundaries that are vital for group flourishing, we need to find ways of raising up the less successful. We could call this perspective the common good, cultural utilitarianism, cultural holism or, more simply, human flourishing.

Restrictions on speech, reason, and national tradition are set to increase in the foreseeable future because they are the new normal among the rising Gen Z and millennial generations. For instance, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans and Britons under age twenty-five prioritize protecting minorities from hate speech over defending free speech. Eight in ten American undergraduate students would ban a speaker who claims Black Lives Matter is a hate group from their campus. Young people who don’t go to university differ only slightly from those who do. These more illiberal generations are reshaping the workforce and will be the median voter by the 2040s.

From the New York Times to Disney to Spotify, younger employees are pressuring their organizations to prioritize cultural socialism over our traditional cultural liberalism of freedom of expression, equal treatment, due process, analytic logic, and the scientific method.5 This cultural revolution has rocked institutions from the bottom up, sparking a wider climate of political mistrust and polarization.

Racism should be frowned upon in society, but when one category of human experience becomes sacralized, competing values can no longer be properly balanced. With the “big bang” of the race taboo, the sacredness around race, like a ball of putty, could be stretched to encompass non-racist phenomena like standardized tests or punctuality. It could be transposed to adjacent identity categories such as gender and sexuality. From early activist court decisions to affirmative action bureaucracies, speech codes to cancel culture, Critical Race Theory to statue toppling, the cultural socialism we are living through is the outworking and scaling up of the logic of the sacredness of race. Revolutions in social media and media, along with Trump, acted as an accelerant, but we would have eventually arrived at a similar place, regardless.

Events and emotions arising from 1960s social movements deepened a set of moral intuitions among egalitarian liberals focused on equal outcomes and protecting chosen identity groups from psychological harm. The “strong majorities bad, weak minorities good” pattern of affective attachments—not a Marxist-style theoretical blueprint—guided the movement. It was inductive and empathy-driven rather than deductive and systematizing, resulting in an emergent, leaderless, sacralizing progressivism. While egalitarian liberals rejected communism, they were socialist on identity, championing a logic of quotas, minority hyper-fragility, and systemic discrimination.

In emotional terms, they were attracted by a progressive identity that elevated the ideal of the White savior, defending weak minorities against oppressive majorities. Their sacred values, stigmas, and heroic ideals are anti-majority and egalitarian, not, as in earlier periods, anti-government and liberal-national. While material self-interest and negative feelings toward communism protected them from economic extremism, no similar emotional or material safeguards existed on cultural issues. Here, there was thus nothing to prevent a drift to the extreme left, ultimately embracing the critical race, feminist, and gender theories of cultural revolutionaries. In some cases, as with affirmative action, political correctness and expanding definitions of emotional trauma and harassment, left-liberals spearheaded cultural socialist innovation; in others, such as Critical Race Theory in schools, they eagerly embraced the slogans of utopian revolutionaries. “Wokeness” thus emerges through a symbiosis of the liberal and illiberal left, with the former more important than the latter.

Theoretical justifications—Maoism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory—tried to intellectualize the emotional elephant. But focusing on the production of these theories fails to ask why the ideas of the radicals struck a chord with so many, especially the young and highly educated. Without a large audience of egalitarian liberals emotionally orienting toward their intuitive North Star of equal outcomes and harm protection for sacred minorities, the words of radicals such as Herbert Marcuse or Ibram X. Kendi would be merely howling in the wilderness. My demand-side analysis helps explain why cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and gender ideology have either been eagerly accepted or gone unchallenged in elite institutions. Some are scared to raise their heads above the parapet, but many left-liberal knowledge workers find it difficult to quibble with an appeal to compassion and equal representation for identity groups. What else could morality be about? Swimming with the progressive tide also allows them to inhabit the attractive role of defender of the vulnerable against an oppressive majority and its “system.”

Woke is more mythos than logos: an identity like nationalism or religion more than a philosophy like liberalism. Thus, while modern liberals are at pains to philosophically distinguish themselves from the woke left, their affective attachments are, in fact, very similar. Figure 1.1 encapsulates the argument, illustrating how the race taboo (bolded) fits within the broader left-liberal symbol complex. This coalesced in America in the early 1900s as a pro-European immigrant, anti-WASP majority orientation. By the late 1910s, the majority was being stigmatized by intellectuals and, by the late thirties, it was painted as a threat. The pluralist left-liberalism of mid-century intellectuals subsequently overreached, from the mid-1960s, to become woke cultural socialism.

I distinguish beliefs about society (located on the left half of the chart) from self-identity (on the right side). The vertical society/self dichotomy is horizontally bisected by positive ideals across the top half and negative reactions in the bottom half. In short, the subjectivity of modern—though not classical—liberals is based on the same myths, symbols, and moral intuitions as the radical left. The difference between modern liberals and radicals is only a matter of degree. Having said this, liberals’ principled commitment to free speech, reason, and incrementalism is also important, preventing them from endorsing cancel culture and rogue statue toppling.6

The Left-Liberal Mythos

Figure 1.1

A Dystopian Future?

In his 1961 short story, The Handicapper General, Kurt Vonnegut portrays a futuristic America in the grip of a noneconomic form of socialist totalitarianism:

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”7

In this brave new world, smart people are required to wear handicap headgear which emits sharp noises to prevent them taking “unfair” advantage of their intelligence. Beautiful people don disfiguring masks. The hero of the story, Harrison Bergeron, rebels by breaking free of his cumbersome handicaps and liberating a pretty ballerina from hers. The duo enjoys a brief moment of glory on stage before being executed in a grand finale by the handicapping authorities.

The Handicapper General is a cautionary tale about the excesses of a cultural form of socialism. That is, an ideology which believes in engineering equal outcomes defined on the basis of social and biological characteristics other than economic class. In the story, Vonnegut focuses on intelligence, athletic prowess, and attractiveness. These are objective traits that are not the basis for subjective identities. In our day, cultural socialism is preoccupied with the woke traits of race, gender, and sexuality, and attuned to the subjectivity of those who identify with these traits. Thus, the Handicapper is a cultural socialist, but not woke because he is neither concerned with subjective identity nor the woke trinity (note that I exclude weight or disability from my definition of woke). Vonnegut’s story was a flight of fancy at the time, coming as it did prior to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Yet it no longer seems quite as far-fetched. Indeed, cultural socialism is the ethos that underpins both Vonnegut’s...