Hopescrolling
Thinking about liberalism after two weeks of war in Ukraine
In 1942, Paul Éluard starts to write a love poem.
Sur mes cahiers d’écolier
Sur mon pupitre et les arbres
Sur le sable sur la neige
J’écris ton nomOn my exercise books
On my desk and the trees
On the sand on the snow
I write out your name
I spent last week in a small French ski resort, with a torn ACL and a dose of Covid, doomscrolling. Isolated in my apartment, I had nothing to do but watch the invasion of Ukraine play out on my smartphone.
Amongst the horror, strangely my dominant emotion has been hope. I think the surprises have come much more on the upside than the downside. I had no illusions that Putin was a wicked man running a brutal system. What I did not expect was the extraordinary unity and power of the world’s reaction.
We had got so used to thinking of social media as nothing but a vector for misinformation and lunacy, manipulated by the Russian regime to sow discord and fanaticism, or worse still cynicism, relativism and mistrust. And yet here we are. People have used Twitter to spread news, challenge misinformation, put out their own analyses, raise donations, and pressure governments and companies to action.
And taking the broadest view — and obviously this is just an impression — it really seems as if public opinion has been an actor in the campaign, not just an inert material to be manipulated. Without the world’s instant reaction, would Western politicians have moved so far, so fast to punch back at the aggressor with sanctions on Russia and military equipment for Ukraine? Without it, would the UK government have had its Damascene conversion to cleansing our institutions of oligarch dollars? A slogan doing the rounds sums this view up: “Russia got cancelled”. (Tyler Cowen makes the same point.)
This idea needs some qualification straight away. There’s been plenty of nonsense on the internet along with the good stuff. Russian trolls are still out there — no Twitter blockage for them — and they’ll still be spreading lies after this initial wave of enthusiasm has worn off. So, it’s too early to declare information victory. Lastly, this wasn’t just a bottom-up movement. Governments, information warfare departments in various militaries, professional journalists, academics and a variety of other “elite” actors have surely all helped to feed the West’s biggest ever outrage mob.
Yet, overall, it seems that social media has a good side which we had forgotten.
Sur toutes les pages lues
Sur toutes les pages blanches
Pierre sang papier ou cendre
J’écris ton nomOn the pages I’ve read
On the pages unwritten
Stone blood paper or ash
I write out your name
In the 16th century, religious fanatics start to use a new communications technology. They spread their ideas through German cities, by pamphlet, woodcut and book. They take over the city of Münster and send out messages to the rest of the world to join them. It all ends disastrously, with a mad dictator taking multiple wives and personally executing his enemies in the town square. After a year-long siege, the forces of order exhibit the rebel leaders’ bodies in cages, which still hang on the side of the church.
Who would think at this point that freedom of speech was a good idea? In fact, essentially noone does. Only a few anonymous pamphleters survive to mock authority’s attempts to monopolize information, and to challenge the powerful to open debate.
But strangely, over the next two hundred years, some societies do take the bet on freedom — not deliberately, but almost behind their own backs, they grow into places where anyone can speak their mind about politics or religion. And still more strangely, this freedom seems to be associated with economic and social success.
Today a new communications technology is upending society, and again it seems a very uncertain bet whether letting it run free will make us or mar us. The first weeks of the Ukraine war suggest that the bet on freedom still has some potential upside. Social media’s chaotic mess might yet be tamed, and — for all of Putin’s troll farms — produce better outcomes than the top-down controls being put in place elsewhere.
More broadly, we have all been facing a choice between liberalism and its alternatives over the past few years, and this choice sometimes seemed quite unattractive. On one side, liberalism seemed to have lost its way. Obsessions with various forms of identity and victimhood, unsatisfiable demands for equity, or debates about gender that got lost in absurd distinctions, took over among left liberals, and pushed out older ideas about fairness, equality of opportunity and free speech. The liberalism of the right seemed morally attenuated, reduced to arguments for lower taxes and deregulation. On the other side, there was a new, postliberal authoritarianism. Like socialism before it, it had a Really Existing version, embodied in Chinese, Turkish and Russian dictatorships. But it also had its fifth column in the democracies — authoritarian populists like Trump and Jair Bolsonaro — and its ideologues, “integralists” who harked back to medieval Catholic ideas.
Ukraine has clarified that choice. Whatever I think of woke gender-noodling intersectional opponent-cancelling jargon-spouting outrage-mobbing vegan SJWs, their crimes are not committed with tanks. They don’t invade countries. They don’t shell nurseries.
A friend asked me, à propos that book I’m writing: are you trying to destroy liberalism or to save it? I wasn’t sure, but now I think I have an answer. I’m a traditionalist; well, if you are a traditionalist in a Western society, you have to be a liberal, because our traditions are liberal.
Sur les images dorées
Sur les armes des guerriers
Sur la couronne des rois
J’écris ton nomOn the gilded images
On knights’ coats of arms
On the crown of kings
I write out your name
This also works the other way round. If you are a liberal, you should respect Western traditions, because that is where liberalism got its content. So if you think liberalism has lost its way, one response is to return to its sources.
In particular, here are three taproots of liberalism. Each has something to offer us today.
The invention of the individual, and of individual rights, in the Christian tradition that developed especially during the twelfth-century renaissance.
The ideas of free speech and free thought that developed from Protestant freedom of conscience, and the idea of toleration that was born from the religious conflicts of the Reformation.
The nineteenth-century liberal nationalism of (e.g.) Mill, Renan and Garibaldi, based in people’s desire to live freely together under no external yoke.
The first root corrects the idea of the liberal individual as just a collection of desires and preferences. Actually, liberal individualism starts from the idea that, as C. S. Lewis once put it, any individual is infinitely more important than any state or institution or collectivity, because while these are historical, the individual soul is eternal.
Free speech and toleration remind us that liberalism was a way of organizing politics. It wasn’t just that people should be left alone to trade or think. It’s also that people should be able to persuade each other to do things together, and that is how we should run our societies. This is the original “bet on freedom”, and we now have to decide, under the new conditions where technology has turned us all into broadcasters, if and how we still want to make that bet.
Lastly, modern liberals tend to see nationalism as a primitive leftover. But Ernest Renan, long ago in 1882, thought of it differently. In his lecture What is a nation? he took up and dismissed in turn each of the “romantic” unities that were thought to found nationality: shared ancestry, shared race, shared language, …. Each of these had awkward cases that clearly did not fit: the racial mixes of every European nation; the Swiss with three languages. Instead, he said, a nation is founded on two things: a fund of shared memories, and a will to live together. In his unshakeable liberalism, he insisted that nationality could only be founded on consent:
A nation has no more right than a king to tell a province “you belong to me, I’m taking you”.
Again, from this idea, we can learn that liberalism is not just a solvent of community. It can create it too. And we have just seen a nation rise up against imperialist invaders. So, this idea was not just a nineteenth-century hangover. It matters today.
It’s not irrelevant here that a prime motivation of Ukrainian resistance is, surely, the desire to be part of Europe. In other words, some quite ordinary material motivations — wanting to be in a prosperous trade bloc, with freedom of movement, with slightly fewer bullying or bribing officials — have brought a people together in a fight against Goliath. There is no paradox here. The individuals of Ukraine, and the nation of Ukraine, would be freer in Europe than in Russia.
Sur les sentiers éveillés
Sur les routes déployées
Sur les places qui débordent
J’écris ton nomOn paths come awake
On routes that are deployed
On overflowing squares
I write out your name
These old liberal ideas are not just deeper than the modern versions of liberalism. They are also more appealing than the “postliberal” alternative. I wanted to write in detail about these, but I think it’s better just to cut to the chase: they’re sometimes very interesting1, but at some level they’re ridiculous. These are people whose touchstone is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas is possibly a really deep guy, but his work was written in the Middle Ages, and I think it is fair to say that you can understand quite a lot about modern society without reading him. I hope so. I haven’t. Postliberals write sentences like “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” Here’s a good heuristic: if someone writes like a pompous ass, then maybe they think like one too. I don’t want to write like that, I want to write like Jonah Goldberg. Screw postliberalism.
One day, Paul Éluard will be asked to save his friend from a Communist death sentence, and he’ll stay silent. But it is 1942 in occupied France. What is the name of Éluard’s lover?
Sur la santé revenue
Sur le risque disparu
Sur l’espoir sans souvenir
J’écris ton nomOn health coming back
On risk gone away
On hope without memory
I write out your nameEt par le pouvoir d’un mot
Je recommence ma vie
Je suis né pour te connaître
Pour te nommerAnd by the power of a word
I start my life again
I was born to know you
To name youLiberté.
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I apologize to Mencius Moldbug if neoreaction is profoundly different to postliberalism. I’m sure I’ll know better once I’ve read all his 300-page screeds.
always amazed how some people are expert in everything, pretty common among economists. Meanwhile we learn that the individual is an invention of the Christian tradition and the idea of nationalism roots also in Garibaldi (!). I made my day.