When the dragon eats the knight

Liberalism — the ideology of the possible over the actual

Once you know the backstory, you’ll see it everywhere. Sometimes the frequency illusion is no illusion at all. The backstory I mean is the essential lie that is liberalism, that fashionable ideological hangup that has made our world in its image; or, rather, that we have used to make the world according to a certain distortion of the human image. We made liberalism for ourselves and now it is unmaking us. It follows the modern trend of seeing politics as a technique; as a mode of control. Soon, politics becomes a technology as technique is reified in systems and processes and bureaucracies. Life becomes very machine-like.

By definition, liberalism is a political and social ideology or technology that promotes individual rights (not virtues) and liberties (not commitments) and free enterprise (money, not value) by seeking the greatest possible freedom from constraints and custom. It is especially the emphasis on freedom that beguiles people. Who wouldn’t want to be free? But such freedom implies that we should be always wanting and always hungry—like the Thessalian king, Erysichthon. He was, as liberalism would have us be, never fulfilled and always dissatisfied. Eventually, as the story goes, the fact that Erysichthon never felt full led him to literally eat himself, although we do not have to take this act literally to see its meaning for us. Self-consumption becomes the primary human project thanks to liberalism. If you ever eat yourself (I do not recommend this), you’ll end up as dead as Erysichthon ended up—or, certainly, dead inside. Well, liberalism is ultimately a kind of suicide. Whatever signs of decay we see in the world now—I will name some of them below—the demon of liberalism is implicated. This is not a new demon, of course, only it is the one that most obviously structures many of the things we now call normal. I call liberalism a demon because we don’t see it. It is invisible. But then, once you know the backstory, once you see the pattern it imposes on the world, the presence of the demon becomes impossible to miss. 

To be clear, liberalism has many gains. To say that there is nothing good in liberalism is a lie. But liberalism itself remains the bigger lie, a contextual falsehood, because it takes the easy pickings of truth but not its more difficult dimensions. The successes of liberalism have often come at the cost of recognising its excesses; the benefits are noticed but its costs are typically put down to regular everyday forms of coping. My aim here, therefore, is to focus on its chief excesses: its boundarylessness and its unscrupulous optimism. The former is evident in unbounded freedom; the latter is evident in any unbridled faith in sheer deworlded potential and progress.

By now, for instance, we know that liberalism’s idea of negative freedom is precisely what the ancients would have called slavery. It turns out that if I can have whatever I want, I am not free at all. Freedom, in its truest and most positive form, is never just freedom from constraints; rather, it is the freedom to commit to the right constraints. We are not free if we can choose whatever we want; we are free only when we are allowed to choose well. It is worth mentioning, especially since the topic is hot, that speech is similarly not free if you can say whatever you want; it is free only when you can speak the truth. Speech is freest, in fact, when it speaks the language of truth, beauty, and goodness.

To linger on this issue for a moment longer, current debates around free speech tend to fall into the liberalist trap of assuming that speech is free when it is free from hate (as ideologically defined) or free to just express the self (as ideologically defined and understood). For liberalism, speech is free when relieved of limits; this is to say, it is free when the limits of speech are invisible to the speaker who just happens to conform to the ideological status quo. Free speech starts, in this case, to be defined by whatever mode of conformity happens to be in fashion. For liberalism, speech is free when it feels free. But it is a mistake to assume a simple identity between what things feel like and what they are. Liberalism does not like the category of ‘error’ as a common human problem. This, ironically, is probably why it tends towards a kind of puritan moralism.

To be clear, I am in favour of free speech. I agree with the basic principle that no state or corporation should determine what I am and am not allowed to say. People should be at liberty to speak out of turn. But this, in itself, is no indication of real freedom. My preference for a law that unbridles the tongue does not mean that I think any talk whatever will be wholesome. Human beings are fallen creatures, sinners and addicts. If I want people to be allowed their transgressive speech it is in part because I want to know who I would do well to avoid and who I should not imitate. The compulsive guttermouth is not any freer than the person who has been cancelled. I just think the law that allows the former is more rational. The law that insists on cancellation or censorship is typically not a righteous law; it has less to do with ethics than with a certain mode of control.

Again, free speech—that is, speech that really is free—is speech that has the freedom (guided by customs and traditions and wisdom and not just arbitrary laws) to say true things. I am freest, in fact, when my words become portals to deeper and richer being-in-the-world. I am freest in creating through words. This, too, is a dimension of discussion on free speech typically neglected. We are natural creators: truth itself is a creative thing because to live the truth (and not merely speak it) means participating in its abundance. The acorn is creative when it becomes an oak tree but is a slave when it turns into a cabbage or a cactus. The person is creative when he becomes more fully alive and flourishes but a slave when he becomes less than what he is. He is free, for instance, when he is able to accept the gift of his body but a slave when he must give up his manhood because it is politically incorrect to be a man. Freedom means being able to commit to the givenness of being and to being part of shaping that givenness into fullness. Slavery means usurping reality in the name of something a bunch of mad theorists dreamed up in universities and French cafés.

Liberal negative freedom doesn’t tend to concern itself very much with truth at all—as I’ll explain in more detail below. It denies any substantiality to being, after all. If people are apparently ‘free’ to inflict enormous harms on their bodies, for instance, to have surgeons hack them up to fit the soteriology of radical constructivists and solipsistic subjectivists—people who seem to me to be like the self-harming prophets of Baal when they wanted their skygod to perform a miracle for them (see 1 Kings 18:20-46)—if people do this, they are clearly not free. To ontologise a profoundly reductionistic and limited conception of reality, to materialise and literalise a false concept of self, is not freedom at all. But liberalism would say otherwise. And since liberalism is so normal, what I’m saying here would sound like madness to a liberal. I would be accused of not respecting rights and freedoms. That would be untrue, of course. I very much respect the rights and freedoms of the demon-possessed. I just happen to think that their rights are wrong and their freedoms are slavery. They can have what they want if the law permits it and I will act as fairly and kindly and lovingly towards them as I am able. But I will not agree with them.

The mere fact that something is legal does not make it right or even good. As Jesus taught, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15-16). Well, I can see the fruit of liberalism and it looks pretty rotten to me. So, again, to be clear, to act in any way that ends up radically tearing us away from the world and each other is not freedom but slavery. Christ also talked about slavery to sin (John 8.34). In fact, it seems to me that what he calls sin (disconnection from reality), liberalism calls freedom. The fact that this so-called freedom is peddled to people as a kind of salvation is surely reason enough to pause and ask: What’s going on?

What is the essence of liberalism? When I mentioned that once you know the pattern you’ll see it everywhere, I was actually thinking about the essence of liberalism. In addition to being an overt rejection of Catholicism, it can be summed up as the inversion of the relationship between what the old metaphysicians call act and potency. We live in an age of inversions. The cart draws the horse; the tail wags the dog; the animal in the man controls his higher faculties; and materialism is (apparently) more desirable than any idealism. In the old stories, dragons were defeated by knights. In the modern story, knights show up to passively submit themselves to be eaten by dragons. Things do not go well for the damsel in distress, of course. In myths and legends, monsters were there to be slain, whether by Marduk or Beowulf or St. George. In the modern story, we feel sorry for the monsters, so we take it upon ourselves to ensure that they are well fed. We nurture monsters—those symbols of disorder and radical equivocation and negative freedom. They are doing quite well, thank you very much.

This is what the inversion of act and potency means. Act refers to what is; that is, to what possesses reality. Potency refers to what could be; to potential and potentiality. On this side of heaven, of course, everything is a mix of act and potency. God is the only pure act; he is pure reality. The main thrust of liberalism, in its antagonism towards Catholicism, is to reject the ultimate and pure act, God, in favour of all created things, which include a mixture of act and potency. In Platonist terms, this effectively amounts to picking the cave over the bright light of the real. But this rejection of God as pure act is only the first step. The next step is to confuse act and potency in everything else.

With everything that depends on God for its existence, act ought to take priority over potency. Reality is first; potential as unrealised reality is second. In other words, potency is always dependent upon actuality. There are hierarchies in being. But with liberalism, in the wake of a number of global developments in philosophy and media and culture and anti-culture, the relationship between act and potency flips. This is the source of our inverted clownworld, in which politicians are clowns and comedians get slapped for being comical. In this world, the jokes aren’t funny but the news is. In clownworld, it’s fascist to want basic freedoms (in the positive sense) and anti-fascist to beat a journalist senseless. What Girard called a crisis of distinctions, the inability to maintain existing barriers, the ancients called demon possession. The modern world is diabolical in that it aims itself toward dismembering things. Demons, as in Dostoevsky’s Demons may be ideas that render the real incoherent—just so that potency can get a little more wiggle-room. Even truth nowadays is always something yet to be discovered and yet to be decided rather than being something with any ontological grounding. Whereas the ancient world stressed what exists over what could be, the modern world stresses what could be over what is. Sometimes, it even favours what could be over and against what is. As this should make plain, the trouble with liberalism is that it will always have a tendency, whether in daily life or political thought, to side with hopes and pipedreams against concrete realities and meanings and experiences.

I can name many examples of this emphasis on potency over act and so this is precisely what I will do below. I offer these examples less as explanations than as provocations, and so I am deliberately omitting complexities in the name of simply pointing out what seems obvious to me, namely that all of the below are cases in which observable, real, felt things (presences in the world) have been rendered subservient to potencies of one kind or another (imaginings or what designers call ‘affordances’). Here they are (some thinkers who deal with such things are named in brackets):

Any conceptualisation of the self and the other that denies the concrete being of either; any defence-mechanism that refuses ‘auto-affectivity’ in favour of some emotional or rationalistic substitute (Michel Henry); the triumph of the therapeutic (Philip Rieff); the entire culture of ‘feeling good’—no thoughts, just vibes—over accepting and dealing with real problems; wanting to change the world without the tedious effort required to work on yourself (Jordan Peterson); the priority of theory over being (Martin Heidegger); the deworlding of time and thus the priority of the digital present over felt time (Heidegger, Douglas Rushkoff, and Byung-Chul Han); neoliberal economics; machines and technologies built with no mind paid to the limits of the earth; the priority of the digital over the real (Gert Lovink); the priority of profilicity over authenticity (Moeller & D’Ambrosio); an emphasis on authenticity over ethics and character (Charles Taylor & Byung-Chul Han); the prioritsing of efficiency over excellence (Alasdair MacIntyre); doomscrolling; the priority of mass production over handcraft (William Morris); the concern with effect over communicating truth (Edward Bernays advocates for this); pseudo-events (Daniel Boorstin); the triumph of movies over life (Neal Gabler); the prioritsing of image over substance in advertising; the priority of individuals over the family; the denial of capabilities in mass-production-imitating education systems; synthetic foods; modern Gnosticism (Eric Voegler); modern luxury Gnosticism (Mary Harrington); the existence of fast food which fails to nourish even as it fills people up; branding; mediocrity; Barbie’s stupid ‘You can be anything’ slogan which pays no attention to capacity and all attention to will; the way cellphones are used to deny present-company; the priority of the ontology of command over the ontology of assertion (Giorgio Agamben); the commodifying of sex through contraceptive technologies; the technologisation and further commodifying of made-up-conceptions-of-gender in woke capitalism; commodification; the favouring of ‘equality’ as an empty signifier over natural abilities; the rise of victimhood culture (Bradley Campbell & Jason Manning); abortion; racism; euthenasia; communism, capitalism, fascism, anti-fascism; many other ‘isms’; the modern elevation of sex over marriage; the postmodern elevation of ‘bodies’ over ‘people’; the packaging of everything to conceal the contents of products; Freudo-Marxism (Carl Trueman); the radical denial of relationships in favour of atomisation in society, culture, and science; the triumph of methodology over the sciences (Nietzsche); the loss of tradition (Roger Scruton); the ideology of progress (Chesterton); divorce; the priority of STEM over the liberal arts; subsuming all qualitative being under quantitative metrics (Byung-Chul Han); the priority of the spreadsheet over the employee; bureaucracy; the favouring of univocal reason over the analogy of being or the metaxological speaking of between-being (William Desmond); the mass production of self-help literature in an age of total mental breakdown; the communicative priority of virtue-signalling over virtue and ‘influencing’ over wisdom and observational force; the triumph of loneliness over relationality; suicide; the confusion of means and ends; the cultural preference for disposability over repair; the triumph of being amused over amusing oneself (Chesterton); and so many more.

Everywhere I look, I see signs of this priority of potency over act. Most of us participate in this way of being and perceiving being without a second thought. For instance, we fill up our cars with fossil fuels because we have to; because cities deworld us and expand our contexts beyond sensible human size. This technology of liberalism is now unavoidable. But it is also clear now that the technology, even with its perks, takes a stand against being. Yes, it is real but once it was imagined. And it was imagined without the recognition—that is, without imagining—that such a potential might ultimately undo the actual. In fact, one sign of the impoverished imagination in our time is found in its inability to conceive of the real as a priority.

Note here: the problem is not potency itself. Everything has natural, given potencies, and allowing things to become more fully themselves is at the heart of life; arguably, it is this natural, given will-to-become and will-to-flourish that has been hijacked and exploited by liberalism. Things must manifest themselves more fully: seeds become trees, children become adults, immature and selfish people can become more virtuous. This is the right place for potency: the ontological priority of the given over the possible; the priority of gratitude over merely imaginative possibilities.

Against the liberal inversion of act and potency, I think of Socrates who, on facing death for contravening a certain consensus, decided to go with a very different strategy. He paid no attention to the effect of his words when he was being tried, for instance, and so he clearly also paid no mind to whether he would get his way or not. He was less concerned with the potential of surviving the trial than with simply recognising and speaking the truth. It was as if this recognition of and speaking of truth was the point. It is the point! Goodness itself, not goodness for the sake of some other end, ought to be our aim. Communion with the good is enough; attunement to the goodness of being is enough. Let that be where we begin. Yes, we will see many potentials. It would be equally foolish to side with act only to deny all potency; to choose, for instance, that acorns should remain seeds and that children should remain children. We are made to see potency in being. But we will not see potency properly if we do not first attune ourselves to the goodness of being.

This, of course, is by no means the last thing that should be thought about or said on how to deal with the problems of liberalism. My aim remains to discern the signs of the times; and, to me, it seems that this normalising of liberalism’s boundarylessness and its optimistic praise of potency over act needs to be recognised fast. At the very least, I wanted to highlight where we ought to begin to have any sense of what kind of politics we ought to commit to. I submit that it will be a politics of the real; a politics that, in the fullest sense, prioritises act over potency.