Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered: An Inquiry into the Buddhist Myths of a Just World and an Afterlife

My new book is finished and now on sale.

Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered: An Inquiry into the Buddhist Myths of a Just World and an Afterlife. Visible Mantra Press. £29.99. Purchase online.

Blurb

In this book, Jayarava combines historical scholarship with philology and philosophical enquiry to re-examine the religious myths of the just world and the afterlife as they manifest in Buddhism, i.e. karma and punarbhava or rebirth. 

Taking a multidisciplinary approach he begins with an exploration of the psychology of religious beliefs, seeking to understand why the supernatural is ubiquitous across all human cultures. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and cognitive metaphors the book outlines a theory of religious belief which explains why belief in the supernatural continues to seem intuitive and natural to so many. 

The central part of the book looks in detail at historical instantiations of the karma and rebirth doctrines. Some early inconsistencies led to doctrinal innovations and polemical tracts, but no consensus on karma or rebirth ever emerged amongst Buddhists of different sects. Modern Buddhists sects have very different views on the details of karma and rebirth, even while insisting on the just world and afterlife myths per se. 

A critique of Vitalism opens the way to reconsideration of karma and rebirth from a contemporary point of view. Scientific inquiry shows that, although they remain plausible to many, the just world and afterlife myths are no longer tenable in any form.

Outline 

This book consists of six main sections, each consisting of several chapters.

Before getting into the more detail, I attempt to present some recent ideas on two subjects that will always be in the background as we assess religious doctrines. In the opening remarks I note that one of Dharmacarī Subhuti’s criteria for religious belief is that it be compatible with reason. The first section of the book, Compatible With Reason, explores what reason is and how it works. This is important because classical theories of reason are now acknowledged to be inaccurate and misleading. So establishing some basic understanding of reason is important before setting off.

Chapter 1 is an introduction and chapter two is this outline. Although I expect readers will already be familiar with karma and rebirth, in Chapter 3, Karma & Rebirth: The Basics, I give a bare outline of the two doctrines. This chapter can be skipped over by the well informed. 

Chapter 4, Of Miracles, reviews David Hume’s discussion of miracles and his method for evaluating testimony regarding miracles. Hume lays down some ground rules for reasoning about the claims made by religious people. Since both karma and rebirth break the laws of physics, and can be considered as miracles, Hume’s criteria are highly relevant to the criterion that belief be compatible with reason.

In Chapter 5, Facts and Feelings, I explore the neuroscience of decision-making. Classic theory of reason suggests that emotions play no role in reasoning. Contrarily, research by Antonio Damasio shows that emotions, or at least the interplay of emotional and cognitive processes, play a central and decisive role in reasoning. Break that link and we are unable to make decisions. Importantly the salience of information is encoded by emotions, by how we "feel" about it.  Belief involves decision-making, so understanding how we make decisions is important to this discussion.

Staying on this theme, in chapter 6 An Argumentative Theory of Reason, I review recent research by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier that attacks the classic theory of reasoning from a different direction. Mercier and Sperber point out that most people are very poor at solo reasoning tasks, but that they do much better in small groups. Reasoning, in this account, is not our first line approach to constructing arguments, but only comes into play when we wish to critique or deconstruct someone else’s argument. When reasoning, we all employ confirmation bias, but as a feature rather than a bug.

Bringing this section to a close, in Chapter 7 Reasoning and Beliefs I try to show how Chapters 5-7 constitute the beginnings of a theory for understanding religious belief. Using an example taken from a heterodox economist, I look at how beliefs distort the way that we interpret new information.

In the next section, Religion is Natural, Chapters 8-13, I expand on the theory of religious belief and look at myths such as the just-world and the afterlife. The central proposition here is that religious ideas are intuitive and thus seem “natural”. They are therefore understandable. Such myths emerge from our evolutionary psychology. The two ideas have some distinctive features, but they are closely related. Chapter 8, The Horrors of Life, deals with the myth of the just world. I tackle the idea of justice, the problem of evil, and related ideas such as the moral universe. The desire for an ordered and regular world is entirely understandable for a self-aware species trying to scrape a living in a capricious environment. However, I argue that our experience of the world should convince us that the world is not just. Rather it is amoral and indifferent to us. Chapter 9 looks at the myth of the afterlife and how it interacts with the myth of the just world. The afterlife is how religions get around the injustice of the world. Justice is delivered in the afterlife and often in the form of “balancing”. The image of the balance is literal in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which perfectly illustrates the concept. However, karma is also seen in terms of metaphors of accounting and balancing the books.

When thinking about Buddhist myths of the afterlife I thought it would be useful to see it against the broad backdrop of other afterlife beliefs. However, I found that most discussions of the afterlife do not look at the structural features of the afterlife per se, but rather discuss beliefs according to each religion. They thus fail to see that the afterlife is few variations on a theme. In order remedy this, Chapter 10, A Taxonomy of Afterlife Beliefs, takes a broad approach to the afterlife based on features rather than religious beliefs. There are two basic kinds of afterlife: single destination and cyclic. Buddhism is a hybrid of these: cyclic if you do nothing, and single destination if you practice Buddhism.

Chapter 11 explores Thomas Metzinger’s conjecture that out-of-body experiences might have given rise to the idea of a soul. Several kinds of experience, which we might broadly call religious, make the idea of a mind-body duality seem plausible or even inevitable. I argue that a mind-body duality is necessary for any afterlife to take place. Something about the mental life of the person has to survive the death of the body for there to be an afterlife. However, mind-body dualities have long been abandoned by scientists for good reason: all the evidence we have refutes such a duality.

Nevertheless, in Chapter 12 Secret Agents, I explore the thesis for belief in mind-body duality and supernatural agents put forward by Justin L. Barrett. Barrett argues that evolution has primed us to hold just such beliefs as an indirect consequence of survival mechanisms. For example, it is important to distinguish agents from objects because in nature agents are often prey or predator, or in some way dangerous. And it is better to err on the side of mistaking objects for agents than vice versa. It is better to avoid 100 sticks that look like snakes but are not, than to fail to avoid a single venomous snake.

Finally, in this section, in Chapter 13, Metaphors and Embodied Cognition, I introduce the theory of cognitive metaphors developed by cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson. This allows us to deconstruct the language associated with religious experiences. How we (unconsciously) frame our experiences through language, through the conventions of our society, affects the way we interpret our experiences. In particular, the language of the mind-body duality is deeply embedded within English along with a raft of related metaphors. Understanding the language of religion is a key to understanding what makes religion seem plausible.

We now have a working theory of religious belief and a number of useful tools for evaluating information we may encounter. In the section Evolution of Rebirth & Karma, Chapters 14-18, I begin to explore karma and rebirth directly. Beginning in Chapter 14, Rebirth Eschatologies, I revisit the category of cyclic afterlife beliefs and flesh out how such beliefs work. I explore the notions of “this world” and “the next world” as we encounter them in early Buddhist texts. I note that Buddhists often use the word loka, i.e. “world”, to mean the world of experience.

In Chapter 15, Rebirth in the Ṛgveda, I review work by Polish Scholar Joanna Jurewicz, on the first accounts of rebirth in India. Although, classically, rebirth is thought not to be mentioned until much later, Jurewicz points out that a Ṛgveda verse does seem to mention being reborn amongst one’s family. It seems likely that a cyclic afterlife was a regional feature of India rather than specific to any one religion.

There is some evidence that both rebirth and karma developed over time in Buddhism. In Chapter 16, with help from Gananath Obeyesekere, I explore this development and outline the changes that seem to have occurred overtime. The point is that the belief in rebirth did not emerge fully formed and that change over time was an important feature of the Buddhist belief system. Buddhist eschatology incorporates a number of elements from Brahmanism (devas, asuras, pretas). I follow this up in Chapter 17, Escaping the Inescapable, by showing how Buddhist karma changed over time. In particular, I look at a post-canonical change from karma being inescapable, to the institution of practises that allowed Buddhists to avoid the consequences of their actions.

Finally, in this section, in Chapter 18, I deal with the figure of Yama and the idea of Hell. Yama is a figure Buddhists adopted from Vedic religion. Originally, he is a promethean hero who is celebrated as the first man to discover the route to rebirth amongst the ancestors in the afterlife. This Yama lives in the sky. The Buddhist Yama is the king of Hell, a place of torment and torture for people who have lived extremely immoral lives. The emergence of Hell as a concept, let alone a place, is an interesting phenomenon. I explore the sparse evidence on the subject and the question of how the hero became king of Hell.

In the Section, Conflicting Traditions of Rebirth & Karma (Chapters 19-23) I focus on Buddhism. When we explore the Buddhist tradition in detail we find a range of conflicting opinions and theories about karma and rebirth. In this section, I rely frequently on internecine polemics written by Buddhists about other Buddhists. However, I begin in Chapter 19, Karma & Dependent Arising, by outlining a problem that seems to have driven a great deal of later doctrinal speculation and innovation. I show that as they stand in the suttas the doctrines of karma and of dependent arising are incompatible. One requires that consequences follow actions are a considerable remove, and the other denies the possibility of action at a temporal distance. Sectarian solutions to this problem are associated with the various Abhidharma schools. They all attacked each other’s theories and never reached a consensus. Opposition died out along with the sects that vanished with the decline of Buddhism in India beginning by about the 7^th Century. The conflicts often centred on three key ideas, which I treat separately: in Chapter 20, The Antarābhava or Interim State; Chapter 21, Manomaya kāya, and Chapter 22 Gandharva. In each case I show that these ideas were hotly contested amongst the different Buddhist sects. Each was quick to point out the flaws of the others. All views had valid criticisms levelled against them.

I finish this section in Chapter 23, The Problems of Seeking Singularity, with some reflections on how we look at history. We are usually taught some tidy version of history in which there are differences, but these are only on the surface, beneath which is a broad and deep unity. An actual reading of the historical texts reveals intractable disputes on many fronts. As with the distorting effect of religious beliefs generally, how we approach history affects how we interpret it.

In the section on Vitalism (Chapters 24-28), I take a long digression. A reader could skip this whole section and move onto the next without losing the main thread. Why include several chapters critiquing vitalism in a book on karma and rebirth? As already noted, the idea of a mind-body duality underpins all myths of the afterlife. Similarly, the afterlife underpins the just-world myth, since justice is delivered after death. Just so, the idea of Vitalism, that life is engendered by some external “spark” underpins our views of life and death. In Chapter 24, I introduce Vitalism as The Philosophy That Wouldn’t Die. Vitalism has a long history in the Western world. It takes in ideas about spirits and life. However, vitalism has been abandoned by scientists and most philosophers because the evidence refutes it and it has less explanatory power than more recent ideas.

In Chapter 25, Crossing the Line Between Death and Life, I outline modern attempts to understand the origins of life. I try to show that we are now at the point where, given the conditions, life was no accident, it was inevitable. Chemistry follows a kind of slope of energetic feasibility. Under the conditions of the early earth, the chemistry of metabolism was the most energetically feasible path. It was followed by replication and life, as we know it, got started and has never ceased. No supernatural elements are required for life.

In Chapter 26, Spiritual, I return to the methods of cognitive linguistics. I take apart the concept of “spiritual” and highlight specific frames and the associated metaphors. The whole thing is based on medieval ideas about life. Language does change, but it can be deeply conservative. The language of “spiritual” is anachronistic and references frames that are not relevant to the Buddhist project.

Chapter 27, The Antarābhava as a Vitalist Concept, revisits the idea of the interim state in light of the critique of vitalism. The interim state depends on mind-body dualism and vitalism. If vitalism is not a helpful way of looking at the world (anymore), then neither is the interim state a helpful way of trying to understand life and death.

To close out this section, in Chapter 28, The Science of Reincarnation, I review some of the arguments made for reincarnation by a group of Western researchers, whose “evidence” consists entirely of interviews with young children. The methods employed are deeply flawed and the resulting conclusions don’t explain anything. The “scientists” simply assert that reincarnation is the only explanation for the stories told by infants. Worse, for Buddhists, they assert a form of reincarnation consistent with Hindu conception of a soul travelling from body to body, and inconsistent with the metaphysics of Buddhism.

The final section of the book, Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered (Chapters 29-31) draws together all these many threads and argues that when we consider all the evidence that karma and rebirth are simply not plausible. I begin, in Chapter 29, Objections to Naturalism, by making a defence of naturalism. Experience suggests that those who reject my arguments often do so on the basis that they do not believe in naturalism. I try to anticipate and neutralise these objections to clear the way for the reader to take in the following arguments confident that they are grounded in reality. However, I also note that many of the strongest arguments against karma and rebirth are not scientific, but historical. The chaos of conflicting views already outlined never did produce a consensus.

Chapter 30, On the Impossibility of an Afterlife, recapitulates and expands on the most popular essay on my blog (it has twice as many page views as the second most popular essay). The basic idea comes from an argument outlined by physicist Sean Carroll. I take a slightly different approach to Carroll, but the conclusion is much the same. The laws of physics, and particularly the laws of thermodynamics, rule out any afterlife in which any information about us is preserved. There is simply no possibility that rebirth can be a genuine phenomenon. As a myth, it has informed Buddhism for centuries, but it does not survive scrutiny.

The argument in Chapter 31, The Logic of Karma, is one that I developed independently. I show that the Buddhist theories of karma that we have available all fail to explain how actions can be connected to consequences over time. The explanations are all flawed and it is very easy to show how. This leaves us with no viable theory of karma. Since there can be no afterlife in which moral and immoral acts are balanced out, the idea of karma leading to better and worse rebirths is already in tatters.

The myth of the just-world and the myth of the afterlife are just myths. They are not real. We are born once, live one life, and after death, there is nothing. I understand that the conclusions I arrive at will be shocking and repugnant to some Buddhists. In technical terms, the view is ucchedavāda or “annihilationism”. This is traditionally a wrong view, but we now know that it is the inescapable conclusion of understanding how our world works. There is no life after death.

Despite this, I see no reason to succumb to nihilism. The world is not just, but human beings and human societies can be. There is no afterlife, but that simply means that our actions in this life count for more, not less. Life becomes more meaningful in this view, not less. Everything we do counts. If we are to leave a positive legacy as a result of our one life, then we have to work hard to make a positive difference. There is no scope for drifting or vagueness. The imperative to change ourselves and to change the world, is all the greater. But in the end this is how things are. Deluding ourselves with fantasies that life is fair or that we will not die, only gets in the way of facing up to our responsibilities.

Other Words

So this is my book. It is what it is. It started life as essays on this blog that appeared over a number of years. It is therefore eclectic in scope and content. Had I set out to write such a book my choice of terminology might have been more consistent. My interest in the secondary literature might have been more comprehensive. Also I have to emphasise that despite my enthusiastic engagement with this subject, I am an amateur and and outsider. I have all the usual foibles of the autodidactic. These will be obvious to the professional scholar, though I hope that they will find something here to provoke thought and rethinking.

There have been very few attempts to see Buddhism in a broader context. Buddhism scholars tend to discuss sectarian Buddhism in isolation even from other sects of Buddhism. My experience of comparative religion tracts is that Buddhism is vastly simplified and homogenised before being compared to other religions and even then there is little in the way of critical thinking. So the approach here is quite unusual, especially to a general reader who is used to reading books on Buddhism which are written by starry-eyed enthusiasts and scholars who are critical only in a very narrow sense. I used to be starry-eyed too - some of my early blog essays attest to this. But then I really started reading Buddhists texts and to really pay attention to what they said. And gradually I began to see clearly. I went from being starry-eyed, to becoming a star-gazer in the tradition of Galileo Galilei.

And this book is one result of that.

My next writing project is a book provisionally entitled The True History of the Heart Sutra. To some extent it will begin to answer some of the questions left open by Karma & Rebirth Reconsidered. What is Buddhism without these doctrines? My short answer is that it's experience and the investigation of experience, especially the experiences of the dissolution of the self and the cessation of conscious sensing and cognising. These experiences are subject to very different interpretations from the complete denial of being to affirmation of absolute being; from transcendental liberation to a rigid form of determinism.

~~oOo~~

We Need to Talk About Reason

About a year ago, the Politico website noted a new phenomenon. Young male American conservatives have begun referring to themselves as "classical liberals". Many were aping a notorious academic turned lifestyle guru but, given how obviously illiberal their agenda seems to be, I wondered how they could identify with the term "liberal". It seemed doubly weird, given that conservative Americans are so openly hostile towards "liberals", and use the word as invective. My few interactions with people who claim to be classical liberals suggest that they don't know much, if anything, about classical liberalism. Most are just naively repeating slogans. 

Clearly, liberalism has delivered us many freedoms for which we may be grateful. It is also true that, had classical liberalism prevailed, these freedoms would have remained the preserve of the elite. While classical liberals wrested power from kings for the elite, it was the new liberals, the "bleeding heart liberals" who wrested power away from the classical liberal elite (the bourgeoisie), for the people, if only briefly. It was the new liberals who ended the slave trade, and slavery as an institution, for example. They were the first to see that if liberty were to have any meaning, then it had to apply to all. 

In the previous essay I covered the background to liberalism and the confusion between the different applications of the term. In this essay and several to follow I will pick apart some of the fundamental beliefs of liberalism and show that they are anachronistic, at best. I begin with the classical view of reason; thence to a discussion of the ideology of utilitarianism; through the negative impacts of neoclassical liberalism on democracy; and I will finish up with the most egregious products of liberalism, runaway global warming and mass extinction.

The ideas of reasoning and rational thought are central to the liberal conception of human beings. Arguably, then, to understand the liberal ideology we need to understand how they conceived of rationality. The problem is that we've known since the 1960s that the ideas of rationality they relied on were wrong. And I mean, obviously, comically wrong, like someone's idea of how we ought to be, without reference to any actual human beings. And if liberalism is based on a delusion, then what would it look like with a accurate theory of reasoning? 

The Classical Account of Reason

The sapiens in our Latin binomial classification, coined in 1758 by the Swedish taxonomer, Linnaeus, means "wise". It comes from the Latin sapientia "good taste, good sense, discernment; intelligence, wisdom." It refers to the Enlightenment belief that men were uniquely capable of reasoning. Again, "men" here accurately reflects the classical view that women were not capable of reasoning. This is not my view, but the fact that it was the classical liberal view is very important to keep in mind.  

Classically, reasoning is a specific conscious mental process by which we apply logic to problems and arrive at knowledge of the truth, which then guides our decisions. In this view, actions guided by truth are good, while actions guided by falsehood are evil. This view of reasoning is thus linked to  concerns of metaphysics (truth), epistemology (how we know things), and morality (good and evil)

For much of history, reason coexisted with faith, which supposedly revealed truths that were inaccessible to reason. Until the enlightenment, philosophers employed deductive logic to explain the existence of God, the problem of evil, and other religious ideas. However, deductive logic has a flaw; it tends to reproduce one's starting axioms, or the propositions that are held a priori to be unquestionably true. All of the unspoken beliefs of the thinker influence the selection of valid deductions. So, if a logician believes in God, then at some point they will unconsciously accept a deduction as valid based on this belief. This leads them to the "logical" conclusion that God exists. And they assert that their belief in God is based on reason. 

The initial contrast and demarcation between reason and faith become more of a conflict and contest until, during the Enlightenment, reason combined with empiricism became the weapon of choice for intellectuals to undermine and destroy faith. This was done in the name of liberating people from superstition and the oppressive rule of the Church. And of course liberty is the central theme in liberalism. In the Enlightenment, reason was virtually deified. Natural philosophers, soon to be re-christened as "scientists" were the priests of this new cult. This coincided with the peak of materialism: a reaction against the superstitions of religion, which brought everything down to earth. The contrast and conflict between faith and reason is still one of the defining issues of modernity. 

Reason was what separated man from the beasts. For classical liberals it also separated the elite from the common man, and men from women. The elite reasoned that only they were truly rational, and as they defined rationality as good, then it made sense to them that they, as the only people capable of goodness, should be in charge of everything and everyone. Indeed, had they not ruled, then the irrational masses might have fallen back into superstition and religion. Liberals knew that they had to rule in such a way as those capable of reason obtained the maximum liberty while those incapable were at least not able to harm the capable. It was a difficult job, but someone had to take it on and the classical liberal elite stepped up. Of course, it was only fair that they be well compensated for their efforts on our behalf. And of course it was tiresome having to deal with the lower classes, so the best of them were put in charge of the day to day business of telling the peasants what to do and reporting profits back to their masters. These middlemen were imaginatively called the middle classes. Thus began the era of what David Graeber has called "the bullshitization of work".

We can already begin to see how classical understanding of reasoning was flawed.

Free Will

This ability to reason, free from any non-conscious irrationality, is linked to free will and, in particular, what we call contra-causal free will; i.e., free will in which only reason is exercised and there is no influence from emotion, intuition, any unconscious process, or external influence such as peer pressure. Anyone with a modern view of the mind has to realise that contra-causal free will could simply never exist, because all of our thought processes are influenced by all of these other factors all of the time. Reason as classically defined never happens and we actually have proof of this, but let me continue for now on the theme of free will. 

Free will is, of course, closely tied to issues of morality. The Christian answer to the problem of evil is that God gave Adam and Eve the choice to obey, they disobeyed, evil got a foothold, and they were thus cast out of Eden to lead lives of suffering. Even though, as an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient supreme being, God created it all and could foresee all outcomes, Christians insist that it is not God's fault that we suffer. It is our fault. Buddhists also highlight the wilfulness (cetanā) of humanity as the cause of evil. 

As we have seen, most liberals also blamed humanity for the problem of evil and linked this to inherent flaws in the human character, or psyche. According to the classical liberals, humans are by nature variously bellicose, aggressive, competitive, acquisitive, and/or just plain selfish, although we are also supposed to be rational and the inherent antimony between selfishness and rationality seems to go unnoticed; i.e., it is not rational for a social species to be selfish because it will cause a break down in reciprocity and they will die out. 

In this view, therefore, morality is linked to reasoning. Only those who use reason to guide their actions can be moral. This is to say that, for classical liberals, morality is solely linked to reasoning and thus it becomes the province of rich European men. The bourgeoisie push out the church as arbiters of morality and temporal courts eventually gain jurisdiction even over the Church (thank God).

In reality, no one reasons in this way. Almost everything about this liberal discourse is wrong. The understanding of reasoning, of humanity as a social animal, of women, and of morality are all wrong. And these false ideas continue to dominate the thinking of the bourgeois elite. Before reviewing how we do reason, I want to sketch out some related ideas. 

Madness

Losing one's reason is seen with increasing alarm as the modern world emerges. Whereas the mad were largely harmless and left to themselves up to late medieval times, especially in Europe, madness gradually becomes a  moral issue, which at that time falls under the purview of the Church. Christians begin to see madness as a sign of sinfulness; the mad must be morally compromised or they would not be mad (deductive logic again). No distinctions are made in terms of the organic causes or etiology of madness until much later.

Michael Foucault notes that leprosy was not treated the same as madness. Of course, people were afraid of contagion (though they had no idea how leprosy spread). But they did not see lepers as morally compromised. Indeed, apart from fear of contagion, lepers were seen relatively positively: their suffering now would free them to go directly to heaven at death. Churchs would have places where lepers could observe services through a window, for example. 

According to Foucault, the confinement and punishment of the mad begins just as leprosy was disappearing from Europe, leaving the sanatoriums empty. The lazar houses where lepers has been quarantined soon became lunatic asylums. Since physicians ran the lazar houses they also inherited the care of lunatics.

Thereafter the loss of reason followed the trends of the medical profession. At first ithey treated madness an an imbalance of the humours. Melancholia, for example is an excess of black bile; whereas mania is an excess of blood. When doctors began to be interested in "psychology", treatment of madness moved from physical medicine to psychological medicine. The loss of reason was ascribed to repressed sexual urges or other psychological complexes. Then as antipsychotic drugs emerged, it was ascribed to chemical imbalance. And so on.

Throughout this period of change from, say, 1500 to 2000 the definitions of reasoning and rational hardly changed. Reasoning was an abstract ability possessed only by humans. It has to be exercised consciously. It is completely separate from and superior to other types of mental activity, excluding emotions in particular. It is almost synonymous with the use of logic. The rational human being is typified by the objective, emotionless man of science. They are contrasted with the hedonistic, irrational, emotional peasant man.  

Friedrich Nietzsche describes two opposing ideals in society: Apollonian, associated with logic, order, rules, rule following; and Dionysian with emotion, chaos, spontaneity, and creativity. Freud thought he saw similar tendencies fighting for dominance in the psyche of every man. This trope lives on in the pseudo-scientific description of the left-brain and right-brain in what are effectively Apollonian and Dionysian terms.

But we may say that the classical liberals saw themselves as rational. Despite the fact that they wrested power from traditional sources against the tide of conservatism, they invested it in certain, rational, individuals. And they were terrified of the great unwashed masses who might (and sort of did) do the same to them. Thus we see the double standards of the class system: freedom to the point of hedonism for the elite, combined with strict authoritarian rule and puritanism for the workers.

Thomas Jefferson rails against the institution of slavery throughout his political career, but continues to own hundreds of slaves the whole time because he feels he must take responsibility for them and that they cannot do so for themselves. The liberal elite decide what freedom is and who gets to enjoy it. Liberty for the few and slavery for the rest.

 

Romanticism

There was a significant rebellion against the materialist, rationalist, Apollonian view of humanity  that emerged from the Enlightenment and dominated European and colonial circles for a time. It gave rise to the Dionysian movement we call Romanticism. They turned materialism on its head: they valued emotion over reason, subjectivity over objectivity. And so on. However, materialists and romantics agreed one one thing: the primacy of the individual.

In England, romanticism resulted in an outpouring of emotional poetry from upper-class layabouts high on opium, but it also left a lasting sentimental imprint in attitudes to "nature". In Germany, things took a more philosophical turn, towards forms of Idealism that denied the very reality of the material world and posited that everything was simply one's own subjectivity.

Emerging from this German-speaking milieu was a new theory about madness in both its florid aspect of what we now call psychopathy (a disease of the psyche) and the more everyday irrationalities we call neurosis (an abnormal condition -osis of the nerves neuro). The new idea was that our conscious mind was only the tip of the iceberg and that lurking below the surface were many mental processes and "complexes" which could, and did, hijack our will. By far the most influential of these new doctors of the mind was Sigmund Freud. 

Freud's theory was that sexual urges were so strong that they governed every aspect of our lives, from birth to death. He was able to reinterpret everything in terms of sexual urges acted on or repressed. In this view, repressed sexual urges simply become acted on unconsciously, causing aberrant behaviour. Freud shared the generally dim view that classical liberals have of humanity:

"Man is revealed as 'a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.'" — cited in Rifkin, J. (2009) The Empathic Civilisation. Polity Press.

Freud's views on women were even more aggressively regressive than those of his English contemporaries. All these guys were certainly the products of their times, but there's only so much apologising for stupidity of people who are hailed as the leading intellectuals of their day. Freud was a fucking idiot whose puerile theories should have rung alarm bells for anyone paying the least bit of attention to humanity. But he lived in a time when abstract theories about people thrived in contradiction to the practice if empiricists observing nature.

Despite the obvious lunacy of his "theories", Freud and his followers became incredibly influential on modern society. The language of psychoanalysis and psychology was co-opted by popular culture so that we now glibly speak of ego, the subconscious, neurosis, Oedipus complexes, and so on. We have no problem imagining emotions having an agency all of their own, so that when repressed they behave like wayward pixies and make us do and say naughty things. 

The focus on subjectivity found a happy home in post-war France where philosophers also asserted the primacy of subjectivity and began an assault on all expressions of objectivity. This was not in the spirit of a scientific revolution, but more of a tearing down the idols of the bourgeoisie and destroying their authority. French philosophers attacked all forms of authority and all attempts to legitimate it. In some ways we can see this as a libertarian project with echos of the French Revolution, which saw the aristocracy guillotined in their hundreds. To the extent that it was a reaction to early 20th Century modernism, the new French movement could accurately be called "post-modern", though in my view this is something of a red herring. 

Summing up the ever more complex history of ideas across the European and colonial world over a few centuries in such a short essay is quixotic at best. I'm highlighting just a few of the major features on the map and suggesting connections that might not be entirely obvious to all. The result is a sketch of a terrain from which the reader, drawing on their own detailed knowledge of history and philosophy, can imagine the background against which I will now paint a contrasting figure. 

Modern Views on Reason

It has been clear for at least fifty years that this is not how humans make decisions, is not how we think, is not how we reason, and that this is not how reason works. I've written at length on this subject, drawing on work by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber in particular, so I don't want to go over it all again in detail. However, having listened to Antonio Damasio's podcast discussion with Sean Carroll, I might need to modify my presentation of this material, but I want to get this out and so I'll have to review it in the future.

Suffice it to say that all liberals, espousing all forms of liberalism, have been completely wrong about the role that reason plays in our lives. Despite the classical view of reason being untenable, and widely known to be untenable, it is still the dominant view outside certain branches of academia. Economists, journalists, and activists all presume that humans are rational in their theories (and most add that we are self-interested, a stupid claim that I will deal with separately).

What we now know, and seems obvious in retrospect, is that humans are capable of using reason in narrowly defined situations that don't typically include making economic and moral choices. We do not use reasoning to make choices at all; rather, we use reasoning to justify choices in retrospect; i.e., to produce post hoc reasons. We make choices using unconscious processes of inference that in all cases involve felt responses to knowledge that we possess. Emotions play a pivotal role in how we assess the salience of any given fact. So, presented with the same facts, and both agreeing that they are true, two people may come to entirely different decisions based on what they perceive (through felt sensations) as most salient amongst the facts.

The other time we use reasoning is in social situations when we are assessing the ideas of others. When making decisions and presenting options to others in this situation we do not use reason, we use other inferential processes. In this social setting it pays for each proponent of an idea to present the best case possible, meaning that confirmation bias (which is virtually universal in such situations) is a feature, not a bug.  

Michael Taft has quipped that "beliefs are emotions about ideas". And as Cordelia Fine puts it, emotions are physiological arousal combined with emotional thoughts. In other words, what we believe, and most of us believe we are a little more rational than the people around us, is emotional.  Not in the Romantic sense, not elevating emotions to revealing the truth better than reason, but simply stating a fact. Emotions colour how we assess the salience of information, which we know from studying people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex. When we are unable to link information with the feelings that tell us how salient the information is, then we lose ability to make decisions.

Free Will

In this view, we can see that an individual's decisions are still important. However, it is also clear that contra-causal free will is irrelevant. An individual human cannot be considered apart from their social context, because we are social primates who live a social lifestyle. In fact, isolation can make us mentally and physically ill. 

The question becomes, "Under what conditions to we have conscious choices and what is the extent of our ability to choose?" A social mammal cannot just decide, "Fuck it, I'm not sharing my food with anyone," because that isolates them and they die during the first general food shortage because no one will share with them. In a social group, refusal to share most likely brings immediate repercussions in the form of active punishment from the group. In chimps, for example, groups round on and beat up any member that displays overt selfishness. The selfish individual weakens the group.

As urbanised humans we have a problem in that in our set-up selfish people can rapidly become so rich and powerful that we cannot easily punish them. And enough other selfish individuals are normalising and rewarding this behaviour that our disapproval and anger as a group don't seem to matter much. Classical liberalism was always about preventing the group from punishing individuals who display sociopathic levels of selfishness. By the way, sociopathy is defined as a pervasive and pronounced pattern of disregard for and deliberate violation of the rights of other people (viz slavery, genocide, and expropriation). 

There are many different views on the question of free will in the light of modern science. Many argue that because determinism is seen to apply at some levels of reality it must apply at all. Determinists argue that there can be no freewill in any meaningful sense. Morality in this view is not even a subject because no one can be held culpable for actions they did not choose. Deterministas frequently cite experiments by Benjamin Libet, as I explained in Freewill is Back on the Menu (11 March 2016); Libet's interpretation of his results was questioned by his colleagues at the time and has been quite thoroughly debunked now. Psychologists don't cite Libet, but many physicists still do - because of confirmation bias.

Others, myself included, hold that while determinism does apply at some levels it does not apply at all and that this allows for some freedom of will for animals. This is called compatibilism.

There are a dozen more variations on this question, but all of them call into question basic assumptions made by Enlightenment thinkers and particularly by liberals. If we call into question the very notion of freedom, then the ideology that deals with liberty loses all traction. What can liberty mean if no one is truly free? 

In fact, I believe this issue is clouded by confusion surrounding the meaning of free will. Most people seem to take it to be synonymous with contra-causal free will. But we've already ruled out contra-causal free will as a useful idea. No one ever had contra-causal free will.

At the very least, we can say that we experience ourselves making decisions. When called upon we formulate reasons for our actions. People around us hold us accountable for the decisions and the reasons we give for those decisions. But we are social animals whose behaviour is strongly influenced by our social milieu. So is there a better framework to discuss this? I think there is, and it emerges from the world of primatologist Frans de Waal.

The Evolution of Morality

Growing up we absorb a worldview—a complex web of beliefs (i.e., emotions) about the world and people and ourselves. We unconsciously absorb, through empathy, how others feel about the topics they are discussing and also about topics that are taboo. Many of us never question the basic assumptions we make because when we hear statements that agree with our belief we feel good about it and about ourselves. This is how we navigate the moral landscape.

In the language of John Searle, rather than consciously following moral rules, we develop unconscious competencies that guide our actions to be within the rules most of the time. We have agency, but in a prosocial animal it is delimited by what contributes to the survival of the group because that is how social species survive. All social animals have a dual nature as individuals and members of groups. 

We also, mostly unconsciously, modify our behaviour all the time based on ongoing social feedback. As social animals we are attuned, through empathy, to the disposition of other members of our group. And we also keep track of the network reciprocity amongst our group. We know, and love to discuss, who is sleeping with whom, who is in debt, who likes/hates their job, who has kids and what they are doing. This all creates a sense of belonging which is essential to good mental health in social mammals. Of course the modern industrialised world has disrupted this pattern on an unprecedented scale and we're still not sure what the result of that will be. But we have a sneaking suspicion that it is tied to the rise in mental health problems we are seeing across the industrialised world. 

The combination of empathy and reciprocity, which comes from the work on chimps and bonobos by Frans de Waal and his group, gives us the basis for the evolution of morality. The social lifestyle puts us in a situation were we know how other members of our group feel and we know the extent of our interrelationship with them: we know the extent of our obligations. From obligations come the idea of rights and duties. Thus, morality evolved as a deontological dimension to social life. And from this we can derive notions of virtue; virtue is primarily fulfilling or going beyond the requirements of obligation. Similar consequentialist accounts rely on an understanding of the expectations that come with obligation. And outcome is not good if it harms others, but this assumes an obligation not to harm.

This framing of agency and decision making as part of being a social primate embedded in networks of mutual obligation gives us a much better sense of the kinds of decisions we have to make as social primates. Legacy concepts like free will and the classical view of reasoning seem to have little relevance here. We are both individuals and social. Choices are always emotional, always with reference to our milieu. We are not isolated, selfish, or rational. Indeed, "rational" really requires a completely new definition.

As organisms we aim for homeostasis; i.e., to maintain our bodies within the limits that make continued life possible. Societies also have something like homeostasis, a kind of dynamic equilibrium, or set of chaotic oscillations through a range of possibilities consistent with the continued existence of the group. But now we scale the group up to millions of people crammed into tiny spaces. And this defies our evolutionary adaptations, very often leaving us to navigate by our wits rather than relying on our natural sociability.

I want to finish this essay on reason with a word on those who seek to grab our attention and subvert our decision making processes.

Propaganda

Many political activists are still fixated on putting the facts before the people and letting rational self-interest do its work. They haven't realised how humans make decisions. I find it difficult myself. In trying to persuade people that liberalism has run its course and that we need a new socio-political paradigm based on mutual obligations, I'm mainly using facts. Of course I'm trying also to construct a narrative, but it's mainly for other people who do like facts and who might be persuaded by a factual narrative.

We already know that few liberals or neoliberals will be persuaded by the narrative I am relating here.  A proper cult does not crumble at the first hint of criticism and liberalism is a couple of centuries old now. I feel the frustration of this. I feel that I want to break out of the faux formalism of essay writing and get someone excited about a new world through some creative story writing. I write non-fiction because I find it valuable in many ways.

Those who have really internalised the reality that humans are not rational are the modern propaganda industries; i.e.. journalism, advertising, public relations; spin doctors, speech writers, press secretaries, copy writers, lobbyists, etc. These are the people who know how we really make decisions and how to exploit that for profit or to gain power.

This is why the UK is doing a volt-face on Europe: through a targeted campaign of disinformation; using millions of profiles illegally obtained from Facebook to create illegally-funded attack ads on Facebook, the radical British nationalists hijacked the referendum and then exploited a very narrow majority of voters on the day (actually just a third of the electorate) to force us out of our most important international relationship, with our biggest trading partner (and the biggest single export market), voiding trade deals with every major trading bloc, and all for what? So a few British sociopaths could tell the rest of us what to do without interference from the sociopaths in the EU.

And even with all of these facts in the public domain, the process carries on with, if anything, even greater momentum. It really is completely mad.

The modern propaganda machine was helped by the sideways shift that psychologists took from psychotherapy to mass manipulation. They were led by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and student, who used knowledge gained from psychology to orchestrate a campaign of manipulation to break through the American taboo on women smoking in the 1920s. He thus doubled the profits of American tobacco and condemned millions of women to death from cancer, emphysema, and other diseases associated with smoking. 

Why do the activists advocating for action on global warming and mass extinction have such a hard time getting their message across? At least partly because they erroneously believe it is simply a matter of putting the facts before the people and waiting for them to do the rational thing. But this has never worked, because reason does not work like this. We believe in such strategies for purely ideological reasons.

Against us are massed the propaganda corps of a hundred industry groups who employ top psychology and business PhDs to work in think tanks and lobby groups to target law-makers with disinformation.

Because we are working on out-of-date information we are extremely vulnerable to propaganda. Whole generations are now growing up saturated with propaganda.

Conclusion

We know that the classical account of reason is wrong.  Evidence has been stacking up on this since the mid-1960s. I found reading Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason profoundly shifted my understanding of reasoning and rationality. But I don't think I've internalised it yet. 

The classical account of reason is hard to shift partly because of the ways in which it is wrong. It is persuasive precisely because the false impression it creates is one that we want to believe - we like thinking of ourselves that way. The truth is much less glamorous, but worse we also have negative narratives about the truth. We feel strongly about reason and the supposed role that reason plays in our lives. And, for many of us, our aspiration to a cool, unemotional rationality still defines our identity. Many people, for example, admire Jordan Peterson because he is never emotional when under attack and he knows how to provoke emotional responses in other people. And in the classical paradigm this means he is rational and his emotional opponents are irrational. And because rationality is explicitly linked to morality, he appears to have the moral high-ground. 

But look at this another way. Someone who is unemotional when attacked is generally speaking alienated from their emotions. If your train in martial arts you have to learn to suppress emotions in order to stay focussed and fight. Samurai undertook Zen meditation techniques the better stay calm in combat; to be more effective killers.

We evolved emotions and the ability to read emotions in others to help us deal with intra-group conflicts. To conceal your emotional state gives you an advantage in a conflict. Being able to easily manipulate other people into expressing emotions, makes for a strong contrast. One is saying, "I am in control of myself and that other person is not in control of themselves". The emotional person is under the control of hostile forces. 

In the classical view, reasoning, thoughts, are voluntary and under our control. We are free to the extent we can suppress our emotions and employ logic. Emotions by contrast are also called passions. A passion is something involuntary that overtakes you. Art depicting Jesus being crucified by the Romans, is often called "The Passion of Christ." In this view, allowing yourself to be overcome by emotion is a form of weakness. And part of this narrative, of course, is that women, who are freer with their emotional displays precisely because they do not view social interactions as combat, are weak. This is the patriarchal argument that is used to oppress women. 

I grew up hating soccer because of the emotional reactions of English players to scoring a goal - they would become visibly elated, hug each other, and run about wildly. In the 1970s, when the game was still played by amateurs, my heroes, the New Zealand rugby team, would never celebrate scoring against the opposition. The goal scorer would simply turn around and quietly walk back to their position, along with teammates. Scoring was a team effort and no individual could or would take credit. Showing off, let alone rubbing the opposing team's face in it, was deeply frowned on. That was my ideal. Soccer players seemed effete and lacked humility or dignity. The British do like to get in your face when they win. 

On the other hand, men's uncontrolled rage, often towards women, is justified as a form of righteousness. As a man, one may not lose control and cry, for example, but one may lose control and punch someone who has offended you. There is a trendy term for this dynamic, but I don't use it, because we have enough problems without the additional stigma of labels. 

Popular culture likes to imagine large external threats, be it aliens, zombies, gangs, or killer bees. And humans usually survive these potential catastrophes by combining our two strengths: individual genius and working together as a team. In the movies, someone figures out how to survive the crisis, they are charismatic enough to convince everyone to try it their way (perhaps after token resistance), and then everyone works together to implement the plan that liberates us from the threat. 

There is a reason for this trope. As smart social primates, this is how we survive: full stop. The smart ones amongst us come up with clever plans. The persuasive ones get everyone on board and organised. But then everyone pulls their weight. Except that in wild primates, the greater one's capacity as a leader, the more obligation one carries to the members who are led. 

However we came to the classical account of reason (and I suspect nefarious intent), we now know that is it wrong. A central pillar of liberalism is rotten and has to be replaced. Liberalism will have to change as a result. Liberty is certainly an admirable goal but is has been used to avoid obligations and responsibilities. For example, the narrative of liberty has been used to continue to pollute our air, water, and land because  environmental legislation has been treated as an unjustified infringement on the free enterprise system. And yet, clearly, to poison the air I breathe or the water I drink is to deprive me of liberty. 

The advisory body Public Health England told me in an email that they estimate between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths each year can be attributed to air pollution. Try to imagine that a group of insurgents are going around shooting 30,000 people per year and what the government response would be.  In 2018, 272 people were killed by assailants wielding knives and there is an ongoing public outcry. But 30,000 deaths from air pollution hardly raises an eyebrow. This has to change, too.

Humans are not rational. We are so not rational. And this has nothing to do with making good or bad decisions (or how we define good and bad). We all need to take this on board and start rethinking morality, society, politics, economics, and pretty much everything else. 

~~oOo~~

On Liberty and Liberalism

Perhaps the most beautiful and lasting contribution of the European Enlightenment has been the idea of individual liberty. It's hard to draw a distinct line, but let's say that before about 1700 almost no one was free. For example, in England, the King owned all the land and all the resources and just let people use them, mostly to build political alliances. Any of all of it could be taken away and given to someone else. You didn't work for a boss and you could not quit. You were owned by a Lord; if you quit you could be summarily killed.

In early medieval Japan, one king bankrupted the state building temples to ward off natural disasters. This meant that peasants faced heavy taxes and forced labour. The Grand Canal and most of the Great Wall in China were built with forced labour. If you were a medieval peasant then you did what you were told. There were peasant revolts from time to time, but usually they faced an army of well-armed and well-trained soldiers who were prepared to cut them down. On the other hand, peasants were themselves often forced into impromptu armies to fight the largely peasant armies of the neighbouring kingdom. A practice that continued long enough to give English the phrase "cannon fodder".

In addition to this material slavery, the Church, especially the Catholic Church, imposed a kind of mental slavery on Europeans. Buddhists did the same across Asia. Michel Foucault writes germanely (if not well) on this subject in his book Madness and Civilisation. The Church used confession as a way of surveilling the minds of Christians and controlling their thoughts. It is not enough to be a physical subject of the king, one's very thoughts must be moulded to make one a mental subject as well. Religion very often characterises the human being as a beast which needs to be tamed and controlled. For the Abrahamic faiths it was a state of original sin that resulted from the story of Adam and Eve. Buddhists characterised our will, our desires, our very sense of self as being responsible for all suffering.

This situation prevailed for most of human history. It probably emerged with the first city states and kingdoms. These early states concentrated power and wealth in the hands of leader who used it as they saw fit. The principle of hereditary power inevitably led to a preponderance of bad leaders and thence to attempts to redistribute power away from kings, away from royal families and, eventually, in our own time, to the people, although even in a "democracy" people (demos) have little say in state level decisions or the day to day governance. Usually all we get is one vote every few years and the rest of the time we just shout at the television.

The various political, economic, and moral ideologies that take liberty as their central idea are (sometimes confusingly) called liberalism. Despite the rise and fall of political parties with various names, liberalism has been the dominant ideology in Europe and its colonies since the 18th Century. Liberalism still faces competition from conservatism and socialism, but tends to come out ahead because the ideals of liberalism are internalised by the population. Anyone espousing liberalism sounds sensible to the majority, because we value the goals of liberalism: typically framed as rights and freedoms. Critiques of socialism and conservatism abound, but the ideology of liberalism is often transparent or presented as natural law.

How did "liberal", which describes über right-wing economics (free markets, laissez faire), become synonymous with welfare and the left-wing? How is this related to libertarianism? What does the much abused term neoliberal mean? In this essay I will attempt to sketch the history of idea of liberalism and show how the various uses of the word are related.

Any relatively short essay inevitably over-generalises and truncates a subject which already fills a library of books. And, of course, I have an agenda in writing this essay and highlighting what seems most germane to that agenda. I make no pretence at neutrality; I think liberalism has made a valuable contribution but has become a dangerous cult. We need to think about our approach to civil society in light of modern science, but before we can do that we need to dismantle the current ideologies. I begin, therefore, with a relatively crude dissection.

Classical Liberalism

When did people start to rebel against the absolute authority of kings? Nobody really knows, but it probably coincides with the first king who was incompetent, insane, or immoral. Freedom from oppressive authority is one of the most basic definitions of liberty. This is what Isaiah Berlin termed "negative freedom". The assumption is that we are naturally free if left to our own devices.

One of the iconic moments in this history of this idea of liberty is the signing of the Magna Carta. The barons of England made a coalition to extract promises of fairness and justice (for the barons, not their human chattels) from a despotic king who used his power in an arbitrary way.

However, liberalism did not emerge as a coherent philosophy until the late 18th Century. Historians seem to agree that a few key figures gave liberalism its intellectual shape. Of course at any point in history there are thousands or millions of people involved in any movement. Liberalism was very much broader than a few individuals, it's just that for the purposes of writing history a movement can be summed up with reference to those few. And of course, liberalism is not a homogeneous movement by any means. The fact that is it used to label both right-wing economics and left-wing social policies should make this obvious.

Hobbes

Historians often point to Thomas Hobbes' 1651 book Leviathan as the beginnings of classical liberalism as a political ideology, though Hobbes does not use the word "liberal" and favoured monarchism. Hobbes gains his place in the canon because he asks on what grounds a citizen owes allegiance to a sovereign. It is perhaps the first articulation of the citizen not being the property of the king.

In Hobbes' view, the natural state of men is war, of everyone against everyone.* In this "natural" state the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Only a powerful ruler, the eponymous Leviathan, can bring order to the lives of men and thus men enter into a social contract between ruler and ruled, or between state and citizen. The ruler rules by the consent of the ruled, and they consent because the alternative is war.

* On the use of "man" here, my task is not to rehabilitate these thinkers. They were, on the whole, sexists who thought of women as inferior (J. S. Mill is one exception to this). Where they speak only of "man", I will report this accurately as a nail in their coffin.

Hobbes lived through a turbulent period in history with the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648) and the English Civil War (1642 – 1651). We could sum up the Civil War by saying that a weak ruler allowed his kingdom to fall apart and then a civilian army succeeded in overthrowing and beheading him. Conditions were exacerbated by rebellions in Scotland and Ireland and by opposition from the Scottish Churches. Thus conceivably this was an influence on Hobbes. However, the Thirty Years War, one of the most destructive and disruptive conflicts in history, was prosecuted by Europe's Leviathan kings, which seems to contradict his view that Leviathan brings stability. In fact most wars are fought by kings using their citizens as proxies.

Other early liberal thinkers, including Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, developed the idea of the social contract.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), of course, wrote a great deal about the individual and their freedom, giving liberalism a rosy tinge of Romanticism. But he is seldom included in the main line of the development of liberalism. He saw our natural, i.e., free, state as that of the noble savage. In his view the social contract was the subjection of the individual will to the general will. This is an idea that is powerfully current in the UK today. Having won a 2% majority for leaving the EU in a referendum, Brexit campaigners repeatedly cite the "will of the people" and expect all to subject themselves to that will even when it is clear that opinion has shifted. Several of the main themes of liberalism are present in his work, but attention rightly focuses on another English philosopher as the father of liberal ideology.

John Locke

Locke (1632 – 1704) came from minor gentry and was a notable Whig. He was educated in an elite school and Oxford University where he became a don. He served as physician to the Whig politician, Lord Ashley (1621 – 1683, aka the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury), one of the richest men in England. It is conventional to see the Liberal Party as emerging from the Whigs.

The Whigs were a party of aristocrats with commercial interests who wanted to be protected from the power of the Crown to appropriate their wealth and raise taxes (mainly to fight wars in Europe). Inevitably, "commercial interests" is in many cases a euphemism for the transatlantic slave trade. Lord Ashley was part of a cabal that dominated the African slave trade, though a later Earl of Shaftesbury would be a prominent abolitionist.

Having lost his patron, Locke spent some time in Holland, where sat out the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw William of Orange take the English crown. Even with a Protestant on the throne, paranoia about Catholic plots continued. On his return to England in 1690, Locke published the tracts that established his reputation and lasting legacy, namely the Essay on Human Understanding and the two Treatises on Government.

Locke, like Hobbes, was concerned primarily with negative freedom; we are assumed to naturally be free except when something (usually a king) deprives us of freedom. He also believed that men are equal and attacked theological arguments for preordained hierarchies such as the divine right of kings. He believed that there were natural laws ordained by God that even in our natural state men must be bound by. These natural laws were revealed by the application of reason. If liberty is the most beautiful theme of the enlightenment then reason is the most problematic (as anyone who has read The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber will understand). The natural laws gave rise to natural rights, such as the right to life, the right to liberty, and freedom of worship. Freedom of worship in particular came to be seen as the long term solution to the question of the incessant conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

In his Treatises on Government (1690), Locke argued for the liberty of individuals and that any encroachment on their liberty had to be justified. Justifiable encroachments on liberty are strictly limited to preventing activities that harm others. Like Hobbes (and unlike Rousseau), Locke believed that, unless coerced, men had an incorrigible tendency to infringe the natural rights of others and thus civil society was necessarily bound by a social contract. Locke argued that the role of the sovereign is to protect the person and property of individuals.

This is a good place to make the distinction between liberalism and conservatism. Rousseau famously framed the problem of negative liberty as "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." Edmund Burke, the quintessential conservative would have replied, "and a good thing too". Liberals argued for the need to break those chains (though typically for a small subset of society) while conservatives were and are concerned with building social institutions to ensure the chains remained in place. Like Hobbes, conservatives see a society without a strong ruler (a father figure) as chaotic and unworkable.

Locke was profoundly influential on the founding fathers of the USA and many of his ideas about liberty are encapsulated in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. One of the measures that they took was to carefully separate out the functions of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—and have them operate independently of each other as far as possible.

There is an important point to be made about nascent and classical liberalism. Liberty is certainly the central issue, but none of the early liberals believed that it applied to everyone. And in these early days the exceptions were by far the majority of citizens. Liberty was not intended to apply to women, for example. Nor to anyone with dark skin. Nor did liberty pertain to the indigenous Americans who suffered genocide and expropriation.

Attitudes to slavery give us an important indicator for the evolution of liberalism. As note Locke's patron was a kingpin of the slave trade. Some of the founding fathers of the USA who wrote that "All men are created equal" were engaged in the slave trade and/or owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson railed against slavery but did not free the 600 he owned, allegedly because he could not afford to (with the implication that one white man going bankrupt was not worth the freedom of 600 Africans). He also thought that they should be trained in a trade before being freed so as not to be a burden on society. He managed to train and free just 6 men over his lifetime or about 1% of the slaves that he owned. Meanwhile, he also had children by one of his female slaves. Later, when slavery was abolished, slave owners were compensated for their loss, but slaves themselves received nothing in reparations.

Thus, when considering the history of the idea of liberty we always need to be attuned to whom liberty applied and did not apply. Of equal importance is the question of who was making such determinations about what constituted liberty: somehow these determinations always favoured the elite, the slave owners. Locke is part of the elite that wants to be free of oppression from the king, but who live by oppressing workers and slaves. Similarly in the USA, the genocide and expropriation of the original inhabitants was done in the name of liberty. I grew up watching Western movies in which the "Indians" were an oppressive force trying to prevent the settlers from being free.

Since Locke's time, the hereditary aristocracy has been largely replaced by industrialists at the ruling class: the bourgeoisie as Marx called them. Though this class also pass on wealth and influence along hereditary lines and use social connections to advance their own and exclude others. In the 19th Century, they represented a middle class between aristocrats and peasants, though "middle class" has taken on quite a different meaning now.

If Locke provided the philosophical inspiration then it was Adam Smith who translated liberalism into economics and who writing marks the beginning of classical liberalism.

The Wealth of Nations

Throughout the late Medieval period and into the Renaissance the merchant classes developed an approach to economics that served only their interests. Mercantilists saw trade as a zero sum game in which each nation attempted to accumulate wealth by outdoing the others. This was partly why Europe kept erupting into large scale wars for centuries, culminating in WWII.

The publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith in 1776 was a turning point in modern history. Many of the ideas that underpin modern nation states and how they trade are first enunciated by Smith. He might be called the first classical liberal, and is still the darling of economic liberals (if only via his later interpreters).

The primary argument is for free trade as a non-zero sum game. If trade is free, Smith says, then "everybody" benefits, although as before we have to be alert to the exclusions that liberal intellectuals always made. Thus we could see Smith as extending Locke's arguments about liberty and encroachment on liberty to the economic sphere. Any encroachment on economic activity must be justified, and then only to prevent harm. And when he says that everyone benefits, he means not workers, but those engaged in trade.

Smith argues for a view of humanity as rational and concerned primarily with self-interest. In his thesis, if every merchant rationally pursues his own self interest (while avoiding harm to others), then the market will guide his actions towards the greater good. This is a crude version of the so-called "law of supply and demand" expanded to cover the whole economy. I will have a good deal more to say about this in the next essay.

This view of economics takes a particular, quite abstract, view of humanity as rational and self-interested as well as primarily motivated by maximising their own benefit. This view of rationality is a feature of Enlightenment thinking about humanity. The modern versions of the theory of market economies also assume that we have perfect knowledge of the costs and benefits of all decisions and make rational decisions about what is best for us. In the economist's worldview everything is idealised with a particular slant. Unfortunately, as the field of economics progressed, that slant increasingly became whatever was required to produce simple mathematics.

Here we need to raise what now seems like an obvious question: had Smith actually met any people? Because it is obvious to any keen observer of humanity that we are seldom rational and that we are frequently not self-interested. We look after our ageing parents, for example, when it can hardly be in our economic interest to do so. If we were as coldly calculating as Smith makes out, for example, it would be in our interest to euthanize the elderly, the sooner to inherit their wealth before they squander it on extending lives of very poor quality. This question comes up again when we consider the other man with a claim to being the first classical liberal.

Bentham and the Mills

Three other key liberal thinkers were Jeremy Bentham, his friend, James Mill, and especially Mill's son John Stuart Mill.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was a child prodigy from a wealthy family. He was educated at an elite private school and Oxford University. It has been suggested that he was on the autistic spectrum, but I am deeply suspicious of such diagnoses long after the death of the individual. I've seen people diagnose me from my writing with psychopathologies that my psychiatrists entirely disagree with.

The name Bentham is synonymous with the philosophy of utilitarianism. In particular he conceived of man as governed by purely pleasure and pain. And from this he extrapolated a moral theory in which good could be understood as maximising pleasure, while evil maximises pain. The calculations involved in how much pleasure or pain was caused by any decision he called "hedonic calculus". Bentham dwelled on the sources of pleasure and categorised them according to intensity, duration, immediacy, and certainty of gratification.

James Mill (1773–1836) was, unlike most of the other liberals, from a modest background, but still benefited from a good education. The elder Mill was a close friend of Bentham and a leading philosophical radical who believed in the power of education. He co-founded London's University College. His view was that men could be persuaded by argument to make rational assessments before acting. We can only assume that, like Smith, he never met many men.

However, Bentham and Mill are both minor figures compared to J. S. Mill (1806–1873). Mill's influence is probably on a par with Adam Smith's and historians refer to him as the most influential English philosopher of the 19th Century. The importance of Mill's ideas about civil society in Britain cannot be overstated. In particular he unites Locke's liberalism and Bentham's utilitarianism.

Mill was educated at home by his father and Bentham, and he was kept isolated from other children other than his siblings. Like Bentham he was a prodigy and became well versed in many fields of knowledge at a very young age. As a non-conformist, Mill was barred from Oxbridge, but he attended lectures at University College and worked for the East India Company.

J. S. Mill made important contributions to a number of fields, and of interest to other parts of my project/object is that, along with Auguste Comte, he was amongst the first generation of emergentists. In his System of Logic (1843) Mill described emergent phenomena that were greater than the sum of their parts.

His book On Liberty (1859) extends Locke's ideas on liberty. Like Locke, he sees the role of the government as preventing individuals encroaching on each other's freedoms. However, Mill's justification for liberty is utilitarian along Benthamite lines. Freedom of speech, for example, allows for a plurality of opinions, which promotes debate and discussion on the best way forward and thus leads to the greatest good. An intellectual monoculture will stifle a society and cause it to stagnate, which is a cause of pain.

Unlike his predecessors, Mill rejects the idea of an explicit social contract, but he does recognise that in society we have mutual obligations. People living in a civil society are interdependent, which creates a problem for Mill. The idea, for example, that our actions can have no effect on those around us when we live in an interdependent society is difficult to defend. Everything we do has consequences for those around us. Arguably, any action that violates our mutual obligations is in some way harmful. This undermines the case for individualism. Where Mill was criticised, it was because he was overly vague on such questions. Drawing on modern understanding of human societies we can do much better, but I get ahead of myself.

In his Utilitarianism (1863), Mill revises and extends Bentham's ideas about Utilitarianism with a more sophisticated analysis of self-interest and pleasure. Where Bentham had been largely concerned with the quantity of pleasure, Mill introduced a qualitative distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Ultimately, utilitarianism aims for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, as Bentham put it. In Mill's understanding, moral terminology—e.g., "good", "evil", "duty", or "rights"—are subsumed into this scheme. Utilitarianism is a moral theory. Mill tries to argue that utilitarianism is "natural", i.e., that it emerges out of our social nature.

Mill was notably in favour of women's suffrage. The issue was becoming increasingly urgent in his day. Mill fell in love with, and eventually married, Harriet Taylor, who had a formidable intellect and was a vocal advocate of women's rights and she seems to have had a powerful (positive) influence on him.

However, Mill's view on India and China was they had regressed into barbarism and were incapable of ruling themselves. He was in favour of the "benevolent despotism" of the British Empire, as long as it helped the unfortunate barbarians to progress. Although, of course, it was the British Empire which had destroyed their civilisations, particularly through the cultivation of opium by indentured labourers in India and through addiction to opium in China. We should not forget that the British fought two wars with China (1839–1842) and the Second Opium War (1856–1860) to retain the "right" to push opium on the Chinese. Prior to these wars, China has the largest economy in the world and was a net exporter to the world. Over the period of the opium wars their share of global GDP halved. The situation in India was similar.

Mill, like other classical liberals, appears to be blind to the contradictions inherent in their worldview. Liberty for all, where "all" meant "rich white men". The greatest good for the greatest number, not counting Chinese, Indians, or the first nation peoples in America. And so on.

There were, of course, dozens of other people who made contributions to liberalism. In the figures mentioned we find the bare outlines of liberalism: individual liberty as the natural state of the elite, limited government combined with benevolent dictatorship of the elite; free trade for the mercantile class combined with servitude for workers; human beings as both rational and selfish. In general, the classical liberals were against democracy because ordinary people did not have the education required to understand human affairs, and they rightly intuited that the common people would want to limit the freedom of the elite to exploit them. However, they were also against wars of aggression since this impinged on trade and the liberty of the elite.

Spencer And Social Darwinism

There is one more influence from the mid-19th Century onwards that I wish to emphasise, since I see it as crucial to understanding neoliberalism. As I have emphasised, classical liberalism is closely tied to the expansion of the British Empire and to the rise of the Industrialists. Classical liberalism is the ideology which defends the right of the imperialist and the industrialist to engage in conquering and commerce (hand in hand) without interference, while justifying their dictatorship over those who are deemed incapable of exercising the rationality required for liberty (women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and the working classes).

The new theory of evolution by natural selection proposed by Charles Darwin played into this imperialist narrative. "Natural" is a word that crops up a lot in the history of liberalism. Natural rights, for example. Natural laws, revealed by reason. And so on. So natural selection was always likely to attract the attention of liberals.

It was Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) who worked the idea of natural selection into liberal ideology. Spencer is infamous for his summation of evolution as "survival of the fittest". In evolution theory this applies at the species level. However, it suited the liberal agenda to apply it to the individual and link it to the idea of a natural hierarchy in nature. And this, to my mind, is one of the ley manoeuvres of neoclassical liberalism or neoliberalism. Spencer confused the idea of evolution with the idea of social progress, producing the idea of social Darwinism. The elite were always on the lookout for justifications of their behaviour.

By the time Spencer arrived on the scene the new liberalism had already begun to try to address the social catastrophe caused by classical liberalism. In a sense, in his denunciation of new liberalism and their interventions, Spencer may be counted the first neoliberal. For example, he opposed compulsory education, laws to regulate safety at work, tax funded libraries, and welfare reforms. For Spencer and the neoliberals, if people fall by the wayside, then they were not fit to survive and we are better off without them. Survival of the fittest, callously applied to individuals. Social inequality explained at the natural order of things.

Ayn Rand denies outside influences on her anti-altruistic "philosophy" of self interest, but the parallels between her denunciation of altruism and Spencer's social Darwinism are striking. Leading neoliberal Alan Greenspan was a direct disciple of Rand. And she continues to be an inspiration to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

It is this violent disregard for humanity, an existing tendency in liberalism made explicit and taken to the extreme, which marks out neoliberalism as distinction from classical liberalism. Neoliberals dropped any pretence of interest in or caring about human beings who are not part of the elite. If classical liberalism is an aberration then neoliberalism is a pathology.

From Whiggery to Liberalism via Radicalism

The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) resulted in the loss of the American colonies or the founding of a great empire depending on which side of the Atlantic you identify with. In fact, the war ended when the Whigs (proto-liberals) came to power in Britain and began to negotiate a ceasefire and peace. Liberty in the sense of negative freedom became a founding principle of new United States of America.

However, as we have already seen there were significant exceptions to this liberty. Slavery persisted. And the genocide and expropriate of the First Nations people continued unabated. Women were not included. And as in Britain, democracy was resisted. It is not until the 20th Century that women get the vote and not until the 1960s that the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. achieves equal status in the eyes of the law for African Americans. Nor has this legal and intellectual equality being internalised or realised. Women and people of colour still routinely experience discrimination, even in the land of the free.

Beginning in 1789, the French Revolution, which had adopted some ideas from liberal intellectuals, began to reshape the Francophone world. However, revolution quickly turned to terror and tyranny from which emerged the militarist state under Napoleon and a pan-European war. French liberalism went in a different direction and France was also strongly influenced by Marxism.

While the French revolution was not repeated in Britain, it did give birth to the Radicals, a cross party grouping which pursued social reforms of a progressive nature. In particular, Radicals moved, with the backing of the working class Chartist movement, to enfranchise more men, culminating in a series of reform acts. Classical Liberals in the UK and the USA were typically reluctant to extend enfranchisement because they saw democracy as a direct threat to their autonomy. Likewise, conservatives resisted democracy. It's quite likely that Churchill was not joking when he referred to it as "the worst form of government".

The radical influence split the Whigs and led to the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859. The Liberal party espoused the new liberal ideology rather than the older classical liberalism. They introduced the first welfare measures in the UK, although these were in the spirit not of collectivism, but of helping people to help themselves. Individualism remained a strong principle. 

The radicals were amongst the first to pursue what Isaiah Berlin termed positive freedom. The lack of a voice in parliament inhibited the freedom of men and so they argued, successfully, for more men to have the vote. Later, progressive liberals would also argue that women should have the vote as well.

Meanwhile in the UK a combination of factors were coming together to kickstart the industrial revolution: technology in the form of steam powered machinery and energy in the form of coal combined to create vast wealth along with a social revolution. Britain, like most other nations, until that point had a largely rural population. But factories needed workers and the money they paid attracted people to the cities. At the same time the mechanisation of farming reduced the amount of labour required and forced people to consider other kinds of work.

 Although it became colonial, the British Empire was first and foremost a money making venture. And it was incredibly successful. Soon a section of British society had masses of surplus capital and they were looking for ways to invest it to make even more money. The built factories and merchant ships and founded one of the great trading empires. However, when they turned to colonialism, government subsidies helped many poor, landless labourers to migrate to the colonies (including many of my ancestors).

Any attempt to tell this story as a linear concatenation of causes falsifies the reality. The changes in Europe and the US that brought liberalism to prominence were complex and part of greater changes in society. And, indeed, liberalism is far from homogeneous. The range of political ideologies that have sheltered under the umbrella of liberalism is bewildering.

The Liberal Divide

When I set out to research liberalism it was partly because I experienced confusion over what the word meant. It especially seemed to mean different things in the UK and the USA. I was particularly puzzled by the term neoliberal, because at least according to one common usage (in the UK and US) neoliberalism is profoundly illiberal in that it has grossly undermined the freedom of workers, reducing their claim on the means of production and to the value created by it, and has resulted in swinging cuts to welfare. Emblematically, Neoliberals and libertarians have blocked liberal attempts to ensure that all Americans have access to health care. How can we understand this apparent contradiction?

As we have seen, however, there were two strands of liberalism from an early period. I tend to think of them as economic liberalism and social liberalism. Classical liberalism, which is currently quite popular due to being espoused by Jordan Peterson, is primarily associated with liberal economic ideas. The historical classical liberals were the rump of the Whigs and other wealthy businessmen, concerned to protect their economic interests from the government. Classical liberalism is generally held to have emerged in the early 19th Century forming around the ideas of Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Mill and their successors. Classical liberal was and is elitist, imperialist, sexist, and racist.

Classical liberalism is the economic philosophy of the wealthy seeking to protect their wealth. They are happy to rule society but not to share their wealth and power with it. They were mainly concerned with negative freedom.

New Liberals

Classical liberalism ran different courses in the UK and the USA. In the UK, classical liberalism is tied to the emergence of the British Empire, while in the USA it is tied to the succession from that Empire and the consolidation of the states into a federal union. In the UK and Europe there was more concerted resistance to liberalism from socialists and communists on the left and conservatives in the centre-right. Anarchists played a role in Europe, mainly because they decided to demonstrate their contempt for leaders by assassinating them, inadvertently setting off World War One in the process.

The results of classical liberalism in Britain are graphically portrayed in the novels of Charles Dickens. Freedom amongst the bourgeoisie gave them an excellent standard of living that is still celebrated in BBC period dramas. What we see less of are the servitude, poverty, slums, disease, child labour, and early death that resulted from the Industrial Revolution. By the mid 19th Century, British society was in danger of collapsing under the influence of economic liberalism. The freedom of the elite creates a huge burden on the rest of society.

Although socialism and communism thrived under these conditions, and labour unions began to claw back some liberty for workers, many liberals were appalled by the world they had created. Liberals began to realise that if liberty was to mean anything then it had to extend to everyone. However, liberals remained committed to individualism. Unlike the left they did not see collectivism as the way to cure the ills of society. They approached the social problems caused by classical liberalism in terms of helping the poor to help themselves.

Liberalism was never simply a political or economic ideology. It was always a moral discourse as well. And part of that moral discourse included the idea that when rational people made good economic choices they prospered. In the liberal ideology, for someone to be poor meant they had made poor economic choices and were thus irrational and unfit to play a greater role in society. They completely overlooked the disadvantages of being born poor and not having access to the elite schools or the nepotism and cronyism of the elite social networks. In other words, classical liberals who were from the ruling classes completely neglected class and privilege in their social analysis.

Where classical liberals saw poverty as an indictment of the immorality of the poor, the new liberals began to see that the poor and working classes were in an impossible situation. Whereas the rich are born into liberty, the poor are born into servitude and lack the opportunities to apply themselves. It was the new liberals who concerned themselves with "social mobility" (still a phrase with a great deal of caché in British politics).

In the USA the political left has never had much traction. And classical liberalism (the right-wing of economics) ran on a lot longer, until the Great Depression. The lack of any real political left, of any true collectivism in the USA has skewed the political discourse. Roosevelt's New Deal is not a left-wing (collectivist) policy. It is a new liberal policy designed to mitigate the unequal economic opportunities individuals face as a result of circumstances beyond their control. The aim was equality of opportunity not, as with socialism, equality of outcome. In the absence of a genuine left-wing in US politics perceptions changed. Welfare liberals took the place of the left, though they are still right-wing by European standards. The new liberals are the "bleeding heart liberals".

So now we begin to see the two main ways the word is used. Classical liberalism or economic liberalism is the ideology of the entitled elite who are solely concerned with making a buck and keeping it. New liberalism or social liberalism wants to change social conditions so that all citizens have an equal opportunity. And as we have seen, classical liberalism combined with social Darwinism reacting against social liberalism gave rise to neoliberalism. In this view libertarians seek to take economic and social individualism to its logical conclusion: people living in isolation with no obligations. Libertarians tend to be utopian in outlook, suggesting that if they could only attain complete negative freedom they would live in the best of all possible worlds. 

Embracing and Hobbling Democracy

For liberals, democracy raised the spectre of another form of tyranny, the tyranny of the majority. Classical liberals were, on the whole, against democracy as a form of government, because of the threat that, outnumbered by the common man, the aristocrats and emerging industrialists would have their liberty restricted. However, it eventually became clear that democracy was unavoidable, partly because the tyranny of classical liberalism was so oppressive.  

In the post war period—a period of austerity and rebuilding for the UK and Europe and a period of unbridled expansion and prosperity in the USA—liberals turned more towards concern for positive freedom. Being born into poverty was now seen as a form of oppression to be removed. Equality of opportunity was the goal of the new liberals.

At the same time, a burgeoning ecological awareness began to push for environmental standards. Unhappy about polluted air, water, food, and land some groups pushed for limits to be placed on industry. The UK was forced to pass a Clean Air Act in 1956 after coal smoke made the air in London unbreathable. Meanwhile, the provision of welfare—designed to help individuals to help themselves—led to higher taxes and to burgeoning governments. Keep in mind that the largest part of the welfare spent in the UK is pensions for the retired. 

The growing role of government in the lives of citizens eventually led to a backlash from economic liberals (who thought of themselves as "conservative" by this stage). In 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce:

"No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack. This varies in scope, intensity, in the techniques employed, and in the level of visibility."

In the sense that Powell and his colleagues in the Chamber of Commerce saw the free enterprise system as an institution that had to be preserved, they were conservative. But more than anything they were economic liberals who resented inference in their profit making. So what if they were poisoning the air and water and causing climate change? That was entirely secondary to their right to make a buck.

Powell made a series of recommendations, which in retrospect look like a manifesto for a social revolution (which is really not what conservatives do). Conservative businessmen should, said Powell, begin to buy up media outlets. They should endow university business departments and even found new business schools to teach conservative business values and ideas by which he meant undiluted classical liberalism. The value being the liberty of the elite and the key ideas being free markets, laissez faire, low taxation, welfare reforms, and small government. But furthermore they should start and generously fund foundations and think tanks to employ the graduates of these new business schools. They would help to articulate businessmen's ideas and combat arguments against them, and use their newly owned media as leverage against citizens who wanted clean air etc. The think tanks would also lobby politicians to prevent, weaken, or repeal legal measures which infringed on the freedoms of businessmen.

And this is what businessmen did. Economic and social problems that emerged in the 1970s, not least of which were the oil shocks, propelled candidates into office on the promise of a neoclassical liberal economic program. At the same time a group of extreme libertarian economists seemed to be articulating similar ideas and articulating a reform program to dismantle the concessions of the new liberals to society. 

Although neoliberalism was an existing term, it soon came to be used to describe the program of economic reform undertaken by leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I sometimes call it the Alan Greenspan doctrine since he it was he who translated the ideology into policies. State assets were sold, often to foreigners; state enterprises were privatised, government let go the levers of power except for control of interest rates (aimed at controlling inflation) with the idea that markets would steer themselves. They ignored the increasing corruption that crept into virtually all of the large corporations who used their power to manipulate markets to their own ends, and usually to the detriment of everyone else. 

The same problems that plagued classical liberalism recurred. Wealth became concentrated in the hands of an elite and... surprise, surprise, they promptly used that power in an oppressive manner. They undermined democracy and the liberty of citizens. 

One of the key neoliberal programs was the stripping away of regulations governing the finance industry that had been in place since the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. Private sector debt expanded by orders of magnitude and fuelled a series of bubbles that regularly burst producing economics recessions. This debt ratcheted up to 500% of GDP in the UK just prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which then threatened to take down the entire banking system of the world. In the UK £1.5 trillion (one year's GDP) was borrowed overnight to nationalise banks in order to stabilise the system. 

We know that J. P. Morgan, Bear Sterns, Goldman Sachs, and company acted recklessly and without regard for anything other than the profit of the elite. We know that many companies made money out of the subprime mortgage scam. We know that banks were manipulating interest rates. We know that they were laundering billions for organised crime groups and kleptocrats. We know, but because they have captured government, there has been very little we can do. Most of the dishonest people involved have not been punished and have walked away with fortunes. 

Meanwhile the foundations and think tanks provided more and more lobbyists with PhDs in business and psychology. Each industry employed multiple lobbyists for each elected representative. We all remember the story of big tobacco being in denial about the health dangers of smoking and doing everything they could to prevent any government from curtailing their product or the profits they made. And this continued long after they were certain about the carcinogenic effects of smoking.

Today we see the same thing from automotive and oil companies. Internally they acknowledge the problem of climate change and their role in creating it, but externally they lobby to undermine the attempts to prevent climate change. We know for certain that ExxonMobil and Shell both knew that they were responsible for climate change but continued to publicly cast doubt on climate science and to weaken any environmental legislation. We know that car-makers falsified result of emissions tests. And so on. These are all symptoms of neoclassical liberalism.

If this were not bad enough we began to see a revolving door between senior positions in government and executive positions and directorships in big business. Having spent a few years running interference for business in government, men would be rewarded with high paying private sector jobs. In the USA the senior staff of the Treasury, including the Secretary, would inevitably come from top Wall Street companies. Much the same thing happens around the world. Government who support business know that when they leave government they will become very rich for very little effort. They basically retire on an executive salary. Former Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair, earns millions in consulting fees (often from very dodgy nation states) and hides his income in an elaborate structure of shell companies and trusts so that he pays no tax. What an example to nation. 

Companies used the lax legislative environment to buy up competitors and create monopolies or near monopolies. In media, only a handful of companies now own all the mainstream TV networks, all the newspapers, and all the publishing houses (including academic publishing) across the globe. Similarly in banking, supermarkets, the automotive, and electronics. There is a relentless consolidation of power and concentration of wealth, facilitated by governments around the world in exchange for generous private sector retirement packages. And along with this is the phenomenon of the bigger you are the less tax you pay. Amazon, to take one example, gets more in government subsidies to do business in the UK than is pays in taxes. It treats its workers like robots - timing their every moment, including bathroom breaks. These companies squeeze every last penny of profit out of citizens, workers, governments, and somehow never pay tax. They use our commercial infrastructure but make no contribution to it. Which puts more of a burden on citizens to cover the costs. 

Classical liberalism is almost always narrow in its application. Neoliberals want business to be free to make profits at any cost to citizens. One of the main costs has been that although we have the illusion of "democracy" because we get to vote for a local representative, in fact, government is not run by the people for the people and never has been. Frank Zappa called government "the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex." This seems more true every year.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that liberalism has made an enormous contribution to society. Many of the freedoms that we take for granted have come to us from the political activities associated with varieties of liberalism. Freedom of speech, of association, and of worship are all liberal values. Liberals are also, generally speaking, against wars of aggression. The project to link the previously adversarial nations of Europe together with networks of free trade, the free movement of capital and labour is essentially a liberal one. The whole idea of civil liberties we owe to liberalism.

However, we should not be naïve about the nature of liberalism. It was, and in many ways still is, anti-democratic. Liberals don't want people to have power because they fear the tyranny of the majority. And the majority don't care about becoming rich and powerful. Most people just want a certain amount of security: a roof over their heads, food on the table, education and healthcare. Most people are willing to work hard for these; in fact, much harder than anyone should have to work in this day and age. That willingness is too easily exploited.

Liberalism was always about freedom for the elite to do what they like. The classical liberals did not consider most people capable of exercising freedom because they were not capable of exercising reason. In this they included all women, all Africans, all indigenous people everywhere. Not only did they deny liberty to these classes, they also practiced genocide and expropriation. And what is more they did it in the name of liberty! And we should be outraged by this.

We should be outraged by the way that neoliberals have reorganised society to promote the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few white men. We should be outraged at the continued, if more subtle, denial of liberty to women, people of colour, indigenous peoples. We should, like the anarchist geographer, Dr Simon Springer, be saying "Fuck neoliberalism". Not being polite about it, but honoring the righteous anger at the rhetoric of freedom being used to enslave us.

One of the most troubling trends that follows in the decades of neoliberal abuses of power and office is the rise of fascism: ultranationalist, racist, authoritarian groups which make the same offer to citizens as the fascists of the 1930s did. The elite do not care about you, they say, but we will protect your interests against those of the elite. And plenty of citizens, tired of barely scraping a living, of feeling out of control, tired of watching the excesses of the seemingly untouchable elite, become receptive to the message of fascism.

We already know that economic liberalism is a failure. Given their liberty, the elite always misuse it to oppress others. That neoliberalism is now making fascism look attractive again ought to be a warning sign that something is terribly wrong.

But of course the single biggest indictment of neoliberalism is the failure to acknowledge the impact that all that industry has on the ecology of the planet. Under neoliberalism we have instituted a mass extinction of plant and animal species and created a genuine existential threat to civilisation that can only be compared to the Black Death in Europe when one third of the population died.

In my next essay I will look at some of the reasons that liberalism goes as wrong as it does, particularly in how it understands human beings and human societies. And I will ponder what politics might look like in a world that acknowledged the truth. 

~~oOo~~

Note: 8 May 2019. There is a good article by George Monbiot from 2016 on the modern manifestations of liberalism: Neoliberalism: the ideology at the root of all our problems. He covers Hayek and Friedman. Brilliant Hayek quote shows that he was in fact a classical, anti-democratic, liberal: “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”.