Untethered, Unmoored, and Unhappy

 

By Frank Filocomo

Liberalism leaves much to be desired. 

There's no question that liberation is, at least on the surface, a worthy goal. We ought to be free to live our lives as we see fit, right? And who are others to tell us what faith to practice, whom to associate with, or how we should love?

All of that is fair; there's a lot of merit in the "live and let live" proverb. 

When I was an undergrad, I recall reading Matt Kibbe's Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff. It offers good insight into the libertarian mind, in a way that the layperson can digest. I recommend reading it. In fact, it was my introduction to libertarian philosophy, which I adhered to for all of about a month.

The thing with liberalism - and libertarianism, its more radical kin - is that, while it is mostly right in its admonishments regarding state coercion, it offers little in the way of identity and belongingness. If liberalism is seen as an end in itself, life will have little meaning. 

In UnHerd, Paul Kingsnorth writes about liberalism's shortcomings vis-à-vis culture and place. Offering an astute anecdote, Kingsnorth relates a story about a campfire he participated in in the Indonesian rainforest:

Twenty-​­five years ago, I found myself sitting around a fire in an Indonesian rainforest. There were people around the fire from a few different countries... One of our hosts from Borneo began singing something beautiful in his language. Then a German picked up the guitar and belted out something lusty and Germanic. Then a couple of others. It was all quite fun. Then the guitar came round to another English ­person —​­ one who, unlike me, knew how to play­ it —​­ and there was a momentary silence, followed by a hushed consultation with a couple of other English people. What shall I play? It became quickly clear that none of us had a clue what a traditional English song was... In the end, the inevitable happened: the Englishman played a Bob Dylan song. Everybody, including the people from Borneo, sang happily along.

Much of the West's belongingness problem can be traced back to the Enlightenment-rationalism of centuries past. Enlightenment-rationalism teaches us that our thinking ought to be governed primarily by reason and reason alone (ever wonder why the country's leading libertarian publication is called Reason?). That is to say, history and tradition are mostly irrelevant. While, again, it would be wrong to say that Enlightenment thinkers presented no merit in their arguments, it would fair game to point to their lacking emphasis on communal identity. 

And it's worth noting that the liberal project is not a partisan one. Both the establishment Left and Right adhere closely to its tenets. 

This opens the door for a "third way," if you will: a philosophy that is premised around belonging. For years I've argued that that philosophy is communitarianism, which I've written about extensively. 

The third way presents us with an escape from spiritual homelessness.

More from the article:

The quest for culture is always a quest for home. Probably humans can never be truly at home on this earth, but there are degrees of homelessness, I think. When you’re young you want to run away from home and sit around an Indonesian campfire with people from many nations and sing. But you find that home has followed you and that you don’t know what it quite is, or why that bothers you so much. As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.

Some may pit communitarianism and liberalism against each other, as though they are diametrically at odds. That, as the late Amitai Etzioni has articulated, is not at all the case. Communitarianism takes a "yes, and" approach to society: a combination of individual autonomy and social order and cohesion. 

While it's tempting to jettison one ideology for another, a more promising future lies within the "yes, and."