Liberalism as a Way of Life, Keynote Address from Alexandre Lefebvre (October 4, 2024)

A

très warm welcome, everyone. We're due to commence shortly, not quite yet. To be more precise, this is not an inherently vague problem,

unlike

many others in philosophy, but we will start shortly, and I hope that's sufficiently descriptive

as

a description. With that said, before we commence, can I invite all the speakers to this wonderful conference to join me for a photo at the front

with

the book as well. So, you know, that's the main protagonist. Sorry, Alex is the main protagonist, but the book is an extension of the main protagonist. So let's have a

group

photo first for everyone who's speaking. So if you could join me at the front, that'd be grand. Thank you. All of us, all of us, everyone, everyone.

So

Professor Bai, Professor Tewald, yes, Professor Lee, wonderful. I think we're not missing anyone, right? No, we're not. Wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful.

So

could I have everyone's attention in the room, please?

Thank

you very much. It gives me a great pleasure

to

welcome you all to this, one of the inaugural events of the Hong Kong Ethics Lab, which is a research cluster nested within the University of Hong Kong Department of Philosophy. We are most honoured, you know, to welcome a speaker who needs really no introduction, but I will just do the ceremonial bit of introducing him in any case. Professor Alexandre Lefebvre,

got

that right,

is

a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney.

He

is also known as one of the most popular, accessible, and engaging scholars in rendering philosophy and also political theory more accessible and also transparent and ultimately relevant to the general public at large. His book, Liberalism as a Way of Life,

provides

us all with

a

humorous, profound, reflective, and also incisive set of insights into the practising and adoption of liberalism as a way of life. For the words of Pierre, Hadeau, and beyond, which I'm sure Alex would be able to share his insights on shortly. The purpose of this event and also many future events to come is that we hope that the Department of Philosophy here at HKU could serve as an integral hub and also nexus under the leadership of, of course, our great department chair who can't be here with us today but she sends her regards in spirit, Dr.

Rachel Sturken, and also many of our leading faculty and researchers, and not just in the department but also in the faculty of law and also the faculty of or the Department of Chinese joining us today to discuss and also comment on this book by Alex.

And

of course, beyond just HKU, we are very privileged to have leading scholars from the mainland, from Australia and beyond joining us in the audience as well as on the panels for today. So in terms of housekeeping, just two quick rules from me. Firstly, please ensure that you've switched off your mobile phones or you've switched it to silent mode because we don't want any unwelcome interruptions. All welcome interruptions are also not welcome. So that's trivial actually.

It's

a null subset otherwise. And secondly, secondly, if you would like to ask a question, please do because this is ultimately what philosophy in general is about. It's about asking questions, interrogating assumptions, even ones that don't seem problematic. So the more questions we ask, the better. And I, as your host slash moderator slash MC, would try my best to facilitate these questions whilst also ensuring that we stick to the schedule. So further ado, please join me in welcoming our wonderful protagonist for today, Professor Alexandre Lefebvre.

The floor is yours for the next 20 to 30 minutes after which we'll entertain a couple of questions from the floor before proceeding onto the first panel of today. Thank you very much. Please.

Thank you for the very warm welcome. I want to start, if I may, with some thank yous.

So

as I say in the acknowledgements, is it

okay

if I sit? Can you see me? Is it, yeah, okay. As I say in the acknowledgements to my book, one of the core meanings of the word liberal is to be generous. So however much it's going to make some people here squirm, I'd like to thank the following liberals. First, Brian Wong for his energy and kindness and for assembling this extraordinary and not a little intimidating, thank you, group of scholars to respond. I'm deeply honoured, a little freaked out, but deeply honoured is the main message. Thank you two for Daniel Bell for being so kind and supportive of the book and the project and for providing the initial impetus for my trip here.

I'd really like to thank the HKU for bringing me out in style and the Ethics Lab and the Philosophy Department who've been so very generous.

To

my distinguished panelists, thank you so much. Some of you I've just met, some of you are new becoming old friends, so this is all very terrific and I just couldn't hope to be supported by a better group of scholars. So thank you and thank you of course to the audience for being here. So what I want to do with my opening bit

is

I want to run through the arguments of the book in kind of an accessible way. The commentators can kind of clock out for the next 30 minutes because they've read the book, but I hope to just provide some context for those who haven't

in

order to be able to participate and more fully join in and I'm happy to be interrupted for any kind of clarificatory questions at all. So

this

is a launch symposium. I don't know what kind of mashup it is, but it's a happy event to announce my book in Hong Kong, Liberalism as a Way of Life, which was published a few months ago by Princeton University Press. Now, it has some origins in my own research, of course, but I want to start out with a more specific event that got my thinking going about this particular topic. Just to confirm, can you hear me okay in the back?

My

voice is good? Yeah, okay, perfect. So you might, I don't know if you have an ear for accents, but if you do, you'll hear that I am not Australian despite the fact that I work in Sydney, so I'm Canadian

and

I moved to Sydney in 2010 with my wife and then very, very small child

and

for the first few years, every time Christmas rolled around, we would go back to Canada. I'm from Vancouver and we'd go back to Canada and we'd have a lovely time with family, but it was always expensive, always drizzly, always kind of crappy weather and in 2016, we're like, okay, okay, we're staying put this year and we're going to enjoy some fun because it's going to be full summer in Sydney. It's going to be Christmas on the beach. This is going to be awesome. So we opened the gifts on Christmas Day and then we strolled down to my local beach which is about 10 minutes

away from where I live

and

we were greeted.

My

big reveal is spoiled.

I

can go up and do it. I can just go up and do that.

What

is this? Yeah, it's working. Oh,

it

is. Can

you

click?

It

works.

Can

you go? No, no. Back, back.

Sorry,

everyone.

It's

supposed to be very swish. All right, all right. So here is what greeted me on Christmas Day. It was a party like I had never seen before. There were thousands upon thousands of partier. It was all bikinis, beer and tattooed flesh as far as the eye could see.

And

I had two thoughts that ran through my mind when I saw this. The first was that Sydney is the most godless city I've ever lived in. Like this is Christmas Day. What the hell?

The

second thought was that this is how people from the Middle Ages must have imagined the fun parts of hell.

So

you have Hieronymus Bosch, 1510. This is basically like the vibe. And it got me though to start thinking like who are we? Like what kind of people are we that we do this on Christmas? And by godless, I live in a godless city. I mean that, I don't mean that we're wicked or depraved, but that very importantly, I think I live,

or

at least my part of it, and a lot of parts in the West, we live in a god absent, I want to say, kind of place. A place where god and religion is no longer the central reference point or anchor of morality

and

that something else has taken its place. And as you can tell, it's announced straight in the title. My bet is that liberalism is functioning something like the core of people's worldview now. And not just their moral ideals, but also their aesthetic sensibility, what we laugh at, what we find outrageous. Basically, the whole vibe of people

is

explainable in some deep way by their relationship and their absorption of liberalism.

So

that's the gambit I want to put forward. I should say that this is not the usual audience I pitched the book to, of course, because this is it's

a

liberal, it's not a liberal democratic country, it's a liberal city. Anyways, but I'm principally talking about Western liberal democracies who have this kind of background culture of liberal ideals. I'll

come

back more to that. Does that make sense as a first move? Do you have any questions?

Just

go.

So

I make three big claims in the book.

The

first, so one is descriptive, one is normative, and one is prescriptive.

So

the descriptive claim is this one, which is that a great many people living in Western democratic countries today are liberals, what I say, all the way down, by which I mean that they draw their values and vibes and their sense of what is good, right, normal, outrageous, wrong, funny, worthwhile, and much more from liberalism. And really, I'm not messing around, but here's the last line of the book. Liberalism is the source of my soul. Yeah, that's right.

The

wager of this book is the same is probably true of you. That's the claim I want to make, that a lot of us in the West, especially secular people, which in the West is kind of 30% in the United States, 40 in Australia, New Zealand is like 60%, Nordic countries ditto. So this is the kind of center of our morality. That's the first claim.

The

second claim is a normative claim, and I'm sure I'm going to be grilled in the most pleasant way possible by many interlocutors today, which is that liberalism is a good way of life, one that is intrinsically rewarding, generous, and fun.

To

be super clear, I don't think it's the best way of life. I don't think such a claim could be made that there's a single best way of life,

but

I do believe it has its own excellences, its own worthiness, and can stand tall with

Christianity,

with Confucianism, with whatever else you want to throw at it. It's going to be different, but I think it's going to be

as

fun and as worthy as fun as any of those.

I

should say joy, not fun. Fun sounds too trite, but I hope you get the idea.

And

the last one, I'm not going to talk about much in my introductory remarks, but since it's a core part of the book, I outline practical exercises, which I call spiritual exercises, to help readers deepen and enrich in a liberal way of life. It's a little bit, I'm kind of tongue-in-cheek here, but I call it a self-help book. It is kind of a self-help book. It's ways to help liberal become the best liberal cell they can and to try to see what might be the advantage of living that way. So, three claims, descriptive, normative prescription.

I

know it's not a class, but question good?

Okay,

all right, all

right.

Moving on then. So, here's a quick road map. I'm not going to be able to do all of this in the time. And Brian, when I hit kind of five minutes left, just

wave

for the other. So, I want to say a word about the history of liberalism as it's pertinent to the concept of it.

Then

I want to give a brief definition of liberalism, which is going to come right back when we talk with Herman. Then I want to give a bit more sense of how we are liberal, how some people are liberals all the way down or deep down. They want to try to fill that in. My book draws on a lot of pop culture in order to try to exemplify the ways in which liberalism has trickled down into our world. And so, I'll give a few examples of that. Next, I want to get somber for a second and say how most liberals are actually just joke, hypocritical, fair-weather liberals, pretend liberals. And then last, I want to conclude on a high note to suggest what might be good with a liberal way of life.

So,

that's the game.

So,

starting with the history of liberalism.

I

realize this is a philosophically-minded audience,

but

there is a book that informed my thoughts so much about the history of liberalism and it's this.

It

was published in 2018 and also by Princeton by Helena Rosenblatt, a friend of mine, and called The Lost History of Liberalism

from

Ancient Rome to the 21st Century. So, liberalism is a really interesting ideology because it's at once very old and it's at once very new.

So,

it's very new in the sense that people only started calling themselves liberal in a political sense in the 19th century.

It

started first as a response, rebellion against Napoleon

and

then Napoleon, big jerk that he was, claimed the name liberal for himself and spread it throughout Europe. What are you going to do? So, it's a very new ideology by the standards of intellectual history

on

the one hand.

On

the other hand, it's also a very old word

and

it has its roots in Latin and in Roman morality and Roman politics

and

the word,

the

root of the word, you'll hear it, of course, is liber and liberalis

which

is to say

being

someone who is free and generous. And so, what Rosenblatt does in this book that I admire so much is she traces out this ideal of being a free and generous person as it keeps getting reinvented through all of these different forms of, let's say, Western civilization.

I'll

come up to that later.

So,

she traces out the idea first in ancient society, in Rome in particular, where being liberal meant being generous to society, being ready to give one's talent, one's money, that limit one's life to something bigger and better than yourself.

Next,

as you might imagine, it gets reinvented under Christianity where the values shift completely

and

in Christianity, in the King James Bible, it's used, it was used about a dozen times, always in connection with giving to the poor. So, the idea of liberality gets reinvented with our, yeah, with generosity towards

those

who

need

it.

And

last, in the early modern moment, especially in the American Republic, it gets reinvented along kind of Roman lines, being generous.

but

that's what I really want to capture in this word liberal, that it combines these two senses which are absolutely crucial for the ethic I want to develop. On the one hand, it means free. We all know that. We know liberalism is about autonomy, it's about freedom, okay, fine, but it's also about being generous and I really want to insist upon that and also in the English language, we preserve that meaning, right? So, if I ask for a liberal serving of soup, I'm not asking for a politically progressive soup, right? I'm asking for an abundant big bowl of soup. So, we have that idea of liberal as being kind of muchness, abundance and we preserve that. So, that's what Rosenblatt does.

Okay, so what happens with it? That's all the prehistory. Now, what happens in the 19th century is so fascinating.

So,

there's all of these great, so the early founders of liberalism are household names in political philosophy. They include J.S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Germaine de Stal, George Eliot and many more and they all have their own different versions of what they're doing.

But

I believe and other historians I believe

argue

that the great question that animates 19th century liberalism is the following. Like, all of them were kind of freaked out about the same sort of stuff and they asked that question

which

is to say how can modern subjects

and

like us we remain in this same kind of field of modernity

remain

free and generous which is to say remain liberal

in

the face of powerful new social forces.

What

social forces are we talking about? two in particular one is capitalism and its tendency not just to render us impoverished and inequality but also to turn us into kind of grubby little consumerist materialists who just want a scotch at the end of the night and that's the good life. Like that is like an image of like mediocrity that they were afraid about that capitalism wouldn't buy.

The

other big thing that liberals were freaked out about and this is the more important one is democracy.

they

looked at the French Revolution and they went oh shit

we

need protections against this. We need protections against popular power

but

we also need protections against kind of like popular taste also about this kind of mediocratization that comes about with the massified society and so liberals then invented all of these institutions that would protect individuals as being free in general. So if you just close your eyes for a second think of the main institutions associated with liberalism

individual

rights powers judicial neutrality

all

of those things and you can name a bunch of others all of those institutions are a validly and explicitly counter-majoritarian and here's the take-home point liberalism was born in a deep suspicion of democracy and so today while in the west we have liberal democracy

it's

important to recognize that that took 200 years of compromise and achievement to make a reconciliation between those two terms that are pulling in opposite directions and I'm sure today we'll talk about later how those two terms may be coming apart more and more today at least that's how I read things.

Questions

on that? I know I'm not a class but sometimes one question goes a long way. I'm going to okay actually you just introduced my next slide so thank you. Yeah yeah right perfect. So the question then okay I'm

going

to come to that but I'm going to come through it through my root here which is that so in the 19th century liberalism was something both political and ethical. It was a doctrine about how to live well in the face of all this nonsense that bombards us democracy capitalism.

Now

the question then becomes very interesting what the hell happened to liberalism? When did liberalism retrench itself into this rather more narrow legal political doctrine maybe that's concerned only with negative freedom and those kinds of things and that makes no real ethical claims on us

and

different historians and thinkers point at different moments at which liberalism became retrenched itself became a bit more thinner became more anemic I want to say Rosenblatt points to the early 20th century when you had all of these kind of free market types who were looking around at the progressivism say of the new deal

and

they freaked out and they wanted to create a discourse of classical liberalism that would be based on individual freedoms and market freedoms as well. So there you have Hayek, Friedman, Von Mies and that's the first move where liberalism walks its ambitions back.

A

next one that's important is Samuel Mowen's book came out last year called Liberalism Against Itself and he focuses on the Cold War and he looks at all the Cold War liberals like Isaiah Berlin like Judish Glar like Trilling Himmelfarb there's a bunch

and

he says that what they were all worried about was effectively collectivism totalitarian totalitarianism is too strong collectivism

and

what they wanted really was they looked at the great progressive and ethical perfectionist ambitions of say the USSR

and

they said no,

no,

no, no we need a doctrine that protects us from that so Cold War liberalism was another step

towards

moving liberalism towards a very much more political narrow doctrine

that

preserves core individual freedoms but doesn't try to do much more. I,

I'm

sure someone commentators me talk about this I talk about political liberalism

and

the development which is kind of the most modern version of it

which

is when liberalism goes towards a doctrine about pluralism

and

so John Rawls' later career is all about

how

to create political frameworks that would accommodate different conceptions of the good life in one harmonious

policy

that's basically the problem

when

things get tricky in political theory I like to draw them so here's my drawing of political liberalism according to Rawls so you have something like liberal political conception just call that the liberal framework constitution and then you have a bunch of different kinds of people like a walks into a bar joke but you have a Christian a Buddhist a Muslim a Kantian a utilitarian and they all have to get along and so what liberals then try to do is devise the right kinds of structures by which all those different kinds of people not just won't tear each other apart but can affirm that same core set of values for the right reasons and so that's where again liberalism loses this ethical ambition because it doesn't want to propose any thick conceptions of the good life it wants to remain pretty it wants to remain inclusivist so that's my first bit how am

I

doing for time

no

I need more than that

oh

wow okay right

well all

right let me then move to my definition of liberalism and this is where I'm going to get grilled in approximately 26 minutes on this topic

so get

five and this is sorry I don't mean to anticipate but get five liberals in a room and you're going to get ten definitions of liberalism right we are

a

coreless bunch

and

so

you

just have all these different strands of liberalism you have kind of social democracy you

have

more libertarian kinds of things anyways it's just kind of a mess of a concept

which

we'll get into

oh

yeah sorry sorry no no no I have to go back one second

okay sorry

sorry sorry wipe your memory which I'm glad

I have

the 25

I'm

just talking off my slides here

so

there's an important point I want to make

which

is that the defenders here's the point

reset the

defenders of liberalism tend to see liberalism as a political kind of thing a legal kind of thing and it tends to be just that

now

interestingly for me there's a group of people in the western world who see liberalism in almost the same way that I do they see it as a very thick ethical doctrine that has gone everywhere in our culture and it can impose or at least suggest a particular kind of world view and I'm talking about conservative critics of liberalism

so

this is a very popular this was a book that made a big splash 2018 by Patrick Deneen is he someone that's known here anyone heard of Patrick Deneen yeah okay so Patrick Deneen political theorist at Notre Dame and he wrote this book with kind of the big bold title Obama retweeted him and this title is like better pay attention

and

then the book took off and this is Deneen's essential claim that I'll just read the quote here liberalism is not merely as is often portrayed a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights

rather

it seeks to transform all of human life and the world so that's the conservative criticism but also insight that liberalism is like basically the blob you know that horror movie it's like this thawing that just absorbs everything it gets bigger and bigger and draws its energy kind of vampirically

from

everything that it encounters

that's

one critic another Adrian Vermeule jurist at Harvard University same kind of take

he

writes the main fact about our lived political order in 2024 is that the public sphere is dominated by a very particular comprehensive or perfectionist version of liberalism which is aggressively sacramental and liturgical

he's

going to review my book so that's going to be fun but yeah so that's where Vermeule lands and the idea again is that this is not a narrowly political thing and that political liberals are either culpably naive or diabolically clever by claiming that it's just this framework for different conceptions of the good to hang out that's just nonsense to

them and

interestingly I don't agree with their condemnation of liberalism obviously I couldn't have written this book but I do agree with their assessment of its scope I think they are on to something correct about that to use the recurrent metaphor of the book which is why it has the cover it does liberalism has become the water we swim in

and

that's what I think they perceive they hate the water they choke on the water the water is the foulest blackest but I think that they're right in its identification of water

closed

parentheses

okay

now I want to go to this business about defining liberalism

so

as I said it's a mess

now

different kinds of scholars they kind of break along disciplinary lines tend to propose different ways of trying to define liberalism Herman's going to talk about this so I'll just be very brief basically the philosophers being a kind of like get to the point kind of bunch philosophers look at this mess and they're like okay okay we just need a simple definition and what philosophers tend to do is stipulate one particular definition for liberalism to be like the true core of it and then they might spin out some history to justify it so liberalism is about individual freedom boom it's about autonomy boom it's about protection from fear and predations of the state that boom anyways you just pick something about liberalism and claim it as a core definition

now

the upside to that is that it's clear and it gives you a purpose the downside is that it's totally partial and won't speak to other people with different definitions

the

other way is the historical way which is contextualist which is basically to try to look at how different people and actors thinkers politicians use the term liberal and liberalism and to try to look at liberalism as the richly contradictory sum of its parts and historians do that now the advantage of that is that it's truer it's more kind of accurate in some sense but it's difficult then to know what on earth liberalism is because it's just this massive

so

what to do

how

to define liberalism and here is my attempt at it

and

to do so I draw on John Rawls a thinker I'm sure you've all heard of if not read ad nauseum but just bear a little bit more

and

it'll come into focus so John Rawls is arguably not controversially the most important political foster of the 20th century and his books are tremendously complicated they're these crazy architectures of concepts but at the end of the day Rawls thinks that liberalism actually has a pretty clear and obvious definition he says

no

yeah okay

so I'll

give you the definition and I'll work back for a minute

what

Rawls says is that society a liberal society sees itself

as

a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next that is the definition that Rawls advances as to what liberalism might mean

now

it's very important

very

important for me as to how he arrives at this definition

which

is that Rawls doesn't stipulate it he doesn't say that I John Rawls mighty moral philosopher think this

he

doesn't derive it from first moral principles either

what

Rawls does instead is he looks around his society

he

looks around at all the major political artifacts of his society whether that's constitutions political speeches judicial decisions et cetera et cetera and so his first move as I wrote here is that Rawls looks at the major public institutions of liberal democracy to see what core moral propositions they enshrine and what he finds

should

have reversed the slide order but is he finds that all of them basically affirm this idea that society is a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next and then his whole moral and political philosophy is basically spent inventing concepts principles ideas arguments by which this can be specified and made absolutely consistent both to what it demands about our countries and what it demands about ourselves

so

my definition then of liberalism I'm just amplifying it a little bit to give it more scope

but

I want to say it's the social political moral and psychological doctrine that grows out of a conception of society as a fair system of cooperation specifies what it means and tries to make it real

the

key move that Rawls and I are both trying to make is that we're stipulating a clear definition fairness

but

we are being contextualist we're trying to anchor it in our own understanding according to our major public institutions of what liberalism amounts to so the idea is that the definition will already have a grip on our heart because we all know it

in

the west I feel no one reads Rawls for the first time he's just already just thematizing everything that we already at least pretend to know about our society

and

that's the claim I make

now very

important distinction between what Rawls is doing and what I'm doing and

in

part it's because I'm writing 40 years whatever 50 years now later than theory of justice

so

it's this idea of where do we find and identify liberal values as I said

where

Rawls finds and identifies liberal values is in the public political culture of liberal democracy so he looks at it in political stuff let's say

the

constitution political speeches judicial decisions all that stuff

cool

I don't disagree with that

but

I think that it's gotten much broader much more ubiquitous than that liberalism that is and so here is my location of liberalism so liberalism me and conservative critics my weird bedfellows all of a sudden locate liberal values and sensibilities in the background culture of liberal democracy places like TV movies social media music parenting pornography dating friendship the workplace and much much much more

and

so here let me move to the next bit of my talk which I want to try to give you an example of what on earth I'm talking about I'm talking about like liberalism is everywhere like Alex what are you actually pointing to so let me give you an example

it's

kind of a fun example and it's through a book that was published ten years ago that I absolutely love it's a book with a great title the title is holy shit colon the history of swearing

by

Melissa Moore published by OUP I want to say tenish years ago

now

the title is so great not because it's like ooh swearing the title is so great because in two words what she's trying to do is encapsulate the history of swearing in the west so at different moments in time a different kind of swear word becomes the truly bad or taboo word of a society

and

by tracing out the history of swear words you can very quickly reverse engineer what a society takes to be moral valuable sacrosanct all of that stuff it's basically what the taboo violates

so

on the one hand you have your holy words right so these are cultures in which the unsaleable words are basically terms of sacraments so this would be Judaism this would be the Christian Middle Ages but here these are literal swear words oaths that bind yourself to God Christ damn it Lord all of those things those are very dangerous words to handle

back

in that time because they literally call upon God to witness something and badly or falsely done

can

endanger you your family your community etc so those are the really risky words back in the

at

different times though it's a different kind of preoccupation that's really important so you got your shit words your bodily words your obscenity words

and

so of course there's like Victorian culture which is all about like the body and its fluids and all that stuff which is like ew anyone know fun what was the major swear word in Roman civilization if

you

wanted to get into a fight with a Roman fronto what would you go rock up and say

yeah

something it's not ball exclusive but yeah okay it's terms of sexual passivity it's terms that would indict someone as being the receiving member of male on male sex so it would thereby present you as not the active male hairy chested Roman citizen that everyone aspired to

but

someone who was a sissy someone who was yeah receiving sex

so

that was that

now where

do we find ourselves today so in the west we like to pretend and I'd like to hear

I

want to hear what are the Chinese swear words I don't want you just to say them maybe later we could talk about that in the west we kind of pretend we're so cool now and we can say any word and we're post swear words that's nonsense because there's a new category of word in the west that if I were to say here at home I would be reported and fired within a week

and

those words of course are slurs slurs have become the new swear words in the west

and

slurs don't say them you all kind of know them which is the n word would be at the very top but also slurs around sexual orientation around gender even relatively tame swear words in my youth are now absolutely not okay like in my youth you could say about someone if they were kind of freaking out you'd call them a spaz which is like a spastic and now that is not okay to say anymore

and

so that just shows how words migrate into this category so why are slurs the big bad word of western societies today because they they attack the core commitment of liberal morality which is that everyone in our society should have a chance to flourish and should be able to cultivate a healthy robust sense of their own self-esteem a missile is just like a laser aimed at that and tries to teach people to hate themselves from the inside so when I say that we are liberal all the way down that's the kind of thing I'm talking about where liberal morality has entered into our bloodstream in ways that we just don't even think about which is how you know it's really effective in the words that

it's

not that I just wouldn't publicly use a slur I wouldn't privately use a slur it wouldn't cross my mind it would just be like so not me so that's the kind of thing that I'm trying to talk about and I try to that's just one example and I try to give a whole bunch in the book to try to bring this out

so

some are about what makes us laugh today so

I

some stand-up comics that are famous in the West I talk about

the

kinds of things that

liberals

and seculars in general find important and for a purpose in life so I look at a TV show

I

look at pornography which I'm worried is the bit of my book that's going to memorialize me if

you

remember these

stupid

eight pages or whatever it is on pornography if you want the short version today if you go to Pornhub.com don't do it right now and you search by most popular videos all of the top videos are about are about playing with the idea of consent

they're

all about like an initially unwilling sexual partner is brought around to want to have sex

and

why is that so like taboo and kind of like provocative because it's playing with the one liberal ethic around sexuality which is that any sex is good sex as long as it's consented to so naturally porn being porn it tries to identify those spots in our culture that are particularly sensitive so that's how porn has gone thanks to liberalism I'm not saying it's a good thing I'm just saying look liberalism is here too so

that

is what I'm trying to do over and over again

do

I have like 10 minutes great

so

I hope that's clear that's what I'm trying to say is that

in

my culture perhaps in yours you can see if this resonates with you we are raised in this sensibility it has become mother's milk to us in so many different ways

now I

bet some of you I expect some of you are

have

an objection brewing in your head which is that you say okay Alex you think that liberalism is hegemonic

and

you also think liberalism is based on fairness and the objection is Alex have you looked at the world today like have you actually gone outside and looked at any city in the world today which is that we live in societies that are manifestly unfair that deny fairness

at

every opportunity that are mired in systemic inequalities and abuses and violences and that are manifestly illiberal

so

it seems that I'm claiming liberalism is this hegemonic thing when in fact it's at its shakiest and at its frailest and as far as it could be from realizing its own values and my answer to that is

yeah kind

of

I

more agree with that than not

and

here I turn to a thinker that's very important for my book

which

is Kierkegaard

so

Kierkegaard bear with me a sec this is going to look left field and make sense in like three minutes Kierkegaard is a Danish theologian 19th century and he's also one of the great critics of the 19th century and Kierkegaard lived his whole life in cosmopolitan nice Copenhagen fine coffee good petisli it was great and Kierkegaard would walk around his society and he would see that it's kind of like explicitly Christian everywhere like there's a Lutheran church on every corner everyone is professing the good life of Christ they're going to church cool cool cool

but

then he really looks at these same people and he's like what do you guys believe in and he really looks at them and they're not Christian they're at best bourgeois Philistines like what they really want at the end of the day is a roast on Saturday and a mistress on Sunday they want these they want social respectability quiet pleasures and just to get on with the easy kind of flow of life and he looks at them and says you guys are hypocritical jokes you do not live according to the morality that you profess and this is a very important style of criticism so

Kierkegaard's

not the only social critic there's other great social critics of the 19th century of course so you have Nietzsche who's also indicting the same culture-ish

but

he's looking back to some other version of culture that was superior he's looking back to let's say the Greeks

you

take Marx same culture being criticized but he's looking forward to something else to communism the birth of a new man a new woman that would redeem everything

okay

Kierkegaard's main move is to say we don't have to look elsewhere for the right values we have them

all

we have to do is take them seriously in other words it's a rigorously internalist critique of the hypocrisy of his time without trying to go somewhere else

so what's

the conclusion I'm drawing from this

I

don't think we live in Christendom in the West anymore Christianity's decline public morality

but

I do think we live in this and this is my word

every

time you say it I get 10 cents liberaldom

which

is exactly the same which is that people who are liberals all the way down profess the liberal pieties that's their moral compass but in so many ways live illiberally they seek out tax breaks in my case my great confession is that I send my daughter to a private school which I know cannot be squared with my commitments to fairness but I'm not willing to do otherwise given that it's my daughter

so

what I'm trying to urge my readers to do is look inward and say hey yeah you profess all these liberal niceties and pieties but how liberal are you really so it's that inward critical move that I'm trying to do a la Kierkegaard

last

bit of the talk

is

what then

so we're

hypocritical we're kind of wishy-washy fair weather Sunday morning liberals

what

now

so

I'm trying to urge my readers to commit to their own liberal values

and

I have to and I have to give them I have to try to furnish an answer as to why they might want to commit to their own liberal values because there's so many goods that come from defecting from your liberalism it is nice to have more money like it's bullshit to pretend otherwise more money is nice I'm not going to claim otherwise it's nice to send your kid to a private school and be able to lavish upon her certain kinds of advantages that will make sure she has a good leg up in life those are goods so what I have to do then is try to present my reader with another set of goods real lived goods that could come from adhering to your liberal values

and

so what I do

and

Simon's

going to

talk about this I think is I try to suggest in the book I have a very clickbait chapter called 17 reasons to be liberal it has to be said I had to find an odd number and a prime number because that's the clickbait number so add it is maybe 16 it's maybe 12 I don't know but it's a lot and it's 17 and I landed on 17 it's not a hill I'm going to die on but that's what I said and so in the spirit of overwhelming you all at once 17 reasons to be liberal that I believe follow from living a life that is an honest attempt to live up to the values of fairness and of reciprocity at the heart of this moral and political doctrine shaboom just read them out loud and you can laugh at them scrutinize them whatever you want but I'm happy to defend them or try to at any rate so impartiality autonomy anti-snobbery playfulness stalwartness a feeling of being home in society gratitude self-coherence avoidance of hypocrisy humility unity of the self gracefulness delight in others tolerance civility cheer redemption that I think is a liberal package and importantly I have to qualify this no single one of these goods I think is distinctively liberal I think you can get a lot of these out of a Confucian way of life or out of

a

Christian way of life or whatever but put together in this constellation of 17 go 19 go 15 doesn't matter

but

this kind of package I think that that is a distinctively liberal arrangement that comes from that way of life

is

that clear

right so

very last question here

and

I'm going to wrap up with this

is

what I'm doing at the in the end of the book I'm trying to yeah I need I just need two of those

what

I'm trying to do in the book is reactivate or revive a very maybe the oldest question in all of political philosophy

which

is the question that Plato addresses in the Republic

so

in Plato's Republic it's text that you've read book one they all sit down for a cozy dinner and they start talking and Socrates is trying to persuade them as to what justice is trying to convince them what justice is and then you have this brutish beastly man this guy Thrasymachus who is just like the badass of the Greeks and he busts in he's like Socrates this is nonsense the best life of all is not one lived according to justice it's one lived according to injustice to tyranny and the tyrant is the happiest of all look at all the money look at all the power and all the women that that guy has that is awesome

and

so what Socrates and Plato have to do then is try to talk up the goods of being justice the real no-nonsense benefits that come from being a just person not just the benefits from living in a just society those are manifest living in a just society is obviously good you have reliable people you have fairness and that's awesome but why not free ride why not just kind of quietly chisel it aside and that's what Plato is trying to figure out why is it desirable for the individual him or herself distinct from the extrinsic benefits of living in a liberal in a just society why should you and I uphold the principles of justice

and

I'm doing exactly the same question I'm just updating I believe

why

is it good for a liberal

in

the way that I'm describing a liberal to really commit to a liberal way of life

and

my answer is I hope direct

which

is that if you are a liberal and if you do not commit

and

if you remain merely a pretend liberal

then

the 17 goods of a liberal way of life will elude you

and

that is sad

I don't know