In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) Daniel Bell argued that modern capitalism abetted two conflicting tendencies: It encouraged hedonistic self-gratification in the cultural sphere while needing sober hard-working adults in the economic sphere. A defect in the thesis is that there is arguably no such thing as capitalism; it’s not a system devised by anyone and so doesn’t deserve the “ism.” To the extent it refers to markets and profits, “capitalism” is the default way people organize themselves in a complex society. It’s natural, but not ideal or perfect. Bell might have written a much longer book on the cultural contradictions of human nature.
Modern liberalism, though, is very much an intentionally devised system. (That’s modern and not classical liberalism; the latter is something closer to capitalism.) Modern liberalism is a loosely configured set of ideas and attitudes, and it does not dominate and define the whole of our society in the way many cultural critics used to say (and still say) “capitalism” dominates and defines modern America. But it is a consciously devised system of belief all the same. Modern liberalism holds that the highest aim of government is to encourage and protect personal autonomy. The individual must have absolute freedom to think and believe and act as he or she wishes, and he or she must not be hindered unless the autonomy of another is threatened. J. S. Mill put it succinctly in his little book On Liberty: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.” The only reason to abridge a person’s freedom, in this view, is in order to stop that person from harming or abridging the freedom of another.
That’s at least what modern liberalism is supposed to mean, but in fact modern liberals don’t hold to Mill’s doctrine—because the doctrine is literally inhuman. Humans judge, they approve and disapprove, they believe in right and wrong ways of doing things, they like to live among people who do things their way and not the wrong way, and they are not capable of establishing a society in which no one interferes with the liberty of another except when someone may be harmed.
Modern liberals may think they believe this, and some get closer than others, but hardly anyone really does. What modern liberals believe instead is that a clerisy, an educated elite that favors personal autonomy and open-mindedness and fairness, should write the rules for everybody else.
Today’s liberal elite do not look backward for their authority—there are no scriptures and no inviolable traditions in modern liberalism. They look to the future. The rules issuing from the modern liberal clerisy are thought to be the latest manifestation of moral progress, to which educated people must adhere if they wish to be thought of as good people. So for instance American liberals can, in the space of a decade or even less, go from believing marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama said they believed this) to holding that it’s a contract between two people who love each other, even if those two people are of the same sex. They can embrace the latter doctrine just as fervently as they did the earlier one.
The real trouble with this system is that the clerisy, in its enthusiasm to keep up with the times, issues new rules that contradict the old rules. The conflicting nature of its demands is not news, but of late those contradictions have become acute and more obvious.
For decades and in a variety of media, Americans were assured by their cultural leaders that sexual relations are a matter of personal preference and desire, bounded only by consent. The old rules requiring monogamy no longer applied. Men and women need sex for personal fulfillment. The sexual urge was not meant to be suppressed but to flourish; only by that means would men and women be able to express themselves to the fullest and become who they really were.
With that dictum, men hit the jackpot. That’s what they had always wanted anyway. So they went about obeying the new rules with great enthusiasm. And with the institution of marriage pushed to the periphery, it was fun and interesting and easy to abide by the updated morality. But there were problems. Men were told that it was not proper to initiate sexual contact with women except under certain circumstances. The woman has to consent. But what does that mean, exactly? Because sometimes she doesn’t consent, and then she does, and vice versa. In the last decade we have seen a desperate effort, by universities especially, to deal with the ambiguities of consent, to eliminate shades of gray. California even passed a law requiring verbal or written expressions of consent before sexual activity might licitly proceed between students at the state’s universities. The lawmakers seemed to want something resembling a public avowal of honorable intentions, minus the lifelong fidelity that used to accompany such vows.
So more rules were handed down to perfect the imperfections, and the rules began to seem convoluted and arbitrary. The contradictions became embedded in modern life: We were encouraged to talk more openly about sex; companies could advertise their products with sexual enticements; the sex act could be shown on television and in movies; desires were meant to be pursued. But if men were to initiate contact in the wrong way, they might be made to suffer severe consequences.
One outcome was that only men of enormous power and influence—politicians, entertainers, Hollywood producers—were able to abide by the first set of rules, the ones allowing sexual license, and flout the new set of rules, the regulations on harassment. They did this by intimidating and blackmailing their female subordinates. Only now have the women they manhandled and brutalized gathered the courage to denounce them en masse.
Or consider race. Long ago the liberal clerisy began telling us that everything comes down to race. Racial diversity became an important criterion in college admissions and professional advance, and in time it became an obsession affecting every area of political and cultural life. We were to value and “celebrate” racial diversity; we were to discuss differences endlessly; we were to assess institutions and ideas and works of art according to racial concepts and descriptors.
But there were other, conflicting rules handed down by the same clerisy. Those rules said we weren’t to discuss race in any insensitive way. Certain words were outlawed, subjects were made taboo, ideas that impinged on racial relations could be handled only with extreme delicacy, and remarks that sounded like they might be about racial characteristics, even if they weren’t, were strictly forbidden. (Alas, one has to describe many of these developments in the passive voice, because it’s often not clear when new rules enter the public sphere and who the issuing authorities are. Such is the mystery of the modern liberal clerisy.)
“Gender” is another area governed by changing and contradictory rules. For a long time we were made to think that women’s equality was among the most important political goals of right-thinking people; the world was no longer to be governed by men but by women and men in partnership, because women bring a distinctive and valuable sensibility to our politics and economy that can make us stronger and more humane. Women writers and artists were taught to schoolchildren and college students for the same reason. Femininity, not the faux femininity imposed on women by generations of men but genuine femininity, would, when embraced and allowed to flourish, change society for the better.
But in the last few years, we have learned that the differences between men and women are arbitrarily imposed. Masculinity and femininity are social constructs. There are many other categories of sexuality; and in fact the number of “gender” identities may reach 50 or 60 or 100. If that’s true, then much of what we’ve been doing, and doing at the behest of and in order to please our liberal clerisy, is misguided and maybe destructive. Our entire society, from schooling and sports to clothing and artistic production, is based on the two-sex “model,” but now we’re told that these sexes are mere social conventions, high-handedly “assigned” at birth, and that we are damaging young people by insisting they identify with one or the other.
You don’t have to fully reject or embrace any of these rules to feel ill-treated. Ordinary people sense, and have sensed for a long time, that they are being put in an impossible position—that full participation in their communities requires abiding by constantly changing conventions and that they may be faulted or ridiculed or worse should they fail to adhere to the ever-changing rules.
Of course, no one knows where these developments will lead, and American society is so vast and complex and multilayered that you could make several different cases about the future and probably be right. But it’s hard to believe there won’t be some sort of reaction against the incessantly changing demands of modern liberalism and a move toward something that holds our public life together in a coherent and stable way.
We may as well come back to Daniel Bell, specifically to a curious paragraph at the end of the first part of his book, the part describing the “double bind” of capitalism. “Despite the shambles of modern culture,” he wrote,
Bell was both right and wrong in his analysis of capitalism. But he was surely right that when people are placed under a contradictory set of demands that they don’t understand, they may reject the whole system and look for something they can make sense of. My guess is that we’ve begun to see that rejection, and we’re about to see more of it.
Barton Swaim is the opinion editor of The Weekly Standard.
