Liberalism is a peace treaty

Culture war sucks.

In a previous post, I said that I would one day articulate what I took the strongest case for liberalism to be. Time to make good on that promise. Two quick disclaimers. First, the “best case” for anything is essentially a subjective matter, to be weighed up in light of individual values. So my best case for liberalism might not be your best case for liberalism. Still, I think a lot of people will vibe with what I’m saying here. Second, I don’t pretend that this is a novel case. I know I’ve seen people say this before. But usually I find that people typically make other arguments for liberalism when called on to defend the program, and so I’d like to give my favorite a boost.

By “liberalism,” of course, I don’t mean the political ideology associated with the Democratic party in the US. Nor do I mean the political ideology associated with Conservative parties elsewhere around the world (where the word “liberal” has the opposite political valence that it does in the US). I mean “small-l liberalism,” the idea that the government certainly, but also the majority of institutions in civil society, should not be actively interfering in how people want to live their lives. Liberalism is about promoting the kinds of freedoms guaranteed in the US First Amendment (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, etc.). It’s the “live and let live” political ethos.

In my earlier post, I said that “What is essential to liberalism is a refusal, as far as is possible, to distinguish between good things and bad things.” The only value that liberals seek to impose on society is the minimal value framework of liberalism itself: Everyone may live their lives as they see fit. Of course, you may have your own ideas and values, and advocate for them passionately. But advocacy is all that is permitted. It’s not consistent with liberalism to try to make different rules for the good and the bad, to treat those with good values better than those with bad values. Praise the good and condemn the bad, and that is the end of distinctions that may be drawn.

Of course, this leaves many problems unresolved. Axe murderers should not be able to live their lives as they see fit, and so some restrictions must be placed on how others may live their lives. The nature of those constraints are difficult, and must be politically negotiated. But the liberal attitude says that the bar for imposing on people is really quite high. If society will literally collapse if a behavior is not limited, then it must be limited. Otherwise, probably not. That’s vague, but I don’t want to try to work out the details here. My goal is just to explain why this is the sort of political program we should be attracted to.

The basic idea, per the title of the article, is that liberalism is a peace treaty. The alternative to liberalism is culture war (and sometimes actual war!). Culture war sucks, and we shouldn’t do it. Declining to engage in culture war is liberalism. This isn’t an unthinking pacifist position. If one political faction attempts to impose a certain set of values on the polity, liberals may fight back vigorously (although non-violently). But the goal is peace.

To understand this case for liberalism, it’s best to think about the fires in which this ideology was forged, the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. This was a time when Catholics and Protestants butchered one another in huge numbers across the continent regarding points of religious doctrine that most people today would find rather esoteric. These wars stopped with the Treaty of Westphalia, which essentially enshrined “live and let live” as a political doctrine. Europe was divided into nation states; the ruler of each state could choose what the official religion of that state would be; and the citizens of that state were free to follow the official religion, or not, as they chose. Both internationally and intranationally, everyone agree to stop killing one another over religion, and the wars ended.

The Peace of Westphalia was more than just a political arrangement, though. The ethos of “live and let live” was essential to the rapid economic development that was beginning in Europe at this time. Advances in navigation and other logistics technologies made integrated national and international economies possible, and the development of early manufacturing technologies made integrated economies desirable as the benefits from specialization and exchange became larger. Europe began to get extremely wealthy through trade. And in this context, if you are only willing to trade with those people who share your exact take on Christian theology, you’ll drastically limit your potential trading partners and end up much poorer. So the ethos of liberalism made its practitioners wealthy, which then helped spread its influence.

The general lesson is that fighting over values imposes direct and indirect costs. The direct costs are those costs that must be dedicated to waging the war itself. Think of the battlefields of dead Catholics and Protestants, who could all have lived happily if they just hadn’t fought about religion. The indirect costs are the opportunity costs, the costs of cooperation that could have happened, but didn’t, because war prevented it. Think of the merchant who could have fed a whole village and himself become massively wealthy in the process by selling his grain at a good price, but passed up on the opportunity because the villagers had the “wrong” view on Papal infallibility.

We can observe this same dynamic play out, although not as dramatically, in the fights over free speech that we see on college campuses today. To the extent that the DEI bureaucracy on universities constitutes an active regime of ideological censorship, we can identify both direct and indirect costs associated with this regime. The direct costs are the salaries paid to the DEI officers, the hours spent in staff trainings and student orientations, and so on. The indirect costs come from forgone opportunities to engage intellectually with students or faculty who are opposed to progressive pieties on race and gender and who will decline to work or study at the university rather than be subject to those DEI mandates.

Of course, to say that there are costs is not to say that there are no offsetting benefits. Perhaps DEI programs have benefits in terms of making campus safer and more welcoming, and those benefits are greater than the costs. (Whether this is so is an empirical question, and the evidence seems to go against DEI on this front, but set that aside.) The point is only that those costs exist.

I choose campus DEI as an example because, as an academic, this is the liberalism-vs-illiberalism debate that is most salient to me. But again, the point generalizes. Whenever there is some sort of illiberal regime that seeks to limit participation in some institution or another on the basis of the beliefs of the people involved, costs of these two kinds will accrue. There are the direct costs of maintaining the regime, and the indirect opportunity costs of excluding those who would otherwise be able to profitably participate in the institution were the regime not in place. The indirect costs are particularly worth paying attention to, since they are both less visible and far larger. It’s easy to quantify the amount you’re spending on enforcement staff, but much harder to see the costs you impose on yourself by isolating from partners with whom you might potentially have had massively beneficial interactions.

And again, perhaps there are places where these costs are worth bearing. There are obvious benefits for nations being religiously tolerant, but the same analysis wouldn’t apply to a religious institution like a church. Explicitly ideological institutions might be willing to bear the costs of ideological conformity because they understand this conformity as central to their mission.

But liberalism will be the best course for any institution that has some goal other than promoting a certain ideology. If an institution has a goal to do X, and then they add to their mission that they will do X and also enforce a degree of ideological conformity, they will always be less good at doing X than an institution that doesn’t try to enforce ideological conformity, because they will take on costs that make them less efficient at promoting X.

I think this is a better argument for liberalism than the currently-more-popular “but you might be wrong!” argument for liberalism. For consider Nazis. Should we make our various institutions Nazi-proof, such that Nazis must always be excluded from any institution? Should Nazis be effectively un-hirable, for instance? No, I think not. And the reason isn’t that the Nazis might be right and we all might be wrong. The Nazis were about as wrong as you could be; I’d happily die on that hill. The reason is that there are abundant costs associated with maintaining a Nazi-free institution, and it’s rarely worth it to take on those costs. And remember, the costs aren’t just born by Nazis! They’re born by everyone who is scrutinized for potential Nazi sympathies, by the falsely accused, by the true believers who must spend a portion of their day performing the proper anti-Nazi rituals (which they don’t disagree with) for fear of being falsely accused. Maybe if we all cared a little less about who is and who isn’t a Nazi, we’d all be a little happier.

Culture war is everywhere these days. It’s exhausting, and it’s kind of frightening, and it’s just no fun. Wouldn’t it be better if the culture war just stopped, and we could all just get along? That’s the case for liberalism.