Mumford's Manichean Liberalism

One interesting effect of the Trump Administration’s interest in annexing Canada is its reawakening of deeply felt Canadian nationalism. And this had an immediate effect on Canadian electoral politics. For in the public’s perception, there is only one true national party in Canada, the Liberals (who had been slouching toward a big electoral defeat). By a natural form of schismogenesis, the opposition party, the Conservative Party of Canada, squandered its nationalist bona fides because its current leader, Pierre Poilievre, had been edging rather close to Trump during the last few years. (I return to this below.)

Today’s post was prompted last Friday, when I attended a fascinating seminar by Caroline Ashcroft (Oxford) which drew on material from her Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought. The Seminar was organized by my colleague, Max Fenner. Among the (impressively broad) set of characters Ashcroft discussed was Lewis Mumford. And one of her sub-themes involved Mumford’s purported anti-liberalism. This surprised me a bit because that’s not how I recalled his (1940) essay, “The Corruption of Liberalism,” (New Republic April 29, vol. 102(18)). Our discussion made me want to look at it again; after I managed to track down the essay anew, I thought it worth discussing because it speaks to our moment in various ways.

In particular, Mumford castigates actually existing (let’s call it ‘New Deal’) liberalism for its passivity (he uses “passivism”) when attacked by Marxists and Fascists alike. (I return to that below.) And his diagnoses of this passivity is not silly. “The Corruption of Liberalism” is clearly a polemic (even in the genre of philosophical prophecy). I am not especially overfond of his categories (and implied history). But he is gesturing toward something significant. One Caveat: I am only familiar with the “Corruption of Liberalism,” and so my remarks should not be seen as comprehensive or in terms of evolution of Mumford’s wider thought.

Mumford’s essay is structured around the contrast between ideal and pragmatic liberalism. Mumford’s polemic is directed against (the dominance of) pragmatic liberalism in then contemporary liberal thinking. But on my reading of the essay, it’s a call to return to the principles of ideal liberalism and to have it infuse political action. The ‘corruption’ then is a call to action to renew and restore what it is eternally valuable about liberalism. (This is a kind of Machiavellian re-interpretation of liberalism.)

Before I get to elucidating the contrast between ideal and pragmatic liberalism, it is worth noting that Mumford starts the essay with a different distinction, that between liberalism understood as an “economic creed” and liberalism as “personal and social philosophy.” Imperialism and monopoly have fatally undermined the economic creed according to Mumford. The distinction between ideal and pragmatic liberalism is, thus, offered within liberalism understood as “personal and social philosophy.” This matters because it supports my general claim that for Mumford there are many different aspects to liberalism and kinds of liberalism. And an attack on one can’t automatically be seen as a retreated from liberalism altogether.

To be sure, there is good reason why one may think of Mumford’s essay as a critique of liberalism as such. Here are two passages one may quote in defense of that point:

The liberal lacks confidence in himself and in his vision of life. He has shown in every country where the attacks on liberalism have been forceful that he either does not possess stable convictions, or that he lacks the insight and the courage that would enable him to defend them. Continually hoping for the best, the liberal remains unprepared to face the worst; and on the brink of what may turn out another Dark Ages, he continues to scan the horizon for sighs of dawn.

The record of liberalism during the last decade has been one of shameful evasion and inept retreat…

[T]he defects of liberalism are not due to isolated mistakes of judgment that individual liberals have made; they are due to fatal deficiencies that go to the very roots of liberal philosophy. Unfortunately, liberalism’s weaknesses are so debilitating that they not merely undermine its own will-to-survive, but they may also give up elements in a longer human tradition, on whose maintenance our very civilization depends.

So, on my reading such passages have to be interpreted as claims about how the victory or dominance of pragmatic liberalism at the expense of ideal liberalism has ended up characterizing liberalism as a social and political philosophy/program, but that this is not an intrinsic feature of such social and political liberalism.

Okay so much for set up.

Now, pragmatic liberalism (which he often presents as what one might call a kind of vulgar utilitarianism) is introduced as follows:

[It is] symbolically a child of Voltaire and Rousseau: the Voltaire who thought that the craft of priests was responsible for the misery of the world, and the Rousseau who thought that man was born naturally good and had been corrupted only by evil institutions. It was likewise a by-product of the inventors and industrialists of the period, who, concentrating upon the improvement of the means of life, thought sincerely that the ends of living would more or less take care of themselves.

To restate Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatic liberalism: for the pragmatic liberal getting the basic institutions of society or the artificial identification of interests properly aligned is the proper task in the art of government. Once set up, they don’t need further defense (or intervention). Humans are susceptible to incentives, and once institutions are well designed the rest can take care of itself. Of course, this is caricature. But the question is whether it’s useful/instructive caricature.

For Mumford the pragmatic liberals in all their variety basically rely on an impoverished philosophical anthropology. This he thinks clearly bad in its own right. But more important is the consequence that liberal society lacks liberal agents who possess the right characters to defend it. (To what extent actually existing liberal society is itself really shaped by well-functioning liberal institutions is, of course, a key empirical question.) And this gets at something that is so troubling about liberal collapse (in the 1930s and increasingly the present); the apparent liberal passivity in the face of danger (or the inability to even grasp that there is danger).

For Mumford, the pragmatic liberal agent is not really quite human and is characterized by a certain absence: “Liberalism under its assumption that men ideally should think without emotion or feeling deprives itself of the capacity to be human.” And this gets at something existential in Mumford’s rejection of pragmatic liberalism (or at least its excesses/one-sidedness.)

The point is not just the familiar one that liberals may lack sufficient interest in moral education (although it is that, too). Mumford might well treat Rawls’ interest in moral education in TJ as salutary corrective within pragmatic liberalism. But Mumford’s more existential articulation of what’s needed goes well beyond the need for moral education (who ends up autonomous, reasonable, etc.); and we can see that in his account of ideal liberalism.

For Mumford ideal liberalism is basically the historical effect of human cultural discovery through the ages that generates humanistic ideals of civilization: commitment to “justice, freedom, truth.” For ideal liberalism is the sediment of humanism in all kinds of epochs. These ideals are constitutive of civilization for him. And their critics represent a (new) barbarism. Mumford connects civilization with a commitment to internationalism/humanity/humanism and a rejection of national isolationism. And what matters for Mumford’s ideal liberalism is not so much the careful articulation of what justice, freedom, truth mean, but rather the existential commitment to them.

For, after criticizing utilitarianism, Mumford remarks that pragmatic “liberalism’s progressive neglect of the fields of esthetics, ethics and religion: these matters were left to traditional thinkers, with the confident belief that they would eventually drop out of existence, mere vestiges of the race’s childhood.”

That is, esthetics, ethics and religion “are the essential principles of ideal liberalism” and embrace of them generates in us “the will to struggle for them.” What he offers is, then, a call to arms:

What is demanded is a recrystallization of the positive values of life, and an understanding of the basic issues of good and evil, of power and form, of force and grace, in the actual world. In short: the crisis presses toward a social conversion, deep-seated, organic, religious in its essence, so that no part of personal or political existence will be untouched by it: a conversion that will transcend the arid pragmatism that has served as a substitute religion.

Mumford is rather terse on the content of these ideals and the mechanism by which they generate passionate willingness to defend them.

Lurking in Mumford is a cosmopolitanism as the underlying grounds to action in ideal liberalism. And he thinks pragmatic liberalism is just an excuse for moral cowardice. Let me quote a very telling paragraph:

The permanent heritage of liberalism has been bartered for the essentially ignoble notion of national security, in itself a gross illusion. These liberals are loath to conceive of the present war as one Waged by barbarism against civilization. Though many of them were moved by the plight of the Spanish Republicans, they have managed to insulate themselves from any human feeling over the fate of the humiliated and bullied Czechs, the tortured Jews, the murdered Poles, the basely threatened Finns—or the French and English who may next face extermination—just as many of them have managed to keep supremely cool about the horrors that have befallen the Chinese. They have eyes and they see not; they have ears and they hear not; and in their deliberate withholding of themselves from the plight of humanity they have even betrayed their own narrow values, for they are witnessing the dissolution of those worldwide coöperations [sic] Upon which the growth of science, technics and industrial wealth depends. This corruption has bitten deep into pragmatic liberalism…No doubt the American liberals mean well; their good intentions are traditional. But they cling to the monstrous illusion that they can save themselves and their country by cutting themselves off—to use Hawthorne’s words in “Ethan Brand”—from the magnetic chain of humanity.

Mumford seems to me undeniably right that some abstract cosmopolitan ideals are quite capable of generating a willingness to fight on their behalf. But that’s because I think — with Hume — that just about anything can be turned into a principle of fierce political action. And I agree with Mumford that ideal liberalism is animated by and animating in terms of what one may call a religious character. (It’s odd that he misses Rousseau’s interest in civil religion.)

Mumford also seems to me right that one should not always leave the initiative to liberalísm’s enemies or allow them to pick off one vulnerable community at a time. Even so, it is pretty clear that in many contexts Mumford’s position is an advocacy of permanent war. And he is clearly tempted by a Manicheanism in which barbarism and civilization wage an eternal battle without limit. While there is more than a kernel of truth in it, at bottom it strikes me as a self-defeating position (in the same way that commitment to eternal balance of power politics is)—the end-result is always war. There need to be principles of self-limitation alongside principles of mutual defense.

Finally, Mumford seems to underestimate the way the nation and nationalism can itself be a means by which a liberal community expresses itself and commit to cosmopolitanism. This was, in fact, the nineteenth century norm for liberals. And it is being re-invented.

Today, Canadians’ rediscovery of national self-affirmation is undoubtedly the effect of President Trump’s aggression toward their independence. But their decision to reach out primarily to the EU (and, say, not China) is rooted in perceived common, cosmopolitan values.