A free society is a moral achievement. Over the past 50 years in the West this truth has been forgotten, ignored or denied. That is why today liberal democracy is at risk. Societal freedom cannot be sustained by market economics and liberal democratic politics alone. It needs a third element: morality, a concern for the welfare of others, an active commitment to justice and compassion, a willingness to ask not just what is good for me but what is good for ‘all of us together’. It is about ‘Us’, not ‘Me’; about ‘We’, not I’.
If we focus on the ‘I’ and lose the ‘We’, if we act on self-interest without a commitment to the common good, if we focus on self-esteem and lose our care for others, we will lose much else. Nations will cease to have societies and instead have identity groups. We will lose our feeling of collective responsibility and find in its place a culture of competitive victimhood.
The market will be merciless. Politics will be deceiving, divisive, confrontational and extreme. People will feel anxious, uncertain, fearful, aggressive, unstable, unrooted and unloved. They will focus on promoting themselves instead of the one thing that will give them lasting happiness: making life better for others. Freedom itself will be at risk from the far right and the far left, the far right dreaming of a golden age that never was, the far left dreaming of a utopia that will never be.
Liberal democracy is at risk in Britain, Europe and the United States. So is everything that these democracies represent in terms of freedom, dignity, compassion and rights. The most technologically advanced societies the world has ever known have forgotten just this: we are not machines, we are people, and people survive by caring for one another, not only by competing with one another. Market economics and liberal politics will fail if they are not undergirded by a moral sense that puts our shared humanity first. Economic inequalities will grow. Politics will continue to disappoint our expectations. There will be a rising tide of anger and resentment, and that, historically, is a danger signal for the future of freedom.
I believe that we are undergoing the cultural equivalent of climate change, and only when we realize this will we understand the strange things that have been happening in the 21st century in the realms of politics and economics, the deterioration of public standards of truth and civil debate, and the threat to freedom of speech at British and American universities. It also underlies more personal phenomena like loneliness, depression and drug abuse. All these things are related.
These are not normal times. Few people in recent years can have escaped the feeling that strange and unprecedented things are happening.
Throughout the West there has been a loss of trust in public institutions and leaders, a rise of extremism in politics, and a notable failure of governments to address fundamental problems. A new phenomenon has begun to emerge: of ‘identity politics’ — political campaigning focused not on the nation as a whole but on a series of self-identifying minorities, leading to the counter-politics of populism on behalf of a beleaguered and enraged native-born population who see themselves sidelined by the elites and passed over in favor of the minorities.
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