“If you’re not with me, then you are my enemy,” proclaims the young, rebellious Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker during the emotional climax of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. To this, his disappointed master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must,” as he switches on his lightsabre. Even though the lightsabre duel that follows is universally praised as a piece of cinematic brilliance, the dialogue has left many Star Wars fans annoyed and disillusioned.
The problem is this: To claim that 1) “Only a Sith” 2) “deals in absolutes” is in itself an absolutist statement; we have here an internal contradiction. If this is really the case, then Obi-Wan has just proven himself to be a Sith. It is safe to say that this is not what George Lucas had in mind. So, theoretically, the whole philosophy of the Star Wars franchise falls flat as a result of this claim.
There is a stark parallel between the frustration that Star Wars fans express about this piece of half-baked Jedi philosophy and that of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor about the theory underpinning liberalism.
There is some debate as to whether Taylor should be regarded as a liberal or a conservative. He is largely known as a communitarian due to his strong emphasis on the importance of community life and his caution against the atomisation of society. These are typically conservative views, although the more conservative side of liberalism would agree with Taylor on this. On the other hand, Taylor is known to emphasise things such as multiculturalism, diversity, and liberal values such as freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas. Most conservatives support these things as well—depending on how you define them, of course.
Taylor’s remarkable book Sources of the Self was published in 1989—sixteen years before Revenge of the Sith. The book deals with the history of modern identity and the way we think about who we are. Even though Taylor does not claim to champion either liberalism or conservatism, he cautions throughout about the risk of modern disengagement. The disengaged self is an individual who has lost contact with his community, culture, and tradition, predominantly under the pretext of being an independent individual.
Taylor claims to endorse a certain version of the modern conception of freedom, while also expressing concern that a certain—we might even say, mainstream—strand of the modern conception of freedom is in important ways becoming unendurable from a philosophical perspective. The modern conception of freedom has become, in Taylor’s words, a “deeply confused” one. This is because it is built on two cornerstones that cannot be reconciled with one another.
The cornerstones of modern freedom
The first is that the modern conception of freedom is primarily driven by a (new) conception of what constitutes the good. Where the traditional Western view teaches that freedom is bound up with the recognition of the common good within the context of the community, the modern view teaches that freedom is the result of liberation of the individual. It teaches, thus, that freedom of individual choice is the ultimate good that must be pursued. The second idea that underpins the modern conception of freedom is that it is ‘good’ to repudiate qualitative distinctions and to reject constitutive goods as such. The notion here is that it is not desirable for anyone to decide on anyone else’s behalf what constitutes the good, as this is something to be decided by every individual for themselves.
The problem here is that the former is in itself a qualitative distinction of what constitutes the good, while the latter claims that one should not work with qualitative distinctions of what constitutes the good. If the former is true, the latter cannot be true, and if the latter is true, the former cannot be true. Put differently, if it is indeed true that individual choice is the highest form of the good, then one cannot simultaneously claim that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with. And if it is indeed true that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with, then one cannot simultaneously claim that individual choice is the highest form of the good.
Or, to put it even more bluntly, to claim that every individual should decide for himself what constitutes the good, is not reconcilable with the idea that individual freedom is indeed the ultimate good. The liberal claim that individual freedom is the ultimate good is the logical equivalent of Obi-Wan’s claim that only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Pluralism and connectedness
Taylor goes on to write with appreciation of many ideas that are often associated with liberalism. He defends liberalism against the accusation that it constitutes an attempt to ‘conquer nature’ by saying that it is not that simple. He argues for moral pluralism in the sense that there is not only one good but goes on to frame the only sustainable conception(s) of what constitutes the good as that which is agreed upon within the context of the community. The proper argument against Nazism, he goes on to say, is not that nationalism or communal identity is evil, but rather that pursuing one good to the ultimate end may be catastrophic, not because it isn’t a good, but because there are other goods as well, which cannot be sacrificed without evil.
As Alexis de Tocqueville so succinctly pointed out, there is an important set of conditions for the continuing health of self-governing societies. These include a strong sense of identification of the citizens with their public institutions and political way of life and may also involve some decentralisation of power when the central institutions are too distant and bureaucratised to sustain a continuing sense of participation by themselves. In short, the continued health of a self-governing society depends on the recognition of a variety of interconnected factors. When we become mere individuals, disengaged from our communities, our awareness of these conditions and the underlying coherence of things become fogged. We lose our sense of connectedness, and we underappreciate the extent to which all things—including ourselves—are connected.
One of the symptoms of this type of disengagement is our tendency to use terms such as ‘the invisible hand’ to explain unintended consequences. There is no invisible hand. To claim that things are guided by one is merely a consequence of underappreciating the fact that all things are connected. In Taylor’s analysis, the lack of appreciation for connectedness, coherence, and the goodness of engagement is the biggest flaw in liberalism. This is not only true of modern—leftist—liberalism. It was also evident in the works of early modern thinkers such as René Descartes, when he concluded that he knows he exists only because he knows that he thinks, and as a result, that everything beyond the judgment of his own existence should be questioned. It is also evident in the works of John Locke, when he described society as a mere “aggregate of men” and the individual as being a tabula rasa, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he proclaimed that men are born free, but everywhere they are in chains. These claims are just different ways of concluding that the things that facilitate engagement, such as tradition, culture, and community responsibilities, are not facilitators of freedom. In the liberal view these things are, at best, non-existing fictions, but at worst, oppressive factors that have to be reduced to non-existence.
The greatest threat of liberalism
Herein lies what Taylor describes as the greatest threat to liberalism. It is not an external threat, but an internal one. A weakness, we might say. The weakness lies in an internal contradiction. Any reasonable person would agree that 1) community life is good, 2) there is such a thing as a communal conception of what constitutes the good, and 3) the common good is indeed a good. To be truly liberal in both the classical and modern sense of the word, however, is to deny these things.
This is not to say that what I have described is true for all liberals, nor that everything about liberalism should be rejected, and certainly not that it is not good for individuals to make their own decisions. There is nothing wrong with the claim that dealing in absolutes is bad, if that is what the Jedi are all about. It becomes unsustainable, however, when the claim itself becomes an absolutist statement. Likewise, it is good to say that individuals should have the freedom to decide for themselves. It becomes unsustainable, however, if we were to decide on their behalf that every other conception of the good ought to be sacrificed on the altar of individualism.
Of course, there are diverse strands within liberalism, just as there are within conservatism. With that in mind, there are many areas in which conservatives and classical liberals can find common ground. We share appreciation for autonomy and the marketplace of ideas, and we share a scepticism of big government, and we stress the importance of constitutional tools such as checks and balances. Even though liberals and conservatives would disagree on the definition of freedom, there remains enough common ground on which we can take a joint stance where there is agreement.
Whatever the shortcomings of conservatives, the fact remains that in order to secure the much-needed freedom for individuals to make their own decisions, it would help if liberals were to express greater appreciation for tradition, culture, and the variety of goods that fall outside the realm of the mere individual.
