There are many “classical liberals” who believe that wokeism is horrible. They think we can walk back from the far-left excesses and go back to liberalism proper. The problem is that liberalism always inevitably leads to wokeism. Wokeism isn’t an erroneous detour. It’s the straightforward destination. When your organizing principle is seeking maximum freedom for individuals, soon enough the freedoms of the individuals will clash and you’ll need brute force to impose the freedom of some over that of others.
Elisabeth Roudinesco is a French thinker, and her book The Sovereign Self is a great example of the flaw at the heart of liberalism.
Roudinesco is horrified by wokeism which she calls “identity politics.” Everything she says about this cancer on humanity is correct. But the way out of wokeness she proposes leads right back to it because the organizing principle Roudinesco advocates is broken.
For instance, Roudinesco is opposed to seeing Muslim head coverings in public. France is a secular state, she says, and this must be respected. And then, literally two pages later, she declares that nations and national borders should be done away with because they are “prison-like” constraints on human freedom. Instead, Roudinesco proposes a planetary civilization organized around shared principles.
This sounds very cute but let’s ponder the practicalities of the “planetary civilization.” There are people who want to wear and see burkas. And there are people who equally passionately don’t. How do they coexist in the “planetary civilization”? The only possibility I envision is that one of the groups murders the other and forces everybody to comply with its preference.
The concepts of freedom and choice are great, if somewhat robotic. Press a blue button for A and a red one for B! But as organizing principles of human existence they are radically insufficient. A moment always comes when the freedom of one person to pursue his whims clashes with the freedom of another not to participate in that pursuit. We are all seeing right now what happens when society breaks up into influence groups that pummel each other for whose freedom is more important.
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“a planetary civilization organized around shared principles”
I remember years ago a naive, idealistic guy (on another forum) who thought that conflicts could be solved in countries that had gambled on multi-culturalism (like the UK) by concentrating on ‘shared values’.
Of course none of his proposed shared values (freedom of expression, equality before the law etc) were shared by anything like all the different groups that had been let into the UK but he resisted that idea mightily.
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Historically the classical liberals were rather aggressive about enforcing their values. Most notably the abolition of slavery.
The UK is fairly new to dealing with immigrants. Probably they will learn that immigrants generally require education in these shared values.
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Classical liberalism is an infantile dream: it somehow manages to superimpose on the child’s delusion of omnipotence (“Look, mum, I can fly!”) the pious wishful thinking of bleeding-heart adults.
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Even though Roudinesco is to be praised for fighting against the Woke insanity, she is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and among the worst examples of pedlars of psychobabble in France. I’m not surprised at all that she should be in favour of such childish ideas as “abolishing borders” and “global citizenship” which are downright preposterous as they run directly counter to some of her more common-sense judgements.
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In SA, people are arguing that the problem is too much focus on the individual at the expense of the wider community.
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/when-liberal-democracy-becomes-the-problem
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