I have three books in my sights this week that defend liberalism. They take back three positions it has allowed progressives and conservatives to steal: anti-imperialism, religion, and equality.
One is William Easterly’s book, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest, available now. Easterly makes a crushingly persuasive case that the “civilizing mission” to the Rest has been deeply, even stupidly, anti-liberal. The Catholic missionaries to First Nations, the imperialists of the 19th century, and the “development” specialists of the past eighty years all exhibited the arrogance of expertise (on which Easterly has also written, and lived: he worked for a long time at the World Bank). He points out that the treatment of women as children has the same metaphor at work: oh, poor dear, let me help you—by preventing you, say, from going to medical school.
The Marxists and other leftists stole anti-imperialism. They claimed that the recent European empires were the outcome of... liberalism. J. A. Hobson (1858–1940), Lenin (1870–1924), and many others saw “late capitalism” as requiring the exploitation of the Third World. You still hear the claim confidently asserted by the academic Marxists who dominate Brazilian and American universities. Their claim never made sense. Most of the classical liberals were staunch anti-imperialists, such as Scotland’s Adam Smith and the US’s Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). Indeed, though it was called the Brazilian “Empire,” Pedro I was of course o Libertador, from Portugal’s empire, and his son Dom Pedro II a model liberal ruler, and liberator of the slaves.
The second, out February 10, is No Compulsion in Religion—No Exceptions: Islamic Arguments for Religious Freedom, edited by my colleague at Cato, Mustafa Akyol. Like Easterly against imperialism, Akyol has for many years been bringing liberal thought to bear against the minority of Muslim countries consumed with hatred of liberty. He says here again that Islam does not need to be anti-liberal—no more than Christianity needs to be, though alarmingly many recent anti-liberal Christian theorists such as Patrick Deneen have said it must. Islam a thousand years ago was decidedly more liberal than the wretched Christians. About the recent reimposition of a crazy tyranny on Afghanistan, Akyol writes, “But was this really the Islamic thing to do? Was the Taliban right, religiously?” He and the other distinguished Islamic scholars in the book say, No, and quote the Koran (2:256) in support: “There is no compulsion in religion.”
The third book is my own, Equality of Permission, out next September. Like the others, it denies an anti-liberal absurdity. Easterly denies the absurd claim that liberalism caused imperialism, and Akyol denies the absurd claim that Islam must be illiberal. I deny the absurd claim that equality of permission leads to inequality.
Enough of absurdity. Liberalism is not a cruel, anti-poor, anti-Third-World “neo-liberalism.” Nor is it the enemy of true religion. It is the natural life of liberated adults.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
I fear that the word "liberalism" does not land, hijacked as it is in the USA.
(1) There is a sense in which liberalism *is* involved in imperialism. Not in imperialisim *simpliciter*, but specifically in European-based extra-European imperialism (excluding Russian imperialism), which is the imperialism the leftists object to (and which they call "imperialism" without qualifier). In this way: liberalism led to European growth, hence relative wealth and power, which led to their explorations and empires.
And if (as many on the left do) you define yourself against wealth, you could hardly do otherwise than to hate specifically those empires but not others. The American black liberation movement in particular was inordinately proud of sub-Saharan African empires, and for all I know still is. Among soy people I notice a real affection for Wakanda, as imaginary as Palestine.
They also hate America and Canada and Japan's late unlamented "co-prosperity sphere" and pre-1994 South Africa, but not China, Iran, India, or post-1994 South Africa. Oh yes, plus Israel's empire, even though it, too, is imaginary.
(2) Suppose it so that a thousand years ago a variety of Islam (the only? the dominant?) was more liberal than the contemporary dominant forms of Christianity (talk about a *low bar*!). Even if that were acceptably liberal to moderns, it would have no important implications for our world. Any promoters of such today would be slain by adherents of some more orthodox Islam, as orthodoxy is now reckoned. At best you might refute a claim that Islamic liberalism, somehow defined, is literally impossible. But with current definitions, it is obvious that it is not going to happen. (Gretchen, top trying to make "fetch" happen. It's not going to happen.)
(3) Equality of *permission* is a noble ideal. It is *precisely* what everybody *ought* to mean by equality of persons. However, we who believe so are a tiny and beset minority. Circumspice.