Liberal, emotive, & other -isms
“Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus.”
― Ferris Bueller
Liberalism & the Resulting Emotivist Trap
Early in my journey through political theory, I learned that liberalism—a political theory centered on individual freedoms—underlies most of western culture and civilization. The end goal of liberalism is something like "to free the individual from any unchosen burdens and responsibilities."
I should note that the liberalism I refer to does not reflect the common usage of the term in US politics, which often considers one party "liberal" and the other "conservative." Liberalism is the core value structure underlying both the Republican and Democratic political parties. Republicans protect gun rights and oppose taxation to protect the individual from the unchosen tyrannies of the state, just as Democrats attempt to free transgender people from the unchosen burden of their sex at birth, and women from unplanned pregnancies. Liberalism is also front and center on the international stage as the basis of human rights, in which the West attempts to free any individuals suffering unchosen obligations that their own citizens have long been unburdened from.
Liberalism has been the best, most humane political theory of recent history, especially in the 20th century. Its triumph over fascism (which values the state over the individual) and communism (which prioritizes class) was a monumental win for humanity. Still, this doesn't mean liberalism is without flaws and that we don't suffer from these flaws. We certainly do. And it is in an attempt to transcend this suffering that we should consider alternatives—just not the murderous ideologies of communism and fascism that humanity has previously considered.
A common impetus of our cultural neurosis is a lack of shared values, culture, or traditions. It is an understanding of liberalism, and specifically its focus on the individual freedoms that are incompatible with shared values, that clarifies this issue is not a cultural but an ideological feature. How could we possibly have shared values if everyone picks their own?
If political theories establish specific values at the core of societies, liberalism forcefully leaves an open space where our values would otherwise be. It rejects anything we attempt to put in its place, like the repulsion between two magnets with like poles.
Our "choose your values" answer may at first seem like a creative solution. And, in many ways, it is! But the task is overwhelming and unbearable to most, and the great majority must outsource this decision. So, a few competing cultures emerge as most reject the responsibility of creating their values and outsource this job to the few who do. In our case, our competing cultures have become adversarial (i.e., a "culture war").
This culture war cannot come to a natural conclusion—a terminus—because the distinctions between the competing cultures are ultimately arbitrary. They are arbitrary because we have lost track of the grounding substance that allows us to build our values in truth. And that may be a confusing, hand-wavy sentence, but it provides us a place to begin our search. Vague as it is, the acknowledgment that our current values are generally not grounded in truth provides the basis for going back & looking for what it means to change that. This acknowledgment underlies the inquiries of both Martin Heidegger & Alasdair MacIntyre. It is the "disquieting suggestion" put forth by Alasdair MacIntyre in the first chapter of After Virtue and it is the reinterpreting of truth as that which reveals itself to us in Being & Time. As MacIntyre makes clear, the reality of this suggestion leaves us in a state of emotivism.
Emotivism — an ethical theory that regards ethical and value judgments as expressions of feeling or attitude and prescriptions of action, rather than assertions or reports of anything
In a world defined by Emotivism, we make our ethical and moral judgments based entirely on how they make us feel rather than making any claim toward truth. Of course, people have different feelings or reactions to the same things and therefore build different emotive moralities.
For example, if someone had a bad experience with dogs as a child, a dog may make them feel unsafe. Subconsciously, they may decide “dogs are bad.” But other people have had positive dog experiences and make the opposite moral judgment. In these cases, the claim that dogs are good or bad has little objective meaning without each person’s personal experience. Both experiences—that which made one person feel loved by dogs and that which made the other feel threatened—are subjectively factual. The person did truly experience them. But, when ethical judgments are based entirely on how dogs make the person feel, it is impossible to ground a defining moral claim because our feeling cannot apply universally or objectively.
It’s easy to see the futility of these discussions when examining something irrelevant to current events, but try applying this same lens to abortion—or war, for that matter. I’d go so far as to say that if you believe your viewpoint is universally or objectively true on these matters, you’ve fallen into the emotivist trap.
Emotivism becomes particularly dysfunctional when people attempt to enforce their arbitrarily chosen values on others. This is often the life of the activist, a figure who has become ever-present in our world as we continue to lose any moral grounding beyond feelings and emotions.
The example of the activist returns us to our culture war, where we previously noted that the cultures developed in the vacuum of liberalism have become adversarial. Now, we note that there cannot be an objective defining endpoint because the claims of both sides are arbitrary. So we’re stuck. Or are we?
Escaping Emotivism
The case for liberalism is strongest if we cannot ground morality in truth. But is this the case? If so, are we permanently confined to the arbitrary moralities of emotivism? I tend to think not, and I have some good company in this contention.
In After Virtue, MacIntyre begins our escape from this condition by identifying a fork in the road. He asks: Nietzche or Aristotle? This distinction can either lead us back to the Virtue morality of the Greeks or forward toward a “Philosophy of the Future” as Nietzche envisioned himself igniting. As is well known, MacIntyre advocated for the return to virtue ethics, defined first by Aristotle and later by St. Thomas Aquinas.
MacIntyre rejected the Nietzchian Ubermensch on the following grounds: The Nietzchian Ubermensch does not provide the basis for morality because it is fundamentally anti-social. It creates naked power dynamics that only allow for domination and submission. Morality, by definition, is crafted so that we can live with other people. With this view in mind, the Nietzschean Ubermensch is something like an anti-morality.
I wholeheartedly agree with this rejection, but my intuition is that we miss a great opportunity by turning back to Aristotle and Aquinas. This intuition is informed by the many philosophers who both followed Nietzche’s original rejection of enlightenment morality and then rejected his Ubermensch as well. Unlike MacIntyre, these philosophers did not return to virtue ethics but looked elsewhere. Heidegger comes to mind, along with Dostoyevsky and Jung, among others.
It seems to me that we have natural values, and we pay for breaking with them. This is opposed to Nietzche’s idea that we can create our own values, and against the emotive idea that we can only make moral judgments based on feeling and emotion. If this is true, which I believe it is, the absence of these values in society would lead to grave social ills, such as opioid addiction and mass shootings—the joint pandemics of despair that are now crippling the West.
So, I hope to better understand these phenomena. I’d like to get a better sense of MacIntyre’s decision to return to Aristotle, Nietzche’s rejection of the enlightenment morality, and the other options available to us beyond our emotivist trap. I’ll do so by following the plan I outline below.
Roadmap
I plan to read and write on the following:
Nietzche’s Beyond Good & Evil
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Martin Heidegger’s Being & Time
C.G. Jung’s The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga
After gaining a basic understanding of each thinker, I’ll return and reevaluate the project, hopefully with a better understanding of the domain I described above. ✌️
