Human wickedness is a better argument for liberalism than human goodness.
Liberals will often explain their liberalism by citing their optimistic view of human nature. Take this view propounded by liberal luminary Millicent Fawcett:
Or more recently this view by Nick Clegg:
Underpinning… [the liberal] attitude towards power is a particular liberal attitude towards people – a belief that most people, most of the time, will make the right decisions for themselves, their family and their community. A belief in the dispersal of power only makes sense if sustained by this optimism. There would be little point in dispersing power from governments to citizens, families and communities if you did not think they have the capacity and capabilities to put that power to better use than governments themselves.
If as Clegg suggests this kind of optimism about human nature actually was a prerequisite for being a liberal then I would not be one. That’s partly a function of my personal religious beliefs. I’m a Christian of a somewhat Calvinist bent. That means it is an article of faith for me that all human are impregnated with original sin and in need of divine redemption. But you don’t need to share my theological outlook to find human beings a frightening bunch.
The most obvious illustrations of this are the almost unimaginable atrocities of history: the Nazi gas chambers, Stalin’s Gulags or the Khmer Rouge killing fields. The latter of which saw soldiers executing children by smashing their heads of children against trees – shooting them would apparently have wasted bullets. Thus the human beings we are supposed to be optimistic about are capable of building a society in which ammunition was precious but human life was disposable. One could perhaps dismiss this as the work of abhorrent monsters rather than ordinary people but that is to give ourselves too much credit. In the wake of the Holocaust psychologists begun doing controversial research that suggested that randomly chosen volunteers could with alarming ease be encouraged to cause pain or dehumanise others. This shouldn’t come as a terrible surprise; generally when we see an opportunity for people to behave awfully without consequences, we see at least a minority of people behaving awfully. The persistent failure of criminal justice system to punish sexual violence means that shockingly high levels of sexual violence persist. The shield of anonymity online allows for all kinds of hate to be spewed. And anyone who’s worked in a customer service job can relate tales of how beastly people can be when they know you are not allowed to argue back.
Now clearly I am focussing here on the negatives. Humans are capable of great kindness and generosity, and they should be treasured and encouraged. But they should not be expected. Our lighter side is unreliable: more likely to apply to some people than others, subject to our blindspots and often overwhelmed by our worse instincts.
There’s simply no reason to think of goodness as our default. In his excellent book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Harvard psychologist makes a convincing case that the terrible things humans are not evidence of the corruption of our true nature. Rather they arise from that nature. For example, he shows that in the kind of tribal societies we are often misty eyed about are probably the most violent that have ever existed. Inhumanity is sadly a very human thing.
Nor is it only others we can screw over; we are quite able to hurt ourselves. On everything from smoking to obesity to saving, we make objectively poor decisions.
Generally, the people who share my scepticism about human nature will incline to authoritarian politics. The usual implication that’s drawn from the idea that people are corrupt is that they need a strong state to prevent them indulging that corruption. And there’s some truth to this. Pinker suggests that the existence of a state reduces violent deaths by somewhere between 75% and 90%. So a preference for authoritarianism over anarchism is prudent.
But they are not the only options. There is also liberalism. It’s necessary because there’s a central flaw in using fallibility to argue for authoritarian politics. The state that’s supposed to contain human fallibility is itself composed of fallible humans. Given the power of the state they can turn tyrannical and/or engage in all kinds of venal profiteering. The best solution we have is not as anarchists suggest to take away the state’s top down power but the liberal one of balancing it with power that comes from the bottom up. Hence the state is made democratic and mechanisms introduced that force it to respect human rights and the rule of law.
As a result, I would suggest that the divide between liberals and authoritarians is not between optimism and pessimism. Rather it is that liberals recognise that everyone is fallible. By contrast, in order to justify giving the state so much arbitrary power, authoritarians tend to wind up assuming that there is a special class of people – be it an aristocracy, priesthood or fuehrer – who have some degree of immunity to that fallibility. I would suggest that both the track record of supposedly special people given power and the fact of our shared humanity strongly suggest that this is a misguided notion.
Irving Kristol once quipped that a conservative is “a liberal who’s been mugged by reality”. But as we’ve seen there’s a hard headed case for liberalism. What makes for authoritarianism is not scepticism about humanity but selective optimism that gives some the right to rule over others. The central liberal insight is that power is dangerous – whoever has it.
Afterword: this post is largely inspired by Judith Shklar’s essay the Liberalism of Fear
Matter Of Facts 
Great post!
I’m not sure how this leads to liberalism, rather than simply to the idea that one needs to have a method for ensuring a regular turnover of power, so that the same people don’t get to hold power long enough to become corrupt?
Such as democracy.
But once you have democracy, as a check on power, which pretty much everyone accepts nowadays, why would you go for democratic liberalism as opposed to, say, democratic conservatism?
For I would say that pessimism about human nature is one of the main reasons to be a conservative: because human nature is basically both evil and stupid, we should stick with systems that we know work, and that have worked for a long time, and if we make any changes we should do so only when absolutely necessary, and gradually and minimally, to minimise the risk that human nature will screw it all up.
Whereas liberals seem to be all about changing as much as possible, as fast as possible (‘let’s change the voting system!’) — something which is, as far as I can see, bound to fail, due to human nature.
See, for example, G.K. Chesterton on fences, and on utopianism (‘And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon’); or Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope.
Thanks for the comment.
I don’t really see holding elections as in and of itself adequate to avoid abuses of power. I disagree with your starting point that corruption is about people staying in power too long. Sure that’s part of it. But a government can be rotten from the get go. There’s also the problem of tyranny of the majority which elections don’t avoid.
I’ve written about liberalism and continuity before: https://matteroffactsblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/actually-id-rather-lib-dems-didnt-rediscover-our-radical-hearts/
Well, it’s true that holding elections won’t stop abuses of power completely; but then nothing will.
And it’s true that a government can be rotten from the get-go; but then such a government, if put in charge, will always be able to do some damage, because if you remove a government’s ability to do any damage then you also remove its ability to act at all.
The only value of democracy is that it provides a way to remove a government that has either become corrupt, or was corrupt to start off with (but nobody realised), without the previously-usual method for doing so, which was a civil war.
(Sometimes one gets the idea people have all sorts of ideas that democracy has other magical powers such as conferring legitimacy on a government; no, the whole point is that is allows peaceful transition of power, which is why you can’t really call a country a properly functioning democracy until it has had its first peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.)
But my point was, what you’ve argued in favour of, reasoning from pessimism about human nature, is checks on the power of the administration. Which is a perfectly fine bit of reasoning. But my point is that it doesn’t get you to ‘liberalism’.
I mean, you’ve ruled out a Leviathan, a la Hobbes, so inasmuch as Hobbes was anti-liberal you’ve argued against that (Hobbes, though, would have come back at you with, ‘Yes, but human nature is so bad that even a corrupt Leviathan is at least only one person imposing their evil will, and that’s still better than the chaos of the War of All Against All; some people can at least survive for a while in a despotic dictatorship by playing the game, if they’re lucky, while in a true anarchy everybody’s lives will be nasty, brutish and short, without exception’, and you must admit he’d have a point).
But there are lots of systems which allow for checks on the administration, which aren’t liberalism. For example, the kind of democratic conservatism I mentioned, where elections and the judiciary (in the form of judicial reviews to keep governmental bodies from acting ultra vires etc) are used to keep the power of the administration in check, but liberal ideas of change (like changing the voting system, legalising drugs, social liberalisation, etc) are not endorsed.
But then, your linked article on Burke makes a lot of these points. Given that, I have to ask, why are you a liberal and not a conservative*?
* A conservative, that is, rather than a Conservative.
This is part of why I’m an anarchist, and why I would also describe myself as liberal – I do not trust anyone to have power over others.
To answer why our current forms of democracy are not sufficient – they allow groups to attain that power. We see it today where a relatively small elite holds power and maintains that power – the US this manifests in them miltary-industrial-congressional complex and the revolving door of politics, regulatory bodies and business. It is similar, in the UK.
Liberalism is largely about breaking this ability – through the ‘social liberalism’ of raising the disadvantaged up or the ‘classical liberalism’ of removing ill-gotten advantage.