The Liberal Origins of the Great Awokening
Patrick Deneen debates Bret Stephens on Bari Weiss’s “Honestly”
Several weeks ago I donned my headset and spent over two hours in conversation, exploration, and debate with the the New York Times’s Bret Stephens on the podcast “Honestly,” hosted by Bari Weiss.
You can find the episode here:
https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/2f0da0fa/has-freedom-failed-us-a-debate
The topics covered were ranging, but a the central question was whether we (Americans, and Westerners more broadly) enjoy too much, or too little freedom. My position was that many of our worsening contemporary pathologies—both social and economic—have arisen from too much bad freedom, and not enough good liberty—i.e., too much liberalism, and not enough classical and Christian liberty. Bret Stephens—obviously, to anyone who knows his worldview—took the opposite position.
In a number of instances there were concrete questions that touched on policy. One of the areas that came under debate was whether government should seek to support family formation—encouraging marriage and children through public financial support backed by the force of law. Stephens held that as long as no one prevented someone from forming a family and having children, they were sufficiently free, and—that being the case—there was no particular need for government support. His position was reminiscent of a slightly altered observation of Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic silence, allows the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
I argued that we now live in a social and economic order in which to be married and to have children is for many, even possibly most of our countrymen and countrywomen, far more difficult than to eschew one or both. To allow the possibility of a genuine choice that allowed people to marry, to have children, and to have one or both parents able to spend time at home raising those children themselves, and not amount to a condition of extreme financial duress, required assistance of the public order. For the liberal, the appearance of theoretical choice suffices; for the postliberal, genuine choice—and moreover, encouragement to make the better choice that requires thinking beyond individual self-interest—cannot exist in the absence of a wide range of public, civic, and familial support.
Further, I argued, the public order has a vested interest in encouraging the formation of families with children, and not only because a nation seeks to foster conditions generative of future generations. As I argue in this clip below (via Twitter), for most humans, we come to learn most deeply about the extent of nearly limitless yet ordinary self-sacrifice when we have our own children. It’s when we ourselves perform the daily small sacrifices and duties as parents that we come most fully and profoundly to realize the sacrifices that our parents once made for us:
For me, however, the most striking aspect of the debate was our respective differences in views about the wellspring of contemporary “wokeness.” For Bret Stephens—and, I suspect, Bari Weiss—progressive wokeness is an aberration from good, old-fashioned liberalism. What I attempted to convey to both of them, and to her audience, was that the key elements of “wokeness” arise not from some successor philosophy, such as “cultural Marxism,” as most classical liberals wish to claim. Rather, I argued, it is the natural and even inevitable outgrowth of liberalism’s core feature of transgression. Nothing revealed this difference more than a brief debate between Stephens and myself over how to understand the legacy of John Stuart Mill: