Unbalanced

I spent some time, while driving from and to work over the past couple of days, listing to an audio version of David Brooks’ most recent column in The Atlantic: “The Outer Limits of Liberalism.” The podcast, hoping, perhaps, to put a much finer point on it, is titled: “The Canadian Way of Death,” perhaps because so much of the beginning of the piece is devoted to Mr. Brooks’ complaints about Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (or MAID) laws. To make a long story short, Mr. Brooks contrasts what he calls “autonomy-based liberalism,” which he clearly feels is a both misleading and broken, with what he terms “gifts-based liberalism,” which he presents as something of a panacea to many social problems, not the least of which being people perceiving themselves as having the freedom to end their own lives.

Personally, I take mild exception to Mr. Brooks attaching the label of “gifts-based liberalism” to his ideal form of liberal thought. The gifts are secondary, it’s the obligations that go with them that Mr. Brooks really feels are central. Accordingly, I’m going to use “obligations-based liberalism” to describe it, instead. Besides, it makes for a much clearer opposition between the two.

In the end, I see nothing really wrong with “obligations-based liberalism,” in and of itself. But I think that Mr. Brooks, as proselytizers are wont to do, massively oversells it. While he sees the excesses of “autonomy-based liberalism” as those of a good idea taken too far, he doesn’t acknowledge that “obligations-based liberalism” is subject to the same problem. Which is why the liberalism of personal autonomy is a thing in the first place. This does make a certain amount of sense, however. For Mr. Brooks to point out the potential excesses of the liberalism of social obligation, he would need to risk the ire of those who support the idea, while earning little to no good will from those who oppose it.

And so he’s left to pretend that there is no balance between the two to be struck. Society should simply use its ability to impose obligations on others (for the gifts those people have no right of refusal over) and individuals should surrender their autonomy to those obligations and burdens, because since the people in Mr. Brooks’ anecdotes who follow that path have great outcomes, the same will certainly be true for everyone.

And this, I suspect, is more of a problem than the excesses of either variety of liberalism; the simple fact that we live in a world in which being open and honest about the downsides of the things one supports is considered to be somewhere between stupid and treacherous. And so many people limit themselves to preaching to the choir, while those outside the congregation consider them to be foolish or dishonest.