Meet the Solutionists transcript and episode notes - season 3, episode 7

Mark Scott 00:00

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Mark Scott 00:31

How do you make the big decisions in life? How do you decide how to live? Do you have a life philosophy? When I say the word philosophy, you might think of ancient Greek guys with long beards walking around town asking annoying questions. But what about a philosophy, a way of living, a way of living? Well, do we still have those in the modern age? Professor of Politics and Philosophy, Alex Lefebvre, says most of us in Australia actually share a philosophy, and it's called liberalism. And no, he's not talking about politics. He says liberalism is not only the way of life we all share, but one that we could and should do better. And everybody's talking about Alex at the moment, from the New Yorker to the New York Times. Alex, you've written this wonderful book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, but it starts on Christmas Day at Coogee Beach. Why was that important to you as a Canadian?

Alex Lefebvre 01:33

Thanks, Mark, thanks for having me. So as you'll tell right away, and as Mark just let the cat out of the bag, I'm Canadian, and I moved to Australia back in 2010 and so for the first several years, what we did is, like any family, we went back home for Christmas, and home for us is Vancouver. You've been to Vancouver America? Yeah, so you'll know it's the one temperate part of Canada that's lovely in spring, fall and summer, but in Christmas it is just sleet and drizzle and sun going down at 3:45 and so at some point we said, enough is enough. We're tired of paying 10 grand for this, however delightful our family is, so we stayed put in Sydney. And so in 2016 we went down to Coogee Beach to celebrate a welcome novelty for us, which is Christmas in full summer, got the flip flops on, I won't say thongs, because I just can't, and there we were, and it was Christmas, and it was a scene like I had never seen before, thousands upon thousands of partiers. I don't know where all these people came from. I heard whispers of the Irish, but it was just a beach full of beer, bikinis, tattooed flesh. And the first thought that came to my mind when I saw this was that Sydney was the most godless place I had ever lived in, Sin City of the South. Yeah, it's a Sin City. But I didn't mean so much, so I did. So don't get me wrong, when in Rome, I had fun. We went for a paddle, I had a drink. It was great. But by godless, I don't mean that it's like depraved or wicked. I mean more that it's at that moment, but maybe more generally, God absent in some important way that for a lot of people in this world of mine, this world of ours, depending on where you're listening, religion, God the transcendent, is no longer a central point of reference in our capital V values, but just in how we orient ourselves to the world. So this kind of shock, this culture shock of Aussie Christmas, for me, raised a very fundamental question, which is that, where do we get our values from? And for religious people, which I'm sure were there at the beach too, but for religious people, that question is a piece of cake. They would just point to their religious text, to their church, to some sort of community, and that answers it for them, that gives them their moral centre and compass. But the class or number of people who are non religious in our society are the fastest growing demographic of religious affiliation or non affiliation in this case. And so in Aussie we, in Australia, excuse me, we clock at around 40 percent, United States a bit lower, 30, over in godless New Zealand at 60 percent and here's a whole bunch of people that don't have religion as their separate central reference point. And so I asked myself, where do these people get not just their values from, but their sensibility, what my 15 year old now would call their vibe? And the gamut of this book is that the thing that people should point to is liberalism, liberalism as a broad set of commitments that includes things like freedom, fairness, tolerance, reciprocity, a certain sense of irony and play, and that, I think that is what makes up who a lot of people are nowadays.

Mark Scott 04:39

One of the central ideas of this book is that we're liberal. We just don't know that we're liberal. Why don't we know that liberalism is informing our values?

Alex Lefebvre 04:49

I think you're right to point to that very odd predicament. I mean, you ask anyone, any place in the world in all time, I know I'm making some pretty big claims here about where they get their values from, and people just nominate something. It's just very difficult for people who are unchurched nowadays to do it. And I've pestered a lot of my friends, my poor students, who are a captive audience, and I asked them, where do you guys get your values from? And their answer is always, invariably, something hyper local. It's like my friends, my family, my experience and all that's fine, and it's absolutely correct, but all of this stuff is shaped within wider frameworks of meaning and of value, and they just don't have the word for it. So that's what I'm trying to nominate. It's like as if we went back to the 19th century and everyone is Christian, but they've forgotten the word Christianity. And I feel that it's not that we've forgotten the word liberalism, but that we don't quite nominate that as the thing that might be the right answer for something very deep about who we are. And the main reason, I think that we do that is because this is a very complicated and interesting history, but liberalism today is understood as primarily a political kind of thing, a legal kind of thing, something to do with institutions, courts, rule of law, stuff that's super important, but in a sense a little bit remote from the everyday and from the deepest kind of existential stuff that we are talking about right now. And so to say, hey Mark or hey whoever, liberalism might be the source of your values, that seems to a lot of people to be like a category error. Like, it's like, I'm nominating the wrong kind of thing. Like, what do you want for dinner tonight? And someone says, tennis rackets? Like, it doesn't make sense as the right kind of thing.

Mark Scott 06:21

Well, even more in Australian context, the liberals are, you know, the conservative side of politics. In America, they're the non conservative side of politics. To what extent does all that political branding and almost different meaning in different contexts, politically, make it hard for you to adopt it as the all encompassing brand for the values that you think we hold.

Alex Lefebvre 06:45

The word liberal, and liberalism is definitely a minefield. It's just that, depending on what country, it'll blow up some different part of you in important respects. So you go to the States, and people will indict you as a do-gooding, tax and spend kind of irresponsible. And if you go to France, it means you're just a cold, blooded individualist, here in Australia, it's center right. So yeah, it does have a kind of brand problem and a kind of fluidity problem in that it means everything to everyone. So at the heart of this thing, I they call this thing called liberalism, I would nominate three main values, and those would be, for me, a defense of personal freedom, the idea that people are entitled and right to live as they see fit, providing it doesn't impose the ability on others to do the same. I would also see another key liberal commitment in the idea of fairness and generosity. I can come back to that idea later, because it's very, very important to me, and historically, it's crucial to understanding liberalism. And last is reciprocity, an idea that you matter no more than me and I matter no more than you, and that becomes the basis of the social contract that we navigate. And my sense is that what those are, those are, of course, institutionalised in political norms and institutions from everywhere we look, whether that's courts or taxation or whatever. But my gambit in the book is that it has those ideals have entered into, they've gone viral, as it were, they've entered the cultural bloodstream of everything nowadays, such that whenever we turn on Netflix, YouTube, go on a dating app, the way we raise our kids, the HR code at this university. It's all liberal through and through, those values are just being articulated and adapted as needed for purpose, but that we just swim in, my metaphor for this book is that we're in Liberal waters, and that's what I believe. We marinate, we saturate in them.

Mark Scott 08:29

One of the interesting things in your book is how recent liberalism is. It kind of shocked me. If you think of these religious traditions, it's come to us through millennia. Liberalism, you say, is 200 years old. How did something so recent come to be so deeply embedded?

Alex Lefebvre 08:46

So there's a distinction here that's important. So people started calling themselves liberal in the political sense that you and I are just talking about right now, in the 1800s it started in Spain in resistance to Napoleon, and then it basically spread wherever Napoleon went in the 19th century. But the word liberal, of course, is much, much older than that. It's a Latin word, and it was core to Roman civilisation and to all the different moral and religious dispensations that came afterwards. So originally in Rome, that word liberal meant an ethical ideal, and it meant to be someone who was free, but also someone who is generous and who is ready and willing to give their time, their money, perhaps even their life, to something bigger and broader than themselves, and then that ideal of being free and generous liberal. And that's, by the way, of course, something baked into the word today. When I ask, for example, for a liberal serving of soup, I'm not asking for a politically progressive soup, I'm asking for a big old portion of soup. So that abundance and muchness continues to be embedded in the word, and what happens in the 19th century is that it gets reinvented. And all of these genius thinkers, these big names that today are still read and I still teach, if you come down to my course on Introduction to Political Philosophy, people like John Stuart Mill or Alexis de Tocqueville or George Eliot or Germaine de Staël, all of these people tried to renew this ideal of what it meant to be free and generous in the world as a political project and also an ethical one. And they looked around the modern world, and they saw all of these things that trampled on our ability to be free and tempted us away from our generosity and from a propensity to be giving. So they looked at capitalism as not just causing widespread inequality, but as turning us all into nasty little consumerists that thought only of our material satisfactions, or they worried about democracy and the lowering of taste and discernment down to the lowest common denominator, a kind of fear of the algorithm before algorithms. And so they were all freaked out about this problem that the modern world besieges us left and right, with all these temptations not to be free and not to be generous, and they did their best to invent a doctrine that would be able to protect us and preserve those qualities in us. And what I'm trying to do in the book, in a lot of respect, is revive, not in 19th century terms, but revive that crucial moral, ethical, psychological intuition that we need to be at once free and generous, and that liberalism and the liberal tradition has all of these resources that can help get us there.

Mark Scott 11:06

You're using some classics of philosophy and literature to teach this to your students, but in your book you take some more contemporary examples as well. You talk about Parks and Recreation, and you identify Leslie Knope, the centre figure of the Parks and Rec comedy series, you know, a local government officer in middle America as an embodiment of liberalism. What did we learn about liberalism through her and through other examples of popular culture?

Alex Lefebvre 11:34

So she is, that's right. So she is the goat of liberalism for me. So if Christianity has Jesus, and if the ancient world has Achilles, really, and I'm not being cheeky here, I do think Leslie ,so this sounds heretical and offensive, I'm not trying to be that. I think that she lives up and embodies a certain liberal ideal as much as anyone. Of course, it's in a silly, joyful kind of medium.

Mark Scott 11:55

But what is it about that character that to you, says embodies the values that you think permeate culture?

Alex Lefebvre 12:05

It’s easy to give an embodiment of the easiest aspects of liberalism, and that's the free individual. What Leslie Knope embodies is the fullest realisation of the generous impulses of liberalism. So she's in this little town in Indiana that's ranking is its motto, is first in friendship, fourth in obesity, and her whole thing is about trying to rescue this town from its own worst impulses, because its citizens are always ready to trade whatever park or public good or common space for the next McDonalds or the next donut shop or whatever.

Leslie Knope 12:38

Well, the Planning Commission has a week to decide if they want a beautiful, innovative community park or a bunch of greasy lard bombs. I'm not editorialising Paunch Burgers’ number one selling burger is the greasy lard bomb.

Alex Lefebvre 12:51

And she's always trying to invest in the place, and trying to lead by coalition building in the kind of funniest ways, and to try to bring this town to realise what it might be. So there's a real kind of love of locality there. There's also a certain spirit of adventure and of a quality that permeates her individual life. So I take from her one of the great statements of liberal romance, which is that her and her love interest finally declare their vows and they say to each other. I love you, which would be common in any culture. And then the man, importantly, adds this. He says, and I like you, and Leslie reciprocates and says the same. And that ideal of loving and liking, I think, evokes a whole kind of notion of the spirit of friendship and an equality that isn't just kind of a civic relationship that we have as citizens, but has gone all the way down into how we negotiate dishes and how we, who's cooking what, into how are we going to raise our kids? And so what I guess I'm trying to say with Leslie Knope is that she's just as serious as anything else, and she embodies the liberal values in a full three dimensional person that I think few others compare to.

Mark Scott 14:05

Your book is partly an effort to explain liberalism, but more importantly, it's a call to defend the liberal way of life. Why do you think liberals need to defend themselves?

Alex Lefebvre 14:14

Liberals, I think, are truly terrible at defending themselves, and I don't think they give a full enough commitment, a full throated commitment to who they are and what they do. So the opponents of liberalism right now have the front foot, the MAGA movements, the populist movements, the authoritarians. And the reason why, I think, is because they really put at the forefront of their not just their pitch, but their commitment, the deepest and most inner things about ourselves, our identity and who we see ourselves as a people, and that's what they're fighting for. They're fighting for something really deep and really personal. It's Make America Great Again. It's a make a particular conception of America and Americanness great again. And say what you like about what that motto, if it's good or bad, it is immediately authentic. An important way for a whole bunch of people, it clicks with them. And I think that when liberals talk up liberalism, they're always talking about institutions, and institutions are crucial and important, and we need rule of law for God's sake, for sure. But what I'm trying to draw attention to in the book is how our souls might also be at stake in the sense of, look, if liberalism is the hegemonic morality of our time, and if it's being displaced day by day, chipped away, eroded, then that's something we should put front of centre of our pitch to try to defend it and realise what's at stake if we lose this thing. Because I'm telling you, it's not a bunch of courts and judges and politicians. It's something innermost to who we are today. So that's the first reason that liberals don't quite see what liberalism is. The second reason why liberals are bad at defending themselves. They have a terrible track record of living up to their own value. Their own values like any moral doctrine can suffer from this. Name me the Christian who will live up to their Christian values, but name me the liberal that will live up to theirs, and who will really live fairly and reciprocally in this world of ours. So critics of liberalism will point at the soaring inequality of our world, or the way in which speech has been weaponised in cancel culture. And they'll rightly round on liberals and say, is that very generous, Alex? Is that very liberal? And the answer is, no, of course, not. So in a way, liberals failing to live up to their commitments is another way why this doctrine seems so frail and so played out. In a sense, it's a dodge, but I don't think it's totally a dodge to say liberalism hasn't been tried yet, because I think it's true if we its principles are genuinely revolutionary and would transform the societies that purport to be liberal.

Mark Scott 16:29

So there are gaps in liberalism. As a liberal yourself, how then do you accommodate those gaps? Are you conscious of areas of outside liberalism that you need to pay attention to and develop in your own value set?

Alex Lefebvre 16:46

Yes, I do think that there are certain human excellences. Let's call them virtues, the simple word, that are undernourished in liberalism and that I do recognise as genuinely important. One of the most important, I think, is self sacrifice in the notion of being able to compromise or to not claim an entitlement in order for a greater good. I think in particular, if I can go gloomy here for a moment, I think that one of the main impediments to fixing or improving climate change isn't just capitalism with its consumerism and its aggressive growth. I think it's liberalism, my darling liberalism, I think is a true liability here, because liberals are terrible at collective action problems. If I don't see my neighbor sacrificing their trip to Bali, well, screw it. I'm not going to sacrifice my trip to Bali. If my neighbor buys a Range Rover, well, that's on the table for me, too. And so in this sense, liberals really don't self sacrifice well, and don't refrain from the entitlements that they can claim, and this can lead us into very bad places, I think.

Mark Scott 17:45

So there are challenges with liberalism in dealing with climate change. You'd think that there are other areas as well. This might be a challenge, the inequality in society, the growing division in society. Is there a risk then that liberalism might work for me, but it doesn't work for us. And when it comes to the great challenges we face as a society, if we're all acting as good liberals, we're not going to get the solutions that we need.

Alex Lefebvre 18:10

I think that's the right question. I just disagree with the end part of it, which is that I think if we're acting as good liberals, then we would see that our doctrine is composed of what I've been saying these two parts, which is not just freedom, but also generosity. So the freedom part is easy. It's what we always do, and we can just always claim our own little privileges, and then nothing will get solved. It's the generosity part that we need to work on and be willing to forego some of those for great collective goods that are important not to only us, but to future generations. The definition of liberalism that I make fundamental to my book is drawn from the great American philosopher John Rawls, and his notion of it was that a liberal society is a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next, and so that intergenerational piece is crucial and to live up to our own liberal values, it's crucial that we preserve the inheritance. Call me a conservative in this respect, that's fine. We preserve that inheritance to future generations. So if we unleash our own little Karen in the sense of that meme, and we claim we always want to speak to the manager, we always want to jump to the front of the line, then I think we're not just doing our kids in. We're doing our own self identity as liberals in and we're not realising the kind of person we aspire to be. So I think it's very easy for liberals to slide into the bad version. But what I'm trying to suggest is that living up to a vocation of oneself as liberal would take a different direction. And I would add to that, what other solutions do we have? What political solutions would be not poisonous, that would be illiberal. We can't just go authoritarian, and we can't just crib individual liberties widely. Imagine one fine morning the Australian government saying no more air travel, unless for emergencies or less for essential national purposes. There's no way that can be achieved. So in a sense, I think we are stuck in a liberal rut, and we have to play that hand, that we are dealt that hand is that people understand themselves as free agents. So we have to try to find a way to motivate themselves to dial down their free agency while not directly opposing it, because that is just not a viable political path.

Mark Scott 20:17

People practice their religion, and there are spiritual practices involved in that. Do you practice liberalism? And in a way, should we practice liberalism like we people practice a religion?

Alex Lefebvre 20:29

This is a great question. It's a big question. Let me begin with the religion bit. So I've had a fair few reviews of the book saying, ha, you're making liberalism into a religion. And I don't know what to say. I mean, yeah, this is a feature, not a bug. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to suggest that it has the same breadth and depth as historical religions do, and that it can be just as sufficient as those religions. If I had to qualify the idea that liberalism is a religion, I would add that it is religion without transcendence, and the idea that it really takes its what I call horizontal commitments to our fellow creatures, very seriously, and that's its core of its morality, but the transcendent dimension to another plane of reality, or to a god, or to notions of pride being the worst kind of sin, those things drop out. So if you can accept the idea that there can be a religion without transcendence, then I think liberalism could be just, just what you're looking for. Now, the question as to how we practice it is crucial, because what I really don't want to leave anyone with the impression of is smugness or self satisfaction, like if we go home at the end of the day, watch half an hour of Netflix, have a glass of wine, then bang we're doing, we're being the best liberal selves we can be. Because I think that, like religion, liberalism is a tremendously demanding moral doctrine that needs kind of daily recommitment to and daily practice of, so religion has all of these techniques that we all know of to do that, whether that's prayer, meditation, confession, in some faiths, by which people remind themselves of the most important and in so doing, find a new way to relate, not just to other people, but to themselves as well they recommit themselves. And so liberalism needs that. And so what I tried to do in the book is try to furnish what I call spiritual exercises for liberalism. And here I'm drawing on a very, very old tradition, a venerable tradition, made alive by one of my favorite philosophers. If you're interested in some gorgeous, accessible philosophy, dear listeners, I suggest you read Pierre Hadot, H, A, D, O, T, and he is the philosopher most responsible for bringing back a notion of philosophy, not just as an academic pursuit, but as a way of life, as a living doctrine. And what Hadot does is he looks back to ancient philosophy, and ancient philosophers had a totally different conception of what philosophy meant than we moderns. So we moderns think of philosophy as totally abstract, systematic theories of knowledge that you try to like, pose really big questions about and find really big, abstract answers. What is the nature of the reality? How do I know stuff, etc, etc. Now, ancient philosophers asked those really fundamental questions too, but it was in service of something else, not just knowledge in and of itself, but a commitment to live a certain sort of way. And so philosophy, as I'm sure everyone knows, means a love of wisdom. And what philosophers did in the olden days, very olden days, is they invented all kinds of practices by which individuals could commit themselves. So one of my favorites was Marcus Aurelius. So Marcus Aurelius was the great Roman Emperor. He was a stoic, but he was just a guy. He was a guy that had to live in this world full of human foibles that he suffered from as well. And Marcus Aurelius his main problem, his main, his main character flaw, if you like to put it that way, was his temper. He would fly. He would lose his shit all the time. So every morning, what he did is he started a diary and he wrote in all of the nuisances and all of this annoying petitioners who would come and just basically, like, prep himself, like, okay, I gotta deal with Marcus later today, and then Lucius, and then whoever else in his calendar. He's like, expect this, expect this, so that when the predictable, annoying requests would come to him, he wouldn't lose his cool. That is a spiritual exercise, a way in which he could retain his commitment to wisdom even amidst all the challenges life poses at us. Now, what I tried to do in my book, I don't have Marcus's full registry of exercises, but I try to come up with a handful of them in which my readers can take upon themselves at any time of the day, really, to try to remind themselves of their deepest moral commitments. And for this, I draw on the philosopher John Rawls, and I try to read some of his ideas in that light.

Mark Scott 24:39

And so give us an example of that, what's a spiritual exercise that we can do?

Alex Lefebvre 24:43

So the most famous idea from Rawls whole philosophy, if you've studied him for even two minutes, you've heard of this word, and it's what Rawls calls the original position. And the original position is what philosophers call a thought experiment. It's an artificial little constraint instruction that allows you to isolate something important about your thinking. Now that's one way to read it, but what I want to suggest, and we can do it in a moment, this notion of this original position isn't merely like a hobby horse toy for philosophers to play with. It's something for Rawls as readers to really remind themselves of what's important and of who they are. So the original position takes form of a set of steps, and we can do it right now, if you like. It begins with Rawls essentially assigning you a task. And he's asking his readers to try to come up with the fundamental principles, the fundamental rules of justice, let's say, for their society. And he's saying, okay, Mark, Mark, you're being the reader here of Rawls, get to it, try to come up with the basic principles, not the form of government, not the constitution, but the absolutely fundamental bedrock moral principles that should organise our societies like have at it, Mark, hammer those out for me. Get back to me in 15 minutes. What do you have so Mark, or any human with the same weaknesses that we all do would go away from his teacher, Rawls, and would write down a list that knowingly or not, would probably favor persons like himself. They would sort of skew the principles of justice quietly in his favor. So Rawls says, okay, okay, good, first try. Now let's do this again, and here's the second step. Do that same exercise again, but pretend that you know absolutely nothing about yourself. And Rawls has a word for this. Pretend you are behind the quote, unquote, veil of ignorance. So Mark, I'm looking at you. You don't know that you're white, you don't know that you're myopic, you don't know that you're religious, non religious. You don't know your class, you don't know your conception of the good. You don't know if you don't know if you have kids, a wife, a husband, a whatever. You don't know anything. Now, Mark and the word here fails now, guy in front of me now, person, because the proper name is gone. Try again. And what Rawls reckons you would do is try to write out a list of principles that would broadly favor equality, in the sense that if you don't know who you are, well, you don't want to design a system of rules that would put you in a really disadvantaged position if the veil were lifted and, uh oh, you're not in the privileged group. So the Rawlsian exercise is to remind us that the contingency of who we are, this artificial stuff of me being whatever I am, we should put that to the side. And we really do deep down, believe we should put that to the side when we try to orient our fundamental commitments to morality. And you can do this exercise any time you like. You can do it when you're doing your taxes. For example, you can ask, do I really need to claim this deduction. Is that really cool, if I claim this semi fictional book, Alex, as a work entitlement, and the answer there would be no, that's not the kind of moral principle I can affirm. I can ask some bigger stuff too. Is it consistent, Alex, for you to support a school system here in which there's public schools, private schools and selective schools, and in which the very talented kids go to one school, the very rich kids go to another school, and the kids who are neither of those things go to another school. And the answer is, no, I can't, but because I'm Alex and because I inhabit my Alex-ness, and I have a daughter who's 15, I slip and I fail, and I send her to that private school, and it's not good. Now that's an example where I failed, but the original position has led me to many examples where I hope I've succeeded, and that's the idea that I believe Rawls was trying to lead his readers to.

Mark Scott 28:37

Well, there you go, a liberal spiritual exercise. Thanks, Alex. That's something we can try at home. I'm Mark Scott, Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and that's Alex Lefebvre, Professor of Politics and Philosophy here at the University. And Alex's book is called Liberalism as a Way of Life, and it's available now. I also spoke with Alex at a recent Sydney Ideas live event. If you'd like to watch Alex's full talk or sign up for future live events, you'll find a link in the show notes. The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. This episode was recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences media room, and our thanks to the technical staff here.

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Episode 7: Living liberal – how this political philosophy could make you happier

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