← Philosophy For Our Times
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- [00:01]
A
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B
I once watched one episode of, what was it called? Desperate Housewives. I can't remember the name of it. And this woman said, it's so over, they gotta find a new word for over, okay? And yet, you know, the archeology, the deep archaeology and the institution, institutional dominance of this idiocy is still very strong. So basically, anybody who disagrees with it, well, you know, I can speak from experience. So I'm a proto fascist. I'm a populist. Lots of really bad things if you challenge fundamental philosophical idiocy.
- [01:20]
C
Welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, the podcast brought to you by the Institute of Art and Ideas. I'm your host, Omari Edwards. For decades, liberalism has been the dominant political philosophy of the west, championing individual rights, free markets and open societies. Yet today, the consensus appears increasingly fragile across the political spectrum. Critics argue that liberalism has failed to deliver social cohesion, economic security, or a shared sense of purpose. So if liberalism is in decline, what comes next? Should we double down on the values that have shaped the modern world as some like Ezra Klein have argued? Or is it time to imagine a different political settlement? Can communities, traditions and the common good be restored without sacrificing freedom? And what would a post liberal society actually look like in this conversation, the first in a series of conversations about what comes after liberalism? Two of the most influential critics of our time, Saurabh Amari and Maurice Glassman, explore the limits of the liberal order and discuss the political, economic and moral foundations of a world beyond it. Saurabh Amari is a journalist, author and political commentator whose work has shaped the growing post liberal movement. Maurice Glassman is a political theorist, a philosopher, a founder of Blue Labour and a member of the House of Lords, known for his advocacy of community work and democratic renewal. This is a world after liberalism. We hope you enjoy.
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B
Foreign. Everybody. I'm Morris actually my mum had a bourgeois moment when I was born. I was named after my grandfather who was M O double R I S But when I come to America I'm used to be calling Maurice. That's that I'm used to. It's really good to see you. It's got the feel of a uncomfortable. It's got the feel of a Labour Party party meeting, kind of circa 1984, where we're talking about how to deal with the apocalypse. About 10 o' clock in the morning on a Sunday is not my natural milieu. Just to explain. And so at least at the beginning, be gentle, just say, this is Sarah Bamari, who's my friend of many years. You've been on your own journey from. I remember you as a kind of Financial Times, neoliberal kind of guy. Would that be Wall Street Journal? That's it, yeah. But so as from Iran, family moved to, to the States. And I think your journey would be really interesting to explain, to talk to people about. I just want to say that. So we build here the world after liberalism. And I do. I mean, I met Saurabh then as well. When I went to Trump's inauguration, I realized a bit like any of you know the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by Marx, this is a different time. I think we're living in a very different era in which working class support is no longer to be understood as left, or I don't even think probably left and right. I think the division is between sovereigntists and globalizers, roughly, that's the way that politics is moving. And this left and right thing comes from the French Revolution, which nothing really good came of that. So I'm willing to talk about that. But you know, Napoleon was not a good thing, the Terror was not a good thing. But this is supposed to be about liberalism and the world after liberalism, so I'll just say a few things about that. So I really reject the title of post liberal because I've never been liberal and I'll explain why that is so just to say, I love liberty, I love that. But liberalism has become a very authoritarian ideology. I talk a bit about the lanyard class who don't want you to laugh, who don't want you to speak, and above all don't want you to enjoy yourself ever. But particularly at work, that's really illegal. And so liberalism is both, as we hear at this sort of festival, I think, so it's epistemologically silly and ontologically stupid. Right. So that's roughly where we'll begin. And so, you know, I think it's true to say that choice is overrated, very overrated. So, for example, I didn't choose to be born, I didn't choose who my parents were I didn't choose where I was born, I didn't choose what language I speak, I didn't choose who my relatives were. I've never really made a choice in my life. Things just happen that way. And that's who we are. And we fashion ourselves out of the really confused jumble of an inheritance. So epistemologically, the idea that we're born tabula rasa, the idea that we're born in a clean slate is so silly. I mean, I had to leave academia because I couldn't bear to have those conversations anymore. But then ontologically, it's really bonkers because they don't understand anything about tradition, they don't understand anything about inheritance. They can't conceptualise actually what it means to be human. So the amazing thing is that it lasted so long, I think, but this is over. So what you have is you have a war really by liberals against people, overwhelmingly poor people, working class people, people of faith, which is almost Maoist, you know, that they have to be re educated into being an idiot. That's roughly the program. So as I once watched one episode of, what was it called? Desperate Housewives, I can't remember the name of it, and this woman said, it's so over, they got to find a new word for over, okay? And yet, you know, the archaeology, the deep archaeology and the institutional dominance of this idiocy is still very strong. So basically anybody who disagrees with it, well, you know, I can speak from experience, so I'm a proto fascist, I'm a populist. Lots of really bad things if you challenge fundamental philosophical idiocy. That's where I see the game. So to those of you who read the Guardian, it's not too late, okay? A better life awaits, you know, read the Bible, for example. It's a lot more interesting and informative about our present time. Or Machiavelli, Marx, anything other than that daily, daily vilification of anybody who disagrees with them. And that's where we are. The world is shifting and it's shifting towards fundamentally. So one of I'm a paradox man. So the old is, the new, tradition is modernity. I can defend all those things. I'll just say that the era that we're in, I don't want to call it a new era because of new labor. Like that word new is a really bad word. It's a marketing word, it's a silly word, it's a liberal word, it's new, you know, but it isn't, It's Old. So the new, the world after liberalism is much more recognizable to the vast majority of human civilization. Up to about 1998, you know, you just. It's not that long ago that we took the red pill or was it the blue pill or was it a pink pill? We don't know. But it was a pill that said technology means, market means, communication system means that the nation state doesn't matter anymore, the borders don't matter anymore, that nothing of political substance matters anymore. All we've got to do is have human rights, law and compliance in a multilateral system. That's over. It's really, really, really over. So in this world after liberalism, democratic politics is going to be much more important. That's very scary because we have to actually deal with the fact that our fate is tied with our neighbors and the people that we live with and that they can't be all arrested. That's really difficult. That's, you know, that's. That politics is going to be a lot more volatile, it's going to be a lot more visceral. I could go on about the changes, but essentially if you look at the old era, I noticed that Alistair Campbell, you have someone here who represents in his entirety that view. So you can go and speak to him. Students are more important than soldiers. Finance is more important than industry. Free movement is more important than borders. Choice is more important than tradition. There's a whole load of stuff, you know, TV production is more important than weapons production. But we're now in an age of war, we're in an age of borders, we're in an age of politics and these things. War, democracy, this is just green kryptonite to the liberal mind. So the politics that's going to come and also the old era working class were the left behind. They were the stupid. They basically had to be tended to like indigenous population, kept alive but ignored. Roughly, I would say now they're deciding elections, they're decisive force in the new politics. So it's a very drastic change of time that is happening in, in real time. And obviously what I would like to see is a socialist politics is a very strong democratic politics. And the, the conflict is going to be precisely between two different forms of non liberalism, really. One quite racist, nativist, angry. And it's whether it's possible to liberate ourselves from our progressive delusions and actually engage in the contestation of those things in the next years. But that's the way it's going to go. So that's just my Good morning everybody. It's not my natural habitat Hampstead but I'm trying and Saurabh any thoughts?
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D
Sure, yeah well first of all good to be with Morris. I'm Saurabh Amari. As you can tell by my accent I'm American by choice because I was born in Iran.
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B
But did your parents give you a choice of where to live?
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D
In the sense if you're born in post revolutionary Iran and you're of a certain milieu, you try to get out. So I was not given a choice
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B
but did you get out or did your parents get out?
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D
Just my mother and I. Just my mother.
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B
Whoa, that's nice.
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D
My father never left the old country. I see a copy of the Guardian in this gentleman's bag as you were saying that. Sorry, I didn't mean to inspect someone's
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B
private Tolerance is important post liberal virtue
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D
but so you know as Morris alluded I was well I mean when I was very young I was a college Trotskyist as one is who isn't I
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B
wasn't oh really never tempted me that one Stalinist made me put the wrong
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D
question and then I took the very typical American journey at least as a well trod path of going to the to gradually to the right and that meant the mainstream of the GOP. This is the early Obama era, 2008, 2009, 2010.
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B
So you're a Republican in the Obama era?
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D
Yeah, yeah like a just a kind of standard Romney Republican and I was posted to Britain for the Wall Street Journal editorial page to like preach open borders, lower taxes, kind of the typical liberal or neoliberal agenda and through a series of personal experiences like becoming a father and becoming a Roman Catholic which is an entirely different story.
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B
Big story by the way don't let him get away with all then I became the Roman Catholic for me well
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D
I, I came to be you know, sort of changed my mind and my critics often accusing me of changing my mind frequently but it's not really it's just one like from like a few years as a Trotskyist to becoming a conservative to becoming a different kind of conservative which is fits more comfortably with with Morris's tendency of blue labor. Unfortunately in the United States we don't have a name for it, a language for it but it's this sense that as a conservative I want to preserve certain goods from the devouring maas of the market and in order to do that I think we need labor unions, strong labor unions just in general a vision of society as these blocks of labor, youth, family that are Arrayed against capital as a form of countervailing power. And so it comes down to my favorite FDR quote, which is if you would preserve, you must reform, that is if you want to preserve stability, family flourishing, the kinds of things that my fellow conservatives, people on the right cherish and rightly so. You can't then be a Thatcherite or a Reaganite or a Farage or a Farage wants just finance and bitcoins and so on. Industry matters because unlike other forms of manufacturing or other forms of production, manufacturing is bound to place and it necessarily involves long term investment. The jobs are more stable and a country as a whole is, is safer and more in terms of national security, in terms of self confidence, if it at least makes some things, doesn't mean every single thing has to be made domestically. I'm not like a total autarky, but so it's a kind of a politics that's very hard to place that straddles left and right and my fear. So I am often called a post liberal and I think I embrace the label a little bit more than maybe Morris does. But to me that just means that I don't think that the highest goal of political community is to maximize individual autonomy, but rather to build the common good. And that's the entire pre modern political tradition, roughly you could say translates into we do politics, we are political animals to do things together, to build up the common good. And of course ideological liberalism, not liberty, not the free press, not all the sort of ordinary liberties that Britons and Americans cherish. That's not what I'm talking about. A certain kind of ideological atomizing liberalism attacks the common good. In fact, it cannot conceive of the common good because it privatizes what the good is. Total privatization of the good. So that's the sense in which I'm a post liberal. However, like Morris, there are ways in which you can be a post liberal and ways that there are other ways you can also be a post liberal. There's not one way. And there is a much, I mean much more threatening mode of post liberalism is coming up. I think it's a response to liberalism's deracinating qualities that people are, I see especially on the right in the anglophone world of like extremely overt return of overt racism kind of eugenic. If you're not online, you don't know even what I'm talking about.
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B
But it's really, I'm not online, so tell me.
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D
I know well, this kind of basically the return of craniometry Right. And the kind of IQ worshiping that is not, to my mind, the kind of solidaristic small C and big capital C Catholic worldview that I try to promote. And I think Morris's politics stand for even as he defends the nation as a useful mode of belonging and an important
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B
power. Yeah.
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D
A shield against, again, the market. The nation state can be a bulwark against. Against the market. But there is. There are other tendencies. And sometimes because I'm very online and I see the other modes of post or anti liberalism that are coming up where it's more about attachment to biological race or a kind of Nietzsche and worship of strength.
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B
Yeah.
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D
When I see that, I'm like, well, maybe. Maybe people like me should form a united front with the liberals. The problem is that I just. That would be, you know,
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E
I think
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D
it's Mitterrand who said, you know, the reason we can't go to the period before 1968 is that that period included all the conditions that led to 1968 happening in the first place. And I think there's something similar at work, is that deracinating, ultra individualist, atomizing liberalism leaves people defenseless before the kind of siren song of race, you know, nationalism in its most ugly forms and so on. So that's why I'm still not a liberal. And. Good morning.
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B
Yeah.
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D
So craniometry has been brought up already, but it's a real thing.
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B
It's a real thing. And so just, I mean, Saurabh has alluded to. I don't use the word post ever. I think I know too many academics who have spent their life post something and they never quite arrive anywhere. And also neo, that's another one to be very cautious of. Neoliberalism, you know, this stuff. Yeah. So let's just talk a bit more there about what you're saying Saurabh about. So the first thing that Sarah brought up there, which is really important is that the meaning of the previous era, which I call the era of progressive globalization, it began in 79. Some of us can. We've lived this life. We've actually lived it. I like to say it was mercilessly initiated by Margaret Thatcher and immaculately consummated by Tony Blair. Right. That's the period that we've lived through.
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D
Can I just say, in the US it's the. It began under Carter and was intensified under Reagan.
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B
No, no, I get that now. You could say we don't want to get too involved in internal Labour Party things, so believe me, you don't. But you could say that it was initiated by Callahan and Healey. From 76. We've got a very similar move where there was a total loss of faith in socialist planning, in nationalization, in industrial. That's all part of this is the common sense, this is the way it is. Industry is over and you can either you've got to be cruel, to be kind, you've got to accelerate that. And the basic assumption which is extraordinary for anybody, I think, from labor to hold, but it became the absolutely dominant view is capitalism is good, markets are good, capitalism is good. And I think we've got to look at that because we're here at this thing which says it's philosophical so we can actually have a conversation about this. So what are my two objections to? To capitalism and to liberalism generally. The first thing about liberalism, I go back to the epistemology and the ontology. They genuinely believe that there's a choosing self that's outside all influence. You know, that there's something if you know. And even Descartes can get over the language issue. How do I think, you know, how do I think without language? And how can I use language without inheriting language? How can I be, you know, he came up with that thing, I drink, therefore I am. But it's not good enough really. So it's this mad idea that you are oppressed by your life, by existence, that you have to liberate yourself from existence. So, you know, I can choose if I'm a man to be a woman. It's kind of bonkers, really mad stuff. But it became institutionalized. So that first thing is the epistemology is really stupid and it leads to authoritarianism because it's against actual existing life. So there's that. The second thing with capitalism is because in liberalism nothing is sacred. So human beings and nature are just commodities to be exploited. It's the. Sorry to use it. It's too early for me to say this. I think it's 20 past 10. Okay, apologies. It's commodification. It's turning something that's not produced for sale. Like your children, for example. I don't think you had them to make a profit. I speak as a parent. Didn't turn out that way. Not at all. And it still doesn't turn out that way. I mean, this is a long term debt commitment that seems to never get paid off. And it gets worse, by the way, as they get older. Yeah, I thought, I thought, okay, they're 18.
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D
I have to pay his hockey.
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B
Yeah, hockey, yeah. Just the least of it. Wait, wait till it's a masters, you know, and, and, and so it essentially desecrates life, you know, the dignity. So this is where we really link up on the Catholic social thought is that the dignity of the person is absolutely threatened by an authoritarian state and an avaricious market. And what do you do to protect the human status of people? A huge thing is association. That's the whole point about the trade unions and the. And the labor movement. That's why people like me, you know, I say when it comes to politics, Christ is king and I'm Jewish and it's Rosh Hashanah on Monday. And I still say it because there's something in that about the human person standing up against the desecration and the domination. And then there's the paradox, Sohrab, that the more you stress the individualism, the more people sit as consumers and porn consumers in front of their computers absolutely identical to everybody else. There's an effacement of individuality within that. So that's it. So what I would say about our politics, but please dissent is that without a really resolute opposition to capitalism, post liberalism is just nasty. I see what you think about that.
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D
No, I totally agree. I happen to be trying to think about how Pope. The new Pope, Pope Leo xiv.
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B
Interesting.
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D
Is thinking about AI. He's indicated that he wants to. I think we. It is likely we'll see an encyclical, a kind of major.
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B
We are going to get one.
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D
Yeah, definitely on artificial intelligence. So that took me back to the last Pope Leo, who was Leo XIII in the 19th. In the late 19th century, who launched this whole project of Catholic social teaching with a document called Rerum Novarum. Most people, what they take away from that is that he endorsed labor unions and even the right of workers to take industrial actions. Industrial action under certain conditions has to not transgress good.
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B
It's living labor, dead capital with capital. Capital is a means through which the worker through their own labor, which capital then gets dehumanized. It's an incredible theory.
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D
The worker alienates himself somehow in the commodity. Well, that's more Marx, but.
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B
No, but that's the point. It's all the good bits of Marx without the polytoynbee stuff.
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D
No, I mean they echo each other. I was reading the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes and there's a quote there that says the order of things must not take priority over the order of persons. Things must not take priority over the order of persons. So I'll just conclude very quickly that what's striking about Catholic social teaching is it begins with the same conditions that the socialist movement was diagnosing actually even earlier. The description of what's happening that Pope Leo gives at the beginning of Rerum Novarum, he says the conflict now raging and he says the masses are becoming ever more immiserated. Wealth is getting concentrated in a very few hands, et cetera, et cetera. I sometimes like to read that description at the opening of Rerum Novarum before Catholic and Christian audiences. And what I'll say first is, you know, as Marx said, or as Rosa or some other canonical leftist figure, and people will nod along and only afterward do I reveal that it wasn't Marx or Rosa Luxembourg who wrote that. It was Pope Leo XIII.
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B
And by the way, that was all 1891 was also, you know, William Booth and Cardinal Manning. They led the dock strike. The East London doc strike. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that was the formation of the Labour Representation Commission, which then became the Labour Party. So another thing is historically the Labour movement was formed by dissenting and Catholic Christians who knew.
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D
And when Cardinal Manning is this great, he's from Hertfordshire, this great Catholic convert, he was an Anglican, but then became Catholic and became Archbishop of Westminster and sided with the workers and became this great labor negotiator. Quite unlikely figure during the, the dock strike. And as a tribute to what he did, of course his work informed Rerum Novarum, this law foundational document. When he died, the dock workers put out a, through their union, put out a statement that said, the dock workers of London would like to acknowledge that in the death of Cardinal Manning, they've lost their very best friend. That was very beautiful. But the point is, it begins with the same diagnosis of what society is like under the reign of the market. But the solution that Catholic social thought takes up, which I think is also the Morris solution, the one that I prefer is ultimately it's class reconciliation. It is not full on social thought,
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B
but not so quickly. There's gotta be class consciousness, there's gotta be a labor movement, there's gotta be a recognition, there's friction between the two.
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D
Right? It's not just like, oh, well, I'm gonna exhaust, exhort you to be good to each other, but rather, yeah, there's
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B
got to be power, counter mutual interests. So it's returned to interest. So we've got to, I'm told, we've got to finish up. So I'll just say a few things just before we get, you know, about the world after liberalism. So what you see here, and it's very unsettling, is that the new era is also an era of faith. Islam is going to be a hugely important force. Sunni Islam, I think Islamism also, this Protestant nationalist is going to be a big deal and we can't run away from that. There's got to be some engagement. We can't hold on to this. Look at France, I mean, it's. It's bonkers. They can't deal with any of their issues conceptually because of the. Because of the nature of the constitution. It's going to be anti capitalist. That's going to be a very big feature in terms of the politics. One way I talk about it is a big shift from diversity to solidarity. How do you build solidarity? How do you build a common good is going to be at the forefront of the politics. And I think now we have reached the end of our conversation and now we've been through.
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C
You've been listening to A World After Liberalism with Saurabh Amari and Maurice Glassman. Whether liberalism is facing a temporary crisis or the end of an era remains an open question. But at the iai, we are dedicated to bringing you the speakers which are challenging these big questions. Political loyalties shift, new ideologies emerge. But debates about freedom, authority, community and the common good are becoming increasingly urgent for the left and for the right. If the liberal order is giving way, the question is no longer simply what has gone wrong, but what kind of society should replace it? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review philosophy for our Times on Apple, podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. It really does help us reach more people and discover the world's leading thinkers and their ideas. For more talks, articles, debates and videos, please go to IAI tv. For more philosophy, politics, science and culture. From all of us at Philosophy for Our Times, thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
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E
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