JOHN GRAY ON WHY I'M NOT A POST LIBERAL
Do you agree : the state intervenes to enforce the rules of co-existence, not to manufacture a morally DEI-correct “progressive” citizenry....
John Gray thinks mixing up security (=the job of the state) with moral re-education is politically fatal because all you'll wind up with is the backlash you fear most. We don't want a virtue-signaling state, we want a strong and neutral state... didn't we separate church and state a long time ago?
Gray says liberals believe tolerance and discussion and debate will lead to better outcomes, but he says he is a Hobbesian in the sense that "rubbing along" ( as he calls tolerance of disagreement) is a good idea not because it leads to harmony but because the alternative - intolerance of people you disagree with - is far worse, as history shows.
Liberals think the state is there to ensure order if groups fail to rub along. Gray's idea is liberalism brings you peace, but NOT liberalism as a Moral Crusade.
But then how strong should this strong Hobbesian state be? It's not there to force DEI conformance... How is a Hobbesian state working for order any different from the curtailment of "rights" that people in the UK already endure?
These are just random thoughts... Gray does nail it though when he says that outsourcing value-laden decisions to technocrats is an administrative approach that is never going to work, because the whole problem is the clashes of values between subgroups, and that's what politics is there to solve.
He says somewhere near the beginning that Enlightenment liberalism just can't work because it assumes one rational set of universal values, whereas we've got all these different cultural subgroups vying for power and resources.
Post-liberalism, like Alasdair MacIntyre, on the other hand is no better - a) it thinks that classical liberalism, in the face of all these different subgroups, "hollowed out" what was once a shared moral culture, and b) post liberalism dreams of restoring a thick moral unity that never in actual fact existed.
The post-libs argue liberal neutrality is incoherent; you need politics to push common moral goods. As we've seen, Gray does not agree.
But pushing common moral goods often ends up hunting minorities as spoilers... If you assume consensus is natural, you are right and dissent is wrong and looks like sabotage, so the state needs to go after dissenters. How's that different from what we've got?
And so, would (a return to) cultural homogeneity (eg Britain the 1950s) bring seamless moral unity? High conformity, certainly. But also rigid gender roles, criminalisation of homosexuality, colonial wars (Kenya, Malaya)... If you look at the history of our gallant country, it's a bit of a myth to think that there were ever peaceful pastoral scenes - we even chopped off the head of our king... Axe, not guillotine.
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