A draft I meant to post ages ago, edited somewhat:
In an article on ABC Religion and Ethics, John Millbank critiques liberalism (in the classical sense) for being paradoxically unliberal. His argument is that liberalism tends to use the freedoms it’s defending as an excuse to curtail and even eradicate those freedoms.
… increasingly, liberal politics revolves around supposedly guarding against alien elements: the terrorist, the refugee, the person of another race, the foreigner, the criminal, and so on. Populism seems more and more to be an inevitable drift of unqualified liberal democracy.
Consequently, the purported defence of liberal democracy itself is often used in order to justify the suspension of democratic decision-making and civil liberties. And so, somewhat paradoxically, it is liberalism that tends to suspend those values of liberality – fair trial, right to a defence, assumed innocence, habeas corpus, a measure of free speech and free [sic]enquiry, good treatment of the convicted – which it has taken over, but which as a matter of historical record it did not invent.
Millbank argues for a more inclusive application of “liberality” — one could also say “generosity” — appealing to premodern legal and social traditions. Marilynne Robinson employs to the same term in her essay “Hallowed be Your Name,” translating the Hebrew word ndb.
Ndb—let us call it “liberality”—occurs in a context that continually reinforces an ethic of liberality, that is, the Old Testament. The many economic laws God gives to Israel as a society are full of provisions for the widow and the orphan, the poor and the stranger. And the abuses the prophets decry most passionately are accumulations of wealth in contempt of these same laws.
What’s interesting about this is that Millbank is a Catholic appealing to premodern traditions, while Robinson is a liberal Protestant who appeals to Modern traditions, particularly Calvinism and American interpretations of the very Liberalism that Millbank decries.1 Yet both aim their critiques at the same target — Enlightenment conceptions of free-market capitalism — and both look to the same alternative, an ethic of liberality and generosity.
This ethic of liberality that Millbank and Robinson propose bears some resemblance to Thomas Friedman’s “ethic of conservation,” proposed in Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Unlike Robinson and Millbank, Friedman takes the free market as a given and sees it as a good thing. But he’s no libertarian; the best solution to the current energy/economic/ecological crisis is, he argues, the imposition of a floor price on carbon fuels along with other regulatory measures, so that the use of carbon fuels becomes prohibitively expensive and alternatives become economically appealing.
But Friedman insists that an “ethic of conservation” is still necessary, because cheap, guilt-free, green energy will allow people unrestricted use of technology, which could lead to even more destructive behaviors. If we’re to avoid becoming victims of our own success, we can’t rely on the market for guidance. A profound change in the way we think and act must be fostered on a cultural level, much as Millbank and Robinson in the case of liberality.
- Although it’s worth noting that John Calvin’s theological project was centered on reviving certain Augustinian concepts, and Milbank’s thinking has been strongly influenced by Augustine, so he and Robinson share that foundation underneath their apparently distinctive Christian traditions. [↩]