Liberalism as Greek Tragedy

The character of Liberalism can be seen as manifesting both the heroic qualities and fatal flaws of a Greek tragedy.

Graham Cunningham is a former lecturer and writer based in Dorset, England. He is the author of the Slouching Towards Bethlehem substack and his work has been featured in The New Criterion, The American Conservative, and Quadrant.

The idea that Western Liberalism is in an existential crisis has become a given on the intellectual Right. This essay reflects on that crisis as if the final act of a Greek tragedy in which the tragic end of the protagonist’s story was implicit in its beginning.

The story of Liberalism’s three-century arc is of this nature in my view. I will also borrow from Greek tragedy the idea that eventual downfall could spring from either one of two distinct forces. It may be the future’s payback for the protagonist’s naivety or hubris, or it may simply be written in the stars.

I do not see it as necessarily a tragedy in the more commonly used sense of the word. I have no clear view of what the postliberal future holds for Western Civilisation. However, I suspect that its conceptions of liberty, freedom, democracy, and the pursuit of happiness will depart – perhaps quite radically – from those still clung to by its current liberal establishment.

How might this framing inform an understanding of Liberalism’s history.....its glorious rise to a civilizational zenith, I will leave it to the reader to put a date on that, and its tragic down slope thereafter? Conceived of in this way, the character of Liberalism can be seen as manifesting both the heroic qualities and fatal flaws of a Greek tragedy:

1. Naivety and hubris are there in the Enlightenment conceit that an ever-advancing progress for mankind can be brought about by politicians and their political parties, and that human nature can be moulded and remoulded to bring about universal harmony and contentment. (This utopian project can be said to have begun with the French Revolution.)

2. The hand of fate can be seen in Liberal individualism’s awesome capacity for inventing tools of ever-increasing sophistication. These tools will then change its world in ways that could never have been imagined at the outset.

Politics to the Rescue?

For many Westerners who loathe the turn that Liberalism took in the Twenty-First Century, it is seductive to see, in Trumpist-type populism, signs that the hyper-progressive tide is finally turning. I will argue, though, that those who dream of a return to a saner, more ‘classical’ liberalism of past times are likely to be disappointed. That whilst a profound shape-shift is indeed underway in America’s political order, other forces are also to be reckoned with that no politicians or politics can control.

There are two fundamental ways of thinking about politics: a limited conception and a grandiose one. The limited one is about negotiating conflicts of interest among the citizenry. The grandiose one is the idea of bringing about ‘progress’ by political means.

Due to the dominance of this latter conception in the modern era, we in the liberal West have been schooled into an expectation that there will always be, or should be, a political solution to society’s ills. There is not, but the expectation can lead people down some deep rabbit holes.

In the past sixty years, conservative-minded voters have been figuratively scratching their heads in dismay at the relentless advance of the hyper-progressive mentality throughout all walks of life; not just Politics per se, but control of every public institution and multiple intrusions even into the private domain. Nevertheless, most conservatives still share with leftists the notion that political change would be the answer to their societal discontents.¹

And political journalism, right across the Left/Right spectrum, has one common thread. It is brimful of ‘we’ should do this and ‘we’ need to do that. We should be making the world fairer to perceived ‘victims’ or should be rolling back all that bogus ‘social justice’ nonsense. At both ends is a fixation on someone to blame for perceived ills.

On the Left, an oppressor/victim psychosis has run riot, giving us the ‘woke’ madness we currently endure. Meanwhile, on the Right, this who to blame mentality can lead to all kinds of conspiracy theories, such as seeing wokeness as having been deliberately imposed on us normal everyday citizenry by some-or-other kind of 'elite' (‘techno bros’, ‘cultural Marxists’, ‘managerial classes,’ etc). These ‘elites’ – so the argument runs – are ‘in control’ and must be defeated in order to bring an end to the madness.

But this is to seriously misread the nature of our twenty-first-century Western malaise; the most salient feature of which is that it has become out of control by anyone. Rather, it is a kind of mass psychosis that ensnares everyone – rich and poor, young and old.

And these ’we should’ incantations are, in any case, merely rhetorical since there is in fact no ‘we’ in this collective-common-good sense. There are individuals with individual votes (necessarily of little account collectively speaking). There are pressure groups and ‘activists’ with often excessive collective power to push their minority agendas. And there are elected governments with ‘democratic’ agendas endlessly subverted by those pressure groups.

Another mistake is to give too much prominence to the idea of wokeness as a toxic ideology. Toxic it certainly is, but it is way too confused and self-contradictory to count as any kind of intellectual system, however wrong-headed. Its essence, rather, is a social psychology. This psychology is hugely seductive because it makes for feeling deliciously personally righteous.

Put another way, wokeness is not Marxism in extremis – it is liberal individualism in extremis. So if one is of the kind that thinks of all these we shoulds as mere windy rhetorical self-indulgence, how then must one account for oneself?

Does one deserve to be dismissed as a ‘quietist’? I think not. Growing older has made me ever more skeptical of politics-with-a-capital-P as a perspective on the complexity of things. And to lean instead towards To Everything There Is a Season, zeitgeist-wise.²

Losing Our Religion?

It has become a commonplace on the intellectual Right to view social justice as a kind of quasi-religious mutation of the Christianity that birthed it, but now stripped of its transcendent spiritual dimension.

Social justice, as a political project, can be viewed as a kind of egalitarian evangelism. Society must be made to love us equally and must not be allowed to be ‘unfair.’ However, this ‘fairness’ has been outsourced from the individual to the system.

When I was growing up in the '50s, there were still some remnants of the old Christian moral sense that everyone, including oneself, has a good side and a bad side. That while we are all capable of good deeds, we are all of us also prone to sin and error.

Liberalism’s ‘centre’ was still holding....just about. But to borrow a perhaps overused Yeatsian line, in 2025, Liberalism’s falcon can no longer hear the falconer, and the centre no longer seems to be holding.

I have never read Spengler’s Decline of the West, but the idea that every civilization will eventually – sooner or later – fall apart seems axiomatic. The laws of entropy will apply; why would an exception be made for Liberalism?

But equally, any but the vaguest predictions and timescales for what will come after may also prove foolish and hubristic. I will nevertheless make this one general observation: the future – whatever it is – will, barring nuclear annihilation, be driven far more by technology than by politics.

Biotechnology, military technology, and, above all, an ever-evolving technology of mass communication will be the forces that shape the future. Over the past thirty years, the internet has overwhelmingly been the great bringer of change in how people live, and in ways that we have only begun to comprehend.

The Medium Is the Mentality?

The possibility of mass communication between friends and strangers near and far is one of Western liberal individualism’s great achievements. Before the age of mass media, most people knew relatively little of the world beyond their direct experience, but what they did know, they knew intimately.

Yes, such knowledge was still subject to myth, rumor, and Chinese whispers, but it was at least possible for the sane, sober individual to be ‘well informed’ about this more confined, localized universe. Information about the world beyond was scarce.

The downside of this awesome technological inventiveness is that it cannot comprehend any possible need for boundaries; human or otherwise. In our digital age, the ‘supply’ of information/disinformation now greatly exceeds the ‘demand’ for it.

This ‘information’ deluge is of such a scale that even the most informed struggle to intelligently parse and filter it. Every citizen now comes to pick up – often barely even noticing it – political ‘opinions’ about all sorts of stuff, including much that they are not even particularly interested in.

In this way, the centre-unravelling beliefs of hyper-progressivism come to be absorbed in insidious dilutions by almost everyone. And into this information/disinformation supply-side log jam, along came Facebook et al, a social media party-time, tailor-made for the uncurious and suggestible.

Another crucial aspect of mass media – one that is widely underappreciated – is that it affords a disproportionate 'voice' to certain kinds of people – the one-track-minded, the politically obsessed 'activist', the loud-mouthed narcissist, the permanent malcontent. Anyone who has a reasonably balanced life is far less likely to be a media-type person.

In these ways, mass communications technology has been bringing the curtain down on the Age of Reason for a good while. That Age of Reason was, in any case, never the great universal liberation of pop-historical record. It was the dream-child of an intellectual elite and emerging bourgeoisie.

La Liberté was a very alluring abstraction for those classes, but in reality a somewhat exclusive one. A future where those toiling masses might also want their Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of it is an outcome the Enlightenment philosophes could never have imagined. And our Western intelligentsia has been coming up with ever more alluring, but often foolish and hubristic, abstractions ever since.

If I were to single out one that I think marked a tipping point in Liberalism’s arcing trajectory, it would be Relativism. This began as an esoteric fringe art movement of little interest to any but a cognoscenti. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, it went mainstream.

The insidious concept took hold, no longer just of the visual arts but ‘progressively’ of social norms and eventually pretty much everything. The consequences have been huge.

It went from (circa 1910) browbeating the hoi polloi into seeing abstract squiggles on a canvas as an advance on the works of a Raphael or Vermeer, to (circa 1970) a cultural milieu in which the general public were given to understand, ex cathedra, that “all your traditions – your beliefs about the nature of what is right and true – are all wrong think”.

Liberalism, fused with relativism as a philosophical framework, became woefully unequipped to set any common sense boundaries. To say: No, not everything is as good as everything else. Eventually, in our time, it became Wokeness, that huge, ugly brat child making shrill demands that nobody tell it anything it does not wish to hear....I think (I am a woman), therefore I am, etc, etc.

Will the Western collective psyche ever back itself out of this relativist rabbit hole? Probably eventually, but I am not holding my breath.

On the other hand, I am not mentally carrying a We Are Doomed sign board on my back either. I suspect that a postliberal age may well engender as much Jeffersonian Happiness – in aggregate – as the one which is now passing into history. The technological wizardry and industrial revolutions that Western Liberalism began, now seem to have outgrown it (witness SE Asia).

Meanwhile, the ideal of a citizenry as politically independent-minded, empirical-evidence-driven beings – the philosophical keystone on which the citadel of liberal democracy was built – seems as remote as ever...perhaps because ultimately such an ideal is contrary to human nature.

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1. In my use of the term, ‘conservative’ is (broadly speaking) synonymous with ‘the grown-ups’ among the Western citizenry.

2. A notion brought to those of my generation, not from Ecclesiastes 3 but from the 1965 hit song Turn Turn Turn.