Liberalism and Its Discontents

This is a book I need to read...

Liberalism and Its Discontents, by Francis Fukuyama

Here's the description from Amazon …

An audiobook about the challenges to liberalism from the right and the left by the bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order.

Classical liberalism is in a state of crisis. Developed in the wake of Europe’s wars over religion and nationalism, liberalism is a system for governing diverse societies, which is grounded in fundamental principles of equality and the rule of law. It emphasizes the rights of individuals to pursue their own forms of happiness free from encroachment by government.

It's no secret that liberalism didn't always live up to its own ideals. In America, many people were denied equality before the law. Who counted as full human beings worthy of universal rights was contested for centuries, and only recently has this circle expanded to include women, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and others. Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning. As the renowned political philosopher Francis Fukuyama shows in Liberalism and Its Discontents, the principles of liberalism have also, in recent decades, been pushed to new extremes by both the right and the left: neoliberals made a cult of economic freedom, and progressives focused on identity over human universality as central to their political vision. The result, Fukuyama argues, has been a fracturing of our civil society and an increasing peril to our democracy.

In this clear account of our current political discontents, Fukuyama offers an essential defense of a revitalized liberalism for the twenty-first century.

The part of this description that caught my eye is the phrase "Developed in the wake of Europe’s wars over religion and nationalism, …".  Humanity's current digression is rooted in religion and nationalism.  It's destroying the United States as we speak, but we're seeing its effects globally.  This relates to another book by Fukuyama that I just finished reading …

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

Religion and nationalism both support a desire to be a part of something that can be distinguished from a "them".  Without an imagined opponent "Conservatives complain that liberalism empties the common life of meaning." What a shallow life conservatives lead where conflict, even imagined conflict, is the only way to find meaning in life.

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel comes to mind.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

-- New International Version 

It's hard to say if there's any fact in this story, but it's a good metaphor for how humans have come to behave. "Language" is a euphemism for belief system.   Conflicting belief systems reduce cooperation and collaboration.  They drive us apart.  Human potential is diminished due to this propensity for conflict vs. cooperation.  Anything that creates an identity that goes against cooperation, us vs. them, is "The Lord" confusing our language.

I have as many issues with the "identity politics" on the left as I do with religion and nationalism.  They're both broken from the perspective of enabling humans to achieve their full potential.  If you need to be part of a group, a least be a human.  This, of course, leads to a discussion about humanity's complete inability to deal with other forms of intelligence (e.g. AI), but that's a different discussion.