Government, the State, and Freedom (3) - John Gray's Account

Image credit.Continued from Government, the State, and Freedom (2) - John Gray's  Account

The Substitution of Logic by Aesthetic Consonance

On reading Gray's chapter 9 on "The Liberal State," in his concise "Liberalism," perhaps the most astounding and reverberant impression is that liberal doctrine may be overestimating its ability to identify analytically and prescribe politically practical policies of whose benevolence and effectiveness it can be sure. 

Yes, there is a matrix of robust conditions of freedom, that cloud of nodes consisting of clouds of nodes which I have described here as The Point Cloud of Freedom. 

There are relatively general conditions of freedom that relate to each other as a flexible yet connected network, whose adaptable coherence shapes feasible freedom. Paradoxically, these interacting nodes of the network of freedoms are presumably as hardy and effective as they are because they betray a certain vagueness and indeterminacy that do not always warrant definitive, characteristically liberal conclusions in the face of concrete issues. 

The outrage of many liberals at the presence of the state in innumerable concerns of modern life may be due to their overlooking the vast range of uncertainties and indeterminacies surrounding the amply supplied question whether to choose a hands-off attitude or whether to take some form of initiative in the face of a challenging social phenomenon. There is no reason why liberals should be less likely to be wrong in their assessment of the challenge (a problem to be removed or a prospect for improvement) than those who are confident of alleviating the issue at hand by some kind of active engineering.

Freedom is actually silent on many of the issue that the liberal is tempted to confidently judge in a way that is not logically compelling but appears to be so merely because it is attuned to an aesthetic sense that tells him whether a wording, a metaphor, the suggestiveness of symbols do or do not resonate properly with his ideological preconceptions.

It is precisely when good ideas attached to a wider world-view run out of determinacy that we are incited to complete the missing compulsion of logic through aesthetic choices which exhilarate us by giving the sure impression that our conclusions chime in with the full tree of ramifications that seems to be according our ideology the cutting edge of incontrovertibly.

When Do We Know That We Do Not Know What We Are Talking About?

This is a huge problem in discussions and decisions that aim at settling complex social issues.

In other posts I shall spell out more fully that I regard freedom as a modus vivendi that accommodates the high likelihood of people making false, yet far-reaching claims and taking incompetent decisions, by reducing their frequency, duration, and intensity as well as defusing their consequences.

Freedom not only expedites our resourcefulness, she is also a strong cushion aborbing our incompetence.

When Good Patterns Become a Fetish

It is not uncommon for liberals to sport a penchant for general rules whose reliability and fairness they cherish in contrast to the messy results of ad hoc judgements. But what if the regularities that we must presume to be underlying the applicability of general principles are either unknown, unknowable, ill-conceived and wrong, or simply do not exist? What if muddling though by piecemeal, cautious trial and error is the superior variant?

Also, a set of principles that works for certain concerns may not apply to others. From the right to free expression, which may compellingly defended in a certain situation, I cannot in general conclude who has won a debate.

Well established in a range of situations, the reasonableness of certain preferences - like the avoidance of arbitrary behaviour - may in other contexts not reach as far as thought. At some point avoidance of arbitrariness may lose substantive meaning and become chant and charm rather than being supported by a viable explanation of the world. It mutates from a problem-solving means into an identity-preserving form of self-assurance.

Liberals may know far less about "the right kind of state" than they think. Which can be tragic if what they do know about it is dramatically important, but confined in the number of correct conclusions to be drawn from the fundamentals.

Liberty does not give us detailed instructions for understanding the full range of positives and negatives inhering in the social technology that we call the state. We have to learn about these from an enduring condition of mutual disagreement.

Continued in Government, the State, and Freedom (4) - John Gray's Account.