Liberalization Requires Belief System Transformation

A prominent Turkish professor of political theory once remarked to me: “We classical liberals have been trying to spread liberal ideas in the Muslim world for at least three decades, but we’ve had so little success.” Indeed, several liberal NGOs and think tanks have been active in the Islamic world since the 1990s. They have done a lot of good work, but none has achieved major impact. Why?

Liberals in Western societies often assume that non- or quasi-liberal societies can liberalize simply by adopting liberal political and economic institutions such as individual rights, the rule of law, checks and balances, and the free market. Sometimes they assume that liberalization can happen through reading Locke, Mill, or Hayek. Both assumptions ignore something important.

In the first case, institutions can go only so far in the liberalization of a nonliberal society. They may even be dependent on other—intellectual and moral— factors, such as certain beliefs and character traits. In the second, Western liberal thinkers like Mill or Hayek are not part of the semiospheres of the belief systems (comprehensive doctrines) popular in nonliberal societies. Even the word ‘liberal’ is still an isolated, “foreign” concept with little history in these societies. It is frequently derided and certainly untrusted. Belief systems and political identities have their own logic that makes them reject foreign elements just as a body rejects a transplanted organ. They often evolve organically from their own internal dynamics.

The role that belief systems play in liberalization is not well understood. Try to imagine a society with all the requisite liberal institutions, but whose citizens adhere to revolutionary communism, white supremacism, or religious fundamentalism. Such a society is unimaginable because it has never existed. Liberal institutions without reasonable belief systems would crumble. They would be captured, eroded, or hollowed out.

We need an account of “reasonable belief systems” that support liberal institutions. I take it that such systems have two features: moral and intellectual. Morally reasonable systems endorse fair cooperation. Intellectually reasonable systems accept reasonable disagreement. Endorsing fair cooperation means endorsing liberty, equality, and fairness as a reasonable tradeoff between the first two. Note that fairness doesn’t entail redistribution by the state because it can be achieved by philantrophy. Reasonable disagreement means disagreement generated by the underdetermination of belief systems by evidence. The idea of underdetermination, familiar in the philosophy of science, holds that scientific theories and hypotheses are underdetermined by evidence, and this is why scientific community is split into multiple research programs in most fields.

The same phenomenon is operative in political life. Citizens split into multiple belief systems because evidence underdetermines the available systems and political views. Pro-choice vs pro-life, theists vs atheists, utilitarians vs deontologists—empirical and moral underdetermination underlies these intractable debates. I don’t mean to say that all views are equally right or anything goes (some views are indeed objectively wrong), but that evidence supports multiple yet rival stances, often differentially.

Once a system endorses fair cooperation and accepts reasonable disagreement, it becomes a reasonable system. How can we operationalize these two features of reasonableness? Endorsing fair cooperation should make a system allow its adherents to cooperate on fair grounds without claims of political superiority. It shouldn’t preach that the adherents of other systems are political subordinates to be dominated or enemies to be eradicated by force. So the claim to political superiority and the exhortation of eradication by force are clear elements of moral unreasonableness.

An intellectually reasonable system accepts reasonable disagreement: it does not teach that all other systems are totally confused, wrong, vicious, or even dangerous. It accepts that some other systems make sense too, perhaps for certain people or in certain contexts. It doesn’t accuse other systems for being totally intellectually useless or dangerous. So, the accusation of total intellectual failure is a clear element of intellectual unreasonableness. In evaluating systems for reasonableness, the focus should be on their prevalent, living interpretations rather than solely on their canonical texts, though such texts naturally provide the foundations of such interpretations. A religious scripture might contain verses exhorting the eradication of infidels by force, or a philosophical text might contain racist remarks. If the prevalent interpretation of the system rejects such passages, that interpretation is reasonable.

Belief systems evolve. When a system comes to endorse fair cooperation and accept reasonable disagreement, I call this transformation philosophical liberalization. Thus, philosophical liberalization is a matter of belief system revision.

Belief systems are structured like webs. At the center are core beliefs that give the system its identity. The more you go further away from the center, the more peripheral beliefs become. A visual illustrates:

Belief systems have two major impulses: a conservative impulse to preserve as much of the existing system as possible, and a coherentist impulse to maintain the overall coherence of the system.

Philosophical liberalization is a gradual process of holistic belief revision. The system strives to preserve its core beliefs to avoid disintegration. Changes start at the periphery and gradually advance toward the center. Counterevidence is first absorbed by revising peripheral beliefs. Only accumulated inconsistencies lead to radical change at the center. Philosophical liberalization occurs not by confronting core beliefs, which backfires by making the system more conservative, but by revising unreasonable peripheral beliefs or sometimes reinterpreting unreasonable core beliefs.

When popular systems in a society transform into reasonable versions of themselves (that is, when they reach consensus or convergence on fair cooperation and reasonable disagreement), a liberal regime is possible. The following visual illustrates the intellectual structure of a liberal regime:

Philosophical liberalization offers a realistic, workable model of how nonliberal societies can liberalize from their own internal dynamics. People don’t abandon their cherished systems and identities overnight. Expecting a Muslim- or Confucian-majority society to first adopt Lockeanism or Hayekianism as a prerequisite for building a liberal regime is unrealistic. If such societies are to liberalize, a key component of this transformation is the spread of the reasonable versions of belief systems prevalent in these societies.

I’ve developed this model of philosophical liberalization primarily to show the role that belief systems play in liberalization. But it also provides an insight into the very nature of liberalism. It suggests that liberalism, at its core, is a theory of reasonableness. Liberalism offers to all citizens, each with their favorite belief system, a social contract they can endorse while remaining committed to their systems, which often constitute their social identities. The contract manages intellectual conflict peacefully, for the benefit of all.

Unlike any other ideology, liberalism doesn’t—or shouldn’t—expect people to abandon their systems to become committed to the liberal project. Citizens can continue to be nationalists, conservatives, socialists, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Confucians, and so on. As long as they adopt a reasonable version of these systems (a version that accepts fair cooperation and reasonable disagreement), they are committed to the liberal project, and in this sense, they are liberal.

The word ‘liberal’ is better understood as an adjective than a noun if we go beyond theory and look at social reality. Contemporary liberal theorists are often liberal as noun: they typically accept liberalism as a belief system of its own, a distinct identity. But most citizens in contemporary liberal societies do not embrace liberalism as noun. They identify primarily with their nation, Protestantism, Catholicism, secular atheism, utilitarianism, and other belief systems. Liberal societies don’t have a large (classical or comprehensive) liberal constituency. They even often lack a liberal political party (in the classical or comprehensive sense of ‘liberal’). How can we call these societies ‘liberal’ if most of their citizens (and political parties) adopt belief systems other than (a classical or comprehensive form of) liberalism? The liberal character of these societies is secured by the reasonable folks of all stripes: reasonable nationalists, reasonable conservatives, reasonable Catholics, and so on. The fact that liberal thinkers are often liberal as noun makes us ignore this social reality.

What is more, liberalism arose as an adjective too, not as a noun. When Locke formulated a compelling liberal theory for the first time, it was offered as part of his broader interpretation of Christianity, not as a belief system of its own. He even published a book titled The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695). While Locke’s liberalism was the political theory of reasonable Christianity, post-Locke liberals such as Kant, Mill, Spencer, Mises, Popper, and Hayek gradually consolidated liberalism and turned it into a noun, a secular belief system distinct from others. By the time when liberalism became consolidated around the mid-19th century, visible in the establishment of the Liberal Party in the UK in 1859, liberal intellectuals growingly began seeing other systems as rival to liberalism whereas this would be unintelligible for someone like Locke who didn’t even use the word ‘liberal’ for a belief system or an identity.

This model of philosophical liberalization helps understand the political transformation of belief systems into a liberal direction and vice versa. Take the revolutionary Marxism of the 19th century. The Frankfurt School and critical theory liberalized Marxism to a significant extent in the 20th century, culminating in the rise of Habermas as a leading liberal theorist. Unreasonable forms of Marxism still exist, but certain forms of Marxism have been liberalizing for a century. Similarly, there are reasonable and unreasonable versions of nationalism, Confucianism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and other religions, which are the most popular belief systems around the world.

By laying bare the core of liberalism (i.e., reasonableness), the model of philosophical liberalization offers a new perspective on the future of liberalism and its global prospects. It is likely that Western thinkers will find it difficult to notice the liberalization of nonliberal societies, especially if such societies have unfamiliar political and economic institutions, because these thinkers are often not very familiar with the belief systems of nonliberal societies. Also, the reasonableness of belief systems in Western liberal societies is crucial for sustaining the liberal character of these societies. Liberal institutions are vital, but the health of belief systems are essential as well. To help keep these systems reasonable, liberal thinkers, even though they come to adopt liberalism as a noun, might want to remain anchored in and provide guidance to their original epistemic communities, which might otherwise drift in unreasonable directions.

Philosophical liberalization is an arduous process that can go wrong in many ways. It may fail due to the suppression by incumbent governments. It may succeed in the minds of a few thinkers but be rejected by the public. It may succeed in public but provoke a powerful backlash from traditionalists. And so forth. Still, moral progress happens. I’ve introduced philosophical liberalization as a useful conceptual tool to study one form of this progress.

Contributor

Ismail Kurun

Affiliated Graduate Fellow