℞

Take the laissez-faire market fundamentalism (but none of the skepticism) out of classical liberalism, add in the important progress in economic thought in the first half-and-a-bit of the twentieth century, don’t pretend two world wars didn’t happen, or four or five major recessions including two global financial crises. Acknowledge the important developments and accept the mathematics of financial economics (before everybody started to get carried away and make really silly simplifying assumptions (then ignored the reality that they had made those assumptions)).

Acknowledge also the significance of critical theory in Frankfurt then New York (via Zurich) then Frankfurt again (see ∋ below), the American empirical political critical realists (Mills, Domhoff) and the genius of Rawls’ veil of ignorance, and you are making a good start.

Then acknowledge the impact of technological progress (especially in cramming circuits on a circuit board) and the resulting astonishing increase in computing capacity, the progress in genetics and genomics, in pharmacology, in anaesthesia, in the micro-biological understanding of evolution and natural selection and the macro-biology of connecting eco-systems, and of the physics of atmospheric absorption of photons, inhibiting release of terrestrial thermal radiation, without which most, possibly all, life on Earth could not exist.

Then think through Exxon’s suppression of its research in the 1970s on the likely impact of fossil fuel combustion on that phenomenon and on global thermal retention and its subsequent active campaign to discredit other such research elsewhere. Sobering. Trampling on the heads, shoulders & ethics of giants, perhaps.

Try taking institutional economics seriously, even (or, perhaps, especially) Galbraith. Realise that many economists of the Chicago school made profound contributions to our thinking, especially Knight, Coase, Stigler and Becker and, yes, even the positivism and the monetary discipline of Friedman. Read all the Popper (especially on fallibilism) and all the Dewey (especially on certainty) and all the Arendt (especially On Totalitarianism) you can find, and you’ll be even closer. Then acknowledge that it is (or should be) possible to reconcile Aristotlean virtue ethics with consequentialism in a pragmatic setting (Dewey again, and some James). Re-read Toffler’s The Third Wave.

Then get going on the systems and complexity theorists. Start with Bateson and don’t stop at Lorenz.

Then, sit and watch a whoop (yes, seriously, a whoop) of chimpanzees for an hour (at your local zoo is fine, even if it forces you to wonder why upper primates are in captivity).

And don’t forget to add a pinch of salt. And read Plato’s Crito.

Ahhhhh. Doesn’t that feel better? That feeling is the comforting knowledge that there is no monopoly on reason (and, conversely, no monopoly on unreason) and that synthesis is spelled with a y.

∋

While basking in the warm feeling of a more mature liberalism, we must pause to reflect on the significance of Adorno’s negative dialectic of the critique of culture, which included the challenging phrase: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” We cannot simply gloss past the profound challenge to post-Enlightment liberalism that Adorno’s critique represents, or disregard critical thought or critical theory as heretical to the liberal position simply because it is uncomfortable or challenges our received wisdoms (a Galbraith coinage, incidentally). Too many people paid too high a price for us, now, to allow that to happen or to allow the events to which Adorno refers to be repeated (pace post-colonial Indian partition, Biafra, the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia, Srebrenica, Kibungo Prefecture in Rwanda, the Simchat Torah massacre of 2023 and too many other instances).

Sure, get comfortable, but never too comfortable. There is much still to be done.