Does Liberalism Lead Inevitably to Cascades of Tragedies of the Commons?

Canadian political philosopher George Grant argues that Liberalism is the political philosophy that makes freedom the absolute value of political life and if deeply embraced, the absolute value of personal life too. If freedom really is the essence of human existence, then based on this outlook one's priority will always be to seek to limit freedom to the least extent possible. But I wonder if this emphasis has a certain kind of fundamental risk to it related to the phenomenon of the tragedy of the commons.

John Stuart Mill certainly helped clarify the Liberal approach for the budding Whig and Liberal political parties of the 19th century.  One's freedom should not be limited unless it could be seen to directly cause harms to others. "Liberal" democratic societies, therefore, should continuously experiment with withdrawing limitations on freedom. According to Mill, the happy byproduct of this approach would be a better society for everyone because individuals are better than governments to explore and understand the possibilities (plans of life) that can make them, and potentially others, more happy.

We have lived with this approach being the predominant approach in industrialized countries for last century and a half. With the aid of abundant fossil energy it has produced a global culture of affluence for many. But we also seem beset by a growing array of crises, that seem to have the hallmarks of instances of tragedies of the commons (soil crisis, fish crisis, water crisis, extinction crisis, debt crisis, pollution crisis, climate crisis, energy crisis, democratic deficit, automation crisis, obesity crisis, drug crisis, anxiety crisis, depression crisis).

Tragedies of the commons, as I understand them, occur whenever harms can result from actions undertaken for an individual's own benefit that are not born by that individual alone but are spread among some wider number of morally relevant parties. When such conditions are present, there must be some kind of formal response that can restrict the behaviour in a way that effectively (although not necessarily perfectly) prevents the harms from being offloaded (externalized) onto others. Unless these measures are reasonably effective, "defection" from responsibility will be continuously encouraged (to the point of absolute necessity) and growth of the harms will rise to unmanageable proportions for everyone.

Or, as the logical puzzle "the prisoner's dilemma" makes clear (especially if repeated over many iterations when modelling behaviours), simply pursuing self advantage as a strategy without mutual limits effectively imposed by all those affected by your decisions can never lead to optimal outcomes for all involved, but only sub-optimal outcomes. Reason demands binding rules on all parties negatively affected by each other's actions.

The problem as I see it is that Liberalism encourages us to always "push towards the red line" in terms of our society's allowance of behaviours that can turn out to trigger tragedies of the commons.  The basic approach of Liberalism is always to seek and experiment with the removal of limits in order to discern if suspected harms are not actually real. In economics this takes the form of the goal of reaching Pareto Optimality or the maximally efficient economy in terms of the production that can be wrung from any given natural environment. This approach might not be a problem if human life and human societies are relatively simple. If this is the case then people in such societies could risk being continuously experimental about removing limits because they could relatively easily discern if missteps had occurred and pull back by re-instituting those limits or by creating new binding rules.  

But societies today are not simple-- They are complex and rapidly evolving technological societies, in which new activities are continuously being added to human life in an ever changing and ever complex "technological ecology" as Marshall McLuhan might put it. The negative effects of such changes often take decades to manifest, as we can see with the impacts of DDT and automobiles.  And technologies can interact in ways that can "synergize" completely new and unexpected negative effects, such as we are beginning to sense with various forms of social media.  Running economies continuously at Pareto Optimality means that any declines in ecological conditions leave no room for adjustment.

But since our instinct in liberal societies is to leave people as free as possible and to have faith in democracy and our innovative ability to fix problems (i.e. technology), we generally assume that we will be able to create whatever limits or systems of management that might reveal themselves to be necessary. But might it be possible, if societies are complex enough for this ability to discern the sources of tragedies of the commons to be overwhelmed?  If the number of new behaviours being introduced becomes so high we might reach a point that we cannot discern among the complexity the specific behaviours (technological activities) leading to the harms poised to runaway into tragedy.

Put another way, might Liberalism be a political and personal philosophy suitable only for relatively simple societies in which harms and their sources can be easily recognized (e.g. my fist hitting your nose) rather than the complex globally interconnected technological societies we live in today? In such societies problems unleashed by technological activities and the synergy between those activities might take so long to manifest themselves that by the time we notice they are problematic that they may have become so deeply embedded that they are effectively beyond practical control (cultural momentum/technological dependency).  Perhaps, therefore, it is time for us to consider returning to being a society of laws (harm seekers, lawmakers and law enforcers). A cautionary philosophy, might be the only political philosophy that can adequately deal with the main threats of the present and the future.

But since we cannot name "technology" or our favourite political philosophy "liberalism" (aka neo-conservatism) as problems, we must find people to blame for our growing fears. So we blame immigrants, or we blame the supporters of opposing mainstream liberal/neo-conservative political parties, or we blame prominent public figures (Trump, etc), or nebulously defined sinister groups (terrorists of the right or left). We put faces to our growing fears and then see ourselves as being on the other team.

Evolution has inclined us to respond in such ways. We evolved to manage threats from specific human individuals in small groups, not complex problems unleashed by synergizing technological ecologies and the abstractions of longstanding political philosophies working their way out in globalized societies.  But we must be able to name the sources of the threats we are facing or we will be inevitably drawn towards the personalization of our problems. To "technology" I would add the name "liberalism" as a fundamental source of the growing cascade of unfolding global tragedies that we face today.

Does Nihilism Provide the Best Argument for Theism?

Is the rejection of nihilism the best argument in support of the consideration of the possibility of the existence of God?  At the prompting of a number of students, I've been watching videos of Jordan Peterson vs. various New Atheists.  Matt Dillahunty was Peterson's latest sparring partner.  It was while watching this video that a thought struck me about these recent defenders of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. Many of them, such as Dillahunty, describe how in the course of their lives they moved away from religious upbringings to embrace atheism. This is so alien to my own experience, since I was raised in a non-religious home, without any encouragement by my parents to believe in God.  Not that I was actively discouraged. There was just a general lack of discussion of any serious sort, except for the occasional critical remark such as that "God was the opiate of the masses" or a "crutch." None of my close friends except for one went to Church.

The result was that for the earliest years of my life I found myself quite happily identifying with a kind of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. In my early teens, I was attracted to Marxism and to the supposedly scientific outlook that Marx felt his outlook was based in. By my mid-teens I was also starting to explore the outlook of nihilism and was reading some Nietzsche. In my late teens, however, I began to question my commitment to nihilism and eventually found myself drawn into the life of a Christian community. That community transformed my life.

What I think many of the New Atheists don't seem to recognize is that their religious upbringing might immunize them from serious consideration of nihilism. Perhaps their religious upbringings, along with the support of lingering religious influences on culture provides an intellectual footing that prevents them from going deeper in their philosophical explorations. Whereas my own life experience started with a certain kind of vague leftist/liberal indifference towards theism, it eventually led to nihilism because one realizes that outlooks like Marxism, Positivism and scientism are not really scientific perspectives but quasi-religious worldviews. Marxism, for instance, is filled with a lingering earnestness for justice that one also hears in the Hebrew prophets. It has saints and music. I still know the words to the Internationale. What drove me towards nihilism was the inability of outlooks like Marxism, positivism, or naturalism to take seriously what committing oneself to a hard-nosed rational empiricism really entails. It involves accepting that only empirical statements are meaningful and capable of being ascertained as true or false. Seeing the world as a material system without supernatural elements means throwing out all the comforting ideas about meaning, purpose, freedom and morality. If one is truly to be a naturalist, this means not accepting subjective beliefs about realities beyond the straightforward operations of matter. As Nietzsche made clear, believing that God is dead must lead one to also wipe away the horizon of meaning which that concept enlightened.

My teenage brain was, of course, filled with certain anxieties about these thoughts. Was life essentially a joke?  A meaningless struggle, with no guarantees whatsoever?  Was morality a mugs game?  Were all human endeavors essentially shams?--  Mere attempts to whistle past the graveyard?  I accepted that the answers to these questions were most likely "yes."  I still find myself sometimes inclining to these conclusions. I felt that scientific discovery shed no useful light on these issues. I was prepared to go forward in life in a stoic way without false and imaginary ideas clung to only to provide solace. This was what I felt all religious beliefs were really about. They were fantasies that helped people in the face of the stark reality of the meaninglessness of existence.

My reaction to folks like Dillahunty and Harris, who so easily spout variations of vaguely utilitarian/natural law outlooks and decry arguments that imply their positions must lead to immorality or amorality, is that they really don't take their atheism seriously enough. I might be one of the few Christians who reject their arguments not because they reject God, but because they reject atheism. They believe that atheism need not devolve to nihilism, whereas I believe that it must. So when they deny that atheism leads to immorality or amorality, I hear Nietzsche whispering in the background, have the courage of your convictions. Sure, you need not, nor are likely to, start killing people, or as Dillahunty quips to "shove Sam Harris off the stage", but don't try to justify still believing in non-empirical realities like "goodness" and "meaning."  Don't suggest that "consciousness" and "freedom" are anything more than mere artifacts of an interesting picture-show of the deterministic operation of your synapses.  If Matt doesn't shove Sam off the stage, admit that this has nothing to do with morality--nothing to do with Sam's worth, or Matt's sense of self-worth-- or the "self-evident goodness of happiness," but is simply the result of contingent biological instincts for self preservation. As Nietzsche jokes, "man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that." If one is prepared to jettison God because there is no compelling empirical evidence, one must also be prepared to jettison these other comforting concepts too. Don't make arbitrary exceptions for ones that you just happen to like or perhaps feel embarrassed to bring into public question.

It would appear that Jordan Peterson thinks along similar lines. You can see him probing Dillahunty in ways meant to prompt him to expose the various junctures in his thought where he holds empirically dubious commitments such as belief in free will, the intrinsic worth of human beings, the importance of being earnest as opposed to straightforwardly self-concerned, etc. One is left wondering why it is so important to ditch God but leave all these other non-empirical aspects of human life and thought untouched. Dillahunty is highly selective in his supposed empiricism and "rational" thinking.  People's reports of their religious experiences are simply discounted, as are apparent somatic effects of such experiences, but their reports of consciousness, freedom and value and their supposedly amenable effects on societies (including science) are left untouched.

So I guess my argument is simple. If you are going to be a materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheist, you really must be a nihilist too. Non-nihilistic atheism unless *intensively* philosophically considered too often simply ends up being an incoherent mishmash of the cultural lingerings of moral outlooks that have grown out of essentially religious metaphysical commitments. The argument here is not that atheism necessarily leads to immoral behaviour. I think there are lots of instincts and social pressures that will keep most of us in line most of the time, and will likely continue to do so for quite some time, if not possibly indefinitely. The objection here is not about such practical matters. It's about whether one has an intellectually coherent metaphysical outlook that can make sense of one's desire for and respect of these instincts and social practices. But many of the New Atheists seem to wish to avoid such wider discussion of foundations, or what Charles Taylor calls "frameworks" of meaning. They are focused only on the issue of God, but seem uncomfortable and uninterested in discussion of other metaphysical beliefs (metaphorical substrates) and abstract issues of contemporary epistemology that inform critical aspects of their outlooks (including their respect for science).

Maybe the best way to proceed in a defense of theism is not directly by way of a defense of the existence of God. Maybe what one must first do is understand why nihilism is not acceptable. If this can be done, then the issue of faith might simply boil down to making a choice between nihilism vs. Non-nihilism (Anihilism?)  If nihilism doesn't make sense, then one must find another outlook, with theism being one of the many possibilities to consider. Perhaps such consideration, if carried out honestly and sincerely over a lifetime, might be enough to allow one to count oneself a theist.