Theory vs. practice: How is liberalism criticized? | Chandran Kukathas | Big Think

When one approaches people from within liberal societies, I think what one has to ask is how much the objection is to the theory and how much the objection is really to the practice. Because many critics of liberalism themselves, I think, depend on certain liberal understandings simply for the freedom to practice their own, you know, particular distinctive ways of living and, you know, for the freedom to advance their particular views about how we should all live.

So, for example, you know, there are some critics of liberalism now who say that the problem with a liberal society is that it gives too much freedom to the individual in that it doesn't give enough protection to families and communities. That it doesn't foster the kinds of virtues that you need for a good society. But in order to advance this view, you either have to accept that the only way to bring about this change is to try to persuade others to come around to your way of thinking, or you've got to say, "Yes, if I had the power, I would somehow try to enforce this way of thinking," to re-emphasize the importance of families, for example, by limiting people's freedoms in all kinds of ways.

And I think what I would have to ask those people is, are you really prepared to go down that path? Because, you know, the liberal idea is that to the extent that you recognize that people are different but disagree with them, you try to persuade them otherwise. If you don't accept that, are you really prepared to exercise force in order to bring about the change that you want? The mass maybe yes, but then I think I would try to press and see really what a strong commitment that is. If you're speaking to people outside the liberal tradition, for whom liberalism is not something that's around them in practice but something that they are hostile to, you know, because it's something that may, for example, infect their own society, I think you've got a very different sort of problem.

Because I think there are, you know, traditions in the world which don't accept something that's, I think, very central to the liberal way of thinking. And this really, I think, has its roots deep in Christianity. This is the idea that right or morality is not something that can be given or found directly in the Word of God. Even for Christians, the understanding that we get going back to the time of St. Paul is that, you know, in order to understand what is right, we have to understand what God has taught us by giving us the capacity to reason and understand the natural world. That's where our understanding of morality is to be found.

Well, for traditions that see this as simply blasphemous because we have got the Word of God, what we should do is simply to abide by that. This is all, you know, entirely unacceptable, and liberalism is, for that way of thinking, something that is deeply antithetical. Now that said, I think, and I'm thinking in here in particular about the Islamic tradition, I think the majority of people who are Muslims now actually have, to a large extent, interpreted Islam in a way that emphasizes an important, you know, dimension that I will, you know, say has strong affinities with liberalism.

That's because they've identified Islam as something which places a good deal of importance on something like toleration, for example, by emphasizing the fact that, you know, the Quran says that there can be no faith through compulsion. Yes, very important doctrine. But there are others who want to minimize this because they want to see the Quran as the Word of God. So if, you know, I think on the one hand, while you're talking to people for whom liberalism is simply an anathema because it simply contradicts the whole way of thinking about religion, it's also the case that many people within that sort of a tradition nonetheless see that there's much in that tradition that looks at the world very differently.

And I think with those people, there's much more of a possibility of dialogue. And I think, in reality, for many of those societies that are dominated by Islamic practices, those are the norms. You know, you'll find, whether you're in Indonesia or Malaysia, for example, that women serve on courts, they've been presidents of their countries, they have a role to play in a way that, say, for other parts of that tradition, this would simply not be possible because it goes against Islamic teachings.

I want to say again, this one kind of way of responding to those within the liberal tradition or within liberal societies. Rather, there's another way of responding to those who stand completely outside it, and I think the responses to the two have to be really quite different.