Liberalism? Forget it

Abstract

There is widespread opinion that, notwithstanding deviations, the political life of humanity on a large scale is on the path of progress, and humans are becoming freer and more enlightened with time. I am going to contend with this opinion, namely, with a part of it telling that the prevailing mass of the people strives to achieve more freedom and enlightenment. On the opposite, freedom, individual independence, and political rights (not to be confused with social rights, such as state care and protection) are of minor importance to the mass. The ideology of liberalism in its classical form, as created by John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and others, yields to the pressure of the ideology of state paternalism. The pressure comes not only from above (that is, from authorities); the people also welcome more paternalism. They appear not to value their individual freedom and independence, and they are inclined to give them up voluntarily to some mighty organization such as the state in exchange for care, protection and leadership. Liberalism has played an important role in the development of human civilization and the formation of the Western world, but new ideologies and political practices are pushing it out of people’s minds. For the author, as adherent of classical liberalism, this is unfortunate. However, I wish to treat this issue realistically, even if the facts conflict with my own convictions and desires.

1 Liberalism Versus State Paternalism

Before proceeding with our discussion, we should define the central notions that I will use in this article. The chief notion is liberalism, for which a proper definition is important because of its various and often directly contradictory meanings. Whereas European liberalism still prioritizes liberty, modern American liberalism, often called social (or ‘positive’) liberalism, stresses equality. Describing the nearly 180-degree turn in the meaning of liberalism in the US, Tom Farer (2014, p. 2) writes,

Liberalism, not as a political party but rather as a belief system, with its original nineteenth century emphasis on freeing the individual from arbitrary or unreasonable constraints imposed by the state, has evolved toward social democracy with its emphasis on employing state power to protect individuals from the suffocating constraints imposed by unaccountable private power and also from life-narrowing contingencies such as physical disabilities or the loss of position and income stemming from the impersonal grinding of economic forces.

There also exist forms of libertarianism that are linked to the notion of liberalism in various ways and are often hardly discernible from the latter. To avoid sinking in the multitude of distinctions and overlook our main task, I shall speak here of classical liberalism proper. Classical liberalism, as I see it, is constituted by the following main propositions (others may offer a different list, of course).

The first one was formulated by Locke, who said that every man is the owner of himself. Ownership of oneself as a person is prior to any other type of ownership, including that of the state over man or man over things. “[E]very man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself” (Locke 2003, p. 111).

The second definitive point, stressed by Locke and later by Kant, is that every person, starting from a particular biological age, is considered a grown-up person endowed with the ability and the right to direct his own behavior and dispose of himself solely and without anyone’s else’s influence. John Stewart Mill added to this point that a grown-up person even has the right to cause harm to himself if this is his wish or a product of his self-exploration and cognitive self-experimenting.

The third definitive point of classical liberalism proposed by Locke and developed by Kant is that a person is bound to be free and to strive toward enlightenment; this is not only his right but also his duty as a human being. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self - imposed immaturity. [Bold by the author.] Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another […] Have courage to use your own understanding!’—That is the motto of enlightenment” (Kant 1988a, p. 33).

Kant’s view on the grown-up but spiritually immature person was even harsher and more contemptuous than expressed in the softened English translation. We read in the German original, “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit”. [Bold by the author]” (Kant 1988b, p. 215). ‘Selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit’ means the self-guilt of an adult about remaining immature.

One of the clear formulas of anti-paternalism, or liberalism, can be found in another of Kant’s small articles, “On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use”.

I express the principle of one’s freedom as a human being in this formula: No one can compel me (in accordance with his beliefs about the welfare of others) to be happy after his fashion; instead, every person may seek happiness in the way that seems best for him, if only he does not violate the freedom of others to strive toward such similar ends as are compatible with everyone’s freedom under a possible universal law (i.e., this right of others.) A government that was established on the principle of regarding the welfare of the people in the same way that a father regards his children’s welfare, i.e., a paternal government… - such a government is the worst despotism we can think of… (Kant 1988c, pp. 72–73).

As the fourth point, Locke stressed that a person has no right to choose serfdom instead of individual freedom. Kant also noted that choosing delusion instead of truth is not real freedom; man should put any convictions under the critical light of his own reason and should have the courage to think with his own head and not to follow someone else’s (even extremely authoritative) doctrine, particularly religious doctrines.

The fifth point is that the individual is considered the primary unit, whereas the state is the secondary and derivative one. The state is only an artificial construction formed by men’s covenant. It is up to individuals to establish their state and elect the government, giving it a strictly limited part of their own natural rights, as well as to change the state and dismiss the government in cases of its abuse of power. According to Locke, the abuse of power or trespassing the circle of individual rights that are temporarily transferred to the ruler followed by the people’s unrest makes the ruler, not the people, the real mutineer who is subject to elimination, similar to any dangerous animal placed out of the human field of law.

A concise overview of liberalism in its evolution, forms, philosophy, representatives, and practical realization can be found in (Gray 1995).

Statism (also called étatism, following the French root) is the direct opposition to liberalism. According to statism, the state is primary, whereas man is the secondary unit that is dependent on the state. Raison d’état (which may be translated as the needs of the state and the system of argumentation in favor of the state’s needs) is more important than individual needs and considerations. Statism contends that man is at the disposal of the state, not at his own disposal, and that man is to serve the state rather than the state is to serve man.

In the established political philosophy, it is common to oppose the two poles: individual, on the one side, and the state, on the other side, and reflect upon their relationships within the space only formed by those two sides. So do I, following the tradition. At the same time, to make the analysis more realistic rather than purely speculative, we have to keep in mind a third unit, namely, the civil society and its historical predecessors, such as the ramified patriarchic families within peasantry, communities of industrial manufactures and workers, art communities, and the vassal subordinate chains among nobility. All of those play a mediating and damping role, occupying the place between an individual, supposed in theory to stand naked and alone before the state that, also in theory, is supposed to command him directly.

The notion of ‘paternalism’ has many nuances and has produced many discussions. A generally accepted presumption among liberal Western scholars is that paternalism is a ‘necessary evil’ in the liberal state; normal people do not welcome or need it, and the less paternalism, the better. Our topic, the mass demand for paternalism and the corresponding demise of classical liberalism, conflicts with this typical view. I mention only a few of the classical works on this theme for general information, because my study extends the mainstream literature on paternalism. As an introduction to and overview of the classical approach, it is worth reading (Feinberg 1986; Van De Veer 1986; Dworkin 2005).

The notion I address in this study is ‘state paternalism’, that is, paternalism executed by the state as the ruling agent. For the paternalistic state, man is by no means the owner of himself; rather, man is owned, in a metaphorical or even direct meaning, by the state. In many cases, the state’s ownership of man is complemented or contested by the church’s ownership of man. In any case, man is considered to belong to one of these two institutions or to both but never to himself proper. Because he is not owned by himself, man is never considered a socially grown-up person; he remains socially and spiritually immature throughout his life and hence needs care, supervision, and direction on behalf of the state and/or the church, even if he does not wish to be the object of such inflicted benevolence.

Classical liberalism and statism (along with state paternalism) are the two contesting views on man that I discuss in this article in an attempt to determine which side will prevail in future decades. My working hypothesis is expressed in the title of the article: statism, along with “soft” paternalism, is likely to surmount and suppress liberalism.

Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw this perspective nearly two centuries ago, so there is nothing new in my prediction. The only differences are that de Tocqueville described the US as the most advanced and democratic country at that time, and I widen the foreseeable outcome for the whole world. The other difference is that for de Tocqueville, this was the probable alternative for the distant future (Tocqueville 2000). For us today, this is the reality that insistently knocks at our doors or has already penetrated our homes.

Politically, classical liberalism of the Lockean type (or, rather, its contemporary partial remainings) may only survive in the European countries with a strong Christian Protestant tradition in which liberalism has deep historical roots (with reservations concerning the flood of Islamic refugees, whose negative influence is discussed later), and where the state has no desire for total electronic control over its citizens, as in the US. Economically, it is likely to exist in the form of neo-liberalism and its striving toward industrial and scientific innovations and risky entrepreneurial behavior, as long as the state does not lead the policy of excessive economic intervention and ‘hard’ paternalism. The example is the economy of the modern US. Privately, liberalism (or, rather, libertarianism) may remain intact in countries with a tradition of “leaving men alone” with their eccentricities and human foibles if they do no harm to others, as in the Netherlands.

Speaking of the widening paternalistic care of the state in respect to an individual, it is worth to recollect the civil society and all types of non-governmental communities and organizations. In reality, an individual may live in a community in which the individual autonomy, on the one side, and harmonic inclusion in the community, on the other side, can well co-exist, so that the individual has no need to apply for the state care, which would make him dependent on the state. It is not surprising that the states of the oppressive type tend to destroy or impede the activity of the civil society in order to withdraw the damping layer that protects an individual and makes him less dependent on the state and screens him from the direct state control and regulation. To disperse all non state-controlled communities and thus atomize the entire population, due to what an individual has nobody or nothing else to lean on except for the benevolent state, is the technique of the rule of the totalitarian states.

2 The Dubious Ontological Foundations of Classical Liberalism Versus the Organic Firmness of Statism

Let us turn to what constitutes the ontological grounds of classical liberalism, on the one hand, and statism, on the other hand, to determine which of them is better substantiated.

When reading some liberal texts, it is rare to find arguments of the type ‘as there is in reality’. At the same time, these texts include many arguments such as ‘As Locke says…’ or ‘According to Kant’s views…’, all of which pretend to be undisputable statements concerning facts of ontological reality. Locke and Kant are such great authorities in the eyes of the liberals that they forget that the cited words are nothing more than words, not some godlike oracle’s verdicts or nature itself speaking.

These are not statements concerning ‘what is in fact’; rather, they are manifestations of the desire of a group of people to transform the relations between men to improve them. This peculiarity is one of the main weaknesses of liberalism, making it inevitably feeble and, as far as the present days are concerned, subjecting it to a statism ideology.

There is an attempt to see the ontological foundations of liberalism in natural law and natural rights. At the same time, there is self-criticism of this attempt in (Gray 1995, pp. 45–55).

The important source and foundation of liberalistic ideology is the American Declaration of Independence, adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776. A committee of five men worked on the document, but it was Thomas Jefferson who prepared the initial draft and who can be truly considered the main author of the Declaration.

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’

Despite being an advocate of classical liberalism, I nevertheless suggest that not a single word in the above paragraph is in concordance with the existing reality of nature. It is, rather, a piece of the constructed social reality, to use the terminology of John Searle (Searle 1995). This means that it exists in men’s heads only.

Let us examine this famous phrase word by word. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’ Philosophically, this is a vicious circle. Something is declared a truth, but the proof is absent. Self-evidence plays the role of a substitute for proof. Logically, it is not fair play. We go further: men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…’ It is known that Jefferson, following his beliefs, generally avoided using the word ‘God’. However, there should be someone who ‘endowed’ the rights; they could not just have fallen from the sky or sucked with mother’s milk. Hence, the introduction of a substitute: a ‘Creator’. But why should he be preoccupied with granting ‘rights’? It would be much more logical to state that man is created (by the Creator) as having a body and instincts—the naturally more basic things compared with some phantom, invisible and untouchable ‘rights’. However, Jefferson wants rights, so: rights. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ seems acceptable, with a correction: rather, the pursuit of staying alive and healthy, giving any creature the natural feeling of happiness. However, liberty is evidently a thought-out thing. Moreover, as shown earlier, men actually value liberty much lower than, metaphorically, a piece of bread and a roof over their head.

In the above-cited essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment’, Kant attempted to present freedom and free thinking as the ‘wish’ of Nature and its aim to which it ‘leads’ humanity. In other words, freedom is the quality and the state of not only single men but the striving of Nature itself with respect to men. “…[N]ature has removed the hard shell from this kernel for which she has most fondly cared, namely, the inclination to and vocation for free thinking…” (Kant 1988a, pp. 45–46). Kant’s teleology of Nature (similar to Hegel’s teleology of Spirit) is presented as the ontological cornerstone of the ideology of liberalism, similar to God’s desire in Locke and the Creator’s intentions in Jefferson. Being sober-minded, I very much doubt that these real or thought-out entities (Nature, Spirit, God, Creator…) do cherish human freedom. The deeds of these entities should be of an entirely different (namely, organically biological) type rather than bringing enlightenment to the human race. Expanding human freedom is the business of humans proper. Unfortunately, the masses are far from enthusiastic about expanding their own freedom, except for the minority of advanced individuals.

John Stuart Mill, with his utilitarian, down-to-earth arguments in favor of freedom, presented somewhat firmer ontological foundations of liberalism compared to Locke and Kant. “Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each other to live as seems good to the rest” (Mill 1991, p. 81). “As it is useful that while mankind [is] imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living…” (Mill 1991, p. 124).

Liberalism makes a society diversified, according to Mill. This brings society closer to the organic diverse nature. Complexity and multi-dependence of species strengthens and promotes the natural world; the same, it seems, should proceed in the social world. This is largely the ‘real’ reality, not Searle’s constructed social reality with its imaginary as-if-real facts. There is only one flaw in this comparison. Diversity and the “ability of all flowers to grow” are not always beneficial to society. In the state of war, unity rather than diversity is needed, which becomes the higher value for society’s survival with respect to liberty and “different experiments of living”. The closer is the world to warlike times, the fewer places there are for liberalism. This means that Mill’s pragmatism does not provide fully valid arguments. Pragmatism is twofold. There are times when unity and the state’s strength are much more necessary than diversity, and such times are coming now.

How profoundly is the statism ideology ontologically established in comparison with the liberalist ideology?

• 1. The statism ideology dismisses the mechanical idea of the social contract as the founding principle of the state. Rather, it contends that the state and society, which the state organizes, continuously grow over time and exist as organic entities (Burke 2002).

  Their existence is similar to the growth of the woods, in which every tree grows and falls while the wood remains. The same is true for the state: single individuals come and go within decades, while the state abides for centuries. This is much closer to nature and the process of natural evolution than the clearly artificial and unrealistic way of establishing woods through, metaphorically, the inclination of single trees, which the theory of social contract supposes. The state is a prolongation of nature, not an artificial unit created by men’s arbitrary desire.

• 2. Classical liberalism says that the ruler is the same as all other men; he is just temporarily elected to organize the community. He has neither special interests nor special knowledge that would single him out from all other citizens. This is not the case with statism. It contends that the state is an emergent and holistic entity with respect to any single individual and, as such, does have its own aims and interests that may be alien or unpleasant to or unaware of single citizens or the whole population. Any ruler must have special or secret information that, want it or not, puts him in a superior position to any ordinary citizen. This is not a Plato’s ruler-type philosopher who has more wisdom that gives him the right to govern. Rather, the modern ruler has more information because of his position as a decision-making center.

• 3. A strong single ruler coincides with the idea of a strong father who brings up his children. We should not forget that the mass considers itself and is considered by the ruler to be immature persons. Under state paternalism, little space is left for caring about personal liberty and human rights.

• 4. Christian and Islamic monotheism fit with the idea of “one Father—one King—one God”. The multitude of freely, diversely and unpredictably deciding persons in a democracy is alien to the orderly “one—to one—to one” scheme in which each unit is subordinate to the higher one and is granted some part of its power.

These arguments lead us to admit that the organic, emergent and holistic view of the nature of governmental power is closer to the ontologically real state of things than the mechanistic and reductionism understanding of the state by classical liberalism. From the perspective of ontology, statism wins, and we, the liberals, have nothing to do with it. In ‘the good times’, liberalism could have flourished in many areas and regions, but in the face of “the bad times” that are evidently coming, liberalism tends to give place to statism.

3 Statism and State Paternalism on the Worldwide Offensive

Russia is a bright example of the unique historical opportunity to break the half-a-millennium circle of autocratic rule (if we count from Ivan the Terrible in the middle of the 1500 s) and the deliberate neglect of this opportunity on behalf of both the governed and the governing by the 2010 s. We are going do discuss situation in the US, Europe, and the Islamic countries as well, and to show that liberalism is fading everywhere, if it was present in these or that regions earlier at all.

The chief necessity for man is to belong to some community and some established power. This need is fulfilled both in Russia and in the US, although in different ways. In Russia, people tend to attach themselves to and identify with the state, whereas in the USA, people tend to attach themselves to and identify with some religious community. Like a single ant, a human cannot stand the situation of being left alone and absolutely on his own. With regard to the Americans, on the one hand, they must comply with the standard of being a ‘real’ American, who must love freedom and individualism—or be considered a Marxist or an Islamist, a pariah. The nearly official American ideology is classical liberalism, with its slogans such as ‘live as you will’ and ‘man is the best judge of his interests’. On the other hand, many men are afraid of being free and welcome paternalistic care and authoritative leadership, as Erich Fromm showed long ago (Fromm 1994).

Hence, many American people of an inherently non-liberal psychological type find themselves in a ‘double bind’ schizophrenic situation. For Russians, this situation is easier because the nearly official ideology has been collectivism and communality for many centuries, and this is the favorite ideology of the poor masses in many countries. Therefore, the proclaimed ideology and the real desires of the vast majority of Russians coincide. It is only for the small minority of classical liberals and libertarians that life seems hard and alien in Russia (White 2013; Chebankova 2014).

This role, which for the majority of the Russians involves the sincere or ostentatious esteem of the state and forbearance from opposing or overtly criticizing the top government ruler, for Americans involves sincere or ostentatious religiosity and forbearance from not fulfilling basic religious rituals such as the breakfast prayer or declaring oneself an atheist. White-collar Russians are primarily dependent on the overt manifestation of their loyalty to the top government ruler. The majority of middle-class Americans is also dependent and avoid expressing their real critical stance, if one exists. What they are dependent on, however, is the need to overtly manifest religiosity.

Fromm’s idea was subsequently revisited by James Buchanan in (Buchanan 2005) with an emphasis on its economic aspect. As Peter Boettke interprets Buchanan’s thought, “The problem that confronts the modern classical liberal, Buchanan (2005) postulated, is not the managerial socialism of the twentieth century or even the Nanny state of paternalistic socialism, but the people’s desire to remain in the infantile state of demanding a parent to protect them from the vagaries of life and provide them with economic security” (Boettke 2014, p. 349).

To some writers, however, refusal to use one’s potential freedom is acceptable. Cass Sunstein sees nothing wrong in the decision to avoid choosing. “When people choose not to choose, it is paternalistic—potentially a diminution of their welfare and an insult to their autonomy—to refuse to honor their choice” (Sunstein 2014).

We contend that the representative samples of humans of any race, country and religion, Americans included, do comply with Fromm’s universal psychological diagnosis (Pedersen et al. 2014). The observed differences appear not because of inherent differences in human psychology, which, at its core, is the same everywhere, but because of social factors and national historical traditions. It is true that psychology itself slowly changes along with the formation of traditions. However, psychology changes more quickly after a person finds himself in different social surroundings and must adjust to them to survive or attain a proper level of prosperity.

A few remarks on American statism. It is true that the Russian state plays an excessive role and should be restrained and forced to behave according to civilized rules. Is the American state only playing the role of the ‘night guard’, as was foreseen by the founding fathers? Not at all. The fear of terrorism made privacy a fiction. Amitai Etzioni holds that the distinction of the private and the public realms has long been obsolete. Modern people live in some intertwined space of both, and the struggle of libertarians to maintain the private sphere has little sense (Etzioni 2013).

In a way, the American state became totalitarian from the perspective of total electronic control over its own citizens. The fact that there are two political parties becomes less and less important; both parties stick together into one ruling clod. That the Democrat Obama did not mind continuing the secret practice of spying even on the country’s political allies, proclaiming at the same time “the superiority of the American values”, including privacy, tells the whole story.

Let us mention paternalism as well. From the psychological perspective, every grown man carries a child in himself; being grown up is more of a surface, a shell, and the childish in every man remains his real, ever-present nature. The state, on its side, welcomes and cherishes the childish elements in the psychological structure of man. Paternalism is welcomed on both sides by the rulers and the ruled. I contend that Europeans are fond of having social benefits, the more the better, as far as not working at all. They are suspicious of ‘personal independence’, which gives them nothing except for poverty; Europe is clearly moving toward socialism (not of the former Soviet type, of course). The same trend is observed in Great Britain, where the mass demands more state expenditures and social benefits. This occurs in the United States as well, although the Republicans and ‘The Tea Party movement’ fight against it fiercely and say that if the Democrats win, with their social care state, this will be the end of America as the land of individual entrepreneurship.

My point is that the massive world-wide leaning on the state as a supplier and protector is pushing out classical liberal and individualist beliefs. This point corresponds to many other writers’ views. Matthew Morgan’s review article summarizes the views of four authors. All of them connect the demise of liberalism not only with its replacement by statism and state paternalism but also with the collapse of the former world order, one of the pillars of which (at least in the West) has been classical liberalism. (Morgan 2013). The reviewed books are (Simons et al. 2011; Sorensen 2011; Mayall and de Oliveira 2011; Bisley 2012).

I present a few telling citations from the books reviewed by Morgan. “Liberalism today is paralyzed, and the emergence of a ‘patchwork order’, in which liberalism is no longer predominant, is on the horizon” (Sorensen 2011, pp. 140, 166; cit. by Morgan 2013, p. 240). “[T]he outcome posited by Bisley, the gradual decline of the post-war liberal order, matches Sorensen’s” (cit. by Morgan 2013, p. 240). According to Mayall and de Oliveira, “Liberalism did not take root in any meaningful way in the countries that were subjected to these attempts at social engineering” (cit. by Morgan 2013, p. 2).

In summary, history has shown us that the overwhelming majority of the people, in whatever country they live, are not self-sufficient; they are looking for someone who can show them the meaning of their existence because they cannot find it themselves. Men lack the inner and the outer foundation of their own lives; they are empty inside and need some person or institution that can fill this existential emptiness. The church and the state, depending on the historical traditions of a given society, quite successfully fulfill this task. In addition to this spiritual emptiness, man needs food, shelter, medical help, and a source of income, and he cannot provide these on his own. The state provides materialistic support. The demand for the state’s support does not diminish with historical time—on the contrary, it increases in the modern age. The difficulties of coping with the new technological world and the absence of the old patriarchal family that helped man to survive make the state’s presence and aid increasingly important.

Russian Bolshevism and German Nazism were the ideologies of the first part of the 20th century that confirmed in practice how easily the majority of the population gives up their freedom and personal responsibility to their Vozjd or Führer. There were hopes expressed by the movement of the 1960 s that after the terrible experience of the two World Wars and many minor but cruel wars, people should learn lessons and change their minds in favor of the ideals of liberalism and enlightenment. Alas, today we are witnessing the failure of those ideals and the widening realization of the doctrine of statism and the rising requests of the masses for paternalistic care. Wars are as easily initiated as in the former centuries. Real human history has moved in a direction different from that proclaimed by the philosophers of progressivism and enlightenment in the 17–19th centuries.

4 What About Modern Liberation Movements?

It may seem that revolutions, people’s uprisings and all other types of liberation movements that have occurred during human history are evidence of man’s craving for freedom and hatred for state rule and hence of man’s inherently liberalistic nature. In such general terms, this statement is not entirely true. The personal as well as the mass motives for political uprisings may be far from what we call classical liberalism convictions. Let us take the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an example. The revolution happened, to put it very roughly, because of an unpopular war and disappointment in the power of the formerly adored tsar. For approximately half a year afterward, there reigned the desired unrestricted freedom or, rather, the lack of the state’s manageability and government presence. No wonder that the next step was not the transition to a civilized and tempered liberal regime but the establishment of an increasingly harsh communist dictatorship that was welcomed by the same people who recently considered the abdicated tsar a ‘tyrant’.

An insurgent’s drives may well be sincere, self-sacrificial, heroic and oriented to the prosperity of his nation or other social group, and still have nothing to do with liberalism in its classical meaning. More specifically, the very first motive and the very first act are almost always overthrowing the existing power, freeing oneself from it, and unchaining oneself. In this sense, any revolt contains elements of the ideology of liberation. However, the consequent steps may involve constructing the new system of power, spreading the new non-liberal ideology, subduing oneself to it and attempting to subdue others to it.

An example of this sequence of events is the so-called ‘Islamic spring’ (Farer, 2014). The first of these revolutions took place in Tunis and in Egypt in 2010 s. In the beginning, to unsophisticated and sympathizing Western observers, the revolutions seemed to be a victory of their own values, that is, democracy and liberalism. However, the underlying mighty current was different. The former governments in many Islamic countries, which were overtly or covertly upheld by the US, have endeavored for decades to keep the Islamists under control and not to allow their influence in society to spread and expand. After the revolutions and the long-awaited ‘unchaining’ and liberalization, huge portions of the populations freely and unrestrictedly turned to fundamentalist Islam.

The sudden lesson for the West has been that the Islamic countries were able to produce revolutions and were ripe for them; at the same time, the revolutions may be not only of the democratic and liberalistic type, as Western political scientists and ‘democratic transition’ theoreticians have expected. As was the case for the hundreds of Sovietologists with the sudden and completely unforeseen collapse of the communist system under Gorbachev, the experts on Islam erred in their forecasts.

Classical liberalism has the closest link to Christian Protestantism and was created as its political “supplement” and application. Liberalism has deep religious foundations in this and only this branch of Christianity. This is one of the main reasons why it could not have been rooted in the societies of Christian Orthodoxy, to say nothing of Islam. A country may strive to transition to a political order in which the classical liberalistic trends would be widely present or dominant. An example is Russia under Yeltsin’s rule in the 1990 s. However, this particular attempt, as well as some others, failed or remained superfluous. It is highly doubtful that any modern country can currently become a country of classical liberalism. The times when that turn could occur are probably gone forever. Why?

To find the answer, let us return to Locke. At the beginning of this article, I said that the basic principle of classical liberalism introduced by Locke is man’s ownership of himself. This principle is the strongest antidote to governmental paternalism. Now, we must make the picture more complex. The issue is that man, belonging to himself, belongs to God in the first place. This situation seems, and is in fact, contradictory. Without discussing the details of Locke’s view on ‘sharing’ man between himself as a person and God, we must say that God gave man some ‘tasks’ or obligations—not only rights in controlling other men who deviate from what God wants from every man. From this point of view, every man is simultaneously God’s ‘possession’ and God’s ‘punishing hand’. What is important for us is this: when and if the state or any governmental body tells men, “Do what I tell you to do because you are mine, and you are in my possession”, man has the right and, even more importantly, an obligation before God to declare, “I am a God’s creation and possession, not yours. I will do what He, my master, empowered me to do; as for you, the state, it is me who is your real master with God behind me, and it is you, the state, who should obey us as a community of citizens”. Belonging to God is like piles going deeper into the granite underwater layer compared to a rough political sea or even storms on the surface, making man independent of all of them. This is the main religious foundation of the Protestant religion, which makes men firm and self-reliant notwithstanding political turmoil and rulers’ demands. The religious foundation of the Lockean doctrine is presented in (Waldron 2002).

This position provides a firm stronghold against tyrants with their attempts to subdue man and place him under their paternalistic control. The important circumstance that can make this ideology work is unconditional religious belief of the Protestant type. The piles exist in men’s heads only, of course, but without such deeply imbedded beliefs in the direct connection with and support from God, priests excluded, the ‘defense scheme’ against the state’s claim to be primary and superior in respect to any single man would not function.

The high times for this scheme were mostly the 16–18th centuries in the European Protestant countries and the US. England was very liberal in the 19th century. However, the scheme later manifested its fragility and inability to constantly apply reverse pressure on the state with its notorious raison d’état. The philosopher Henry Thoreau, who lived in the middle of the 19th century, was a bright representative of the classical liberal attitude toward the state. However, by the end of his life, even Thoreau had to yield to the state’s demands, particularly to pay taxes for the state’s expenditures that he declared to really not need as an individual who lived freely and independently in the woods.

Today, with the general weakening of the Christian religion, including the Protestant religion, the classical liberal ideology based on this religion is inevitably weakened. Both become a factor of historical national and cultural identity more than a factor of the present religious and political beliefs that people are ready to fight for. The Protestant countries that are formally still considered the classical liberal countries gradually yield their position to statism and to state paternalism.

Still, I pose the question: was it only religion (namely, Protestantism), that has engendered the political philosophy of liberalism, or it was the universal human strive for liberty that has engendered both the secular political philosophy of liberalism and the religious belief of Protestantism adopted as an underpinning sacral ground for this political philosophy? I suppose that in the historical circumstances of the Lockean time none of those two was the exclusive origin; the religious doctrine and the secular political doctrine have developed mutually supporting and strengthening each other. Moreover, we have to take into account the third, far not less important factor. Liberalism was neither the pure product of a religious belief nor the product of the universal human strive for liberty. The third factor was the severe clash between branches of the Christian religion and the centuries-long devastating religious wars in Europe as their outcome. The need to stop the wars induced by the religious controversies created the need to develop a political theory that would allow to coexist all the hostile religions. Liberalism happened to be the proper ideology to pacify the fighting sides and bring them into non-militant balance.

It is commonly accepted that fundamentalist Islam and classical Western liberalism are nowadays the two poles. Some authors, however, seek ways to make tempered Islam and political liberalism compatible (Badamchi 2015).

This author introduces the ambiguous term ‘post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies’, among which he includes Iran and Turkey. On the basis of this contradictory term, he attempts to prove that these societies can accept political liberalism. “Post-Islamism as a project aims to marry Islam with individual choice and freedom, with democracy and with modernity” (Badamchi 2015, p. 682). Despite understanding the good intentions of the author to escape the universal Western humiliating view of Islam as a backward system of beliefs that is prone to violence, I still cannot fully accept the author’s idea. As noted earlier, real classical liberalism, whose originator was undoubtedly the Protestant Locke, has the Protestant religion as its engendering core, so one cannot be an authentic classical liberal without being a Protestant Christian. You may call yourself a proponent of political liberalism, but this is only a surface label. Classical liberalism is not a secular doctrine. From the very beginning it was rooted in Christianity, and this is why it is repellent to Islam, whatever peaceful, reasonable and intellectually advanced the latter pretends to be.

What makes Badamchi hope that one can combine being a Muslim and being a follower of political liberalism is appeal to reason. The same idea of reason as a substitute for Protestant belief is expressed in (Barre 2009).

Barre considers not only the Muslim but also the Catholic faith, stating that both are compatible with political liberalism if they appeal to arguments of reason. Let us suppose that reasonable arguments are used by a Muslim and a Catholic in their contest with the state. However, at a certain stage, the Muslim will have an inevitable dilemma between the demands of reason and the demands of the Koran. Five prayers a day is itself an unreasonable act from an external point of view, and there are many other unreasonable rituals one must fulfill. What type of reason is supposed to be here? The same situation occurs with the Catholic. The problem for him is the same: he must follow unreasonable rituals of his religion and be subject to the Pope, not to God (or Nature, as in Lockean doctrine), directly. The Protestant has a minimum of religious rituals and prohibitions, but this is not the main point. These rituals can also make him act unreasonably to the external observer (from the perspective of all these believers, their rituals seem inside quite reasonable). The main point is that the Protestant believes that he has God directly behind him without any mediators, and this gives him the real possibility to see things as if with God’s eyes proper, that is, purely reasonably (given that God embodies pure reason himself). Neither the Pope nor the official interpreters of the Koran or political rulers would move him from the way his (that is, God’s) reason prescribes. Reason may seem valid for a Muslim and a Catholic, but in a relative way only; at every moment, they are subject to the corrections of a priest, the Pope or an interpreter of the Koran. For the Protestant, however, the demands of his reason are absolute. Neither a priest nor the top political ruler can make them void. It is this very meaning that Locke called man the exclusive owner of himself.

The fact that liberalism has once played the role of a pacifying factor in the clash of the branches of the Christian religion brings some hope that it may play the same role in pacifying the modern militant Islam in its animosity both in respect to Christianity and Judaism as well as to the hostile branches of Islam itself. It may be only the factor of time and of appearance of outstanding authoritative thinkers and political leaders in extinguishing the present animosity. Islam is nowadays in its passionate stage, as Christianity has been five and more centuries ago. History tells that passionate and irrational stage is finally replaced by pacifying and rational stage. I see no ground why this should not happen to Islam. The only question is this: how long shall we wait yet? Atomic war or at least the systematic terrorism destroying Europe may forestall all the awaited religious and ethnic reconciliations.

“The Islamic spring” has a strong influence on the survival of the national and cultural identity of Europeans. On the one hand, the newcomers will erode the liberal and individualistic values of the countries they managed to penetrate. On the other hand, the flood of refugees will make any European country strengthen itself and establish firmer control to cope with the Islamic influence and the deviant behavior of masses of people of other religious and cultural traditions. Allowing hundreds of thousands of non-European refugees in—on humanitarian grounds—will undermine those grounds because it will soon become clear that the invaders will be of the opinion that Europeans owe them everything, not vice versa. The European reaction to this ingratitude, on behalf of the state as well as the private citizens, is perplexity and indecisiveness so far. From a broader perspective, however, statism has to replace traditional liberalism, and this is for the better. Statism is always viewed as negative. However, to protect Europe’s national and cultural identity, liberalism is a weak political order. Liberalism cannot protect itself. It is only militant statism that can withstand aggressive herds of refugees with impregnations of deliberate terrorists masked in between them. Statism is the solution for the Europe in its fight with the South and the East.

Facing the sudden and massive Islamic invasion, Western political thought tends to rethink its foundations to ‘wake up’ from the idealistic drowsiness that began after the collapse of communism at the beginning of the 1990 s and to become more realistic and mobilized to meet new challenges. One such attempt is presented by (Sleat 2013), who attempts to consider how legitimate it would be for liberals to coerce non-liberals. The mentioned article was written before the flood of refugees began in 2015, so it calls upon liberals to be realistic but does not take into account the new realities.

Merkel’s naïve behavior, driven by the old German guilt, triggered the long forecasted ethnic and cultural clash between rich and peaceful Europeans and poor and angry peoples of the Near East and Africa. I do not think that the Islam vs. Christianity religious war is on the brink in Europe. This is partly because Europeans are far less passionate about their religion than Muslims are. If leaving terrorism alone as the aim of the tiny minority of fanatics, the desires of the masses of simple Europeans and the desires of hundreds of thousands of simple refugees who flooded from the South, paradoxically, are about to coincide: they all want social care from the state. The majority of European countries seem ready to help. There is only one radical alternative to this: the expulsion of aliens and cleansing Christian Europe from Islam, as Spain successfully did in the Middle Ages. However, a new Inquisition is needed for this. The likelihood of selecting that cruel way of solving the problem is very low. Some tempered but militant form of coping with the situation is most realistic. The Europeans will have to carry their new weight, but in the dosed way.

The peculiarity we see is that the modern clash is going to be not over getting jobs. Even unskilled jobs will not be the object of fierce competition between old Europeans and ‘the guests’. Aid for unemployment, municipal housing and free health care—that will be the pie to share. Given that the European family has an average of one child whereas the norm of ‘the guests’ is four children or more, it is easy to forecast to whom Europe will belong within the next twenty years, if not to introduce strict birth control of the Chinese type for the newcomers.

In the US, the situation is somewhat better: the Chinese and the Mexicans come mostly to work hard, not only to consume the social state’s benefits. Nobody guarantees, though, that the American state will not slide with time into the similar nanny state of social benefits redistribution, as Europe has already.

5 Conclusions

• 1. Statism is a more substantiated political order from the perspective of ontological reality and thus is more convincing for the large part of the people.

• 2. Classical liberalism is a mind-constructed phenomenon rather than a factual materialistic reality that would have stemmed from the natural state of things.

• 3. People in their multitude prefer state care and state paternalism to being left alone in their freedom.

• 4. The striving toward state paternalism is increasing in modern times, not diminishing, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment believed.

• 5. The role of the state increases in the modern age with regard to both the total control of citizens and their social care.

• 6. The number of people who think and feel in the classical liberal and individualistic way may be roughly estimated as no more than one-tenth of the whole population. They live and act in their communities but clearly cannot become the governing class.

• 7. There should be no illusions that the revolutions in Islamic countries are based on the liberalistic doctrine. They involve liberation and anti-colonialist movements, but they are directed by Islamic values that have nothing to do with the classical liberal ideology born in Protestant Europe and developed in the early US.

• 8. The niches in Europe where liberalism is still relatively influential because of Protestant roots will shrink because of the general decline of sincere religious beliefs in the masses and because of the invasion of Islamic refugees that began in 2015. Liberalism will shrink because the state will have to become stronger and stricter to cope with the equally strong and strict Islamic influence and the deviant behavior of the masses of people of other religious and cultural traditions. At the same time, the newcomers will erode the remaining liberal and individualistic values of the countries they managed to penetrate. This is why the shift from relaxed liberalism to mobilized statism in Europe is inevitable and a positive protective phenomenon.