I’m a kind of individuals who subscribes to the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s doctrine: “Man’s seek for which means is the first motivation in his life.” To really feel at dwelling on the earth, individuals must see themselves serving some good — doing vital work, loving others nicely, dwelling inside coherent ethical communities, striving on behalf of some set of beliefs.
The good liberal societies that Zakaria describes expanded and celebrated particular person selection and particular person freedom. However when liberalism thrived, that non-public freedom lay upon a basis of commitments and ethical obligations that precede selection: our obligations to our households, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.
Over the previous few generations, the celebration of particular person freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Particularly after World Struggle II after which into the Nineteen Sixties, we noticed the privatization of morality — the rise of what got here to be generally known as the ethos of ethical freedom. People had been much less prone to assume that folks study values by dwelling in coherent ethical communities. They had been extra prone to undertake the assumption that every individual has to give you his or her personal private conscience. Way back to 1955, the columnist Walter Lippmann noticed that this was going to result in hassle: “If what is nice, what is true, what’s true, is simply what the person ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we’re outdoors the traditions of civility,” he wrote.
Belief is the religion that different individuals will do what they must do. When there are not any shared ethical values and norms, then social belief plummets. Individuals really feel alienated and beneath siege, and, as Hannah Arendt noticed, lonely societies flip to authoritarianism. Individuals eagerly observe the nice chief and protector, the one who will lead the us/them wrestle that appears to present life which means.
Throughout our present second of worldwide populism, the liberal custom is beneath menace. Many individuals have gone economically nationalist and culturally traditionalist. World wide, authoritarian moralists promise to revive the outdated methods, the outdated faith, nationwide greatness. “There are particular issues that are extra vital than ‘me,’ than my ego — household, nation, God,” Viktor Orban declared. Such males promise to revive the anchors of cultural, ethical and civic stability, however they use brutal and bigoted strongman strategies to get there.