Embracing freedom, rejecting the call of the tribe
By Bruce Edward Walker
After the U.S. exited the Vietnam War in the 1970s, there didn’t seem much left to unite proponents of what Mario Vargas Llosa in “The Call of the Tribe” calls liberalism. After protesting the war, pretty much anything else seemed mundane.
Even eco-consciousness wasn’t exactly polarizing as everybody was pretty much in agreement that protecting the environment was a net positive.
Punk musicians in the 1970s mostly had to invent targets of dissatisfaction.
In the meantime, we endured economic malaise, double-digit inflation, and gas lines to boot (and disco music). Trouble is, most of us were like the proverbial frog in boiling water, accepting the status quo long after Whip Inflation Now buttons were a thing. Economics — the “dismal science” — wasn’t exactly the sexiest cause du jour.
But inflation was more than likely the most important issue of the day. As well today, but only if you avoid jumping down the rabbit holes our socalled leaders and op-eddies distract us with continuously. For all their blather about assisting the most economically disadvantaged among us, they ignore the deleterious effects of higher prices on everyone — but most significantly on the poor.
One would think this last sentence self-evident, but … alas, no.
The call of the tribe intent on micromanaging every jot and tittle of the socio-political realm is powerful. However, the urge to engineer into existence utopian designs — damn the torpedoes and George Santayana’s aphorism, full speed ahead! — typically results in something significantly short of the mark, often ending in a deluge of unintended (or perhaps not) and disastrous consequences.
Writes Llosa in his introductory essay: “… othing has illustrated the return of the ‘tribe’ better than communism, under which sovereign responsible individuals regress to being part of a mass submissive to the dictates of a leader, a sort of religious holy man, the bearer of irrefutable sacred truths, which revived the worst forms of demagogy and chauvinism.”
Llosa’s “liberalism,” by which he means the tradition of classical liberalism or what is commonly referred today as libertarianism, is different. Liberalism stands for spontaneous order, doesn’t pretend to have all the answers (unlike its ideological competitors), and focuses on expanding rather than limiting freedoms as its highest purpose.
While in agreement, I think Llosa, like Friedrich Hayek before him, unfortunately gives too short shrift to conservatism and Christian faith — putting him squarely in the category Russell Kirk dubbed “chirping sectaries.” Despite Llosa’s aspersions cast against the Gospels, encyclicals and conservative values, he fails to recognize they assimilate well with classic liberalism in that all implicitly and explicitly support economic freedom, which Llosa correctly concludes “brings material development and progress.”
Otherwise, Llosa and the intellectual fire power he subsequently brings to the defense of classical liberalism is stellar. “… we want a strong and efficient state, which does neat mean a large state involved in doing things that civil society can do better under a system of free competition. The state must guarantee freedom, public order, the respect for law, and equal opportunities.”
These equalities, Llosa writes, “do not mean equality of income,” which is only possible “through an oppressive system, doing away with different individual capacities, imagination, inventiveness, concentration, diligence, ambition, work ethic, and leadership. This would imply the disappearance of the individual, subsumed into the tribe.”
Likewise, equality is touted as a necessary baseline for education. How best to achieve such ends when competition between public and private institutions is stifled? Furthermore, restrained educational competition concomitantly has resulted in falling or moribund test scores over the past few decades. Other diminished returns within the public sector include a focus increasingly drifting toward leftist indoctrination, social activism and, some might say, perversion.
Classical liberalism, according to Llosa, “has given us the greatest protection from the inextinguishable ‘call of the tribe.’”