Anti-Freedom Book Praised By Evangelicals, Why?

Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed should have remained an obscure academic publication discussed on web sites such as Public Discourse. But Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition published favorable reviews. Now second hand dealers in ideas, especially preachers, will read it and its fallacies will show up on in the sermons and Facebook pages of popular socialist evangelists such as Russell Moore, Rod Dreher, Ron Sider and Jim Wallace.

Deneen is an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Most of the opposition challenges Deneen’s depiction of the founding fathers of the US even though Deneen spent little ink on that subject. Deneen devoted his book to listing the tragedies of modern life and laying the blame on the rise of liberalism in the West.

Typical readers will cheer the book’s title because liberalism today means progressivism, which is a flavor of socialism. All libertarians and conservatives know the damage that kind of liberalism has caused and Deneen does a good job of repeating them. But Deneen refers to classical liberalism as well, the father of conservatism and libertarianism. The professor acknowledges that classical liberalism preceded modern liberalism and that modern liberalism is different from the original. But where conservatives and libertarians would rightly claim that atheist socialists hijacked the term “liberal” in order to better peddle their ideology, Deneen asserts that classical liberalism chased its own tale, caught it, devoured itself, and morphed into modern socialist liberalism.

Free markets celebrate individualism

Individualism is the root of all evil if you believe many theologians and sociologists today. For example, Philip bond wrote in First Things,

Liberalism finds its quintessential form in a market state that enforces individualism. The market state must abolish anything that stands in the way of unconstrained freedom; it must eliminate solidarity or shared associations with other people, places, or things. This gives liberalism a curious Maoist cast, as it seeks to dispel our settled notions, be they sexual, biological, or even of who counts as human. 

The current Pope has been a leading critic of individualism, according to a Catholic writer:

The Pontiff acknowledged that our Western culture ”has exalted the individual to the point of making him an island, almost as if one could be happy on one’s own.” Stemming from it are ideological visions and political powers that “have squeezed the person, have standardized him, thus making room for economic powers that wish to exploit globalization, instead of fostering greater sharing among men, simply to impose a global market of which they themselves dictate the rules and draw the profits...the concept of person, born and matured in Christianity, helps in fact to pursue a fully human development.” Moreover, the word “person” always means relation, not individualism; it affirms inclusion, not exclusion, a unique and inviolable dignity and not exploitation, freedom and not constriction.

The Jekyll and Hyde nature of individualism and what is means for China

Nobel-prize winning economist Edmund Phelps ties economic growth to the spread of individualism in his forthcoming book. A November 3 Streetwise column by James Mackintosh, “What Martin Luther Says About Capitalism,” summarizes Phelps’ book:

The more individualistic a country is, the better it has used its labor and capital. ...even in recent years, countries with more individualistic cultures have more innovative economies. They demonstrate a link between countries that surveys show are more individualist and total factor productivity, a proxy for innovation measuring growth due to more-efficient use of labor and capital. Less-individualistic cultures, such as France, Spain and Japan, showed less innovation than the individualistic U.S. 

In God is a Capitalist I summarize the work of Geert Hofstede who trail blazed research on the connection between individualism and economic growth in the 1970s, Shalom Schwartz in the 1990s, and William Easterly in 2011. All found very strong correlations between individualism and economic growth.

Adam Smith doesn't explain the wealth of nations

Adam Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations,

That security which the laws of Great Britain give to every man that he shall enjoy the fruits of his own labor, is alone sufficient to make any country flourish... The natural effort of every individual is to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, ... capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity. 

Smith missed two things that made Great Britain unique - individualism and admiration for commerce. He missed them in the same way that a fish might not think about water. Smith grasped that taxes punished farmers in France to the point that they refused to improve their plots. And he understood that rulers and nobility in the Ottoman Empire and China often confiscated the wealth of successful people and so discouraged them from investing.

How Christmas ended starvation and enriched the West

The world was flat until 1600. Not the shape of the planet. According to the best economic history, standards of living even in 1800 AD hardly differed from those of 5000 BC. TV shows dealing with the ancient past assume a gradual slope of progress so they portray Egyptians or Abraham and Sarah in the Bible as if they were primitive South American tribes still stuck in hunting and gathering mode for food. But if economic historians are correct, Egyptians in 3000 BC lived as well as the eighteenth century French.

Famine and mass starvation were common. Nobel-Prize winner Robert Fogel wrote that in eighteenth century France 20% of the people could get only enough calories each day to fuel a short walk to the spot where they begged.

Of course, some ancient capitals did better than others by looting conquered nations but per capita wealth never increased; it just sloshed from one conqueror to another. Rome enjoyed wealth and splendor because it had stolen stuff from defeated nations for the most part.