It is difficult to mount a searching critique of liberal culture — as Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings set out to do in The Perversion of Autonomy (Free Press, 270 pages, $ 25) — when you are determined to say nothing that any liberal could take as critical. The authors, both associated with the Hastings Center, think there is something seriously wrong with the ” culture of autonomy” that dominates American society, but they assure us, and then proceed to demonstrate, that they have absolutely no intention of ” waging cultural warfare against ideological enemies.” The predictable result of this pointless high-mindedness — a polemic without polemics — is a book that dodges every issue, pulls all punches, and would cause no stir even in Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood.
That’s a shame, because Gaylin and Jennings have useful, if mostly unoriginal, things to say, and if they could bring themselves to say them without endless hedgings they might do some good in liberal circles. But like other neoliberal communitarians, they are so eager not to offend the Left or to get identified with the Right that their argument loses all of its edge and much of its point.
The thesis of the book (which, for those with limited attention spans, the authors helpfully repeat every few pages) is easily stated. The ideal of personal autonomy, a good thing in itself, has become a danger to American society because, rather than simply one social value among others, it now stands as the value to which all competing values — such as community, authority, and mutual concern — must defer. American individualism has run amok, and rights talk has crowded out other forms of moral discourse. We need to reclaim a “moral common sense” that recognizes the necessary limits of personal freedom.
As the authors put it, “Autonomy does not give us the conceptual tools we need to think intelligently and decide appropriately about social policies and practices that have a controlling or coercive effect on individual behavior. We must reach beyond the philosophical and psychological framework of autonomy to understand properly the ethics of social control and the proper uses of coercion in a liberal society.”
In doing their rethinking, Gaylin and Jennings say, liberals will have to modify their excessive faith in the sufficiency of reason — and the accompanying assurance that any and all social ills can be cured by programs of “education” — and recognize the role played in human behavior by feelings of guilt, shame, pride, and conscience. The autonomy we want to retain is a ” bounded” autonomy in which individuals freely accept limits on personal gratification for the sake of the common good. “Internalizing social norms,” the authors conclude, “is the key to liberal social order.”
All this makes good sense, and it is refreshing to encounter liberals with sober views of human nature and non-utopian conceptions of the social order. The authors understand — as few on the Left do-that the manifest virtues of political liberalism (classically understood) do not necessarily extend to the social realm.
If only they could say so simply, straightforwardly, and without constant nervousness about losing their liberal credentials. Gaylin and Jennings vitiate much of their argument by evasions and waverings. No criticism of liberals, however tentative, goes without an instant and equal (at least) jibe at conservatives.
Every rebuke to the culture of autonomy is balanced by the reminder that of course autonomy is much to be cherished. For every ment an immediate qualification. As the authors unnecessarily explain, “This book stands amid the present backlash against the culture of autonomy, but uneasily and restlessly.”
Most important, the authors pretend that the problems of autonomy are equally distributed across the political spectrum, when they must know very well that insistence on autonomy in the social realm — which is their real target — is a preoccupation not of conservatives but of liberals. The ” perversion of autonomy” is not an undifferentiated American problem; it is primarily a problem of the Left. Rather than take the side in America’s culture war to which their argument would seem to lead them, the authors steadfastly deny that any such war is going on. Their self-assigned perch on Mt. Olympus allows them a vision so grand as to obscure the gritty reality beneath them.
As with principles, so with particular cases. Gaylin and Jennings focus their outrage over “autonomy gone bonkers” on easy cases, while carefully avoiding, or dancing gingerly around, the hard ones. They rightly protest a concept of autonomy that allows the mentally ill to refuse medical care even in life-threatening situations or that leaves pregnant drug addicts free to continue in their addiction without regard for the consequences to the health of their developing children.
But on issues controversial in liberal circles, the authors are silent or evasive. On euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, there is one brief, cautious paragraph. Abortion gets a bit more attention, but readers will find it impossible to make out the authors’ position. Gaylin and Jennings note only in passing — and with studious neutrality — the irony that many of those indignant over mothers-to-be doing damage to their fetuses through drug use would implacably defend the right of those women to destroy those same fetuses at any stage of pregnancy.
There is, finally, the curious matter of the authors’ slighting of religion. They frame their analysis of human behavior in terms of psychology and psychiatry, and their entire discussion of a subject with grave moral import relegates religious concerns to the periphery. This is decidedly eccentric in a society where most people profess faith in God and insist that their moral principles derive from their religious convictions. Indeed, the problem of the perversion of autonomy is one to which the Christian tradition has devoted a great deal of attention, and the authors’ argument could have been greatly enriched by consulting that tradition. But of course in the circles in which the authors move — and to which they direct their argument — secularism reigns supreme.
All in all, then, this is a most frustrating and disappointing book. The authors take on as serious a topic as any engaging American society today, and in a self-defeating and spurious pose of neutral objectivity wreck any chance they had of making sense of it.
Had the book’s argument been rightly framed, liberals would have been deeply disturbed by it. As it is, they will have no reason to regard it with anything but complacency.
James Nuechterlein is editor of First Things.
