When the first pioneers in the 1960s and 70s built the forerunners of the internet, they did so admirably. Dozens of researchers and battalions of doctoral students built small parts, some of which could only be integrated into the network years later. In painstaking, detailed research the first servers and networks were developed, and along the way thousands of problems were solved creatively and pragmatically.
The whole network was meant to be transparent and open to connections, as open as possible. On these principles the Network Working Group, and later its international counterpart INWG, laid the foundations of the global internet. The Header Wars, the conflict over which information would be displayed in the header line of an email, were resolved by dozens of tinkerers building their own mail clients, each displaying standardised information in its own way. Maximum compatibility in transmission was combined with maximum individualisation at the user’s end.
I admire the values that the first internet pioneers embodied in their work. They showed creativity and pragmatism in solving problems. They showed solidarity, reliability, and a concern for the common good in how they built the network. Individuality and self-development were valued, as was the free exchange of ideas and opinions. At the same time, the network rested on voluntary cooperation, on genuine assent and conviction instead of coercion.
All of these are liberal values. And yet, what a surprise, they do not concern the market, our political system, or the state.
Rather, they were the personal convictions of people like Steve Crocker, the author of the first Request for Comments. Liberal values like self-development and voluntary work for the community guided these people in how they led their lives and how they dealt with other people in private. How much more admirable such a life looks from a liberal perspective than a life of passive consumption aimed only at short-term gratification.
Paradoxically, Patrick Deneen or Rod Dreher would describe precisely the latter as the liberal way of life: living alone, in a flat in a large city, ordering fast food online, passively watching series or reality TV, or swiping on apps for quick sex.
If one follows critics of liberalism like Rod Dreher, or even aggressive defenders like Milton Friedman, the liberal cannot, indeed must not, make such a judgement. No, he must give a shrug of passive indifference. At most he may hold private standards of his own, conservative or religious for instance, by which he himself would not want to lead such a life. But explicitly liberal standards, by which one might rank some ways of life above others, are, on the common view, not supposed to exist.
This attitude is not only wrong, it is dangerous. It is the one that loses us scores of young people to the right and left. Refusing to offer an ethics, that is, an idea of a good life, means staying out of the competition over our society’s future.
Of course, conservatives, socialists, or religious leaders have an easier time: they can, at least by their own lights, rely on coercion, do not have to convince others. They can also assume that there is only one right way of life. These options are not open to liberals, who have understood the pluralism of values and the necessary conflicts among them, just as they detest coercion.
Without question, liberals admire the market also because it allows millions of life designs to be lived at the same time, precisely without any authority having to approve them. That is also why past generations of liberals have limited their thinking to the state and its power: where must it step in, where must it not? On these questions it is without doubt important to draw a hard line between what may be condemned from a liberal point of view (murder, theft, defamation) and what falls only under private standards (everything that happens between consenting adults).
This separation is essential when it comes to liberal thinking about the state. It should not, however, stop liberals from developing their own ideas of the good life, ones they advocate without coercion. On the contrary, liberals urgently have to think about these questions: what makes a life worth living? Where do we actually stand on social developments? On aesthetics? On everyday morals? On relationships? On gender roles? On good literature and valuable stories? On cities and nature? On digital developments and our rapidly changing everyday experience?
The left has been thinking about questions of this kind publicly for decades: skepticism toward markets is also so deeply anchored in public consciousness because all books about good relationships, one’s own life in the digital world, or the meaning of life, which one finds in a German big-city bookshop, spring from a left-wing discourse whose basic assumptions show through everywhere. Conservatives have always done this too, and by now even the right is finding its way back into public discourse with its own ideas of the good life.
In this country, the idea of a liberal life as a good life, attractive as a virtuous example, comes across at best as amusing. Can one imagine Christian Lindner as an example of a good life? Going by the public image, one would rather advise friends against taking him as a model. Others who stand in public as liberals may not give quite such a poor picture, but they too stand for economic expertise or legal policy. When liberals speak about ideas of the good life, they do so mostly by way of rejection, almost in a dismissive, nihilistic tone. Green ideas about giving up meat and flight shame are easy targets for liberal indignation.
It has not always been this way. The great liberals of past centuries, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and all the others over whom Deirdre McCloskey rejoices, defended moral judgements, described various liberal life designs, and made the case for liberal virtues. So a repertoire of liberal values is available to us: living out one’s own autonomy and using one’s own abilities. Helping others to realise their possibilities. Building self-organised structures in which voluntariness is the pillar from which solidarity can spring. Innovation, creativity, and aesthetics that arise where the limits of narrow conventional ideas are overcome.
In the past decades, liberals have lost the language of the good, the beautiful, and the true, of the moral and the worthwhile. We have to rediscover it. We have to develop our own life paths, ways of life, ideas of the good life, or others will. To be clear: there is a difference between what may be coerced and what we have to advocate, between a political liberalism and a liberalism as a way of life. But the two are not independent. Many of the same values, autonomy, innovation, self-development, cooperation, voluntary solidarity, and free exchange, that drive us in shaping law and markets, also guide our lives. And even more liberal values can be found if one only looks.
So liberals should go looking: what inspiring examples are there who, like Steve Crocker and the first internet pioneers, lived liberal virtues? Only equipped with new examples of liberal ways of life can we then develop our ideas of the good life and successfully advocate them.
