The God-Shaped Hole in Liberalism

I used to really like Steven Pinker.

I still agree with a lot of what he’s written. The Enlightenment changed the world for the better. The “blank slate” was a lie. Science works. Markets have lifted billions out of poverty.

I’ve always fundamentally considered myself a classical liberal—what I increasingly just think of as Americanism.

But over the last few years, something about the classical liberal “progress” narrative has started to wear thin for me. The most striking contradiction is that, sure, GDP keeps going up, but in recent decades, so have suicides and mental health issues more broadly—especially among my kids’ generation. Not exactly the mark of progress.

While Pinker certainly isn’t uniquely guilty in this regard, one recent incident focused my frustration on him. Last month, he Tweeted (X’d?) an explanation of why he’d left the Board of Advisors of the University of Austin (UATX), a startup university founded in 2021 with the ambition of providing an alternative to the increasingly Marxist, anti-liberal institutions of higher education.

He saw the school as reflexively “anti-woke,” without a clear vision of what should be done once it vanquished leftist bias. The thing is, I know a lot of the people working to build UATX, and I just don’t see it. They’re trying to navigate nearly uncharted territory—credit to Hillsdale College where due—and that’s not something that succeeds overnight.

If every other institution of higher education claims to be value-neutral while being obviously left-wing, then of course any attempt to right the ship will be seen as right-wing. That’s just basic math. I’m sure Pinker has some reasonable critiques of UATX’s approach, but to expect a brand new institution operating in a hostile environment to never misstep sounds more like an excuse to save his personal brand from the stain of associating with “right-wingers.”

So what does that have to do with the limits of classical liberalism? I promise I’m not just beating up on Pinker for turning on a project I personally happen to like. What concerns me is that, when push came to shove, he revealed the God-shaped hole in his worldview. If you don’t believe in a transcendent grounding for truth, then institutional legitimacy becomes your metric.

Any meaningful alternative to the leftist-dominated world of higher education naturally will be defined by a competing worldview. I still prefer one that’s “liberal” in a basic sense, but that isn’t some law of physics that can exist without context. Values matter. Culture matters. And even if you don’t personally have faith, you’re free-riding on a religious—and in the West, Christian—foundation.

Equality Without a Soul

The tenets of liberalism—neutrality, rationality, and equality (this isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a start)—are often useful, but not universal.

Institutions can attempt to be neutral, and some succeed for a long time. But when the rules are set on auto-pilot, a group of committed ideologues will eventually work the system to entrench a worldview other than liberal neutrality, either through formal rules or informal social norms, and usually both.

Rationality is also a fiction. While it mostly accurately describes economic behaviour, it starts to break down on an interpersonal level. That’s the realm of emotion, which is evolved, but not exactly rational.

Which brings us to equality. The “rationalist” types usually espouse egalitarianism as an obvious moral truth. And at the same time, they’re usually committed atheists. So how exactly is equality objectively observable in the natural world? As best as I can tell, it’s not.

People aren’t equal in ability, temperament, or judgment. Anyone who’s raised kids knows that. Most of us, me included, share some version of the belief that all people are morally equal, but not because it’s a biological truth.

When we talk about equality, we’re making a metaphysical claim that even the weakest or least competent among us has a moral status that shouldn’t be violated. This is the belief that human beings have a soul. In Christian terms, we’re made in the image of God.

Classical liberalism, along with the non-Marxist flavors of left-liberalism, inherited that assumption, but cannot justify it on its own terms. Human spiritual equality exists outside of secular ideology.

Classical liberalism tried to thread the needle—equal protection under the law, and let the chips fall where they may. Left-liberalism called its bluff—what is equality worth if you have a systematic underclass? Marxism took it a step further—why should there be any distinctions between people at all?

Clearly, something deeper than just ideology is required to make classical liberalism sustainable.

Freedom is Responsibility

At the same time that we lost touch with the true nature of equality, we also revised our understanding of freedom.

In the early American republic, freedom meant the ability to self-govern. To sustain self-government, the political process was limited to a subset of the population. We can debate the moral and political justifications for who was, and who was not, allowed to vote, but the fact is that the rules in place made sure that the electorate was largely literate and property-owning. In other words, they could be proven to be capable and responsible.

This doesn’t mean it was fair—plenty of people excluded from the political process were entirely qualified to participate—but at least it was a semi-functional filtering mechanism to preserve self-government.

Over time, as the vote expanded and economic life became more abstract (first nationalizing and then globalizing), the connection between freedom and self-sufficiency disappeared. “Freedom” transformed into freedom from hardship, freedom from consequences, even freedom from being offended.

When culture weakens, the state fills the vacuum. We try to solve social problems through policy and bureaucracy because the institutions that used to shape behavior—families, churches, traditions—have worn away. But bureaucracy can only manage behavior. It can’t cultivate autonomous individuals.

Today, huge swaths of the American public consume more in government services than they pay in. This is not self-government, and it sure isn’t sustainable.

Learn From the Italians

It may sound like I’m about to double down on an anti-welfare rant, but that’s not where I’m going. These things are complicated and don’t just boil down to ability or character. So let’s get into an interesting case study—my ancestors, the Italians.

A few years ago, I became interested in the jarring economic divide between northern and southern Italy. The jury’s still out on the exact historical cause, but what is clear is that in the south, trust began and ended with the family. You trusted your cousins—think of the Mafia—but outsiders were another story. That made for strong family cohesion and loyalty, but limited scale. You can’t build large industries if you can’t trust that contracts will be honored outside the family.

Northern Italy developed broader social trust, able to build luxury craftsmen economies on the level of the city. Northern Europe took it a step further, building economic powerhouses at the national scale. America took that to another level entirely. We built a national culture where strangers could do business together and generally expect contracts to be honored.

However, at the risk of sounding a little bit Marxist, there’s also a dark side to that increased economic potential—cultural alienation. Today, Americans leave their hometowns for work and replace their cousins with colleagues, identifying with career over family.

Division of labor and specialization are near-magical economic forces, but they come at a cost. For a while, that tradeoff probably made sense. Have we crossed a threshold?

The Neo–Middle Ages

With AI and automation accelerating, we’re entering a period of real disruption. Entire layers of administrative work will soon be automated. The old corporate bureaucracies may not shrink overnight, but the logic behind them is already changing.

And that opens up an interesting possibility.

What if the next phase of our civilization isn’t a more centralized, more optimized global order, but something smaller?

I’ve started thinking about it as a kind of Neo–Middle Ages—not medieval in terms of poverty or feudal imposition, but rather in terms of the scale of social bonds.

For most of human history, the family was the basic economic unit. Production, education, and identity were all rooted in the household. Industrial modernity stretched that structure to the breaking point. It created wealth, but it also pulled people away from thick bonds of family in a physical place and replaced them with thinner economic relations over long distances.

I’m not interested in authoritarian alternatives to the current system. I don’t want a king or a theocracy, and I’m not trying to burn down the Enlightenment. But I do think liberalism without a metaphysical core becomes fragile. If dignity is real, it has to rest on something more than consensus. If freedom is real, it has to be tied to responsibility. If culture dissolves, the state will suffocate our ability to exercise freedom.

If AI can radically augment individual productivity and eliminate layers of bureaucratic overhead, family-scale enterprises will become more viable again. You don’t need a department to handle every back-end function if custom-built software can do it. You don’t need to uproot your life and give up your family structure to work for a company in the “big city” if small businesses become substantially more profitable.

Maybe what’s coming won’t look like the sleek, globalized world we’ve been promised since the end of the Cold War. Maybe it will be rooted in local culture.

This is a hopeful vision. It’s not guaranteed. I still haven’t figured out whether I think it’s the most likely outcome—if you’ve watched my last few Friday monologues, you’ll know how unsettled I am by the latest developments in AI. But this is my best crack at aligning my classical liberal beliefs, the obvious problems with 21st century society, and the unimaginable future of AI.

If I’m right, the work ahead isn’t primarily political. It’s personal. Build something real—build a family. Anchor your life in people, not abstractions.

Long live the Neo-Middle Ages.