Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Dear Professor Legutko, Early this year, when Russians were positioning their troops along Ukraine’s borders and liberal democracies were debating what it all might mean, I started reading your books. I have heard that they are influential in Poland, and I am concerned about the weakening of liberal democratic commitments in our native land and more broadly in East Central Europe. Would their political identity, their liberal commitments, prove strong enough in what seemed like a new confrontation with Russians authoritarianism? It is a rather disturbing question to ask about Poland and Hungary, and to a lesser degree about other former Soviet satellites, only thirty years after the fall of communism. A lot has been written lately about the possible reasons for this weakening, and for the contemporary appearance in the West of “post-liberalism,” but I decided to explore the issue by studying the work of Ryszard Legutko, your work, the work of a declared Polish anti-liberal, a philosopher, an educator, a former minister of education, a politician of the ruling illiberal Law and Justice party, and a member of my own generation. In our lives we have witnessed the same events — the student protests in 1968, the Prague Spring, the workers’ protests of the 1970s, Solidarity and martial law. We have read the same books, we have heard the same people. I was exhilarated by Poland’s, and the region’s, attainment of democracy in 1989, a benevolent revolution that I considered a perfectly natural and logical development. You, on the other hand, believe that adopting democratic liberalism was our homeland’s gravest mistake. You also claim, provocatively and rather counterintuitively, that liberalism, or liberal democracy, which has always been rightly regarded as communism’s eternal enemy, is in fact communism in disguise. Liberalism, in your view, is communism that is actually winning! I was not sure what I expected to gain from reading your books. Keeping a vigilant eye on the enemy of everything I believe in? But attending to counter-narratives, even distasteful ones, can be instructive. An unapologetic liberal, I was prepared for a strange voyage. I was not wrong. When I was halfway through your book The Cunning of Freedom, Russia invaded Ukraine. Illiberal authoritarianism was on the march and liberal democracies were rapidly mobilizing. (I must note here that when you spoke before the European Parliament you condemned Moscow’s invasion in the strongest terms.) Glued to a TV, I became distracted and irascible. So many lives, all of them so similar to our own, were being destroyed, so much pain inflicted on real human beings, in the name of antiliberalism. Still, I kept reading. In the foreword to your book The Demon in Democracy, John O’Sullivan, the British conservative commentator and erstwhile political advisor to Margaret Thatcher, tries to convince us that what you mean by liberal democracy is not liberal democracy at all. It should be called by an altogether different name, perhaps “liberal-democracy.” It is certainly not liberal democracy “as it was understood by, say, Winston Churchill or FDR or John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. That was essentially majoritarian democracy resting on constitutional liberal guarantees of free speech, free association, free media, and other liberties needed to ensure that debate was real and elections fair.” Liberal-democracy, on the other hand, is ideological, “liberationist,” and does not hesitate to restrict the freedom of persons and institutions “from parental rights to national sovereignty.” It is, in other words, precisely what conservatives denounce as “leftist” or “progressive” liberalism. Whereas the “classical liberalism” of fundamental human rights, open debate, and governments of, by, and for the people, is, for O’Sullivan, just fine. Your repeated complaints against feminism, the “enormous privileges” of homosexuals, the “persistent attempt to deconstruct family,” multiculturalism, the general decline of public and private morals, the loss of self-restraint and shame and the sense of duty, all have a distinct odor of right-wing bigotry. But your ambition goes much further. All these modern abominations, you claim, are not excesses or aberrations of liberal life. They are, in your interpretation of them, direct and unavoidable consequences of the very essence of liberal philosophy. Yes, your enemy is the same liberalism that O’Sullivan so gallantly defends — the liberalism of human rights, equality, and individual sovereignty. Liberalism, and with it liberal democracy, is poisoned at the root, in the fundamental and faulty premises of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill. The whole intellectual and political structure created by the Enlightenment is, according to you, only now reaching its full potential, which is also its final undoing. You have your own version of the end of history. You are not original or alone in your post-liberalism and your counter-Enlightenment. We have heard similarly hostile judgments about liberalism, and about modernity, and about the Enlightenment tradition, since the beginning of liberalism itself. Today they can be found in the works of academic anti-liberals such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Adrian Vermeule, and Patrick Deneen. Liberalism’s cardinal sin, they claim, was Locke’s concept of the “state of nature” — a hypothetical condition of perfect liberty, pre-political and pre-social, to which every human being aspires. But in the course of history various forms of governments, aided by religion, have imposed upon this naturally free human being piles of arbitrary restrictions and obligations that hamper and distort his natural capacities. To liberate the human individual and allow him to reach his full potential, every form of human association, every stricture and obligation, needs to be rationally examined, reduced to actual necessities, and legitimized by popular consent — the hypothetical “social contract.” In your view and the view of other antiliberals, this was a revolutionary idea that struck at tyranny — but also destroyed everything that was good and useful in the pre-liberal and pre-modern world. In order to fulfil its goals, liberalism, according to the account of the post-liberals, became the fierce enemy of the intricate network of traditional interhuman relations, “social hierarchies, customs, traditions, and practices that had existed prior to the emergence of the