Seems to me like a “glass half full vs half empty” situation. What was the standard alternative to a society that preached freedom and oppressed many people? Probably a society that oppressed even more people, and also taught everyone that it was the right thing to do.
In your historical examples, you mention the negatives, but don’t mention the positives. For example, revolutionary France has abolished slavery; so if we (rightfully) criticize USA for the slavery, it seems fair to mention this as a point in favor of France.
If we compare these examples to societies that existed at the same time or the same place… well, I don’t know the historical rate of political opponents murdered, but I suspect that it was pretty high; it’s just that when the kings or the holy inquisition do it, most people accept it as their divine right. Similarly, Soviet Union was a horrible place, but Russia has always been (and still remains) a horrible place.
(Also, Soviet Union did not exactly consider itself Liberal. Lenin would call most liberal things “bourgeois”.)
So I think the criticism is that you can declare your aspirations overnight, but it may still take years, sometimes centuries, to implement them in real life. Therefore we should think of wannabe-liberal societies as being on their way towards something good, rather than being already there.
Maybe we can agree on something like this: Our group can still validly strive for virtue, even if the people who started our group, and who loudly and famously cheered for virtue, did a lot of unvirtuous things. We don’t have to take their cheering literally as a description of their practices.
Right, that was never the intention.
I actually think there’s something noble about them realizing and expressing the ideal values even though they fell short of them. It would be very easy to rationalize their shortcomings, as most people do and did all throughout history. Instead, they left an unfulfilled ideal as legacy for future generations to fulfill. That dream was their gift to tomorrow.
Seems to me like a “glass half full vs half empty” situation. What was the standard alternative to a society that preached freedom and oppressed many people? Probably a society that oppressed even more people, and also taught everyone that it was the right thing to do.
In your historical examples, you mention the negatives, but don’t mention the positives. For example, revolutionary France has abolished slavery; so if we (rightfully) criticize USA for the slavery, it seems fair to mention this as a point in favor of France.
If we compare these examples to societies that existed at the same time or the same place… well, I don’t know the historical rate of political opponents murdered, but I suspect that it was pretty high; it’s just that when the kings or the holy inquisition do it, most people accept it as their divine right. Similarly, Soviet Union was a horrible place, but Russia has always been (and still remains) a horrible place.
(Also, Soviet Union did not exactly consider itself Liberal. Lenin would call most liberal things “bourgeois”.)
So I think the criticism is that you can declare your aspirations overnight, but it may still take years, sometimes centuries, to implement them in real life. Therefore we should think of wannabe-liberal societies as being on their way towards something good, rather than being already there.
Maybe we can agree on something like this: Our group can still validly strive for virtue, even if the people who started our group, and who loudly and famously cheered for virtue, did a lot of unvirtuous things. We don’t have to take their cheering literally as a description of their practices.
Right, that was never the intention. I actually think there’s something noble about them realizing and expressing the ideal values even though they fell short of them. It would be very easy to rationalize their shortcomings, as most people do and did all throughout history. Instead, they left an unfulfilled ideal as legacy for future generations to fulfill. That dream was their gift to tomorrow.