The open society and its frenemies

What do you think of when you hear the phrase “the open society”?

Quite likely you think of Pride parades, or the relaxed immigration laws that have made London a microcosm of the world rather than a national capital. Maybe it calls to mind the bustling, seething streets of the City and Canary Wharf, where brilliant people from all over the globe come to be part of the beating heart of international capitalism. Or perhaps you think fondly of a – real or imagined – deregulated economy, open to competition and innovation and creative destruction. 

Here are some things you probably didn’t think of: religious believers being allowed to withdraw their children from sex education classes that they believe to be counter to the teachings of their faith. A men-only private member’s club. Restrictions on the portrayal of sex and violence in media, and on what can be shown in advertisements. Political and fiscal policies that support the maintenance of stable two-parent married families.

This is, granted, counter-intuitive. In the normal discourse these things are regarded as concessions to the forces of bigotry, small-mindedness or reaction. But that is not the whole story. They are also part of the vital underpinning of a truly open society - not only because they are in some cases important manifestations of freedom, but just as importantly because they form part of the infrastructure of a free country; they are ways of allowing people to be at home in the world, to be part of a stable moral community, to have places of refuge that are not open to the corrosive forces of market liberalism and social liberalism. Freedom is not simply the absence of coercion but the ability and the opportunity for people to live as thinking, reasoning, balanced individuals, not enslaved to impulse and desire, and not easily swayed by emotion and hifalutin rhetoric. The most cherished institutions of freedom, such as a free press, a fair legal system, academic inquiry, a non-political civil service and so on, cannot survive unless they are inhabited by such persons.  

If we wish to be truly open we must pay attention to the preconditions of liberty. As Augustine of Hippo has it in City Of God: "The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but - what is far worse - the slave of as many masters as he has vices" (IV.3). 

A society whose conception of freedom is centred on consumption, acquisition, pleasure, mechanisms of exchange and self-actualisation will of necessity look rather different to one whose conception of freedom is much more focused on conscience, thought, expression and debate. Freedom is not one thing; the insistence on one’s right to express political views freely and to live in accordance with one’s one religious beliefs is a completely different kind of demand than the insistence on one’s right to view pornography, or to have no government restrictions on how much sugar goes into food. 

Those who praise, and claim to cherish, open societies, should pay close attention to what really underlies such societies, what really threatens them, and how they can be maintained in the long term.