MICHAEL MORRIS | Individuals are not beneficiaries of liberalism, but its agents - Business Day

Michael Morris

In a line that surely deserves being fixed in eternal memory, Adrian Wooldridge, one of the most vividly thoughtful liberals of our time, wrote recently that after World War 2 “liberal politicians and sages created a golden straitjacket to imprison bestial passions”.

If that sounds like a good thing, his point is that the trouble with good things is that people often take them for granted.

The theme of his recent writing can be guessed from the title of his new book, Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism, the back-cover blurb of which warns that in an “age of extremes … the liberal establishment is a bewildered blob, devoid of new ideas or fresh solutions”.

Yet, far from being (just another premature) eulogy at the burial of liberal ideas, Wooldridge’s contribution is a rallying cry. In a recent piece in The Spectator, he invokes the tenor and terror of the 1930s, warning that “[w]e know how extremism leads not to correction but to further extremism. We know how polarisation leads to yet more polarisation.”

The lesson, he decides, is that the “return of extremism can be prevented only by the vigorous application of liberal principles” and “a muscular defence of fundamental values”.

Forgetting, he writes, “is a function of a bigger failure: that overwillingness, after decades of relative peace and prosperity, to take things for granted. We assume certain liberal verities — the division of powers, tolerance of dissenting opinion, peaceful coexistence as the norm — are part of the natural order.

“We forget that we had to wade through rivers of blood to establish tolerance and the division of powers. And we forget that liberal regimes are created and preserved through constant vigilance.”

‘Cultural information is acquired’
This is not a heritable quality. As cognitive scientist Liane Gabora of the University of British Columbia noted in 2025, “even if your parents never break a bone and the genes for bone repair never turn on in their lifetimes, you still inherit those genes and they still work fine if you break a bone. In contrast, if your parents know how to ice fish but never teach you, you don’t have that knowledge … [which], like all cultural information, is acquired, not inherited.”

What is it, then, that we must constantly reacquire? For some, reducing grander-seeming formations — of “culture” or “race”, or geopolitical allegiance — to what they may see as the oblivion of atomised individualism, seems like capitulation. But surely our redemption really is placing that lone human figure — the singular of all of “us” — at the centre of every idea.

A friend wrote to me last week of his and his wife’s Sharpeville Day visit to a “discarded” Ekurhuleni community, that the efforts of the caring there were “remarkable, fantastic”, but that there was no obscuring the general condition of “the marginalised and wretched … broken people and dreams, existence within life-draining informal settlements and hostels, hovels, broken toilets, hijacked or invaded dens of poverty and crime, shuttered doors and no windows to the future, dysfunctional facilities and infrastructure, roads, inhuman rights, nondignity”.

There’s no high-sounding idea to easily answer this, but for all the temptation to throw off that “golden straitjacket [fashioned] to imprison bestial passions”, or trust in the illusion of hard-eyed “realism”, our vigilance is best invested in emphasising the primacy of individuals not as recipients of some magical liberal endowment, but as the agents of it, who see in every part of society their own selves and their shared fate, and intervene.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-03-30-michael-morris-individuals-are-not-beneficiaries-of-liberalism-but-its-agents/