Why Liberalism Failed

Along with the post-Enlightenment desire to liberate human nature from any restrictions and its desire to find a way to dominate and subjugate nature comes its obsession with technology. Deneen writes, “While we have always been technological creatures, our reliance on technology has distinctly changed, along with our attitude toward technology and our relationship with it” (91). While technology has always fascinated human beings, we now find ourselves in an unprecedented position where technology has become so powerful that it has come into question. Works of fiction are now questioning not if technology will play a part in liberating humanity, but whether or not it will in fact be the cause of humanity’s destruction.

Rather than being the subject that acts upon technology as an object, the roles almost seem to have been reversed in the 21st century: “We are the subjects of its activity and largely powerless before its transformative power. Our anxiety arises from the belief that we may no longer control the technology that is supposed to be a main tool of our liberty” (97).

In the ancient world, liberty was conceived as the power to do what one ought to do, and what one was meant to do, and so civic life was ordered around the good of the human being in themselves and to the common good of the community as a whole.