Liberals trying to articulate a vision of decent political order often invoke the concept of the “open society,” made famous by philosopher of science Karl Popper in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, and later by the various incarnations of the Open Society Foundation of philanthropist George Soros, who was originally inspired by Popper’s work. Popper, trying to defend liberal democracy against the forces that he believed had led to Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism, distinguished open societies, in which human beings are capable of freely expressing their rational judgments about social conventions, from closed societies, in which such questioning is forbidden and uncritical obedience imposed. The division between closed and open societies is by these lights self-evident, and history is the record of human progress from closed to open in the face of periodic threats of catastrophic regression.
The outlines of Popper’s account remain part of many American liberals’ mental sketch of politics, even if they have never read The Open Society or heard of its author. Liberalism appears to its defenders as a regime founded on discussion and debate, in which free individuals participate without fear of censorship or undue moral pressure. Citizens in a liberal society are “open” to new ideas and to argument about them. They are, moreover, “open” to the influence of such ideas to reshape their lives; they are not committed to inflexible norms inherited from their tradition but are able, through their interactions with other open-minded interlocutors, to choose their own trajectories. Liberals neither receive from the past nor transmit to the future a commitment to maintain a specific set of truths, values and practices; all social and personal values are subject to ceaseless contestation and change. The open society and its members are thus open all at once to reason (as opposed to irrational prejudices binding them to convention), debate (as opposed to unspeaking conformity or the parroting of ideological scripts), and change (their personal and collective futures, which they will determine for themselves, being at present unknown).
Emphasizing rationality and human agency, however, may suggest that the open society forecloses humanity’s need for morality and religion. If society is essentially a debating club, in which individuals exchange and refine their opinions, how can the voices of either moral duty or of God be heard? As our traditions record them, these seem to speak to us not in a register of deliberation and mutual questioning but in sometimes terrifying imperatives. Illiberals of the right and left have thus long accused liberals of promoting freedom of speech, democratic deliberation, and skepticism about absolute truth as means of deafening themselves to the call of conscience. From such a moralizing perspective, the open society is open in the manner of a cloaca or a wound.
The tension between our desires for freedom and morality, however, was not unknown to the thinker who established the distinction between “open” and “closed” societies. He was not Karl Popper, but the French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), in his last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Bergson had spent most of his career offering bold restatements of our experiences of time, knowledge, and the permanence or transformations of objects and perceptions. In The Two Sources, however, he turned to politics. Rather than arguing, as Popper would, that the open and the closed are distinct forms of society, separated by the chasm between reason and unreason, he held that a rhythm of opening and closing is the heartbeat of every society, and every social institution and practice.
Society, Bergson insisted, begins “closed” and cannot survive without to a great extent remaining so. In this, he took inspiration from his former classmate Emile Durkheim, the founder of French sociology, who argued that society dominates and shapes its members to a degree many of his contemporary readers found horrifying to contemplate. Like Durkheim, Bergson argued that human beings are compelled to uphold social norms and fulfill our duties to each other, often in opposition to our own desires. We experience these compulsions, which constitute our moral sense, as coming at once from inside and outside us. In order to be effective, our feeling of duty must be automatic, compelling us to act without hesitation in predictable ways. It can be so only if the field of situations in which it would apply—that is, the whole of society—is itself stable, regular and relatively unchanging. A “closed society,” in Bergson’s view, both requires and generates a compulsory “closed morality” among its inhabitants. In a chilling comparison that he repeats throughout the book, he adds that a such a society and such a morality are as natural to human beings as an anthill is to ants.
The human anthill of the closed society, in which people are unconsciously compelled to follow social norms, is disturbed by the power of individual thought. In order to function, society requires individuals to cooperate, make sacrifices, and defend the collective against its enemies. Thinking, however, “counsels egoism.” It sets the thinker, who now becomes the judge of his own case, against the demands of others and of his own conscience. READ MORE...
