Een links beschavingsoffensief. Deugden en competenties voor een pluralistische, dynamische samenleving

Abstract

A left-wing civilisation offensive. Virtues and competences for a dynamic and pluralistic society. Recently, the conservative right has been stressing the need for a civilisation offensive. The most outspoken opponents of such an offensive belong to the right as well. Right-wing liberals argue that government should not interfere with people's affairs, except when they are harming each other. The left is less hesitant to interfere with citizens' lives, because it acknowledges that some of them deserve help. However, partly due to its own mistakes (and crimes) in the past, the left feels obliged to subscribe to an ardent anti-paternalism similar to that of the right-wing liberals. It typically solves this puzzle by focussing on the structural and institutional conditions under which people live, not on those people themselves. In this article we argue that all these three political strategies fail to equip citizens with the competencies and virtues needed to flourish in a modern, dynamic and pluralistic society. This should be the goal of a left-wing civilisation offensive. To create the intellectual space to develop and discuss such an offensive, we develop a critique of the left's all too placid anti-paternalism. The article ends with three examples of what such an offensive could contain.