Individualism or Illiberal Groups as the Greater Threat to Liberalism?

In the first pages of Creating Citizens (1997), Eamonn Callan describes a “Brave New World” where there is peace, prosperity, and robust rights, but no civic dialogue. This world, which Callan hopes we will be able to avoid, lacks civic dialogue “because citizens are either indifferent to questions of good and evil, seeing the point of their lives simply as the satisfaction of their desires, or else they commit themselves so rigidly to a particular doctrine that dialogue with those who are not like-minded is thought to be repellent or futile” (p. 2). Though Callan cites two possible reasons for this lack of dialogue, he, so far as I have read, seems to see the later reason as the greatest threat. I say this because all of his examples of potential causes for the deterioration of civic dialogue deal with members of illiberal groups (especially religious groups) who, due to an insufficient education, adhere too closely to the values of their ascribed groups. I think he, and most scholars who write about the tension between liberalism and multiculturalism, have not given sufficient consideration to the first cause that Callan cites: an atomizing individualism.
Callan and other liberals are correct to be concerned about the potential that group affiliations can play in breaking down the necessary civic ties between a pluralistic polity. To review the concern, liberals wish to respect individual liberty and a plurality of visions of the good. This seems to lead to a contradictory stance where liberals must accept as tolerable all visions of the good, even those that are illiberal. Rawls made an attempt to resolve this tension by conceiving of political liberalism, which demands that members of all groups, even those that are illiberal, affirm some basic liberal principles , but only in their public actions. Rawls' aim was to leave members of illiberal groups free to practice their illiberal beliefs in their private lives. Callan agues (correctly I believe) that Rawls fails in this project and that political liberalism falls back into a comprehensive liberalism because 1) it is difficult (WC) for individuals to hold two separate standards of believe for public and private lives – these lives cannot be insulated from one another, and 2) because of the demands of a reasonable pluralism – Rawls himself does not affirm all illiberal beliefs, only those that are reasonable. It is from this idea of reasonableness that Callan argues that the state has a right to teach civic virtues – chiefly the virtue of reciprocity which all reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the good must endorse.
Callan's focus on illiberal groups is due to their potential the threaten the develop the civic virtue of reciprocity. This is certainly true, but I believe the liberal concern over these groups is overblown. First, (and at this point I am restricting my comments to American society since this is what I know best) truly illiberal groups are few and far between. This is evidenced in the reliance of liberals discussing multiculturalism on the Amish cases of Mozert and Yoder. Second, most groups which might be considered illiberal or as having illiberal trends, such as many religious groups, exhibit what Callan calls 'sophisticated belief'. Callan says, “Sophisticated believers think that certain things are true with an assurance that self-consciously goes beyond the limits of the reasonable. But they also think it would be wrong to draw on these convictions in political argument, at least about constitutional essentials and basic justice, because doing so would transgress the same limits” (p. 37). Callan sees this attitude as being restricted to a subset of religious doctrines, but I think it is highly likely that some degree of sophisticated believe can be extended to many faithful believers, especially in contemporary American society.
Rather than illiberal groups posing the greatest threat to civic virtue and dialogue, we should consider the other alternative offered by Callan: that civic dialogue is lost because citizens see “the point of their lives simply as the satisfaction of their desires” (p. 2). This thought is still in its infancy, but it seems to me that this is a description of an extreme individualism, and that, though such extremes of individualism are unlikely, even a more tempered individualism can lead to significant threats to liberal society. Using Callan's argument, the standard for reasonableness is acceptance of reciprocity. Extreme and many less extreme forms of individualism erode the commitment to reciprocity by inhibiting the tendency to “provisionally suspend the thought that you are simply wrong and enter imaginatively into the moral perspective you occupy” (p. 26). There is not room to explore this further here, but I wanted to put this hypothesis out there and hope to continue to explore it. One piece of supporting evidence here might be the work of Erving Goffman who saw modern society moving away from adherence to religious groups which raised a supernatural deity as God. Rather, he saw the development of a multitude of individual Gods: the self.

Callan, E. (1997). Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford political theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.