KEENEY: Bondi Beach and the failure of the liberal imagination

Patrick Keeney is a Canadian writer who divides his time between Kelowna, BC, and Thailand.The attack on Jews at Bondi Beach in Sydney — where two Islamic terrorists, a father and son, opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration, killing fifteen and producing Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in decades — ought to jolt the West from its dangerous complacency about radical Islam. Coming as it does amid rising anti-Semitism, with chants to “globalize the intifada” reverberating through the streets of major Western cities, the massacre appears less an isolated eruption than the latest revelation of forces that have been gathering beneath the surface of our societies for years.This ancient hatred is not confined to far-off places. On December 19, police in Markham, Ontario, announced they had foiled a terrorist plot by three Islamic extremists targeting women and Jews. .CARPAY: Ottawa's assault on our internet freedoms must stop now.That such a conspiracy could take root in the quiet suburbs of Toronto serves as a sobering reminder that the pathologies of the wider world do not obligingly stop at our borders. They travel with people, with ideas, and with religious grievances that liberal societies have been reluctant to acknowledge, let alone confront.Yet whether we acknowledge it or not, the core assumptions of late-modern liberalism are beginning to buckle under the strain of realities they have long declined to face. When I speak of liberalism, I do not mean a partisan label or the daily skirmishes of electoral politics. I refer instead to the great intellectual inheritance of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — a worldview built around the autonomous individual, upheld by neutral procedures, sustained by a faith in reason, rights, and the spontaneous harmonies of pluralism.Liberalism, in this sense, has become so amorphous, so thoroughly woven into the fabric of Western life, that most of us no longer perceive it as an ideology at all. It is simply the atmosphere we inhabit, the natural order of things. Its ubiquity has rendered it the background hum of our civilization, the water in which we swim..But it is precisely this taken-for-granted quality that now exposes its fragility. Liberalism’s guiding premises — its confidence that procedural norms alone can hold a society together, its belief that ancient religious and cultural loyalties will mellow into harmless eccentricities, its conviction that prosperity and personal choice can replace shared moral and social commitments — have grown increasingly implausible. The virtue of liberalism was always its modesty, its refusal to impose a thick conception of the good. Yet that modesty has calcified into a dangerous naïveté about the deeper sources of human belonging.Looking at the world today, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these assumptions are collapsing under pressures they were never designed to withstand. What once provided the unseen scaffolding of the West now looks more like a fragile façade, ill-equipped for the demands of the present moment.Australia, like Canada, has long taken pride in its commitment to diversity and multiculturalism, policies now widespread across much of the Western world. Born of admirable impulses such as generosity, openness, and a sincere desire to welcome newcomers, multicultural policies rest on the conviction that Western institutions are sufficiently capacious and robust to absorb and harmonize all arrivals, whatever their cultural, religious, or political inheritances..RZEPA: Finding my voice — when my country seems to be losing its own.Yet embedded in these hopes are deeply questionable assumptions. Chief among them is a worldview rarely stated but always presumed: that all cultures are, at their core, benign variations of an 18th-century Enlightenment universalism, the very moral and political framework from which the modern Western nation-state emerged. This tacit faith — part dubious anthropology, part comforting myth — holds that societies across the globe are destined, sooner or later, to converge on the same liberal norms that define the West: tolerance, rational discourse, women’s rights, universal suffrage, secularism, and pluralism, the resulting melange producing a peaceful coexistence across communities.In this liberal worldview, human beings everywhere are presumed to desire the same freedoms, to gravitate toward the same institutions, and, most crucially, to share the same moral horizons. When this expectation collides with reality—when a culture proves resistant to liberal norms or even openly hostile to them—the reflex in many Western societies is not to question the assumption, but to fault the host nation. The failure, we are told, lies in our inadequate efforts to understand or properly welcome “the Other.”.Alternatively, we convince ourselves that a culture’s resistance to modernity is only temporary — a brief setback in a community otherwise destined to adopt the values of its enlightened hosts. The dominant view across the West has been that, with enough time, patience, and public-service messaging, everyone will eventually become like us. Multiculturalism, at its core, assumes a steady moral convergence, a belief that newcomers will, over time, adopt the social norms and values that define their host society, which is to say the values of the secular West.There comes a point when the accumulating weight of experience begins to shatter even our most comforting illusions. We can turn away for only so long. Eventually, we must face the sobering reality that not everyone perceives the world through the lens of the liberal inheritance, and that our refusal to acknowledge these differences comes at a steep and sometimes tragic cost. The massacre at Bondi Beach serves as such a confrontation—a harsh reminder that not everyone shares the assumptions we hold dear about the human condition, or the universality of values, and that our complacency in facing this truth leaves us vulnerable..QUESNEL: The price of ‘mushy nationalism’ — why Canada needs a stronger citizenship standard in the age of diaspora power.The violence witnessed there was not some passing atmospheric disturbance but a symptom of a far deeper trend, one that the liberal imagination is chronically reluctant to acknowledge. We are seeing the reassertion of tribal and religious loyalties within our nations, allegiances that would, we were assured, be subsumed by the ongoing socialization of immigrant communities. We are discovering to our cost that ancient enmities do not simply evaporate in the warm bath of Western tolerance and forbearance. The omnipresent mantra that “diversity is our strength” so favoured by our political class has little purchase among those unmoved by the finer sentiments of liberal universalism and even less influence over communities for whom such abstractions are irrelevant to their most binding solidarities.The problem is not that multiculturalism invites diversity; diversity is simply a fact of modern societies. The issue stems from the naïve belief that vastly different cultural traditions — some rooted in honour hierarchies, others in religious absolutes, and still others in ethno-nationalist resentments — can be easily incorporated into a modern political community based on individual rights, secular governance, and the rule of law..Believing that ancient hatreds will dissolve upon entering the modern West is to indulge in a consoling illusion, one that persuades us that our own moral inheritance is the universal condition of humanity. We think the historical trajectory of the West and its institutions provides the aspirational blueprint for all peoples everywhere. We imagine that the norms and values we cherish are surely desired by others as well. In doing so, we blind ourselves to the enduring power of loyalties far older, deeper, and more tenacious than the norms and values we so casually presume to be universal.The liberal imagination prefers to look away from these complexities. It clings to the comforting belief that intentions are the true measure of outcomes. Were the world so obliging that good intentions reliably produced good results, our progressive custodians would both rightfully and righteously inherit the earth. But politics is a stern tutor, and even the most well-meant policies are fully exposed to the law of unintended consequences.Progressive idealists nevertheless exhibit a striking tenacity when reality intrudes upon their expectations. When the world refuses to match their vision, they do not reconsider the vision; they reaffirm it with greater fervour, convinced that failure lies in the world rather than in their own assumptions..WIECHNIK: Bio-Leninism and Canadian protest politics .What we are witnessing across much of the West is a curious inversion of the older conservative disposition to attend to the world as it actually exists, with its tangled webs of custom, loyalty, and inherited meaning. Conservatives are, by temperament, empiricists, building their understanding of politics from what Kant famously called “the crooked timber of humanity.”Progressives, by contrast, do not begin with the world as it is but with the world as they believe it ought to be. Their outlook is shaped by an idealized anthropology that assumes people of any background or tradition can be gently encouraged or politically engineered to embody the virtues of a modern, secular state. When experience refuses to align with this aspiration, the fault is then attributed to experience rather than to the theory. To act otherwise would be to cease being progressives at all.The events at Bondi Beach demand more than superficial and automatic condemnations. They call for a sober re-evaluation of the principles that have shaped Western immigration and multicultural policies for the last fifty years. They force us to revisit the ancient question—one Aristotle considered central to civic well-being—of whether a political community needs a shared moral horizon.The liberal approach has been to sidestep the issue entirely, defaulting to the view that procedural norms such as fair elections, neutral rules, and well-functioning institutions are sufficient to keep a nation united. This was the primary hope of the post-war settlement: that social cohesion could be achieved through process alone, without relying on deeper stories, social virtues, or the shared goals that guide a community..The resurgence of communal, ethnic, and religious antagonisms in Western nations suggests that this answer is no longer adequate, if it ever was. As thinkers from Tocqueville to MacIntyre remind us, human beings do not live by, nor do they flourish under, procedures alone; we are not animated by bureaucratic protocols or held together by a passion for institutional norms. Instead, we live by stories that shape our experience, loyalties that anchor us amid changing circumstances, shared histories that place us within a lineage, and communal understandings that tell us who we are and what we owe to one another. We inherit practices—rituals, customs, habits of the heart—that knit individuals into a community and give life meaning beyond the merely utilitarian.Liberalism, despite its genuine achievements, has long struggled to account for these deeper forms of belonging. Yet it is precisely these profound sources of identity and unity that uphold human communities over time, and without which, no polity can hope to endure. When these deeper sources of social meaning erode, either through inattentiveness or deliberate destruction, what remains is a thin proceduralism, a fragile and brittle veneer covering a society that no longer knows what it values or what ends it hopes to serve..SONG: Do ‘principles that recognize the supremacy of God’ matter in our society?.None of this is to deny the moral worth of hospitality, nor to impugn those who come to our shores seeking safety and opportunity. The point is that, like Australia, Canada is a political community. It is not an empty vessel into which we may pour whatever contents we please. It is an inheritance, fragile and hard-won, and it depends upon the cultivation of shared commitments—commitments to secularism, to the rule of law, to pluralism, to the dignity of all persons, and above all to the repudiation of violence as a means of resolving grievances.Bondi Beach has revealed, with tragic clarity, the costs of the Western political class’s refusal to engage honestly with the realities now shaping our societies. What began as a moral confidence in liberal norms has devolved into a deadly naïveté, a faith that good intentions can substitute for the hard work of understanding the world as it is rather than confecting a world as we might wish it to be.The West’s great strength has long been its liberal inheritance. Yet, that inheritance has curdled into its most vulnerable point: generous but credulous, tolerant but inattentive, hospitable yet strangely indifferent to the very cultural and civic preconditions that make hospitality possible. If we want to uphold the freedoms and decencies that define our societies, we need to regain the intellectual and political courage to see the world clearly, not as our own sentimentality wishes it to be. The alternative isn't compassion but complacency. And complacency, as the horrors at Bondi Beach remind us, comes at a price that no free society can afford.Patrick Keeney is a Canadian writer who divides his time between Kelowna, BC, and Thailand.

KEENEY: Bondi Beach and the failure of the liberal imagination

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