"I don't want to intimidate anyone from pointing to negative consequences of liberalism. It may be that freedom, tolerance, and diversity mean that we must deal with social isolation, alienation, troubling emptiness. If so, that's too bad.
"So maybe you will have to put up with social isolation, alienation, troubling emptiness as the price of the freedom to pursue your vision of the good, the tolerance of others in putting up with your following goals they thing are pointless or even bad, and social isolation because lots of people are pursuing different aims.
"Things could be worse. They are in lots of places. You could be made to march in lockstep, swear fealty to ideals you despise at pain on persecution or death, have to forswear the things that mean most to you because other think your sexual preferences or life goals are sinful or counterrevolutionary; you may find your life full of sociability and meaning in shared resentment at the enforcers of virtue."
Perhaps worse for you and me. But for some personal autonomy is no compensation for social alienation, absence of shared social purpose, the freedom to pursue an absent good as the good is shared and social, and consequent meaninglessness.
You are basically trying to shout these people down, telling them that freedom is more important than community, that they should accept as the good life the right of all to pursue privately and antagonistically their version of the good,that collective indifference is not too great a price to pay to keep the state neutral.
We shouldn't turn our backs on the wish for holism even if we are mature enlightenment Kantian men. It percolated in Weimar until it was finally respected and manipulated.
So I never did say as you suggest here:
"2) Neutrality doesn't even begin to imply relativism. I cannot believe that so intelligent a person as you repeats so stupid an argument."
Thank you for calling the argument stupid and me intelligent.Both are wild mis-characterizations.
At any rate, I did not make this argument. I said that the failure of liberalism to hold the imagination had to be understood...sympathetically at times. Not shouted down. If it is shouted down, then we will have created respectability for fundamentalism and Jacobinism.
"3) The opposite of freedom, tolerance, and diversity, which is not a liberal vision of a good life but a liberal conception of the conditions of whatever you might think is the good life, is, so far as you have indicated, Rakesh, oppression, intolerance, uniformity. You say that is a false dilemma."
You miss my point. Not your private understandings but the shared social understanding of freedom, tolerance and diversity do in fact serve to underwrite and ensconse a new kind of veiled collective oppression, a slavery in fact. I think you are just at sea with the paradoxes of liberalism Marx illuminated.
Rakesh