After the Future

Sam Altman on How Great It's Going to Be

From a NY Times interview with Sam Altman: 

Sam Altman: Yeah, I actually don’t think we’re all going to go extinct. I think it’s going to be great. I think we’re heading towards the best world ever. But when we deal with a dangerous technology as a society, we often say that we have to confront and successfully navigate the risks to get to enjoy the benefits. And that’s like a pretty consensus thing. I don’t think that’s a radical position. I can imagine that if this technology stays on the same curve, there are systems that are capable of significant harm in the future. And Andrew [Ng of Stanford] also said — not that long ago — that he thought it was totally irresponsible to talk about AGI because it will never happen.

Kevin Roose: I think he compared it to worrying about overpopulation on Mars.

Sam Altman: And I think now he might say something different.

...

Later in the conversatiion--

Casey Newton: This is the stuff where my brain starts to melt as I ponder the implications, because you’ve made something that is smarter than every human. But you, the human, have to be smart enough to ensure that it always acts in your interests, even though by definition it is way smarter than you.

Sam Altman: Yeah, we need some help there.

Help from whom might I ask?

I also found this interesting--

Casey Newton: I want to ask you about this feeling that Kevin and I have had; we call it “A.I. vertigo.” There’s this moment when you contemplate an A.I. future, and you start to think about what it might mean for the job market, your own job, your daily life, for society. And there is this kind of dizziness that I find sets in. And this year I actually had a nightmare about AGI. And then I sort of asked around, and I feel like people who work on this stuff — that’s not uncommon. I wonder if you have had these moments of vertigo. Or is there at some point where you think about it long enough that you feel like you get your legs underneath you?

Sam Altman: There were some. There were some very strange, extreme vertigo moments. Particularly around the launch of GPT-3. But you do get your legs under you. And I think the future will somehow be less different than we think. Like, we invent AGI, and it matters less than we think. And yet it’s what I expect to happen.

Guys like Altman and Ng sure sound like they know what they're talking about. Their prescience, profundity, and wisdom is dripping from every word they speak. I think it's just, you know, "great" that we are entrusting the future of humanity to them. Can't wait to see how "great" things will be. 

Chesterton's Fence

If one reads the articles of the early Swedish feminists, they ran the gamut from socialists to liberals and Christian reformers. Some disliked the patriarchal family and thought it necessary to abolish it. Others thought that its flaws could be reformed voluntarily through public education. Some feminists considered men and women fundamentally equivalent and all differences between them artificial and imposed by society; others argued forcefully that men and women were different and those differences had to be respected. But no matter where a feminist fell on this spectrum, and no matter how radical her aims, there was a very basic sense of the reality of “Chesterton’s fence” being operative in the sphere of family. Just as one shouldn’t just remove a fence if one doesn’t know why the fence is there, one can’t simply abolish the family or some aspect of traditional gender roles if one didn’t know what function they served, and if one didn't have some sort of replacement ready to go. To do otherwise would be deeply irresponsible, everyone agreed, no matter their other differences.

Malcom Kyeyune, "The Myth of American Conservatism"

I've read some Chesterton, but I've never come across this phrase. I like it. I think it points to the naievete, if not nihilism, of the intersectional Left, at least insofar as there's no tradition or taboo that they don't feel a moral obligation to obliterate. 

I'm not arguing that there aren't many really awful things that we have inherited with the traditions and customs of our ancestors. But those traditions and customs are what hold a society together, and you just don't throw them out willy-nilly.

That's a lesson the Left has not learned since the French Revolution. The chaos you create when you knock down all the fences leads to Bonapartism--the demand for the strong man to restore order. And while American society has been creating its chaos at a slower pace over a forty year period than the French did in the 1790s, there's a very good chance that we're approaching a chaos tipping point that will lead to the same kind of demand.

What's the alternative?  You find a way to inspire people to embrace something larger and richer, and that points the the underlying problem: there is nobody influential in our public life who exemplifies that largeness and richness. No MLKs, no Gandhis, no Nelson Mandelas or Bishop Tutus. We have become a society that is so spiritually impoverished that it is no longer capable of producing such public figures. (See Note 1)

There is nobody who has broad moral authority to talk sense to us when we so desperately need it. We have only crudely reductive fanatics on the Left and Right who drive things, and the rest of us, even if we are the resistant majority, find ourselves being dragged careening behind them because there are no longer the fences against which we might set our feet.   

Well, it's too late to warn against tearing down these fences because we have already done it, and what we're left with is not something larger and richer, but atomized social chaos and the ontological dizziness that afflicts great swaths of the American public as a result. Thatcher asserted the Neoliberal axiom--that there is no society--and I don't know to what degree her policies in the U.K. succeeded in destroying its fences, but it has certainly succeeded here in the U.S. since Reagan.

Kyeyune goes on--

Unlike in the European case, where the people holding the reins saw historical change as a process that had to proceed cautiously, the American attitude in some ways ended up being “let it rip.” The United States stumbled into being an empire, and all the massive transformations that followed in the wake of this fateful step proceeded haphazardly. Fences were torn down, without anyone taking the time to understand or replace them. In the global fight against communism, the United States might have masqueraded as a conservative power, but the same fundamental churn that the French revolutionaries admired and Louis Veuillot detested was still there.

***

I've been re-reading Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry in the last week. They predicted decades ago the hollowed out thing American society has now become, and they were horrified at the prospect.

But because there is something so spiritually shallow and utilitarian about what shapes the American soul, both on the Left and the Right, there was and still is no capacity in its most prominent public figures to take heed. Certainly not the kind of establishment "conservatives"  who found a home in the GOP or in the pages of The National Review. They were almost all of them worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand, and they let the Hand swipe left and swipe right to knock down all those fences, and here we are. 

Well maybe now is the time for them, especially the elites on the Left, to read Lasch's Revolt of the Elites or Berry's The Unsettling of America if they are sincere in wanting to get a better understanding of what MAGA is about. Neither Lasch nor Berry would ever defend MAGA, but they both would see it as a symptom of an underlying disease.

The Postwar managerial Liberalism that was hegemonic for both the GOP and the Democrats created a class of experts, the best and brightest, technocrats. These are the managerial elite who are obsessed with control, and who have had no compunction about telling everybody who is not credentialed as they are to trust them because they know better. Both Lasch and Berry make the case why we shouldn't trust them. Theirs is not so much a critique of expertise as it is of the narrow, shallow, fragmented way that their expertise is acquired. 

These experts are people who know a lot about a very narrow area that defines their expertise. And their judgments are entirely circumscribed by a utilitarian calculus, and their mostly unconscious metaphysical presuppositions are governed by Rationalist Materialism, which is, I believe, the source of the disease. Our ailment is an advanced form of metaphysical misalignment.

The cure has yet to be discovered, and there is no one from within the ranks of this expert class I'm aware of who is doing the research to find one. Why should there be such an effort if no one feels the need of a cure? It's the others in the 80% who are sick, not they. What is their suggested cure for those ailing in the 80%? Work hard, get good grades, and become like us.

These experts are the produce of our universities, and they dominate the corporate world, media, and the arts. They are the carriers of the disease and its spreaders, but, like Typhoid Mary, they don't suffer with its most baleful symptoms. Indeed their the symptoms are to prosper materially. 

But it's because they prosper materially, they find it almost impossible to see how they languish spiritually.  Their lives are wonderful.  Onward and upward, more money, more status, more pleasure, more freedom to live as they please. How can that be bad? The best among them want to spread the prosperity. But this is, of course, impossible because the world cannot sustain billions of people living as they do.

A reckoning lies ahead, and this class hasn't a clue. Some new technology, maybe AI, will solve the problem, they think. It always has in the past, right? What could go wrong?

----------

Note 1: I have often wondered if Jesus Christ were to arrive tomorrow trailing clouds of glory, how many from among this expert class would look up from their screens and notice. And among those who do, how many would say, echoing Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor, "Go away. We have no need of you. We are perfectly happy as things are. We are in control, and you will only disrupt things." Kierkegaard called this "happiness" the despair that does not know it's despair.

The Duttons vs. The Roys

The TV shows Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in that they are both about two powerful American overlords and their families. What's different about them is more interesting and significant. To understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. In a proxy war between the Duttons and the Roys, who would you prefer to win and rule the country? From the POV of Red America, coastal corporate elites like the Roys are already ruling it, and the Duttons are fighting everything that the Roys represent. Are they wrong?

John Dutton is a stubborn, nasty character that you never want to cross, but at least there are some things--the land and its traditions--that are sacred to him. And he's willing to sacrifice his fortune to preserve and protect the land and its traditions in what he  knows is a losing cause. This is what makes him a hero for viewers in Red America. Is there anything analogously sacred for Logan Roy?

I have never lived in Anerica's rural heartland, but I've always had a soft spot for Wendell Berry's Jeffersonian vision for America (See Note 1), and it leads me to appreciate John Dutton in a way I could never appreciate the Hamiltonian Logan Roy. I'm not saying Wendell Berry would approve of John Dutton, but it wouldn't surprise me if a character like John Dutton (or his creator Taylor Sheridan) has read and approves of Wendell Berry. What thinker might Logan Roy approve of--Ayn Rand? 

So the difference between the shows lies in the difference between what the two families care most about. The principal characters in Yellowstone are by almost every normal standard of decency bad people, but the 'good' is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The principal characters in Yellowstone --particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie--are terrible people when we first meet them. But we gradually learn their backstories, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption. At least I do. 

I don't find myself hoping anything for the characters in Succession. These characters are written as soulless appetites. Repentance and redemption are never a question for any of them--it would never occur to any of them that they are in need of it. For the people in the Roys' world, there is no possibility for choosing the "good"--there are only winners and losers, and so there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices. They live in an morally flat world absent any ambiguity and so are completely predictable. 

Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but Red America thinks about Blue elites as typified by the amoral characters that make up the Roy family. Would it be so unbelievable to learn that some in the Roy family are into child trafficking as a sideline? What in their characters would incline them draw a line at that if the opportunity for it came up that would give them a kick or some extra cash? 

Red America tends to see all of America's coastal Liberal elites as very comfortable in that world inhabited by the Roys. Surely the Clintons are at home there, and so, they think, it's not ulikely that they committed the crimes that were rumored about them in the 90s. They're all birds of a feather. Didn't Bill hang out with Harvey Weinstein?  Of course, from this pov, the Clintons have done much worse than anything that Donald Trump has done. They just got away with it because the elite establishment circled their wagons around them the way they did it for Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick. Trump, at least, hasn't killed anyone. Same now for the "Biden crime family".

Now almost all of this is nonsense, but some of it isn't. And it's understandable how Red America, because it is so cynical about America's coastal overclass, might be inclined to believe anything that fits with or reinforces their cynicism. And it's all consistent with what they've been taught to believe about elites from the way they are portrayed in movies and TV shoes like Succession. Red America looks at these elites in the corporate and media worlds and asks, "What deep down do they really believe in? What is their program except to shatter every taboo that decent people have respected from time immemorial? Is there anything wholesome or good that they don't seek to destroy?"

The point is that it's not unreasonable for Red America to hold the affluent, well-educated elites in Blue America in contempt. They have given the demagogues plenty to work with. 

I live in among relatively affluent, well educated folks in Blue America, and almost everyone I know has values shaped by Liberal cosmopolitan presuppositions. They are all decent people with a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. They do not recognize themselves in this caricature that Red America has of Blue America. But as with Red America, their moral code comes from their acculturation, and its interior logic is mostly left unexamined. As social attitudes change so do theirs without thinking about it too much. They simply adapt. Adapting is what Liberals do. It doesn't cost them anything to do so, and so they can't understand why to do so costs Red Americans so much. It must be because they're all racists and homophobes. 

Blue America is fascinated by the Roy family, but hardly approves of its amorality. If anything it mistakenly sees the Roys as inhabitants of Red America. Isn't Logan Roy a thinly disguised Rupert Murdoch? But this is what many in Blue America have a hard time understanding: the Roys and the Murdochs, regardless of the content they produce, are part of the cosmopolitan elite that Red America despises. Their commitments are essentially the same as woke corporations like the Comcast and Disney, or Amazon and Apple. They just serve a different, anti-woke market.

Folks in Red America often act in vicious, licentious, appetitive ways. You know, like Beth Dutton. But they know such behavior is wrong. And while Red America justifies resorting to violence to achieve its goals in ways that Blue America finds outrageous, Red Americans see themselves as defending something sacred. You've got to be meaner than evil to protect what you love, says John Dutton. What is sacred for Blue America that it would defend it with the same level of passion? 

Indeed, what does Blue America believe in at all about America except some shallow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. Whatever is vicious about Beth, she has a loyalty to her father and husband that ennobles her in a way that is utterly beyond Jamie. Jamie doesn't fit in the Dutton family; he'd be a much better fit with the Roys.

Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents. But in order to prevail against evil, they believe, they have to play on the field where evil sets the rules. There are a lot of people in Israel who find that logic persuasive these days. Are they right? No, but it's at least understandable why they should. 

***

I don't know that Yellowstone qualifies as 'prestige' TV in the way that Succession, The Sopranos, or The Wire do. There are too many contrived, plot-driven implausibilities in Yellowstone, but the writing and dialogue (and the music) are often very good, and there and some compelling characters. For instance, Angela Blue Thunder, a Native American warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Tribal Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--

“They [the white elites] make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters.”

Not ideas you expect to hear expressed on a show streaming on Peacock. 

Liberals talk about the "rule of law" as if it has some sacred, numinous glow, but it has no such thing. For most Americans the rule of law lacks any deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect. Even decent people feel little moral obligation to obey laws they think are stupid or wrongheaded. Legislators are perceived as easily corruptible careerist hacks with no claim even to a minimum of rudimentary competency or decency. What right have they to tell me what's right and wrong? Their laws are just stuff they make up as they go along that mostly suit the interests of those who have the power and money to pay them off. Liberals love Nancy Pelosi, but we saw recently how her instincts are to protect her overclass interests before doing what's obviously, from the non-elite pov, in the public interest.  

That's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals in the media sounds so empty these days, especially in Red America. Everybody understands that legislative policy is a tool the powerful use to sustain their hold on power and to enrich their allies. And the criminal law has no real purpose except to keep the lower orders in line. That's why it's so rarely used against elites in the power structure. How many of the architects of the 2008 economic collapse went to jail? And now you're going after our guy Trump? Rule of law, my ass. 

Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history, but as such worthy of our aspiration. A democratic republic cannot survive with it, and it's important that we do everything we can to support it. But respect for it would get a huge boost if in fact it was enforced against elites as frequently as it is against poor folks. The behavior or the supreme court lately hasn't helped. If nothing else this attempt to hold Trump accountable for his crimes is forcing us to have a reckoning about how the Liberal Order functions and for whose benefit. 

But in the meanwhile, we need to appreciate better than we do why so many people are so cynical about the rule of law. It's not something Native Americans or Black Americans have reason to take seriously, and neither is it for those in the MAGA world. So for them it's to hell with self-serving Liberal pieties about the rule of law. Law is what those with power say it is, and so we in Red America mean to get it back by any means, legal or extralegal, so that we can enact and enforce laws that benefit us. And besides, God is on our side, and we are the tools of his just retribution. 

The shrewdest folks in MAGA world understand that Trump is an idiot, but he is an effectively blunt instrument in helping them to achieve such ends. When Trump tells his MAGA followers, "I am your retribution", he understands how it resonates because he's working with this deeply felt desire to turn the tables, to restore the old order, an order most of MAGA believes has been wantonly destroyed by Liberal elites.

And they're not wrong insofar as GOP and Dem elites both supported the Neoliberal policies that are largely responsible for destroying the economic and cultural matrix that supported their local communities, traditions, and customs. Heartland America has been hollowed out in the last 40 plus years because of a project initiated, ironically, by its hero Ronald Reagan.

***

Our feeling about what's "right" largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. This is how it has always worked in societies with living traditions.

Cosmopolitan Liberal Americans have no belief that law is something aligned with a transcendent Deep Real that is the ground for ontonormative justice. Conservatives do, even if their relationship to it has rigidified into something inflexible and lifeless. The problem with the traditionalists on the religious Right today is that they no longer have a living tradition, but only zombie traditions--there's no vitality or wisdom in them anymore. The traditions they seek to defend maintain the old forms, but are animated by something quite alien to the originary energies that gave them those forms. And the result is that most traditionalists can't tell the difference between what's wholesome and what's rotted. 

We're not a healthy society, and neither the Right nor the Left has a remedy. Both blame the other for impeding what is in effect their respective hoped-for nihilistic vision for an American future. And now because there's no culture anymore that is shared by both elites and non-elites, it comes down to who has the power to impose laws that benefit their team no matter how unfairly they penalize the other. 

Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, we have become default worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand. The invisible Hand has no interest in preserving traditions, customs, and communities. It destroys all that in the name of 'progress', and the Left-leaning, cosmopolitan elite are quite comfortable with that. Aren't patriarchy, homophobia, and racism all woven into those traditions and customs? Good riddance to the whole retrograde ball of wax.

But it's more complicated than that, and it's important that Liberals of good will try to understand that Red America is experiencing domicide--the destruction of their homeland--in a way that's analogous to the domicide that white America inflicted on Native Americans, and it's not too much of a stretch to compare it to the domicide that the Chinese government is inflicting on Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Why are American Liberals outraged at the destruction of those Asian traditional cultures but not those of traditionalist Americans? Well the reason is obvious. The people in those traditional cultures over there are not a massive voting block over here. Nevertheless, can American Liberals at least attempt to understand why Red America might think that assimilating into Blue America is about as appealing for them as Native Americans assimilating into White America? Or Palestinians assimilating into Israeli society? 

So Blue Americans--especially the most affluent and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest moral commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family? Of course, they're different, they say. The Roys are horrible people, and we're not.

But on what philosophical basis can you criticize their behavior? I would argue that your objection to the Roys is merely aesthetic, like your preferring Picasso to Matisse. And I would go further to argue that the Roys are perfect products of the anything-goes, nihilistic Libertarianism that shapes the corporate Right and the cultural Left. Tell me why I'm wrong.

----------

Note 1: Wendell Berry's agrarian vision of America might seem absurdly unrealistic. He seems to be decrying the loss of a world that is just gone, and there's no bringing it back. Too bad, one might think, but we have nothing to learn from him that will enable us to live in the world as it really is. I used to think that.

But I wonder now if Berry might be more relevant in a hundred years than he is now. I can say that because while he is certainly out of tune with the current, late-capitalist reality, he's more deeply in tune with the Living Real. And sooner or later, because no matter how out of tune with Reality we become, it always reasserts itself. When it does, the broader culture will recognize that Berry had it right all along, and that we need his wisdom about embodiement and the deep interrelationship between culture and agriculture going forward. How many hard lessons we have to learn between now and then remains to be seen. 

Technology is not necessarily the enemy; imbalance is. And while we humans need our tools, they are not going to save us. Indeed they will likely destroy us unless we develop a wisdom and clarity about what true human flourishing is. As a society we have no clue about that  right now and for that reason we have no idea about how to subordinate tools in the service of human flourishing. But Berry has has a clue, and because he does, he has more wisdom and clarity than anybody, for instance, in Silicon Valley. And yet we let these callow folks unfettered powers to determine the human future? Who's to stop them? 

It's cliche to say it, but that should not distract from its truth--we are not using our technology so much as our technology is using us. And only with the kind of wisdom Berry has will we have the clarity to find ways to subordinate technological developments to serve human ends rather than the ends of techno-capitalism. I assure you the latter is not taking us to a place where human beings will flourish. 

Is a Post-Liberal Open Society Possible?

I have no truck with the Illiberalism of either the Right or the Left, and yet I look at the Liberal Order as no longer sustainable. We are moving into a Post-Liberal world whether we like it or not. I want to defend an open, pluralistic society, but it seems clear to me that the philosophical presuppositions that undergird Liberalism that were largely responsible for making the Open Society possible in the first place, can no longer sustain the Open Society in the future.

Something else is called for to take the baton from Liberalism to run the next leg. Whatever comes next will be, by definition, Post-Liberal, and I fear a forced Illiberalism, most likely from the Right, is our future unless a solidarity-gelling, transcendentally inspired alternative that supports an Open Society emerges as a counterforce.

This is not just a battle of ideas magazine intellectuals. Something far greater is at stake: it's a battle for the human spirit in which the forces that would advance the human project are contesting with enormously powerful forces that would destroy it. Those destructive forces are inherent in technocapitalism and justified by the reductio ad absurdum of Liberal principles in the Neoliberalism that since the 1980s has accelerated the profusion of the toxic potentialities inherent in Liberalism. This is precisely why Liberalism is useless for us in this moment. It's presuppositions and contradictions created the mess we're in now, and a solution cannot be found within an imaginal/intellectual framework that is constrained by Liberal presuppositions. 

The reductive eschatology of Marxism has been utterly de-legitimated and offers no real possibilities unless coupled with a Christian eschatology, as in some possible future interation of  Liberation Theology. And the legatees of J.S. Mill on the cultural Left are all decent, reasonable people, but when push comes to shove, they are incapable anything inspiring any kind of robust solidarity movement in the broader culture. They haven't the intellectual and spiritual resources to take us to whatever comes next if technocapitalism doesn't destroy us. 

Liberals of goodwill are defenseless against the deeper dystopian il-liberalism inherent in techno-capitalism (See Note 1) because Liberals share with techno-capitalism its fundamental presuppositions in Rationalist Materialism. Liberals accept the inevitability that technocapitalism will drag us wherever it wants, and that at best they can mitigate its most humanly deleterious effects. So instead they become preoccupied with identitarian issues that by comparison are trivial like transcending the gender binary. The best Liberals seem capable of at this point is simply to ask, "Can't we all get along and play nice?" 

What a compelling alternative might be or how it might emerge, I have no specific proposals or program. I trust it will arise in ways that are now unforeseeable. But I do believe that the general framework or components of what I think need to emerge are gestured to in the previous post entitled "Here We Are". I am quite aware that the diagram near the end of the post is vulnerable to be misappropriated in such a way to justify an il-liberal society. I want to make clear that any form of il-liberalism would be utterly incompatible with everything that I think and that I care about.

But I believe that our movement into a Post-Liberal era is inevitable, and it will be Post-Secular in character. The choice in the future will not be between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad religion. What's the difference?  Bad religion closes off possibilities for human flourishing, while good religion opens up possibilities. Liberalism is failing us now because it is has become bad religion. In coming decades, we have good reason to fear that its weaknesses will allow it to be defeated by something far worse. 

Liberalism played an important historical-cultural role in opening up new possibilities for human flourishing, and we humans must not lose what we have gained from it. But it's done it's job, and now it's time for something new, something humanly deeper and richer that can take us forward to a place where Liberalism simply cannot. 

For a more expanded version of the argument, See "Progressivism in a Post-Liberal World". 

----------

Note 1: Whatever might be the ever-changing opinions of Sohrab Ahmari from week to week, his Tyranny, Inc. makes an overwhelming case that the Libertarianism embraced by the corporate overclass, despite its often woke window dressing, means freedom for them and peonage for everybody else. 

Here We Are

Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”

Peter Wehner

Wehner's essay references Allan Bloom's 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, at the time a critique of the postmodern Left's epistemic nihilism. Wehner's point here is that what Bloom complained about then is now a far more significant problem for the Right than for the Left, at least insofar as it threatens the stability of the political and social order.

I agree, but it's not that the Cultural Left has moved on from epistemic nihilism. Nihilism is the most influential shaper of our public metaphysical imaginary, no matter what one's personal beliefs might be, no matter whether one leans to the cultural and political Right or Left.

While most decent people don't think of themselves as nihilists, nihilism is so much in the air they breathe that they are unaware of how it influences their thinking and behavior. So the next thing you know a perfectly decent evangelical Christian finds himself voting for an uber-libertine in Donald Trump, believing his lies, and storming the Capitol to save his presidency. And perfectly decent, morally earnest college students find themselves marching to justify Hamas's butchery in southern Israel. It's the most morally earnest, whether they're aware of it or not, who are the most impassioned agents of a nihilism they would insist they don't believe in. 

***

The world is run by the ambitious, not the wise. I understand that. And the ambitious have no need of wisdom or knowledge except that which serves their ambitions. And yet humans don't want to live in chaos to which the unchecked ambitions of the ambitious lead us. So in a world where transcendent values have no public legitimacy we are given two basic choices: (1) either the Hobbesian state of nature in which a violent anarchy reigns, and where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', or (2) the Hobbesian Leviathan that produces a 'brave new world' of  frightened, flat-souled Last Men, distracted by bread and circuses--a lot like the world satirized in WALL-E. On the globals scale, Neoliberalism is producing the worst of both. 

Is there no alternative. I, of course, think there is, but we are reluctant to choose it for complicated reasons. It comes down to this: 

Every society needs forms and norms, but the healthiest society has norms that are aligned with Reality, that is, with the way things are, not with the way we wish them to be. And yet because there is a transcendental dimension to Reality, it must be a part of what a healthy society seeks to be in alignment with. (See diagram below.) Because this affirmation of a transcendent dimension is so difficult for us to enshrine in any vital way in our public discourse today, we cannot affirm it except as individuals. But as individuals we are divided and conquered. 

A broadly accepted sense of Justice as metaphysical balance is essential for a vital sense of social order. Even Machiavelli would agree with that. (See Note 1) Without a center pole to organize and orient our navigation of the world, we spin purposelessly and allow those with the coarsest ambitions to drag us where they may. That's why the idea of justice embraced by the intersectional Left is so useless for us today. It's a symptom of what ails us rather than any kind of cure for it. Whatever its good intentions, it has very little to do with Reality--either in terms of the way the world works or in its relationship to Justice as an inspiring transcendental. It's metaphysical foundations are nihilistic, and its program drags us toward chaos. 

***

I make the case for this in the informal series I've been writing on and off called A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity. The basic argument I make largely relies on the structure diagramed below. Every civilization needs a vertical pole as part of its metaphysical imaginary. But the intellectual elite in North Atlantic societies for complicated historical-cultural reasons beginning in the 14th century amputated what had been its vertical pole since the mid first millennium BCE. It remained as a  phantom limb so long as religious faith--in a fideistic form that rejected Greek metaphysics--remained robust. But it was just a question of time before the loss of this limb would be broadly felt in practical ways, and that time came in the mid-19th century.

After Darwin, any idea of transcendent dimension interpenetrating with the immanent was fairly quickly supplanted--in about 50-60 years--by a wholly horizontal, i.e., wholly immanent, cosmology. Henceforth the imaginary that dominated elite discourse essentially framed the human project as metaphysically meaningless, as an utterly random production of an impersonal, cruel, and purposeless universe that eventually ends with a whimper in heat death. To believe anything else was either naive or medieval. 

Now most Americans--at least 85%--believe that there is some kind of God or transcendent dimension or order despite what the scientific narrative tells them about the origin and history of the cosmos. The 15% who don't largely comprises overclass elites. Many of these Americans among the 85% might not go to church, but they don't believe the narrative of meaninglessness, even if they don't have a better narrative to replace it. Some, of course, on the religious Right completely reject this narrative and  the science that promotes such meaninglessness. But while those on the non-atheistic Left embrace science, they are capable of only weakly affirming some vague understanding about there possibly being a transcendent dimension, but who really knows? And certainly those crazy religious people can't be right.

So among the non-religiously fanatical, vagueness reigns, and vagueness always loses when it comes up against fanaticism on one side and scientistic dogma on the other. So, if you have to choose, it seems more respectable to lean toward scientistically based meaninglessness. It's as conventional an attitude on the cosmopolitan Left as believing in climate change. No one will challenge you at a cocktail party in New York or Seattle if you favorably quote Sagan, Hawking, or Dennett in making your point. However, describing yourself as a Neoplatonist and quoting Plotinus or Meister Eckhart at such a gathering would come across as bizarre, to say the least. 

So it's easier, especially for young people, to embrace the meaninglessness. Some read Ayn Rand or come up with some other pop-Nietzschean ideas about making their own meaning in a meaningless world or whatever. But the naiveté of such adaptations should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two minutes. And besides, there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. Ayn Rand is no Nietzsche. 

Along these lines, I had a conversation recently with a physics major who told me she cannot believe in free will, but chooses to live 'as if' she has it. That exemplifies the kind of cleverness that typifies the postmodern way of coping with its nihilism. We play all kinds of tricks on ourselves so that we may eat our cake and have it to. Cleverness in this sense is a poor substitute for intellectual honesty, but it passes in a world where nihilism is our public metaphysics. So, you know, whatever. Who am I to judge what lies you tell yourself? Whatever gets you through the night, right? 

So lying to oneself is not just something people on the Right do. Many on Left do it too, but with a sophistication that avoids criticism because it's attuned to the postmodern nihilistic aesthetic. If you challenge them by saying it makes no sense, they reply "Of course it makes no sense. Nothing does. Why should I care about making sense?"

Now there are still some Rationalist Materialists, you know the kind who 'believe' in science. They want to insist that their commitment to 'reason' and 'objectivity' absolves them of any accusations of nihilism. They just "follow the science". How can that be nihilistic? They believe in objective Truth. But here's where the postmodern thinkers do us a service. They have taken the presuppositions of Rationalist Materialism and pushed them to their logical, i.e., nihilistic, conclusions. There's no such thing as knowable objective truth, they correctly insist--there are only interpretations. 

But are some interpretations better than others? No--if there are no criteria by which you can judge better and worse. But yes, if there is some scale that measures deeper and truer, and more superficial and less adequately true. The point is that none of our propositions are absolutely true, because absolute truth is unknowable, but that doesn't mean that we can't move toward a deeper appropriation of the truth and talk about it in ways that make sense.  

As illustrated in the diagram below, if there is no vertical dimension to orient our thinking on the horizontal dimension, then there can be no way to evaluate better and worse, truer and falser. Maybe on a purely utilitarian level, but not in any way that truly matters for the way we live meaningful lives.

If there are no depths and heights, there are only surfaces, and if there are only surfaces, there are only shifting habitual patterns of perception that are 'truthy', but never really true in any profound sense. This was Hume's insight three hundred years ago, and postmodern thinkers are simply putting a point on it. What we think is truth, they more or less say, is whatever we all agree it is, and what's fashionably truthy one moment isn't in another. And so here we are. What is fashionable on the Left is rejected by the Right, and vice versa. And truth becomes whatever whoever has the power to force it on those who disagree.

So here we are. This is really what the culture wars are all about. 

***

But truth as fashion is not the only possibility. In my Genealogy Series I attempt to make the case for human reason having to operate on both horizontal and vertical dimension as illustrated below. The vertical dimension is what makes meaning in a deeply satisfying way a possibility. 

Now let me say that while accepting this imaginary is not the same thing as having religious faith, it is not incompatible religious faith. Indeed it diagrams the Christian metaphysical imaginary bequeathed by the early Church Fathers and accepted in both the East and West until the Reformation. I would also argue that it maps what Taoism, Vendantic Hinduism, the esoteric branches of Islam and Judaism affirm. But I'm more interested in retrieving an imaginary that does not require faith or confessional commitments.

In other words, in a pluralistic, globalizing society, I believe it's possible to develop a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical or transcendental dimension. It will be accepted to the degree that all people of good will would find it reasonable and desirable because restorative of cultural vitality and as a robust alternative to the meaninglessness and nihilism that is currently hegemonic in our public discourse.

I believe the embrace of such an imaginary is inevitable at some point in the future, but not in my lifetime. But until that happens, the nihilism of Rationalist Materialism that currently shapes our collective metaphysical imaginary rules by default. Our social and political disorder are its symptoms. I suspect we must (continue to?) go through a collective dark night of the spirit that strips away all our delusions to clear the way for the emergence of something new. In the meanwhile we sow seeds in the hope they may germinate in the future when the time is right.  

In the long run, the only real cure is to re-member the amputated vertical limb. Until then we all spin in ontological dizziness in a world without a center. BTW, I envision such a re-membering as a cultural project, not a political one. It cannot be forced. If we shift to a social imaginary that has regained its center, it will happen in much the same way that we shifted from a geocentric idea of the cosmos to the post-Copernican one--it will just make sense to anyone who thinks about it, and in time will become common sense. As our ideas change, our work in the world changes. And as our work in the world changes our ideas change, and the next thing you know, as our ancestors became no longer medievals but moderns, so will we become no longer moderns, but whatever comes next. 

Yes, even after such a transition, the world will continue to be run by the ambitious, not the wise. But the ambitious won't be allowed to run amok as they do now. There will be resources within the culture that will allow sane people of good will to push back. The problem for us now is that most people of good will have no deeply held convictions, and to the degree that they do, they are fragmented, divided and conquered in so many ways. And so with no common ground on which people of good will can set their feet to push back, an impassioned bad will takes the field unopposed. And I'm not as worried about how that bad will manifests in MAGA as I am as in how it manifests in the C-suites of the financial and techno-capitalist overclass. 

Note on this diagram. I have no expectations that this is more confusing than helpful for most people who look at it unless they are already familiar with the presuppositions that undergird it. But I'd like to emphasize that I don't see this diagram as describing a static situation. The movement from ignorance to knowledge is dynamic, experiential, and developmental. As is the movement toward self transcendence. Wisdom as Phronesis and Sophia is a function of the experience of a movement away from ignorance on the horizontal dimension, and delusional, self destructive thinking and behavior on the vertical dimension.

Both axes describe growth upward toward becoming a more densely, i.e., a more fully realized or formed  or individuated Self, which in turn leads to the development of capabilities to see and understand the depths of things on the horizontal dimension, the world around us. So I mean for this diagram to suggest that a human life well lived requires the integration of the vertical with the horizontal in whatever measure that is possible for each of us within the limits of our particular existential situations. That growth toward integration changes the way we experience and imagine Reality. Its fruits are apparent in the generally good judgments we make as we grow in wisdom in both dimensions. As one becomes wiser, he or she makes better judgments both in practical matters as well as in matters of cognizing truth in art, religion, and philosophy. Nobody knows everything, but some people get it right more than they get it wrong, and there's a reason for that. 

In previous posts I talk about four criteria that define what a healthy society's metaphysical imaginary should comprise: Here's a summary: 

Scope: The best metaphysical imaginary has the broadest scope on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Premodern societies have more scope on the vertical axis and less scope on the horizontal, but it could be argued that premoderns had a better grip on reality than moderns because they were not as profoundly alienated from the world as moderns are. We moderns know more "about" the world, but we are at the same time more disconnected from its vitality, and in that sense have less of a grip on it.  A remedy for us now is to restore the individual's ability to get a better grip on reality, or in Neoplatonic terms, to participate more deeply in it. This requires self-transformation in both a psychological-therapeutic sense and in a spiritual sense. We need to expand our scope on both the horizontal and the vertical, but it's more important now that we expand on the vertical because we desperately need more wisdom to deal with the crises looming on the horizontal as it expands especially in the domain of information technologies--AI and VR. 

Coherence: The best metaphysical imaginary therefore integrates in a coherent way what it knows on both the vertical and the horizontal. This is the task of philosophy. As we learn more on the horizontal, we need to integrate it on the vertical. As more people take seriously the importance of growing in wisdom, i.e., as a new participatory epistemology and ontology becomes increasingly legitimated, humans will find ways to understand and interpret what we know as knowledge expands on the horizontal in ways that help us to get a healthier grip on the world. We need science, but we need its findings now more than ever to be wisely interpreted in such a way that it serves the deepest human needs, not the needs of shareholders. 

Adaptability: The best metaphysical imaginary is in a continuous process of expanding and deepening our grip on reality. Coherence requires the development of the ability to adapt what is known on the horizontal to what has broad consensus on a restored vertical, and vice versa. As new knowledge becomes legitimated on either axis, it is likely to challenge existing imaginal models on either the vertical or horizontal, and so the Wise celebrate as progress (rather than resist as disruption) the need to revise the imagined models because our doing so effects the expansion and deepening of our grip on reality. Self-transcendence on the Vertical axis means that our model of reality is continuously developing as we become wiser, and analogously our expansion of knowledge on the horizontal requires a continuous adaptability in our thinking and knowing on both horizontal and vertical axes. The best metaphysical imaginary is a dynamic, evolving system. But such evolution is healthy only so long as it retains a creative tension between the horizontal and the vertical.

Richness:  The best metaphysical imaginary enriches, complexifies, and deepens our experience of the mystery of Being--or what I call the Living Real. When a society loses touch with the Living Real, it sickens and it must find a remedy. It should be obvious to anyone--even those who are best adapted to living in a late-modern milieu, i.e., educated, affluent cosmopolitans, that late Modernity has produced a sick, spiritually impoverished society for most people who are living in it. The problem of spiritual poverty cannot be addressed from within Liberalism because Liberalism has created the problem, but neither can it be addressed by the Religious Conservatives because while they want to restore the vertical axis, their solutions are incoherent and maladapted to the reality on the horizontal axis. An important task for 'richness' is to develop some consensus about what a rich, deeply human life comprises. Right now, as a matter of cultural consensus, we haven't a clue. 

---------

Note 1: As Charles Taylor points out in his A Secular Age:

Even Machiavelli still has an understanding of this kind when it comes to Republican forms. There is a certain equilibrium-in-tension which needs to be maintained between the “grandi” and the people, if these forms are to survive. In healthy polities, this equilibrium is maintained by the play or rivalry and mutual surveillance between the orders. But there are certain developments which threaten this, such as an excessive interest on the part of citizens in their private wealth and property. This constitutes “corruzione”, and unless dealt with in time, and severely, will bring about the end of republican liberty. There is a causal attribution here: wealth undermines liberty; but the term used, with its strong normative resonances, shows that the understanding of society is being organized around a concept of normal form. (p. 182). 

Are You Feeling Politically Homeless?

If you are an ordinary, i.e., non-overclass, American, Michael Lind explains why you might be feeling that neither party represents your values or your interests: 

...the center of gravity of the overclass is center-right (promarket) on economic issues and center-left (antitraditional) on social issues. In comparison, the center of gravity of the much larger working class is center-left on economic issues and center-right on social issues.

Populists combined with social democratic leftists make up half or more of the US population, but they are almost completely unrepresented among the college-educated overclass professionals who make up most of the personnel in legislatures, executive agencies, courts, corporate suites, think tanks, universities, philanthropies, and media corporations. This explains why, for the last generation, “centrism” in American politics has been defined as overclass centrism, identified with support for cutting working-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare in the name of “fiscal responsibility,” while embracing individualistic liberal views of reproduction and sex and, more recently, gender identity. Meanwhile, the “radical center,” the midpoint of the working-class majority’s political spectrum, has either been ignored by politicians and pundits and academics altogether or grossly mischaracterized by overclass journalists and overclass academics as the “far right” and lumped together with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Michael Lind, The New Class War, p. 73

Lind is waging war on what he calls the Overclass, the bipartisan Neoliberal elites that have made such a mess of things from Reagan through Obama. Each of these writers wants center-left policies when it comes to wealth redistribution and government programs that help ordinary Americans and their families. He wants to make the case that ordinary Americans, especially the ones that support a guy like Trump, have justifiable beefs that Overclass elites are blind to. 

I'm very sympathetic to that argument. I think that ordinary Americans that support Trump are not evil, but they are too easily seduced by evil. And I do disagree with Lind when he argues that people like me who are patronizing these folks when I describe them as naive and easily manipulable. However annoying people might be on the Left, they cannot be blamed for J6. Those who participated proved that the Liberal stereotype was largely correct. Such people are naive and easily manipulable.Whatever level of responsibility elite Liberal clueless has played in in annoying MAGA, is nothing compared to the cynical exploitation of that naivety by illiberal elites on the Right. 

But I get it. Lind wants to argue that the Neoliberal overclass elites are oblivious of the underlying causes that made Trump a possibility, and there's an argument to be taken seriously there. But regardless of the degree to which the overclass has provoked non-elites, we can no longer look at the MAGA populists as a benign movement after J6, and we can no longer trust to the basic decency of too many of the ordinary Americans who are attracted to Trump. That decency will not impede their doing terrible damage to our polity precisely because they so easily manipulable. That's on them; not on Overclass elites. If that sounds patronizing, too bad. It's just the obvious truth. And that naiveté and manipulability has been and is continuing to be weaponized by cynical right-wing pols and right-wing media. 

Later in Lind's book, which came out in early 2020, he mocks overclass criticism and alarm about the threats that Trump posed: 

A far more common view among transatlantic elites interprets the success of populist and nationalist candidates in today’s Western democracies not as a predictable and disruptive backlash against oligarchic misrule, but as a revival of Nazi or Soviet-style totalitarianism. One narrative holds that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime, by cleverly manipulating public opinion in the West through selective leaks to the media or Internet advertisements and memes, is responsible for Brexit, the election of Trump in 2016, and perhaps other major political events. A rival narrative sees no need to invoke Russian machinations; in this view, without aid from abroad, demagogues can trigger the latent “authoritarian personalities” of voters, particularly white working-class native voters, many of whom, it is claimed, will turn overnight into a fascist army if properly mobilized. These two elite narratives, promulgated by antipopulist politicians, journalists, and academics, can be called the Russia Scare and the Brown Scare (after earlier “brown scares” in Western democracies, with the color referring to Hitler’s Brownshirts).

The reductio ad absurdum of this kind of mythological thinking is the adoption of the term “Resistance” by domestic opponents of President Donald Trump, which implies an equation between Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans and the heroic anti-Nazis of the French Resistance. The anti-fascist theme also provides the name for the Antifa movement which, like the earlier “black bloc” anarchist movement, is made up chiefly of the privileged children of the white overclass who abuse leftist ideology as an excuse to dress up as movie-style ninjas, vandalize property, and harass people.

The New Class War, pp. 90-91.

He's like the Ross Douthat conservatives who thought that the Left was overreacting to Trump. I wonder if he thinks that now. Would he be so dismissive of Brown Scares after J6? And while I don't believe that Putin caused Brits to vote for Brexit or Americans to vote for Trump, Putin did what he could to nudge things toward those ends, and in an election as close as it was in '16 it's not implausible his efforts made a difference. I also believe that someday we're going to find out that Trump's relationship with Putin was far more significant than Lind seems to think it was.

I want to take the ideas of thoughtful, good-faith conservatives like Lind, Patrick Deneen, and Sohab Ahmari (See Note 1) seriously because they have important insights that most conventional American Lefties need to understand. But because these three writers' sympathies lie with heartland anti-elites, I think they are (were?) not nearly as concerned as they should be about the brown-shirt energies that are there to be aroused and manipulated--indeed that have been aroused and are being manipulated. 

Because most people who voted for Trump are not White Nationalists or Christian Nationalists does not mean that (1) these forms of proto-fascism aren't the primary driving force of the GOP now, and (2) that rank-and-file, "decent" Republicans  will 'resist' these forms of illiberalism if their advocates come into power. A Christian Nationalist is the freakin' Speaker of the House now. Does that not alarm Lind or Deneen? Is Johnson's kind of theocratic populism something they think should be in the person of someone who's second in line to the presidency? 

I think another important, if obvious, point to make is that the Republican Party as the Party of Trump, Kevin McCarthy, and now Mike Johnson can no longer be taken seriously as a governing party. It has surrendered to reactionary clowns and spineless empty suits who go along with them. So if Lind, Deneen, and Ahmari are serious about their ideas becoming policy, they will have to do it through the Democratic Party.

But because the Democrats are the only party capable of governing, they have a responsibility to make room for serious, good-faith anti-Neoliberal, cultural conservatives like Deneen and Ahmari to find a home in it. It cannot do that so long as Middle America sees the Intersectional Left as the Democrats' public face. 

Yes, the Intersectional Left has more influence in the cultural sphere than it has in the political. Most elected Democrats are not seeking to transcend the gender binary or support the anti-colonialist ideology that justifies 10/7. But Heartland America connects the Democrats with that Left extremism because the Democrats are the Party of the Left Progressivism because it's the  Party that wants 'progress'.  And so because 'progress' these days is defined by the Intersectional Left more than it is by Gandhi or MLK, the Democrats, or anybody who identifies as "progressive" are guilty by association with the extremists. Americans have seen how the once staid Republican Party has been taken over by its extremists, so it's not utterly ridiculous for many moderate voters to think that the same thing will happen to the Democrats. 

----------

Note 1. I don't think there's much in the critique of Neoliberalism found in Deneen's Regime Change or Ahmari's Tyranny, Inc. that Bernie Sanders would disagree with. I think that Deneen's 'aristo-populist' ideas resonate with Christopher Lasch's ideas about the need for elites instead of being rootless staying in the communities that they grew up in and actually dealing with non-elites in a face-to-face way. Demographic sorting and the nationalization of local politics is a huge problem.  And while everything in a society dominated by Neoliberal values works against that, he's right, at the very least, that we need more mixing and less separating.

But the 'aristo' part of aristo-populism isn't palatable to most on the egalitarian Left for whom the Iron Law of Oligarchy is so deeply offensive. So are death and taxes offensive, but an elite overclass we shall have always with us. The future political challenge is not to abolish the elite, but  to establish a polity in which its elites can be more effectively pressured if not compelled to take the material and cultural needs of non-elites seriously. Lind addresses this in a recent essay about power alignments in coming decades:

Whether human society in the future consists mostly of “a mass of semi-slaves” depends on whether the wage-earning majorities in particular countries, by means of disciplined mass-membership institutions like political parties, labor unions, and religious organizations, are able to exercise countervailing power to restrain the “aristocracy of talent at the top.”

In other words, ordinary people have to organize to resist and hold accountable, not to overthrow, the overclass. It needs to find ways that compel the overclass to see how its interests lie in taking seriously the interests of the non-overclass seriously. Both Lind and Deneen point out that the institutions that enabled ordinary Amerians to do that in the mid 20th Century have collapsed. That coupled with the fact that 18th-century liberal ideas about contracts, property, and individual freedoms are used as an ideological cudgel by overclass elites like Koch brothers and the legal hacks attracted to the Federalist Society to crowd out any possibility of balancing these in a regime committed to the common good.

See Deneen's second interview with Ezra Klein here and his 2019 interview with Lind here. I talk about that interview and another with Ahmari in a post entitled  "Radicalized Elites on the Right 1" and the homelessness theme in "Radicalized Elites on the Right 2"

Saying the Obvious

I think Israel's biggest problem with folks on the Left is that it elected Netanyahu, the Israeli equivalent of Trump. If the Israeli equivalent of an Obama had been head of state when this Hamas attack happened, the reaction on the Left would have been very different. These days, It always boils down to picking a red or blue jersey to put on. So because Netanyahu = the Right Wing "red" Bad Guy, Hamas = the Left Wing "blue" Good Guys. No matter how horrific their savagery, Hamas is fighting the good, de-colonialist fight. Would that things could be so simple.

The question that remains open for me is whether Israel will blunder here, as the U.S. blundered after 9/11, in confusing the need for revenge with the need to find a practical, realistic solution to terrorism.  Invade and suppress does not strike me as a practical, reallistic solution. But they have to do something, right? So here we are.