After the Future

Retrieving a "Better Angels" Ethos

This review of Jonathan Haidt's new book The Righteous Mind is worth a read (h/t MMc). In my class we talk a lot about rhetorical technique and how every message has a mix of logos, pathos, and ethos. Universities are logos-centric, but the rest of the world is not. Most people make judgments based on emotion and according to what they "feel" is "right", and what they feel is right is usually shaped by their acculturation, the values they were taught growing up. Reason is overrated, I argue; it's used to justify what people already believe. 

Many liberal intellectuals have a hard time understanding this, because the ethos that shapes liberal thinking starts with a bias that assumes tradition--its conventions, values, mores--are oppressive. They must be rejected tout court, and then be readmitted only when they prove themselves worthy according to some reasonable standard. So why not incest between consulting adults? What "reason" is there against it, so long as they abort any children they may conceive? 

The bottom line here is that politics is almost always about ethos-centered arguments, not logos-centered ones, and if you want to change people's minds, you need to change the ethos that shapes them. That's what Reagan and Norquist did. They changed the Beltway ethos from one dominated by the New Deal, social democratic ethos to one that is now dominated by a leave-me-alone libertarianism. For a while there I thought that Obama understood his task to reshape the Beltway ethos using his considerable oratorical skills. My chief disappointment with him is that he didn't even try. But whether he or someone else, that is the task.

The 'ethos' that defines a particular group's thinking defines the limits of what is possible. There was never any discussion, for instance, of single-payer, or medicare for all, as an option in the health care reform debate a few years ago, because the Beltway ethos excluded it from any consideration whatsoever. It doesn't matter how reasonable it might be. It is an option that was then unthinkable in the Reagan/Norquist defined Beltway ethos. It would not have been if the Beltway ethos was still defined by the New Deal. Facts and reasonableness have nothing to do with what's possible; ethos does.

And so the task is not about making facts-based or reasonable arguments as liberals are wont to do; it's about making arguments that appeal to the "better angels" that lie dormant in the souls of all Americans with any common sense and common decency. It's there in us because it's a part of the way we were all brought up.

Competing Tribal Narratives

From Jonathan Haidt, "Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness" in Saturday's NYT"

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”

This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.

Contrast that narrative with one that Ronald Reagan developed in the 1970s and ’80s for conservatism. The clinical psychologist Drew Westen summarized the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”

This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos. (Think of Rick Santorum’s comment that birth control is bad because it’s “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”) Liberals are the devil in this narrative because they want to destroy or subvert all sources of moral order.

The problem lies in that as each tribe fights the other as its perceived principal enemy, power elites, who could care a fig for either sacred story, are robbing both tribes blind. This is why I think the small 'r' republican narrative about which I write here has the best possibility for our finding the middle ground between these two tribal camps. They are thesis and antithesis badly in need of a synthesis.  

BTW: For other posts related to this theme, see my series on "Zombie Traditionalism" here, here, and here. 

 

Republican Virtue

Active virtus, to achieve its highest development in the confrontation with fortuna...requires the fullest participation in the life of the city, . . . Bruni goes on to develop an idealization of Florentine civility along lines consciously modeled on the Funeral Oration of Pericles, the citizen is he who can develop as many forms of human excellence as possible and develop them all in the service of the city, and a constitution like that of Athens--which Florence now follows--was praiseworthy because it encouraged and required this combination of versatility and patriotism from as many individuals as possible. The case for the open society, as Bruni saw it, was that the excellence of one could only flourish when developed in collaboration with the diverse excellences of others; not only was it better for any citizen that there should be many rather than few others, but such civic if not directly political excellences as the arts and letters could flourish only under conditions of liberty.  it was also better for any one republic that there should be others than that it should rule the world alone. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, p. 87-88.

I've been reading Pocock to understand better why the imagination of republican virtue seems no longer to have much traction in the American imagination.

Pocock's book traces the American founders' ideas about the founding of the new republic back to the Renaissance thinkers Bruni, Machiavelli, Cavalcante, and Guiciardini who retrieved classical republican ideals that trace back to Thucydides, Aristotle, and Polybius, Livy, Plutarch. I don't think I've ever really appreciated how the neglect of these writers in our education as Americans has played so significant a role in our loss of any imagination of Republican virtue. In fact, if it's alive in anyone's imagination these days it's in the fevered minds of the Tea Party. I would argue that the rest of us have to reclaim the Republican tradition from the fanatics on the right.

I suspect that their neglect by "liberals" derives from the contemporary intelligentsia's compulsion to debunk as quaintly unhistorical the events and characters rendered by these classical authors. Why read these ancient sources when we can get a more historically accurate, modern account elsewhere? The result: we have become divorced from the imagination that shaped the nation's founding, and we don't care anymore when attitudes and policies that erode that imagination become commonplace. For the founders were more influenced by the imagination of these events and personalities than they were by the historically verified truth of them.  

I'm not saying that's it's not important to understand what really happened; it's just not as important. There's been a misplaced emphasis. These texts should play the role in our political life that the Bible plays in our relgious life.  Oh, I forgot--the liberal imagination has rejected those texts as quaintly unhistorical as well. I would argue nevertheless that our political health and the progress that progressives insist that they want depends on retrieving the earlier relationship to these classic texts, but, of course,in a way that is adapted to 21st-century realities. 

Or perhaps that's just question that I'm posing to myself without being sure yet what the answer is. For republican ideals and virtues cannot flourish in big, populous, centralized states. And yet some degree of centralization is inevitable in a world as complex and globalized as ours is. But it should be minimal, and so subsidiarity has to play a role here in framing the relationship of local, face-to-face polities and their ability to function as small republics like the Greek, Latin, and Italian Renaissance city states. Ultimately it's about finding a balanced tension between local autonomy and liberty on the one hand, and a central, rights-protecting, peace-keeping authority on the other. Is such a balanced tension possible?

Human excellence and flourishig is possible in the Bruni sense only in face-to-face relationships. There was a time in American history during which there was more prestige in working in Hartford or Richmond than in Washington. How and why that changed would be important to understand and then to reverse. We've become paralyzed by our focus on things we cannot change in Washington rather than focusing our energy locally on things we do have the power to change. It's more likely that we'll get real health care reform on the state level, for instance, before we ever get it on the federal level.  

Another problem lies in that republican theory requires the "armed citizen"--this is the theme the Tea Party and Second Amendment fanatics seize on. I think there is a place for the warrior spirit in the republic that I would work to realize, but such martial energies must be channeled into other projects besides the domination of one's neighbors. I'm not sure that's possible, though; for so much of the American ur-repubican identity lies in this idea of the warrior citizen imposing his will on fortuna, the chaos of the primitive wilderness and the aboriginal forces who would thwart him. Perhaps there is some way of reworking those archetypes, but I"m not sure what it is. 

More later.