After the Future

Fear & Desire; Grace & Freedom

These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things they should do instead and how to make them abandon their silly and harmful practices in order “to live better lives.” Harris’s engineering mission envelops human life as a whole. “Given recent developments in biology, we are now poised to consciously engineer our further evolution,” he writes. “Should we do this, and if so, in which ways? Only a scientific understanding of the possibilities of human well-being could guide us.” Harris counsels that those wary of the arrogance, and the potential dangers, of the desire to perfect the biological evolution of the species should observe the behavior of scientists at their professional meetings: “arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity.” Scientists, in Harris’s telling, are the saints of circumspection.  Jackson Lears in The Nation

Lears' point is that new atheists like Sam Harris aren't just reductionist in their rejection of religion, but their embrace of an aggressive ideological positivism can be just as dangerous as any fanaticism that comes from the right.  Right-wing ideologues are more in the news these days, but I think an argument can be made that the Harrises and Kurzweils of the world are wittingly or unwittingly working for an alternative, transhuman future that is more ominous than anything envisioned in the feverish imaginations on the Right.

Atheists get things mixed up when they blame religion when the real problem is an unbalanced ideology, whether secular or religious in its style. Religious wars were the cause of absurd levels of violence and destruction in 17th century Europe, but the most massively destructive violence in Europe's recent history has been motivated by secular ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's purges were not motivated by religious zeal. Religious attitudes and behaviors can be a  part of an ideology, but insofar as a religion has a genuine faith dimension to it, that part of it cannot be contained within any ideology, and it usually works at cross purposes with fanatical ideological agendas.

Rationalists don't understand faith because they think about faith claims as head-centered truth propositions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Faith is not believing in an unproveable assertion as opposed to not believing it. It's not an intellectual kind of thing. At root faith is an irreducible experience--an intuition, gift, discovery--whatever the best word for it might be. It's about having one's life turned upside down by a realization about how things are, and then trying to make sense of the world from this inverted perspective.

And so faith propositions are simply attempts to describe how the world looks from that perspective. That "making sense" is what is known as theology, but as with any human endeavor, there's good theology, and there's bad theology. Bad theology is inpsired by instinctual fear and desire; good theology by a spirit of grace and freedom. Instinctual fear and desire, whether it's religious or secular, are at the root of the problem, not faith.

All of us, whether we are aware of it or not, have a mix of experiences that are composed of both transcendent and instinctual impulses--from above and below, so to speak. To be human means always to experience a mix of both whether we are aware of the sources of these impulses or not. Those who live right-side up, live in a practical, utilitarian way in which instinctual fear and desire are primary. For them the logic of freedom and grace is also a presence in their lives, but it is secondary. To live a life turned upside-down by faith means to live as if the logic of grace and freedom is primary and the logic of fear and desire secondary.

To be a man or woman of faith means to be more consciously aware of the transcendent role grace plays in his or her own life, but also in everyone's life. People of faith don't have some special access to grace, but their awareness of it compels them to strive more consciously to live according to its expansive, liberating logic. They see more clearly, or should, that the point of this striving is to subordinate instinctual fear and desire to the logic of freedom and grace. Those who are more successful than the rest of us in this struggle, because it is not at all easy, we call saints. It's one thing to understand it; it's another thing to live it. And there are many who live it without understanding it. The only important thing is to live it.

So the human task, from the point of view of faith, is to live within the tension of grace and instinct, but in such a way that grace plays the dominant role. Churches  are useful to the degree that they support individuals and communities in the struggle to live that task, and they are harmful to the degree that they obstruct it. And my problem with the ideological religious right is that they don't understand the task and cannot understand it so long as they are institutionally fear-centered rather than grace-centered. By their fruits you will know them.

And my problem with more moderate churches is that they miss the point, too, insofar as they are desire-centered--that is, insofar as they see their primary goal as to deliver happiness, peace, and prospertiy to their congregants. From an upside-down-perspective, those concerns can never be primary. To live one's life centered either on fear or on desire is to live in a way that has nothing to do with the spirit of Christianity, which rather often leads to the taking up of burdens. Nothing could be clearer to me. In the Old Testament following the law leads to prosperity and Canaan; in the New Testament it leads to Calvary, to the paradox of losing one's life in order to find it. That's not a formula that makes sense in the rightside up world, a world driven by fear and desire.

***

There is an antinomian strain at the heart of Christianity that has been from the beginning subversive of conventional attitudes and practices. I don't mean this in the sense of anything goes, but Jesus, and later Paul, made it clear that there were more important things than following the rules and conforming to traditional conventions. Jesus and Paul both understood that if one is truly a citizen of the "kingdom", then one is governed by the logic of grace and freedom, and while that logic often overlaps with traditional wisdom and practice, it is not constrained by it or subordinated to it.

The worst kind of theology is an attempt to take religious language born of a subversive impulse directed toward turning things upside-down and to co-opt it into a project to reinforce right-side-up ideological or conventional thinking. For me the sign of genuine faith lies in its being in some way a sign of contradiction to mainstream--liberal or conservative--right-side-up thinking.

Our culture, consciously and unconsciously, has appropriated a utilitarian, pleasure- mazimizing model of what human happiness means, and it has made us ridiculously superficial. Consumerism and utilitarianism go hand in hand, and the churches are as coopted by it more than they are a sign of contradiction to it except for a few cautionary bromides against overdoing it. In such a cultural milieu, it is difficult to have any real sense about how sacrifice and suffering can be redemptive and transformative.

Liberalism in the Anglo-American sphere, at least, has a strong historical link to utilitarian thinking, and its pleasure maximizing approach to ethical and policy choices. And I'd argue that because this utilitarian model influences  Liberals more than it influences Conservatives, "liberals" are more prone to give up when things get difficult or when they aren't fun anymore. That's why the right wipes the floor with liberals in almost every conflict between them. Liberals make fine bureaucrats or academics, but substantive progressive change in the Anglo-American tradition has come mainly from people with faith commitments, people who are willing to pay a price for what they believe.

Our respect for the military in a consumerist culture is largely rooted in the memory of a time when the embrace of these older virtues was commonplace--when courage, discipline, loyalty, sacrifice, and suffering, not for their own sake, but for the attainment of a larger purpose, were a highly respected ideals for everybody. They are not expected of anybody now outside of the military, and we expect the military to take the full burden when some kind of sacrifice is called for--sacrifices that the rest of us, especially if we are liberal, well-educated, and affluent, wouldn't dream of making ourselves. There is a scapegoating dynamic going on here that I'd like to explore in Girardian vein in another post some time.

[BTW:Nobody has more respect than I do for the men and women who put their lives on the line in the belief that they do so for a greater good. It's not their fault that their missions, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, serves no such lofty purposes but rather the ambition and greed of elites who irresponsibly sent them there.]

***

Dietrich Bonhoeffer while in prison wrote about a religionless Christianity in a world come of age, and thinking about what that means has been a central concern of this blog. His was a profoundly Christ-centered life, and yet he wrote to Bethge about how he felt more comfortable in the company of non-believers than believers.  I sympathize. I think that it's because he experienced with conventional believers a meaning disconnect because their world was too right-side up, too "ideological", too much governed by fear and desire, and the meanings of the religious language understood from his upside-down perspective simply did not mean for him what they meant to them.

Bonhoeffer's idea about a religionless Christianity in a world come of age has not become popular, particularly among Christians, because it's a Christianity that does not offer much comfort. It's a Christianity for grownups. Its primary objective is not to promote human flourishing in the ordinary sense; it has rather more subversive purposes. It promotes, if the situation requires it, an austere life, one that has the appearance of normalcy but which understands that normalcy and its complacent assumptions are a sterile illusion. It is committed to a larger sense of purpose than that, one that often requires sacrifice and deprivation, and that's not something most people, especially conventional Christians, are interested in.

A religionless Christianity is not interested in institutional stability and preserving traditions and maintaining cultural identity; it's interested in being real. It's interested rising to the challenge to do the work that must be done because that's what is called for in this moment, here and now. And this is what it means to live a life of faith, because faith is the discovery that parallel to or underneath the ordinary workings of the world ruled for the most part by the logic of power and greed, fear & desire,  runs an upside-down logic, the logic of grace and freedom.

That logic seeks to subvert the dominance of the "normal", especially when normal means a life in all its fundamentals committed to "getting more"--even getting more happiness. A religionless Christianity eschews ideology, but it's for celebration--it's for compassison, for beauty, for remembering, and for mutual support. A religionless Christianity is always about celebration when what is celebrated is the Real.

[Ed: This is a repost from May 2011]

Common Core State Standards: More Top-Down Stupidity

I remember when I first heard about the idea of having a national common core standards in K-12 education, it didn't seem like a bad idea. Why not set standards to insure a basic minimum so that we can be sure that every child is getting the education he or she deserves? 

But, like many things, what might appear to be a good idea is not when you look under the hood. It's just another form of top-downism that should be opposed in principle as well as for the practical negative effects that it will have on teachers and students.

As the blog Rational Mathematics Education puts it:

It's a rigid, one-size fits all system that presumes to know now, for everyone, everywhere, what EVERY child "must" know in order to be successful in a rapidly-changing world in which the rate of change increases all the time. Such an approach is guaranteed to always be dramatically lagging behind the demands of reality, stifling creativity at every level imaginable, punishing those who dare to try to escape the centralization and conformity such an approach to anything inevitably brings.

It is another doomed attempt to bring about meaningful change through a top-down, punitive system that will be badly misunderstood by many - even if everything in it were good, which is far from the case - and resented by those who for good reasons or bad view it as a wrong-headed path. Much research indicates that such reforms are fated to fail badly because few at the ground level were given a real voice in the process. Despite the propaganda that this is a state-led reform effort, it is in fact a federal one, supported primarily by corporate interests who are playing this opportunity for all it's worth - new textbooks, new assessments, and new professional development all lining the pockets of the publishers and testing companies. And whether it succeeds or fails matters not - they will profit greatly on this and will be ready to profit further when the next wave of change comes, innocently declaring that not they, but "the states" were the ones who brought this about.

What makes any of us think in this severely politically divided period in our history, that we can get any kind of broad agreement on what good science is, what good history is, what good literature is? Why should we expect anything except a mediocre compromise on almost everything, and then to have that mediocrity forced upon teachers whose evaluations will be linked to how well their students have absorbed it? 

The system needs to be student-centered, not some abstract standards centered. We are living in an informationally volatile world, and we need teachers who are nimble and creative, teachers who can adapt to a fast-changing landscape, and who know their kids' needs and who can creatively adapt their teaching to help kids to take the next step, whatever that next step is for them.

If you are serious about improving educational outcomes, empower families, students, and teachers, not bureaucrats. If you are serious about improving educational outcomes, stop measuring kids, and do everything you can to engage and motivate them. If you are serious about improving educational outcomes, train teachers well, treat them like professionals, and trust them to do their jobs. And if you are serious about improving educational outcomes, improve the lives of poor kids outside the classroom. 

GOP Is Not the Party of Entrepreneurism

Patrick Ruffini, up-and-coming GOP strategist, attends RootsCamp, watches Democratic organizers share tactics and lessons learned from the 2012 campaign, and tells Draper that “the thing I was struck by at RootsCamp was that in many ways, the Democratic technology ecosystem has embraced the free market — whereas the Republican one sort of runs on socialism, with the R.N.C. being the overlord.”

Ben Domenech, a founder of the RedState blog, explaining why there’s a perception that, as Draper puts it, “technological innovation runs at cross-purposes with the [GOP's] corporate rigidity,” says that “there are always elders at the top who say, ‘That’s not important.’ And that’s where the left has beaten us, by giving smart people the space and trusting them to have success. It’s a fundamentally anti-entrepreneurial model we’ve embraced.” [Source]

When Republicans start categorizing their own operating system as “socialist” and “anti-entrepreneurial” you know that the Grand Old Party is in serious disarray. 

The problem isn't big government; it's rigid, centralized, control-obsessed bureaucracies. It doesn't matter whether they are in the private sector or the pubic sector. 

Blue Millennials in Red States

From the NYT this morning about under 30s in Montana:

Billie Loewen and Heather Jurva, editors at the student newspaper, speak of a Depression-era mentality that is pushing their generation to back Democrats. Saddled with student debt, they worry about health care and are terrified that they will not find good jobs. “You might be just one accident away from losing everything,” said Ms. Jurva, who has worked 40 hours a week waiting on tables to put herself through school.

It is no secret that young voters tilt left on social issues like immigration and gay rights. But these students, and dozens of other young people interviewed here last week, give voice to a trend that is surprising pollsters and jangling the nerves of Republicans. On a central philosophical question of the day — the size and scope of the federal government — a clear majority of young people embraces President Obama’s notion that it can be a constructive force.

One of the ideological stereotypes that is out of touch with reality is the GOP trope about small government. As Ruy Tuxeira, who is quoted at the end of the article says, "it’s going to come down to not whether the government should address certain problems, but how.” It starts with confronting the realities of climate change. Markets are not going to solve that problem; governments are. And the government has to be big enough to confront the big fossil fuel corporations and impose broad rules concerning energy consumption for the rest of us. It might take a cataclysm or two before we find the political will to do anything, but it will have to be big government that coordinates things.

Another out-of-touch idelogical stereotype: the one that insists that the unemployed are lazy and don't want to work. Here's the reality. Everybody is going to be an "independent contractor" in the near future. The volatility and increased competitiveness of the markets in a more tightly integrating global economy will force more companies to shed the concept of permanent employees with unaffordable benefits packages. The largely unregulated global economy will be afflicted with more frequent meltdowns and with more intense boom-and-bust cylces. There will be winners, but there will be more losers, and how are people going to support themselves and their families when they are on the losing end of a crash? Where is their health insurance going to come from or the premiums to pay for them even on the Obamacare exchanges? 

Anybody who has any sense of this economic future knows that government has to play a role in greasing the friction that will be created by these inevitable disruptions. States will not be able to shoulder the burden because of workforce mobility. If one state has more generous support for its workers, everybody leaves the states that don't and puts an unfair burden on the states trying to deal with the situation in a sane way. It's like trying to get effective gun control: what any one state does to decrease the insanity is ineffective unless it's coordinated with other states, and that requires the feds to provide that coordination. 

And anybody who has any sense of the economic future knows that inevitably there will have to be some kind of global coordination, which can only be effected by the development of some sane form of global sovreignty. I've argued that has to be governed by the principle of subsidiarity. The higher levels should have powers limited only to what is minimally necessary to fulfill functions that the lower levels cannot. I'm not saying that's going to be easy or that there won't be abuses or seemingly irresolvable conflicts between the local and the central. But bigness is our future, and our thinking should focus not on whether we should have it, but on how we want it to work.

Quote of the Day: Robert Cialdini

From Influence: Science & Practice, p. 7:

You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex that has ever existed on the planet. To deal with it, we need shortcuts. We can't be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven't the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger features is present.

Sometimes the behavior that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the best stereotypes and trigger features work every time. We will accept their imperfections since there really is no other choice. Without these features we would stand frozen--cataloging, appraising, and calibrating--as the time for action sped by and away. From all indications, we will be relying on these stereotypes to an even greater extent in the future. 

I think this goes a long way toward explaining why people reduce reality to stereotypical, ideological talking points that have only a passing resemblance to the complexity of the reality in which they and the rest of us live. It's the only way they can process the chaos of their experience.

There's a part of me that is disturbed by this, but also a part of me that is ok with it. It disturbs me that there are way too many people living within a world shaped by stereotypes that have little to do with the world as it really exists, and their "behavior that unrolls" is not "appropriate for the situation", and too many of these people have way too much power.

The part of me that is ok with it recognizes that in the end it's always about what the Greeks called phronesis, practical wisdom. The people we trust are those who are able to work with complexity, they are vulnerable to and immersed in the world as it is, but in a way that discovers patterns rather than imposes them or projects them. They see structural similarities, they think metaphorically and analogically, and they make judgments, not with certainty, but with a confidence that the analytical type cannot when it comes to the intangibles of human nature and behavior.

Stereotypes are simply organizational patterns that make the chaotic buzz of reality comprehensible, but too often have outlived their usefulness. They work at best as shorthand for what we once knew, but not for what we must know now. So while no one can master all the informtion that we have available to us, there are some who have a talent for paying attention and for noticing what's important and filtering out what is not, for allowing patterns to emerge, the way the experienced chess player sees patterns of possibilities on the board in a way a novice cannot. These people will be the creators of new stereotypes and narratives that will have legitimacy so long as they work, and when they don't, the cycle will begin again.

I think the current rationalist technocratic narrative is driving on fumes, and that we are on the edge of some kind of breakthrough. The old thing lost its center and its explanatory power long ago; it holds together only by force of habit and for want of something to replace it. 

The Futility of Bi-Partisanship

Former congressman Tom Allen on the futility of trying to govern from a bipartisan center:

Our debates over particular budget and tax policies, health care, global warming or Iraq were not driven by the details of the legislation. Differences over health care reform became more about the role of government than the critical health care trifecta of cost, coverage and quality. To some, President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq seemed grounded in family history — the failure of his father to “take out” Saddam Hussein. . . .Taxes evoke intense emotions unrelated to their economic consequences. The Republican tax cuts were less connected to an established theory of economic growth than to convictions that tax cuts “pay for themselves” and the government is “too big.” Moreover, the proponents believed that individuals know best how to spend “their own money” — even though individuals don’t generally buy fighter jets or bridges, or spend their money on pensions or health care for people they don’t know.

When the ugly reality becomes too overwhelming, too many of us choose to become fools and retreat into ideological simplifications. 

I wrote last year how politicians can be categorized in four ways: Fools, Primitives, Hacks, or Mensches. A fool is an idealist who sincerely believes, but refuses to make adjustments to his worldview to accommodate contradictory facts that refuse to fit into it. A Fool finds refuge in ideological simplifications. A hack is someone who might have started off as an idealist, but when confronted with the ugly reality, he accepts it and decides to stay and play on the ugly reality's terms. He has come to think of himself as a 'realist'. A Primitive is the adrenally driven Gordon Gecko type who revels in the ugly reality and whose narcissistic drives dominate its agenda. A Mensch is someone, often a former fool, who accepts the ugly reality but stays to work within it to do what he can to change it. Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was the story of a fool who grew into a mensch. I suppose you could add a fifth category, "Cynics", those who accept the ugly reality, don't care, and remain ironically disengaged. They're mostly in the media.

Washington and Wall Street are places whose agendas are driven by Primitives and Hacks and abetted by Fools. The mensches are few and rather powerless. It doesn't matter how much sense they make, their good sense never has a chance as long as the rest of us play the role of Fools who are conned into sending Primitives, Hacks, and other Fools back into office year after year. 

Who are people that strike me as Mensches? Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Neil Barofsky, Diane Ravitch, Bill McKibben, Joseph Stiglitz. In the media Matt Taibbi, Chris Hayes, Stewart & Colbert. These are just the ones who are top of mind this morning. They're there. We just need more of them. Too often on election day we are only given the choice between two hacks.

I think in fairness, there are a lot of pols who are a mix of hackery and menschiness. Best case for Obama is that he's a Fool who hasn't quite decided yet whether to become a Hack or a Mensch. The guy has certainly surrounded himself with Hacks, that's for sure. 

Related articles

What Makes a Hack?

Online Education and the Future of the University

We seem to think that education is a thing--like a vaccine--that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." Gov. Jerry Brown, State of the State, January 2013

Interesting piece in this morning's Salon about how the quality of free online courses will impact education, particularly higher education. Why should should we or our kids go into massive debt to get information that is readily available on the net or can be credentialed cheaply through online delivery like "Khan" Univerisity.

Our institutions of higher learning in the next hundred years will move more toward the small liberal arts college model or they will become irrelevant. The post WWII technocratic university model is moribund. Colleges will be branded by the quality of their teaching, which will be a function of the quality of the relationships students can develop there. And that in turn will be a function of the quality fo the people hired to teach and the quality of the students accepted.

Why? Because information is cheap, and relationships are precious. I was listening to an interview with the psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason recently, and she made an interesting point about how very young children acquire language. If you put a kid in front of a TV channel for hours and hours in which the language is, say, Korean, she will not learn Korean. If the same child had a Korean nanny that spoke only Korean to her, she would learn it.

Language acquisition, in other words, is relational. It's something that only happens when there's an emotional connection. I think a similar argument could be said about the acquisition of anything that is worth knowing, at least in a foundational sense. We can add to or build onto the foundation alone (online, books, TV, etc.), but the foundation for learning is built only in relationships with parents, teachers, and peers. And we forget what we learn unless we use it, and we use it in our interactions with others. Knowledge is relational, and the quality of our knowledge largely depends on the quality of the relationships we have with parents, peers, and teachers.

Have you seen this interesting Gallup Study on student motivation. So ask yourself why motivation to learn craters for most kids by the time they get to middle and high school. On the grade 6-12 levels the only really sensible reason to pay the steep tuition at a private school is that you are buying a much better teacher/student ratio. That is, you are buying a chance for your kid to develop a relationship with teachers that is harder for many kids to do starting at middle school in the public schools. Not impossible, just harder. In a private school your kid can't hide if there are only 15 kids sitting around a table. (Yes, Bill & Melinda, class size matters, once you understand that education is not about filling a pail, but lighting a fire. Teachers matter, too, but not in the way you think.)

Plato understood that real knowledge only happens in relationships, and that we only truly understand what we love. Information acquisition is not the same thing as knowledge. Facts are a means to an end, and the end is insight. Facts without insight are like jokes without a punchline. But things worth knowing, like a good joke, aren't worth much if they aren't shared with others who "get it".

Intrinsic Motivation and the "School Cliff"

(h/t Dan PInk)

In my ongoing effort to define what Liberalism 5.0 might mean, I want at some point to talk about the work of buisness writer Dan Pink, whose books Whole New Mind, Drive, and most recently, To Sell is Human, are important contributions to our understanding about work and motivation.

His reporting on the research about the negative effects of carrots (as in carrots and sticks) was surprising to me, but made sense the more I thought about it. The key insight is that to the degree that we do things for extrinsic motivations, we lose touch with our intrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivations are what give us purpose and joy; extrinsic rewards give us a quick fix that wears off, and so we demand more or higher intensity fixes in order to feel motivated to do the work. Extrinsic rewards kill intrinsic motivation.

Pink makes clear that reward incentives are necessary for the jobs no one could find any intrinsic motivation to do, but has a negative impact on creative or non alogrithmic work, work that requires imagination, adaptation, innovation. Creative people want to be paid well, but getting paid isn't the thing that gets them up in the morning.

And so when we look at the chart at the top of the post, why do you think that most students at the beginning of their education are "into" it, and by the time they are in high school most are not. Do you think it might happen because they have lost their intrinsic motivation?  Why would that happen?

Pink quotes the Gallup report from which the chart above was taken:

As this Gallup blog post explains: “[Our] research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become.” Primary school kids begin their educations deeply engaged — but by the time they get to high school, more than half are checked out. And the problem is even worse for our most entrepreneurial students.

Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education, points to several factors for the decline. An “overzealous focus on standardized testing.” Not enough project-based or experiential learning. Too few pathways for students who won’t, or don’t want to, attend college.

Every normal healthy child should be required to attain a basic level of numeracy and literacy, they should know basic things about history, the natural world, art and music, but after 8th Grade kids and their parents should be allowed to choose an educational path that will keep them engaged. Standards, yes. Standardization, no.The school district should ensure the quality of the training and education that the school provides for students who chose these different paths, not insist that every kid meet a university prep standard. 

Education should be a preparation for life, not just for a STEM job. 

Liberalism 5.0?, Part 2

Last week I posted about Walter Russell Mead's article "The Once and Future Liberalism." There is much in it I like, and I think he is correct when he attributes the political impasse that we are in to a futile argument between "conservatives"--Liberal 4.1 types (i.e., New Deal/Great Society Democrats) and reactionaries-- Liberal 3.0 types, (i.e., 19th Century laissez-faire Tea-party types and Ron Paul Libertarians).

I have made the same argument that the New Deal Democrats are the true conservatives, and that those who seek to dismantle the New Deal compromise between government and markets are reactionaries whose thinking is 19th Century Social Darwinism wrapped in the pop Nietzsheanism of Ayn Rand. And while I like Mead's historical anaylysis, I think he could have made clearer that while the "conservatives" belong at the table, the reactionaries do not.

Our dysfunction derives mostly from Republicans' simplistic understanding about the complexity of the reality that we are trying to manage here. Markets are not going to solve climate change or deal with natural disasters, and markets are not going to solve egregious power and wealth imbalances--and the tyranny that comes with them. While the conditions that gave rise to Liberalism 4.0 and 4.1 are quite different from the conditions we are dealing with now, the basic threat of tyranny from powerful private sector interests continues. I think that what I wrote in a 2006 post about Libertarianism and tyranny still holds

 . . . large, complex societies develop large, complex problems that too often cannot be dealt with exclusively on the local level. And in the world we live in the real threat of tyranny comes not from the political sector, but from the economic. For me the fundamental flaw in Libertarian thinking is its failure to recognize this. Tyranny derives from the abuse of power, and so it follows that the greatest threat to freedom comes from those who have the greatest concentrations of power. Look around you. Does that power lie in the hands of Liberal congressmen and professors? Of course not. It lies with those private-sector factions within American society that have enormous economic power. And the greatest threat to American democracy lies not in the power of big government if it serves the will of the broad electorate, but in the power of big government if it serves the will of those with enormous economic power.

Toward the end of his artlcle Mead says, "Developing a politically successful liberalism 5.0 must start with an understanding of what the people want. Americans may be conflicted, but we are not particularly complicated. In a big-picture sort of way, the American people have a Maslovian hierarchy of needs, and we want our political leaders to meet them all." He goes on to lay out five things Americans want: security, prosperity, freedom and autonomy, and for America to fulfil its global mission, and, lastly, for the first four all to work together. Americans are "looking for more than a set of unrelated policies that accomplish certain discrete goals: They want those policies to proceed from an integrated and accessible vision that meshes with their understanding of traditional American values and concerns." 

This is fine as far as it goes, but should we just accept the old definitions of 'security', etc., as givens we have to work with, or is part of developing a Liberalism 5.0 changing our fundamental understanding about what security, prosperity, freedom/dignity, and national purpose means. That's the real task, not just complaining that Liberalism 4.1 no longer cuts it. And clearly we need to think deep and hard how to redefine them. Mead isn't particularly prescient, so I'm going to lay out some preliminary ideas laying out what a Liberalism 5.0 should look like. 

It starts with finding the right balance between the local and the central, the small and the large. Every discussion about  security, prosperity, freedom/dignity, and national purpose starts with a frame regarding our basic assumptions about what these terms mean, and in turn that frame is determined on a macro level by our understanding of how local relates to central, small to big, individual to whole. Our 4.0 v. 3.0 debate is basically an argument that gets nowhere because its basic assumptions about these are so different. 3.0 emphasizes the local and indvidual, and 4.0 the whole and the governmental and economic systems that shape life on the larger systems level.  Subsidiarity has a bias toward the local, but recognizes the necessity for a limited but essential role for the big. 

3.0 is naive about the ways that the individual and the local are interdependent with these larger systems, and they think that society can run just fine without them. They tend to mistake, IMO, bugs for features, and to think that the whole sytem should be blown away, rather than to fix the bugs and make adjustments when needed.

A lot of what must happen for 5.0 will derive from fundamental changes in our thinking, and that requires cultural change. I'm planning a post on Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's book, Conscious Capitalism. Mackey shares a lot of common ground with libertarian thinking that I oppose, and he has gotten a lot of bad liberal press because of his opposition to Obamacare and his indifference about climate change (sure, the climate is warming, but we'll adapt), but I am very interested in his ideas that capitalism has to redefine its mission as "creating value" and not as "maximizing profit". That's should be a key element in Liberalism 5.0. Whether and how that thinking can supplant Gordon (Greed is Good) Gecko/Rick Santelli thinking is an open question, but it's a beginning.

But we are to move forward there must be another fundamental cultural change, which is that collectively we must become less governed by our fears. Prudence, yes; fear, no. I'd argue that almost everything that is dysfunctional in our politics and in our cultural life derives from fears and anxieties that have a soul-constricting effect that makes any kind of creative problem solving an impossibility.