From David Brooks in the Atlantic reporting on the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month in Orlando. You know, the one where Hawley gave his American masculinity speech:
Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.
Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.
The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation.
For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate. “Majority cultures have the right to establish the ruling culture, and minority cultures have the right to be decently treated,” he said. “To take the minority view and say the minority has the ability to stamp out the views of the majority—that seems to me to be completely crazy.”
In essays I've posted this month, I've argued that a human society cannot sustain itself if it becomes permanently cut off from its originary mythos--and the way that mythos grounds us in the Living Real. That mythos in North Atlantic societies is Christianity, which is the fusion of two post-Axial traditions--transcendental Greek philosophy and Judaism superimposed on Mediterranean, Germanic, and Celtic paganism. Perhaps a post-human society can can live without its being grounded in such a mythos, but not a human one. In making this argument, I was aware that it sounds a lot like what cultural conservatives have been saying since forever, so while there is some overlap, I want to distinguish what I'm saying from what Hazony is saying as reported by Brooks.
The difference lies in that conservatives like Hazony do not take seriously the implications of the death of God as a cultural reality. The death of God is a statement about the fact that the originary mythos and its transcendental ontology has been displaced as the primary shaper of the social imaginary by a materialist ontology. This materialist ontology co-existed for a while with the originary ontology in a kind of tension, but the materialist ontology is clearly dominant now, mainly because what people have come to care about most is what works in day-to-day life, and science and capitalism get practical results in a way that religious beliefs don't. It's not much more complicated than that.
Obviously people still believe in God, and there's nothing wrong with science or markets. What's different after the death of God is that there is very little creative dynamism that comes from the originary mythos. Since the death of God, most of the culture's creative energy has been channeled toward projects shaped by the merger of science and capital. That materialist project defines who we are. If you have religious beliefs, good for you, but that has nothing to do with what really matters. What matters is where all the creative energy is, which has nothing to do with religion. The practical effect is that the values of the originary mythos have no constraining effect on the most destructive influences of techno-capitalism, and among them the destruction of the the idea of the human itself.
Conservatives like Hazony want to prop up the corpse of the dead king on his throne for fear of the kingdom's being taken over by evil usurpers. He and conservatives who think like him don't seem to realize that the usurpers took over long ago, and they were welcomed with open arms, including by most people who consider themselves Christian. The king has been dead for some time now, and propping up the rotted corpse is delusional and can't work. It has to be replaced by something living, something inspiring. I believe that resurrection is possible, or another word for it is renaissance. But that's not what people like Hazony are talking about.
Now as I made clear in my posts in the last weeks on this topic, because God is dead doesn't mean that faith is. Many people, me included, affirm its vitality in shaping their sense of what is real and what is worthy of their deepest aspirations. But the cultural forms of Christianity no longer signify robustly in the broad cultural sphere, which means that the tradition that once 'worked' effectively to convey from generation to generation the life of the originary mythos no longer conveys it. It's there in the background, i.e., in the private sphere, and clearly a secularized version of Christianity is the basis the democratic ethos that prevails in American society, but it is mostly impotent in shaping the most important judgments that we must make about the human future. Techno-capitalism and its materialist imaginary is in the driver's seat, and Hawley/Cruz administration would do nothing to remove it.
If the traditional Christian mythos still played a vital role in shaping American society's ethos, there wouldn't be any felt need to reimpose it in the political sphere. It would be something that people would gladly choose because it provides meaning and vitality in a way that secular beliefs do not. The fact of the matter is that what is best, most vital, and most liberating in Christianity is not available to the broader culture because its most public-facing institutions have made it so profoundly unattractive to people who might find it otherwise.
This is so because so many Christians, mostly fundamentalists and conservative Catholics, have given Christianity a bad name because they themselves are emphatically not exemplars of what is best, most vital, most liberating in Christianity. They come across as anal, resentful, fanatics animated by a vulgar, totemic version of Christianity that is about as far from the spirit of the gospels as one could take it.
That being said, Dallas Jenkins' The Chosen is one good-faith effort coming out of the evangelical world that avoids all the ideological culture-war nonsense in a way that could have broader cultural appeal. It finds a way of bringing out the vital, liberating, subversive dimension of the gospels--subversive regarding the rigidly conservative political and religious establishments of its time--in a way that you don't often see in television or film in this genre. And it's grittily human and often funny. Skeptics, if they could muster some second naïveté, might actually find something in it.
So if you want a more Christian culture, O young conservative intellectuals, live Christianity in a way that is more humanly appealing, in a way that will attract people to it rather than repel them. And there is nothing more repellant than the prospect of a Hawley/Cruz administration supported by a Republican Congress imposing a Christian sharia on the nation. You don't seem to understand this because you are too caught up by a cultural ressentiment that blinds you as to how matters of the spirit actually work. Most people, including genuinely religious ones, don't want to live in Franco's Spain.
In my previous post about Socialism, I talk about how socialism will never take hold in American culture until there is a vast shift in the cultural imaginary, and I'd argue the same for Christianity. Both are too unattractive because both, at least in their current manifestations, are too uninspiring. Young socialists and conservative Christians are two sides of the same coin. Neither understand how real cultural change works, which is what is fundamentally required for there to be any real receptivity to what they are selling. And without such a shift in the cultural ethos that is freely and willingly embraced by most Americans, both conservatives and socialists are deluded if they think that their programs can be effected in the political sphere.
I understand Hazony's point "that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere" because the "public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite." I would agree, this is a problem that cannot be sustained in the long run. But Hazony misdiagnoses the root of the problem. He doesn't seem to understand that it's industrial/consumer/technocapitalism that has eviscerated private values, not the ideology of progressive Liberals who are simply trying to mitigate the damage capitalism has done in the material lives of the non-wealthy.
The public (political) sphere simply represents the values of capital, which in turn shapes the vital, animating ethos of both Democrats and Republicans. In the Republican Party, traditional Christian values are a thin veneer that covers up what is the party's real vital, animating 'ultimate concern', which is preservation of the wealth and property rights of the wealthy. Democrat elites' ultimate concern is similar, but complicated by their guilt about it. But that guilt makes them more practical when it comes to wanting to solve pressing material problems that concern the broader society. So two cheers for guilt. Better that than Republican indifference to or contempt for the suffering of the poor.
And so while these young conservatives are upset with corporate America for its being captured by 'wokeness', I suspect that most would be appeased if corporate boards hired good, conservative Christians who would have no compunction about how techno-and consumer-capitalism continues to crush the American soul. I suspect that most are blind how its doing so diminishes with each passing decade the human capacity to even respond to what is genuinely, authentically religious. And I feel confident that most would resist my assertion that capitalism and the Neoliberal ideology, which justifies its unchecked hegemony in the economic sphere, is the single-most powerful force in preventing what they think they want. So in other words, they offer no real solution, not even the beginning of one. They don't even understand the real cause of the problem.
Nevertheless, I agree with conservatives who complain that the secular public square is not neutral, that it is aggressively materialist. And I agree that a good society needs to understand and value that humans are material/spiritual beings, and it needs to embrace a humanizing mythos that draws upon the wisdom traditions that come to us from the great post-axial religions. And I agree with conservatives that a purely secular society cannot sustain itself in the long run. It's too imbalanced.
But I don't agree that these problems can be solved from within the political sphere. I have been arguing that Progressives, if they have any hope of saving democracy, need to better understand how the destructive effects that follow from a rigidly materialist ontology having crowded out spiritual values in the intellectual/cultural sphere, and that their success in the long run depends on their taking seriously good-faith efforts to rebalance things in that sphere.
What's so discouraging to me is that, unlike in the 1950s and 60s, there are no prominent, credible voices who are making a compelling case for such a rebalancing. If such voices don't emerge, I fear that these young conservative intellectuals will get what they wish for. That would be a disaster for them, as well as everyone else, in ways they are currently incapable of imagining.
See also my post on Heroes of the Fourth Turning