The anti-liberals Rose profiles all believed that liberalism prescribed a life without sacrifice, an age when individual contentment reigned supreme and collective struggle disappeared. This was not true then, and it is not true now. What they missed is what liberalism actually believes: that there is a collective identity to be found in collective betterment, that making the future more just than the past is a mission as grand as any offered by antiquity.
But a critique they make thrums through our present, and should be taken seriously: Liberalism needs a healthier relationship to time. Can the past become a foreign country without those who still live there being turned into foreigners in their own land? If the future is to be unmapped, then how do we persuade those who fear it, or mistrust us, to agree to venture into its wilds?
Yes and No.
Marxism was an eschatological cult despite its materialism, and with the de-legitimization of the Marxist grand narrative, the Left lost any way of framing a positive imagination of the future. Any philosophy of history has to be grounded in a metaphysics, and a metaphysics is only popularized, i.e., comes to shape the cultural imagination, through religion--or something religion-y. The Progressive Left was drafting on Judaeo-Christian ideas about the 'end of history', and without those ideas, it has nothing to offer to replace it. This is where I think Klein is wrong about Liberal identity found in collective betterment: The Liberal project has naively believed that in saying No to constraints on Liberty, it is is saying Yes to a 'better' future. It isn't. Liberalism has no positive content; it is only a No to what it perceives as constraints on Liberty. You need religion, or something religion-like, to provide the positive content that defines what "betterment" means.
Without religion there is no shared cultural imagination of positive human future, i.e., a future to which we can all say Yes. It's just not possible. But secular Liberalism does not trust religion; it sees it as a problem to be overcome because the secular Liberal project has been primarily defined as Liberation from the dead weight of the past. Liberalism sees Christianity as too implicated with the mores, taboos, and constraints of customary culture and its accommodation with racism, patriarchy, and negative attitudes toward sexual minorities. Nevertheless, what's positive in Liberalism would not have been possible without the disembedding, universalistic dynamic that is inherent in Christianity. And at the same time, ironically, Liberalism constrains a broader spectrum of human possibilities that are inherent in Christianity. Again, it's not in what Liberalism affirms in terms of individualism and rights but in what it leaves out--or has thrown out--that is the cause of its lethal deficiency.
In another part of this column, Klein seems to get this in a preliminary way--
Klein is talking about Matthew Rose's new book, A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, a book I haven't read yet but will soon. I've been a little concerned that my critique of the Liberal Order might be associated with illiberal critiques of it, the kind surveyed by Rose in his book. Clearly, I am proposing the opposite of embracing their reactionary vision. But I do believe we are entering a post-secular world "after Liberalism", and my greatest fear is that the radical Right will win because it has a compelling story that draws on the past that provides the most important answers to questions that many people these days have, which are the metaphysical questions "Who am I?" and the ethical questions: "What ends are worthy of my deepest aspirations?"Both liberalism and Christianity become thrilling when described by their critics. Far from the technocratic slog of trade regulations and the deadening work of dragging laws past the filibuster, this liberalism is a marvel of imagination and ambition. It’s an ideology that believes human beings capable of new forms of social organization and a movement capable of untethering them from hierarchies so deeply embedded in our societies that they were thought to represent a natural, or even divine, order.
Christianity, too, gleams with a light it often lacks in today’s politics, and even in its pews: Here is a religion that insists on the dignity of all people and centers the poor and the marginalized. Rose’s subjects fear Christianity because they fear it cannot be tamed; even when the leaders they admire try to subvert it for their own purposes, it infects their societies with a latent egalitarianism, setting a trap that will inevitably be sprung.
Liberalism's answer is that you can be whatever you want to be, but this is not an answer most ordinary people find helpful because it's too open-ended and vague. A healthy culture provides a framework for growth that works like a trellis; it provides a pattern of growth for ordinary people that allows them to come into a flourishing maturity and with it a deeper freedom rather than to sprawl aimlessly along the ground. Even the most creative cooks started with recipes, and only after they learned how food works, did they become capable of cooking without them and creating something new. We learn the best practices from those who preceded us, and then we reach a point where we can add to what has been given to us by them from our own interior resources, i.e., from our own creativity and freedom.
Likewise, we all of us need to learn how the human soul works, and healthy cultures provide some practical structures that most people find helpful in that regard. Liberalism provides no trellis. It just says, "You're free, do as you please. Sprawl or climb to the heights; make a mess or don't." It's a matter of indifference to Liberalism what you choose. All that matters is that you are free to choose." Well, as we saw during the Trump years, an awful lot of people chose to embrace an authoritarian personality cult. Why? Because capitalism and its anti-customary culture ideology destroyed their trellis, and so in the ontological dizziness that ensues, they grab onto anything that provides some semblance of stability, meaning, and purpose. To say that these people should be more mature, that they should find ways to adapt or to be more creative reeks of the arrogance that makes them 'choose' anything that is not 'Liberal'.
Christianity has a very compelling solution to the problems of identity, meaning, and purpose, and it has nothing to do with the right-wing religiosity of Evola or Bannon. In the coming post-secular age, we will learn that there is no escaping religion. The only question is whether this age will be defined by good religion or bad. And good religion is only a possibility if something happens within the culture that allows most of us, even our intelligentsia, to become inspired once again by what Klein calls its more thrilling, inspiring, truly liberating aspects. Then perhaps we can find a way together to imagine a compelling human future, one where the economy and the machines serve humans, and not the other way around, which is our current predicament.