After the Future

The Praying Coach of Bremerton

Teachers are state employees, but they are not the state’s robots. When they clearly speak on their own, the First Amendment should apply. Whether they kneel in prayer or protest, it’s not just acceptable for students and parents to see teachers as people and citizens; it’s imperative. The best way to teach pluralism is to model pluralism. Let Coach Kennedy pray, for all our sakes.

David French, "Let Coach Kennedy Pray" in The Atlantic

I respect French as a thoughtful, serious conservative, but in this he's blinded by his team affiliation, so to say.

The real issue is to what degree is Coach Kennedy's praying coercive. It's one thing to pray, it's another thing to gather the team around him as he does so. I haven't made a deep study of it, but from the reporting I've read, apparently he did both, and his doing the first led to to the second:

Kennedy spent much of his coaching career behaving like a preacher, holding public prayer sessions for students — many of whom Kennedy wielded authority over. And, while there’s no evidence that he ever ordered a student to kneel with him when he performed a religious ceremony on the 50-yard line, he did not discourage students from joining him, either, and a majority of the students on his team eventually did so. (Source)

The problem is that in a complex pluralistic society it's more likely that some students are going to feel that they are being pressured to do something they don't want to do. You can say that they are free to abstain, but what does that do for team unity? Isn't that the coach's primary responsibility--to build team cohesiveness and morale? If he thinks the assertive public display of his religious commitments are more important than the requirements of his job description, he should be fired on those grounds alone if they lead to feelings of favoritism, resentment, and exclusion, which apparently they did. 

The school administrators tried to work with him and set some limits--

Initially, the coach complied. But he soon unleashed a coordinated legal and PR campaign against the school district. About a month after the superintendent ordered Kennedy to stop preaching religion to his students, Kennedy’s lawyer informed the school district that the coach would resume praying at the 50-yard line immediately after games.

What followed was a circus. Kennedy went on a media tour presenting himself as a devout coach who “made a commitment with God” to performatively pray after each game. Good Morning America did a segment on him. Conservative media ran with headlines like “High School Coach Bullied Into Dropping Prayer at Football Games.” By the end of the month, 47 members of Congress — all Republicans — wrote to Leavell in support of Kennedy.

At the conclusion of the next game, coaches, players, and members of the general public mobbed the field when Kennedy knelt to pray. A federal appeals court described the rush of people onto the field as a “stampede,” and the school principal complained that he “saw people fall” and that, due to the crush of people, the district was unable “to keep kids safe.” Members of the school’s marching band were knocked over by the crowds. (Source)

It's one thing to let everybody know that you are a sincere, committed Christian. I think most people would respect that, especially if you behave like one. It's another thing when you assert your beliefs in such a way as to make a public space like a school a battle field in the culture war.  I don't know the man, but from the reporting Kennedy comes of as more of a fanatic than a love-centered Christian. And If he is so fanatical about this that he is making a Supreme Court case of it, he's not someone I'd want coaching any child of mine. He should just get a job coaching at a conservative Christian School where his zeal will be appreciated. 

While I am myself someone who prays, I am not someone who believes that God has or should have a rooting interest in my team winning, and it goes against everything that I believe that I should pray to him that he may help me to defeat my opponent. I'm not saying that this is what [Coach] Kennedy prayed about because I don't know, but a court precedent would open the door to coaches who would pray in this way, and if I were a religious student athlete, I would feel that I was being coerced to pray to a God I don't believe in because my God doesn't take sides in such matters. Such a coach is not praying to the transcendent God revealed in the gospels but to a sublunary, local deity like Mars, the Roman god of war. 

And to take it a step further, once you set the precedent, what is to prevent a coach from praying to Moloch or Satan--or some Wiccan deity? Is [David] French willing to stand by some other coach if such entities are the object of his worship and parents and school administrators object? Do you really want to open that can of worms? Where do you draw the line? Once again, the fundamental problem here is trying to litigate a metaphysical matter in the political sphere. It just doesn't work. 

If the coach prays for each student to do his best and may the better team win, let him do that quietly and by himself, and then publicly tell his students that he knows that each has his best game in him on that day. That would be laudable. And it would be the more Christian way to pray. Coach Kennedy and David French might well be reminded of Jesus's advice on the matter:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.⁶ But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.⁷ And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. ⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matt 6:5ff)

Civilization and Its Discontents

It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that animated the West from the time of the Renaissance. World War I was the war that marked the end of the modern era, and World War II was the war that marked the beginning of the postmodern. That's how I have come to think of it, anyway.

Freud's 1929 book was a development of ideas he introduced in his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, in which he attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Both books have become more or less the background music that plays in most secularist thinking since then. Until recently it has been impossible for any self-respecting modern intellectual to accept that religion is anything but a form of delusional wish-fulfillment born out of the fundamental inability human beings have to accept the real ugliness and horror in the world, not the least of which is the prospect of their own deaths.

Civilization, according to Freud, is essentially the product of the fundamental tradeoff humans make to live in an ordered, secure world. The rule of law is the foundation of any civilization, for without it the law of the jungle prevails instead, and according to that law, the strong dominate the weak. Without the restraint of civilizing laws, the stronger prey on the weaker, the former searching out the latter to satisfy their instinctual drives, which boil down to sex, money, power.

I am inclined to think of Power as primary, and the other two as secondary. Power is aggression. Aggression is about one person or a group of persons seeking to dominate another. As Hegel pointed out way before Nietzsche, Freud, and Adler, this aggression is not economically motivated; it's about prestige. It's about the ego rush one feels in victory. Wealth and sexual satisfaction are a byproduct. They are the trappings of power. You must be powerful if you were able to acquire all that wealth and to obtain all those slaves and wives.

Premoderns understand this seeking after prestige as essential for their "honor." Their value as human beings depended on how much of it they got, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them would be to lose it. The Chinese call it "losing face" which is basically the same thing. You lose your honor, you lose your face, you lose your identity. You're nobody. Your identity is in this sense completely a social construction. There's nobody at home behind the mask.

In its most primitive form obtaining "face" requires prestige battle to the death. The truly noble person is the one who would rather die than submit. This sentiment is echoed in the New Hampshire state slogan and imprinted on all New Hampshire license plates: "Live free or die." The slave is the one who makes the calculation that it would be better to live serving the one who vanquished him than to be slain by him. He chooses submission. Any feudal hierarchy is based on this fundamental transaction. And it's why Roman emperors and medieval kings were always having to put down rebellions by ambitious generals, dukes, and barons who lusted to have more face.

The whole point for those in the old aristocracy was "honor", and honor was something that depended on station, and station was something you took by force of arms. The question they would ask themselves was basically: Do I have have the balls or don't I? This is barbarism, of course, but at least these men were men, not alienated, faceless wimps sitting in cubbies in big, anonymous, high-rise cages. It was a barbarism mitigated to a certain extent in the high middle ages by the Christian-inspired chivalric code and the tradition of courtly love.

But it affected not at all the earlier Christian rulers, the Roman emperors and their Germanic successors in the west. The whole underlying prestige-centered honor code was barbaric through and through. Christianity replaces the ideas 'face' and 'honor' with 'dignity' and integrity. The whole movement of Christianity is one away from external identity props and toward the discovery of an interior identity, the 'face' that is created in the image and likeness of God, where we live as citizens of the Kingdom born within, as the gospels describe it. The idea of face and honor are irrelevancies for citizens who abide there.

Christianity transvalues honor into integrity. You can lose face if others take it from you, but having or losing your integrity does not depend on others. Honor is about the value that others give to you; integrity is a self-valuation that follows from an interior achievement. But integrity is not something you can organize a society around, unless you have a critical mass of people who have achieved it. Clearly there was no such critical mass in post-Constantinian Christendom, nor is there one now, or perhaps ever.

Until such a day when a critical mass develops, a true Christianity is more of a leaven in any civilization in which there are true Christians. It's influence is subtle, and it works more on the periphery than at the center. 

Back to Freud: His point was that civilization in suppressing aggression creates alienation. Alienation is what happens to human beings when they are cut off from their instinctual life. It happens when they make a choice for safety and conformity of the group that comes with renouncing one's impulse life. It is the condition of the slave. This, according to Freud, is the source of the discontent that must necessarily come with civilization. Becoming civilized in modern societies (since Hobbes anyway) requires submitting to the law, and submitting is always an act of slavishness.

Most of the "advanced" thought since Freud has been about finding ways to become more instinctual and less civilized, while remaining "nice." In other words, wild and crazy, but loveable--like John Belushi or Jack Black. These are our contemporary models for what it means to be un-alienated. The way this works in practice is while continuing to suppress aggression, give more free rein to the pursuit of sex and money, and to put an American-Dream happy face on both. Consumer capitalism provides the political cultural framework that celebrates this solution to the problem of alienation. And it works insofar as it satisfies what is most vulgar in human desire, but fails in all the truly important ways. And then we fight endless wars to give an outlet for the aggression for those who need to earn a 'face' through mortal combat.

Freud's idea of civilization is the opposite of what I mean by it, but his is understandable because his experience of it was mainly of its collapse. The people he treated were living in cultural forms that had no inner vitality. That was Nietzsche's big idea--there was no there there anymore; there are only the empty forms, like a copse of dead trees. They point to something that once lived but no longer does.

Nevertheless people hang onto those dead forms and because their sense of self is deeply entiwined with them, and this clinging to lifeless forms is the essence of alienation, because in order to be un-alienated you have to be in touch with Life, something green and living. For Freud that meant the suppressed instinctuall life of formalistic Victorians, a suppression of life impulses that arise from below, so to speak. But the late 19th century in its mechanistic materialism created a sytem that also suppressed life that descends from above, so to speak. 

The goal of civilization is not to suppress life but to create forms for its expression in such a way that we are raised up above the barbaric and purlely instinct-driven. But that does not require a suppression of instinct, but rather humanizing it. And the humanization, I'd argue, is only possible by the introduction of something outside the barbaric eat-or-be-eaten system, and that would be the leavening effects of 'grace'. 

Freud and Darwin would have described the human predicament accurately if the world were indeed a closed system. But something enters from outside the system that has this leavening effect. You don't have to be a believer to know what it is. We've all experienced it at one time or another. True advances in the human story occur when grace and human instinct combine to create something new. The instincts are the raw material. Grace is the active principle inspiring our imaginations, and the human will works with both to bring something of value into the world. It can be a small thing; it can be a great thing. But if it is worth anything, all three were essential in its making.

In the early years, many of the Christians who "got it", the ones who understood that the kingdom was within and that one's identity was not solely determined by social constructions, headed out into the wasteland. In the period in which we live, celebrated by T.S. Eliot's famous poem, people who get it no longer have to flee into the wasteland because the wasteland has come to us. They get that's our life now, and so we must learn to wander in it, in a way analogous to the Israelites of old, but as with ordering from Amazon, no need to go out, it has been delivered to us right at home. Nevertheless we long for the fleshpots of Egypt and find it hard to hope that there might be any landscape physical or psychic, exterior or interior, in our future that is flowing with milk and honey.

[Ed. note: This is a repost from November 2012. It seems relevant for explaining what's going on in Putin's head, and also why it has nothing to do with his perverse understanding of Christianity.]

Reactionary Chic

Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one. The transformation of the right is a direct response to a shift on the left. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right.

--Nate Hochman

According to Pogue, the [reactionary chic] movement “has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right-ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic.” This might be an overstatement, but it’s pretty clear that there’s cultural energy in the opposition to the progressive norms and taboos that are derisively called “wokeness.”

The BuzzFeed News writer Joseph Bernstein captured this energy in a March article about an anti-woke New York film festival funded by Thiel and headed by a Black queer provocateur named Trevor Bazile. “Call it, if you must, a vibe shift: a new generation of internet-native tastemakers — like many of the people crowded into Bazile’s party — who find the moralistic gatekeeping of millennials all a bit passé,” wrote Bernstein.

Michelle Goldberg, "The Awful Advent of Reactionary Chic"

There's tremendous energy in any group that sees itself as unfairly marginalized, and there's also a lot of energy in transgressing the pieties of the establishment. Isn't that what's driving what Goldberg calls 'reactionary chic' in her column yesterday? She gives an example of what is being reacted against:

In novels set in progressive social worlds, internet leftism tends to be treated with disdain — not a tyranny, but an annoyance. In Torrey Peters’s “Detransition, Baby,” a young trans woman reacts with priggish outrage to a dark joke shared between the book’s heroine, Reese, and her friend, both older trans women. “Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender,” writes Peters. “The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head — insensitive! — staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes.”

For those who get most of their politics online, this can be what the left looks like — a humorless person shaking her head at others’ insensitivity. As a result, an alliance with the country’s most repressive forces can appear, to some, as liberating.

I remember thinking decades ago that what made gay culture interesting and energetic was its transgressiveness, it's being anti-establishment, it's being a place for those who couldn't stand the sanctimonies of the straight, conventional world to gather in a joyful communities of liberation and mutual support apart from all of that was too buttoned down, prim and proper. There was something my gay friends in New York and Seattle had that straight people did not, which was a vital sense of community that gave them a sense cohesiveness and energy and purpose. They had an elan, a verve, a joie de vivre, a disinhibited, creative craziness that most straight people I knew lacked, and I saw it as as being directly associated with their being counter-cultural, their being against and so liberated from establishment pieties.

And I wondered back then if the assimilation of gay culture into the mainstream would take the joy out of it, make it as boring as the culture it saw itself then in opposition to. It would appear so, at least insofar as the partisans of gay assimilation into the establishment have now become santimonious scolds. They've become the new establishment with a new set pieties. They've become the new gatekeeper regime of the boring and ordinary. It's annoying because all moralistic priggery is annoying, but as such it was inevitable that it would spawn a new counter-cultural reaction. 

So it's ironic that the sexual identity politics of the 80s has spawned a new transgressive community on the Right that now occupies the space they once did. These days if you want to belong to a community that provides cohesiveness, energy, and purpose born of transgressiveness, you have few other choices than on the radically chic Right. 

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

In fact, if you ask me what really went wrong after 1991, it’s ... that there was no recognition among the Soviet elites that they had lost the Cold War and that they had deserved to lose it. Instead, people like Putin and others nursed resentments about betrayal and humiliation—as if the Soviet Union had just been another country and hadn’t been part of a mad project that killed millions of its own people and enslaved its neighbors.

--Tom Nichols

Faulkner's quote points to a reality that was particularly true in the American South, and it is at the heart of its dysfunction. Perhaps the only way of overcoming it is to follow the gospel's admonition to let the dead bury the dead. The dead are always with us, but their misdeeds should not be allowed to foreclose the future. We must find a way to recognize what was fundamentally wrong about the attitudes and practices of our ancestors while at the same time to be inspired by and build upon what's best. This attitude toward a better future is at the heart of Christian spiritual practice which is all about becoming liberated from the mistakes of the past. But there is no moving into a better future unless you acknowledge that past behaviors were wrong, to make amendments to those who were harmed, and resolve as best you can not to do it again. 

When I read Nichols' article, it struck me that as the South lost to the North in the American Civil War, as the Germans lost to the Allies in the First World War, as the Soviet Union lost to America in the Cold War, the most important result was to reinforce what was most dysfunctional, delusional, and extreme in the defeated societies precisely because they failed to confront why they were wrong. Instead they chose to stew in their humiliation. And that dysfunction in the South produced the KKK, Jim Crow, and the sense of white grievance that paved the way for Trump in the U.S; it produced Hitler and the Holocaust in Germany, and now Putin in Russia.

In each defeated society factions that sought to aggressively assert its delusions came to dominate the collective imaginary because these societies never faced the fact that they had been wrong. They never made amends. Rather they doubled down. They sought to prove, even if mostly to themselves, that their delusions were true. So they undertook to force, by any means necessary, to defeat those whom they saw as having humiliated them. Anything rather than to face the humiliation of admitting to themselves that they were wrong. Were the North after the Civil War, the Allies after WWI, or the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union without hypocrisy or fault? Of course not. But that's no excuse for failure to recognize your own faults, which in the South and the Soviet Union were egregious. 

But why were Germany and Japan after WWII different? I think that it has primarily to do with each having been able to suppress the humiliations of past and to embrace a new national identity that focused on the future. They let the dead bury the dead, or at least pushed to the fringes those who didn't want to. Why some societies are capable of that while others are not is worth thinking about more, but clearly huge, irrepressible factions within American and Russian societies have not been able to do it. But a key factor is that as long as a society has a vital sense of future possibility, it finds a way to push the reactionaries to the fringes, but as soon as that sense of future possibility weakens, there is space for the reactionaries to thrive.

. We see that happening in the UK, in France, and now even in Germany. The growing strength of the Right correlates not with the diminishing strength of the Left, but with a diminishing felt sense of collective future possibility. 

The crisis of Liberal Democracies derives from its failure to provide for huge swaths of their populations any robust sense of future possibility, and so nothing is more important for the continued flourishing of Liberal democracies than that they find a robust consensus in their imagination of a possible positive human future that's worth fighting for. This is, whether most people realize it or not, a metaphysical question, and it cannot be adequately answered within the limitations of the rationalist materialist imaginary that is the default because the most energetic shaping influence among the culture's elites. Its failure in this regard has created a spiritual vacuum for passionate reactionaries with a delusional metaphysics to rush in. 

So now in the U.S., the problem is acute. American democracy is under threat from a reactionary faction that thinks it is fighting a holy war in defense of Christian values. Of course, their war has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with a defense of a customary culture that was only ever nominally Christian. 

Any society that claims to be Christian, even medieval Christendom, is only nominally Christian. It is, of course, better for whatever is genuinely Christian in it. But Christianity in its essence is a religion of the future, of promise, of a looking forward to something better.  Its fundamental thrust is to challenge every individual, and the societies in which they live, to be better than they are. That requires that the most mature Christians adopt a subversive attitude toward existing unjust social arrangements, and if not to be actively involved in their subversion at least to be open to any challenges posed to whatever is vestigially barbaric in them. 

How that fulfillment is to be effected is a matter for debate, but monotheistic Judaism and Christianity are post-Axial religions, religions whose effect on their societies is to disembed them from traditional practices in the hopes of achieving something higher and better. That this disembedding is difficult because it often feels contrary to 'nature' has always been understood. But the essence of the disembedding dynamic in any post-axial religion is to give up what is comfortable in the hope of obtaining something more deeply real. Any society that claims to be Christian is honest only to the degree that it acknowledges how far it is from what it aspires to become. It is dishonest to the degree that it is complacent in its existing social arrangements. A Christian society is truly Christian not because it fights wars and tortures heretics in the defense of Christian values but because it is has the capacity to be ashamed of such behaviors. 

The only really important question at this moment for Americans is about how they imagine their future. The conservatives are correct that Liberalism, insofar as it imagines the future only in terms of economic development, is inadequate by itself to speak to the deep longings of the spirit that are at the heart of our current crisis. But the answer does not lie in preserving past forms and customs that no longer have vitality. The only real solution comes in reconnecting with the deep vitality that gave these cultural forms--or any healthy, vibrant culture--their shape. Our culture is vibrant in the sense of its being energetically innovative in the entrepreneurial sense, but it is unhealthy because it shares no deep metaphysical consensus about what it means to be human, and so a vulgar, leveling, least common denominator prevails by default. It celebrates energy for energy's sake, no matter how crude or dehumanizing. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have energy, and so both are celebrated in ways that any healthy society would be incapable of. 

The problem. of course, is that people who have no sense about what this deep vitality is in their lives are suffering, and that suffering is real. They look for society to alleviate their suffering, and if we had a healthy culture, it would be easier for them to find healthful relief. But we don't, and so unless they find a remedy from within themselves, they will continue to take their cues from whatever groupthink--whether on the Left or the Right--dominates in their proximity. What we need is leadership that is grounded in the inside-out thinking that is the essence of post-Axial spiritual practices promoted by Socrates and Jesus. If we had a healthy society, such people would be recognized and elected. Instead, American society is dominated by an outside-in dynamic that is born of a vestigial pre-Axial form of embeddedness that is the driving force behind the mob and any other kind of groupthink. A 'liberal' education used to be about promoting citizens who had that capacity for inside-out thinking. Now education is mostly about job training, the only thing that makes sense within an imaginary that dominated by a utilitarian ethos. 

Nevertheless, Liberal Democracies are a step forward because they are heirs of axial disembedding. As such they allow for flexibility and change in ways that static, top-down hierarchical societies cannot. It's their adaptability that makes them reformable, and so, at least in theory, capable of moral progress. But at this juncture, they have no moral compass, and flail about without any consensus shaping policy decisions except a utilitarianism that is inadequate to confront the challenges posed by developments in AI and biotechnology. So the emergence of Liberal Democracies during the modern era is not in itself the end of the story. We're at the end of a chapter in a much longer story, one that is more likely to move toward a positive fulfillment if Liberal Democracies rather than autocracies prevail in the future.

***

Liberal Democracy is a tool, and like most tools its effective use depends on the skill of the people who use it. The primary challenge for democracies is that they depend on their citizens to act like grownups, to be responsibly informed, to be passionate in their advocacy but civil in their debate, to eschew violence always, and to be willing to accept losses in the short run in the knowledge they can fight another day and perhaps prevail in the future. Such skills are no longer revered in America, especially by the American traditionalist faction that has proved itself deficient in every one of these skills. And so in their deficiency they fail to recognize that they are not soldiers in the service of preserving American democracy but of its destruction.

And essential to the effective use of a tool is to understand what it's good for and what it's not. Liberal democracy is a good tool to provide a political framework that is best suited for grownups to manage their affairs, which in the political sphere should be mostly about about solving practical problems and peaceably resolving conflicts. It is not a good tool to adjudicate metaphysical disagreements. Metaphysical arguments are important, and developing a healthy consensus about them is of central concern for any healthy society, but they should not be resolved in the political sphere. They are matters to be hashed out in the cultural sphere, and they have to be won by persuasion not force. Right now we have two "metaphysical" factions who are dominating American society, and both are duking it out in the political sphere in such a way that they are making it extremely difficult to use Liberal democracy as an effective problem-solving tool. 

The first, a rationalist materialism. Its cosmopolitan ethos dominates in American society's cultural establishment--the media, the universities, and corporate board rooms. At its best, it produces a basic decency and desire for fairness; it seeks a balance between freedom and equality; it is intellectually honest and rigorously self critical; and it is open to innovation, exploration, growth, and change. At its worst it is elitist and arrogant; it is sanctimonious in its judgments of people who want simpler, more stable lives; it has no real feel for what is sacred or worthy of reverence, and it regards the inheritance from the past shaped by dead, white men as something to be overcome rather than as something to be cherished and built upon.

The second, a traditionalist American Christian imaginary, is a vestige of 19th century American ethos of the frontier. At its best, it embraces an unpretentious decency and down-to-earthness; it values human dignity as found in a balance between neighborliness and self-reliance; it professes a heartfelt simple, Christian piety; and it feels a deep connection to the land and to the natural world. At its worst, it's xenophobic and racist, it's resistant to and so poorly adapted to complexity and change; it's intellectually lazy or dishonest and so prone to delusional, crackpot conspiratorial thinking. 

There are lots of people who don't fit comfortably in either of these influential camps, me included, but they are for the most part culturally and politically irrelevant.

Those most influenced by the traditionalist imaginary feel they are forced to live in a world shaped by the Rationalist-Materialist imaginary, and they don't like it. For them, American society feels soulless and perverse. It goes against every good thing they were taught as children, and they don't see why they should have to live in such a world, a world that from their pov has lost its soul.

I sympathize, and I, like they, would like to live in a society where I felt more at home, where there were broadly shared vital customs and traditions, where there was a broadly shared sense of the sacred, and a shared sense of what is truly most worthy of our deepest aspirations. That's not the society any of us lives in. But the difference between most American traditionalists and me is that I don't think Rationalist-Materialists are evil; I just see them as mistaken. I see them as in need of persuasion, and in order to do that I need to make the case that there is something better available that they don't have.

In the meanwhile, I make my peace with the broader culture, and live as best I can according to my own lights. Politics for me is not an arena for philosophical persuasion, but as I said above, it's the arena for solving shared practical problems--like infrastructure, managing pandemics, dealing with climate change, and income inequality. My positions on these issues are obviously affected by my metaphysics, but that doesn't mean I will only work with people who share it.

The problem with so many American traditionalists is that, unlike other traditionalist groups--Mennonites, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others--it's not enough for them to be left alone to freely practice what they believe. They want to assert control over the entire society. But you can't force your metaphysics on others, especially when it is so poorly adapted to the world as it is. People have every right to choose for themselves to live in communities that are simple and isolated from the corruptions and complexity of modern consumer capitalism, but they are not competent to govern in such a complex world. And if they elect people who share their desire to live in a simpler world, people like Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al., they put people in critical decision-making positions who simply haven't the competence to do the job that is required of them.

And the problem for honest, simple people is that they often haven't the sophistication to understand how cynical politicians tell them what they want to hear so they can achieve their own ego-driven agendas. I know that sounds condescending, but it's the hard truth. This is a faction within the U.S. that needs a 12-Step program to be developed for conspiracy theory believers. Healing can only start once you admit you have a problem, and then you need to make amends. 

I fear that the worst for which they will have to make amends still lies ahead. Even if this American traditionalist faction wins in the short run by electing a demagogue, it will lose in the long run. It might seem for a while that they have the winning hand, but ultimately they will lose. Putin will inevitably lose. All the suffering and destruction they cause has been and will be for naught because it's always based on a fundamentally delusional relationship with reality. History keeps moving on, and one way or the other, sooner or later, societies have to adapt to the changing reality history produces. Clinging to the dead past leads to a delusional relationship with reality. This kind of traditionalist imaginary produces a politics that is ill-adapted to the world as it really works. 

In a rapidly changing, complex world with so many billions of people, there are no simple solutions. We have to be nimble in the way we adapt, and we have to elect the people who are most competent into decision-making positions. We need people who are both sophisticated and profound to emerge as leaders, and that means that we need a society that produces an electorate capable of recognizing them and choosing them. Ideally, in coming decades a new consensus will develop that is not shaped by the limitations of the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates now, but by a new consensus that emerges that is grounded in a renewed connection to the Living Real. 

We'll see, but clearly we're at the end of something. And because our collective imagination of the future is largely shaped by the vertigo we experience as cultural and political forms crumble around us, we tend to embrace cataclysmic scenarios for the future. It's understandable, but I live in hope that as disruptive as things will continue to be, those disruptions are clearing the way for the human spirit to take a step forward. The question is to what extent in the meanwhile people will grab onto whatever fool thing they find to stabilize themselves in their vertigo.  

The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”

 Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism, 2018

After reading Ezra Klein's column about Matthew Rose's A World after Liberalism, I read the book, which profiles five anti-Christian thinkers who have been influential on the far Right over the last one hundred years--Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis. I've also been reading (but not yet finished) Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, which profiles Ivan Ilyin, a Christian fascist who lived through the Russian Revolution who has been very influential in shaping Putin's understanding of Russia's historical mission and his role in it after the fall of the Soviet Union.

While the thinkers that Rose profiles are anti-Christian atheists or neo-pagans, Ilyin's idea of Christianity has almost nothing to do with Christianity except as it reflects the worldview of the Grand Inquisitor, the main character in a "poem" that Ivan Karamazov presents to his brother Alyosha in Dostoyevski's great novel written in 1880. Snyder doesn't mention the Grand Inquisitor in his book--at least not in the parts I've read so far--but it struck me while reading his book how much explanatory power Ivan's story has in explaining Putin/Ilyin's imagination of what Russia is or should be, and how this keys around the idea of innocence and an idea of national identity that is shaped by it, and then by extension how explains why totalitarianism is so attractive for so many.

I think revisiting the story is worthy of a little of your time. Go to the link above for the whole thing--it's not that long--but in what follows I focus on key passages to develop my theme:

The Grand Inquisitor is a man of the Church who is an admitted servant of the "tempter" whom Jesus confronted during his forty days in the desert. In Ivan's story, Jesus returns to earth in Spain during the Inquisition, and the Inquisitor recognizes him and immediately arrests him as a threat to the social order. The Inquisitor's argument when confronting Jesus is that he, the Inquisitor, is the more compassionate because he wants to allay human suffering while Jesus's project to liberate humans leads only to unhappiness. Ivan's Inquisitor says to Jesus--

Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"

Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions.

They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves.

And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves.

And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they.

Chilling and prescient, not so much about the Church but of the totalitarianism to come, whether or not it is cloaked in religion. That last sentence is so revealing of the contempt that the Inquisitor has for his wards. Because even if there is a God and an afterlife, it is not meant for these insects who could never be worthy of what Christianity tells them is their ultimate destiny. So, insists the Inquisitor, we few among the elite tell them the noble lie, we tell them what they need to hear so that they will obey and will live in the hive society we create for them. It's for their own good. And we, the noble liars, will nobly take on the unhappy burdens of freedom and rule so they may live and die in peace.

Jesus is cruel because he expects too much from humans, whereas the Inquisitor is kind because he expects nothing. He tells Jesus that his believing in the human possibility to be truly free, to become fully human persons, was criminally naive:

But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and vile. ... Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union.

He tells Jesus that when tempted in the desert he failed in what could have been a truly salvific mission. Rather than to have initiated the human farce that ensued, he could have created the perfect totalitarian state had he not resisted the tempter:

Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar's purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him [the tempter]. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism.

This is the Grand Inquistor's project: to relieve the people of the burden of freedom, to allow them to live as children, as innocents who never have to become free, mature individuals, who have no moral responsibility except to obey. The Grand Inquisitor sees himself as a benefactor of humanity because he relieves them of their suffering, a suffering that follows from their being called to freedom by Jesus. This maps remarkably well to Snyder's depiction of  Ilyin's, and so Putin's, Christian fascism, particularly this idea of the Russian people as innocents:

Like fascists and other authoritarians of his day, Ilyin insisted that his nation was a creature, “an organism of nature and the soul,” an animal in Eden without original sin. Who belonged within the Russian organism was not for the individual to decide, since cells do not decide whether they belong to a body. Russian culture, Ilyin wrote, automatically brought “fraternal union” wherever Russian power extended. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” in quotation marks, because he denied their separate existence beyond the Russian organism. To speak of Ukraine was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Ilyin took for granted that a post-Soviet Russia would include Ukraine. Ilyin thought that Soviet power concentrated all of the Satanic energy of factuality and passion in one place. And yet he argued that the triumph of communism showed that Russia was more rather than less innocent. Communism, he maintained, was a seduction by foreigners and deracinated Russians whom Ilyin called “Tarzans.” They lusted to violate immaculate Russia precisely because it was guileless and defenseless. In 1917, Russians had simply been too good to resist the cargo of sin arriving from the West. Despite the depredations of Soviet leaders, Russians retained an imperceptible goodness. Unlike Europe and America, which accepted facts and passions as life, Russia retained an underlying “Spirit” that recalled God’s totality. “The nation is not God,” wrote Ilyin, “but the strength of its soul is from God.”

When God created the world, Russia had somehow escaped history and remained in eternity. Ilyin’s homeland, he thought, was therefore free from the forward flow of time and the accumulation of accident and choice that he found so intolerable. Russia instead experienced repeating cycles of threat and defense. Everything that happened must be an attack from the outside world on Russian innocence, or a justified Russian response to such a threat. In such a scheme it was easy for Ilyin, who knew little of actual Russian history, to grasp centuries in simple phrases. What a historian might see as the spread of power from Moscow across northern Asia and half of Europe was for Ilyin nothing more than “self-defense.” According to Ilyin, every single battle ever fought by Russians was defensive. Russia was always the victim of a “continental blockade” by Europe. As Ilyin saw matters, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.” Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia. Facts do not matter and responsibility vanishes.  (pp. 23-24)

Russia is innocent, and all evils, from Communism to homosexuality, come from the West. Everything that Russia does, no matter how barbaric, is by definition in self-defense against the corrupting influences of the West. It's not hard to see how this translates into Putin's justification for his invasion of Ukraine. He wants to save the Ukrainians from the corrupt West. Any brutality he must commit is in the service of returning them to the innocence that they want deep down, even if they are not conscious of it. They are like children who must be disciplined for their own good against temptations they haven't the good sense to resist. 

I'll probably have another post about the thinkers that Rose presents in A World after Liberalism, but I think that the same basic idea is at the heart of what these more "Western" thinkers want. It is a nostalgia for an Edenic existence before all the complications of human cultural evolution. The main difference these thinkers from the West and the Russian thinkers is that they see Christianity as the primary obstacle to achieving a return to such a society. Rose says, 

Alt-right thinkers are overwhelmingly atheists, but their worldview is not dismissive of religion or religious questions. On the contrary, to read deeply in its foundational sources is to discover a movement that takes Christian thought and practice seriously. It is the conflicted tribute paid to their chief adversary, whose moral assumptions, they believe, distort our culture and twist our consciences. Against Christianity they make two related charges. Beginning with the boast that Europeans effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—they argue that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous, providing inspiration to ideologies of white disempowerment. They insist that conservatives are therefore tragically mistaken to see in Christianity a buttress against the spread of liberal and progressive values. From the alt-right perspective, such values are the rebellious offspring of Christianity, whose legacy is not the preservation of a cultural past, but the ongoing subversion of traditional ways of life.

That is, pre-Christian ways of life. The Alt Right finds support in figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger and those influenced by them on both the Left and on the Right who see Christianity as a disaster because of the way they have alienated humans from a more natural, organic way of living. They see Christianity as the source of all unhappiness and alienation.

But for Christianity alienation is not a bug. Christianity--as with all the post Axial religions/philosophies--is all about disembedding humans from the natural world so that the human soul might know and be aligned with a transcendent order. It's about moving out of the cave. The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan Ilyin, and Rose's thinkers, in varying degrees, reject the existence of such a transcendental order. Nothing exists outside the cave, and any effort to go out from it is delusional and dangerous. They propose as a religious solution that would return culture to an embedded paganism, a religion of land and blood, rather than going forward toward an idea of a human future in which humans live as free individuals in communion. Such a future, they insist is impossible, so they preach instead a return to the cave, to Eden and infantilism. Rose explores what that means on the Right, but even on the Left, the postmodern polytheism proposed by Dreyfus and Kelly in All Things Shining or the pagan animism extolled by Richard Powers is acceptable in a way that the disembedding dynamic Christianity is not. That's why Christianity is hard--you have to go through the alienation to get to something deeper and more profoundly connecting. It's not supposed to be easy. 

Alienation is the fundamental human problem, and the human future boils down to which solution most humans will choose--to return to some kind of womb existence in a hive society, or to choose cultural and political forms that take a chance that humans are capable of becoming truly free, of leaving the womb and individuating, and of eventually moving out of their alienation into a deeper communion with one another, with the natural and the spiritual worlds. This cannot be accomplished if one remains forever in a hive or cave or cult. What was lost can be restored, but only by moving forward. 

This is what I mean when I say that the future will be shaped either by good or bad religion. Good religion looks forward inspired by the possibility of realizing a richer, more deeply free, more fully mature and realized human future. Bad religion looks backward in nostalgia to restore a childish innocence. Good religion has faith in humanity in the same way that the Inquisitor's Jesus does. Bad religion, like the religion of the Inquisitor has no such faith, and seeks to quash human freedom, to impose instead its fascistic control. There is no going native in the past, which is what all bad religion wants to do in one way or the other. 

Secular Liberalism, for all its limitations, at least insofar as it affirms the sanctity of human freedom, is morally more advanced than that kind of Christianity that flows from the cynical presuppositions about humanity held by the Grand Inquisitor. In order for people to be free, they have to make mistakes. That's why in the story of the prodigal son, the prodigal is morally more advanced than the older brother who follows the rules and stays at home. The prodigal by any conventional moralistic standard is a reprobate, and yet in the eyes of God he is closer to fulfilling his human destiny than the older brother, who stews in his alienation and resentment. The prodigal has not yet arrived; he has only begun his journey toward becoming him who he was created to be. The older brother hasn't even started. 

Imagining a Positive Human Future

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?

--Ezra Klein

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--

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.

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?"

 

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.