There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.
There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.
So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are proposing illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below.
So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is its assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.
So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. [See Note 1] They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves.
Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right that they're in this sense more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.
So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And whatever, for instance, might have been a genuine spiritual energy in mainstream Protestantism for a while had at best a constraining effect on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate its maker, and now the shark roams free. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.
Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. They are thought of by Red America as overly educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center, empty suits like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. They're phonies, but they're our phonies, declares Red America.
But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than to find relief from their guilt by focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.
So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes.
Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 2] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.
Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 3]
The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.
And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom.
I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them.
***
I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist, managerial liberal strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I have no desire to destroy it but see the task as to vigilantly hold it accountable and to use its power as a tool to solve problems only it is capable to solve in the service of a democratically determined common good. Without a broadly shared cultural commitment to an inspiring ideal of the common good, no productive, healthy Progressive Left project can get traction. Material interests alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a vigorous Progressivism that might actually enact Justice.
As suggested above, I reject as a dead end the poststructuralist historicism that plays such a large role in shaping the post-Marxist politics of the contemporary Left. An effective Left politics must derive inspiration from transcendentals like Justice, Truth, Goodness, Beauty that are the source of all ontonormativity. These are not intellectual abstractions but energizing sources of felt meaning. A truly vigorous Left politics becomes a possibility only when the broader culture becomes capable of imagining a possible future in which these provide a solidarity-creating energy for its accomplishment. And I'd argue that a true Left solidarity cannot come into being so long as Rationalist Materialism provides the dominant metaphysical imaginary for American society.
So those on the secular Left who talk about the need for solidarity are quite right--nothing changes without it. But that kind of healthy, constructive, Left solidarity is playing no significant role on the American political landscape right now. We got a whiff of it in Bernie's campaigns, but the last time we really saw it was in the Civil Rights movement before the assassination of King. King, for all his flaws, was someone through whom Justice as a transcendental ideal shone. All Americans of good will felt it, were moved by it, and changed by it. But King was killed and reaction set in, and not long after with the ascension of Reagan, Neoliberalism and its inherent nihilism becomes the elite consensus for both the Republican and Democrat establishments.
So after Reagan, a "Liberalism" that dominates both GOP and Dem elites becomes too entrenched an ideology to have any truck with Justice and a solidarity movement to instantiate it. Let the Invisible Hand do its thing. Goodbye labor unions, good by multi-racial solidarity, goodbye any hope on the Left for real Justice, goodbye any sense that there's such a thing as 'society', much less a common good. The hardcore Neoliberals consolidate their gains as the isolating, enervating, anti-common good, individualistic world they always wanted becomes realized by the proliferation of its solipsizing Technocapitalist produce. The Left retreats to fight cultural issues in despair of fighting structural power and economic issues. Nothing pleases Neoliberal elites more--their opponents are divided in their squabbling over abortion and guns, and thus easily subdued.
The historicist Secular Left has no robust answer for this because it has no real way of standing outside of it. If we've learned nothing else in the last few decades, some things other than material interests are important for the creation of solidarity. The Right has an easier job of creating it because its goals are served by drawing upon the primitive resentments and fears that have always been the primary animator of the mob. The mob is a form of counterfeit solidarity, and the best on the Left know that riding the tiger produces nothing good. Some other energies must be drawn upon to create a sense of solidarity, but they're not readily available except in small groups here and there.
So how is my critique of Liberalism different from the one illiberalism makes? I do not think that Liberalism has created a world that is worthy of our hatred. It has, though, created a world that is inadequate for true human flourishing. It is incomplete, not evil. For all its talk of freedom, Liberalism and its rationalist materialist imaginary imposes constraints on the spirit and closes off more possibilities than it opens up. The cure is not to destroy Liberalism but rather to subordinate what's good in it to something else more deeply humanizing. Science and critical thinking, pluralism and free speech, freedom of religion, democracy, and a conception of fundamental natural rights are good gifts Liberalism bequeaths to us. They must be retained and defended while realizing that they must inevitably be subsumed into a higher cultural synthesis in which the Wisdom dimension is restored.
All I am asking of any Liberal reading this is to suspend disbelief, to treat what I'm saying as a thought experiment. I am asking you to try to step back from the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that shapes all our ways of thinking whether we have religious commitments or not. We can surely say about Liberalism that it worked for a while, that it gave us a spectacular means to create material bounty. But it exacted significant costs, and we are no longer in a position to pay them. The cost was a loss of wisdom in our public life and of our capacity even to care that we lost it.
Insofar as people care about wisdom in their private life, it has at best indirect public impacts. But the fact is that wisdom never has a seat at the table in our political economy. Utility and expediency are the only criteria, and both are useless in solving the deeper problem, which is one of metaphysical imagination. The cost therefore is not just that we lack wisdom in planning for the future, but that without it we are we are spinning meaninglessly at a time when we need our wits about us and firm ground upon which to plant our feet if we are to face what's coming without being washed away.
The inadequacy of Liberalism is apparent to everyone but the 20% or so of educated elites who have benefited most from it and who are the primary constituency that the Democratic Party now serves. They cannot understand how the regime that has benefited them so much could be hated so intensely by those whom Sam Francis called years ago Middle American Radicals, the Jacksonians the GOP recruited during the Reagan era but mostly neglected until the Tea Party and Trump. The gifts of Liberalism are not valued by the Middle American Radicals or the Integralists and others on the Right because they see Liberalism as the shark that has chewed up their world and everything they hold sacred. They're not wrong. And elite Liberals do not endear themselves to these folks when they tell them to get over it and move on.
***
So if you've stuck with me this far, I'm likely to lose you in what follows. I have no expectation that what I'm trying to do here would be well received either by those who are deeply captured by a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary or by one that is rigidly dogmatic or fundamentalistic in his religious beliefs. I speak to those who care about the human prospect and share with me the sense of urgency about what is happening to us as a civilization. And I speak to those who are open to think through things in a way that doesn't fit neatly into any established categories, but nevertheless sees their thinking as part of a long tradition that dates back to the Axial revolution. There's lots of 'new' thinking out there about our collective life together, but the only thinking that I can take seriously has to be grounded in some understanding of the transcendent. Transcendence should not be surrendered to the Right.
I'm arguing for something that is, to say the least, not obvious--especially to people who lean Left, who are my primary audience. I see myself as a dog that's barking up a tree. I smell something up there and I think I know what it is, but it's hidden among the branches and leaves, so I'm not sure quite what it looks like. But there's something there, and we need to see it and understand it better.
I am among those who believe that any new political project lies downstream from the emergence of a new cultural project. This new cultural project requires bringing what's up in that tree to ground. What that means for us going forward is outlined in the first five or six parts of my Geneaology Series, and if what I'm writing here makes any sense to you, I encourage you to at least read Part 1 and Part 2.
Here's an excerpt from Part 2 "Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West" to suggest what I'm barking about--
A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.
In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture.
A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. [Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.]
...
There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.
...
Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. [See Note 4 for criteria to evaluate effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary.]
So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose individual lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their spiritual beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live.
Religious people respond in four basic ways to this split between what their religion tells them is true and the reality of their everyday world:
- They separate their lives into public and private spheres. In private life they go to church and practice their religion with friends and family, but in public their lives are ruled by the law of the shark, and they, too, become sharks if they have any ambition.
- There are, of course, lots of religious or spiritual people who live decent lives in this public sphere, but because they are not driven by ambition, they only rarely rise to leadership positions. They choose careers as artisans or in service professions. But even so, unless they own their own businesses, they must work in organizations--schools, hospitals, government bureaucracies--whose ethos is shaped by rationalist-materialist assumptions and that are often run by ambitious sharks.
- They retreat into quietism--monasticism, Anabaptist separatism, Dreher's Benedict Option, off-the-grid cults, etc. It's possible to live an integrated life in such bubble worlds, but living in them requires the abdication of responsibility for what happens in the rest of the world.
- They seek power in the political sphere to order the society into a theocracy in which they will no longer feel alienated even if almost everyone else will. This was Calvin's project in Geneva, and is now the Catholic Integralist and Evangelical Dominionist project. It leads to illiberalism and oppression.
This is pretty much reality in North Atlantic societies as most people experience it, and few are really, truly happily thriving in it. The restoration of the vertical axis to the metaphysical imaginary cannot be forced in the way the fourth group wants. As soon as it's forced, it loses any claims to wisdom or spiritual authority. Nevertheless, the restoration of a wisdom dimension is desirable, and it's more likely to happen if people are prepared for it, look for it, hope for it--and live it in their own lives as best they are able. My Genealogy Series is an attempt to trace how the wisdom dimension functioned in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West until it didn't, and to make the case for its retrieval in a way that makes sense in a globally pluralistic world.
I do not see "wisdom" as being as exclusively derived from any one religious or philosophical tradition. I see religious and philosophical traditions deriving their legitimacy by their effectiveness in providing the broader culture access to the Living Real. No religious or philosophical tradition is doing that for North Atlantic societies in this moment, and, I'm arguing, the lack of such a sapiential tradition with broad cultural legitimacy is at the heart of the crisis we are living through. A lot depends on whether we will be able to find a healthy way to resolve this crisis.
The task as I see it is not to force anything on anybody but rather to ring an alarm that we are in a profound meaning crisis, and that we need to find some level of consensus on the vertical dimension. Any solution to this problem must be bottom-up rather than top-down. No sane person wants some Mandarin class to arise to impose its "knowing better" on everyone else. Or another way of saying this is that we should expect no solutions from our current Mandarins in the universities, media and other cultural institutions, including the church's managerial class. If something 'real' arises, they will, after some initial resistance, adapt.
How might this happen? I really don't know the specifics but suspect it will emerge in a way that is both continuous with Liberalism and discontinuous with it. How did Buddhism happen? How did Taoism happen? How did Christianity happen? How did is Islam happen? The energies of the Living Real have a way of breaking through from time to time in a way that is recognized by the broader culture, and it does it in a way that is both continuous and discontinuous. Christianity, for instance, is both continuous with and discontinuous with Judaism. I have every expectation that something like these historical breakthroughs will happen again. How and when I have no idea, but we should hope for it, expect it.
If it happens it won't be about believing a new doctrine so much as it will be about restoring a felt connection to the Living Real. No felt connection, no breakthrough. And when such a breakthrough occurs, it's something that wise Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, other religionists, and all people of good will will recognize as cognate with their own wisdom traditions. Doctrine--right teaching--follows from the experience of connection.
The Living Real is accessible by all. Those of us who are Christians have an account regarding how such access became possible, but accepting that account is no prerequisite for access to it. What matters is that one hears the song and is inspired to sing it. It doesn't matter what language you sing it in if we all are hearing the same melody, the melody of Justice. Hearing this melody is the prerequisite for the solidarity that is necessary for any real progress.
So this is not an intellectual enterprise. It's not something you can think yourself to--and it's certainly not something a minority can force on a majority in the political sphere. It's about hearing the song. Lots of people hear it even now, but maybe only faintly because of all the noise that drowns it out, and because so few others who do hear it are singing it with confidence and gusto.
***
Question: But what to do if we don't hear it, or until we hear it?
Answer: The best we can. We respond to what's given to us and do what's called for. We work for Justice as best we can know and feel it. And sometimes that means just resisting as best we can the siren songs that lure us and our fellow citizens toward shipwreck.
In the short run, perhaps all many of us can do is say, No, that's not the song. I don't know what it is, but that's not it. That's the Socratic daemon working in us. Better to wait and trust that something true and new will break through. So while the temptation is for many compelling, the worst thing anyone can do is surrender to the siren song for want of anything better.
We are in that respect like Odysseus on the trackless sea or the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness. We must keep moving even if we don't know when we'll eventually arrive. And that means we must resist Circe's enchantment or the longing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. These are mythopoetic archetypes that speak to us in this moment. I realize that this might sound like a rationale for complacency, but it isn't. It requires fortitude and hope beyond hope. It is not just about waiting passively because there will come a moment when we must act decisively, but there has to be a chance for success, even if a small one. Wisdom is knowing when the chance is presented. Only a fool expects his roses to bloom in January, but we must be alert, vigilant, and prepared for the first signs of Spring.
In a post last month I wrote that I was looking for an entertainment alternative to the nihilism that passes for prestige TV, I read for the first time Tolkien's Silmarillion, re-read the LOTR trilogy, and re-watched the Jackson films. I was surprised by how they engaged and moved me. And I've been wondering since why it works in a way differently from something like Game of Thrones, which after a while I found unwatchable. I think the key is that for all GOT's fantastical elements, there is no Mythos or vertical dimension in it. There's not a whiff of transcendence in it. It's just the modern secular world transposed into one where dragons and zombies and magic are real, but where true goodness and true wisdom are not. It's Succession in medieval garb. Some find such entertainments interesting and enjoyable. Some find Tarantino's films entertaining for the same reason. I find them suffocating.
In Tolkien's legendarium, the whole point is to imagine a world where the vertical Mythos or Wisdom dimension is integrated with the Logos dimension. It's an adventure fantasy and an entertainment on one level, but it strives and largely succeeds to create a metaphysical imaginary with a Mythos dimension that provides an analogue or metaphor for what we all long for but can't bring ourselves to believe in because of our Rationalist-Materialist cultural programming.
So let me finish this long piece on a Tolkienian note. A few paragraphs above I referenced the mythopoesis of Homer and Exodus as a source of needed wisdom in this moment. Let me now reference Tolkien and his central character, Aragorn. "Not all those who wander are lost", he says. He knows this from his experience wandering anonymously throughout all Middle Earth for decades until finally his decisive moment arrives.
He goes by many names, but his real name, the name his mother and wife called him by, was Estel, which means hope beyond hope. Tolkien's entire legendarium is a meditation on fate and freedom, patience and fortitude, and of the centrality of hope when there seems to be no "Logos" for it. What is it in us that makes us capable of such a thing? Our capacity for living on the vertical, or mythos dimension, the dimension of depth and wisdom.
So to sum up, Liberalism Plus, i.e., the various Whatevers subordinated to "Liberalism" that Douthat talks about, can no longer work, but going forward the gifts of Liberalism must to be retained in a way that is subordinated to a living, developing, dynamic Wisdom Tradition. We don't have that now, but until we do, the bad guys and their seductive song of destruction must be resisted lest they steer us all to shipwreck .
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Note 1: Some of the references in this essay assume you have some familiarity with Yellowstone, the most popular (and important?) TV show in America right now but more in Red than in Blue America. (11/10/22: See "How Taylor Sheridan Created America's Most Popular TV Show" in The Atlantic.) I think every Liberal in Blue America should watch it to better understand a moral world that is largely incomprehensible unless you know people in Red America. I don't know that it qualifies as 'prestige' TV (too many contrived plot-driven implausibilities), but it's got some good lines here and there and some compelling characters. For instance Angela Blue Thunder, a ruthless warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--
“They make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters.”
Not the kind of sentiment you expect to hear expressed streaming on Peacock. But that's how the Duttons run their ranch and it's how the U.S.--whether the Blues or Reds are in office--runs the world. And it belies the Liberal fetishization of 'rule of law', and it's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals sounds so empty these days in Red America. What does it have to do with the way the world really works? It's just a tool that the powerful use to their own advantage to sustain their hold on power and to punish their enemies. It's used to keep the lower orders in line, but rarely if ever against elites in the power structure.
Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history. And at best it's been like a fragile truce competing parties agree to abide by until it's no longer in their interests to do so. And it's a truce that the MAGA world no longer feels works in its interests. So for them it's all-out war now.
In a society with a living sapiential tradition, the "law" would be grounded in what I've been calling ontonormative justice, as for instance the Tao or the Torah is understood to be grounded in the law of heaven. We don't have a sapiential tradition, so Law is whatever we make up as we go along, and when it goes against people's sense of what's "right", it's disregarded as illegitimate. This sense of what's right largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would in turn be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. We're not a healthy society, and so appeals to Tao/natural law don't make much sense now, but that needn't always be the case.
In the meanwhile the distance between what people feel is right based on custom and what is enacted law results in a contempt for the law and the kind of vigilantism that is rampant in Yellowstone or that we saw on J6. The law when it's just just based on one faction's opinion is substanceless and evanescent for opposing factions, a temporary inconvenience that can and will be reversed when they take power. Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, the rule of law has no deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect--with a few exceptions, they are just careerist hacks with no claim even to even a minimum of rudimentary wisdom.
Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in their being about two "mob bosses" and their families, but despite their similarities the Succession world is profoundly repugnant to those in the Yellowstone world. What's different about these two worlds is more significant than what's similar, and to understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. It's really about the clash between Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. The show doesn't justify all the violence; it just accepts it as reality, and if violence is just the way it is, who would you rather win--the Duttons or the Roys?
The difference lies in that none of the principal characters as written in Succession has a soul and so redemption isn't a possibility any of them. Winning is the best it gets for anybody, so it's the only thing that matters. But you don't care who wins, or at least I don't. Goodness doesn't exist, so there is no possibility for a good choice--there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices.
The principal characters in Yellowstone are really bad people, but goodness is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The souls in Yellowstone are on the road to damnation and loathsome when you first meet them--particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie. But at least they have souls, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption.
Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but that's how Red America thinks about Blue elites. They can't trust them because they don't believe in anything except a project to justify moral license and appetite. People in Red America act in egregiously licentious, appetitive ways, but they know it's wrong. And yes, our leaders in Red America might be ruthlessly violent, but they justify it in the service of preserving something sacred that they believe in. What does Blue America believe that goes beyond some callow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. He'd be a perfect fit in the Roy family. He's a careerist who only cares about what's good for him. And Blue America asks, "What's wrong with that?"
Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents, but in order to prevail against evil, they must be meaner than evil. They also know the difference between having a soul and not having one, and Red Americans see the ethos of Blue America as so soulless that those who live in it have become incapable of making such distinctions.
They are wrong to think so. I live in Blue America and almost everyone I know has a decency and lives by a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But Blue Americans--especially the most powerful, affluent, and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family?
I doubt that the Yellowstone writer Taylor Sheridan is going to go there, but it's not impossible in in a sequel show called 2043 that Tate --the child of both White America and Native America and heir to the Yellowstone Ranch--returns the land to the Tribe and succeeds Rainwater (or whoever) as chief/chairman. Unlikely, but not inconceivable in the more complex moral world Yellowstone explores. Justice is a possibility in that world even if it rarely shines in it.
Note 2: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--
Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is.
A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts.
Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.
See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"
Note 3: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it.
I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source.
Note 4: In Genealogy Part 5--scroll down to the second half of the essay--I lay out and develop in a preliminary way four criteria--coherency, scope, richness, and adaptability--for evaluating the effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary:
(1) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both vertical and horizontal dimensions,
(2) how broad the scope of its knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,
(3) how both the scope and coherence of its knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to human experience, and
(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in human experience of reality [and growth of knowledge] on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.
...A rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary has broad horizontal scope, coherence, and adaptability, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, vertically rich metaphysical imaginaries that lack horizontal scope. What a vital, healthy civilization needs is a metaphysical imaginary that has both vertical and horizontal scope, coherence that integrates knowledge on both dimensions, and richness that comes from a sense of meaning and purpose that derives from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized.