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 admires Wendell Berry, but who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I do not align myself with the kind of Progressive today who sees him or herself as a woke social justice warrior. I'm for Justice and compassion, not some form of intellectually fashionable, performative Neopuritan priggery.
While I recognize the necessity of the technocratic state, I see our task as citizens to be vigilant in holdingit accountable and to exert whatever pressure we can so that it will use its power to solve problems 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.
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 for economic justice. 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.
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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 the hatred so many on the cultural right direct toward it. It is incomplete, not evil. But Liberalism, whatever were the ideals that originally inspired it, has become reduced into an metaphysical imaginary and epistemology that rests almost completely on rationalistic materialistic assumptions. As such, it no longer has the resources from which we can draw to meet the challenges that face us. It has created a world that is for us now inadequate for true human flourishing. It's not about what it affirms as important so much as about what it rejects as unimportant.
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 defender of Liberalism 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 that supported George Wallace back in the day, and that 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.
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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 those who are rigidly dogmatic or fundamentalistic in their 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 compose 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 must develop hand in hand with 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/Phronesis and the vertical dimension Mythos/Sophia. 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 operates 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.]
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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.
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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 1 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 connecting or being a conduit for the broader culture 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.
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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, and so 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/Sophia or a 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 utterly absent. 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: 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.