Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.
But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.
Why are these young intellectuals so attracted to illiberalism? Because they reject the flabby meaninglessness of life in the Age of Whatever. There is no future in flabby meaninglessness, so people--me included--who are committed to retaining an open, free society had better find an antidote for it. If we don't, Illiberalism in some form or another will win.
Liberals say that finding meaning is something you do on your own time in the cultural sphere--go meditate or go fishing, join Doctors without Borders, go camping in the wilderness, start collecting stamps--whatever. Meaning in life is what individuals choose it to be, right? This is commonplace Liberal thinking, and we're so inured to it, it seems irreproachable.But meaning doesn't work that way. It's filtered or disclosed through cultural constructs, and our current culture mostly filter out the deep sources of felt meaning in ways that are suffocating us. Finding a pleasant hobby is no solution. This explains why conservatives feel this need to make their meaning everybody else's. They feel a need to change the mediating social forms. I get that, but they don't understand that illiberalism provides a cure that is worse than the disease.
But this mentality among young conservative intellectuals should be seen as a miner's canary signal by complacent Liberals. The empirical reality, whether Liberals recognize it or not, is that everything about what a LIberal society produces is fake and meaningless. And spirited young people are disgusted by it, and want something more. In 1962, they put together the Port Huron Statement. That noble, humanistic project failed miserably. The Left since then has capitulated to a postmodern priggish moralism that feels completely out of touch with Reality as most people live it, and almost anybody with any sense gets that Liberal anything goes cluelessness is inadequate to meet the challenges that the world will confront in the coming decades. So now a significant minority of young intellectuals are willing to look for other ways to make change happen.
This is why Nietzsche and his shallower imitators like Ayn Rand resonate with these young intellectuals. (See Note 1) They hunger for more than vapid Liberal bromides. Nietzsche and Rand map out a path of self-transcendence, a path toward what the Greeks called arete, excellence, which is what all spirited human beings long to achieve. The Liberal Left instead have become of the celebrators of the mediocre. In their misguided understanding of equality, they want a society that levels everyone to the least common denominator. And so in the Age of Whatever, Nietzsche and Rand seem to offer the only legitimate alternative for such a noxious leveling mentality.
But Nietzsche's and Rand's self-transcendence project leads to barbarism, not excellence, because both were involved in what Ernest Becker called causa sui projects. A causa sui project is a parody of self-transcendence, and Rand's heroes are parodies in this sense. I'm more sympathetic to Nietzsche and would argue that most would-be Nietzsheans have no understanding about what he was talking about. Nevertheless Nietzsche books, particularly toward the end, virtually beg to be parodied by lesser human beings.
What Nietzsche and Rand have in effect done is to take what is a profound human longing for excellence and to pervert it in the promotion of what every great metaphysical imaginary from Taoism to Buddhism to Neoplatonism insists is delusion. Self-transcendence? Yes. Uebermenschen? No. Last Men? No. The true humility, and so the true excellence of Socrates and Chuang Tzu? Yes.
Is it possible to build civilizations on such an impractical ideal? It was done before; it can be done again.
I believe it's possible because deep down everybody, including Garsten's right-leaning young intellectuals, hungers for reality. Garsten's students are starved for Reality, and they reject the system whose main produce is the false and the fake. They are right to do so, but they will choose instead whatever seems more authentically, deeply real, even if it isn't.
That's why it's important that some how some way we find a way--as a broadly accepted societal ideal--to make contact with Reality at its deepest something that is what the most spirited human beings strive for. I believe it's possible because I think that Socrates was right, that people chose the Good when they know the Good, because the Good is the deep Real. The challenge is to find a way to make that experience of the Good available as something that's easier for people to know and so to choose. That's almost impossible where a nihilistic materialistic consumer-choice Neoliberalism defines the terms of discourse. A rationalist materialism is not necessary for preserving a truly free open society. Indeed, it creates the conditions that make it almost impossible to sustain.
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Note 1: I am a practicing Catholic, so I understand why there is a hunger among Garsten's Catholic students for a pre-Reformation Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary. One finds in Aquinas and Dante, and later in Cusa and Ficino, a beautifully articulated imaginary that resonated among its greatest souls at that time. We must draw now upon the deep originary sources that gave rise to those articulation then in a way that fits what we've become since then. Catholic Integralism is a truly crazy solution to a real problem, and I reject it utterly and completely.
My argument on this blog might seem equally crazy, but at least I recognize that there can be no imposition of a confessional religion on the broader society. That's why I'm an advocate for a restoration within the cultural sphere--by no means the political sphere--of a form of Neoplatonism that provides a vertical pole to the metaphysical imaginary that is cognate with all the great post-Axial religions and philosophies.
As far-fetched as that might seem in this moment, I think it's possible because Neoplatonism points to something whose truth is not to be evaluated in its historical propositions, but rather in the way it is an expression of something deeply, vitally true in an originary sennse. And because we all hunger for truth and to have deeper contact with Reality, I think we will find our way to it once again. The Integralists are wrong because you just can't take the forms from another era and impose them on people who don't feel the originary energy that gave rise to them. New forms have to arise in a new way that inspires people because they shine with originary Reality. I sincerely believe that such a restoration lies ahead of us.
I focus on Neoplatonism as restored in a postmodern key because it can provide a on a civilizational framework that works with the innate human longing for the Good while not being prescriptive or dogmatic about it. And it provides a lingua franca for people who are averse to religion but who are attracted to a kind of Emersonian transcendentalism, and this in turn can put them in conversation with Christians, Jews, Muslims of goodwill in the West and with the same constituencies in the religions of the East. Something like this is necessary if we as a human race are going to find a way to define what it means to be human in the face of threats posed to the human by nihilistic technocapitalism.