Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom. Americans were less likely to assume that people learn values by living in coherent moral communities. They were more likely to adopt the belief that each person has to come up with his or her own personal sense of right and wrong. As far back as 1955, the columnist Walter Lippmann saw that this was going to lead to trouble: “If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we are outside the traditions of civility,” he wrote.
Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. When there are no shared moral values and norms, then social trust plummets. People feel alienated and under siege, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, lonely societies turn to authoritarianism. People eagerly follow the great leader and protector, the one who will lead the us/them struggle that seems to give life meaning.
During our current moment of global populism, the liberal tradition is under threat. Many people have gone economically nationalist and culturally traditionalist. Around the world, authoritarian moralists promise to restore the old ways, the old religion, national greatness. “There are certain things which are more important than ‘me,’ than my ego — family, nation, God,” Viktor Orban declared. Such men promise to restore the anchors of cultural, moral and civic stability, but they use brutal and bigoted strongman methods to get there. (Source)
Brooks' column today starts with a celebration of Fareed Zakaria's new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present. This is the period I describe in my Cathedral Lectures as the story of how the Baconian Project emerged in the 1600s and gradually, decade by decade culminating in the Post WWII era, came to crowd out every last remnant of premodern societies, their traditions and religious values. It's the story of Techno-Capitalism, i.e., science in the service of technological advancements that capitalism has used to commodify--thing-a-fy--just about everything.
Brooks closes with these paragraphs--
This election year, in the United States and around the globe, will be about whether liberalism can thrive again. Zakaria’s book will help readers feel honored and grateful that we get to be part of this glorious and ongoing liberal journey. He understands that we liberals can’t just offer economic benefits; we also have to make the spiritual and civic case for our way of life. He writes: “The greatest challenge remains to infuse that journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did — to fill that hole in the heart.”
There’s glory in striving to add another chapter to the great liberal story — building a society that is technologically innovative, commercially daring, with expanding opportunities for all; building a society in which culture is celebrated, families thrive, a society in which the great diversity of individuals can experience a sense of common purpose and have the space and energy to pursue their own adventures in living.
Oy. "The spiritual and civic case for our way of life"!? Is he living in America in the 2020s?
The problem with Brooks and Zakaria is that they want to eat their cake and have it too. They want a vibrant, Liberal Capitalist society with a traditional religious ethos. But the two cannot co-exist because Techno-Capitalism is a totalizing system--it brooks no challengers. And so the kind of religion that could co-exist with it is no religion at all. At best such a religion is a parody religion like the Gospel of Prosperity or some form of Christian Nationalism. The people who are best acclimated to life in the TCM are radical Libertarians, the people Lippmann is talking about in the excerpt above, who since WWII have come to think of the human being as a wetware consuming machine.
And so given the choice between the world that capitalism wants to give us and the world with the religious values that the great post-Axial traditions want to give us, the latter has no chance. You have to have a society where the Transcendent Good is recognized by everyone and so has the authority to provide the constraints within which economic development proceeds. I think that's kinda what Brooks and Zakaria want, but they don't seem to realize that in such a world Capitalism can no longer be Capitalism. It can no longer serve its own ends; it must serve something higher. And that would require a different kind of revolution than the one Zakaria celebrates that began in the 1600s.