After the Future

Liberal/Conservative; Revolutionary/Reactionary

There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty, Russian Old Believers who wanted to recover early Orthodox Christian rites, Pre-Raphaelite painters who rejected the conventions of Mannerism, Morrisites and Ruskinites who raged against the machine, all these were what you might call restorative reactionaries.

A second type—call them redemptive reactionaries—take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back. But they are not historical pessimists, or not entirely. They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over. Ever since the French Revolution reactionaries have seen themselves working toward counterrevolutions that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there. . . .

All this [the apocalyptic redemptive reaction of the American Right] is new—and it has little to do with the principles of conservatism, or with the aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” which Corey Robin sees at the root of everything on the right. No, there is something darker and dystopic at work here. People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse. When I read the new reactionaries or hear them speak I’m reminded of Leo Naphta, the consumptive furloughed Jesuit in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who prowls the corridors of a Swiss sanatorium, raging against the modern Enlightenment and looking for disciples. What infuriates Naphta is that history cannot be reversed, so he dreams of revenge against it. He speaks of a coming apocalypse, a period of cruelty and cleansing, after which man’s original ignorance will return and new forms of authority will be established. Mann did not model Naphta on Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand or Bismarck or any other figure on the traditional European right. He modeled him on George Lukács, the Hungarian Communist philosopher and onetime commissar who loathed liberals and conservatives alike. A man for our time.

This is excerpted from the end of a January 2012 NYRB review of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, by Mark Lilla. I haven't read the book, but I read Robin's blog from time to time, and I learn things from him. I don't see myself as sharing his worldview, though, and I find Lilla's account of conservatism more compelling than I do Robin's.

I'd agree with Lilla that Robin has a rather reductionist view of conservatives. Robin's is a class warfare model in which ideology, one's thinking--is always about a deeper self-interested agenda. He sees conservatives as the group in any society that holds most of the power and has no other project except its own self-preservation. They are in that sense non-ideological, except insofar as they embrace whatever ideology de jour will support them in their self-preservationist project. Conservatives are in that sense pragmatists, not ideologues. They believe in nothing except to stay on top, and are intellectually adaptible to whatever type of thinking will support them in doing that. Some might believe their own self-justifying propaganda, but there's nothing more to it than the need to self-justify. 

I think that there are plenty of people who call themselves conservatives that fit this description, and if they are Libertarian, they are, as Lilla points out, really Liberals. Liberalism is the ideology that justifies the ascendancy of the bourgeois over against the entrenched interests of the aristocratic old regime, and its laissez-faire/social Darwinist ideology was "new thinking" that justified bourgeois's holding on to power against the leveling masses that would take it away from them.

But Lilla argues that there's more to it than that. The philoophical difference between Liberals and Conservatives is not only about who's in power and who's not. It's about which side of the individual/society balance you think is more important. Liberals emphasize the individual and conservatives society:

What makes conservatives conservative are the implications they have drawn from Burke’s view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the deepest basis of Burke’s critique of the French Revolution; it was not simply a defense of privilege. 

I'm temperamentally a Burkean conservative by this definition of it, and yet I've also argued that there's very little that's part of a living hertage given to us in a liberal, market-centered society that is worth conserving. I've argued that we're in a spiritual/cultural wasteland now, and that's ok if you accept it as part of a cycle. The challenge, though, is to live austerely in hope for the day we will be ready to enter Canaan, by which I mean the next renascent era of spiritual/cultural creativity. It will come. The purpose of this blog is to be attentive to the signs of the times in the expectation of its coming. 

Plodding along in the desert is rather a bore, and I can understand what animates the Leo Naphtas and Glenn Becks. They are in the grip of the Savonarolan impulse that Lilla calls "redemptive reaction". They feel a loss, and they are made crazy in their grief. They blame those whom they see as responsible for turning paradise into a waste, and they long for cleansing apocalyptic fire. And this is where the difference between Lilla and Robin becomes important. The privileged pragmatists that Robin is talking about--the 1% from age to age--are in our own age making common cause with the redemptive reactionaries that Lilla is talking about. But Lilla understands something that Robin doesn't, which is that the pragmatists are playing with apocalyptic fire. That's a lesson learned the hard way by pragmatic conservatives in Germany in the 1930s. At what point did von Hindenberg learn that he was not the puppeteer but the puppet?

Some Thoughts on 'Breaking Bad'

I came to this show late. I've only watched the first season, and a couple of episodes in the second. I realize that the show's finale is only two episodes off, but I wanted to say a few things about it as it relates to the 'missing middle" post I put up a few days ago.

The story starts with a classic late-modern bourgeois guy who lives in his head--Walter White. He's a chemistry teacher at a high school in Albuquerque. In the pilot he is depicted as weak and ineffectual, and we seem him dramatically contrasted with his brother-in-law, Hank, who heads up the local DEA. Hank is a brash, macho loudmouth. He's annoying, but there are signs he's more than the stereotype he first appears to be. There's substance behind his bluster, he's good at what he does, and he's no jerk.

Walter's teenaged son, Walter Jr., has cerebral palsy. He's a nice kid who just wants to be a normal teenager. It appears he admires his uncle more than he does his father. At one point Junior calls Senior a wuss because he refuses to go through with his cancer treatment.  Walter's wife Skyler is a strong, intelligent woman; she's she's rock-solid sensible. She's the Greek chorus in this drama representing uncritical acceptance of conventional norms and mores. She's what I would describe as a maternal instinctual type--her thinking is very predictable as governed by convention and by her maternal instinct to keep the people she loves safe.It's hard for her to imagine anybody living outside the zone of what is conventionally acceptable.  She's not someone to whom you confide dark secrets. At some point she's going to get stretched, and it will be interesting to learn whether she will snap. 

Walter is a wuss. He's all head, and he can't get it up. He has lived a life in which he risked nothing. He's the kind of person that FOX News likes to make fun of. While red/blue politics are not overt, at least so far, Hank is Hannity and Walter is the nerdy Colmes, and there's not question which of them has more social capital. 

The story arc of the first season follows Walter for several months after he has learned he has an inoperable lung cancer that will killl him in 18 months. We learn that his insurance won't cover much of the cost of his treatment, that he fears bankrupting his family, that he won't accept the charity of rich friend who has offered to pay for it, and that his sense of his own self worth depends on his winning the prize for his family. Walter is clearly living in the breadwinner narrative about which I wrote in the last post. He learns he can do that by 'cooking' the purest, high-quality crystal meth that's available locally. But in making this choice, he must leave the safe harbor of civilization and enter the jungle, and the story is about his learning to survive there.

It's an adventure story in this basic sense, and  the show poses the question right from the beginning:  will he lose his soul? So far, despite his having killed two men, he has not, because he killed neither in cold blood. But foreshadowed is a day when he will.

And so the show interests me because I'm wondering where its writers are coming from and where they are going. If you're a fan up to date with the show, you probably already know. I fear that they will just go down the now tired nihilistic/Freudian path: civilization is emasculating; its laws and norms are arbitrary; real life is only available outside its safe boundaries. We are most alive when we are in touch with our animal instinctual self that makes its own rules.  In other words, does the show embrace the fundamental nihilism of missing middle syndrome, i.e., that we are soulless talking animals, and that morality and decency are a fantasy for people who are living lifeless, alienated lives in the safe cocoon of civilization.

I am hoping that the writers are not going down that well-trod path, and are instead groping  toward an understanding of 'soul' in a way similar to my groping for it--that it's not about either/or intellect or instinct, civilization or jungle, but about holding the two in tension--and where that tension is felt most intensely and painfully is where there is a space stretched open where one can grow a soul.

Hank is the Cal type in East of Eden, and (at this early stage in the series) strikes me as a guy who has been stretched and can be stretched even further. I'd be interested to see if his relationship with Walter stretches him, or whether he just reverts to the formulaic role as enforcer of the law. Walter is the Aron type, and his cancer death sentence has put him into a situation where the dark side of Being has shaken him out of his dormancy, cracked open his cocoon, and he has found himself confronted by the opportunity to hold the light and dark in tension, but the dramatic tension in the series lies in not knowing whether he'll go completely dark, become Crazy 8 or Tuco--or become something else, someone who has grown a soul.

 

What do Men Want?

I was interested to reread recently an old column I’d saved by Maureen Dowd in which she writes about how she was shocked to hear from a male friend that before his recent marriage he had thought about dating her but chose not to because she was too “intimidating”. She also referenced a recent study that showed that women in powerful executive positions were among the least likely to be married or in any kind of intimate relationship with a man. Her conclusion: men have a fundamental need to marry submissive women so they can dominate the relationship.

The balance of power in intimate relationships depends on the issue and depends on the couple—even in traditional patriarchal-age marriages. Clearly the dominating partner in the Macbeth marriage wasn’t he. In more balanced traditional relationships, though, it’s possible for two strong partners to play equally powerful roles. It’s not about dominating and submitting; it’s about embracing a framework that gives both meaning.

I saw The Great Gatsby last week, so I have it on my mind. He’s a prototype of a man for whom the traditional framework provided intense meaning. It was never about the wealth for him, it was about being worthy of his lady’s love. He needed a woman to give his life meaning. His life is meaningless unless there is someone to create a world for. Other men don’t need Gatsby’s grandiosity for the model to work. But Gatsby and other men who have relied on this model depend on finding a woman who wants to play along, someone who likes being the one who is the source of that meaning for her man, who is happy to be given the prize he works so hard for, who is honored to be the one for whom such efforts are expended--and who understands the power she wields in this scheme. Chances are that the guy Dowd is complaining about is a Gatsby type, and it was clear to him that Dowd was no Daisy.

The Gatsby type, in his many varieties, needs a woman to give his life meaning, and that meaning was provided him in the old narrative of prize/bread winner. But in feminist-era marriages, if the woman has gone out and got the prize for herself, there’s no emotional satisfaction in a relationship like that for him. You can say that he should change his thinking, but it’s not about thinking, it’s about an emotional need for meaning that the old narrative fulfilled and the new one does not. Many, many men feels rudderless in this sea change.  They feel emasculated and they don’t like it, and so they start looking for ways to change that, and then they become the selfish jerks castigated in our many pop culture depictions of them.

So I’d argue that many men, especially ambitious men, are not afraid of powerful women with established careers; it’s just that they don’t see that they have anything to give to them, and it’s hard for them to imagine any way to connect in a deep way with them if there is nothing their women need from them that they want to give. They may very much admire them, may be sexually attracted to them—but they don’t see them as marriageable.

So I want to start this longish reflection on the changing relations between the sexes by looking at this issue from the male perspective, and I want to do that by trying to understand the impact the destruction of the traditional male as breadwinner model has had on many if not most men since the 1970s. Because since the seventies it’s been all about what women want, and it’s only rarely asked what men do. The norms have changed, and there are good arguments to support these changes as a matter of justice for women, but those arguments tend to be rather a head trip, and I want to think out loud here about what men need emotionally from women, and why they are not getting it, and why it’s not men’s fault that they often act in ways that disappoint their women. I think that men and women both want the same thing, but that they need it in different ways, and that our culture and its conventional wisdom lack any real wisdom or models that point a way for either to get it.

So I’m not interested in looking at marriage as a social institution or a unit of social order in western societies. I’m more interested it provides or fails to provide meaning. The old breadwinner model dates back at least to the Provencal poets and the chivalric ideals of the late medieval period. Dante needs his Beatrice, and Gatsby needs his Daisy. The male must be worthy of his lady’s love and admiration, and he wins it in the public sphere. And so, yes, Lord Macbeth needs his Lady Macbeth in this scheme, though her ambitions for him, (and thus the bar he must clear to win her admiration) is more than he likely bargained for. Nevertheless, his sense of meaning, purpose, and identity are all linked to whether he will win or lose his lady’s love. Other norms are eclipsed by those. The Macbeth and Gatsby stories make no sense outside that old meaning framework given shape in the old romances.

There is something big here, and it needs closer analysis than I have the space to give it here, but I suspect that there is an aspect to this this model that needs to be retrieved, but in a postmodern key. I explored it in another post about Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. It points to something important even if it seems impossible to imagine having validity in our current confusion regarding who men and women are for one another. So all that matters for our discussion here is that this model no longer works to provide meaning for most educated westerners—at least in ways they would consciously acknowledge—but also that nothing has emerged that effectively replaces it. Is there any reason for a relatively aware twenty-something to see in marriage something to which they can honestly make a life-long commitment? What is the meaning framework in which such a commitment could make any sense, especially when things start getting tough?

We muddle along together, but to what effect? There are some couples who seem to make it work, but for reasons I’ll explain later, I think it’s rare that such relationships are deeply emotionally satisfying. Deeply emotionally satisfying relationships are always rare. That doesn’t mean that these couples don’t make good companions for one another, feel affection and loyalty for one another. But they are not most of them deeply meaningful relationships; they are not relationships about which either partner feels inspired to write sonnets. Where has the poetry gone in our relationships with one another? Isn’t that what men and women really want? Is that too much to expect?

***

Conventional wisdom demands that marriage provide meaning where couples too often experience very little of it. Its solution? Well, couples need to provide for the other’s needs. It’s basically a consumerist model of human intimacy. I was watching Oprah a while back, and she had on a marriage therapist who was counseling a couple that had experienced what he described as an “emotional divorce”. Both the husband and wife struck me as fundamentally sane, decent people—but very conventional, and not particularly insightful. The guy had been made profoundly confused by the way the rules had changed. He saw himself as doing all the right things, as a hard worker and good provider for his family. But his wife wasn’t playing her part. She didn’t want him working so much; she wanted him home and more involved with her and the kids. She said she wanted to have the same kind of intimacy and closeness with him that she felt with her girlfriends.

She was angry, and this guy was not having any of it. The problem lay in that he was playing by one set of rules, and she was playing by a new set that she learned about by reading the women’s magazines and watching shows like Oprah. This particular woman was too weak and lacking in self-confidence to be a true lady Macbeth or even a Maureen Dowd. But there is a poignancy there, for both of them. There is something that she needs, and clearly she isn’t getting it. Neither is he. She wants more emotional intimacy with her husband, and the new conventional wisdom tells her that she should have it, and it’s his fault for not giving it to her. Maybe intimacy is a word to describe what’s lacking in her life, but no one in that TV studio, most of all the therapist, had any good ideas about how she should  get it. It’s first of all not something you can demand. You don’t demand intimacy; you create the conditions that make it possible. And so the basic question is how to do that.

Intimacy is about connection, and I think that men and women connect on three levels. The most common is the physical, instinctual level. This is something everybody understands. Less well understood is a spiritual level. I think there are some marriages made in heaven, but they are not necessarily happy ones—they are what I would describe as karmic. There is some work they have to do with one another, and it’s often painful work. The rarest connection I would describe as a soul connection. It’s rare because few of us have much in the way of souls anymore, and there’s not much in us to connect to on that level. But men and women really want to connect, but they don't know how; they are too soul-weak to effect it. But this is what men really want—and it’s what women want, too. That's what the couple on Oprah wanted. They long for the poetry.

***

We have, we educated moderns and no-longer-moderns, “Missing Middle Syndrome". We are  all brain and genitals, but no middle, no soul.
 It took several centuries to produce such a type in the West; the soul-centered, premodern, magical, shamanic way of experiencing the world lingered tenaciously in the rural countryside, among the illiterate, and in the Mediterranean, Eastern European, and Latin American cultures, which were more resistant to the Modern impulse. We see soul still in the spontaneity and joy of the poorest people who have not yet become soul-shriveled moderns.  But by the time Freud came upon the scene, there was a significant constituency of top-heavy, fat-headed men and hysterical women. But top-heavy guy that Freud was, he saw the problem not about the missing middle, but about a repressed bottom. And so his main contribution to western civilization was to try to fix Victorian angelism by opening up the tap to release repressed instinctually. 



Nineteenth-century Victorian bourgeois culture was extraordinarily head centered in its Gnostic/puritanical rejection of life impulses beneath the neck, which led to the kind of problems that Freud tried to understand. And the model Freud eventually developed was one in which there was a kind of opposition between the goals of civilized life and the goals of human instinctual life. The task for psychotherapy became to find a balance between the brain and the genitals.
It is no wonder that the earliest psychotherapists were called ‘alienists’ because they saw their task as helping their patients to bridge the rift between a kind of head-centered angelism and a genitally centered instinctualism, a split that Freud thought could never be bridged in any deeply satisfactory way.  

The best that could be achieved for the healthy bourgeois post-Freud was to find a balance between the head-centered fulfillments of career and work and the genitally centered pleasures to be found in the erotic. No notice was taken of the still missing middle—not at least until Jung pointed it out. But no one (except flakes) took him very seriously. But ‘soul’ is the missing middle, and it is the only thing that can bridge the gap.
The challenge is to learn how to grow one.

What men long for, but now more than ever women, too, is the missing middle. Women readers, think about it.  Isn’t this really what frustrates you most about the men in your life? You might connect intellectually; you might connect sexually. But something still isn’t there--a level of intimacy that, women, like the wife on the Oprah show, find easier with other women because they are not as soul-dead yet as men are.  Of course, if by some fluke you have a soulful, sensitive man, you’re probably angry at him because he won’t go out and get a job. He's allergic to the soul-deadening corporate workplace and would suffocate there. 



Men want something so badly and women symbolize that for most of them, and they don’t really know what it is, and they certainly don’t know how to get it. That’s the big story behind Don Juan. He is not a crude sensualist; he is a clueless guy with Missing Middle Syndrome who thinks that each time he beds a woman, she will be the one to give him what he’s missing, which is his soul. It doesn’t work; if it did, he’d stop. Don Juan and his early modern cousin Faust, a rationalist at the end of his rope, are archetypes of the missing middle, and as such they symbolize the soul-empty, restless spirit of modernity. Both are looking for what’s missing, but going about it rather ineffectively. Give them credit for trying; at least they’re not vegging out in front of the tube.


The central point I want to make is that while this trend is at least a thousand years old, it’s come to a critical juncture in the twentieth century during which the combined effect of the changing role of women and the growing encroachment of techno-commercial values into every facet of contemporary life has all but extinguished the lingering, atavistic vestiges of premodern soul culture in the West.  This has led to a condition that is not new in the West; it’s just affecting more people than ever before, and the result is the profoundly disorienting experience of a collective soul vacuum, and the culture dislodged from its traditional moorage has been drifting in fragmented confusion for some time now looking for ways to compensate for its loss.  



***

So whence the solution? My sense is that it’s the women who will take us to it because they are not as soul dead as we men. The best we men can do now is talk a good spell about what’s wrong and why. We have good enough sniffers to tell whether a solution is bogus or not, but we’re as dimwitted as ever when it comes to finding real solutions, especially if the solutions require any soul sense, which they do. Sure men got us here--it was a male-driven historical impulse that over the centuries has driven us out of the fertile soul world below up into the arid, barren, sun-drenched mountaintops of modern rationality. It was something we had to do, I guess. But it will be the women who lead us down into the fecund valley again.

Many women have come up to the mountain top and sniffed around and learned pretty quickly that this was no place to live a life. They picked up what they needed there, and have already started back down to where the climate is more hospitable. And the men will follow them down because while it might have been interesting climbing to the top, once you get there it gets old. It’s old already, and that’s why we talk about what we’re in right now as the postmodern. The modern Enlightenment impulse is spent; it’s time for something new.

So what do men want in their relationships? They want meaning--deeply felt meaning, and that kind of meaning is not found in sex or in heady conversations or shared ideological commitments. Those connections have their place and importance, but they don't meet the real need, which is for all of us to be more than we are. For what we want most deeply is to be worthy of the beloved's love, and how many of us feel that we  really deserve it? You know what I mean. In the abstract sense, yes, we deserve it, but in the deeply felt sense, there is something deeply narcissistically infantile about you if you really think you deserve the beloved's love. We neither deserve another's love, nor can we demand it. We can only receive it with gratitude. 

So much of what is grand and foolish about men lies in their absurd projects to prove themselves worthy of the beloved's love.That's Dante's story, and Macbeth's and Gatsby's. Gatsby's project and Macbeth's were delusional and evil because the women they loved were themselves unworthy. And with Dante, who knows? Beatrice was a kid he hardly knew, married someone else, and died young. She was never real, never a real human with whom one lives in the day-to-day.

So what do men want? They want capacity, for it's precisely capacity they feel they lack, and they then go about doing the stupidest things to compensate. It's a capacity however that can be filled some by the love a good woman. But a good woman is hard to find these days for lots of reasons because they lack capacity, too. And they, like their men, are looking for it in all the wrong places. 

So what do men want? The same as women--the recovery of their souls, and as they have always done, they look to their women to help them do it. It may be possible for them to do it without women, but I doubt it. The mistake too many women make is to think that men have something they want—like power and influence in the public sphere. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have it if that’s what they want. I’m just saying that they won't find their souls there, and soulless women in the public sphere are just as useless or dangerous as soulless men. Don't follow us into the wasteland; lead us to the promised land. You'll know you've arrived when the poetry begins to flow again. 

Does it Matter What People Think or Believe? (Updated)

Or only what they do?

I think that ultimately what most matters is what they do, the choices they make, but the scope of what they can do--the scope for their freedom--is expanded or limited by what one thinks or believes. And how one thinks is shaped by the underlying story he tells himself about the sense or nonsense that the world makes.

But it is also important what the people around us think or believe, what their expectations and aspirations are for themselves and for us. What is the accepted measure by which we measure up or fail to? In other words, it matters what the culture in which we find ourselves thinks and believes. That is the 'social imaginary'--and it structures our assumptions about possibility and impossibility.

I do not believe in the power of positive thinking. I do not believe that believing it so makes it so, but I do believe that one's mental framework creates the workspace for action. This is simple in the psychological sense of self-fulfilling prophecies. People who have a positive outlook expect good things to happen, and even when bad things happen, they see it as a temporary setback and keep at it. People who expect things to go badly, are less likely to put their heart into it, because, well, what's the point? The article the other day in the NYT about a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders that found that depressed people have a higher likelihood of to repsond well to treatment when compared to those who don't.

“I think it’s a scientifically sound way of measuring things that have to do with people’s experience of spirituality,” said Torrey Creed, an assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think about this as a study of cognitive styles, that there’s a pattern of thinking that helps people get better in treatment. And two examples of this pattern of thinking are ‘I believe in treatment’ and ‘I believe in God.’”

Randi McCabe, director of the Anxiety Treatment and Research Center at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Ontario, said, “People’s belief that something is going to work will make it work for a significant proportion of people,” similar to the placebo effect.

That makes sense to me on its own terms, and this kind of belief or outlook has very little to do with the deeper and more mysterious thing, which is faith. Faith, in fact, is very often accompanied by an anguish that is simply incommensurate with any discussion about having a positive outlook. I think we're all of us the richer that St. John of the Cross, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others didn't go into 'treatment'. Mother Teresa, we've learned, was often deeply anguished. William James did not identify himself among what he called the "healthy minded." Healthy mindedness has its limits. I have no patience with people who think that religious faith is some kind of opiate to dull wits incapable of confronting the world as it is.

But quite apart from the question of 'faith', the test of any social imaginaray is the degree to which it promotes sanity and decency. Sanity is the measure of human capacity to allow the world to disclose itself on its own terms. Decency is the measure of human capacity to act in the world as if one's own interests and concerns were not the only or most important consideration. One's capacity for one is reciprocal with the other. And yet if we live in a social imaginary in which one's dreams, interests, personal ambitions are celebrated as core values, whose realization is the measure of a life lived successfully or not, how is sanity or decency a possibility in our political arrangements? 

I lay those thoughts out as a prelude to what I hope to get around to talking about, which is the dialogue between Millbank and Zizek about the possibility of working for justice and peace in the political sphere. Their discussion takes these basic ideas about the relevancy of thinking and believing to a different level. Millbank argues that Zizek's Hegelian ontolgoical nihilism makes any aspirational work toward a just society unsustainable. And although I don't understand Zizek yet well enought to agree, this is an argument that I've made here frequently about secular Liberalism, and I think we're seeing its failure played out all around us. The aspiration for justice and peace is not sustainable or even remotely possible in a "flat" social imaginary, if by flatness we mean closed to transcendence. There is at best Hobbes's perpetual cold war.

More on this as we go along. 

UPDATE: In the NYT this morning there was this article entitled "On Wall Street a Culture of Greed Won't Let Go." So what else is new? But it relates to the point I'm trying to make above. Wall Strett is the reductio ad absurdum of the American individualist dream. The article states that 

Virtually every top M.B.A. program in the country now teaches ethics classes, many of them required. In 2008, a coalition of students started the MBA Oath, a voluntary pledge among students to “create value responsibly and ethically.” So far, more than 6,000 students have signed the pledge.

And yet, the report and other anecdotal evidence suggest that whatever is being done both in the classroom and on the job is not enough. According to a controversial study called “Economics Education and Greed” that was published in 2011 by professors at Harvard and Northwestern, an education in economics surprisingly may be making the problem worse.

“The results show that economics education is consistently associated with positive attitudes towards greed,” the authors wrote. “The uncontested dominance of self-interest maximization as the primary (if not sole) logic of exchange, in business schools and corporate settings alike, may lead people to be more tolerant of what other people see as morally reprehensible.”

So you get require everybody take an ethics course, which everyone dutifully does with eyes struggling not to roll upward. In my experience these ethics courses are often more about what is legal or not, rather than what is ethical or not. But let's say you get somebody in there who wants to grapple with the ethical realities these kids are going to face. What does he have to work with? Everything outside his classroom militates against whatever he's might want to teach about embracing a code of basic decency. 

The people who go into MBA programs are already predisposed to think of self-interest as the only really important motivator, and everything they see around them reinforces it. So this guy in an ethics class wants to suggest an alternative mo? Whatever. What a waste of time and effort. 

Do you think my minimalist definition of decency as the 'capacity to act in the world as if your personal interests are not the only ones or the most important ones' can get any traction in such a social world? There are no resources in the social imaginary of the larger secular culture to combat a mentality in which decency is merely an aesthetic preference. Go for it if 'being decent' floats your boat--but you have no right to judge me if what floats my boat is the thrill of winning in a high-stakes game. By what standard can you make such a judgment about better and worse? 

Our political economy is such an obscenity because the obscene people who are its primary actors think they are completely morally justified, even benefactors of humanity, in pursuing their interests because they are social Darwinists in the Gordon Gecko idiom: 

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

This is very compelling if you operate in a world in which it's not just an idea, but an accurate description of the way the most successful people around you think and behave. What works to counter it, some pre-school admonition "to share" or "be nice"? Why? Why should I share or be nice? I did it when I was younger because I'd earn the teacher's disapproval if I did not, but now I earn my peers' and superiors' disapproval if I do. Decency is for losers. Ask Rick Santelli.

 

Brooks on 'A Secular Age'

Brooks's column this morning tries to summarize Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. There's nothing particularly striking in it to quote, but if you're not familiar with the book, the column will give you an overview of its concerns, which are the concerns of this blog. The basic question for the book, Taylor says, is "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?"

I think the answer to that question is complex, and Taylor's grappling with it is an honest and interesting response, which is as a believer, a Catholic, to embrace the pluralism at the same time as to rigorously pursue his own faith commitment. What other sane choice is there? Faith, most particularly the Christian faith, is most itself when it eschews a Constantinian project, which isn't to say that it hasn't an obligation to evangelize, which I think is done for most of us in our deeds in how we live rather than in aggressive public professions. 

But I think it's also done by engaging with the spirit of the times and by reading the signs  of the times, and so along those lines I wanted to say a word about John Milbank Radical Orthodoxy. I bring him up because I started reading his dialog book with Slavoj Zizek entitle The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? 

Taylor, Millbank, and Zizek are not for everybody, and the focus of this blog is not to become a forum for technical discussions of philosophy or theology, but I sense a shift in the zeitgeist and while only a minuscule percentage of educated people could spend more than thirty minutes reading any of these books without giving up in frustration, I think it's important to point to and try to understand what they are doing: Challenging the presuppositions of modernity and hypermodernity and creating a space for believers to become essential voices in shaping the thought and imagination of the global fusion culture that is now emerging. The Western tradition is this Christian tradition. It isn't the whole story, but it's a critical part of it. 

Milbank's project to retrieve a tradition of Christian thought that uses Plato, and the Neoplatonism of Proclus and Iamblichus,  and moves through the early church fathers, particularly Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, then through Aquinas, Eckhardt, Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists, Kierkegaard and the nouvelle theologie of de Lubac, Congar and other Catholic thinkers of the early 20th century is one I find very appealing in its broad outline. I am all for a post-Kantian, post-secular retrieval of serious, high-level metaphysics, and I don't think it's possible to do without this Christian tradition being an essential dialog partner.

And that's why the Millbank/Zizek book interests me. I'm not ready to talk about that yet, and when I do, I'm going to try to make it as accessible as possible to lay readers. But I'm convinced what they are doing is worth understanding and knowing about. 

It Is Futile to Reason with Them

From "Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Roger Berkowitz in yesterday's NYT:

That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.

I haven't seen the movie Hannah Arendt yet because it hasn't arrived in Seattle. But in watching the trailers and reading about it I was surprised to learn that Arendt was roundly excoriated for her depiction of Eichmann in her New Yorker dispatches and the book she wrote about the trial. And I was surprised to learn from Berkowitz that the consensus since then about her depiction of Eichmann is that Arendt's book on Eichmann is good philosophy but bad history. Berkowitz defends Arendt, and says that she would be wrong if she said Eichmann was simply a bureaucratic automaton, but that's now what she said. She said that Eichmanns evil lay in his surrendering to a movement and allowing his own autonomy to be obliterated by his merging with it. This is the other side of 'movement politics'. 

I think there are a lot of directions to take this, but the one that interests me at the moment is how people understand the nature of the 'autonomy' that Eichmann surrendered? If Eichmann should have resisted, what is the ground for it? When your entire horizon is filled by norms and everyone you know accepts and reinforces those norms, and those norms are broadly reinforced as noble and idealistic, what resources does an Eichmann have to think or believe otherwise? And why should he think otherwise?

People who have religious commitments have a good answer for that, but I'm curious what the arguments might be for those who don't. Doesn't it just come down to aesthetic preference? Well, you prefer an aesthetic of humaneness and respect--good for you, but I choose power and glory and noble violence. Who are you to say I'm wrong? On what basis can you reason with me? To what in me can you appeal? 

 

Zizek and Christianity's Perverse Core

Salon has an atheist write a critique of Hitchens' critique of religion. He accuses Hitchens of intellectual dishonesty, but I guess in Salon's view, you have to be an atheist to have any credibility in pointing that out. Nevertheless, it's worth a read. Sample graf:

As critics have observed since its publication, one enormous problem with Hitchens’s book is that it reduces religion to a series of criminal anecdotes. In the process, however, virtually all of the real history of religious thought, as well as historical and textual scholarship, is simply ignored as if it never existed. Not for Hitchens the rich cross-cultural fertilization of the Levant by Helenistic, Jewish, and Manichaean thought. Not for Hitchens the transformation of a Jewish heretic into a religion that Nietzsche called “Platonism for the masses.” Not for Hitchens the fascinating theological fissures in the New Testament between Jewish, Gnostic, and Pauline doctrines. Not for Hitchens the remarkable journey of the first Christian heresy, Arianism, spiritual origin of our own thoroughly liberal Unitarianism. (Newton was an Arian and anti-Trinitarian, which made his presence at Trinity College permanently awkward.) Not for Hitchens the sublime transformation of Christian thought into the cathartic spirituality of German Idealism/ Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. And, strangely, not for Hitchens the existential Christianity of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and, most recently, the religious turn of poststructural thought in Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek. (All of these philosophers sought what Žižek calls Christianity’s “perverse core.”) And it’s certainly not that he didn’t have the opportunity to acknowledge these intellectual and spiritual traditions. At one point he calls the story of Abraham and Isaac “mad and gloomy,” a “frightful” and “vile” “delusion,” but sees no reason to mention Kierkegaard’s complex, poetic, and deeply felt philosophical retelling of the story in “Fear and Trembling”. In this way, Hitchens is often as much a textual literalist as the fundamentalists he criticizes.

"Christianity's perverse core"? I've been familiar with Zizek as a rising philosophical star, but wasn't familiar with the phrase or his quest. So to find out what he means by this peculiar phrase I, of course, googled it, and found this article at the top of the stack: "What would Zizek Do: Redeeming Christianity's Perverse Core", which reviews several of his books. It, too, is worth a read in its entirety. Sample graf:

Slavoj Žižek's subtitle - "The Perverse Core of Christianity" - seems to promise an account of all that is corrupt in the Christian faith. Readers aware of Žižek's reputation as a leading Leftist theorist but unfamiliar with the Slovenian philosopher's thinking might open The Puppet and the Dwarf expecting a neo-Nietzschean or post-Marxist critique of Christianity. But Žižek doesn't censure Christians for subscribing to a 'slave morality' or becoming addicted to an 'opiate for the masses.' Instead, it's liberals, especially Western intellectuals with disavowed spiritual tendencies, whom Žižek targets for rebuke. Their misguided ethical convictions and corresponding lack of political gumption have facilitated the spread of a global corporatism that benefits a relatively small economic elite at the expense of the world's oppressed masses. With the need to combat this exploitative New World Order informing his philosophizing, Žižek prescribes a dose of Christianity to an anemic and largely impotent Left he diagnoses as suffering from a debilitating malady - postmodern ethical relativism.

Exactly. And then this interesting paragraph:

The Left must understand that its ultimate commitment is not to liberal tolerance or "all-encompassing Compassion" (32) but to eliminating material inequality. Radical changes in the social order are needed, and a crucial starting point is to denaturalize the existing capitalist order, to make people aware that market forces are not omnipotent. But consciousness raising alone will not suffice. What's needed is a willingness to introduce a "radical imbalance into the social edifice" (95). Žižek's wager is that "Christian love" - defined as "a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others" (33) - can be a catalyst that will provoke the Left to resume collectively its emancipatory struggle.

The review goes on to talk about the problem of belief:

Žižek does contribute something new to Anglo-American debates about the status of belief in postmodern societies with his account of disavowed belief, which begins with a simple premise: "today, we believe more than ever" (6). The catch is that contemporary believers are confused and fail to recognize the extent or the nature of their beliefs, particularly when it comes to "religious matters" (5). Thus, to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's oft-cited formula of cynical reason - "I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it ... " - Žižek adds a final clause: " ... because I don't know what I believe" (5).

I wrote a couple of posts about the problem of "believing" in 2006 that I think still hold up pretty well. Here's an excerpt from one of them that relates to the reviewer's theme:

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said.  And it starts with the acknowledgment of the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. ‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another.  And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, but it bears a family relationship to it. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives. 

This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical.  What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. Whatever narrative we ultimately choose opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to.  But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism.  If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals.

To relate this to themes I've been writing about recently, it's one thing what I believe in isolation; it's not unimportant for me and those who interact with me, but the health of a culture depends on the narrative it embraces as a collective project. The argument here for years has been that when a culture is decadent, it has no collective sense of future possibility. In America this means that we have reverted to two basic narratives. One that embraces "fragmentation" as normative and desirable as Libertarian and much of academic postmodern secular thought do, and the other is a reversion to an old narrative that makes no sense anymore, as cultural conservatives do. (Reversion is not the same as retrieval, which is essential for living into the future.) I reject both fragmentation and nostalgic reversion.

The review also points out that Zizek's fundamental philosophic project is to reactualize (retrieve) German Idealism, a project I have deep sympathies with. I guess Zizek will be on my summer reading list.

Commonplace Freedoms

What Gramsci calls 'common sense' . . . typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or 'others') can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word 'freedom' resonates so widely with the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes 'a button that elites can press to open the door in the masses' to justify almost anything. Thus could Bush retrospectively justify the Iraq war. Gramsci therefore concluded that political questions become 'insoluble' when 'disguised as cultural ones'. (David Harvey, BHoN, p. 39)

I've never read Gramsci, but I've been saying here for years that we need to separate out political issues from cultural issues. People who belong to different tribes frequently have a common enemy, and they figure out how to make alliances when facing a common threat. But that would require a level of 'good sense' that neither traditionalist nor cosmopolitan tribalists in American society seem capable of mustering. 

In the rhetorical tradition, the verbal tool used to evoke common sense is the commonplace. A common place is an idea or a value that one absorbs with one's mother's milk. It's assumed to be true the way we all assume that the truth in an adage like the "early bird gets the worm." Politics runs on commonplaces, and the rhetorical challenge is to develop narratives that resonate with American commonplaces.

In the post I put up the other day, I talk about how Neoliberalism's appeal lies in its use of commonplaces. I quote Harvey who says "The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as a  'central values of civilization'." These are the core values of the liberal tradition tracing back to the 1600s. But the real question is whose freedom, whose dignity? Harvey concludes his first chapter with this passage:

Thirty years of neoliberal freedoms have, after all, not only restored power to a narrowly defined capitalist class. They have also produced immense concentrations of corporate power in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing (for example Wal-Mart). The freedom of the market that Bush proclaims as the high point of human aspiration turns out to be nothing more than the convenient means to spread corporate monopoly power and Coca Cola everywhere without constraint. With disproportionate influence over the media and the political process this class (with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the lead) has both the incentive and the power to persuade us that we are all better off under a neoliberal regime of freedoms. For the elite, living comfortably in their gilded ghettos, the world must indeed seem a better place. As Polanyi might have put it, neoliberalism confers rights and freedoms on those 'whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing', leaving a pittance for the rest of us. How is it, then, that 'the rest of us' have so easily acquiesced in this state of affairs? (David Harvey, BHoN, p. 38)

How is it indeed? Well, part of the answer is that we have been skillfully manipulated by powerful factions who know their way around a commonplace. The appeal to American values that made sense in a country of 5 million people before the industrial revolution is being very effectively deployed to reinforce political and economic arrangements that favor these elites. And the opposition to these ideas has been very successfully framed as 'socialism', which is anathema to these ideals. The result is 

Quote of the Day: Robert Cialdini

From Influence: Science & Practice, p. 7:

You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex that has ever existed on the planet. To deal with it, we need shortcuts. We can't be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven't the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger features is present.

Sometimes the behavior that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the best stereotypes and trigger features work every time. We will accept their imperfections since there really is no other choice. Without these features we would stand frozen--cataloging, appraising, and calibrating--as the time for action sped by and away. From all indications, we will be relying on these stereotypes to an even greater extent in the future. 

I think this goes a long way toward explaining why people reduce reality to stereotypical, ideological talking points that have only a passing resemblance to the complexity of the reality in which they and the rest of us live. It's the only way they can process the chaos of their experience.

There's a part of me that is disturbed by this, but also a part of me that is ok with it. It disturbs me that there are way too many people living within a world shaped by stereotypes that have little to do with the world as it really exists, and their "behavior that unrolls" is not "appropriate for the situation", and too many of these people have way too much power.

The part of me that is ok with it recognizes that in the end it's always about what the Greeks called phronesis, practical wisdom. The people we trust are those who are able to work with complexity, they are vulnerable to and immersed in the world as it is, but in a way that discovers patterns rather than imposes them or projects them. They see structural similarities, they think metaphorically and analogically, and they make judgments, not with certainty, but with a confidence that the analytical type cannot when it comes to the intangibles of human nature and behavior.

Stereotypes are simply organizational patterns that make the chaotic buzz of reality comprehensible, but too often have outlived their usefulness. They work at best as shorthand for what we once knew, but not for what we must know now. So while no one can master all the informtion that we have available to us, there are some who have a talent for paying attention and for noticing what's important and filtering out what is not, for allowing patterns to emerge, the way the experienced chess player sees patterns of possibilities on the board in a way a novice cannot. These people will be the creators of new stereotypes and narratives that will have legitimacy so long as they work, and when they don't, the cycle will begin again.

I think the current rationalist technocratic narrative is driving on fumes, and that we are on the edge of some kind of breakthrough. The old thing lost its center and its explanatory power long ago; it holds together only by force of habit and for want of something to replace it. 

Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State

Is Jerry Brown the model for Liberalism 5.0?

Every once in a while a major politician shocks by actually speaking in a way that politicians rarely speak, i.e., in a way that suggests that he really "gets it". What are the chances considering all the filters that prevent such people from seeing things other than the way the power establishment they inhabit presents things to them.

I've always found Brown to be an intriguing figure, but I don't live in California, and I can't say I've been paying much attention, but the education section in his State of the State Adress earlier today is something I could have written for him. Here's the relevant section, but the whole speech is worth reading:

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.

We seem to think that education is a thing--like a vaccine--that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work - lighting fires in young minds.

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level--with school boards. I am asking you to approve a brand new Local Control Funding Formula which would distribute supplemental funds -- over an extended period of time -- to school districts based on the real world problems they face. This formula recognizes the fact that a child in a family making $20,000 a year or speaking a language different from English or living in a foster home requires more help. Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

With respect to higher education, cost pressures are relentless and many students cannot get the classes they need. A half million fewer students this year enrolled in the community colleges than in 2008. Graduation in four years is the exception and transition from one segment to the other is difficult. The University of California, the Cal State system and the community colleges are all working on this. The key here is thoughtful change, working with the faculty and the college presidents. But tuition increases are not the answer. I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities.

BTW, my jaw almost hit the ground when he brought in 'subsidiarity'. It's something I've written frequently about here, but have never heard an elected politician talk about. Here's a post I wrote about subsidiarity  when I was running for School Board in 2011.

Liberalism 5.0?

The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in. --Walter Russell Meade

Last Spring, Walter Russell Mead from Bard College wrote a piece in The American Interest entitled "The Once and Future Liberalism." The first part of the article gives the impression of a standard Libertarian critique of big-government overreach, but he's attempting something more interesting and raises some important questions.

The article is long, so I'll try to summarize his argument here, and then, if I have time this week, I will write some follow-up posts to dig a little deeper into some of the issues he raises. He starts out by describing the history of political liberalism in the Anglo-American world using the Operating System software update metaphor:

Liberalism 1.O: England's Glorious Revolution in 1688. Estabishes a constitutional monarchy and asserts the primacy of parliament over the King. Hobbes and Locke were 1.0 Liberals. Crown-and-altar narrative still essential for national identity

Liberalism 2.O: American Revolution in 1776. Replaces constitutional monarchy of L1.0 with a republic founded on Enlightenment ideas about natural rights. Crown-and-altar narrative and traditions are abolished. Benjamin Franklin starts out as a L1.0 but converts to L2.0. (Limited suffrage. Slavery tolerated.)  

Liberalism 3.0: Manchester Liberalism. "Programs included once unthinkable ideas like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, an end to state-enforced monopoly corporations, limited government, free markets at home and free trade abroad. . . . More likely to be evangelical than either 1.0 or 2.0 liberals. . . . believed that capitalism, individual rights and a culture of virtue supported by a tolerant, non-fanatical Protestant Christianity could provide ordered liberty. (They also, by and large, believed in the superiority of the white race, thought that “too much” Jewish influence was bad and believed that Catholic countries could never become effective modern democracies.)"

Liberalism 4.0: Late-19th century's Progressive movement that developed in repsonse to social imbalances created by industrial capitalism. Rises to policy during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. If an unholy alliance between church and state was the chief threat to liberty for L1.0-3.0, "the rise of huge industrial corporations seized pride of place as a threat to individual liberty; 20th-century, 4.0 liberals began to think about the state as a possible ally to defend individuals from unaccountable private power. The liberalism of Theodore Roosevelt and men like William Allen White was defined by their response to these challenges. Democratic government needed to ensure a level playing field, to fight for basic equality of opportunity."

Liberalism 4.1: In response to Great Depression and WWII, "turn-of-the-century progressivism was revamped and retweaked into liberalism 4.1, the big government, Iron Triangle system [Feds, unions, large corporations] that most Americans think of when they hear the word “liberal” today." 

Mead argues that the whole mentality behind Liberalism 4.1, the mentality that I have been defending on this blog as the "New Deal Compromise" is obsolete:

Today liberalism 4.1, blue liberalism, is increasingly outdated and backward-looking, but in its time it was a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances, and many of its achievements still demand our respect. The driving force shaping the agenda of 4.0 and 4.1 liberals before and after the New Deal were a series of powerful and profound historical developments that changed the world under their feet. The earlier versions of liberal politics had been built in societies that, while beginning to urbanize and industrialize, were still predominantly agricultural. Both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian liberals saw independent small farmers as the basis of American freedom and democracy.

. . . Although socialists and social democrats sometimes made common cause with 4.1 liberals, at bottom, blue liberalism was built as an alternative to socialism rather than an on-ramp for it. With the onset of the Great Depression in particular, most American liberals came to believe that providing benefits like Social Security and unemployment insurance would inoculate American workers against more virulent forms of socialist ideology and attract new immigrants and their children toward the American liberal tradition. It worked. 

. . . Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and later the GI Bill, along with the experience of mobilization and rationing during the war, convinced many liberals that government could and should do more than ensure a level playing field, that it could plan, regulate and control well enough to at least bracket a rough equality of economic and social outcomes, not just opportunities. . . . In time, with the advent of the Great Society programs of “the best and the brightest”, liberalism 4.1 became more explicitly redistributionist, and more deeply convinced of the superiority of the technocratic ethos. 

Mead talks about how all the earlier versions of Liberalism--1.0 through 4.1--are inadequate for our situation today, and points to the as yet to be realized "Liberalism 5.0": 

None can serve as the political program for the heirs of the two great revolutions today. We don’t want the constitutional monarchy and Anglican establishment of William III; we don’t want the aristocratic, limited-franchise republic of George Washington; we don’t want the Manchester liberalism of the 1860s; and we don’t want the managerial state that liberals and progressives built in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. That doesn’t mean we should not admire, learn from and build on each of these liberal traditions, but our job today is to synthesize enduring liberal values in a 21st-century liberalism 5.0.

As with earlier versions, liberalism 5.0 must build on the best of what has gone before while making adjustments—radical when necessary, though never gratuitously so—to existing beliefs and institutions. 5.0 liberals must challenge the right of blue [4.1] liberals to own the L-word, seeking both to convince 4.1 liberals to come back to the future and denouncing those who won’t as the blinkered reactionaries and speed bumps they are.

And I agree with him when he says

. . . Many believe that the real ideological contest in America today is between “red” liberalism 3.0 (the more individualistic, laissez-faire, often evangelical kind of liberalism of the 19th century) and the more state-oriented, collectively minded post-World War II 4.1 blue liberalism. Red liberals denounce blue liberals as betrayers of the liberal legacy, as ideology thieves who have taken a philosophy grounded in individual freedom and limited government and turned it into a charter for “big” government. Blue liberals respond that red liberals don’t understand how the complexities of modern life make the outmoded pieties of liberalism 3.0 inadequate to today’s problems. But common to both these positions is the belief that the American debate today is between two versions of the past: the (presumed) free market utopia of the 19th century versus the (presumed) social utopia of the New Deal/Great Society of more recent times. If that were true, this would be a nation of conservatives fighting reactionaries—the status quo of 1970 fighting the status quo of 1880.

I agree that a society dominated by a technocratic ethos is not a good thing, and I am never going to defend government overreach, but the fundamental problem that the early progressives recognized has not gone away: If there is no big government to protect the public interest, a huge, powerful private sector will dominate, and the key players in that sector care only about their own interests, not the public interest. Until the problem of bigness in the private sector is solved, bigness in the public sector is a necessity. Until the disruptive, destablizing effects of market capitalism can be tamed, there must be an adequate way to support the people whose lives have been disrupted and destabilized by it.

If you want to argue that capitalism is so great because it's the most effective wealth engine the world has ever seen, then there have to be mechanisms for distributing that wealth fairly and sanely, and if private market mechanisms fail in that regard, then the public sector must step in to provide the remedy. But if the task now is as Meade puts it to make "a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances," a 5.0 solution cannot be found if the public sector is locked in an ideological argument that pits 4.1 thinking against 3.0 thinking. 

So my argument in defense of the New Deal Compromise is not one that seeks a return to mid-20th Century arrangements--that was then; this is now--but that the New Deal provided for its time a much healthier balance between the interests of the private sector and the public interest that we need to emulate in principle now. This is a balance that was destroyed in the period since 1980, and we saw the destructive impact of this imablance in 2008. Whatever Liberalism 5.0 might be, it must restore this balance. Most of what we think of today as "crisis" derives not from uncontrollable structural changes, but from regressive 3.0 thinking poorly adapted to the real world in which we are living that dominated policy in the first decade of this century.

I would argue that, yes, there are structural issues that we need to deal with, but they could not have been handled worse by the Reagan/Norquist/Cheney resgressive 3.0 mindset. Real problems emerged in the 1970s; the weaknesses of L4.1 were exposed, and the worst possible approach was taken in trying to solve them. A saner approach would have been to make gradual adjustments to 4.1 thinking that might have slowly ratcheted us throught 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, etc., in a more orderly progression toward an eventual 5.0 realignment. Instead we've had reactionaries in the driver's seat dominated by 19th-Century 3.0 thinking. Meade correctly points out that it's a mistake to think that the argument is between 4.1  and 3.0 thinking, but seems not to be willing to point out the obvious, that 3.0 thinking ought not to have a place at the table at all. The real debate should be about finding ways to push basic 4.1 arrangements to be more adaptive to the changing global economic realities. 

Whenever anybody tells you that there is no money for entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, or Medicaid, they are talking ideological nonsense. The fiscal crisis at the federal, state, and local levels was engineered by no-taxes/no regulation ideologues on a mission to destroy the legitimacy of government. There is plenty of room for debate about how to find the right balance between the private and public sectors, but you cannot find that balance with people who think that the government has no legitimate role to play in redressing social and economic imbalances created by private markets. We don't have a resource problem; we have a thinking problem.

Anyway, Meade talks about five things that Americans want from American socieity. When I have a chance, I want to examine them, show where I agree and perhaps lay out a few other things that I think will be necessary for a workable 5.0. 

 

 

Second Naiveté.

The most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In the former the great majority of people live in a 'given' world and in the latter a chosen world. We all live in a given world, of course, one bounded by history, but those of us born into modern societies are bound by history , for better or worse, in a way significantly different from those born into traditional societies. We are not bound in the same way to a world given to us by the ancestors. In fact, we are rather disposed to reject that world. And unlike people born into premodern societies, we have a wide array of alternative values matrixes, of "belief systems" as they've come to be known, from which we can choose. The essence of modernity as contrasted with premodernity is precisely this attitude toward the ancestors, and everything, for better and for worse, follows from that.

The traditionalist resists living in any world different from that given to him by his ancestors. Contemporay American traditionalists, for instance, object to homosexual marriage/civil unions not primarily, IMO, for religious or spiritual reasons. It has more to do with how gay marriage represents yet another stage in the erosion of what remains of the world given to them by tradition. For moderns, the ancestors are guilty until proved innocent, and their innocence can only be proved in the court of rationally determined utility. For premoderns the tradition embodies the wisdom of the ancestors, the culture heroes who lived in a golden age, who understood things to which we have since become insensible to. For moderns, this is nonsense. 

While I agree with traditionalists that there is more in the tradition than is visible to the modern eye, I understand modern skepticism about all things premodern, and I embrace putting tradtion on trial, so to speak, but I think that better criteria need to be developed in making judgements about whether the tradition is guilty or innocent. 

For western educated elites, there is nothing much about their traditions that is very attractive. If anything, they are embarrassed about the negative impact that that white males have had on the course of world history. But the same sensibility that finds the traditions of the West so unattracitve is very often attracted to non-western traditions. Think about the recent interest in exotic Asian and aboriginal premodern traditions, like martial arts, Buddhist meditative practices, or shamanism. And what's that tatooing all about? That kind of tradtionalism is driven by a weariness with the soul flatness of modernity, and a longing for something that has texture and depth and soul.

So these non-western traditional forms have  a 'cool' factor with significantly more interest and credibility for late modern sensibililities than those traditions whose familiarity to us has bred mostly contempt. But do those exotic traditions make claims that withstand the scrutiny of critical conscisousness more resiliiently than the western tradtions we have find contemptible? I don't think so. We tend to see the exotic "foreign" traditions in their best light, the familiar western traditions in their worst. Ask the Chinese what they think of Tibetan traditionalism. They see it much the same way as western seculars look at Catholics--medieval holdovers.

So there's a part of me that connects with the traditionalists because like them I understand that something precious lies in those traditions, but I would make a distinction between a living traditionalism and a zombie traditionalism. A living traditionalism is supple, adaptive, sacramental; a zombie traditionalism is brittle, rigid, non-adaptive; they are the forms abandoned by the life that shaped them and inhabited by an animating force that is not native to them. They are a mere going through the motions.  A living traditionalism is increasingly rare because the cultural ecosystem that supported it has been been destroyed in societies with capitalist economies. In such societies there is no longer a living memory of the ancestors conveyed from generation to generation; there are only the archaeological remains, shriveled museum pieces, that point to but no longer possess the life and creative juice that made them. 

Insofar as the forms and rituals continue to be practiced in a state of undeadness, it's a kind of make-believe, like a child playing house or soldier. It's like a modern European who burlarized a museum exhibit of ancient Egyptian pottery, clothing, and furniture, and replaced all his modern stuff with them, and then lived his life as if he were an Egyptian. Using something now created by another culture doesn't change who you are now, and too often that's what traditionalists are really doing. Their understandable distaste for the flatness of modernity has impelled them to "go native" in the past. This is a deep form of alienation.

I would be a traditionalist if there existed a living tradition--i.e., something that conveyed the wisdom and practices of the ancestors that still had the possibitly of enriching one's life in this time and in this place. But I know of nothing like that which has the smell of possibility for me, and when I am with zombie traditionalists, the smell is bad, and it suffocates and depresses me. And I am particularly irritated by them when they make claims to have something that clearly they do not. I don't think they are insincere, but that they just don't know what they are talking about. If they had something, it would produce at least a few great souls, and all I see among these traditionalists are small souls, angry souls, fearful souls. What they have does not interest me in the least. I want the real thing, and I'm happier to live without anything than with some zombie version of something that once lived but does not now. 

But because there is nothing there now, does that mean there was always nothing there? I don't believe that. The life was there and is still, but it's gone underground. 

***

I am amused when people talk about creating “new” traditions. I know what they mean, but probably the word 'practice' or ‘ritual’ would be more accurate. They become traditions when they get passed on over at least two or three generations. They have to stand the test of time, and that test is that they work, and working means that they enrich and ensoul life. And I think creating new rituals needs to be done, but it's no good, it won't work, if these rituals don't tap into that underground life. The real question is not about the forms, but about finding the life.

We need rituals that will en-soul our life together again. But if a ritual or practice is eventually to become a living tradition, it cannot be 'invented'. Its sources have to be 'uncovered' or 'disclosed'. Or perhaps the word is 'discovered' or in some cases 'recovered'. And then it has to be legitimated by broad acceptance of people who refuse the bogus. It has to resonate deeply. It has to have a kind of “authority”; it has has to have some music. 

In other words it has to 'work'. 

So how are we to think of this discovery/recovery work? 

I don't know for sure, but the idea of retrieval/second naiveté offers a clue as to how it might go about it--at least in part. Both come from Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher of religion that I read years ago as an undergraduate. I’m not sure I’m using these terms precisely in the way he does (I should go and reread him, I suppose), but 'first naivete' characterizes the mentality in premodern societies where everything is a given. People simply accept the beliefs and values as the ancestors have passed it on to them, and they wouldn't think about questioning them. With the coming of critical consciousness (through the Greeks in the West), people start questioning the assumptions on which naive consciousness is based and inevitably they lose their naive faith that things are the way they are as “given” by tradition and the ancestors. The experience of 'truth' becomes interior and subjective, and the exterior world loses its enchantment. 

But while critical consciousness is good at saying No—at debunking—it’s not very good at saying Yes. And so in order for it to be possible to say a deeply resounding Yes, one finds that he must go back and revisit the world as it was presented to naive consciousness, but now with “second naiveté.” This does not mean 'going native', i.e., reverting to first naiveté, but opening up to or becoming vulnerable to the reality that was self-evident to consciousness with first-naivete--without losing critical consciousness.

So the challenge becomes one of rediscovering what has been lost, remembering what has been forgotten. My hunch is, and that’s all it is, a hunch—that if “new traditions” are to be created, they will not have enough ballast or resonance unless they are in one way or another the retrieval of older, previously rejected rituals and practices, but now adapted to our very different circumstances. And I'd argue that this kind of 'retrieval' is possbile for the traditions of the West, and that some fusion of lost wisdom of East and West is the future of tradition. And in that future also lies the re-enchantment of the earth, and perhaps we will have retrieved what the Psalmist meant when he said, "When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth."

Robert Kuttner on Albert Hirschman

Two of his finest books as economic philosopher are The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in 1991 when Hirschman was 76, and Rival Views of Market Society,published in 1987. In Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman goes back several hundred years and identifies three basic strands of conservative argument against social reform that keep recurring. He calls them Perversity, Futility and Jeopardy. These reactionary forms of sophistry are as old as the Middle Ages and as current as the Heritage Foundation and Charles Murray: Reform will actually harm the people it as intended to help (Perversity); it will incur high costs only to fail (Futility) and it will imperil other dearly held values (Jeopardy). On display is Hirschman’s brilliant capacity for synthesis, good humor, and originality as a thinker, and energetic debunking of right-wingers throughout history.

In Rival Views, Hirschman notes that radicals and conservatives, at different times, have viewed markets as supportive—or corrosive—of the glue that holds society together. But oddly, they often switch camps. In the 18^th century, conservatives such as Edmund Burke worried that the market forces celebrated by Adam Smith would undermine traditional society. Radicals of the era hoped markets would do just that. But other conservatives such as Montesquieu saw markets as taming aggressive impulses because people who were doing business with each other the were less likely to go to war. By 19^thand 20^th century, however, it was conservatives who had embraced markets, while Karl Marx warned that as society is marketized “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx actually borrowed the insight from conservatives) and liberals such as Karl Polanyi (and Hirschman) saw markets as destroying social norms. (Source)

I've argued before that conservatives who embrace a traditional values worldview and market ideology at the same time are involved in a contradiction that they don't seem to be aware of. You can have one or the other. Liberals understand that, and have adapted to a world defined by market forces. Liberals are not to blame for the erosion of traditional mores and norms; they simply accept the world that markets have given them. 

 

Scoundrels and Prigs

Nobody with any common sense believes the Warren Commission explanations for the Kennedy assassination. Nobody with any common sense believes that the reason we went into Iraq was to liberate Iraqis from Saddam's despotism. Nobody with any common sense believes that corporate education reform is about what's best for kids and not about a privatizing ideology. There is the cover story, and then there's reality.

The problem lies in that while the cover stories rarely pass the laugh test, you can never be sure about what really happened or what is really going on. You can speculate and come up with the most elaborate conspiracy theories, but you never really know. You can do a lot of research, and maybe you can get a bigger collection of dots to connect than the next guy. But about too many subjects, usually the ones that matter most to us, there's always someone with more dots or someone else who has the same dots as you but connects them differently.

And so it always comes down to judgment, and judgment is always biased, and yet you trust some people's judgment more than you do others. Why? Partly because they might have a track record of being right more often than being wrong.But I think there is more to it than that. Good judgment is, for instance, not just a function of intellectual capacity, although being able to think things through rigorously is obviously an asset to good judgment.

Good judgment is ultimately connected to the development of wisdom, and wisdom is a moral quality.Wise people are generally well informed, but they don't get lost in a flood of detail. They have a nimble, intuitive way of organizing the dots into meaningful patterns that are refreshing and true. Wise people trust other wise people to the degree that they have developed this moral quality, and they don't trust people to the degree that they haven't. I guess it take one to know one. But even if we are not particularly wise, there is still something in us capable of responding to wisdom when we confront it. 

If we think back about all of the bad judgments we've made during our lives, if we're honest, we'd recognize that there was usually something blinding us from seeing clearly what was right in front of us. Sometimes it was a laziness that prevented us from looking carefully or making the effort to investigate. On other occasions because of some blinding passion or desire for things to be a certain way. When we're in such a state, we dismiss any contrary evidence as insignificant.

Everybody makes mistakes, and we are wiser for them if after making them we learn something about our blindspots. We can also learn by observing the mistakes of others, but sometimes we just have to learn the hard way. One way or the other, though, we have to learn, and this learning in religious language is called "repentance." The word has become encrusted with guilt-driven moralistic meanings--'fessing up to being a bad boy who broke the rules and promising to be a good, obedient boy from now on. But that's not what the word really means.

The Greek word for repentance is metanoia, which comes closer. It has more the meaning of being open to transformation, to seeing things in a different way and to be changed by our new seeing. This cognitive element is very important. If you don't really see the world differently, you haven't genuinely repented, which is to say, your vision hasn't changed. The bllindspots remain in place.

The wisest people are the ones who have undergone to some degree this kind of moral transformation. The stupidest people, no matter how high their IQ, are those who remain willfully blind. And one of the stupidest things any of us can do is take too seriously any particular ideological construct about how the world works. None of us knows, really, how the world works; all we have are provisional constructs that we develop over time to help us to make sense of things. The worst possible combination is to be both stupid in this sense and to be arrogantly willful.

The people who got us into Iraq or the people behind corporate education reform are very smart, but they are stupid. Their thinking lacks moral legitimacy to the degree that it remains so willfully blind. Ideological thinking is one of the primary causes of blind thinking because it only works with the dots that fit into the pre-existing ideological pattern, and it's always, as a result, stale and predictable. Ideological thinking is fundamentally lazy thinking and its main concern is to reinforce the cage in which one's mind is already imprisoned. We all need some kind of a construct or worldview; the stupidity lies in thinking that it represents absolute truth.

This is not to say that there is no absolute truth--I don't believe that for a minute. But we don't ever know anything in an absolute sense--all we have is provisional theories. Some people see more clearly than others, but no one sees absolutely--I don't care if you're the world's greatest, saint, initiate, or boddhisattva. If you can't be surprised, you're not human.

The Democratic Party is full of scoundrels--the ones who come to Washington to do good and stay to do well. But the Republican party is full of people blinded by their moralistic ideology. Moralism is wannabe morality. It's the priggish posture taken by the morally immature to appear morally righteous. The moralistic person deep down knows he is a fraud and aggressively strikes out at anyone who would expose him. For this reason the moralistic frauds of Athens executed Socrates and the ones in Jerusalem crucified Christ.

Come election day, if given the choice, I'll likely vote for a scoundrel before I'll vote for a moralistic prig. The scoundrel is more vulnerable to repentance; the moralistic prig is blind to his need for it. He thinks everyone else needs it. The self-righteous, moralistic prigs are the ones who do all the major damage. That's the picture painted over and again in the gospels these folks on the rigid right keep insisting is their playbook.

I don't doubt their sincerity. The problem is not with their being sincere but with their being blinded by their own righteousness. Many of the Bolsheviks were quite idealistic and sincere, as are suicide bombers. But you don't want to give these people the keys to the car. They will sooner or later find a way to drive it over a cliff.

[Ed. note: this is an adapted repost from November 2003]

Quote of the Day: Jackson Lears

These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things they should do instead and how to make them abandon their silly and harmful practices in order “to live better lives.” Harris’s engineering mission envelops human life as a whole. “Given recent developments in biology, we are now poised to consciously engineer our further evolution,” he writes. “Should we do this, and if so, in which ways? Only a scientific understanding of the possibilities of human well-being could guide us.” Harris counsels that those wary of the arrogance, and the potential dangers, of the desire to perfect the biological evolution of the species should observe the behavior of scientists at their professional meetings: “arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity.” Scientists, in Harris’s telling, are the saints of circumspection.  Jackson Lears

Very interesting article in The Nation about the dangerous reductionism of the new positivists like Harris.  The problem isn't what they are against; it's what they are for. The whole article is worth a read.