After the Future

Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”

Let me offer an addendum here: There is plenty to worry about when the state controls technology, too. The ends that governments could turn A.I. toward — and, in many cases, already have — make the blood run cold.

I might, for that reason, alter Chiang’s comment one more time: Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

--Ezra Klein

We Americans won't do anything do anything to constrain A.I. because Technocapitalism does not serve us, but we it. We Americans are worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand, and it is a jealous god that will have no other gods beside it. All our blessings derive from our being a Nation most servile to this god and so most favored by it. And we dare not risk angering it, for surely for such sacrilege we will be cast out of the Temple and be forever forsaken. 

Liberalism + Whatever

There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

--Ross Douthat

There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.

So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is their assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right and in this sense they are more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.

So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And mainstream Protestantism might have had a genuine spiritual energy for a while that imposed some constraints on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate mainstream Protestantism leaving only its most fanatical forms behind, and now the shark roams free gobbling up the customs and traditions of the heartland. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.

Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. Blue America is thought of by Red America as overly populated by educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, and then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center--empty suits  like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. "They're phonies, but they're our phonies," declares Red America.

But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief from their guilt in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.

So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes. 

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 1] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 2]

The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.

And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom. 

I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them. 

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Note 1: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"

Note 2: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source. It's not derived from logic but from the cognitive capabilities of a supple heart. 

 

Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

--Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine in his speech accepting the GOP nomination in July 1980. 

The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex marriage.)

Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.

...The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)

Ronald Brownstein, "America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good"

Until Reagan, even in the South, we were making real progress toward a more perfect union, and then it all stopped. Why? Because of Reagan's radical program to start the world over again by which he meant to restore America to a time before the New Deal. 

I know it's more complicated, but I trace the acuteness of the current crisis of American democracy back to Reagan. Morning in America was really the beginning of a journey into the heart of darkness, a journey that led us to Trump. With Reagan the sorting and the polarizing and the  tribalizing begins. He opened up the space for the more cretinous, resentment-driven, and hateful characteristics of the American character to emerge and to be legitimated.

At the root of the current crisis is a fundamental inability of great swaths of the American populace to distinguish truth from fantasy. Reagan's was always an American-greatness fantasy that had little to do with the complex realities of living in America. It gave Main Street Americans a meaning story when they intensely felt the need for one, but while it might have seemed benign and Norman Rockwell-y enough at first, Morning in America was the beginning of a longer story that has created in so many Americans a compulsive need for delusion that has made it possible for them to take Donald Trump seriously. as a legitimate political leader. 

Conservatism, traditionally, has never really had a program; it was always primarily about enlisting a natural resistance to change as a way to protect the interests of the the wealthy. The philosophical roots of Conservatism are not Libertarian--quite the contrary--but Libertarianism has a convenient ideology to justify its negative animus toward an intrusive, constraining administrative state. Everyday Americans are duped into thinking that a bootstrapping, rugged individualism constitutes an essential element of the American character. Such an attitude might have promoted one's chances for success during pioneer days, but they make no sense in America after the Industrial Revolution.

More thoughtful Conservatives, guys like Bill Buckley, thought that too-rapid change was destabilizing and driven by naive, do-goody Liberals, who, even with all the best intentions, promoted a project that would destroy the social and cultural infrastructure that makes civilization possible. He was partly right, but it wasn't do-goody Liberals who were to blame but the fundamentally socially disruptive dynamics of laissez-faire capitalism. [See Note 1]

So conservatives don't like the way America changed after WWII, but really since FDR. And they waited a long time for their moment to roll things back. And they got their chance when the Progressive America that Brownstein describes above started to unravel in the late 60s and 70s. This unraveling was not caused by Liberals but by the necessary lancing of a long festering boil on the American soul--segregation in the South combined with outrage at a futile war in SE Asia. All this exploded in unrest in the context of a society whose norms were dissolving in consumer capitalism's torrential acid rain. 

Reagan couldn't bring himself to blame consumer capitalism, so he blamed government: His laugh line--“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."--became a mantra for Republicans, and Neoliberal Democrats accepted that the era of big government was over. In doing so, they gave in to the idea that big government was the problem. Of course it wasn't. It was never about getting rid of big government but about whose interests it would serve--those of wealthy elites or of everyday Americans.

The enemy for conservatives was always the administrative state, the state that in its New Deal and Great Society programs provided the infrastructure for the progress described in the Brownstein excerpt above. Traditionalist Conservatives blame Liberals for getting in the way of their restoring the America they love and that they believe was taken from them, but it's rather like blaming Liberals for hurricanes and tornadoes--and then doing everything possible to prevent them from taking steps to mitigate their most destructive effects.

***

I'm not against capitalism; I'm against unfettered capitalism. I'm not against change; I'm against change that is dehumanizing. In order to direct change in such a way that it promotes human flourishing, you  have to have a model of history--a compelling meaning story--that has some working relationship with the dynamic forces that are shaping history. In other words, you need a philosophy or a theology of history to make sense of it. It has to be plausible and intellectually honest, and that requires that it never present itself as the absolute truth, but rather as a working model to help us navigate history in the most humanly productive way. But it needs to be inspiring. 

Americans have no such public philosophy of human flourishing except one shaped by a crude, it's-the-economy-stupid materialism. Our public religion by default is the cult of the Invisible Hand, the market deity that makes everything turn out right if we just let it do its thing. The Invisible Hand doesn't care about traditional values. It's a rapacious deity that is fed only by human greed and a compulsive need for growth. And it is greed and growth that have destroyed what Red America feels so deeply the loss of. They blame Liberals, but they should blame the Invisible Hand. And if they're honest, they will recognize that they, too, are worshippers in its cult.

Directing change that promotes broad human flourishing is almost impossible to do when there is no consensus about what constitutes human flourishing. in a Libertarian ethos, we are constrained from making judgments about the choices people make. Who are we to judge? So this in turn leads us to a least-common-denominator imagination of human possibility, for instance human possibility as Judd Apatow or Mark Zuckerberg might imagine it. Apatow's vulgarity and Zuckerberg's callowness are wildly successful as measured by the marketplace, and their success therefore makes them saints in the Invisible Hand's cult.

But most spirited Americans want to think better of themselves than that, and so they are likely to grab onto anyone or anything that tells them they can do better. Some join the military. Others Doctors without Borders or the Peace Corp. Fundamentalist religion offers another possibility, and often that is combined with the 19th-century American mythos to which Reagan gave new life--a mythos of rugged individualism, never-stand-down toughness, and loyalty to god and country. 

But what do Liberals have to offer traditionalist Americans that's better--career advancement in a meritocratic technocracy? Jobs in a cubby in some soulless high rise in Oklahoma City? For many of the people whose customary culture has been destroyed in the decades since WWII, to pursue such a life feels to them like surrender to the enemy that has taken everything from them that they and their ancestors held sacred. They'd rather blow it up. 

But Democrats and Liberals in general seem incapable of understanding this simple idea: It's the meaning, stupid. They keep thinking that the solutions to the crisis are primarily economic, and of course there must be an economic dimension to any solution that might work. But such a solution can only be advanced within a larger, animating meaning story, a story that Liberals haven't the resources to tell. Red America does have an animating meaning story; it's divorced from reality, but it inspires action and commitment in a way that Liberals don't understand. Because the solution for finding a progressive animating story is a religious one, and Progressives don't trust religion. 

Liberals, at best, see religion as a consumer choice, and most don't feel a need for it. Their lives feel meaningful enough without it. They are mostly educated and prosperous, and so have the financial and cultural resources to live decent, interesting lives. But they see themselves as magnanimous and openminded about religion. "If you want to be religious," they'll say, "good for you."  But this is so patronizing, and really they are thinking, "Why can't you just be like us? Isn't your religion just you're clutching a teddy bear to get you through the night? Do you really need it? Grow up."

Blue America can't understand why it is hated so much by Red America  or why Red America won't become more like Blue America. And because it won't, Blue America justifies its contempt for Red Americans as a failure to adapt. It's rather like the way white settlers came to see Native Americans as sullen, drunken layabouts for their unwillingness to assimilate. Of course, it never occurred to the white folks that their having destroyed their thousands-year old culture might be a soul-crushing loss and cause for disgruntlement. You lost. Get over it. Move on. Is Rust-Belt and rural resentment toward educated elites essentially different? Aren't their resentments cognate with the resentments of Native Americans toward the whites who held them in contempt for similar reasons? I'm not saying the situations of the two groups is equivalent, but analogous. [See Note 2]

***

Now I say I blame Reagan, but you might retort that if it wasn't Reagan it would have been someone else. Maybe. But what if the someone else that had been elected in 1980 had the stature and charism of Lincoln or FDR? What if it were someone who could have faced down the dark side of the American character and led the nation out of the confusion of the 60s and 70s toward a more perfect union. Is that so hard to imagine? Isn't that in our American DNA as much as the delusions of grandeur that Reagan represented? ...

Carter, as admirable as he was in so many ways, was just not the man for the moment.  He was a morally serious guy who wanted us to eat our spinach, but people won't eat it if there's someone offering them ice cream instead. And that's what Reagan's Morning in America was--junk food. What Americans needed in 1980 was someone to inspire them in a way Carter was incapable of, and so his failure cleared the way for Reagan who was indeed inspiring, but he was selling the sugar high, and it made the country sick. 

As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both roads led to disaster. Both Jackson and Reagan were popular, larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Ailes were given the space to emerge into the mainstream to do their destructively polarizing thing in the 90s. I'd argue there are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis as from Reagan to Donald Trump.

So yes, I blame Reagan. I don't think America had to go the way he diverted it, but arguing counterfactuals isn't useful unless it can help our understanding the problem we're trying to solve. If 1980 was a fork in the road in American history that led us to this moment, what would the road untaken look like, and is that a route that is open to us now?

***

I've been arguing here over the years that fundamental to the crisis in our political order is a deeper crisis of meaning in our cultural order. This dimension of the crisis is something most Liberals in Blue America don't feel acutely for reasons alluded to above. And so their ideas since WWII about progress have always been shaped by a utilitarian calculus about material progress. And so their program has been mostly limited to economic policies designed to mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism on those most vulnerable to be hurt by them. This kind of materialistic utilitarianism lacks the fervor and animating vision of the early Progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Liberals don't understand that It's the meaning, not the economy, stupid.

The Progressivism that gave us all the progress that Brownstein describes above was incapable of dealing effectively with the crisis of meaning that Main Street Americans experienced in the wake of the disruptions of the 60s and 70s. All Democrats had to offer were programs that never addressed the underlying causes of the crisis, which was Traditional America's losing its meaning story as it was embedded in its customary culture. The loss was accelerated by Reagan's program to dismantle the New Deal and unfetter the nihilistic forces of corporate capitalism. [See Note 3]

So I would argue that most Liberals don't understand that there's double whammy here for Red America in its feeling that Liberals are the cause of their having become both culturally and economically marginalized. While cripple-the-government Republicans are more to blame for their economic losses, Red America blames Democrats for both because they've come to think that Republican pols care about them when they show up wearing their red jerseys and then feed their resentments regarding their cultural losses. These pols and their media propagandists tell Red America that the Liberals want to take away their religion, their guns, and their whiteness, but guns, religion, whiteness are just MacGuffins in the meaning story plot. Give Red America a better meaning story, and they lose their importance. But until that story changes, they play a central role in supporting the cult. The challenge is not to persuade Red America that their ideas are wrong, but to inspire them with a better story. 

Red America's losses are not the fault of Liberals, but Liberals are at fault for not understanding why they are being blamed by Red America, and their Blue cluelessness leads them to endorse attitudes and policies that make things worse. It's astonishing to me to think that Democrats could ever think that nominating Hillary Clinton was good idea. It only makes sense from within a particular kind of blinkered technocratic/meritocratic version of feminism that has no sense of the causes that have led the broader society into this crisis.

But as bad as the Clintons were, they were simply adapting to the world that Reagan created. His Morning in America was a celebration of both unfettered, deregulated capitalism and traditional American values. And so follows the irony that in the name of traditional American values he unleashed the forces that in subsequent decades destroyed the social infrastructure that supported them. In doing so, Reagan began the process of creating a deracinated, anomic mass that was ripe for exploitation by the first demagogue to come along, which turned out to be Donald Trump.

That such an absurdly ridiculous figure should be so successful in not a testament to his talent, so much as it is a testament to the social psychological damage done to the country by Reaganism. His unfettering of the nihilistic forces of capitalism, dressed up in a 19th-century, rugged individualist fantasy, thrust Red America into a ferocious ontological vertigo, a vertigo that they could remedy in this crusade to take their country back from the Libs who are absolutely convinced stole it from them. Trump's claims of a stolen election are so persuasive because it fits the story that that's what Libs do, steal and cheat. They did it to them, and so, of course, they did it to Trump. That's what explains MAGA and J6. Reagan and the right wing demagogues who emerged after him told them to blame big-government Liberals, and Trump has just taken it all to its logical conclusion.

So since Reagan and the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal New Democrats, have not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but have led us to a condition where it's not enough for the worst tendencies in American society to be tolerated, but rather for those worst tendencies to become the norm. The Reagan-promoted fantasy of America created the space for the most regressive and shameful elements in the American psyche to emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult to understand how it created the shame-denying, resentment-driven, reality-averse habits of mind that inevitably led so many conservatives to embrace Trump.

So rather than admit that they were wrong, MAGA conservatives and their fellow travelers must do whatever is necessary to shut out the truth and the shame of their having enabled such madman. And in their doing so they have played a critical supporting role in his project to smash basic norms and impediments without which a healthy democracy cannot survive. Their repressed shame requires that they double down in their hatred of the morally smug Libs who they can never acknowledge were right. So they must do whatever it takes, whether legal or illegal, to shut Blue America out of power because that's the only way to shut them up. This was the psychology of the slaveholders in the 1850s, and it's true now of any conservative who is not a Never-Trumper. Brownstein reinforces the point:

The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.

It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

And as in the 1850s, the forces of resentment and reaction are aggressively overreaching today. Conservatives are justifying their support for Trump because he gave them the court that overturned Roe, but more consequential is that he gave them the court that is bent on its project to dismantle the administrative state--to return us to the 1880s if they can. Or something even worse. We could be headed toward the fulfillment of Bannon's "Leninist" dark fantasies to destroy the administrative state, and to replace it with what? Some Putinesque, synarchist-theocratic nightmare?

Will such a project or something like it succeed? There's a good chance of it. Reactionary Red America has short-term structural advantages--the Supreme Court, the electoral college, the Senate, a majority of state legislatures, the obliviousness of a center-right-leaning electorate. But Progressive Blue America has the greater numbers, and the cultural, economic, and intellectual energies that Red America simply can't constrain indefinitely.

It's possible we'll have a decade like Cromwell's parliamentary dictatorship in the 1650s, but that will prove so unattractive that it cannot last. Maybe we will need Red America to do its worst before a backlash will develop that will empower a broad consensus to push back against it. Perhaps that's the only thing that can galvanize the political will to push for a Progressive Restoration that picks up where it left off in 1980. Perhaps only then can we get the constitutional changes that will free the country from the 18th/19th century thinking and institutions that prevent it from dealing with 21st century challenges. That's as much optimism as I can muster at the moment. 

++++++++++

Note 1: Buckley is a fascinating character, and I have more to say about him in a post entitled "Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary". But his Catholicism and his embrace of capitalism never really made much intellectual sense. Capitalism has always been more of a Calvinist thing. But he came from oil wealth, and so for all his purported Catholic fervor, that side of him never really got into a very deep conversation with the capitalist side of him. His Catholicism and therefore his conservatism always struck me as having more in common with that of Latin American oligarchs--i.e., more about protecting their privileged place in the social order than about the spirit of the gospels. His theology was deeply correlated with his sense of social privilege in an older oligarchic sense. 

Nevertheless, there's a partial truth buried in Buckley's critique of the naïveté at the heart of the Liberal project, but the deeper reality is that Liberals simply adapted to the dynamically changing world that post-WWII consumer capitalism created. Capitalism's consumer-driven-choice-and-self-indulgence ethos was the acid that slowly dissolved whatever feeling Americans had for the public interest that formed during the depression and WWII. 

Note 2: That's why Liberals are so obsessed with education. Education is always the solution for Liberals because it was the key to their own success. But getting educated has come to mean for Red America its becoming brainwashed in institutions dominated by the ideology of its enemy, the enemy that destroyed everything they and their ancestors held sacred. The brouhaha about CRT has nothing to do with CRT; it's all about the fear that traditionalist Red Americans have about losing their kids to the enemy and its ideology. Conservatives see themselves as the earthy, valiant, freedom-fighting Celts in Braveheart, and Liberals as the ever-expanding machine, that is, the hated, snotty, slick English that would as soon squash them all as if they were only bugs. Liberals aren't that, of course, but they are more comfortable in the machine than conservatives are, and so are guilty by association. 

Note 3: I'm surprised this theme doesn't get more attention. Reagan's program was abetted and advanced by Neoliberal Democrats in the 90s. The Washington consensus for deregulation and free trade endorsed by both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats insisted that lower prices were good for everyone, and if in order to get them some people needed to lose their jobs, well that's unfortunate, but they can be retrained to do something else. Was it ever a consideration how such policies atomize American society and have destructive effects on families and the communities that support them? Conservatives are right that government programs are no substitute for healthy families and communities, but conservatives--thick, dull guys like Romney and Paul Ryan--never understood how market capitalism worked so mercilessly to destroy them.

Oren Cass is an interesting conservative exception who understands that public-private partnerships are essential to promote healthy local communities and the families that are their life. This should define the common ground between Democrats and Republicans, but the Republican Party policy wing is dominated by Libertarians who don't want the government involved in solving problems. They are worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand. Just lower taxes and let the markets do their thing, and all shall be well. There are a lot more Democrats in today's congress who would be open to Cass's ideas than Republicans. 

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See also "How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name", a reflection Rick Perlstein's Nixonland shortly after it came out.

Also "Growth Idolatry" about the tradeoffs between fairer wealth redistribution and rates of economic growth.

 

Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability

Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you actually desire. You lose the habit, right? You never perform the mental gymnastics of stretching to figure out what a better world might actually be because you think you’re on track to that better world no matter what happens.

So it’s not just that you don’t recognize that somebody else’s values are different from your own. You’ve forgotten completely that there is such a thing as values, that they might be plural, they might be different, they might be contested. And so you find yourself, as you say, in this kind of binary where I’m rational and the other guy’s irrational.        

But actually, your notion of rationality is completely meaningless. It’s just means-ends rationality. But you can’t even really define what the ends are, your own ends. And you’ve lost the habit of asking what another end might be like.

...

And once we realize that there’s a plurality of values and we actually stretch ourselves again to see that, then we can track backward from that and start to ask about means-end rationality. But when we forget all about ends, which is what the politics of inevitability has done to our brains for the last 30 years, then we can’t actually talk about rationality. You can’t talk about means-end rationality if you don’t know how to talk about ends anymore.

Timothy Snyder on Ezra Klein's show

The context for these comments is Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, but it touches upon the larger argument I'm making in my Genealogy series about metaphysical imaginaries: In our public intellectual life, we have come to assume that the rationalist-materialist imaginary is the only one that has legitimacy, and so any possible future must follow from its presuppositions. The imaginary and its deity, the Invisible Hand, work together to promote a sense of complacency or resignation that the global economy is going to do what it's going to do; technology is going to do what it's going to do--and it's all for the best, so no need for us to do anything except go with the flow.  And even if we wanted to do something, it's pointless; it's out of our hands. That passes for rational thinking, but it isn't. It's just an an act of abdicating our collective agency, which we justify by the tenets of a bad religion. [See Note 1]

Bad religion is any metaphysical imaginary and its practices that close down possibilities for human flourishing; good religion is a metaphysical imaginary and its practices that open them up. American mainstream political thinking is under the sway of a religion called Neoliberalism. As with any religion, it has its extremists (Republicans) and its moderates (Democrats), but the basic tenets for this religion are its utilitarian ethic, its profession of toleration, and its celebration of individual autonomy and self determination.

"So what's wrong with that?," you might ask. It's certainly better than some form of religious or ideological fanaticism. Yes, it is. But as with most problematic ideologies or values systems, It's not about what they affirm but about what they leave out. Certainly a healthy society must embrace pluralism, but that should not mean an embrace of chaos and randomness. Has it become impossible for us to imagine a non-nihilistic meaning structure that embraces pluralism and difference? Only if we believe in the inevitability of our own current presuppositions. 

The idea here of having a coherent, non-nihilistic meaning structure is not easy to convey in the context of a society that on the face of it seems so irretrievably committed to its current imaginary. But as I argue in Part 1 of the Genealogy series, there is an underlying coherency, even if it is nihilistic, in our contemporary rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that promotes, if not guarantees, our experience of fragmentation, alienation, and isolation. How so? It might be helpful to contrast our contemporary imaginary with the premodern imaginary given to us in the Great Chain of Being.

The Great Chain of Being provided a coherent meaning structure for late ancient and medieval Western societies until it broke down after Galileo and the barrage of new knowledge that obsoletized its static structure. But, as I argue in Part 11, that doesn't mean its fundamental intuitions were wrong. It wasn't just a pure fiction that had no basis in reality; it worked effectively on several different levels--until it didn't. The test of any imaginary is the degree to which it works to effectively convey a coherent picture of reality. It should never be confused with reality, which mostly lies filtered beyond any capacity we have to cognize it directly. A healthy metaphysical imaginary adapts and evolves as knowledge on both the vertical and horizontal dimensions expands. As I argue in the Genealogy series, after the breakdown of the Great Chain of Being, the vertical dimension gradually disappeared. That's what's missing now, and that's the root cause of our collective ontological dizziness. 

The best metaphysical imaginary is the one that integrates the broadest scope of knowledge most coherently and in a way that has rich emotional and spiritual depth. The Great Chain of Being did that. It worked because it provided a model of reality that integrated a picture of the cosmos, with a picture of good social/political order, with a rich picture of spiritual/moral aspiration. That's what any effective metaphysical imaginary should do.

Our contemporary rationalist-materialist imaginary performs these functions, too, but It provides a sense of intellectual coherency only if you accept its nihilistic presuppositions. Most people accept these presuppositions without really thinking about it and about how they conflict with other things they believe that are important values for them. So, why do I insist that these presuppositions are nihilistic?  Like the Great Chain of Being our rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary integrates the cosmic, the social/political, and the moral but does so within a cosmology that accepts that the universe is shaped by Darwinism and other cosmological materialistic assumptions that creation itself was a random event, that the history of the universe since the Big Bang has been random, impersonal, meaningless, and dispassionately cruel. And that fits with a Darwinian social  organization that embraces the randomness of markets and the inevitability of technological development. There's no meaning in any of it except that that's the way things are, and we do what we can to have a more or less pleasant life within its constraints.

And this fits with a Libertarian/utilitarian or socio-biological moral imaginary that makes no moral judgments about anything except to insure the randomness of each individual making his or her own random choices to determine for himself what is in his best interest within the minimum constraints of the social contract to not harm others. There is no robust sense of the common good, or else it is defined as the sum of each individual pursuing his own interests. This makes dealing with threats like climate change and income inequality almost impossible because it requires individuals to surrender their short-term interests for a common or social good that has no imagined, inspiring content. The idea of freedom has no real moral content; it's just the negation of restraint, and unrestrained you are free to do as you please whether it's to run a porn site or join Doctors without Borders. The second can have no more moral value than the first within a rationalist-materialist frame.   

So on the cosmic level, randomness is all; entropic heat death is our telos. On the moral spiritual level, there is no concept of moral development or of there being a transcendent Good. On the social/political level Justice is something that we make up as we go along, a function of prudential contracts we make with one another to prevent the war of all against all, the greed and power of one against the greed and power of the other, which would otherwise be our natural condition in a random, impersonal, cruel cosmos. 

If you think I'm exaggerating about the fundamental spiritual vacuity of the the rationalist-materialist imaginary, it's probably because you don't think of yourself as a nihilist even though you accept the its basic presuppositions as outlined above. You think of yourself as a good person who has a moral code. You see yourself as being more moral than lots of people who justify their violence and cruelty by appeal to the scriptures or other religious sources.

But what's your argument from within a strict Libertarian frame to justify your thinking of yourself as a good person? Being good within a rationalist materialist frame simply means being conventional, following the rules, rules that have no ontological foundation except a Hobbesian agreement that we cease to pillage and rape and to lord it over one another. [See Note 2]

But it's important to understand that there is nothing deeply moral about the Hobbesian social contract. It is simply a truce, a way to stop the underlying savagery for a while. It's just a survival strategy that we pay for by alienating ourselves from our inner predator, our inner Genghis Kahn, our need to dominate, to be glorified, to be be in control. The Hobbesian Liberal is not a moral hero, but a scared rabbit hiding behind the police powers of the state and the so-called rule of law and its bureaucracies. Scared rabbits have no morality; they have only shame to frighten other scared rabbits into conformity. There is nothing inspiringly moral in a fear-based conformity. Liberal societies are created by scared rabbits who foreswear their inner predator and use the state to suppress any predator who breaks the rules. It's a system that has utility, but no real moral significance. 

My point has been that while you may think of yourself as a good person, what basis have you to argue that you are no more than a scared rabbit? I believe that you are more, or are potentially more, but that you have to awaken and grow something within you that supplants the predator/prey dynamic that is our natural condition. In order to do that, you must draw on some understanding about what it means to be human that does not fit within a Hobbesian utilitarian ethos, which is the only social organization that makes sense within a rationalist-materialist metaphysics. We all deep down know we are more than that. A true morality, as contrasted with a moralism that parodies it, is all about realizing that deep-down we are more than talking animals, that we are capable of transcending and transforming that aspect of ourselves. 

The Great Chain of Being models that human potentiality in a way that our current rationalist-materialist imaginary does not and cannot. The Great Chain had a place for Chaos--at the very bottom. But it also had a place for human moral transformation, for human divinization, which is what we are to become if we follow the growth pattern that is in our spiritual DNA. There is a dynamic, growth aspect in this model insofar as a being can ascend or descend. A thing was judged better or worse depending on its place on the chain, either closer to the top--good because more constituted by Mind, or the bottom--bad because more constituted by chaos and less by Mind. In the rationalist-materialist imaginary, a human being can only be predator or prey. 

A being descends as it physically or morally disintegrates, i.e., loses its form. It ascends as it grows into a fuller, denser, intenser possibility of its innate potencies, as a seed become a mature plant. What defined something as good was the degree to which it realized the fullness of its form as imagined in the mind of God. So something participates in the Good to the degree that is healthily growing toward the full realization of its mature form. Something is bad to the degree that it lacks participation in the Good becomes a perversion or parody of what it was meant to be, and so  regresses, moves away from the the path toward the full realization of its form.  

Now there's another aspect regarding the rationalist-materialist presuppositions that undergird the Liberal Order, which is that like the Great Chain of Being had its day, so now has the Liberal Order reaching the end of its day. We live in dread of its collapse because our only imagined alternative is a regression into illiberalism--and clearly that's a possibility if we don't think of something better. But we now have an opportunity to think of something better, and we should be very much involved in that. Snyder points to that in the excerpt above.

What's missing in the rationalist/materialist/Libertarian/utilitarian imaginary that currently dominates our collective imagination is a positive imagination of future possibility. We have no imagined future that inspires us to work for it or fight for it. That's what enervates us and so inclines us to a politics of inevitability.  We think we have values, but our values only incline us to say No to things that are repressive or restrictive of individual freedom.

We are energized only in the service of a No. We have nothing positive that inspires us to transcend our constraints. And isn't that what real freedom is all about?--to transcend our individual and collective constraints? And the only way that's truly, deeply possible for us as a society is if for the best of us its an imagined possibility, which requires a metaphysical imaginary that embraces the possibility of moral transcendence.That's really not a part of our moral landscape as Americans for complicated reasons I'm exploring in the Genealogy series. 

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I think that what inspires us about the Ukrainian resistance is the way we see an entire society coming together in such a way that so many people experience themselves  as transcending their individual constraints and petty self interests. These Ukrainians are not scared rabbits, and we're inspired to learn that people who are not that different from us are still capable of such courageous, spirited behavior. Each person who commits himself to the resistance is putting his or her personal self interest aside in order to contribute to something that transcends those interests. While surely these resisters hope for practical outcomes, these are not people who are applying a utilitarian calculus to motivate their actions.

No one sane puts his or her life on the line for an abstraction; they do it because they are inspired by something that calls them to be something more. The essence of being a truly alive human being is to be in a continuous process of self-transcendence. Sometimes circumstances force us out of our slumber; sometimes awakening to the more we have it in us to be is something we must find within ourselves to achieve alone or with others. When we actually see others awakened in this way, we cannot help but be inspired by it. 

I want to argue for a metaphysical imaginary that asserts that some things are more worthy of our desires and aspirations than others, that to assert this is not incompatible with living in Liberal social democracy, and that it is not sufficient for a healthy society to just say No to tyrants. It must say Yes to a Good, and that while this Good is something mediated by cultural constructions, it transcends cultural constructions, and that the measure of our lives both individually and collectively is determined by our proximity to that Good. The Great Chain of Being did that for the premodern West; it broke down not because it was wrong on a vertical moral/spiritual axis, but because it no longer worked on the horizontal historical axis. 

And the important thing to understand about the juncture between the American Right and Left right now is that the people who were storming the capitol on 1/6 saw themselves as resisting tyranny in a similar way to how the Ukrainians see themselves doing it. It's not the same, of course. And this goes to my point about good and bad religion. Those who stormed the capitol were inspired by bad religion because there was no good religion available to them. Without it they feel a desperate, ballast-less anomie that comes from living within the spiritual vacuity of a soulless, rationalist-materialist imaginary they associate for good reason with Liberalism because of its antipathy to the values of American customary culture.

The stormers want to feel inspired by something, anything. And if bad, delusional religion gives them that feeling, they are going to embrace it. The only real solution in the long run is not to tell them that they are ignorant and delusional, but to offer them something better, to inspire them with something that is truly Good. Customary culture can no longer provide that sense of the Good to ordinary Americans. It has to be found in something else. It has to be found in an imagined hoped-for future. 

One of the more interesting ideas that Snyder discusses was in his answer to Klein's question about how Ukrainians see their historical story as defining them. Snyder says: 

...what’s interesting about the Ukrainians is that they seem to be moving more towards the argument that the nation is not about a clear story of the past. It’s more about action directed towards the future.

And I say this because both in the case of the Russian invasion in 2014 and in this much more stressful period now, when I talk to Ukrainians anyway, I don’t find them talking much about the Second World War, about ancient hatreds with Russia, or about some long narrative which has to be clear in some way. I find them more focused on what they’re doing.

...

Like a French historian said that a nation is a daily plebiscite. It’s not about having the past all in order. It’s not about having all of your blue books on a shelf, all of your red books on a different shelf. It’s about what you do every day, you know, as a collectivity which exists, as a collectivity because it’s directed towards some kind of a future.

That's all I'm saying. That if we're to break out of our spiritual/ideological gridlock here in the U.S., we can learn from the Ukrainians in quite a few ways, but perhaps the most important is their refusal to be constrained by the past grievances and instead to focus on imagining a best possible Ukrainian future. There is for us no positive political future for Americans if, unlike the Ukrainians, we continue to surrender our agency to an idea of historical inevitability. And we will continue to feel impotent unless we undertake the 'mental gymnastics' Snyder talks about that requires that we scrutinize what our deepest values truly are and in awakening to them to discover flowing from theman inspiring vision of a future--a telos--that's worth fighting for. 

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Note 1: I feel a need to stress from time to time that I am not against technology or innovation. The question is not whether either is good or bad but rather what or whose interests do they serve. The system is set up in such a way that technology and innovation are driven by the desire of innovators to make a lot of money. This is a truism that plays a central role in the politics of inevitability. It is assumed that there could be no other motive and no other ends besides financial gain that would be adequate to motivate innovation. So long as we inhabit a metaphysical imaginary that is dominated by rationalist-materialist presuppositions, this will remain the case. Change the imaginary, you change the motivations--and almost certainly change the nature and quality of what is innovated. 

Note 2: And so the irony here is that so many religious people are pre-Hobbesian. Their desire to burn people at the stake is better explained by a primitive alignment with the impersonal, Darwinian cosmic nihilism outlined above. Those on the American religious Right experience themselves as prey being crushed and mangled in the Liberal maw, so they embrace a new identity as predators and justify it as doing God's will. They are correct that their customary culture and its norms and values are being destroyed, but Liberals are not to blame; consumer capitalism and mass media are the real culprits. Like so many other things, human identity has become a consumer choice, and it's understandable why people who derive their sense of identity from traditions find this bewildering and wrong. The Liberals that they despise are simply those who have adapted to this brave new world and have prospered in it. It's in this sense that Colbert's mot that 'reality has a liberal bias is true'. The mainstream cultural OS is Liberal in its rationalist materialist presuppositions, and so only programs compatible with rationalist materialism run smoothly on it. Customary culture most emphatically does not run well on it, and so seems divorced from reality. 

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! ...--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

--Fyodor Dostoyevski, Notes from the Underground, 1864, Chapter 8

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators. 

--Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

In Part I, I assert that religion and faith are not the same thing. A few words to elaborate because it's important for advancing the larger argument:

Religion is social; faith is personal. The possibility for faith is obviously something culturally mediated, but one’s experience of it is deeply intimate. When Augustine says in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee", it is a deeply personal and intimate assertion of faith, and it follows from a discovery, an epiphany, an event, an encounter, which is what we mean by the “gift” of faith. The Christian ‘mythos’ provided a framework for him to interpret and to develop what was given in the gift. And that explains a lot of what went down in shaping the European religious imaginary of the Living Real--and rigidified parodies of it--for the next thousand years. 

But the point I'm arguing here is that the crisis of the spirit to which I referred in the previous post is not a crisis of faith, but a crisis of the social order--the superstructure--whose foundations lie in the Greco/Judeo fusion that Augustine was largely responsible for constructing. This social order was always at best provisional, something that worked for quite a while and later didn't. But that doesn't mean that the originary intuitions like Augustine's upon which the superstructure were based are untrue. It just means each generation needs to adapt them better to social/cultural realities as they evolve.  Those adaptations essentially stopped working in the 19th century.

The crisis of the spirit that we are experiencing now lies in what is commonly referred to as the death of God in North Atlantic societies. This crisis has been a long time in the making--its originary framework started to shake during the Enlightenment in the mid-18th Century but was given knock-out blows by the one-two punch of Darwin and Industrial Capitalism in the mid-19th Century. The death of God signifies that the basic superstructure shaped by Augustine, emended by Luther, and then again by Enlightenment Deism gradually lost it vital connection to its origins, and then came to interpret that to mean that there were no origins for it to become disconnected from. In failing to adapt, the superstructure became increasingly rickety and unbalanced. We got away with it for a while, but now we're paying the price. This disconnect from our origins is at the root of our civilizational crisis of the spirit. The solution lies in reconnecting.

We're paying the price because we've allowed the vital connection to our origins to be supplanted by the energies of materialist bounty delivered by science and capitalism.  Pre-axial religions were mostly about managing a spiritual economy by placating the gods to entice them to support human flourishing in the most basic sense--long life, many children, plenty of food, victory over one's enemies. Capitalism solved those problems far more effectively than primitive religious practice. And so many since the advent of capitalism, those whose religiosity had always been pre-axial in this transactional sense --Please, God, if I close this deal, win this battle, get that promotion I will never miss church ever again--eventually traded in their old religion for capitalism's work ethic. Better to depend on one's own efforts than on very iffy divine assistance. Or worse, they created a parodic form of Christianity that replaced spirit of the gospels with the spirit of the gospel of wealth. 

We live in a society now were the default among its intelligentsia, whether in the sciences or the humanities, is to think about any talk of transcendentals is hogwash. But their rejection of it is mixed up with an absurd reductionistic understanding religious transcendence that depends on a conception of religion whose deity is the God of the Gaps. In other words, their idea of religion is almost always confused with the primitive transactional elements that linger from its pre-Axial modes.

This transactional function of religion is not at the core of the great post-Axial religions, even if it lingered in them. These religions were all about affirming a transcendent Good and about developing practices that aligned with it. Post-Axial religions in the West that were a fusion of Greek philosophy and Jewish revelation were not at their deepest level about tit for tat, but about getting one's life right, i.e. about living in alignment with the transcendental Good or an idea of transcendental Justice. 

But the intelligentsia, in rejecting the primitive elements in Western religion, have also thrown out something much more important, which is any sense of its transcendental foundations, its vital spiritual origins, on which any civilization with vitality is dependent for its sustenance. And in doing so have created a spiritual vacuum that has been filled with crude energies that crowd out the possibility for anything more civilizing, vitalizing, or humanizing that should, if we had a healthy culture, shape its imaginary.

The Death of God was announced by Nietzsche in the late 19th century, and, as the quote in the epigraph indicates, he hated what it meant, and his philosophy was largely a diagnosis of the causes and suggestions for a cure. His diagnosis or genealogy of the problem traced back to what he saw as the progressive shriveling of the human spirit endemic to the disembedding caused by Western Axial traditions. He blames Socrates for starting us down this path, but he sees the disease as infecting the entirety of the  Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos. For him the cure lay in a return to a pre-Axial (pre-Socratic), un-alienated way of living by a recovery of a more intimate relationship with the chaotic energies of the Living Real that he called the Dionysian.  

Nietzsche was prescient in his announcement of the death of this post-Axial mythos. Its all but gone now, except for vestiges, traces in a cultural palimpsest that lie hiding behind a consumer/materialist overlay. But Nietzsche's philosophy is just one variant on a rich counter-Enlightenment theme, which seeks to reassert something about the infinite depths of the human being, depths that unbalanced rationality and its Positivist ontological assumptions have effectively sealed us off from. 

So Nietzsche was right, God has died, and we have killed him, if by his death we mean that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a vital way in the societies shaped by the Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos. Nietzsche feared that this collapse would bring with it a flattening of the spirit that would quash all noble human aspiration, i.e., that it would create a society of Last Men. His solution was the uebermensch, the overcoming-human, the human who distinguishes him or herself by acts of self-creation and self-transcendence without any reference to Axial ideas about transcendence.

I wouldn't be the first to point out that Nietzsche's uebermensch draws from the Christian ideas about 'theosis', which asserts that we humans born in the image and likeness of God are destined to become like gods, if we choose a path that will lead us to it. He wanted to assert the possibility for human divinization as a purely human project without any reference to a transcendent foundation. The problem is that without such a foundation to ground it, such a project easily morphs into vulgar narcissism. And most of the would-be uebmenschen celebrated in film and fiction are variants on the narcissistic theme. So much of pop culture now is some form or another of vulgarized Nietzsche. 

I have a soft spot for Nietzsche, the brilliant, shy, sensitive man who thought himself as a lightning-bolt-throwing prophet. He was the miner's canary, though. He saw before most, and imagined and even lived where late modern societies were headed, which was to the madhouse. 

***

In contemporary America we largely see Nietzsche's fear about a culture of Last Men, Dostoyevski's Piano-Key-Men in the epigraph, affirmed. There is no ethos among the educated elite that celebrates noble aspiration, except maybe in the way that Ayn Rand does it. If there is anyone that speaks to spirited, ambitious young people these days it is she, and her imagined American uebermenschen Howard Roark and John Galt are models of noble aspiration for many of our contemporary entrepreneurs and financial elites. 

To say that God is dead does not mean that faith has become impossible, but it does mean that people who have it have an understanding of reality that has little to do with how the broader contemporary society imagines it. People of faith extrapolate from what is central to their understanding of the Living Real an ontology that is utterly out of joint with how the broader society after the death of God imagines it, and that's the crux.

If people of faith broadly understood are right, people who are guided by their spiritual intuitions, people like MLK, Gandhi, Wordsworth, Shelly, Galileo, Goethe, Blake, Erasmus, Hegel, Emerson, Einstein, Beethoven, Bergson, Berdyaev, Buber, Yeats, and so many more, then the whole materialist edifice is wrong.  It's not wrong because of what it affirms, but because of what it leaves out. As a result, it's out of balance with Reality, and if it's out of balance with reality, it's going to tip over and come crashing down unless it finds a way to get back in balance. It's no longer enough to be neutral on the questions of the spirit because the default ontology shaping the late-modern imaginary isn't neutral--it's materialist, and because it's the default, it undermines in unconscious ways the public will to resist its most destructive effects. 

So secular Liberals will read this and say, "Well that's very interesting, but I don't buy it. And yet I celebrate your right to think whatever you want. I want a society in which it's possible for everybody to be free to think what they want. What scares me is that these fanatics on the religious right want to kill democracy and impose an illiberal theocratic autocracy where people won't be free to think and believe what they want. And you seem to be flirting with that if you think that religion is a solution in the political sphere. You, sir, are a proto-theocrat."

I'm no theocrat--religion should embrace a commitment to political powerlessness. And yes. I fear illiberalism, too. But I also fear that it is inevitable unless a cure for the underlying problem is found. Theocracy provides no solution, but a shift in the broader cultural imaginary is needed, and if secular Liberals understood this need, they would be more openly receptive and supportive of healthy forms of it, because an unhealthy form will fill the vacuum otherwise.

It's a tired cliche, but I can't think of a better one: Liberals are worried about the deck chair arrangement on sinking ship, when they should be concerned with the reason the ship is sinking. What public intellectual these days is talking about a crisis of the spirit. I know it sounds hopelessly old fashioned, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Is this a crisis public intellectuals grapple with in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, or the NYRB? It's beyond the scope of such intellectuals to even frame the problem in this way. To do so is so profoundly inimical to their presuppositions, and that's a big part of why we're in crisis. Nonsense from Peter Singer, John Gray, or Richard Dawkins, however, can be taken very seriously. 

***

What I'm trying to get at here is that with the death of God, i.e., the collapse of the axial Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos, there are no restraints anymore on the real threat to Liberals' ideals for an ever-more open society: the deeper threat is not from the cultural right, but the one posed by the Randians who are driving techno-capitalism. Those folks at the cutting edge of its developments see themselves as uebermenschen at the vanguard of evolution, and they see it as their manifest destiny to steamroll over any one who would oppose them: Get with their evolutionary program, or get out of the way. The craziness on the cultural Right is largely rooted in the "irrational" idea they don't want to get out of the way. They don't want to be piano keys, and in that irrationality I sympathize. 

Because from where I sit techno-evolutionary project is frightening because it's very likely to lead to a society that will be deeply, dystopically, anti-human. And I can say that because I have a very clear commitments about what it means to be human, which draws on the Western Axial ideas about that. And what these 21st century uebermenschen are doing is completely in opposition to those commitments. And because secular Liberals don't feel threatened by this in the way that I do, or maybe find my outlook "interesting" but remain agnostic, i.e, unworthy of their commitment, they have no ground on which to set their feet to push back against the coming anti-human tide. They will just get swept along by it when it comes. 

What's at stake now is the future of humanity, not in some will-we-survive-an-eco-catastrophe sense, but will we all be absorbed into some hyper-real virtual dream completely cut off from the Living Real. Anxiety about our future as humans, whose underlying causes remain mostly unconscious, pervades the culture. It plays out in this fetishizing of guns and liberty and fundamentalist religion, but this fear of losing one's humanity to the machine is at the heart of the malaise that drives right-wing fanaticism. As I argued in Part I, this is not going to be solved by economic or safety-net policies, but it has become nevertheless a problem critical for the future of democracy. The solution for it is not political, but if no solution is found, the consequences will have profound political impacts, none of them good. 

And to be frank, Conservatives are not wrong when they see Liberals as too comfortable with the kind of world that the Positivisitic/Scientistic metaphysics that Dostoyevski is railing against in the quote above. They got a similar scolding from Solschenitzyn over forty years ago that made them squirm. (Why did we invite this lunatic to Harvard?) Well he was mostly right then, and hopefully Liberals can begin to see now why. That 19th-century Positivism is cognate with the humanity-crushing techno-capitalism that is now shaping the human future. And so it's understandable that the cultural Right sees Liberals as collaborationists with machine, for them fetishized in the Deep State, and themselves as the Bravehearts who stoutly resist it.

The radical Right offers no real solutions, and if it takes over, as they well might, they will only make things worse if for no other reason than because its leadership are utterly corrupt nihilists. The ideas that animate the cultural right are 90% delusional fantasy, but that remaining 10% is based in fears that are quite legitimate. But these demagogues on the Right are cunning enough to exploit these anxieties in such a way as to make an enemy of the one thing that can save us from going off the cliff, which is a functioning democracy. 

And in the political sphere, it's too easy to paint the Liberals as those who are aligned with and coopted by the machine. It shouldn't be hard to see why many Americans in the mushy middle turn to the cultural Right because it's a way for them to resist becoming piano keys, a way for them to resist becoming Last Men. They want to hold on to an older idea about what it means to be human. Their sense of human dignity lies in their resistance to the machine.  

***

So you say, "Whatever, but even if you're right, what can be done about it?"

I think the first step is to recognize the deep nature of the problem, and that the only real solution is to rebalance. And if that seems impossible, it's probably because you're still too inured, whether you're aware of it or not, to the materialist/Positivist ontology in which techno-capitalism and the consumerist dreamworld it produces thrives.

So a first step is at least to seek out and listen to those who have an understanding of what's at stake in a way that maybe you don't yet. And those are generally people who have a religious sensibility, people who have a deep sense of reverence about the mystery of Being, people for whom reality is defined by that reverence and not the profane, reductive imagination that comes to us from Positivistic materialism. Wendell Berry, Iain McGilchrist, and Charles Taylor should be on the short list of people to talk to. Almost anybody else I can think of is dead. 

At the very least we need from you a more sympathetic understanding about what role a healthy religious sensibility might play in redressing this balance. 

Religion, if it's working in a healthy way, should function more as a cultural frame that plays the central role in shaping a society's understanding about what is real and unreal, what's true and untrue, what's good and not good, what is worthy of our desires, and what is not. It doesn't need to be linked to a particular religion, but it needs practices and beliefs than help sustain a good society that helps people to become their best selves.  

I'm arguing here that in a society after the death of God, that the deepest aspirations of so many of the brightest and most spirited young people have no where to go except to Silicon Valley until someone comes up with something better. And all the world's Silicon Valleys, if left unchecked, will lead us off the cliff. This is not a Luddite argument; it's simply asserting that in this moment technology is subordinating humans for its needs, and we're powerless against it until humans find enough ontological grit, and with it the self-confidence to assert a human future that subordinates technology to human needs. This is impossible so long as the culture's intelligentsia is captured by the materialist ontology that is cognate with the ontology that supports techno-capitalism. There is no solution within that frame. 

And so here's the thing: whoever controls the most compelling imagination of human possibility controls the future of being human. Silicon Valley owns the human future until a more compelling alternative emerges. And for something better to emerge, maybe it's people who have some deeply felt sense for the mystery of the Living Real--people who are in their many different way 'religious', who need to be consulted on that.

As a rule of thumb, the last people I would turn to are the clerisy in the religious and humanities bureaucracies. North Atlantic societies are too far gone, and Eastern Europe and Northern Asia have little to offer. I'd look to the global South. Just a hunch.

Christian Nationalism

If you're not aware of this bizarre exercise in religious delusion, this article in the NY Times does a good job of laying it out, and of identifying who benefits. It's pretty much what I've been writing about over the last month--how billionaires use culture war issues and credulous Christians to insure the entrenchment of their power and wealth.

While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down. The rank-and-file of the movement is diverse and comes to its churches with an infinite variety of motivations and concerns, but the leaders are far more unified.

They collaborate in a densely interconnected network of think-tanks, policy groups, activist organizations, legal advocacy groups and conservative pastoral networks. What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world. Partisan politics is the lifeblood of their movement.

If one considers the movement from the perspective of its leaders, it is easier to see why it is unlikely to change in the new political circumstances we find ourselves in. The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.

The first is the growing economic inequality that has produced spectacular fortunes for the few, while too many ordinary families struggle to get by. Leaders of the movement get much of the support for their well-funded operations from a cadre of super-wealthy individuals and extended families who are as committed to free-market fundamentalism as they are to reactionary religion. The donors in turn need the so-called values voters in order to lock down their economic agenda of low taxation for the wealthy and minimal regulation. These donors include, among many others, the Prince-DeVos family, the fracking billionaire Wilks brothers, and members of the Green family, whose Hobby Lobby fortune helped build the Museum of the Bible. The movement gets another big chunk of its funding from the large mass of people who are often in the middle rungs of the economic spectrum and whose arduously cultivated resentments toward those below them have been turned into a fund-raising bonanza.

These are the crazy, cargo-cult Christians who give Christianity a bad name. They'd be harmless enough if they weren't providing the base for illiberal autocrats. Read the whole article by Katherine Stewart. It's very good. 

This would also be the starting point for an argument that I'd like to have with David French, who is not a crazy theocratic nationalist, but who is clearly  captured by elements of this ideology by combining his Christian faith with Libertarianism. The idea that traditional values and free-market capitalism work together is intellectually incoherent and proved false by the historical record. Other principled Conservatives like Patrick Deneen and Oren Cass understand this.

I should point out that Charles Koch has apparently had a come-to-Jesus moment--in a good way. He has recently admitted that his role in promoting the the insane partisanship since the Tea Party has gone too far.  I'm not aware of Koch as having any strong religious affiliation. Perhaps that's what saved him. 

Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath

But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life — and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that they’d been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

Kurt Anderson, "How Liberals Opened the Door to [Crank] Libertarian Economics"

Milton Friedman was a crank, a fanatic Libertarian, whose views through much of his early career were relegated to the fringes. The Friedman Doctrine did not cause the problems we are dealing with now--Trumpism, huge economic inequality, intensified racial conflict--but legitimated the worst human impulses that led to their becoming as bad as they are now. Milton Friedman's ideas did not make men greedy; he legitimated greed. He removed the constraints and social norms that impeded people in business from giving their inner Scrooge or Mr. Potter free rein.

There's a direct line from Friedman to the corporate ethos that led to the 2008 meltdown and to the kind of mentality among many business types, especially on Wall Street, that leads them to embrace Trump. Like Friedman, Trump legitimates the worst human impulses. He brazenly acts out what normal people would feel ashamed to do, and so that makes people think he's honest or un-hypocritical. People see the president of the U.S. acting out their own secret, dark fantasies, and admire his "courage". But he's not courageous; he's a sociopath. 

The curious thing about Friedman is that he's an idealist about something that legitimates the worst impulses in human beings. That is a kind of sociopathy that he shares with most religious fanatics. His is a personal psychopathy that justifies Capitalist sociopathy. 

Libertarianism attracts a lot of smart people who are uncomfortable with complexity, who feel insecure at a deep ontological level, and so gravitate toward simplistic solutions that appear smart or edgy. It's the kind of thing that nerdy, emotionally stunted high schoolers get into, like reading Ayn Rand, as if she's really, really, you know, profound. But it's the kind of thing that if you don't outgrow it by your early twenties, you easily meld into the kind of sociopathic ethos that rules on Wall Street and shaped the ethos of Enron.  

Jesus said that the poor we shall have always with us. He forgot to mention that the sociopaths we shall have always with us, too. Unfortunately they're the ones who run things because normal, healthy people don't have their ruthlessness, monomania, and need to dominate. And most decent people tend to give even the worst people, if they're white and rich, the benefit of the doubt until it's too late. Any grifter or con artist understands this tendency among normal, decent human beings, and they know how to take advantage of it. 

The problem with America right now is that a grifter sociopath like Trump has shown other grifter sociopaths that there is a huge swath of the American public--40%+--who are ripe to be massively conned. Certainly more than I thought before Trump got elected--I would have guessed the number closer to 25%. There is nothing to hold back the next grifter sociopath to come along because Trump completed what Friedman began in destroying the decency norms that used to play a role in restraining what's worst in human nature. 

I assume that unless Trump stooges and the Russians are successful somehow in creating enough chaos and confusion to allow Trump to steal the election (a real possibility), Biden will win in November. But unless something even more unexpected happens, it's pretty clear that Biden and the Democrats haven't the imagination or strength of mind to fix what ails us. If 40%+ of the country prefers someone as comically crackpot as Trump now, 50%+ will prefer some future grifter selling the same snake oil but with more sophistication.

They'll find all kinds of crazy ways to justify their support for him or her, but it comes down to the con man's ability to persuade people that what they feel shameful about is really ok. As Gordon Gecko said echoing Friedman, "Greed is good... it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind." It's a great con because it makes you feel good about acting out what's worst. 

12/27/23 Update: I still think that the basic thrust of what I wrote here stands, but maybe softened somewhat by the more complex picture presented in Jennifer Burn's new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Read it and judge for yourself. Friedman, as were many other economists in the neoclassical school that became so influential in the late 20th century, was a true believer in the Cult of the Invisible Hand. He seemed to suffer from whatever the pathology is that leads people to join cults, and that cult produced beliefs and policies that, imo, are sociopathic. And is there any question that he was a fervent evangelist in the spreading of those beliefs and practices? Maybe that's too harsh. To what degree he is morally culpable is not for me to say. He started out as a New Dealer, but in later years he seemed oblivious of how his ideas had such negative impacts on the lives of ordinary people. He was in many ways just a man of his times, and when the times normalize sociopathy everybody shares in it some extent, me included. 

State of the Race 3

It's looking more and more like it's going to be Bernie, and it's looking more and more like the establishment types are in full freak out. I think it's fine to go after him with all guns firing between now and Super Tuesday, but I hope that the establishment types are savvy enough to get behind him if he emerges after Super Tuesday with a significant lead. 

I don't know what's going to happen if Bernie goes up against Trump. Nobody does. Whatever matrix we've had to explain how things usually work no longer has any validity. The "experts" who are predicting that Bernie will lose don't really know. It's just more prudent to say it's 50/50. Conventional wisdom is worthless in our current situation. People want a return to normalcy, but normalcy is no longer a possibility. The best antidote to Trumpism is something like Bernie-ism. It's certainly not back-to-normal-ism.

And so if there's one generalization I think it's safe to maintain, it's that the more establishment the candidate, the more clueless, and the more clueless, the less likely to win. That's the most positive thing that can be said about Bernie. He's the most anti-establishment candidate in the Dem field. And so if establishment Dems in the Hillary/Biden wing of the party hate Sanders, that's just a sign about how out of touch they are.

So that's why if after Super Tuesday Bernie has a significant lead, they better get on the Bernie train and make the best possible case for his candidacy rather than prolong the civil war. Do I think they'll do it? No. And that's what makes me most pessimistic about Bernie's candidacy. It's not about him; it's about them.

Bernie probably understands that it's a liability for him to be called a socialist, but it's worse for him if he backs away from it. Bernie's task--and the task of all Democrats--should be to define Democratic Socialism on their terms and not accept how it will be characterized by the Libertarians in the Business Class. A Democratic Socialist is for social democracy, and social democracy is what we had in this country until Libertarians in the GOP and Neoliberals (like Clinton) in the Democratic party dismantled it. Democratic Socialism is the New Deal. It's Denmark, not Cuba. 

And please, media types, stop thinking you're so smart by asking how Bernie is going to pay for it all. Nobody with any sense believes that he's going to get what he is running on, even Medicare for All. This is not an election about being practical; it's about laying out a vision for the future of the country. And that future is mostly about what young people want, and they don't want more of the same. And for good reason. 

And Bernie is right when he questions why it's ok to build huge deficits to benefit the wealthiest as Reagan, Bush, and Trump have done, but not for programs that actually benefit real people. It's not about what's practical; it's about what there's the political will to do. So it's first about getting the right people in office, and then it's about the hard work of building a consensus and the political will to solve real problems, chief among them the ridiculous inequity in our wealth distribution. This gross injustice is the responsibility of both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats who effected it by dismantling the New Deal, i.e., the social democratic, framework that kept things more equitable during our trente glorieuses.

Sorry Pete and Amy. The old people and editorial boards love you, but the old people and establishment media aren't the future. I don't know if Bernie is the answer or whether he'll succeed, but he has a better chance of it than either of you do. 

BTW--Check out this post I wrote some years ago: Socialism vs. Neoliberalism

Albee's "The Goat" or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness

Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however, becomes enraptured with and starts sleeping with a goat named Silvia, and the play examines how family and friends react when they learn of his breaking the bestiality taboo, and how each falls into a state that I call ontological dizziness.

Ontological Dizziness (OD) is an experience that many people are having with increasing frequency: one is walking along in a world that seems securely grounded in reality, but then finds that all the while he was walking while balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead. Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in this country in their different ways experience themselves walking on firm ground, but they have been doing it in what I like to think of as Reality Simulation Orbs, and these orbs for both groups are breaking down.

By 'simulation' I mean that people, all of us, live in symbolic systems that provide models of reality that work with data given by Reality, but these symbolic systems interpret the data in any number of possible ways depending on the cultural download that runs the simulation. It's a simulation because it gives us a model of reality and not reality itself. A good analogy is how a pilot can fly in extreme fog with instruments rather than seeing what's there. The instruments use real data to provide information about what's there. The instruments provide a stripped down version of reality, that is good enough to navigate by, but filters out almost everything else that is not relevant to navigation.

Similarly, our acculturation runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it, but it's a very filtered version of what's actually there. The best simulations work with the broadest range of accurate data, but even when a simulation works with good data, it always filters out more than it lets in.

We know there's real data, and we know when our simulation fails to interpret it correctly. How? Well, when we make mistakes, i.e., when our simulation isn't reflecting accurately what's there, we pay the price. For instance, Neocons were working with a Reality Simulation in which invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein would be a cakewalk. Their reality simulation worked with some data that was accurate, but their simulation failed because it filtered out too much data, data that was actually readily available, and that's what made their plan so egregiously foolish. We can't know everything, but the definition of foolishness is to reject good data because it challenges the assumptions that govern our simulation orb. Reality has a way of asserting itself when we filter out the parts of it that insist on being taken seriously. 

I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulation orbs--even the best of them--work with incomplete data, and so the programs that run the simulation can only provide best guesses in their interpretation of the data available to it. If the simulation program seems to work, we assume it's interpretations of the data are good enough, at least until they don't work. And because Reality is dynamic and continuously transforming, sooner or later simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. So, for instance, it no longer works for most of us to think that the woods are full of spirits, that the gods control our destiny, that the sun rotates around the earth. Or more recently that Blacks and Native American are subhumans who deserve to be treated like animals or just wiped from the face of the earth.

Most people live in simulations that have made the appropriate adjustments, but many have not. Those who operate in simulations that filter out important data given in a particular society's historical reality have a harder time navigating in the real world. They experience OD with greater intensity than others, and substance abuse, joining cults, or engaging in extremist politics are coping mechanisms for some victims of OD. And some feel OD with such intensity that they will do anything they think necessary to restore the simulation that gives them a sense of security and order. Some of the mass shootings we've seen in recent years are motivated by vengeance, but many of them are motivated by a need to restore the old Reality Simulation that the shooters feel is being undermined by those they shoot.

Capitalism and technological innovation are amoral, anarchic forces that have, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, destroyed every traditional culture into which it has come into contact. Either the people who live in those cultures adjust to the new data or they don't. Liberals are people who have adjusted, and Conservatives are people who have not. The strength of operating within the Liberal Reality Simulation is that it's better adapted to the creative destructive forces of techno-capitalism; the disadvantage is that is that its adaptation has left behind aspects of the older simulations that worked with real data regarding transcendent dimensions of Reality, aspects of Reality that transcended randomness and anarchic change.

The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that transcendent data has been filtered out. But that doesn't mean there is no such data available. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of the older reality that affirms transcendence, but they do it in a a way that is deeply maladapted to Reality in a reality shaped by the creative destructive aspects of contemporary techno-Capitalism. 

Progress, until recently, has been intrinsic to the Liberal program, but the new data given by the reality of the World Wars, the dropping of the atom bomb, the unraveling of traditional cultural norms in the sixties and seventies, the failure of the Political Left almost everywhere since the 80s has led the Progressive Left to surrender to the anarchy of markets and to a rejection of any grand narratives that suggests there is anything but anarchy. And so at least among the elite in the Cultural Left, their simulation Orb no longer allows for narratives in which some kind of better future is a possibility, because the word "better" really is a word fraught with metaphysical assumptions that are no longer part of their simulation. Randomness is all, so learn to live with it. 

***

This idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat.At first I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think he's trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing its OD. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition, in that it seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos, because when they are subverted, they experience OD that just as their conservative opponents do. They are more like them than they might want to acknowledge. Whether Albee thinks that's a good or bad thing, I don't know. But the underlying point seems to be that we have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality.

So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Lacanian assumption, as Albee seems to do, that all human beings are polymorphously perverse in their desires but those desires are repressed by the Oedipus Complex, the cultural download of codes and taboos that we all receive as children. Humans, no matter what their culture, have the Oedipus Complex, which generates the codes in the symbolic sphere--the Reality Simulation-- that gives humans their sense of order, an order that no sane person can live without. It creates the program--different for different cultures--that the simulation orb plays for us.

In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation Orb has been shattered with the revelation that her "normal" husband is having an affair with a goat. So, after her violent, dish-throwing, furniture-overturning rant during the middle of the play when she learns about her husband's "infidelity", she goes out to find Silvia, the goat, severs her head, and hauls the carcass onto the stage in the play's final moment. It's pretty horrifying. 

After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very urban-hip, intelligent students whether they thought Stevie had over-reacted. "Why couldn't she be more tolerant and understanding of her husband?" I asked. I was curious to see how far their non-judgmental, anything-goes-so-long-as-you-don't-hurt-anybody ethic extended. Apparently it does not extend to bestiality.  All the students thought that Stevie's violent freak-out was completely understandable, and that this was not a play celebrating bestiality, which clearly, they all thought was horrifying.

Apparently some sexual taboos are still in place with this generation. But why should bestiality be so horrifying if taboos are just arbitrary social constructions? Isn't that what these students have come to believe about all the traditional taboos that govern the ethos of Rural America? Why is bestiality different? Martin makes clear that his relationship with Silvia was consensual, and that his love for her was reciprocated. Who are we to judge? And by what standard do we judge?

Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if Albee was familiar with Derrida's famous 1969 essay, "Plato's Pharmacy" in which Derrida plays with the Greek word pharmakos and pharmakon. Pharmakos has the ambivalent meaning of a potion that can be both cure and poison; pharmakon is the Greek word for goat. In the play, Silvia, the goat, is a potion that both poisons and cures. It is poison as the kind of potion, like Puck's in Midsummer Night's Dream, that induces Titania to swoon for the ass-headed Bottom.

But is the potion something that creates delusion, or is it rather something that induces 'disinhibition' insofar as it lets in heretofore filtered-out aspects of Reality--in this case Martin's repressed polymorphous perversity that is no respecter of taboos in the way it eroticizes everything. Someone like Norman O. Brown (remember him?) would say that a retrieval of polymorphous perversity and its ecstasy is the goal--and even argues that its attainment is the true meaning of the Christian idea of Resurrection of the Body. A guy like Martin is closer to it than Stevie and the others who are so appalled by his breaking of this taboo. Is the pharmakon a blue pill or a red pill? Is it the red pill insofar as it dissolves the Oedipal simulation orb? Or is it the blue pill insofar as it restores the old simulation and the sense of sanity, safety, and order it provides? Or to put it another way, which pill is the poison and which the cure?

So Martin's encounter with Silvia is like his having taken a potion that induces him to leave his particular late-modern, taboo-constrained Oedipal Reality and to enter a kind of Norman O Brown ecstasy state. Stevie and the others are appalled by the breaking of the taboo, by the disgust that is evoked by the physical act, but for Martin it's all about the ecstasy, an ecstasy he knows the others cannot understand because they have not taken the potion.The old Liberal, taboo-constrained Simulation is dissolved, and he goes into a new, polymorphously perverse orb of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire.

Is Martin ill? Or is Stevie? Or are they both? Now, to step outside the Oedipal Simulation in Freudian terms is mental illness. The degree to which one steps out determines whether one's illness is neurosis or psychosis. So do both need a cure? Which pill to take then--the red or the blue? They both are experiencing aspects of Reality outside the Oedipal System that in their case is defined by the Liberal cosmopolitan Simulation Orb. It has broken down in different ways for both; it's just that Martin does not feel the need to return to the old order whereas Stevie does, and so she acts in uncharacteristically violent ways for a tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.

***

And so it struck me that one of the takeaways for these students--and all Liberal, cosmopolitan audiences--is that everybody has taboo systems, and everybody needs them, and when they are subverted, it's understandable that people react as Stevie did, And it's completely understandable that she wants to go back into the old simulation--she wants that blue pill. But if Stevie's violent reaction to the subversion of the bestiality taboo is understandable, isn't the violent reaction of Red America to the subversion of its taboos equally understandable?

The question here is not about what's right or wrong in any ultimate sense, but in just understanding the role that taboos play in keeping us sane. There is nothing absolute about superego, but we need one. The question is how to transform it so that it does its job of preserving our sanity while at the same time it becomes more permeable to a broader, richer experience of Reality.

And I would add that superego always assumes some kind of grand narrative. Collective sanity--a cure for our chronic OD--cannot be restored without there being some plausible collective imagination of future possibility that is grounded in Reality. The challenge for us is not to live without such a narrative, but to develop a good one, one that works with the real data that Reality provides for us. Reality is in large part chaotic and anarchic, but what's more important is that humans learn how to work with those energies lawfully.  

And we don't have a narrative for that yet, at least not one that has broad acceptance. But for me such a future narrative will draw upon the wisdom of the past. We may never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation Orb, but we can keep developing better orbs that use higher levels of good data and are flexible enough to adapt as new, higher quality data becomes available. And that includes data given to us that transcends the anarchic, destructive forces that otherwise will continue to drive history. 

 

Contempt for the Liberal Class

Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.”

That phrase, delivered with sneering emphasis on the second word, may have been a key to the whole confusing affair. Tom Frank

Contempt for the 'Liberal Class' comes from both the Left and the Right. If the near Republican sweep last week demonstrates contempt from the Right, it masks what is also a contempt from the Left. Chris Hedges' keelhauling of Liberals in his book The Death of the Liberal Class explains why the Left finds the Liberal Class so odious:

The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions — the pillars of the liberal class — have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda to propel us into a war in Iraq. Many of these same journalists assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Those life savings were gutted. The media, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, at the same time renders invisible whole sections of the population whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principle focus of journalism.

In the name of tolerance — a word the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., never used — the liberal church and the synagogue refuse to denounce Christian heretics who acculturate the Christian religion with the worst aspects of consumerism, nationalism, greed, imperial hubris, violence, and  bigotry. These institutions accept globalization and unfettered capitalism as natural law. Liberal religious institutions, which should concern themselves with justice, embrace a cloying personal piety expressed in a how-is-it-with-me kind of spirituality and small, self-righteous acts of publicly conspicuous charity. Years spent in seminary or rabbinical schools, years devoted to the study of ethics, justice, and morality, prove useless when it comes time to stand up to corporate forces that usurp religious and moral language for financial and political gain. (Source)

The Liberal Class is the 'establishment' in Washington, but it's also as much the establishment in liberal Seattle as it is in conservative Omaha. Those who compose the Liberal Class may disagree about gay marriage and abortion in those two cities, but they agree when it comes to neoliberal principles that organize the economy. They agree when it comes to globalization; they agree when it comes to hatred of unions; they agree when it comes to top-down education reform; they agree when it comes to regulating Wall Street or running oil pipelines from the Tar Sands of Alberta.

Daniel Bell wrote an article that I want to write more about in the future about five kinds of conservative. Libertarians (Ayn Rand, the Pauls), Populists (Tea Party,) Evangelical Christians (Huckabee, Palin, Goehmert, etc.), Neconservatives (Cheney, Kristol, Krauthammer), and Corporatists (Catholic conservatives like Wm F. Buckley and Antonin Scalia). The names in parens are my examples, not Bell's, but I think that taxonomy stands up as well today as it did in '87. The one end of the spectrum is Liberal and anti-statist; the other end is anit-Liberal and Statist--an extreme example would be Franco's Spain, which Buckley sometimes defended. I don't think the paleo-conservatism of The American Conservative magazine fits well in any of these categories. It is anti-statist, and a defender of traditional values--but it is is also anti Libertarian and in that sense anti-populist, if by populist we mean these days the populism of the Tea Party. I am very sympathetic to its POV, but its POV has close to zero influence in shaping policy. 

None of these groups votes Democratic, and yet the Libertarians, who dominate Republican policy thnking at this time, are quite sympathetic to Neoliberal economic and social policy as described above. Because Neoliberalism, whether in Republican or Democratic attire, dominates the Washington consensus and is the ideology of the ruling class in Washington--and wherever else elites hold sway. And yet, for now at least, Libertarians, dominate Republican thinking and are of all the five conservative groups most comfortable with Neoliberal policy thinking. This is the point that Frank is making in the rest of the article--the Tea Partiers and Evangelicals are electing Republicans who, whether they believe this about themselves or not, will fit right in when they get to Washington. They think they are sending people there who are anti-Liberal establishment, but nothing could be further from the truth. 

Neoliberal policy eventually leads to social chaos, and the the Neocons and Corporatists are waiting in the wings to clean up the mess. And they will be the only option unless something emerges on the progressive Left to present a robust alternative. This is what I meant when I wrote the other day that Leo Strauss will likely supplant Ayn Rand in shaping the Republican mindset. It's far more intellectually sophisticated than Libertarianism, and it is very seductive. I could see the Washington consensus become dominated by it very easily.

The Neocons have more in common with managerial Liberalism that the Corporatists, but both Neocons and Corporatists are about as anti-populists as you can get, and the Corporatists are about as anti-Liberal as you can get. That's precisely why it will appeal to Washington elites when the Libertarian-driven crash inevitably comes. If you're not familiar with the magazine, read First Things. It's an interesting attempt to join theologically conservative Catholics with evangelicals in shaping discourse in the public sphere. It supported the invasion of Iraq, a Neocon project, and aligns for the most part with a thoughtlful Wm. F. Buckley  Catholic corporatism--probably moreso now than does Buckley's National Review, which has become an unreadable partisan rag.

I am not at all sympathetic with its POV, but  First Things is not unreadable in that way, and if we are moving into a post-Liberal, post-Secular era, as I think wet are, here is a good possibility that it will be dominated by conservative thinking until a post-secular progressive alternative can form.  So we might as well understand what we're in for. More on Leo Strauss as I have time. I'm reading Gottfried's Leo Strauss and the Coervative Movement in America. 

 

Silicon Valley Progressivism

"And when you walk thru Uber’s HQ in San Francisco, the place is pulsating with young, brilliant and dedicated employees who believe they are part of doing something historic and meaningful and won’t take no for an answer. It’s a feeling I’ve been fortunate to experience previously and feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by that talent and energy one more time." David Plouffe quoted in Andrew Leonard's "How Uber Will Conquer America".

Exploiting the idealism and adventurousness of the young--it's an old game played by old men to get kids to fight in wars that should not have been declared or to support demagogues who should never be given power. It's now a game being played to hoodwink kids into supporting a economic model that is leading us into neofeudal peonage.

It's cool--it's disruptive, no stodgy rules, no boring safety net. But those kids working for Uber are no different than the associates who work for Wal-Mart--except in their having been sold a bill of goods that they are going to change the world. For better or worse? Who cares? It's not boring. A lot of German kids reasoned that way in the early 30s. As did a lot of kids worldwide in 1914. Off to war. What a lark! What excitement! What a delusion. 

My son just turned 18 in time for the election in 2008. He was a senior in high school, and with a handful of his friends who were voting age decided to ritualize the moment by wearing a suit and tie to school on election day and to drive together to the polls to cast their votes for Obama. I was touched by that, that they would even care enough, but Obama did that for kids then. It was one of the last years that such a ritual was even possible, at least here in Washington State, because now here it's mail-in only voting. It's more consumer friendly, no hassle of having to actually go out to the local school, wait in line with neighbors for a few minutes, go to a booth, and actually cast your vote. Voting is so much easier to do in the privacy of your own home.

Well, we all now know how disappointing for young people the election of 2008 turned out, and now politics are no longer inspiring for them--disruptive business models are the next new thing. The 'consumer' has now completely displaced the 'citizen'. There is no stronger indicator that we have given up on the belief that we have the capability to govern ourselves; we all have abdicated responsibility to the mystical powers of the Invisible Hand to make all things right. 

Depair as the Refusal to Become One's Self

...the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair.  --Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.” --Gordon Marino

A few weeks ago I reposted a piece that quoted extensively from Emerson's essay on "Heroism", and in the last paragraphs I say

Of course, Nietzsche blamed Christianity for promoting this slavish, weak-souled quality, and there is some merit in the accusation. But that's a theme I want to address in coming posts. Because now more than ever we need an imagination of future possibility that has religious roots and which inspires in us, and perhaps more importantly inspires in the young, an aspiration toward robust virtue. This is not a liberal project.

My post several days ago on "Honor" describing how it was a delusional recognition/ego fantasy as contrasted with the idea of 'integrity' was one attempt to develop that alternative idea of 'virtue'. In today's post, I want to address what Gordon Marino points to as the delusion of happiness. I think that the framework within which I am trying to do this is shaped first of all by the larger theme developed on this site, which is that God and the sacred are no longer available to us anywhere out there--in nature or in culture and ritual. That doesn't mean that God and the sacred don't exist and never did, but rather that they've gone into hiding, underground so to speak, when the underground is the depths of the human heart. There lies the sacred, or at least the potential for its growth and  through it the renewal of the face of the earth.

If there is anything the gospels make clear it's that the ur-Christian experience is of a new birth of a  kingdom within. (How many people who call themselves Christians have any idea what this is?) My argument on this blog over the years has been that this "kingdom" born within is a very real experience at first tentative and fragile but which grows stronger if it is nurtured and develops into the interior 'nomos' that we  recognize as conscience. Conscience is the cognitive capability that as it grows develops in us an increased capacity for discerning 'what is called for' in any given situation, and what is called for is often subversive of the existing norms, laws, and practices of the culture in which one's conscience grows.

I am averse to deontological presecriptions, but I do not consider myself a relativist. Nevertheless, I am in a certain sense an anti-nomian, if by 'nomian' we mean the existing mores and norms of any culture or society, and yet I am deeply 'nomian' in the sense that I assert vehemently the existence of the Law that is in each of us a seed planted in the depths of human heart that must germinate and grow. And so as with all things that develop and grow, there are people who have more highly developed and thus more highly cognitive consciences, and there are those who have less developed and confused consciences. We are in despair to the degree that we are oblivious of our conscience, and we live in hope to the degree that one grows within us to a point where we have learned how to submit to its interior nomos.

The basic 'heuristic' or working hypothesis that governs most of what I write on this blog is that the human future, which is coincident with the future of the earth, depends on the emergence of conscience understood in this sense of interior nomos and logos in such a way as to play a more robust role in the shaping of our cultural, political, economic life. And while I do not think that Christians have any special claim or are any more adept than non-Christians in matters of conscience, I do believe the gospels and the ur-Christian narrative (as contrasted with the historical narrative of the churches) provides a framework for understanding what this nomos/logos is and how it works in the human soul.

I say this in order to explain that my debunking of heroism, honor, or the common aspiration for human flourishing and happiness as forms of Kierkegaardian despair is not in the service of snarkery or of some attempt to be superior to all of that. It's in the service of trying to think through and to discern, for my own sake as well as for readers here who are interested to think about it with me, what is deeply real and what is delusion. I certainly make no claims to have any special insight here. I am no prodigy of conscience. My moral cognitive capacity is primitive at best. But I have enough of it to know it's real and to want to take seriously the task of developing it.  

So why is honor and heroism and the aspiration to be happy despair? They are when they are fantasies that lead to dead ends. Is it always wrong to have a 'dream' for a flourishing life? No, but it's easy for our dreams and fantasies to lead us down those dead ends rather than along the way that brings us gradually to the realization of who we were created to be. When we we are "bewitched" by the first, it's a form of despair. But how to know the difference? 

***

I came of age in an era when Freud was still taken seriously, and when it wasn't shameful to admit you found Jung intriguing. But we're in a post-Freudian era now. Something happened--in the 80s or 90s?--when it became accepted conventional wisdom that the ailments of the soul were nothing more than bad brain chemistry. I was never a Freudian, but Freud, at least, when he was taken seriously, created a space in our mainstream cultural life for considering the possibility that we have souls that are in need of our care.

For Freud the soul or psyche was mostly a cauldron of sub-rational, instinctual impulses, but while I was never a Jungian, I found him interesting for finding a quasi culturally legitimate way to talk about the super-rational and transpersonal archetypes as mixed in with all the other impulses in that cauldron. That kind of thing seems to have been pushed to the periphery now. Jung is considered a flake today in a way he wasn't thirty or forty years ago. 

Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, argues that Kierkegaard was talking about both the sub- and super-rational in a proto-postmodern idiom decades before both Freud and Jung. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are, in my opinion, the profounder and more honest psychologists in comparison to Freud and Jung, and each, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in a profounder way, was a prophet pointing to two possibilities that lay before humans in what has become the no-longer modern age. I think we're living the Nietzschean alternatives, but I'd argue that real hope lies in living a Kierkegaardian one.

Let's do a bloggy comparison of the two: I admire Nietzche's cultural analysis, but find his prescription for a cure regressive. I admire Kierkegaard's cultural analysis, and see him as someone who points us to our best future. Both understood the leveling cultural forces carried by late modernity and the spirit of capitalism and how they were grinding up the human soul and churning out despairing Last Men. And both offered alternatives, which I would argue are the only alternatives to being bread-and-circuses Last Men if one is serious about finding one. Kierkegaard's solution, if not the road less frequently taken (I think there are many 'anonymous' Kierkegaardians out there), is certainly a road much less celebrated in popular and high culture. W.H. Auden and Walker Percy were deeply influenced by Kierkegaard. What significant literary figure or thinker is alive today about whom the same could be said? There are many pop-Nietscheans--Ayn Rand comes to mind--but are there any pop Kierkegaardians? [One example comes to mind: I saw the Tao of Steve a few months ago, which was an entertaining attempt to make some Kierkegaardian themes more available. Any others?]

Nietzsche and, more obviously, Darwin define the cultural narrative that dominates mainstream secular thinking in our time. Darwin’s influence is better understood, but Nietzsche is no less important in terms of his significance in shaping the postmodern stream of secularist thought. When talk of Nietzsche comes up, it’s usually associated with a discussion of his idea of the uebermensch “Superman” or, and the way the Nazis appropriated it in to their bizarre ideas about the Aryan master race, or the Leopold and Loeb affair. While the German word uebermensch is usually translated into English as superman, it's meaning is closer to "overcoming man." And for Nietzsche 'overcoming' meant self-transcending.

And we could point to many of the toxic ways in which Nietzsche’s philosophy, fairly or unfairly, has been adapted to justify excessively pathological behaviors. Just as there are vulgar Christians, there are vulgar Nietzscheans, and it's unfair to attribute to the eponymous founder the limitations of those who claim him as their inspiration. (Nietzsche understood that as well as anyone as in his famous quote: "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.") Nietzsche was an honest and very serious thinker, and he was confronting a very real problem head on. He was struggling for a way to embrace transcendence in a world in which grace was an impossibility.

Not possible, I'm afraid. There was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. But he deserves credit for seeing more clearly than almost anyone the nature of the problem and the importance at the 'end of an age' to find a new model of open-ended human future possibility to which late moderns could aspire that contrasted with the homogenized lumpen mass of Last Men into which he thought his contemporaries were being transformed. 

The conflict between Superman and Last Man has had a tremendous impact on our popular culture in the way we have come to understand heroism or what the well-lived life is. It is seen, for instance, in almost every film that comes out of Hollywood since the 1960s. The protagonist, whether he’s an action hero, or the free-spirited type that for instance Jack Nicholson portrays in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, or even Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (just to take three films that randomly come to mind) is a variation of Nietzsche’s uebermensch.

Whether Nietzsche would approve of these heroes is another matter, but we understand our heroism these days in a Nietzschean idiom. He is formulaically depicted as a larger-than-life, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along Superman who always fights a villain who represents the repressive, conformist law of the Last Man--aka, "The System". Every plot that pits the alienated, risk-taking, bold individual against the soul-crushing ”system” is a variation on this Nietzschean theme. 

The American adaptation of Nietzsche’s Superman is hardly perceived as pathological. Rather in one variation or another, he is the charismatic, passionate man. He’s in touch with his instincts, he knows what he wants, and he thinks that rules are for lesser beings, namely the Last-Man wimps who lack his boldness and initiative. In Hollywood terms you’re either a Superman or a conformist, ground down, bread-and-circuses Last Man, and if you’re a Last Man, your story is only interesting if it’s about how you find the courage to become a Superman. 

The uebermensch is antinomian and subversive, but in the service of what? Usually mostly the service of his ego or in some vague idea of 'freedom' for its own sake. As if the assertion of freedom for its own sake over against the system equates with 'then they live happily ever after'. The real question is what does one do with one's freedom beyond simply fighting against those who would suppress it? Does it matter if we use our freedom in the service of a delusion or in the service of the Real? Of course it does, but first you have to believe that there is a Real. Otherwise everyone is living in a dream of his own choosing, and every dream is equal, if perhaps not aesthetically, ontologically. But serious people cannot be satisfied with to substitute the aesthetic for the ontological. The Nazi aesthetic then becomes equal to a Zen aesthetic, merely a matter of preference. That, of course, is Kierkegaard's point in his discussion of the movement from the aesthetic to the ethical. What is it that awakens when one makes that movement? It's the germination of the aforementioned conscience, which is the birth of the Self.

The Nietzschean heroes tend to be transgressive "libertarian" types who seek to overcome the restrictions of traditional morality when they appear in popular cinema, but in real life, particularly in the American political sphere, the Nietzschean hero is embraced more readily and dangerously by the political right. Right wingers like Dick Cheney see themselves as uebermenschen, and see Liberals as the contemptible promoters of a society that produces lumpen Last Men: Rule of law?  That's for Last Men, not for me. I am a superman who creates his own reality. Ironies, of course abound, when it comes to the ways in which the lockstep, conformist, law-and-order movement conservative comes to support leaders like Cheney, who sees himself fancies himself above the law and beyond good and evil. These movement conservatives are, alas, Last Men, and they submit to the strong man, the Big Daddy, who promises them bread and circuses and to keep them safe.

But movement conservatives don't see themselves as Last Men. Rather they see themselves as players in a grandiose heroic fantasy. They see themselves as homorable defenders of freedom, and they see Liberals as destroyers of it. Movement Conservatives, with the exception of the demagogues who cynically manipulate them, are Last Men through and through, but they project their Last Manhood onto their ideological polar opposites. One thing about Freud and Jung: they understood how projection works. And if there is one essential element of collective right-wing psychology, it's their projection of dissociated negative parts of themselves to demonize those whom they perceive to be their enemies, whether they are Communists, Muslims, or Democrats. Obama is a trifecta in this respect. 

***

So what alternative does Kierkegaard offer to either the Last Man or the Superman?  Here's Marino in the NYT piece:

Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince, despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else. 

Delusion, therefore, is wanting to be someone other than who you are. But who are you? Well, the Christian answer is that you are the being in whose image God created you to live in communion with him and the rest of creation. I explore this problem of Selfhood in my posts "From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen I and II", But here's the bottom line: The difference between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is that the latter was open to the super-rational, the realm of grace and freedom. Nietzsche's world, for all his longing for liberation, was a closed system, a jail, the overcoming Self come to a dead end, locked in on itself, an eternity of drawn-out Groundhog Days, endless cycles of eternal return. You can argue that Nietzsche is the braver for accepting the hard truth, but to do so requires a willful rejection of so much evidence for the existence of grace.

You don't have to believe in the Christian mythos; unpacking that is graduate level work that isn't all that important in the final analysis. Just acknowledging the existence of grace is all that's required. It's Ariadne's thread, lying there right in front of us, discernible by conscience, for conscience is our cognitive capacity recognize the working of grace. And if one uses it as a guide, it will bring him wherever he needs to go, whether with the correct intellectual understanding or not. And for some pulling on that thread might lead them to Kierkegaard who might help them make some sense of what they've got hold of, because his work is nothing if it is not primarily a phenomenology of grace.

That's the only thing that explains his description of the movement out of the aesthetic, into the ethical, and ultimately into the religious. It's at the heart of his antinomian ideas about the teleological suspension of the ethical. It's why he points to  Abraham as the paradigmatic man of grace. But the reverse is true as well: you're not going to get anywhere with Kierkegaard unless you have some basic apprehension of the basic logic of grace. His stuff will seem only to be convoluted nonsense without it.

And if the world is in fact devoid of grace, and if the great tradition that bears witness to it is delusional, then Nietzsche's intuition about the logic of eternal return is quite correct. But once you accept the possibility that he is not correct, the world is turned upside down and we learn that the thread of conscience leads us down a path designed to subvert the system from within its belly, not in the style of the Nietzschean hero, but in the style the Logos bearer--those who have Selves reconstituted in the image and likeness. Frodo Baggins is more the heroic prototype here, but for more on this, see my posts Christian Liberty and  Disembedding and Theosis.

For despair is the condition of not-Self, when by Self we mean the 'image and likeness' we were created us to become, the Self that is destined to live in communion with other realized Selves in the communion of saints. To be in despair is to be on a path of delusion that leads to the retardation of the Self's development or to its destruction. To live in hope is to be on the path that cultivates the Self's growth, and that is always a moral path, mostly walked in darkness, but lit a few feet in front of us by the flame of conscience.  And this path often enough leads us to places we would rather not go. But it's easier to go there if we accept that happiness and human flourishing are not the only criteria to measure a life well lived.

[This is a revison of a 2009 post entitled "Kierkegaard on the Couch".]

 

Burke v. Paine = Right v. Left?

In a review of Yuval Levn's book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Burke biographer Jesse Norman writes:

But one might wonder if these categories can really be mapped onto the left and right of American politics today. After all, it was Ronald Reagan, icon of American conservatives, who in declaring his candidacy for the presidency in 1979 repeated Paine’s words that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” a sentiment that taken literally should be utterly repugnant to any Burkean. Indeed, one way to read America’s own political development is as a progression from the Burkean conservatism of the Founding—which, as Michael Barone has shown, preserved so much of the British legal and constitutional settlement of 1688—steadily forward to the modern populist embrace of Paine.

Indeed, the irony is that as the federal government has grown, so has the number of self-professed Burkeans of the left seeking to preserve the status quo; while it is the Paineans of the right who seek to begin all over again. Needless to say, this misreads both Burke and Paine; indeed it makes one despair for the future of Burkeans in American politics. . . .

I am familiar with Corey Robin's mission to demythologize Edmund Burke and to paint him as little more than an apologist for free markets and oligarchic entrenched interests. But free markets were progressive in the anti-Tory, anti-landed gentry/aristocrat sense in the 1790s, and I wonder if Burke would have had the same opinion of free markets had he lived to see what was happening in Lancashire by the 1830s. His younger soul mate de Toqueville was revolted by it. Nevertheless, without getting into arguments about  who was the "real" Burke, I think we can talk about a Burkean temper of mind, and so a Burkean left and a Painean Left. As Norman points out, Burke was considered a man of the Left before 1789:

The French Revolution had been widely celebrated amongst intellectuals, radicals, and bien-pensants in Britain, and many people naturally assumed that Burke would join his protégé, the Whig leader Charles James Fox, in acclaiming it. It came as a profound shock for them to read not merely that he was bitterly opposed, but opposed in terms that combined soaring rhetoric with what was quickly recognized as a profound statement of political philosophy, including a devastating critique of revolution itself. As that critique came under fire—and the Reflections became a bestseller—Burke himself was denounced as a turncoat and traitor to the progressive cause. His reaction was to redouble his efforts, in a desperate bid to halt what he saw as the canker of Jacobinism from spreading to Britain.

To none was the shock of the Reflections greater than to Thomas Paine. He had made his name as the author of the revolutionary tract Common Sense in 1776, stiffening American popular resolve for war against the Crown. Returning to Britain, he stayed for several days in the summer of 1788 with Burke at the latter’s house near Beaconsfield. Now he saw that Burke’s book demanded a rapid and equally trenchant public response. The result was The Rights of Man, whose two parts were an even bigger popular success, if not quite as big as Paine claimed. There followed dozens of further pamphlets, as opinion divided over the issue, while the revolution in France descended—as Burke had predicted—into anarchy, terror, and war.

So before the French Revolution Burke was perceived as what might be anachronistically called a Progressive. Fox and Paine saw him as their ally and were shocked to learn that he opposed from the beginning what was happening in France. They thought that he was one of them, because on issues like slavery, the American Revolution, Ireland, and other issues he was with them, so why would he depart from them on this, the most fantastic eruption for human progress and liberaton from tyranny in the history of the world?

It is understandable from the perspective of 1789-1792 why honest thinkers alive then might embrace the Revolution in France--I'm sure I would have been among them. But can anyone on the left argue now in a post-1989 world that Burke was wrong and Paine and Fox were right? For clearly Burke was more prescient, and his fundamental insight explains also why the Jacobin principle of social change--to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch--while appealing to a certain kind of naive idealism--has proved itself over and over again to lead to even greater evils than those they were designed to eliminate. 

The essence of the French Revolution and the others inspired by it is radical discontinuity with what preceded it. The American Revolution was about continuity, about being left alone to govern themselves as they were wont to do before the encroachment of a meddling monarch (and parliament) after the French and Indian War. But the spirit of discontinuity inspired by 1789 defined for the rest of the world what it meant to be progressive, and those who were uncomfortable with the assumption that progressive social change equated with radical discontinuity were forced into the opposition and branded reactionaries.

This is, I think, the key to understanding why the temper and spirit of American progressivism is different from progressive movements inspired by the spirit of 1789--it is more evolutionary and experimental, more about continuity than discontinuity, and at its heart it is resistant to meddlesome centralizers and technocrats, be they monarchical or revolutionary. All progressives embrace freedom and equality, but in American culture freedom is primary, equality secondary. For societies inspired by the  the spirit of 1789, I'd argue that in most cases equality is primary, and freedom secondary.

For me the politics of a social social democracy is not about the dominance of one or the other, but it accepts that there is a dynamic tension between freedom and equality, and that continuous adjustments are necessary when there is too much freedom at the expense of equality or too much equality at the expense of freedom. Neither is absolute; both are defined in relation to the other. In America that means that progressives most often find themselves fighting to increase equality, because there is too little of it as the American temper is biased toward freedom.

Progressivism in the late 19th Century through the New Deal and Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and Gay Rights eras has been about fighting inequality. In the beginning it was about redressing inequalities in the economic sphere; toward the end it has been about redressing inequalities in the social sphere. And my argument here for some time has been that the American left's focus on social inequality has provided cover for economic elites to push for egregious inequalities in the economic sphere in the name of freedom.

So now we find ourselves back where we were in the early Progressive period. Elites in either party have little problem with the push for social equality, but they are very reluctant to embrace adjustments to inequality in the economic sphere. That's a much tougher adjustment, because it's one thing to fight against relatively powerless old white people who listen to FOX and quite another to fight Neoliberals in the think tanks and foundations, and on Wall Street. They are not powerless, and they pretty much own the Democratic Party. 

And so another question arises, and that is whether, especially now in a post-1989 world, the spirit 1789 provides an adequate frame for progressives now, and whether it can provide an adequate counterbalance to the Neoliberalism that has has emerged triumphant since 1989. My argument here for years is that the secular spirit of 1789 was never was indigenous to American progressivism, even though since the sixties it has become the spirit of the cultural and political left in this country. And I would argue that Main Streeters who otherwise want progressive change reject alliances with the left precisely because it is not home grown. Americans are allergic to Jacobinism in all its forms. Jacobins might win temporary victories, but if progressive change is to be framed in a way that can be embraced by the broad American public, it has to be framed in terms more consonant with 1776 than 1789. There is a difference. 

The American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution in Britain were Burkeish revolutions because they were about taking steps forward that were continuous with their pasts; the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions were Jacobin revolutions in that they emphasized discontinuity and the imposition of abstract social blueprints in ruthlessly top-down ways. It's the discontinuity that leads to anomic, social vacuums that too often lead to barbarism. Jacobin revolutions led to the Terror and to Napoleon's military dictatorship, to Stalin's purges and the holodomor in the Ukraine, to Mao's forced famine and his Cultural Revolution, and to Pol Pot's killing fields.

There are less dramatic examples, and I'd argue that technocracies everywhere run by earnest idealists, the best and the brightest, people who sincerely think they know better and have a plan to make it better. Such people are Jacobins in the temper of their minds. A toxic, elitist, puritanical paternalism shapes the Jacobin mind. Jacobins always think they are doing the right thing; they justify their atrocities because they were necessary to promote positive change, and they can do this because they have the temper of mind that characterized Tom Paine's--they see truth in a decontextualized, absolute, black and white way.  Norman quotes Paine here:

Time with respect to principles is an eternal NOW … what have we to do with a thousand years? Our lifetime is a short portion of time, and if we find the wrong in existence as soon as we begin to live, that is the point of time at which it begins to us; and our right to resist it is the same as if it had never existed before.

Is it any wonder that such a way of thinking is embraced by intelligent people of good will in every generation since. But can you also see how this temper of mind leads to and justifies  the paternalism of every technocrat from Robert McNamara to Arne Duncan and why both sincerely see themselves as progressives? Norman explains that

[Paine] is deaf to the rationality of existing arrangements and constantly prey to the idea that because humans ought to be able to decide on a given problem using abstract reason—itself an often rather questionable premise—they will do so. . . . He constantly calls for evidence, yet despises experience. His insistence on the power of reason becomes a recipe not for sober statesmanship, but for individual and generational arrogance. 

It's such rationalistic, abstracted and arrogant thinking about social change that leads to hubristic policies that lead to the deaths of millions in Russia or China or tens of thousands in Iraq or to the destruction of a localist K-12 educational system whose foundations are sound. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out some time ago:

If modern conservatism can be held to derive from Burke, it is not just because he appealed to property owners in behalf of stability but also because he appealed to an everyday interest in the preservation of the ancestral and the immemorial. And the abolition of memory, as we have come to know in our own time, is an aspect of the totalitarian that spares neither right nor left. In the cult of "now," just as in the making of Reason into an idol, the writhings of nihilism are to be detected.

There is no eternal now in which what is right must be imposed. Historical context is everything. Societies evolve, and so there are moments in every society where crises arise and present opportunities to move forward in a progressive way. And very often these moments require top-down interventions. But an intervention is not the same thing as trying to reengineer an entire society. There is a kairos for such interventions--the pregnant moments in the development of any society when adjustments are necessary.

The 1780s were deeply kairotic for the development of American society, but the kairos then was not to abolish slavery. That moment came in the 1850s. The 1930s were a moment when there was a possibility for the development of social democracy in the US, and the 1970s, alas, a moment when Neoliberals saw their opportunity to dismantle it. As I've argued before, 2008 presented a kairotic moment to push back against Neoliberalism, but the Obama administration failed to respond. But the point is this: How humans respond or fail to respond to these moments is critical, and the worst possible response follows when Jacobins or Fascists with big, radically discontinuous ideas get the upper hand. Better no response, which is essentially what we got from Obama, whose administration's mission was to return to the status quo ante. 

My argument here is that the temper of mind that promotes the best possible outcome is Burkean, not Painean. By this definition, despite Norman's discomfort with the idea, FDR was indeed a Burkean and Reagan a Painean. The social democratic system that developed in the 1930s was not Jacobin social engineering, but Rooseveltian pragmatism in responding to a massive, historical economic crisis. And, yes, I'm sure there were plenty of Jacobins in the Roosevelt administration pushing him harder to the left than it was possible or healthful to go, but FDR was no Jacobin. 

Reagan's and Thatcher's radical mission to dismantle social democracy after the crisis of the seventies was not at all conservative in the Burkean sense. But neither was it fascistic. Whatever might be repugnant in it, Reaganism/Thatcherism is not that. Its goal is free market anarchism. That anarchy eventually leads to inequalities of wealth and power is common sense, and with that too often a fascistic subjection of the weak to the powerful is the flaw that sincere, Neoliberals and Libertarians seem not to understand.

Social Democracy, if it can be developed in a subsidiarist, non-technocratic key is the only sane form of government possible in a complex, globalizing world. Robin's critique notwithstanding, I think that Burke would have been smart enough to understand how things look differently now than they did in the 1790s, but even if today he would align with the reactionary right, it's possible for others with his temper of mind to develop their own ideas about what the historical moment demands. I think of myself not as a Burkean--I concede that label to those on the right. But I do think of myself as Burkeish, especially if the alternative is the temper of mind that typifies Paine and the Jacobins. 

The Logic behind Vouchers, Charters, and Privatization in General

Today’s American right is an uneasy coalition among libertarian plutocrats and working-class and middle-class whites who depend on Social Security and Medicare and can’t afford to send their children to expensive private schools.  The need to win white middle American votes means that the right can’t simply promise to abolish public services, leaving the mass of Republican voters on their own.  In order to be electable, conservatives have to abandon pure libertarian principle and accept the idea of vouchers funded by taxation — even though this is really just “voucher socialism,” as hardcore libertarians sometimes point out.  But this doesn’t necessarily harm the right-plutocrats, particularly if they can invest in health insurance, private schooling or retirement savings companies that can vacuum up voucher money.  (Source)

This is  the logic of corporate education reform. It's the wolf of privatization cloaked in the sheepskin of consumer choice. Privatization, whether it's in education or in other public goods, is about letting markets rule rather than letting people rule themselves through the democratic process. It's a con because it seems to affirm our basic idea of freedom, but in the long run it undermines our freedom because when the market rules, those with the most market power control what there is to choose. 

Rawls v. Nozick

I am by no means a Rawlsian, but I can find some common ground with those who claim to be. I cannot fathom the mind of the Nozickian when it claims as it does to be "moral", and this piece in the NYT Stone lays out why. Closing graf:

Rejecting the Nozickian worldview requires us to reflect on what justice really demands, rather than accepting the conventional wisdom that the market can take care of morality for us. If you remain a steadfast Nozickian, you have the option of biting the bullet (as philosophers like to say) and embracing the counterintuitive implications of your view. This would be at least more consistent than what we have today: an ideology that parades as moral common sense.

I think the problem in this debate is that it seems always to be posed in either/or terms--that it's either the market or the state. And it's not; it's both. The political challenge is to find the right balance between them. That's what the principle of subsidiarity is all about. 

If there is anybody out there reading here who leans libertarian, please tell me why a single-payer system in health care, like Medicare, is immoral or an abrogation of your liberty rather than the most effective way to provide for a basic human need. Do you really believe that the only motivation for talented people to go into healthcare is to get rich? Do you think most people are only extrinsically motivated by financial rewards? Or is it possible that most people who are attracted to the healthcare professions are motivated intrinsically, by the desire to help and to make a difference in people's lives, by the intellectual and creative challenges posed by sickness and disease? If you think it's the first, what does that say about the culture's moral imagination. 

I'm not interested in arguments against single payer that we can't afford it--we can if we want to. I'm interested in moral arguments. If we can come to some agreement on a moral values level, we can work out the practicalities relatively easily.