[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable breadth of concern, to this day memorialised in the concept of the Renaissance man, of this period.
As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Kindle Location 8766-8783). Yale University Press.
McGilchrist's book is astonishing on so many levels. It is a prodigious feat of synthesis drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, psychiatry and so much more. It, imo, is one of the most important efforts at thinking published in the last decade or so. I believe it gives us the resources to find a way forward. For if the shift from the stale, abstract, left-brainy, rigid intellectualism of late medieval scholasticism could morph into the the rich, lively, right/left balanced celebration of life of the Renaissance, perhaps we can find a way forward toward our own Renaissance. Because now in our "postmodern" condition, we are living the reductio ad absurdum of the hubristic Enlightenment Age of Reason, which was until mid last century the consensus spirit animating the Liberal Order. And as the Liberal Order decays, a revanchist, regressive irrational Right arises to provide some atavistic fantasy of a bygone Golden Age. This has come to a head in the Age of Whatever, which set the stage for the Age of Trump.
In the Age of Whatever, what remains of the old Liberal Order is in one prominent aspect a Neo-puritan, moralistic priggery that at best parodies a serious moral outlook for want of something better. At the same time, a Social Darwinist Neoliberalism dominates in the most woke of workplaces, a Liberalism that paradoxically celebrates diversity, equality, individualism, and freedom while too-often imposing a soul-deadening technocratic organization and a managerial culture of compulsive surveillance and control. But that's all cool because management tacked up a Black Lives Matter poster in the lunchroom.
In the Age of Whatever, there is no consensus about anything. Anything is permissible so long as you don't hurt others. Outside of a depressingly Social Darwinian Ayn Randian framework, there is no longer any imagination for what might be noble individual aspiration, much less noble collective aspiration. Depressing because so many of my most spirited students are attracted to it for, again, want of something better. So everybody is as free to be as good or bad as they wish in theory, but in reality most people are constrained by tribal Liberal or Conservative moralistic groupthinks.
De Toqueville pointed this out about Americans almost two hundred years ago. There is something about Anglo-American and French culture that makes true independent or original thinking very rare and hard to come by. What passes for original is really just novel, a clever variation along lines accepted by Right or Left groupthinks. {See Note 1 in the comments section.] Nobody sane wants to live in the Age of Whatever--except maybe a handful of wannabe Nietzsches in the academy and in pop culture who have persuaded themselves it's edgier or braver to live in some realm beyond Good and Evil. But there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum.
So the culture must move through this awkward phase, and it will. The Age of Whatever is the Age of Whatever Comes Next. The only question is whether it will do it in a healthy or unhealthy way. Healthy means an open society in which its citizens are provided a cultural framework, a trellis, on which they as individuals can become their best selves.
Unhealthy means a rigid, autocratic, closing down of any possibilities except those that are sanctioned by elites on the theocratic Right or on the technocratic Left who think they know best. That's why the individualistic liberation agenda of the Cutltural Left is inadequate. There is in it no vision of possibility for a better human future except to say No to traditional constraints. That's fine so far as it goes, but it has the unintended consequence of clearing the ground for technocratic Social Darwinians to take the field unopposed. We need an imagination of a human future to which all people of good will can say Yes. We need them to be inspired enough by such a vision to be willing to fight for it.
The culture can move through the Age of Whatever to something better only if it finds a way to synthesize its contradictions on a higher level. That is the coincidentia oppositorum, or the Hegelian aufhebung or what I have stressed repeatedly on this blog as the Platonic metaxis--a practice by which we stand between polarities, identifying with neither, but allowing what is healthy or positive in both to marry, so to say, to create a new moment of integration at a higher level. That is the formula for Renaissance and for true moral development. We all, if we are sane, want to live in Renaissance. We will need a little help from the zeitgeist for such a thing to happen, but there will have to be enough people awake enough to its possibility to work with it when it shifts. [BTW, I don't think this is a task for philosophers. They're the last ones to look to. I think someone like Dolly Parton is a better model to emulate.]
I am an advocate for Renaissance, not nostalgia. Renaissance means 'rebirth', and while it involves a retrieval of things lost or forgotten, it does not involve a nostalgia for former social orders, or the fantasy of so many conservatives to go native in the past imagined as some Tolkienesque golden age or some darker, Evola-esque autarchy. In this rather long post, I want to lay out in one place some of the meta issues that define us at this moment. We are most of us looking at things from the worm's eye view, and it's helpful sometimes to take a look at things from 30,000 feet up.
Part of the mission of this blog is to help cosmopolitan educated types to understand the forces driving the Right but also the limitations of their own presuppositions. The Right and Left are two poles of the same system, and they work dynamically together, but they no longer do so creatively because there's no deep vitality in either. So the task is to transcend both their contradictions in a new synthesis. In previous posts here and here, I've made as sympathetic a case as I can muster to understand what I call Bannonism, whether or not he personally plays any future role in it. His critique of the contemporary Liberal Order is incisive, and his strategy for overturning it could have worked if Trump were not such a self-absorbed fool. But it may work still with a less feral, more strategic fuerher in the future. So I take Bannonism very seriously.
The most intelligent advocates for Bannonism see themselves as redressing an imbalance in the Liberal Order, which clearly is needed, but they have no real positive, healthy alternative. Their movement is mostly animated by an impassioned NO to the soullessness of the secular materialist and technocratic ethos that shapes mainstream society. So they understand something that most Liberals do not, because to be a Liberal means that you are more or less well adapted to the secular, materialist technocracy. So the No to traditional restraints that animates the Left is matched by the No to Liberal technocracy that animates the Right, and both Nos lead not to resolution, but to impasse. You need something positive in one pole to interact with something positive in the other to move forward--and neither has it at any level of meaningful vitality.
Bannonism, in realizing that there is no longer anything of real value for conservatives to conserve in the Liberal Order, seeks to tear it down in the hope that something better might arise from the ashes. That, of course, is crazy. But so is Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinism & Nazism, Maoism, and any number of collective delusions that justify themselves as pushing back against what they see as an evil, corrupt status quo. The insane have a way of taking control because they are willing to cross lines the sane won't. And the sane tend to give the insane the benefit of the doubt, and when they realize that they were mistaken, it's too late.
So Bannonism offers nothing positive; it certainly does not offer Renaissance, only a substitution of one deeply inadequate negating ideology for another. If the Bannonites succeed in their tearing down the Liberal Order--and they just might--they will only bring us more intense pain and broader suffering. Some Bannonites are naive because they honestly think anything is better than the current Liberal Order; others simply don't care how many people suffer after the Liberal Order's collapse so long as they're in power.
The Meta-Historical Context
I don't have views that flow easily in the mainstream, but I persist in thinking I can make compelling arguments for some alternative to the current Left/Right impasse. There are primarily two resistant audiences I need to persuade. The first would be people with a conventional, secular, scientific worldview who see evolution, and therefore human evolution, as driven primarily as a random, meaningless process; the second would be people with religious convictions who believe life on earth is a prison, a vale of tears to be escaped. Both of these constituencies have grounding intuitions that are valid, but both for reasons that I will try to explain are wrong in the way they extrapolate from these intuitions.
My own mythopoetic framework, which I believe is completely consistent with a Nicene Christianity in a Christian Neoplatonic key is tersely summarized here. I think something along these lines is necessary to provide a future framework for Renaissance. It need not be Christian, but should be post-Axial along the lines of the Philosophia Perennis. My framework is also shaped by a combination of non-theological sources, but probably the main one is what I call "The German Story". Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jung, Gebser, and the Englishman Owen Barfield are all different articulators of a basic intuition about the meaning of history as the evolution of consciousness. The French thinkers Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin add a dimension to this story that I have deep sympathies with.
This German story can be briefly summarized like this: The human being is the place where the cosmos becomes aware of itself, or to use Heidegger's phrase, a "clearing in the forest of Being". This is a human centered, progressive, evolutionary process extending over millennia. The health of the earth matters because the earth is where the sacred human project unfolds.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud are also contributors to this "German story". They would dissent about their being a collective progressive dimension to the evolution of consciousness, but they are important because, like the others, they emphasize that the human being has fathomless depths, depths that are as deep as the mystery of Being itself. It is human openness to this dimension of depth that I see as threatened by the new technologies, particularly the seductions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies need not be malign, but they are and will be to the degree that they close off human possibilities more than they open them up. They might open possibilities up on the horizontal dimension--like the superpowers celebrated in the movies--but it's hard for me to see how they might open them up more than close them down on the vertical dimension, the dimension of depth. We'll see.
Insofar as they are closing off the human being from the dimension of depth, they are obstructing what I believe central to the human project. To put it in McGilchrist's terms, the new technologies insofar as they mechanomorphize the human being, are working from the imbalanced, closed-off perspective of the Left hemisphere of the brain. This may sound simplistic, but it will not appear so after you've read the book. If you've not seen it, the RSA animate video will give you a better feel for the sophistication and nuance that McG brings to this subject. But, really, you've got to read the book.
I know the computer science folks have great hopes that machine learning will find a way to replicate human consciousness, but it is hard for me to believe that machines can have the special thing that humans have, which is this openness to the dimension of depth mediated to them by the Right hemisphere of the brain. I wonder how many in CS folks actually believe that there are depths in human consciousness that they need bother to try to replicate. Machines can mimic left-brain thinking, but do not have access to the "data" which is only mediated through the right brain, because that data comes from having a soul and with it the capacity for cognitions on the dimension of originary depth.
The peculiarly modern condition of alienation from Being began to take hold in the West among the Voluntarists and Nominalists in the late medieval period, and it is chiefly characterized by a mindset in which the values of the Left brain have usurped and crowded out the richness and soulfulness given to us by the Right. Occam's razor became a justification for cutting away more of the richness of thinking and imagination than the pious Occam ever intended. Why? The left brain is all about seizing power and imposing order. "I just want to keep people safe" is the most common justification for all control zealots, and safety and control are dominant themes in the cultural ethos of the military in one way and of the bourgeois Cultural Left in another.
The Right brain opens humans up to the depths, the messy domain of everything beyond human control, while the Left Brain is all about grasping, controlling, and ordering what is given to it from the right. Ideally, as McG explains above, they work together--that's the formula for true creativity and Renaissance--but when they do the Right Brain is the Master and the Left the Emissary and servant. Societies get into big trouble when the Emissary usurps control from the Master, much as Antonio usurped Milan from Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. We're in that trouble now.
The Tempest is the story that hinges on the coincidentia oppositorum. I would argue that most of Shakespeare's plays work with its archetypal power. The basic structure of the comedies starts with conflict between two dramatic polarities, then proceeds with a serious effort by the protagonist to effect a reconciliation at a higher moral level, and if successful, culminates in the final act with a scene that celebrates the expansive joy of an achieved communion--weddings, feasts, circle dances.
In The Tempest, the basic dramatic conflict is between Prospero and his usurping brother, Antonio. The moral question at the heart of the play is to avenge or not to avenge. Prospero refuses revenge and its endless cycle of counter-revenge, which is "natural" in its following logic of evolution without grace. His refusal allows for the possibility to achieve integration at a higher level, a restorative, expansive aufhebung, that reestablishes him in Milan with the expansion of his realm with the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand to include Naples.
Something like that has to happen to resolve the sterile conflict between the Left and Right in American society; otherwise our future will be an infinite, irresolvable series of Left/Right backlashes. Aufhebung is not the same as compromise. It's about synthesis and communion at a higher level. This is how real moral progress happens, but it requires leaders who are mature moral agents. Is the Cultural/Religious Right capable of producing such leaders? I'm sure there are mature moral agents on the Right, but will they be listened to by the rank and file they would lead?
And on the Cultural Left, are there leaders there with the spiritual or moral resources to say No to the ways the Enlightenment project leads to the end of the human project? Is there any capacity there to push back against those who are advocating for a mechanomorphized transhuman or posthuman future? Are they capable of seeing how this is the reductio ad absurdum of Left Brain cultural hegemony? Is it within their resources to see it as the parodic apotheosis of the Enlightenment project to liberate the humans from the irrational by liberating them from their bodies?
Left Braininess is something Liberals value in a way that Conservatives do not, and for this reason, elite Liberals in the universities, the media, in pop culture either celebrate or are otherwise blind to, complacent about, or resigned to the threats posed to the human project by mechanomorphizing it. Technocratic Neoliberalism and the postmodern liberation ethos of anything goes are symptoms of Left-braininess on steroids. Are Liberal elites able to transcend such limitations? We'll see. but I don't see much sign of it at this juncture.
The Current Crisis
I believe that the shrunken capacity of humans to cognize levels of Being on the dimension of depth is the greatest threat to humanity in this moment. All the other problems, whether environmental degradation, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, immiseration of the masses, the trend toward authoritarianism, are one way or another symptoms of our historically unprecedented Left-brainy shallowness in the West--and increasingly everywhere else as well. Anybody with a shred of a soul feels it. They might identify it as a feeling that their lives are being choked by a suffocating 'inauthenticity'. And so many people feel increasingly alienated, anxious, angry, depressed.
The world around them seems unreal, a kind shadow theater, a virtual simulation, with little in it that resonates meaningfully. People are going through the motions because what else is there to do? But they are starved for authenticity, and it's in very short supply. People will seize on almost anything that gives them an antidote to their alienation. The easiest remedy is to lose oneself one way or another--in a surrender to Tribal identity or to sterile, instinct-driven pleasures. These are deeper forms of alienation from which it is more difficult to recover because they require a refusal of what Tillich called 'the courage to be'. The Liberal model with all the best intentions frames existential failures of courage in this sense as disease, which hygienizes it in ways that rob people of their spiritual dignity.
Nevertheless, Cultural Conservatives are wrong to blame liberals for creating this shallow, alienated shadow world. Liberals didn't create it, but they are better adapted to it. They don't feel as uncomfortable in it as cultural conservatives do, at least the affluent, educated Liberals don't. Religious conservatives look at these shallow, happy Liberals--Hillary Clinton being their exemplar--and are disgusted by their smug complacency. What's the matter with these Liberals? How can they be so glib, so self-righteous? Have they no souls? How can they be so comfortable in such a flat, spiritually eviscerated culture? Well, most Liberals are not soulless; the best among them feel as alienated as conservatives, but they certainly don't think that the people on the religious right have any real remedies. And they're not wrong.
And hardly any Liberal I know is a hard-core secularist. There are some, but they are far fewer than most conservative ideologues believe. They are secular but not necessarily unspiritual; they are mostly agnostic when it comes to religious questions, because when they look at the churches, unless they're lucky enough to live in a place with an exceptional local church community, they rightly see that there's nothing special or challenging there either intellectually, morally, or socially. Joining a bicycle or hiking club would be more edifying than attending a local church services. They certainly don't care or even know about the pronouncements of Church bodies like the National Council of Churches, or the various Catholic, Lutheran, or other denominational synods. And even if these bodies make pronouncements that they agree with, why should they care? They have no political clout, and Liberals don't need the churches to tell them what common sense and common decency easily recognize without them.
Their views on liberal policies, in my experience, are not rigid. I live in Seattle, a very culturally liberal place. I had a conversation recently with a very Liberal, very secularized, non-observant Jewish friend who knew that I was a practicing Catholic. This perplexed him because I otherwise seemed so sane. He wanted to know what my position on abortion was. I usually avoid conversations on tribal shibboleth issues like abortion. Most Liberals, like most Conservatives, don't have strongly thought out or deeply held convictions. They just go along with whoever in their tribe shouts the loudest, and so when it comes to having a conversation about such a topic, most Liberals and Conservatives just mouth the tribal talking points. And I don't want any part of the kind of moronic conversations that operate on that level.
But my friend is an honest, morally serious person. He's someone you can have a frank conversation about a radioactive topic like this. So he asked and I answered frankly. I told him I thought it was wrong, and that there is something soul-dead about a society that has come to see abortion as a banal surgical practice which is the moral equivalent of an appendectomy.
I see it as consonant with the deeply alienating and perverse extreme aspects of the modern liberation project toward a posthumanism that seeks to liberate what it means to be human from what it means to have a body. Having a body is the whole point of being human. It is only in our bodies that we can renew the face of the earth.
I don't think this because I'm a Catholic, and that's what Catholics believe. But I do think that my being a Catholic gives me a way to stand outside the Liberal Groupthink and to determine for myself what is truly good or a counterfeit of it. My life as a Catholic is largely defined as a metaxis between its rich tradition of thinkers, prophets, and saints and the Liberal social imaginary, which is the world into which I was born and in which I live my day to day life. Striving to live in the space between them rather than to be circumscribed by either is not easy, and I may not do it well, but it's my understanding about how to live authentically in a world that has lost its mind. It enables one to find a foothold in a place that is foundational for both but which also transcends both.
In any event, I didn't say all this to my friend, but I explained to him that I'm not interested in criminalizing abortion, but I am truly dismayed by Liberals' glib, technocratic-utilitarian approval for what is a fundamentally a dehumanizing act. It says something very damning about us as a society, but it's just one among many symptoms of a deeper disease because so does the dehumanization of criminals with the death penalty, our enthusiastic support for the vengeance-driven invasion and destruction of Iraq, our dehumanizing of political prisoners with torture, and our dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and refugees. We are a sick society, which is losing its grip on its humanity, and our hygienizing of abortion is one symptom of the way the way the utilitarian-technocratic ethos has dehumanized us among many others. I know--life is messy. Nothing in a life seriously lived is determined by binary black-and-white thinking. There are situations where having abortion is a defensible choice. But the exception should not be the rule. At some time in the future, I hope most people will look back on our contemporary mainstream attitudes toward abortion and think of them as barbaric as we now see genital mutilation.
My friend's reaction was interesting. I think my answer to his question gave him permission to express his own moral discomfort with the knee-jerk cultural legitimacy that abortion has achieved in his cosmopolitan culture world. Deep down he feels it's wrong because it really is, whatever clever utilitarian or ideologically driven reasons might be used to justify it. But he never heard anybody explain why in language that was not ideologically motivated.
Authenticity and Morality
Any moral position is inauthentic to the degree that is determined primarily by outside-in factors. People who have an outside-in morality generally have no strongly held convictions. They just do what people expect them to do, whether it's contribute to a group-approved charity or show up at church--or whether to wear a mask or not to wear a mask. Too many of the same people who do nice things if that's what expected of them will also do horrible things if that's what expected of them. If their neighbors are part of a lynch mob, they'll join in. If they're working at Enron, they'll come up with creative ideas to cheat the elderly poor. If they're sitting in Trump's cabinet room, they will kiss his ass when he demands it because everyone else is doing it. Whatever.
There are degrees of inauthenticity, of course. But the defining essence of inauthenticity is that "you" don't really decide; "you" just do what somebody else thinks is best. You just go along to get along. It's what's expected. There is no moral agent working from the inside-out struggling to know what the right thing is and then finding the courage to do it. No authenticity is required if moral questions are decided for you outside-in, by the authorities or cultural bullies. No matter how much you might appear to others as a model citizen, there is no virtue in it when it requires no courage or moral conviction to just go along.
Mature moral judgments are always inside-out, and any kind of authentic moral development must have some degree of inside-out. But the way the inside-out moral agent emerges initially is almost always in conversation with people who have themselves achieved some level of inside-out, authentic moral development. So of course, there is some outside-in triggering event of some kind--a conversation, a lecture, a book--but this is completely different from just downloading someone else's or one's tribe's moral code and following it mainly for fear of being caught and shamed.
That was Socrates' project, right? He was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, but all he was trying to do was to have honest conversations and through through them to awaken them, to have them go deeper to see that their cultural download was shallow, that there was in fact a Good that transcends custom and culture. He wanted to awaken them to the existence of this culture-transcending Good so that they might live lives that are aligned with it rather than simply to mindlessly goose step to the tribal code. This is the essence of "Axiality", this awakening to the transcendent Good.
So a healthy "Axial" culture's customs and traditions are important because of the role they play in awakening individuals in each generation to this transcendent Good. Any culture is healthy to the degree that it awakens the people born into it to their best possibilities as human beings, to their blossoming inside-out. A culture becomes decadent to the degree that it no longer produces this kind of authentic moral development. It is unhealthy to the degree that it imposes a rigid outside-in code and demands a rigid obedience to that code or risk ostracism. A shame culture is not a truly moral culture. It looks like Islamic fundamentalism over there, but like the Republican Party or Woke political correctness over here. A shame culture functions merely as a social constructions whose concerns are for social utility and order, not on what is truly, deeply Good.
But the problem I have with cultural conservatives is that their traditions and customs are more what I have called elsewhere Zombie Traditions: their traditions and codes maintain a cadaverous form, but they no longer carry the spiritual Life that originally gave them shape. They are animated by a kind of undead energy that masquerades as but really parodies the transcendent inspiration--the Good--that originally gave them their form.
Zombie traditionalists show themselves in their anger and resentment because they feel that they don't get enough outside-in respect in a society dominated by Liberal values. But if their tradition was a healthy, living one, it would produce enough people who have that interior sense of dignity that always awakens in others when they encounter it the same inner dignity. If people feel this sense of inner dignity, they don't feel anger and resentment at being slighted by people that don't "get it". Instead they try to share with them the Good that they have come to know.
Why are so many cultural and religious conservatives attracted to Trump? Because he articulates the anger of profoundly alienated people on the cultural Right and channels their resentment. If they really cared about and aspired to the Good, they could only be disgusted by him and by the dark impulses he evokes in their souls. One of the most common symptoms of stunted moral development is the urge in the immature to blame others for their own failures, and to project onto them their own shortcomings that they fail to see in themselves.
Everybody does this--me included--but there is a peculiarly toxic way that this is endorsed and legitimated on right-wing media. It blames Liberals for everything rather than even entertaining the possibility that its own mindset reinforces and rigidifies a mentality that is morally stunting precisely because it refuses to do the hard work of becoming a mature moral agent. Trump, Rush, Alex, and others give them permission to be their worst selves, and it must be ok because everybody they know thinks and feels the same. So it's just so satisfying to join the mob and blame the Liberals. That feeling that they get, that rush, substitutes for and crowds out any possibility for authentic moral, inside-out development.
Zombie Traditionalists are aggressively outside-in in their moral program. Their sense of identity is something that depends on the propping up of a fragile structure that no longer awakens an authentic, calming, interior dignity. And so it produces another form of alienation that is just as toxic, and I'd argue more dangerous, than the kind of alienation that typifies the anything-goes ethos of secular Liberals.
You can have a conversation with most Liberals, you can't with fanatic, right-wing tribalists. Are there fanatic, Liberal tribalists? Yes, of course, and you can't have a conversation with them either. But they are the exception, in my experience, rather than the rule. If the primary negative characteristic of Cultural Conservatives is their outside-in moral rigidity, the primary negative characteristic of Liberals is their moral diffidence and tolerance for any individual's thinking so long as they are tolerant of others.
Cultural Conservatives value loyalty more than reason. Cultural Liberals value reason (usually in a rather attenuated, left-brainy form) more than loyalty, but that makes it possible for Liberals to be open to arguments that lay outside the Liberal Groupthink. That's much, much harder for conservatives because their sense of integrity lies in keeping faith with others in the Tribe no matter whether there are really, really good reasons to doubt the validity or the goodness of their tribal norms.
Cultural conservatives see Liberals as morally lax and unprincipled, but most Liberals don't see themselves that way. They have deeply felt moral commitments, even if they are agnostic about the metaphysical foundations that ground those commitments. And they don't "hate" cultural conservatives. The only thing most rank-and-file Liberals really hate about the cultural Right is its rigid intolerance. Cultural Liberals are quite tolerant of all kinds of conservative values and practices so long as they who hold them do not seek to impose them on others. But since intolerance is at the core of the Cultural Conservative identity, the Cultural Left's hatred of the Cultural Right's intolerance feels like a complete rejection of everything that conservatives believe.
I think there is an analogy presented in the gospels that illuminates the difference between the cultural Right and Left. Jesus had more problems with the religious professionals, the culturally conservative Pharisees and Saducees who were so obsessed regarding their moral rectitude. Every religion produces this class of meathead. These people, so 'righteous' in their imaginations of themselves, were closed to having a conversation that might open them up to new moral possibilities. So Jesus spent most of his time with the local sinners, i.e., the morally lax cultural liberals of his day, who were quite open to having a conversation. Zacchaeus (Luke 19) is the classic affluent liberal of his time, as was the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (John 4).
Despite these sinners' code-breaking, they had supple enough hearts that made them de facto morally superior to the rigidly moral Pharisees. Jesus described the latter as 'whited sepulchers', clean outside, but rotting inside, a vivid image of an inauthentic, alienating morality that is outside-in. The worst kind of sin is hardness of heart because it's the disposition of soul that makes you invulnerable to the influences of Goodness and Truth when it is standing there right in front of you. They couldn't see who Jesus was because he didn't fit their morally rigid template for what was acceptable. This is the source of the kind of intolerance that is central the cultural conservative's identity. They think they know what is moral, when in fact they are remarkably clueless about what is truly Good.
Not a problem for the Zachaeuses and Photines of the world, morally lax though they might be. It is better to be the improvident, morally lax prodigal son than the older son, righteous but tight-assed and full of resentment. The point of the parable is not to endorse an antinomian moral laxity but rather to point out that the prodigal son is open to new moral possibilities in a way that the older brother is not. Whether he realizes those possibilities in becoming an authentically inside-out moral agent is another question. But the chances are better for him than for his resentment-driven, rotted-on-the-inside brother.
***
Thoughtful cultural conservatives have a legitimate critique of the Liberal Order, but they have no realistic, healthy remedy. They don't understand what a real cure requires. They are understandably frustrated, but they channel their anger toward the wrong enemy. They should instead focus their energies at the greater threat posed by unbridled techno-capitalism. It's a place where they could find many allies on the Progressive Left. But even here, saying No is not enough. The issue is not to put a halt to what Silicon Valley is doing, but rather to offer an alternative imagination for a human future where machines serve human purposes rather than to let the machines and the logic of techno-capitalism set the agenda, which is currently the default. You can't do that if you believe that humans are talking animals that have no more significance for the cosmos than slime molds. But neither can you if you think the earth is a prison from which we must escape.
So it is extraordinarily difficult for secular Liberals, especially the Neoliberal elite who dominate the media, pop culture, and the Democratic Party, to push back against the hubristic techno-capitalist agenda because most Liberals don't have strong convictions about what it means to be a human being, and even frequently believe that the earth would be better without humans. That kind of thinking is truly, deeply crazy as anything the Cultural Right puts out there. But it is also extremely difficult for the Cultural Right to push back because, if they think about it at all, which most don't, they are Libertarians in the Goldwater/Norquist mode, and the idea of using government power to impinge in any way on private-sector freedoms shorts out their thinking and makes their heads explode.
So this is why I think that both Liberals and Conservatives are both right and wrong, but in the short term I side with the Liberals because they are the true conservatives insofar as they are committed to the rule of law and to finding practical solutions in a complex, pluralistic, globalizing world. In other words, the real world. Conservatives just want to say No to all that complexity and to live bunkered in their traditionalists hidey-holes and media bubbles and in doing so make themselves unavailable for honest conversation with Liberals of good will.
I see Cultural Conservatives as like people in a burning house, a house that they co-own with Liberals, but would just as soon let it burn if they have to share management responsibilities with the Liberals. Anyway, their real home is in heaven, not in this house, so, yeah, let it burn. We will die with the Liberals, but we go to a better place where we won't have to deal with them anymore because there won't be any of them there.
Is it really more complicated than that? If so, not by much.
Liberals might be blind to things that the most thoughtful conservatives know and understand, but conservatives in the political sphere have proved themselves over and over again to have nothing positive to contribute. They just say No and then find convoluted ways to justify their support for a sociopath like Donald Trump. Conservatives in America have become more a part of the problem than partners with sane Liberals who are seeking in good faith to find solutions to the most pressing problems we are facing.
In the long term, I believe what I described above as the German story will continue to play out. And this moves forward through successive moments of Renaissance, moral leaps forward, a la the Iain McGilchrist epigraph. So in future posts, I want to continue to think out loud about this, and I'm interested in anybody wanting to join in to think with me. It's not as if I have any clear program, except to strongly believe that humanity is a sacred project and that humans have within themselves everything they need to transcend their ignorance and delusional thinking if somehow they find the will to do it.
[A version of this essay originally appeared here in 2019 under a different title.]
