After the Future

AI and How Washington Works

Effective Altruism (EA) gets some attention from Politico for being a "hot new philosophy" funded by deep pockets:

EAs are particularly fixated on the possibility that future AI systems could combine with gene synthesis tools and other technologies to create bioweapons that kill billions of people — a phenomenon that’s given more traditional AI and biosecurity researchers a front row seat as Silicon Valley’s hot new philosophy spreads across Washington.

Many of those researchers claim that EA’s billionaire backers — who often possess close personal and financial ties to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic — are trying to distract Washington from examining AI’s real-world impact, including its tendency to promote racial or gender bias, undermine privacy and weaken copyright protections.

...

The generally white and privileged backgrounds of EA adherents also has prompted suspicion in Washington, particularly among Black lawmakers concerned about how existing AI systems can harm marginalized communities.

So on the one hand you have lobbyists (Effective Altruism) concerned about how AI could kill billions of people and on the other hand people concerned with AI's potential to distract from DEI concerns. Hmm. Let's weigh these concerns.  Clearly the first should have the higher priority, right?

Nope. 

Here's a quote from Liberal technocrat Cory Booker--

“I don’t mean to create stereotypes of tech bros, but we know that this is not an area that often selects for diversity of America,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told POLITICO in September.

“This idea that we’re going to somehow get to a point where we’re going to be living in a Terminator nightmare — yeah, I’m concerned about those existential things,” Booker said. “But the immediacy of what we’ve already been using — most Americans don’t realize that AI is already out there, from resumé selection to what ads I’m seeing on my phone.”

Of course some "AI apocalypse" (eye roll) is a possibility, but let's get real. What's important is getting marginalized folks up the meritocratic ladder so they can get their share of the technocracy and its bounty. 

While the article does its due diligence in quoting sane people who are EA allies, the main thrust of this article is to suggest Effective Altruism is a "cult" of fanatical true believers who have more influence than they should because they get a lot of funding from Dustin Moskovitz and Open Philanthropy. They are bothering everybody with all their doom and gloom.

It's like a scene in Don't Look Up.

I don't know, maybe it is cult-ish. But who cares? It's like saying that Daniel Ellsberg took himself too seriously. That's just bad form. Not done. These EA folks are naifs who don't understand the Washington game. They're too sincere. They just don't fit here. They should go back to flakey California where they do. 

The article ends with these lines--

... many AI and biosecurity experts continue to fret that deep-pocketed doomsayers are distracting Washington with fears of the AI apocalypse.

“The irony is that these are people who firmly believe that they’re doing good,” Connell said. “And it’s really heartbreaking.”

Poor dears. It's so touching that they should be concerned about the future of humanity. They just don't understand how Washington works. 

Sam Altman on How Great It's Going to Be

From a NY Times interview with Sam Altman: 

Sam Altman: Yeah, I actually don’t think we’re all going to go extinct. I think it’s going to be great. I think we’re heading towards the best world ever. But when we deal with a dangerous technology as a society, we often say that we have to confront and successfully navigate the risks to get to enjoy the benefits. And that’s like a pretty consensus thing. I don’t think that’s a radical position. I can imagine that if this technology stays on the same curve, there are systems that are capable of significant harm in the future. And Andrew [Ng of Stanford] also said — not that long ago — that he thought it was totally irresponsible to talk about AGI because it will never happen.

Kevin Roose: I think he compared it to worrying about overpopulation on Mars.

Sam Altman: And I think now he might say something different.

...

Later in the conversatiion--

Casey Newton: This is the stuff where my brain starts to melt as I ponder the implications, because you’ve made something that is smarter than every human. But you, the human, have to be smart enough to ensure that it always acts in your interests, even though by definition it is way smarter than you.

Sam Altman: Yeah, we need some help there.

Help from whom might I ask?

I also found this interesting--

Casey Newton: I want to ask you about this feeling that Kevin and I have had; we call it “A.I. vertigo.” There’s this moment when you contemplate an A.I. future, and you start to think about what it might mean for the job market, your own job, your daily life, for society. And there is this kind of dizziness that I find sets in. And this year I actually had a nightmare about AGI. And then I sort of asked around, and I feel like people who work on this stuff — that’s not uncommon. I wonder if you have had these moments of vertigo. Or is there at some point where you think about it long enough that you feel like you get your legs underneath you?

Sam Altman: There were some. There were some very strange, extreme vertigo moments. Particularly around the launch of GPT-3. But you do get your legs under you. And I think the future will somehow be less different than we think. Like, we invent AGI, and it matters less than we think. And yet it’s what I expect to happen.

Guys like Altman and Ng sure sound like they know what they're talking about. Their prescience, profundity, and wisdom is dripping from every word they speak. I think it's just, you know, "great" that we are entrusting the future of humanity to them. Can't wait to see how "great" things will be. 

Update 12/4/23:

Is Altman perhaps a very charming bot?

(Source)

The Healthcare Technocracy & the Pandemic

So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence—what the patient says—only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence—what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis, he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists; he also relinquishes control over more and more of the diagnostic process. These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgment.

...

There are, one may be sure, very few doctors who are satisfied with technology’s stranglehold on medical practice. And there are far too many patients who have been its serious victims. What conclusions may we draw? First, technology is not a neutral element in the practice of medicine: doctors do not merely use technologies but are used by them. Second, technology creates its own imperatives and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives. And third, technology changes the practice of medicine by redefining what doctors are, redirecting where they focus their attention, and reconceptualizing how they view their patients and illness.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, 1992 (pp. 77-79).

I think it was Pascal who made the distinction between the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. We need both; what is lacking, particularly in the technocratic Liberal Order these days, is the latter. Finesse is another name for what Aristotle called phronesis, which is usually translated as 'practical wisdom'. It combines intuition with what we've learned from experience. The spirit of geometry is what we mostly encounter in the healthcare system and all the ways that healthcare judgments have been subordinated to statistical probabilities and the data generated by machines. One would think that the spirit of finesse is something that one would value in a competent health care provider, but that's rarely what one finds. 

The problem, of course, is that in the technocratic ethos that defines the delivery of health care in American society, finesse and subjectivity are not privileged in the same way that data-driven decisions are. And while the spirit of finesse, like most talents, is something some people have more innate capacity for than others, it's a talent that needs to be developed through use and experience. But its chances for development are attenuated in a society that does not value it. 

It doesn't require finesse to determine that 2 + 2 = 4. You just need a mind that operates in a mechanically logical way. And in our day-to-day life a lot of what passes for wisdom is really process knowledge that follows algorithms--it's automatic and mechanical. And too often this is the kind of solution you're going to get when you go to your doctor complaining about this or that ailment. His remedy is very algorithmic--x problem requires y procedure or z med. You're up the creek if you have a pattern of symptoms the algorithms don't recognize. Horror stories abound, and I have my own to share. It's no wonder to me why people would look outside the system for solutions to problems it seems unable to adequately to deal with. 

Anybody who has dealt with healthcare system has probably had to deal with people who are nice and well meaning, but rigidly conventional in their thinking. In a technocracy that means that their thinking is circumscribed by the spirit of geometry. They will only tell you about solutions that research or the data support. They will reject personal testimony as unscientific and anecdotal. And that's fine so far as it goes, but much better is to find a provider who both knows the research and also has a well developed spirit of finesse. In other words, a mensch. But it's unlikely that you will ever find one. 

While anybody who has read this blog over the years knows that my biases are with the Left, I have always found that I share common ground with the Right's distrust of technocracy. And I think that many on the Left might be more sympathetic to the underlying distrust that attracts so many Americans to MAGAism and its fear of big government and bureaucratic control if they spent some time reading Left-ish critiques of the technocracy, such as the critiques of Neil Postman and Christopher Lasch. And understanding their critiques might be helpful in understanding why all this distrust has come to a head during the pandemic.

And it's important for Democrat elites to use the pandemic as an opportunity to look at themselves in the mirror and face the fact that in the popular imagination the Democratic Party has become identified with the promotion of a soulless technocracy. I don't know that very many Democrats in this country fully understand the implications. That's because most educated Democrats are very well adapted to living in a technocracy and tend to be blind to its inadequacies until the have a personal crisis that requires that they deal with it, particularly in its health and legal systems. 

The common ground shared by both Left and Right critiques is a distrust for a class of trained "experts" who know the data but who lack any common sense or any of what I'm describing here as the spirit of finesse. We want to deal with people who know what the rules are, but also know when to break them. That requires a well-developed spirit of finesse. But the healthcare system is mainly designed to protect itself and to enrich its principals. There can be no rule breaking because that makes the system vulnerable to lawsuits. So regardless of the competency or good will of individuals working within it, the system has given ordinary Americans little reason to trust or admire it. 

Most Americans have encountered the healthcare system only when they have a personal or familial healthcare crisis, and that's when they learn what a soulless system it is. In that system, you are only your data, and while you might find a provider that has a cheery bedside manner, it's only a thin veneer that hides the training and protocols that require this person to make strictly algorithmic decisions about your care.

So the problem lies in that most people's experience of the healthcare system they often find that they are dealing with providers whose jobs are about serving them in moments of when they are coping with the profoundest issues of life and death, but who are forced by the system to work with them as if they were just data points on a spread sheet. It's understandable why so many Americans have come to see healthcare professionals as cheerful robots at best or arrogant Gregory Houses and imperious Nurse Ratcheds or at worst.  

I'm not saying that healthcare providers don't care about their patients. I'm not saying that they are themselves soulless robots. But the system forces them to behave as if they were. Even if they would bring a certain menschiness to their treatment decisions, the threat of a lawsuit hangs over every decision they make that does not follow strict protocols. There are no incentives within the system for anyone to exercise the spirit of finesse.  

I think that the pandemic has brought the contradictions inherent in the healthcare system to a head. This has been a time when we needed to trust the expertise of our healthcare professionals, but our experience with it has given us little reason to. Many Americans for good reasons are predisposed not to trust it. 

But during a pandemic the tragedy lies in that what we need is what we most dislike about the healthcare system, which is the rigor of the spirit of geometry.  A pandemic is the one place in medicine where the individual doesn't matter; he or she really is just a data point on a spread sheet because public health is all about statistical outcomes. The individual's well being is deeply implicated in the well being of billions of others. And whether freedom-loving Americans like it or not, they are all part of a global system where their individual well being and behavior is deeply linked to the well being and behaviors of people across the globe. A global pandemic is one situation where one's individual freedom must be subordinated to the common good, and it's one place where data and algorithmic calculation should shape national policy.

The tragedy lies in that people who understandably distrust the technocratic ethos of the healthcare system from their own personal experience of it, are likely to distrust it regarding public health. When they hear the pronouncements of the epidemiological bureaucrats, It feels like the same old soulless bureaucratic thing that they've come to hate about the healthcare system. If you dislike or distrust the healthcare system in one context, why should you trust it in this other? I think Anthony Fauci is a mensch, but I understand why he's so vulnerable to be vilified in the way he has been. 

Over the last several weeks the talking-head docs on TV have been saying that the vaccine hesitant should trust their local health care providers and their exhortations to get vaccinated. But how many people have a personal relationship with their local healthcare provider? And so why would they be more likely to trust him or her? Why would they trust anybody whom they see as merely a functionary of the healthcare technocracy?

In my own case, my provider is a nice enough guy, but I don't know him and he doesn't know me except for what's on my chart. When I visit for my once-a-year check up, I listen and ask questions, but I take every thing he says with a grain of salt. He provides some information that I recognize as important, but I evaluate it within a broader spectrum of information I take into consideration when making decisions about my health. 

For better or worse, I trust my own spirit of finesse over the recommendations of someone whose advice is legitimated only by the spirit of geometry. I have come to believe that I must supply what he lacks. Better if I could find a doc who had both, but good luck finding one. 

Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.

H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1925-29

 

Most educated people share a cosmic imaginary that is shaped more by Newton than by relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics. While a lot of the freakier things like multiverses, black matter, and worm holes make it into popular science fiction, those ideas don't make it into the everyday way educated people imagine their place in the cosmos. We are taught to see it the way Lovecraft describes it. If you accept the description as he presents it as "factual", the conclusions follow--the cosmos is meaningless and absurd. He's just following the evidence.

I don't mean what I write below to be a personal attack on Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but rather on how his attitude typifies a conventional mindset among many (most?) American cultural elites. From all appearances, he seems to be a great guy, someone you'd enjoy conversing with. But I also know enough about him from his public appearances on Colbert's show (See Note 1) that his view of the cosmos, insofar as such a view follows from the material evidence, aligns with Lovecraft's. It follows, therefore, that for him the cosmos is "a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity". To think anything else is to go beyond the evidence. 

But from my pov his evidence-based rationalist materialism is as naive as the Christian fundamentalist who tells you his religious ideas are absolutely true it follows from what's plainly written in the Bible. The same kind of naiveté affects the Originalists on the Supreme Court. The Originalist and the Fundamentalist both say,  "Just read the words in the text". Rationalist materialists like Tyson say, "Just look at the evidence."

As if it were that simple. All three are naive because they don't understand how their unconscious presuppositions organize and filter the "evidence" or the "words", or how they foreground and privilege some evidence and some words, and background or just plain disregard others that don't fit their interpretations. The problem with grasping the truth is not just to see what's there, but to interpret what's there in the most humanly profound way. Both the fundamentalists, Originalists, and rational materialists fail in that regard miserably. 

Part of what I do here is try to deconstruct what I see as incoherent intellectual positions. It's easy to do with most conservatives, but it's done less frequently with rationalist materialists, who tend to be Liberals. I want to argue that Tyson's ontological presuppositions don't fit with what I'm sure are his sincere feelings of awe when contemplating the cosmos. I'm not arguing that his exuberance is fake, but that his feelings are not adequately accounted for by his rationalist materialism. His mistake is to start with the material facts rather than starting with the wonder. Because he starts with the material facts, he cannot give a satisfying account for the source of the wonder. 

Science studies the the husks and mechanics of the cosmos. What science affirms about them is true until new evidence proves them not to be. I have no quarrel with material facts and evidence. My quarrel is with how an obsessive focus on them crowds out other kinds of knowing that are much more important. 

Science has always been a child of instrumental reason, i.e., more interested in utility than awe, in getting results than contemplating in wonder. And instrumental reason has always been the practical, debunking, snarky cousin who thinks he knows better and who delights to make you feel like a naive idiot if you insist there's anything more. "Prove it", he says. And yet to prove it requires proving the existence of 'red' to someone who sees only in black and white. I'm fine with the kind of scientist who is agnostic about matters of the spirit; it's those who aggressively reject the spiritual--like Tyson--who bug me. There is an honest humility in the first, but a smug condescension in the second. 

Do some rationalist materialists nevertheless feel a genuine sense of awe when beholding the cosmos? Of course, and this capacity for wonder points to something about the human spirit that rationalist materialists like Tyson, because of their presuppositions, are unwilling to acknowledge--that the very possibility for awe requires something that cannot be explained in purely materialistic terms. A sack of chemicals is not capable of awe; one needs a mind and a soul to feel them. 

Neither the Mind nor the soul is a material thing, and all attempts to explain their existence in materialist terms fail miserably. As soon as you flip the sequence from matter preceding mind to mind preceding matter, everything makes much more sense. Why is that so difficult for so many among the educated elite? It wasn't the case even 150 years ago. There's no logical reason for anyone to think that Mind is not anterior to matter even now. It's difficult because of how educated elites--especially those who are most influential in our cultural institutions--are acculturated to privilege scientific knowing in a way that delegitimates any other kind of knowing. 

This priority of mind is what every great civilization took for granted until about the middle of the 19th Century in Europe. Hegel, the last of the German Idealists, died in the 1830s. The great early 19th century English Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelly and figures like R.W. Emerson were all Platonists. These are people whose attempt to make sense of the world began in wonder. They were the cultural elite of their day. 

What changed in the second half of the 19th century? The causes are hard to adequately explain because overdetermined. But clearly one massive reason obtrudes: Western societies at that time were caught up in an infatuation with how technological innovations got material results. Within a few generations concerns of the spirit or the experience of wonder came to appear squishy and trivial. These were concerns that had no robust relationship to the "real world". They were not the concerns of serious men of action with dreams of making a fortune and shaping a brave new world in their mechanomorphic image.

People have always been greedy and lustful for power. But now the machines magnified their wealth and power and made robust resistance to them extraordinarily difficult. And people who might otherwise resist were seduced: "Look at the results! Don't we all benefit from their greed and powerlust?" We became the first great civilization in the history of the world that could actually take seriously the idea that "Greed is good." There was resistance, but it was always relatively powerless and so easily pushed to the Left Bank, so to say. Not a neighborhood where good citizens careful of their reputations dare to wander. 

But few Americans of good will understood then that in allowing the greedy to have their way, they were trading cultural vitality for material prosperity. Americans are optimists, so it was difficult for them to anticipate how with each passing decade since the mid 19th century American society would become a soulless, hollowed-out shell, and so we have no problem electing soulless, hollowed out human beings to represent us politically.  And even now most don't understand what we've lost--even Liberals. They just adapt, and still they marvel at our technology and about how great the machines are going to make our lives. It's gonna be awesome. What's next? Flying cars and vacations on the moon. Can't wait.

Rationalist materialism is not science; it is a particular kind of metaphysics that follows from a particular interpretation of human experience that has been impoverished by the hypertrophying of instrumental reason. The real question is whether other metaphysical presuppositions that would lead us to a deeper, richer understanding of the cosmos and of humanity's place in it is possible for us in the future. For me, it's obvious where the development of such an alternative metaphysical imaginary should begin--by retrieving the ontological anteriority of mind before matter. 

In the meanwhile, the attempt to rhapsodize about what we know from science has always been to me an attempt to make the best of a fundamentally bad situation. It's akin to marveling  about how beautiful or clever the work of a taxidermist or the cosmetic work of the undertaker. There’s skill in it, and even a kind of beauty, but we're marveling at something that is not so marvelous as the thing was when it was alive. It lacks other deeper possibilities for the cognition of beauty because in the end its object is something abstract and dead, and as such a simulacrum, a faded memory of a living Real no longer believed in. 

So any meaning we see in it beyond the engineering practicality of it seems forced at best and perverse at worst. It feels to me like an attempt to make more of something than is really there to make of it: I want to be entertained and to be in a good mood, so by the gods I’m going to enjoy this unfunny movie no matter what, and laugh at its vulgar, unfunny jokes. Similarly regarding the cosmos, I'm going to feel the awe no matter that it is meaningless, purposeless, random arrangement of atoms. It’s an attempt to force some distant memory of beauty, from a time when humans had a profound capacity for apprehending the sacred, onto something that provides no evidence to justify our feelings of awe. Maybe it's unfair to accuse Tyson of this kind of thing, but I can't help but feel there's a forced, performative qualiity to his cosmic ebullience. 

***

Here's another way of getting at what I'm trying to point to: I'm reminded of the story from Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, where the author describes his having achieved a certain archery skill, which he demonstrates it to his teacher. But the teacher is outraged at the fraud because while he might have got the result that indicates mastery, he achieved that result in a non-Zen, mechanistic way. He took mastering the mechanics as the end rather than understanding that the goal was the transformation of his soul. He did not understand that the mechanical result was a secondary effect. He got the result, but getting the result wasn't the point--an expansion of the soul was. He had the appearance--the husks--of the master archer but not the soul of one. Such a distinction is beyond the scope of our contemporary materialistic imaginary, even for most people who profess to be religious.

Something like that is at the bottom of what I’m trying to get at here. The scientistic cosmologists are technically right about the mechanics, but the soul of their excitement isn’t "right". Their experience of awe should call them to seek for a deeper interpretation of its significance. Their excitement by their own presuppositions is the "illusion of significance", to use Lovecraft's phrase. They're not wrong because what they assert about the facts of the cosmos are wrong so far as it goes; they are wrong because the immaterial they insist cannot exist is the source of their capacity for awe. 

So I’m trying to make the point that scientific truth, which is real, and does in fact have a kind of beauty, nevetheless has gradually come to crowd out another kind of experience of truth, and in fact has come to delegitimate it. That's what happens if you start with facts rather than starting with awe and wonder. The rationalist materialist does not see the legitimacy of this other way of understanding the deep source of truth and beauty, so people who retain some level of soul life--and Tyson is clearly among them--try to eke out what juice they can from an unyielding rock because the rock is all they've got. But it doesn’t work. 

I exaggerate, perhaps unfairly, to make a point. A less exaggerated way of saying it might be that there is something inherent in the human spirit that rightly longs for beauty and to participate deeply in the mystery of Being, but we live in a world whose primary imaginary is shaped by engineering utility and capitalist expediency. This imaginary has progressively crowded out our capacity to experience real beauty and real mystery. If you experienced the real thing, it wouldn't be possible to be a rationalist materialist. 

And It becomes a vicious circle--the more our spiritual capacity diminishes, the more jejeune becomes the most frequent articulations of spiritual experience. Serious people see those who claim to be spiritual as jejeune, and so they reject any kind of spiritual reality as unserious--even if they have had such experiences themselves. Such experiences are for them embarrassing, or are dismissed as merely aesthetic. And so because rejected as unserious, the implications of such experiences are not developed, and because they are undeveloped, there are fewer and fewer people who achieve any substantive level of spiritual maturity. The last place one would expect to find such maturity these days is the churches. It's there, but you have to look hard to find it.

So this is not a personal knock on Tyson; it's about the limitations of his cosmic imaginary. I'm sure his enthusiasm and love of science are sincere. But there is, it seems to me, a mismatch between his very conventional, scientistic-materialist worldview and his understandable need to find a mysterious beauty in it. He connects them in a way that seems fraudulent to me--there's an inherent contradiction in it that most people--including Tyson--are oblivious of, and accept without thinking it through. In the end, I'm just saying that If he took the second impulse--his capacity for awe--more seriously, it would lead to his undermining of the first--his materialist presuppositions. 

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Note 1: I'm thinking in particular about one of his appearances on Stephen Colbert. In the clip below you'll see how incredulous Tyson is when he asks Colbert how the "urges of a believer" are compatible with following the evidence.  I've queued this to the point in the video that's most relevant, but watch from beginning if you're unfamiliar with Tyson and his cosmic enthusiasm.  

How Does this End Well?

The big question for me going forward is to what degree the craziness of the hard right in this country will retain the level of legitimacy it now enjoys? A related question is what has to happen for its grip on so many Americans to loosen? The answer to the second question is foundational for any answer for the first.

Why is the hard-right fantasy that America is being taken over by evil Liberals so attractive? I just spent a weekend with a family member who believes that the Democratic Party is a subsidiary of an international Jewish oligarchy that seeks to establish a new world order that will exterminate religion and freedom. He believes Putin is a good guy who is just trying to restore Christian traditions after atheistic communism, that the anti-Putin Democrats in the U.S. are bent on starting a new Cold War.

He believes that this oligarchy controls the mainstream media and so everybody getting his information from the New York Times, CNN, etc. is being brainwashed. He believes that the election was stolen because this kind of control is so powerful that it reaches into the voting machines in all the states. It's a seamless explanation impenetrable by any information that doesn't fit. Clearly this narrative makes sense of the world for him in a way that other narratives don't.

This family member is not crazy or stupid. He's a kind, thoughtful man who, who, however, spends a lot of time on the internet, and mostly talks with others who reinforce this world view. I hope my conversation with him planted some seeds of doubt that might germinate later, but while he respects me, he believes I'm being duped. He sees me as I see him. So this is the state of things. Two world views both of which see the other as being brainwashed and with no neutrally respected arbiter to mediate. 

If this were twenty years ago, I'd just shrug my shoulders and think of him as a lovable eccentric. But twenty years ago this was fringe thinking--it was in the same category as thinking that the moon landing was faked by filming it on a movie set.

Most people don't spend the time or make the effort to think things through. They just go along to get along, and so that's what frightens me about this level of delusion. More and more people are going along with this than with what has been a flawed but relatively sane mainstream or conventional narrative. The legitimacy of the conventional narrative is breaking down progressively year after years, and I don't see how to stop it. There seem to be no more conventional narratives to organize our imagination of what's real within American society, so anything goes, and this creates a situation where worst who are full of passionate intensity are carrying the day against the best who are hamstrung by their convictionless embrace of complexity.

Because anything goes without a mainstream narrative, a field opens up for the craziest and most aggressive subcultures in this potage of world views to push their way into power. This is exactly what we see going on in the right right now. They just keep telling their big lies over and over again, and more and more Americans have no resistance to it. If so many people believe it, more Americans come to reason, there must be some truth to it. What do I know? If everybody in my church believes it, well, they're good people. It must be true. it must be true. 

In most fights, those who lack conviction are going to get steamrollered by those whose convictions are passionately held, no matter how delusional. So how does this end well for the forces of sanity in America? It's clear that it can only end well if a more robust narrative emerges that is grounded in reality and which provides a satisfactory alternative for people otherwise drawn to the delusional narrative. People are not going to give up what gives their lives meaning for a narrative of complexity that doesn't fit well with their presuppositions and that they find difficult to understand. 

People are starved for meaning, and they will take it wherever they can find it. I think this is hard for Liberals to understand because many of them are quite comfortable living in a world where there need be no overarching, collective meaning narrative. It would be great if that were possible for everybody, but it's become clear that for a huge swath of the American populace it is not. This is a real problem, and it's not going away. So the challenge is to develop a meaning narrative that is both healthily realistic and that works with many of the traditional suppositions of the the people who cannot live without the overarching narrative.

The churches used to do this insofar as there were many levels of entry from the kind of simple peasant piety one found in the countryside to the kind of intellectual sophistication you found coming from great souls and minds from the early church fathers through Aquinas and Bonaventure to Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King. So the problem comes down to Liberals who are comfortable in a complex, pluralistic world where there is no one overarching meaning narrative facing down Conservatives who feel a kind of desperate need for an overarching meaning narrative. 

And while I realize it seems crazy unrealistic, it seems that some kind of socially integrating big story has to develop if the centrifugal forces working within American society don't lead to his utter disintegration. We need a coherent metanarrative in which both sophisticated cultural elites and simple ordinary folk feel that they belong in the same world and where there is mutual respect for the one by the other. 

All I know is that being religious is baked in to the human condition, and we have a choice going forward to either be overwhelmed by really bad religion or to develop a healthy alternative out of the historical cultural resources available to us. What that would look like I have no idea, but I think that something that developed a system of what Charles Taylor calls hierarchical complementarity as found in Buddhist and in Catholic or Orthodox Christian societies would provide a framework for people participating a different levels of seriousness but within a larger cosmic imaginary and a compelling theological mythopoeisis of history that is not in contradiction to what science tells us. 

I have written here for years that the I suspect that the way forward into the postmodern--i.e., whatever comes after the modern--will be a synthesis of modern critical left-brained techno thinking with a retrieval of aspects of premodern religiosity that has a more right-brained receptive approach to the mystery of being than currently acceptable, an approach, in other words that can be comfortable with sacraments and shamans as well as computers and biotechnology, that integrates the pre-Axial with the post Axial, Heidegger with Silicon Valley in a dynamically evolving coincidentia oppositorum. This is what I believe needs to happen, but how it happens I have no idea. But I feel fairly certain that unless it does, unless there is some kind of transcultural awakening or renaissance along these lines, the machines will win by default.

 

Belief and Cash Value

I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately. I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because of its open-endedness, its aptness for the way we actually live and think about the world. It's somewhat simplistic to say that for James 'truth' is what works, but it points us in the right direction. Truth is what has 'cash value'; it's what you have confidence enough in to act on. It's never identical to the Real. At best it gives us a working model for or a map of the 'Real'.

But there is a Real--even if our models of it are only better or worse approximations. There is an ontological foundation behind the models. aka, the "appearances". There's a difference between saying that we cannot know the Real and that there is no Real. There's a difference between saying that all our models about the Real are social constructions on one hand, and that all our constructions of the Real are ontologically groundless or arbitrary or merely serve ideological purposes on the other. Some models are better than others, and what makes them better is the degree to which they align with the Real or are out of alignment with it. 

We are acculturated into working models for how the world around us works, but we should never assume that the model is the Real. It's just something that allows us to navigate in the Real. And over time we individually or collectively make revisions in the model, or we replace it with another one because it works better or because it delivers benefits the older one did not. This is the way science works, but it's also the way we  live our lives if we're sane. Delusion is persistence in the use of a model that no longer works. 

We humans have the understandable tendency to persist in the habits of mind formed by the model we grew up with and got comfortable with. We fear change and we often fear losing something that is precious to us. The mistake fear makes is to think that the 'model' and the 'Real' are the same thing, that to lose the first is to lose the second. But it's liberating when you come to understand that's just not true, that our loss of one model does not mean the rejection of what it modeled, but that we have a need for a better model, one that accounts for the data--for our experience--in a richer more robust way. It is only important that we strive to be in the best possible alignment with the Real. When the old model becomes an obstacle to that, it must be discarded. 

The problem with modern materialistic Liberalism is not that it is misaligned with the Real, but that it filters out too much of it. It privileges the objective and what is given to the senses, and it dismisses as "subjective" what is given to the heart and to the spirit. It scoffs at the idea that the poets, not flat-souled technocrats, should be the true legislators of humanity, because they are the flat-souled technocrats who have no idea how spiritually impoverished their worldview is.

Our culture is in deep need of renewal, and that will only happen when, to use Iain McGilchrist's analogy from Nietzsche, the "Emissary"--the technocracy--once again serves the "Master"--the artists, prophets, and philosophers through whom the depths of Real are disclosed. If human beings are both angels and beasts, the problem with Liberalism is its hypertrophying of what is real about the second and hypotrophying the first. This leads to the kind of imbalances that we are suffering in the U.S. today, but also in every developed society in which the spiritual dimension of our humanity has become hypotrophied and trivialized, i.e., as having no 'cash value'. 

But materialist Liberals are better aligned with the Real than reactionary conservatives. Materialist Liberals navigate in a world that is shaped by the materialist presuppositions, as inadequate as those might be, that shape our dominant and now rather rickety social imaginary. Materialist Liberalism's social imaginary is our model of the Real, whether we feel comfortable within its constraints or not. And so it's what we use until something better replaces it. Reactionary conservatives are right in their critique of the spiritual poverty of a materialist social imaginary, but they fail to persuade because they don't provide a model that works better, if by working better we mean balances the spiritual with the material, the angel with the beast.  

It's this pragmatic view of truth that has been at the heart of my critique of Conservatism. Conservatives too often persist in habits of mind that are no longer adapted to the world that we live in. Liberals are not the cause of the changes that conservatives lament. They are not to blame. They are not bad people. They are people who simply went with the flow rather than to have resisted it. And most live perfectly decent lives within its limitations.

Early Liberals saw that the old premodern model wasn't working very well, and it really wasn't. The Thirty Years War de-legitimated for good reason confessional allegiances. Something better needed to be found. And they developed a new model that brought us levels of material property and technological advancement unimaginable within the premodern social imaginary. But it left behind much that was valuable, and, as I've been writing here for years, the task for us going forward is to retrieve much of what has been left behind. But retrieval in not reaction. Retrieval accepts the world given to us by materialistic Liberalism, and seeks now to spiritually enrich it. 

So thoughtful conservatives were not wrong in recognizing that important dimensions of human experience were lost in the shift to modernity. If there are aspects of the Real that they know about and which are not part of the contemporary social imaginary, they must work to develop a model that delivers a robust account that has advantages the materialist Liberal model lacks. I don't see anybody on the Right who is doing that in a way that maps a way forward. I think a big part of that is because those who are temperamentally inclined toward the Right don't believe there is a way forward; they believe "progress" is a liberal delusion. Nevertheless, my challenge to religious conservatives is hold fast to the Real that has been filtered out by modern habits of thinking, but to trust in their belief that God is Good, and that because he is our movement in history is toward the Good. 

For this reason I think of myself as a political progressive. I believe that there is a movement in history toward the Good, that the arc of history does in fact bend toward justice. Nevertheless I do not consider myself a Liberal because I think that Liberalism no longer works. Look around you. Is the world given to us by liberalism working?  It brought some short-term advantages, and it's understandable that some of the West's best minds explored its possibilities, but that Liberal model no longer works. It is deeply, profoundly inadequate. 

As I've written here frequently before, the Liberalism that was the child of the Enlightenment and the source of the optimistic republicanism of 1776, 1789, 1848, the revolutionism of the Paris Commune, and so many others died in Western Europe after by World War I. Bolshevism in Russia morphed into an authoritarianism that had nothing to do with the spirit of '89. This progressive idealism died in the U.S. during the 1960s, (when we said Bye Bye to Miss American Pie). And it died officially during the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, and everywhere else where the Jacobin spirit of 1789 was its inspiration. It had a good two-hundred year run, but now we're at a very interesting point in history. We're in a cultural/historical slack tide.

Neoliberal ideology has filled the political vacuum for want of anything better, but anything goes and who knows where it's going. It's going to be a rocky ride, and we have to trust in our ability to adapt, and to realize that to cling to habits of mind that no longer work will not preserve order, but rather lead to more suffering and to a more destructive collapse. Better to adapt, to go with the flow, and try to manage things to mitigate the inevitable transitional suffering as best we can. We need to be prudent, but not fearful. Fear almost always inclines us to make the wrong choice. 

***

We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation. Our experience of the world is shaped by habits of perception and thinking that enhance or filter out aspects of the Real. At any given moment, we only experience and understand what our acculturation has programed us to see or understand. Our habits change when we are forced to adapt to changes in our environment. We resist the change, but sooner or later we make it when we come to understand that we receive benefits from the change that our current habits prevent. This is Pragamtism 101.

We change our habits because we discover the benefit of the change on our own or because we imitate those whom we notice are thriving because they have already made the change. And when our habits change, as they did when the medieval model broke down to make way for the modern, our experience changes. This is not a process that moves quickly. It happens slowly from generation to generation. But the world given to the French peasant in the 18th Century has more in common with his contemporary in China than it does to the French bourgeois information worker employed in a glass tower in Paris.

The biggest cultural gulf is not defined by whether one is Asian or European, Christian or Hindu, but by whether one's habits of mind are modern or premodern. We are now moving into another transition in which the differences will be defined by whether one's mind continues to be shaped by modern habits or by whatever the New Thing, the no-longer-modern modeling of the Real will be. Many are living intensely aware of our being in this slack tide, and it's not easy to flourish in such a time, but it's interesting.

And so because we are now living at a time when the modern model has broken down, we live with modern habits of mind for want of better ones. And so those of us who recognize this, especially if we are Christians, have a special opportunity and responsibility to develop new habits of mind that are both inspired by the spirit of the gospel but which also have  "cash value" in the Jamesian sense, that model the Real in a way that works. The biblical term for cash value  is "fruits".

Jamesian Pragmatism brackets questions about metaphysics, but it recognizes the central role that belief plays in shaping the world we work in and think about. So I consider myself a Jamesian Pragmatist when it comes to understanding the real world we live in, but I combine that with a Christian Neoplatonic metaphyisics concerning the ontological grounding of the Real. The Real is real, and while it transcends our models of it, it provides an ontological foundation for those models.

If the test for any belief system is its 'cash value', the burden on Christians is to prove that its beliefs deliver. It has to deliver meaning that makes sense in the real world that we live in, and it also must help us to be productive in the world in a way that has advantages that others would notice and imitate. It happened in the Roman world as that world slowly disintegrated; it could happen in the modern Liberal world as it continues its disintegration. I accept, in a Jamesian key, that the best we can do is develop working models that map reality in ways that work. Do we have enough faith in our model to actually live by it and shape our life by it? Can we be ruthlessly honest about whether it is working for us or not?

***

If the 19th Century was a time when the Western social imaginary--its model of the real shifted from mind-dominated model to a matter-dominated model, we've been undergoing a shift, at least in some precincts of the culture from matter to mind. We see it in popular culture in the way that “believing” no longer has the pejorative connotations it once had. It’s possible now to entertain metaphysical questions in a way that it was not even thirty years ago. That much of it feeds a spiritual narcissism that is hard to take seriously because it just isn't is beside the point. There's an openness to a new story, a new grand narrative, a new Jamesian model if it can deliver cash value. 

Since Kant, metaphysics has been suspect; it was perceived by the mainstream of western thought to be about believing something rather than really knowing it, and “believing” until recently was considered a weakness of mind. And for lots of people whose habits of mind are still modern, it still is. But one of the pillars of the postmodern critique of modern rationality has been that most of what we think we know is really only what we believe. Our truths—even scientific facts like our model for the atom—are just provisional maps that have meaning only insofar as they work, i.e., have  explanatory power that allows you to work with them, but they make no pretense of understanding the 'thisness' of the atom. That's open to different interpretations, and I would say the same is true for biological evolution. It's for now a provisional map; it works, but no one can claim to know with certainty the 'thisness' of evolution. What we know about it is open to different interpretations. 

The postmodern thinkers recognize this, and while I don't buy into the nihilism that many of them think is the ineluctable consequence of their critique, I find what they say interesting because their mood of "deconstruction" reflects accurately the spirit of our decomposing age. I have the same relation with Marxism. I find much value in its critique of capital, but I reject the materialistic metaphysics and its prescription for a cure. Marxism gives us a good map for understanding how capital works; it gives us a deeply inadequate model for something better. 

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said. Can we show that there is more 'cash value' in our model?  And such a project starts by acknowledging the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. 

‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

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

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

So I hope  I can count on the flexibility and adaptability of my readers as I try to make my case for the plausibility of my beliefs. And I hope I've made the  case today for the idea that there are worse things that you can do than to believe something.  And if 'belief' is where it's at, why not loosen it up a little, get wild and crazy and see if it works. The worst that can happen is that it won't, and then we'll make the necessary adjustment. But anything is better than the thing we have now, which just isn't working. The bottom line is whether your beliefs lead you to  live a fruitful life or one that is sterile and puerile.

[Ed. This is a revised version of a post of the same title from 2014. ]

Calvinism + Baconism = The Toxically Arrogant Technocratic State

I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be taken seriously at all, for what's best in its traditions if the way most Catholics have acted is the measure. The same can be said of the Calvinists, but as I argued in my previous post, we're all Calvinists now, even Catholics, and we need to understand how Calvinism shapes the way we experience the Real for better and worse.

I have often wondered why the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination didn't lead the Calvinists into a kind of Amish separatism. For the early Calvinists, most people are unregenerate and damned, so why should the elect not just move away and start something new that leaves the damned to the damned. Perhaps the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts came close to this kind of project. But the early Puritans saw themselves not as separatists, but as a vanguard, a light shining on a hill to be emulated by those left behind in England.

This is one of the main questions that Charles Taylor addresses in both A Secular Age and Sources of the Self. He is quite eloquent in describing how ambitious the Calvinists were not just for themselves but for transform all of European society. The English Civil War and the Thirty Years War are hard to understand without acknowledging this as a central Calvinist objective. They wanted to tear down the old thing in its entirety and to build something new. But If they truly believed that most humans were utterly, irredeemably depraved, how could the possibly believe that such a reform project could possibly succeed? 

As Taylor points out, the Calvinist logic is that good people—the regenerate—do good things. Paul says to the regenerate in Corinthians 1: 15.58—"My dear brothers and sisters be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.”

Calvinists do good not because it is efficacious for their salvation, but out of an energy that flows from their having been regenerated. There is something genuinely noble about that. There's no quid pro quo, no need to do good to earn points that can buy you a place in paradise; instead, there's just the impulse to do good because that's what's called for, because It's what conscience dictates. But not only must they do good, they must order their lives and the lives of others in such a way as to restore creation from the chaos into which it has degenerated. So, this means that they must restore order in society and in the lives of the unregenerate, even though most living in society are damned.

For the Puritans, the disorder of the world is a stink in God’s nostrils, and so the regenerated have a responsibility to mitigate God’s discomfort and the insult this stinking, disordered, chaotic world presents as an offense to his dignity. Once the “law” awakens in the heart of the regenerate, he is tasked with imposing that law on a lawless world, and by force if necessary. There is an inside-out dynamic at work here. The order is discovered within, and then it is imposed without, both in getting one’s own life in order, but also in imposing order on the world. This is a central insight if one is to understand the the new kind of reform mentality that is born in the modern period. The Thirty Years War, rather than being seen as cruel, destructive holocaust, which it was, is seen rather as a violent cleansing of the old degenerate society to make way for the new regenerated one. We know now how naive such an idea is, but it's understandable that idealists of a certain temperament could believe this. Is it so different from the mentality of Robespierre, Lenin, Mao and those who were inspired by them?

The idea of radical, top-down, humanly engineered revolution is something that only becomes possible after Calvin. And so without Geneva in the 1550s, there would be no Paris in the 1790s. Rousseau was a Genevan, but he took the idea of Calvinist human depravity and flipped it on its head. The idea of starting something new, something in defiance of the old, is very much part of the Calvinist imaginary, and plays an important shaping influence on Rousseau's imagination of the possible. Without Rousseau, there is no French Revolution. The causes of the French Revolution are more complex, of course, but it was not possible without this very different, very modern idea of reform that originated in Calvinism. And it lays a foundation for the technocratic state ruled by the best and brightest who know what's best and seek to impose their will from their positions of power.

And at the same time Calvinism lays the foundation for the Baconian revolution in science. Both Puritanism and Baconism set themselves against tradition and see themselves as involved in creating something new, from scratch. Aristotle becomes the foe for each—an authority that stands in the way of seeing things more clearly as they are. So Aristotle and the whole premodern, medieval superstructure is ripped down, and the idea that traditions and customs have any value except to impede the transformation of the world into something pleasing to God for the Calvinists morphs easily into transforming the world into something pleasing for humans by the Baconians.

Modernity is the confluence of both Calvin and Bacon, but in such a way that the first, the idea of pleasing God, becomes gradually supplanted by the latter, which in turn becomes something understood as evolution-without-grace. Hobbesian and Macchiavellian realism emerge at this time. Both accept the world as defined by evolution-without-grace, a world ruled by greed, will to power, and promiscuous sexuality. To be a realist is to understand the world as if grace does not exist. 

If the goal for the Calvinists was to restore God’s order, Baconian science provides a methodology that allows humans to come to a better understanding about what that order is. But there is a different spiritual impulse or energy at work in Baconism. It works hand in hand with Calvinism because it is impelled by a desire to understand the underlying order of God’s creation in order to make it useful and productive. This had  become a key element in the Puritan ethic—to be productive in ways that benefit humans, but it can very easily morph into the Faustian by the less pious. 

So Baconism is the Faustian side of Calvinism. Baconism is a movement driven more by evolution-without-grace than by what was the originary imputse within Calvinism, which was to do what conscience calls for. There is a similarity of motive—to improve the human condition by the establishment of a new order—but there is a fundamental difference in the nature of the orders that each seeks to realize. It’s easy for people of good will to be confused by such distinctions, but one leads eventually to a mechanomorphic, technocratic hellscape, and the other to the New Jerusalem. As I argued in my previous post, we're headed for the former if we don't find a way to restore a sense of the latter's possibility, and I see that effected only by something like a transcultural Axial awakening some time in the next century. 

But the idealism of the Puritans goes wrong almost from the start in part because of its image of God that stresses His power and freedom. God is everything all powerful and utterly free and without obligation to anyone or anything beneath him in dignity of Being. So he owes humans nothing. But this is the God of the philosophers, not the God revealed in the Bible. This idea of God as arbitrary despot depicts him as a being closer in nature to Genghis Khan than the one who reveals himself in a still, small voice to Elijah or as the one who seeks to forgive and befriend us in the New Testament.

God might indeed be all powerful, but that aspect of his nature is not how he presents himself in the Gospels. But no matter how pious the original intent--to exalt God and to insist on a radical human humility vis a vis the power of God--the Calvinist idea of God, even if unintentionally, aligns with and supports the technocratic power project of Baconism.

And there is something toxically arrogant about someone who insists that he knows God’s will and insists that you submit to it. This is the flip side of Calvinist humility--an incredible arrogance that the regenerate Calvinist knows better in ways that the unregenerate cannot. And this leads in turn to the remarkable hubris necessary to reorganize a society top-down according to a template that they alone had access to.

This mentality is secularized in modern revolutionary ideologies, which are born of the same kind of we-know-better arrogance. But so is this mentality found in the kind of technocratic mentality that reigns in Silicon Valley. It shares in the arrogance that I call Aspen Institute Liberalism, the mentality of rich elites who think they know better because they are rich and are good at navigating in the world created by consumer capitalism. Trump, Brexit, and the "democratic" embrace of illiberalism everywhere is an understandable, if even more dangerously toxic, response to this liberal, Baconian arrogance. The problem we face at this moment lies in that there are no healthy alternatives to either. 

This kind of technocratic top-downism claims to be progressive, but it's a progressivism that is shaped primarily by evolution-without-grace. It's a "liberal" mentality that seeks to be cutting edge in the development of the new, and as such is consonant with the Baconian project to use science and technology to make life better for human beings. But at a certain point the tail started wagging the dog, and as modern society lost any sense of a vital connection to a sense of a transcendent moral order, there has been no foothold for people to get traction to push back. Technological progress is not human progress unless it can become baptized in some way, which is to say subordinated to the logic of grace. Technological progress without grace, i.e., evolution without grace, is dehumanizing--slowly at first, but ultimately it leads to the complete extermination or enslavement of the human. 

Whether consciously or unconsciously acknowledged, evolution-without-grace is the metaphysics, i.e, the dominant metaphysical imaginary, of the intelligentsia in North Atlantic societies. It is running amok in consumer capitalism and in the developments in machine learning and biotechnology. As I pointed out in my last post, while in the short run evolution-without-grace might need human beings, in the long run it doesn't.  

Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the culmination of the Baconian project, a project that from my pov seems peculiarly impervious to grace. As a Christian, I must live in hope that grace will find a way, but its operation in the world right now is out of sight, and out of most people's minds. 

Deep State 2

The concept of the deep state has a variety of overlapping meanings, and a long heritage within historical and political analyses of famously top-heavy states like Turkey and Egypt, where powerful entrenched bureaucracies have subverted democracy or ignored it altogether. In the current American context, journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady have used it to designate the far-reaching national security apparatus that was expanded so dramatically after 9/11. In an influential essay published earlier this year (which helps explain why the Obama administration is sliding toward another Middle East war), former congressional aide Mike Lofgren uses it to signify something much larger, “a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out,” comprising not just the federal bureaucracy and the intelligence agencies, but also the bankers and corporate elites.

If we were voting for or against candidates who were willing to address the power of the deep state, or at least to disclose and discuss it openly, then the midterm elections might mean something. As things stand, American electoral politics looks a lot like the circus staged to keep the kids entertained while the grownups pave over the fields and run the railroad through the middle of town. Can you blame the kids if they’re getting bored of watching the same clowns jamming themselves in and out of the same Volkswagen?

Tom Frank takes Krugman to task in his Sunday Salon column Sunday morning, but I think that Andrew O'Hehir's piece, quoted from above, is more probing. Frank still believes that Obama could have made a difference, or still could, and I just don't. Even Krugman seems to think that the president has powers over policy that I just no longer believe he has. The president isn't impotent, but he only has as much power as the Deep State allows him. That's the main thing that I've learned since 2008. Elected politicians to the federal government  mostly don't matter; it's the Deep State that matters; elected politicians in Washington succeed or fail depending on whether they serve or resist the will of the Deep State.

I'm not saying that the Deep State is some conspiratorial cabal; it's rather the 'group think' of insiders who mainly talk among themselves and are contemptuous of the democratic process because it mostly elects venal morons to congress. The key players in the Deep State like power, they understand how power works, and they serve power in order to get more of it for themselves, and so therefore no individual rises to power without first becoming its servant. I talk about that in a piece back in February about Lofgren's essay on the Deep State that my reading O'Hehir this morning reminded me about. 

The only politicians now who could make a substantive structural difference on the national level are those that challenge the "Deep State", but no politician can become powerful enough to do that effectively because the Big State, with the cooperation of the establishment media, destroys or makes irrelevant candidates who oppose it. (Howard Dean comes to mind.) At first I thought that Obama would be such a challenger, but it now seems clear to me now that the stuff he said that actually made sense he said because he (and I) didn'tunderstand scope and power of the Deep State. But when it became clear to key players in the Deep State that he was likely to win, he got "educated".

I could imagine some powerful insider having a conversation with Obama in Spring of 2008 in which he flatters him, tells him how smart he is, how great it will be for the country to have its first black president, that the world of Washington insiders is ready to embrace him and his presidency with enthusiasm: You want healthcare reform? Great--go for it--but there are rules you have to learn, and one of them is that you don't challenge the security state or it will chew you up and spit you out, and you will have squandered this remarkable, historic opportunity for black Americans and for accomplishing important things that you care about (so long as they are things that  we in the Deep State approve or just don't care about."

Obama's remarkable reversal on the FISA vote in the summer of 2008 was the first sign he had been "educated" about where the real power lies. Hilary voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because she already had been 'educated' during the 90s; she knew that the Deep State wanted that invasion, and it was pointless to oppose it. Obama, who was not in any federal office in 2003, could say sane things about the invasion because he was still naive about how power in Washington works. I think that's what angered and frustrated Hillary and her supporters off so much. Obama could come out as the anti-war candidate in 2008 because he could sanelyoppose the war in 2003 when no one in the Deep State saw him as significant enough to pressure him to support it. 

George Bush or Dick Cheney were not the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq; the Deep State was. Bush & Cheney were simply servants of the deep state, willing servants perhaps, but servants nevertheless. That's why Cheney completely reversed himself about invading Iraq. There's that famous quote from 1991 when he worked for the first Bush when he laid out all the reasons why it would be stupid to invade Iraq:

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq. (At the Washington Institute's Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991)

He could talk sense then because it didn't contradict what the Deep State wanted at that time. Things changed since 1991, but not in Iraq. They changed in Washington where neocon thinking became more influential in shaping insider groupthink. What most Americans wanted was never a factor. The insiders knew that public opinion, at first negative about invading Iraq, could be easily manipulated by fear rhetoric.

It's depressing that this country would even consider giving the Republicans a majority in the Senate, but as O'Hehir points out, it has nothing to do with what people want; it's understood more like the weather. There seems to be little or no human agency involved at all. If there is any such thing as political agency anymore, it lies on the local level. 

Grace in the Wilderness

If you want optimism, I don't have any for our society's  near future. But hope I have, and here's a repost of an essay that explains my reason for it:

Barfield and Nietzsche start from the same place—a recognition that the transcendent values of the West have dried up as a living source of meaning in the culture, that is to say as a source of “given’ meaning in the cultural forms and institutions that we inherit from the past and into which we are socialized as children. And both agree as to the remedy—that human beings must find a way to reconstitute meaning in the outer world from resources found within their own individuated subjectivity. 

The difference lies in that for Nietzsche this reconstituting project was to be achieved through the will to Power; for Barfield through the awakening of the Logos. (By Logos Barfield means that which is referred to in the Prologue of John's Gospel, not the logical functions of the mind, although an argument can be made that the latter relies on the former, but that's another post.) The point is that either N’s choice must be made or Barfield’s--or the culture shrivels into something shaped by the bread and circus values of the Last Man.

I think it’s important to point out that neither Nietzsche nor Barfield are the first to talk about the interiorization of meaning. It was a movement in the history of Western thought that began with Descartes and then with Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”. (See my post "Metaxis" for more on this) 

Barfield’s importance for what I want to present lies, first, in his explanation of why the objective world has become stripped of so much of the meaning that people of an earlier age took for granted. And, second, in his proposal, that hearkens back to the thought of the Romantics, perhaps Coleridge, Schelling, and Novalis more than the others, that transcendent meaning can no longer be found out there because its source has migrated from out in the world into the depths of the human soul. Indeed the whole meaning of the Incarnation of the Logos two thousand years ago was to enable this transition. For after Christ an entirely new possibility for freedom became available for human beings, and the history of the world since then is the story of conditions gradually changing in such a way as to allow for the emergence of this freedom in all of its fullness. 

The idea of Christian freedom has been a theme in Christian thought since it was first articulated in the Epistles of St. Paul, but during the Romantic period, Western thought awakened to it as a possibility in a profoundly new way that has given shape to the modern human sense of individuality and selfhood, to the importance of human creativity, and for the shaping power of the human imagination that simply was impossible for people in earlier era.

So the irony lies in that as the culture has come more and more to understand meaning as subjectively constituted, the Christian meaning world has significantly diminished in its influence and in its power to shape the public culture. The objective meaning of the traditional language and ritual of the Church has become more stripped of its obvious objective meanings and as such has become easy not to take seriously.  Since the Reformation the Church’s control over even its own meanings has progressively eroded to a degree where now Christianity means pretty much anything anyone wants it to mean and where moral and doctrinal orthodoxy is something only a relatively small group of traditionalists care about.

There is, therefore, no real mystery about why Christianity and the religious sensibility in general has had such a diminished influence in shaping public culture since the mid nineteenth century. But this does not mean that the traditional forms are meaningless.  It makes a huge difference if one believes that the forms have lost meaning because they never had any to begin with or if one believes that the loss of “given” meaning was an essential stage in a longer term process by which human beings have to become liberated from external forms if they are to come into possession of the freedom and selfhood for which they were created.  

If the forms never had meaning to begin with, then the past is irrelevant and the future is a blank slate upon which the uebermenschen can write whatever script pleases them. If the latter, then the script for the future at least in part lies in finding ways to reconstitute the forms from the past so that they might live again, pulsing again with meaning, not as something given from without by the gods, but constituted by a self-transcending, world-constituting human Self, the Self created in the image of the I Am Who Am, whose purpose and meaning derives from an awakened sense of the Logos which lives in the interior depths of the human soul. 

Because this is the difference between the Nietzschean and the Christian. For the first, the world is radically open-ended and any human future is a possibility. The Christian would also acknowledge that because humans are no longer fated by the gods and determined by outside forces in the way they were, that a wide range of futures is a possibility, but however it is attained the future has a goal, a telos,  an Omega point.  And the striving toward that endpoint is what gives meaning and significance to what we do now. 

And the achievement of this telos will require unprecedented effort and imagination if it is to be achieved, but not any kind of effort or any kind of imagination. Rather the challenge lies in awakening an imagination-inspired effort that is informed by the Logos. What’s required is a way of reconstituting meaning from within that also resonates deeply with the truth Christians recognize as a presence in the Gospels and the traditions of the Church. This is not the truth of the scholars who have deconstructed, torn up, demythologized, and eviscerated the scriptures and traditions of the church in a misguided search for objectivity.  Among the most absurd of these projects has been the modern, mostly Protestant, project of wanting to determine which were the words in the Gospels that Jesus really spoke. It misses almost completely the point. The real goal of modernity has not been the enshrinement of objective truth, but of the discovery of the profound subjectivity of truth. Kierkegaard, Yes. Comte, No.

But subjective doesn't mean arbitrary. It requires that in the same way that humans developed criteria about understanding what was true or false in the the outer world of nature through experimental method, a similar method must be developed for understanding what is true or false in the interior world of the Soul. What it will come down to is what works, what is fruitful, what moves the individual toward true freedom and the culture forward toward an embodiment of peace and justice. William James, Yes. Syllabus Errorum, No. There are resources from the tradition from which we can make a beginning here. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but those resources have to be adapted to these remarkably open-ended cultural conditions.

So here is the essential thing:  If there is no Logos and no Grace, the Nietzscheans are right, and it’s either the uebermensch or the Last Man, masters and slaves. I know there are other possibilities, but they are not serious because if Grace is an illusion, then Power is the only thing that matters. That's hard for some to accept, but it's obvous to anyone who thinks it through. But if the Logos is potentially awakenable in the depths of every human being’s soul, then a whole range of possibilities lie before us. For this graced awakening is what we mean by “faith,” and faith is the main ingredient that distinguishes the subjectivity of the Christian from the subjectivity of the Nietzschean. And this is an experience that has been repeated continuously through the centuries and will always continue to happen regardless what happens in the larger culture or the Church. 

So the shift toward the interiority of meaning is not something new after Kant. Indeed the Pietism in which he was nourished as a child and which he never relinquished as an adult was the 18th-century German manifestation of this interiority that has always been central to genuine Christian faith. It’s just that now the fundamental experience of faith has become essential in a different way for a culture that has otherwise lost its way. If the challenge for the first Israelites was to live according to the law, which meant an effort of will to resist regression into the idolatry that surrounded them, the challenge for us now is to find the will and the imagination to stoke the slumbering flame that burns within our hearts. For a truth lives there as real and “objective” as any that lived in an earlier age on tablets of stone. But it’s for most of us a weakly recognized truth which tends to get lost amid a myriad other subjective impulses. Its presence is like a still small voice, which can only be heard if one listens for it, and that requires the stilling of other voices that roar within the soul.  And so like the Israelites of old, a discipline is required to resist the natural flow of the world to create a space for grace to work. 

Before modernity, Christianity had to fight for its interior truth in a world in which the exterior world of meanings given by a culture still steeped in original participation was overwhelming and in which its clamor easily drowned out the still, small voice now calling from within. Those who heard this interior calling went out into the desert or sequestered themselves in monasteries where the noise outside could be kept at bay. After Constantine, Christianity was recognized and incorporated into what remained of the cultural forms of Imperial Rome, and life continued much as it had before despite the Christian trappings. But the world since the mid nineteenth century has changed radically, and as recognized in Eliot’s zeitgeist-defining poem of the 1920s, it is no longer necessary for us to go out into the Wasteland; the Wasteland has come to us.

The culture until the mid 19th century was able to maintain some integrity, some coherence because the old forms given by a human consciousness that were shaped by an outside-in Christianity still provided a context of meaning. But Nietzsche following Schopenhauer and Feuerbach realized that meaning is no longer out there—it’s no longer given to us by a God who is out there. It’s time for us to reclaim as something essential to human dignity what was projected outward onto God. There is no god out there; it’s we who are God, and we must accept the active, world-creating responsibility that goes with it. They were half right.

The story of modernity is essentially the story of the shift from outside-in to inside-out, of individuals asserting their interiority over against the perceived exterior authority.  There would be no felt need to do this if the exterior authority had not rigidified into a “system” that no longer carried life, the way, for instance, the oral traditions of tribal cultures carried life. The modern period has been dominated by one liberation program or another, and liberation has become an end in itself, and politics has become a simple-minded program for progressive-minded of  searching for anyone or anything in need of liberation. Politics in the modern period has been defined as the need of the oppressed individual or group to  assert itself against the individuation-crushing system—whether it be governmental, corporate or religious. 

This is a Romantic project. Because since the late 18th century Western culture has split into two main factions. One, the rationalist “technocrats” who see the world as a machine and are fascinated primarily with the engineering and system-building challenges the world poses, including social engineering projects.  The other, the alienated “Romantics” who instinctively find any given cultural forms or meanings oppressive and think of their purpose as only to stifle individual expression. The real culture war that will shape the next century is not between fundamentalists and evolutionists, but between Romantics and Technocrats.  It’s what’s driving, for instance, the protests against the WTO. 

The kind of Christian that has most to contribute will ally himself naturally with the Romantics, but not in the interests of promoting subjectivist anarchy, but in affirming, as they do, the dignity and sacredness of the individual and of the potency of human imagination and freedom. But he or she will also form alliances with the those who want to give shape and form to our lives together in culture. If there is any meaning at all to be found in our public institutions, it is something we give them from within our own subjectivity.  Meaning isn’t there now for most people in the Romantic faction, and they feel estranged from the system.

The political implications of this viewpoint are present throughout the blog entries I've been posting since 2003.  I've described here the basis for both saying No and Yes.  There isn't much to say Yes to at this point, but that could change. In the meanwhile we must recognized that the old forms, withered and brittle though they have become, have not yet collapsed. There is much that is worthy in them, no matter how much they have been coopted and distorted by the forces of anti-freedom. But if they haven’t collapsed, they  stand as something rather rickety and vulnerable to collapse soon. It needn’t happen, and it won’t if some way can be found to reconstitute the forms from within. This does not mean that the forms themselves must be preserved at all costs, but rather that what remains of the forms be approached with reverence because they once held something precious. And they must be approached with the attitude that in our contemplation of them, something in us will awaken that correlates with what first gave them shape. And once that happens, the life in us so awakened will lead to new growth, and the Wasteland will bloom again.

World War I and the End of the West

As the centennial of Guns of August approaches, I should imagine we'll be reading quite a bit about World War I and its implications, as we should. It was an absurd catastrophe, and it marked the death of the spirit of Enlightenment Modernity in Western and Central Europe. By the spirit of modernity I mean the collective, culture-wide optimistic consensus among the culture's progressive elite that utopia could be engineered by human rationality. A disaster like World War I destroyed any possibility for continued belief in such a possibility, except in Russia, where its Revolution gave it hope for such an engineered future, and in the U.S., whose elites thought such a future was largely already realized. But by 1969 in the U.S.--after the deaths of MLK and RFK and the Nixon presidential victory--and 1989 in the Russian sphere, such optimism was all but dead. The habits of modernity linger, but much like the chicken running around without its head. 

So to begin my thoughts about WWI, I thought I'd quote from this post at TAC by the very conservative William Lind (is he a quasi-monarchist?) entitled "The Lessons of 1814". His larger argument is that had the spirit of 1814 reigned in 1914 and the Christian monarchs maintained the Holy Alliance they formed after the defeat of Napoleon, World War I could have been avoided and Christian civilization preserved: 

The greatest and most worrying parallel is that today as in 1914 key policy-making elites are thinking and acting within an outdated paradigm. Then, the obsolete paradigm was dynastic competition, especially that between the Houses of Hapsburg and Romanov; the new paradigm was set by the mortal threat posed to all Christian, conservative monarchies by the notion of popular sovereignty and Jacobinical definitions of human rights. By fighting each other instead of uniting against the left, three dynasties doomed themselves and possibly us as well. Western culture’s last chance of survival may have been a victory by the Central Powers in World War I.

I love reading TAC because I always come across somebody saying something there  that in my world I hadn't heard before. In this case the idea that the victory in the World War I by the central European Christian monarchies would have preserved Western culture. Now I don't think this for a minute, and I'm amazed, quite frankly, that anybody could think it, but it's interesting because it has made me think a little more about WWI counterfactuals. What would have happened if the massive conflagration that we came to know as the Great War could have been short and limited or have been avoided altogether? 

I wonder if Lind believes that the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Hapsburgs would have become, had they survived as sovreigns, anything other than symbolic monarchies like the royal families of Britain, Denmark, Belgium, or Sweden. Can he really think that the monarchies of the continental great powers could have had a significant impact on preserving their nations' cultures from the secularizing and economic forces that were already making the existence of monarchy, except for reactionaries and nostalgists, irrelevant? Until reading this article it never occurred to me that anyone, especially any American, could look at WWI as a disaster, even in part, because it destroyed the houses of Hohenzollern and Habsburg. It would seem to me that would be one of its few benefits. 

The more interesting counterfactual question for me is what would have happened in Russia, Germany, and the U.S. if there hadn't been WWI. Had WWI not occurred, it's less likely that there would have been a successful Bolshevik Revolution and more likely that Russia, without "party discipline", would have developed along lines similar to Brazil or Mexico. If there hadn't been WWI, there would have been no Versailles, no stabs in the back, no hyperinflation, no German resentment for Nazis to exploit. No Nazis or Bolsheviks, no Hitler, no WWII, no Stalin, no holocaust, no famine in the Ukraine--and no Cold War. Maybe even no nuclear bomb. 

Germany would have continued as an economic superpower, and it's likely that its commercial class would gradually supplant in influence its military class. So Europe arrives pretty much where it is today, maybe a few decades sooner, and without as much bloodshed. 

***

How would these counterfactuals have had an impact on the U.S.? It's interesting to me that progressives were split on whether or not to support U.S. entry into WWI. One faction, led by John Dewey, favored entry into WWI because he saw it as an opportunity for greater centralization of the state in Washington, which he thought necessary to deal more effectively with social problems that were intractable so long as solutions for them were left to actors on the local level. Dewey was opposed by other progressives like Randolph Bourne who understood that 'war is the health of the state' and feared that US involvement in WWI would accelerate the destruction of the old republican localism and the new rule of technocrats.

But had the U.S. not entered WWI, the process that Bourne feared would have been slowed but not stopped. There was too much already in the works in the private sector that was leading to the destruction of the republican ideal. Industrial proletariatization, massive immigration, Taylorism, Fordism, the influence of social control freaks like E.A. Ross, and the manufactured consent of Walter Lippmann didn't need WWI for them to transform the U.S. into something the founders never dreamed of. And the Great Depression and the war with Japan was going to happen no matter what, and both required aggressive interventions from a strong centralized state. Centralization and secularization were inevitable in the U.S.

Because Japan's aggression would likely have continued according to its own internal drivers, conflict with the U.S., its main competitor for hegemony in the western Pacific, would have been inevitable. The U.S., the sleeping commercial giant once aroused, would have had an easier job defeating the Japanese fighting it only on the one front. The U.S. focus would likely have shifted more toward Asia and away from Europe, and if there had been no successful Russian Revolution, it's likely that Mao would be just another warlord rather than a Marxist ideologue, and without the ideological impediment would welcome a partnership  the conqueror of his Japanese enemy. No Great Famine, no Gang of Four, no Cultural Revolution. China goes the way of Deng a couple of decades earlier and develops a relationship to the U.S. and the West much like the one Japan developed. 

 ***

My argument with conservatives like Lind is that they give to much attention to developments in the political sphere and tend to see it as central in effecting changes in the social or cultural sphere. It just doesn't work that way. The Christian monarchs could not have "saved" Western culture because they could not have been at all effective in pushing back against the economic and cultural forces promoting secularism. The monarchs might have delayed things by partnering with a military autocrat as the Bourbons did in Spain, but it was only a matter of time before any such attempt to hold back the tide would collapse, as it did in Spain in the 1970s. 

So bottom line, had WWI been avoided, the twentieth century would have been a lot less bloody, but we would have wound up pretty much where we are now. But I'm open to be persuaded otherwise.

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 Deep State

I've said in a recent post that the Tea Party is right to be angry but wrong because it channels that anger in unconstructive ways. Last night on Moyers and Company, Moyers interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staffer, who explains why. He's coined the term the "Deep State", and describes more precisely and effectively than I've been able to do why we in the States have become what is virtually a ceremonial democracy. It doesn't matter whom we elect, we elect them not to serve the interests of the electorate, but the interests of the Deep State. Here's  Lofgren:

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. . . . 

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.

I wrote at the time about my disappointment in Obama's FISA vote here. That vote was the first clear sign that Obama was someone who had no problem with the Beltway rules and had no stomach for changing them. I was still hopeful that Obama would be better than that at the time, but as we all know now, that hope proved groundless.  

Lofgren also has some very good things to say about groupthink, which is the hive mentality that keeps the Deep Government from ever questioning the legitimacy of what it does:

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

 A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.

Groupthink is a dream state, the kind that one doesn't realize he's in until he wakes from it. In January I wrote this about the "institutional mind". It applies to all institutions, but particularly to the institution with the most power in the history of the world:

If I’ve come to understand anything over the years, it’s that individual human beings, even the best and worst, are always a mix of good and bad motives, but large institutions (governments, corporations, churches) the larger they get, the less ambivalent the motives that drive them. Large institutions don't do ambivalence. Their defenders will make all kinds of nuanced, clever, lawyerly arguments to justify what they do, but what in the end they do is boringly predictable, i.e., whatever serves their institutional self-interest.

That self interest is defined mainly in terms of security and control. There are always threats, real or imaginary, that justify getting more of the latter to insure the former. No argument, no matter how morally compelling, succeeds if it requires that the institution act in such a way that it threatens to undermine or diminish its security and control, no matter how much security and control it already possesses. The individuals who do the institutional will might feel ambivalently about what they do, but they do it, or the institution will spit them out.

I honestly don't know how you combat this. The Deep Government is impervious to even something like Marxist analysis and critique--it's about power, not greed, and there is no effective counterbalance, like the Proletariat, to bring it down. It's not something that the people who have positions in it control; the system instead controls them by a kind of institutional hypnosis. Does anyone think the Tea Party is going to bring it down? Talk about a group in a hypnotic dream. The Tea Party, if anything, serves its interests. Does anyone think that even electing more conscious people like an Elizabeth Warren to the presidency is going to bring it down? People like that could not do it even if they had the will to do it because government gridlock and the careerist groupthink in Congress will reisist with ferocity dismantling the trough at which it feeds. Gridlock among our elected officials isn't a bug but a feature as far as the Deep Government is concerned. If elected officials are paralyzed by tribal conflicts or care only about  corrupt, self-interested gamemanship a la Frank Underwood, the Deep Government sets policy by default; there's no united, countervailing power to restrain it. Even the Frank Underwoods are its tool.

If the Deep Government comes down, and eventually it will, it will come down from its own dead weight. Even now it is like a building that's been abandoned and has been taken over by squatters. Eventually the building will collapse from the accumulated negative consequences of its blinkered, parasitic, short-term thinking. It's interesting in a way--like watching a slow-motion implosion of a huge building, But instead of explosives that bring the structure down, it's all these bit players, who in removing beams and bricks to build fires or little shelters that serve their short-run interests, in the long run make of this building a ruin.  

Jerry Brown on the Common Core

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Gov. Jerry Brown blasted the notion of government-imposed standards for public schools, saying he opposed efforts from Washington and Sacramento to dictate education policy.

Using "data on a national or state level I think misses the point -- that learning is very individual, very personal," Brown said during an onstage interview with The Atlantic's James Bennet at a Silicon Valley Summit at the Computer History Museum. "It comes back to the teacher and the principal. The leader of the school is by far the most important factor."

When asked if he supported national education standards, Brown said, "No. That's just a form of national control."  (Source)

The goal is to educate our kids, not train them. The goal is to help them become competent human beings, not just competent workers. Doing good work is a part of living a good life, but it's not the most important part, and it should be subordinated to other concerns.

Brown gets this, but I would offer one caveat to his point about principals: Principals can be an important factor (never the most important, IMO) if they are genuine educators, but too often they are not. There are some men and women who are very effective principals and school leaders, but most are not. If you know an experienced teacher, ask them how often they've been in a school where the principal actually helped them to do their job better. 

In contemporary public school systems principals are more often middle managers more worried about test scores and performance numbers than they are about the welfare of their kids or their teachers. They are very often people who started off as teachers but didn't like it, or thought it was too small-time for them. They wanted more money or to be the boss rather than to work with the kids. They too often do not understand what motivates teachers because their own motivations are so different. They too often don't have a clue what the teachers are doing, so they rely on the numbers, and we all know that numbers don't lie, right?

The kids are the most important people in the school--everything about a school should be directed toward giving the kids the resources they need to become competent human beings. The teachers are the second most important people in the shcool, because they are on the front lines working with these kids. Everybody else in the system is there to support the teachers in their work with the kids. More often than not they would do both a favor by just getting out of the way. That's the way it should be, but it isn't. And if there is a problem with public schools these days, that's it. Could we do a better job of putting better trained educators in the classroom. Yes, but that's not what corporate education reform is ppushing for. The reformers want better trainers. 

Learning is something we all want to do; it's something that comes naturally to us. For too many kids "school" is what kills that desire to learn, and it happens around middle school. And a big part of why that happens is that when kids begin to feel that they have their own sense of agency and freedom, they pick up on whether they are there for the system or the system is there for them. And a school regime of teachers and principals obsessing about meeting their numbers sends a pretty clear message about who's there for what. They see that they are being trained to perform for the system. And spirited kids know it's all b.s.

If you are reading this blog, chances are you are someone who did pretty well in school. That means that you were successful in giving the system what it wanted, even if you weren't particularly interested in the subject that you were being taught. You saw, or were made to see, that it was in your self interest to give the system what it demanded of you. You probably grew up in a world where giving the system what it demanded was continuously reinforced at home.

So it might be hard for you to imagine why some kids, especially smart, talented kids  don't do well. "Why don't they apply themselves?," you may ask yourself. Well, why did you? Why did you bother, especially when it came to studying something you weren't particularly interested in? Well, it's probably because you didn't want to disappoint someone who was important to you.

But what if you grew up in a world where learning and academic achievement wasn't important? What if there was no one in your life who was a model for you of having applied himself and succeeed in giving the system what it wanted?  What if there was no one in your life who is living the results of having applied himself and succeeded?  What if there was no one in your life to help you imagine a better future or to give you the support you needed to get there? What if you lived in a world where all your friends thought that school was b.s.? What if since middle school you did poorly on standardized tests, which just reinforced what you already knew--that you and the system didn't match up  well? 

Well, if you're a corporate ed reformer, you don't think about the answers to these questions. It's much easier to blame the teacher for not doing a better job. Because the corporate ed reformer is only interested in measurable results. Poor results = poor teacher. Somebody's got to be held accountable, right? So he looks at the teacher as an assembly line worker, the kid as a widget, and tests as quality control to insure nothing defective is put out on the market. And when the corporate ed reformer thinks about improving the quality of teaching, he doesn't want better educators in the classroom, but better trainers, people who will more effectively train to the test, because the only thing that matters is getting a higher percentage of kids to pass quality control. This is all so dehumanizing, and that is why so many spirited kids hate school and don't learn anything in it. There are far more interesting things to learn on the street. 

 

Socialism v. Neoliberalism

Corey Robin recently in a post entitled " Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years"

In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. That, in fact, is the openly declared goal: once we are made more cognizant of our money, where it comes from and where it goes, neoliberals believe we’ll be more responsible in spending and investing it. Of course, rich people have accountants, lawyers, personal assistants, and others to do this for them, so the argument doesn’t apply to them, but that’s another story for another day.

The dream is that we’d all have our gazillion individual accounts—one for retirement, one for sickness, one for unemployment, one for the kids, and so on, each connected to our employment, so that we understand that everything good in life depends upon our boss (and not the government)—and every day we’d check in to see how they’re doing, what needs attending to, what can be better invested elsewhere. It’s as if, in the neoliberal dream, we’re all retirees in Boca, with nothing better to do than to check in with our broker, except of course that we’re not. Indeed, if Republicans (and some Democrats) had their way, we’d never retire at all.

In real (or at least our preferred) life, we do have other, better things to do. We have books to read, children to raise, friends to meet, loved ones to care for, amusements to enjoy, drinks to drink, walks to take, webs to surf, couches to lie on, games to play, movies to see, protests to make, movements to build, marches to march, and more. Most days, we don’t have time to do any of that. We’re working way too many hours for too little pay, and in the remaining few hours (minutes) we have, after the kids are asleep, the dishes are washed, and the laundry is done, we have to haggle with insurance companies about doctor’s bills, deal with school officials needing forms signed, and more.

It took until the late 19th Century, early 20th century before even the most progressive minds in the Anglo American world figured out that poverty for most people is not a sign of their moral turpitude. The famine in Ireland? It was ordained by God, and the Irish heathens deserved it. Debtors prisons, work houses, the concept of moral hazard: these are all products of a social imagination dominated Victorian economic moralism. The old Catholic idea that the poor were closest to God gave way in the modern period in the capitalist countries to the Calvinist idea that your wealth was an indicator of your favor with God. At least in the first model, the rich had a sense of their moral responsibility for the poor. In the Calvinist model, the immiseration of the poor was their getting what they deserved because the poor were responsible for their own immiseration. 

So it was something of a breakthrough when the English sociologist Seebohm Rowntree made the distinction between primary and secondary poverty in a 1901 study entitled Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Primary Poverty affected those people who simply hadn't enough money to meet the basic necessities of life. Secondary Poverty was the condition of those who had enough money, but wasted it on "non-necessities". For Rowntree a non-necessity was meat if poor families could be taught to subsist on a vegetarian diet, but secondary poverty was really just a hangover from the Victorian Calvinist idea that people are poor because they blow their money on alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes. 

But the very idea of Primary Poverty, that a huge number of people were poor because they were unemployed or paid too little for the work they could find was actually a Victorian ethos frame crasher, so to say. Of course Marxists on the continent were saying this for about a half century already, but Marxism never found a congenial home in the Anglo-American ethos dominated by the Calvinist Liberal moralistic frame. 

The fact is that the difference between conservatives and progressives even today lies in that conservatives still work within that Victorian frame. They really believe that the poor are responsible for their own plight. That government handouts make them passive and dependent. They focus on the few who abuse government programs, the welfare queens, etc., and assume that they are the rule rather than the exception. And they would deny help to those who really need it if that's the only way to prevent the few undeserving from getting what they don't deserve.

Charles Blow did a piece in the NYT the other day about this zombie Victorian idea that poor people are passive and dependent:

We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the charge.

They paint the poor as takers, work averse, in need of motivation and incentive. 

Well, that is simply not my experience with poverty. I have been poor, and both my parents worked. I grew up among poor people, and almost all of them worked. The problem wasn’t lack of effort, but low pay. Folks simply couldn’t make enough to shake the specter of need....

To buy into this destructive lie about the character of the poor means you’ve either had no experience being poor, or have no capacity to empathize with their plight.

Being poor is a job unto itself. The daily juggle of supplying the most basic needs — food, shelter, medicine — and the stress of knowing that you are always just one twist of fate away from calamity.

We moderns and late moderns live in a world where money means too much. It's bizarre that it has become a signifier of moral worth. Money is important--we all need enough of it that we shouldn't be in a continuous state of anxiety about it, but there are so many other better things to do than to manage it and worry about it.

That's the difference between those who celebrate free market capitalism and those who lean toward social democracy. The former thinks that the economic sphere in our lives is the most important, and that happiness and meaning in our lives depends on being effective economic players. It's for them as if economic activity is an end in itself, the way you prove your worth as a human being. And really, how bizarre is that? It's such an impoverished concept of what it means to be human. It takes an idea that has a little bit of truth in it and makes an idol of it. 

People in the second group think that, yes, the economic sphere provides a foundation, but that it is not an end in itself. Each of us needs a stable economic foundation upon which to build a meaningful life, but that meaning is not built through economic activity, but in the sphere of culture--of friends, family, music and the arts, religious practice, learning, sports, hobbies, and other entertainments. That's where the meaning is. Happiness is not guaranteed for anyone, but the prospect of immiseration for anyone is never a worry. The focus for your moral responsibilty lies in whether you have made a life, not just in whether you have made a llving.

There is at its heart something deeply dehumanizing about the Liberal and Neoliberal ethos, and so whatever might be said about socialism and its limitations, it has a human heart, at least until the technocrats get hold of it. That's the danger of socialism--not the moral hazards associated with redistribution, but its proclivity toward a toxic top-downism dominated by another kind of moralistic elite, the Jacobin who becomes a commissar.

No solution is ideal, but this is where the Rawls's veil of ignorance thought experiment is useful. If you were told before birth that you would be born black and poor, with average intelligence and talent, would you choose to be born in Cuba or in the U.S.? 

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 2

I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it:

See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs:

I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we could perceive, in fact, a pervasive historical commitment to the aspiration of republican self-government. Because humans in their social and political communities are various, it was understood by our Founders that the way that these educational purposes to be achieved would be various, and so the commitment to local control of education was not born of a resignation in the absence of a strong central government, but a positive embrace of variety and multiplicity. Because there is likely to be debate and disagreement in a pluralistic society over the nature of our civic ends and the nature of a good character, it was understood that only in more local circumstances could the highest aspirations of education be pursued, even if that would be various and multiple. In our modern insistence to standardize and equalize, we necessarily discard any higher aspiration of education’s end in an embrace of a widely-secured agreement about lower, debased ends: an education based upon a lowest common-denominator, “career-readiness.” Our civilization thus shows its ultimate commitments through how it educates its young—that we think them incapable of anything higher than being workers in a deracinated globalized economic system, neither citizens nor, in the fullest sense, humans.

At the same time, we condemn ourselves, betraying our ancient faith in our own ability to educate and cultivate our young, handing over our final and most basic liberty to a distant power. Contained in the very act of handing over the education of our young is the self-indictment of a decaying Republic, a future feared by, among others, Tocqueville, as a possible path that America might take, since it is one that all republics heretofore have taken, and is an inevitability once a people has lost the taste and the art of ruling themselves.