After the Future

Genealogy Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West

Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth?  The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond....

What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth.  Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.  And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), p. 214

What Roszak calls myth, I call a metaphysical imaginary. I use the word 'mythos' in a way similar to the way Roszak uses 'myth', but I do not think it's possible to have a materialist or rationalist 'mythos', because a mythos works on the dimension of spiritual depth. Roszak points out that rationalist materialists think they know the truth as opposed to those who believe in myths, but that they, too, live circumscribed within myth. Point taken, but I still prefer to make a distinction between myth and metaphysical imaginary.

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.

Religion and poetry have become consumer choices, like buying a new car. They serve our needs or they don't, and mostly they don't because religion and poetry fail to be relevant to the way the larger society actually operates. People don't feel a need for either because the larger society feels no need for either. Being irreligious has become as conventional as being a sports fan. Is this the problem of religion, or is it the problem of the society that has made religion so irrelevant? Well the answer depends on whether you think there is a problem with a society whose cultural forms no longer connect the people in it to the Living Real. Lots of people (most?) are like Cypher in The Matrix--they would prefer to live in a virtual reality, a Metaverse, which is both the pinnacle and the reductio ad absurdum of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. 

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

Roszak says that myth is so critical for the operation of a society that "it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond". Well, in my terms, he's talking about a metaphysical imaginary, and in our case it's a metaphysical imaginary that's missing one of its two dimensions. This creates incoherence despite even if until recently it provided the appearance of it. Our current crisis of incoherence lies not in that we lack a metaphysical imaginary, but in that the one we have lacks a vertical dimension, the having of which provides what Roszak calls the "mythological bond" that holds things together. Rationalist materialism fails to provide that bond, even if it is our dominant metaphysical imaginary. That's why it feels like the world is falling apart. 

This loss of Mythos, the vertical dimension, in Western societies is also known as the death of God. It spawned a backlash that was simmering for a while, but it flared into public awareness in the U.S. at the time of the Scopes trial. Since then, American evangelical Christianity, which had been the custodian of the American version of the Western mythos, became more rigidly fundamentalistic and increasingly hostile to knowledge on the horizontal dimension. But its growing fundamentalism also made its already rather weak hold on the vertical dimension even weaker. We're in a situation now where neither rationalist materialism nor American Christianity provides American society with any vitality on the dimension of depth. We are a society that completely lacks wisdom in the conduct of its affairs. Expediency is all. 

Roszak is saying that Rationalist Materialism is a myth and doesn't realize it, but I'm saying that Rationalist Materialism has come to so dominate our metaphysical imaginary that we operate no longer with a Mythos or vertical pole around which to spin, and so we spin erratically and meaninglessly. Without the vertical pole to orient activity on the horizontal, we reel in ontological dizziness. Because neither a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary and its religious fundamentalist antithesis has a vertical dimension, neither can be called Mythos. The civilizational crisis we face today, I'm arguing, is the direct consequence of a society whose metaphysical imaginary has lost its vertical dimension. This loss of Mythos has produced a society that lacks wisdom because it lacks broadly accepted cultural forms that connect it to the Living Real. 

A functional metaphysical imaginary 'works' on both the horizontal and vertical. It integrates facts and wisdom. It fails to the degree that one or the other fails to balance the other. The difference between premoderns and moderns is that premoderns privileged the vertical; moderns the horizontal. Most premodern metaphysical imaginaries worked because the vertical and the horizontal reinforced one another. In other words, the everyday world of experience made sense in the context of its mythos. Modern societies have evolved in a way where its everyday experience became increasingly divorced from what had been its vertical dimension until eventually the vertical became irrelevant for the way in which people conducted their everyday lives.

This diagram maps what I think would be the underlying structure and function of an healthy metaphysical imaginary: 

A metaphysical imaginary should not be judged as inadequate by what it affirms but by what it leaves out. And so for that reason I would say that the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary fails us, not because of what it affirms as knowledge on the horizontal, but because of what it leaves out the dimension of depth and its wisdom. But any religious system that seeks to play a vital role in a society fails if it rejects knowledge on the horizontal. Fundamentalism fails twice over because it rejects knowledge on both the vertical and the horizontal--it lacks factuality and wisdom. Biblicism is a reductive metaphysical imaginary that provides no real knowledge on either the horizontal or vertical dimensions. Fideism, which for some people has a genuine spiritual depth, rejects knowledge whether derived vertically or horizontally. Biblicism and Fideism cannot work on a social or civilizational level because both in their different ways reject real knowledge on the horizontal dimension as irrelevant for the individual's salvation, which is the only thing humans should be concerned about. I think Christians should be concerned about the redemption of history, but that's a topic for another day. 

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being, as well as a healthy, integrated society, "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. 

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their religious beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. More often than not, those religious concerns become directed toward a supernatural world that has little relationship with the immanent, sublunar everyday, common-sense world of their daily experience.

Their mythos must necessarily alienate them from life in a world that is dominated by a Rationalist Materialist imaginary. Rather than for them to think of their lives as entwined with the destiny of the earth, they see the earth as a place of exile or as illusion from which they must be freed by getting off-planet and into the supernatural dimension, which is their true home.

This leads to a quietism that leaves the earth open to be dominated by the sociopaths. A quietist mythos that assumes that the earth is dominated by evil, delusional, and depraved human beings has robust explanatory power--isn't this an apt description of the world we live in? But it also functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But better that kind of otherworldly, quietistic fideism, like that, for instance, practiced by the Amish, than the kind of militant fundamentalism that seeks holy war to impose a wisdomless theocracy on the rest of us. That would simply replace a wisdomless Liberal horizontality with a wisdomless Illiberal one. Theocrats on the American cultural right crave to live in a "godly" society, but what they really crave is a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. 

We all crave it, whether we recognize it or not, because we all crave the Living Real, whether we recognize it or not. As I said above, a felt connection to the Living Real is the only cure for alienation, and there is no society in the history of the world that is experiencing alienation with greater intensity than American society. American society craves a restoration of Mythos to balance out a suffocating, alienating, overweening horizontality. Lots of people live in communities that attempt to live lives aligned on the vertical dimension, but as I argued in Part I, it is hard for such communities to flourish. They are running a cultural program on a cultural OS that has become incompatible with it. I believe that eventually, if we are to find health again, we must find a way for the entire society to restore the dimension of depth while respecting the freedom of every individual to find his or her way on it.

I realize that such an idea is an affront to the postmodern, cosmopolitan ethos in which most the culture's elite swim, but I think that most also recognize that something's got to give. I also realize that I have to make a more compelling case than I've done so far that at the root of our crisis is this loss of the vertical. See Part 3 for that. People have lived so long without it that they have no sense of its loss. It's just disappeared without a trace, and so we assume it never existed. The ancestors who report their connection with the Living Real, we think, were delusional; they didn't have science to set them straight.  

In a future posts, I will make the case that there is a Living Real, and that we live in a society that has lost any sense of its importance. But even without having made that case yet, I think anybody who is half awake realizes that we cannot continue on the course we're on. Something radically different is called for. At the root of our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and meaning comes from the vertical dimension. 

Part 2B: Random Reflections on This Theme

On Christmas, I posted "A Reflection on the Incarnation" in which I laid out in rough outline a way of synthesizing the vertical with the horizontal. The challenge is to recover the Mythos that roots Western civilization within the context of what evolutionary science and modern cosmology tell us about reality on the horizontal dimension. I think that the core mythos of Western civilization can be accurately described as Christian Neoplatonism, which is an integration of two post-Axial traditions--Greek transcendental speculative philosophy and Jewish revelation. Of course, I recognize how implausible what I wrote there sounds both to Christians of a certain stripe and to secularists of another. But my goal is not to persuade people I am right that the Christian Neoplatonic mythos is the only one that's possible for the West--or the world. I do, however, insist that something like it is called for. My goal is not to argue by marshaling evidence and logic so much as it is to evoke a memory of something long forgotten. 

And in any event, I suspect that Christianity is its best version of itself when it is countercultural rather than providing a civilization's central mythos. In all likelihood, at least in the next hundred or so years, I think that something other than the Christian mythos will play the primary role if we find a way to restore the vertical pole to our collective metaphysical imaginary. But in its main outlines such a mythos should be compatible with the Christian mythos as well as with the mythoi of the other great post-Axial religions. All I'm saying is that the broader society needs an alternative to the Rationalist Materialist cultural OS if they are to run effectively, i.e., run in a way that provides a way for the broader society to reconnect to the Living Real. 

I think there needs to be room for the vertical knowledge that comes from pre-axial 'shamanic' religions, as well. This was the case in medieval Christendom and in Buddhist societies, where a system of hierarchical complementarity allowed for a whole range of religious practices within one social system. The goal in restoring  the vertical dimension would be to embrace a religious integrated pluralism. I'll explore what this means in a future post, but the way I think about it now is that a future Mythos has its own vertical and horizontal dimensions--a transcendent, theistic vertical, and an immanent, polytheistic horizontal.

As suggested in Part 1, something like a metaxis that defines a centering Perennial Philosophy as the colorless light in tension with many colors refracted in particular traditions, local variations, orders, and sects is probably what is called for. Again, this is for a later post, but I"m not talking about Bellah's "civil religion". There's not enough of the vertical in that, but there must be a civil dimension to whatever mythos we come to embrace.

My goal in writing these essays is to bark up a tree that needs to be barked up. For those of us who live in societies shaped by the Christian mythos, it's important to understand why that Mythos "worked" for so long and then why it didn't. To do so requires that we think very differently than we think now, that we entertain the plausibility of a metaphysical imaginary that is not dominated by Rationalist Materialism.

All I see myself doing, is barking out loud to draw attention in whatever modest way to something that's missing but not gone--it's up there in that tree. We need to bring it to ground one way or another. And the best way I know how to do that is to talk about what I see hiding among the leaves and branches when I look up into them. Perhaps others will see more clearly something quite different than what I see. And clearly, bringing it to ground is a task for the future. We're not ready for it yet. The important thing is that people start looking, and then that they find some way to bring it back into our collective lives. I make no pretension to know anything more than to say that there's something up in that tree, and that we need to coax it out of hiding. 

In the posts to come in this 'genealogy" series, I want to bark a little more. I want to spend some time to understand how the originary mythos of the West collapsed, what the implications of that collapse were, and then how to imagine a robust Mythos for the future. We're at a juncture now where we've lost any sense that the vertical matters--that wisdom matters--that spiritual concerns should play any role in shaping life in our collective public life. They are not even relevant in defining our collective moral commitments. We've bent over backwards to find ways of affirming moral goods that have no reference to a transcendental foundation, to the Good. We find utilitarianism, social contract theory, abstract deontological rules or some bizarre form of sociobiology as preferable alternatives to ground our moral thinking. These are all moral programs that might work compatibly on the rationalist materialist cultural OS, but that doesn't mean they are adequate or come even close to what is called for to meet our civilizational crisis. They confuse a practical expediency for wisdom. 

As I said above, people who actually take the great post-Axial metaphysical imaginary of the West seriously still exist, but they have no influence. What they have to say does not scan in the broader culture. It's a tradition that isn't even taught anymore (mostly) as part of an educated person's understanding of what it means to be educated. At best, matters of the spirit are concerns that might be allowed for people to muse about in private, but mostly they are entertainments to be indulged by children and adults who have nothing more interesting to do with their leisure. Reading Plato has the same status as reading a Michael Crichton novel, but more boring. But I think that nothing is more important than for those who will be most influential in shaping future civilization to recover that great tradition. [See Note 2]

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So I'm arguing that the deep roots of our crisis are causally linked to the failure of our current metaphysical imaginary. That being said, who among us with any cultural legitimacy thinks metaphysically anymore? The intellectual class just blithely accepts that Rationalist Materialism is the only game in town. There are the religious people and then there are people who accept science. Sometimes there are people who have a foot in both worlds, but even if religious people accept science, the metaphysical imaginary in which they live is dominated by Rationalist Materialist assumptions.

How that jibes with their religious beliefs is not something most people fret about--at least until recently. But whether they fret or not, they have been living in a disjointed world where one set of assumptions is at odds with the other. Most compartmentalize: this is my private life where I read the Bible or Cabbala; that is my public life where I enact ruthless tactics to enrich my company's shareholders. It is never good to compartmentalize, even if doing so was a strategy that provided some temporary social stability. That stability is gone, and so therefore is the utility of compartmentalizing. 

I argued in Part 1 that it was possible for American society to maintain some level of stability so long as the customary culture that shaped the lives of most people in Main Street America still had some vitality. The persistence of customary culture until last mid-century provided the social ballast that insured a level of stability that just isn't there anymore. American customary culture used to provide a grounding, humanizing character for exurban America, but it has lost its vitality. It has become a simulacral.

Norman Rockwell's depiction of that customary world in the mid 20th century was the earliest sign that it was already achieving museum status rather than doing anything vital. This loss of WASP, exurban customary culture is coupled with the loss of the customary cultures of the ethnic minorities in the urban areas--Irish, Italian, Jews, Germans, and other European traditions that carried the Western originary mythos and its customs with them from the old country. With the destruction of all those customary cultures has died whatever vestiges of vitality were left of the Western originary mythos in American society. 

There is still some customary vitality in Black and Hispanic communities, and I'm sure there are other communities I'm unaware of where some customary vitality persists, but the pressures to erode what's left of them are terrific. Many people still go through the motions in communities where the originary mythos has lost its vitality. But it doesn't work, and it can't be passed to the next generation. But without even the zombie forms of customary culture, people are now being thrust into ontological dizziness in a way that is unprecedented.

These are the people who are attracted to Trump or to cargo cults like Qanon who show up in the hundreds at Dealey Plaza. It gives them an unhealthy parody of community because the healthy real thing is no longer available. Better such collective fantasies than oxycontin or meth, but these are simple folk dealing with the loss of a cultural heritage that is making them crazy, and as such they are vulnerable to be seduced by anything that promises a cure or even just a temporary respite.

***

As I argued in Part I, the Western originary mythos came to English North America in a deeply attenuated form with Calvinism, which means that its metaphysics were univocal/nominalist and voluntarist. If you're unfamiliar with these terms, i'll explain them in a future post, but the upshot is this: Ideas have consequences, and by the time Europeans, especially the English, came to America, they carried with them a metaphysical imaginary that profoundly alienated them from the Living Real. And it was for this reason that the native Americans who encountered them thought they were crazy. And as Benjamin Franklin observed (see epigraph for Part 1), the English who lived among the Native Americans never wanted to go back to live among their own people. Why choose to live in a cold, soul-shriveling social world if you could live in a rich, warm, deeply symbolic one. 

So before the reader rolls his eyes dismissing me as a naive Rousseauan who celebrates the noble savage, let me assert quite adamantly that, yes, Rousseau was mostly right in some very important respects. I would just frame the noble savage issue differently. It wasn't that there was anything special about native American culture that was not true of most premodern, pre-literate customary societies. Such societies lived close to nature and felt deep communal bonds that are essential for the flourishing of any human life. And they had a richly deep metaphysical imaginary that provided a symbolic world that reinforced their experience of the world as deeply participative with it. They had societies with a mythos axis and so had societies in which wisdom played an essential role in shaping their societies, a wisdom that most of the white settlers had no capacity to recognize. 

What was really different and weird was what elite European society had become by the 1600s, which was one deeply alienated from the Living Real, and so the European metaphysical imaginary came to reflect that profound alienation. Descartes was the miners' canary. With him we get the first strong indicator that the European educated elite had become so alienated from the Living Real that they could actually conduct a thought experiment that started with the assumption that no extra-mental Real even existed.

A century later, Rousseau looked at the people he hung out with, especially in the courtier class, and it was clear to him that these people were just strange, because so deeply estranged. There's got to be a better way to live, he thought, and so it's not surprising that he embraced the idea of the nobility of a people who were as different from the French courtier class as could be imagined. They had a dignity and a wisdom that was simply unavailable to Rousseau's elite contemporaries.  And in fact, as Franklin pointed out, so many of the English who emigrated to America found in their encounter with the Native Americans something that proved Rousseau correct.

But we all know the story that follows. The other more deeply alienated English who stayed proudly English in their deep alienation from the Living Real, responded to their encounter with Native Americans by essentially wiping them out by force of arms. An aboriginal, richly human, symbolic society is destroyed by a deeply alienated, anti-symbolic society, and we Americans have inherited the winners' violence and their deep alienation from the Living Real. We've had two hundred and fifty years to become even more alienated from it. And we wonder why everybody around us now is losing their minds. 

***

And so the question follows: If our deepest problem lies in that we live within a metaphysical imaginary that is profoundly spiritually impoverishing, how do we find our way to a remedy? Well, it's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Does our metaphysical imaginary shape our experience, or does our experience shape our metaphysical imaginary? I'd argue that experience is primary and then our thinking about the implications of our experience follow from it. But it's reverberative, to use a McGilchrist term. A society reaches a tipping point where the one reinforces the other for better or worse. I'll come back to McGilchrist in a future post to explore how this might work in a positive way, but in the meanwhile, an examination of a society's underlying metaphysical imaginary is a strong indicator of the relative sanity or insanity of the social world in which its people live. We are insane now largely because our metaphysical imaginary is so deeply alienating, and our insanity is reinforced by our metaphysical imaginary precisely because it lacks a vertical dimension. 

And so, any reader of this blog should not be surprised to learn that I think that the secular materialism/positivism defines the contemporary metaphysical imaginary of the global north and pretty much everywhere capitalism defines a society's central priorities. My critique here owes more to Baudrillard's ideas about disappearance, symbolic exchange, commodification, and seduction than to Marx. Marx assumed that humans would stay relatively rational in thinking about their political interests, and it's there where's he's been proved most wrong. He had important things to say about alienation, but he had no idea how bad it was going to get. 

What we have is too insane for a Marxist critique. Because Marxism suffers from the same problem that the capitalist materialism does--no vertical dimension--it provides no cure for ontological dizziness. That's why Soviet Society failed and why now Capitalist democracy is failing. Both in their ontological vertigo are ripe to be exploited by someone like Putin over there and Trump over here. These demagogues present themselves as figures who are selling sanity and metaphysical realignment with the vertical dimension when in fact they are promoting a counterfeit of them. They represent a reversion to oligarchical warlordism in a postmodern, hi-tech key.

Even if they have a really bad solution, they, at least, understand the problem. Not Trump of course: he's a big, dumb, dark channel for an egregore whose energy someone like Bannon and the Claremonsters, who do understand it, seek to exploit. But unless the "good guys" come up with a better solution to our collective loss of verticality, then there's a very good chance the dark, violent forces Bannon seeks to exploit will win. He understands the hunger for the vertical dimension can be exploited with a snake-oil version of it. Secular Liberals correctly see the snake oil, but then incorrectly conclude that anything that comes from the vertical dimension must be snake oil. 

***

And so then the next question is this: what happened in Europe that set it apart from every other society that existed in the world around five hundred years ago? The causes are complex, of course, but chief among them is Gutenberg's printing press and the Reformation. Both together magnified what had been an incipient trend among some of Europe's elite toward alienation and disenchantment, and while I have laid out a summary for what I believe is the most coherent explanation for what comes next in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age here, in posts to come, I want to emphasize key parts of Taylor's story and add a layer of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and the Emissary to provide the thousand-year genealogy of our current insanity. Both these books are essential reading for anybody whose hair is on fire as mine is and who wants a deeper understanding about what we're truly dealing with and how we might find a way forward.

Go to Part 3.

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Note 1: My use of Logos here as knowledge on the horizontal axis carries a different meaning from what I understand as the Johannine Logos, which is foundational for intelligibility on the horizontal axis, but also the intelligibility of revelations that disclose themselves from the depths of of the Living Real on the vertical axis. The Johannine Logos is in my Christian epistemology foundational for both Logos and Mythos. 

Note 2: After writing Part I, I learned about David Brooks's interviewing Leon Kass on Ezra Klein's podcast. I see Kass as struggling with the same issues I am, and while I'm uncomfortable with any thinking that originates from within the University of Chicago's Straussian milieu, Kass is an interesting, morally serious man, and I intend to read his Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2021). I am interested to learn whether he is barking up the same tree as I am. 

At first glance, it would appear that he is. In the podcast he says that there are three things a 'nation' needs to flourish, (1) a story of origins, (2) a covenant/law, or broadly accepted moral ethos, and (3) a tabernacle, a cult that defines a nation's highest spiritual aspirations. Ok--he's talking mythos here, restoring the vertical dimension--and I'm listening with interest to learn where he's going to take this, and then he blows it by saying American society had such a mythos until the sixties. There's no bigger turn off for me than to blame our current turmoil on the sixties.

The sixties were a failed attempt to correct the deeper problem. Read Roszak. The Making of a Counterculture is still very, very relevant and remarkably prescient. That the counterculture failed then has more to do with the power of technocapitalism to absorb and coopt almost every vital attempt to subvert it. There was no mention in the conversation between Brooks and Kass about how technocapitalism might be playing a role in our current crisis. This is a blatant refusal or blindness that affects so many American Conservatives. It renders whatever of value they have to share, if not irrelevant, at least as something incapable of influencing the broader cultural ethos. Nevertheless, I'll read Kass's book in the hope that his arguments will be more nuanced, but I fear it won't get past much of what's acceptable at the American Enterprise Institute where Kass is a fellow.

But even so, there might be common ground here. I'm just not sure that Exodus provides the originary mythos that is going to do the job for us now, even if it was the mythos of the Puritans who came to New England. If you read Part I, you know what I think about Calvinism. The Canaan they founded was no land of milk and honey I'd ever want to live in. But the basic problem with the Puritans was that while indeed they had a vital mythos, it was too colorless and too deeply implicated with the emergence of capitalism and its materialist metaphysical imaginary. I'll argue this assertion in a future post, but the point to make here is that you can't solve a problem from within the frame of the metaphysical imaginary whose contradictions are the cause of the problem.

We are living in a time where the problem needs desperately to be resolved, and the Calvinist mythos does not have the resources to do it. And yet Exodus could work as a contemporary mythical lens if we understand it not as our having arrived in Canaan as those first Puritans believed they did, but as our still wandering in the wilderness. It's precisely the the obsoletized metaphysical imaginary of the Calvinists that we must leave behind as we wander in the wilderness for a few generations during which we unlearn its soul-crushing habits of mind. But to what land of milk and honey are we headed? Again, considerations for a future post. 

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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in early December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I

[This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post]

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”

 --Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (pp. 2-3). 

And I confess that I’ve come to wonder if the tension between “America” and “conservatism” is just too great. Maybe it’s impossible to hold together a movement that is both backward-looking and forward-looking, both in love with stability and addicted to change, both go-go materialist and morally rooted. Maybe the postwar American conservatism we all knew—a collection of intellectuals, activists, politicians, journalists, and others aligned with the Republican Party—was just a parenthesis in history, a parenthesis that is now closing.          --David Brooks

David Brooks, qua America's spokesperson for a principled conservatism, looks himself in the mirror in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. It's a companion piece to Gellman's and Packer's essays about the coming demise of American democracy, about which I've written in the last few weeks. I started writing this post to parse Brooks's quote excerpted above about why I think of his American Conservatism is oxymoronic, as clearly he seems to recognize by his listing of all its antinomies.

But before coming to that, I wanted to reflect a bit on how the current crisis has pushed me to appreciate in a way I did not before how a society's dominant metaphysical imaginary unconsciously shapes its experience about what is most important, what is most deeply true, and what is worthy of its aspirations--no matter what the conscious individual beliefs of the people in it. For us that metaphysical imaginary derives from Rationalist Materialism. Whatever our individual beliefs, we live in a world whose basic assumptions about reality are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. 

I believed before, or rather my basic world view was shaped by the belief, that pluralism is a good thing, that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking, that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded by our being confronted by others who see things differently.

And so it follows that ideally a pluralistic society embraces a plurality of metaphysical imaginaries. There are realists and idealists, theists and atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, pagans and polytheists, materialists and transcendentalists. And various combinations of all the above. And ideally all should live together in a society where at the very least they tolerate one another and where at best they actually engage with one another in an honest, empathic attempt to understand the other, to walk in his or her shoes, to come to appreciate what's best rather than to demonize what's worst.

Of course, that idea of pluralism in the abstract I still value, but I think the hard truth is that in our particular historical/cultural context our differences keep us divided and conquered. Few of us actually engage in good faith with the differences others present to us; rather we at best tolerate others, but mostly we'd rather not deal with them. So the default is to think of the Other as quasi-barbarians, and to support whatever efforts are afoot to promote one's own group's interests and to suppress the interests of everyone else. And this natural tendency in human beings is exaggerated if they are acculturated into, as we are, the One Metaphysical Imaginary that Rules Us All, which is  Rationalist Materialism, its capitalist social-economic dynamics, its media, and with both of those a crude, Social-Darwinist ethos that shapes our bloodsport politics.

I hesitate to use a mechanistic metaphor, but it's perhaps never more appropriate for our current predicament: Rationalist Materialism and its capitalist utilitarian moral frame is the the developed world's metaphysical operating system--all other beliefs are programs that must run on it. We don't have any choice about that because whatever our individual beliefs, we have to live in a world whose fundamental presuppositions are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. The problem for people with religious commitments lies in that that most of the world's great religions originated in societies that ran quite different, premodern metaphysical operating systems that were compatible with them. And the way those religions have been patched in to work with our current, late-modern OS makes them very buggy, if not unusable.

Does the problem lie with these older religious "programs" or with the late-modern operating system on which they are forced to run? I rather think the latter, and I argue why in Part 2. But that's extremely hard to accept by anybody who has been acculturated into a society that runs a Rationalist-Materialist OS. We're all in the Matrix created by that system, and extricating yourself from it is not easy for those who want to--and impossible for people who don't feel a need to do it the first place because they're quite comfortably well adapted to life within it. 

And so people who are well-adapted to materialist metaphysical matrix naively believe that everybody is free to think or believe whatever they want. But in fact, you're not free if your personal beliefs are incompatible with the cultural OS. The cultural OS--not one's personal beliefs--plays the dominant role in shaping his experience of the world--even for people with religious commitments.

The idea of a sacrament, for instance, depends on an imagined participative ontology which supports and interprets the knower's experience of herself in a participative relationship with the mystery of Being. That's not how we think about or experience the world in a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Rather, we see and experience the world as just containing stuff to be used. Nothing sacred or sacramental about anything in it. Just so many atoms and empty spaces. Some environmentalists, like the ones celebrated by Richard Powers in Overstory, are trying to restore an animist sense of the sacred, but they are considered by the mainstream culture as flakey nuisances. 

But hardly anybody in the world--East, West, North, or South--experienced the world that way until about five hundred years ago. Some religious people today might believe in sacraments, but they cannot, with some rare exceptions, experience their power in the way our ancestors did. It feels forced, so much "hocus pocus", and it's understandable why people nowadays think it's nonsense. But it's not nonsense. It's that we've been culturally programmed to be insensible to their significance. The problem lies not with what's there but with our ability to see or experience it. 

So if one has non-materialist personal beliefs, they are circumscribed or cramped by the dominant materialist metaphysical imaginary--unless we live like the Amish or in monastic communities off the grid. To use a less mechanistic metaphor, we are dyed yellow in our acculturation into the rationalist materialist imaginary, and so most people see a yellow-colored world, but even if some entertain religious thoughts that were in their original form green, they come out looking blue. It might look ok, but it is a distortion. And so no matter what your individual beliefs might be, they are always yellow-tainted, if not yellow-dominant. It's possible, but it takes an extraordinary effort to cleanse that yellow taint. 

And I would argue that while not all cultural operating systems have this soul-deadening effect, our yellow one is killing us as a society, whether or not we as individuals have found a way to purge its taint. But the task isn't just an individual one, because our well being as individuals depends on the health of the whole society. We need an infusion of something that promises a different kind of life, a life that might actually help the best among us to transcend our differences and unite us at a level where we might actually have the strength to fight against what's coming.

Our fundamental metaphysical imaginary should be a colorless, radiant light that comprises the full color spectrum and allows for a range of possibilities that are all in their different ways aimed at the same goal, which is an imagined future possibility for human flourishing that simply is not possible within the current materialist imaginary.

So let there be pluralism, but let it run on a cultural OS that has a spiritual dimension. What that might look like, I don't know, but I can imagine a trans-cultural system of symbols that opens up such possibilities unavailable to us now. Otherwise our pluralism within our current spiritually impoverished metaphysical imaginary promotes divisions that will continue to keep the best of us preoccupied with clickbait--all the stupid, superficial stuff--and so distracts us from the real threat that is posed by techno-capitalism and the simulacra of culture that it is creating. 

***

So back to Brooks. I think he's grappling with a fundamental truth concerning American Conservatism that most American Conservatives don't understand, which is that it is oxymoronic. I want to explore this a little more deeply within the broader context outlined above. I see the primary historically positive function of Conservatism, whether here in America or in Europe, as its mission to 'conserve' the cultural ballast that customary culture, especially in its towns and rural areas, provided to the larger society. Liberals, generally speaking, see customary culture as oppressive, unless it's someone else's, which then they find charming. 

A healthy society needs that ballast, especially if it has healthy communities that pass from generation to generation a cultural vitality that works for most ordinary people. Local musical and dance traditions, oral histories, local heroes, local lore and legends, a vital communal religious life and reverence for things that are worthy of reverence. A healthy customary culture is rich with symbols and close to nature. A healthy conservatism cherishes these things, and seeks to push back against whatever works to undermine them. I think that Brooks would see himself as a defender of this kind of conservatism, and it would be worth defending--if in America it still existed.

I would argue American customary culture was rather weak to begin with since it was so deeply Calvinist in its origins. Calvinism was already a movement grounded in the rejection of old European symbolic customary culture, which it perceived as papishly exotic and paganly exuberant. Which it was. The old Christendom was an extravagant symbolic world that Calvinists wanted no truck with, and so they did what they could to strip out all that symbolism and exuberance and to remake society from scratch based on their stern, spare, rather colorless imagination of what was most important. Absolute Spirit might be colorless, but our life on earth cannot be. It needs to refract that light into its many colors. The problem with the Calvinists was they wanted to live in a pure colorlessness that is not meant for humans, and their attempt to do so created negative, unintended consequences I'll lay out in a future post. A few, rare individuals can live in thin, unshaded, mountaintop air, but not whole societies. 

And so frustrated in their inability to impose their spare, colorless vision in Geneva, they tried it in New England. This eventually failed. And as Ben Franklin notes in the quote excerpted above from Tribe, the descendants of those stern Puritans couldn't stand the society they created, and once they had a taste of truly rich customary culture in the Native American societies of their time, they had no desire to go back to the life of the English. Many Northern Europeans in the 19th Century had the same experience when they went to Italy: Yikes! What have I been missing all of my life?!

They found there what was still a vital customary culture in the old pre-Reformation European sense, something that had been all but purged in Protestant northern Europe, which had by then become quite smugly superior about its having traded cultural vitality for prosperity--at least for the few who prospered. Contemporary American Conservatism is ironically largely heir to the mentality that saw it as its mission to destroy the two principal customary cultures they encountered at the time--first, that of old Europe and then that of the Native Americans.

In the U.S. today, if there are American Conservatives who have anything interesting to say, they are mostly Catholics and Jews, people who draw on intellectual traditions that have deep premodern roots. WASP America hated both when they started arriving in droves starting in the mid-19th Century because they represented a worldview, a metaphysical imaginary, that they saw as deeply incompatible with theirs. They were seen as unassimilable. Well, in the decades after WWII, consumer capitalism and its media has bleached out most Catholics and Jews so that they left behind the old customs to become nice, upstanding work-a-holic Calvinists. Now, if we are mainstream Americans, we're all Calvinists whether we realize it or not--either the Woke kind on the Left or the gun-and-bible-toting kind on the Right. 

American Calvinism has always been more interested in vilifying what was not compatible with its tight-assed vision rather than understanding or preserving what was vital in anything that did not fit within it. And so after the founding, most of New England's intellectuals couldn't stand Calvinism either, so they became Unitarians and Transcendentalists, the latter basically an import from German Romanticism and idealism. I know this is oversimplifying Calvinism in this pejorative sense, and in future posts I'll add some nuance. There is a positive side to Calvinism (despite itself). MLK came out of it, after all. There are many good, decent, spiritually vital Calvinists. But Calvinism as an idea system and cultural movement has done more harm than good overall. 

So American conservatism, insofar as it had a "tradition" to conserve, had a tradition that was symbolically weak to begin with in its rejection of the old Catholic, sacramental religion and with it the old European folkways, festivals, and quasi-heathen customs. And yet there was a customary culture in Yankee America, symbolically spare though it might have been, which before the Civil War retained a basic decency and public spiritedness that Toqueville writes about.

And then there was the South, which also had a vital customary culture, but its society was dominated by thugs living out a poor-man's fantasy about what it would be like to be an aristocrat. And so they made a society based on chattel slavery that was rotten at its core, and so whatever was vital in Southern customary culture was the warp to the chattel slavery woof that wove the Southern social fabric. We're still suffering from that rot--not just in the South now but everywhere. And whatever little was healthful in either Yankee and Southern customary cultures is gone now because post-war consumer capitalism and its information technologies has hollowed out whatever was vital and humanizing in them. The old customs have become museum pieces preserved by cultural societies of different sorts. 

In future posts I want to lay out the genealogy of the death of culture, if by culture we mean a vibrant symbolic system that mediates the Living Real for a civilization. I'll draw on both Jean Baudrillard and Iain McGilchrist who in their different ways make a compelling argument that we are living now in the aforementioned simulacra of culture, i.e, a parody of culture, and we're suffocating because of it. Baudrillard is pessimistic that there's any way out, but McGilchrist sees one. Whether we'll find a way to choose it remains to be seen. More on that in a future post. But what we're living together as Americans now is insane, and we need to understand its genealogy if we are to find a cure. 

Anyway, this is why Brooks's American Conservatism was always oxymoronic because it wanted simultaneously to preserve customary culture while embracing the capitalist dynamics that have been most responsible for destroying it. American Conservatism was never a movement to preserve what was vital, but rather only a movement to slow down the inevitable decay of a pre-Industrial way of life.

But the upshot is that America never had a richly vital tradition to preserve. Ask the "English" who went native in Franklin's account quoted in the epigraph. And for that reason it never had the spiritual or cultural resources to push back against the materialist flood that industrial capitalism brought to it in the decades following the American founding. The desire to preserve local community values and their customary cultures while at the same time celebrating the disruptive, creative-destructive energies of capitalism was at best a naive fantasy and always intellectually incoherent. 

American society was founded on some important ideals, but those ideals were never rooted in a metaphysical imaginary in which they might have been cultivated and sustained. Certainly the contemporary American cultural Left, the primary defender of those ideals now, does so with an unattractive moralistic priggishness that lacks the metaphysical heft to sustain them. These ideals were doomed from the start to be smothered by far more powerful cultural energies that accompanied the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie as a dominant social class.

The new imaginary legitimated greed and the will to power and came to see it as the engine that drove material progress, and indeed it did. Nevertheless, while people have always lusted for power and wealth, no civilized society had before embraced these vices as admirable. That we live in such a society is in large part what makes us so crazy, and no such society has a vital human future.

Materialist capitalism's negative effects are not primarily about the inevitable gross social inequities it produces, but about the way it impoverishes the human spirit of everyone it taints. It creates the conditions that make it extraordinarily difficult to deal humanely with its excesses. BTW, American socialism suffers from the same metaphysical imaginal limitations. I lean socialist in my politics because the system needs some constituency to mitigate the worst excesses of the private-sector sociopaths American society lionizes. But in the long run, socialism does not solve the deeper problem. 

So that's why 'American Conservatism' is oxymoronic. You can't have both vital local communities and their customary cultures in a larger society shaped by the unchecked energies of a capitalist economy. The flourishing of the latter leads invevitably to the destruction of the former. 

I want to take some time over the next year or so to reflect on how the 'death or disappearance of culture' presents some opportunities as well as dangers, but I want to state as clearly as I can now my conviction that our current collective metaphysical imaginary is no longer sustainable if we want to secure a positive future for humanity. And so long as we are culturally divided and conquered, culture-killing energies will remain unchecked, and with the death of culture inevitably comes the death of the human.

A respect for and celebration of pluralism is a good thing, but there needs to be an overarching commitment to which all the parties in a pluralistic society submit, and the argument that I want to make is that this commitment needs to be grounded in an imagined future, a cultural OS if you will, of positive human flourishing. Such a future is simply beyond the resources of our current Rationalist Materialist OS, and so people for want of something better turn to toxic fantasies of a lost past. 

See also "Dying Traditions"and "Tthe Baymen and Farmers of New York before World War II".

+++++++++++

This is the first in a series that is still in process. The parts posted so far are summarized below with links to each: 

Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West argues that the prestige of science and the material benefits of capitalism and its technological advancements has led to the development of metaphysical imaginary that is unique in the history of the world for its lacking a wisdom dimension, and that this accounts for the ontological dizziness that is at the heart of our current collective insanity. And I argue that because  technocapitalism and its rationalist, materialist, utilitarian imaginary reigns unopposed by any coherent wisdom tradition, the human project is at risk to be dragged off the cliff. For this reason, the only way to prevent disaster in the long term is to find a way not just as individuals but as a society to restore the vertical dimension to our metaphysical imaginary. 

Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus argues why some recovery of the vertical or wisdom dimension is necessary for us as a society, not just on an individual level. I try to make, at least in a preliminary way, the case for Axial verticality, and I defend Socrates as an essential model for us now--the opposite of what Nietzsche and Heidegger thought of him. Socrates should be for us now a model of both acquiring and teaching wisdom. All of us should be in a continuous process of clearing away what we think in order to create a space for what is true to emerge. This is true especially for Christians who think they know what Christianity is but really don't.

Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries points to the work of John Vervaeke and others who are trying to establish a cognitive-science basis for understanding and legitimating knowledge on the vertical dimension since the Axial Revolution. I see their work as supporting and enriching my argument. Vervaeke's presentation of a "salience landscape" and how cognitive development as the growth in wisdom is really about the transformation of one's salience landscape is a key for understanding how I think the metaphysical imaginary might eventually flip in such a way that the vertical dimension could be restored.

Part 4B takes Vervaeke's 'salience landscape' concept further in arguing that it provides a model for how people and societies make real progress, which requires not just progress on the horizontal axis, but on the vertical as well. I talk about how some salience landscapes can be evaluated as better or worse according to three criteria--coherency, scope, and richness. I talk about how Kohlberg's six stages of moral development are examples of how children through adulthood self-transcend in their moral development by having moral insights at progressively higher levels of coherency, scope, and richness. The "moral" is one dimension of self-transcendence on the vertical axis that does not get enough attention in a lot of New Age spirituality, which is more interested in developing cognitive scope rather than moral richness. 

Part 5: Salience Landscapes and Salience Bubbles explores the distinction between the two. It draws upon the Adam McKay film Don't Look Up as a case study in how salience bubbles work. It argues that the goal is not to be unbiased because that is impossible, but rather to always be open to have our biases challenged by new information. That's possible for people who live in a flexible salience landscape, not possible for those who live in saliency bubbles. It argues that real science proceeds from within evolving salience landscapes on the horizontal level which deserves the legitimacy that it enjoys, but the problem for the rest of us is the way that the criteria for what makes knowledge legitimate on the horizontal dimension is used to evaluate the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension. Hopefully sooner, but probably later, we will develop a metaphysical imaginary that restores the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension in such a way that it can be integrated with knowledge on the horizontal dimension. 

Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series discusses how what this series is trying to achieve supplements Vervaeke's Awakening series. If his goal is to do a genealogy that explains why his psychotechnologies are a needed solution for our contemporary meaning crisis as it affects individual in crisis, my series runs on a parallel track that focuses more on the need for a broader societal solution insofar as it is the root cause of the experience of crisis on the individual level. 

Part 7: The Bigger Picture lays out, in a sense, the map for where this Genealogy series is heading. The goal is to make plausible--not to prove; proof is impossible--a Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary that integrates an evolution of consciousness mythopoesis with developments in science and a progressive politics. The heavy lifting to establish plausibility lies in the future after retracing the evolutionary pattern from the past. I think that while there is much overlap with the claims that I want to make with other religious traditions and with contemporary science, there are two things that Christianity emphasizes that are less important in these other traditions: One, history has meaning because it has a telos. This has practical implications because no progressive politics is possible without an eschatology. Marxism was an eschatological cult, and MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" assumes a deep eschatology. The second thing Christianity emphasizes is the importance of the individual person who is destined for communion, for deep connectedness with God, with other humans, with the cosmos. 

Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic is the first post to begin at the beginning of this Genealogy. The goal now, with some digressions here and there is to understand the origin and evolution of Christian Neoplatonism, the premodern Western metaphysical imaginary. The focus of this post is to demonstrate that Plato's philosophy was based on visionary experience from contemplation of the Divine One. This experience of transcendence is not common, but it's hardly exceptional. The whole post-Axial tradition is essentially the attempts of various societies to make sense of the world in the light of such experiences of transcendence. I further argue, following Pierre Hadot, that you can't understand either Plato or Aristotle if you don't see their philosophies as practices in their schools as promoting a habitus that orients its students toward this experience of the transcendent One.  

Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism makes the case that early Christian thinking was open and fluid in its development and took from Judaism, Greek philosophy, and mystery religions what fit within a framework of criteria that were shaped by the Christian revelation. While Christianity after Constantine became more obsessed with correct doctrine for political and social reasons, this earlier sifting process needs to be understood as an honest attempt to understand what was valuable from non-Christian sources and to integrate them into a broad "catholic" synthesis.

Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation surveys the importance of late Second Temple Jewish literary forms that arose from the cross-fertilization of Jewish belief and practice with Hellenic philosophy and practice. Relying heavily on Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Christian Mysticism, I focus particularly on the significance of the Apocalypses and the Song of Songs. And then we spend quite a bit of time understanding the significant contribution of the great Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria. I also make some distinctions between the Mysticism of the Heath and the Mysticism of Transcendence. This Genealogy series is mostly concerned with the second, but it's important to understand how it co-existed in a cultural milieu in which the first played a significant if not dominant role in the broader society. I emphasize the role of Love in both Greek and Jewish itineraries of spiritual ascent and the importance of the personalist dimension that Jewish thinking added to Greek ideas. 

Part 11: The Christian Synthesis 

Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project.   

Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West  

 

The Return of the Bobos

A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful.

For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the posts that have appeared here in the last several weeks. It's mostly just another version of describing the latest arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic--in other words, not much more than describing how one faction of Social Darwinians has replaced another. And so the world turns.

The question that most preoccupies my thinking is whether it's possible for us as a society to transcend the logic of evolution without grace, which manifests in the American Liberal social imaginary in what I've been describing as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is simply the ideology that justifies what most people think of as natural, healthy human behavior--seek glory in your achievements, grow as rich and prosperous as you can, spread your genes as widely as possible, and triumph over your enemies. But it boils down 'to eat or be eaten'. Raw capitalism thrives within an ethos defined by such an ideology--it is as pure a manifestation of Social Darwinism as you're ever likely to find. 

The best human beings as individuals are capable of transcending this way of "being natural". We see it all the time. The question is whether societies are. I believe they are capable of it, of at least slowly evolving out of it. But the first step is to believe it's possible so that at least we can organize around our aspiring toward it. That would require our transcending the values presuppositions of the Liberal Order, presuppositions that privilege the secular and the materialistic. From the beginning, the most trenchant criticism of modernity and its Liberal ethos has been that it quashes any kind of spiritually noble aspiration, channeling human aspiration instead toward the fulfillment of crude appetites, aka, the pursuit of happiness. In other words, Liberalism has always implicitly accepted the logic of Social Darwinism avant la lettre. Hobbes was its earliest theoretician of note. 

At this point in our development, Social Darwinism shapes the social imaginary of the cultural left as much as it does the right. Left and Right are just competing tribes in a contest for survival. There are "nice" Social Darwinians and "mean" ones. The nice ones want to find ways of mitigating the worst effects of the Social Darwinian game on its losers, and they're mostly on the Left. The mean ones couldn't care less about the losers, and they're mostly on the Right. But the problem lies in the rules of the game itself. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives question the validity of the rules, and neither do moderates like David Brooks. 

But I fear that the U.S is like the USSR in the '80s. We're teetering and about to collapse from our own dead weight. The Tucker Carlsons of the world are just the hyenas who are waiting for the sick elephant to die, and doing what he can in the meantime to hasten the process. 

The average educated, affluent Liberal cannot appreciate that we're near collapse because for him the Liberal meritocracy is as good as it gets.The system has worked well for him, and all it needs is a few tweaks here and there. Such Liberals are concerned that the system be fair, but they don't understand that a meritocracy can never be fair. Fairness is just their way of fooling themselves that that they can participate  in a system that is fundamentally corrupting in good conscience.

Liberals often talk about their being an epistemological crisis--and it's true, there is one--but they're less likely to appreciate that it's rooted in a metaphysical crisis, which in turn leads to a moral or ethical crisis. Liberals don't understand that so much of their posturing about fairness and justice is like a group of drug dealers debating among themselves whether there is an environmentally friendly way to exploit their users.

Liberals in the order bequeathed to us by Hobbes have no real moral imperative except to be Nice. We all do better if we don't tear ourselves to pieces in the war of all against all. But there is something so emasculating about "being nice" in this way. Hobbes understood the price, which was the alienation that comes with the surrender of one's freedom to the State, so is there any wonder that factions within the Liberal Order, especially those benefitting least from it, might consider being not nice is more authentic, more free, more noble? 

***

I like David Brooks. He's a serious, decent guy, and he's often insightful. But as I've been arguing for years, Liberals, and Brooks is very much a Liberal, don't have the spiritual and cultural resources to transcend the contradictions of the society Liberalism with its capitalist engine has created, and American society is Liberalism on steroids, and insofar as it is driven by the logic of capitalism, it is Social Darwinism on steroids. There are no real constraints anymore on the worst excesses of capitalism except to hope that people be "nice". The churches used to provide some constraints, but they've become more a part of the problem than a solution insofar as they are among the major promoters of our current tribal warfare. (The churches for the most part have become an embarrassment. They've given Christianity a bad name.) 

Brooks, among the members of the class he purports to represent, has historically been more friendly to religion and more critical of the secularist and materialist presuppositions that play such a large role in shaping its ethos. And as such he has represented a version of Liberal cultural conservatism within the broader Liberal ethos as an op-ed columnist at the NYT or the reasonable moderate conservative on PBS. I've wondered sometimes if his University of Chicago roots has meant his concern for religion is more in the vein of the Straussian noble lie, but I have come to believe that he is sincere in his aspiration for Americans to find a higher collective moral purpose.

Brooks has long played the role of describing the manners of his class. What is the "higher selfishness", except a spiritualized version of Social Darwinism peculiar to his liberal Bobos? He's right to point out that there's nothing higher about it at all. But he does this while on the one hand standing on ground defined by the older Judeo-Christian values he sees as intrinsic to the American character, while on the other standing on the ground defined by capitalism, which has been the historical-cultural force most destructive of Judeo-Christian values.

And so for that reason he's always struck me as that kind of incoherent religious conservative that wants to embrace the creative/destructive energies of capitalism while at the same time preserving the traditional religiosity, customs, and decency mores of Middle America. I say incoherent because the destructive powers of consumer capitalism have obliterated 'traditional' America, and the loss of 'traditional America' is really what bothers the tribalists that constitute Brooks's Red class hierarchy in his Atlantic article. Brooks seems to want to blame Red-Team insanity at least in part on the sins of Blue-Team arrogance, but this is just wrong.

The Bobos who sit atop the Blue-Team class hierarchy are simply those who have best adapted to the kind of culture/society that the creative/destructive powers of capitalism have created. They didn't cause it, and they're not to blame. They were just clever enough or lucky enough to go with the flow. The people in the Red-Team hierarchy are simply resentful of those who sit atop the Blue-Team hierarchy because the cosmopolitan Blues won, and now their traditionalist Red politics are all about finding a way for them to win back what was lost. This is what makes their politics so stupid and destructively revanchist--because it is so out of tune with and poorly adapted to the kind of society that late capitalism has created. 

There's no stuffing the toothpaste back into the tube, and that's what these revanchists want to do, and Brooks seems to be at least mildly sympathetic to the revanchist cause in this respect. He, too, wishes that somehow we could find a way to return the toothpaste from whence it came, and he seems to think that if Blues could compromise a little or try to empathize with the concerns of Red America, it might help. He praises Biden for not making things worse, and fair enough. But, really, we're past that. Moderation might have some role in damage control and in buying some time, but there are no real solutions to be found by compromising with people who are living or long to live in a delusional dreamworld. The problem is with the Liberal Order itself. 

So Bobos are not to be blamed for being intelligently adaptive to the underlying reality. This does not make them in any way morally superior; they are just better players of the Social Darwinian game. Blue elites are just doing what any red-blooded Social Darwinian should do in a society based on Social Darwinian presuppositions. The Blues are flourishing in the world that Capitalism created, and the Reds, threatened with extinction, are freaking out and doing whatever they can to claw and scratch to survive. There is no virtue whatsoever in their revanchist program. Not a shred of it. But virtue, if by it we mean counter-instinctual practices that cultivate what is truly good in the human soul, is not something that the Liberal Order has ever cared much about.

As I alluded to above, my basic argument for years now is that the Liberal Order is in decay, and that Liberalism does not have within its philosophical/ontological presuppositions the resources to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. Does that mean that some progressive imagination of a human future is impossible? No, of course not. And in my clumsy way here on this blog I've been trying to suss out what that future human possibility might look like. I don't know what it will look like. But at this point I can say with some degree of certainty, that things cannot go on as they are going. Something has to give, and either something truly new, something with originary power arises from within the culture that offers a way forward, or the bad guys--the revanchists and the more ruthless among the techno-capitalist Social Darwinists--win. 

***

So thinking about Brooks's article leads me to what I really want to talk about: If the future of America is to be determined by which Social Darwinian faction wins, who cares? Well, I do because I persist in believing that the American experiment was an important step forward in the human evolutionary project, and the Blues are, imo, more likely to be receptive to new ideas about moving forward. The Blues are right for all the wrong reasons.

I think the American future will be determined by either the reactionaries on the Red team winning or by our finding another way. I believe that the Blue team is the more likely one to find a positive way forward because it has more flexibility, but it will require that it retrieve elements from within the Judeo-Christian tradition that Liberalism jettisoned as irrational and barbaric. The American experiment was very much animated by an anti-traditional values liberation project, but it threw the baby out with the bath water, and the experiment will fail if it does not find a way to renew itself by drawing on these rejected older, deeper "irrational" resources. I think that Blacks and Hispanics are closer to those sources because they still live in communities where their religious traditions still have vitality. 

Most Blues are not hard-core atheists. They are agnostic or vaguely spiritual in a New Agey way. And many retain the moral habits of the religious communities into which they were born even if they no longer go to church. There is an infrastructure there to work with.

I think that the metaxis that leads us out of this impasse lies in integrating what's best in the modern project--critical consciousness, a respect for the individual conscience, a genius for innovation, an experimental spirit that guides the quest to better understand the Real--with what's best in in the "irrational" premodern--a sense of the sacred and sacramental, a feeling for connection with the cosmos, a renewed sense of the deepest possibilities for the human being as becoming divinized, i.e., each of us becoming what we are as created in the image and likeness of God. 

If it fails, I fear the reactionary critics of modernity and Liberalism will be proved correct. They were right to insist that societies, because of the persistence of Original Sin--what I call evolution without grace--are incapable of moral progress. They were right to insist that the idea of egalite is palpably ridiculous because talent and wealth have always and everywhere been distributed in ways that make equality impossible. They were right to insist that the idea of human freedom--liberte--is palpably ridiculous because the Grand Inquisitor was right: most people don't want to be free; they want to be told what to think and how to behave because the burden of accepting true existential freedom is too heavy for average humans. 

And the reactionaries were right to insist that the idea of fraternite is palpably ridiculous because most humans don't know who they are unless they have an enemy, someone in opposition to whom they can define themselves. They cannot feel any sense of nobility of purpose unless they can risk everything in a war fighting loyally and courageously for their tribe.

But more than that, humans need an enemy onto whom they can project all their unresolved irrational resentments and hatreds. This is why world peace is a structural impossibility, and world government and the aspiration for global world orders is insanely naive. We will always have--must have--wars because from time to time these irresolvable hatreds must be purged with blood sacrifice. If we don't project these hatreds onto the Other over there, we project them onto one another over here, and we have the interminable war of all against all. Most humans are primitive and irrationally stupid in this way, and to wish them capable of anything more leads to chaos and greater suffering for all. This is just the human condition if you look at it clearly and with any knowledge of history. 

These reactionaries would say that democracy was doomed from the beginning, that the ancients knew what Liberals refuse to acknowledge, that the 'demos' are too selfish, ignorant, and too easily manipulable to rule themselves. They need an elite, the 'aristos' to to rule them. It was stupidly wrong to destroy the old class/caste system that replaced the aristos with the demos. In any society, there will always be winners and losers--it's naive to think otherwise--but better that there be order than chaos in which almost everybody is a loser.

And the reality is that the demos are happier and less resentful so long as they have a place in the hierarchy and know their role. They don't really want the burden of true freedom, and they are happier when ruled by those whom they see clearly as their 'betters'. And in a Christian society those betters--the aristos--have a responsibility to make sure that the demos are well provided for, not something your typical amoral Social Darwinian capitalist elite ever thought necessary. And besides, the most important things in life, the things that bring true happiness--love, family, friends, piety--are available even to those in the lowest ranks. All these deep goods Liberalism and capitalism have made less available. And now these people, these demos, are now so deeply alienated and unhappy that all they want to do now is tear down the system that has abused them so terribly materially and spiritually.

***

But I still have hope that the reactionaries will be proved wrong. There is a another way of looking at Liberalism and the American experiment, and it's one I still believe we can be inspired by. It assumes that there is a quorum of people in America who have a basic decency, whose values are  not completely circumscribed by the Social Darwinian logic of late capitalism and more importantly that they have the suppleness of heart to respond if something better should be presented to them in a way that makes sense and can inspire.

My reasons for hope assume that the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were inchoate articulations of a future human possibility, even if humans at the time of their writing were not yet spriritually or morally mature enough to realize it. These documents were prophetic rather than realistic for their contemporaries; they were aspirational for a future order rather than descriptive of what was possible at the time they were written.

But it's precisely the aspiration toward something that seems so impossible that makes them so interesting. These ideals born at the inception of the Liberal Order during the Enlightenment are seeds, which if cultivated provide a way of growing out of the Social Darwinian logic the Liberal Order that it has come to promote until now without constraint.

That the aspirations of the French and American  Declarations have not yet been realized does not mean that they never can be. If we are to break out of the current impasse, we must be renewed by their ideals. We just have to reassess and think about a more realistic route to get there, and that would require in the U.S., among many other things, an overhaul of the U.S. Constitution to bring it more in line with the ideals articulated in both Declarations.

The American constitution was written by the realists, not the idealists. As such, it tips its hat with a roll of the eyes to the Declaration and gets down to the real business of governing men as they are not as we would wish them to be. And at the time, it was written to protect the interests of both the Southern and Northern oligarchs who assumed that they were the aristos who would continue to rule the demos. That might have been realistic in the late 1780s; it no longer is.

The Constitution is a patchwork of compromises that reflected the competing interests of the Social Darwinian factions of its day. It no longer serves our purposes. And at this juncture in our history, the Constitution is both a symbolic and practical cause of the gridlock that paralyzes us at a time when we must be nimbler and more adaptive. Fetishizing the Constitution by both Conservatives and Liberals is one of the biggest obstacles to any real solutions. 

So while a Democratic Republic with a quorum of sane, decent, well-informed human beings should in theory be nimbler and more adaptive, ours is not because hamstrung by the imagination of it by its 18th Century founders. And so our institutional paralysis is due primarily to the senate and to a supreme court, the former stuffing the latter with Federalist Society types whose imaginations are stuck in the 18th Century. Whether their rationale is sincere or cynical, the practical effect is to reinforce the interests of wealthy elites who justify their predations with a Libertarian ideology. As the worst "thought product" of modernity, Libertarianism provides the ideological justification for what is worst in the American character. Libertarianism is simply the Social Darwinist pig gussied up with a little makeup.

So my impossible hope for a better American future also assumes that this quorum of decent Americans is capable of being realistic about what's worst in human nature while also creating new institutions, customs, mores that aspire to what's best in the American character. In order to achieve this, Americans need to integrate the ideals articulated in the Declaration with an understanding of the human being that draws upon its Judeo-Christian roots. These are roots that made writing the Declaration a possibility in the first place. 

It assumes, therefore, that a broad enough swath of Americans can retrieve the idea that we all have an inherent dignity before one another and before God--egalite--and that we have all have the capacity to choose--liberte--to become the best versions of ourselves, creatures that are born to aspire to become divinized because created in the image and likeness of God. It assumes that because we all have this potential for divinity that we have the obligation to help one another to realize it, that none of us can do this alone, that we fail as humans so long as we only care about saving our own individual eternal asses--fraternite. And not only do we have a responsibility to one another but to the earth because that's where this drama unfolds. No earth, no human future. The idea of colonizing other planets is ridiculous if it's motivated only by extending our Social Darwinian sickness of soul.

A democratic republic is the best way to organize a society that promotes these objectives. But it can only work if there is an aspirational idealism that operates as a counterforce to the Social Darwinism that otherwise seems so natural. Such an idealism must be broadly accepted by all people of good will who are committed enough to it to fight for it when the revanchists allied with elite cosmopolitan Social Darwinians on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Congress do everything they can to mock it and break it down and find ways to co-opt it for their own greedy, power-mad purposes.

Again, these ideals are not something that we just invent out of whole cloth. They are archetypes that lie dormant in the collective unconscious awaiting our awakening them. It's a special part of our heritage in the Judeo-Christian West, but it's there for everybody. It's just been forgotten, washed away by the flood that roared through American society starting with industrial capitalism and abetted by a soul-flattening materialism that seemed the only plausible metaphysics after Darwin.

We can recover what was lost and reimagine it in a new post-secular key.. Otherwise, I fear, the reactionaries will be proved right. 

What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable breadth of concern, to this day memorialised in the concept of the Renaissance man, of this period.

As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World  (Kindle Location 8766-8783). Yale University Press.

McGilchrist's book is astonishing on so many levels. It is a prodigious feat of synthesis drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, psychiatry and so much more. It, imo, is one of the most important efforts at thinking published in the last decade or so. I believe it gives us the resources to find a way forward. For if the shift from the stale, abstract, left-brainy, rigid intellectualism of late medieval scholasticism could morph into the the rich, lively, right/left balanced celebration of life of the Renaissance, perhaps we can find a way forward toward our own Renaissance. Because now in our "postmodern" condition, we are living the reductio ad absurdum of the hubristic Enlightenment Age of Reason, which was until mid last century the consensus spirit animating the Liberal Order. And as the Liberal Order decays, a revanchist, regressive irrational Right arises to provide some atavistic fantasy of a bygone Golden Age. This has come to a head in the Age of Whatever, which set the stage for the Age of Trump. 

In the Age of Whatever, what remains of the old Liberal Order is in one prominent aspect a Neo-puritan, moralistic priggery that at best parodies a serious moral outlook for want of something better. At the same time, a Social Darwinist Neoliberalism dominates in the most woke of workplaces, a Liberalism that paradoxically celebrates diversity, equality, individualism, and freedom while too-often imposing a soul-deadening technocratic organization and a managerial culture of compulsive surveillance and control. But that's all cool because management tacked up a Black Lives Matter poster in the lunchroom.

In the Age of Whatever, there is no consensus about anything. Anything is permissible so long as you don't hurt others. Outside of a depressingly Social Darwinian Ayn Randian framework, there is no longer any imagination for what might be noble individual aspiration, much less noble collective aspiration. Depressing because so many of my most spirited students are attracted to it for, again, want of something better. So everybody is as free to be as good or bad as they wish in theory, but in reality most people are constrained by tribal Liberal or Conservative moralistic groupthinks.

De Toqueville pointed this out about Americans almost two hundred years ago. There is something about Anglo-American and French culture that makes true independent or original thinking very rare and hard to come by. What passes for original is really just novel, a clever variation along lines accepted by Right or Left groupthinks. {See Note 1 in the comments section.] Nobody sane wants to live in the Age of Whatever--except maybe a handful of wannabe Nietzsches in the academy and in pop culture who have persuaded themselves it's edgier or braver to live in some realm beyond Good and Evil. But there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum.

So the culture must move through this awkward phase, and it will. The Age of Whatever is the Age of Whatever Comes Next. The only question is whether it will do it in a healthy or unhealthy way. Healthy means an open society in which its citizens are provided a cultural framework, a trellis, on which they as individuals can become their best selves.

Unhealthy means a rigid, autocratic, closing down of any possibilities except those that are sanctioned by elites on the theocratic Right or on the technocratic Left who think they know best. That's why the individualistic liberation agenda of the Cutltural Left is inadequate. There is in it no vision of possibility for a better human future except to say No to traditional constraints. That's fine so far as it goes, but it has the unintended consequence of clearing the ground for technocratic Social Darwinians to take the field unopposed. We need an imagination of a human future to which all people of good will can say Yes. We need them to be inspired enough by such a vision to be willing to fight for it. 

The culture can move through the Age of Whatever to something better only if it finds a way to synthesize its contradictions on a higher level. That is the coincidentia oppositorum, or the Hegelian aufhebung or what I have stressed repeatedly on this blog as the Platonic metaxis--a practice by which we stand between polarities, identifying with neither, but allowing what is healthy or positive in both to marry, so to say, to create a new moment of integration at a higher level. That is the formula for Renaissance and for true moral development. We all, if we are sane, want to live in Renaissance. We will need a little help from the zeitgeist for such a thing to happen, but there will have to be enough people awake enough to its possibility to work with it when it shifts. [BTW, I don't think this is a task for philosophers. They're the last ones to look to. I think someone like Dolly Parton is a better model to emulate.]

I am an advocate for Renaissance, not nostalgia. Renaissance means 'rebirth', and while it involves a retrieval of things lost or forgotten, it does not involve a nostalgia for former social orders, or the fantasy of so many conservatives to go native in the past imagined as some Tolkienesque golden age or some darker, Evola-esque autarchy. In this rather long post, I want to lay out in one place some of the meta issues that define us at this moment. We are most of us looking at things from the worm's eye view, and it's helpful sometimes to take a look at things from 30,000 feet up.

Part of the mission of this blog is to help cosmopolitan educated types to understand the forces driving the Right but also the limitations of their own presuppositions. The Right and Left are two poles of the same system, and they work dynamically together, but they no longer do so creatively because there's no deep vitality in either. So the task is to transcend both their contradictions in a new synthesis. In previous posts here and here, I've made as sympathetic a case as I can muster to understand what I call Bannonism, whether or not he personally plays any future role in it. His critique of the contemporary Liberal Order is incisive, and his strategy for overturning it could have worked if Trump were not such a self-absorbed fool. But it may work still with a less feral, more strategic fuerher in the future. So I take Bannonism very seriously. 

The most intelligent advocates for Bannonism see themselves as redressing an imbalance in the Liberal Order, which clearly is needed, but they have no real positive, healthy alternative. Their movement is mostly animated by an impassioned NO to the soullessness of the secular materialist and technocratic ethos that shapes mainstream society. So they understand something that most Liberals do not, because to be a Liberal means that you are more or less well adapted to the secular, materialist technocracy. So the No to traditional restraints that animates the Left is matched by the No to Liberal technocracy that animates the Right, and both Nos lead not to resolution, but to impasse. You need something positive in one pole to interact with something positive in the other to move forward--and neither has it at any level of meaningful vitality. 

Bannonism, in realizing that there is no longer anything of real value for conservatives to conserve in the Liberal Order, seeks to tear it down in the hope that something better might arise from the ashes. That, of course, is crazy. But so is Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinism & Nazism, Maoism, and any number of collective delusions that justify themselves as pushing back against what they see as an evil, corrupt status quo. The insane have a way of taking control because they are willing to cross lines the sane won't. And the sane tend to give the insane the benefit of the doubt, and when they realize that they were mistaken, it's too late.

So Bannonism offers nothing positive; it certainly does not offer Renaissance, only a substitution of one deeply inadequate negating ideology for another. If the Bannonites succeed in their tearing down the Liberal Order--and they just might--they will only bring us more intense pain and broader suffering. Some Bannonites are naive because they honestly think anything is better than the current Liberal Order; others simply don't care how many people suffer after the Liberal Order's collapse so long as they're in power. 

The Meta-Historical Context

I don't have views that flow easily in the mainstream, but I persist in thinking I can make compelling arguments for some alternative to the current Left/Right impasse. There are primarily two resistant audiences I need to persuade. The first would be people with a conventional, secular, scientific worldview who see evolution, and therefore human evolution, as driven primarily as a random, meaningless process; the second would be people with religious convictions who believe life on earth is a prison, a vale of tears to be escaped. Both of these constituencies have grounding intuitions that are valid, but both for reasons that I will try to explain are wrong in the way they extrapolate from these intuitions.  

My own mythopoetic framework, which I believe is completely consistent with a Nicene Christianity in a Christian Neoplatonic key is tersely summarized here. I think something along these lines is necessary to provide a future framework for Renaissance. It need not be Christian, but should be post-Axial along the lines of the Philosophia Perennis. My framework is also shaped by a combination of non-theological sources, but probably the main one is what I call "The German Story". Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jung, Gebser, and the Englishman Owen Barfield are all different articulators of a basic intuition about the meaning of history as the evolution of consciousness. The French thinkers Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin add a dimension to this story that I have deep sympathies with. 

This German story can be briefly summarized like this: The human being is the place where the cosmos becomes aware of itself, or to use Heidegger's phrase, a "clearing in the forest of Being". This is a human centered, progressive, evolutionary process extending over millennia. The health of the earth matters because the earth is where the sacred human project unfolds. 

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud are also contributors to this "German story". They would dissent about their being a collective progressive dimension to the evolution of consciousness, but they are important because, like the others, they emphasize that the human being has fathomless depths, depths that are as deep as the mystery of Being itself. It is human openness to this dimension of depth that I see as threatened by the new technologies, particularly the seductions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies need not be malign, but they are and will be to the degree that they close off human possibilities more than they open them up. They might open possibilities up on the horizontal dimension--like the superpowers celebrated in the movies--but it's hard for me to see how they might open them up more than close them down on the vertical dimension, the dimension of depth. We'll see.

Insofar as they are closing off the human being from the dimension of depth, they are obstructing what I believe central to the human project. To put it in McGilchrist's terms, the new technologies insofar as they mechanomorphize the human being, are working from the imbalanced, closed-off perspective of the Left hemisphere of the brain. This may sound simplistic, but it will not appear so after you've read the book. If you've not seen it, the RSA animate video will give you a better feel for the sophistication and nuance that McG brings to this subject. But, really, you've got to read the book. 

I know the computer science folks have great hopes that machine learning will find a way to replicate human consciousness, but it is hard for me to believe that machines can have the special thing that humans have, which is this openness to the dimension of depth mediated to them by the Right hemisphere of the brain. I wonder how many in CS folks actually believe that there are depths in human consciousness that they need bother to try to replicate. Machines can mimic left-brain thinking, but do not have access to the "data" which is only mediated through the right brain, because that data comes from having a soul and with it the capacity for cognitions on the dimension of originary depth.

The peculiarly modern condition of alienation from Being began to take hold in the West among the Voluntarists and Nominalists in the late medieval period, and it is chiefly characterized by a mindset in which the values of the Left brain have usurped and crowded out the richness and soulfulness given to us by the Right. Occam's razor became a justification for cutting away more of the richness of thinking and imagination than the pious Occam ever intended. Why? The left brain is all about seizing power and imposing order. "I just want to keep people safe" is the most common justification for all control zealots, and safety and control are dominant themes in the cultural ethos of the military in one way and of the bourgeois Cultural Left in another. 

The Right brain opens humans up to the depths, the messy domain of everything beyond human control, while the Left Brain is all about grasping, controlling, and ordering what is given to it from the right. Ideally, as McG explains above, they work together--that's the formula for true creativity and Renaissance--but when they do the Right Brain is the Master and the Left the Emissary and servant. Societies get into big trouble when the Emissary usurps control from the Master, much as Antonio usurped Milan from Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. We're in that trouble now. 

The Tempest is the story that hinges on the coincidentia oppositorum. I would argue that most of Shakespeare's plays work with its archetypal power. The basic structure of the comedies starts with conflict between two dramatic polarities, then proceeds with a serious effort by the protagonist to effect a reconciliation at a higher moral level, and if successful, culminates in the final act with a scene that celebrates the expansive joy of an achieved communion--weddings, feasts, circle dances.

In The Tempest, the basic dramatic conflict is between Prospero and his usurping brother, Antonio. The moral question at the heart of the play is to avenge or not to avenge. Prospero refuses revenge and its endless cycle of counter-revenge, which is "natural" in its following logic of evolution without grace. His refusal allows for the possibility to achieve integration at a higher level, a restorative, expansive aufhebung, that reestablishes him in Milan with the expansion of his realm with the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand to include Naples. 

Something like that has to happen to resolve the sterile conflict between the Left and Right in American society; otherwise our future will be an infinite, irresolvable series of Left/Right backlashes. Aufhebung is not the same as compromise. It's about synthesis and communion at a higher level. This is how real moral progress happens, but it requires leaders who are mature moral agents. Is the Cultural/Religious Right capable of producing such leaders? I'm sure there are mature moral agents on the Right, but will they be listened to by the rank and file they would lead? 

And on the Cultural Left, are there leaders there with the spiritual or moral resources to say No to the ways the Enlightenment project leads to the end of the human project? Is there any capacity there to push back against those who are advocating for a mechanomorphized transhuman or posthuman future? Are they capable of seeing how this is the reductio ad absurdum of Left Brain cultural hegemony? Is it within their resources to see it as the parodic apotheosis of the Enlightenment project to liberate the humans from the irrational by liberating them from their bodies? 

Left Braininess is something Liberals value in a way that Conservatives do not, and for this reason, elite Liberals in the universities, the media, in pop culture either celebrate or are otherwise blind to, complacent about, or resigned to the threats posed to the human project by mechanomorphizing it. Technocratic Neoliberalism and the postmodern liberation ethos of anything goes are symptoms of Left-braininess on steroids. Are Liberal elites able to transcend such limitations? We'll see. but I don't see much sign of it at this juncture. 

The Current Crisis

I believe that the shrunken capacity of humans to cognize levels of Being on the dimension of depth is the greatest threat to humanity in this moment. All the other problems, whether environmental degradation, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, immiseration of the masses, the trend toward authoritarianism, are one way or another symptoms of our historically unprecedented Left-brainy shallowness in the West--and increasingly everywhere else as well. Anybody with a shred of a soul feels it. They might identify it as a feeling that their lives are being choked by a suffocating 'inauthenticity'. And so many people feel increasingly alienated, anxious, angry, depressed.

The world around them seems unreal, a kind shadow theater, a virtual simulation, with little in it that resonates meaningfully. People are going through the motions because what else is there to do? But they are starved for authenticity, and it's in very short supply. People will seize on almost anything that gives them an antidote to their alienation. The easiest remedy is to lose oneself one way or another--in a surrender to Tribal identity or to sterile, instinct-driven pleasures. These are deeper forms of alienation from which it is more difficult to recover because they require a refusal of what Tillich called 'the courage to be'. The Liberal model with all the best intentions frames existential failures of courage in this sense as disease, which hygienizes it in ways that rob people of their spiritual dignity. 

Nevertheless, Cultural Conservatives are wrong to blame liberals for creating this shallow, alienated shadow world. Liberals didn't create it, but they are better adapted to it. They don't feel as uncomfortable in it as cultural conservatives do, at least the affluent, educated Liberals don't. Religious conservatives look at these shallow, happy Liberals--Hillary Clinton being their exemplar--and are disgusted by their smug complacency. What's the matter with these Liberals? How can they be so glib, so self-righteous? Have they no souls? How can they be so comfortable in such a flat, spiritually eviscerated culture? Well, most Liberals are not soulless; the best among them feel as alienated as conservatives, but they certainly don't think that the people on the religious right have any real remedies. And they're not wrong.

And hardly any Liberal I know is a hard-core secularist. There are some, but they are far fewer than most conservative ideologues believe. They are secular but not necessarily unspiritual; they are mostly agnostic when it comes to religious questions, because when they look at the churches, unless they're lucky enough to live in a place with an exceptional local church community, they rightly see that there's nothing special or challenging there either intellectually, morally, or socially. Joining a bicycle or hiking club would be more edifying than attending a local church services. They certainly don't care or even know about the pronouncements of Church bodies like the National Council of Churches, or the various Catholic, Lutheran, or other denominational synods. And even if these bodies make pronouncements that they agree with, why should they care? They have no political clout, and Liberals don't need the churches to tell them what common sense and common decency easily recognize without them. 

Their views on liberal policies, in my experience, are not rigid. I live in Seattle, a very culturally liberal place. I had a conversation recently with a very Liberal, very secularized, non-observant Jewish friend who knew that I was a practicing Catholic. This perplexed him because I otherwise seemed so sane. He wanted to know what my position on abortion was. I usually avoid conversations on tribal shibboleth issues like abortion. Most Liberals, like most Conservatives, don't have strongly thought out or deeply held convictions. They just go along with whoever in their tribe shouts the loudest, and so when it comes to having a conversation about such a topic, most Liberals and Conservatives just mouth the tribal talking points. And I don't want any part of the kind of moronic conversations that operate on that level. 

But my friend is an honest, morally serious person. He's someone you can have a frank conversation about a radioactive topic like this. So he asked and I answered frankly. I told him I thought it was wrong, and that there is something soul-dead about a society that has come to see abortion as a banal surgical practice which is the moral equivalent of an appendectomy.

I see it as consonant with the deeply alienating and perverse extreme aspects of the modern liberation project toward a posthumanism that seeks to liberate what it means to be human from what it means to have a body. Having a body is the whole point of being human. It is only in our bodies that we can renew the face of the earth. 

I don't think this because I'm a Catholic, and that's what Catholics believe. But I do think that my being a Catholic gives me a way to stand outside the Liberal Groupthink and to determine for myself what is truly good or a counterfeit of it. My life as a Catholic is largely defined as a metaxis between its rich tradition of thinkers, prophets, and saints and the Liberal social imaginary, which is the world into which I was born and in which I live my day to day life. Striving to live in the space between them rather than to be circumscribed by either is not easy, and I may not do it well, but it's my understanding about how to live authentically in a world that has lost its mind. It enables one to find a foothold in a place that is foundational for both but which also transcends both.

In any event, I didn't say all this to my friend, but I explained to him that I'm not interested in criminalizing abortion, but I am truly dismayed by Liberals' glib, technocratic-utilitarian approval for what is a fundamentally a dehumanizing act. It says something very damning about us as a society, but it's just one among many symptoms of a deeper disease because so does the dehumanization of criminals with the death penalty, our enthusiastic support for the vengeance-driven invasion and destruction of Iraq, our dehumanizing of political prisoners with torture, and our dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and refugees. We are a  sick society, which is losing its grip on its humanity, and our hygienizing of abortion is one symptom of the way the way the utilitarian-technocratic ethos has dehumanized us among many others. I know--life is messy. Nothing in a life seriously lived is determined by binary black-and-white thinking. There are situations where having abortion is a defensible choice. But the exception should not be the rule. At some time in the future, I hope most people will look back on our contemporary mainstream attitudes toward abortion and think of them as barbaric as we now see genital mutilation. 

My friend's reaction was interesting. I think my answer to his question gave him permission to express his own moral discomfort with the knee-jerk cultural legitimacy that abortion has achieved in his cosmopolitan culture world. Deep down he feels it's wrong because it really is, whatever clever utilitarian or ideologically driven reasons might be used to justify it. But he never heard anybody explain why in language that was not ideologically motivated. 

Authenticity and Morality

Any moral position is inauthentic to the degree that is determined primarily by outside-in factors. People who have an outside-in morality generally have no strongly held convictions. They just do what people expect them to do, whether it's contribute to a group-approved charity or show up at church--or whether to wear a mask or not to wear a mask. Too many of the same people who do nice things if that's what expected of them will also do horrible things if that's what expected of them. If their neighbors are part of a lynch mob, they'll join in. If they're working at Enron, they'll come up with creative ideas to cheat the elderly poor. If they're sitting in Trump's cabinet room, they will kiss his ass when he demands it because everyone else is doing it. Whatever.

There are degrees of inauthenticity, of course. But the defining essence of inauthenticity is that "you" don't really decide; "you" just do what somebody else thinks is best. You just go along to get along. It's what's expected. There is no moral agent working from the inside-out struggling to know what the right thing is and then finding the courage to do it. No authenticity is required if moral questions are decided for you outside-in, by the authorities or cultural bullies. No matter how much you might appear to others as a model citizen, there is no virtue in it when it requires no courage or moral conviction to just go along. 

Mature moral judgments are always inside-out, and any kind of authentic moral development must have some degree of inside-out. But the way the inside-out moral agent emerges initially is almost always in conversation with people who have themselves achieved some level of inside-out, authentic moral development. So of course, there is some outside-in triggering event of some kind--a conversation, a lecture, a book--but this is completely different from just downloading someone else's or one's tribe's moral code and following it mainly for fear of being caught and shamed.

That was Socrates' project, right? He was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, but all he was trying to do was to have honest conversations and through through them to awaken them, to have them go deeper to see that their cultural download was shallow, that there was in fact a Good that transcends custom and culture. He wanted to awaken them to the existence of this culture-transcending Good so that they might live lives that are aligned with it rather than simply to mindlessly goose step to the tribal code. This is the essence of "Axiality", this awakening to the transcendent Good.

So a healthy "Axial" culture's customs and traditions are important because of the role they play in awakening individuals in each generation to this transcendent Good. Any culture is healthy to the degree that it awakens the people born into it to their best possibilities as human beings, to their blossoming inside-out. A culture becomes decadent to the degree that it no longer produces this kind of authentic moral development. It is unhealthy to the degree that it imposes a rigid outside-in code and demands a rigid obedience to that code or risk ostracism. A shame culture is not a truly moral culture. It looks like Islamic fundamentalism over there, but like the Republican Party or Woke political correctness over here. A shame culture functions merely as a social constructions whose concerns are for social utility and order, not on what is truly, deeply Good.

But the problem I have with cultural conservatives is that their traditions and customs are more what I have called elsewhere Zombie Traditions: their traditions and codes maintain a cadaverous form, but they no longer carry the spiritual Life that originally gave them shape. They are animated by a kind of undead energy that masquerades as but really parodies the transcendent inspiration--the Good--that originally gave them their form.

Zombie traditionalists show themselves in their anger and resentment because they feel that they don't get enough outside-in respect in a society dominated by Liberal values. But if their tradition was a healthy, living one, it would produce enough people who have that interior sense of dignity that always awakens in others when they encounter it the same inner dignity. If people feel this sense of inner dignity, they don't feel anger and resentment at being slighted by people that don't "get it". Instead they try to share with them the Good that they have come to know.

Why are so many cultural and religious conservatives attracted to Trump? Because he articulates the anger of profoundly alienated people on the cultural Right and channels their resentment. If they really cared about and aspired to the Good, they could only be disgusted by him and by the dark impulses he evokes in their souls. One of the most common symptoms of stunted moral development is the urge in the immature to blame others for their own failures, and to project onto them their own shortcomings that they fail to see in themselves. 

Everybody does this--me included--but there is a peculiarly toxic way that this is endorsed and legitimated on right-wing media. It blames Liberals for everything rather than even entertaining the possibility that its own mindset reinforces and rigidifies a mentality that is morally stunting precisely because it refuses to do the hard work of becoming a mature moral agent. Trump, Rush, Alex, and others give them permission to be their worst selves, and it must be ok because everybody they know thinks and feels the same. So it's just so satisfying to join the mob and blame the Liberals. That feeling that they get, that rush, substitutes for and crowds out any possibility for authentic moral, inside-out development.

Zombie Traditionalists are aggressively outside-in in their moral program. Their sense of identity is something that depends on the propping up of a fragile structure that no longer awakens an authentic, calming, interior dignity. And so it produces another form of alienation that is just as toxic, and I'd argue more dangerous, than the kind of alienation that typifies the anything-goes ethos of secular Liberals.

You can have a conversation with most Liberals, you can't with fanatic, right-wing tribalists. Are there fanatic, Liberal tribalists? Yes, of course, and you can't have a conversation with them either. But they are the exception, in my experience, rather than the rule. If the primary negative characteristic of Cultural Conservatives is their outside-in moral rigidity, the primary negative characteristic of Liberals is their moral diffidence and tolerance for any individual's thinking so long as they are tolerant of others.

Cultural Conservatives value loyalty more than reason. Cultural Liberals value reason (usually in a rather attenuated, left-brainy form) more than loyalty, but that makes it possible for Liberals to be open to arguments that lay outside the Liberal Groupthink. That's much, much harder for conservatives because their sense of integrity lies in keeping faith with others in the Tribe no matter whether there are really, really good reasons to doubt the validity or the goodness of their tribal norms. 

Cultural conservatives see Liberals as morally lax and unprincipled, but most Liberals don't see themselves that way. They have deeply felt moral commitments, even if they are agnostic about the metaphysical foundations that ground those commitments. And they don't "hate" cultural conservatives. The only thing most rank-and-file Liberals really hate about the cultural Right is its rigid intolerance. Cultural Liberals are quite tolerant of all kinds of conservative values and practices so long as they who hold them do not seek to impose them on others. But since intolerance is at the core of the Cultural Conservative identity, the Cultural Left's hatred of the Cultural Right's intolerance feels like a complete rejection of everything that conservatives believe. 

I think there is an analogy presented in the gospels that illuminates the difference between the cultural Right and Left. Jesus had more problems with the religious professionals, the culturally conservative Pharisees and Saducees who were so obsessed regarding their moral rectitude. Every religion produces this class of meathead. These people, so 'righteous' in their imaginations of themselves, were closed to having a conversation that might open them up to new moral possibilities. So Jesus spent most of his time with the local sinners, i.e., the morally lax cultural liberals of his day, who were quite open to having a conversation. Zacchaeus (Luke 19) is the classic affluent liberal of his time, as was the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (John 4). 

Despite these sinners' code-breaking, they had supple enough hearts that made them de facto morally superior to the rigidly moral Pharisees. Jesus described the latter as 'whited sepulchers', clean outside, but rotting inside, a vivid image of an inauthentic, alienating morality that is outside-in. The worst kind of sin is hardness of heart because it's the disposition of soul that makes you invulnerable to the influences of Goodness and Truth when it is standing there right in front of you. They couldn't see who Jesus was because he didn't fit their morally rigid template for what was acceptable. This is the source of the kind of intolerance that is central the cultural conservative's identity. They think they know what is moral, when in fact they are remarkably clueless about what is truly Good. 

Not a problem for the Zachaeuses and Photines of the world, morally lax though they might be. It is better to be the improvident, morally lax prodigal son than the older son, righteous but tight-assed and full of resentment. The point of the parable is not to endorse an antinomian moral laxity but rather to point out that the prodigal son is open to new moral possibilities in a way that the older brother is not. Whether he realizes those possibilities in becoming an authentically inside-out moral agent is another question. But the chances are better for him than for his resentment-driven, rotted-on-the-inside brother. 

***

Thoughtful cultural conservatives have a legitimate critique of the Liberal Order, but they have no realistic, healthy remedy. They don't understand what a real cure requires. They are understandably frustrated, but they channel their anger toward the wrong enemy. They should instead focus their energies at the greater threat posed by unbridled techno-capitalism. It's a place where they could find many allies on the Progressive Left. But even here, saying No is not enough. The issue is not to put a halt to what Silicon Valley is doing, but rather to offer an alternative imagination for a human future where machines serve human purposes rather than to let the machines and the logic of techno-capitalism set the agenda, which is currently the default. You can't do that if you believe that humans are talking animals that have no more significance for the cosmos than slime molds. But neither can you if you think the earth is a prison from which we must escape. 

So it is extraordinarily difficult for secular Liberals, especially the Neoliberal elite who dominate the media, pop culture, and the Democratic Party, to push back against the hubristic techno-capitalist agenda because most Liberals don't have strong convictions about what it means to be a human being, and even frequently believe that the earth would be better without humans. That kind of thinking is truly, deeply crazy as anything the Cultural Right puts out there. But it is also extremely difficult for the Cultural Right to push back because, if they think about it at all, which most don't, they are Libertarians in the Goldwater/Norquist mode, and the idea of using government power to impinge in any way on private-sector freedoms shorts out their thinking and makes their heads explode. 

So this is why I think that both Liberals and Conservatives are both right and wrong, but in the short term I side with the Liberals because they are the true conservatives insofar as they are committed to the rule of law and to finding practical solutions in a complex, pluralistic, globalizing world. In other words, the real world. Conservatives just want to say No to all that complexity and to live bunkered in their traditionalists hidey-holes and media bubbles and in doing so make themselves unavailable for honest conversation with Liberals of good will.

I see Cultural Conservatives as like people in a burning house, a house that they co-own with Liberals, but would just as soon let it burn if they have to share management responsibilities with the Liberals. Anyway, their real home is in heaven, not in this house, so, yeah, let it burn. We will die with the Liberals, but we go to a better place where we won't have to deal with them anymore because there won't be any of them there.

Is it really more complicated than that? If so, not by much. 

Liberals might be blind to things that the most thoughtful conservatives know and understand, but conservatives in the political sphere have proved themselves over and over again to have nothing positive to contribute. They just say No and then find convoluted ways to justify their support for a sociopath like Donald Trump. Conservatives in America have become more a part of the problem than partners with sane Liberals who are seeking in good faith to find solutions to the most pressing problems we are facing. 

In the long term, I believe what I described above as the German story will continue to play out. And this moves forward through successive moments of Renaissance, moral leaps forward, a la the Iain McGilchrist epigraph. So in future posts, I want to continue to think out loud about this, and I'm interested in anybody wanting to join in to think with me. It's not as if I have any clear program, except to strongly believe that humanity is a sacred project and that humans have within themselves everything they need to transcend their ignorance and delusional thinking if somehow they find the will to do it. 

[A version of this essay originally appeared here in 2019 under a different title.]

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. 

I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a progressive Catholic sensibility. But while I know many conservative Catholics, I have no personal conversational relationships with the kind of people who appear in this play--extremely Conservative Catholic intellectuals who, with the exception of Emily, seem to befriend only other extremely conservative Catholics. My only encounter with people who think this way is in reading The American Conservative or First Things. The first was founded by Pat Buchanan, and it's a site on which Rod Dreher, a crunchy conservative and the author of The Benedict Option referenced in the play, seems to play an outsized role.

I think the play's performance in New York has gotten a lot of attention because like Hillbilly Elegy, it's an intelligent exposition of an American culture world that most New York cosmopolitans have no understanding of or sympathy for, and as such it is helpful for Liberals struggling to understand how intelligent, sympathetic human beings could vote for Trump. (BTW, alas) The events take place on August 19, 2017, right after Trump dumps Bannon. Although all five characters voted for Trump. Teresa, a wannabe Ann Coulter, is the only one of the five characters who did so without moral ambiguity. Teresa is smart and articulate, but she's the least attractive character in the play, unless, of course, you find someone like Ann Coulter attractive.  

I think the most interesting character is Emily, who is suffering from a mysterious disease reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's Lupus. She's in enormous pain, and she is enormously empathic. Empathy is what this play is all about. It provides an opportunity for Liberals to empathize with this kind of Catholic, but I think Arbery intends it as an appeal to his people back home to encourage them to empathize with the suffering of people who don't fit neatly into their rigid, moralistic cubbies. I think dramatizing Emily's empathy is the central point of the play and is the only real way of understanding the fugue state into which she is transported in the final scene. More about that below.

The second most compelling character is Emily's mother, Gina. She is a woman in her sixties, was a Goldwater girl who knew Hillary Clinton when she was one too, but unlike Clinton Gina remained faithful to the kind of peculiar Libertarian cultural conservatism that Goldwater and later Reagan represented while at the same time being a committed Catholic. She is a First Things kind of conservative Catholic. Perhaps not--she could be a The American Conservative kind of Catholic. The first is more Neoconservative, the latter Paleoconservative, or Rod-Dreher-Crunchy-Conservative. She supported Pat Buchanan, founder of The American Conservative, in his presidential run. 

Gina is the kind of person I've written about over the years who I argue does not understand the intellectual incoherence of holding her Christian commitment together with her capitalist/libertarian political ideology. People like her claim that Liberalism is destroying everything they hold sacred while at the same time embracing capitalism, the engine of cultural Liberalism. Capitalism is the single most powerful force in history in destroying what all traditionalists hold sacred. One of the few people in that conservative Catholic world whose acuity I respect is Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. He doesn't make that mistake.

I don't know if Gina would be a fan of Ayn Rand, as the similarly intellectually incoherent Catholic Conservative Paul Ryan is, but it wouldn't surprise me. I take that back. I don't think Gina would be taken in by a celebrant of the Darwinian Self like Rand, and she's better and more interesting than a big dope like Ryan. But she has a Barry Goldwater poster in her office, and that speaks to a simplistic, ideological borderline fanaticism that is disturbing. It raises the question: when does having principles slide into becoming fanaticism? More on that below. 

As written, Gina is the kind of person who is a second-rate thinker. I don't mean that in a pejorative, judgmental sense but more in a neutral descriptive one. Most of us are second rate. We are first-rate to the degree that we have thoroughly examined and critiqued our presuppositions. Gina does not lack intelligence or an instinct for truth, but she lives in a parochial world in which the incoherence of her presuppositions have never been challenged--at least not in a compelling way that could pierce her formidably wrought conservative armor. She is in that respect like most intelligent, interesting people, including Liberals.

Few people undertake that kind of rigorous self-examination, but most decent people are open to change their mind, and that's what prevents them from being third rate. Any kind of reductionistic, ideological thinking is third rate. Scientistic materialism of the Dawkins variety, for instance, is third rate in this sense. Or when First Things defended the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it exposed itself in all its ignominious ideological, third rateness. 

To become first rate requires humility enough to recognize the provisionality and limitations of one's thinking and to realize that one's thinking is an evolving, dynamic process. This doesn't mean that anything goes, but that we never arrive, we are always groping toward a deeper apprehension of the truth. Nothing about the truth is black and white, but there is better and worse, deeper and more superficial. Ideological thinking is not about seeking truth and articulating what one finds, but about defending a rigidified abstraction that has lost its living connection to whatever intuitions originally inspired it. A good part of Gina is very much a defender of the faith in this ideological sense, but unlike her protege Teresa, she strikes me as the kind of person who has an openness that makes a deeper movement of the mind a possibility. 

So what's more important about Gina is her basic moral instincts and a basic vulnerability to the truth when it presents itself to her. She's someone who has that possibility in a way that her protege Teresa does not. While she is still captured by her ideological thinking, she's still open. Teresa, intelligent though she is, is a third rate thinker because she lacks that openness to have her ideological thinking be subverted by the truth. Gina is still captured by ideological thinking, but she's not possessed by it in the fanatical way that Teresa is. Gina's healthy moral instincts save her from that. She is Emily's mother, after all.

Although she voted for Trump, Gina has no illusions about Trump and his crowd, and she laces into the Bannonite Teresa in a fittingly apt way that echoes the way that Teresa laced into Kevin earlier in the play. What goes around comes around. But I think that the animus that Gina directs toward Teresa is grounded in a projection of the aforementioned fanatical part of herself that she hasn't yet come to own. Gina is an interesting, but not yet integrated woman. Like most of us, she has parts within her that are not talking to one another. The Emily part isn't talking to the Teresa part, but the Emily part is stronger. 

So Gina is someone, unlike most conservatives I know, with whom I could have a conversation. I think she profoundly misreads the zeitgeist, but does it honestly. She lives and works in a siloed world where she would not have occasion to meet and talk with sane Progressives. She too easily dismisses them as abettors of abortion. Abortion as a political issue makes both Liberals and Conservatives crazy. It's a shibboleth issue for someone like Gina, and as such, as it is for someone from NARAL or MSNBC, it becomes a moral issue virtually impossible to discuss in a sane way. 

Teresa, on the other hand, is an articulate, all-in fanatic. She has virtually no self knowledge, and so no way of understanding the egoism that drives her. She believes that we're headed for a civil war, and that her generation, the millennials who are the Heroes of the Fourth Turning, have to be ready to fight the good fight. She's the kind of person who would have been among the mob storming the Capitol on Jan 6. So I guess if you want an intelligent, articulate justification for that kind of fanaticism, her speeches in the play provide it. But the bottom line is that she's a morally callow nutcase, like most of the people whose ambitions lead them to draft behind someone like Trump. She is a Social Darwinian obsessed with tribal survival. She has no sense that 'tribal Catholic' is an oxymoron. The spirit of the gospels is something incomprehensible to her. Gina sees that about her, and calls it out in no uncertain terms. 

So in Gina and Teresa we explore the question--When does being principled bleed into being a fanatic. Barry Goldwater famously said that "...extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue." Anyone with a lick of sense recognizes extremism/moderation as a false binary, and for that reason Conservatives who find this false binary inspiring confuse being principled with being fanatical. Robespierre didn't think of himself as a fanatic, but as principled. So do Goldwaterite Libertarians. In other words, when being principled becomes a function of reductionistic, third-rate ideological thinking, it is a form of fanaticism. 

It's true that being a moderate can be a coverup for being mushy, for not believing in anything. But moral maturity is always first generous in its judgments and discerning and compassionate in sussing out the good in the fundamental messiness of human affairs. If that manifests as moderation, tolerance, compassion, let's have more of it. Emily is moderate in this deeper sense. She certainly has more generosity of spirit than I have. For instance, she sees more good in someone like Teresa than I ever could. 

So in Gina we have someone who remains largely an unreconstructed Goldwater Girl and for that reason, despite her better moral instincts, retains a latent fanaticism in the liminal shadowy parts of her soul. In someone like Teresa, she encounters that fanaticism in full, throbbing, living color. Gina is horrified by Teresa at least in part because Gina was her mentor when Teresa was a student, and so Gina must now confront in Teresa something of herself that she imparted to Teresa, the latent part of herself that she thought was "principled" but was in fact always much darker. I'd like to think that Gina has the capacity to own that part of herself and do something about it. 

There is nothing much to say about the other two characters. Kevin, a holy fool, brings some comic relief. He represents the chaos archetype. He is Dostoyevski's Smerdyakov or Lear's jester--a teller of uncomfortable truths and asker of uncomfortable questions.  He keeps things moving. Justin, the fifth character, is the chivalric good soldier. A decent guy, an idealist, but lacks down-to-earth sense. His children's book idea--"The Grateful Acre"--is truly bizarre. It parodies a genuine moral insight about gratitude in a way that is off-the-wall inappropriate for children. I think Arbery almost certainly intends it as a sendup of a  perverse, masochistic, peculiarly Catholic celebration of suffering. I say so because I think he has an important to say about Emily's suffering that contrasts with it.  

So back to Emily. There is on the more mystical fringes of Christianity this idea that the most saintly people are capable of identifying empathically in a deeply specific bodily way with the suffering of others. St. Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio were stigmatists, which means that they so empathically identified with the crucified Christ that they developed in their own bodies the the wounds in the hands and feet from the nails that held him to the cross. 

The novelist and Dante scholar Charles Williams talks about substitutionary love. Some people are capable of relieving the suffering of others by absorbing parts of it, by finding a way to empathically transfer it to one's own body. It's a literal way to follow the gospel admonition to carry one another's burdens.  C.S. Lewis reports having done this with his wife while she was dying of cancer. I don't know that Arbery had these examples consciously in mind in writing Emily's character, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. But whether he did or not, it informs how I read the last scene.

As in the line between being principled or fanatic, there's a line between masochism and empathy and its cousin compassion. Clearly in Emily we have no masochist. She would give up her suffering in a New York second if there were a way to. But she's someone whose suffering has opened her up to the suffering of the world in a way that is deeply Christic. The strange fugue state into which her pain and stress induce her in the last scene is not a sign of Emily's lack of faith, but of her Christic capacity. She channeling the psychic pain and anger of the woman she is counseling against getting an abortion. And the pain of the woman, temporarily, fuses with her own.

This is real suffering in all its ugliness. It's not the kind of thing you write a beautiful children's book about.

Bonhoeffer coined the phrase "cheap grace". Justin's children's book about suffering is a mushy piece of cheap grace. I think Arbery means to contrast it with something deeper and truer, a capacity for compassion that is not cheaply bought. It's no wonder that so few of us have much of it except in a cheap, mushy sense. Few of us are willing to pay the price that having the real thing requires. 

This Moment is Different

I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.

Polarization and political tribalism are not new to America; fear and hatred for our fellow citizens have been increasing for decades. We’ve had plenty of presidents who have failed us, in ways large and small. But this moment is different because Donald Trump is different, and because Donald Trump is president. His relentless assault on truth and the institutions of democracy—his provocations and abuse of power, his psychological instability and his emotional volatility, his delusions and his incompetence—are unlike anything we’ve seen before. He needs to be stopped. And his supporters can’t say, as they did in 2016, that they just didn’t know. Now we know. It’s not too late—it’s never too late—to do the right thing.

Peter Wehner, The Atlantic

I think the questions I would ask a Trump supporter at this point is "What is it that you feel is such a threat to your lives that you can justify supporting this demagogue? Do you really believe that this incompetent, amoral, deeply foolish man represents a better future for America? Do you really believe that the Democrats, for all their fecklessness and cluelessness, are really out to destroy everything you love?

I can assure you that for the most part Liberals don't care about what you love enough to want to destroy it. They don't care what you believe or love, but they are willing to tolerate it. You see malice where really there is only indifference. The one thing that Liberals cannot tolerate is intolerance. I can understand why you think there are some things that cannot be tolerated, and you shouldn't tolerate them in your personal lives, and in the public square you should do what you can to persuade others to share your beliefs and practices. But you cannot force them to. It's better, much better, to live in a liberal, tolerant society than in an illiberal one that is not. 

To destroy the whole system whose core value is tolerance because you think that indifferent, clueless, liberal elites don't give you the respect you think you deserve is to cut off your nose to spite your face. It's rooted in paranoia. The basic thing about paranoia is that it tends to create self-fulfilling prophecies. The people you fear to be your enemies, even though they're not, become your enemies when you treat them as such. Acting out such paranoia quickly devolves into a death spiral. Another four years of Trump will bring down on yourselves much greater woe than whatever you think is troubling you now. The country will devolve into chaos and become the violent hell-scape that you fear. 

In the same way that Republicans have worked so assiduously to make government dysfunctional so that they can then argue that government is dysfunctional, so is Trump creating chaos to make you fear chaos. Too many conservative Americans have been seduced into thinking that they will get better government by electing the people who want to destroy any possibility of it, and now the same illogic leads them to believe that they will restore order by electing the greatest elected agent of chaos this country has ever seen. 

I can understand why you voted for him in '16. I can understand why you wanted to send a message. I can understand why you wanted to shake things up and put the fear of God into complacent elite thinking. Message received. Now there's no plausible justification for voting for him unless you really think that living in a deeply corrupt, illiberal, intolerant South American or Eastern European-style autocracy is better than what we have now. Surely you can see that we can be better than that. Right?

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. ]

It's the Meaninglessness, Stupid

I've just finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging after just having read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both focus on what I've been writing about here for years, which is that the problem at the root of American societal dysfunction since the sixties is the lack of a meaning narrative that gives Americans a collective sense of future possibility. Americans suffer from Collective Meaning Deficit Syndrome. What's left of the American Dream, which more or less had performed that collective meaning function, is framed in crude careerist or consumerist terms. And those meaning-giving narratives, rather thin to begin with, frame possibilities that are available to fewer and fewer people as good jobs and opportunities for social mobility in this country shrink. The U.S. is one of the least socially mobile nations in the developed world. 

Most ordinary Americans muddle through having found more or less adequate ways to work with the rather anemic collective meaning frameworks that organize their lives. But the meaninglessness is always there looming in the background ready to show itself as soon as their rather fragile meaning frames crack and crumble in response to  a variety of stresses. So as the effectiveness of the American Dream has diminished in providing a collective sense of meaning, some people create their own individual meaning narratives, which may or not be sustainable depending on how deeply aligned with reality such narratives might be, and others join cults or cult-like groups that might provide a collective sense meaning but are fundamentally delusional. This is why kids join gangs and grown ups join the Tea Party. 

It doesn't matter that the meaning framework that these cult-like groups provide is not aligned with reality. The function of a cult is not to deliver truth, but to provide meaning and a sense of belonging. Truth and Meaning are not the same, and although they can be aligned, very often they are not. No matter how people find ways to give their lives meaning, it has become increasingly difficult for them to find it in ways that are socially grounded in healthy and sustainable frames. Careerism and Consumerism are not healthy meaning narratives. Junger in Tribes writes about how affluence in itself is not meaning giving, and in fact creates the conditions that diminish meaning insofar as it creates social buffers that promote social fragmentation and isolation. He argues that a sustainable sense of human meaning comes primarily from a deeply felt sense of belonging to a collective enterprise that counts on and values the individual's contributions to it. This can be positive or negative. Gang/cults, negative. Doctors without Borders or Missionaries of Charity, positive. 

Moderns differ from aboriginal peoples because during non-crisis moments their affluence allows them to self-isolate in everyday life, and in doing so to remove themselves from any deep sense of connection to larger collective purposes. This is particularly true in America, where there is no robust mythos of national solidarity, and where instead the emphasis is on individual achievement. The commonplace that the greater good is served by each individual pursuing his individual interests is reinforced by elite policymakers whose sense of meaning comes from a careerism narrative which has worked very well for them, and which is justified by the neoliberal mythos that has dominated elite thinking since the late 1970s.

Junger talks about how this emphasis on individual interests would be an impossible idea in aboriginal societies, which, he argues, are far happier societies than modern ones despite their relative poverty and short life expectancies. Their happiness comes from their members' belonging to a cohesive social group that values each member's contribution to its survival. He points out that the closest ordinary Americans come to experiencing something like the meaning and cohesiveness of aboriginal societies is during crises like war or natural disasters. Most moderns affected by these crises find common cause to meet the challenges that come with those crises, and after the crisis has passed often say they miss the sense of solidarity and meaning that they felt when things were "bad".  

So to generalize a bit, a healthy, meaningful life requires two things, and it's not wealth and security. There need to be (1) a robust, reality-based mythos, and (2) an identity-shaping role for every individual to play that is validated by that mythos. The problem, or course, is that often the mythos that shapes meaning for a group is completely out of alignment with the truth, and that's when dysfunction becomes normative. 

Vance in Hillbilly Elegy paints a picture of dysfunction when the meaning is out of alignment with reality. He  vividly describes the life and culture of poor whites in Appalachia and rust-belt cities like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up in the 80s and 90s where drugs, domestic violence, welfare fraud, serial monogamy, delusional thinking, reckless credit card spending, and learned helplessness are normative. Vance himself was able to realize the dream--he went into the Marines after high school, got a degree from Ohio State when he came back, and then went on to graduate from Yale Law School. The book is a sincere attempt to try to puzzle out why his story is so unusual. 

He's a conservative who is reluctant to "blame society" for the the bad choices individuals make, but he also sees that Hillbilly culture has become something that reinforces certain attitudes and behaviors that make it extraordinarily difficult for most people break free of its dysfunctionality. The Hillbilly mythos has become, in Vance's telling, a classic case of what I call in "Drove My Chevy to the Levy" a parody or zombie culture: it has a body, i.e., customary or traditional forms, but it is animated by the undead spirit of consumer capitalism. It provides collective meaning, but meaning that is fundamentally out of alignment with reality and with richer human potentialities for human flourishing. Vance's grandmother is old enough that some of the pre-zombie, healthy values of Scots Irish Hillbilly culture gave her the possibility to lead a decent, generous life. Vance's junkie mother exemplifies the Hillbilly parody. 

Junger talks at length about the problems that American soldiers have when returning home from war in recent decades. Certainly there are challenges in healing from the physical and emotional traumas experienced during battle, but more problematic is the transition to civilian life where the meaninglessness and alienation they experience so dramatically contrasts with the meaningfulness and deep human bonds that characterized their lives when in war zones. Junger points out that Israeli soldiers don't have near the proportional number of cases of prolonged PTSD that American soldiers do, and it's likely that a large part of the reason for this is that Israeli soldiers see themselves as playing a significant role in a collective mythos in which the survival of their country is at stake. This narrative has visceral meaning for everyone in Israeli society, and Israeli soldiers are integrated back into civilian roles in a way that is very different from the experiences of veterans in the U.S. 

Junger makes a strong case that the problem Americans face when returning to civilian life has less to do with the trauma of battle and more to do with the meaninglessness and purposeless of their lives as civilians. When American vets return home, the intensity of their experience in war zones has no real connection to their experience at home, and the war they put their lives on the line for is a fuzzy abstraction for the people at home for whom their service has no deeply felt meaning. "Thank you for your service," has become an automatic obligatory response people make when meeting someone from the military, even if they have no deeply felt sense of what that service was for.

The significance of the disconnect can be disorienting for vets; it makes what they went through seem meaningless and irrelevant in a new environment in which it is extremely difficult for them to find civilian roles that can be meaningful and relevant for them going forward. Junger points out that instead of thanking veterans for their service or letting them board planes before everyone else, give them a job. They don't need your appreciation for what they did, they need a role to play that can give them meaning and sense of future possibility when they return to civilian life.

But one has to wonder whether just giving veterans a job will even begin to scratch the surface of the deep alienation that both Junger and Vance describe. Both books are disturbing for the way they bring into focus how the dysfunctions associated with Collective Meaning Deficit Syndrome have become increasingly acute in the last forty years--and there is no reason to think that we have any capacity in the near term to solve the underlying problems that are its root cause.

The fundamental inadequacy of the American Dream as a meanaing framework has been something until the seventies most Americans could ignore because there was a feeling that a better life, usually framed in terms of economic prosperity, was always a possibility, if not for oneself, then for one's kids. The American Dream was always rather crudely materialistic, but it was a dream that had power to confer meaning, especially for parents who could derive a legtimate sense of meaning from the sacrifices they would make to ensure a better life for their kids. And until the seventies there was a feeling in this country that because we were expanding we could absorb all the people who wanted to come here from around the world to make a better life for themselves and their children.

The conditions to ground that sense of future possibility in reality melted away in the 1970s, and maybe it was inevitable because it was embedded in a narrative that could only work while there was room for the country to expand. The seventies was the decade when it became clear that the pie could not grow indefinitely at the same rate, and a neoliberal ideology emerged to insure that elites got more than their fair share. Lip service is still given to the old American Dream, and it took a couple of decades for ordinary Americans to catch on that there would be no realizing that dream for either themselves or their kids. 

The problem isn't simply that Americans are more economically stressed--they are, and that matters--but more importantly it is a problem of meaning. If the American Dream isn't there for them anymore, what is there to give their lives meaning?  So rather than adapt to the new realities in the 80s, they were told that it was "morning in America", they doubled down, reverted to a 19th century version of the American Dream that no longer correlated with reality, and believed that as long as kindly Grandpa Ron was in charge, all shall be well. Well that was a delusional mythos if ever there was one. The Reagan years reinforced a mode of delusional thinking that has rigidified into this zombie form of the American Dream that has paralyzed us and prevents any possibility of healthy adaptation. 

Both Vance and Junger go a long way to explain why a Donald Trump is a possibility in 2016 in way he would not have been in the 1960s or 70s. Trumpism is not driven primarily by naked racism; it's driven by a collective meaning deficit. People revert to older, more primitive purpose-giving narratives regardless of their alignment with reality because most people can't abide the alienation and the meaninglessness, and they will embrace anything that gives them some relief from that. 

So the country is essentially divided between the delusional thinking of the Right and the cluelessness of a Weimarish cultural left with a neoliberal economic ideology that just compounds the problems. The underlying problems that make Trump a possibility are not going away, and certainly HRC--or anybody who comes out of the cosmopolitan secular left--hasn't a clue about how to deal with this. This isn't just about old white guys who are going to die off; it's about a deeper problem of collective meaninglessness and alienation. The old white guys are the miners' canary. 

Political thinkers from Plato down through the centuries have asserted that democracy is inherently unstable because it's just too vulnerable to demagoguery. And so the importance of Trump is this: he has made it possible for sane people to think that if our democracy can produce someone like him, then maybe it is irretrievably broken and we need something else. Trump isn't going to be elected, but it worries me that in the same way that the failure of the Right in 1964 set up 1980, it's not unlikely that the Right's failure in 2016 will set up something worse for the 2020s. The longer we go without a narrative that gives us a healthy sense of collective purpose and future possibility, the more likely we are to accept an unhealthy one proposed by some talented demagogue not yet on the scene. He will give us a story that seems to deliver a sense of meaning and purpose that will obliterate what remains of the now rickety thing we call American democracy. It won't be that hard to do, and elites, even liberal ones, will go along because they fear disorder. 

So the deep solution to the problem does not lie on the level of policy; it lies on the level meaning and narrative. The solution doesn't lie in refusing to be careerist or consumerist or in abstaining from certain kinds of behaviors or attitudes; it requires instead alternative, positive behaviors and attitudes that can be adopted in their stead. That is our dilemma. It seems virtually impossible for any such narrative to emerge that might actually pull us together to provide that sense of collective purpose and future possibility. And it's quite possible that we will not be able to develop a positive meaning narrative that will return us to some level of human collective functionality until first we suffer through a negative one.

After HRC wins in November, there will be a collective sigh of relief, and there will be all kinds of editorializing about how Trump was an aberration and how the system still works. But it's hard to see how the fundamental conditions of deep alienation and meaningless that created the possibility for a Trump aren't still there for someone else who can more effectively exploit what Trump has so clearly shown is exploitable. Think of Trump as a kind of trial balloon. Someone is carefully taking notes. Unexpected things can happen, but it's hard to see how we get off the negative, dysfunctional trajectory we're on without some kind of catastrophe forcing it. Junger would probably agree. It's very hard for a moderns to discover their best selves except within the context of catastrophe. 

The Neocon Nightmare World

[Ed. Note: While Neocons are not in the news so much these days, but they are waiting in the wings, and for reasons given in recent posts, it's just a matter of time before they make their comeback. This is a repost of a 2007 piece (slightly edited) that was a repost of a 2005 piece. See also these posts related to Strauss here and here.]

When I first picked up Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in the nineties, I feared that it would be a Rush Limbaugh-like rant against Liberal decadence. In some ways you could say it is, but unlike Limbaugh, you have to take Bloom seriously. He's got a case to make, and both he and Christopher Lasch make similar and, for me, persuasive cases for the inadequacy of secular Liberalism as a dominant culture-wide value system or worldview.

Neither Bloom nor Lasch have developed an alternative that makes any sense to me, but Lasch's celebration of the kind of religious progressivism, quite alien to the spirit of Liberalism, that inspired the Civil Rights movement comes closer. For Bloom's thinking, as fairly typical of the thinking of all the Straussian neoconservatives, is a symptom of decadence rather than an antidote for it. Lasch understands the problem, but struggled in a much more wholesome way to develop a solution. The mistake the neocons make, in my opinion, is their belief that there should be no pluralism either in the political or cultural spheres. That a healthy society needs a unified cultural/political mythology to give it strength and coherency. Toleration for if not an enthusiastic embrace of pluralism is for me the litmus test for political sanity. 

But pluralism isn't the same thing as individualism. Both Bloom and Lasch understood that a society pays a price when it values individualism and freedom above all other values. For both men the laissez faire in Liberalism creates a fragmented, atomized society. This is a problem for Lasch because it diminishes the possibility for human community life, destroys local traditions and neighborhoods, and creates a culture of narcissism, a culture of minimal selves--of lost souls who don't know who they are, a society of ungrounded people who are empty of any real interior life, and who are therefore weak and easy to manipulate.

In other words, Liberalism creates a vacuum in the life of a society where instead there should be a soul. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so the emptiness is filled with the crudest kinds of impulses. But the antitdote for the fragmentation of pluralism is a localist communitarianism, not top-down statism. Lasch was a communitarian; the neocons, with their flipped Trotskyist ethos, are statists.

Shadia Drury's says of Straussians like Bloom that he "believes that America fails to provide a culture that can be embraced, loved, and appropriated by its citizens. She offers them only an opportunity to devote themselves to the satisfaction of their brutish nature. Far from teaching them to have contempt for themselves and their brutishness, it teaches them smugness and self-satisfaction. America provides her people with nothing splendid and sublime to bow before." It's  not the job of the state to provide aspiration to the sublime, and any state that tries to do it is dangerous. The American patriotism that tries to be this sublime thing in American civil religion is the crudest kind of jingoism that appeals not to what is humanly noble, but to the crude nationionalism that feeds the need to feel superior. 

For Straussians feeling superior is good enough if it is a unifying social force. The problem lies with a society that is fragmented, because it is weak. An open, multicultural society in which every thing is equal, in which no value or cultural ideal is considered any better than any other, an anything-goes" different strokes for different folks" society loses any sense of cohesiveness and is very vulnerable to manipulation by a willful, well-disciplined minority that has no qualms about violently asserting its own values and suppressing any other value system as inferior and to be annihilated.

In other words, the easygoing, nonjudgmental, cultural laissez faire of Liberalism invites its own destruction by those whose attitudes are anything but laissez faire. The anything-goes decadence of the Weimar Republic created the conditions for the Nazis to bully their way into power. Strauss, a German Jew who fled the Nazis, saw structural similarities between the anything-goes liberalism of Weimar and the anything-goes mentality of the American Liberalism. He believed it was inevitable that the U.S. would succumb to an aggressive minority of thugs if Liberalism continued to be the main shaping force in American politics and culture.

For many of the neocons, politics is thuggery, and you fight thuggery with thuggery, so the only thing that matters is whether the thugs you approve of are running things. The thuggery that we began to see assert itself on the right starting with Newt Gingrich, the impeachment of Clinton, through to the the bullying of Tom Delay in the House are all justified by Straussian theory. It's thuggery in the cause of the higher good. They really believe that. Liberalism must be destroyed or America will be destroyed by its enemies.

For the Straussians, following Carl Schmidt, politics is not the sphere of compromise and working things out, it's the realm of domination of the weak by the strong. For the neocons, politics is war. It's about controlling the political process or being controlled, annihilating or being annihilated. They understand power as the central truth, and every other value has value only insofar as it promotes power. And the neocon influence in the Republican party seems bent on proving their theory right by doing everything it can to discredit and destroy Liberal ideas and Liberal institutions. And so far, judging by the compliance of the Democrats, they seem to have proved their case.

All of this has become so much clearer for me after reading Shadia Drury's Leo Strauss and the American Right -- particularly the virulence of the conservative attack on Liberalism, which until recently I had naively dismissed as crackpot. Most normal people think of wingnuts like Limbaugh, Robertson, and Coulter as comical, barely sane troglodytes. These rightists, on the other hand, take Liberals very seriously, and see them as a cancer that is destroying American society and making it spineless and weak, and as such all the more vulnerable to its enemies. They believe that Liberalism is destroying America, and they are totally committed to preventing that by destroying Liberalism. "Let the Liberals laugh at us," think the wingnuts. "We'll see how hard they laugh when eventually we put our boot on their throats."

The great virtue of the Liberal credo is its belief that a society can be built on facts, rationalism, and enlightened, pragmatic self-interest. But I also think that over the long haul that's not enough. Conservatives understand that a society needs myths, religion, and to stand for something worth dying for. Otherwise, as Drury points out, "it is little more than an animal farm." I would say that a postmodern America needs to find a way to integrate both the Liberal and Conservative credos. But it's not the state's job to provide or reinforce any particular mythos.

But the conservative part is dangerous if the myths are not true narratives. By' true narrative' I mean that they are true in a metaphorical or analogical sense--they use symbol and story to point to transcendent truths that are genuinely life-giving and profound. For the neocons, myths are simply arbitrary fictions whose value lies in their effectiveness to anesthetize and galvanize the masses. How to distinguish between the true and false myths is a tricky business, but it boils down to: By their fruits you will know them.

Until reading Drury's book, I thought that the alliance between the intellectually sophisticated neocons and the simplistic religious-right extremists like Falwell and Robertson was a marriage of convenience engineered for short-term political gains. But Drury makes clear that the neocons believe that the religious right is essential for continued American dominance because it provides the requisite myths that justify American supremacy.

The neocons themselves don't believe in the myths of religion--they are philosophers who have transcended the need for such childishness. Like the nihilists on the cultural left, they believe that philosophy necessarily leads one to understand that there is no God, that there is no truth, that there is only the void. But the few, the true philosophers, can confront the bleak truth of this metaphysical nihilism. And the truly great philosophers are the creators of the great metanarratives that inspire great cultures.

Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammad constructed magnificent fictions, according to the neocons, that these individuals themselves did not believe, but which they saw as meeting the needs of the people who could not live without such splendid illusions. The arrogance and cynicism of this kind of thinking is beyond comical. You have to be a madman to take it seriously, and yet these guys surround Bush and are directing policy.

This is why in my opinion Straussian neoconservatism is just as decadent as the nihilistic philosophies of the cultural left. Both left and right are nihilistic at their root; the difference lies in that the the Straussian rightists see themselves as socially responsible because they understand that society needs its myths and illusions and should not be disabused of them. They oppose the cultural left, which wants to evangelize its nihilism. Drury says of Bloom:

But it is important to recognize that Bloom does not condemn the universities for failing to inculcate the truth. On the contrary, he regards the truth as too dangerous to be spread liberally by universities intended for mass education. His point is that the universities because of their commitment to openness, have failed American society on two counts. They have failed to educate either the many or the few. First, they have failed to impart to the many what Strauss calls the noble lies or the salutary myths; the myth of of openness is destructive, not salutary. Second, the universities have failed to provide the few with what Bloom regards as an education in the real sense: a capacity to transcend the myths of the cave and see the truth. To do this, philosophy must dismantle culture, and Bloom warns that this is a "dangerous business." Philosophy breaks the spell of culture. It liberates man from the charms by which culture holds him captive. It is therefore a threat to civil society.

Strauss thought that the Athenians were correct in their condemnation of Socrates. Socrates was indeed corrupting the youths of Athens by breaking the spell the collective myths had on their minds and which undermined their ability to be loyal citizens who loved their city above all others. For the neocons, a society must believe in its superiority and it must be fanatically committed to its preservation precisely because of its belief in its superiority. It doesn't matter if in reality its customs, values, and achievements are no better or worse than that of its enemies. Power determines what the truth is, and history is written by the victorious. Does this sound familiar? We have Americans in power now who believe this.

For the Straussians, if a society does not believe itself superior in every way to its enemies, it will be defeated by an enemy who is not intimidated and that believes itself superior. The neocons therefore have formed an alliance with the Christian Right not for political convenience, but because the Christian Right naively and fanatically accepts the myth of American superiority and of its special God-given role in world history. The neocons support the wingnut attitude that anyone who does not believe this myth is an America-hater and, as Ann Coulter puts it, is guilty of treason. There is no gray area. There is no room to criticize. It's my country right or wrong--any other attitude leads to inevitable defeat by another society that believes in itself more.

Sane people dismiss extremists like Coulter as comical crazies. But the very fact that her views have been legitimated by her ubiquitous presence in the media in the last decade points to the drift of things in this country toward insanity. What should by now be clear to everyone is that the right is not just indulging in a lot of crazy talk. They are walking their talk.

They look at the mainly passive, disorganized, fragmented Democrats and they say to themselves, "This is an enemy easy to defeat. The Liberals have no unifying religion or myths; they are fragmented, weak, and ripe for the taking." And they were taken in 2000. And they were taken again in the runup to the war in 2002. And they were taken yet again in the swiftboating of Kerry and the shenanigans in Ohio in 2004. The wingnuts have proved correct their critique of the Democrats as weak and spineless time and time again.

Does that mean that anybody who wishes to oppose the neocons must resort to thuggery to defeat them? No. But I do not believe that secular liberalism has the resources to defeat it. Even if the Democrats win in the short run, the problem remains for the long run. We need a tough, principled, idealistic politics in the spirit of King, Mandela, Gandhi. These men were not nihilists. They were genuinely religious humanists who understood evil and knew how to fight against it on their own principled terms, not on the terms defined by the thugs.

The Straussians are convinced that we all live in a nightmare world and that there is no ultimate purpose or meaning to human existence, and they seem bent on turning our world into something that conforms to their imagination of it. It will be an American capitalist nightmare world that the neocons believe nevertheless all Americans should embrace with patriotic fervor. They believe that the masses have to be anesthetized and controlled with myths and religious fictions, but that the grownups have to run things, and the grownups understand that it's all about power, and that so long as the U.S. has the enormous power it now possesses, it had better use it or lose it.

This explains their gambit in Iraq--it was an opportunity to fill a geopolitical power vacuum with American power after the collapse of the Soviet sphere of influence in the Middle East. It's a gambit that has failed--the Muslims there are not Liberals, and they do not fold so easily. But I for one am worried about what the neocons have up their sleeve now that their policies are being discredited by their failure. They will not walk away with their tail between their legs. They still believe they are right even if their tactics were ineffective. They will not be gracious in defeat. Look at Cheney, for god's sake.

And they are not going away. Wingnuttery in America will always be a problem so long as there is a vacuum in American society where there should be a soul. How to solve that problem in a sane, progressive way is for me the most pressing issue that confronts Americans in the 21st Century. 

Ross Douthat v. Pope Francis

Douthat argues in a recent piece that the Pope and church synod's can't just change doctrine. It can't, for instance, just say that Christological ideas that are virtually Arian can be tolerated. And then he says:

Now you can make a case that my hypothetical is absurd or fails as an analogy because the proposed changes to church teaching around marriage right now are not at all like a springtime for Arianism, that they are in fact in essential continuity with past teaching, with the New Testament, etc. But this is my point: You have to make that case, which I would submit that Father O’Malley does not exactly do, and if you just invoke authority and docility without actually making it, you’re implicitly indicating that the Protestants were right about the nature of the Catholic position all along.

There’s a special irony to that possibility, because as I suggested in my last post, the question of divorce and remarriage is among the issues where the Catholic claim to a special authority, both contra Protestantism and in its own right, has historically been strongest, because it’s place where the binding force of tradition and ecclesiastical stewardship of the same have helped Catholicism hold a line that’s very clearly rooted in scriptural, indeed gospel authority … while in many Protestant communities, notwithstanding their official commitment to scripture’s primacy, that line has either been blurred more often or erased. Ross Douthat

I have thought for a long time that Catholic identity--and Christian identity in general--cannot be primarily located in its codes. Codes are for children, for people who haven't yet developed an awakened conscience. The grasping at Catholic identity as being rooted, for instance, in its proscription of divorce and remarriage is a form of idolatry and devolves quickly into a form of whited-sepulcher syndrome, a kind of legalistic extrinsicism that is tone deaf to the way human beings really live. 

I do in fact believe that what God has joined together that no man should put asunder, but I also believe that most twenty-somethings who are infatuated with one another do not qualify for making such a commitment, and for the church or any Christian to insist on it just because it was consecrated in a church ceremony is humanly stupid.

The Church would be wiser if it looked at marriage as simlar to the way that men in women in orders take their vows, in stages, with making a final commitment that has sacramental authority until after, say, ten years. In other words Catholics should be allowed to be legally married and divorced like everyone else, there should be a church ceremony in which (aspirational) promises are exchanged, but it should not be considered a "sacrament". There should be a second and perhaps even a third level of commitment after the passage of some time before any  marriage should not be sacramentally validated. We already acknowledge the need for something like this in renewal of vows ceremonies. 

Rigorists like Douthat would argue that that has not been the practice of the Church for centuries. But there's a lot that has been the practice of the church for centuries that has been shaped more by the role it plays in shaping social order than by the spirit of the gospels. Is there really anthing more spiritual in the proscription of divorce in the church's practice than the proscription against it ordered by the Roman emperor Augustus? 

I think the argument that I have with Douthat is that you have to find ways to affirm the deepest truths of Christian faith, which have level after level of depth without, but to do it in a way without making them into rigorously enforced rules. The faith, if it is lived at any depth, leads one to a deeper levels of rigor, but it's a rigor that has to be freely chosen; it can't be something that is demanded of people who have no idea what they are doing. And the vast majority of young people who get married could not possibly have any idea about what they are being asked to do. It's just not something that can be learned by reading a book or taking a class. It's something that only life can teach, and only life can present as an existential choice after some experience of it. 

The Great Transformation

Several months ago I announced that I was going to post a piece entitled "1848". It's probably not going to happen, but my reason for it was that I saw it as the year that the music died, so to say, the year that materialism and disenchantment became the dominant motif in the West.

When I was younger I mostly thought this was a bad thing, but now I see it as an inevitable or even as a necessary thing. I think it's important as a stage in anyone's spiritual development that they see reality and all the ways it's shot through with evil and brutishness and yet to remain hopeful. I've written before here about how the early modern St. John of the Cross was a harbinger in writing about his own spiritual development about what we would go through collectively as dark nights of spirit, soul, and senses. After 1848 the Dark Night began in the West.

Delusional, optimistic, naive, utopian thinking lingered until World War I among certain factions within the West's cultural elite, but already by 1848 the new cultural OS had been installed, and it had purged romantic notions of spiritual dimensions shaping history. My essay "Metaxis" discusses this theme in greater detail. Hegel dialectics of spirit became Marx's dialects of matter, and about ten years later Darwin's publication of the Origin of the Species provided a basis for Huxley, Spencer, and the development of ontological naturalism as the culture's new dominating (if not quite yet dominant) metanarrative that sealed the deal.

Thereafter any arguments that history was anything more than a random, purposeless struggle for survival seemed silly and medieval. But surely once a civilization loses all sense of spiritual aspiration, it ceases to be a civilization. It's been the argument of this blog that our current social reality is not civilization, but a wintertime of the spirit, a wandering in the dead land, the wilderness, a decadent interlude, which we must endure in hope while we wait for spring. 

And so for the last year or so I've been trying to understand the how this winter came upon us, and if understanding its nature might lead to some understanding about how to look for and cultivate the early signs of spring. I've been spending time reading about 19th Century as much as I had time for it--mostly Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of" books. And I feel that while I don't have a specialist's grasp of what happened, I do have a very good understanding of the main economic, cultural, and political developments from the American and French Revolutions through to World War II.

But knowing what happened is not the same as understanding it, and I need some help in understanding that, and since in a wintertime of the spirit, there is no such thing as a philosophy of history, one is force to embrace people of a philosophical cast of mind who think about history, and such a person is Karl Polanyi.  I've just started 1944 book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, which has been on my reading list for some time. I wanted to read Wm. James and maybe Peirce this summer, but that will have to wait, because Polanyi is more in the flow of what I've been thinking about the last year. 

So this is my summer project. I've just finished reading the first two chapters, and I invite readers here who have read Polanyi or may have had him on their list too to work with me as I read through it. My family health issues are a little more stable, but not completely resolved, so my posting here still might be a little spotty. 

***

Polanyi understands that something really big happened in the 19th century, which wasn't all that long ago, and that we still don't understand it very well. He's writing from the perspective of the middle of WWII, but I don't know that we've learned much about what happened since he wrote about it, especially considering the developments of the last thirty years:

To trace the institutional mechanism of the downfall of a civilization may well appear as a hopeless endeavor. Yet it is this we are undertaking. In doing so, we are consciously adjusting our aim to the extreme singularity of the subject matter. For the civilization of the nineteenth century was unique precisely in that it centered on a definite institutional mechanism. 

No explanation can satisfy which does not account for the suddenness of the cataclysm. As if the forces of change had been pent up for a century, a torrent of events is pouring down on mankind. A social transformation of planetary range is being topped by wars of an entirely new type in which a score of states have crashed, and the contours of new empires are emerging out of a sea of blood. But this fact of demoniac violence is merely superimposed on a swift, silent current of change which swallows up the past often without so much as a ripple on the surface! A reasoned analysis of the catastrophe must account both for the tempestuous action and the quiet dissolution. (p. 4)

What is this institutional mechanism? It's the self-adjusting market of 19th Century Liberalism and the complex of institutions that became subservient to it from the Concert of Europe, to the gold standard, to the great international banking houses: 

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it. (p. 3-4)

I find it interesting that he thinks that the changes that came in the 1930s and 40s as a response to the cataclysm were a permanent:

But if the breakdown of our civilization was timed by the failure of world economy, it was certainly not caused by it. Its origins lay more than a hundred years back in that social and technological upheaval from which the idea of a self-regulating market system sprang in Western Europe. The end of this venture has come in our time; it closes a distinct stage in the history of industrial civilization. (p.5)

Has this stage in industrial civilization dominated by the unregulated market come to an end? Until the mid 90s I would have agreed with this statement, but the resurgence of 19th Century Liberalism in the Libertarian and Neoliberal ideologies that dominate American and world political elites since the 80s shows that the lessons that Polanyi thinks we learned apparently have not been learned. 

That we have traded material prosperity for spiritual poverty is basically a conservative argument, at least an argument made by thoughtful conservatives. I agree with conservatives in this regard. I disagree, however, that this was a mistake. I embrace it, as suggested above, as a necessary stage in the spiritual evolution of humankind. I also disagree with conservatives who think that the State is necessarily the enemy--it can be, for sure. But the depredations of powerful actors in the private sector have been and will continue to be more destructive of the quality of our lives if left unchecked, and the only checking mechanism we little people have is our collective political will to push back against the predators through our political institutions. The cataclysms dating from 1914 through to 1945 taught our grandparents and parents a lesson that Polanyi thought we had learned, but apparently not. I hope we won't have to go through similar cataclysms in order to understand what he and they did. 

More as I continue with my reading. 

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.

Deneen on In Loco Parentis

Deneen's most recent post is about the Feds getting tough on colleges and universities regarding sexual assault. He makes the case that this is the inevitable result of abolishing in loco parentis rules on college campuses (I"m old enough to remember parietals), which have created a vacuum that the state, a la Hobbes, must fill:

In effect, this immorality tale is Hobbes in microcosm: first tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then, we see that absent such norms, anarchy is the result (“the state of nature”). Finding such anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate by habit and within the context of ongoing communities, and replaced it with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms. And, now lacking any informal and local forms of authority, it’s virtually assured that those abuses will regularly occur, and that the role of the State in ever more minute personal affairs will increase (“Prerogative”).

In place of the parent we now have a distant power which, perhaps like a parent, seeks to punish us when we act against decency and civilization. But, unlike a parent, it does not educate or seek to cultivate its wards into self-governing adults. It infantalizes us by saying that we don’t have to grow up—just don’t get caught. Of course, know too that your professors and every adult on campus—while we can’t speak of norms or character or morality or virtue (and most don’t even believe in such things) will be acting as “agents” and reporters. You are free, but Leviathan is watching.

This goes to my recent arguments about the difference between having an inner sense of what's lawful, and not having it which requires that one be constrained by extrinsic means, which boils down to the fear of punishment if caught. Does it matter qualitatively if it's Father O'Brien or the politically correct police or the real police who punishes you? The real issue, the real moral failure, lies in that the person who committed the offense is not a master of himself and needs to be constrained by something outside himself. 

I get his larger point about Leviathan, but honestly, if the parents haven't done their job by the time their kids go away to college, they can't expect the college to do what they failed to. Sexual assault is a crime, and it should be dealt with by the local police. So if Deneen's larger point is that the Feds getting involved is overreach, well, maybe. But the idea that the college itself playing policeman is unrealistic and, frankly, counterproductive. Does he really think that clergy patrolling the hallways in dormitories at Notre Dame is a solution? It will create more Mary McCarthys than Dorothy Days.

I'm not happy with this 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 scheme, because it's too oversimplifying, but it's useful as shorthand to layout the larger argument that I am trying to make. The moral evolution of humans requires a movement from external constraints on greed, glory/pride), will to power--and, yes, appetitive excesses like gluttony, drunkenness, and lust--imposed by law and custom to the internal restraints on these. Because we have more freedom or latitude to choose them, we have to build more interior capacity to refuse them. In other words, we have to be moral grownups. Living in a 2.0 society forces one to face up to what he is--a child or an adult.

When the constraints are primarily external in law or custom, there will always be those, on the one hand, who game it, try to remain "legal" while doing the minimum, or follow the letter while abusing the spirit. On the other hand, a system of external constraints creates in the "spirited" a need to rebel against its oppressiveness, and so we come to celebrate the transgressors as rebels who stick to the Man. This response to external constraint is silly and tedious, as well. But it thrives so long as there are conservatives trying to impose their extrinsic norms. 

So my point is that both responses miss the point, which is that it's not about the external constraints or what is permitted or forbidden by society; it's what's inside you that matters, and the only morality that matters concerns the ability to master yourself. Everything else is just a matter of setting up rules to get along, like agreeing that green means go and red means stop. 

So I'm fine with saying good-bye to all that and having a civil code that seeks minimally to protect citizens from the assaults on their economic well being or civil rights. Gesellschaft is sink or swim, and for most of us, it forces us to grow up. There is nothing morally superior about fearing neighbors gossip in the gemeinschaft face-to-face world conservatives lament having lost. That's the great gift to humanity of 2.0--it has washed away all the 1.0 extrinsicism and created a space for individuals to grow from the inside out.

We forget the tyrannies of outside-in gemeinschaft society. There's good reason people fled it, and rather than lament its loss, which is a pointless waste of time anyway, I say good riddance, and let the moral grownups build something new from the inside out. In the long run, it's the only thing that protects us from the Leviathan that Deneen and all sane people are right to fear as our possible future. My overall argument here is that only 3.0s, whether they are religious or not, will have the inner moral capacity to push back against the machine that is growing out of the 2.0 materialist/positivist thinking. The only question for me is whether there will be enough 3.0 critical mass to constrain its growing power. The 1.0 thinking that typifies the critique of religious conservatives fears what I fear, but it frames the solution in ways that are irrelevant and a waster of time. 

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. 

What's the Matter with Connecticut? (encore)

While Creative Class locations [BosWash, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin] are successful in generating financial and creative capital, they are comparatively poorer in social capital. Bishop discovered that people living in non-Creative Class settings enjoyed “the comfort of strong families, bustling civic groups, near universal political participation, and abundant volunteering.” Creative Class cities, by contrast, “had fewer volunteers, lower church attendance, and weaker family connections.” Among other attractions for the Creative Class were “anonymity, the opportunity for self-invention, and the economic benefits of loose ties.”

Far from being subject to false consciousness by supporting liberal political candidates, members of the meritocratic class are acting in a rational and deliberate fashion. Because of the sorting that has taken place, locales with large Creative Class concentrations are far less likely to engage in activities that would call upon deep reservoirs of social capital. Inclined toward individualism and a devotion to personal expression and development, and committed especially to success in their careers, members of the meritocracy rely not on each other for assistance and support, but rather expect the government to fill in the abandoned civic sphere. Thus their decision to support liberal politicians is a classic case of recognizing opportunity costs: rather than generating their own social capital, which would detract from their careers and their lifestyle experimentation, they are willing to use relatively ample economic resources to get someone else to do the job. . . .

If the denizens of Connecticut are acting reasonably in supporting liberal politicians, so are Kansans in opposing them. They inchoately recognize that expanding government is a desideratum of the Creative Class, not of those left behind. Theirs is a new kind of class resentment, ironically one in which the “revolutionary” class supports conservative policy and the “aristocracy” advances a global liberalism. Further, they vaguely perceive that their own taxes end up enabling the bad habits of the meritocrat class. And even as citizens of Red States enjoy substantial federal largesse, they are at least surrounded by enough residual social capital to recognize that there is a better way. Theirs is a deep resentment born not of status envy but of a disgust that arises from allowing the irresponsible to buy off their bad consciences. Patrick Deneen in TAC

Following Tom Frank's central question in What's the Matter with Kansas?--i.e., why do working and middle income Americans act against their economic interests in voting Republican?--Deneen asks why high-income Connecticuters vote against their economic interests in electing Democrats. The answer:  Kansans understand that it's all about community, and Connecticuters and other Americans in the "creative class" are all about self-absorbed individualistic pursuits. The Kansans are willing to take on social obligations themselves; the wealthy Connecticuters want to pay the government to do it so they won't have to bother.[Deneen is also following Christopher Lasch in the way he flipped Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses in his essay entitled "Revolt of the Elites".]

Do conservative intellectuals really believe this? Do they believe that if we could just get rid of the New Deal nanny state we'd have once again a nation of virtuous citizens who would take care of one another without any meddlesome government getting in the way?  A thousand points of light, etc., etc.?

Thoughtful conservatives like Deneen seem to think that Red Staters better understand that solving thorny social problems requires personal commitment and a sense of social obligation. He argues that Blue Staters, especially rich ones, just want to throw money at human problems, and higher taxes are the easy way out as a salve to their consciences. You know the way these rich people are--we see it all the time on TV and the movies: rather than spend quality time with their loved ones, they give them money.  "Haven't I given you everything that you could possibly want, darling? Why are you so unhappy?" Clueless rich liberals--they just don't understand what the wise, warm, down-to-earth conservatives do.

I think that conservatives think that the problem at its roots is attitudinal; but it's not; it's structural.They seem to think that liberal attitudes have caused the low state of contemporary cultural life. But both Liberals and Conservatives are reacting to historical economic, technological, and cultural dynamics that are out of their control. The question is which group is better equipped attitudinally to move with these historical forces and through this period in the most resourceful, deeply human way. I understand the conservative argument about how much we owe to the past, and I agree that we are fools if we disregard what has been bequeathed to us by the ancestors. But we must live into the future, and conservative obsessing on all that we have lost is a silly waste of time.

Now in fairness to Deneen, he's not dismissing all liberals as narcissists. He's just trying to explain why rich people in blue parts of the country are liberals and vote Democratic--they vote their cultural values just like the people in Kansas do--their voting preference has as little to do with economic interest for wealthy Connecticuters as it does for middle-income Kansans. I don't want to digress here on a discussion of whose interests people like Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd actually represent (certainly not the working and middle class), but it's true, Connecticut and other zones where the "creative class" flourishes are not that hospitable for the agenda of the cultural right.

And I don't want to digress into a discussion of just how far the social capital of Kansans will take them in solving the social problems caused by the massive disruptions of market capitalism, but let's grant that Kansans and folks in red counties wherever still retain old-school values rooted in their religious and community commitments in a way the so-called creative class no longer does. So let's accept all that for the sake of argument. I certainly wouldn't want to defend the attitudes and behaviors of the American rich as a group, whether they're Democrats or Republicans. But by Deneen's own admission, at least rich Democrats have a social conscience; it's questionable to what degree the typical rich Republican does.

The more important question for me is how much vital social capital the so-called "revolutionaries" by whom, I assume, he means the Tea Partiers and their less extreme sympathizers, really have. This is a critical issue for me and one about which I have written quite a lot, especially in my posts about Zombie traditionalism. There is a difference between living from the past because it is a rich source of vitality and wisdom and clinging to social forms and attitudes that were vital in the past but just aren't any longer. The forms are not necessarily alive because they are crudely animate; they could be possessed by a spirit quite alien to the one that originally gave them their life and shape.

I'm not saying that there are no examples of a vital traditionalism in contemporary America, but I'd argue that they are rare and hardly constitute the lived reality of most people living in the red counties. I'd argue that the better part of cultural-right politics is driven by a fantasy traditionalism, not a vital traditionalism. It's a nostalgic fantasy born of a sense of loss and confusion for want of the real thing. It's the fantasy so many people want to live in rather than adapt to the real world in which the conditions necessary for a living, vital traditions have been destroyed, primarily by the economic forces Republicans love to celebrate. By their fruits you will know them:

There's a family-values divide between red states and blue states, two researchers say, but the differences might surprise people on both sides of the political spectrum. The states that voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections have the lowest rates of divorce and teen pregnancies. And the red states had the highest. One of those researchers, June Carbone of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, tells host Guy Raz what she thinks is the deciding factor: Women in blue states wait later to get married and have kids.

See also.

People in Red America are in pain, and it's deeper than just economic. I'd argue that a good deal of the pain comes from the disjunction between its mindset and the real world in which Red America lives. The world no longer makes sense for a mindset that was developed in the early 19th century. Rapid change and disruption have been normative in America at least since the 1860s, and the rhetoric we hear from the cultural right is rooted in ante-bellum commonplaces. But as Gordon Wood points out in his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, even ante-bellum Americans were already highly mobile, individualistic, restless, and commerce driven--there was never a time when Americans were content Hobbits living in their respective edenic Shires.

But in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the people in America's red counties, even in the South, have had their lives turned upside down by those cultural and economic dynamics as much as anyone else. Cosmopolitanism isn't the cause of these tradition-destroying dynamics; cosmopolitanism is simply more adaptive to the world as it exists. People can cling to the vestigial old forms if they wish, but don't tell me they possess a social capital that has superior value to the social capital being created by people who recognize the old forms no longer work and who have found other ways to live deep, committed, resourceful lives in a world where the most important human values are no longer "given", but have to be discovered and "chosen". They have to be worked for. [See "Dying Traditions" and "From Outer to Inner, from Given to Chosen."]

The vitality of most of those traditional communities, insofar as there ever was any, has been pretty much destroyed by the aforementioned social disruptiveness of market capitalism. People like Deneen and Lasch understand capitalism's destructive effects in this respect, even though I think it's fair to say that most people in the Tea Party movement do not. So I guess my question for Deneen is whether he really believes there is a significant difference between the social capital as it really exists in red counties throughout the country, or is the matter with Kansas and Tea Partiers and their sympathizers elsewhere precisely that they no longer possess that capital and are desperately driven to find a substitute for it.

And isn't a better explanation for the demagogic right-wing politics afflicting us that it seems to meet that need? I would ask Deneen whether a more likely explanation for what we're seeing on the cultural right is a mass of people, who, because their traditional way of life has been destroyed, are seeking an ersatz sense of identity and community in a mass politics that has little or nothing to do with a vital traditionalism. It has the form of the old, but is possessed by the zombie spirit characterized by identity loss, resentment, and fear--and those are not traditional values.

There are lots of people who live in red America who are decent, caring, virtuous, and right thinking, but so are most of the people I know in cosmopolitan-blue Seattle. Traditional, red-state social capital isn't necessary to lead a decent life, and given what we're seeing in the politics of the cultural right these days, what passes for it is for many an impediment."

[Ed. note: This post originally appeared in August 2010. I'm going to be doing some retrospecting in coming weeks, looking at older posts, thinking about them, tweaking them maybe a little, reposting them with the label 'encore', and commenting on them in the comments section--all in an effort to begin integrating themes I've been developing in this blog for over ten years now. (I should have said something in November when I had my 10th anniversary. It didn't occur to me then.) I think most of my stuff holds up pretty well, but reader challenges are always welcome and make me think deeper and better about what I'm trying to say. This post seems apt because it picks up on the discussion about tribalism in the post that preceded it.]