Liberalism & Conservatism

[Whiskeyjack]

Here's Deneen's Week-5 post on the origins of Libertarianism:

John Stuart Mill offers both an ideal articulation of the libertarian worldview, as well as one that is both problematic and revealing. He straddles the “progressive liberal” and “libertarian” positions—but then again (as we will see next week, in the case of F.A. Hayek), so generally does libertarianism as a whole.

In contrast to the figures upon whom we focused in the first week of our course—the “classical liberal” figures like Locke and Paine—Mill’s main focus in On Liberty is not the dangers of overreaching and oppressive government, but rather, the dangers of suppression of freedom arising from a democratizing society. Mill largely takes for granted that liberalism has succeeded in establishing structures and practices that limit government. He begins On Liberty by noting the historical steps that have accomplished that goal: first, the establishment of a theory of inalienable rights; second, the political protection of those rights through the institutionalization of constitutional limits to public power; and, lastly, and most recently, the extension of political power to the populace. Yet, it is from this last solution of limiting public power from which a new threat arises: “tyranny of the majority.”

The greatest danger to liberty that now faced his time, Mill argued, was the danger of conformity to the opinions of the majority. In particular, Mill worried about the persistence and overwhelming shaping power of “custom” and “tradition” in defining acceptable and unacceptable opinion. Even where there was the existence of formal liberty (i.e., rights) and political liberty (constitutionalism), society was still dominantly defined by the rule of custom that existed beyond the realm of political solution. Liberty needs to be expanded not only politically, but to all spheres of life, and in particular, to opinion, speech, and inquiry.

A society governed by custom—hence, in Mill’s view, opinion by accretion—views dissenters and inquirers as threats to social order. He points to the examples of Socrates and Jesus as two figures who questioned the existing social order, and were executed as threats to established norms. Mill instead famously proposed to judge threats not based on compatibility with order, but whether it caused direct harm to other individuals: “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number, is self-protection That the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

Note that Mill here is speaking about the limits of the State to follow the will of the majority in limiting speech. Implicitly, Mill is calling upon the State not only to avoid interfering with free expression, opinion, and inquiry, but in fact to prevent those who might appeal to custom from interfering with the freedom of individuals.

After all, Socrates claimed that it was Aristophanes more than Meletus who had poisoned the demos against him, and it was the Pharisees who encouraged Pilate to crucify Jesus. By Mill’s understanding, public authority may be the most powerful protector of individual freedom, particularly in a society that is “custom-rich” like the one in which he regarded himself to be living (not to mention the less advanced societies such as the British colonies, e.g., India).

On Liberty is not merely a brief on behalf of liberty as an end in itself, however. Mill argues that liberty serves the end of progress. Liberty to inquire and challenge existing orthodoxies serves “the permanent interest of man as a progressive being.” Only by being liberated from the shackles of inherited opinion—most often in the form of custom and tradition—can a people begin to transform society in a progressive direction. As Mill argues, “the greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete.” Mill here means not that there’s no “history” in the sense that nothing happened; rather, progressive history has not been initiated in lands and places where “Custom” dominates. Only where the despotism of custom can be challenged without fear of persecution by independent-minded and free-thinking individuals can progressive history commence.

Mill seeks therefore replace a society grounded in custom with a society replete with “experiments in living.” He is particularly insistent that “persons of genius” be liberated from the “ape-like” conformity and mediocrity of ordinary people. Mill—as is almost always the case in the libertarian tradition—is an ardent defender of considerable inequality, particularly inequality born of liberated “people of genius” who are no longer restrained by the limits of custom. As I have argued elsewhere on this site, Mill sought to forge a society in which the strong and powerful would encounter few obstacles to their self-advance (which, like many libertarians, Mill could justify as ultimately benefiting society as a whole). Mill anticipates and fuels a society marked by the new inequalities of “meritocracy”—a world of winners and losers that one of our leading libertarian economists regards as an inevitable and laudatory outcome of our dynamic and progressive society.

Mill even sought to protect the elite from the rule of ordinary, custom-bound masses through proposals for plural-voting for those with education and argued for the enslavement of backward populations into industrial servitude until “history” could properly be started. Today, we find calls by libertarians for an activist Court to stringently strike down popular legislation that, for a libertarian, can be regarded as an obstacle to individual liberty—whether economic or personal liberty (e.g., popular laws that define marriage solely between a man and a woman). Following in Mill’s tradition, an active government is justified in the name of individual liberty. While libertarians have always been mistrustful of centralized government power, arguably at the very core of the tradition is a willingness to use extensive and powerful government powers to eviscerate the “despotism”—or even residue—of Custom, and thus, in freeing people from tradition and the communities that were their homes, forcing them to be free.

 

[Bluto]

Here's Deneen's Week-5 post on the origins of Libertarianism:

"He is particularly insistent that “persons of genius” be liberated from the “ape-like” conformity and mediocrity of ordinary people. Mill—as is almost always the case in the libertarian tradition—is an ardent defender of considerable inequality, particularly inequality born of liberated “people of genius” who are no longer restrained by the limits of custom."

So like who decides who these "persons of genius" are? Genghis Khan was clearly a "person of genius". Nowadays the self proclaimed "persons of genius" rely on a large and effective police state and or strict social norms to keep the "apes" a bay. Anyhow, this is the most elitist dribble I've ever read in my life.

 

[Guest]

There were two points of discussion that interested me.

First, the idea that capitalism, in the original context, would have anything to do with big corporatism. Corporatism is socialism; ie, the sharing of assets (insurance and mutual fund investing for example) and a hive mind of the employees towards on purpose that overshadows their own individualism. This is not the idea of capitalism that the American founders were in favor. This is the form they fought against.

Corporate structures, and trusts especially, were formed and supported by by super powerful businessman who sought to further their own interests. The same can be said for the socialist education system that beats the individualism out of students in the name of conformity and rote memorization and repetition of facts for the purpose of being an employee who specializes in only one major skill that benefits the corporate hive and its kings/queens mainly.

The problem with liberalism, conservatism, and politics today is the controlled discourse we are all forced to follow through the media. Just this morning, I tuned into PBS to see poll results which had Rand Paul winning with a 26% plurality of votes (forget where) and the anchors laughing at the notion he had any chance. After quickly dismissing the notion that Americans would actually vote for a candidate outside the political machinery and concentrating on the 2-3 established candidates, I wondered how any independent candidate who wasn't part of the machine would ever have a chance. This goes against the very foundings of our constitutional republic and its ideals, yet that is the state we are in. The media, corporate, and political machines run the country and the people have no real chance at change. Liberalism and conservatism are now the same funnel through which a new fascist corporate-political state is arising.

If you don't like it, then leave America. But oh wait, we'll take 50% of your wealth through our taxes or we'll tax you on your foreign income till death even though the country had nothing to do with generating that wealth.

There is no freedom in political thought today outside of the Internet. And now we have Internet regulation. Hmm, I wonder why ..

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Here's Deneen's Week-6 post on Libertarianism/ Hayek:

In the final segment of the first half of this semester’s course, we focus on a relatively more contemporary (if not current) libertarian author, F.A. Hayek. While best known for his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, we will instead be exploring a few chapters from what is arguably his most philosophically accomplished book, The Constitution of Liberty. In particular, I want to explore the interesting confluence and tension that exists in this work between Hayek as both a “traditional” and a “progressive” thinker.

In stark contrast to Mill—who we discussed last week as a key figure in the articulation of libertarianism—Hayek does not begin his analysis with a condemnation of the “tyranny” of tradition and custom. Rather, “tradition” receives strong praise from Hayek, who regards the vibrancy and strength of traditional practices to be essential to a healthy and functioning society. No society can long subsist without inherited moral frameworks. Only the prevalence of a great number of habits permit people to make long-term plans with the assumption of relative stability between present and future. “A successful free society will almost always be a tradition-bound society,” he argues.

Hayek contrasts two understandings of liberty, one of which leads him to endorse the role of tradition. One understanding of liberty comes down through the British and Scottish tradition, and includes thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Edmund Burke. The other is the French tradition inspired by the thought of Descartes, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Comte. The former accepts freedom bounded by the practices of tradition, but thereby is generative of healthy progress. The latter seeks to “make men free” through the imposition of revolutionary reform, and hence generates forms of political tyranny in the name of freedom.

According to Hayek, “British” freedom arose because of an embrace of organic and gradualist change that welled up from broadly-accepted changes amid the people. As developed in the British tradition, change and progress are generated through trial and error, adaptation, evolutionary and cumulative growth. “Tradition” is just another way of saying “practices that people and society develop over time,” the form that “spontaneous order” takes when it is allowed to develop organically and nonhierarchically.

By contrast, Hayek condemns “French” liberty that engages in deracinated, abstract “rationalism.” Such purported efforts to advance liberty are the result of prideful and overweening belief in the ability of a few people to “design” social reform, and to impose it upon a people in spite of their particular situation or native inclination for change.

In the British tradition, change arises organically out of established social patterns and the mores of a society, and thus, well up from “the bottom up.” In the French tradition, reform is conceived as a full-blown plan that is abstracted from the life and patterns of society, and hence is imposed from “the top down.” The two worldviews are motivated by radically different views of human nature. Hayek writes:

The rationalistic design theories were necessarily based on the individual man’s propensity for rational action and goodness. The evolutionary theory, on the contrary, showed how certain institutional arrangements would induce man to use his intelligence to the best effect and how institutions could be framed so that bad people could do the least harm. The anti-rationalist tradition is here closer to the Christian tradition of the fallibility and sinfulness of man, while the perfectionism of the rationalist is in irreconcilable conflict with it. (120)

While these chapters at first blush would seem to exist in contradiction with Mill’s criticisms of “Custom” and would seem to merit placing Hayek—and perhaps liberatarianism—in the “conservative” camp, there are good grounds to understand Hayek’s defense of tradition as a preferred ground for progress. Unlike the times when Mill was writing, for Hayek the greatest threat to liberty no longer seemed to be the tradition-bound opinions that demanded conformity—particularly instantiated in “custom”—but rather the threat to liberty through directives of governmental central planning, empowered by the intervening philosophical developments of Progressive liberalism. While for Mill, government power should be used on occasion to restrain public opinion and protect transgressive individuals, for Hayek, progressive innovation was more likely to arise from the countless decisions of individuals in the ongoing development of ways of life, while government power increasingly seemed designed to thwart such developments. For Hayek, “tradition” was actually a constantly changing and shifting body of views and beliefs, largely accepted on a loose and voluntary basis in a way that did not bind individuals as firmly as he feared was the case of centralized government diktat. Indeed, eschewing Millian arguments to achieve Millian ends, Hayek held that tradition and custom were flexible enough to allow for considerable innovation:

It is this flexibility of voluntary rules which in the field of moral makes gradual evolution and spontaneous growth possible, which allows further experience to lead to modifications and improvements. Such an evolution is possible only with rules which are neither coercive nor deliberately imposed—rules which, though observing them is regarded as merit and though they will be observed by a majority, can be broken by individuals who feel that they have strong enough reasons to brave the censure of their fellows. (124)

Hayek’s “tradition” was thus defended for the end of progress and change—indeed, change that he argued ought to be considerably more rapid and transformative than his arguments in defense of tradition would initially seem to suggest. Progress is the inevitable result of unpredictable developments that are the product of the inquiring and innovating human mind. It can’t be said in advance whether any experiment or idea will turn out well, but Hayek has faith in the human capacity always to turn potentially baleful developments into unexpected forms of progress. As such, his arguments are not “traditional,” hewing closely to ways of ancestors: “It is not the fruits of past success but the living in and for the future in which human intelligence proves itself.” Change has no particular object but change: “progress is movement for movement’s sake” (95).

That said, Hayek is aware that a society that is in fact no longer “traditional”—relatively stable and very slowly-changing—in fact demands not only change, but rapid change as a matter of social necessity. Absent stability, the only option is rapid progress. This is because a changing society will foster relatively high degrees of inequality, and thus, potentially destabilizing dissatisfaction. Only rapid progress can ensure that the greater inequality of dynamic societies is acceptable to those who are “left behind.” “Progress at such a fast rate cannot proceed on a uniform front but must take place in echelon fashion, with some far ahead of the rest.” If such inequality is allowed to become stabilized, political and social dislocation is the likely result. As a matter of political exigency, Hayek argues, “in order that the great majority should in their individual lives participate in the advance, it is necessary that it proceed at a considerable speed” (96; emphasis mine).

“Tradition” thus exists to supply the venue for speedy progress. The speed of progress is needed to allay social discontent. And progress itself exists for the sake of progress. While opposed to “Progressive” fondness for central power and government planning, one is finally struck by the similar commendation of progress as an inevitable feature of modern society by libertarians, as much as by progressives. We are “captives of progress,” Hayek states—a curious formulation by a proponent of liberty, but perhaps finally understandable for one who equates the persistence of political liberty as hinging on constant and accelerating progress, lest society consume itself amid the realization that always only a few are the fullest beneficiaries of that “speedy progress.”

 

[Old Man Mike]

Possibly irrelevant:

The two ideas of "Progress" and "Sustainability" need some real thought. On a philosophical level, "Progress" can only be "Sustainable" if whatever that progress is based upon is constantly available at whatever levels the "progressed" state [constantly] is evolving into. If one intuitively tried to picture/graph this concept, almost any visual aid would involve a rapidly accelerating upward "something".

Imagining what the "somethings" might amount to, one guesses "physical energy" and, for a better word, "psychological energy" would be fundamental, but other things like materials, time, creativity etc also come to mind.

There is no proof yet [on a global scale] [though plenty of proof on a local scale] that the human ambition cannot sustain a fast-speed progress interminably, but all intuition is against it. It seems that we must run out of something critical sooner or later, and the accelerated-pace progress must then "turnover" its graph and, at best, flatten out [or actually crash.]

There are lots of people [not just the hated environmentalists] who believe that the accelerated progress model we are currently pursuing is a dangerous and inevitably catastrophic policy. Even the majority of those futurists who like the current accelerated "dance", admit that we will have to settle into a more stable sustainability "later". Only the so-called "Startrek" futurists believe that there are no limits whatever. [their roll-the-dice optimism is based on the concepts of space exploitation, such as asteroid and other planet mining as if those things were somehow reachable in the near future --- reading futurist magazines exposes one to the most unrealistic time frames for some required developments you can imagine, and the themed articles reappear over and over again with no let-up in enthusiasm.]

Other than the Startreker futurists, future envisioners break down into several schools of thought, of which three are prominent. 1). The current pace will roar on for a while, and we will get cleverer and cleverer at maximizing harvesting of resources and replacing the ones we run out of. These are the Techno-optimists --- no crisis is unbeatable by human creativity, no matter at what scale. Techno-optimists believe that one day we will have everything we need in abundance, and no one will be unsatisfied, and we can then rest in peace. The corollary "until then, there will be constant resource-related war" is seldom discussed. Techno-optimists also believe that technology is almost wholly good, and there are no reasons to fear "side-effects", and that the occasional bad side-effect is worth the risk, and probably shouldn't have happened anyway. This school of thought has a hidden triage nature about it: some will super-succeed, some will be partly pulled up by the supermen, and some will be left behind. The function of government is to get out of the way of this technological and economic triage.

2). The current pace will continue as long as the power behind it can protect its continuance. This is a darker shadow of the Techno-optimist school. It is not particularly optimistic about anything, but conceives of itself as "realistic". It views Power as unlikely to give up power, especially for "humanitarian" values. Rather, it views huge organizational power as acting like an animal giant doing what it has to do to "personally" survive. The darkest edge of this School-of-Power is when the inevitable [in their minds] thorough joining of corporate and governmental power arrives. This forms the Fascist Techno-State. Only this Thing has the possibility of the Uber-control needed to force-match resource-handling to product-production with the greater and greater need for precision/"efficiency" that the dwindling resource status of the Power Status Quo requires. George Lucas' thesis-turned-movie THX1138 is an eery intuitive nightmare picturing of one such "final state". Paradoxically {?}, this scenario too ends in a physically sustainable but psychologically horrible final state.

3). The current pace will continue until one of two things happen: a]. we simply run into the wall and catastrophically crash with unimaginable suffering for all but the small percent of "winners" who have separated themselves by physical [killing] power from everyone else, or b]. enough people will find ways to "drop out" of the techno-race and create little "arks" of localized sustainability, so that their numbers relieve stress on the bigger system, allowing it more time to adjust, and, most romantically, their examples reach enough other folks that the sustainable localized lifestyle becomes a non-organized movement of large size, forcing the corporate powers to begin taking them into account in their production planning. "3a" are the Pessimists, and "3b" are the Hopefuls --- the two main groups in the so-called "Green Movement." Greens would like the government to be both less and more active. They'd like less involvement with Big Power/Money, and more encouragement of little localized economic ventures --- even including improvements [of a sustainable kind] in one's own residence.

Again, who knows the relevance? Hayek has been used as inspiration for Startrekkers imagining "perfect" life on a Space Colony of the City-sized O'Neil Cylinder type. The idea was a libertarian mini-world with almost no government at all --- just really smart people doing really smart things. My students were initially fired up about this full freedom concept. One day in the classroom, I brought in a "space mafia lord" [played by me] and showed them that what they admired was a classic "Power Vacuum" and I had just filled it with my thugs and my demands, and they were in semi-slavery now for whatever I decided. Enthusiasm for the libertarian extreme faded rapidly. I had become a really smart person inventing a really smart but very undesirable thing --- unless you were on the "winning" side.

 

[GoIrish41]

I have to say, this is a fantastic thread. I have resisted the urge to participate because you guys are lightyears ahead of me in discussing political philosphy and I would just be getting in the way. But, I've read it often and have learned a great deal from those who have offered their knowledge and wisdom to the topic. The post from OMM above, for example, is terrific, as have been many posts in this thread. I hope all of you guys keep posting. Rest assured that I will keep reading. Thanks.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

There are lots of people [not just the hated environmentalists] who believe that the accelerated progress model we are currently pursuing is a dangerous and inevitably catastrophic policy.

I'd argue that this is the real dividing line between Conservatives and Progressives. The latter are comfortable with where "progress" is taking us, and the former (for whatever reason) are not.

Techno-optimists believe that one day we will have everything we need in abundance, and no one will be unsatisfied, and we can then rest in peace.

Define utopian.

Techno-optimists also believe that technology is almost wholly good, and there are no reasons to fear "side-effects", and that the occasional bad side-effect is worth the risk, and probably shouldn't have happened anyway.

This belief is puzzlingly widespread, since it doesn't seem to withstand even cursory scrutiny. Technology is essentially instrumental. Any moral dimension it has derives from the purpose for which it is used. Humanity's ability to split atoms has been used to both create (relatively) clean and abundant electricity, but also to incinerate ~225,000 Japanese civilians in the blink of an eye. It's absurd to argue that applied nuclear physics is Good per se.

This school of thought has a hidden triage nature about it: some will super-succeed, some will be partly pulled up by the supermen, and some will be left behind. The function of government is to get out of the way of this technological and economic triage.

Define "libertarianism". The strong shall lord over the weak forever, and we'll call it justice.

This forms the Fascist Techno-State.

We're already seeing the early stages of this as the Progressive left in DC begins to join forces with the technocratic right of Silicon Valley.

3). The current pace will continue until one of two things happen: a]. we simply run into the wall and catastrophically crash with unimaginable suffering for all but the small percent of "winners" who have separated themselves by physical [killing] power from everyone else, or b]. enough people will find ways to "drop out" of the techno-race and create little "arks" of localized sustainability, so that their numbers relieve stress on the bigger system, allowing it more time to adjust, and, most romantically, their examples reach enough other folks that the sustainable localized lifestyle becomes a non-organized movement of large size, forcing the corporate powers to begin taking them into account in their production planning. "3a" are the Pessimists, and "3b" are the Hopefuls --- the two main groups in the so-called "Green Movement." Greens would like the government to be both less and more active. They'd like less involvement with Big Power/Money, and more encouragement of little localized economic ventures --- even including improvements [of a sustainable kind] in one's own residence.

ND Professor Alasdair McIntyre argues in After Virtue that, from a cultural perspective, we're already past the point of no return, and that those who hold to a classical understanding of Truth and morality need to retreat into insular communities in order to keep the flame of civilization alive through the coming dark age.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

OMM's excellent post above reminded me of a terrifying interview I read recently with Yuval Harari titled "Death is Optional":

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Before asking you what are the questions you are asking yourself, I want to say that I've now read your book Sapiens twice and in that book you do something that I found pretty extraordinary. You cover the history of mankind. It seems to be like an invitation for people to dismiss it as superficial, so I read it, and I read it again, because in fact, I found so many ideas that were enriching. I want to talk about just one or two of them as examples.

Your chapter on science is one of my favorites and so is the title of that chapter, "The Discovery of Ignorance". It presents the idea that science began when people discovered that there was ignorance, and that they could do something about it, that this was really the beginning of science. I love that phrase.

And in fact, I loved that phrase so much that I went and looked it up. Because I thought, where did he get it? My search of the phrase showed that all the references were to you. And there are many other things like that in the book.

How did you transition from that book to what you're doing now?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It came naturally. My big question at present is what is the human agenda for the 21st century. And this is a direct continuation from covering the history of humankind, from the appearance of Homo Sapiens until today, so when you finish that, immediately, you think, okay, what next? I'm not trying to predict the future, which is impossible, now more than ever. Nobody has a clue how the world will look like in, say, 40, 50 years. We may know some of the basic variables but, if you really understand what's going on in the world, you know that it's impossible to have any good prediction for the coming decades. This is the first time in history that we're in this situation.

I'm trying to do something that is the opposite of predicting the future. I'm trying to identify what are the possibilities, what is the horizon of possibilities that we are facing? And what will happen from among these possibilities? We still have a lot of choice in this regard.

KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?

HARARI: I think about it in visual terms, whether you try to narrow your field of vision, or to broaden it. For example, when you try to predict the weather for tomorrow, there are a lot of possibilities to begin with. It might rain, it might snow, there might be sunshine. And a good meteorologist, according to one view of science, is a meteorologist that takes this horizon of possibilities and narrows it down to a single possibility or just two possibilities. It will certainly rain, maybe hard, maybe less so. That's it.

And after you finish reading the book or taking the course or whatever, your view of the world in this sense is narrower, because you have fewer possibilities to consider. You know it's going to rain. The same thing in economics, in medicine, and also in history. People ask what will happen next? You have all these possibilities, and I'm telling you, China is going to be the superpower, end of story. You narrow down the range.

There is room of course for that. When I go to the doctor to get a medicine, I want him to narrow down the possibilities, not just to enumerate all the options. But I personally like the kind of science that broadens the horizons. I often tell my students at the University that my aim is that after three years, you basically know less than when you first got here. When you first got here, you thought you knew what the world is like and what is war and what is a state, and so forth. After three years, my hope is that you will understand that you actually know far, far less, and you come out with a much broader view of the present and of the future.

KAHNEMAN: But do you get to a broader view by becoming more differentiated, that is, by having more detailed views? Or is it just that you get people to consider a possibility that wouldn't occur to them?

HARARI: Mainly, the second way. The main thing, and my main task as a historian is to get people to consider the possibilities which usually are outside their field of vision, because our present field of vision has been shaped by history and has been narrowed down by history, and if you understand how history has narrowed down our field of vision, this is what enables you to start broadening it.

Let me give you an example that I'm thinking about a lot today, concerning the future of humankind in the field of medicine. At least to the best of my understanding, we're in the middle of a revolution in medicine. After medicine in the 20th century focused on healing the sick, now it is more and more focused on upgrading the healthy, which is a completely different project. And it's a fundamentally different project in social and political terms, because whereas healing the sick is an egalitarian project ... you assume there is a norm of health, anybody that falls below the norm, you try to give them a push to come back to the norm, upgrading is by definition an elitist project. There is no norm that can be applicable to everybody.

And this opens the possibility of creating huge gaps between the rich and the poor, bigger than ever existed before in history. And many people say no, it will not happen, because we have the experience of the 20th century, that we had many medical advances, beginning with the rich or with the most advanced countries, and gradually they trickled down to everybody, and now everybody enjoys antibiotics or vaccinations or whatever, so this will happen again.

And as a historian, my main task is to say no, there were peculiar reasons why medicine in the 20th century was egalitarian, why the discoveries trickled down to everybody. These unique conditions may not repeat themselves in the 21st century, so you should broaden your thinking, and you should take into consideration the possibility that medicine in the 21st century will be elitist, and that you will see growing gaps because of that, biological gaps between rich and poor and between different countries. And you cannot just trust a process of trickling down to solve this problem.

There are fundamental reasons why we should take this very seriously, because generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it's the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it's done, it's over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.

And once most people are no longer really necessary, for the military and for the economy, the idea that you will continue to have mass medicine is not so certain. Could be. It's not a prophecy, but you should take very seriously the option that people will lose their military and economic value, and medicine will follow.

KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?

HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.

Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it's tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.

But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than any other disease. It's like cancer, it's like Alzheimers, it's like tuberculosis. Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, "Come. Your time has come." And you say, "No, no, no. Give me some more time." And Death said, "No, you have to come." And that's it, that is how you die.

We don't think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

KAHNEMAN: Death is optional.

HARARI: Death is optional. And if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The big consolation of the poor throughout history was that okay, these rich people, they have it good, but they're going to die just like me. But think about the world, say, in 50 years, 100 years, where the poor people continue to die, but the rich people, in addition to all the other things they get, also get an exemption from death. That's going to bring a lot of anger.

KAHNEMAN: Yes. I really like that phrase of "people not being necessary," can you elaborate on this dystopia? It's a new phrase for me. Such things, by the way, are developing very, very slowly. I was worrying about what computers would do in displacing people. I was worried about this when I was a graduate student, and that was more than 50 years ago, and I thought that's a very serious, immediate problem. It wasn't a serious immediate problem then, but a serious ... not immediate, but it may be a serious problem now. You have thought about it deeply, can you tell us about people becoming unnecessary, economically, and unnecessary militarily? What will that do?

HARARI: The basic process is the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness. Throughout history, you always had the two together. If you wanted something intelligent, this something had to have consciousness at its basis. People were not familiar with anything not human, that didn't have consciousness, that could be intelligent, that could solve problems like playing chess or driving a car or diagnosing disease.

Now, what we're talking about today is not that computers will be like humans. I think that many of these science fiction scenarios, that computers will be like humans, are wrong. Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness.

KAHNEMAN: It needs intelligence.

HARARI: It needs intelligence. And intelligence is a far easier thing than consciousness. And the problem is, computers may not become conscious, I don't know, ever ... I would say 500 years ... but they could be as intelligent or more intelligent than humans in particular tasks very quickly. And if you think, for example, about this self-driving car of Google, and you compare the self-driving car to a taxi driver, a taxi driver is immensely more complex than the self-driving car.

There are a zillion things that the taxi driver can do and the self-driving car cannot. But the problem is that from a purely economic perspective, we don't need all the zillion things that the taxi driver can do. I only need him to take me from point A to point B as quickly and as cheaply as possible. And this is something a self-driving car can do better, or will be able to do better very quickly.

And when you look at it more and more, for most of the tasks that humans are needed for, what is required is just intelligence, and a very particular type of intelligence, because we are undergoing, for thousands of years, a process of specialization, which makes it easier to replace us. To build a robot that could function effectively as a hunter-gatherer is extremely complex. You need to know so many different things. But to build a self-driving car, or to build a "Watson-bot" that can diagnose disease better than my doctor, this is relatively easy.

And this is where we have to take seriously, the possibility that even though computers will still be far behind humans in many different things, as far as the tasks that the system needs from us are concerned, most of the time computers will be able to do better than us. And again, I don't want to give a prediction, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, but what you do see is it's a bit like the boy who cried wolf, that, yes, you cry wolf once, twice, three times, and maybe people say yes, 50 years ago, they already predicted that computers will replace humans, and it didn't happen. But the thing is that with every generation, it is becoming closer, and predictions such as these fuel the process.

The same thing will happen with these promises to overcome death. My guess, which is only a guess, is that the people who live today, and who count on the ability to live forever, or to overcome death in 50 years, 60 years, are going to be hugely disappointed. It's one thing to accept that I'm going to die. It's another thing to think that you can cheat death and then die eventually. It's much harder.

While they are in for a very big disappointment, in their efforts to defeat death, they will achieve great things. They will make it easier for the next generation to do it, and somewhere along the line, it will turn from science fiction to science, and the wolf will come.

KAHNEMAN: What you are doing here, in terms of prediction, is about trends. The trend is clear, what progress means is clear, but when you describe people as superfluous, you are presenting the background for a huge problem. Who decides what to do with the superfluous people. Especially, what are the social implications that you see, the technical or technological development that you foresee?

HARARI: Well, again, I am an historian, I am not a biologist, I'm not a computer scientist, I am not in a position to say whether all these ideas are realizable or not. I can just look from the view of the historian and say what it looks from there. So the social and philosophical and political implications are the things that interest me most. Basically, if any of these trends are going to actually be fulfilled, then the best I can do is quote Marx and say that everything solid melts into air.

Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, to take just one example, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can basically break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, as it's often referred to, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening beyond that.

Looking before the point of Singularity, just as the trend is gathering pace, one thing we can say is there may be a repeat of what happened in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, of the opening of huge gaps between different classes and different countries. Generally speaking, the 20th century was a century of closing gaps, fewer gaps between classes, between genders, between ethnic groups, between countries. So maybe we are starting to see the reopening of these gaps with a vengeance, gaps that will be far greater then were between the industrialized and the non-industrialized part of the world, 150 or 200 years ago.

In the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, what humanity basically learned to produce was all kinds of stuff, like textiles and shoes and weapons and vehicles, and this was enough for the very few countries that underwent the revolution to subjugate everybody else. What we're talking about now is like a second Industrial Revolution, but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles, or even weapons. The product this time will be humans themselves.

We're basically learning to produce bodies and minds. Bodies and minds are going to be the two main products of the next wave of all these changes. And if there is a gap between those that know how to produce bodies and minds and those that do not, then this is far greater than anything we saw before in history.

And this time, if you're not fast enough to become part of the revolution, then you'll probably become extinct. Countries like China, missed the train for the Industrial Revolution, but 150 years later, they somehow have managed to catch up, largely, speaking in economic terms, thanks to the power of cheap labor. Now, those who miss the train will never get a second chance. If a country, if a people, today are left behind, they will never get a second chance, especially because cheap labor will count for nothing. Once you know how to produce bodies and brains and minds, cheap labor in Africa or South Asia or wherever, it simply counts for nothing. So in geopolitical terms, we might see a repeat of the 19th century, but in a much larger scale.

KAHNEMAN: What I find difficult to imagine is that as people are becoming unnecessary, the translation of that into sort of 20th-century terms is mass unemployment. Mass unemployment means social unrest. And it means there are things going to happen, processes going to happen in society, as a result of people becoming superfluous, and that is a gradual process, people becoming superfluous.

We may be seeing that in the growing inequality now, we may be seeing the beginning of what you're talking about. But have you thought, in the same way as you're thinking in interesting and novel ways about technology, have you thought about the social side?

HARARI: Yes, the social side is the more important and more difficult one. I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don't think we have an economic model for that. My best guess, which is just a guess, is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology, you will be able to produce food to feed everybody. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with people, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.

My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most ... it's already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their inner problems with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs. But this is just a wild guess.

What I can say is that maybe we are again in analogous position to the world in 1800. When the Industrial Revolution begins, you see the emergence of new classes of people. You see the emergence of a new class of the urban proletariat, which is a new social and political phenomenon. Nobody knows what to do with it. There are immense problems. And it took a century and more of revolutions and wars for people to even start coming up with ideas what to do with the new classes of people.

What is certain is that the old answers were irrelevant. Today, everybody is talking about ISIS, and the Islamic fundamentalism, and the Christian revival, and things like that. There are new problems, and people go back to the ancient texts, and think that there is an answer in the Sharia, in the Qur'an, in the Bible. We also had the same thing in the 19th century. You had the Industrial Revolution. You had huge sociopolitical problems all over the world, as a result of industrialization, of modernization. You got lots of people thinking that the answer is in the Bible or in the Qur'an. You had religious movements all over the world.

In the Sudan, for example, you have the Mahdi establishing Muslim theocracy according to the Sharia. An Anglo-Egyptian army comes to suppress the rebellion, and they are defeated. They behead General Charles Gordon. Basically, this is the same thing that you're now seeing with ISIS. Nobody remembers the Mahdi today because the answers that he found in the Qur'an and the Sharia to the problem of industrialization didn't work.

In China, the biggest war of the 19th century is not the Napoleonic war, it's not the American Civil War, it's the Taiping Rebellion in China, which started in 1850, when a failed scholar named Hong Xuiquan, if I remember correctly, had a vision from God that he, Hong, is the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and that he had a divine mission to establish the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace on Earth, and to solve all the problems China had due to the coming of the British and of modern industry. He started the rebellion, and millions followed him. According to the most moderate estimates, 20 million people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion, and it was 14 years before they suppressed it. He didn't establish a Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, and he didn't solve the problems of industrialization.

Eventually, people came up with new ideas, not from the Sharia, and not from the Bible, and not from some vision. People studied industry, they studied coalmines, they studied electricity, they studied steam engines, railroads, they looked at how these developments transformed the economy and society, and they came up with some new ideas. Not necessarily everybody liked the new ideas, but it was something at least to argue against.

And looking from the perspective of 2015, I don't think we now have the knowledge to solve the social problems of 2050, or the problems that will emerge as a result of all these new developments. We should be looking for new knowledge and new solutions, and starting with the realization that in all probability, nothing that exists at present offers a solution to these problems.

KAHNEMAN: What is very interesting and frightening about this scenario is that it is true, as you point out, that people have lived to work, or worked to live, and that what you are describing is a scenario in which work is unnecessary for most people.

There is a class of people who work because they enjoy it, and are able to do it, and then there is most of humanity, for which work no longer exists. That mass of people cannot work, but they can still kill people. How do you see the possibility of strife and conflict, between the superfluous people and those who are not?

HARARI: Once you are superfluous, you don't have power. Again, we are used to the age of the masses, of the 19th and 20th century, where you saw all these successful massive uprisings, revolutions, revolts, so we are used to thinking about the masses as powerful, but this is basically a 19th century and 20th century phenomenon.

If you go back in most periods in history, say to the middle ages, you do see peasant uprisings. They all failed, because the masses were not powerful. And once you become superfluous, militarily and economically, you can still cause trouble, of course, but you don't have the power to really change things.

Once you have the revolution we are undergoing in the military in which the number of soldiers simply becomes irrelevant in comparison with factors like technology, you still need people, but you don't need the millions of soldiers, each with a rifle. You need much smaller numbers of experts, who know how to produce and how to use the new technologies. Against such military powers, the masses, even if they somehow organize themselves, don't stand much of a chance. We are not in Russia of 1917, or in 19th century Europe.

And so again, it's not a prophecy. Maybe it will turn out differently. But as a historian, the most important thing to realize is that the power of the masses, that we are so used to, is rooted in particular historical conditions, economic, military, political, which characterized the 19th and 20th centuries. These conditions are now changing, and there is no reason to be certain that the masses will retain their power.

KAHNEMAN: What you're describing, the scenario that you're pointing to, is one of fairly rapid technological progress, and it really doesn't matter whether we're talking about 50 years or 150 years. There is a social arrangement that has been around for a long time, for decades and centuries. And they change relatively slowly. So what you bring to my mind, as I hear you, is a major disconnect between rapid technological change and quite rigid cultural and social arrangements that will not actually keep up.

HARARI: Yes, this is one of the big dangers, one of the big problems with technology. It develops much faster than human society and human morality, and this creates a lot of tension. But, again, we can try and learn something from our previous experience with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, that actually, you saw very rapid changes in society, not as fast as the changes in technology, but still, amazingly fast.

The most obvious example is the collapse of the family and of the intimate community, and their replacement by the state and the market. Basically, for the entirety of history, humans lived as part of these small and very important units, the family and the intimate community, say 200 people, who are your village, your tribe, your neighborhood. You know everybody; they know you. You may not like them, but your life depends on them. They provide you with almost everything you need in order to survive. They are your healthcare. There is no pension fund; you have children, they are your pension fund. They are your bank, your school, your police, everything. If you lose your family and the intimate community, you're dead, or you have to find a replacement family.

And this was the situation for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Even once history started, say 70,000 years ago, and you see all the changes and agriculture and cities and empires and religions, you don't see any significant change on that level. Even in the year, say, 1700, most people in the world still live as part of families and intimate communities, which provide them with most of what they need in order to survive. And you could have easily imagined, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that this will continue to be the situation.

If you were, say, an evolutionary psychologist back in 1800, and you saw the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, you could have very confidently said all these changes in technology are well and good, but they won't change the basic structure of human society. Human society is built from these small building blocks, the family and intimate community, because this is kind of an evolutionary given. Humans must have this. They cannot live in any other way.

And you look at the last 200 years, and you see them collapse after millions of years of evolution. Suddenly, within 200 years, the family and the intimate community break, they collapse. Most of the roles filled by the family and by the intimate community for thousands and tens of thousands of years, are transferred very quickly to new networks provided by the state and the market. You don't need children, you can have a pension fund. You don't need somebody to take care of you. You don't need neighbors and sisters or brothers to take care of you when you're sick. The state takes care of you. The state provides you with police, with education, with health, with everything.

And you can say that maybe life today is in some ways worse than in 1700, because we have lost much of the connection to the community around us ... it's a big argument ... but it happened. People today actually manage to live, many people, as isolated, alienated individuals. In the most advanced societies, people live as alienated individuals, with no community to speak about, with a very small family. It's no longer the big extended family. It's now a very small family, maybe just a spouse, maybe one or two children, and even they, they might live in a different city, in a different country, and you see them maybe once in every few months, and that's it. And the amazing thing is that people live with that. And that's just 200 years.

What might happen in the next hundred years on that level of daily life, of intimate relationships? Anything is possible. You look at Japan today, and Japan is maybe 20 years ahead of the world in everything. And you see these new social phenomena of people having relationships with virtual spouses. And you have people who never leave the house and just live through computers. And I don't know, maybe it's the future, maybe it isn't, but for me, the amazing thing is that you'd have thought, given the biological background of humankind, that this is impossible, yet we see that it is possible. Apparently, Homo Sapiens is even more malleable than we tend to think.

We can also learn something from the Agricultural Revolution. Some experts think that agriculture was the biggest mistake in human history, in terms of what it did to the individual. It's obvious that on the collective level, agriculture enhanced the power of humankind in an amazing way. Without agriculture, you could not have cities and kingdoms and empires and so forth, but if you look at it from the viewpoint of the individual, then for many individuals, life was probably much worse as peasants in ancient Egypt then as hunter gatherers 20,000, 30,000 years earlier. You had to work much harder. The body and mind of Homo Sapiens evolved for millions of years in adaptation to climbing trees and picking fruits and to running after gazelles and looking for mushrooms. And suddenly you start all day digging canals and carrying water buckets from the river and harvesting the corn, and grinding the corn, this is much more difficult for the body, and also much more boring to the mind.

In exchange for all this hard work, most peasants got a far worse diet than hunter-gatherers, because hunter-gatherers relied on dozens of species of animals and plants and mushrooms and whatever, that provided them with all the nutrients and vitamins they needed, whereas peasants relied on usually just a single crop, like wheat or rice or potatoes. And on top of that, you had all the new social hierarchies and the beginning of mass exploitation, where you have small elites exploiting everybody else. Putting all this together, there is a good case to be said for the idea that for the individual, agriculture was perhaps the biggest mistake in history.

This may provide us with a lesson, or at least something to think about with regard to the new technological revolution. Nobody would doubt that all the new technologies will enhance again the collective power of humankind, but the question we should be asking ourselves is what's happening on the individual level. We have enough evidence from history that you can have a very big step forward, in terms of collective power, coupled with a step backwards in terms of individual happiness, individual suffering. We need to ask ourselves about the new technologies emerging at present, not only how are they going to impact the collective power of humankind, but also how are they going to impact the daily life of individuals.

In terms of history, the events in Middle East, of ISIS and all of that, is just a speed bump on history's highway. The Middle East is not very important. Silicon Valley is much more important. It's the world of the 21st century ... I'm not speaking only about technology.

In terms of ideas, in terms of religions, the most interesting place today in the world is Silicon Valley, not the Middle East. This is where people like Ray Kurzweil, are creating new religions. These are the religions that will take over the world, not the ones coming out of Syria and Iraq and Nigeria.

That last paragraph is especially chilling. I shudder to think of the atrocities this emergent techno-utopian religion will inflict on humanity. Fascism and Marxism were both utopian as well, and millions died before those ideologies were resigned the dust bin. Though technological advancement in the interim means future atrocities will take place on an entirely different scale.

 

[zelezo vlk]

That guy sounds off his rocker. But I'm sure some would agree with him.

 

[Old Man Mike]

Hmmmm..... too much to respond to by a factor of perhaps a hundred. I will not bother. This is responsible intellectually, I believe, because I do not see this article as being a coherent argument for many things, but, as he states it is a device of teaching, wherein he destroys "comfort zone thinking" and attempts the widening of consciousness.

However, on the issue of medicine et al: The medical world is structured to attempt to cure illness and its momentum will drive it to continue to do so. Harari's common vs elite medical scenario will be well masked for quite a long time. It will present itself "privately" at the level of advanced skills [the best doctors] and advanced treatments [the most expensive whatevers --- think purchasing organs] since that is what economic inequality can actually buy. It cannot buy freedom from death, and will not be able to do so for decades if not centuries. Why?

We are seeing that the issue of ultimate survival is not cure for cancer, or assurance of unclogged blood vessels, or better functioning sugar controls [all of these will be licked in the next 50 years] but in the general cell death/dysfunction process called "aging". Medicine, as it corrects the big problems of Cancer, Diabetes, Stroke, Heart attacks etc will continue to be "common" medicine, as everyone gets this, and the breakthroughs will VERY likely be scaled to be "affordable" for the masses and the medical profession's bottom line. The defeat of the protein cross-linking problem, and the subsequent failures of enzyme systems and all the metabolic machinery complex which must accurately mesh together, will itself be a scientific nightmare to "solve". And it will doubtless turn out to be only one such nightmare needing solution before the aging "syndrome" is beaten. Throughout the 21st century human lifespan [in advanced countries] will CREEP up but not jump up in change-of-state type behaviors. One might imagine living to 110 healthily, but not "indefinitely".

In the 21st century, societies will have to deal not with "indefinite living pseudo-immortals" but with population growth of lesser-needed general populations. Not only philosophers and socially-conscious futurists have noted this, but even some nation states. A couple of European nations tried to engineer policies to reduce the work week hours to allow more employment --- one way to have more persons feeling "needed" and getting a paycheck. To my knowledge, this didn't work, essentially crushed by global competitivism. On paper, though, it could work, and be of great state advantage if the now-empty hours were utilized by people for contributions to worthy social endeavors --- think things like extra part-time teachers and aides in schools, extra persons available for helping the elderly, extra hands available for improving commons open spaces and recreational areas. But our current Darwinian economic condition apparently blocks such a helpful vision. This vision, of course, would probably require a great deal of state help [and legal force] to get self-oriented organizations/businesses to employ it, which throws the idea into the popularly-rejected "socialist" pile of concepts.

On the longer scale of time, yes, we will someday lick the aging process and become pseudo-immortals. Then death will occur only by accident, murder, or suicide. Even stopping with THAT sentence gives me the creeps a bit. But there is more. An individual faced with that prospect [they are all positively eugenic, thus also "tall, dark, and handsome, and eternally young"] faces two issues of difficult-to-resolve character: What am I going to do today that is worth bothering with?; and Boy, it better not be at all dangerous or even possibly so. The pseudo-immortal inevitably loses any spice in existing. You might joke that having sex with someone who looked like Marilyn Monroe would never get old, as even that surely would, but even if it didn't, turning oneself into a mindless blur-brained hog-rutting animal seems a poor existence to me. Also, nothing really with an edge of fear to it would be chosen. Risking "immortality" becomes a heavy choice. Result?: Excruciating boredom. Take the effete European spoiled brat royal and multiply by several thousand.

But that is a long way off. Harari's good point is: what do we do with the "economically useless man"? I had a conversation with my brother-in-law [a graduate of Penn's Wharton School of Business]. We were discussing some massive lay-offs occurring nationwide by some corporate giant. I asked him if there were a small town with one factory which that town depended upon, and a technological way was found to replace a third of the workers so as to make more profit, was that a "good" thing to do? He said "Absolutely!!" and defended himself in modern economic terms. His wife, my sister, was listening in, and, like a good life partner, nodded. Well, said I, what if another techno-development occurs which can replace another third? Would that be a good thing to do? "Absolutely!!" And the same defense. so you know how it then went. I asked him about the third great invention which turned the factory into an automated plant with just an occasional overseer who dropped in from out of town. "Absolutely!!"

My sister looked at him, who had just enthusiastically "fired" the entire town for profit, and said: "WAIT A MINUTE!! I was with you sort of until you unemployed everybody. How's that a good idea??" He stoutly continued to quote economic cant despite eye-rolling by the "audience". Regardless of whether my scenario is fiction, this precise thing is happening all over the place and many persons are being left behind, and in many places so many that the entire community degrades. Counterarguments such as "too bad, that's the way it is", are the exact Social Darwinism that no sane individual wants to encourage in a society. Why would ANY social/political thinker want to enable an "Inevitable Struggle for Existence" on the human individual level? But we are doing so without much thought [of any sufficient kind] to the individual consequences of this enabling.

There's a ton more in this article, some of which to my mind is wrong [the "singularity crap" --- artificial intelligence will be good enough to replace us on the jobsite, not in real humanness], some right, none particularly original to him. I'll leave it to wiser heads to make sense out of those pieces.

 

[Bluto]

Thank you for the fantastic posts Old Man Mike and Whiskey.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Hmmmm..... too much to respond to by a factor of perhaps a hundred. I will not bother. This is responsible intellectually, I believe, because I do not see this article as being a coherent argument for many things, but, as he states it is a device of teaching, wherein he destroys "comfort zone thinking" and attempts the widening of consciousness.

In retrospect, that interview isn't as apt to our conversation as I had hoped. Your post reminded me of the horrific implications of transhumanism, so I shared it primarily because it was the last such thing I had read on the subject. But I could have found some more directly relevant to that subject.

I do believe that transhumanism is the "Next Big Thing", and that, like all utopian ideologies, it's bound to end in tragedy.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Deneen just posted his Week 7 article titled "Natural Rights Conservatism-- The Case of Leo Strauss":

This week we begin the second half of our seminar, now turning our attention to different understandings of conservatism. We will focus in coming weeks on three varieties: “natural rights conservatism”; “traditional conservatism”; and “radical Catholicism.”

Before turning to the first of these, a few words about “conservatism” are in order. Arguably, there have always been conservative people, conservative eras, conservative ways of life—since the disposition to “conserve” is a core feature of our humanity—but “conservatism,” qua-ism, is a relatively new phenomenon. Its “founder” is widely recognized as having been Edmund Burke—though Burke himself did not use the label.

Burke famously wrote in criticism of the French Revolution, arguably the world’s first effort to instantiate a political ideology through a radical transformation of an existing society. “Conservatism” is thus born as a response to a particular and uniquely modern form of political engineering. Conservatism is not by its nature a program or a competing ideology (and thus, why the addition of an “-ism” was and remains problematic), but rather a stance of opposition against a perceived radical effort at remaking the world in the image of a false idea. Conservatism then, has been rightly described more as a disposition that seeks to protect that which has been tried and found to work, that which is old and venerable.

However, as a result, conservatives might agree on what they oppose, but rarely agree on what they are for. The American political conservative movement that began in the mid-20th century and achieved political prominence with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, held together widely disparate elements more by what it agreed was its common foe—in the first instance, communism, and in the second, home-grown progressive liberalism—than by what it was able to agree upon.

Conservatives tend to want to preserve something from the past, and even to regard with regret a departure from the old ways. The source of fervent disagreement among conservatives is exactly when everything began to go wrong. For some, 1968; for others, 1920s; for others still, 1860; or 1789, or 1688, or 1517—and so on. Conservatives are prone to argue just as much with each other about the nature of the lost golden age as they are to agree that they oppose progressives. Frankly, the nature of these disagreements make conservatives much more intellectually interesting.

In general, conservatives in the United States regard its golden age as the time of the American founding, and seek in some form to recover the wisdom and practice that animated the Constitution. The figure who largely inspired this widespread shared understanding of American conservatism was a highly philosophical, academic, often obscure German-Jewish emigre named Leo Strauss, who wrote detailed treatises on Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and other major figures in the history of political philosophy.

More fascinating still, is that his conservative admirers may have completely misunderstood him.

Strauss on the Ancients vs. the Moderns

Leo Strauss (1899-1973)—who fled his native Germany in 1932 and settled permanently in the U.S. in 1937, and taught at the University of Chicago from 1949-1969—was animated by one overarching question: how could fascism have happened? To answer that question, he sought to discover what went wrong in the realm of ideas, looking for the source of error in the history of Western political thought.

Strauss concluded that a revolution in ideas happened in the early-modern era that led to a succession of intellectual developments that culminated in modern totalitarianism in the forms of fascism and communism. He divided the ages of the West between ancients and moderns, and further, subdivided the moderns into three distinct periods (the “three waves of modernity”). With the rejection of ancient political philosophy, and its embrace of classical political right, a fateful string of developments in western philosophy led to catastrophe.

Ancient philosophy recognized a fundamental distinction between nature and convention (phusis and nomos) and explored the question whether any and all societies might be ordered in accordance with that which was naturally right, or just. Political philosophy is born of the suspicion and belief that many of the norms of most societies are merely conventional, the result of tradition or custom or accident. Socrates is the first political philosopher inasmuch as he challenges the norms and beliefs of his society—Athens—and as a result, was condemned and executed for corrupting the youth and introducing new gods in to the city. Classical political philosophy is a standing danger to the city’s prevailing way of life and customary beliefs.

The question of whether there is a form of justice in accordance with nature orients classical political philosophy to the question of the best regime: is there one best city that can be said to be truly and perfectly just? But even as this question is asked, classical political philosophy recognizes that the mixed nature of human beings—a combination of high and low, divine aspirations and beastly instincts—does not permit the realization of the perfect city. Classical political philosophy is always deeply informed both by the inescapable aspiration for the ideal, and the inescapable limitations of the real. The statesman-philosopher seeks to move the real closer to the ideal while recognizing that a gap between them will always exist.

Modern political philosophy—inaugurated by Machiavelli—rejects the relevance of the “ideal” for political thinking. Machiavelli rejects the ancient effort to “imagine republics and principalities,” instead urging political leaders to deal only with the reality of human beings and particularly with what works (“the effectual truth”). Calling for a politics grounded on the predictable human motivation of self-interest and the desire for esteem, along with the permanent presence of fear, Machiavelli—followed by Hobbes and Locke—establishes modern politics on the “low but solid ground” of self-interest. This belief Strauss called “modern natural right.” Its political fruit was the American founding, and can be found articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.

This “first wave” of modernity generated a subsequent wave that arose in reaction to, and rejection of, the basic premises of “modern natural right,” a reaction inaugurated by J.J. Rousseau. Rousseau rejected the idea that humans had a fixed nature—whether the nature understood by the ancients or moderns—and instead that humans were constituted in and through history. Rousseau inaugurated the philosophical school of “historicism,” one that held the possibility not only of material progress, but moral progress. His philosophical descendents are the likes of Hegel, Marx, Condorcet, and Comte. The political fruit of his ideas has been borne out in Communism and Progressivism.

The “third wave” was an intensification of Rousseau’s claims against a human nature, one that insisted that we are less the products of “history” than our own self-fashioning. This view was articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, and subsequently Heidegger and various Existentialists and postmodernists. The political fruit of this philosophy, Strauss argued, was fascism.

Rupture or Continuity?

Strauss’s highly philosophic and often obscure analyses of the history of political philosophy proved enormously influential throughout the mid-20th century down to our own day. His work has inspired several generations of students who have advanced his analyses and basic premises in their own academic work, but perhaps more remarkably still, has spawned countless political think-tanks, institutes, programs and centers devoted to the project of political conservatism.

What’s perhaps most surprising, given the sketch of Strauss’s argument that I have outlined above, is that so many of Strauss’s students would have devoted themselves to restoring the American order by returning America to the principles of the American founding. According to Strauss’s own argument, the American founding was the outworking of the “first wave of modernity,” or the rejection of classical natural right.

In the main, Strauss’s students have understood Strauss to endorse something more of a continuity between ancient and modern natural right than Strauss himself seemed to express. They especially endorsed the continuity of “nature” as a standard, against the “historicism” of the second wave and “nihilism” of the third wave. At the conclusion of Strauss’s essay “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Strauss suggested that this understanding was not unwarranted:

The theoretical crisis does not necessarily lead to a political crisis, for the superiority of liberal democracy to communism, Stalinist or post-Stalinist, is obvious enough. And above all, liberal democracy, in contradistinction to communism and fascism, derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of our western tradition.

What Strauss at least suggests is that “classical natural right” continues to afford “powerful support” for the regime that arose from “modern natural right”—liberal democracy. This is, of course, not the same as suggesting that the two are continuous, and one can expect tensions and even contradictions to arise between them. But, at least when confronted with the threat of communism, Strauss’s analysis seemed to suggest that the liberal democracy of America was far superior, even if founded on defective principles.

Those students of Strauss who accepted more of a “rupture” thesis between ancients and moderns were likely drawn to the philosophic quest and cultural critique rather than direct engagement in conservative politics. Perhaps a paramount example of this form of Straussianism was Strauss’s most famous student, Allan Bloom—whom, for all the accusations about his conservatism, was not especially engaged in conservative politics per se. His broadside against the modern university was above all a defense of the possibility of Socratic philosophy—not a defense of American political principles. Many less famous examples exist of Straussians who devote their academic careers to philosophical and literary exegesis.

But for those students of Strauss who reject the “rupture” thesis—instead understanding Strauss to have argued for a continuity between ancient and modern natural right—there has been a strong tendency to take up the call to restore America’s constitutional principles. The bastions of this approach are found among “West Coast Straussians,” often associated with the Claremont Institute, but now populating other parts of the country—e.g., Hillsdale College in the heartland, as well as countless programs and institutes in Washington D.C. These political warriors conclude from Strauss’s argument that the real enemy can be found in “historicism”—a threat posed last century especially by communism, and today by domestic forms of left-wing progressivism.

What’s perhaps most striking about the latter argument is that it posits a basic continuity between ancient and modern natural right, but a definite and lamentable rupture beginning with the second wave of modernity—historicism. Whereas Strauss argued that the rupture occurred with the “first wave,” and that the “second wave” developed out of the first (and the third out of the second), contemporary natural rights conservatives have “re-written” Strauss’s analysis and updated the moment of the rupture. If Strauss’s analysis is correct, then the effort to “restore” America’s founding principles is simply to double-down on the first step in modernity’s crisis. Further, it is potentially to strengthen the very “origins” of the second wave, if we understand that the tendency to “historicism” arises out of modern natural right. And, lastly, it is to embrace a political philosophy that is not inherently “conservative” at all, but profoundly—well, liberal. Hence, as we will see next week, this dominant form of American conservatism consists in the paradoxical effort to “conserve liberalism.”

 

[Emcee77]

A Hateful Sort of Love - The New Yorker

I liked this piece because it shows how hard it can be to talk about -isms in politics. Putin decries the Ukrainian "Fascists," but he is the real heir to Fascism as most of us understand the term. Venezuelans who "call themselves revolutionary leftists have made common cause with Russian conservatives and Iranian theocrats." Etc.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

National Review's Ian Tuttle just published a fantastic interview with Matthew Crawford called "The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in the Age of Distraction":

‘We are living through a crisis of attention,” writes Matthew Crawford in his new book The World Beyond Your Head. If that sounds like the beginning of a diatribe against Twitter, it’s not. What Crawford — the philosopher-turned-motorcycle repairman whose 2010 Shop Class as Soulcraft surely counts as one of the most unlikely bestsellers in recent years — has produced is something far richer. Tracing the philosophical roots of our fractured mental lives to the Enlightenment and the modern liberal project, Crawford suggests that our very ability to become individuals is under threat — and likewise the possibility for genuine human flourishing. The World Beyond Your Head is a work of philosophy, and of urgency. Pay attention. — IPT

IAN TUTTLE: Let’s start at the beginning, with the roots of our “crisis of attention.” In your chapter “A Brief History of Freedom,” you propose what some might consider a damning interpretation of the anthropology of modern liberalism that suggests that the desire of 17th-century thinkers to free themselves from political authorities led to a rebellion against all external authority. The end result is not just a political, but an epistemic one: Reality ends up being self-constructed; we end up trapped in our heads.

Your account starts with Descartes and his mind-body distinction, passes through Locke, and culminates in Kant. Does the modern political project we cherish — liberal, democratic, rights-based, etc. — and that those same thinkers developed necessitate the loss of genuine attention (and the consequent problems)? Or were there off-ramps along the way?

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: This comes down to a question of how useful the history of philosophy is for understanding the present. It is generally thought to be in bad taste — too idealistic — to assert anything like a necessary connection between the history of ideas and cultural developments. And indeed there are so many determinants of culture that pure intellectual history misses: natural resources, demographics, sheer dumb accident, etc. But I think it is fair to ask how the fate of Enlightenment ideas in the wider society, where they have trickled down and become cultural reflexes, reflects back on the moment of their original articulation. Viewing the Enlightenment retrospectively in this way, we can discern the seeds of who we have become. We may then develop a fresh take on those thinkers, and new reasons to quarrel with them, ultimately for the sake of self-criticism.

My critique of the anthropology we have inherited from early modern thought has a couple of dimensions. The first is sociological, simply noticing how autonomy-talk is pretty much the only idiom that is available to us for articulating our self-understanding, and how inadequate it is for capturing lived experience. It is the idiom of commencement speeches, of daytime talk shows, and also of marketing: You’re In Charge, as the message on the handrail of the escalator at O’Hare puts it.

Living in a culture saturated with vulgar freedomism, you may develop a jaundiced view of the whole project of liberation inaugurated by Descartes and Locke. If you then revisit those thinkers, I think your irritation prepares you to see things you would otherwise miss. You are bringing a prejudice with you, but sometimes a prejudice sharpens your vision. Sensitivity to the present, and giving credit to your own human reactions to it, can bring a new urgency to the history of philosophy.

What stands out for me, and for other writers I have learned from, is that the assertions those enlighteners make about how the mind works, and about the nature of the human being, are intimately tied to their political project to liberate us from the authority of kings and priests. In other words, it is epistemology with an axe to grind, polemical at its very root.

Yet this original argumentative setting has been forgotten. This is important, because Enlightenment anthropology continues to inform wide swaths of the human sciences, including cognitive science, despite that discipline’s ritualized, superficial ridicule of Descartes. We need to be more self-aware about the polemical origins of the human sciences, because those old battles bear little resemblance to the ones we need to fight.

In particular, it is very difficult to make sense of the experience of attending to something in the world when everything located beyond the boundary of your skull is regarded as a potential source of unfreedom. This is, precisely, the premise behind Kant’s ideal of autonomy: The will must not be “conditioned” by anything external to it. Today we get our Kant from children’s television, and from the corporate messaging of Silicon Valley. Certain features of our contemporary landscape make more sense when you find their antecedents in serious thought, because the tacit assumptions that underlie them were originally explicit assertions.

TUTTLE: Relatedly, there are certain modern thinkers who have attended to (sorry) the problem you explore — you quote, for instance, Heidegger and Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch — but are there pre-modern thinkers whose thought is particularly relevant or instructive?

CRAWFORD: Iris Murdoch is under-appreciated. I haven’t read her fiction, but her philosophical essays are one of the richest sources for thinking about attention in its full human context. She stresses that to see the world clearly is a rare moral accomplishment, because it requires getting free of the self-absorbed fantasies that we routinely project out onto the world. She suggests that this is what good art does — it shows us the world as viewed by somebody who has succeeded in doing that, at least for a spell.

Speaking of pre-modern thinkers, in the book I set up a quarrel between Murdoch and the novelist David Foster Wallace and suggest it parallels a quarrel that may be found between Stoics and Epicureans on the question of how to escape the hell inside your own head. I think Murdoch and the Epicureans offer a more promising therapy: It is not by “constructing meaning” tailored to our own psychic needs that we escape our grumpy self-centeredness; it is by joining ourselves to the world, latching onto external objects that provide a source of positive energy. What this comes down to is an erotic disposition, as opposed to an ascetic one. You need both, actually. Only by excluding all the things that grab at our attention are we able to immerse ourselves in something worthwhile, and vice versa: When you become absorbed in something that is intrinsically interesting, that burden of self-regulation is greatly reduced.

TUTTLE: To the present-day consequences. The first, and perhaps most obvious, consequence is a moral one, which you address in your harrowing chapter on machine gambling: “If we have no robust and demanding picture of what a good life would look like, then we are unable to articulate any detailed criticism of the particular sort of falling away from a good life that something like machine gambling represents.” To modern ears that sentence sounds alarmingly paternalistic. Is the notion of “the good life” possible in our age? Or is it fundamentally at odds with our political and/or philosophical commitments?

CRAWFORD: Once you start digging into the chilling details of machine gambling, and of other industries such as mobile gaming apps that emulate the business model of “addiction by design” through behaviorist conditioning, you may indeed start to feel a little paternalistic — if we can grant that it is the role of a pater to make scoundrels feel unwelcome in the town.

According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention.

My point in that passage is that liberal/libertarian agnosticism about the human good disarms the critical faculties we need even just to see certain developments in the culture and economy. Any substantive notion of what a good life requires will be contestable. But such a contest is ruled out if we dogmatically insist that even to raise questions about the good life is to identify oneself as a would-be theocrat. To Capital, our democratic squeamishness – our egalitarian pride in being “nonjudgmental” — smells like opportunity. Commercial forces step into the void of cultural authority, where liberals and libertarians fear to tread. And so we get a massive expansion of an activity — machine gambling — that leaves people compromised and degraded, as well as broke. And by the way, Vegas is no longer controlled by the mob. It’s gone corporate.

And this gets back to what I was saying earlier, about how our thinking is captured by obsolete polemics from hundreds of years ago. Subjectivism — the idea that what makes something good is how I feel about it — was pushed most aggressively by Thomas Hobbes, as a remedy for civil and religious war: Everyone should chill the hell out. Live and let live. It made sense at the time. This required discrediting all those who claim to know what is best. But Hobbes went further, denying the very possibility of having a better or worse understanding of such things as virtue and vice. In our time, this same posture of value skepticism lays the public square bare to a culture industry that is not at all shy about sculpting souls – through manufactured experiences, engineered to appeal to our most reliable impulses. That’s how one can achieve economies of scale. The result is a massification of the individual.

TUTTLE: Is there a balance to be struck between moral considerations and a free market? Are you subtly advocating Wendell Berry and Wilhelm Ropke?

CRAWFORD: Not that I know of. But I suspect a genuinely free market has natural limits of scale, and limits on how far wealth can be concentrated before you have to call it something else. I don’t know if there has ever been a free market, but what we have does not fit that description, unless you are willing to stretch the term beyond credit. We have a corporate economy, and the corporation is a curious animal, a hybrid of public authority and private wealth.

Apparently the corporate legal form was invented as a charter granted by the crown to a group of investors to carry out some well-defined public purpose, such as building a road or sending a ship across the sea. It was granted certain privileges, such as limited liability, to make it easier to raise capital for risky yet publicly necessary ventures. Today the corporation is legally and culturally untethered from any notion of a public purpose, yet still enjoys those public protections, without which it would not exist.

Another thing to notice is that capital has gotten concentrated to the point that it acts in quasi-governmental ways, abetted by ever more powerful information technology. I appreciate the freedom-loving spirit of libertarians, but I think they take too narrow and old-fashioned a view that is blind to new settings in which we are subject to various kinds of rule. If some credit rating bureau like TRW makes a mistake that requires six months of my own hard labor to get corrected, well, that’s what makes me think, “Don’t tread on me!” I am happy to pay the IRS my share, if it will help the government maintain its monopoly on coercive power. I want the Federal Trade Commission to fight TRW on my behalf.

While we’re at it: The Republican Party in 2012 seemed to take as one of its most important tasks the clouding of the difference between small business and those who are positioned to orchestrate the movement of vast sums, so as to be able to attach the moral valor of the entrepreneur to enterprises that primarily capture wealth.

TUTTLE: You write, “The ecology of attention that prevails between persons in a liberal public culture is one of polite separation.” What’s so bad about being polite?

CRAWFORD: Let me clarify. I speak up for reticence and reserve, and suggest that these are rooted in awareness of difference, the kind that may impress itself on you when you are alert to another individual. I borrow the phrase “polite separation” from Kierkegaard, who talks about a “leveling” that occurs when we regard ourselves as representatives of a generic category, “the public.” This puts us in a limbo where neither reverence nor rebellion is possible. He has some very funny passages: A student is no longer in fear of his schoolmaster; instead he and the schoolmaster discuss the question of how a good school should be run. We “go meta” and become third parties to ourselves, as well as to others. Human connection is attenuated.

TUTTLE: Your book is political philosophy, but you are not above engaging the grubby world of politics. Both Left and Right (libertarians, Tea Partiers, and Mitt Romney) come in for criticism. While we often hear about the polarization of American politics, it seems you might be suggesting that both sides share troubling philosophical commitments. Is that right?

CRAWFORD: There do seem to be some affinities. Both invoke “choice” as a content-free meta-good that bathes every actual choice made in the softly egalitarian, flattering light of autonomy.

Here’s another. The ongoing “creative destruction” of capitalism celebrated on the Right clears away settled forms of social life. Cultural progressives find their work made easier by this; they get to re-engineer the human landscape with less interference. They do this by moving the threshold of offense ever lower, creating new sensitivities and then policing them. The institutions of civil society (universities, corporations, etc.) then scramble to catch up with the new dispensation and demonstrate their allegiance to it — by expanding their administrative reach into ever more intimate corners of the psyche. This dynamic has given us a stunning expansion of coercive power over the individual, but it has nothing to with “the government.”

While we’re scrambling ideological divisions, allow me to make a suggestion: Marx is due to be discovered by conservatives. Seriously. Not the positive, utopian program, obviously. But the critical part. Arguably, Marx was a conservative, initially. Read the 1844 Manuscripts — much of it is straight out of Aristotle. I am not the first to notice this. His account of what we require to flourish is rooted in the idea that there is a distinctly human form of activity, one that answers to our “species nature.” We’re the kind of creatures who need to see our own thought manifested concretely in the world, through productive activity. It may well be that no viable form of large-scale economic organization can take this as its guiding insight, but I think the perspective Marx offers is timely, and can cast new light on what we are doing to ourselves. With the Cold War now decided, I think we can safely start to ease our way out of certain intellectual habits that arose from our defensive posture against the Soviet threat, and take a more cold-eyed look at the trajectory of our own economy. In thinking about economics, conservatives would do well to recover the more tragic view of the human condition that is part of their tradition, and a more pessimistic take on history, as against triumphant neoliberal enthusiasms.

TUTTLE: Re-engaging with “the world beyond our heads,” you contend, can put democracy on a firmer foundation. How so?

CRAWFORD: That’s in the final pages where I suggest that an aristocratic ethos needn’t be thought threatening, that it can in fact strengthen democratic solidarity and place it on a more real psychological footing. Our attraction to excellence — our being on the lookout for the choicer manifestations — may lead us to attend to human practices searchingly, and to find superiority in unfamiliar places. For example, in the embodied cognitive finesse of the short-order cook, or the intense intellectual labor that may be required in work that is dirty, such as that of the mechanic when he is diagnosing a problem. With such discoveries we extend our moral imagination to people who are conventionally beneath serious regard, and find them admirable. Not because we heed a moral demand such as the egalitarian lays upon us, but because we actually see something admirable. Our openness to superiority is what connects us to others in a genuine way, without a screen of abstraction.

By contrast, egalitarian empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. But the one who is on the receiving end of such empathy wants something more than to be recognized generically. He wants to be seen as an individual, and recognized as worthy on the same grounds on which he has striven to be worthy, indeed superior, by cultivating some particular excellence or skill. We all strive for distinction, and I believe that to honor another person is to honor this aspiring core of him.

Just added this book to my queue for future reading.

 

[Black Irish]

Deneen's Week 7 post touches on a problem conservatives have with arguing their political philosophy. So many people dismiss many on the Right as retrograde dinosaurs who are looking to turn the clock back. While the root word of conservatism is "conserve" no serious conservative is looking to transform this country wholesale back in to America circa 1955.

It's frustrating to see the conservative argument get dismissed out of hand using just that logic. Unfortunately, many on the Right allow themselves to get painted into that "you just want to halt progress and conserve the white male patriarchy" and argue from that perspective. They need to stress that they are arguing for a different perspective going forward. No one is looking to move backwards; we just need to be more selective about the type of progress we make.

 

[Old Man Mike]

Some of the earlier root-concept of this discussion by Tuttle/Crawford was promulgated quite intelligently by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves To Death. Among other things Postman discussed the modern world's obsessive quest for being entertained at all times as leading to a world of mind-numbing cacophony, erasure of meditative and considered thought, deepening insensitive egocentrism, and triviality of existence. This pursuit COULD be viewed as a "{un}natural product" of successful capitalism plus liberal democracy. That is: "we're rich and we can do any damm thing we please, so get out of my way if it's legal [and, if the 'culture' doesn't really care, even if it isn't]".

 

[GoldenToTheGrave]

Deneen's Week 7 post touches on a problem conservatives have with arguing their political philosophy. So many people dismiss many on the Right as retrograde dinosaurs who are looking to turn the clock back. While the root word of conservatism is "conserve" no serious conservative is looking to transform this country wholesale back in to America circa 1955.

It's frustrating to see the conservative argument get dismissed out of hand using just that logic. Unfortunately, many on the Right allow themselves to get painted into that "you just want to halt progress and conserve the white male patriarchy" and argue from that perspective. They need to stress that they are arguing for a different perspective going forward. No one is looking to move backwards; we just need to be more selective about the type of progress we make.

Yea, except for reproductive rights, environmental regulations, voter suppression, etc. Everything other than that.

 

[Black Irish]

Yea, except for reproductive rights, environmental regulations, voter suppression, etc. Everything other than that.

Great response. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Someone like you throws out an incendiary and outrageous accusation and so many conservatives get put back on their heels defending themselves against such broadsides. You are not looking to engage a conservative on the merits of a political or ideological argument; you are simply accusing someone of being a heartless bastard, doing a mic drop, and walking away with your fingers in your ears.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Deneen's Week 7 post touches on a problem conservatives have with arguing their political philosophy. So many people dismiss many on the Right as retrograde dinosaurs who are looking to turn the clock back. While the root word of conservatism is "conserve" no serious conservative is looking to transform this country wholesale back in to America circa 1955.

It's frustrating to see the conservative argument get dismissed out of hand using just that logic. Unfortunately, many on the Right allow themselves to get painted into that "you just want to halt progress and conserve the white male patriarchy" and argue from that perspective. They need to stress that they are arguing for a different perspective going forward. No one is looking to move backwards; we just need to be more selective about the type of progress we make.

This has been a real problem for the American Right ever since "conservatism" became a movement after WWII. The American Conservative published an article almost nearly 9 years ago titled, "What is Left? What is Right?" which includes many excellent short essays on the essence of "conservatism", but my favorite is Ross Douthat's explanation:

Liberals are Baconists: they believe in Francis Bacon’s dictum that the ends of politics are “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” A conservative, meanwhile, is anyone who either says no to Baconism, or who says yes, but only up to a point—and so conservatism embraces anyone who has jumped off liberalism’s fast-moving train at any point over the last five centuries. If you’re a monarchist who thinks that liberalism went wrong with John Locke and the Glorious Revolution, step on up. If you’re a West Coast Straussian who thinks it went wrong with Woodrow Wilson, then welcome aboard. And if you’re a neocon who loved the New Deal but found the Great Society and George McGovern to be a bridge too far, there’s a place for you as well.

But here’s the rub, and the reason for a great deal of recent conservative confusion: the Right actually won a victory in the latter half of the 20th century, after centuries of defeat, and turned modernity away from a particularly pernicious path. This unexpected triumph has meant that many people who became accustomed to calling themselves “conservatives” when the conquest of nature seemed to require socialism or Communism are back on board the Baconian train, racing happily down a different track into the brave new future. These are the people who insist that conservatism ought to mean “freedom from government interference” and nothing more—the Grover Norquists of the world, for instance, or the Arnold Schwarzeneggers. In fact, they are ex-conservatives, because they are no longer sufficiently uncomfortable with the trajectory of modernity to be counted among its critics. They were unwilling to give up freedom for the sake of progress, but they’re happy to give up virtue.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that because conservatism only really exists to say “no” to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy’s terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue—and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name—whereas conservatives have … well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another. Neoconservatives want to return us to the New Deal era; Claremont Instituters want to revive the spirit of the Founding; Jacksonians want to rescue American nationalism from the one-worlders and post-patriots; agrarians and Crunchy Cons pine for a lost Jeffersonian or Chestertonian arcadia. Some conservatives think that liberalism-the-political-philosophy can be saved from liberalism-the-Baconian-project and that modernity can be rescued from its utopian temptation; others join Alasdair MacIntyre in thinking that the hour is far too late for that, and we should withdraw into our homes and monasteries and prepare to guard the permanent things through a long Dark Age.

Liberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It’s the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way.

Also relevant is this article in Ethika Politika titled "Futurists and Conservatives":

In his book of essays, Alarms and Discursions, G. K. Chesterton includes an amusing essay called “The Futurists.” Futurism, which is pretty much forgotten nowadays, was an Italian artistic and literary movement founded around 1910 that glorified machinery, speed, violence, etc. It appears to have had some elements in common with Italian Fascism. But be that as it may, does it have any connection with conservatism?

Not in terms of ideas, certainly, but I think that with regard to its use of labels it does. Let me introduce what seems to be this similarity between conservatives and futurists by quoting from Chesterton’s final remarks in his essay.

A brave man ought to ask for what he wants, not for what he expects to get. A brave man who wants Atheism in the future calls himself an Atheist; a brave man who wants Socialism, a Socialist; a brave man who wants Catholicism, a Catholic.
What does this have to do with conservatives and conservatism?

I admit to having been puzzled for many years over the term conservative and its obvious attraction to so many. Would it not make more sense, so it seemed to me, if one wanted to conserve capitalism, that he would call himself a capitalist; if the U.S. Constitution, a constitutionalist; if something else, then that thing? Conservatism, however, seemed to suffer from a vagueness in that it lacked a necessary direct object: conserve what? Of course, this is equally true of those who call themselves progressives, for they need to supply a similar object to signify what it is they think they are progressing toward.

The lack of such an object after the word ‘conservative’ has brought forth much sloppy thinking and many odd political alliances. People who really don’t agree on much else agree on one thing—that they are conservatives—and as such, apparently share common ground, when in fact it is hard to see how they do.

Today and in recent years people who disagree on the place of the market in an economy, on the justice and wisdom of America’s ongoing foreign wars, on the value of the American Lockean political tradition, and even on abortion or same-sex “marriage,” happily all call themselves conservatives, and sometimes even manage to coexist within the same groups or movements. Although the media presents a kind of standard image of what a conservative is, a little acquaintance with those who label themselves by that term will show that one’s self-proclamation as ‘conservative’ doesn’t necessarily reveal much about his ideas.

Now I suppose one could argue that all these people and groups share one thing in common, a common cast of mind, a desire to preserve what seems to them to be good. Well, I suppose so did Communists at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We get nowhere, it seems to me, if we start classifying political positions on the basis of psychology. Doubtless at times psychology may explain why someone or other has embraced a particular political movement, but it does nothing to explain the tenets of that political movement. Moreover, some proponents of capitalism positively celebrate the destructive, anti-traditional nature of market economics, an attitude that seems hard to square with any notion of conservation or preservation, unless one can talk about conserving continual change.

Probably since the beginning of the post-World War II American conservative movement, conservatives haven’t really wanted to conserve; they have wanted to, as they saw it, restore certain things they thought had been lost in the American polity or in Western civilization. Today this seems even clearer, since, say, pro-gun activists want not merely to preserve the status quo and prevent any further legal restrictions on carrying guns to be enacted, but they want to restore gun rights that they think have been lost.

Some of those who conventionally are considered conservatives have well understood the unhelpfulness of the term. Milton Friedman, for example, in his Capitalism and Freedom, noted that liberalism is the “rightful and proper label” of “the political and economic viewpoint elaborated in this book”; likewise Friedrich von Hayek, who penned an essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” They both understood that there are different political positions, different ideologies, and that it makes much more sense to label each as accurately as possible rather than bunch them together under the umbrella of ‘conservative,’ a label that, as Friedman and Hayek in particular well knew, hardly fit with their hypercapitalist point of view.

I am well aware that the term ‘conservative’ exercises an enormous attraction for many, and I hardly expect most people to cease to use it on the basis of my argument here. So as a compromise may I suggest the following: that anyone who calls himself or his views conservative, from now on ought to place a direct object after that term and proclaim to the world what it is that he is interested in conserving? For “a brave man who wants Atheism in the future calls himself an Atheist; a brave man who wants Socialism, a Socialist; a brave man who wants Catholicism, a Catholic.” Let people who call themselves conservative be clear about what it is they want to conserve.

Then perhaps we can not only understand each other better but our own thinking will become clearer, and brave men can fight for what they really believe in.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

I've shared this before, but I'm re-upping Deneen's essay "Unsustainable Liberalism" for reasons that should be obvious:

For most people of the West, the idea of a time and way of life after liberalism is as plausible as the idea of living on Mars. Yet liberalism is a bold political and social experiment that is far from certain to succeed. Its very apparent strengths rest upon a large number of pre-, non-, and even antiliberal institutions and resources that it has not replenished, and in recent years has actively sought to undermine. This “drawing down” on its preliberal inheritance is not contingent or accidental but in fact an inherent feature of liberalism.

Thus the liberal experiment contradicts itself, and a liberal society will inevitably become “postliberal.” The postliberal condition can retain many aspects that are regarded as liberalism’s triumphs—equal dignity of persons, in particular—while envisioning an alternative understanding of the human person, human community, politics, and the relationship of the cities of Man to the city of God. Envisioning a condition after liberalism calls us not to restore something that once was but to consider something that might yet be; it is a project not of nostalgia but of vision, imagination, and construction.

Many of what are considered liberalism’s signal features—particularly political arrangements such as constitutionalism, the rule of law, rights and privileges of citizens, separation of powers, the free exchange of goods and services in markets, and federalism—are to be found in medieval thought. Inviolable human dignity, constitutional limits upon central power, and equality under law are part of a preliberal legacy.

The strictly political arrangements of modern constitutionalism do not per se constitute a liberal regime. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature. These two revolutions in the understanding of human nature and society constitute “liberalism” inasmuch as they introduce a radically new definition of “liberty.”

Liberalism introduces a particular cast to its preliberal inheritance mainly by ceasing to account for the implications of choices made by individuals upon community, society, and future generations. Liberalism did not introduce the idea of choice. It dismissed the idea that there are wrong or bad choices, and thereby rejected the accompanying social structures and institutions that were ordered to restrain the temptation toward self-centered calculation.

The first revolution, and the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the free, unfettered, and autonomous choice of individuals. This argument was first articulated in the proto-liberal defense of monarchy by Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, human beings exist by nature in a state of radical independence and autonomy. Recognizing the fragility of a condition in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” they employ their rational self-interest to sacrifice most of their natural rights in order to secure the protection and security of a sovereign. Legitimacy is conferred by consent.

The state is created to restrain the external actions of individuals and legally restricts the potentially destructive activity of radically separate human beings. Law is a set of practical restraints upon self-interested individuals; there is no assumption of the existence of self-restraint born of mutual concern. As Hobbes writes in Leviathan, law is comparable to hedges that are set “not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way”; that is, law restrains people’s natural tendency to act on “impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion,” and so are always “rules authorized” as external constraints upon what is otherwise our natural liberty. “Where the law is silent,” people are free, obligated only insofar as the “authorized” rules of the state are explicit. All legitimate authority is vested in the state. It is the sole creator and enforcer of positive law and even determines legitimate and illegitimate expressions of religious belief. The state is charged with the maintenance of social stability and with preventing a return to natural anarchy; in discharging these duties, it “secures” our natural rights.

Human beings are by nature, therefore, “non-relational” creatures, separate and autonomous. Liberalism thus begins a project by which the legitimacy of all human relationships—beginning with, but not limited to, political bonds—becomes increasingly subject to the criterion of whether or not they have been chosen, and chosen upon the basis of their service to rational self-interest.

As Hobbes’ philosophical successor John Locke understood, voluntarist logic ultimately affects all relationships, including the familial. Locke—the first philosopher of liberalism—on the one hand acknowledges in his Second Treatise on Government that the duties of parents to raise children and the corresponding duties of children to obey springs from the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother,” but further claims that every child must ultimately subject his inheritance to the logic of consent beginning in a version of the state of nature, in which we act as autonomous choosing individuals. “For every man’s children being by nature as free as himself, or any of his ancestors ever were, may, whilst they are in that freedom, choose what society they will join themselves to, what commonwealths they will put themselves under. But if they will enjoy the inheritance of their ancestors, they must take it on the same terms their ancestors had it, and submit to all the conditions annex’d to such a possession.” Even those who adopt the inheritance of their parents in every regard only do so through the logic of consent, even if theirs is only tacit consent.

Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision, particularly once the duties of child-rearing are completed. If this encompassing logic of choice applies to the most elemental and basic relationships of the family, then it applies all the more to the looser ties that bind people to other institutions and associations, in which continued membership is subject to constant monitoring and assessment of whether it benefits or unduly burdens any person’s individual rights.

This is not to suggest that a preliberal era dismissed the idea of the free choice of individuals. Among other significant ways that preliberal Christianity contributed to an expansion of human choice was to transform the idea of marriage from an institution based upon considerations of family and property to one based upon the choice and consent of individuals united in sacramental love. What it is to suggest is that the default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and even personal relationships becomes dominated by considerations of individual choice based upon the calculation of individual self-interest, and without broader considerations of the impact one’s choices have upon the community—present and future—and of one’s obligations to the created order and ultimately to God.

Liberalism began with the explicit assertion, and has continued to claim, that it merely describes our political, social, and private decision-making. Yet implicitly it was constituted as a constructive or normative project: What it presented as a description of human voluntarism in fact had to displace a very different form of human self-understanding and long-standing experience. In effect, liberal theory sought to educate people to think differently about themselves and their relationships. Liberalism often claims neutrality about the choices people make in liberal society; it is the defender of “Right,” not of any particular conception of the “Good.”

Yet it is not neutral about the basis on which people make their decisions. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible and subject to constant redefinition, but so are all relationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.

The second revolution, and the second anthropological assumption that constitutes liberalism, is less visibly political. Premodern political thought—ancient and medieval, particularly that informed by an Aristotelian understanding of natural science—understood the human creature to be part of a comprehensive natural order. Man was understood to have a telos, a fixed end, given by nature and unalterable. Human nature was continuous with the order of the natural world, and so humanity was required to conform both to its own nature as well as, in a broader sense, to the natural order of which human beings were a part. Human beings could freely act against their own nature and the natural order, but such actions deformed them and harmed the good of human beings and the world. Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—thus, natural law—places upon human beings, and each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits, through the practice of virtues, in order to achieve a condition of human flourishing.

Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself. Liberalism inaugurated a transformation in the natural and human sciences, premised on the transformation of the view of human nature and on humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

The first wave of this revolution—inaugurated by early-modern thinkers dating back to the Renaissance—insisted that man should seek the mastery of nature by employing natural science and a transformed economic system supportive of such an undertaking. The second wave—developed largely by various historicist schools of thought, especially in the nineteenth century—replaced belief in the idea of a fixed human nature with a belief in human “plasticity” and capacity for moral progress and transformation. While these two iterations of liberalism—often labeled “conservative” and “progressive”—contend today for ascendance, we would do better to understand their deep interconnection.

The “proto-liberal” thinker who ushered in the “first wave” of liberalism’s transformation was Francis Bacon. Like Hobbes (who was Bacon’s secretary), he attacked the ancient Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of nature and natural law alike and argued for the human capacity to “master” or “control” nature—even at one point comparing nature to a prisoner withholding secrets from an inquisitor and requiring the inquirer (the scientist) to subject it to torture—all with an aim to providing “relief of the human estate.”

Liberalism became closely bound up with the embrace of this new orientation of the natural sciences and also advanced an economic system—market-based free enterprise—that similarly promoted the expansion of human use, conquest, and mastery of the natural world. Early-modern liberalism held the view that human nature was unchangeable—human beings were, by nature, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be harnessed but not fundamentally altered—but could, if usefully channeled, promote an economic and scientific system that increased human freedom through the active and expanding capacity of human beings to exert their mastery over natural phenomena.

The “second wave” of this revolution began as an explicit criticism of this view of humanity. Thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx, from Mill to Dewey, and from Richard Rorty to contemporary “transhumanists” reject the idea that human nature is in any way fixed. Adopting the insight of first-wave theorists, they extend to human nature itself the idea that nature is subject to human conquest.

And so first-wave liberals are today represented by “conservatives” who stress the need for the scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project fully to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends but oppose most forms of biotechnological “enhancement.” Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating man from the biological imperatives of our own bodies. Today’s political debates occur largely and almost exclusively between liberals, first-wave and second-wave, neither of whom confront the fundamentally alternative understanding of human nature and the human relationship to nature that the preliberal tradition defended.

Liberalism is thus not merely a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights, as it is too often portrayed. Rather, it seeks the transformation of the entirety of human life and the world. Its two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity in the service of the fulfillment of the self. Liberalism rejects the ancient and preliberal conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to govern their base and hedonistic desires. This kind of liberty is a condition of self-governance of both city and soul, drawing closely together the individual cultivation and practice of virtue and the shared activities of self-legislation. Societies that understand liberty this way pursue the comprehensive formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of self-rule.

Liberalism instead understands liberty as the condition in which one can act freely within the sphere that is unconstrained by positive law. Liberalism effectively remakes the world in the image of its vision of the state of nature, shaping a world in which the theory of natural human individualism becomes ever more a reality, secured through the architecture of law, politics, economics, and society. Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy such as that first imagined by theorists of the state of nature, except that the anarchy that threatens to develop from that purportedly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. With man liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

Ironically, the more complete the securing of a sphere of autonomy, the more encompassing and comprehensive the state must become. Liberty, so defined, requires in the first instance liberation from all forms of associations and relationships—from the family, church, and schools to the village and neighborhood and the community broadly defined—that exerted strong control over behavior largely through informal and habituated expectations and norms.

These forms of control were largely cultural, not political—law was generally less extensive, and existed largely as a continuation of cultural norms, the informal expectations of behavior that were largely learned through family, church, and community. With the liberation of individuals from these associations and membership based upon individual choice, the need for impositions of positive law to regulate behavior grows. At the same time, as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are increasingly felt to be residual, arbitrary, and oppressive, motivating calls for the state to actively work toward their eradication through the rationalization of law and regulation.

Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state. Hobbes’s Leviathan perfectly portrayed those two realities: The state consists solely of autonomous (and non-grouped) individuals, and the individuals are “contained” by the state. No other grouping is granted ontological reality.

In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a near-universal pursuit of immediate gratification: Culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past toward the end of cultivating virtues of self-restraint and civility, instead becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting a culture of consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, seemingly self-maximizing but socially destructive behaviors begin to predominate in society.

In schools, norms of modesty, comportment, and academic honesty are replaced by widespread activities of lawlessness and cheating (along with the rise of forms of surveillance of youth), while in the fraught realm of coming-of-age, courtship norms are replaced by hookups and utilitarian sexual encounters. The norm of stable, lifelong marriage fades, replaced by various arrangements that ensure the fundamental autonomy of the individuals, whether married or not. Children are increasingly viewed as a limitation upon individual freedom, even to the point of justifying widespread infanticide under the banner of “choice,” while overall birthrates decline across the developed world. In the economic realm, get-rich-quick schemes replace investment and trusteeship. And, in our relationship to the natural world, short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty becomes our birthright, whether or not its result for our children might be shortages of life-sustaining resources such as topsoil and potable water. Restraint of any of these activities is understood to be the domain of the state’s exercise of positive law and not the result of cultivated self-governance born of cultural norms and institutions.

Premised on the idea that the basic activity of life is the inescapable pursuit of what Hobbes called the “power after power that ceaseth only in death”—Alexis de Tocqueville would later describe it as “inquietude” or “restlessness”—the endless quest for fewer obstacles to self-fulfillment and greater power to actuate the ceaseless cravings of the human soul requires ever-accelerating forms of economic growth and pervasive consumption. Liberal society can barely survive the slowing of such growth and would collapse if it were to stop or reverse for an extended period of time. The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis on “Right” over the “Good”—is nevertheless premised on the embrace of the liberal human as a self-fashioning individual and self-expressive consumer. This default aspiration requires that no truly hard choices be made between lifestyle options.

Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from those constitutive associations and the accompanying education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of good families, schools, and communities was assumed, though their bases were philosophically undermined. The philosophical undermining led to the undermining of these goods in reality, as the norm-shaping authoritative institutions become tenuous with liberalism’s advance. In its advanced stage, the passive depletion has become active destruction: Remnants of associations historically charged with the cultivation of norms are increasingly seen as obstacles to autonomous liberty, and the apparatus of the state is directed toward the task of liberating individuals from any such bonds.

In a similar way—in the material and economic realm—liberalism has drawn down on age-old reservoirs of resources in its endeavor to conquer nature. An extended inability to provide for seemingly endless choice would result in a systemic crisis, requiring the state to face down a populace suddenly confronted with the one unacceptable “choice” of restricted choices. Liberalism can function only by the constant increase of available and consumable material goods and satisfactions, and thus by constantly expanding humanity’s conquest and mastery of nature. No matter the political program of today’s leaders, more is the incontestable program. No person can aspire to a position of political leadership through a call for limits and self-command.

Liberalism was a wager of titanic proportions, a wager that ancient norms of behavior could be abolished in the name of a new form of liberation and that the conquest of nature would supply the fuel that would permit near-infinite choices. The twin outcomes of this effort, the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources, make inevitable an inquiry into what comes after liberalism.

Liberalism’s defenders fear that any compromise of liberal principles will result in the resurgence of religious warfare, the re-enslavement of various populations, the loss of the independence of women, and the abandonment of rights and equality under law. If I am right, however, a reconsideration of liberalism’s two main commitments will not compromise but instead be the preconditions for securing equal human dignity and ordered liberty. The conception of inviolable human dignity, of constitutional limits upon central power, of equality under law, and of the free exchange of goods and services in markets is, again, part of a preliberal legacy.

The creation of a world after liberalism would not require, as some might fear, the dismantling of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, nor the cessation of free markets. Instead, what would be required is a fundamental rethinking of how law and economics are understood and employed to undergird the liberal vision of society. Such a rethinking is by necessity taking place, in many ways. As government is able to provide fewer and fewer services to people facing challenging times (the claims of the political left notwithstanding), people will necessarily turn to the very constitutive relationships that liberalism regarded as limitations upon our autonomy: family, neighborhood, and community. Breakdowns in the market similarly call for strengthening such institutions. The economic crisis has, for example, resulted in greater understanding of the need to rely upon the help of families and communities, as shown in the growth of multigenerational homes, which were the norm for much of human history.

Contemporary “conservatism” does not offer an answer to liberalism, because it is itself a species of liberalism. While the elders on the political right continue to rail against “environmentalists,” they fail to detect how deeply conservative (conservationist) is the impulse among the young who see clearly the limits of the consumptive economy and the ravages it bequeaths to their generation. What these elders have generally lacked is a recognition that one cannot revise one of liberalism’s main commitments, today characterized as “progressivism,” while ignoring the other, particularly economic liberalism. A different paradigm is needed, one that intimately connects the cultivation of self-limitation and self-governance among constitutive associations and communities with a general ethic of thrift, frugality, saving, hard work, stewardship, and care. So long as the dominant narrative of individual choice aimed at the satisfaction of appetite and consumption dominates in the personal or economic realms, the ethic of liberalism will continue to dominate our society.

Both the left and the right effectively enact a pincer movement in which local associations and groups are engulfed by an expanding state and by the market, each moving toward singularity in each realm: one state and one market. If the left insists on the liberal interpretation of our constitutional and political institutions in an uncompromising effort to defend the ever-expanding role of the state to secure the practical liberty of individuals, the right defends the free-market system and uncompromisingly rejects any restraint on the unfettered economic choices of individuals. The right embraces a market orthodoxy that places the choosing, autonomous individual at the center of its economic theory and accepts the larger liberal frame in which the only alternative to this free-market, individualist orthodoxy is statism and collectivism. It seeks to promote family values but denies that the market undermines many of the values that undergird family life. The left commends sexual liberation as the best avenue to achieve individual autonomy, while nonsensically condemning the immorality of a marketplace in which sex is the best sales pitch. The encompassing Leviathan daily attains more reality.

A different trajectory does not require a change of institutions; it requires a change in how we understand the human person in relationship to other persons, to nature, and the source of creation. While the Constitution consolidated a number of political activities in the center, it left considerable room for local entities. The return to a more robust form of federalism would allow for greater local autonomy in establishing and cultivating local forms of culture and self-governance.

This will provide space for the nuanced discussions between what sociologist Robert Nisbet called the “laissez-faire of social groups.” Recommending federalism always meets the response that local self-rule and culture will reinstitute local prejudices. That argument is a strained effort not to defend the great and I think irreversible achievement of Christendom’s embrace of the imago Dei, but instead to defend the state’s intervention in every sphere of life, justified on the grounds that local norms and prohibitions express bigotry and lead directly to oppression.

A wide variety of local norms and beliefs should be permitted, within limits that would exclude egregious limits upon human liberty. These authoritative norm-shaping institutions and behaviors are the only credible mechanisms for advancing the substantial withering away of the state. These local norms and beliefs would afford a different experience of liberty, one about which liberalism has been silent, one that stresses self-governance and self-limitation achieved primarily through the cultivation of practices and virtues. Such a cultivation of ordered liberty would restrain the pursuit of libertine liberty, and restrain the tendency toward the expansion of state and market, which together increasingly undermine constitutive social institutions, thereby leaving the individual “free” to be shaped by popular culture and advertising mostly aimed to encourage the appetites fed by the enticements of a globalized market.

The recognition of the central and constitutive role and the necessity of the varied institutions that exist between the state and the individual has been a staple observation of thinkers from Tocqueville to contemporary thinkers on both the nominal right and nominal left, such as Bertrand de Jouvenel, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Wilson Carey McWilliams, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. As they have argued, family, citizenship, church, neighborhood, community, schools, and markets need to be drawn closer together in a more integrated whole, in every aspect ranging from the built environment to the cultivation of genuine local cultures arising from the varying circumstances of diverse places. Drawing them together requires an ethic of self-command. So long as the right tries to defend them without offering a broader ecology of a deeply integrated and formative community—something broader, for example, than the long-standing defense of “family values” that denigrates the idea that there is a relationship between the family and the village—it can offer no real alternative to liberalism.

If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory, culminating in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied even without replenishing them, then we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and likely martial imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state.

If my analysis is fundamentally accurate, liberalism’s endgame is unsustainable in every respect: It cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it continually provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back slowly but inexorably into a future in which extreme license invites extreme oppression.

The ancient claim that man is by nature a political animal and must in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. Currently we lament and attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s idea of liberty but not the deeper sources of those symptoms deriving from the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments.

While most commentators today regard our current crises—whether understood morally or economically or, as they are rarely understood, as both moral and economic—as technical problems to be solved by better policy, our most thoughtful citizens must consider whether these crises are the foreshocks of a more systemic quake that awaits us. Unlike the ancient Romans, confident in their eternal city, who could not imagine a condition “after Rome,” we should ponder the prospect that a better way awaits after liberalism.

Also, (1) this thread is awesome; and (2) I miss OMM

 

[GowerND11]

I've shared this before, but I'm re-upping Deneen's essay "Unsustainable Liberalism" for reasons that should be obvious:



Also, (1) this thread is awesome; and (2) I miss OMM

Absolutely. Where has he been?

 

[irishfanjho15]

Absolutely. Where has he been?

Just was thinking of him the other day. Hope the professor comes back soon.

 

[Cackalacky]

I've shared this before, but I'm re-upping Deneen's essay "Unsustainable Liberalism" for reasons that should be obvious:



Also, (1) this thread is awesome; and (2) I miss OMM

Absolutely on both parts. This article really resonates postively with me. There are so many comments I want to make but need some time to parse through them.

 

[NDohio]

I've shared this before, but I'm re-upping Deneen's essay "Unsustainable Liberalism" for reasons that should be obvious:



Also, (1) this thread is awesome; and (2) I miss OMM

Thanks for sharing that article.

I knew I would miss OMM the day he announced he was signing off for good. Would love to hear his take on the results of this week's election.

 

[tussin]

It's a fantastic article and I found myself nodding in agreement throughout.

Unfortunately, the article left me feeling like our society is in a hole too deep to get out of.

 

[Legacy]

If liberalism did not exist as a political philosophy, where would conservatism be?

Our Founding Fathers, including James Madison, John and Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin, were disciples of John Locke.

Since Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government was the basis of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, what does that imply about Conservativism and "strict Constitutionists"?

Is Conservatism a reactionary philosophy to the basis for our government?

 

[tussin]

I just re-read it again, while Deenen seems to point out the flaws of both modern conservatism and progressivism --- it seems like the a GOP platform highlighting small government aligns better with preliberal ideals.

Where exactly does Trumpism fall in this spectrum? Is his election a furthering of the crisis, deepening liberal positions that are seen traditionally on both the right and the left? It feels like Trumpism (fiscal policy dedicated to the effectiveness of the free market, without traditional GOP checks on the expanding role of the state) feels like the exact opposite of what is necessary.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

If liberalism did not exist as a political philosophy, where would conservatism be?

Our Founding Fathers, including James Madison, John and Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin, were disciples of John Locke.

Since Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government was the basis of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, what does that imply about Conservativism and "strict Constitutionists"?

Is Conservatism a reactionary philosophy to the basis for our government?

Conservatism, as you seem to be deploying the term, is just as liberal as Progressivism in Deneen's analysis. Neither of them offers a sustainable political philosophy.

I just re-read it again, while Deenen seems to point out the flaws of both modern conservatism and progressivism --- it seems like the a GOP platform highlighting small government aligns better with preliberal ideals.

Yes and no. This highlights the contradiction at the heart of the GOP. You can't promote economic liberalism and social conservatism because the former undermines the latter. Similarly, libertarianism is unworkable because its individualism erodes the sort of robust civil society that's necessary for a minimalist state to be realistic.

Where exactly does Trumpism fall in this spectrum? Is his election a furthering of the crisis, deepening liberal positions that are seen traditionally on both the right and the left? It feels like Trumpism (fiscal policy dedicated to the effectiveness of the free market, without traditional GOP checks on the expanding role of the state) feels like the exact opposite of what is necessary.

Trumpism is a preview of what likely comes after the exhaustion of liberalism-- "blood and soil" ethno-nationalism. Protestant Christianity used to provide the shared moral framework that bound the American majority together. Now that that's fallen apart, we need to find some other vision of the Common Good to take its place. Otherwise, a nasty tribalism will fill the void. Imagine the Alt-Right v. BLM.

 

[Legacy]

Conservatism, as you seem to be deploying the term, is just as liberal as Progressivism in Deneen's analysis. Neither of them offers a sustainable political philosophy.



Yes and no. This highlights the contradiction at the heart of the GOP. You can't promote economic liberalism and social conservatism because the former undermines the latter. Similarly, libertarianism is unworkable because its individualism erodes the sort of robust civil society that's necessary for a minimalist state to be realistic.



Trumpism is a preview of what likely comes after the exhaustion of liberalism-- "blood and soil" ethno-nationalism. Protestant Christianity used to provide the shared moral framework that bound the American majority together. Now that that's fallen apart, we need to find some other vision of the Common Good to take its place. Otherwise, a nasty tribalism will fill the void. Imagine the Alt-Right v. BLM.

Liberalism/conservativism vs _______ ???

Don't delude yourself, Whiskey. There is no underlying political philosophy here and has not been for quite some time. What has driven our government is-----capitalism, which has no soul, an insatiable appetite and an inexhaustible drive.

Advocates for conscience are booed off the political stage and who must choose either academics or are forced to capitulate. American politics is devoid of any spirit. Yet I hope you find a solution to it.