Rod Dreher writes:
The political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the inequality and social dislocation we’re living
through now are a product of liberalism, by which he means not the
philosophy of the Democratic Party, in particular, but the philosophy of the
Western world and its market democracies.
Excerpts:
Excerpts:
Liberalism, as the name suggests, sought to liberate
people from all the institutions and relationships that – in the view of
liberal thinkers – had held people back from achieving the fullness of their
potential, and thereby benefitting society through their inventiveness and
creativity. They argued for the diminution of membership to a form of
marketplace choice that individuals could enter and exit at will, reserving
always their options for future revision – where they would live, what they
would do, whom they would marry (or not), who they would be.
This empowered the “rational and industrious” while
exposing the “querulous and contentious.” The structure of society was
rearranged to standardize, rationalize and universalize this arrangement, and
the liberal State became a guarantor of this rearrangement, everything from
supporting “internal improvements” (infrastructure) to promoting a national and
then global marketplace, from subsidizing America’s automobile culture to
forced provision of birth control. The nineteenth-century’s heavy progressive
hand in the form of its eugenics policy had been disgraced by the encounter
with National Socialism, but a rationalized effort at empowering the strong has
remained at the heart of liberalism from its very outset.
Today many are apt to conclude that growing evidence of
“income inequality” or the division of the nation (and the world) into
ever-more perfectly sifted “winners” and “losers” is a mistake or
departure from liberalism that liberalism can fix. “Progressive” liberals –
often educated at elite institutions of higher education, which have become one
of the main institutional conduits for the sifting of the winners from the
losers – bemoan the inequality, even as they flock to one of a half-dozen
cities of the world where they live at great remove from those who have lost in
the meritocratic sweepstakes, and live lives that have far more in common with
their elite “conservative” political opponents (classical liberals) than with
those whose lot they pity, but in no way seek to share.
Deneen cites the economist Tyler Cowen’s new book Average Is Over as a critically important contribution
to the way we think about America’s future (though you should not assume that
this means Deneen agrees with him).
Cowen sees the country settling into a
Third World-like social and economic arrangement in which elites live in cities
and run everything while Everybody Else lives in favelas and are kept in line by bread and
circuses.
The ideology of meritocracy will be used to justify this arrangement.
It’s not so much inequality that characterizes the new settlement — we have always
had material inequality with us, and always will — as it is the attitude of the
elites towards the rest: they’re on their own, and their fate has nothing to do
with the elites’.
It’s the Ayn Randization of America. Deneen’s point is
that this is not happening in spite of liberalism, but because of it.
More:
In the world that Cowen describes coming into being, we
see the full flourishing of a different vision, in which to the greatest extent
possible our fates are disconnected, especially encouraged by the disassembling
of the institutions and social forms that were devised to link the fates of the
strong and the weak.
Today many of the communal forms of life that might once
have been thought to link the fates of the strong and weak are attenuated or
all but dissolved. There has been extraordinary geographic sorting, a result of
extensive educational sorting (even President Obama sends his daughters to the
Sidwell Friends School). We are engaged in the human equivalent of strip
mining, identifying “rational and industrious” young people in every city and
town and hamlet through standardized testing, extracting them for processing at
one of our refining centres (universities), and then excreting them now as
productive units of economic production to be conveyed to an hub of economic
activity while leaving behind a landscape stripped bare of talented and
industrious people that God thought wise to distribute widely.
For a graduate of one of the institutions where I teach
or I have taught – Princeton, Georgetown and Notre Dame – to return to one of
these strip-mined places would be an indication of failure. How striking a
contrast to the life led by one of my favourite Minnesotans, that transplanted
son of Chisholm, Minnesota – Archibald Graham, better known as Archie
“Moonlight” Graham of “Field of Dreams” fame. In spite of the fact – or,
rather, because – he held a medical degree, he spent fifty years in Chisholm
where he served the children of the Chisholm schools and every Saturday could
be found in his office offering free eye exams to poor children and giving away
eyeglasses that he collected from townspeople. A scholarship in his name is
still offered to two graduating seniors from the Chisholm High School.
I dare say that, were Doc Graham growing up today, he
would have settled in one of five cities and there would be no scholarship in
his name after he died. Once every town in America had its own Doc Graham, but
in the world described by Cowen, you can be damn sure that the future Doc
Grahams will be extracted from the crowded favelas, never to be
seen again.
Note well that
Deneen concedes there are no plausible competing models to liberalism currently
on offer, and whatever would succeed it may well be worse.
But saying, “It
could always be worse” is not a sufficient response to the challenges posed by
late liberalism.
Deneen’s essay is challenging on a number of fronts.
As a
reader of Dante, I am struck by how the world of atomizing liberalism described
by Deneen resembles Dante’s Inferno.
In Dante’s Paradiso, the mutual and joyful
interdependence of others is characteristic of heaven; utter and eternal
solitude is what it’s like in Hell.
In Paradiso, there exists a kind of
inequality (this is dealt with in the episode with the nun Piccarda), but it is
explained by saying that God desires harmony, not uniformity.
In heaven, all
are equally blessed, but not equally positioned — and to be united with God is
to accept His will in that regard.
All the blessed in Paradiso live with the
good of all the others foremost in mind, because they are filled with divine
love.
We are obviously not going to recreate Heaven on Earth,
but Paradiso is a model of social harmony in which all souls understand
themselves as inextricably linked to each other, and none able to fulfill his
own proper destiny without love for all others.
Dante says that if we on earth
saw ourselves as God sees us, and lived as God wants us to live, this is how we
would do it.
He wrote Paradiso as
a political exile, and within a polity in which elite-led factions were tearing
each other to bits, destroying the peace and order that everyone depended on to
thrive.
Dante, of course, was no modern liberal, or a liberal of
any kind (he prescribed monarchy as a cure for Italy’s political strife). Liberalism wouldn’t begin to emerge for centuries yet.
But it’s interesting to
consider how humane Dante’s ideal of political order is compared to our own.
A
politician who offered a vision sounding like Dante’s would be written off as a
socialist loon, or maybe just a loon, period, because there’s nothing in Dante
prescribing the redistribution of wealth.
Besides, I don’t think any one of us
care to hear our politicians gassing on about love.
The point, though, is that
in Dante, the Good is a communal good, not the sum total of individual goods.
If I’m reading him correctly, Deneen says that liberalism by its very nature
makes it impossible to think in those terms.
It’s a difficult problem.
As you know, I am far more
likely to side with Pat on the politics of all this, but my experience of the
last three years has given me a more nuanced perspective.
I’ll be talking about
this in my forthcoming book about Dante, but for now, I’ll say that I can’t see
how the ideal state of mutuality exists outside of a shared and lived
commitment to faith — the Christian faith in particular, given its central
focus on humility, repentance, and forgiveness.
(I don’t mean to deny the power
of other faiths to bind in this way; I just don’t know enough about them to
say.)
Mutuality only approaches justice when everyone
recognizes that they live in a bond of love — a bond into which they were born,
not necessarily chose.
Yet human nature being what it is, many, probably most,
of us would use that bond pridefully, to manipulate others into doing our will.
I am grateful that I came along in a time in which it was not only thinkable,
but possible to leave my home and go out into the world.
If I had not been able
to develop my own life free from the immense gravity of my father, I would have
been crushed by it.
I don’t at all mean to say that my father was a bad man,
only that his personality was so strong, and his will so absolute, that
resisting it required me to leave for a long time.
If you’ve read Crunchy Cons or Little
Way, you know that the central political question in my mind is also a
spiritual one: how to be at Home in the world.
I came back to my hometown, but things did not turn out
as I thought they would. Complicated story, one I’ll tell somewhat in How Dante Can Save Your
Life.
The main lesson I learned is that it is folly to expect any
kind of utopia in this world.
I knew that from the beginning — that is
Conservatism 101 — but it’s surprising to dig deep, beneath one’s conscious
knowledge, and find that what one thought one believed is not really what one
believed.
What I came to see is that traditionalism separated from
love becomes a rigid and inhumane ideology — but this is also true of
liberalism.
There is no political system or arrangement that can make people be
good and just. We can only better our odds.
Sorry that these thoughts are incomplete. I’m still
working through a lot of this. I think my own political development goes like
this:
1. Young Rod: Liberalism is great, freeing me of the
tyranny of roots.
2. Older Rod: Liberalism is seriously problematic, making
it very difficult to form and to sustain deep roots.
3. Even Older Rod: Liberalism is seriously problematic,
but so is everything else, including traditionalism. We can’t continue as a
society to live under liberalism, because it’s tearing us apart, and creating
exactly the world Pat Deneen identifies. But all the alternatives seem worse.
To me, the answer, insofar as there can be an answer, is
to be found in a more humane and, well, liberal version of traditionalism.
But
what does that mean? Is it even possible, or is that utopian?
After all,
tradition that can be endlessly modified is no tradition at all — but a
tradition that can never be modified eventually ossifies and dies.
Is it
possible to think beyond liberalism and individuality, and individual choice as
the summum bonum? If
not, how do we create structures in the world that make it easier to choose the
Good?
How can we know the Good in a condition of radical pluralism?
My sense is that we have to seek our answers within the
possibilities dictated by liberalism, insofar as there are no more compelling
alternatives on offer.
Benedict Option stuff, this is.
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