I write in response to two provocative short essays that pay attention to figures on the right (intellectual supporters of Trump) who claim that liberalism is morally bankrupt and that contemporary illiberalism offers a pathway to moral renewal. Here’s the links to the two essays, one by Alexandre Lefebvre, the other by Noah Smith.
My response to this talk/hope/dream of moral renewal is not very coherent. I think a lot of things on the subject. So this post will try to articulate that variety without concerning itself too much with how what I have to say “hangs together.”
But let’s start by seeing what the critique of liberalism has to say for itself.
Here is N. S. Lyons, as quoted by Noah Smith, on the failure of the liberal project that was put into place after World War II in response to the horrors of fascism and the fear of communism.
“Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”
Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism…
Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.” (N. S. Lyons)
This is certainly a different understanding of “deaths of despair” than the one offered by Angus Deaton. More on that later. For now, I have two preliminary reactions. 1) This kind of diagnosis of the ills of modernity, of plural societies grounded in norms of tolerance and equality, is standard fare from the Romantics of the 1790s through the reactionaries opposing the French Revolution to Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft social thinkers to the high modernist cultural right (Yeats, Pound, T. S. Eliot) up to various theological thinkers (including the soft version offered up by Charles Taylor) and now including intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. Hannah Arendt in 1951 identifies “the essential homelessness of the masses” as the conditions in which totalitarianism can take root. “The revolt of the masses against ‘realism,’ common sense, and all ‘the plausibilities of the world’ (Edmund Burke) was the result of their atomization, their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense” (Origins of Totalitarianism, 352, my emphasis). The whole world has gone crazy. You, as Arendt’s parenthetic citation indicates, can already find much the same argument in Edmund Burke.
Here’s Talbot Brewer, hardly a radical soul, a sober minded philosopher at the University of Virginia who, nonetheless buys into Alasdair MacIntyre’s sweeping vision of the barren landscape we all now inhabit. “We are inarticulate in the face of questions that cannot be left to specialists, questions that are basic and unshirkable markers of the human condition, questions such as how we ought to live our lives and what we ought ideally to be like. MacIntyre’s view . . . is that if we are to recover depth and coherence in our thought about the human good, we must first strive to recover a sense of the cultural and intellectual history whose fragmentary conceptual remains provide us with the only resources for framing a livable conception of the good life” (The Retrieval of Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.3, my emphasis).
The narrative of modernity is a narrative of loss—and the loss is always of an imagined past when life was full of meaning, when we actually had (according to MacIntyre) the ability to ask questions about meaning, purpose, and “the good.” Now we are all wanderers in the wilderness, bereft of any meaningful ties to others, or to our history, or to the intellectual resources we would need to live good lives. We can’t even articulate the question of the good life. Ethics needs to be “retrieved”; community needs to be reestablished.
Can we just, for one moment, ask if this portrait of modernity is even slightly plausible? Should we not be suspicious that the date of the fall into modernity shifts depending on the writer. For Arendt, apparently, it’s the end of the classical world; for T. S. Eliot it’s the early 17th century (right after Shakespeare’s death); for Macintyre, it’s the end of the Middle Ages.
Let’s engage full-heartedly in a thoughtful assessment of conditions on the ground for people living in 2025 or 1945 or any other date you want to pick—with full attention to how different those conditions are depending on where on the globe you live. But could we at least stop claiming there was a time in the past when all was hunky-dory, that something vital was once possessed but is now lost? Any clear eyed view of human history demonstrates there was never a time when humans had it all figured out. And can’t we dispense with huge generalizations about civilizational despair and a global loss of meaning? Really? What evidence is offered that people experience their lives as lacking meaning? Or that people in modernity are any less or more capable of considering how to live a good life than people in ancient Greece or medieval Europe or, for that matter, various indigenous peoples outside of Europe’s sphere prior to 1492?
Funny how the people making these condemnatory judgments of modernity always exempt themselves. They don’t claim their own lives lack meaning. It’s the other guy they are trying to lift out of the slough of despond. (How thoughtful of them to offer a helping hand!)
My second reaction is that I begin to suspect that the critique is really all a matter of taste—and that Nietzsche was the one to understand that. For starters, the soulless modern societies are always the prosperous ones of the West. Having for the most part dropped (by the end of the 20th century) benighted ideas about bringing “civilization” to the savages, now the widely differing conditions (material and otherwise) in which different global populations live is just passed over in silence. What really seems to irk the mandarin critics of modern life (Kierkegaard, Ruskin, Arendt, Eliot, Adorno, MacIntyre all fit this bill) is just how badly the masses use the leisure time that modernity has afforded them. The underclasses—the unheard and unseen for millennia—emerge from their obscurity and are interested in and pleased by the vulgar, the meretricious. What “they”(the plebeians) seem to value, how they choose to spend their time and energy, is appalling. Surely such pursuits can only indicate non-serious lives, ones dedicated to things of no lasting value or true meaning. (This contempt for the bourgeois, for shopkeepers, can be accompanied by a romantic view of “the folk,” of peasants and the like who have been uncorrupted by modernity. Hokum of this variety can be found in Wordsworth and Yeats.)
If only people would be content with the station they were born into–and would listen to the exhortations of their betters–all would be well. The career open to talents has just opened the door to the crass, the grasping, the people who lack class (in its sense of a refined set of desires and tastes).
Even J. S. Mill, who hates the paternalistic tenor of all efforts to call the masses to behavior their betters approve of, can’t keep from introducing a hierarchy between worthy pursuits and those not worthy of human beings. Mill says no person can be a better judge of an individual’s interest than that individual him- or herself. So butt out! Yet he can’t keep his disapproval of how some people live their lives to himself.
In short, it’s freedom for me but not for thee for most of these critics of modernity. The lack of “strong gods” as Lyons puts it means, in practice, I can freely choose to follow such gods, but you are not free to not follow them. Your not following them is (in ways never very clearly explained) screwing up my following them. It’s the puzzle of the whole gay marriage debate played out again and again. You are against gay sex and gay marriage. Great. Don’t indulge in either. But what harm is it to you if I practice either one. You can lament that someone lives a frivolous life, that they have not made it meaningful along the lines that you deem confer meaning, but how does that detract from your meaning? Why can’t you just let me be?
In his book on liberalism, Lefebvre calls “reciprocity the cardinal virtue of liberal democracy” (146). I don’t think that’s right—or, at least, reciprocity rests upon a prior virtue: tolerance. I define tolerance as “cultivated indifference.” Cultivated because it does not come naturally. We as human beings just seem prone to being outraged by what someone else is doing, saying, thinking. One man’s meat is another’s poison–and we can’t resist trying to change what that other guy is eating. We can’t just shrug and just let him go his way. We have the urge to, at the very least, voice our disapproval and, at the very most, intervene to make him stop doing that. It’s a cliché that liberalism has its origins in establishing religious tolerance sometime around 1750 as a way to stop over two hundred years of Protestants and Catholics killing each. (The Irish did not get the memo.) What an incredible achievement! One of the true glories of human history. And those who pine for “strong gods” want to roll back that achievement.
So the real moral challenge is how to cultivate tolerance, how to get people to live in a world that is crowded with other people of whom they disapprove. Learning how to accept how you can’t change others’ behavior to fit your notions of how to live a life–and, crucially, that you shouldn’t want to change their behavior–is the vary basis of a decent society and a moral modus vivendi in a pluralistic world. Liberalism is about trying to extend as far as possible the things any individual is allowed to do without fear of interference from others or from the state. Of course, that desire poses moral dilemmas of its own, most notably the issue of where to draw the line. What behaviors cannot and should not be tolerated. Not an easy call to make–and that decision will constantly be revised and contested.
Still, this is where I believe the rubber hits the road. It’s either tolerance or violence. I want no part of a “moral renewal” that it is founded on coercion and violence. And I refuse to believe that modernity means the loss of a communal unanimity “we” once enjoyed. We never enjoyed the unanimity, the unity, that Lyons bemoans losing. Read Thucydides. Or take the Middle Ages for another example; they were full of internal wars against “heretics” as well as the external wars (the Crusades) against Muslims. Every creed based on “strong gods” identifies enemies. And it doesn’t take much or long to justify violence against those enemies.
The existence of enemies serves an additional crucial purpose: it serves to explain why the utopia of a society united in its allegiance to the strong gods is never achieved. Noah Smith (in the blog post linked above) is especially good in describing this dynamic.
“But anyway, yes, this thing will fail, because nothing is being built. Yes, every ideological movement assures us that after the old order is completely torn down, a utopia will arise in its place. Somehow the utopia never seems to arrive. Instead, the supposedly temporary period of pain and sacrifice stretches on longer and longer, and the ideologues running the show become ever more zealous about blaming their enemies and rooting out the enemies of the revolution. At some point it becomes clear that the promises of utopia were just an excuse for the rooting out of enemies — thumos as an end in and of itself.” (Noah Smith; “thumos” is a term from Harvey Mansfield referring to masculine strength).
Even on a topic as mundane as the economy (not pie-in-the-sky transcendent like “meaning”), the inability of the right to ever admit failure, to always blame various scapegoats, is evident. Like communism, right wing fantasies can never fail; they can only be failed. And as anger at failure increases, so does the level of violence against those blamed for those failures.
I want to make three further points, neither of which is very related to what I have said thus far.
First is the puzzle of how these right wing moralists could fixate on Donald Trump, a man without a moral bone in his body or moral thought in his head, as the agent of moral renewal. The only possible explanation is that they see in him the kind of strength, the kind of contempt for received norms and institutions, and the callous relationship to suffering on the ground required to raze liberal culture and political structures. They are placing their faith in destruction (since Trump is clearly only capable of that phase), thinking that somehow the work of constructing their illiberal order can than proceed. If nothing else, they show an astounding lack of imagination in their failure to see what destruction entails. The same lack of imagination led to the two World Wars of the 20th century. Somehow we can’t wrap our heads around how destructive humans can be, even with glaring historical examples (or the current wars in Ukraine and Israel) to show us the truth.
Second: in early 2017, I was in a DC restaurant just shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration. At the next table was a guy from Notre Dame (he could have been Patrick Deneen for all I knew) talking about how Trump’s presidency opened up the path to moral regeneration. He was talking to three other men, all of whom were obviously Washington politicos of one stripe or another, possibly members of Congress or of Congressional staffs, or functionaries in the federal bureaucracy. The Notre Dame guy focused, not surprisingly, on abortion and the disintegration of the family as the ills that were to be remedied—with the Catholic Church lighting the way. Only my wife kicking me under the table kept me from leaning over and asking him about the moral bona fides of a church that enabled and covered up sexual abuse of children.
I am hardly the only one to have noticed how completely the intellectual right wing (Harvey Mansfield as one prime example, but J. D. Vance has stepped forward as another) associates moral decline with the changes in women’s roles and behavior wrought by feminism. Yes, there is also deep resentment of non-whites taking up positions in the public sphere and civil society. (Non-whites are tolerable as entertainers—sports heroes and singers/rappers–but keep them out of board rooms and the classrooms where we credential professionals.) Still, I can’t help but be amazed at how much it comes down to sex. The Church’s attempt to deny sex (the absurd requirement of chastity for its clergy), along with its refusal to ordain women, and its refusal to countenance sex as anything other than a means to reproduction. So it refuses to see sexual abuse of children even as it is horrified by the thought of women as sexual creatures with any right to self-determination in matters ranging from sex to how to live their lives. That resentment of women is a red thread throughout much contemporary right wing moralizing. Women, like blacks, should not get “uppity,” should not show any disquiet or discontent with the roles to which white men want to confine them. As many have pointed out, abuse of women seems to have been an essential requirement to being given a position within this second Trump administration.
My third point. Deaths of despair. Lyons talks of civilization committing suicide—and apparently the rationale is the lack of meaning, is the “thinness” of liberal life (a time-worn complaint). But, surely, when it comes to actual suicides (not the abstract one of a society doing itself in), the culprit is economic precarity combined with the necessities of holding a job and keeping it. People (I would assert—but admittedly without concrete evidence) know where meaning lies in their lives. They find it in the struggle to maintain a decent life, day to day, for themselves and for their loved one. A roof over their heads, food to eat, vacations, friends, a way forward for their children. Sneer if you like, but surviving in our cruel society–where vast numbers don’t have enough to eat, where the minimum wage is not remotely close to a living wage, where one is one medical emergency away from complete bankruptcy, and where one holds a job at the sufferance of an employer who can (and will) lay you off tomorrow—is an achievement worthy of profound respect.
It constantly amazes me how most people manage to keep on keeping on, that they do not collapse under the burdens and anxieties that are daily life in these United States. Yes, some people go under (as Deaton has documented), but I am surprised it isn’t more. And, yes, I know that Deaton’s study has been criticized. But even if he got some of the exact facts/numbers wrong, there remains the fact that many people in our society live precarious lives. They cannot afford (quite literally) to relax for a moment; they must keep their noses to the grindstone. That’s meaning enough, wrestling a living and a life out of such harsh conditions.
No need for strong gods—and wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could get some respite from the powerful humans who keep them at that grindstone, not to mention the scolds who tell them that their lives lack meaning, that they lack the intellectual and spiritual resources to contemplate how to live a good life. That they are, in short, morally bereft as well as economically burdened. I think their morals are just fine–until they become prey from demagogues just as they live as prey for their economic overlords. Or to put it yet another way, the degradations of modernity which should command out attention–and call for remedy–are material, not spiritual. Somehow, our moral preachers always assume that those they exhort to find meaning are suffering from a soulless material prosperity. If only . . . We have millions on earth (billions, in fact) who would be blessed if burdened with soulless material prosperity.
McGowanBlog 
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