Author: john mcgowan

LINKS

Blogging has been pretty much non-existent for me over the past year.  I won’t make any promises about the future.  If my silence goes on much longer, I will very likely just close down this site altogether.

But I have written a few things over the past months, and here at the links for anyone who might be interested.

First, a review of John Guillory’s recent short book on “close reading.”

https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/37/3/919/8259478

Second, a review of Alexandre LeFebevre’s book, Liberalism as a Way of Life.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/liberalism-as-a-way-of-life-by-alexandre-lefebvre-princeton-nj-princeton-university-press-2024-285p/8A0FBBBFBD5842764650B966930B9EEF

Third, an essay on Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment that considers its deficiencies as a solution to the failure to construct a “common world” within a political and/or social community.

https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.58.1.0040

This last link is only to an abstract of the essay.  Contact me at mcgowanjohn74@gmail.com if you would like me to send you a copy of the whole essay.  I also have a pdf of the entire special issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in which the essay appears.  Happy to send that along to anyone who is interested.

The Perplexities of Violence

I have been gnawing at this issue for some forty years now and am no nearer to a formulation that satisfies me.  I think it’s because there are no generalizations about violence and its effects that stand up to even the most cursory encounter with historical examples.  I would love to believe that violence is always (in the long run) counter-productive.  Certainly in any utilitarian calculus that measures whether people (in the aggregate) are better off as a result of violence, the answer most usually will be a clear-cut NO.  Apart from its immediate (in the moment) victims, violence breeds violence. The definition of violence from which I work is “physical harm done to a person by another person.”  To perpetuate violence is to insure that physical harm will be done—either to others or to oneself.

But before I even try to consider how violence leads to more violence, let me dwell a moment on my definition.  I do not intend to deny the extended use of the term “violence” to denote psychological or material (destruction of a person’s goods or livelihood) harm done to people. And destruction of non-human entities (whether human built, like cities, or non-human built, like forests) could also be covered by the word violence.  It is also the case that physical harm is done by earthquakes and the like. But, for simplicity’s sake, I want to stick with direct physical harm done by some human to another human in trying to come to grips with how violence is deployed in various cases, and what that violence causes or does not cause to happen.  In other words, what motivates the action of inflicting physical harm on others?  What benefits does the perpetrator of violence believe the violence will give him?  What are the actual consequences of acts of violence? (This question indicates my belief that perpetrators of violence are routinely mistaken about violence’s effects.) And, finally, how does violence either underwrite or undermine power?  (The relation of violence to power is an ongoing puzzle.)

Again, let’s be simple about it for starters.  People deploy violence either 1) to force others to do things they would, if left to themselves, not do and 2) to eliminate people who are actual (or are perceived to be) obstacles to what the agent of violence desires.  Violence as intimidation and/or coercion (1) or violence as the means to winning a competition that is understood as either/or (2).  Either I win or you do—therefore, I will use whatever means necessary to assure that I win.  And violence appears the most compelling strategy to assure victory.  There can be no compromise.  It is, as we say, a fight to the death.  As long as you still are present in the field, I am threatened.  You must be eliminated for me to be at peace (the term “peace” used ironically here to indicate a sense of security that is impossible as long as my opponent lives). 

In short, violence is, one, the great persuader (in the coercion case) or, two, the surest means for victory in a competition.  The argument against claiming violence is always counter-productive is that it can secure submissive obedience and the absence of competitors over very long stretches of time.  Terror deployed by either state or non-state actors can subdue whole populations. (Definition of terror:  the use of sporadic violence against one’s opponents. Many opponents can be left unharmed, but the key is that they know themselves subject to violence at all times and that acts of violence are unpredictable.  When and where violence will be inflicted cannot be calculated; thus, violence is ever present as a threat that is then actuated sometimes.)   Historical examples abound, including the killing and corralling of native American populations as an instance of the “elimination” path, with the reign of Jim Crow in the American South offers a case of terror’s effectiveness when deployed over a one hundred year span. 

The reductionist view of the relation of violence to power is that power is, at bottom, just violence.  Or, to put it differently, power’s ultimate recourse is always violence (the ability of the state—or of other actors—to physically harm with impunity).  The knowledge that the powerful can harm you is what keeps those who would resist power in line.  Power can inflict harms short of physical destruction to keep resistors in line (including economic destitution and incarceration), but it remains the fact that harm done to bodies is the ultimate threat—and power remains dependent on that threat. Inevitably, power will act upon that threat at times. 

The problem is that the reductionist view does not work—or, at least, not in all cases.  When power resorts to violence to secure obedience is precisely when it is weakest, Arendt argued.  Her generalization is as false as the reductionist generalization.  But she was on to something.  Any law (or other device to govern behavior) is only effective if the vast majority obey it voluntarily.  The power of the law resides (in this analysis) in the governed’s acceptance that the law as binding.  One classic case is the American experiment with prohibition of alcohol.  And history offers many examples of seemingly powerful regimes that simply collapsed without much in the way of a battle.  The French and Russian revolutions are cases in point; the governments in both instances were “taken over” very quickly and with very little bloodshed.  It was only after the revolution had occurred that reactionary forces gathered themselves together and instigated civil wars. 

So, it would seem, power based solely on violence follows the Hemingway description of bankruptcy: the power seeps away slowly until it suddenly collapses.  Again, to be clear: the seeping away period can be very long indeed, and collapse (if we take the very long view) in inevitable and multi-caused since nothing human lasts forever. 

What interests me in thinking about the relation between power and violence is the extent to which power’s resorting to violence is delegitimizing.  When and where power relies on violence, it admits that its edicts are not acceptable to those who can only be compelled by violence.  On the one hand, that admission necessitates the creation of the category “criminal.”  Power must insist that there are deviants who simply (for whatever perverse or self-interested reasons) will not obey the law.  On the other hand, extensive reliance on violence will indicate the law’s unreasonableness, its inability to win voluntary consent.  Violence may cow many, but it will not win their respect.  (Exceptions to this assertion, of course.  There will always be those who are impressed by violence, who aspire to be enlisted in the ranks of its foot soldiers.  I will get back to my thoughts on this sub-section of any population.)

The “on the one hand and on the other hand” of the previous paragraph reveals how completely acts of violence are entangled in speech acts.  The act of violence itself is a speech act.  It can only have its effect if the act is publicly known and the message it is meant to convey is somewhat unambiguous.  Thus, a Mafia killing must clearly indicate this is the result of encroaching on our territory.  Revenge killings must make the fact that this “was for revenge” obvious.  State violence must say “this kind of behavior/disobedience” will not be tolerated.  And, in a secondary speech act, the state creates the category “criminal” to justify its violence against those who disobey.  An exception to violence being public (as it must be if it is to send a message) are private murders where the perpetrator hopes to get away with the act never being ascribed to him.  Such murders only make sense if there is one victim, without any future intention to deploy violence—and hence no audience to whom a message needs to be sent.  Even serial killers, it seems to me, are message senders.  They get off on the terror they inspire among a certain population.

Because violence is embedded in message sending, the meaning of any act of violence inevitably becomes a contested field.  Violence is rhetoric.  Acts of violence are intended to persuade.  The regime (Romans against Christians; South Africa against black dissenters) that creates martyrs aims to dissuade others from acting as the martyr did; the martyr’s peers hold up his death as an inspiration to further acts of resistance.  War aims to persuade another country to bend to my country’s will just as violence against the “criminal” aims to persuade others to follow the law.  But just as violence often inspires violent resistance, the meanings attached to any act of violence will also generate resistance.  There will be competing interpretations.

I think that all of this means that acts of violence always need to be justified.  That is, every act of violence will be accompanied by a set of speech acts that strive to justify that act.  This is hardly to say that such justifications are equally plausible.  Some will be downright risible, but I daresay few acts of violence go unspoken.  This, admittedly, is tricky.  There are black holes, and people who are simply “disappeared.”  And regimes (or the Mafia) are rarely explicit about the kinds of torture they deploy.  Similarly, the Nazi concentration camps were (sort of) secret, while what was going on in those camps was even more secret.  Still, in all these cases it was generally known that “enemies” (of the state, of the people, of our clan) were targets, even if the details were left to the imagination or only whispered in various quarters. And leaving things to the imagination might even be a more effective way to instigate terror.

If I am right that all acts of violence need to be justified, that suggests there is a prima facie assumption that violence is wrong.  It can only be justifiable if compelling reasons as to its necessity are offered.  Violence is “moralized” (made moral) when it is claimed that only its deployment can insure the health of morality against the threats posed by the immoral.  Wherever an attempt to justify violence is made, the term “necessary” will almost invariably appear.  The perpetrator of violence will almost always express regret that violence had to be resorted to.  But his victim left him no choice.  It was a species of self-defense; without the recourse to violence, some horrible consequence would have unfolded.

To appeal to self-defense is always an attractive option because self-defense is almost universally accepted as the one obvious, incontrovertible, justification for violence.  No one currently thinks the Ukrainians are engaging in unjustified violence against the Russian invaders—unless they buy Russian propaganda in all its absurdity.  But even here matters are not simple.  Firstly, because self-defense gets entangled with questions of revenge, which may explain why the desire for revenge is so powerful.  But revenge notoriously generates cycles of violence and, thus, is not (in many cases) a successful remedy to inflicted violence.  It just keeps violence going.

Secondly, self-defense gets tangled up in notions of “proportionate violence.”  There is some sense that violence inflicted as a response to a prior act of violence should be proportionate.  To escalate the scale of violence, even in cases of self-defense, is usually seen as morally dubious.  The obvious current example is Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023.  The whole notion of “proportionate violence” is bizarre.  Who is doing the measuring?  Yet the moral intuition underlying the notion is real and strongly felt.  Even in a no holds barred war (such as World War II) some limitations on violence are still respected.  The Germans did not kill downed Allied airmen wholesale, or non-Russian prisoners of war.  How to understand where and how some limitations are imposed on possible acts of violence is extremely difficult.  There is no formula; there is a tendency toward escalation; and yet since 1945 no belligerent with nuclear arms has used them.  Whether that restraint is solely a result of a rational fear of retaliation is an open question.  In any case, whether with the notion of proportion in violent responses to acts of violence or in self-imposed limitations on the means of violence deployed in conflicts, there is a shaky, unenforceable, yet real set of constraints.  When those constraints are ignored, the violent actors lose any plausible grounds for justification.  And it proves both difficult and rare for any person or any regime to say “fuck it” to all attempts at justification.  The rule does seem to apply even in the most egregious cases: those engaged in violence will attempt to justify their actions. Violent actors will try to win the rhetorical battle in the court of public opinion. (In international affairs currently, that court is often the United Nations. Its lack of enforcement powers make it seem absurd in many cases, yet state actors still care about its verdicts.)

Because self-defense is almost always accepted as a justification, those who initiate violence have a much harder row to hoe.  For that reason, peremptory violence is most often justified in the name of preventing an even greater harm than the violence itself. The speech acts here are counter-factual; if I don’t act violently, these things will happen.

Presumably, violence could be deployed to bring a better world into existence (Soviet violence was perhaps an instance), but much more usually violence is justified as overcoming the threat certain others pose to the current state of affairs.  Still, preventive violence can morph into (or be merged with) creative violence.  The Nazis offer an example of such intertwining.  They preached (and practiced) violence against the threat posed by Jews and communists, but they also used the violence to create a whole new political order, one they claimed would be strong enough to combat those threats. In its own way, the current Trump administration is following that path.  It has designated a set of enemies (including the “deep state”) fit to be punished while also attempting to create a whole new form of government (rule by executive) justified as the only means to overcome the enemies.

Since the revulsion against violence, the prima facie assumption of its being morally wrong, is so prevalent, the demonization of enemies is required.  Such enemies must be deemed outside the moral pale.  This gets complicated, of course, in the modern state system, with its distinction between citizens and non-citizens.  Even the Nazis felt compelled to strip people of citizenship first before making them the victims of violence.  It remains to be seen how much the Trump administration will refrain from violence against citizens.  Or if it will begin to strip citizenship from current citizens. For now, Trump has declared open season on non-citizens, while only (?) depriving citizens of employment while not sending them off to prison. (But his “lock ’em up” fantasies might lead to that next step.)

But what about those for whom violence is not wrong, but actually to be celebrated as a sign of strength.  Easy enough for Arendt to make fun of such losers for mistaking a capacity for violence with real power.  Those losers still can cause severe havoc in the world.  And it’s also easy to pathologize these incels, spending hours and hours “gaming,” and frustrated by their lack of access to good jobs, sexual partners, or social respect.  It remains the fact that for some people (mostly men) violence is the means to self-esteem, to showing that they are here and can make a difference in (an impact on) the world.  The recruits for para-military and state thuggery are standing by.  And, as Christopher Browning’s work has shown, just the need to go along, to be accepted as a member of a group, can facilitate violence once someone else instigates it.  Fear of ostracism from the only group that is offering one membership can be sufficient motive to participate in acts of violence in good conscience.  The point: any attempt to come to grips with violence that appeals only to its rationality or to the justifications offered to render it compatible with morality will miss the non-rational and non-moral motivations that enable much violence.  From sadism and crimes of unreflective passion to conformism and ecstatic participation in group actions, the sources of violence are multiple and defy calculation along cost/benefit lines, or in terms of what can be morally justified.

To be continued. These musings are, in large part, only the preliminaries to considering the use of violence as a tactic of resistance to established regimes.  I will take up that question of strategy in subsequent posts.

The Strong Programme: Issues of Method and Advocacy in Presenting Intellectual and Political Positions

This post is a follow-up to the previous one: https://jzmcgowan.com/2025/03/11/moral-renewal/

In particular, I am intrigued by Alexandre Lefebvre’s desire to write a description of illiberal thought that does not verve immediately (or even eventually) into a critique of that thought.  Instead, the idea is to describe illiberal thought on its own terms.  With the pay-off being 1) a better understanding of illiberal views (because not biased, not looking out for “gotchas” as that thought is described) and 2) a way of understanding how illiberal views are appealing to illiberalism’s followers.  Since illiberalism obviously makes sense to millions of people now, it is better not to disparage its followers or insist that they are misinformed, stupid, malicious etc.  Is it possible, in other words, to be illiberal in good faith? And what would an outsider’s account of illiberalism look like if good faith on the part of its adherents was assumed?

I am trying to think through the implications of this approach to the thinking of writers/activists/politicians with whom I deeply disagree. For starters, I am entirely on board with the desire to stop preaching to the choir, i.e. to the endless conversations among progressives (for lack of a better term) about the horrors of the right wing.  I have become notorious among my friends for calling a halt to conversations in which we all sit around tut-tutting about the latest Trump outrages.  Such conversations follow completely predictable lines and feel smug, like the Pharisee in the gospel, to me.  Not to mention that it is incredibly rare for anything new or interesting to be said.

On the positive side, I am perplexed by the appeal of these anti-liberal guys to half the American populace.  (Russia and China didn’t get to vote for their anti-liberal overlords; Modi’s India is perhaps closer to the US in that regard, i.e. in having secured popular support.) So, yes, trying to provide an unbiased, straight up account of what these guys have to say for themselves is an incredibly worthwhile project. 

But I would want to couple that account with some more speculative thinking about why people buy into that worldview.  What about it resonates with them?  We all know the familiar memes that try to answer that question.  Status loss; owning the libs; resentment against cultural elites; feeling disrespected by those elites; loss of solid blue collar jobs to deindustrialization; the rise of women and people of color.  All true enough, but why would these erstwhile new deal democrats turn their backs on the social democratic regulations and institutions that produced a large middle class?  Why fail to see that the attack on social democracy, and on unions, was orchestrated and bank-rolled by those who were determined to redistribute wealth upwards?  Why, in short, do the ideals and actual achievements of social democracy now inspire hostility more than loyalty? 

All that’s familiar territory—and, it would seem, territory Lefebvre does not want to traverse since it is well-trodden.  Fair enough.  He wants to attempt something different: to enter into the mindset of various anti-liberals without any prejudice as to the truth or validity of those mindsets. 

His project resonates with the “strong programme” in sociology (it had its heyday in the 80s and 90s).  Its practitioners tried to achieve “epistemic symmetry”; that is, they wanted to approach all webs of belief as equivalent and contingent.  In other words, they wanted to avoid the starting premise that my beliefs are true, but the other guy’s are false.  Instead, the starting premise should be that the other guy is as rational or irrational as I am, that he has “reasons” for his beliefs just as I do for mine.  So in attempting to describe and understand his beliefs I should evaluate them along exactly the same lines that I would evaluate my own.

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the strong programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_programme

And here’s a long quote from Barbara Herrnstein Smith that lays out the basic idea.  (From Belief and Resistance, Harvard UP, 1997, p. xvi, Smith’s italics).

“If what I believe is true, then how is the other fellow’s skepticism or different belief possible? The stability of every contested belief depends on a stable explanation for the resistance to that belief and, with it, a more or less coherent account of how beliefs generally are formed and validated, that is, an epistemology (though not necessarily a formal one).  The two favored solutions to the puzzle just posed seem to be demonology and, so to speak, dementology: that is, the comforting and sometimes automatic conclusion that the other fellow . . . is either a devil or a fool—or, in more enlightened terms, that he or she suffers from defects or deficiencies of character and/or intellect: ignorance, innate incapacity, delusion, poor training, captivity to false doctrine, and so on.  Both solutions reflect a more general tendency of some significance here, namely ‘epistemic self-privileging’ or ‘epistemic asymmetry’: that is, our inclination to believe that we believe the true and sensible things we do because they are true and sensible, while other people believe the foolish and outrageous things they do because there is something the matter with those people. . . .

[What would it mean/entail] to maintain ‘symmetry’ in analyses of scientific and other beliefs, those beliefs currently seen as absurd and wrong as well as those generally accepted as true?  Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, this commitment to methodological symmetry is not equivalent to maintaining that all beliefs are equally valid (objectively? subjectively?)  Such a claim would have to be, from a constructivist perspective, either vacuous (constructivism, by definition, rejects classic ideas of objective validity) or tautologous (to say all beliefs are equally subjectively valid is just to say that people really believe what they believe).  That commitment is equivalent, however, to maintaining that the credibility of all beliefs, including those currently regarded as true, reasonable, self-evident, and so forth, is equally contingent: equally the product, in other words, of conditions (experiential, contextual, institutional, and so forth) that are fundamentally variable and always to some extent unpredictable and uncontrollable.”

The model here would be Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Harvard UP, 1987), which attempts to lay out all those variables that combine to make a scientific theory or a scientific “fact” acquire widespread consent.

I am very attracted to a project that aspires to methodological symmetry.  And want to cheer on any and all attempts to overcome the temptations to demonology or dementology.  I think such a project is very, very difficult to pull off—all the more reason to try it.

The Herrnstein Smith description of the enterprise is not, however, to provide a simple recapitulation of some one’s views.  Rather, she is describing what might be called a “transcendent” account of a view—if we take “transcendent” in its Kantian sense.  She wants also to delineate the underlying “conditions” (or factors) that combine to make a viewpoint plausible, credible, attract a substantial number of adherents.  It’s the William James point: truth is made; it only comes into existence through a process; it is not an inert, pre-existing, self-evident thing.

Since I spent my whole writing life basically describing and assessing the views of other writers, I was pushed to think about how my own practice over the years aligns with the “Strong programme”—and with what I take to be Lefebvre’s project.  The most obvious thing to say is that I have never come close to (and have never really undertaken) a “transcendent” analysis.  I have not considered the material, societal, institutional, and political bases that leads ideas or beliefs to be formulated, disseminated, and endorsed by various social groups.  I have speculated some on the professional proclivities of intellectuals and on the nature of their institutional base: the university.  But generally in that work [certain essays, and in Democracy’s Children (Cornell UP, 2002)] I don’t consider how their social positioning affects the actual ideas articulated or the belief/nonbelief attached to particular views.

Instead, I have (as philosophers tend to do) tried to 1) lay out what a certain writer thinks, 2) make sense of that thought in the places where it seems hard to understand, and 3) evaluate the plausibility of the thinking in relation to canons of consistency and rationality (very generally construed in terms of what renders an argument convincing) and what can roughly be categorized as “reflective equilibrium.”  That is, do the presented ideas make sense in relation to other things we know about the world, where those “other things” come from experience, from alternative views presented by other writers than the one being examined, and from a sense of what kinds of claims “hang together” as opposed to negating one another. (One key issue here is the role of “intuitions.” How much does my judgment of a writer’s positions depend on whether they align with my pre-rational, originary, intuitions about how the world works and what is right. William James leads us to suspect that a basic sensibility, a basic orientation to others and the world, comes first–and our ideas, our articulated viewpoints, only come second. Those viewpoints exist as after the fact attempts to rationalize, to make seem reasonable, convictions that aren’t based on reason at all. I think he is right about the grounding of our convictions in the pre-rational, but also think that the process of having to articulate reasons for our views–often in response to others who challenge those views–can lead to revisions of our beliefs and commitments.)

Granting that I have not done the work of a “transcendent” account, I still think my work can be seen as occupying four different registers of philosophical presentation.  1. In Postmodernism and its Critics (Cornell UP, 1992), I did offer overviews of various writers (Derrida, Foucault, Said as well as short sections on Kant, Hegel etc.) that could serve as introductions to people not familiar with their work.  However, my overviews were biased in relation to an overarching argument about the nature of postmodern thought generally.  Thus, I was at pains to show what these writers shared—and how they understood and used the work of their 19th century predecessors (hence the sections on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche).  So my descriptions of any writer’s work was “motivated”—and their work was evaluated (even as it was explained) within the framework of a contrast between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.”  In short, an introduction (to postmodern thought) with an attitude.  I was not an unbiased explicator, but I was trying to be a trustworthy one even as I acknowledged my biases.  So I was trying to accomplish a two-sided goal.  I wanted my readers to better understand the postmodern thinkers I discussed, but I also wanted to convince them of the political deficiencies of postmodern thinking.

2)  In my book on Hannah Arendt [Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) I took the more standard route of attempting to provide a synthetic overview of a writer’s whole career (although I will eternally regret that I didn’t include her book on totalitarianism in my account, an omission that made no sense at the time and much less sense now).  But the book is not mere description of what Arendt thought because 1) it strives to make sense of things in Arendt that are perplexing (such as her hostility to the “social” and the puzzle about what the content of political action could actually be given her views); that is, I try to put together the most plausible reconstructive accounts that would explain moments in her text that are particularly hard to make sense of.  And 2) I do evaluate her thinking, allowing myself to explain where I think she gets things wrong or makes assertions that are dubious or that contradict what she asserts elsewhere.  All of this, however, sticks closely to the logic and arguments of Arendt’s own writing, with very little (really, almost none) attention to the “conditions” in which Arendt wrote or under which her work circulated and found adherents/critics.

3) My work on the headnotes for the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, first edition 2001; third edition 2018) was much more straightforward textbook work.  The idea was to offer a short summary of a writer’s characteristic concerns and ideas, with a look at how that writer’s work responded to or was aligned with various traditions (or schools) in the field, and a very short synapses of some objections other writers had raised to the work of the writer in question.  The first person was strictly absent.  I was not evaluating this writer’s views.  I was simply explaining what they believed and how they were located in the field and what some responses to their work had been.  All judgment was left to the reader—or, perhaps, to the field. 

I don’t think Lefebvre is necessarily looking for this kind of textbook impersonality in his project.  But this does approach the suspension of judgment (along with eschewing any temptation to debunking or critique or moral condemnation) that he seems to aspire to.  One trouble, of course, is that textbooks are boring.  The “view from nowhere” style (neither an advocate, or even in sympathy, with the views examined, nor a critic of those views) can prove unreadable after a while.  Advocacy yields piquancy. On the other hand, the Olympian style of all-seeing and impartial Homer has a sublimity of its own to recommend it.  So non-advocacy can have its own style, its own sources of interest.  I think they are hard for a writer to access/deploy, but hardly impossible.  I don’t think anyone would really want to read the over 150 headnotes in our Norton anthology one right after the other.

4) I had one final mode that was pretty much present in all my books, but was absolutely to the fore both in American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).  These works were very much in line with a certain kind of philosophic practice—one that would be called (mostly by those hostile to it) “idealist” and “presentist.”  My goal in both books was to present a particular understanding of what “liberalism” and “democracy” “mean” in normative (or ideal) terms.  To what does an adherence to liberalism or democracy commit a person if those two ideals are understood in the way that I present? So the books argue for a certain understanding of liberalism and democracy, attempt to lay out the consequences of accepting that the presented understanding of these terms is normative and desirable, and to then consider how actual conditions in 21st century America fall short of the ideal.

In pursuing that goal, I raid writers for whatever ideas or arguments are useful to my making my case. (The subtitle of the pragmatist book is “making the case for liberal democracy.”) So I am not 1) offering an examination or explication of the various writers I do discuss and 2) am very partial in what I take from those writers—partial in both senses of the word.  I am biased in what I choose to focus on in their work and incomplete in my engagement with their work.  So, for example, I offer a very secular view of William James, ignoring all his mystical yearnings and interest in the para-normal.  I announce in my preface that I have no investment in offering an “accurate” reading of James’s work or of any of the other pragmatist writers (Peirce, Dewey, Rorty).  I am just stealing from them ideas and arguments I find help me toward articulating my own position.  Thus, in sharp distinction from my postmodernism book, in making my argument in these two later books, a charge of inaccuracy in my portrayal of various writers would be beside the point.  But in the postmodernism book, my whole argument would fall apart if what I had to say about Derrida or Foucault was not “true” in the sense of being a very plausible account of what they have to say.  Accuracy matters in the postmodernism case, but not in the other one. The two latter books stand or fall on the basis of how convincing my “case” is, not on whether I have gotten James or Dewey “right.”

OK.  So where does Lefebvre’s project fit amidst all these ways of skinning the cat.  I don’t know, but I think he wants to get as close as possible to neutral, non-judgmental description.

Is pure, neutral distillation possible—in the manner of an introduction for those unfamiliar with the terrain?  Lefebvre would do the hard work for us of reading/listening to various right-wing voices and then present us with an overview of their thinking, their commitments, and their beliefs.  The audience consists of people with only vague and incomplete ideas about the right-wing world view and right-wing aspirations.  So now, after reading his (projected) book, I know more about the right-wingers.

But . . . How much does it advance our understanding of those views if Lefebvre eschews any analysis or evaluation of them?  Wouldn’t he need, at the very least, to identify the “perks” of becoming the kind of person the right-wing perfectionists want you to be?  In other words, the right-wing views have their negative side (a critique of the liberal world “we” all swim in, where “we” hardly includes the majority of the world’s population) and their positive side (the blessings they say will accrue to people living in illiberal societies).  But those blessings are not very well articulated (at least in right-wing American discourse).  Only vague promises of more economic prosperity and retrieval of lost status are offered; their vision of illiberal man (akin to Lefebvre vision of liberal personhood in his liberalism book [Liberalism as a Way of Life, Princeton UP, 2024]) needs to be fleshed out since it is only hinted at.  Does Lefebvre just let these silences sit unnoticed as he offers his overview of their thinking?  In other words, his liberalism book draws out the implications of liberalism as a “comprehensive doctrine” even where those implications have rarely been noted or highlighted.  The implications are a neglected feature of liberalism.  Wouldn’t a writer be called upon to do the same in an exposition of right-wing views? (I have written a review of Lefebvre liberalism book that I will post in the next few days.)

Once a writer begins articulating unexpressed implications, it is very hard to avoid evaluation.  As Herrnstein Smith says, all positions engage in demonology—and that is what Lefebvre is striving mightily to avoid.  But the right-wing is addicted to telling lies about its opponents and to identifying scapegoats to explain current dysfunctions.  Muslims for Modi; Uighurs and Tibetans for the Chinese; Mexican rapists and drug dealing immigrants for Trump etc.  This isn’t a side-note for right wing views; it’s explicitly and persistently built in.  So Lefebvre is going to need a strategy for addressing those claims about the enemies within—and perhaps he is also going to need to do some kind of Latourian analysis in order to avoid arm-chair psychologizing and/or his own version of demonology/dementology.  In short, the goal of symmetrical epistemology is to not pathologize the right-wing views he describes. So he has to show how right-wing beliefs do make sense within a broad experiential and institutional context; but that shouldn’t mean (in my view) that he can’t point to the huge effort right-wingers make to disseminate lies and to foster animosities.

Similarly, I don’t see how Lefebvre can sidestep the fact that calls to violence are a feature, not a bug, of right-wing views.  Not pathologizing such views does not entail ignoring their real world consequences.  To understand why some people believe that some other people need to be deported, jailed, censored, or killed is not to condone such beliefs.  But that’s a line that will be fuzzy (I think) if repudiation of violence is not made explicit.  In other words, pure description of right-wing views would necessarily include accounts of right-wing hate mongering.  I guess one could just lay out the fact of such hate-mongering and leave it to the reader to pass judgment. But that’s not a position (i.e. neutral and non-judgmental about violent repudiation of demonized groups of people) I would want to occupy.  So, for example, can a writer just report the claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio without also doing some fact-checking?

Maybe the easiest way to say all this is that right-wing views double down on the ”closed Society” that Lebrvre describes in his Bergson book [Human Rights as a Way of Life, Stanford UP, 2014.] For my synapsis of this book, see https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/27/alexandre-lefebvres-human-rights-as-a-way-of-life-on-bergsons-political-philosophy/

The right-wingers are stalwart opponents of “open societies”—their whole world view is built on the conviction that open societies are soul-destroying, depriving individuals of grounded communities, and upsetting the unanimity, the untroubled consensus in values and beliefs, enjoyed by tight-knit, closed groups.  Hannah Arendt believed that totalitarian regimes must lie, must strive to replace the real world with a fictional one, precisely because there is no unity in the real world—never was and never will be.  Plurality is a fundamental, inescapable fact about “the human condition.”  And her hopeful belief was that totalitarian fictions must inevitably collapse in the face of the fundamental fact of plurality.  That’s probably too optimistic; totalitarian fictions, underwritten by violence (by terror) wielded by the state can last a very long time. Historical examples abound. What such totalitarian regimes can never achieve is the moment of conflict-free harmony they claim to aspire to.  Instead, the violence is unending as ever new enemies (the ones responsible for harmony not arriving) are identified. 

My point is that  recognizing how seductive narratives of a return to lost idylls of unity can be is very different from refusing to say how the consequences of those narratives are catastrophic.  Right-wing visions must, like every world view, be disseminated through various channels that aim to persuade others of their validity, their desirability.  Lefebvre’s liberalism book is an attempt to contribute to the dissemination of liberalism.  His current project, it would seem, wants to stand above or beside any persuasive motive or effect.  He is just going to present what right-wingers believe, without prejudicing his account by taking a negative stance toward those beliefs. No demonology, no pathologizing.  As I have said, the attempt intrigues me even as I see problems with it. 

Moral Renewal?

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.

From Statecraft To Soulcraft
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/this-thing-will-fail?r=1jua0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

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.