Jonah Rehearses How We Got Here in "Suicide of the West"

Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy is the latest from the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left. In that earlier book Jonah led us through the murky waters of the original Progressive Era, and how it stank with authoritarianism, and, during World War I, descended to what would come to be called "fascist" policies.

But now Jonah is a never-Trumper, and so his new book is tinged with a certain rage towards the Trumpian ascendancy.

But first, Jonah sets forth a pretty decent exegesis of what the western liberal tradition is/was all about. He presents it all as a dichotomy between the Lockean celebration of the individual and Rousseau's celebration of the community, as expressed in his notion of the General Will.

There is also the fact of the "Miracle," what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment, the utterly unprecedented and un-thought-for explosion in economic welfare of the last 200-300 years. To put the whole thing in perspective, Jonah reminds us that 250,000 years ago we humans were "semi-hairless, upright, nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food." If you checked in every 10,000 years since you would report back "no change" to your intergalactic masters. Until the day before yesterday.

Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled  into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world.

This new way of thinking, the Lockean Revolution,

held that the individual is sovereign; that your rights come from God not government, that the fruits of our labors belong to us, and that no man should be less equal before the law because of his faith or class.

Whatever this change represented, it was not "evolution."

[From] the perspective of our genes, we weren't meant to live like we do today, with wealth, rights, and freedom, and all their fruits... [O]ur natural condition isn't merely poor, it's tribal. 

And you see that "young men from dysfunctional homes and atomized communities have fallen in with street gangs for thousands of years in every corner of the globe." In other words, you have to teach humans not to be tribal. But it is not just lower-class young men. Ever since Locke there has been a romantic rebellion against the new culture of the individual, that the new culture is "unsatisfying and devoid of authenticity and meaning." Often the people that feel this way believe that "someone must be responsible": Jews, or capitalists, or "globalists and cultural Marxists."

And for Jonah, this romanticism, this lurch for authenticity and meaning, is reactionary, for it yearns for a return to tribalism. Sure, this yearning cannot be eradicated, but "it can be channeled." Otherwise we will lose our Miracle in a process of "corruption," of cultural "decay, rot, and putrefaction."

And Jonah worries that the rise of Trump is a "catastrophic corruption of conservative principles, and a sign of how deeply the corruption has set in."

Thus Jonah sets up his argument: the culture of individualism that set the stage for the economic Miracle of the last 300 years against the romantic nostalgia for the tribal world of authenticity and meaning. The point is that if we surrender to tribalism we will demolish the Miracle and return to the world of the hairless ape, the world we humans lived for the previous 250,000 years, up until the day before yesterday.

The Eternal Battle, writes Jonah, is thus between Reason and the Search for Meaning, between Lockean individualism and Rousseau's romanticism.

Actually, I believe, all human endeavor is a Search for Meaning, and  we need to understand, for instance,  that reason was invented by humans as a way of managing their relationships with other humans, in other words to "rationalize" their behavior to other humans.

And I don't think that the battle is between individualism and tribalism. Because, if you ask me the culture of individualism is also a tribalism, the tribalism of individualism. If there is an Eternal Battle -- the title of Jonah's Chapter 5 -- it is between Force and Persuasion. But more of that anon.