Jonah's "Suicide:" The Bigger Problem

In his new Suicide of the West Jonah Goldberg reminds us of the Miracle of the last 300 years, and the fact that we are still the tribal animals we have been for the last 250,000 years at least. Our modern era is a battle between the Lockean idea of individualism and the reactionary Rousseauean idea of the General Will and the romantic rebellion against Reason. See my piece here.

And Trump, on his telling, is a return to tribalism, the celebration of a tribalism of nation against the left's tribalism of identity. Thus the subtitle of Suicide, "How the rebirth of tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy."

Maybe Jonah is right. The only thing is that the failure of Conservatism Inc. to push back the left in recent years means that Lockean individualism and Reason are too weak a reed with which to beat the identity tribalism of the left.

This was made clear to me when I read F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West back in the 1980s. Here is the money quote:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

That was the basis of the very German Romantic rebellion. It said that we can't just be rational Lockean individuals; we are driven by our emotions, as symbolized in paintings long ago of thoughtful Germans standing on top of mountains looking out over Nature's Creation. So ever since I have been looking for a counter-culture to the official counterculture, one would take into account the German critique of rational individualism and start from there.

Or, to put in in Jonah Goldberg's terms, the critique would have to recognize that we humans are still tribal.

And here we are 200 years after the Romantic rebellion, 100 years after the Bolshevik revolution, and we still haven't solved the problem. In fact things are getting worse, with Democrat-identifying Americans exhibiting majority support for socialism, and lefty social media well on the way to declaring that all non-lefty speech is hate speech and therefore criminal.

My point is this. Trump or no Trump, if we non-lefties can't roll over the left in a counter-revolution of ideas and throw their ideas on the dust heap of history then what's the point?

So Jonah gets to the end of his book, and complains about the shrinking role of God in our world, that people can't name the three branches of government, that kids in elite colleges are nice, pleasant know-nothings, that "feeling... has become the live idea about how we should organize our lives" and that life is becoming entertainment.

But modern American conservatism, for Jonah, is supposed to be about "the beliefs that ideas matter and that character matters" and he wails that Donald Trump stands athwart both these notions, and his supporters don't care. So we must rededicate ourselves to turning our barbarian children into citizens, and show out gratitude for our civilization.

We cannot get rid of human nature and humanity's natural tribal tendencies. But we know that, under the right circumstances, our tribal nature can be grafted to a commitment to liberal, property rights, innovation, etc.

Yes. But how? The collapse of Conservatism Inc. in 2016 is surely proof that something is wrong with the conservative movement and its culture. And the fact that a political neophyte could come in and blow up a cadre of 14  professional would-be presidential nominees underlines the proof.

So where do we go, what do we do?

Thanks, Jonah, I'm glad you asked.

As I noted above, F.S.C. Northop pointed to the problem that for a lot of people, Germans and such, Locke and Hume don't do the job. For me that starts with the guy that Hume woke out of a dogmatic slumber: Kant. Kant's big thing was that we cannot know things in themselves, but only appearances. This seemed to suggest that nothing is possible, except that in the hands of Hegel it seemed that anything was possible.

Then Schopenhauer reduced things-in-themselves to one thing, the Will, and Nietzsche declared God dead and looked to a world Beyond Good and Evil. Then we had a complete revolution in physics, mostly led by Germans. Then we had the revolution in psychology with Freud as inspiration for the left and Jung's rather different effort to re-understand the universal meaning underlying myth and religion.

Does all this German thinking mean the end of the world, a demolition of Locke and the dream of an individualism beyond tribalism, or a rebirth into something else?

I don't know, but I'd say it is curious that just this year we see a psychologist like Jordan Peterson, who seems to be connecting to the lost boys of the millennium in his call to responsibility, and whose Maps of Meaning is an attempt to integrate Jung, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and more into a revaluation of the creative, sacrificial Hero's quest.

Oh, and by the way, Peterson argues that we have to stop imagining that we humans are rational creatures, reasoning our way through life. In fact we are driven by "affect," which is a fancy-pants word psychologists use instead of the word "emotion."

And then there is Trump. He may have rallied the right with appeals to the tribalism of nation and America for Americans, but he has governed as a tax cutter, a deregulator, and seems to be heading towards some resolution of the 65-year stand-off in Korea.

Suppose President Trump is a man that understands that humans can only be led by an appeal to tribe, the neo-tribalism of patriotism and the nation state, but also knows that the way the world works comes from the insights of the Lockean revolution.

And if that were true, then Trump is doing what just Jonah wants, recognizing that Americans are still tribal, but using his appeal to tribe to get our permission to lead us into a better place. Only Jonah can't see it. And perhaps more important, neither can the left.