I saw a reference to Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen, and bought the book. And I am glad I did. Not that I agree with Deneen, who accuses liberalism, both in its economic-libertarian and progressive-social versions of being an “anticulture” that destroys the culture of virtue and sense of place of the great cultural tradition from the Greeks to the start of the Enlightenment. Says he:
And as for time: certainly it is true that we now think of time as linear, and we used to think of it as cyclical. But we also have cyclical theories of dynasties, such as the progressive dynasty that seems to be showing its age right now and doesn't seem to have the chops to see off the populist rebellion.
Deneen also makes a lot about the sense of place, about humans being rooted in a single place, anchored to land and community. Except that people anchored to place were usually not virtuous souls giving back to the place what they took out of it, but serfs, that thrived so long as weather and the political ambitions of their lord allowed it. And humans are notoriously a nomadic species that wanders the Earth in search of it knows not what.
Like many cultural conservatives Deneen’s ideal is a culture of virtue.
In other words, the ancient world through the Middle Ages may have had an ideal of virtue and looking after the Earth and cherishing community and the sense of place. But the Spartans were throwing kids off cliffs if they didn’t look like they were going to measure up to the Spartan ideal of masculinity. The Romans legions were conquering near and far and sending the booty and slaves back to Rome for a jolly old triumph. The feudal age was big on inter-lordly conflict with this lord teaching that lord a lesson. They recruited their armies with promise of loot and plunder.
Now I don’t know if you think of that sort of behavior as nurturing nature or conquering it. And as for a sense of place, well, you’d better have your armed knights and archers ready to defend it.
Let’s interpret that world in this way, as a Two Peoples world. There were the virtuous that had studied the classics or the Bible under worthy teachers and had succeeding in the endeavor of paideia, the education in virtue. But everyday life was superordinate and subordinate, with lords ruling it over their subordinates that looked to them from protection.
What Deneen doesn’t like is the advent of the age of creativity.
If you think of economic liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can learn how nature works and put it to work for us. Conquest of nature, no question. Or as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. But you know what? We also got the Great Enrichment with an increase in income of 30 times in 200 years. In Africa people are using cellphones for money transfers. How crazy is that? And is it despoiling the Earth? Yes, probably. Only, as the London Economist wrote about 20 years ago, once a country gets to about $10,000 per capita income per year it starts to care about cleaning up the environment. And worry, as we have taught teenagers to worry, about our resource use destroying the planet’s climate. Whatabout the crash of 2008 and unsustainable debt? Well, people that take out debt are anticipating future income; debt is particularly useful in trade where the final sale may be months after production. But there's a problem when the political sector uses mortgage debt to buy votes, for if people can service their debt and/or the collateral on a debt can't be liquidated -- as was direct policy due to the Community Reinvestment Act, then you got trouble, right here in River City.
If you think of progressive liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can free people from age-old hierarchy and subordination. We can create our own hierarchy and justice out of the incrustation of centuries. Is there a downside? Certainly. We can screw up and we have screwed up big time. And as plenty of critics have pointed out, the new world seems to be really good for educated elitists but not so good for lesser folk.
See I don’t believe that things were nobler and more virtuous and wise in the old days. People may have had a dream of virtue, but there wasn’t much around. Let us say that the Enlightenment with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and all started the rot. But what about Henry VIII who disarmed the nobles in his reign of 1509 to 1547? His nobles forthwith threw out a good bunch of their peasants because they were no use as potential soldiers. I don’t think that had anything to do with virtue and lordly noblesse oblige. It was a simple power play: Henry VIII on his nobles to keep them from causing trouble. And nobles looking out for Number One and deciding that they didn't need no stinkin' peasants any more if they weren't going to be used in their private armies.
Now, I agree that the problem with getting all creative, economically and socially, is that you certainly throw out a lot of babies with the bath water. Untrammeled creativity is indeed what Nietzsche described, free spirits going all out for a bit of Wille der Macht before breakfast.
The interesting thing to me is that after Nietzsche described and celebrated pedal-to-the-metal creativity, the dialectical opposition of creation and destruction, the folks that came after him dug up the old wisdom about creativity, that it must be implemented through the agency of the Sacrifical Hero who has been on his Hero’s Journey into his personal unconsciousness and its demons and come back sadder and wiser, ready to explore on the border between chaos and order. And give his life so that others may live.
But however high we may reach into the creative empyrean we are still humans, and many of us merely want to hang on to some powerful lord for his protection -- not to mention a bit of free stuff. A good proportion of middling folks aspire to responsibility and virtue, learning how to live a good life. But what happens if the world changes, but conquest or by invention? What do the sensible Hobbits of the world do then? The truth is that life is full of challenge and tragedy and learning the virtues is not enough. You also have to suck it in in the hard times and perhaps up sticks and leave your beloved home and journey to a new land.
There is no doubt that modern liberalism in all its facets is a hot mess. And there is no doubt that the economic titans with their constant chop and change cause ordinary people much heart ache. And the progressive wokerati and their secular religions have caused untold misery, and it some cases a return to slavery. The whole thing could yet end in utter failure and disaster just as the climate change enthusiasts insist.
Or we may muddle through.
What I say is that we, the educated, the wise, the evolved, the people that have had an education in paideia and the virtues, need to understand that our own agenda is not all there is. The world is not here just for creative geniuses and creative knuckleheads. Creative people are destroyers as well as creators. Nor is it just for people what want to hold on to the culture and the accumulated virtues built up over the past. You can’t hold onto the past: it can disappear in the twinkling of an eye. And if you just want to hang on in the retinue of some powerful lord or onto your well-paying union job and its guaranteed pension and shelter from the icy blast, be warned that the day will come when you are no longer of use to the lord's power project. You do have a backup plan ready? Right?
Liberalism is a hot mess. So is every creative project. The only problem with creativity is for the creative folks to insist, as they do all the time, that creativity is the only thing, and beat up the ordinary mortals that just want to wive and thrive and get kids on the ground.
But hey, nobody needs to figure that one out. The Trumps and the Brexits and the Borises are teaching the creative geniuses a lesson and all we have to do is sit back and watch.
These creative guys, liberals of the market and liberal of the wokerati are so brilliant that they didn't see it coming.
Imagine that!
Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that makes place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning.Actually, I don’t agree. First, humans have always been in the business of conquering nature. More and more, we learn how even our furthest ancestor mucked about with the Earth. For instance, we have just experienced a moral panic about monster bush fires in Australia, supposedly proof of runaway climate change. Only, skeptics point out, aboriginal tribes have done controlled burning since time out of mind. And all animal breeding and horticulture is a flat out conquest of nature: what are domestic animals but our conquered slaves?
And as for time: certainly it is true that we now think of time as linear, and we used to think of it as cyclical. But we also have cyclical theories of dynasties, such as the progressive dynasty that seems to be showing its age right now and doesn't seem to have the chops to see off the populist rebellion.
Deneen also makes a lot about the sense of place, about humans being rooted in a single place, anchored to land and community. Except that people anchored to place were usually not virtuous souls giving back to the place what they took out of it, but serfs, that thrived so long as weather and the political ambitions of their lord allowed it. And humans are notoriously a nomadic species that wanders the Earth in search of it knows not what.
Like many cultural conservatives Deneen’s ideal is a culture of virtue.
The Greeks especially regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-governance in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance governed the souls of the citizens; and self-governance of individuals could be realized only in a city that citizenship itself was a kind of ongoing habituation in virtue, through both law and custom.The only thing, of course, is that all this good thinking was a kind of pious hope. The reality of Greek life was Peloponnesian wars. Followed by the rise of Alexander who conquered most of the known world. Not much virtue there, or a wise recognition of the sense of place and the obligations of community. Just flat out pursuit of power.
In other words, the ancient world through the Middle Ages may have had an ideal of virtue and looking after the Earth and cherishing community and the sense of place. But the Spartans were throwing kids off cliffs if they didn’t look like they were going to measure up to the Spartan ideal of masculinity. The Romans legions were conquering near and far and sending the booty and slaves back to Rome for a jolly old triumph. The feudal age was big on inter-lordly conflict with this lord teaching that lord a lesson. They recruited their armies with promise of loot and plunder.
Now I don’t know if you think of that sort of behavior as nurturing nature or conquering it. And as for a sense of place, well, you’d better have your armed knights and archers ready to defend it.
Let’s interpret that world in this way, as a Two Peoples world. There were the virtuous that had studied the classics or the Bible under worthy teachers and had succeeding in the endeavor of paideia, the education in virtue. But everyday life was superordinate and subordinate, with lords ruling it over their subordinates that looked to them from protection.
What Deneen doesn’t like is the advent of the age of creativity.
If you think of economic liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can learn how nature works and put it to work for us. Conquest of nature, no question. Or as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. But you know what? We also got the Great Enrichment with an increase in income of 30 times in 200 years. In Africa people are using cellphones for money transfers. How crazy is that? And is it despoiling the Earth? Yes, probably. Only, as the London Economist wrote about 20 years ago, once a country gets to about $10,000 per capita income per year it starts to care about cleaning up the environment. And worry, as we have taught teenagers to worry, about our resource use destroying the planet’s climate. Whatabout the crash of 2008 and unsustainable debt? Well, people that take out debt are anticipating future income; debt is particularly useful in trade where the final sale may be months after production. But there's a problem when the political sector uses mortgage debt to buy votes, for if people can service their debt and/or the collateral on a debt can't be liquidated -- as was direct policy due to the Community Reinvestment Act, then you got trouble, right here in River City.
If you think of progressive liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can free people from age-old hierarchy and subordination. We can create our own hierarchy and justice out of the incrustation of centuries. Is there a downside? Certainly. We can screw up and we have screwed up big time. And as plenty of critics have pointed out, the new world seems to be really good for educated elitists but not so good for lesser folk.
See I don’t believe that things were nobler and more virtuous and wise in the old days. People may have had a dream of virtue, but there wasn’t much around. Let us say that the Enlightenment with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and all started the rot. But what about Henry VIII who disarmed the nobles in his reign of 1509 to 1547? His nobles forthwith threw out a good bunch of their peasants because they were no use as potential soldiers. I don’t think that had anything to do with virtue and lordly noblesse oblige. It was a simple power play: Henry VIII on his nobles to keep them from causing trouble. And nobles looking out for Number One and deciding that they didn't need no stinkin' peasants any more if they weren't going to be used in their private armies.
Now, I agree that the problem with getting all creative, economically and socially, is that you certainly throw out a lot of babies with the bath water. Untrammeled creativity is indeed what Nietzsche described, free spirits going all out for a bit of Wille der Macht before breakfast.
The interesting thing to me is that after Nietzsche described and celebrated pedal-to-the-metal creativity, the dialectical opposition of creation and destruction, the folks that came after him dug up the old wisdom about creativity, that it must be implemented through the agency of the Sacrifical Hero who has been on his Hero’s Journey into his personal unconsciousness and its demons and come back sadder and wiser, ready to explore on the border between chaos and order. And give his life so that others may live.
But however high we may reach into the creative empyrean we are still humans, and many of us merely want to hang on to some powerful lord for his protection -- not to mention a bit of free stuff. A good proportion of middling folks aspire to responsibility and virtue, learning how to live a good life. But what happens if the world changes, but conquest or by invention? What do the sensible Hobbits of the world do then? The truth is that life is full of challenge and tragedy and learning the virtues is not enough. You also have to suck it in in the hard times and perhaps up sticks and leave your beloved home and journey to a new land.
There is no doubt that modern liberalism in all its facets is a hot mess. And there is no doubt that the economic titans with their constant chop and change cause ordinary people much heart ache. And the progressive wokerati and their secular religions have caused untold misery, and it some cases a return to slavery. The whole thing could yet end in utter failure and disaster just as the climate change enthusiasts insist.
Or we may muddle through.
What I say is that we, the educated, the wise, the evolved, the people that have had an education in paideia and the virtues, need to understand that our own agenda is not all there is. The world is not here just for creative geniuses and creative knuckleheads. Creative people are destroyers as well as creators. Nor is it just for people what want to hold on to the culture and the accumulated virtues built up over the past. You can’t hold onto the past: it can disappear in the twinkling of an eye. And if you just want to hang on in the retinue of some powerful lord or onto your well-paying union job and its guaranteed pension and shelter from the icy blast, be warned that the day will come when you are no longer of use to the lord's power project. You do have a backup plan ready? Right?
Liberalism is a hot mess. So is every creative project. The only problem with creativity is for the creative folks to insist, as they do all the time, that creativity is the only thing, and beat up the ordinary mortals that just want to wive and thrive and get kids on the ground.
But hey, nobody needs to figure that one out. The Trumps and the Brexits and the Borises are teaching the creative geniuses a lesson and all we have to do is sit back and watch.
These creative guys, liberals of the market and liberal of the wokerati are so brilliant that they didn't see it coming.
Imagine that!
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