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.

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.