Irrational and mythological thinking have been gaining adherents recently. In his essay “Conservative Rationalism has Failed,” Yoram Hazony insists that an overemphasis on reason has corroded the moral and spiritual foundations of western societies, leaving them vulnerable to anomie and to the radical modernism of the neo-Marxist left. These concerns have been echoed by pundits and intellectuals like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Sohrab Ahmari, all of whom insist that some form of traditionalist or mythological revival is required to rejuvenate the body politic’s faith in itself. More extreme mythologies have been espoused by the far right, invoking dark impulses previously thought long dead.
Some see this as a reaction against the excesses of the so-called neo-Marxist left. National Review columnist Nate Hochman hypothesizes that many—especially among the young—are gravitating towards new forms of traditionalism, in response to excessive cultural changes. I believe Hochman is fundamentally correct on this point. This parallels the reactionary impulse which underpins what I have called postmodern conservatism. These phenomena can help explain why appeals to mythology have been gaining traction.
Enlightenment and the Sleep of Reason
In his 1799 painting “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” Francisco Goya depicts the sleeping artist tormented by beasts. Shortly thereafter (in 1808), Johann Goethe published the first part of his drama Faust, whose titular character is an insatiably curious genius, whose eclectic interests have resulted in a lifetime of scientific study. Nevertheless, he finds that reason can tell him nothing about the ultimate purpose of the universe. Dissatisfied and unhappy, he turns to magic and even contemplates suicide. Eventually, Faust is contacted by the demon Mephistopheles, who promises to show him wonders beyond his ken. The only downside is that, if Faust ever wants to cease his incessant travels and finds himself longing to stay in one place, Mephistopheles will claim his soul.
Both of these artists articulated a growing sense that the project of Enlightenment reason was reaching a dead end. The pursuit of reason had resulted in marvelous technological and political improvements, including revolutionary democratic movements in the United States and France—but reason could be destructive, too. Figures like Voltaire had relentlessly attacked the old mythological and religious ways of understanding the world, subjecting them to ridicule and treating the most sacred practices as farce. This emancipated society from the shackles of superstition, forcing people, as Kant put it in his essay “What is Enlightenment?,” to awaken to reason at last.
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.
Goya and Goethe sensed that there was a serious price to pay for this liberation, a price that would only become fully apparent when the consequences of full scale rationalization became known. This price was what Max Weber, following Nietzsche, would call the “desacralization of the world.” Liberation from superstition and tradition freed individuals to use their reason more effectively. But this led to a world without magic or purpose. Each person had to choose what to do with her life, without the help of sacred guidance. According to its most vocal critics, reason could tell us a great deal about how to accomplish our goals, but very little about which goals are worth pursuing. This left a tremendous gap where there had once been certainty. Like Faust, modern rationalists were left continually searching for a new home, without ever coming to rest. This would prove intolerable to many, and would paradoxically lead to the emergence of more overarching and frightening mythologies than ever before.
Modern and Postmodern Mythology
In his book The Myth of the State, Ernst Cassirer argues that the apparently nihilistic consequences of Enlightenment reason led many to turn to new sources of mythological inspiration. For some, this meant a complete repudiation of reason and Enlightenment and a headlong return to religious traditionalism. But others began to formulate new mythologies to replace the old. Such mythologies drew on secularism and even tried to present pseudo-scientific bases for their conceits. But they were thoroughly mythological at their irrational core, presenting heroic individuals fighting against an increasingly mechanical world that threatened to devour their sources of meaning. Some, like English historian Thomas Carlyle, turned to blatant hero worship, arguing that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” For Carlyle, while the mass of humankind pursued meager and vulgar pleasures, heroes from Thomas Cromwell to Napoleon remade the world in their image. This position is not so different from that of Nietzsche—the greatest modern mythmaker—who disdained Carlyle’s romanticism, but found his ideas intriguing. Later, ethnic and racist mythologies became increasingly popular, as Cassirer describes. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West theorizes that Western culture is becoming exhausted (a popular anxiety among the right today) and that this exhaustion can only be countered by putting an end to materialist degeneracy and discovering new and even violent struggles. More disturbingly still, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau produced a comprehensive racist mythology, with all the trappings of pseudoscientific glamor. In his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, Gobineau argues that the white race has been responsible for almost all the great accomplishments of the human species, but has since declined due to interbreeding. According to Gobineau and his followers, this has led to growing lethargy and complacency.
The appeal of these modern mythologies was not based on their plausibility. Even in the eighteenth century, historians like Edward Gibbon had begun to challenge the tendency to see history as merely an account of the deeds of great men. Spengler’s gloomy demand for conflict, far from bringing about a renewal of civilization, led to the barbarities of the Second World War. Many contemporary scientists and scholars pointed out the implausibility of De Gobineau’s racist claims: great civilizations, they observed, had emerged everywhere from Mexico to China, and the idea that the white race was ultimately responsible for all these developments was self-aggrandizing nonsense. What made these mythologies appealing to many, however, was that they gave them a sense of having a higher destiny than could be provided by reason alone—and equipped them with pseudo-rational tools to justify that idea.
This desire for mythological meaning was challenged by the horrors of war, but it never entirely disappeared. Among other things, it led to the emergence of postmodern culture as what Frederic Jameson might call a cultural logic within twentieth and twenty-first century capitalist societies. Postmodern culture encouraged individuals to embrace a new mythology of self-creation and creative destruction. In this respect, it is a kind of hyper-modernism. It suggests that individuals should use reason and technology to develop new modes of life and even to alter human nature itself. These aspirations found cultural expression in the cyberpunk genre, in which human beings use technology to expand their capabilities and explore. They are also represented in the Enlightenment mythology of Star Trek, in which technological advances and liberalism have brought about a utopian society. Generally speaking, these developments were cautiously welcomed by liberals and embraced—even made more radical—by many on the left.
Postmodernism, however, was also defined by a radical suspicion of grand narratives, which lead many reactionaries to despair. They found the hypermodern mythologies of self-creation and technological reason unappealing. Instead, they continued to embrace the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century myths of decline and fall: for them, the world was becoming an ever more nightmarish place, as old certainties collapsed under the pressures of pluralism, new sexual identities and secularism. This led to renewed skepticism about reason itself. The new mythologies centered on identity—framed in nationalist, religious, gendered or even racial terms. Like their predecessors, these myths were often given a pseudo-rationalist gloss—evidenced, for example, in the white nationalist fascination with racial science and supposedly hard-nosed historicism. But the underlying drive was always mythological: a desire to restore purpose and order to the world. Ironically, hypermodern technologies and media—from Twitter to 4Chan—are used to advance these irrationalist, anti-modernist sentiments.
Awakening Reason From Its Dogmatic Slumber
Despite the insistence of cheerleaders like Steven Pinker, Enlightenment and reason are under threat. The desacralization of the world was liberating. But it also created a deep need for meaning which could only be satisfied through the construction of new and often violent mythologies, now empowered by modern technologies and practices. In postmodern culture, new reactionary mythologies have replaced their predecessors and enjoy substantial support among segments of society mired in anomie, especially those left behind by capitalist inequality and precarity. To give one prominent example: a recent US census indicated that about thirteen million Americans—mostly women—work at more than one job: often full time in one position, and part time in another. While, sometimes, the extra work is taken on in pursuit of higher level ambitions, in many cases the choice is due to stagnant wages and transient employment. Being forced to spend most of one’s time laboring seriously restricts the opportunities for realizing one’s potential through creative development and exploration. Reconfiguring the political and economic system so that people possess both the free time and the resources to engage in such pursuits might prevent them from being seduced by reactionary mythologies, which usually blame problems in the labor market on foreign elements. In these situations, individuals lack the capacity to develop more emancipatory sources of meaning—for what Slavoj Zizek might call the creative realization of human potential, guided by reason.
A substantial reorientation of people’s imaginative energy would require the kind of egalitarian democracy theorized by Seyla Benhabib and others. If a mythology of self-creation, linked to reason, is to succeed, individuals need to feel empowered to decide which life goals they wish to pursue and be capable of pursuing them. When self-creation is the privilege of a materially and intellectually separate elite, this will elicit resentment and anger on the part of those left behind. These emotions strengthen the appeal of reactionary and anti-rationalist mythologies, which advocate returning to the past, by marginalizing deviant and disruptive groups. By redistributing resources and capabilities in a more egalitarian manner, and increasing citizen’s rights to meaningfully participate in their increasingly plutocratic democracies, we could buck this trend. Individuals could then develop a sense of meaning by redefining themselves and the world around them, in cooperation with others, and exercising their amplified human potential. In my book Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law (forthcoming here), I argue that an egalitarian democracy of this kind would be organized around twin rights: the right to democratic authorship and the right to equality of expressive capabilities.
In most of today’s liberal representative democracies, citizens have very little input into politics. This contributes to the belief that elites are indifferent to the needs of ordinary people. As Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have observed, this belief is accurate—politicians are more likely to work for moneyed interests than for their constituents. We should counteract this by taking the right to democratic authorship seriously. Citizens should be allowed to define themselves by redefining the sociohistorical contexts in which they live. They should be involved in formulating and deliberating upon the laws and policies which govern them; perhaps assisted by the new digital media that make such participation possible on a large scale. A growing number of authors and advocates argue that e-democracies, in which citizens use modern technologies to discuss and vote on individual policies, are the way of the future. Implementing such approaches would go a long way towards securing the right to democratic authorship.
The second right is equality of expressive capabilities—except when inequalities are the result of individual moral choices. The term capabilities is drawn from economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum and describes what individuals need in order to enjoy robust and concrete freedom. This kind of freedom is more than just non-coercion: it implies everything from institutional reforms to the redistribution of resources. For example, a person is freer in a concrete sense if she is capable of maneuvering around a city than if she is prevented from doing so due to a physical disability and a lack of social accommodations of that disability. An individual’s expressive capabilities are defined by how free she is to engage in meaningful life projects and creative development. This is related to equality because some people enjoy far fewer expressive capabilities than others for what Rawls would call morally arbitrary reasons: they are born into poor families, lack educational facilities or have to manage significant disabilities without aid. It is not these individuals’ fault that they do not have the same expressive capabilities as those in more fortunate circumstances. A just society would therefore seek a fair distribution of goods to equalize individual expressive capabilities, except where inequalities result from individual choices (for example, a decision to pursue a life of religious self-denial). A person born into a poor family is right to demand a redistribution of wealth to give them a fairer start in life. Greater equality of expressive capabilities would give individuals the freedom to pursue more creative and fulfilling life projects.
If these two rights were granted, it would go a long way towards developing the egalitarian democracy needed to reverse the trend towards reactionary mythmaking. Individuals would have the sociopolitical and material capacity to engage in creative projects that realize their human potential and are guided by reason. Reason must be reawakened from its post-Enlightenment slumber. We must turn our focus back to a comprehensive critique of the status quo, while theorizing on what is needed to ensure a brighter and fairer future.
28 comments
“Being forced to spend most of one’s time laboring seriously restricts the opportunities for realizing one’s potential through creative development and exploration. Reconfiguring the political and economic system so that people possess both the free time and the resources to engage in such pursuits might prevent them from being seduced by reactionary mythologies, which usually blame problems in the labor market on foreign elements.”
There is so much wrong here I don’t even know where to start. The author seems ignorant of basic facts about human personalities. Only people high in a personality trait called Openness will find “creative development” fulfilling. The rest of us (the vast majority) don’t really see the attraction. We’re not creative and we don’t have worse lives for it. We find fulfillment in other areas of life. It is profoundly arrogant to assume that everyone is the same as you and wants the same things. Unfortunately, this kind of hatred towards working people is prevalent in “rationalists”. I read SlateStarCodex and it’s depressing how much the “rationalists” there shit on little people for the crime of being little.
Foreign elements ARE to blame for much of our working class’ problems. The US State Department made the decision quite some time ago to harm the working class so that foreign countries could benefit. NAFTA was a terrible idea for our working class, but elite opinion was unanimous. Admitting China to the WTO was a death-knell, and again elites were 100% in favor of it. We put our working class in direct competition with slave labor. Is it any wonder they lost?
Democrats used to be in favor of our working class back in the 90s before NAFTA and before they repealed Glass-Steagal, which predictably crashed the financial system within a decade. Proof:
“What the commission is concerned about are the unskilled workers in our society in an age in which unskilled workers have far too few opportunities open to them. When immigrants are less well-educated and less-skilled, they may pose economic hardships to the most vulnerable of Americans, particularly those who are unemployed or under-employed.”
— Barbara Jordan, civil rights icon and first black woman elected to Congress from the South.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMywOal05s0
In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton said:
“We are a nation of immigrants.. but we are a nation of laws. Our nation is rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country…
“Illegal immigrants take jobs from citizens or legal immigrants, they impose burdens on our taxpayers…
“That is why we are doubling the number of border guards, deporting more illegal immigrants than ever before, cracking down on illegal hiring, barring benefits to illegal aliens, and we will do more to speed the deportation of illegal immigrants arrested for crimes…
“It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that has occurred in the last few years.. .and we must do more to stop it.”
He received a standing ovation in Congress for saying this.
I’m not sure that Goya’s work supports the idea of Enlightenment reason having reached a dead end. The title is “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”—not “Reason Produces Monsters.” Isn’t this similar to Kant’s idea that we must reason together?
For Goethe and Goya, I wouldn’t say their argument is that reason itself produces monstrosities. Instead the argument is that reason is either incapable of providing a sense of meaning in the world, or in the case of Goya that it doesn’t account for many of the dimensions of human existence. Later thinkers were radicalize this into a generalized critique of reason
Tho I’m not very left these days, being as I am a hater of wokeness, the comments here backfire and have me more in sympathy with Matt. Just sayin’.
Appreciate that.
Frankly, this essay is just the same tired Marxist claptrap that has been spouted around university colleges and campuses for years. ‘Redistribution of resources’ – tax anybody who’s got more than somebody else, leaving everybody skint. ‘Citizens should be allowed to define themselves by redefining the sociohistorical contexts in which they live.’ So who’s stopping anybody from trying to do that, even though it’s meaningless drivel? The faux-academic erudition cannot mask the plain fact that this entire essay is pointless word salad.
Referring to the ideas described here as ‘Marxist’ doesn’t do much for your case that it’s all meaningless word salad. It does far more for the conclusion that you don’t actually have a clue as to what Marx thought, let alone anyone McManus refers to.
But thanks for implying Sen, Nussbaum & Rawls are in some way ‘Marxists’, you’ve given us a laugh at least.
So we are unable to find purpose without magic, superstition, and tradition? I don’t need any of those to find purpose, and I pity those who require them.
I’m non-religious and rationalist but I find it interesting that one of the loves of my life is the fantasy genre. I know it is all just fiction and yet its depictions of the magical and divine enrich my spare time. I suspect that these imaginary worlds fulfill a need in many even if we don’t really believe them.
As for tradition, well, doing things just because they’ve always been done is silly, but drawing on the work and wisdom of the past can be worthwhile.
1. Marxism was conspicuously absent from your list of “new mythologies,” despite having been and continuing to be the most consequential of all. The followers of Gibbon, Carlyle, Spengler, and Gobineau were and still are a little thin on the ground, and they’re non-existent by comparison.
2. Blum’s characterization is less caricature than a concretization of the abstract right you call equality of expressive capabilities. In past generations, large swathes of people wanted to write a novel; the kids nowadays want to be Youtube stars. That’s what freedom to indulge in one’s expressive capabilities means in practice. I’m sure they’ll be hiphop stars and pole dancers too.
3. You don’t explain what being able to pursue expressive capabilities has to do with anomie or malaise (or whatever term) and, thus, how it solves that problem. On top of that, the cause you attribute to anomie was the destruction of grand narratives. Yet your solution is something entirely different: free money to indulge in your creative impulses. It’s not as if all rich people are anomie and malaise free. Indeed, social injustice outrage seems to be the creative expression of choice among the most creative of the leisured class.
4. You have mechanical, deterministic view of human life. The only points are birth and self-realization—nothing in between matters. Everyone’s born to be some specific kind of expresser. Any failure along the way is ruin that must be fixed by the state. No one has experiences of any consequence, meets people of any consequence, suffers anything of consequence. Each succeeds or fails to become what he was somehow meant to be because of money or bad choices.
This reply, again, misses the key point which is that this is a twinned model of rights. The exclusive focus on the second right ignores the importance of the first, which is situated in that ranked position for a reason. The point is precisely that we ‘meet people of consequence’ in our communities, and “in cooperation” with them, deliberate on how to redefine the world. Moreover you miss an important qualifier on the second right, which is that consequences can be suffered if they flow from choices which are not arbitrary from a moral point of view. So it is not just “free money” to do as one wishes. It instead is a rectification if inequities to establish a level playing field from which individuals significant choices will, inevitably, produce different outcomes.
The exclusive focus on the second right ignores the importance of the first, which is situated in that ranked position for a reason.
If the right to expressive capabilities is subject to the right to democratic authorship, then democratic authorship is not a right (e.g., a right to be heard), but the power to be obeyed, which makes it a legislative body. In that case, there’s no right to expressive capabilities, only a proposed entitlement to some kind of expressive capabilities equalization to be determined via the democratic authorship process.
The point is precisely that we ‘meet people of consequence’ in our communities, and “in cooperation” with them, deliberate on how to redefine the world.
By meeting people of consequence and so on, I was referring to the real life experiences and relationships that shape people and give their lives meaning. You assume we’re born to be something. Are Youtubers and pole dancers born or made? I say the more of the latter. But that’s ultimately a minor point.
The more important point is this: You assume creative self-realization is the human telos and that money’s the means of realizing it. To an unmarried childless 20-something word-processors surrounded by other unmarried childless 20-something word-processors, that might be true. But to human beings, family, friendships, and community are the most important things. Those anomie-suffering people you refer to aren’t unhappy because they don’t have a Youtube channel or the money to start one; they’re unhappy because they’re alone (look at the research).
And why are they alone? One of the main reasons is that your misguided ideological forebears decimated civil society and its institutions to make people “free” from evil bourgeoisie norms and “free” from want in the name of Progress. All good if you happen to share the proclivities of Michel Foucault—much less good if you want a human life.
Anyway, deliberate and redefine the world? Since when does deliberation lead to the unanimity one needs for equality when, by hypothesis, the essence of your deliberators is their creativity? A beehive of creative bees is an impossibility. I suspect you’ve never been involved in any sort of rule-making body–or you never learned anything from the experience. Neither have the advocates of “e-democracy,” the kind of unnatural seed that takes root in the academic hothouse. Your links says the Centre for e-Democracy is the brainchild of Delvinia CEO Adam Froman—a business school graduate and owner of “a digital-strategy and digital-consulting firm”—and “Nicole Goodman, an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.” Who needs Blackstone or Dicey when you have a digital strategist and an assistant professor of global affairs…
Seriously, how much time have you spent thinking through how this democratic process of yours is going to work? You seem to think the idea is more important than the process:
They should be involved in formulating and deliberating upon the laws and policies which govern them.
This is already true of every Western country insofar as it has any concrete meaning. So is this bit: “Citizens should be allowed to define themselves by redefining the sociohistorical contexts in which they live.” Who can’t do that now insofar as it’s even possible? The point is that concepts of governing processes might as well be poetry for all their practical value. The process is everything in government–it’s engineering, not physics.
In most of today’s liberal representative democracies, citizens have very little input into politics. This contributes to the belief that elites are indifferent to the needs of ordinary people.
How much input does a citizen have a right to? Would Canadians feel better getting a 1/34,000,000 share in every decision? I jest because the statement is an evocative but empty claim made by people selling dreams of a better way. People feel like they have little input when they don’t get their way or they think the state should do something for them. When they get their way or their lucre, the elites’ indifference is forgotten. In other terms, there’s no inherent problem with representative democracies that doesn’t affect every other system—the iron law of oligarchy says oligarchies can be changed but oligarchy is ineradicable. Of course, I can’t say for sure your system won’t be different, but then that’s because neither of us has a particularly clear idea of how it works.
McManus often comes across as confused or shallow, as in his over-use of a pet phrase, “postmodern conservatism” (by which he appears to mean just irrational conservatism, which to him is close to a redundancy). This time, however, he is at least onto a real issue, which is the inadequacy of reason by itself to hold together human collectivities. The undermining of traditional religions in the wake of the Enlightenment, particularly, gives rise to a variety of pseudo or ersatz substitutes, the more serious examples of which have tended to center on the State as a substitute for the Church — as we see in the Utopian experiments of the last century, communism and fascism, and as we see now in various versions of eco-topia or Rawls-based, state-forced egalitarianism. We’ve seen what became of the first set of such experiments, of course, and it wasn’t pretty, and the latter-day versions look to be at least as bad. But while McManus gets the need for meaning right, he confuses that with a pop-critique of recent economic circumstances, which of course completely ignores the enormity of the improvements in material conditions for virtually the entire planet (Pinker’s point). Later, he’s right again, that new digital media have indeed spread expressive powers far beyond the gated limits of traditional media, to the consternation of traditional elites, but seems blissfully unaware how it’s precisely this development, among others, that have led to the global surge in populism that is undermining the progressive faith in the State, like reason undermined the Church. Thus, his final paragraph, reasserting a faith in Rawls’ notion of the State as a means to impose cosmic justice, seems either oddly irrelevant to the modern absence of meaning, or, much worse, another try at forcibly re-configuring the meaning of meaning. In the end, then, all we have is just the old (progressive) wine in an old bottle.
While I appreciate the partial appreciation, I’m afraid you are mischaracterizing most of my position on post-modern conservatism. While I do indeed characterized it as a new iteration of conservative irrationalism, that is only a very small element of the analysis. Focusing exclusively on it misses the key points about the material and cultural conditions abetting the emergence of this iteration of conservative irrationalism, and also neglects to address what makes it unique in political practice. The points about material and cultural conditions actually take up the lion’s share of novel analysis, with the focus of practice taking up the rest. The genealogical link to conservative irrationalism of yore is a relatively minor historical point intended to link the post-modern form of conservatism to relevant antecedents.
Secondly I do not know where I suggested the state should be final the arbiter of these rights. Instead I spoke about a “just society” and an “egalitarian democracy” which would be characterized by direct involvement of citizens in “formulating and deliberating upon the laws and policies which govern them” in a more direct manner than what you see now. This is connected to the argument for an equality of expressive capabilities except where limited by morally significant choices, since how to realize this second right is to be determined through bottom up processes decided upon be citizens themselves in line with their concrete interests. It might take the form of state mandated redistribution, but it may also take other and more nuanced steps. An example would be the social accomodation of person’s with disabilities through something as simple as nudge economics. In a development context it might take the form of offering school meals to girls to incentivize attendance in schools. It is highly context dependent; which is partly why the first right takes priority over the second.
You’ve used the term “postmodern conservatism” repeatedly in essays here and elsewhere, in one case, for example, saying that the use of a phrase like “going with my gut” was a good example of it. No, it’s just a commonly tossed-off phrase in a variety of contexts, some appropriate, some not — but your statement IS a good example of just how shallow your notion of “postmodern conservatism” is. Your attempt to give it substance now, involving “material and cultural conditions”, just appears to refer to recent technological change, in which case, of course, everybody is a “postmodern” something or other. It seems pretty evident that either you don’t understand postmodernism at all, despite lots of name-dropping, or you’re simply using the word as a smear and a taunt, because you know postmodernism is largely rejected on the right. Mostly likely, of course, it’s both.
I’m not surprised that you don’t quite dare to say the state should be the final arbiter of your new-found rights — that idea still has a bad odor left over form communist and fascist attempts to do just that, not to mention the dystopias, from “1984” to “Harrison Bergeron”, that portray the results of such “arbitration”. You think, perhaps, that you can avoid such associations if you just elide “the state” into “bottom up processes decided upon by citizens themselves in line with their concrete interests”. Of course, if no state coercion is involved, citizens are free to do that right now. But state coercion MUST be involved, whether or not it’s admitted, to achieve an equality not just of status, and not just of wealth through forced “redistribution”, but also of all the other factors that determine differential outcomes, that according to you are “unfair” because no one had a chance to choose them: intelligence, looks, athletic ability, character, good parents, or just luck generally. You can’t really hide behind “nuance”, since any tyranny knows how to use “nudges” too, subtle and not so subtle. It is, at least, interesting that the “direct involvement of citizens” in formulating governments and policies, driven by the very technological changes you imagine to characterize postmodernism, has resulted in the sort of global populism that so horrifies you and the rest of the current left — represented by Trump and Brexit. A nice irony.
Again that is a serious misreading of my account. This is hardly my first “attempt to give it substance now, involving “material and cultural conditions.” To give just one example, my very first article on the topic for Areo involved the following ruminations:
“The second—and more interesting—way to understand postmodernism is as an epoch in human history. Or as a culture. Postmodern culture is characterized by many different features. At an economic level, it involves increasing global interconnectedness. Globalization brings the world together economically, facilitating the rapid—even instantaneous—transportation of goods from different cultures and traditions into alien environments. It also upsets traditional labor markets and industry, as the free movement of capital across the globe dissolves ancient, local ways of producing and selling goods. These are replaced by vast, global, interconnected webs of production, distribution, and consumption. Much of this is driven by the internationalization of labor, as economic firms and laborers both become migratory, in their search for ever greater opportunities. Underpinning much of this is what liberal economist Joseph Schumpeter calls the “creative destruction” of traditional values. To sell new commodities, economic firms create and market new value systems, and, in so doing, tear down the old. Even religion, as Patrick Deneen points out, can itself become an object of market dissemination and commodification for profit in one place, while being simultaneously undermined elsewhere.
These economic changes are underpinned by hitherto unknown technological transformations. Gutenberg’s revolution has only just begun. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter, have transformed the capacity of billions to communicate with great speed and efficiency. But, more importantly, they have also transformed the way in which we communicate. As Marshall McLuhan put it, the “medium is the message.” These new mediums speed up discourse, while flattening it. While a literary culture involving books enables deep consideration of complex ideas, digital culture disseminates information much faster, but flattens its substantive content into bite-sized rhetoric or ironic cynicism. The consequence has been a movement towards one-dimensional communication, coupled with entertainment technologies which increasingly allow us to “amuse ourselves to death,” in Neil Postman’s unforgettable phrase. Radio and television were the forerunners of postmodern culture, compressing complex topics down into ever shorter bursts of informational overload, competing for listeners and viewers in an increasingly media-saturated culture. Now, with the emergence of the internet, YouTube, blogs, and fake online universities, we have access to more information—both true and false—than ever before. One of the negative consequences of these developments has been a competition for attention which ups the rhetorical ante, while downplaying substance. As a result, we have seen a strange increase in hyper-partisanship and mean-spiritedness in many postmodern media. This, in turn, has an impact on politics, as liberal concerns about the greater good give way to a competition for attention and one-upmanship, resulting in a political culture of “ownage,” which more closely resembles a wrestling match presided over by the Donald than a traditional democratic polity organized by “ordered liberty” and communitarian resemblances.
The paradox of postmodern culture is that, as information flattens and communication becomes more one-dimensional, economic interconnectedness and technological transformation speed up. As Paul Virillio puts it, postmodern culture is a culture of speed. This renders traditionalist conservatism increasingly untenable as a political ideology. The flattening of discourse, combined with the availability of so many forms of entertainment and spectacle, eradicates the necessary conditions for creating a consistent culture, in depth, over an extended period of time. Economic “creative destruction” eradicates traditionalist barriers to the creation of new values, when these can be used to market new commodities. Even religion itself has become a marketable product, which can, in turn, become an object of competition in the so-called “culture war.” These trends in postmodern culture expose the limitations of conservative traditionalism. Roger Scruton decries the emergence of Trump and Trumpism as symptomatic of the decline of culture, while never sufficiently interrogating the forces—including capitalist markets and the creative destruction of values—that have helped bring about this decline.”
https://areomagazine.com/2018/07/22/the-decline-of-traditional-conservatism-and-the-rise-of-the-postmodern-conservative/
This indicates how the arrival of PMC is determined by both technological and economic change which generates a particular kind of culture characterized by informational flatness and creative destruction of values.
And of course in my book the most lengthy sections address these topics
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Post-Modern-Conservatism-Neoliberalism-Reactionary/dp/3030246817/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3E8E3Y2OAZ1FW&keywords=the+rise+of+postmodern+conservatism&qid=1568382429&s=gateway&sprefix=The+Rise+of+postmode%2Caps%2C197&sr=8-3
A lot of words can’t make an untenable, ultimately silly, idea sensible, and nor can a book. In fact, in this case, they make it worse — what all that’s saying is just a simplistic rehash of every critique of capitalism from Marx on: “All that is solid melts into air”, “globalization”, “creative destruction”, “commodification”, etc., etc. And dropping names — Mcluhan, Deneen, Postman, Virillio, e.g., — doesn’t help. What your “ruminations” amount to, in other words, is simply an old and stale, even if one-sided, account of the modern world from the Enlightenment on, with a tacked on hand-wave at current information technologies, as I mentioned. The latter is the only bit that could remotely resemble anything POSTmodern, but, first, even that is pretty threadbare now; and second, postmodernism proper, while influenced certainly by earlier technology, has much different concerns than you seem to understand, involving matters like social constructivism and cultural relativism, among others. But if you think your ruminations are really about postmodernism, then they clearly extend far beyond conservatism, and then everything is postmodern, including, obviously, the current left. Where, finally, you would at last be on some solid ground — “postmodern leftism” really is a redundancy for the most part. If, on the other hand, you like oxymorons, as it seems you do, a better one is “liberal fascism”.
Firstly, none of that is an argument against what I said. It amounts to a bunch of insults, and efforts to paint what I said as redundant. Even were that true it doesn’t deflect from my main point; only suggests other people have come similar conclusions in the past. Which I would never deny. As yourself pointed out, my consistent references to and inspiration from other authors on the topic of post-modernity situate my own position in relation to theirs,
Secondly, I’ve never said there weren’t left wing variants of politics influenced by post-modern culture. In fact I’ve always acknowledged that-it is key to my point. The broader cultural condition generates specific kinds of political agitation and outlooks which naturally resemble one another in many respects. To give one representative example:
“Postmodern culture has produced many different political reactions. Most of these can be interpreted as consequences of postmodern culture’s tendency to destabilize our sense of identity and moral values. On the Left, postmodern culture has produced the well-known and much-critiqued identity politics movements. These groups see the destabilization of identity and values as an opportunity to establish a new kind of pluralistic society where traditionally ‘marginalized’ groups are given a greater say. These postmodern leftists invoke these marginalized identities and their affiliated values in order to push for great political inclusion and power. For liberal centrists, the reaction to postmodern culture has been more mixed. For some, like Richard Rorty, the destabilization produced by postmodern culture provides an opportunity for a more ambitious social dialogue about the kind of liberal polities we would like to create together. For more right-wing liberals, like Jordan Peterson, this same destabilization should be criticized for leading individuals to embrace cynical social withdrawal on the one hand, and group conformity on the other.”
https://quillette.com/2018/09/04/understanding-postmodern-conservatism-a-reply-to-aaron-hanlon/
You seem to only consider post-modern “culture” through the lens of a relatively narrow set of ideologies tropes, such as social constructivism and so on, rather than being willing to entertain an argument even smart conservatism theorists will make: that it is broad condition which impacts society as a whole.
First, it’s unfortunate you find my description of your comment as insulting, but sometimes an accurate characterization will appear so. My argument against yours was based on the assumption that, by the phrase “postmodern conservatism”, you were referring to postmodernISM, as distinct from simply postmodern culture, whatever that’s taken to be. If that’s not the case, I think it would help to make that clear, and then people might indeed at least be willing to “entertain” your argument.
But I have to say, even watered down to something like “postmodern culture”, the term as you use it seems vague to the point of incoherence. What, for example, is supposed to be the difference between postmodern and modern culture? If they’re distinct, how so, and how, in particular, does a postmodern culture differ from the bourgeois culture Marx and Engels famously critiqued in saying “all that is holy is profaned”? When, assuming they’re distinct, did this divergence happen, and why? Does it all just hang on communication technology? If not, what, or what else? If so, how does anyone or anything, left, right, or middle, escape from such a culture?
This last question assumes particular salience in light of the two examples you give: it’s not clear, in the first place, what a phrase as vacuous as “an opportunity for a more ambitious social dialogue” even means, much less how it relates, pro or con, to any postmodern culture. And the Jordan Peterson example, in representing a figure standing against such a culture, presents the conundrum of a right-wing opposition to a so-called postmodern culture, in stark contrast to the left, even in its diminishing centrist modes. Of course, if all you want to do is attack white supremacists, you really don’t need a phrase like “postmodern conservatism”. Find a more honest label, I’d say.
If you want you can email me at mattmcmanus300@gmail.com and I can send you the chapter of my book that discusses these topics at great length. I don’t imagine you will agree, but it will at least situate everything in more context.
Okay, thanks. I don’t wish to seem merely vituperative, and a friend has suggested that I’ve been too combative over this. If so, it’s because my sense is that your phrase “postmodern conservatism” has been used largely as a red flag or a provocation, and not in good faith. But I appreciate your offer, and am willing to reconsider my assumptions.
Indeed. Matt’s continued confusion on “postmodern conservatism” is amusing. He can’t tell the difference between a BS artist and someone who doesn’t believe in the objective truth. It’s amusing to read his writing, which is dripped in leftwing partisan nonsense.
I am absolutely baffled by this piece. For one, this line, which is at the center of most left-wing arguments for self-creation as a response to the collapse of meaning, always leaves me cold: “Being forced to spend most of one’s time laboring seriously restricts the opportunities for realizing one’s potential through creative development and exploration.”
What exactly does the author envision here? Does he genuinely believe that a world where everyone is a struggling YouTuber without a job would be better than the one we have? Everyone a poet or a rapper trying to “make it” with no other distractions? A world of European backpackers searching for new drugs to try? I surmise you’d have a nightmare on your hands. This vision is hollow.
The problems don’t end here.
“To give one prominent example: a recent US census indicated that about thirteen million Americans—mostly women—work at more than one job: often full time in one position, and part time in another.”
Yep, and this transient state of labor as “self-creation” was the fruit of the latter half of the twentieth century’s failed attempts to do exactly what the author thinks we should try again. Somehow, “self-creation” always gets co-opted by capital. I wonder why…
As for “equality of expressive abilities”, this might be the most irrational concept of them all. This could literally refer to anything in practice from transhumanist machine communism to merely a housing guarantee, and the vagueness allows “self-creation” and “freedom” to masquerade as answers to a problem the author can’t solve.
The author fundamentally views the right as paranoid without seeing any genuine causes for paranoia. He points to racism and sexism and “irrationalism” without contending with the deeper reasons for malaise, which are why the left is always trying to make meaning and the right sweeps up the lost people while the left tries. Without traditional belief systems, we have produced a world more or less of hedonism and capital-seeking. That’s the problem. And the right to “equality of expressive abilities” means that people have a right to purchase virtual reality chambers and implant wings on their backs as technological power usurps our notions of the self entirely. Now, I hope Spengler is right, and Western civilization is on the start of a massive technological decline that will prevent these dreams of total escape from selfhood and humanity from becoming a reality. But if they are going to happen, introduced to us by capital, left-wing ideology will be the perfect brainwashing device to eliminate humanity entirely and blend our identities with new technologies developed by Facebook Inc. and Tesla.
Which do you think is stronger – the ability of atomized, lost individuals to “self-create” and “be equal”, or the might of capital and technology to usurp your own identity and sell you freedom as a product? I think we already know the answer.
Man, relax! The author is a typical Marxist. If he’s breathing, he’s lying. Just look at this:
«…about thirteen million Americans—mostly women—work at more than one job: often full time in one position, and part time in another. While, sometimes, the extra work is taken on in pursuit of higher level ambitions, in many cases the choice is due to stagnant wages and transient employment.»
and below
«…By redistributing resources and capabilities in a more egalitarian manner, and increasing citizen’s rights to meaningfully participate in their increasingly plutocratic democracies, we could buck this trend.»
Everyone knows that if his egalitarianism will be realized, 100 million American women will have stagnant wages, but who cares? 🙂
While I admire the erudition and passion behind this comment, I feel it deeply mischaracterizes the essay. I will try to explain why in two points.
1)The claim that I don’t address the “deeper reasons” for this malaise ignores that two thirds of the essay concern exactly this project. The author of this comment seems to have focused myopically on the last third, which was merely designed to suggest a potential alternative to this malaise. Indeed the essay begins by acknowledging and providing several links to conservative or classical liberal authors who also attempt to describe it, in order to provide a juxtaposition.
“Irrational and mythological thinking have been gaining adherents recently. In his essay “Conservative Rationalism has Failed,” Yoram Hazony insists that an overemphasis on reason has corroded the moral and spiritual foundations of western societies, leaving them vulnerable to anomie and to the radical modernism of the neo-Marxist left. These concerns have been echoed by pundits and intellectuals like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Sohrab Ahmari, all of whom insist that some form of traditionalist or mythological revival is required to rejuvenate the body politic’s faith in itself. More extreme mythologies have been espoused by the far right, invoking dark impulses previously thought long dead.”
Much of the remaining essay is taken up by explaining why these accounts are limited or inadequate, while providing a counter narrative. Also included are references to other authors who address the malaise from a similar standpoint, which could be looked into if desired. Rather than repeat myself I will provide a few examples from the text itself:
“In his book The Myth of the State, Ernst Cassirer argues that the apparently nihilistic consequences of Enlightenment reason led many to turn to new sources of mythological inspiration. For some, this meant a complete repudiation of reason and Enlightenment and a headlong return to religious traditionalism. But others began to formulate new mythologies to replace the old. Such mythologies drew on secularism and even tried to present pseudo-scientific bases for their conceits. But they were thoroughly mythological at their irrational core, presenting heroic individuals fighting against an increasingly mechanical world that threatened to devour their sources of meaning. “
And later:
“Postmodern culture encouraged individuals to embrace a new mythology of self-creation and creative destruction. In this respect, it is a kind of hyper-modernism. It suggests that individuals should use reason and technology to develop new modes of life and even to alter human nature itself. These aspirations found cultural expression in the cyberpunk genre, in which human beings use technology to expand their capabilities and explore. They are also represented in the Enlightenment mythology of Star Trek, in which technological advances and liberalism have brought about a utopian society. Generally speaking, these developments were cautiously welcomed by liberals and embraced—even made more radical—by many on the left…Postmodernism, however, was also defined by a radical suspicion of grand narratives, which lead many reactionaries to despair. They found the hypermodern mythologies of self-creation and technological reason unappealing. Instead, they continued to embrace the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century myths of decline and fall: for them, the world was becoming an ever more nightmarish place, as old certainties collapsed under the pressures of pluralism, new sexual identities and secularism.”
Now the author may disagree with this analysis but it is clearly addressing his concerns, including linking these anxieties to a longstanding critique of reason dating back to at least the 19th century. Addressing what was said rather than ignoring it would have been admirable.
2)Despite the authors comments, nowhere did I say that capital wasn’t responsible for interpellating most processes of self-creation today. Though this was a topic which goes beyond the purview of the essay, this possibility is gestured to in the following comment:
“Reconfiguring the political and economic system so that people possess both the free time and the resources to engage in such pursuits might prevent them from being seduced by reactionary mythologies, which usually blame problems in the labor market on foreign elements. “
And elaborated upon in other pieces of mine which were readily available with a quick search:
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/11/19/capitalism-and-the-production-of-difference/
Summarizing very briefly; you ignore the fact that the model is of a twinned set of rights rather than just one to an equality of expressive capabilities. The reason for this is the right of democratic authorship is meant to establish the parameters for inter-subjective politics and encourage more deliberative approaches. It is if anything intended to displace the myopia of indivualistic liberal consumption and atomism. Nowhere is this point addressed, though it expressed clearly here “Individuals could then develop a sense of meaning by redefining themselves and the world around them, in cooperation with others.”
On the point of “expressive capabilities” more generally, once again ignored is my point that they are presicely conceived to enable individuals to resist the power of capital or technology, which is captured by the reference not just to resources but institutions as a necessary subject of egalitarian reform along the lines specified by economists like Sen.
So in sum, while you might have your own considered judgements on these points, it would be admirable to take greater care when assessing the position of other’s.
I mean, I’m aware that your essay puts forth the conservative malaise in some form, I just think that your solution is hardly a solution, and that gesturing toward discredited race science and Western chauvinism as a means of deflating right-wing concerns and then presenting your two-pronged approach is not a sufficient response.
The piece of yours you linked is interesting. A few lines stood out:
“When I consume a product, it is intended not just to gratify a desire, but to sublimate it as a part of my identity; that part which can be given expression in the public world with dignity because it is undertaken along the lines commended and authorized by capital.”
“Capitalism is tied to the production of new values which are mutually constitutive of the desires they seek to meet.”
Given this environment, why isn’t “democratic authorship” itself just a desire that is born out of this constant identity-creation fixation of capital? How does it in any way stand outside of capital? What would people define themselves as in a socialist utopia? What new roles would they occupy? My community is “freer” if we all vote together and decide we should be able to go to Mars. We should therefore have a right to go to Mars. We’re also “freer” if we can have a furnished room for untrammeled video game playing and drug use. If a person’s metric of freedom is the pillar on which your world stands, I don’t see it going well. This is just the age-old conservative/liberal dispute about human nature, but I don’t understand what new roles would emerge if you allowed people to force institutions to change in accordance with their demands for unlimited “democratic authorship” and “expressive capabilities”.
The sentence you wrote, that democratic authorship is meant to establish “parameters for inter-subjective politics and encourage more deliberative approaches” conveys literally no meaning to me. Perhaps I’d have to read your whole book to understand it, or enroll in a PhD program, but the further explanation that “expressive capabilities” would “enable individuals to resist the power of capital or technology, which is captured by the reference not just to resources but institutions as a necessary subject of egalitarian reform along the lines specified by economists like Sen” is again of no help. Until we all read Sen and democratically agree to instate the libertarian-left utopia, we’re still in capitalist realism, and our desires are shaped by the world as it is currently. As an egalitarian reform (which, again, could be anything from Bernie Sanders to machine communism for all I know) is prerequisite for your ideas to be effective, they seem to be pretty circular. As with all left-wing thought, it again seems to be stuck in the “transvaluation of all values” as the first step that never gets off the ground, it just wrecks existing institutions and stabs away at traditionalism to no defined end other than remaining consumers with vaguely higher aspirations.
The emphasis on cooperative self-definition in the context of a deliberative democracy is probably the locus of an answer to your questions. Fisher’s point in Capitalist Realism, drawing on Fredric Jameson. was that the post-modern culture generated in the late 20th century precluded beliefs that the world could be changed in fact. The result of this was the emergence of fantastic genres in which fantasy served the psycho-social function of projecting visions of radical change which we accepted would never be instantiated, thus easing the burden of living in a static world at the end of history.
The point of the deliberative democratic tradition is effectively to open up these possibilities through foster inter-subjective ties between citizens who will then feel capable of actually changing the world in cooperation with their fellows; perhaps as I mentioned through digital media. Perhaps through other methods. How this relates to critical theory is acknowledging that the cultural ubiquity of capitalist realism flows in no small part from the anomic atomism generated wherein individuals are made to feel isolated from one another, and therefore incapable of enacting transformative changes because of limitations on their capacity and socio-psychological resources. If you can adequately eliminate these feelings of anomic atomism through generating sufficient inter-subjective ties-for instances through trying to realize the first right to “democratic authorship” within spheres of life currently regulated by neoliberal governance to give just one example-then you move closer to something closer to the community of virtue described by figures from Hannah Arendt and going back to Aristotle. Rather than pursuing the expression of identity purely through sublimated consumption individuals express it through inter-subjective deliberation on the forms political and social life could take, in a public manner which inclines them to inculcate the civic virtues cherished by the Ancients. Who, after all, saw the life of the citizen as the noblest form of existence.
Barring what I consider an unlikely return to religious life-given the incompatability of religious metaphysics with the inescapable power of the scientific mindset-this strikes me as the best we can do. Alternately the various forms of inauthentic religiosity now being parroted strike me as mocking a sensibility which enjoyed dignity in its decline, but is now being parodied in the undead form of religious nationalism and so on. As I point out here:
https://arcdigital.media/the-west-is-repurposing-religion-toward-nationalist-aims-891c67697517
Ah, I see what you’re saying. We still likely disagree about where such forms of community would lead, and perhaps how to build them, but I fundamentally agree with what you’re saying here. Particularly the point about fantasy and actually engaging reality as a community instead of projecting change into fiction as an outlet for repression. I also agree that scientific metaphysics makes the return to religion impossible en masse right now, but I do think that scientific metaphysics is at the root of our deeper malaise. After all, oddly enough, it’s now fashionable to imagine a grand “simulator” who contains all our minds in a program, circa Bostrom, seeming to me that we’re just reconstructing religious ideas in scientific language, perhaps to their distortion, perhaps to an eventual synthesis.