Reason, again, is solely directed to the attainment of truth, and careless of money and reputation. In accordance with the difference of men’s natures, one of these three principles is in the ascendant, and they have their several pleasures corresponding to them. Interrogate now the three natures, and each one will be found praising his own pleasures and depreciating those of others. The money-maker will contrast the vanity of knowledge with the solid advantages of wealth. The ambitious man will despise knowledge which brings no honour; whereas the philosopher will regard only the fruition of truth, and will call other pleasures necessary rather than good. Now, how shall we decide between them? Is there any better criterion than experience and knowledge? And which of the three has the truest knowledge and the widest experience? The experience of youth makes the philosopher acquainted with the two kinds of desire, but the avaricious and the ambitious man never tastes the pleasures of truth and wisdom. Honour he has equally with them; they are “judged of him,” but he is “not judged of them,” for they never attain to the knowledge of true being. And his instrument is reason, whereas their standard is only wealth and honour; and if by reason we are to judge, his good will be the truest.—Plato, The Republic
Few terms generate as much controversy as reason—ironically, given how reasonable it seems to subordinate ourselves to reason. The straightforwardness of this position might explain the appeal of Stephen Hicks, Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky and others, who push back against irrationalism and relativism by upholding the virtues of the Enlightenment project. Of course, critics can always point out that reason seems to lead these figures to very different conclusions about how the world operates and what should be done. Reason inspires the pious objectivist disciples of Ayn Rand to declare that the world can be known in itself and that the right thing to do is to invoke the virtues of selfishness; and it has also inspired centuries of Marxist theorists, who dedicated themselves to developing a true science of society and emancipation from capital. Such controversies go at least as far back as the ancient Greek philosophers, who disputed what reason demanded of thinking and action. But what unites all these figures and traditions is a belief that, at least in principle, we can know some truths about the world and what constitutes moral human behavior.
Yet, for as long as there have been Apollonian sages preaching the advantages of reason, there have been opponents who have scorned its alleged authority. The Greek sophists emphasized that power and rhetoric are more important than appeals to the rational capacities, and generations of skeptics from Gorgias to Derrida have questioned whether we can actually know what we claim to know. Even some Enlightenment thinkers—such as Hume and Kant in their darker moments—conceded that human intelligence may be so limited that our aspirations to discover the truth will be eternally foreclosed in many areas.
A specific type of anti-reason developed during what Isaiah Berlin called the counter-Enlightenment. It has been associated with irrationalist sociopolitical movements from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day.
The Counter-Enlightenment and the Politics of Reaction
Few periods were as enamored with reason then the Enlightenment. From the late seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, developments in the arts and sciences persuaded many thinking people that human intelligence could not just discover the deepest inner workings of the world, but also how to organize all elements of human life for the better. The prevailing sunny atmosphere was best captured in Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” written in one of his more optimistic moods. Kant makes the startling claim that all previous human history was a period of immaturity and superstition from which individuals are only now waking up:
Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere aude! [Dare to know!] Have the courage to use your own intelligence is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
However, even at the time, some were highly skeptical of the new church of reason, notably Joseph de Maistre, a hyper-conservative Catholic, who insisted that the new philosophies were fundamentally destructive. He argued that the power of the human mind to know anything is intrinsically limited, and its capacity to develop a just society independent of traditional authority and religion virtually non-existent—beliefs to the contrary reflect the kind of rebellious pride depicted in Milton’s Lucifer. The foundation of knowledge and ordered civil society, de Maistre believed, is not some hypothetical and superstitious conceit about rational individuals thinking and cooperating for the common good. De Maistre rarely tried to demonstrate the validity of his positions (his St. Petersburg Dialogues are a notable exception). Attempting to offer proof would concede too much ground to the rationalists. Instead, de Maistre insisted we accept both epistemic and political authorities, such as the Church and the crown. The alternative would be horror and chaos.
De Maistre’s irrationalist disdain for reason extended to an admiration for the spectacular qualities of violence, when necessary to uphold ordered authority. This is why Berlin regarded him as both a major figure of the counter-Enlightenment and the godfather of fascism. But his often manic denunciations lacked the theoretical and charismatic weight of his successors.
Probably the most infamous critic of the Enlightenment was its dark offspring, Friedrich Nietzsche. The power of his criticism stemmed in no small part from his profound capacity to carry the positions of reason’s defenders to dark places. Nietzsche famously observed that what remained unquestioned by the Enlightenment project was why reason should feel compelled to submit to its own authority? Reason was first and foremost an attempt to understand the world as it truly was, but people like Kant wanted to go further and insist that reason could tell us how to behave and what to value—to provide existential meaning. But no collection of facts or philosophies about how the world is can lead to conclusions about what ultimately matters. The world is simply what it is: death, suffering and resentment are part of existence. Reason can only overcome this by insisting that the world as it is, is insufficient. But on what basis could a rationalist claim this, while still invoking pure reason? According to Nietzsche, the Enlightenment thinkers shy away from this nihilistic abyss by smuggling irrational faith back into their projects. Kant argues that we must posit the existence of freedom, immortality of the soul and God, to provide a justification for the imperatives of so-called practical reason. Late Enlightenment thinkers like Hegel and Marx argue that history has an inner logic that reason can apprehend, and is moving towards inevitable universal emancipation from alienation.
Nietzsche would have none of that. He pointed out that, since Plato, the priests of rationalism have run into the dilemma that the real world is filled with imperfection. They overcome this by sacrificing the real world to the ideal. Christianity—Platonism for the masses—became a worldwide force by insisting that this life was but a suffering-filled simulacrum of the true existence to come. Scholastic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas insisted that both reason and faith demonstrated this, but their final appeals were to faith. Even the Enlightenment, which prided itself on casting off the yoke of religious superstition, remained in the shadow of this outlook. The philosophes, liberals and socialists viewed their time with disdain, invoking quaint phrases about rationalizing our understanding and society to hide their powerless resentment. Instead of adopting secularized Christian reason, Nietzsche argues, we should will the pursuit of inegalitarian excellence. The Übermensch to come will scorns the idea of trying to improve the world, in accordance with a superstitious universal plan dictated by mysterious reason. Instead he will remake it in accordance with the dictates of taste and aesthetics.
This position was later radicalized by Martin Heidegger, who was both one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers and—notoriously—a supporter of the Nazi party. In Being and Time, Heidegger insists that the history of Western civilization has been a long decline from the glory of the Greeks, who had the audacity to live in awe of the question of Being: why is there something instead of nothing at all? Since Plato, we have gradually abandoned interest in this mystery in favour of technical problems that we believe reason can solve. For example, we have moved from the question what is justice? to what rights should people have? and, finally, to what should the marginal tax rate be? In our inauthentic modern epoch, the key issues are all limited by technical reason. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, which is based on a lecture given towards the height of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement, the philosopher claims that capitalism and communism/socialism are “metaphysically the same.” Both are technical and rationalistic approaches to the world, which emphasize the satisfaction of human desire as the sole end of existence. All the military bluster and partisan mewling aside, according to Heidegger both capitalism and its left-wing competitors are just debating the best way to design and distribute better refrigerators. Heidegger claims that we need to reject this for a project of individual and national authenticity. We should heroically face the absurdity of the world and the nihilistic expectation of our inevitable destruction, along with all that we know and believe to be stable, by trying to make something grand and complete out of ourselves.
Defending Reason
These irrational philosophies resonate in part because they capture many of our deepest anxieties. Despite our aspirations to understand the world and discipline our behavior, many of us often feel powerless in the face of systems that purport to be rational but whose motives and processes none can understand. Dostoevsky’s work suggests that rejecting reason can be deeply satisfying in such a world. In his Notes from the Underground, the Russian novelist depicts a world in which both liberal capitalists and proto-Bolsheviks are struggling to remake society in their image. They promise that once they have accomplished their goals all will be right with the world. But they also claim that there is no other choice but to submit to their allegedly scientific outlooks. The capitalists invoke the laws of economics and the socialists the laws of history to deny people the freedom to act or remake the world as they wish. In such a setting, Dostoevsky argues, the greatest satisfaction may come from resisting the force of reason and willing free acts purely to disprove the inexorability of the rationalist claims.
But the dangers of embracing irrationalism have been demonstrated by the recent ascendency of postmodern conservatism (which I have written about here), whose mantra that truth is not truth suggests that the appeal of irrationalism hasn’t worn off. To defend reason, we need to moderate its claims. From Plato through many iterations of Enlightenment thought, there has been a totalizing desire to subordinate human life to a single unified principle or set of principles, which both explain the world and provide moral obligations. Perhaps the most characteristic of these principles is the classical principle of utility, which suggests that all human action is governed by the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain. This means that the moral thing to do is to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Such a claim has great purchase on our rational faculties. But it doesn’t capture many elements of human life that provide us with resonant value, even if they entail suffering. One rather mundane example—which even Heidegger might appreciate—is the inner satisfaction that comes from overcoming hardship and developing a sense of self. If this is rationalistic utilitarianism, it is utility understood in what Mill might call the last instance. Or consider the feelings of affect and association we feel towards the dead, both those we knew and others we encounter only through reputation. The fidelity we have towards departed fathers, daughters and so on can mean a great deal to us. Reason can interrogate all these forms of value successfully, but only if it is fine-grained enough to appreciate their qualitative differences in a spirit of pluralism and sincere curiosity. In a postmodern era in which the charms of irrationalism are becoming increasingly apparent, we badly need such an outlook.
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I think I should add one more observation to my March 1st comment on the Jordan Peterson vogue reflecting the decline of David Riesman and Nathan Glazer’s “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture.” I discussed the economic and occupational shifts first noted by Barbara Ehrenreich in the 1980’s that since the 1970’s have made liberal-arts majors and academic or “cultural elite” careers seem more and more unrealistic and unattainable for young Americans from unprivileged families. However, I’d also like to mention a significant demographic shift in the past half-century that has greatly reduced the proportion of college-age Americans fitting the particular social and cultural profile of Riesman and Glazer’s 1950’s “eager strivers.”
When Riesman and Glazer wrote their article in the 1950’s, American society was nearing the tail end of two processes that had dominated it throughout the first half of the 20th century: the assimilation of European immigrants into mainstream American society, and the spread of educational opportunity to rural and working-class white Americans. The immigration restrictions of the 1920’s had led to a progressively smaller and smaller and smaller population of unassimilated European immigrants speaking little or no English, clinging to “Old World” customs, and living huddled in “Polishtowns” and “Little Italies,” in Irish and Jewish tenement neighborhoods where black-shawled grandmothers haggled with pushcart vendors. The post-World War II “G.I. Bill” had given the chance for some sort of college education to countless white male Americans who could have never even dreamed of it earlier. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, these two social trends were winding down, as the last major cohorts of White Americans moved from the tenements, “coaltowns,” “steeltowns,” “Tobacco Roads,” “Podunks,” and “Dogpatches” to Suburbia (from where some of their children and grandchildren would in turn later move to gated communities or to gentrified former working-class urban neighborhoods).
This 1950’s and 1960’s winding-down of the old mass immigrant Americanization, along with the “G.I. Bill” expansion of educational opportunity for white male Americans, led to progressively fewer and fewer occasions for bitter inter-generational conflicts between rural, small-town, or immigrant parents and their newly “emancipated” and “sophisticated” college-educated sons and daughters. In the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s, even into the 1950’s, small-town or immigrant parents and their college-educated children could still engage in angry, even tearful arguments about evolution, Bible criticism, dating or marrying boys or girls of the “wrong” ethnicity or religion, or “worldly” habits and practices like smoking, drinking, dancing, lipstick, jazz (or rock’n’roll) music, or Sabbath-breaking. The “kids” themselves, too, could experience their new-found perspectives as a joyously liberating revelation. They might find a wonderful sense of personal liberation in defying their parents’, grandparents’, and home-town’s or ethnic enclave’s authority figures’ prejudices against Jews or Christians, Protestants or Catholics, Irish or WASP’s, Poles or Germans–or in defending Darwinism against a literal interpretation of Genesis. Aside from the progressive Americanization of vast numbers of European immigrants, the early decades of the 20th century also saw the literary “Revolt From the Village,” as Carl van Doren called it in his 1921 “Nation” article by that title, of writers like H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Zona Gale, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, who all criticized what they considered the negative aspects of small-town life while celebrating urban sophistication. At the same time, “Americanization” was a similar central theme among immigrant writers. These were major themes of American life and culture throughout the first half of the 20th century–but, as I’ve observed, largely “lost steam” after the 1950’s and 1960’s, as fewer and fewer young Americans defined themselves in contrast to “greenhorn” or small-town parents.
These cultural and demographic shifts of the past half-century have greatly reduced the once often large cultural gap between young American college students’ home environments–at least for non-Latino white students–and mainstream modern American society as found on campus. College life is not nearly as much of a “culture shock” for most young Americans now as it might have been in the early or middle decades of the 20th century. Far fewer young white non-Latino Americans entering college these days are struggling with old-world, small-town, or rural customs, practices, attitudes, and expectations increasingly felt to be irrational and restrictive. They no longer feel any great need to fight the “old fogey,” “up-tight” old-country or fundamentalist parental restrictions on normal healthy youthful fun and games that so preoccupied “jazz age” collegiate youth. At the same time, however, they now confront new, previously unknown restrictions, constraints, and annoyances imposed by “political correctness,” “woke” identity politics, and the “call-out culture,” all making the college experience far more uncomfortable than it was a few decades ago. Thus, campus liberals and leftists are no longer perceived as allies, inspirations, or role-models for young rebels against parental, religious, or community restrictions and prejudices. Rather, they are now regarded as adversaries to be opposed or evaded. Their liberalism or leftism is no longer the seductive temptation it once was, but rather a definite “turn-off”, at best a nuisance!
Jordan Peterson is thus an ideal mentor for contemporary young white Americans who, on the one hand, no longer feel as great a need to rebel against parental, religious, or community values and prejudices as they might have felt a generation or two ago, and on the other hand, find our time’s campus liberalism to be just as oppressive, drearily moralistic, “up-tight,” and fun-hating as they might once have found traditional cultural authorities. Those campus liberals, for their own part, seem to have completely forgotten Dale Carnegie’s reminder that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. A generation or two ago, they appealed to bright young people seeking an alternative to family, religious, or community attitudes and prejudices they felt to be irrational and
oppressive. Nowadays, however, they seem to be every bit as oppressive, restrictive, and killjoy as anything from the students’ own family or community backgrounds!
Perhaps the most succinct way to interpret the current Jordan Peterson vogue is that it reflects the decline in our time of David Riesman and Nathan Glazer’s mid-20th century “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture,” college-educated children of the upward-mobile working and lower-middle classes questioning their families’ less “sophisticated” or “enlightened” attitudes.
In their 1955 essay “The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes” exploring the social sources of Joseph McCarthy’s popular appeal, sociologists Riesman and Glazer observed that many of post-World War II America’s “newly prosperous” tended to “reject the traditional cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened upper and upper-middle classes.” However, Riesman and Glazer then added, they had “sent their children to college as one way of maintaining the family’s social and occupational mobility.” Some of those children had “become eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values now held by the discontented classes,” though many others had also “acquired…and helped their families learn, a half-educated resentment for the traditional intellectual values some of their teachers and schoolmates represented.”
Riesman and Glazer’s “eager strivers” represented a significant portion of mid and late 20th century America’s college students and graduates (though certainly not all of them). Occupationally, they gravitated heavily to the careers described by Barbara Ehrenreich in 1980 as most heavily impacted by America’s post-1970 economic downturn–to her jobs “offering relative autonomy from corporate domination,” as “in academia, many of the service professions, the public sector.” These career fields, which also often offered considerable freedom for personal nonconformity, among colleagues and co-workers largely sharing a sophisticated urban liberal cultural outlook, seemed to be limitlessly expanding in mid and late 20th century America. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, as Ms. Ehrenreich observed in 1984, liberally-educated young college graduates could “look forward to secure, high-status careers, provided only that they acquired some credentials and showed up for work.” Professional-level job slots were increasing in the first two post-World War II decades, “along with the expansion of corporate and governmental administrative apparatuses,” while “jobs in higher education increased to keep pace with the growing demand for managerial and ‘mental’’ workers.” Secure, high-status academic, professional, and administrative careers almost seemed to be a natural, guaranteed reward for graduates of liberal-arts majors like History, English, or Philosophy in mid-20th century America.
Then, however, Ms. Ehrenreich noted, “came the long economic downturn of the 1970’s,” as America’s seemingly endless postwar boom gave way to what University of Economist Wallace Peterson would later (1994) call our continuous post-1973 “Silent Depression.” Beginning in the early and mid 1970’s, “whole occupations–from public administration to college history teaching–closed their ranks and lost ground.” This collapse particularly afflicted fields like “academia, many of the service professions, the public sector” with “relative autonomy from corporate domination,” in contrast to “careers requiring direct subordination to corporate priorities”–and, we might also add, often with more expectations of strict “bourgeois” propriety. Thus, Ms. Ehrenreich observed, the “young man who might, in the sixties, have studied history or philosophy now swallowed his curiosity and took up accounting.” If 1950’s sociologists had “bewailed” the bland conformity of the “man in the gray flannel suit,” the “middle-class male swallowed up by the corporate behemoth,” in the 1970’s and 1980’s “their sons were glad to find a white-collar job at all.” A “whole segment of formerly middle-class, educated youth” now “drifted downward to become taxi drivers, waiters or carpenters.” Other college-educated young Americans “crowded into the most vocationally promising areas” like “medicine, law, management,” but “those too became hazardously overpopulated.”
All this, as I’ve been driving at, has had a particularly dampening effect on the sort of young men–but I’d also add young women too–whom Riesman and Glazer back in 1955 called the “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture,” PARTICULARLY on those young people coming from less privileged families–and I’m NOT thinking here of so-called “white privilege,” either! The economic, educational, and occupational shifts of the last half-century have made it seem increasingly less and less worth-while for young people from at best only modestly affluent families to study liberal-arts subjects like history, philosophy, or English in contrast to STEM or business fields. Those shifts have also made also it harder and harder from them to break into occupations and work environments where a certain degree of nonconformity, unconventionality, and departure from strict “bourgeois” respectability is commonplace or even expected. In other words, it’s much harder nowadays for such kids to become “eager strivers” and youthful recruits to “upper Bohemia” than it would have been half a century ago!
As I’ve already noted, I suspect a main reason for Jordan Peterson’s phenomenal appeal these last few years to college-age white male Americans is their growing lack of belief in any realistic possibility of rising into the “cultural elites” where it seems safe and even fashionable to question Peterson’s traditional eternal verities. As I said the other day, they feel permanently locked into “Middle America,” with little chance of mobility beyond it, to a degree that was almost unknown a few decades ago–that few observers would have predicted a half-century ago.
One of the earliest observers to note this trend, I believe, was feminist/socialist social critic Barbara Ehrenreich in a couple of early 1980’s articles on the fate of American masculinity. Ms. Ehrenreich noted a drastic steady post-1970 shrinkage of “cultural elite” career opportunities for college-educated young men first in a 1980 *Socialist Review* paper with film historian Peter Biskind, and then in a more popular 1984 *New York Times Magazine* article on the “New Man.”
Ehrenreich and Biskind first noted the shrinking career opportunities for educated young man in an aside in their 1980 *Socialist Review* discussion of “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class,” analyzing the 1970’s popularity of movies with blue-collar heroes. The “working-class world,” they felt, “might not have become a subject for major Hollywood films if its ‘discovery’ had not coincided with the middle-class ‘masculinity crisis’ of the seventies.” On “the home front,” they noted “the inexorable spread of battlefield stretching from the kitchen, through the den, to the bedroom.” On the “job front,” at the same time, the 1970’s “economic downturn” with the fading of America’s postwar 1945-1973 boom was “limiting middle-class opportunities.” Thus, “[c]areers offering relative autonomy from corporate domination–in academia, many of the service professions, the public sector–began to decline relative to careers requiring direct subordination to corporate priorities.” As a result, “[t]he young man who might, in the sixties, have studied history or philosophy now swallowed his curiosity and took up accounting.” Sociologists in the 1950’s had “bewailed” the “man in the gray flannel suit,” the “middle-class male swallowed up by the corporate behemoth.” In the 1970’s, however, “their sons were glad to find a white-collar job at all.” They “chase[d] after their lost autonomy, away from work or home, on the edges of highways, in Adidas sneakers,” in Ehrenreich and Biskind’s dig at the rising vogue of jogging and running as upper-bourgeois status fads from the early 1970’s on.[Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class,” *Socialist Review*, 50-51, 1980, reprinted in Donald Lazere, ed., *American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives* (University of California Press, 1987–618 pp.–Biskind & Ehrenreich on pp, 201-215), p. 206]
A few years later, Ms. Ehrenreich offered her skeptical “A Feminist’s View of the New Man” in the May 20, 1984 *New York Times Magazine*. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, she observed, the “professional-managerial middle class, which is the breeding ground for social ideals like the new man or new woman,” had “become an embattled group.” In the 1950’s and 1960’s, she noted, “young men of this class could look forward to secure, high-status careers, provided only that they acquired some credentials and showed up for work.” Professional-level job slots were increasing in the first two post-World War II decades, “along with the expansion of corporate and governmental administrative apparatuses,” while “jobs in higher education increased to keep pace with the growing demand for managerial and ‘mental’’ workers.”
Then, Ms. Ehrenreich continued, “came the long economic downturn of the 1970’s,” as the seemingly endless postwar boom faded out, “and whole occupations–from public administration to college history teaching–closed their ranks and lost ground.” A “whole segment of formerly middle-class, educated youth” now “drifted downward to become taxi drivers, waiters or carpenters.” Other college-educated young Americans “crowded into the most vocationally promising areas” like “medicine, law, management,” but “those too became hazardously overpopulated.” According to recent [as of 1984] studies of the ”disappearing middle class,” she noted, the “erstwhile middle-class majority” was “tumbling down and out (both because of a lack of jobs and because those that remain have not held their own against inflation),” while a “minority” was “scrambling up to become the new high-finance, high-tech gentry.” Our “new men,” she concluded. “are mainly in the latter category, or are at least holding on by their fingernails.” [Barbara Ehrenreich, “A Feminist’s View of the New Man,” *The New York Times Magazine*. May 20, 1984, p. 36 ff.]
In these two 1980’s articles, I think Ms. Ehrenreich put her finger exactly on the economically quite realistic, practical, and down-to-earth main reason why college-age young men are flocking to Jordan Peterson’s books, videos, and lectures in early 21st century America, quite apart from whether or not there is any purely philosophical validity in her arguments. Careers “offering relative autonomy from corporate domination,” as in “academia, many of the service professions, the public sector” offer far, far fewer opportunities now than they used to in the now almost prehistoric 1950’s and 1960’s, in comparison “careers requiring direct subordination to corporate priorities.” Young men who might have studied History, Philosophy, or English Literature in the 1960’s, when such Humanities fields seemed limitlessly open, now must “swallow their curiosity” and study Accounting (or maybe Computer Programming or Software Design). Secure, high-status jobs in academic or public-service fields are now hardly open to anybody who just bothers to get sme credentials and show up, as it seemed in the 1960’s. One is nowadays lucky to find any white-collar employment at all–as since the 1970’s and 1980’s so many PhD’s have found themselves forced to support themselves as taxi drivers, waiters/waitresses, baristas, bartenders, or carpenters.
Even more directly related to the ultimately economic and structural reasons of Jordan Peterson’s appeal is the fact that most of the jobs and careers that have progressively dried up since the 1970’s have been precisely the ones–e.g., in College History,. Philosophy, or English teaching, or in “highbrow” and “upper-middlebrow” journalism and publishing–where there has long been a certain freedom to flout, ignore, or question traditional middle-class respectability and propriety, to be at least a bit of an “Upper Bohemian,” to question what Peterson and his admirers consider the time-honored if “square” and unfashionable eternal verities, the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” as Rudyard Kipling called them a century ago in his famous 1919 poem. It just seems far less realistically possible now than it appeared in the 1950’s and 1960’s for young Americans to aspire to a reputable high-status career where it was fairly safe to ignore, question, or deride the “square” virtues and prejudices–and comfortably “get away with it.”
In her 1980’s articles on American men and the impact of the 1970’s economic downturn in educated young Americans’ work lives and economic prospects, Barbara Ehrenreich described “careers offering relative autonomy from corporate domination,” as in “academia, many of the service professions, the public sector,” as far harder hit by the downturn than “careers requiring direct subordination to corporate priorities.” Thus, she observed, young men who might have studied History in the 1960’s now had to “swallow their curiosity” and study Accounting–unless they wanted to join the army of unemployed PhD’s drifting “downward to become taxi drivers, waiters or carpenters.” Other college-educated young Americans, Ms. Ehrenreich added, “crowded into the most vocationally promising areas” like “medicine, law, management,” which soon also “became hazardously overpopulated.”
Those “careers offering relative autonomy from corporate domination” so hard-hit by the post-1970 downturn, as in “academia, many of the service professions, the public sector,” include precisely the job fields that half a century ago as today offered educated young Americans the most day-to-day personal latitude, the most freedom for unconventional behavior, the least pressure to conform to “stuffy,” “up-tight” norms of “respectability,” “propriety,” or “gentility.” Half a century ago as today, career fields like academia, publishing, and “quality” journalism, all hard-hit by the post-1970 economic changes, generally subjected educated, sophisticated, culturally cosmopolitan young Americans the least day-in-day-out pressure to “shape up,” the fewest tongue-clucking raised eyebrows at harmless unconventionalities or irregularities–certainly on comparison to most of the business world, or banking, or real estate, or even grade-school teaching. It was in fields like college teaching, publishing, or “quality” journalism a half-century ago, as opposed to the other areas I just mentioned, where one could most easily be somewhat casual in one’s dress and grooming, a bit eccentric in one’s household decor, somewhat unconventional or irregular in one’s sexual morals and political opinions, rather avant-garde in one’s artistic, literary, and musical tastes, and pretty indifferent to flag-waving patriotism and organized religion–and still be very much in one’s employers’, colleagues’, and co-workers’ good graces.
Interracial marriage or dating was still rather “edgy” a half-century ago, biut it still was more common and more acceptable in academia, publishing, “highbrow” journalism, and the arts than in most other sectors of mid 20th century American society. Dating and marriage between young men and women of different “white” ethnic and religious groups, again, were quite commonplace and “no big deal” In academic, publishing, and “highbrow” journalistic circles. Very few if any eyebrows were censoriously raised in such circles by an Irish boy falling on love with a Jewish girl, or a Jewish boy marrying a “shiksa,” or a WASP girl dating a Polish or Italian boy. Upward-mobile working-class or lower-middle-class boys and girls from second- or third-generation immigrant “ethnic” enclaves–e.g., from Irish, Italian, or Orthodox Jewish urban neighborhoods, or from largely Polish, Hungarian, or Slovak “Coaltowns” or “Steeltowns”–fortunate enough to attend college (and maybe then also graduate school) might often find themselves meeting interesting, stimulating new friends and intriguing potential romantic partners whom they would never have met in their parents’ church, synagogue, or ethnic lodge.
The brighter, more intellectually “alive” and curious sons and daughters of Princeton University historian Eric F. Goldman’s upward-mobile, newly middle-class third-generation immigrants in *The Crucial Decade: America 1945-1955* (1956), his “Italian-American worker, Slovak-American accountant, Russian-American teacher” (p. 127) might often have found college a stimulating, broadening, and mentally and emotionally liberating enough experience, free from what they’d learned to consider the irksome constraints of “old-world” life-styles, to aspire to spend their subsequent working lives in a comparable setting. Over a century ago, in his July 1916 *Atlantic Monthly* essay welcoming immigrants and multiculturalism, “Trans-National America,” the social and literary critic Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) optimistically hailed the beneficial mutual influence of “Anglo-Saxon” and immigrant college students in developing a vibrant, sophisticated new cosmopolitan American culture free of stodgy “WASP” provinciality. Bourne noted that “the eager Anglo-Saxon” youth going to “a vivid American university” quite often found “his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian,” displaying a “cosmopolitan note.” In these immigrant youths, “foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents,” he could “find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away” among “friends…oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up.” He had “a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day.” His “new friends,” Bourne went on, had “gone through a similar evolution.” America, he felt, had “burned most of the baser metal also from them.” In other words, those college- or university-educated immigrant youngsters enjoyed a similar liberation from the narrower aspects of their own ethnic cultures, learning to question, e.g., the more repressive and dogmatic beliefs and practices of Irish or Italian Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism, to reject German or Polish peasant anti-Semitism or old-world Jewish fear and distrust of the “goyim.”
All these potentially personally liberating tendencies, however, were foreclosed for millions of young Americans by the post-1970 economic downturn we are still essentially enduring today. Today’s Jordan Peterson vogue is one an result of that foreclosure.
The American class and culture clashes epitomized in our own time by Jordan Peterson’s groupies and detractors were already prefigured half a century ago. Back in the 1950’s, an academic political historian and a “middlebrow” popular journalist deftly analyzed their day’s forerunners of the dawn-millennial “cultural elites” from which today’s young male American “Petersonians” feel themselves eternally excluded by their socioeconomic fate. Educated, comfortably situated, high-status Americans with a skeptical view of popular pieties and conventional “respectability” were wittily depicted in the 1950’s both by an academic scholar of American political history and a journalistic commentator on social mores, popular culture, and artistic taste. Princeton University historian Eric F. Goldman called them the “New Dealers” from their political involvements, while art historian Russell Lynes dubbed them “Upper Bohemians” for their general life-style. Goldman mainly focused on their political role but also noted their general attitude to life. Lynes, again, emphasized their overall approach to life while touching on their specifically political outlook just in passing. Both Goldman and Lynes, however, noted and emphasized the same skeptical, detached attitude toward many “Middle American” values and prejudices.
Eric Goldman devoted a chapter of his 1956 *The Crucial Decade: America, 1954-1955* to analyzing the wide popular resonance in mid-20th century America of Joseph McCarthy’s demagogic “anti-Communist” crusade. Goldman echoed Columbia University sociologist Daniel Bell and his fellow-contributors (Richard Hofstadter, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Peter Viereck, Seymour Martin Lipset, etc.) to *The New American Right* (1955) in attributing it largely to populist resentments at the supposed social snobbery, cultural profligacy, and political disloyalty of “Establishment” liberal and centrist politicians and pundits. Like Bell, Riesman, Hofstadter, and the other *New American Right* symposiasts, he portrayed “McCarthyism” as a backlash, aggravated by social status anxieties and resentments, against the Roosevelt and Truman era Democratic politicians, State Department careerists, and Ivy League intellectuals seen as responsible for the catastrophes of the early Cold War–for the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe, for the “loss” of China, for the Korean War, for the theft of American atomic and military secrets by Soviet spies like the Rosenbergs, even for inflation and high prices. He used “New Dealers” as a shorthand term for the social groups and types most targetted by McCarthy and his supporters. However, he saw them as a cultural and not simply as a political group.
The complexities of New Deal economic regulation and the rising welfare state in the 1930’s, Goldman noted, had “begun bringing into prominence” a “quite different type” from the old-style lawyer, businessman, military hero, or practical politician. Those had been increasingly supplanted in the 1930’s and 1940’s by “the highly educated man, decidedly intellectualish in manner, with a marked, often wise-cracking, impatience for the certitudes of the man of action.” To “top off their ability to arouse suspicion,” Goldman added, “many of these Brain Trusters were the sons of wealth and the products of Eastern universities which had long been associated in the popular mind with snobbery.” [Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America, 1954-1955 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 119.]
“New Dealism,” Goldman observed, was a widespread popular name for the social and cultural changes brought by the “Half-Century of Revolution in domestic affairs,” an “appropriate…term” though “Franklin Roosevelt was long dead and the New Deal as a specific program had ended years ago.” In its “simplest form,” it “may have been a set of domestic policies,” but it was “also” an “emphasis, a climate of opinion, a collection of attitudes.” It was “the assumption that the new was better than the old; that intellectuals ought to be leaders; that morals and religion as well as economics and politics were constantly to be re-examined; that progressive education and Freudianism and planned parenthood were to be furthered; that the cocked eye was man’s most proper expression.” The Truman Administration, Goldman conceded, “broke with many of these attitudes” in its own actual policies and in “Harry’s” own personality, but “it never really disassociated itself from them in the public mind,” where the “New Deal and the figure of Franklin Roosevelt loomed over anything a Democrat might do.” [Goldman, *The Crucial Decade*, pp. 119-120.]
As Harry Truman’s Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953, Goldman noted, Dean Acheson epitomized many of the cultural attitudes popularly associated with “New Dealism.” At a “staid Washington affair” one afternoon in 1949, Acheson “tweaked his perfectly groomed mustache” and in “the most cultivated of voices” began, “All that I know I learned at my mother’s knee and other low joints.” There it was, Goldman confessed. “a man in the so easily suspected post of Secretary of State who was the New Dealish type down to the last item of irrepressible kidding.” To “capsule Acheson,” Goldman observed, was “to summarize the things which provoked the devotees of the theory of conspiracy.” He was “born to the Social Register and he was Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law School.” Acheson had “been a New Dealer in domestic affairs despite some differences with Franklin Roosevelt,” then “operated as a let’s-be-friends-with-Russia man during the war,” and “when he shifted in his attitude toward the Soviet after V-J, did it with a conviction that the world revolution called for a basic change in traditional American ideas.” Acheson and Alger Hiss were longtime associates.” Alger’s brother, Donald, was “a member of the law firm of which the Secretary had been a senior partner.” Acheson was “not only the Secretary of State who had to announce the fall of China.” but he had “been a high officer in the State Department during most of the period when Communism made its chief advances.” And “always there was Dean Gooderham Acheson the man, a goadingly adventurous mind in irritatingly handsome tweeds.” [Goldman, *The Crucial Decade*, pp. 123-124.]
Another “important part of support for New Dealism,” Goldman observed a few pages later in another echo of Bell, Riesman, Glazer, Hofstadter, and other 1955 *New American Right* contributors. had “come from recent immigrants living in the great urban centers across the country, most of whom were in the working class during the 1930’s.” These people, he noted like Bell, Riesman, and their colleagues, had “a special sensitivity,” to which however they could “afford to pay little attention during depression times.” Still, as the increased economic prosperity” of the 1940’s and 50’s “moved many of them into the middle classes in income or in actual jobs,” the sensitivity “became a vital part of their reaction to public affairs.” Americans, “just because they are so mixed in background,” Goldman observed, are “one of the few peoples in modern history who have shown a great concern with aspiring to full nationality with being ‘100% Americans.’” By 1949, the “nature of the population had changed so much” that “only a minority could feel genuinely old stock.” The “typical American” was a “third-generation immigrant” in the 1940’s and 1950’s. “Rising to the middle class” thus “left the Italian-American worker, the Slovak-American accountant, the Russian-American teacher only the more anxious to achieve the further respectability of unhyphenated Americanism.” Under such circumstances, Goldman suggested, the ex-immigrant” was the more likely to want no part of the New Dealism and the Democratic foreign policy which were being assailed as an un-American conspiracy and he was the more ready to accept that view himself.” [Goldman, *The Crucial Decade*, pp. 126-127.]
Eric Goldman’s skeptical, irreverent “New Dealers” were echoed in the 1950’s in a less actively political register by art historian, social commentator, and *Harper’s Magazine* managing editor Russell Lynes’ “Upper Bohemians.” Like Goldman’s “New Dealers,” Lynes’ “Upper Bohemians” were educated Americans from professional-class or “old money” backgrounds who felt entitled to a polite, sophisticated disdain for “square” piety and respectability. In his 1953 *Harper’s* essay on “The Upper Bohemians,” later reprinted in his 1956 collection *A Surfeit of Honey*, Lynes offered a an amiably satiric portrait of literate, cultivated upper-middle-class metropolitan sophisticates who felt themselves “above” stuffy, narrow-minded “bourgeois” conventions. He depicted a “somewhat ornamental and by no means inconsequential” stratum of the mid-20th century American professional, academic, and arts & communications world educated upper-middle classes, disdainful of “mere” money-making and stuffy “up-tight” social convention, inhabiting a “twilight zone in our society, neither below the aristocracy nor above the middle class.”
Basically well-educated upper-middle-class people whose rebellion consisted of “slightly odd” tastes, Lynes’ “Upper Bohemians” typically exhibited a “relaxed attitude toward convention,” a lack of zeal for “middle-class moralities,” an “open-minded” attitude toward sex (without defending promiscuity), a “suspicious and scornful” view of “dogma,” a “tolerant attitude toward other people” that very often made it “difficult to make clear-cut decisions for himself,” and a studied indifference to “wealth or position or any of the cushions of life that we now group under the unromantic heading of Security.” The “Upper Bohemian,” Lynes found, generally leaned to “the side of the labor aristocracy against the business aristocracy,” to “the Freudian interpretation of behavior,” to “the Keynesian interpretation of economics,” and to “a free-thought interpretation of religion,” though he went “overboard about none of these” as he was “not a faddist”–that is, though clearly at least a bit left of center, in the 1950’s he was very rarely if ever what we would now call a “woke,” “politically correct” social justice warrior excoriating everybody else for their straight white male privilege! Preferring casual but not eccentric dress, Upper Bohemians “put comfort and casualness before routine propriety.” The Upper Bohemian was “not sloppy in his manners,” but merely saw “manners of all sorts” as “an expression of good will, not of good training.”
Lynes’ “Upper Bohemian” was typically “ a publisher, though he might as easily be a lawyer, or writer, or an architect, or an editor, or, but less likely, a business man,” in “advertising or some other form of communications” In his “professional life,” he usually moved “in and out of the arts and near them,” and was “alive to their latest alarums and excursions.” In social origin, they came “mainly from two socially secure segments of society.” Lynes’ “guess” was that “the largest number” were “the sons and daughters of the professional classes, the offspring of the law and medicine, of academics and clergymen… brought up in an atmosphere in which the achievements of the mind have been put ahead of the achievements of the bank balance.” Alongside these were “the intellectually inclined sons and daughters of the rich…embarrassed about Father’s lack of what they would call ‘any real culture.’” They came “from a socially secure group well versed in the gentle amenities of decorous behavior and well able to give their children all of what are known as ‘the advantages.’” These “scions of wealth and manners” were “refugees to Upper Bohemia from the upper classes, seeking sanctuary from aristocratic stuffiness.” [Russell Lynes, “The Upper Bohemians,” *Harper’s Magazine*, February 1953, pp. 46-51, reprinted in Russell Lynes, *A Surfeit of Honey: A Friendly If Somewhat Skeptical, Excursion into the Manners and Customs of Americans in This Time of Prosperity* (Harper Brother’s, 1956), pp. 31-46]
Lynes, whose other books included *Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow* (1949), *Snobs* (1950), The Tastemasters (1954), *Confessions of a Dilettante* (1966), *The Art Makers* (1970), and “The Lively Audience* (1985), was a cultivated but largely apolitical chronicler of artistic taste and popular culture with very little interest in politics, in contrast to Eric Goldman’s heavily political focus. “The Upper Bohemians,” though written in 1953, said nothing about Joseph McCarthy, the Korean War, or the Rosenberg case, and confined its description of its subjects’ political outlook to briefly noting their siding with “the labor aristocracy against the business aristocracy” and with “the Keynesian interpretation of economics,” adding that not being “faddist[s]” they never went “overboard” about their political or cultural beliefs. The full title of *A Surfeit of Honey*, where he reprinted “The Upper Bohemians,” was significantly *A Friendly If Somewhat Skeptical, Excursion into the Manners and Customs of Americans in This Time of Prosperity* In a 1957 *Commentary* review of *A Surfeit of Honey*, psychologist Lillian Blumberg McCall complained that Lynes confined his social observations and moral worries to “the self-indulgent middle class, fretful, restless, whiney—the Miltown-chewing set.” Lynes’ “world” was “that of the backyard barbecue pit and he calls it America. No problems of segregated schools. No immigrants. No refugees. Not even anyone driving a 1949 Chevrolet.” To say nothing of McCarthy, Korea, the Rosenbergs, or the Bomb. Lynes simply proved for McCall that Americans “adore self-appointed scolds who tell us what shallow characters we are,” depicting us as “History’s Spoiled Children.” [Lillian Blumberg McCall, “A Surfeit of Honey, by Russell Lynes,” *Commentary*, June 1957, p. 589 ff.]
In his February 21 comment on Matt McManus’ “Why Is Reason Controversial?,” Hersgblogger noted that Prof. McManus had “managed” writing his article “without ever mentioning Jordan Peterson.”
Jordan Peterson having now been mentioned, I’d first of all like to say that I don’t wish right now to get into the pros and cons of Peterson’s views, his podcasts, or his “12 Rules for Life” book. I don’t think I have anything particularly fresh, original, or brilliant at this point to offer one way or the other about his comparison of human and lobster social and sexual hierarchies, or about his admittedly a bit surprising linkage of transgender pronouns to Stalin’s gulags. In particular, I feel no great urge at the moment either to hail him as a savior of traditional Western values or as a sexist fascist reactionary.
However, I do see Peterson as potentially significant, and thus interesting, as a symptom. I see him as a disquieting harbinger of a possible decline of American social mobility. Observing the “Peterson phenomenon” of the past few years, I’ve framed a tentative sociological theory about the reasons for his great popularity among college-age young Americans. If I may cite one Peterson to explain another, it reflects what University of Nebraska economist Wallace C. Peterson has called America’s post-1973 “Silent Depression” and the fading of our post-World War II economic boom. I suspect that the economic changes in American society in recent decades (the 2008 crash being only the most dramatic illustration), the increasingly crushing burden of student debt, etc., have made college-age young Americans increasingly skeptical and pessimistic in our time about their realistic chances of ever leaving the struggling “Middle American” lower-middle or middle-middle class and entering the ranks of the so-called “cultural elites.” Once born and raised in “Middle America,” that’s your permanent fate, and you’d better learn to adjust to it–and the Canadian psychologist’s books, podcasts, and lectures do provide a good guide to “making it” as a clean-cut young “Middle American”!
Those “cultural elites” (a.k.a. “effete snobs,” “limousine liberals,” “Brie and Chablis set,” “chattering classes,” and similar endearments) have traditionally felt free to safely be a bit cavalier or skeptical about the “square” virtues extolled by Jordan Peterson (and celebrated by Rudyard Kipling a century ago as his unfashionable but perennially reliable 1919 “Gods of the Copybook Headings”), to be a bit irreverent about them and still safely “get away with it.” That, however, seemed much easier and much more realistically possible for upward-mobile young Americans in, say, the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s than today! It just FEELS far less realistically possible these days than it did 40 or 50 years ago, I think, for a plumber’s, electrician’s, truck driver’s, policeman’s, bookkeeper’s, beautician’s, paralegal’s, or grade-school teacher’s son (or daughter) to rise someday to become Chairperson of the Yale or Harvard English department, or associate editor of “Harper’s” or “The Atlantic”, or editorial writer for the “New York Times” or “Washington Post”! :=) :=)
There was a widespread tacit and occasionally explicit understanding in 20th century America–and especially in the 1945-1973 postwar boom years–that upward social mobility involved (or should involve) a growth in “enlightenment,” “sophistication,” or “cosmopolitanism” as well as in economic prosperity and social prestige. The increasing education associated with rising from the blue-collar working class into the lower-middle class, and then from the lower-middle into the upper-middle class, it was generally assumed, was bound to lead to a skepticism about religious orthodoxy, flag-waving “my country right or wrong” patriotism, “blue-nosed” private morality, and ethnic, racial, and religious prejudices. The well-educated, it was widely taken for granted, would “of course” lean to a Freudian view of human behavior, a Keynesian view of economics, a free-thought view of religion, an open-minded attitude toward sex, and an internationalist view of America’s world role tempered by a sneaking (or not so sneaking) sympathy for “ban-the-bomb” pacifism. They would definitely prefer “nurture” to “nature” interpretations of human mental, psychological, and temperamental traits, and would be quite certain that Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu, and the UNESCO Statement on Race had conclusively demolished once and for all any belief in innate mental or psychological differences between the races.
Commenting in 1955 on the social sources of “McCarthyism,” David Riesman and Nathan Glazer noted that while the “newly prosperous” often rejected the “traditional cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened upper and upper-middle classes,” they nevertheless had “sent their children to college as one way of maintaining the family’s social and occupational mobility,” and some of these children had “become eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values now held by the discontented classes” drawn to McCarthyism. However, they conceded, “many of those who have swamped the colleges” had “acquired there, and helped their families learn, a half-educated resentment for the traditional intellectual values some of their teachers and schoolmates represented.” While “their humbler parents” might have “maintained in many cases a certain reverence for education,” their children had “gained enough familiarity to feel contempt.” They thus anticipated our own time’s conservative complaints about the plight of conservative students on liberal campuses. Yet, the “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture” were widely seen in the mid-20th century American public mind as somehow archetypal, even if perhaps actually outnumbered by young college graduates loyal to parental values and prejudices, The “eager strivers” were felt to be the FULLY, COMPLETELY upward-mobile, their less “emancipated” classmates seen as a bit “incompletely” or “imperfectly” acculturated by comparison, as failing to have quite fully profited or benefitted from their educational opportunities
Those “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture” questioning their parents’ values and beliefs, it was widely taken for granted in our postwar boom years, would “of course” exchange their parents’ American Legion and Knights of Columbus for their own newfound circle’s American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, League of Women Voters, and Sierra Club. The college-educated sons and daughters of Southern Baptists would “naturally” become Unitarian-Universalists or enter the ranks of the openly unchurched, while one-time Orthodox Jewish bar-mitzvah boys “of course” would join a Reform temple or the Society for Ethical Culture–also defying parental pressure to become a doctor, lawyer or accountant to study Philosophy, Sociology, or English Literature instead. The sons of Irish Catholic Coughlinites or McCarthyites would marry (or just live with) Jewish girls and march in “Ban the Bomb” and anti-Viet Nam War protests. For the bright, ambitious son or daughter of an Irish-American high-school teacher, an Italian-American medical technician, a Slovak-American bookkeper, or a Polish-American speech therapist, entering the ranks of the “cultural elites: or “upper Bohenians” seemed to be the next obvious normal natural step further up, the logical next step after Mom and Dad’s own climb up from the tenement, coaltown, or steeltown–unless of course the bright, ambitious boy or girl felt the lure of the executive suite! It was “obviously,” “naturally” taken for granted that “of course” the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Ethical Culture, Unitarian-Universalism, the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post,” the “New York Times,” and “The New Yorker” had more social prestige, were more suitable and appropriate for people who had “arrived” and “made it,” than were the Knights of Columbus, the Elks Club, the “New York Daily News” (which in the 1950’s and 1960’s had the “image” that Rupert Mutdoch’s “New York Post” has today, and the “Reader’s Digest.”
In any case, a certain “enlightenment,” “modernity,” or “sophistication” was implicitly seen as the “natural” crown and climax of upward social mobility. It was, to borrow the jargon of our own day’s “postmodern” disciples of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, a widely accepted early and mid 20th century “Grand Narrative” about the “inherent,” “natural” direction of upward social mobility that has lost much of its credence and lustre with the fading of America’s mid-century post-WW II boom. Middle-class and upward-mobile Americans who may have never read a word of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, or Baudrillad, who might even be ignorant of their very names, are as skeptical of this once-fashionable “Grand Narrative” as the avid academic groupies of those Gallic gurus who’re as fond of that term as they are of “discourse,” “hegemonic,” “subaltern,” and “valorize”! Joining the ranks of the “cultural elites” no longer seems a realistic “live option” for our own day’s young “Middle Americans,” convinced that they have close to zero chance of rising out of the “square” world as they might have had a generation ago! For such young people, Jordan Peterson may well be an ideal guide!
Maybe I’m feeling sentimental today, but you almost sound like you’re thinking through the thoughts of people you disagree with before judging them. The usual impression I get is that you’re being as diplomatic as possible—not that diplomacy is a vice, mind you, but it’s no substitute for sympathetic reading. This is a good turn, Matt.
Still, a couple of objections. I can’t say for sure, but you seem to read Plato as though he were talking about reason the way contemporary people do—i.e., meaning something synonymous with “opinions of mine that I know to be true.” Plato’s talks of reason as a faculty, one of the three dominant forces at work in the human psyche. Moreover, reason cannot control the other forces, only harness and direct them in the best case—see the chariot metaphor in Phaedrus. The same goes for the philosopher—he’s not the set of people who so call themselves. The philosopher is an ideal type of human life that might not even be possible.
As for de Maistre, I wonder whether the people who denigrate him actually read him against the reality of his times or with a willful blindness to those realities. The man lived through the hyper-rationalist horror show that was the French Revolution. What thinking person would have not preferred the old order to the new?
You may be right. I always had a soft spot for existential irrationalism at a spiritual if not a political level.
Much to agree with here!
Questions here, though, where you write:
“ To defend reason, we need to moderate its claims. From Plato through many iterations of Enlightenment thought, there has been a totalizing desire to subordinate human life to a single unified principle or set of principles, which both explain the world and provide moral obligations. Perhaps the most characteristic of these principles is the classical principle of utility, which suggests that all human action is governed by the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain. This means that the moral thing to do is to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Such a claim has great purchase on our rational faculties. But it doesn’t capture many elements of human life that provide us with resonant value…”
Technically, it seems to me the pursuit of happiness/avoidance of pain can be either a “purpose in life” for the individual, as for Epicurus and his followers, or an observation about human behavior from which we can draw further conclusions about economics, politics, etc. The principle of utility, as formulated by Bentham and Mill, Is something separate, which goes on to say that we (have a moral duty to) expand the scope of the pleasure/pain principle beyond ourselves, so as to extend it (In the world of action in society) to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This is a quibble, because I do tend to agree that this idea is firmly rooted in our political consciousness about “what a single unified principle”, if there is any, should be.
I take it then from your conclusion, that you are “OK with this” (in current slang), but that this rationalist “purpose” (If it is a shared purpose) must be enhanced by other values – Including respect for forebears, the satisfaction of achievement and struggle, etc. I agree – But I feel as if this could be developed much further…
OK, but who is going to define “happiness” and measure it? And enforce the conditions (“single unified principles”), leading to it?
Mike Bloomberg?
I was struck by the fact that you managed this without ever mentioning Jordan Peterson. 😉
In that vein, I found this sentence worth contemplation:
“But it doesn’t capture many elements of human life that provide us with resonant value, even if they entail suffering.”
Alternately, “But it doesn’t capture many elements of human life that provide us with resonant value, _precisely because_ they entail suffering.”
This is partly because “suffering” takes the form of “I suffer when I am not immediately gratified.” In moving from “the question what is justice? to what rights should people have?” the definition of “rights” is distorted to narcissistic whim. And responsibilities are ignored.
This is irrational simply as a practical matter, whether reason can ever apprehend “life, the universe, and everything” or not.
I was struck by the fact that you managed this without ever mentioning Jordan Peterson. 😉
In that vein, I found this sentence worth contemplation:
“But it doesn’t capture many elements of human life that provide us with resonant value, even if they entail suffering.”
Alternately, “But it doesn’t capture many elements of human life that provide us with resonant value, _precisely because_ they entail suffering.”
This is partly because “suffering” takes the form of “I suffer when I am not immediately gratified.” In moving from “the question what is justice? to what rights should people have?” the definition of “rights” is often distorted to narcissistic whim. And responsibilities are ignored.
This is irrational simply as a practical matter, whether reason can ever apprehend “life, the universe, and everything” or not.