[Ed. I'm reposting this piece from 2007 in response to Patrick's pointing me to an interesting lecture by Patrick Deneen. I think it reinforces and expands on the basic points that Deneen makes.]
I have some important differences with Christopher Lasch, but I'm
95% in agreement with his basic understanding about what's happening to
us as a society. I know of no one else who is more eloquent or
insightful. The following passage from The True and Only Heaven (1991) summarizes very effectively the basic premise upon which this website is based:
But if humanity thrives on peace and prosperity, it also needs an
occasional taste of battle. Men and women need to believe that "life is
a critical affair," in Richard Niebuhr's words. They cannot be
satisfied merely with the opportunity to choose their goals and
"life-styles," in the current jargon; they need to believe that their
choices carry serious consequence. In the Christian cosmos, the forces
of good and evil wage a mighty struggle for man's soul, and every
action had to be weighed in the scales of eternity. Communism endowed
everyday actions with the same kind of cosmic significance, as Keynes
and many others understood. In 1940, George Orwell made the same point
about fascism. The Western democracies, he observed, had come to think
that "human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, the avoidance
of pain." Whatever else could be said about it, fascism was
"psychologically far sounder than any hedonist conception of life."
Hitler knew that men and women wanted more than "comfort, safety, short
working hours, hygiene, birth control." "Whereas socialism and even
capitalism . . . have said to people, 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler
has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a
result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."
I've
been talking a lot about fascism lately, and I know that in doing so I
risk falling into the category of the stereotypical 'man of the left'
who uses the term as an insult for anyone whose views are to the right
of his own. But if I've also gone to great lengths to show that I am
not a Liberal. That I am closer to a Burkean conservative than I am to
the kind of Liberalism that is at the secular-left heart of the
Democratic Party, and that it is from this Burkean standpoint that I
criticize the "Jacobinism" driving current GOP policy. As I've argue
before, to be a conservative
at this moment means to be a defender of the New Deal compromise. And
that means fending off the attacks on it by bow-tie conservatives like
George Will, Thatcherites like Andrew Sullivan, and Libertarians like
Ron Paul who present themselves as principled small-government
conservatives. See here and here for more on this. I have argued that Libertarians don't understand the unintended consequences of their principles.
And I have said repeatedly that I do not believe that whatever hope
we have for a better future lies with the secular left, whose
conception of that better future is at root closed to transcendence in
its implicit if not explicit materialism and nihilism. But the failure
of the left to offer a counterbalance to the backlash from the right
over the last twenty-five years is at the root of my fears about how
profoundly seductive the program of the extremist right. People have a
profound longing for a "more" that the secular left cannot provide, and
Fascism offers that more. It's a perverse, evil more, but that doesn't
diminish its seductiveness.
So my concerns about fascism are not rooted in some over-reaction to
current events. Rather, I see current events as fulfilling my worst
fears about what we Americans are capable of, not because we Americans
are particularly evil, but because we are human in a fallen world. I
think that another weakness of liberalism is its Rousseauan/Lockean
tabula rasa naivete about our lack of fallenness and our a priori
inclination to perversity if we are not offered a robust alternative.
Liberalism does not offer that robust alternative, and right-wing
Christianist Dominionism is the incarnation of the perversity, the
Devil himself quoting scripture. Lasch goes on:
In
the same year, Lewis Mumford offered an analysis of the "sleek
progressive mind" that could easily have been written by Orwell
himself. Progressives, according to Mumford, believed that human nature
is deflected from its natural goodness only by external conditions
beyond the individual's control. Having no sense of sin, they
discounted inherent obstacles to moral development and therefore could
not grasp the need for a "form-giving discipline of the personality."
They scorned the discipline gained through manual labor, the endurance
of discomfort, and the nurture of the young. They sought to free
mankind from all manner of hardship and adversity, from the boredom of
domestic drudgery, and from natural processes in general. Societies
based on progressive principles, Mumford wrote, renounced every larger
goal in favor of the "private enjoyment of life." They had created a
race of men and women who "deny because of their lack of experience
that life has any other meanings or values or possibilities." Such
people "eat, drink, marry, bear children and go to their grave in a
state that is at best hilarious anesthesia, and at its worst is
anxiety, fear, and envy, for lack of the necessary means to achieve the
fashionable minimum of sensation."
A loathing of
this view of life is precisely what animates principled conservatives
in this country–and I quite understand why they loathe it. Such
liberal societies are good only for producing "last men."
Confronted
with this kind of indictment, progressives usually reply that
discipline and adversity are all very well for those who can take a
certain level of material security for granted, but that impoverished
masses can hardly be expected to listen to such appeals. Until everyone
enjoys a decent standard of living, material improvement will therefore
remain the overriding objective of democratic societies. The trouble
with this argument is that the political pressure for a more equitable
distribution of wealth can come only from movements fired with
religious purpose and a lofty conception of life. Without popular
initiative, even the limited goal of democratization of comfort cannot
be realized. The favored few cannot be expected to consult the needs of
the many, even if their own interests may be served, at least in the
long run, by raising the general level of consumption. If the many now
enjoy some of the comforts formerly restricted to the few, it is
because they have won them through their own political efforts, not
because the wealthy have freely surrendered their privileges or because
the market automatically assures abundance for all.Popular initiative, however, has been declining for some time–in
part because the democratization of consumption is an insufficiently
demanding ideal, which fails to call up the moral energy necessary to
sustain popular movements in the face of adversity. The history of
popular movements, including the civil rights movement of the fifties
and sixties–the last such uprising in American history–shows that
only an arduous, even tragic, understanding of life can justify the
sacrifices imposed on those who seek to challenge the status quo.The idea of progress alone, we are told, can move men and women to
sacrifice immediate pleasures to some larger purpose. On the contrary
progressive ideology weakens the spirit of sacrifice. Nor does it give
us an effective antidote to despair, even though it owes much of its
residual appeal to the fear that its collapse would leave us utterly
without hope. Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a
belief in justice. [excerpts from pp. 79-80]
This is
why I say that hope does not lie within the political sphere. Politics
is the sphere of power, and if left to its own internal logic, the
political drive is about the acquisition of greater levels of power.
Those who seek power can never have enough of it, and the only check on
their "natural" (or perverse) tendency to get what they want is for a
countervailing power to oppose them. Politics is therefore the battle
of countervailing powers to achieve domination, and a countervailing
power inspired by suprarational ideals is the only kind that if
victorious can put a stop the otherwise endless process of one strong
man toppling another.
I believe the founding of the American republic was one such
victory, but such victories are never permanent. The republic has been
slowly corrupted for over a century now by the seductions of global
power. The original ideals have slowly been emptied of their meaning to
a point now when I hear politicians speaking the words freedom and
democracy I cringe rather than feel the force of the ideals that used
to stand behind them. They are zombie words now.
If there has been a note of pessimism in my posts since the 2004
election and why I have not been too encouraged by the 2006, it's
because I see the momentum toward perversity as unstoppable until
something genuinely new emerges to offer a counterbalance that can
redirect us. I don't see the election of a Democratic congress or
administration as a solution–at best it slows down this movement
toward the consolidation of power in the hands of fewer and fewer power
elites. Whatever their rhetoric about traditional values, the bottom
line for them is power acquisition, and they have not shown that they
have any compunctions about its abuse if it serves their goals. It's
very, very disturbing.
The only counterbalance to this natural trend of the powerful
seeking ever greater levels of power can come from popular movements,
and it is very discouraging to me that whatever opposition there is
right now to this very dangerous trend toward power concentration comes
only from Liberalism, which for the reasons explained in the excerpts
above, simply does not have the moral resources to put up much of a
fight. Sooner or later a spirited opposition will arise, but, if I'm
right, it won't be effective unless it is motivated by a "loftier
conception of life" than the materialism the secular left proposes.
I am pessimistic, but not without hope. As Lasch points out,
optimism and hope are not the same thing. I think that in the long run
human beings will figure it out, but the story of our doing so will be,
as it has been to this point, fraught with struggle and tragedy.
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