My loathing for what the GOP has come to represent is about as intense as it could possibly be, but my criticism does not come from the standpoint of Liberalism. I came across this quote from Louis Menand's essay "Christopher Lasch's Quarrel with Liberalism", and it serves as an introduction to what I want to say:
Modern life, to some of its critics, looks like a giant wrecking yard of traditions, with none around to pick up the mess. In the middle of the yard there is a small tin shed and inside the shed the apologists of fragmentation sit. These are the liberals. They explain how it is that we are better off without guides to conduct that are any more substantive than the right of each of us to pick up whatever pieces catch his or her fancy, and why it is that life inside the yard counts as liberation.
People who are unhappy with modernity, on this description, have two alternatives: they can gather together bits of the failed traditions and construct from them a philosophy of conduct that might supplant liberalism's emptiness, or they can choose, intellectually , at least, to live outside the yard altogether.
There are three kinds of people who choose to live outside the yard. There are those like the Amish, Hutterites, Hasids and guys like the poet Wendell Berry, who still plows his field with a horse-drawn plow. These people chose to live in worlds constructed as best as possible as a huge refusal to acknowledge the existence of the modern world around them. A second group would be restorationists who feel that the traditions haven't failed they just have to be freshened up a bit. The old traditional social forms were good for our ancestors, they think, and we've got to bring them back. The agenda of much of the Christian right is restorationist in this sense.
But the third category is the first Menand describes–people who are unhappy with modernity, but who see the cultural task as gathering the shards from shattered traditions and to assemble them into something that is lightweight and portable into an uncertain future. The essential characteristic of people in this group is to recognize that there is no longer a living tradition, but there is enormous value in retrieving what was lost. I would call those in this group Romantics. Nietzsche and Heidegger were Romantics in this sense–and Christopher Lasch is another. The romantic impulse dates to the mid 1700s and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. It was animated by a revulsion many felt at the disenchantment of nature being promoted by the new approach to it taken by science (Blake, Wordsworth). And by profound misgivings about the kind of human being who was being created by these new social forms that seemed to blithely sweep away tradition as if it were so much irrationality and superstition (Burke).
Christopher Lasch situates himself solidly in this tradition as it manifested in American thought, which for him was carried forward by Jonathan Edwards, R. W. Emerson, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, and Reinhold Niebuhr. And in his books, especially in The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self, he points with alarm to the kind of human being modernity has created. And in his, I believe, last book, The True and Only Heaven, he struggles to define what the antidote is, and he calls it "populism."
Populism is not Liberalism. Populism is the force that drove southern blacks to overturn the segregationist system. Liberals tagged along, but they did not have the moral force to make it happen. The essence of Liberalism is laissez faire–leave people alone to do as they please. Liberalism lacks moral force because it is morally contentless. It is simply a framework that seeks to allow citizens to do as they please so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to do as they please. Moral content must come from outside the framework of Liberalism. The Civil Rights movement would not have been possible outside of a Liberal political framework, but it was not something that Liberalism made happen. It was effected by the religious consciousness of black Christians that was (and is) quite alien from the spirit of Liberalism.
There's a connection between what Nietzsche called the Last Man and what Lasch calls the culture of narcissism, and neither is well enough understood and both are the products of modernity and its Liberal values matrix. About that I have no disagreement with the right. My disagreement lies not with their diagnosis of the problem but with their prescription for a remedy.
My standpoint in criticizing Liberalism, therefore, is not from the restorationist cultural right. That way, if left unchecked, leads inevitably to a neo-Puritan dictatorship. Restorationism is a form of decadent Romanticism that is rooted in the longing for long ago and far away. And it's fueled by a politics of anxiety that would promote the most slavish form of Last Man society. Rather, my standpoint lies in a Romanticism that is rooted in hope and oriented toward the future.
The Romanticism that I would promote while looking toward the future would at the same time seek to retrieve and to revive what has been lost from our past. Such a project is not at all the same as "restoring." Restoring is what you do to old run-down things that still have some structural integrity, like a house or an old car. A tradition is not a thing. It is a living organism and as such the parts of it that have been lost cannot be restored, they must be re-membered. We must re-awaken ourselves to what we have forgotten and integrate it with what we have become in the mean time.
The challenge, therefore, is not to reject Liberalism, but to move beyond it. And for me this requires that "Romanticism come of age," as Owen Barfield entitled a collection of his essays. The nostalgic Romanticism that focuses on long ago and far away is a symptom of decadence, and offers no way forward. But the archetypal longing at the heart of all Romanticism is a longing for a culture that is more soulful, which means to say more intensely human. A Romanticism come of age is one that without falling into utopianism redirects this longing from the past toward the future.
I don't know if it's going to happen or if it does, how it will. But I'm convinced that something like this has to happen if we are to make it through to the next century.
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