Q: I think I kind of get it, but could you clarify why you’re spending so much time talking about two ancient Germans that hardly anybody has heard of?
A: There are several reasons.
First, I thought that all my talk about Aristotle and Neoplatonism needed to be balanced by something more down to earth and more recognizable in our contemporary culture.
Second, there’s an autobiographical element: I’m more instinctively a Hamann/Herder/Kierkegaard/Dostoyevski guy than a Plato guy. When I talk about the Deep Real or the Living Real or the originary sources, I’m talking about what these guys were talking about. My thinking over the years has been a movement from Herderian (and my) Christian existentialism to integrate it with Neoplatonism that, like most “moderns”, I always felt somewhat suspicious about and never understood its existential relevance until the last twenty years or so.
Third, Herder’s current relevance in trying to make sense of ethno-nationalism on the Right. I’m also laying out here the foundation for the critique I want to make of Hazony’s books on Nationalism and Conservatism. You can’t really understand what he’s saying unless you understand Herder’s counter-Enlightenment critique. And you can’t critique Hazony effectively either unless you understand what’s right about Herder. I think that’s why Ezra Klein seemed, to me anyway, so flummoxed when he interviewed Hazony a few weeks ago. If he knew something about Herder, he could have asked better, more challenging questions.
Fourth, because I think that if we are to save our collective soul, we need to retrieve both Romanticism and Neoplatonism and integrate them. That inttegration is alread there, especially in English Romanticism—in Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelly. It’s there in the Americans Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Brownson. The Romantics are the people who first realized things were going terribly wrong because of the way we were sealing ourselves off from the Living Real. What’s interesting to me especially about English Romanticism is the way it integrated the sub-rational with the supra-rational, the existential particular with the transcendental eternal. This stream has always been attractive to most of the well educated class in North Atlantic socieities, but it played an increasingly weak role after the Civil War, and no role at all after WWII. There’s something to work with there, i.e., something to return to and appropriate for our own time.
I could go on.
Q: Ok. Stop there. I have no idea what you talking about with phrases like “collective soul”. Talk about obscurantism.
A: That’s a very Herderian idea and without understanding Herder, it’s hard to understand what I’m talking about when I use a phrase like that. I think it’s a real thing. It’s more than a metaphor, and whatever the American soul is is different from the French soul or Italian soul or Russian soul. There are cultural phenomena that I think cannot be truly understood without such a concept. I think there are a lot of interesting things to say about the American soul, and I’ll get into that at some time in the future. But for now I think it has regional variations, like any country. But whatever ballast those regional cultures provided have become a more zombie energy than living energy in the post WWII era.
Hillbilly Elegy is, if nothing else, a testament to how these regional cultures have been breaking down in the last forty years. This culture-destroying dynamic is, of course, driven by the logic of late capitalism—not by Liberals. Conservatives hate Liberals because Liberals celebrate this destruction because Liberals see traditional values as a constraint on individual freedom and autonomy. The tradition for the ideological Liberal is shot through with patriarchy, racism, homophobia, so why not just get rid of the whole thing. Who needs it? Well Liberals need it for reasons their ideology makes it very difficult for them to understand. But Liberal ideology at least has a consistency to it. Its capitalist substructure matches its globalist, cosmopolitan values superstructure. Heritage Foundation Conservatives want to match their celebration of free-market capitalism with a theocratic superstructure, and its a shotgun marriage that almost certainly would fail in the long run.
Q: Superstructure and Substructure?
A: Let me get to that in a minute. The argument I’m making cuts two ways—against traditionalist conservatives and against Enlightenment Liberals. I think that the traditionalists want a Herderian substructure, but they want their capitalism too. That’s intellectually incoherent, and the more sophisticated conservatives understand that—guys like Patrick Deneen and even Sohrab Ahmari. There is very little about their critique of capitalism that I disagree with. There is very little that Bernie Sanders would disagree with. The problem is that both ally themselves with a reactionary politics. Mussolini was an orthodox socialist before WWI, and the war morphed him into a nationalist because that’s where the people were, and so that was where the power was. Nationalism combined with Socialism is a movie we’ve all seen before, and don’t want to see again. I don’t think that’s what Deneen or Hazony want, but I think it’s where Steve Bannon wants to go—and anybody who supports Trump has to understand that they are abetting a movement toward National Socialism.. But let’s not get sidetracked.
Q: Superstructure and Substructure?
A: It comes out of Marxism, but it’s just common sense. Marx and Engels talked about how every society has a base reality, which is the material conditions that provide the substructure for any society, usually determined by its economic system. A stable healthy society has to have a cultural superstructure that aligns with its material substructure. So aboriginal societies have cultures, beliefs, rites, stories and legends that perfectly align with their nomadic, hunter gatherer base reality. Medieval European societies had a base reality that was primarily agricultural and warfare driven, and the theocratic superstructure of ancien regime societies from its feudal hierarchy aligning with the Great Chain of Being was perfectly aligned. In capitalist societies, the material base is driven by continuous, disruptive technological innovations, and so the superstructure that’s best fitted to it is one that celebrates change and innovation, and is resistant to any values that would constrain or impede change and innovation.
The people who most thrive in capitalist societies are those who are most adaptive to change, and having a fixed world view or deeply held values doesn’t really make one as adaptable as someone who has no worldview or no deeply held values. This is why sociopaths so often rise to the top in capitalist societies—whether in politics or big business. It’s easier to be a success if you don’t believe in anything or if you are capable of believing anything one moment or the opposite five minutes later. Trump is the perfect expression of this kind of sociopathy, and the techno-capitalist oligarchs recognize in him a kindred spirit.
So say what you want about American heartland conservatives, they have deeply felt values, and they are not just going to change them because it’s the next new thing. The problem is that those values just don’t align anymore with the underlying substructure. This is the great tragic drama enacted in Yellowstone. which Liberals really need to watch if they don’t get this.
Q: That makes sense, but why do cultural conservatives with such strong traditional values like Trump so much. That makes no sense to me whatsoever.
A: The short answer is that he’s not a globalist Neoliberal. The Democrats are—or at least they are perceived to be—globalists, and Trump is all about America First.
Q: What’s the longer answer?
A: The mood of the country right now is moving away from globalism to an embrace of nationalism, and it’s important to understand why. We need to understand why MAGA is attractive to so many ordinary decent people, and to blame it simply on racism is too reductive. That’s why Hazony’s books are so important and why understanding Bannon is so important. And that’s why Herder’s ideas about nationalism are so important. They all have their finger on something that more and more Americans crave—a sense of homeland, a sense of “this is who we are”, which has nothing important to do with who others are. We are our heritage; we are what our grandparents and great grandparents were. We’re not just these random atoms bouncing around meaninglessly in a void. This was the mood behind Brexit; it’s what’s behind the Scottish separatist movement. It’s behind Hungary’s ethno-nationalist politics, and it’s behind Make America Great Again. Even Canadians are feeling a renewed sense of nationalist solidarity if for no other reason than the threats posed by their thuggish neighbor to the south. All of this is explained by Herder in a way that I think most open-minded Liberals can understand.
Q: But you were clear that Herder wasn’t about politics.
A: Right. He was a quasi-anarchist, and would have been horrified by National Socialism, but nationalism has become political because these local ‘nations’ feel they have to use political force to defend themselves from being obliterated.
Q: But they’re not just defending their local autonomy; they want to push their values agenda on everybody.
A: Exactly. That’s what makes MAGA so dangerous. We see it in the abortion issue, right? At first it’s “All the anti-Roe folks want is for the states to decide”—which I always thought was reasonable compromise. But now the theocrats want a national policy. Fanatics are not interested in compromise. They want absolute control. It’s justified as turnabout fair play. This is what the Libs have done to us since the 1960s, so now we’re going to do it to them.
Q: But half the country doesn’t want that. How can they succeed?
A: They can’t—at least not in the long run—because it has nothing to do with the underlying dynamics of late capitalism, which will continue its destabilizing “creative destruction” no matter how successful in the short term their reactionary political agenda. That agenda has no basis in the actual material reality that shapes American and other capitalist societies. A traditional-values superstructure would have no base reality to support it. The substructure is leading toward a nihilist transhumanist dystopia, not a 1950s-style quasi-theocracy. Huxley’s Brave New World is our more likely future, not some restored version of Norman Rockwell’s America.
This is why the problem with the reactionaries is that they want to impose a superstructure that does not align with the existing substructure. Project 2025 is a weird attempt to force its theocratic superstructure onto a capitalist substructure, and it just can’t work. Or if it’s to work, it would have to be in an oppressively top-down oligarchical authoritarian state, which is very fragile and relatively short lived because of the way it makes almost everybody miserable. My problem with cosmopolitan Liberals is that they are ok with the capitalist substructure, and have too easily adapted to the whatever-comes-next-is-better-than-what-used-to-be ethos of capitalism. They are too well adapted to life in the TCM, and so they feel no compelling need to resist it.
MAGA blames Liberals, but Liberals are just people who have adapted to disruptive change that is fundamental to life within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. They have financially benefited from it, and so have embraced its globalizing, deracinating ethos in a way that heartland Americans have resisted. The problem is that both are right. Most people need a sense of homeland, and we also need some kind of global coordination to deal with increasingly global problems.
Q: Ok, so what do you think the solution is?
A: I don’t know what it is, but I do know that the principal actors on the Left or the Right don’t know what it is either. I do understand that this substructure/superstructure dynamic has to be worked with in a strategic way, and that requires a shift in the superstructure that leads to changes in the substructure, but how exactly I don’t know.
What I’ve been trying to do in these posts is to make the attempt to think outside of the Liberal/Conservative dynamic, and that requires understanding what both get right and what both get wrong, and then adding something that neither has any real understanding of—the transcendental dimension.
Q: What makes you qualified to do that?
A: Nothing. But does anybody think that those who are “qualified” have any real answers? I certainly don’t think they do. So maybe my two cents is worth that, just two cents. But the answers are going to come from sources that in this moment are not considered qualified because the qualified are too coopted by the bankrupted consensus reality.
Q: So how is this Conservative/Liberal impasse transcended?
A: The answers or solutions have to be “original”. That’s a Herderian idea. They have to be ‘Krafted’, so to say. I am no prodigy of this kind ‘originality’, but I do think I know it when I see it. And for now, I see my role as simply to say, ‘No, that’s not it.’ Or “Yes, that’s it.’ You can take that for what it’s worth.
But the source of that originality is always there, always available for all of us just outside the cultural constructs that filter it out, and so it is always a resource if people make the effort to find it, in whatever modest measure, in their own lives and in the world around them.
Q: So, again, what role does Herder have in all this?
A: He, and Hamann before him and (many of) the Romantics after him, were true prodigies of this kind of originality who spoke to their time and place. If you don’t feel what was deeply original about both, nothing that I say here will make any sense to you. But their importance doesn’t lie in their having a doctrine that we must learn, but in their pointing to the source from which all originality springs. If we are to develop real solutions, they have to be original solutions, and that requires that more and more people resist the forces that are working so relentlessly to seal them off from the originary source.
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