Mike McG, a long-time ATF reader, from time to time sends me thoughtful dissents. I deeply appreciate that he takes the time and makes the effort to do it. I got this one last night as a comment in response Dying Traditions IIIb with a message that the site wouldn't let him post it there. (If others have that problem, please email me from the link at the top of the column to the left.) I've edited out the first several lines about the posting problem:
. . . Our fundamental values are aligned and our cultural heritage is virtually identical. And yet both our ‘build out’ from the values and our evaluation of the heritage are remarkably distinct. I find Jack’s critique of the cultural left to be cerebral and generous (they are his neighbors, after all), his critique of the cultural right to be visceral and contemptuous (they clearly aren’t his neighbors), and his dismissal of centrists to be unusually lacking in nuance.
But of course I would think so. We inhabit different tribes. Jack lives, more or less comfortably, in Blue America while I live, more and more uncomfortably, on a Purple Island in Red America. We have come to know, to ‘get,' to love and…yes…to loathe very different kinds of folks. He sees the world through a cognitive lens, believing that ideas can be formulated and understood apart from their social construction. I am all about the affective context for idea generation, believing that moral instincts precede and form moral reasoning. As Jon Haidt says, “Moral claims and arguments function like gang signs – they show others what team you are on, and they let you share emotions with other people, which bonds you more closely together.” Yet it is precisely because his views so challenge my own that I regularly need to read AfterTheFuture but rarely need to enter the fray.
An aside to Jack, Steve and Eli re: our delight in seeing cosmopolitan young people forge a new and noble path. Definitely to be hoped for and certainly not without anecdotal support…but do the data support our impressions? The University of Michigan issued the following news release about a study presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science: “Empathy: College students don't have as much as they used to.”
Today's college students are not as empathetic as college students of the 1980s and '90s, a University of Michigan study shows. The study…analyzes data on empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.
"We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000," said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait."
Compared to college students of the late 1970s, the study found, college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective" and "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."
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Mike–
I agree with you that our ideas cannot "be formulated and understood apart from their social construction", but I think some social constructions are better than others. Let's call these social constructions "cultural mindsets." I think you can agree with me that some mindset are vicious, and many people who are decent in so many ways, can still have vicious mindsets. Many people have inhabited viciously racist mindsets, for instance, and at the same time have lived decent, loving, and generous lives. This is the phenomenon that intrigues me–that people with vicious mindsets can at the same time lead decent lives.
People are complicated, and one cannot judge individuals, but one can judge and challenge their mindsets, and it's fair to say that I find the parts of any mindset that are vicious and that have vicious effects to be contemptible, even though I think I've been careful (for the most part) to exclude the complexity of the person who is in the grip of such a mindset from that contempt. And while there are elements in the mindset of the cultural left that also deserve our contempt because of their viciousness, I argue that the mindset of the cultural left is "better" because better adjusted to the rapidly changing world in which we're living. On the most basic level, it's not a moral judgment but a practical one. But as I'll explain below, I do think there is a moral or spiritual component to this judgment.
Before I try to do a better of job of justifying that assertion, let me say that I grew up in a culturally conservative family in an affluent Republican New York suburb on Long Island. I married a blue-collar girl from a deeply embedded social world in the Bronx, and she has no patience with the pieties of limousine or other kinds of Liberalism. I am not someone who thinks of himself as a Liberal, maybe because of my religious commitments, which generally are not understood by the Liberal intellectuals and activists of my acquaintance, but perhaps more because I just think of Liberalism as obsolete. It's just not very interesting.
So I know the cultural Right from the inside, and I have never felt like an insider on the cultural Left; I see myself as having a foot in both worlds. But you're right when you say that I have a bias toward the Left, but I'd argue that it is not so much a tribal affiliation as an alliance of convenience because the Left has a bias toward the future, and ATF, although its ontological assumptions are completely different from those of secular Liberals, is all about the future.
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I'm familiar with Haidt's ideas. What he describes as a lattice social world I, following Charles Taylor, describe as an embedded social world. Unlike Haidt, I see embedded or lattice social worlds as atavistic, as premodern vestiges. I see Haidt as trying to help Liberals understand the many positives of embedded consciousness, which have mainly to do with warmth, stability, connection. Take, for instance, aboriginal consciousness, which is the archetype of deep embeddedness. The given connections within aboriginal societies between people, nature, the spirit world suggest a richness of experience and soul life that we can only barely begin to appreciate, and it's clear that people in that kind of embedded consciousness are happier than disembedded, buffered moderns and postmoderns. Cultural conservatives are defenders of vestigial embeddedness, and I think this is a fundamental mistake.
This has been the underlying argument of ATF from the beginning–that embedded social worlds are something we must necessarily leave behind. It's painful to do it, and people fight it, but it has to be done. Disembedding is happening to us whether we like it or not, so the thrust of my thinking has been to embrace it in hope with the idea of moving through it to something better. I see no point in digging in one's cultural heels; in fact I see it as harmful, like refusing a painful surgery that will help the seriously ill patient to recover faster.
I recognize that this understanding of history is not mainstream thinking–it's not a way of thinking that either the cultural Right or Left feels comfortable with. If you want that, there a a ton of far more popular blogs than this one that you can read. The purpose of this blog is to argue for the plausibility of this meta-historical perspective and for the benefits that follow from working within the framework it defines. And it's precisely purple people like you, Mike, that I hope to persuade of those benefits. And I do think some open-minded Liberals might also be persuaded, but I have no hope of persuading hard cores on the cultural Right or Left, and because I assume none would ever be remotely attracted to what I write here, I don't feel much of a need to be tactful in rendering my judgments on the shortcomings of their respective mindsets.
I accept that most people need some kind of lattice network to give their lives meaning and purpose, but I see spiritual maturity as something that can be achieved only by leaving that kind of embeddedness behind insofar as it is lived as an unconscious "given". In the past the great saints fled into the wilderness, i.e., into a kind of disembeddedness, but now we don't have a choice–the wilderness has come to us, and it's pointless to lament what we've lost; instead, let us embrace it and learn and grow from it. And then new lattices can be, must be built, and this building is the work that will renew the face of the earth.
I'd argue that this embracing the wilderness is the story of salvation history since Abraham left Ur and started his journey west, and that the fundamental impediment to historical/spiritual growth is what I've called Lot's Wife Syndrome, which is a nostalgia for embeddedness. It's the longing for the fleshpots of Egypt. It's the longing that even Jesus expresses when he says he has no place to lay his head or when he talks about having no mother or brother or sisters–he's saying that that kind of given connection is to be cast aside if it is an impediment to the realization of the kingdom of God.
And then there's Socrates who made it his life mission to disembed the youth of Athens from their naive given consciousness and pieties. And I could go on and on to give you examples about how the cultural mission of the West, as carried by the Greeks and Jews, is one of disembedding that finally reached a kind of apogee in the modern period. It's what's supposed to happen, but we pay a price for it, and it's something the cultural right in particular has always resisted. The anomie they reject has to be embraced and passed through. I'm convinced it's the only healthy way forward.
Does that mean that the people who have embedded consciousness are morally inferior? No, but if you accept the validity of my argument, it would follow that their mindsets are relatively spiritually immature, and their remaining in those mindsets might involve some moral culpability, if they were given the choice to move out of it and refused it out of fear or because of the desire to cling to old comforts. I think this plays out in dozens of different ways, but spiritual maturity in the Christian tradition requires displacement, and that displacement is always in a tension with Lot's Wife Syndrome, and things get bad for the Church when the latter plays the more dominant role in shaping the Christian imagination. The great saints are in their different ways heroes of displacement.
So unlike Haidt, I do make a value judgment about embedded consciousness when it is the fundamental stuff out of which a mindset is composed. And I see myself as his ally in his advocacy of civility in our public discourse. But even Haidt admits that Liberals are better able to see both sides of an issue than cultural conservatives, and the reason, quite frankly is that cultural conservatism is either embedded consciousness or nostalgia for it. And the character of embedded consciousness makes it extremely difficult for it to see any point of view other than its own. Liberals are comfortable with pluralism and validating mindsets other than their own, but they are not good at tolerating intolerance. And they shouldn't tolerate it.
Now obviously there are thoughtful, principled conservatives who are capable of seeing the other point of view, and of course, some Liberals have a kind of thoughtless tribal consciousness. But conservatives for whom I have the deepest respect, like Deneen, Larison, Douthat, Frum, and others, I would argue, are all nostalgists, and the whole thrust of After the Future is that the future, not the past, is where it's at. So, as I suggested above, my bias toward liberals has less to do with my relationship with my Seattle neighbors and more to do with the thrust of my thinking–Liberals have a bias toward the future, and so do I.
The treasures of the past are no longer given to us by the tradition; we have to rediscover them, and integrate what we rediscover into a new post-liberal narrative. So even though I see modern Liberalism as an obsolete mindset, I align more with Liberals because of this shared bias. But I'm much more interested in the development of a post-Liberal, future-focused mindset that I see as inchoate in many young people that I meet–however small their statistical representation within their generation. Thinking about that post-Liberal narrative has been my project at this blog within the modest capabilities I have to do it, but I see these kids as much more capable than I, precisely because they are unencumbered by history and the old embedded thinking in a way that I have been.
People like you and me, born in the forties and fifties, are transitional figures in American culture. Modernity ended in Europe after WWI, but it didn't end here until the sixties when we were teens–when the music died, so to speak. (T.S. Eliot announced the death of the modern narrative for Europeans in his poem the Wasteland, and Don MacLean in "Bye Bye Miss American Pie". They were both telling their audiences what they already knew on a subliminal level.) So we have a foot in both the pre- and post-sixties milieux, but these kids are all-in in the postmodern ethos. I have very little reason to hope short term about anything creative or positive coming out of the political sphere, but there is hope in the cultural sphere.
As at any time in history, there are dangers and opportunities. There are things to be hoped for and things to be feared. My purpose here, at least insofar as my posts about American culture go, is to focus on the opportunity/hope side of the equation, but those opportunities and hopes have a different shape and texture than it had for people in our generation. I'm just trying to understand that better. And to be a resource for people like my son, because I have enough credibility with them to point to things that I think they should take seriously.
See also "People and Their Mindsets."
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