If one reads the articles of the early Swedish feminists, they ran the gamut from socialists to liberals and Christian reformers. Some disliked the patriarchal family and thought it necessary to abolish it. Others thought that its flaws could be reformed voluntarily through public education. Some feminists considered men and women fundamentally equivalent and all differences between them artificial and imposed by society; others argued forcefully that men and women were different and those differences had to be respected. But no matter where a feminist fell on this spectrum, and no matter how radical her aims, there was a very basic sense of the reality of “Chesterton’s fence” being operative in the sphere of family. Just as one shouldn’t just remove a fence if one doesn’t know why the fence is there, one can’t simply abolish the family or some aspect of traditional gender roles if one didn’t know what function they served, and if one didn't have some sort of replacement ready to go. To do otherwise would be deeply irresponsible, everyone agreed, no matter their other differences.
Malcom Kyeyune, "The Myth of American Conservatism"
I've read some Chesterton, but I've never come across this phrase. I like it. I think it points to the naievete, if not nihilism, of the intersectional Left, at least insofar as there's no tradition or taboo that they don't feel a moral obligation to obliterate.
I'm not arguing that there aren't many really awful things that we have inherited with the traditions and customs of our ancestors. But those traditions and customs are what hold a society together, and you just don't throw them out willy-nilly.
That's a lesson the Left has not learned since the French Revolution. The chaos you create when you knock down all the fences leads to Bonapartism–the demand for the strong man to restore order. And while American society has been creating its chaos at a slower pace over a forty year period than the French did in the 1790s, there's a very good chance that we're approaching a chaos tipping point that will lead to the same kind of demand.
What's the alternative? You find a way to inspire people to embrace something larger and richer, and that points the the underlying problem: there is nobody influential in our public life who exemplifies that largeness and richness. No MLKs, no Gandhis, no Nelson Mandelas or Bishop Tutus. We have become a society that is so spiritually impoverished that it is no longer capable of producing such public figures. (See Note 1)
There is nobody who has broad moral authority to talk sense to us when we so desperately need it. We have only crudely reductive fanatics on the Left and Right who drive things, and the rest of us, even if we are the resistant majority, find ourselves being dragged careening behind them because there are no longer the fences against which we might set our feet.
Well, it's too late to warn against tearing down these fences because we have already done it, and what we're left with is not something larger and richer, but atomized social chaos and the ontological dizziness that afflicts great swaths of the American public as a result. Thatcher asserted the Neoliberal axiom–that there is no society–and I don't know to what degree her policies in the U.K. succeeded in destroying its fences, but it has certainly succeeded here in the U.S. since Reagan.
Kyeyune goes on–
Unlike in the European case, where the people holding the reins saw historical change as a process that had to proceed cautiously, the American attitude in some ways ended up being “let it rip.” The United States stumbled into being an empire, and all the massive transformations that followed in the wake of this fateful step proceeded haphazardly. Fences were torn down, without anyone taking the time to understand or replace them. In the global fight against communism, the United States might have masqueraded as a conservative power, but the same fundamental churn that the French revolutionaries admired and Louis Veuillot detested was still there.
***
I've been re-reading Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry in the last week. They predicted decades ago the hollowed out thing American society has now become, and they were horrified at the prospect.
But because there is something so spiritually shallow and utilitarian about what shapes the American soul, both on the Left and the Right, there was and still is no capacity in its most prominent public figures to take heed. Certainly not the kind of establishment "conservatives" who found a home in the GOP or in the pages of The National Review. They were almost all of them worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand, and they let the Hand swipe left and swipe right to knock down all those fences, and here we are.
Well maybe now is the time for them, especially the elites on the Left, to read Lasch's Revolt of the Elites or Berry's The Unsettling of America if they are sincere in wanting to get a better understanding of what MAGA is about. Neither Lasch nor Berry would ever defend MAGA, but they both would see it as a symptom of an underlying disease.
The Postwar managerial Liberalism that was hegemonic for both the GOP and the Democrats created a class of experts, the best and brightest, technocrats. These are the managerial elite who are obsessed with control, and who have had no compunction about telling everybody who is not credentialed as they are to trust them because they know better. Both Lasch and Berry make the case why we shouldn't trust them. Theirs is not so much a critique of expertise as it is of the narrow, shallow, fragmented way that their expertise is acquired.
These experts are people who know a lot about a very narrow area that defines their expertise. And their judgments are entirely circumscribed by a utilitarian calculus, and their mostly unconscious metaphysical presuppositions are governed by Rationalist Materialism, which is, I believe, the source of the disease. Our ailment is an advanced form of metaphysical misalignment.
The cure has yet to be discovered, and there is no one from within the ranks of this expert class I'm aware of who is doing the research to find one. Why should there be such an effort if no one feels the need of a cure? It's the others in the 80% who are sick, not they. What is their suggested cure for those ailing in the 80%? Work hard, get good grades, and become like us.
These experts are the produce of our universities, and they dominate the corporate world, media, and the arts. They are the carriers of the disease and its spreaders, but, like Typhoid Mary, they don't suffer with its most baleful symptoms. Indeed their the symptoms are to prosper materially.
But it's because they prosper materially, they find it almost impossible to see how they languish spiritually. Their lives are wonderful. Onward and upward, more money, more status, more pleasure, more freedom to live as they please. How can that be bad? The best among them want to spread the prosperity. But this is, of course, impossible because the world cannot sustain billions of people living as they do.
A reckoning lies ahead, and this class hasn't a clue. Some new technology, maybe AI, will solve the problem, they think. It always has in the past, right? What could go wrong?
———-
Note 1: I have often wondered if Jesus Christ were to arrive tomorrow trailing clouds of glory, how many from among this expert class would look up from their screens and notice. And among those who do, how many would say, echoing Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor, "Go away. We have no need of you. We are perfectly happy as things are. We are in control, and you will only disrupt things." Kierkegaard called this "happiness" the despair that does not know it's despair.
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