A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.
Archilochus
I’ve been arguing for years, but especially since the Cathedral Lectures, that for all our celebration of diversity, we need to find something that unites us, something that all people of good will can agree is of central importance in our being human. We need the diversity that comes with the concrete and the particular—we must resist anything that seeks to homogenize us—and yet we need to find something that affirms what is universally valuable.
The two poles—the universal and particular—need to be held in creative tension in our lives as individuals, but also in our broader cultural life. Most people refuse the discomfort and work required to hold two opposing things in tension, and so usually one or the other dominates in a particular individual or a particular society. But that can’t last, and eventually things get so suffocatingly imbalanced that reaction sets in and things move violently toward imbalance in the other direction, and on it goes.
Isaiah Berlin, whom I often quote and excerpt, wrote a famous essay entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, and he used it mostly as a way to talk about Tolstoy, but more broadly as a way to evaluate the intellectual temperaments of many great cultural figures. To simplify,1 think of the hedgehog as someone like Marx or Luther, i.e., someone who has one big idea and everything becomes explained by it; the fox would be typified by an embrace of pluralism and complexity. Think of Erasmus the fox vs. Luther the hedgehog. Karl Marx the hedgehog vs. Max Weber the fox. Freud was a hedgehog; Derrida was a fox.
Berlin thought that Plato was the hedgehog and Aristotle the fox. I’d say that in their different ways they started as hedgehog and fox respectively, then sought integration with their opposites—Plato, who starts with a profound sense of the underlying unity of things, seeks to grapple with the thorny, intractable particularity of empirical experience. Aristotle, who starts with a lively sense of the particularity of the empirical, seeks to find in them their underlying oneness. Charles Taylor, who was a student of the fox Berlin was dubbed by his teacher a hedgehog, and Taylor embraced it. And I, too, would embrace the hedgehog as my totem. Though hedgehogs have little honor these days in elite cultural circles, there is no shame, if little acclaim, in belonging to the hedgehog clan if you are a hedgehog who strives to be intellectually honest.
Hedgehogs have a bad rap because, when they lack intellectual honesty, they become reductive fanatics. We honest hedgehogs get tarred with their dishonest brush. Dishonest hedgehogs tend to be inquisitors, Jacobins, Nazis, and Maoists. In American culture, they tend to be conspiracy theorists, militia crackpots, transhumanist tech billionaires, and religious fundamentalists. They think they know the truth, and so seek to impose it on others with messianic zeal, and in doing so make everyone, most especially themselves, miserable.
So the tolerance of the fox seems so much more attractive. It embraces pluralism and difference; it rejects hierarchies of domination, It rejects in-group and out-group, and seeks to restore balance by privileging historically marginalized out-groups. There is vitality in difference, foxes insist; death in conformist homogeneity. De-territorialize, take flight. Re-invent yourself by following whatever whim takes your fancy. No one is right, and no one is wrong. The only vice is intolerance. Every values matrix embraced by one group is incommensurate with what is embraced by another. You must not judge.
Can’t we all just get along?
Apparently not. The foxes have overreached, and now the crackpot hedgehogs are in full revolt.2
Foxes have ruled the roost in cultural elite circles since WWII, and without rejecting the truth of the many things foxes know, I think it’s fair to say that things are out of balance, and we’re about to get a serious pendulum swing toward hedgehoggery, whether we like it or not. So as a hedgehog who has lived most his adult life in a cultural milieu dominated by foxes, I dare to suggest that perhaps it’s time for the culture’s elite to open up to an intellectually honest version of hedgehoggery. It’s the only real antidote to the fanatical, reductive kind they’ll get otherwise.
An intellectually honest hedgehog is someone who starts with a fundamental conviction that despite the messiness and chaos of experience, it all makes sense, that it is, at root, Good. An intellectually honest fox starts with an overwhelming sense of the messiness and absurdity of things, and yet is open to the possibility that at some level it all makes sense. Hedgehogs need skeptical foxes to keep them honest, and foxes need hedgehogs to give them hope.3
We find that intellectually honest hedgehogs in the work of Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others, and it’s on MacIntyre I’ll be focussing most of my attention in the near future. Taylor’s job was to tell the big story about the disenchantment of the west and to suggest a path toward its renchantment. Hart’s job was to deconstruct the materialist presuppositions that dominate almost all “legitimate” contemporary cultural and political discourse. MacIntyre’s job is to lay out for us what the cultural conditions must be if we are ever to recover a morally coherent society, i.e., a society that has some broadly shared foundation for embracing the ‘common good’.4 The foxes among you smell a fanatical hedgehog in such a project, but something richer and more complex is possible. And not just possible, but, imo, the only way forward.
1. I’m probably pushing this further than Berlin would be comfortable with.
2. And besides, there isn’t a truly vital diversity in late-modern societies; there is only a simulacra of it. Those who celebrate difference do it with the messianic zeal of fanatical hegdehogs. And those who celebrate traditional multicultural ethnic and cultural diversity are too late. That diversity and vitality is no longer vital; it’s only found only in Disneyfied cliches, as museum pieces, as Norman-Rockwell, nostalgic kitsch, not as things that really live. Some of the old diversity of ethnic and religious traditions linger here and there, but in a hundred years what’s left of it will be gone unless some significant disruption changes our trajectory. That’s unlikely, so instead we must instead start to think about what must happen if we are to begin anew. See also my essay “Dying Traditions”.
3. The hedgehog/fox polarity is structurally similar to another that I have spoken about over the years, the dove/serpent polarity, as in “Be ye shrewd as serpents, and guileless as doves.” Doves = Hedgehogs; serpents = foxes. This polarity, I argue, provides the underlying structure for two great novels—Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I explore this idea in a post entitled “Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves”.
4. In other words, Taylor tackles the epistemological/aesthetic—beauty is truth, truth beauty; Hart the metaphysical, to re-establish the ontological primacy of Mind; and MacIntyre, the ethical/moral, the necessity of restoring a teleological understanding of virtue as a way of grounding our judgments about what is better and worse in our individual and collective striving for a full human life.
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