Throughout the twentieth century liberalism has been pulled in two directions at once: toward the market and (notwithstanding its initial misgivings about government) toward the state. On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle—the cardinal principle of liberalism—that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their happiness and well-being.
But individuals cannot learn to speak for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except those of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the church, all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market.
The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself: schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image.
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, pp. 97-98 (1996)
In my last post I made an attempt to qualify what might seem to be my rejection of Capitalism in so many of my posts. I'm not anti-business; I'm not anti-freedom. I'm not anti-innovation. I am anti-materialist if by materialism we mean the metaphysics by which all values collapse into economic or market values and human freedom becomes trivialized by a consumerist idea of choice.
Some might retort that I am free to reject materialism and consumerism, and that no one will stop me from believing anything I want. And that's true, and I do. So then, why don't I just go about my business and leave others to go about theirs? Because the current ethos of late capitalism gives license to vulgar nihilists to acquire obscene amounts of wealth and power that they use to constrain, if not in too many cases to utterly destroy, life possibilities for the rest of us.
And so those of us who are not nihilists have an obligation, however quixotic it might appear, to resist those who are, and to make as robust as possible a case for an alternative to their destructive nihilism, an alternative that celebrates human productivity, freedom, and creativity in a way that enhances human flourishing rather than suffocates it.
No such imagination of the future is possible within the totalistic materialistic/nihilistic constraints of late capitalism because of the ways in which it "remodels every institution in its own image".1 This totalistic system is what I've been calling the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and the human future, I've been arguing, depends on our becoming one way or the other liberated from its constraints and on our occupying a restored living cultural configuration that is more deeply aligned with what I've been calling the Deep Real.
I've been arguing that the totalizing influence of the TCM has been working decade by decade at an accelerated pace since WWII to seal us off from the Deep Real by promoting a hubristic, transhumanist, mechanomorphic human future that will imprison us all in a world of our own making. This is the definition of the deep alienation that is hell, a virtual simulacra of reality cut off from the divine, cut off from everything that is soulful, living, true, and good.2
To resist this trend and to imagine an alternative is not a Liberal or Conservative project as we currently frame our politics. Neither is it socialist or capitalist because it rejects the materialistic presuppositions of both ideological socialism and capitalism. It is for a renewal of culture aligned with the Deep Real that will create its own politics.
That's not something that we will gently evolve toward. Profound disruptions and discontinuities loom prominently in our future, and as what's left of the old thing crumbles, everything will depend on whose imagination of the human future emerges as hegemonic–the transhumanists or the transcendentalists. The former have the wealth and power; the latter, worldwide, have the numbers.
The former will win by default unless the latter get organized and offer something living and new. Can the Church play a role in that? It could. Will it? We'll see.
Notes
1. This is why the David Brooks defense of capitalism and markets as being compatible with Christianity—or any culturally vital religion—rings so hollow. Market capitalism and consumerism work on so many levels to subvert and destroy the social infrastructure religious communities need to thrive. He, like many religious conservatives, laments the diminishing influence of religion in American society without ever acknowledging how the totalizing effect of market capitalism and consumerism have been the most powerful agents of its demise, and their arguments are incoherent. Whatever you might think about them, two religious conservatives who are rare for their not suffering from the intellectual incoherence are are Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari.
2. I’m not arguing that all future technologies will necessarily cut us off from the divine, but that the technologies that are inspired and driven by the materialist-mechanomorphic presuppositions of the transhumanist project are doing that now, and will continue to do so in an increasingly totalizing way if left unchecked.
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