I just came across this NY Times op-ed written by Hart in 2019. It’s a useful retort to Hazony’s anti Neo-Marxism, and worth the read because, if nothing else, it shows why Neoplatonists like Hart (and me) are naturally drawn to a ‘genuine’ Left politics.
Here’s a shortened version—
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It may be amusing to hear Republicans assert that a military kleptocracy like Venezuela is a socialist country because its government uses that word when lying about itself (rather in the way that North Korea claims to be a people’s democratic republic). It may make one wince to see Senator Bernie Sanders obliged (as he was on Monday at a town hall hosted by CNN) to explain once more that the totalitarian statism of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the (far older) tradition of democratic socialist thought. But fair’s fair, it’s not much less bizarre to hear a “progressive” like Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, assert that “socialism” simply means state seizure of all the means of production. (Had Marx and Engels only known this, they might have spared themselves the effort of denouncing the socialists of their time for failing to call for a completely centralized economy.)
Well — only in America, as they say. Only here is the word “socialism” freighted with so much perceived menace. I take this to be a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity. In every other free society with a functioning market economy, socialism is an ordinary, rather general term for sane and compassionate governance of the public purse for the purpose of promoting general welfare and a more widespread share in national prosperity.
In countries where, since World War II, the principles of democratic socialism have shaped public policy (basically, everywhere in the developed world except here), the lives of the vast majority of citizens, most especially in regard to affordable health care, have improved enormously. This is acknowledged by almost every political faction, whether “liberal” (like Social Democrats), “conservative” (like Christian Democrats) or “progressive” (like Greens). And the preposterous cost projections that American conservative propagandists routinely adduce to prove that “socialized medicine” or a decent public option would exhaust our Treasury are given the lie in each of those countries every day.
Democratic socialism is, briefly put, a noble tradition of civic conscientiousness that was historically — to a far greater degree than either its champions or detractors today often care to acknowledge — grounded in deep Christian convictions. I, for instance, am a proud son of the European Christian socialist tradition, especially in its rich British variant, as exemplified by F.D. Maurice, John Ruskin, William Morris, R.H. Tawney and many other luminaries (including, in his judiciously remote way, C.S. Lewis), but also in its continental expressions (see, for example, Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, with its prescient warnings against the dangers of unfettered capitalism).
True, I have lived abroad often enough to be conscious of the flaws in various nations’ social democratic systems. But I know too that those systems usually make possible something closer to a just and charitable society than ours has ever been. I can also tell the difference between Venezuela and today’s Germany, or the Scandinavian states, or France, or Britain, or Australia, or Canada (and so on).
One need not idealize any of these nations or ignore the ways in which they differ in balancing public and private financing of civic services. But all of them are, broadly speaking, places where — without any unsustainable burden on the national economy — the cost of health care per capita is far lower than it is here and yet coverage is universal, where life spans are longer, where working people are not made destitute by serious illnesses, where a choice between food or pharmaceuticals need never be made, where the poor cannot be denied treatments by insurance adjusters, where pre-existing health conditions could never be denied coverage, where most people have far more savings and much lower levels of debt than is the case here, where very few families live only a paycheck away from total poverty, where wages generally keep pace with inflation, where every worker has decent vacation time each year, where suicide and opioid addiction are not the default lifestyle of the working poor, where homelessness is exceedingly rare, where retirement care is humane and comprehensive and where the schools are immeasurably better than ours are.
Americans, however, recoil in horror from these intolerable impositions on personal liberty. Some of us are apparently even, like Mr. Stein, canny enough to see the shadow of the death camps falling across the whole sordid spectacle. We know that civic wealth is meant not for civic welfare, but should be diverted to the military-industrial complex by the purchase of needless weapons systems or squandered through obscene tax cuts for the richest of the investment class. We know that working families should indenture themselves for life to predatory lending agencies. We know that, when the child of a working family has cancer, the child should be denied the most expensive treatments, and then probably die, but not before his or her family has been utterly impoverished.
We call this, I believe, being free. And as long as we have access to all the military-grade guns we could ever need to fight off invasions from Venus, and to assure that our children will be slaughtered at regular intervals in their schools, what else can we reasonably ask for?
Interesting that Trump has taken to calling Zohran Mamdani a "Communist". Be afraid. We can't have that. We'll use the centralized powers of the state, announces Trump, to rig things to make sure he cannot succeed.
Look, in America, we try to try to derive too much of life’s meaning from our work in the economic sphere. As machines continue take from humans more and more of the tasks that have provided their way to make a living, the creative challenge will not to be to "create jobs", but to create a society where people learn how to create for themselves a good life.
If there are not going to be jobs for people to make a living, the state will have to provide for their material needs through a UBI or some method not yet imagined. So some form of socialism is in our future, so we better start planning for the best version of it. And clearly one of the biggest challenges will be how people will find meaning in their lives without work. Meaning will have to be derived by ideas and practices—work—that have meaning unrelated to economic value. All humans derive meaning in their being active and productive in some way. That won’t change. So the big question will be whether we can create a society where people can find meaning in being productive in ways that are disconnected from a paycheck.
The real challenge, therefore, is spiritual-cultural, not economic. We will have to grow out of our Calvinism and its work ethic, which would bring relief to everyone if done in the right way. How then to redefine what ‘productive’, to be fruitful, means in the Good Society. And obviously the state will have to play a role in supporting (not imposing) the policies and institutions that will emerge to effect such a transition.
Two different visions of such a future were imagined near the end of the 19th Century: one by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), and the other by William Morris's News from Nowhere (1891). I had my class read them, and I recommend them to readers here. Both writers couldn't be more different in the way they imagined their utopias, but both were socialist through and through. No other positive future made any kind of sense for anybody with a shred of common decency. Certainly not a continuation of the insane laissez-faire capitalism that was destroying the social fabric of their societies at the time.
Jacques Barzun in his From Dawn to Decadence (2000) defined a decadent society as one that has lost its collective imagination of a positive future. It has lost its 'geist', so to say. The word 'decadence', he insisted, was not a pejorative term but a technical or descriptive one. People within decadent societies can live good lives, but as the larger social framework unravels, chaos and violence increase. That's us, and will continue to be us until we find a way together to imagine and work toward a plausible positive future. Only then will there be a shift from decadence to dawn.
Until then we're living in the Age of Whatever both in the sense of 'anything goes', but also in the sense of waiting for whatever comes next. Our current imagination of the future reflects our decadence. For want of anything better, we imagine the worst, and so our popular culture has focused almost exclusively on the violent, the grotesque, and the dystopian. Anything else seems unrealistically pollyanna. But when new novels, movies, and philosophical works emerge that start to imagine utopias rather than dystopias–as Bellamy, Morris, and others did during the height of the Industrial Revolution–we will know then that we're making the shift out of decadence to whatever dawn comes next. That, at least, is the working premise of After the Future.
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