Don’t Mess with Our Roots

It is fashionable to cut away the values in which humanity is rooted. We should not cut away our roots, but transcend and include them in healthy ways. Liberalism is the master doctrine for this.

Scott Umstattd

Editor’s Note: First, new readers will appreciate that liberal here does not mean left-wing, but rather one concerned with human freedom, from the Latin root libertas. Second, a couple of readers got a little confused by last week’s article in which I appealed to Spiral Dynamics. If you found that piece confusing, this will either clarify matters or make them even more confusing. Either way, please hang in there. Your feedback is welcome. Finally, a lot of my readers follow Paul Kingsnorth’s

The Abbey of Misrule

. My pushback against Kingsnorth is intended as an effort to discover a synthesis position with his deep traditionalism. In short, liberalism—sufficiently upgraded—integrates worldviews.

But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.
– George Orwell, from 1984 

When two climate-change activists went into a London museum and tossed tomato soup all over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, they didn’t do their movement any favors. The act struck most people as petty terrorism, like something from the Cultural Revolution. One suspects this is just the sort of antics that have driven thinkers such as traditionalist Paul Kingsnorth away from the environmental movement. More on him later.

Recall that the Chinese Red Guard had been encouraged to destroy the Four Olds: Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, and Old Habits. Mao had prompted the Red Guard student movement to shore up Chinese Communism, which, at the time, the party viewed as the end of history. The Red Guard wanted to destroy anything that might remind people of society before Mao. So they destroyed art, burned books, and toppled statues.

Source: PBS.org

We are witnessing the return of the Red Guard. But this time, the call for the destruction of the Four Olds comes not from the CCP but rather from Western universities. It’s no secret that the academy is the beating heart of radical social justice ideology, which, today, extends its tendrils into corporations, primary schools, athletics programs, and modern media. 

As György Lukács and other European intellectuals sympathetic to Marx understood, to reprogram a people, you have to destroy their roots. Where Lukács failed, Mao succeeded. By cutting away China’s roots, the communist dictator could usher in subsequent eras of totalitarian control. I call these roots the substrata because, as we will see, our psychosocial development is layered. We derive a significant portion of our self-concept from these layers of rootedness. But radical social justice activists view healthy self-concept as a demonic force to be exorcized, perhaps a weed to be plucked from a utopian garden. To rid people of healthy self-concept, radical social justice activists attack any sources of meaning that challenge their doctrine.

So much of the so-called “meaning crisis” comes from the mass deployment of radical social justice mind viruses. The result has been an insidious mob psychology that continues to spread like a contagion. The layers of humanity upon which we understand ourselves and derive meaning can resist change, but radical social justice activists want to obliterate all resistance. It matters not that such changes can leave people sick, poor, depressed, or physically altered. To make the postmodern omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

Substrata: Liberalism and Traditionalism

Educational entrepreneur Michael Strong refers to academia as “The World’s Leading Social Problem.” To make his case, Strong points out that nineteenth-century liberals believed in two basic ideas:

• An economic system consisting of property rights, rule of law, and freedom of contract led to ‘the wealth of nations’ and was a sound foundation for peace between nations.

• Personal virtues such as hard work, perseverance, ingenuity, initiative, self-discipline, personal responsibility, good manners, and wholesome living could put any individual on the path to a life in which he or she could become ‘healthy, wealthy, and wise.’

Strong says these two basic points had been mainstream thinking in the United States and Britain. But, “for the next hundred years, most of the intellectual and pedagogical activity of university professors in the humanities and social sciences was dedicated to undermining respect for those ideas.” 

Such undermining persists to this day.

Academics embraced various flavors of socialism, and many continue to do so. Whether Maoists, Marxists, or mendicants of subtler shades of radical social justice, their modus operandi is to undermine liberalism. As critical race theorists Delgado and Stefancic write:

Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-​by-​step progress, critical theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

These “foundations” are the substrata—part of our American roots. They are also the adopted roots of those around the world who value the blessings of liberty.

But activists can read between the lines. Step One is to question those foundations. Step Two is to dismantle them. Those rushing to strike at the roots of the liberal order know full well that behind the veneer of concern for marginalized groups lies a will to power. Yet they will be the first to refer to everyone they loathe as fascists.

Some argue that true liberalism—a doctrine that holds that people ought to live in peace, pluralism, and freedom under the rule of law—is wholly at odds with traditional values. Even some self-styled classical liberals argue that there's nothing to see here when it comes to radical social justice. Others, like classical liberal writer Aaron Ross Powell, have decided to pick a partisan team. 

“We can work ourselves into a moral panic about left-wing wokeism,” writes Powell, “but the GOP has become the party of American fascism, and that's a good deal more of a problem than getting yelled at by Millennials and Gen Zers for refusing to use someone's preferred pronouns.”

Yes, this is the same Aaron Ross Powell who, a decade before, wrote so stirringly about what politics does to us all.

I consider Powell a friend and have worked with him. But like many intellectuals who have done too many tours of duty in the Beltway, I worry he has been captured and suffers from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. As a post-enlightenment liberal, I wish Powell and others like him would take care not to try to sever the connection among the strata. That would be a terrible mistake. At best, it would mean turning a blind eye to the destructive nature of radical social justice. At worst, it would mean people who claim to cherish freedom are hacking at its roots.

None of this is to argue for right-wing authoritarianism. As one committed to the Founders’ Project, I recognize that we must often be steadfast in our both-sides-ism. I argue, we are currently navigating between the Scylla of radical social justice and the Charybdis of so-called National Conservatism. Yet true liberalism also leaves room for those with progressive and conservative values to self-determine within a broader liberal framework.

Of course, liberals and traditionalists will clash from time to time. But as the petty terrorists of radical social justice continue their vandalous march through the institutions—sometimes literally, as in the BLM damage of 2020—many liberals, traditionalists, and moderate progressives will find a common cause in pushing back. Indeed, as a techno-optimist with an anarchist streak, I never thought I’d find myself nodding along with Paul Kingsnorth, a reformed climate activist turned Orthodox Christian who occasionally flings holy water at the Technium.

Kingsnorth writes:

Back in America – now ground-zero for the abolition of biology – thousands of girls are undergoing double mastectomies, and teenage boys are being given ‘puberty-blocking’ drugs designed to chemically castrate rapists. Eleven-year-old girls are taught that ‘if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender’ – which may explain why, in some classrooms, a quarter of the children identify as precisely that. The concept of ‘trans kids’ – a notion that would have been inconceivably baffling to most people even a few years back, and for many still is—is now being pushed so hard that it starts to look less like the liberation of an oppressed minority than an agenda to reprogramme society with an entirely new conception of the human body—and thus of nature itself. (Passage lightly edited for style.)

Radical social justice activists are destroying the biological substrate, much like American iconoclasts are toppling statues of Thomas Jefferson—symbols of our liberal substrate.

Attempts to dismantle our shared historical substrate are one thing. It would be quite another to mess with the family. But Lily Sánchez, writing in Current Affairs, says hold my beer:

The family must be abolished, which means a “breaking open of the family to free and unleash what’s good in it and to generalize that into the social body as a whole. To make the necessary forms of care available to everyone unconditionally.”

See? To unleash what is good about the family, you have to destroy the family; just as to unleash what is good about being a girl, you have to destroy the very concept of a girl as well as girls’ and boys’ bodies. To make a postmodern omelet…. According to radical social justice activists, these substrata are merely contingent. Chesterton’s useless old fences stand in the way of progress. 

Now, what if I told you that this urge to destroy the substrata follows a historical pattern?

The Integral Heuristic

In Spiral Dynamics—a framework of psychosocial values development first advanced by psychologist Clare Graves—the basic idea is that individuals and groups change over time according to certain life conditions. While some readers will prefer alternative stage theories, such as those of Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan, all such theories share a common idea. Human psychosocial development changes according to levels of complexity. 

Because it’s most familiar to me, I’ll use the Spiral Dynamics framework as a heuristic, along with a sketch of social complexity through time. You’ll notice that a color change indicates a new stage. As each stage is connected to a prior stage, picture in your mind the spiral starting at Beige and spiraling upward, even as you read the chart from up to down. The colors are useful, particularly as references to the associated values. 

On the right side of the chart, you’ll notice we begin with low complexity. But as societies develop through time, the complexity increases. That is, humans arrange themselves and their rules according to their need to process information and maintain coherence. When they can no longer maintain said coherence, they evolve along with the values that shore up the corresponding structures.

According to this model, as civilizations become more complex, people develop different values and modes of cognition. Development has been intermittent and heterogeneous. Still, a few have managed to ascend to Tier Two. Most, though, linger somewhere in Tier One. And when they do, they tend to cling to a monolithic value system. They find others disorienting.

Practitioners of this heuristic emphasize that, instead of wars among value systems, people can learn to transcend and include the values of prior levels, but this usually happens with Yellow. So, for example, a highly rational scientist (Orange) might eschew the beliefs of religious orthodoxy that hold sway in the prior stage (Blue). But the scientist might eventually come to see that there are features of Blue worth preserving, such as respect for elders or guarding certain traditions. In other words, you can transcend Blue traditionalism to see the world through the Orange lens of enlightenment liberalism—but also include Blue’s healthier values. 

Integral practitioners such as Ken Wilber have noted the excesses of the Green stage—with its emphasis on hyper-relativism and the rejection of human nature, rationality, and truth. Wilber worries, quite justifiably, that Green can be a psychosocial ditch. He observes that “Mean Green” represents the values of a new Cultural Revolution. Radical social justice, according to Wilber, is an unhealthy expression of Green that militates against the prior substrata, whereas healthy development requires synthesizing prior values, not going to partisan war with them. For example, Mean Greens talk about tolerance but only with respect to marginalized groups. They spurn other values. “Inclusion,” far from calling on us to integrate diverse worldviews, is but shop talk for the intersectional props in Green victimhood narratives.

I am sympathetic to the idea that, in psychosocial development, we can retain healthy expressions of prior stages. For example, when I go home to my native North Carolina, I say ma’am and sir more often, despite my letters and laurels. (And now that I live in South Carolina, this practice has come back strong.)

Mean Greens would view this as some abhorrent reinforcement of dangerous gender stereotypes designed to erase the existence of ‘queer people.’ For example, writes thought-police officer Brooklyn Reece: 

The server comes up to you and brings you and your friend cups of iced water. When they place the glass in front of you, they chirp, “Here you go, ma’am!”

A wave of tension and self-consciousness sweeps through you. You consider the situation. Was it the long hair? The earrings? The lipstick? Which feminine-stereotyped accessory gave your server the right to assume your gender identity? When did they ever ask you your pronouns?

Only such a bizarre neo-puritan ideology would prompt one to attack ma’am and sir as OLDTHINK. It must be difficult and frustrating to decouple oneself from her humanity's culturally and biologically evolved layers. Perhaps the tribal proclivities of the Purple stage, mingled with the dominating urges of Red, unconsciously prompt Reece to dismantle and destroy rather than transcend and include. 

Still, instead of going to civil war against these zealous Greens, is there a way to help them out of their ditch? After all, once they learn to transcend and include, most Greens aren’t Green anymore.

Return of the Kingsnorth

As quickly as I found myself nodding along with Paul Kingsnorth on protecting our roots, I turned to find him brandishing a machete next to mine. 

First, Kingsnorth writes glowingly of illiberal conservative Patrick Deneen who routinely makes two-steps between the “liberalism” of technocratic progressives and the original liberalism of the American Founders. It’s no wonder then that Kingsnorth has this assessment of liberalism:

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedom for the individual from society itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.”

Did I say liberals and traditionalists will clash? Christ, straw is everywhere. I hope a loved one was there to sweep and check Kingsnorth’s pulse after he so thoroughly and violently thwacked that poor fellow.

While Kingsnorth rightly notes that radical social justice types are hacking away at the roots of human nature, he turns around and takes a stab at our shared roots (Kingsnorth is a Brit). Integral thinkers won’t be surprised. Even the best first-tier thinkers have difficulty transcending and including. As Kingsnorth has become a valiant knight in Blue’s shrinking kingdom, he sometimes retreats too far into the cramped recesses of that value system.

But not always.

Kingsnorth writes admiringly of Simone Weil’s heterodox thinking here:

Her attachment was to the eternal things, and she could never be boxed in. She wrote in praise of God, tradition, roots, peoples and culture; but also of justice, freedom of speech and thought, honour and equality. She could be equally scathing about fascism, communism, established religion, liberal elites, capitalism and mass education.

Kingsnorth should not box himself in, either. After all, free speech is a liberal value. And we liberals can be just as scathing about fascism and communism, to the point that we define ourselves as the opposite of these. Further, original liberalism doesn’t seek to break “all borders, limits, and structures.” Instead, liberalism recommends porous borders that let people organize themselves within communities of peaceful pluralism. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

Wherever, at the head of a new undertaking, you see in France the government, and in England, a great lord, count on seeing in the United States, an association.

Sadly, progressive technocrats destroyed most of America’s great associations in the twentieth century. But technocrats don’t like true liberalism, either. Indeed, they share the same contempt for associations that Lily Sánchez has for the family. In any case, I invite Kingsnorth to witness the beauty that Tocqueville saw when America lived its liberalism.

Despite Kingsnorth’s strawman, liberalism doesn’t require a “detached, sovereign personhood.” Our doctrine acknowledges human interdependency while respecting individuals as something other than the chattel of the church, state, or ruling class. Liberalism doesn’t seek freedom “from society itself.” Instead, liberals know that the ties that bind a community are stronger when woven by people who associate freely, as opposed to when zealots have to shame, conquer, and convert them. 

Liberalism, at least in its original form, seeks harmony with the natural order. Properly conceived, the doctrine is not about tearing anything down except arbitrary barriers that would otherwise prevent more organic forms of organization from emerging via peaceful human choices.

Paul Kingsnorth chose to convert to Orthodox Christianity. Surely his faith is bolstered by that choice, as opposed to the paltry faith one might find when baptism seems a better idea than torture. The difference is one of agency, which liberalism offers as a central value. I suspect that if God exists, God prefers us to choose moral acts rather than having goons compel us.

While liberalism carves out space for different traditions, with peaceability as the limiting principle, the reverse isn’t always true. Kingsnorth should therefore take another look at liberalism. He might find some roots there. Indeed, he might even find traditionalist roots in liberalism, as Edmund Burke did. As Daniel Klein and Dominic Pino explain:

“Conservative liberalism” is a suitable name for Burke’s outlook. In that expression, “liberalism” is the noun. It is primary. It communicates something about the house people are to make their homes in. The adjective “conservative” curbs the enthusiasm of liberalism but enhances its wisdom. Conservatism makes liberal principles more practical, pertinent, and robust. It grounds the arc of liberal civilization; it spans continents; it can endure.

While I am no conservative liberal in the mold of Burke, I can see Burke’s value. At a minimum, liberal doctrine is commensurate with traditionalism insofar as liberalism seeks to integrate other value systems peacefully.

Surely, therefore, Kingsnorth can do better than to get his assessments of liberalism from close-minded theocrats like Patrick Deneen. 

The essence of liberalism is this:

Don’t hack at my roots, and I won’t hack at yours. We probably share some roots, you and I. If so, let us work together in peace. If we do, an ordered ecosystem might just spring up with plenty of soil left for others to grow in their own way.

One can only admire Kingsnorth’s work because it’s clear he’s grown. He writes beautifully and persuasively. I see why there are certain features of life he wants to sacralize. That is why I want him in the trenches next to us as we face both Green's radical social justice activists and Blue’s Christ-haunted theocrats. Those who learn to transcend and include healthy first-tier values will ascend the spiral together. When we do, we will figure out how to challenge the destructive aspirations of Mean Green—or Greedy Orange, or Fundamentalist Blue, or Bloodthirsty Red. 

Hell, we might be able to help those under the spell of radical social justice to leap from Green to Healthy Yellow. And in the process, we can recall what is true, beautiful, and good in Green.

Cultural Evolution

“Ideas have sex,” said fellow liberal Matt Ridley famously. The incredible bounty we enjoy each day is a consequence of this fact of human nature. Humans have ideas, and we transmit them to each other. Sometimes we adopt them and, perhaps more rarely, we hybridize our ideas to create something new. Each novel genome confers advantages or disadvantages within certain life conditions. This is perhaps no truer than in the domain of cultural evolution. One of the great liberal thinkers, Friedrich Hayek, offered us this insight. 

If we squint hard enough at Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution, we will see the wisdom of rootedness just as Kingsnorth did in the work of Simone Weil. In my own words, here’s a summary of Hayek:

People transmit memes. Sometimes we adopt and imitate sociocultural memes. Among the most important memes are common rules and cultural norms that allow people to predict what others in their group will do. This provides order. Common rules and norms preserved over time become traditions. These are selected for and tested by our life conditions, which include competition with other groups. Traditions we might have imitated or adopted differ from instincts that evolved through biology. Sometimes this fact can make for conflicting internal thoughts or difficult external allegiances. Still, traditions can confer advantages to groups. Those traditions maintained through group selection can be superior to individual reason in certain respects because culture carries tacit adaptations to life conditions that a single mind could never apprehend. Though the precise mechanisms of biological- and cultural evolution aren’t exactly similar, they share relevant aspects. Both work through selection. Social rules persist through reproduction and fitness and get tested (and retested) by circumstances. 

Traditionalists aren’t likely to appreciate a Darwinian explanation of tradition’s value—or, not at first blush—but at least the rationale shows how the Whig and the Tory might come to the same conclusion: Don’t mess with our roots. 

If this evolutionary view of cultural traditions is generally correct, what does this mean for radical social justice? 

While radical social justice gained relatively rapid mindshare, it must quickly evolve. By analogy, certain viruses transmit quickly but also quickly destroy their hosts. Such viruses tend to die out, much in the same way that Marx’s alpha variant did. Due to the destructive nature of radical social justice, people are developing a kind of immunity to Green’s meaner memes. And hosts who find their lives worsened or destroyed won’t long be effective propagation machines. Even as radical social justice advocates are likely to gain political power in the short term, their values have little to no connection with the substrata. 

Fight, Flight, and Facilitate: War on Three Fronts

Finally, we arrive at our call to action. This call cannot be either/or. It must be yes/and. 

First, traditionalists should join with liberals to fight radical social justice. But if by fight, we mean to use illiberal means, that risks creating a different-but-equally-dangerous enemy.

Humbly, therefore, I submit that we lock arms in solidarity around original liberalism, which transcends and includes traditionalism.

Then, when we cannot fight, we must exit—that is, flee. It might sound cowardly, but it’s not. Flight can mean leaving a state like California to settle in Texas or Arizona. Jurisdictional arbitrage is a way to let rotten cultures and institutions collapse while shoring up healthier institutions by voting with your feet.

Finally, we must help facilitate radical social justice activists' cognitive and moral transition to a healthier place on the spiral. Some won’t ever make it. But others will. And maybe, like Michael Strong referenced above, they will become leaders capable of seeing and synthesizing the healthier values of the whole spiral. 

Integral thinking can lead us not only to a place of unity in pluralism favored by liberals but it can also work to the end of protecting our roots.

---

This is excerpted from my book Underthrow. A version appeared at AIER.