For years, I have been saying that the signature human evil is the act of using force to turn one person into the means to another's ends. That seems to cover virtually all evil acts.
More recently, I have begun to consider a similar formulation: that the signature human pathology is the urge to force collective solutions on large groups of people, even if it is against their will.
I say "pathology" because I believe this grows from our nature as an "ultra-social" species (as Michael Tomasello calls us). This urge is our social nature, pathologized.
We have to move beyond that urge.
Twenty years ago, I would have been one of those yowling conservatives. Today, I believe that an upgraded version of Nozick's "framework" is the way to go. Let everyone chart their own course!
Explorers on the edges of unknowns will never agree. Whatever survives their disagreement must serve as the best we know. It's not much, but it's the reason we have civilization.
Interesting and creative writing Max. Sounds like a good Introduction to your Own construct: Ideal Ideological Liberalism...OR...maybe Liberal Ideological Idealism, New-&-Improved?
It reminds me of Edmund Burke's response to his old Whig buddies who chaffed at Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Like many today who Long, fervently, to sip a bit more of the "new-and-improved" poison from the Revolutionary Cup of Progress. Charles James Fox, with many other fellow Whigs (with also Paine & Jefferson)...at least till the Revolution bore its Bloody fruit a few yrs later.
A century later Solzhenitsyn offended Liberals at Harvard, channeling Burke's assessment --Jacobin, Bolshevik or Woke -- of the poison in the Revolution's Cup. Burke's biographer, Russell Kirk writes:
"At bottom, the difference of Burke from the revolutionaries -- like all large differences of opinion -- was theological. Burke's was the Christian understanding of human nature, which the men of the Enlightenment violently rejected. We must leave to Providence; to presume to perfect man and society by a neat "rational" scheme is a monstrous act of hubris...To the revolutionaries, Christianity was superstition -- and an enemy. The dogmas and doctrines of Christianity must go by the board. But in short order, theological dogmas were supplanted by secular dogmas. Christian charity was supplanted by "fraternity" -- which, in effect, led to the attitude "Be my brother, or I must kill you." (pg 165)
To this day we grossly underestimate the violent intolerance of All rivals to the Revolution -- especially those who refuse to burn incense to their god of Secular Rationalism. But the ugly fruit is increasingly before us...yea ON us all.
Dear David, I, the integral liberal, reject Rationalistic Liberalism, which is the whole point of why I call for something "new and improved." This liberalism doesn't forget its roots, and integrates the healthier aspects of those roots. I give a big nod to Burke here: https://underthrow.substack.com/p/dont-mess-with-our-roots
I don't deny, for example, that there is a distinct rootedness in healthy Judeo-Christian values. But when those values were supreme, we got impositions, and Inquisitions. We got King, Aristocracy, and serfdom. We got bloody civil wars, witch burnings and other forms of excess that came along with the merger of Church and State that the founders hoped wisely to avoid, because they were liberals. Whigs. We can keep the healthy values of the Whigs and shed their excesses. But that doesn't mean that liberalism shouldn't be thought of as the Master Ideology. Even Burke, while rightly concerned about Jacobinism, was a conservative liberal or liberal conservative. And I don't know where you think I have ever been committed to the idea of the perfect sort of person. Indeed, despite my secularism, I think humans are warty, evolved creatures, which is pretty darn close to saying we're 'fallen.' I also agree that there are limits to liberal toleration. For example, if you think non-believers should be slaughtered or burned alive, then you probably shouldn't be given a visa. But by the same token, if 330 million people have to swear allegiance to a Christian God, well that's just downright unAmerican, whatever Russell Kirk has to say on the matter. It's also why I wrote: "Perfectionist theories animated imperfect people to replace imperfect social orders with other imperfect social orders." All I'm arguing is that we need a liberalism that allows imperfect, fallen people to be able peacefully to experiment with different social orders based on different conceptions of the good.
In any case, I'm not asking anyone to burn incense to the God of Secular Rationalism--that's the problem with the Enlightenment version. I'm simply asking people of a more traditionalist bent to acknowledge that humans are going to have different values, and that these values are best balanced by some kind of liberal doctrine. As I set about reading my new copy of a book on Orthodoxy, I'm reminded that under some Protestant Theocracy, these poor souls might have been run out of America or worse were it not for something so bloodless and liberal as the First Amendment.
Hey Max (Dear Max?), No, I do not believe you are a closet Jacobin, Bolshevik, modern Woke Liberal...or demanding I burn incense ("get your mask on & take this injection") to any god, thank God! ;-) Perhaps I wrote sloppily. We, no doubt, agree on many if not Most of the particulars...and I DO much appreciate your "Root" article's intent to retain what's good about the wisdom & Traditions of the ages. [Chesterton would say, "give our ancestors a vote!"]' No intent to charge you with the sins of radicals or revolutionaries. I do think Burke & Solzhenitsyn on to something, per just What our Roots are, & where they lead us. The key here might be just what best Holds-The-Center stable...per pluralism and diversity? State experimentation...is doubtless ahead for us all. Lord have mercy
But in wanting to slay ideology, you espouse an ideology! – Your “upgraded liberalism.”
The truth is that no Spartacus Revolt, including any “emergent” Spartacus Revolt, can ever succeed. All revolutionary change must be driven by a unique thinker, whose ideas are adopted by an intelligentsia, at a favorable historical moment. The masses do not think; they feed and follow.
Of course. That was the joke to acknowledge the paradox. But something tells me you missed the point. Even if you are right that revolutionary change must be driven by a unique thinker who enchants the intelligentsia and leads the timid herds, imagine that revolutionary thinker turned out to be Nozick in Part Three of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even if this could be realized in a revolutionary moment, which I kind of doubt, the result would be the same: a cluster of niches, each lead by its own unique thinker who enchants his own sycophants, who lead the timid herds into their particular niches -- of which there are many.
Like you, I think that there are moral universals that apply in politics.
To rehash: The failure of classical Liberalism was (1) to find an unquestioned minimal set of such universals and (2) to entrust an omnipotent Westphalian state to defend them.
Given the impossibility of those two principles, and given the current state of collapse, we may be left with something like Rod Dreher's Benedict Option -- a hunkering down through a Dark Ages until enough remnant communities form a confederation, growing a "piecemeal universality" by success, instead of by state enforcement of its canon of presumed universals.
Beautifully said. I might argue that moral universals preclude politics, depending on how one defines politics. Otherwise, absolutely. Now--
Gah! Everybody keeps telling me about The Benedict Option. I have a stack of unread books. But Christmas is coming. I'm dying to finish this book on Gurdjieff and then tackle this book on Orthodox Christianity. I'll just add the Dreher to my wish list and make a very big pot of coffee.
I have been thinking about your strong Nietzschean bent, particularly has I have a friend, beautiful, terrifying, brilliant MF who considers himself a Zoroastrian, probably after reading Also Sprach Zarathrustra. He thinks the Jews and the Zoroastrian Persians are the real originators of philosophy and Western civilization. It's an interesting thesis, in any case.
IMHO the problem isn't ideology, the problem is a certain ideology.
In the 2016 book _Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats_ political scientist Matt Grossmann shows that the political left and right are two different KINDS of systems. The leftists are really a group of people who share a goal and will do what is necessary to achieve it. While the right, on the other hand, are people who share a set of beliefs about what is right. An ideology.
The right is rightly an ideology. The left is a group of people who want to make the government more powerful and take control of the government. That’s the problem.
I want to resist Republican and Democrat (partisan) framing and make super clear what I mean by ideology, which is a totalizing theory about how society ought to be arranged for everyone, which I have referred to as The One True Way. But the only true way is E Pluribus Unum and Ex Uno Plures -- which is why I call it the Master Ideology. The partisan divide is less interesting to me than the liberal/illiberal divide, which cuts orthogonally against the left-right spectrum. While I agree that the Democratic Party in the US has gone full authoritarian and have been infected by social justice fundamentalism, the Republicans are fractured and mostly devoid of principles. If there is one R exemplar, who is it? If any partisan isn't committed to anything but the principle of power, they are a rare creature and likely do not have a constituency group among the voters.
I would take care in declaring liberalism a 'Master Ideology' - so many ways to misread that! Acknowledging those misreadings doesn't really escape the problem, alas.
On the whole, I am reminded of this quote:
"It is the claim of a certain trendy 'post-modernism' that the age of Grand Narratives is over, that we cannot believe in these any more. But their demise is the more obviously exaggerated in that the post-modern writers themselves are making use of the same trope in declaring the reign of narrative ended: ONCE we were into grand stories, but NOW we have realized their emptiness and we proceed to the next stage. This is a familiar refrain." - Charles Taylor
I fear this whole issue of establishing a shared stable framework for international or post-national politics is enormously more complicated than you're presenting it here, although I have great sympathy for any attempt to rescue the liberal political project. I'll be passing by something not far from these issues in January's Stranger Worlds, actually... I'll try to remember to pop back with a link when it runs.
"I would take care in declaring liberalism a 'Master Ideology' - so many ways to misread that!" You would, but I wouldn't, at least not anymore. I don't think being timid or concerned about someone taking offense has gotten us anywhere. I sure don't care about getting into an academic journal. "The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms." - H.L. Mencken
Now, I almost always can't stand anything by Charles Taylor has to say. I'm surprised I agree somewhat with his assessment here, but I don't know why you mention it. I don't think societies can long persist without Grand Narratives (or micro-metanarratives). I could be wrong. And I'm sure there are exceptions. But there is tremendous power in a Story of Us.
Now in terms of complication, of course it's more complicated than what I have presented here! But it's not meant to be a framework for international politics. It's only a sketch of a framework for building a post-national politics, depending on how one interprets the idea of nation. Building a set of protocols is itself enormously complicated. Anyway, if you have great sympathy for any attempt to rescue the liberal political project, then what is the nature of that sympathy? What are your commitments? And how do you operationalize them?
Thanks for this response, Max. The Taylor quote is, I think, the neatest summary of the 'grand narrative' motif as it so often appears, and was not meant to rebut you, it just felt 'of a piece' with some of your thematics here. I agree with your claim that societies need these grand narratives, and Taylor would too.
As for your final challenge, I'm working on similar problems to you to some extent but in somewhat different spaces, with a distubingly wider remit, and with different constraints. I don't think I can do your challenge justice in a short comment, but I'll try and make a few remarks that might be somewhat illuminating.
The nature of my sympathy with liberalism is that I do not acknowledge any viable basis for jointly constructed international or post-national constraints that don't begin by acknowledging the necessity of diversity in the authentic sense of difference (not in the sallow version you rightly spear in this piece). Here we are very much in accord.
However, the path to being able to set up such a framework in any viable form is fraught and highly problematic - probably far easier for you since you chose 'exit', so you can act as if you had a free hand (although of course, you don't, as I'm pretty sure you know). For myself, I do not know that liberalism can be rescued as such... this is what the January Stranger Worlds piece addresses, the question of what has become of liberal democracy (which is a fusion of two different political traditions). But there may yet be paths open. I live in hope, but it has become far more difficult now to find open paths to such things.
As for how do I operationalize my commitments - apart from in my personal sphere of life, I suppose the short answer is that I don't, not yet. Alliances first, action later... I know the objections that can be raised to this approach, but it is a viable political course to defer action, especially if premature action destroys the common ground required for success (which is an ever-present risk).
This is partly why I'm interested in your underthrow project, and whether it can be bridged with the anarchists (I'm not sure it can) or any of the other movements available right now. Even if it can't, I like that you are trying to pursue a path from where we are to somewhere else, because it sure beats going down with the ship!
I hope this partly answers your question. Stay wonderful!
Chandran Kukathas addresses some of the issues regarding human rights abuses (like the hypothetical hebephilic priest example in this column) in his book The Liberal Archipelago. It’s a profound but quite accessible book.
For years, I have been saying that the signature human evil is the act of using force to turn one person into the means to another's ends. That seems to cover virtually all evil acts.
More recently, I have begun to consider a similar formulation: that the signature human pathology is the urge to force collective solutions on large groups of people, even if it is against their will.
I say "pathology" because I believe this grows from our nature as an "ultra-social" species (as Michael Tomasello calls us). This urge is our social nature, pathologized.
We have to move beyond that urge.
Twenty years ago, I would have been one of those yowling conservatives. Today, I believe that an upgraded version of Nozick's "framework" is the way to go. Let everyone chart their own course!
I need more hearts for this comment.
🧡
Explorers on the edges of unknowns will never agree. Whatever survives their disagreement must serve as the best we know. It's not much, but it's the reason we have civilization.
Interesting and creative writing Max. Sounds like a good Introduction to your Own construct: Ideal Ideological Liberalism...OR...maybe Liberal Ideological Idealism, New-&-Improved?
It reminds me of Edmund Burke's response to his old Whig buddies who chaffed at Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Like many today who Long, fervently, to sip a bit more of the "new-and-improved" poison from the Revolutionary Cup of Progress. Charles James Fox, with many other fellow Whigs (with also Paine & Jefferson)...at least till the Revolution bore its Bloody fruit a few yrs later.
A century later Solzhenitsyn offended Liberals at Harvard, channeling Burke's assessment --Jacobin, Bolshevik or Woke -- of the poison in the Revolution's Cup. Burke's biographer, Russell Kirk writes:
"At bottom, the difference of Burke from the revolutionaries -- like all large differences of opinion -- was theological. Burke's was the Christian understanding of human nature, which the men of the Enlightenment violently rejected. We must leave to Providence; to presume to perfect man and society by a neat "rational" scheme is a monstrous act of hubris...To the revolutionaries, Christianity was superstition -- and an enemy. The dogmas and doctrines of Christianity must go by the board. But in short order, theological dogmas were supplanted by secular dogmas. Christian charity was supplanted by "fraternity" -- which, in effect, led to the attitude "Be my brother, or I must kill you." (pg 165)
To this day we grossly underestimate the violent intolerance of All rivals to the Revolution -- especially those who refuse to burn incense to their god of Secular Rationalism. But the ugly fruit is increasingly before us...yea ON us all.
Dear David, I, the integral liberal, reject Rationalistic Liberalism, which is the whole point of why I call for something "new and improved." This liberalism doesn't forget its roots, and integrates the healthier aspects of those roots. I give a big nod to Burke here: https://underthrow.substack.com/p/dont-mess-with-our-roots
I don't deny, for example, that there is a distinct rootedness in healthy Judeo-Christian values. But when those values were supreme, we got impositions, and Inquisitions. We got King, Aristocracy, and serfdom. We got bloody civil wars, witch burnings and other forms of excess that came along with the merger of Church and State that the founders hoped wisely to avoid, because they were liberals. Whigs. We can keep the healthy values of the Whigs and shed their excesses. But that doesn't mean that liberalism shouldn't be thought of as the Master Ideology. Even Burke, while rightly concerned about Jacobinism, was a conservative liberal or liberal conservative. And I don't know where you think I have ever been committed to the idea of the perfect sort of person. Indeed, despite my secularism, I think humans are warty, evolved creatures, which is pretty darn close to saying we're 'fallen.' I also agree that there are limits to liberal toleration. For example, if you think non-believers should be slaughtered or burned alive, then you probably shouldn't be given a visa. But by the same token, if 330 million people have to swear allegiance to a Christian God, well that's just downright unAmerican, whatever Russell Kirk has to say on the matter. It's also why I wrote: "Perfectionist theories animated imperfect people to replace imperfect social orders with other imperfect social orders." All I'm arguing is that we need a liberalism that allows imperfect, fallen people to be able peacefully to experiment with different social orders based on different conceptions of the good.
In any case, I'm not asking anyone to burn incense to the God of Secular Rationalism--that's the problem with the Enlightenment version. I'm simply asking people of a more traditionalist bent to acknowledge that humans are going to have different values, and that these values are best balanced by some kind of liberal doctrine. As I set about reading my new copy of a book on Orthodoxy, I'm reminded that under some Protestant Theocracy, these poor souls might have been run out of America or worse were it not for something so bloodless and liberal as the First Amendment.
Hey Max (Dear Max?), No, I do not believe you are a closet Jacobin, Bolshevik, modern Woke Liberal...or demanding I burn incense ("get your mask on & take this injection") to any god, thank God! ;-) Perhaps I wrote sloppily. We, no doubt, agree on many if not Most of the particulars...and I DO much appreciate your "Root" article's intent to retain what's good about the wisdom & Traditions of the ages. [Chesterton would say, "give our ancestors a vote!"]' No intent to charge you with the sins of radicals or revolutionaries. I do think Burke & Solzhenitsyn on to something, per just What our Roots are, & where they lead us. The key here might be just what best Holds-The-Center stable...per pluralism and diversity? State experimentation...is doubtless ahead for us all. Lord have mercy
I hope not. The state is already experimenting with us. Lord have mercy, indeed.
I tend to agree:
https://christophercook.substack.com/p/problem-with-revolutions
But in wanting to slay ideology, you espouse an ideology! – Your “upgraded liberalism.”
The truth is that no Spartacus Revolt, including any “emergent” Spartacus Revolt, can ever succeed. All revolutionary change must be driven by a unique thinker, whose ideas are adopted by an intelligentsia, at a favorable historical moment. The masses do not think; they feed and follow.
Of course. That was the joke to acknowledge the paradox. But something tells me you missed the point. Even if you are right that revolutionary change must be driven by a unique thinker who enchants the intelligentsia and leads the timid herds, imagine that revolutionary thinker turned out to be Nozick in Part Three of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even if this could be realized in a revolutionary moment, which I kind of doubt, the result would be the same: a cluster of niches, each lead by its own unique thinker who enchants his own sycophants, who lead the timid herds into their particular niches -- of which there are many.
Like you, I think that there are moral universals that apply in politics.
To rehash: The failure of classical Liberalism was (1) to find an unquestioned minimal set of such universals and (2) to entrust an omnipotent Westphalian state to defend them.
Given the impossibility of those two principles, and given the current state of collapse, we may be left with something like Rod Dreher's Benedict Option -- a hunkering down through a Dark Ages until enough remnant communities form a confederation, growing a "piecemeal universality" by success, instead of by state enforcement of its canon of presumed universals.
Beautifully said. I might argue that moral universals preclude politics, depending on how one defines politics. Otherwise, absolutely. Now--
Gah! Everybody keeps telling me about The Benedict Option. I have a stack of unread books. But Christmas is coming. I'm dying to finish this book on Gurdjieff and then tackle this book on Orthodox Christianity. I'll just add the Dreher to my wish list and make a very big pot of coffee.
I have been thinking about your strong Nietzschean bent, particularly has I have a friend, beautiful, terrifying, brilliant MF who considers himself a Zoroastrian, probably after reading Also Sprach Zarathrustra. He thinks the Jews and the Zoroastrian Persians are the real originators of philosophy and Western civilization. It's an interesting thesis, in any case.
IMHO the problem isn't ideology, the problem is a certain ideology.
In the 2016 book _Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats_ political scientist Matt Grossmann shows that the political left and right are two different KINDS of systems. The leftists are really a group of people who share a goal and will do what is necessary to achieve it. While the right, on the other hand, are people who share a set of beliefs about what is right. An ideology.
The right is rightly an ideology. The left is a group of people who want to make the government more powerful and take control of the government. That’s the problem.
I want to resist Republican and Democrat (partisan) framing and make super clear what I mean by ideology, which is a totalizing theory about how society ought to be arranged for everyone, which I have referred to as The One True Way. But the only true way is E Pluribus Unum and Ex Uno Plures -- which is why I call it the Master Ideology. The partisan divide is less interesting to me than the liberal/illiberal divide, which cuts orthogonally against the left-right spectrum. While I agree that the Democratic Party in the US has gone full authoritarian and have been infected by social justice fundamentalism, the Republicans are fractured and mostly devoid of principles. If there is one R exemplar, who is it? If any partisan isn't committed to anything but the principle of power, they are a rare creature and likely do not have a constituency group among the voters.
I would take care in declaring liberalism a 'Master Ideology' - so many ways to misread that! Acknowledging those misreadings doesn't really escape the problem, alas.
On the whole, I am reminded of this quote:
"It is the claim of a certain trendy 'post-modernism' that the age of Grand Narratives is over, that we cannot believe in these any more. But their demise is the more obviously exaggerated in that the post-modern writers themselves are making use of the same trope in declaring the reign of narrative ended: ONCE we were into grand stories, but NOW we have realized their emptiness and we proceed to the next stage. This is a familiar refrain." - Charles Taylor
I fear this whole issue of establishing a shared stable framework for international or post-national politics is enormously more complicated than you're presenting it here, although I have great sympathy for any attempt to rescue the liberal political project. I'll be passing by something not far from these issues in January's Stranger Worlds, actually... I'll try to remember to pop back with a link when it runs.
"I would take care in declaring liberalism a 'Master Ideology' - so many ways to misread that!" You would, but I wouldn't, at least not anymore. I don't think being timid or concerned about someone taking offense has gotten us anywhere. I sure don't care about getting into an academic journal. "The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms." - H.L. Mencken
Now, I almost always can't stand anything by Charles Taylor has to say. I'm surprised I agree somewhat with his assessment here, but I don't know why you mention it. I don't think societies can long persist without Grand Narratives (or micro-metanarratives). I could be wrong. And I'm sure there are exceptions. But there is tremendous power in a Story of Us.
Now in terms of complication, of course it's more complicated than what I have presented here! But it's not meant to be a framework for international politics. It's only a sketch of a framework for building a post-national politics, depending on how one interprets the idea of nation. Building a set of protocols is itself enormously complicated. Anyway, if you have great sympathy for any attempt to rescue the liberal political project, then what is the nature of that sympathy? What are your commitments? And how do you operationalize them?
Thanks for this response, Max. The Taylor quote is, I think, the neatest summary of the 'grand narrative' motif as it so often appears, and was not meant to rebut you, it just felt 'of a piece' with some of your thematics here. I agree with your claim that societies need these grand narratives, and Taylor would too.
As for your final challenge, I'm working on similar problems to you to some extent but in somewhat different spaces, with a distubingly wider remit, and with different constraints. I don't think I can do your challenge justice in a short comment, but I'll try and make a few remarks that might be somewhat illuminating.
The nature of my sympathy with liberalism is that I do not acknowledge any viable basis for jointly constructed international or post-national constraints that don't begin by acknowledging the necessity of diversity in the authentic sense of difference (not in the sallow version you rightly spear in this piece). Here we are very much in accord.
However, the path to being able to set up such a framework in any viable form is fraught and highly problematic - probably far easier for you since you chose 'exit', so you can act as if you had a free hand (although of course, you don't, as I'm pretty sure you know). For myself, I do not know that liberalism can be rescued as such... this is what the January Stranger Worlds piece addresses, the question of what has become of liberal democracy (which is a fusion of two different political traditions). But there may yet be paths open. I live in hope, but it has become far more difficult now to find open paths to such things.
As for how do I operationalize my commitments - apart from in my personal sphere of life, I suppose the short answer is that I don't, not yet. Alliances first, action later... I know the objections that can be raised to this approach, but it is a viable political course to defer action, especially if premature action destroys the common ground required for success (which is an ever-present risk).
This is partly why I'm interested in your underthrow project, and whether it can be bridged with the anarchists (I'm not sure it can) or any of the other movements available right now. Even if it can't, I like that you are trying to pursue a path from where we are to somewhere else, because it sure beats going down with the ship!
I hope this partly answers your question. Stay wonderful!
Chandran Kukathas addresses some of the issues regarding human rights abuses (like the hypothetical hebephilic priest example in this column) in his book The Liberal Archipelago. It’s a profound but quite accessible book.
Damn it, Peri, I have been on a book buying spree. This doesn't help.