Worker and Parasite: Recent Episodes
Jerry Brito, Stan Tsirulnikov
In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright. The book's first half explains AI's rise and risks; the second argues, via Teilhard de Chardin-style "complexification," that evolution is driving Earth toward a unified planetary consciousness, or "noosphere," with AI as the catalyst. Wright frames this as requiring expanded cognitive empathy and coordinated global governance to avoid catastrophe. Jerry and Stably examined the book's undercurrents of Buddhism, nonzero-sum game theory, and cosmic purpose, questioned whether Wright's proposed top-down steering contradicts his own bottom-up instincts, and debated whether moral progress or natural selection will ultimately determine humanity's fate. They also touched on Thomas Metzinger's theory of consciousness as a useful counterpoint.
In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll. The academic ethnography examines how slot machines—once a marginal casino afterthought—now generate most gambling revenue, driven largely by local repeat players rather than tourists. Schüll interviews designers, executives, and addicted gamblers, showing how machines are engineered to induce a self-erasing "zone" akin to flow states, prioritizing extended play over winning. Jerry and Stably debate her capitalism-focused framing, question whether her extreme case studies represent typical gamblers, and connect the addictive "zone" to evolutionary mismatch theory and Schopenhauer's concept of denying the Will. They also touch on Nevada's pre-1969 ownership rules that once limited corporate casino ownership. Despite its dry, jargon-heavy academic style, both hosts found it compelling and recommend it.
This episode covers The Special One: The Secret World of Jose Mourinho by Diego Torres, Jerry's pick timed to Mourinho's appointment as Real Madrid manager. Jerry and Stably discuss the book's chronicle of Mourinho's tumultuous 2010-2013 Madrid tenure, focusing on his combative management style: cultivating an atmosphere of fear and favoritism, sidelining players unrepresented by super-agent Jorge Mendes, and blaming referees for losses. They examine his fraught relationship with president Florentino Perez, the locker-room fractures between Portuguese and Spanish players, and his eventual exit following a player revolt. Both note the book's one-sided framing and oddly literal English translation, while drawing comparisons to authoritarian leadership styles. They recommend it for soccer fans despite its insider assumptions.
In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga. They examined the central thesis that play forms the foundation of human culture and critiqued the author for utilizing vague definitions and romanticizing historical conflict.
In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed Ride the Tiger, a survival manual for the aristocrats of the soul by Julius Evola. The discussion centered on Evola’s core thesis that the modern world is in terminal decline, having fallen from a traditional, hierarchical society where people found inherent meaning through natural aristocracy. The hosts explained that this decline has left people feeling a lack of meaning, which they attempt to fill through materialism, viewing both capitalism and communism as different expressions of the same materialistic impulse. Evola's prescription, the titular "Ride the Tiger," is an acknowledgment that the forces of decadence are overwhelming and cannot be stopped; therefore, the "differentiated man" must embrace the flow of modernity as a path toward transcendence, prepared to jump off and restart the cycle when the world exhausts itself.
Jerry noted that the book functions more as a "permission structure" for individuals feeling alienated from the world rather than a literal manual, giving them authorization to be themselves and aim for transcendence. Both hosts acknowledged Evola's background as an actual fascist and Mussolini supporter, but pointed out that the book promotes a stance of apolitia, urging the differentiated man to be detached from all political, moral, and religious identification, as their will is their own morality. While Jerry agreed with the diagnosis of modernity's inability to provide meaning, he criticized Evola's superior, elitist tone and the book's focus on aristocracy, contrasting it with the compassionate ethics of other philosophical traditions. The hosts distinguished the modern issue of lacking meaning from the question of historical happiness, arguing that past societies may have had a clearer sense of meaning despite pervasive physical suffering.
The conversation detailed Evola’s philosophical critiques of his contemporaries, particularly Nietzsche and the existentialists. Evola respected Nietzsche but saw his philosophy as ultimately materialist, relying on a faith-based ideal of the Superman that Evola compared to Marxist aspirations for a "new model man". Against the existentialist claim that "existence precedes essence," Evola countered that essence, derived from the metaphysical Will, precedes existence, viewing the individual as an instantiation of this universal force. Evola also analyzed certain modern practices that a differentiated man could use for transcendence—what he called "residues of tradition"—such as asceticism, warrior ethics, and even drugs (if used to awaken the mind rather than as an anesthetic against meaninglessness). However, Jerry strongly disagreed with Evola's specific condemnation of "Negro jazz," arguing that its improvisational nature and capacity to create a trance-like state aligns perfectly with Evola's own goal of "lucid inebriation" as a transcendent experience. The episode concluded with Stan announcing the next book pick, Homo Ludens, a study of the play element in culture by Johan Huizinga.
In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed Leap of Faith by Michael J. Mazarr. Mazarr, a RAND Corporation scholar, draws on every available memoir, declassified document, and interviews with senior administration officials to dissect how the United States stumbled into the Iraq War. His central argument is that there was never really a decision — the invasion happened through a process of drift, assumption, and institutional momentum, with no memo ever formally ordering it. Jerry and Stably walked through Mazarr's typology of the principals — Bush and Wolfowitz as values-driven, Cheney and Rumsfeld as power-oriented unilateralists, and Powell and Rice as multilateralists — and how their clashing psychologies at every turn undermined coherent planning. They discussed how the easy initial victory in Afghanistan gave the administration a dangerously false sense of what a small-footprint war could accomplish, Saddam's catastrophic misreading of American intentions, and the near-total absence of any post-invasion plan. The conversation turned to the eerie parallels with the current situation in Iran, and whether the lessons Mazarr draws — about American missionary zeal and intuitive, values-driven foreign policy judgment — are simply baked in.
In this episode Jerry and Stably discussed Andrey Mir’s The Digital Reversal, which explores the concept of reversal, arguing that media, when pushed to extremes, reverse their cultural effects due to accelerating technological change. They discussed debated the book's support for technological determinism, which posits that the trajectory of AI and technology is unstoppable and will lead to an inevitable loss of human agency. This surrender of agency is driven by the relentless pursuit of optimization—exemplified by AI making coaching decisions in sports and the shift from structured knowledge to a searchable "goo"—suggesting that most people will voluntarily "plug in" to fully automated, performant systems, with only a few non-maximizing groups remaining.
In this episode Jerry and Stablydiscussed Susan Sontag’s On Photography, with both finding the book overly long, baroque, and pedantic, though both agreed that Sontag's observations were interesting when extracted from the dense, "show-offy" prose. Jerry and Stably critiqued Sontag’s positions on photography as a predatory act, its role in tourism and status, and its potential for desensitization, with Jerry challenging Sontag's political framing and insistence on classifying art. The discussion included Stably suggesting Sontag's critique was politically motivated, while Jerry prioritized free speech regarding photography in public.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discussed Arthur Schopenhauer's On the Suffering of the World. Jerry praised the book as a great introduction to Schopenhauer's philosophy and its insights, particularly the concept of life as a balance between suffering and boredom, while Stan found the text repetitive and at times impenetrable, disagreeing with the author’s premise. They also explored Schopenhauer’s core ideas, including the "Will" as an eternal, irrational force and the philosopher’s suggested solution of denying the Will through asceticism or art, and they further debated the ethics of procreation and the necessity of preserving consciousness. Stan then selected "On Photography" by Susan Sontag as the next reading material for discussion.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discussed Stefan Borg's book, The Return of the Common Good: The Post-Liberal Project Left and Right, with Stably finding it enjoyable but wanting more and Jerry viewing it as a concise outline confirming prior beliefs, while both criticized its dense, academic style. A major talking point was the assertion that post-liberals offer a "fantastic critique" of liberalism's self-undermining nature but are "incredibly light on prescription," with participants exploring alternative post-liberal approaches like Michael Lind’s and the intellectual genealogy rooted in "radical orthodoxy." The conversation covered various facets of the post-liberal critique, including its US and UK contexts, its distinction from National Conservatism (NatCon), its theoretical core identifying liberalism as an ideology rooted in fear and violence, and its analysis of liberalism's internal contradictions, which erode social trust and necessitate state enforcement of radical individual freedom, alongside a critique of post-liberal feminism.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss Philip Roth's The Human Stain, focusing on the character Coleman Silk, a disgraced college professor whose downfall began after a misconstrued comment with a big secret. They analyzed the book's themes of radical individualism, societal judgment, and the complexities of Silk's relationships.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss Bryan Burrough's book, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, focusing on the complexity, motivations, and incompetence of 1970s radical groups like the Weather Underground, BLA, SLA, and FALN.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss Hanno Sauer's book, "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality." The discussion highlighted the book's exploration of cooperation in early hominid evolution, the emergence of punishment, the impact of agriculture and "big gods," and the influence of the Catholic Church on Western individualism.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss Andrew Preston's book, "Total Defense, the New Deal, and the Invention of National Security," which explored the evolution of "national security" from territorial defense to an ideological concept linked with the New Deal and global interventionism.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss two books by Mark Schatzker, "The Dorito Effect" and "The End of Craving," exploring how artificial flavors and government mandates have altered food, affecting satiety and nutritional wisdom. They also talked about the challenges of engineering natural flavors, the critiques of lab-grown meats, and the accessibility and cost of quality food.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back by Mark J. Dunkelman. The conversation centers on Dunkelman’s core thesis that modern progressivism has become paralyzed by internal contradictions between its Jeffersonian impulse to decentralize power and its Hamiltonian desire to empower experts and centralized institutions. This unresolved tension has led to procedural gridlock and institutional ineffectiveness, which in turn fuels public distrust and reactionary populism. The hosts compare Dunkelman’s analysis to Mancur Olson’s and public choice theory, noting that while Dunkelman emphasizes process over interest groups, he largely overlooks incentive structures. Both Jerry and Stably appreciate the book’s historical scope and clear narrative but critique its lack of engagement with deeper structural limits and its vague, ultimately inadequate prescriptions for reform. They agree that Dunkelman’s call to “restore balance” is insufficient without grappling with constraints inherent in democratic governance.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss The Cynic Philosophers: From Diogenes to Julian, edited by Robert Dobbin. The conversation centers on the core tenets of Cynicism, such as radical self-sufficiency, rejection of societal norms, and public acts meant to provoke reflection. The hosts explore how cynics challenged conventions through deliberately outrageous behavior, like Diogenes’ public defecation or spitting on opulence, aiming to expose hypocrisy and dependency. They contrast Cynicism with Epicureanism and Stoicism, debating whether these philosophies share a common telos and whether Cynicism’s austerity is a viable path to virtue. The episode ends with a preview of their next book: Why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman.
Jerry and Stably discuss The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, a book exploring why large systems often produce irrational outcomes. While the subtitle promises insight into how “the world lost its mind,” the hosts note the book leans heavily into cybernetics and systems theory, which was unexpected. They reflect on a shared cultural sense that “something has gone wrong,” but critique the book for offering a diffuse diagnosis—pointing vaguely at free market capitalism and systemic complexity without a clear prescriptive argument. The conversation highlights both the book’s ambition and its lack of concrete answers to institutional dysfunction.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss The Art of Happiness by Epicurus, specifically the Penguin Classics edition that compiles Epicurean texts alongside interpretations by editors like Dan Klein and George K. Strodach. They clarify that Epicurus never authored a book by that title; rather, it is a curated volume of letters, aphorisms, and summaries of his philosophy. The hosts highlight how the book heavily features commentary by Strodach, which at times overtakes the original texts. They explore the core tenets of Epicureanism, such as pleasure as the absence of pain, and critique the editorial tone, noting Strodach’s assertive, almost irascible personality.
The episode continues Jerry and Stably’s deep dive into Huey Long by T. Harry Williams, covering the second half of the biography of the controversial Louisiana politician. Picking up after Long’s first gubernatorial win, the discussion traces his aggressive consolidation of power, his near-impeachment, and the establishment of a political machine that blurred the line between populist governance and autocracy. Jerry and Stably emphasize Long’s command over the state legislature and his manipulative use of patronage and state resources to silence opposition. They explore the contradictions in Long’s character—his professed idealism versus his often ruthless tactics—and analyze how his charisma and direct appeals to the poor fueled both admiration and intense resistance.
The hosts examine his tenure as a U.S. Senator, during which he maintained effective control over Louisiana politics from Washington, D.C. They note his increasing paranoia, use of bodyguards, and elaborate security measures. His “Share Our Wealth” program is given particular attention, with discussion about its radical proposals and how it positioned Long as a national political threat, especially to President Roosevelt. The episode also delves into Long’s polarizing public image, his strategy to control media narratives, and his dramatic assassination. Jerry and Stably reflect on the legacy of Huey Long, drawing connections between his methods and modern populism, and debating whether his contributions to infrastructure, education, and wealth redistribution justify his authoritarian tendencies. The conversation closes with a sober assessment of the enduring relevance of Long’s political style.
The episode features hosts Jerry and Stably engaging in a discussion about Huey Long: A Biography by T. Harry Williams. The conversation begins with Jerry expressing his frustration with the book’s length and dense formatting, noting that it was difficult to obtain digitally. Stably acknowledges the challenge but defends the book’s depth and significance. They proceed to explore the life and political career of Huey Long, the populist governor and senator from Louisiana, whose ambitions and policies made him one of the most controversial figures in American history.
The discussion highlights Long’s rise to power, his unconventional political tactics, and his ability to mobilize mass support through populist rhetoric. Stably emphasizes Long’s role in reshaping Louisiana politics, particularly his efforts to expand social programs, build infrastructure, and challenge entrenched elites. Jerry, however, is more critical, questioning whether Long’s authoritarian tendencies undermined the very democratic ideals he claimed to champion. They debate whether Long was a true reformer or a self-serving demagogue, referencing specific moments in his career, including his battles with corporations, his conflicts with political opponents, and his aggressive consolidation of power.
The hosts also consider Long’s national ambitions, discussing his Share Our Wealth program, which proposed radical wealth redistribution during the Great Depression. They analyze how his policies resonated with struggling Americans but also raised concerns about their feasibility and authoritarian implications. The episode concludes with a reflection on Long’s legacy, debating whether his assassination cut short a dangerous trajectory or silenced a leader who might have reshaped American politics.
In this episode we discuss A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney. Jerry selected the book as a deep dive into the behaviors and societal impact of the baby boomer generation, a topic that both hosts had discussed in passing. The conversation explores Gibney’s central thesis that baby boomers, as a generational cohort, have demonstrated extreme selfishness and short-sighted governance, prioritizing their own interests at the expense of younger generations and the country’s long-term well-being.
The hosts examine key arguments from the book, particularly how the economic and political power wielded by boomers led to policies favoring immediate personal gains over sustainable societal progress. They highlight examples such as fiscal irresponsibility, the erosion of public infrastructure, and the dismantling of social safety nets. The discussion also touches on how boomers’ approach to wealth accumulation, corporate influence, and political decision-making has created financial and environmental burdens for future generations.
Jerry and Stably engage in a critical analysis of whether Gibney’s arguments are fair and balanced, debating the extent to which structural forces versus generational attitudes contributed to current societal issues. They reflect on personal anecdotes and historical contexts, considering alternative perspectives on intergenerational responsibility. The episode concludes with a discussion on whether younger generations can shift the trajectory set by boomers and what lessons can be learned from the book’s analysis.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably dive into Kaiser: The Greatest Footballer Never to Play Football by Rob Smyth, a fascinating exploration of the life and myth of Carlos Kaiser. Known for his extraordinary ability to avoid playing professional football while maintaining a high-profile “career,” Kaiser’s story blends deception, charisma, and ingenuity. The hosts discuss how Kaiser leveraged charm, fake injuries, and carefully orchestrated media coverage to sustain his reputation in the elite world of football without ever stepping on the pitch.
Jerry and Stably analyze the cultural and systemic factors that allowed Kaiser to thrive in 1980s and 1990s football, highlighting how charisma and myth-making can sometimes outweigh skill and merit. They share amusing and thought-provoking anecdotes from the book, such as Kaiser’s elaborate schemes to evade matches, and explore broader themes of ambition, imposture, and the human fascination with larger-than-life figures.
The episode examines the ethical and societal implications of Kaiser’s actions, questioning whether his story is one of clever survival or manipulative fraud. With their trademark mix of humor and insightful critique, Jerry and Stably offer listeners a compelling look at a figure who turned football’s conventions on their head and became a legend for all the wrong—or perhaps right—reasons.
The podcast episode explores Fat Leonard: The Con Man Who Corrupted the US Navy by Craig Whitlock, focusing on the astonishing true story of Leonard Glenn Francis and his large-scale corruption scandal involving the U.S. Navy. Hosts Jerry and Stably delve into the book’s narrative, beginning with Francis’s origins as a Malaysian entrepreneur and his rise as a defense contractor, where he exploited weaknesses in Navy operations. Through bribes, lavish gifts, and manipulation, Francis secured lucrative contracts while engaging in systematic fraud, inflating invoices, and misappropriating resources.
The hosts highlight how Francis’s operation thrived in an environment rife with negligence and complicity, exposing systemic vulnerabilities in military oversight. They discuss specific examples, such as the misuse of Navy funds for personal gain and the pervasive culture of secrecy and entitlement that allowed Francis’s schemes to flourish. The story is presented as both riveting and disheartening, with the moral complexities and human failings of those involved taking center stage.
Jerry and Stably reflect on the broader implications of the scandal, including its impact on trust in military institutions and the challenges of reforming such entrenched corruption. Despite its detailed account of misconduct, the book is acknowledged as an engaging and accessible read that illuminates a lesser-known aspect of military history. The discussion blends critique, analysis, and a touch of incredulity at the audacity of Francis’s operations, making for an insightful exploration of a shocking case of institutional failure.
The episode opens with Jerry and Stably greeting each other warmly after a holiday break, reflecting on the New Year and its opportunities for renewal. They segue into the central discussion, focusing on “Heart of a Dog” by Mikhail Bulgakov, a novella set in 1920s Moscow. Stably introduces the story, describing it as a satirical exploration of Soviet society through the transformation of Sharik, a stray dog, into a human following an experimental surgery conducted by a renowned doctor, Professor Preobrazhensky.
The hosts delve into Bulgakov’s critique of the Soviet regime, examining how the novella uses humor and absurdity to highlight the societal and moral dilemmas of the time. They discuss the professor’s intentions behind the experiment, portraying it as a commentary on human nature and the challenges of attempting to create “ideal” citizens. Sharik’s transformation is analyzed as both a metaphor for social engineering and a direct critique of the upheavals of the Russian Revolution.
Stably highlights how the novella’s narrative structure juxtaposes Sharik’s perspective as a dog with his later experiences as a human, emphasizing the loss of innocence and the complexities of human existence. The conversation touches on Bulgakov’s use of vivid imagery and allegorical elements, with Jerry noting the novella’s blend of dark comedy and philosophical inquiry.
The hosts also discuss specific scenes and character dynamics, such as Sharik’s initial gratitude towards his rescuer and his eventual rebellion as he struggles to adapt to his new identity. They reflect on the ethical implications of the experiment and the broader questions it raises about science, power, and identity. Notable examples include the interplay between Professor Preobrazhensky and his assistant, Dr. Bormenthal, which underscores the tensions between ambition and responsibility.
Concluding the discussion, Jerry and Stably agree that “Heart of a Dog” remains relevant for its incisive critique of authoritarianism and its exploration of what it means to be human. They praise Bulgakov’s storytelling for its ability to provoke thought while entertaining readers, encouraging listeners to explore the novella for its rich thematic layers and enduring significance.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin, a book that explores the construction of unreality in American media and culture. Jerry introduces the book as his pick and notes its thematic resonance with previous discussions, particularly those around Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The hosts agree that Boorstin’s work predates many of Postman’s arguments and, in some ways, anticipates the cultural shift toward media-driven realities.
Stably and Jerry unpack Boorstin’s central argument that American culture increasingly operates within “mirrors upon mirrors of unreality,” where pseudo-events—artificial happenings staged for media consumption—dominate public perception. Boorstin, writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, critiques how society becomes incentivized to embrace these fabricated realities, constructing what Jerry calls “castles in the air.” This critique extends across multiple facets of public life, including politics, advertising, and entertainment, all of which blur the line between authenticity and illusion.
The discussion touches on Boorstin’s seemingly conservative perspective, as he neither explicitly condemns the shift toward pseudo-events nor advocates for a return to a previous era. Instead, he opts to describe the phenomenon with striking clarity, allowing the implications to speak for themselves. This ambiguity prompts Jerry to reflect on Boorstin’s ultimate goals or desired outcomes, noting that while the book is critical, it refrains from offering solutions or alternatives.
Stably and Jerry also draw connections between Boorstin’s work and Marshall McLuhan’s theories on media, highlighting the shared observation of media as an environment that reshapes human experience. They discuss how Boorstin’s observations remain relevant, despite the book’s age, as contemporary media landscapes have only amplified the prevalence and impact of pseudo-events.
Throughout the conversation, the hosts emphasize the enduring value of Boorstin’s analysis, particularly in an era where digital media and social platforms further complicate notions of authenticity. They reflect on specific examples of pseudo-events in modern society, noting parallels to Boorstin’s original case studies and illustrating how the themes of the book continue to manifest today.
By the end of the episode, Jerry and Stably underscore the significance of The Image as a foundational critique of media culture. While Boorstin stops short of prescribing change, his work serves as a powerful lens for examining how societies construct and consume manufactured realities. The hosts conclude with a shared appreciation for Boorstin’s prescient insights, leaving listeners with a deeper understanding of the book’s arguments and their implications for contemporary life.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably engage in a thoughtful discussion about The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. The hosts delve into the book’s central thesis that the modern world, often perceived as secular and rational, has deep roots in theological and metaphysical ideas. They explore how Gillespie traces the evolution of modernity back to debates between medieval theologians and their reinterpretation of ancient Greek philosophy.
The conversation begins with a recap of Gillespie's argument that the Reformation and the Renaissance played pivotal roles in shaping the modern worldview. Stably highlights how the author connects figures like Martin Luther and Descartes to a broader intellectual trajectory, emphasizing their attempts to reconcile human freedom with divine omnipotence. Jerry complements this by discussing how these thinkers laid the groundwork for Enlightenment values, such as individual autonomy and scientific inquiry.
A key portion of the episode is dedicated to Gillespie’s examination of nominalism—the idea that universals do not exist independently of the mind. Both hosts note how this seemingly abstract philosophical shift had profound implications, undermining the hierarchical, God-centered cosmos of medieval scholasticism and paving the way for a more human-centered perspective. They discuss specific examples from the book, such as the works of William of Ockham and how his ideas challenged traditional notions of order and knowledge.
Jerry and Stably also tackle the tension between faith and reason, a recurring theme in Gillespie’s analysis. They reflect on how this tension manifested in early modern thinkers, including Galileo and Bacon, who sought to harmonize religious beliefs with empirical science. The hosts provide a nuanced take on the enduring relevance of these debates, drawing parallels to contemporary discussions about the role of religion in public life and the boundaries of scientific authority.
In addition to philosophical themes, the episode includes accessible anecdotes and case studies. For instance, Stably recounts the historical context surrounding the Protestant Reformation and how it reshaped societal structures, while Jerry adds insights on the influence of classical antiquity on Renaissance humanism. Both hosts emphasize Gillespie’s skill in weaving these diverse threads into a cohesive narrative, making a complex subject engaging and relatable.
The episode concludes with Jerry and Stably sharing their personal takeaways. They agree that Gillespie’s work challenges readers to reconsider simplistic narratives about modernity’s origins, inviting a deeper appreciation of the interplay between theology, philosophy, and history. As they wrap up, the hosts encourage listeners to reflect on how these historical dynamics continue to shape modern identity and values.
This discussion offers an intellectually stimulating journey through the intersections of faith, reason, and modernity, underscoring the importance of understanding historical context in making sense of today’s world.
In this episode, Jerry and Stably discuss “Prophets of Doom” by Neema Parvini, a book that delves into societal power dynamics and the mechanisms by which elites maintain control. The discussion begins with an overview of Parvini’s intellectual background and his previous work on elite theory, which provides a foundation for this latest exploration. Jerry and Stably explain how “Prophets of Doom” builds on these ideas, focusing on the interplay between cultural narratives and elite influence.
The hosts examine Parvini’s argument that societal elites are not merely individuals in positions of power but members of a cohesive class that perpetuates its dominance through institutional control and manipulation of cultural norms. They explore historical examples and link these ideas to modern-day case studies, providing a robust analysis of how elites shape public discourse to secure their position. Throughout the episode, Jerry and Stably critique and expand on Parvini’s theories, debating their applicability to contemporary political and social issues.
They also reflect on the broader implications of elite theory, questioning the potential for systemic change and considering whether Parvini’s perspective offers a way to understand recurring societal challenges. The conversation is enriched with anecdotes, personal insights, and recommendations for further exploration, making this episode both thought-provoking and highly relevant for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of power and influence in society.
In this episode we discuss What Went Wrong with Capitalism by Ruchir Sharma What Went Wrong with Capitalism by Ruchir Sharma. Next time we'll discuss The Prophets of Doom by Neema Parvini.
In this episode we discuss The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman. Next time we'll discuss What Went Wrong with Capitalism by Ruchir Sharma.
In this episode we discuss Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East by Philip H. Gordon. Next time we will discuss The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman.
In this episode we discuss The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century by Benn Steil. Next time we will discuss Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East by Philip H. Gordon.
In this episode we discuss The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford. Next time we will discuss The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century by Benn Steil.
In this episode we discuss The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker. Next time we will discuss Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak.
In this episode we discuss The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini. Nex time we will discuss The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker.
In this episode we discuss Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live by John Sellars (and also On Duties by Cicero). Next time we'll discuss The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini.
In this episode we discuss The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest Growing Sport by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. Next time we'll discuss On Duties by Marcus Tullius Cicero.
In this episode we discuss Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu. Next time we'll discuss The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest Growing Sport by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg.
In this episode we discuss The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter. Next time we'll discuss Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu.
In this episode we discuss Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. Next time we will discuss The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter.
In this episode we discuss How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going by Vaclav Smil. Next time we will discuss Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman.
In this episode we discuss A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Next time we will discuss How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going by Vaclav Smil.
In this episode we discuss Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect by Andrey Mir. Next time we'll discuss A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and ZachWeinersmith.
In this episode we discuss discuss The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities by Mancur Olson. Next time we'll discuss Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect by Andrey Mir.
In this episode we discuss discuss In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present by Michael RJ Bonner. Next time we'll discuss The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities by Mancur Olson.
In this episode we discuss discuss Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism by Andrei Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman. Next Time we'll discuss In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present by Michael RJ Bonner.
In this episode we discuss The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania. Next time we'll discuss Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism by by Andrei Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman.
In this episode we discuss Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Next time we'll discuss The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania.
In this episode we discuss Transformative Experience by L.A. Paul. Next week we'll discuss Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman.
In this episode we discuss Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Next week we'll discuss Transformative Experience by L.A. Paul.
In this episode we discuss The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Eric Hoel. Next week we will discuss Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.
In this episode we Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America by Michael Lind. Next week we will discuss The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Eric Hoel .
In this episode we discuss End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. Next week we will discuss Up From Conservatism by Michael Lind.
In this episode we discuss two books by Joan Didion: The White Album and Miami. Next time we'll discuss End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin.
In this episode we discuss The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Next time we'll discuss The White Album by Joan Didion.
In this episode we discuss After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State by Paul Gottfried. Next time we'll discuss The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.
In this episode we discuss Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia. Next time we'll discuss After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State by Paul Gottfried.
In this episode we discuss The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus. Next time we'll discuss Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia.
In this episode we discuss The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade. Next time we'll discuss The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus.
In this episode we discuss Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton. Next time we'll discuss The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade.
In this episode we discuss The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought by Jerry Z. Muller. Next time we'll discuss Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scrutton.
In this episode we discuss By the People by Charles Murray. Next time we'll discuss The Mind and the Market by Jerry Z. Muller
In this episode we discuss Obedience is Freedom by Jacob Phillips. Next time we'll discuss By the People by Charles Murray.
In this episode we discuss The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell. Next time we'll discuss Obedience is Freedom by Jacob Phillips.
In this episode we discuss Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations by Benedict Beckeld. Next time we'll discuss The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell.
In this episode we discuss The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves by Andrew Potter. Next time we'll discuss Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations by Benedict Beckeld.
In this episode we discuss Soccernomics: Why European Men and American Women Win and Billionaire Owners Are Destined to Lose by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. Next time we'll discuss The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves by Andrew Potter.
In this episode we discuss Nostalgia for the Absolute by George Steiner. Next time we'll discuss Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski.
Recording of the CBC Massey Lecture by George Steiner on YouTube.
In this episode we discuss Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama. Next time we'll discuss Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan.
In this episode we discuss Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports Scandal by Ken Bensinger. Next time we'll discuss Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama.
In this episode we discuss Telluria by Vladimir Sorokin. Next time we'll discuss Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports Scandal.
In this episode we discuss The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman. Next time we'll discuss Telluria by Vladimir Sorokin.
In this episode we discuss The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. Next Time We'll discuss The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman.
In this episode we discuss The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech by Jeff Kosseff. Next time we'll discuss The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer.
In this episode we discuss The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by Peter Zeihan. Next time we'll discuss The Network State: How To Start a New Country by Balaji Srinivasan.
In this episode we discuss The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham. Next time we'll discuss The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by Peter Zeihan.
In this episode we discuss Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat. Next time we'll discuss The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham.
In this episode we discuss War and the Liberal Conscience by Michael Howard. Next time we'll discuss Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat.
In this episode we discuss Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. Next time we'll discuss War and the Liberal Conscience by Michael Howard.
In this episode we discuss The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. Next time we'll discuss Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.
In this episode we discuss This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev. Next time we'll discuss The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama.
In this episode we discuss Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier. Next time we'll discuss This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev.
In this episode we discuss Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif. Next time we'll discuss Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier.
In this episode we discuss Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis. Next time we'll discuss Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif.
In this episode we discuss The Sum of Small Things by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. Next time we'll discuss Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis.
In this episode we discuss The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa. Next time we'll discuss Choosing the Right Pond by Robert H. Frank.
In this episode we discuss The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. Next time we'll discuss The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa.
In this episode we discuss The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Woolridge. Next time we'll discuss The Evolution of God by Robert Wright.
In this episode we discuss Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. Next time we'll discuss The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Woolridge.
In this episode we discuss The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher. Next time we'll discuss Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris.
In this episode we discuss On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever by Andrew Potter. Next time we'll discuss The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher.
In this episode we discuss After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division by Samuel Goldman. Next time we'll discuss On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever by Andrew Potter.
In this episode we discuss Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World by Charles A. Kupchan. Next time we'll discuss After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division by Samuel Goldman.
In this episode we discuss Great Founder Theory by Samo Burja. Next time we'll discuss Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World by Charles A. Kupchan.
In this episode we discuss Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran. Next time we'll discuss Great Founder Theory by Samo Burja.
In this episode we discuss The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset. Next time we'll discuss Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran.
In this episode we discuss Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin. Next time we'll discuss The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset.
In this episode we discuss Why It's OK to Speak Your Mind by Hrishikesh Joshi. Next time we'll discuss Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin.
In this episode we discuss The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond by George Friedman. Next time we'll discuss Why It's OK to Speak Your Mind by Hrishikesh Joshi.
In this episode we discuss The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity by Edward J. Watts. Next time we'll discuss The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond by George Friedman.
In this episode we discuss On Desire: Why We Want What We Want by William B. Irvine. Next time we'll discuss The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity by Edward J. Watts.
In this episode we discuss Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Next time we'll discuss Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn.
In this episode we discuss Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood, and Rethinking Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Next time we'll discuss Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.
In this episode we discuss The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch. Next time we'll discuss Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood, and Rethinking Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams.
In this episode Jerry and Stably discuss True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier by Vernor Vinge et al. Next time we'll discuss The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch.
In this episode we discuss Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann. Next time we will discuss True Names by Vernor Vinge.
Some highlights from Whiteshift:
Many people desire roots, value tradition and wish to maintain continuity with ancestors who have occupied a historic territory.
This means we’re more likely to experience what I term Whiteshift, a process by which white majorities absorb an admixture of different peoples through intermarriage, but remain oriented around existing myths of descent, symbols and traditions
No one who has honestly analysed survey data on individuals – the gold standard for public opinion research – can deny that white majority concern over immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist right in the West. This is primarily explained by concern over identity, not economic threat.
We are entering a period of cultural instability in the West attendant on our passage between two relatively stable equilibria. The first is based on white ethnic homogeneity, the second on what the prescient centrist writer Michael Lind calls ‘beige’ ethnicity, i.e. a racially mixed majority group. In the middle lies a turbulent multicultural interregnum. We in the West are becoming less like homogeneous Iceland and more like homogeneous mixed-race Turkmenistan. But to get there we’ll be passing through a phase where we’ll move closer to multicultural Guyana or Mauritius. The challenge is to enable conservative whites to see a future for themselves in Whiteshift – the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.
Anyone who wants to explain what’s happening in the West needs to answer two simple questions. First, why are right-wing populists doing better than left-wing ones? Second, why did the migration crisis boost populist-right numbers sharply while the economic crisis had no overall effect? If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear. Demography and culture, not economic and political developments, hold the key to understanding the populist moment.
Because Western nations were generally formed by a dominant white ethnic group, whose myths and symbols – such as the proper name ‘Norway’ – became the nation’s, the two concepts overlap in the minds of many. White majorities possess an ‘ethnic’ module, an extra string to their national identity which minorities lack. Ethnic majorities thereby express their ethnic identity as nationalism.
I contend that today’s white majorities are likely to successfully absorb minority populations while their core myths and boundary symbols endure. This will involve a change in the physical appearance of the median Westerner, hence Whiteshift, though linguistic and religious markers are less likely to be affected. Getting from where we are now, where most Westerners share the racial and religious features of their ethnic archetype, to the situation in a century or two, when most will be what we now term ‘mixed-race’, is vital to understanding our present condition.
In our more peaceful, post-ideological, demographically turbulent world, migration-led ethnic change is altering the basis of politics from class to ethnicity. On one side is a conservative coalition of whites who are attached to their heritage joined by minorities who value the white tradition; on the other side a progressive alliance of minorities who identify with their ethnic identity combined with whites who are agnostic or hostile towards theirs. Among whites, ethno-demographic change polarizes people between ‘tribal’ ethnics who value their particularity and ‘religious’ post-ethnics who prioritize universalist creeds such as John McWhorter’s ‘religion of anti-racism’.
Whites can fight ethnic change by voting for right-wing populists or committing terrorist acts. They may repress anxieties in the name of ‘politically correct’ anti-racism, but cracks in this moral edifice are appearing. Many opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighbourhoods, schools and social networks. And other whites may choose to join the newcomers, first in friendship, subsequently in marriage. Intermarriage promises to erode the rising diversity which underlies our current malaise.
Religion evolved to permit cooperation in larger units.31 Our predisposition towards religion, morality and reputation – all of which can transcend the tribe – reflects our adaptation to larger social units. Be that as it may, humans have lived in large groups only in the very recent past, so it is reasonable to assume tribalism is a more powerful aspect of our evolutionary psychology than our willingness to abide by a moral code. Today what we increasingly see in the West is a battle between the ‘tribal’ populist right and the ‘religious’ anti-racist left.
Much of this book is concerned with the clash between a rising white tribalism and an ideology I term ‘left-modernism’. A sociologist member of the ‘New York Intellectuals’ group of writers and literary critics, Daniel Bell, used the term modernism to describe the spirit of anti-traditionalism which emerged in Western high culture between 1880 and 1930. With the murderous excesses of communism and fascism, many Western intellectuals embraced a fusion of modernist anti-traditionalism and cultural egalitarianism, distinguishing the new ideology from both socialism and traditional liberalism. Cosmopolitanism was its guiding ethos. Unlike socialism or fascism, this left-wing modernism meshed nicely with capitalism and globalization. The left-modernist sensibility spread from a small elite to a much wider section of middle-class society in the 1960s with the rise of television and growth of universities, taking over as the dominant sensibility of the high culture.
As it gained ground, it turned moralistic and imperialistic, seeking not merely to persuade but to institutionalize itself in law and policy, altering the basis of liberalism from tolerating to mandating diversity. This is a subtle but critical shift. Meanwhile the economic egalitarianism of socialism gave way to a trinity of sacred values around race, gender and sexual orientation.
Immigration restriction became a plank of the Progressive movement which advocated improved working conditions, women’s suffrage and social reform. This combination of left-wing economics and ethno-nationalism confounds modern notions of left and right but Progressive vs. free market liberal was how the world was divided in the late nineteenth century. A prominent plank in the Progressive platform was temperance, realized in the Volstead Act of 1920 prohibiting the sale of alcohol. The Prohibition vote pitted immigrant-origin Catholics and upper-class urban WASPs such as the anti-Prohibition leader and New York socialite Pauline Morton Sabin on the ‘wet’ side against ‘dry’ working-class, rural and religious Protestants. For Joseph Gusfield, Prohibition was principally a symbolic crusade targeted at urban Catholic immigrants who congregated in saloons and their ‘smart set’ upper-class allies. This was a Protestant assertion of identity in an increasingly urban nation in which Catholics and Jews formed around a fifth of the population. Those of WASP background had declined to half the total from two thirds in the 1820s.
What’s interesting is that Anglo representatives did not make their case in ethno-communal terms, nor did they invoke the country’s historic ethnic composition. Rather they couched their ethnic motives as state interests. Instead of coming clean about their lament over cultural loss, they felt obliged to fabricate economic and security rationales for restriction.
Much the same is true today in the penchant for talking about immigrants putting pressure on services, taking jobs, increasing crime, undermining the welfare state or increasing the risk of terrorism. In my view it would be far healthier to permit the airing of ethno-cultural concerns rather than suppressing these, which leads to often spurious claims about immigrants. Likewise, immigrants’ normal desires to defend their interests are decried as ‘identity politics’.
[Randolph] Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to:
Breathe a larger air … [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide. [1916]
Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.
Cosmopolitanism must manage the contradiction between its ethos of transcending ethnicity and its need for cultural diversity, which requires ethnic attachment. Bourne resolved this by splitting the world into two moral planes, one for a ‘parental’ majority who would be asked to shed their ethnicity and oppose their own culture, and the other for childlike minorities, who would be urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms. This crystallized a dualistic habit of mind, entrenched in the anti-WASP ethos of 1920s authors like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken and the bohemian ‘Lost Generation’ of American intellectuals such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. All associated the Anglo-Protestant majority with Prohibition, deemed WASP culture to be of no value, and accused the ethnic majority of suppressing more interesting and expressive ethnic groups. The Lost Generation’s anti-majority ethos pervaded the writing of 1950s ‘Beat Generation’ left-modernist writers like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac – who contrasted lively black jazz or Mexican culture with the ‘square’ puritanical whiteness of Middle America. As white ethnics assimilated, the despised majority shifted from WASPs to all whites. The multiculturalism of the 1960s fused the Liberal Progressive pluralist movement with the anti-white ethos of the Beat counterculture.
The situation by 1924 was a far cry from the pre-1890 dispensation, when a liberal-assimilationist Anglo-Americanism spanned both universalist and ethno-nationalist shades of opinion. Prior to 1890, most Anglo-Protestant thinkers held the view that their ethnic group could assimilate all comers. During moments of euphoria, they talked up the country as a universal cosmopolitan civilization; in their reflective moods, they remarked on its Anglo-Saxon Protestant character. By 1910, this Emersonian ‘double-consciousness’ was gone, each side of its contradiction a separate and consistent ideology. Most WASP intellectuals were, like New England patrician Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, ethno-nationalists who backed restriction, or, like Bourne and Dewey, cosmopolitans calling for diversity and open borders. Few ethno-nationalists favoured open immigration. No pluralists endorsed restriction. Herein lie the roots of our contemporary polarized condition.
Critical race theorists contend that white ethnics only ‘became white’ when they became useful to the WASP majority. Even Bill Clinton, a southern Protestant whose Irish heritage is undocumented, latched on to the idea that his Irish forebears ‘became’ white. Irish Catholics in the north, some claim, were important allies of southern whites in the struggle against Yankee republicanism, so southerners embraced the Irish.60 I’m less convinced. The Irish, Jews and Italians may not have been part of a narrower WASP ‘us’, but they were perceived as racially white, thus part of a pan-ethnic ‘us’. This entitled them to opportunities not available to African- or Asian Americans. Post-1960s intermarriage led to an extension of American majority ethnic boundaries from WASP to white but the foundations for expansion were already in place. From the 1960s on, the religious marker of dominant ethnicity came to be redefined from Protestant to ‘Judaeo-Christian’.
This chapter underscores several aspects of American ethnic history that are relevant today. First, that the US, like most European nations, has had an ethnic majority since Independence. Second, that the Anglo-Protestant majority underwent a Whiteshift in the mid-twentieth century which permitted it to absorb Catholics and Jews, members of groups once viewed as outsiders. Finally, certain ethnic groups – notably Anglo-Protestants and African-Americans – have become symbolically intertwined with American nationhood. Two thirds of Americans are not members of these groups, yet many recognize them as ethno-traditional: part of what makes the nation distinct. On the right, an ethno-traditional nationalism focused on protecting the white Anglo heritage is emerging as an important force in American politics.
Culture is not ethnicity and the two have too often been conflated. Even if white culture remains the default mode, ethno-cultural decline may proceed apace. There are two separate ethno-cultural dynamics, white ethnic decline and the attenuation of the white tradition in American national identity. Only whites will be concerned with the former, but conservative-minded minorities may be attached to white ethno-traditions of nationhood. That is, they will wish to slow changes to the America ‘they know’.
Where conservatives seek to preserve the status quo, which might be multiracial, authoritarians always prefer less diversity and dissent. Conservatives are not the same as authoritarians. For instance, authoritarians dislike inequality – a form of economic diversity – thus may find themselves on the left
Electoral maps based on aggregate county results matched to census data offered the first snapshot of the social drivers of Trump, and it was apparent that education, not income, best predicted Trump success. Still, at first glance, maps reinforce stereotypes like the urban–rural divide.
As with Brexit, income is correlated with education, but there are many wealthy people – think successful plumber – with few qualifications. Similarly, many resemble struggling artists, possessing degrees but little money. When you control for education, income has no effect on whether a white person voted for, or supports, Trump. Being less well-off produces an effect on Trump voting only when authoritarian and conservative values are held constant – and even then has a much smaller impact than values. Education is the best census indicator because it reflects people’s subjective worldview, not just their material circumstances. Researchers find that teenagers with more open and exploratory psychological orientations self-select into university. This, much more than what people learn at university, makes them more liberal. Median education level offers a window onto the cultural values of a voting district, which is why it correlates best with Trump’s vote share. In American exit polls, Trump won whites without college degrees 67–28, compared to 49–45 for whites with degrees.
The changing racial demographics of America could permit the Democrats to consistently win first the presidential, then congressional, elections. Alternatively, the Republican establishment may be able to install a pro-immigration primary candidate. But is this a solution? With no federal outlet for white identity concerns or ethno-traditional nationalism, and with a return to policies of multiculturalism and high immigration which are viewed as a threat to these identities, it’s possible the culturally conservative section of the US population could start viewing the government as an enemy. This is an old trope in American history and could pose a security problem. It is also how violent ethnic conflict sometimes ignites. For instance, the British-Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, where parties run on ethnic lines, meant Irish Catholics lost every election in the province between 1922 and the abolition of the Northern Ireland provincial government in 1972. This lack of political representation produced alienation which helped foment the civil war in 1969. What happens if rural and red-state America is permanently frozen out of power when it considers itself the repository of authentic Americanism?
[EUROPE:] Liberals fought against the ‘normalization’ of the far right, but with rising populist-right totals and coalition arithmetic pulling towards partnership it was only a question of time before the consensus gave way. The anti-racist norm against voting for the far right began to erode and centrist parties started adopting their policies. Elite obstruction may actually have contributed to an angrier anti-elite mood, recruiting yet more voters to the far-right banner. The anti-racist taboo against them has weakened but remains: more voters express strong anti-immigration views than are willing to vote far right.4 Yet, as I explain in chapter 9, the higher the populist right’s vote share, the more the taboo erodes. This eases their path to a higher total when conditions permit, setting in motion a self-fulfilling spiral.
Economic rationales frequently disguise underlying psychological drivers. For instance, in small opt-in samples on Prolific Academic, one group of white Republican voters scored the problem of ‘unchecked urban sprawl’ a 51 out of 100, but another group of white Republicans who saw the question as ‘unchecked urban sprawl caused by immigration’ scored it 74/100 (italics added for emphasis). Likewise, among a sample of white British Brexit voters, the problem of ‘pressure on council housing’ scored a 47/100 but ‘immigrants putting pressure on council housing’ was rated 68/100. In both cases, it logically cannot be the case that the immigration-driven portion of the problem of urban sprawl or pressure on council housing is more important than the problem itself. Thus what’s driving opposition to immigration must be something prior to these material concerns. Likewise, the large-sample, representative British Election Study shows that concerns over the cultural and economic effects of immigration are tightly correlated. This suggests opposition to immigration comes first (Jonathan Haidt’s unconscious ‘elephant’ moves us to act) and various rationalizations like pressure on public services follow (Haidt’s conscious ‘rider’ telling us a story about why we acted as we did).17 But rationales matter. If a morally acceptable rationale is not there, this inhibits a party’s ability to articulate its underlying anti-immigration grievances. This is why restrictionists tend to don the cloak of economic rationalization.
The idea that the country has a traditional ethnic composition which people are attached to – what I term ethno-traditional nationalism – and which should not change too quickly, is viewed as beyond the limits of acceptable debate. This is a pity, because the ‘legitimate’ arguments stigmatize minorities and are often racist in a way the ‘illegitimate’ arguments about wanting to slow cultural loss are not. Only when the latter is taken to the extreme of wanting to bar certain groups or repatriate immigrants do they become racist.
Rising diversity polarizes people by psychological outlook and reorients party platforms. As countries ethnically change, green parties move to capture cosmopolitan liberals and the populist right targets conservatives and authoritarians.88 While attitude liberalization did throw up cultural debates over religion, gay marriage and traditional values, these are on their way to becoming marginal in Europe as liberal attitudes attain mass acceptance. The legalization of drugs and the question of how best to address crime are live social issues, but neither promises the same radical transformation of society as ethnic change. Therefore it is ethno-demographic shifts which are rotating European societies away from a dominant left–right economic orientation to a globalist–nationalist cultural axis. The West is becoming less like homogeneous South Korea, where foreign policy and economic divisions dominate, and more like South Africa, where ethnicity is the main political division.89
When a regalizing order fails to make a charge of deviance stick, the norm begins to unwind, leading to a period of intense cultural contestation. Competing groups police norm boundaries and marginalize deviants who are seen to have violated their community’s sacred values. I maintain we are currently in such a period, in which hegemonic liberal norms known as ‘political correctness’ are being challenged by both populists and centrists, some of whom are trying to install new social norms, notably those defining Muslims and cosmopolitans as deviant.
Fascism and socialism lost out after the Second World War, but what of the victor, liberalism? The Allies’ victory did enlarge and protect the scope of negative liberty. But alongside this success a positive liberalism was smuggled in which advocated individuality and cosmopolitanism over community. Most, myself included, value individual autonomy, but one has to recognize that not all share this aim. Someone who prefers to wear a veil or dedicate their lives to religion is making a communitarian choice which negative liberalism respects but positive liberalism (whether of the modernist left or burqa-banning right) does not.
Expressive individualism advocates that we channel our authentic inner nature, or what H. G. Wells or Henri Bergson termed our life force, unconstrained by tradition or reason. Aesthetically, it tended towards what the influential American sociologist Daniel Bell terms modernism, rejecting Christian or national traditions while spurning established techniques and motifs.22 Not only were traditions overturned but esteem was accorded to those whose innovations shocked sensibilities and subverted historic narratives and symbols the most. Clearly something happened between the nation-evoking historical and landscape painting of a Delacroix or Constable in the early nineteenth century and Marcel Duchamp’s urinal of 1917. This ‘something’ was the rise, after 1880, of what Bell terms modernism and Anthony Giddens calls de-traditionalization.
For Bell, modernism is the antinomian rejection of all cultural authority. For Giddens, the shift is from a past- to a future-orientation and involves a decline in existential security.23
For Bell, modernism replaces contemplation of external reality and tradition with sensation and immediacy.26 The desire to seek out new and different experiences elevates novelty and diversity into cardinal virtues of the new positive liberalism. To favour tradition over the new, homogeneity over diversity, is to be reactionary. Left-modernism continually throws up new movements such as Surrealism or Postmodernism in its quest for novelty and difference. The shock of the new is accompanied by a cosmopolitan pastiche of borrowings from non-Western cultures, as with the Primitivism of Paul Gauguin. Yet there is a tension between the expressive-individualist and egalitarian strands of left-modernism. Gauguin, for example, who considered himself a cosmopolite defending Tahitian sexual freedom against the buttoned-down West, stands accused by the New Left of cultural appropriation, colonialism, orientalism and patriarchy.
The social penetration of left-modernist ideas would take a great leap forward only in the 1960s as television and university education soared. In America, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds in College increased from 15 per cent in 1950 to a third in 1970. Given the large postwar ‘baby-boom’ generation, this translated into a phenomenal expansion of universities. The growth of television was even more dramatic: from 9 per cent penetration in American homes in 1950 to 93 per cent by 1965.41 The New York, Hollywood and campus-based nodes in this network allowed liberal sensibilities to spread from a small coterie of aficionados to a wider public. Rising affluence may also have played a part in creating a social atmosphere more conducive to liberalism. All told, these ingredients facilitated a marked liberal shift across a wide range of attitudes measured in social surveys from the mid-1960s: gender roles, racial equality, sexual mores and religion – with the effects most apparent in the postwar Baby Boom generation.42
Since so much of the debate around the boundaries of the permissible revolves around racism, we need a rigorous – rather than political – definition of the concept. It’s very important to specify clearly, using analytic political theory and precise terminology, why certain utterances or actions are racist. Only in this manner can we defend a racist taboo. I define racism as (a) antipathy to racial or pan-ethnic outgroups, defined as communities of birth; (b) the quest for race purity; or (c) racial discrimination which results in a violation of citizens’ right to equal treatment before the law.
The problem is that left-modernism has established racial inequality as an outrage rather than one dimension – and not generally the most important – of the problem of inequality. If racial inequality is one facet of inequality, it should be considered alongside other aspects such as income, health, weight or age. To focus the lion’s share of attention on race and gender disparities entrenches ‘inequality privilege’, wherein those who suffer from low-visibility disadvantages are treated less fairly than those who fit totemic left-modernist categories. A white male who is short, disabled, poor and unattractive will understandably resent the fact his disadvantage is downplayed while he is pilloried for his privilege.
In effect, the 2010s represent a renewed period of left-modernist innovation, incubated by near-universal left–liberal hegemony among non-STEM faculty and administrators. Most academics are moderate liberals rather than radical leftists, but in the absence of conservative or libertarian voices willing to stand against left-modernist excess, liberal saturation reduced resistance to the japes of extremist students and professors. Social media and progressive online news acted as a vector, carrying the new left-modernist awakening off-campus much more effectively than was true during the first wave of political correctness of the late 1980s and 1990s.
Angela Nagle finds that leftist radicalism emerged first, attracting a far-right response. One of the first to trace the emergence of this polarizing dynamic, she shows how, in left-modernist online chat groups, those who stake outlandish claims about white male oppression win moral and social plaudits. These in turn are lampooned by the alt-right, who leverage left-modernist excesses to legitimate blatant racism and sexism. This begins a cycle of polarizing rhetorical confrontation. Alt-right message boards adopt a playful countercultural style, emphasizing their rebellion against a stifling, puritanical-left establishment.11 Whereas bohemians like the Young Intellectuals of the 1910s and 1920s lauded African-American jazz and immigrant conviviality as a riposte to an uptight Prohibitionist Anglo-Protestant culture, the alt-right champions white maleness as a liberation from the strictures of the puritanical left.
Hamid argues that being attached to an ethnic group and looking out for its interests is qualitatively different from hating or fearing outgroups. This is a distinction social psychologists recognize, between love for one’s group and hatred of the other. As Marilyn Brewer writes in one of the most highly cited articles on prejudice:
The prevailing approach to the study of ethnocentrism, ingroup bias, and prejudice presumes that ingroup love and outgroup hate are reciprocally related. Findings from both cross-cultural research and laboratory experiments support the alternative view that ingroup identification is independent of negative attitudes toward outgroups.54
If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet. Marginalizing race puritanism is important, but muzzling relaxed versions of white identity sublimates it in a host of negative ways. For example, when whites are concerned about their decline but can’t express it, they may mask their concern as worry about the nation-state.
It’s more politically correct to worry about Islam’s challenge to liberalism and East European ‘cheap labour’ in Britain than it is to say you are attached to being a white Brit and fear cultural loss. This means left-modernism has placed us in a situation where expressing racism is more acceptable than articulating racial self-interest.
David Willetts, Minister of Education in David Cameron’s Conservative government:
The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.62
trying to reconstruct our racial categories from above through politics may be as difficult as trying to get people to unlearn the primary colours. This doesn’t mean categories can’t evolve, but it suggests the process is complex, evolutionary and bottom-up. As the median racial type changes, the boundaries of whiteness may expand because people judge categories based on the average type they encounter.
Hispanics, like the Italians before them, may become part of the ethnic majority in the not-too-distant future. Many white Americans currently view those with Spanish surnames or Hispanic features as outsiders. A majority of Hispanics see themselves as white, but only 6 per cent of Hispanics who identify as white say they are accepted as such by American society. Even among those with just one Latino grandparent, 58 per cent identify as Hispanic.43 Yet this may change with increased intermarriage, cultural assimilation and the arrival of more culturally distant groups. Already, lighter-skinned Hispanics are more likely to vote Republican or live in the same neighbourhoods as whites.44 As group lines are blurred by intermarriage, ethnic boundaries may shift: Ramirez may be considered an Anglo-American on a par with De Niro. Hispanic surnames are unlikely to be ‘counter-entropic’ barriers to assimilation. This assimilation process is a major reason why the centre-left writer John Judis revised his thesis that America’s changing demographics will automatically produce Democratic victories in the future.45
When the criteria for defining who is in or out of the majority change, whole chunks of the population who are not of mixed origin – like the fully Irish John F. Kennedy – suddenly become part of the ethnic majority. The analogy would be if fully Hispanic or Asian Americans came to be viewed as white. I deem this unlikely, given the proximity to Mexico and the established nature of the racial categories noted by Richard Dawkins. What seems more likely is that the high rate of intermarriage between Latinos and whites, as well as the rising share of native English-speakers, Protestants or seculars among them, may expand the boundaries of whiteness to include those of mixed parentage. That is, those with some European background who are culturally assimilated and have Anglo first names – but who have Spanish surnames or a Hispanic appearance – may be accepted as white.
On the podcast this week, Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump by Andrey Mir. Next time: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann and Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the "Real America" by Kevin D. Williamson.
Some highlights from Postjournalism:
The greatest harm caused by media is polarization, and the biggest issue is that polarization has become systemically embedded into both social media and the mass media. Polarization is not merely a side effect but has morphed into a condition of their business.
Engagement, much needed for the platforms’ business, appeared to be tied to polarization.
The news media business used to be funded predominantly by advertising, but advertising fled to the internet. The entire news media industry was forced to switch to another source of funding – reader revenue.
People almost always already know the news before they come to news websites because they invariably start their daily media routine with newsfeeds on social media. Increasingly, therefore, if and when people turn to the news media, it is not to find news, but rather to validate already known news.
The membership payers do not pay to get news for themselves (they already know the news), they pay for news to be delivered to others. The membership is payment from below but driven by motives from above. They require newsrooms to operate with values, not news. This slowly forces journalism to mutate into crowdsourced propaganda – postjournalism.
The media are incentivized to amplify and dramatize issues whose coverage is most likely to be paid for
Covering polarizing issues for better soliciting of support, the media are incentivised to seek and reproduce polarization for the next rounds of soliciting. They change the picture of the world and they change their audiences, agitating them into more polarization, for profit.
The media relying on ad revenue makes the world look pleasant. The media relying on reader revenue makes the world look grim. The decline in the media business caused by the internet has not distorted the picture of the world in the media; it has distorted the habitual distortion.
The media system based on ad revenue manufactured consent. The media system based on soliciting the audience’s support manufactures anger. The ad-driven media produced happy customers. The reader-driven media produces angry citizens. The former served consumerism. The latter serves polarization.
The least obvious and yet most shocking aspect of the discussion about the death of newspapers is the fact that we are discussing the fate of journalism, not just papers. This is neither a cyclical crisis nor a matter of transition; this is the end of an era.
Because of the Trump bump, the New Yorker, the Atlantic[21] and the Washington Post[22] doubled or tripled their subscriptions in the first year of Trump’s presidency.
Due to media conditions shaped in the mid-2010s, news organizations were forced to choose a side.
The evolution of the media as an instrument of commercial and political communication created the conditions that led to the formation of modern society, both in its economic and political dimensions.
Journalism is inherently designed to sell news downward, to the end user – a reader. However, as it is an intrinsic part of a whole social context, journalism inevitably switches to selling agendas upwards, with some news traded downwards as a side business. This gives us two ultimate ‘ideal’ models of the media business. Journalism is either paid from below by those who want to read news or paid from above by those who want others to read news. These two opposing models, in different mixes, have been employed by journalism throughout it 500-year-long history.
There was always someone from above who came and forced or seduced the media to sell the audience upwards, not news downwards; first political patrons, then political parties, then advertisers.
Journalism has simply lost the publishing monopoly. It has become clear that it is not the quality of content, nor the social function, but the technological monopoly over content communication that was at the core of the media’s existence.
The cost of the telegraph limited not only the number of messages that could be sent but also the size of messages, as the charge for messages was based on the number of characters. This forced correspondents’ writing to become concise and substantive, and the telegraphic style of journalism emerged. When a conveyed message is literally charged by the letter, nobody will subsidize someone’s opinions. Only naked and solid facts were therefore telegraphed. The cost of messages made facts more valuable than opinions, simply by the design of the medium.
By the end of the 19th century, the cost of the telegraph had decreased, which made it widely affordable. Newspapers became saturated with international news. The demand for guidance in this news kaleidoscope appeared. Opinions and expertise started being valued above mere facts in the media diet. In this new cycle of the evolution, opinion journalism re-established command.
Similar cycles happen each time a new mass medium appears and then ages. It happened again to radio, TV, and the internet.
News production is much more expensive than the production of opinions and expertise.
According to assumed standards of journalism, news is disseminated because of its significance. But, in fact, news becomes significant because of its dissemination.
Note: What happens to Wikipedia?
The problem is that a factoid is good; too good for the audience to want truth instead. The truth is not as good as a factoid is. Therefore, factoids are good for profit. Being an industrial capitalist enterprise, the media produce a reality that is supposed to be relevant but also has to be marketable. Even non-profit media do this, as they must compete for the public’s attention. Thus, the supply of reality in the media is impacted by the necessity to meet the demand.
The use-value of a factoid is defined by the relations of demand/supply, not by compliance to reality. In their swirling chicken-or-egg tango, readers want to read what they want, and the media define and supply it. Factoids are the news that is wanted. Journalism is the mastery of factoids.
The political biases might define what kind of induced reality will be induced, but the very inevitability of reality induction is not ideological. It rests on the commercial need to manufacture a saleable picture of the world. Ideological preconceptions simply accompany the marketing strategy in a chosen or allocated market niche comprised of liberal or conservative audiences. The media define their audience and then manufacture what their audience wants and buys.
Interestingly a factoid dovetails rather well with the concept of simulation and Baudrillard’s simulacrum.
By minimizing the size of media consumption from the media issue down to the article, the internet detached content from media brands. The media was thereby deprived of the opportunity to maintain their ownership over content. When content travels in parcels that are smaller than a physically wrapped and salable piece of media (book, magazine, newspaper), it becomes harder or impossible to commodify it under a media brand.
News bits’ shepherding on social media, whether by humans (by the Viral Editor) or by algorithms, is making journalism obsolete.
The transition from the parceled to the streamed mode of producing content had a dramatic impact on the quality of journalism. This change in the technology of production caused newsrooms to switch from fixed deadlines to rolling ones, which, in reality, are no deadlines at all, but rather a constant pressure to supply as much content as fast as possible.
The fact of the matter is that value in the media market is now extracted not from content but from the audience’s time/attention. So, content is used as bait to attract attention. No business can sell bait to fish. The only party who pays for bait in this relationship is the fisherman – those who supply content.
But when advertising disappear, journalism's true nature comes into focus: it is a public good, something society requires but that market cannot provide in sufficient quality and quantity. Like other public goods, if society wants it, it will require public policy and public spending.
Membership is a sort of crowdsourced philanthropy propaganda and also a sort of slactivism, as members outsource their activism (support to a cause) through small donations.
The news-validation service is an important step of the media towards the membership model, as it makes people regard the media as a source of evaluation, not news.
The prevalence of opinion journalism over journalism of fact (due to the redundancy of news) makes the attitude towards events (not the news about events) the main use-value in news production and consumption. People want to see already-known news to be covered from the right angle; they also want others to see the news covered from the right angle.
If the winners take all, then it remains for the losers to only rely on patrons or foundation funding of a limited scale. Crowdfunding potential simply does not have the capacity to support all.
Because public opinion is impacted by so many distorting factors but is “supposed to be the prime mover in democracies”, the common interests “can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality” (Lippmann, 1929 [1922], p. 253). This class, the class of administrators and politicians – the decision-making elites – needs to both receive adequate information about social reality and spread useful information to the public. This task can be accomplished by a special cohort of educated and independent experts who know “how to create and operate public opinion” (Ibid., 255) and can advise the leadership competently and unbiasedly.
However, these different threats must reflect a binary split value system, where the opposites play the role of mobilizing enemies for each other. For a donscription-driven media system, the Cold War ceased to be an external mobilizing factor. The fear of enemy has to come inside the national media system for the better soliciting of readers’ contribution on each side of the spectrum: the Cold War must become a Cold Civil War.
After Trump, the reader-driven media based on soliciting subscription as donation will need to find an equivalent binary threat to preserve the mobilizing power of the political cause they undertake to promote.
Postjournalism is journalism that sells the audience to the public by soliciting donations in the form of subscription. Classical journalism pretended to be objective; it strived to depict the world-as-it-is. Postjournalism is openly normative; it imposes the world-as-it-should-be. Similar to propaganda, postjournalism openly promotes an ideological view. What distinguishes it from propaganda, however, is that postjournalism mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business imperative required for the media to survive. Postjournalism is not the product of a choice but is the consequence of the change in the media business model.
Real propaganda involves the proliferation of ideas and values. However, postjournalism cannot even do that. Those whom it is supposed to reach and convert are already trapped in the same agenda bubble.
The only “others” for the agenda bubble, made of the donating audience and their media, are the inhabitants of the opposite agenda bubble on the other side of the political spectrum. Paradoxically, postjournalism supplies not so much content but, rather, the reason for the foes’ existence and their motives, which justify their outrage and mobilization. However, there is also no expected agenda impact on opponents. The opponents do not consume ‘opposing’ content as information. They regard it as a source of energy to feed their anger. Polarization is the essential environmental condition and the only outcome of postjournalism (besides the earnings of the media that practice postjournalism). Because of its self-containment and the need for energy input, postjournalism exists in a binary form in which the strength of the one side depends on the strength of the other. Their confrontation strengthens their audience-capturing power and maintains their business.
Polarization means that journalists and the media need to take a stance. The professional standards of seeking truth, objectivity and impartiality are among the first to fall under the risk of being weakened or denied. The next are going the standards of independence, accuracy, transparency, diligence in newsgathering, accountability and harm limitation.
The democrat’s dilemma, Gunitsky suggested, is something similar but opposite: by forbidding information potentially harmful to democracy, democracy is thereby harmed; by allowing it, democracy allows antidemocratic ideas to spread.
The polarization of stances requires the commonality of topics, in which the stances have to be polarized.
Hence topics and discourses that do not support polarization will not circulate for long or will be completely ignored. All the energy potential of the media industry will focus on the topics that fit polarization.
Discourse concentration is a technical prerequisite of media polarization which can also have a set of cultural and even psychological consequences. Apart from the reduction in coverage and the deterioration of public service, the media’s obsession with topics most suited to polarization leads to an emotional surge. When everybody runs one and the same story, every ensuing account has to be louder than the last in order to be heard. New and more radical arguments and statements need to be made. Discourse concentration contributes to hysteria, a devoted companion of polarization.
Journalism wants its picture to match the world. Postjournalism wants the world to match its picture.
Post-truth is truth in the digital environment, where the physical risks of ‘wrong’ interactions do not exist. If the physical reality is made of objects, the digital reality is made of subjects – of others. The sensorial feedback of wrongdoing, the pain of hitting against objects, has turned into the pain of hitting against subjects, against others. People are training to resettle into the digitally induced environment, where the spatial dimension is replaced by the temporal dimension. Instead of physical risks, social risks become absolutized. Digital is pure social. In the digital world, death is ostracism and cancellation. Cancel culture is apologetics and the practicing of a tribe’s death penalty, similar to execution by stoning, where legitimacy is maintained by the collectivity of others. The numbers matter. This new regulator of wrongdoing is replacing the old criteria of truth: instead of the complying with the laws of the physical Universe, one now needs to comply with the values of the social Multiverse – or the part of it to which a person wants or needs to belong.
Paradoxically, the social media environment has built-in settings that encourage socializing through rage. This is something normally unacceptable and strategically disadvantageous in offline social communication. Offline, rage would result, among other things, in physical consequences that correct behavior through the sensorium. But on social media, particularly those with a short form of literacy, like Twitter, rage is not risky and can be beneficial.
Print, with its delayed reactions to linear thought, started the Age of Reason; social media with their instant service of accelerated self-actualization has turned the Age of Reason into the Age of Rage.
The new medium, newspapers, unleashed a new environmental force that enabled the public sphere and capitalism. Capitalism would not have been possible without the exchange of information about markets’ and industries’ prospects and risks. The same is true for the public sphere – it would not have appeared without the emancipated and enhanced exchange of ideas. Democracy, capitalism and journalism are substantially important to each other. They are, respectively, political, economic and communication dimensions of the same historical process.
Electronic media, as McLuhan noted, retribalized society and therefore diminished the significance and influence of literacy. This shift is not only about the ability to read and quantity of reading. The way people learn the news impacts the way social coherence is shaped – through ideas or through emotions. Reading of news, however sensational it might be, just because of its linear and semantic representation of the world, appeals to cognitive perception, whilst the delivery of information via radio, TV and now the digital media seeks to simulate the natural, sensory perception of the surroundings. Digital media do not represent reality, as writing and print used to do; they put the user into the induced reality, shaping along the way a new kind of sensorium – the digital sensorium (Miroshnichenko, 2016).
Is it possible to rearrange the economic and behavioral rewards for media use in such a manner that they incentivize people’s engagement based if not on consensus, then at the very least on tolerance instead of polarization? This is a million-dollar question, literally; though, considering the capitalization of Google and Facebook, it is more like a billion-dollar question.
Perhaps one of the potentially more fruitful searches for depolarization could be in the field of reinforcing the middle (not even the center, as the center opposes the opposites and therefore has a polarizing potential itself). If one side of the spectrum thinks the past represents nothing but shame and the other side thinks the past represents nothing but glory, the only way to mitigate polarization is not to bring those sides together but to empower the voice of the middle. It is the middle who thinks, for example, that the past is much more complex than shame or glory, both of which are, actually, political tools of the present but not conditions of the past.
On the podcast this week, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age by John Gray. Next time: Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization by Andrey Mir.
Normally Jerry writes an ideological Turing test summary for the book we discuss, but it’s impossible with this one as you’ll hear us say. So here are some of Jerry’s highlights from the book itself:
If the Enlightenment myth of progress in ethics and politics continues to have a powerful hold, it is more from fear of the consequences of giving it up than from genuine conviction.
the collapse of communism was a world-historic defeat for the Enlightenment project. Communism was not a type of oriental despotism, as generations of Western scholars maintained. It was an authentic continuation of a Western revolutionary tradition, and its downfall – after tens of millions of deaths were inflicted in the pursuit of its utopian goals – signalled the start of a process of de-Westernization.
It is an inquiry into the right whose agenda is justice and whose content is given, not by any investigation of human beings as we find them in the world, with their diverse histories and communities, but by an abstract conception of the person that has been voided of any definite cultural identity or specific historical inheritance.
Consider, in this regard, the central category of the intellectual tradition spawned by Rawls’s work – the category of the person. In Rawls’s work, as in that of his followers, this is a cipher, without history or ethnicity, denuded of the special attachments that in the real human world give us the particular identities we have. Emptied of the contingencies that in truth are essential to our identities, this cipher has in the Rawlsian schema only one concern – a concern for its own good, which is not the good of any actual human being, but the good we are all supposed to have in common, which it pursues subject to constraints of justice that are conceived to be those of impartiality. In this conception, the principles of justice are bound to be the same for all. The appearance of a plurality of ciphers in the Rawlsian original position must be delusive, since, having all of them the same beliefs and motives, they are indistinguishable.
The subject matter of justice cannot, except indirectly, be found in the histories of peoples, and their often tragically conflicting claims; it must be always a matter of individual rights. It is obvious that this liberal position cannot address, save as an inconvenient datum of human psychology, the sense of injustice arising from belonging to an oppressed community that, in the shape of nationalism, is the strongest political force of our century.
The task of political philosophy is conceived as one of deriving the ideal constitution – assumed, at least in principle, to be everywhere the same. This is so, whether its upshot be Rawls’s basic liberties, Nozick’s side-constraints, or Dworkin’s rights-as-trumps. The presupposition is always that the bottom line in political morality is the claims of individuals, and that these are to be spelt out in terms of the demands of justice or rights. The consequence is that the diverse claims of historic communities, if they are ever admitted, are always overwhelmed by the supposed rights of individuals. The notion that different communities might legitimately have different legal regimes for abortion or pornography, for example, is hardly considered.
If the theoretical goal of the new liberalism is the supplanting of politics by law, its practical result – especially in the United States, where rights discourse is already the only public discourse that retains any legitimacy – has been the emptying of political life of substantive argument and the political corruption of law. Issues, such as abortion, that in many other countries have been resolved by a legislative settlement that involves compromises and which is known to be politically renegotiable, are in the legalist culture of the United States matters of fundamental rights that are intractably contested and which threaten to become enemies of civil peace.
Communitarian thought still harbours the aspiration expressed in those forms of the Enlightenment project, such as Marxism, that are most critical of liberalism – that of creating a form of communal life from which are absent the practices of exclusion and subordination that are constitutive of every community human beings have ever lived in.
Old-fashioned toleration – the toleration defended by Milton, and by the older liberals, such as Locke – sprang from an acceptance of the imperfectibility of human beings, and from a belief in the importance of freedom in the constitution of the good life. Since we cannot be perfect, and since virtue cannot be forced on people but is rather a habit of life they must themselves strive to acquire, we were enjoined to tolerate the shortcomings of others, even as we struggled with our own. On this older view, toleration is a precondition of any stable modus vivendi among incorrigibly imperfect beings. If it has become unfashionable in our time, the reason is in part to be found in the resistance of a post-Christian age to the thought that we are flawed creatures whose lives will always contain evils. This is a thought subversive of the shallow optimistic creeds of our age, humanist or Pelagian, for which human evils are problems to be solved rather than sorrows to be coped with or endured.
Toleration is unfashionable for another, more topical reason. It is unavoidably and inherently judgemental. The objects of toleration are what we judge to be evils. When we tolerate a practice, a belief or a character trait, we let something be that we judge to be undesirable, false or at least inferior; our toleration expresses the conviction that, despite its badness, the object of toleration should be left alone.
we tolerate ersatz religions, such as Scientology, not because we think they may after all contain a grain of truth, but because the great good of freedom of belief necessarily encompasses the freedom to believe absurdities. Toleration is not, then, an expression of scepticism, of doubt about our ability to tell the good from the bad; it is evidence of our confidence that we have that ability.
The idea of toleration goes against the grain of the age because the practice of toleration is grounded in strong moral convictions. Such judgements are alien to the dominant conventional wisdom according to which standards of belief and conduct are entirely subjective or relative in character, and one view of things is as good as any other.
Indeed, when a society is tolerant, its tolerance expresses the conception of the good life that it has in common. In so far as a society comes to lack any such common conception – as is at least partly the case in Britain today – it ceases to be capable of toleration as it was traditionally understood.
What the neutrality of radical equality mandates is nothing less than the legal disestablishment of morality. As a result, morality becomes in theory a private habit of behaviour rather than a common way of life.
What a policy of toleration would not mandate is the wholesale reconstruction of institutional arrangements in Britain such that homosexuals acquire collective rights or are in every context treated precisely as heterosexuals.
This is not to say that the current law of marriage is fixed for all time, any more than the rest of family law, such as the law on adoption, is so fixed. Further, it is to say that such extension of legal recognition would not be to homosexuals as a group but to individuals regardless of their sexual orientation.
To make a political issue that is deeply morally contested a matter of basic rights is to make it non-negotiable, since rights – at least as they are understood in the dominant contemporary schools of Anglo-American jurisprudence – are unconditional entitlements, not susceptible to moderation
In modern Western pluralist societies, policies which result in the creation of group rights are inevitably infected with arbitrariness and consequent inequity, since the groups selected for privileging are arbitrary, as is the determination of who belongs to which group.
a stable liberal civil society cannot be radically multicultural but depends for its successful renewal across the generations on an undergirding culture that is held in common. This common culture need not encompass a shared religion and it certainly need not presuppose ethnic homogeneity, but it does demand widespread acceptance of certain norms and conventions of behaviour and, in our times, it typically expresses a shared sense of nationality.
The example of the United States, which at least since the mid-1960s has been founded on the Enlightenment conviction that a common culture is not a necessary precondition of a liberal civil society, shows that the view that civil peace can be secured solely by adherence to abstract rules is merely an illusion. In so far as policy has been animated by it, the result has been further social division, including what amounts to low-intensity civil war between the races. As things stand, the likelihood in the United States is of a slow slide into ungovernability, as the remaining patrimony of a common cultural inheritance is frittered away by the fragmenting forces of multiculturalism.
The kind of diversity that is incompatible with civil society in Britain is that which rejects the constitutive practices that give it its identity. Central among these are freedom of expression and its precondition, the rule of law. Cultural traditions that repudiate these practices cannot be objects of toleration for liberal civil society in Britain or anywhere else.
The radical tolerance of indifference has application wherever there are conceptions of the good that are incommensurable.
the claim that there may be, and are present among us, conceptions of the good that are rationally incommensurable is not one that supports any of the fashionable varieties of relativism and subjectivism, since it allows, and indeed presupposes, that some conceptions of the good are defective, and some forms of life simply bad.
the radical tolerance of indifference is virtually the opposite of old-fashioned toleration in that its objects are not judged to be evils and may indeed be incommensurable goods.
Woodrow Wilson’s project of imposing a rationalist order conceived in the New World on the intractably quarrelsome nations of Europe. Like Marxism, this rationalist conception had its origins in the French Enlightenment’s vision of a universal human civilization in which the claims of ethnicity and religion came long after those of common humanity.
In the wake of Soviet communism, we find, not Homo Sovieticus or any other rationalist abstraction, but men and women whose identities are constituted by particular attachments and histories – Balts, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Russians and so on.
Western opinion-formers and policy-makers are virtually unanimous in modelling the transition process of the post-communist states in terms which imply their reconstruction on Western models and their integration into a coherent international order based on Western power and institutions. Underlying this virtually universal model are assumptions that are anachronistic and radically flawed. It assumes that the system of Western-led institutions which assured global peace and world trade in the post-war period can survive, substantially unchanged or even strengthened, the world-wide reverberations of the Soviet collapse; the only issue is how the fledgling post-communist states are to gain admission into these institutions. This assumption neglects the dependency of these institutions on the strategic environment of the Cold War and their unravelling, before our eyes, as the post-war settlement disintegrates.
The strategic consequence of the end of the Cold War has been the return to a pre-1914 world – with this difference, that the pre-1914 world was dominated by a single hegemonic power, Great Britain, whereas the return to nineteenth-century policies and modes of thinking in the United States leaves the world without any hegemonic power.
the Soviet collapse has triggered a meltdown in the post-war world order, and in the domestic institutions of the major Western powers, which has yet to run its course.
the crisis of Western transnational institutions is complemented by an ongoing meltdown of the various Western models of the nature and limits of market institutions in advanced industrial societies. The alienation of democratic electorates from established political elites is pervasive in Western societies, including the United States.
Contrary to Hayek, who generalizes from the English experience to put forward a grandiose theory of the spontaneous emergence of market institutions that is reminiscent in its unhistorical generality of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx at their most incautious, the English example is a singularity, not an exemplar of any long-run historical trend. The English experience is sui generis, not a paradigm for the development of market institutions, because the unique combination of circumstances which permitted it to occur as it did – immemorial individualism and parliamentary absolutism, for example – were replicated nowhere else. Where market institutions did develop elsewhere on English lines, as in North America and Australasia, it was in virtue of the fact that English cultural traditions and legal practice had been exported there more or less wholesale. Market institutions of the English variety failed to take root where, as in India, their legal and cultural matrix was not successfully transplanted.
It is noteworthy that, until its collapse in 1991, the Swedish model performed well in respect of what was, perhaps, its principal achievement, an active labour policy that kept long-term unemployment very low, and so effectively prevented the growth of an estranged underclass of the multi-generationally unemployed.
The German or Rhine model of market institutions, as it developed in the post-war period up to reunification, was not the result of the application of any consistent theory, but rather of a contingent political compromise between a diversity of theoretical frameworks, of which the most important were the Ordoliberalismus of the Eucken or Frankfurt School and Catholic social theology. It represented a political settlement, also, between the principal interest groups in post-war Germany, including the newly constituted trade unions.
It would be false to imagine that China lacks ethnic conflict, or separatist movements. As a portent for the future, there appears to be an Islamic separatist movement in the far-western ‘autonomous region’ of Xinjiang, which has borders with the new republics of Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, and with Afghanistan and Pakistan; and there are undoubtedly strong separatist movements in neighbouring Tibet and Mongolia. it would not be entirely surprising, but would in fact rather accord with long-term patterns in Chinese history, if the Chinese state were to fragment in the coming years, perhaps after the death of Deng Xiaoping;
market institutions have as their matrices particular cultural traditions, without whose undergirding support the frameworks of law by which they are defined are powerless or empty. Scottish thinkers, such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, who not unreasonably generalized from their own historical experience to such a connection, this result of their inquiries evoked anxiety as to the eventual fate of market institutions, since – like later thinkers such as Joseph Schumpeter – they feared that individualism would consume the cultural capital on which market institutions relied for their renewal across the generations. Our experience suggests that such fears as to the ultimately self-defeating effects of market institutions that are animated by individualist cultural traditions are far from groundless.
The growth of lawlessness in Russia, the threat posed to social and business life by organized criminality, and the apparent powerlessness thus far of the Yeltsin government in the face of this threat, suggest that an authoritarian turn in Russian political life, whether by the Yeltsin government or by a successor, and whether or not the army has a decisive role in any subsequent authoritarian regime, would be in accord both with the exigencies of current circumstances and with Russian historical precedent. Authoritarian government is likely to emerge in Russia both in response to the dangers of fragmentation of the state and ensuing civil strife and as a response to growing criminal violence in everyday and business life.
The Soviet collapse, far from enhancing the stability of Western institutions, has destabilized them by knocking away the strategic props on which they stood. The prospect of the orderly integration of the post-communist states into the economic and security arrangements of the Western world is a mirage, not only because of the unprecedentedly formidable difficulties each of them confronts in its domestic development, but also because the major Western transnational institutions and organizations are themselves in a flux, amounting sometimes to dissolution.
The world-historical failure of the Enlightenment project – in political terms, the collapse and ruin, in the late twentieth century, of the secular, rationalist and universalist political movements, liberal as well as Marxist, that that project spawned, and the dominance in political life of ethnic, nationalist and fundamentalist forces – suggests the falsity of the philosophical anthropology upon which the Enlightenment project rested.
On the alternative view that I shall develop, the propensity to cultural difference is a primordial attribute of the human species; human identities are plural and diverse in their very natures, as natural languages are plural and diverse, and they are always variations on particular forms of common life, never exemplars of universal humanity.
The task for liberal theory, as I see it, is not vainly to resist the historical falsification of the universalist anthropology that sustained the Enlightenment philosophy of history, but to attempt to reconcile the demands of a liberal form of life with the particularistic character of human identities and allegiances – to retheorize liberalism as itself a particular form of common life.
Agonistic liberalism is that species of liberalism that is grounded, not in rational choice, but in the limits of rational choice – limits imposed by the radical choices we are often constrained to make among goods that are both inherently rivalrous, and often constitutively uncombinable, and sometimes incommensurable, or rationally incomparable. Agonistic liberalism is an application in political philosophy of the moral theory of value-pluralism – the theory that there is an irreducible diversity of ultimate values (goods, excellences, options, reasons for action and so forth) and that when these values come into conflict or competition with one another there is no overarching standard or principle, no common currency or measure, whereby such conflicts can be arbitrated or resolved.
Value-pluralism imposes limits on rational choice that are subversive of most standard moral theories, not merely of utilitarianism, and it has deeply subversive implications for all the traditional varieties of liberal theory.
The thesis of the incommensurability of values is then not a version of relativism, of subjectivism or of moral scepticism, though it will infallibly be confused with one or other of these doctrines: it is a species of moral realism, which we shall call objective pluralism. Its distinguishing features are that it limits the scope of rational choice among goods, affirming that they are often constitutively uncombinable and sometimes rationally incommensurable.
It is a fundamental contribution of Raz’s political philosophy to have shown that a rights-based political morality is an impossibility. rights claims are never primordial or foundational but always conclusionary, provisional results of long chains of reasoning which unavoidably invoke contested judgements about human interests and well-being.
If the truth of value-pluralism is assumed, such that there are no right answers in hard cases about the restraint of liberty, then it seems natural to treat questions of the restraint of liberty as political, and not as theoretical or jurisprudential questions.
Despite its self-description as political liberalism, then, Rawls’s is a liberalism that has been politically emasculated, in which nothing of importance is left to political decision, and in which political life itself has been substantially evacuated of content. The hollowing out of the political realm in Rawlsian liberalism is fatal to its self-description as a form of political liberalism and discloses its true character as a species of liberal legalism. The liberal legalism of Rawls and his followers is, perhaps, only an especially unambiguous example of the older liberal project, or illusion, of abolishing politics, or of so constraining it by legal and constitutional formulae that it no longer matters what are the outcomes of political deliberation. In Rawlsian liberal legalism, the anti-political nature of at least one of the dominant traditions of liberalism is fully realized.
In historical practice, the effect of attempting to abolish or to marginalize political life has been – especially in the United States, where legalism is strongest – the politicization of law, as judicial institutions have become arenas of political struggle. The end-result of this process is not, however, the simple transposition of political life into legal contexts, but rather the corrosion of political life itself. The treatment of all important issues of restraint of liberty as questions of constitutional rights has the consequence that they cease to be issues that are politically negotiable and that can be resolved provisionally in a political settlement that encompasses a compromise among conflicting interests and ideals. In conflicts about basic constitutional rights, there can be no compromise solutions, only judgements which yield unconditional victory for one side and complete defeat for the other.
Allegiance to a liberal state is, on this view, never primarily to principles which it may be thought to embody, and which are supposed to be compelling for all human beings; it is always to specific institutions, having a specific history, and to the common culture that animates them, which itself is a creature of historical contingency.
On the view being developed here, allegiance to a liberal state is always allegiance to the common culture it embodies or expresses, and, in the late modern context in which we live, such a common culture is typically a national culture.
the only things, on the account here defended, that can command allegiance. In our world they are nations, or the common forms of life which national cultures encompass and shelter. The point may be put in another, and perhaps a simpler way: there can be no form of allegiance that is purely political; political allegiance – at least when it is comparatively stable – presupposes a common cultural identity, which is reflected in the polity to which allegiance is given; political order, including that of a liberal state, rests upon a pre-political order of common culture.
As Berlin has put his position: The fact that the values of one culture may be incompatible with those of another, or that they are in conflict within one culture or group or in a single human being at different times – or, for that matter, at one and the same time – does not entail relativism of values, only the notion of a plurality of values not structured hierarchically; which, of course, entails the permanent possibility of inescapable conflict between values, as well as incompatibility between the outlooks of different civilisations or of stages of the same civilisation. He sums up his view: ‘Relativism is not the only alternative to universalism … nor does incommensurability entail relativism’.
Berlin’s point, which is surely correct, is that there may be a specifiable minimum universal content to morality, and some forms of life may be condemned by it; but the items which make up the minimum content may, and sometimes do, come into conflict with one another, there being no rational procedure for resolving such conflicts.
because the universal minimum in all of its variations underdetermines any liberal form of life, many of the regimes that meet the test of the universal minimum – probably the vast majority of such regimes to be found in human history – will not be liberal regimes.
The likely prospect, on all current trends, is not only of the East Asian societies overtaking Western liberal individualist societies in the economic terms of growth, investment, savings and living standards; it is also of their doing so while preserving and enhancing common cultural forms which assure to their subjects personal security in their everyday lives and a public environment that is rich in choiceworthy options. By contrast, the prospect for the Western individualist societies is one of economic development that is weak and feeble in a context of cultural impoverishment in which the remnants of a common culture are hollowed out by individualism and legalism. The prospect for the Western liberal societies, and particularly for those in which individualism and legalism have by now virtually delegitimized the very idea of a common culture, is that of a steep and rapid decline in which civil peace is fractured and the remnants of a common culture on which liberal forms of life themselves depend are finally dissipated. The self-undermining of liberal individualism, which Joseph Schumpeter anticipated in the mid-1940s, is likely to proceed apace, now that the Soviet collapse has removed the legitimacy borrowed by Western institutions from the enmity of a ruinous alternative, and the East Asian societies are released from the constraints of the post-war settlement to pursue paths of development that owe ever less to the West.
When our institutional inheritance – that precious and irreplaceable patrimony of mediating structures and autonomous professions – is thrown away in the pursuit of a managerialist Cultural Revolution seeking to refashion the entire national life on the impoverished model of contract and market exchange, it is clear that the task of conserving and renewing a culture is no longer understood by contemporary conservatives. In the context of such a Maoism of the Right, it is the permanent revolution of unfettered market processes, not the conservation of traditional institutions and professions, having each of them a distinctive ethos, that has become the ruling project of contemporary conservatism. At the same time, neo-liberalism itself can now be seen as a self-undermining political project. Its political success depended upon cultural traditions, and constellations of interests, that neo-liberal policy was bound to dissipate.
liberal civilization itself may be imperilled, in so far as its legitimacy has been linked with the utopia of perpetual growth powered by unregulated market processes, and the inevitable failure of this utopia spawns illiberal political movements. Indeed, unconstrained market institutions are bound to undermine social and political stability, particularly as they impose on the population unprecedented levels of economic insecurity with all the resultant dislocations of life in families and communities.
A central test of the readiness to think fresh thoughts is the way we think about market institutions. On the view defended here they are not ends in themselves but means or tools whose end is human well-being.
Indeed, among us, market liberalism is in its workings ineluctably subversive of tradition and community. This may not have been the case in Edmund Burke’s day, in which the maintenance of the traditions of whig England could coexist with a policy of economic individualism, but in our age a belief in any such harmony is a snare and a delusion. Among us, unlike the men and women of Burke’s day, markets are global, and also, in the case of capital markets, nearly instantaneous; free trade, if it too is global, operates among communities that are vastly more uneven in development than any that traded with one another in Burke’s time; and our lives are pervaded by mass media that transform tastes, and revolutionize daily habits, in ways that could be only dimly glimpsed by the Scottish political economists whom Burke so revered.
The social and cultural effects of market liberalism are, virtually without exception, inimical to the values that traditional conservatives hold dear. Communities are scattered to the winds by the gale of creative destruction. Endless ‘downsizing’ and ‘flattening’ of enterprises fosters ubiquitous insecurity and makes loyalty to the company a cruel joke. The celebration of consumer choice, as the only undisputed value in market societies, devalues commitment and stability in personal relationships and encourages the view of marriage and the family as vehicles of self-realization. The dynamism of market processes dissolves social hierarchies and overturns established expectations. Status is ephemeral, trust frail and contract sovereign. The dissolution of communities promoted by market-driven labour mobility weakens, where it does not entirely destroy, the informal social monitoring of behaviour which is the most effective preventive measure against crime.
Classical liberalism, or what I have termed market fundamentalism, is, like Marxism, a variation on the Enlightenment project, which is the project of transcending the contingencies of history and cultural difference and founding a universal civilization that is qualitatively different from any that has ever before existed.
In this paleo-liberal or libertarian view, the erosion of distinctive cultures by market processes is, if anything, to be welcomed as a sign of progress toward a universal rational civilization. Here paleo-liberalism shows its affinities not with European conservatism but with the Old Left project of doing away with, or marginalizing politically, the human inheritance of cultural difference. That this perspective is a hallucinatory and utopian one is clear if we consider its neglect of the sources not only of political allegiance but also of social order in common cultural forms. Market liberalism, like other Enlightenment ideologies, treats cultural difference as a politically marginal phenomenon whose appropriate sphere is in private life. It does not comprehend, or repudiates as irrationality, the role of a common culture in sustaining political order and in legitimizing market institutions.
Market liberalism is at its most utopian, however, in its conception of a global market society, in which goods, and perhaps people, move freely between economies having radically different stages of development and harbouring very different cultures.
Human beings need, more than they need the freedom of consumer choice, a cultural and economic environment that offers them an acceptable level of security and in which they feel at home.
The conservative idea of the primacy of cultural forms is meant to displace not only standard liberal conceptions of the autonomous human subject but also ideas of the autonomy of market institutions that liberal thought has been applied – or misapplied – to support. It is not meant to support nostalgist and reactionary conceptions of organic or integral community which have no application in our historical circumstances and which, if they were implemented politically, could end only in tragedy or – more likely in Britain – black comedy. The idea of a seamless community – the noumenal community, as we may call it, of communitarianism – is as much of a fiction as the autonomous subject of liberal theory. We all of us belong to many communities, we mostly inherit diverse ethnicities, and our world-views are fractured and provisional whether or not we know it or admit it. We harbour a deep diversity of views and values as to sexuality and the worth of human life, our relations with the natural environment and the special place, if any, of the human species in the scheme of things. The reactionary project of rolling back this diversity of values and world-views in the pursuit of a lost cultural unity overlooks the character of our cultural inheritance as a palimpsest, having ever deeper layers of complexity.
It is clear only that, for us at any rate, a common culture cannot mean a common world-view, religious or secular. It is an implication of all that I have said, however, that we have no option but to struggle to make our inheritance of liberal traditions work. At present, the principal obstacle we face in the struggle to renew our inheritance of liberal practice is the burden on thought and policy of market liberal dogma.
The central difficulty is that the enlargement of leisure that Mill, by contrast with the gloomier classical economists, expected to come from stability in population and output against a background of improvement in the industrial arts is occurring in the form of ever higher levels of involuntary unemployment. It may be that proposals for a basic or citizen’s income, where that is to be distinguished from the neo-liberal idea of a negative income tax, and for a better distribution of capital among the citizenry, need reconsideration – despite all their difficulties – as elements in a policy aiming to reconcile the human need for economic security with the destabilizing dynamism of market institutions.
Almost as significant in disclosing the Americocentric character of the new liberalism was its anaemic and impoverished conception of pluralism and cultural diversity. The incommensurability of values affirmed in doctrines of objective ethical pluralism was understood as arising in the formulation of personal plans of life rather than in conflicts among whole ways of life. And cultural diversity was conceived in the denatured form of a cornucopia of chosen lifestyles, each with its elective identity, rather than in the form in which it is found in the longer and larger experience of humankind – as the exfoliation of exclusionary forms of life, spanning the generations, membership of which is typically unchosen, and which tend to individuate themselves by their conflicts and by their historical memories of enmity.
The core project of the Enlightenment was the displacement of local, customary or traditional moralities, and of all forms of transcendental faith, by a critical or rational morality, which was projected as the basis of a universal civilization.
This is the project that animated Marxism and liberalism in all their varieties, which underpins both the new liberalism and neo-conservatism, and to which every significant body of opinion in the United States continues to subscribe.
That liberal individuality is, in practice, invariably a prescription for abject conformity to prevailing bien-pensant opinion is, on the view being presented here, not the chief objection to it. The most disabling feature of these and other constitutive elements of the new liberalism is what they all betoken – namely, a rejection of the political enterprise itself, and of its animating value of peace.
For the pluralist, the practice of politics is a noble engagement, precisely on account of the almost desperate humility of its purposes – which are to moderate the enmity of agonistic identities, and to generate conventions of peace among warring communities. The pluralist embrace of politics is, for these reasons, merely a recognition of the reality of political life, itself conceived as an abatement of war.
from the truth of a plurality of incommensurable values the priority of one of them – liberty, autonomy or choice-making, say – cannot follow. Value-pluralism cannot entail, or ground, liberalism in any general, still less universal way.
Pluralists reject this Old Right project for the same reason that they reject the Enlightenment project. Both seek to roll back the reality of cultural diversity for the sake of an imaginary condition of cultural unity – whether that be found in a lost past or in a supposed future condition of the species in which cultural difference has been marginalized in a universal civilization. Both perspectives are alien to that of the pluralist, which takes the reality of cultural difference as a datum of political order.
A pluralist political order may nevertheless deviate from the central institutions of a liberal civil society at crucial points. It need not, and often will not possess an individualist legal order in which persons are the primary rights-bearers. The principal bearers of rights (and duties) in a pluralist political order will be communities, or ways of life, not individuals.
The pluralist standard of assessment of any regime is whether it enables its subjects to coexist in a Hobbesian peace while renewing their distinctive forms of common life. … By this standard, the current regime in China might well be criticized for its policies in Tibet; but such a criticism would invoke the intrinsic value of the communities and cultural forms now being destroyed in Tibet, not universalist conceptions of human rights or democracy.
Here I think Raz has grasped a point of fundamental importance, perceived by Mill but not by Rawls – that a liberal state cannot be neutral with regard to illiberal forms of life coming within its jurisdiction. Or, to put the matter still more shortly, Raz is entirely correct in seeing liberalism itself as a whole way of life, and not merely a set of political principles or institutions. The trouble is that, if value-pluralism is true at the level of whole ways of life, then the liberal form of life can have no special or universal claim on reason.
In the late modern period in which we live, the Enlightenment project is affirmed chiefly for fear of the consequences of abandoning it.
(The United States is, as ever, an exception in this regard, since in it both fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist affirmations of the Enlightenment project remain strong. The collapse of these fundamentalisms in the United States, however, were it to occur, would likely be accompanied by an outbreak of nihilism of a violence and intensity unknown in other Western countries; such an outcome is prefigured in much contemporary North American art, literature and popular entertainment.)
There can, in my view, be no rolling back the central project of modernity, which is the Enlightenment project, with all its consequences in terms of disenchantment and ultimate groundlessness. … the thought of Nietzsche, especially but not exclusively his thinking about morality, is unavoidably and rightly the starting-point of serious reflection for us, at the close of the modern age which the Enlightenment project, in all its diversity, inaugurated.
the political forms which may arise in truly post-Enlightenment cultures will be those that shelter and express diversity – that enable different cultures, some but by no means all or even most of which are dominated by liberal forms of life, different world-views and ways of life, to coexist in peace and harmony. For this development to be a real historical possibility, however, certain conceptions and commitments that have been constitutive, not merely of the Enlightenment and so of modernity, but also, and more fundamentally, of the central traditions of Western civilization, must be amended, or abandoned. Certain conceptions, not only of morality but also of science, that are central elements in Enlightenment cultures must be given up. Certain understandings of religion, long established in Western traditions, not as a vessel for a particular way of life but rather as the bearer of truths possessing universal authority, must be relinquished. The most fundamental Western commitment, the humanist conception of humankind as a privileged site of truth, which is expressed in Socratic inquiry and in Christian revelation, and which re-emerges in secular and naturalistic form in the Enlightenment project of human self-emancipation through the growth of knowledge, must be given up.
Further, and perhaps decisively, once liberal practice is released from the hallucinatory perspective of liberal theory, it will be seen for what it always was – not a seamless garment, but a patchwork quilt, stitched together and restitched in response to the flux of circumstance. … If, as I believe, liberal practice is best conceived as a miscellany of ad-hoc improvisations, made over the generations in the pursuit of a modus vivendi, then no part of it can be regarded as sacrosanct; it can, and should, be rewoven, or unravelled, as circumstances and changing human needs dictate.
The conception of the natural world as an object of human exploitation, and of humankind as the master of nature, which informs Bacon’s writings, is one of the most vital and enduring elements of the modern world-view, and the one which Westernization has most lastingly and destructively transmitted to non-Western cultures.
In this last period of modernity, Western instrumental reason becomes globalized at just the historic moment when its groundlessness is manifest. The embodiment of instrumental reason in modern technology acquires a planetary reach precisely when the animating humanist project which guided it is overthrown. Nothing remains of this project but the expansion of human productive powers through the technological domination of the earth. It is this conjunction of the global spread of the Western humanist project with the self-undermining of its most powerful modern embodiment in the Enlightenment that warrants the claim that we find ourselves now at the close of the modern age.
In truth, the likelihood is that, now that the imperatives of the Cold War period are over, the European countries and the United States will increasingly decouple, not only strategically and economically, but also culturally, so that their cultural and political differences will become more, not less, decisive. It is difficult to believe that the forms of liberal culture will not diverge greatly, as a result of this likely decoupling, between the United States and the various European nations. Indeed, even as things stand now, Rorty’s post-modern liberalism is an expression of American hopes, which are far from being shared by other liberal cultures, such as those in Europe.
For liberalism to become merely one form of life among others would involve as profound a cultural metamorphosis as Christianity’s ceasing to make any claim to unique and universal truth.
The surrender of the will to power has its most important application in our relations with other forms of life, and with the earth. The project of subjecting the earth and its other life-forms to human will through technological domination is Western humanism in its final form.
On the podcast this week, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America by Bruno Maçães. Here is Jerry's ideological Turing Test book summary:
Like Europe, from which it descends, America is organized around individual liberty, but what liberty means has diverged. Just like Rome incorporated Greek culture just as that civilization was reaching its end, America has incorporated European. That is just repetition, however. The real act of creation came when the Roman Empire fell and a new beginning from the ruins was possible. Maybe that’s where America is today, and what looks like the abyss to progressive liberals is actually empty space full of possibility.
Maçães does not care for Tocqueville, who he thinks missed the point of America because he saw it as the culmination of European history rather than the beginning of something new. He likes William James the pragmatists: unlike the liberal European instinct to arrive at a final truth, they believes not that there is not truth, but that there are many truths, all equally valid if they help us, even if they are contradictory. To Maçães this means a world open to possibilities and creativity.
American culture is antithetical to European culture because it is focused on efficiency and productivity. In a society where everyone works, there are no classes, which is a problem for European conservatives. Everything is mass-produced and there are no limits imposed by tradition, religion, or class. In such a world, man is beset by angst. The European solution is to reorder society, while the American solution is escapism. Socialism never took root in the U.S. because you could always go west.
The U.S. resisted taking on world leadership after WWI. America was the economic and military center of the world, but it didn’t want to take on the cultural mantle from Europe. That’s not stainable. The Soviet threat papered-over the differences between America and Europe and now they are surfacing. With that threat gone, it’s crazy to expect the U.S. to continue to accept the limits imposed on it by the liberal world order, especially when the likes of China break the rules. Meanwhile, Europe cannot fathom any path that is not in the direction opposite Nazism.
Americans experience life as a movie of TV show, and this explains guns, the death penalty, religion (which in America is about possibility, not limitations). Political correctness is about portrayal rather than any reality. Reagan wasn’t really a liberal (or an American conservative), he was an American who wanted people to find their own happiness in their own truths—they should be able to play the characters they want in their own movies. Europe, by contrast, is incredibly limited in its possibilities of existence. Westworld is right about race.
Television taught Americans to think of themselves as characters in a stories, and the Internet is an extension of that where one is character and creator at the same time. On the internet you have to act to be seen and to exist. Nothing is real, everything is an invented story. Americans don’t pine for the real world but for their own story. Everything is symbolic and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Liberalism has been so effective at specifying the conditions of a free society that is produces an answer to every political question, thus there is no freedom in liberalism. This is anti-American so Americans are pursuing a post-liberal, post-truth way of living based on the principle of what Maçães calls unreality: “everyone can pursue his or her own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real—as something valid for all.” No universal truths, except perhaps one, which is the right to exit, to change the channel. Westworld again.
Meanwhile, Europe wants to freeze time because it thinks it’s at the end of history, at the apotheosis of a free society except “we should keep very quiet or else the magnificent edifice of freedom might be shaken too hard.” The reaction from both sides is grasping for hard truth: socialism/green religion or tradition. American populism by contrast arrives at a different conclusion from the fact of relativism. It’s about a constant appeal to voters/viewers with new content. Everything is permitted, even the illiberal.
Technological progress is predicated on massive inequality, which is why we need universal basic income.
The Truman doctrine went from tactic to principle and led to Vietnam. Iraq was about the struggle for meaning—creating a new reality after 9/11—and it also turned out badly. If the U.S. wants to create its own reality, it has to do so in a way that allow others to find their place; where other value systems are accepted. Neoconservatism is over.
The U.S.’s permanent strategic goal has always been to prevent a single power from controlling Eurasia. This has meant standing up to European powers, but now the threat comes from China. Maçães doesn’t think a Cold War model will work against china because we’re too coupled and decoupling is self-defeating. He thinks a better approach is to act as a balancer much like 19th century Britain was relative to European powers. The danger is an Sino-Russian alliance.
The American experience with Covid highlights its its embrace of unreality. “First Trump evaded reality by believing there was no problem, then everyone else evaded reality by believing the problem was Trump. … When America turned from the virus to protest, it also revealed that the fight against the pandemic was after all a story—not a necessity—which could be replaced by a better story.” The experience with Covid will accelerate the transition to living in a surveilled virtual reality.
On the podcast this week, The Jungle Grows Back by Robert Kagan. Here is Jerry's ideological Turing Test book summary:
Peaceful liberal world order is not the natural state of affairs; it exists because, like a garden, it has been artificially created by the United States. If the United States stops tending this garden then the jungle of great power competition and chaos will reemerge. The order is not perfect, but the alternative is worse.
Only the United States, given the power it has by virtue of its geography, is capable of imposing order. Spheres of influence should be a discredited notion, except for the U.S. as order-keeper.
Like the prewar world, disorder means a world dominated by powers hostile to American interests and principles. Indeed, American security would be threatened directly by such a state. Left alone, Hitler would have invaded the U.S. It is not unthinkable that prewar-like disorder with Hitlers and Stalins can return, and indeed the conditions for the emergence of such characters seem to be reappearing.
After the war, the U.S. sought to pursue its own security and interests, but to foster an “environment of freedom” (Acheson) that ended great power competition and disorder. The decision to shoulder this responsibility was made before the Cold War when we still believed the Soviets would be part of the order.
Maintaining the order means “operating in a gray area in which wars [are] fought not for security, but for less easily measured ends: stability, prosperity, progress, liberalism.” People do not share a universal desire for freedom; very often they prefer order and security. Sometimes you have to convert adversaries to liberalism, presumably at gunpoint. The struggle has no end.
The U.S. guaranteeing the security of the members of the order (and indeed by allowing no other alternative), liberated Germany, Japan, China, etc. to focus on economic growth. “To criticize this as free-riding is to miss the profound and historically transformative choice they were making.”
The order depended on the U.S. not abusing its dominant position, but instead competing on a level playing field, although sometimes it didn’t. It certainly never respected the rules when it came to security and Cold War strategy. Nevertheless, the Cold War ended peacefully because the Soviets could see the U.S. wasn’t going to be revanchist. Britain, Japan, and Germany were allowed to give up empire without penalty—to the contrary.
Americans before and after the Cold War have consistently rejected the idea that they have a responsibility to foster an order. This democratic opinion gets in the way of properly tending the garden. Bush I didn’t go to Baghdad, Clinton didn’t invade North Korea or take out al Qaeda, and Obama didn’t invade Syria out of deference to public opinion—all mistakes. The exceptions to this was immediately after WWII and after 9/11.
Americans accepted the post-war plan first because they did not think it would be as costly as it turned out, and after the onset of the Cold War because they believed the Soviets to be an existential threat. In retrospect, communism probably didn’t pose such a big threat to American “way of life.” After 9/11, “fear in the United States was much higher, and actions that had been unthinkable before became thinkable.” The Bush administration took the opportunity to invade Iraq even though there was no connection to 9/11. It turned out that Iraq was not the threat we thought.
Without the Soviets or the fear of terrorism, Americans are back to their habit of denying the need to intervene broadly to maintain the order. After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. only imposed sanctions and didn’t even sell Ukraine defensive weapons. Hillary Clinton was so cowed by public opinion she turned on her own Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Russia today is not acting out because it’s concerned about its security, but out of national pride. NATO expansion shouldn’t have bothered it because it knew it didn’t threaten its security, only limited its ambitions. In any event, it was really good for the expansion nations, so it’s worth “[w]hatever the effect on the Russians may have been.” Putin is also worried that the U.S. wants to drive him from power. “Behind every democratic revolution on former Soviet territory, in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, he saw the hand of the West, and particularly the United States,” but he really shouldn’t be so paranoid since “the role of outsiders was not the decisive factor in the toppling of the authoritarian regimes in those countries.” Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland.
China today is not acting out because it’s concerned about its security, but out of national pride. The Chinese are merely unhappy that the U.S. wants to limit its ambitions, namely unifying with Taiwan and controlling the South China Sea.
European, and particularly German, nationalism is on the rise, due largely to increased immigration from the Middle East and Africa that the people perceive as a threat to their (liberal?) culture. The U.S. bears a lot of the responsibility for this because it didn’t invade Syria. “A year ago, one AfD leader, complaining about the inundation of ‘culturally alien peoples,’ attributed it to the ‘pigs’ in the German leadership who were ‘nothing other than puppets of the victor powers of the Second World War.’ It doesn’t really matter what spurs such thoughts. The rise of such nationalist sentiments has geopolitical implications.”
The threat in Europe today is worse that communism because Marxism at least had liberal roots and thus shared many of the same goals. Today there is a counter-enlightenment from the right “that plays more effectively on liberalism’s failings and insecurities.”
