I’ve spent the last week or so traveling, so haven’t had too much time to read, or to answer your emails which are accumulating in my inbox (I promise I’ll get to them, if you’re waiting).
But in the meantime here are a few items that may be of interest:
In this interview Francis Fukuyama (of “End of History” fame) discusses his forthcoming book Liberalism and Its Discontents, in which he offers a full-throated defense of liberalism, but also finds an “opportunity to piss off people both on the right and on the left” by criticizing both the “market fundamentalism” of “neoliberalism” and left-wing identity politics. Fukuyama’s argument is that “liberalism ended up turning on itself” due to the various failures of neoliberal capitalism and a hyper-individualism that led to a reactionary flight into collectivist group-identity obsession. This is surprisingly close to the post-liberal critique – in which liberalism’s pathologies are products of its success – but it’s not clear from this interview what his proposed solutions are.
Fukuyama’s book comes out in April 2022 – notably the same month that Yoram Hazony’s forthcoming book Conservatism: A Rediscovery will also be released and argue for a post-liberal revival of conservatism. I will try to review both and compare, because mark my words: the liberal vs. post-liberal vs. anti-liberal argument that is now raging below the surface of politics has become THE central conceptual debate about the future of political, social, and economic order, not the zombie “left” vs. “right” contest (more on this another time).
Continuing the post-liberal theme, here Flaherty reviews Adrian Pabst’s new book, Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal (which I have also not yet had a chance to read):
Pabst argues that, politically, we are caught in an impasse. Across the West, a new division of liberal v populist has supplanted the old class-based division of left v right. Meanwhile, in China and the ‘rising rest’, authoritarianism prevails. There, one-party rule is coupled with state capitalism and nationalism.
…
Amid the battles between populism, liberalism and authoritarianism, there is an opportunity for a genuinely new kind of politics: a post-liberal resolution to the slow decline of the West. And with the shift from neoliberal economics to Keynesian interventionism inaugurated by the pandemic, the window of opportunity is now wide open. What, though, is post-liberalism?
Post-liberalism is an imprecise title for an otherwise concrete set of ideas and proposals. At the level of philosophy, it is an approach to politics that rejects the utilitarian ‘science’ of maximising the happiness of the greatest number, adopting instead ‘a practice of ethical judgement for the flourishing of all persons as they are in their families, localities and workplaces’. Instead of talking in the abstract terms of ‘the individual’, it foregrounds embodied experience and relationships between actual people.
Post-liberalism draws on ethical socialism and ‘one-nation’ conservatism. It is not anti-liberal. On the contrary, it bases itself on the ‘best liberal traditions’ – freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of association and representative government, for example. But as Pabst says, it ‘corrects liberal errors and excesses such as individualism, untrammelled capitalism [and] identity politics’.
That sounds nice, but I’m not sure it’s quite so simple. As far as I can tell, most post-liberals are quite insistent that, moving forward, a specific vision of the Common Good must be defined and pursued by the state (in contrast to anything-goes-liberalism). How easily this can coexist with the freedoms of liberalism is a central question that has yet to be answered (for example, how much would a more openly religious post-liberal conservative party regulate morality on, say, pornography?). Whether a liberal-conservative synthesis can successfully be found is another topic I plan to explore in more detail.
Consider this as a very interesting follow up to The Reality War. Greer is mainly talking here about “magic” in the sense of narrative “spells” (i.e. propaganda) that can punch through the defenses of the rational mind and manipulate “the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown.” He argues that:
This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies.
Greer notes that:
Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.
Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed.
Well, that sounds disturbingly familiar. He concludes:
[T]here are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.
Magic and the occult happens to be kind of big in popular culture right now, if you haven’t noticed.
I'm still chary of accepting the idea of Wokeism as a religion--we should have a conversation about what sets religion apart from ideology, if anything. That said, the idea that Wokeism is a form of magic is more compelling, complete with ritual activities and incantations that can open up a space for an imagined liberation, freedom and re-invention. And of course for those in power, acting as sages and magi helps maintain order. I wonder if there is a parallel with the devolution of QAnon into notions of the resurrection of JFK--at the end of ideology on the left and right, there is only incantation and the belief in overcoming mere flesh.
I have followed the writings of Adrian Pabst quite closely over the years. He has long been associated with an English grouping called Radical Orthodoxy, largely led by the theologians John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock--all interested in developing a more post-secular politics.
In contrast to many post-liberals favoring a powerful centralized state, Pabst appears to support a type of more decentralized, largely locally based politics rooted in particular places and people, perhaps not too different from the emerging perspective of Paul Kingsnorth. In fact Pabst has
recently argued that what he calls the Western-market-state is now morphing into a Beijing style state-market.
Pabst has also done deep dives into the philosophic assumptions behind liberalism and i believe he will continue to be an extremely valuable source for insights into that doctrine as well as the potential revival of political theology.
Thanks, that's interesting. I'm definitely planning to read his book once I can get to it. And definitely true on the convergence toward Beijing style-market state; that's another topic that's on the list.
Hmm ... my personal observation is that interest in the occult is significantly DOWN from what it was in, say, the 1970s, when pyramid power was everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power
Greer's thesis seems like one of those many that sounds vaguely plausible but has no actual data to back it up.
I have no hard data whatsoever, but in my experience the number of people I know or know of identifying as witches (or similar) has really taken off (especially after 2016, when it seemed to merge vaguely with the overall anti-Trump resistance). Whether it's as high as the 1960s and 70s, when activists vowed to levitate the Pentagon with their psychic powers, I have no idea.
And TM and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi! (Sorry, it's all coming back to me.) I had an ex-girlfriend who was utterly convinced that she could levitate herself while meditating.
Anyway, whatever Dire Consequence is supposed to follow a rise in belief in magic, it didn't happen then ...
I'm still chary of accepting the idea of Wokeism as a religion--we should have a conversation about what sets religion apart from ideology, if anything. That said, the idea that Wokeism is a form of magic is more compelling, complete with ritual activities and incantations that can open up a space for an imagined liberation, freedom and re-invention. And of course for those in power, acting as sages and magi helps maintain order. I wonder if there is a parallel with the devolution of QAnon into notions of the resurrection of JFK--at the end of ideology on the left and right, there is only incantation and the belief in overcoming mere flesh.
I have followed the writings of Adrian Pabst quite closely over the years. He has long been associated with an English grouping called Radical Orthodoxy, largely led by the theologians John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock--all interested in developing a more post-secular politics.
In contrast to many post-liberals favoring a powerful centralized state, Pabst appears to support a type of more decentralized, largely locally based politics rooted in particular places and people, perhaps not too different from the emerging perspective of Paul Kingsnorth. In fact Pabst has
recently argued that what he calls the Western-market-state is now morphing into a Beijing style state-market.
Pabst has also done deep dives into the philosophic assumptions behind liberalism and i believe he will continue to be an extremely valuable source for insights into that doctrine as well as the potential revival of political theology.
Thanks, that's interesting. I'm definitely planning to read his book once I can get to it. And definitely true on the convergence toward Beijing style-market state; that's another topic that's on the list.
Hmm ... my personal observation is that interest in the occult is significantly DOWN from what it was in, say, the 1970s, when pyramid power was everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power
Greer's thesis seems like one of those many that sounds vaguely plausible but has no actual data to back it up.
I have no hard data whatsoever, but in my experience the number of people I know or know of identifying as witches (or similar) has really taken off (especially after 2016, when it seemed to merge vaguely with the overall anti-Trump resistance). Whether it's as high as the 1960s and 70s, when activists vowed to levitate the Pentagon with their psychic powers, I have no idea.
And TM and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi! (Sorry, it's all coming back to me.) I had an ex-girlfriend who was utterly convinced that she could levitate herself while meditating.
Anyway, whatever Dire Consequence is supposed to follow a rise in belief in magic, it didn't happen then ...