Ground Rules for a Discourse With Me

 

In an earlier post, I explored why I felt I had an easier time reading conservative Christians than woke leftists. The practical implication of this is that I recognize that I struggle to engage people on the left. I am open to the possibility that this is a failure on my part that I need to rectify. Readers should feel free to offer book recommendations or to attempt to engage me in dialogue. For a fruitful conversation to happen, I suspect that there are going to need to be ground rules. 

1. People on the mainstream right today are not responsible for racism: 

We can still acknowledge that there are real problems today facing various minority communities and, recognizing the historical sources of these problems as well as a need for Americans to come together, there may be a need for government solutions; this may even include direct reparation payments. That being said, the very act of reaching out to conservatives to help in solving the problem means that you are not blaming them for racism. This would apply even if we are mainly asking conservatives to write a check. Even asking conservatives for money is distinct from trying to punish conservatives by making them pay. With punishment, there is no dialogue, just a demand and a threat of what might happen if that demand is not met. 

2. There will be no tearing down of present-day systems: 

We may acknowledge that the political and social systems we have inherited contain deeply problematic elements that need to be reformed. Furthermore, an important aspect of how we teach history should be an open and honest exploration of the skeletons in our collective closet. That being said, it should be acknowledged that any attempt to completely tear these systems down is likely to bring about extreme bloodshed and what is likely to arise will be more authoritarian than anything we have today. It may still be possible to argue that those people unfairly victimized by the system should be compensated in order that they do not harm the rest of society by turning toward revolution.  

3. As a general principle, capitalism/free markets should be acknowledged as superior to government action on both moral and practical grounds: 

There can still be room for government action under specific circumstances such as providing public goods or compensating people for past iniquities. That being said, there is going to be no unwritten constitution where the government is deemed as "people coming together" and markets as mere greed. Government must be acknowledged as a literal act of physical violence, leaving us with the question only of how much can we minimize its use without causing the collapse of civilization.   

4. There must be red lines on the left:

Historically, as Jordan Peterson has argued, the mainstream right has understood that there were lines, mainly Nazism/racism, that should not be crossed. This has not been the case with the left. Consider the example of Che Guevera. It is not socially acceptable, within polite society, to wear a Himmler t-shirt; how is it ok to wear a Che Guevara shirt? Underlying such social rules is a double standard regarding Communism. Communists get a pass for their ideals and are not held responsible for the millions of deaths they have caused. The fact that Nazis also were idealists gets ignored. We can talk about where to draw these lines to the left, just as we can talk about where the right needs to draw its lines, but such lines must still exist.    

For a meaningful dialogue to happen, I need to believe that you are not planning to kill me. As such, I need to feel confident that you are not going to demand something that I must refuse even at the risk of my life. The reality is that there are going to be people (such as Nazis and Communists) that I am unlikely to be able to live with and having me live in the same country as them is likely to lead to Hobbesian Civil War. I do wish to be able to live with others, even those I disagree with, and to do so I am willing to make compromises but compromise needs to be a two-way street.   

The Hitchhiking Pilgrim's Guide to Progressing through the Multiverse

 

I recently finished reading an advanced copy of the Postmodern Pilgrim's Progress by Kyle Mann and Joel Berry of the satire site Babylon Bee. As satirists, I take them very seriously. Whether or not conservatism has a future is going to come down to whether the next generation of conservative activists have properly internalized what the Bee offers. As a reviewer, I come to this newest offering of theirs from a fairly unique perspective. I am a Jew who has read John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, C. S. Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress as well as Douglas Adams. 

In essence, what Mann and Berry have given us is the Bunyan classic if it has been written by a Christianized Adams. In the role of the pilgrim Christian, we have the unbeliever Ryan Fleming, who agrees to attend a church service because of a last request from his teenage younger brother who died of cancer. Ryan then finds himself transported into another world called the Dying Lands where he is given a quest to wake the king and save the world. As Bunyan's original has a companion named Faithful, who helps keep him on the right path, Ryan is joined by a woman named Faith. All of this is told by an angelic narrator who is essentially the Book from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ryan is modeled after Arthur Dent. He is a perfectly normal unexceptional person who finds himself in an insane world and insists on being his reasonable self. For example, he tries to point out to the people in the City of Destruction that, if they bothered to look up into the sky, they would see a storm of meteorites coming to destroy them and is frustrated when everyone continues eating their bread and cheese. (Granted, Ryan does find the bread and cheese to be quite marvelous and almost fails to escape himself.)  

Jordan Peterson argues that true art requires that the artist has an idea but one that they cannot directly put into words. If the artist understands the message they wish to convey then they should come outright and say it. If the artist consciously tries to smuggle a message into a story then what they have is propaganda and the inherent dishonesty of the process undermines its artistic value. What makes the original Pilgrim's Progress work, despite the fact that it is a Puritan sermon crammed into story form, is that it is so blatant and earnest as to be above the charge of guile. 

Bunyan's message that he makes no attempt to dress up is the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. To understand it is to recognize that it is a horrific doctrine that no one would willingly accept unless they were forced to through divine revelation or the reading of scripture. You are a totally depraved sinner and there is no action that you can perform that can make you less deserving of eternal damnation. That being the case, Jesus still died to save you despite your fundamental unworthiness of salvation. To be justified through faith means to walk that tightrope and simultaneously believe both of these things at the same time. 

Christian's primary struggle in the early stage of his journey is with this balancing act. He comes to know that he is a sinner living in the City of Destruction by reading a book written by the creator of the world that tells him this fact. Christian, therefore, abandons his wife and children even to the point of covering his ears and shouting "eternal life" as he runs away from them. Evangelist tells him to stay on the road to the Celestial City as that is the only way he will eventually be able to be relieved of his burden of sin. What repeatably gets Christian off of the path is the temptation to believe that there might be an alternative way to escape his burden, such as following the Law, or despairing of ever being redeemed. 

The purpose of Bunyan is not to convince us to accept justification by faith by making it sound attractive or reasonable. On the contrary, Bunyan wants us to recognize that we need to accept this belief no matter how much it violates our every moral intuition simply because it is true. It also should be noted that Christian's struggle is not over his belief in God. The king's existence is an assumed fact. The only question is whether he can internalize the logic of justification by faith so that it carries him all the way to the end.  

This can be contrasted with Lewis, whose John utterly rejects the Landlord. It is not so much that John does not believe in the Landlord, though he is relieved when Mr. Enlightenment informs him that the Landlord was invented by the stewards, but that John rejects the sort of relationship the Landlord offers where, if you follow his rules, and you can live in his house with him forever but if you violate the rules you will be sent to his scorpion pit. John does his best to keep away from anything connected to the Landlord. His primary companion is Virtue (Kant) who insists on not caring whether the Landlord with his bribes and threats might exist. Instead, John seeks to find his island (joy). What John slowly is forced to accept is that, if he wants to cross the canyon of Peccatum Adae and reach his island, he is going to need the Landlord in the form of Mother Kirk.

In essence, Lewis was a 19th-century style romantic who came to accept that, in order to salvage this romanticism, he needed to ground it within a Christian worldview. Jesus, for Lewis, was all the best of mythology made real in human history. Lewis was not interested in the question of salvation let alone whether one could be saved through faith or works.

The big question for Lewis was whether one could maintain the enchanted worldview in the face of modernity that would allow someone to relate to God as a real individual as opposed to a mere theoretical proposition. Part of the appeal of Lewis, unlike Bunyan, is that his writing was designed to not antagonize readers. Anyone, even a Jew like me, could embrace Lewis as an exercise in attempting to maintain, with a straight face, that there is more to the universe than simple materialism. 

Lewis was a fundamentalist, not in the modern sense of holding particularly conservative theological views but in the sense of the early twentieth-century Christian Fundamentals pamphlets. Lewis was not interested in rehashing the early modern debates within Protestantism and ultimately with Catholicism, but in offering a few basic principles for a wide spectrum of Christians to rally around, what Lewis referred to as "mere Christianity." For Lewis, this primarily meant accepting that the God-Man had entered history in the person of Jesus in a completely factual and literal sense.  

 

With this in mind, we can begin to explore a major challenge of using Adams to make Bunyan work for a modern audience. The key to translating Bunyan is that there is no way that you can make him acceptable to most modern readers. Considering the amount of time that he spent in prison, it is not as if his message was all that acceptable to seventeenth-century ears.  

Bunyan was too earnest to do satire. I do not read Pilgrim's Progress as any kind of absurdist comedy. The book needs to be read with full salvation or damnation seriousness. The only thing absurd is why would a sinner like Christian be given so many chances to get back on the road when he did not even deserve to make it out of the City of Destruction? By contrast, Lewis can be seen in a comic light as he wished to mock his own highly roundabout path to Christianity and he offers a romp through modern philosophy. 

Absurdity was something essential to Adams and it connected to his atheism. His point was not the conventional Dawkins-style atheist polemic to render religion as absurd and atheism rational. Rather, he embraced a world that was absurd. The question then becomes, if the world is absurd no matter which way you turn, might it make more sense to accept a world that is absurd in its lacking of meaning than one where there are beings in charge who are ridiculous? 

Mann and Berry struggle with striking the right tone in their writing and ultimately in finding the purpose of their book. The book could have been a self-acknowledging satire of themselves as the kinds of people who read Adams and yet have somehow remained religious Christians. Alternatively, it could have served as a vehicle for the authors to explore something about their worldview that defies straightforward exposition. Much of the strength of the Babylon Bee is that it captures certain truths that could only be expressed by satire. If readers take nothing else from the Bee it should be the simple question of how is it that a satire site consistently offers a more thoughtful analysis of the world than CNN.  

The Postmodern Pilgrim offers some genuinely excellent moments with ideas that are best expressed through the surreal allegory of Pilgrim's Progress. The random people getting killed by falling meteorites in the City of Destruction offer a powerful response to Ryan's struggle with theodicy. We are tempted to turn the unfairness of children dying against God when it should cause us to contemplate the fact that we may randomly die at any time. People living in the time of Bunyan had a certain spiritual advantage over us as they were constantly confronted with dead children. There could be no pretense that life on Earth could be perfected as an end in itself. 

We have one of the best versions of the Devil since Screwtape. There is this delightful ambiguity to him because he tempts Ryan with what Ryan honestly wants, mainly to escape his miserable situation and get back home to his life. Ryan's Arthur Dent personality works well in these scenes. He knows better than to make an agreement with the Devil yet also sees nothing wrong with just talking to the Devil and struggles to say no when the Devil turns out to be so unfathomably reasonable. 

Similarly, there is Ryan and Faith's visit to Urbina. Readers of the original will be familiar with Faithful's martyrdom in the city of Vanity Fair, which is modeled after Jesus' passion. As such, the narrator offers the spoiler that Faith is going to die. Even though I was expecting Faith's death, how it is done still managed to be poignant. 

What I loved is how the authors make use of the issue of abortion with Humanist demanding that the travelers murder a child as the price of staying in the city. The scene captures why abortion is so important for religious conservatives. Living in a secular society that offers ever greater material comfort and seems to also make moral progress all without religion, where does one find the moral grounding to resist? If a person can truly see a fetus as a living being then the moral authority of modern secularism simply collapses. At the center of secular society is the mass murder of children. Without this murder of children, secular society, with women being able to pursue careers and sexual fulfillment as opposed to family and children, would not be practical. If people on the left demand that conservatives deny that abortion is murder and instead celebrate abortion as a constitutional right and as the liberating act of a woman freeing her body from the control of patriarchal society as the price of being accepted into secular society, then conservatives need to accept that they cannot be part of that society.  

This is a good book that makes for a fun read whatever your religious beliefs. I think it could have been a better book if the authors had been willing to spend the time giving it a more consistent narrative. The angel fails as a character because he does not advance the narrative and ends up as a distraction. One should not confuse making references to popular culture with actually being funny. The final meeting with the king certainly suffers as a McGuffin. Perhaps, instead of writing The Postmodern Pilgrim as a book, the authors could have used the travels of Ryan and Faith as a regular feature of the Babylon Bee where the Devil could offer us updates on their travails and progress. 

Toward a Meaningful Neo-Liberalism: A Historical Narrative

As a general rule of intellectual honesty, one should try to describe one’s opponents using their language as opposed to using loaded straw man language. This is an extension of the Ideological Turing Test. Can you describe a viewpoint you oppose without it being obvious you oppose it? For this reason, it is, in practice, counter-productive to call people racist or anti-Semitic unless they already embrace those labels for themselves. An extreme example of this problem with labeling is the term “neoliberalism.” While you can fill a library with books on neoliberalism, I know of no neoliberal thinker, someone who self-consciously embraces the label for themselves instead of using it as an epithet against others. Contrast neoliberal with neoconservative. Neoconservatism may have taken a hit with the failure of the Iraq War (which is part of the reason why I abandoned the system) but there still remain proud neoconservatives.

One of the reasons, one needs to stick to what people openly proclaim about themselves is that, without that grounding, it is all too easy to fall prey to conspiracy theories that say more about you than your opponent. Nancy Maclean is the perfect example of this. Her search for a secret agenda makes her incapable of engaging with the thought of the late James Buchanan specifically or of Public Choice in general. Instead, she falls prey to conspiratorial thinking that sounds delusional to anyone not already convinced of the existence of a Koch Brothers plot to take over the world.

This is not a unique problem for people on the left. Consider the state of conservative discourse on Marxism. In the case of Marxism, we are dealing with a concept that continues to attract open self-proclaimed, followers. Furthermore, Marxism, by its very nature, is a conspiracy. More so than any other political ideology, Marxism is not simply a set of beliefs but a methodology for seizing power. Furthermore, Marxists pursue the dishonest strategy of framing their position in terms of their noble intentions as opposed to what they may have to do to bring about those ends. Despite all this being true, it is usually counter-productive to accuse people of being part of a Marxist conspiracy. (For one thing, not all Marxists are conspirators; many are not even political.) Such anti-Marxist thinking will usually backfire on the accusor, trapping them in paranoid delusions. Personally, I think Jordan Peterson is great until he starts talking about Cultural Marxism and equating it with post-modernism. The moment he does this, he stops engaging living people but his own fears. He should stick to Jungian literary analysis and preaching personal responsibility.

I would like to suggest a means to rescue neoliberalism from being a generic conspiratorial term of abuse for those not sufficiently on the hard left. We can use neoliberalism to refer to the political consensus that arose in the 1970s in England and the United States that combined a pro-business skepticism in regard to heavy welfare spending with a warfare mentality abroad and at home.  Underlying this was a cultural Christianity even as the shifts in society made openly theocratic politics implausible.

The key thinker here was William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, who fashioned late 20th-century conservatism as an alliance between social conservatives, neoconservatives, and limited government free marketers. Getting such different groups to cooperate was possible because all three groups had a perceived common enemy in the 1960s liberal, who wished to use an expansive state to overthrow traditional values and undermine the United States military in order to allow the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. It was this brand of conservativism that defeated the post-war liberal consensus and fashioned a neoliberal consensus in its place.

The United States and England, after the Great Depression and World War II, were dominated by a "New Deal" consensus in which it was assumed the government would take on a greatly expanded role in running the economy and offer a wider range of welfare programs. In England, national healthcare was seen as a reward to the English people for the sacrifices they underwent fighting Nazism. Even if Churchill had been able to stave off the 1945 Labor landslide, there was no way that conservatives could have resisted the popular tide to offer a major state-sponsored safety net.

This did not mean that voters in either country rejected right-wing parties. One of the marks of a political consensus is its ability to draw in even the opposition to the point where, even as they criticize particular points of policy, they accept the fundamental premises behind those policies. This serves the ironic purpose of establishing the consensus as it makes it almost impossible to think outside of it. The Republicans in the United States under Dwight Eisenhower did very well for themselves. That being said, Eisenhower helped entrench the New Deal, perhaps with a more corporate spin. In England, Conservative prime ministers like Harold Macmillan or Ted Heath could succeed by being innocuous managers of the ship of state. Neither of them were ideologues with a vision to counter that of the Labor Party. As such, whether Labor won or lost, it was still Labor's agenda that was going to dominate; the only question conservatives were left with was to what extent specific Labor policies would be implemented.

This post-war consensus in the United States and England was made possible by strong working-class support. This collapsed in the late 1960s and 70s. In the United States, we see white disillusionment with the Civil Rights movement. The parallel for England, perhaps, was the end of the British Empire, which had the ironic result of England bringing the empire home with its liberal immigration policy for those from the former imperial holdings. This undermined a sense of common ethnic identity so important for consensus building. Both the United States and England faced the problem of transitioning to a post-industrial economy. As long as both countries benefited from the post-war economic boom and the optimistic belief that things were improving it was possible to paper over the differences in society, making compromise possible. A growing tax base would be able to pay for an expanding list of programs either in the present or at least in the near future. Without the economic boom and the optimism that it usually generates, such compromise became impossible as politics was reduced to a collection of tribes fighting over the remnants of a shrinking pie, each side trying to grab their piece before it was all gone.

Into this gap left by the failed post-war consensus came neoliberalism as represented by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Unlike their Conservative and Republican predecessors, they actually had an ideology. Limiting government spending in the name of free markets served a practical purpose under the economic challenges of the 1970s. It also helped frame neoliberal policies as advancing the cause of freedom through limiting government. It is important to realize that neoliberalism was a product of a wider liberal consensus and, unlike traditional conservatism, was not about to take any kind of principled stand in favor of hierarchy.

Much as neoliberalism was not a defense of any kind of crown, it also rejected the altar of religious authority. As Victorian morality was an attempt to find a justification for religion in a world with Darwinian Evolution and Biblical Criticism, Neoliberalism was a product of the secularization of the public sphere and an acceptance of that reality. Neoliberalism still wished to fight a rearguard action to save religion as a cultural force. Beyond that, religion served to cement the 1960s liberal as the enemy trying to shove secularism down the throats of common folk. Abortion is a good example of this. Making abortion illegal was never a practical goal. Roe vs. Wade was the product of a growing wave to legalize abortion (ironically enough, helped along by then Gov. Reagan of California) even as the Supreme Court's decision counter-productively short-circuited the national conversation. The Court's ham-handed approach gifted neoliberals by allowing them to campaign less against abortion itself than against Roe. The real story of Roe became liberals trying to force their values on the rest of society as opposed to a woman's right to choose.   

From the earlier liberal post-war consensus and ultimately the Wilsonian tradition, neoliberalism inherited an activist foreign policy in the name of advancing democracy. Thatcher famously fought the Falklands War in 1982 to hold on to one of the last vestiges of the British Empire even as it served little purpose beyond taking a final stand in the name of the Empire. What was different now was that this foreign policy was meant to be pursued in defiance of the hard left who rejected the Western tradition, seeing it as the source of imperialism and racism. Neoliberalism was meant as a war to be fought at home as well as abroad. One manifestation of this was the War on Drugs, which served to establish active drug users (in practice those on the left) as the enemy and gave the police the tools to wage actual war against this enemy.

Up until now, my description of neoliberalism has simply been late 20th-century Anglo-American conservatism. Here is the twist; just as the post-war consensus did not keep conservative parties out of office as long as they were willing to play the moderate pragmatists to the dominant liberal ideology, neoliberalism offered a temptation to liberals to gain electoral victory as the moderate pragmatists, cementing neoliberalism as the reigning ideology. From this perspective, a critical part of neoliberalism was the rise of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. They were not a rejection of neoliberalism but the epitome of its power.

Both of these politicians criticized Reagan and Thatcher but from within a certain consensus. So conservatives were to be criticized for running up deficits to support tax cuts for the wealthy. Gone was the romantic notion of a welfare state that could transform society. In its place was an accountant's pragmaticism of getting the maximal utility for the taxpayer's money. Clinton was willing to fight for abortion but he did so from within a consensus that still paid religion cultural deference. Most infamously, he signed the Defence of Marriage Act. Clinton's foreign policy was a continuation of a neoliberal desire to see the United States as the global defender of freedom now being practiced without the Soviet Union as an excuse. Bush's Iraq Invasion in search of weapons of mass destruction was simply an extension of Clinton's use of the American military in a post-9/11 world. It was Blair who was Bush's most important ally in invading Iraq.

Just as the post-war consensus benefited from the post-war economic boom, which granted legitimacy to the dominant government policies, neoliberalism benefited from the computer and internet revolutions of the 1990s. How does one argue with policies that seem to work and seem to be creating a rising tide that should raise all boats? Just as the economic stagnation of the 1970s made the post-war consensus appear suddenly vulnerable, the economic crisis of 2008 made neoliberalism suddenly appear as the emperor with no clothes. The political fallout was slow in coming as the political class remained under its spell long after the general public. Barack Obama came from the same mold of pragmatic neoliberalism as the Clintons. Thus, he framed his policies in anti-Republican terms, ignoring the wider neo-liberal framework.

Donald Trump brought down Republican neoliberalism by demonstrating it lacked a real basis of ideological support. Similarly, David Cameron was brought down by Brexit, which demonstrated that his own Conservative Party base did not support the relatively free-trade and open-border policies of the European Union. Once neoliberalism fell as an ideology within conservative circles, there was no longer a reason for liberals to play pragmatic lip service to neoliberalism either. Hence the rise of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in England.

In the wake of the fall of neoliberalism, Anglo-American politics seems to be turning into a conflict between nationalists and democratic socialists. What the new dominant consensus will be remains to be seen. I suspect that it will be some version of a blatantly extractive state that attempts to bribe its voters with the right and the left simply disagreeing on who should be expropriated and for whose benefit.

From this proposed definition of neoliberalism and this history offered a few things should be clear. I discuss neoliberalism within an Anglo-American context, though I confess that I might be stretching things even to include England. How much more problematic to include other countries. I readily grant that one could draw parallels between Anglo-American neoliberalism and policies in other countries. Those who are more knowledgeable than I am regarding non-Anglo-American politics should feel free to make those comparisons as long as they show proper caution. The more you stretch a term, the greater the risk of either distorting the reality on the ground or rendering the word meaningless. One thinks of the problem of talking about "feudal" Japan. Yes, there are certain parallels to Europe but it is risky to push those comparisons too far. Similarly, I do not think it is productive to call authoritarian figures like Augusto Pinochet of Chile or Deng Xiaoping of China neoliberals. Doing so risks distorting the differences between these countries and descending into conspiratorial thinking where Anglo-American neoliberals not only become people plotting to violently undermine democratic norms but also have Elders of Zion capabilities to rule the world.

Even within Anglo-American politics, notice the number of people who should be placed outside of neoliberalism. While Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were influential figures in the rise of neoliberalism, one should not make a direct link between neoliberalism and libertarianism. Here, the War on Drugs is important. Nor should one equate neoliberalism with neo-confederates or white nationalism. On the contrary, neoliberalism grew out of a world in which open white nationalism was no longer politically viable and its fall has opened that door once again.

Because I have limited the scope of neoliberalism in time and place it appears much less all-powerful and sinister. Neoliberalism was a political ideology espoused by specific people in a specific time and place with a variety of policy positions some of which may or may not appeal to readers. My teenage self was more supportive of this kind of neoliberalism than I am now. That being said, the fact that whatever is going to replace neoliberalism is likely to be worse, I do confess to being nostalgic for neoliberalism.