James Kalb

In an age of checklists, decision trees, and zero tolerance, it's a puzzling notion.

People think it means giving up on reason. Or doing what's been done no matter what. Or accepting an external authority that has nothing to do with the situation we're actually dealing with.

What else could it mean, when each of us has his own thoughts and goals, reason is a matter of studies and statistics, and social authority is either following rules we've agreed to for our own purposes, or getting someone else's demands shoved down our throat?

Moral Mazes is an account of life in the corporate management suite by sociologist Robert Jackall. At bottom, it's a description of life at court. The desires of the powerful are what matter, responsibility exists to be shifted, an Act of God (recession, change in management, public relations issue, whatever) might change everything overnight, and whatever happens has to be presented as part of a rational and controlled system in which one was right all along and nothing could ever interfere with the steady increase in earnings quarter to quarter.

Such a situation naturally leads to amoral self-seeking and endless manipulation of illusions in which the original purpose of the activity disappears. Rational management, it seems, isn't so rational. In the twentieth anniversary edition of the book that just came out the author tacks on a discussion of the recent meltdown of the financial system that applies the same general analysis to explain why the people running the show were so irresponsible, self-involved, and generally clueless. What he says might have come out of Chronicles or any paleoconservative publication--he even gets into immigration as an example of our rulers' fecklessness.

Tradition makes us what we are. The institutions that are dominant today want to make us more manageable as human resources, so they destroy all traditions but those of consumerist careerism. The latter, of course, include pluralism and inclusiveness.

People usually don't like it when things that are close to them are attacked for someone else's benefit. So why doesn't everyone join the traditionalists and overthrow the technocrats?

The untutored or perhaps commonsense view is that there's something out of order about certain sexual acts. They're "unnatural," as people once said, or "intrinsically disordered," as the Church says today.

Nowadays of course educated people think that's all ridiculous. After all, no one says sodomy or whatnot is miraculous, so it evidently complies with the order of nature. And all intentional actions are unnatural in some sense, since they change what would happen if we let things go their own way.

So to discuss sexual conduct with people today it seems you have to go with the flow and start with the assumption that there's no natural or unnatural in human affairs. Still, there's less to the change than meets the eye. "Free to be you and me" is not the sum of all wisdom. There's still the question how choice should be exercised.

Paul Gottfried's comments on my post on shrinks and hipsters raise several interesting points: is the social outlook found among the modish half-educated young an organic development or an intentional construction? Can we can do something about it and the broader stream of advanced liberalism of which it is part? And if something can be done, what's the key?

On the first point, there's no doubt a bit of a mixture but organic development seems more basic. Today's education is propagandistic but a system of propaganda can grow up organically. There's nothing radically autonomous about liberal theorists and propagandists. They function as part of a system that's evolved historically.

Paul's books have shown that major political traditions--liberalism, leftism, Christian activism--have all sunk into the same politically-correct mush. I've followed up with a book of my own claiming that the degeneration is a result of current understandings of knowledge and reality. If all that's even partly true, how can our situation at bottom be something that's constructed?

In any event, an emphasis on organic development helps avoid conspiracy theories and false optimism. If our present situation were simply a construction it could be dealt with by finding the bad guys who are doing the constructing and getting rid of them. That would be good if true, but our problems are too basic for that.

"Organic development" is another way of saying that a lot of things have grown up that are working together to promote advanced liberalism. That seems to be the case. It's conceivable that the bad guys continually win overwhelmingly because they're demonically powerful and clever, but more likely it's because the wind is blowing their way.

The point of my initial posting was that one notable version of advanced liberalism expresses a psychological type that is produced by the conditions of life today, in particular by the expectations and presuppositions that surround young people as they grow up.

To mention such influences isn't to claim they're the whole story. The (at least short-term) stability of the present situation shows that the hipster psychological type and its conditions and consequences are part of a package in which one part supports the others.

That package includes the people and institutions present-day trends make socially dominant. Those people and institutions naturally favor the trends and understandings that secure their position.

Hence the system of indoctrination that passes for education today. If liberalism makes you law school dean, you'll use your deanship to promote liberalism. And if hipsterdom destroys human ties and makes tradition inconceivable, the managerial state will be perfectly happy to promote hipsterdom.

Indoctrination is certainly part of how things work now, but it wouldn't turn people into self-satisfied true believers unless they were more than ready to accept the message offered. Nor would it be so consistent and pervasive if it didn't express a self-sustaining system of concepts, attitudes, and understandings that makes the message seem self-evidently correct.

On the question of what to do, it's worth noting that the "organic development" guy in the discussion (me) is more inclined to say something can be done than the "intentional construction" one. Even so, I wouldn't carry the point too far. No law, policy initiative, or corps of administrators is going to get us out of the hole we're in. We need a basic shift in outlook and how people carry on their lives.

Something so basic and comprehensive would amount to a religious conversion. If that's so, then "nothing can be done" does sound like a sensible comment. You can't just will a mass religious conversion, especially on the grounds it'll have political benefits.

On the other hand, it seems right to look for what's possible. Basic transformations do come about, and people can do things that further or retard them. So why not try to understand what's going on, what's needed for something better, and what we can to promote it? If political difficulties lead us to notice that some things are more basic than politics, then that's a good thing too and it can tell us something about what we should attend to.

What sort of transformation is needed is a big topic. Here are a few points that seem worth mentioning:

• Ideas have consequences, and the nature of man, the good, the world, moral obligation, and so on affects the public order. For that reason Christianity is prepolitical rather than apolitical as some of the comments suggest.
• In a totalitarian age even nonpolitical religion is political, because it challenges official doctrine by denying the ultimate significance and authority of the regime. That's why commies past and present have wanted to squash Christianity.
• That's also why the purely political is no longer politically serious. We can't challenge the status quo unless we emphasize what precedes politics.
• When you've got big problems that aren't going away, basic principles are more important than current manifestations. The Catholic Church formed the West, and I think it remains essential to the West, but like much else it hasn't been in great shape lately. A basic question is whether that's a matter of fundamental principle or of stupidities and corruptions that won't necessarily last--in other words, whether the essential points are still there that would enable a return to type.
• Another question, assuming (as some suggest) that today's basic understandings and institutional arrangements make radical secularity inevitable, is whether those things can sustain themselves or whether we're living on borrowed time and a basically different understanding of man and the world will be needed for social order to remain functional. If the latter is true (which is my view), then the serious political question is what that understanding will be.

While doing a Google search I ran into an abstract of a 2007 scholarly article by three French psychiatrists whose English title is "New society, new families: a new basic personality? From the neurotic to the narcissistic-hedonistic personality."

The basic thought is that changes in education, family structure, social attitudes, and so on have led to a new dominant personality type with specific pathologies that require a reorientation of psychiatric care:

This basic personality, which could be termed as "narcissistic-hedonistic", is characterized by few internalizations, a poorly efficient Superego, nearly no guilt feeling, a weakly socialized Ideal Self suggesting more the Ideal Self of the early childhood, and finally a difficulty in experiencing or testing oneself as a free subject. The resulting narcissistic fragility leads the subject to be more dependent on external objects, to be allergic to frustration, to find delay in the achievement of instinctive aims hard to take, to develop an exaggerated pursuit of perception and sensations. The relation to time is also affected through a privileged investment in the present and the shading off of historical time. These changes must lead to a different subjectivity stemming from a new basic personality. Disorders may stem from three axis of this new basic personality: dependency with attachment disorders, narcissistic fragility, and a high risk of depression; guilt-free "narcissistic perversion" with people, who use other people for their own and exclusive interest, without real empathy; "light" psychopathy, with people capable of social integration for shorts periods of time, with a lot of breaking off in love, friendship, and professional ties.

The account is jargony but the substance sounds familiar. The basic idea is that people aren't really getting socialized, so character and connections to other people disappear. Instead there's just impulse, self-indulgence, and flip-flopping between grandiosity and depression, tyranny and subservience, and no doubt other mindless polarities. Life becomes a matter of pure immediacy and groundless assertion of self, combined with insecurity and avoidance of issues.

[The ninth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

Western societies treat liberal ideals of freedom, equality, diversity, tolerance, and inclusiveness as uniquely authoritative. Those ideals increasingly trump all other considerations and silence all criticism.

As a practical matter, they mean rule by experts, bureaucrats, and commercial interests that promise to give everyone what he wants, as much and as equally as possible. Other authorities aren't rational and neutral enough.

Under such circumstances, the function of representative institutions becomes legitimating decisions already reached in other ways. Traditional less formal institutions such as family and religion become strictly private in significance. The point of multiculturalism and similar tendencies is to keep them so by destroying the public relevance of every particular tradition.

[The eighth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

What's it like to live in a modern, diverse, tolerant, vibrant, inclusive, multicultural society? Everyday experience in early twenty-first century America is enough to sketch the situation in bold strokes.

Growing up absurd

Such a society lacks sustaining stories, symbols, and models of a good life, and indeed intentionally eradicates them. Such things are racist, since they reflect the specifics of a particular culture, and sexist and heteronormative, since they express fundamental patterns of human life. They're also theocratic, since they connect the order of human life to a particular understanding of the order of the world.

[The seventh in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

The Catholic view of the world has lasted a long time and supported many good things, so the Catholic view of antidiscrimination and inclusiveness ought to matter to anyone interested in those topics.

But what is "the Catholic view"? The phrase can refer to anything from the view that best fits the overall Catholic understanding of the world to the average view of all Catholics at a particular time and place. As a day-to-day matter, people mostly take it to be the view expressed by Catholic functionaries. If the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops puts out a statement, that's the Catholic position.

Recent pronouncements

Day-to-day pronouncements by Church officials on discrimination and related issues often seem generally consistent with the advanced liberal view. That view takes the lead, and situations where Catholic doctrines and traditions make deviations necessary are played down. Or so it seems.

[The sixth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

A common leftist claim is that established social and moral principles serve the interests of the ruling classes. The claim isn't applied to principles of which the left approves. In particular, it's not applied to inclusiveness. That's unfortunate, because it's obvious that inclusiveness serves governing elites by eliminating competitors and justifying an elaborate system of irresponsible control by those at the top.

In particular, inclusiveness makes money, bureaucracy, certified expertise, and therapy the sole permissible principles of social order, while treating other more traditional and natural principles as ignorant, irrational, and hateful. The rhetoric is familiar. Religious authority is bigoted and oppressive. Family authority is narrow, sexist, agist, heterosexist, ethnocentric, and intertwined with patriarchal religion. And authority based on history and tradition is exclusionary and racist.