James Kalb

In his comments on my discussion of alternate modernities, Paul Gottfried observes that in our present situation there's no educational program, system of alliances, or political and cultural strategy that seems likely to get us out of the hole we're in.

I agree. If we start with what I called the modern "attempt to base social order simply on this-worldly empirical man," we can't get anywhere, because we can't escape the problem of conflicting wills fighting over who gets what. The only way to deal with that problem is by some combination of force and fraud, and any new combination of programs, alliances, and strategies is just going to be one more configuration of force and fraud. Why should our force and fraud work out better than everyone else's? Haven't the possibilities been tried and found wanting?

The problem, it seems, is the basic modern understandings that make our present situation what it is and so condition all the programs, alliances, strategies, and so on that now seem reasonable and practical. Things won't get a whole lot better until those understandings change, and that won't happen because some group of activists and theoreticians puts together a system of understandings that's more to their liking and tries to get them adopted by the dominant forces in society.

In particular, as Paul notes, right-wingers aren't going to create a better world by getting together and aligning themselves with selected religious institutions, "command[ing] the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview," and educating the masses into an outlook more to their liking. Among other problems, religious institutions themselves are affected by the dominant understandings.

But what then? If we don't like the way things are there must be some response--alcohol, skydiving, suicide, whatever--that makes sense even if political maneuvering is not likely to do much for us.

My proposal was to "go back to first things." What defines the political situation is what seems best and most real to the people involved, and if the situation is impossible those things must change. Current understandings have basic problems that (among other things) lead to a view of man as essentially asocial and eventually mean various forms of tyranny as well as "mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled."

It follows that the dissatisfied need first of all to understand the world better, and in a way that enables them to live in a manner more worthy of human nature. That, of course, is a prepolitical issue. It's worth dealing with in itself, since doing so will help ourselves and our families and friends. It's more than just a personal matter, though, since such initiatives can spread and transform social life. At some point some initiative will--it's happened before and will happen again--so why not ours if it's superior?

The present setup has basic contradictions, and won't last forever any more than other social arrangements have. With that in mind, those with an outlook and way of life that is more true and more worth living by should make their pitch and see what catches on and endures. As I commented, "revolutions begin in thought, and the way of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually."

The proposal sounds impossibly conjectural and long-range, but when there is no obvious quick fix you drop day-to-day events as your reference point and do what you can for what could work in principle. If what's needed is a change in basic understandings then that's what you should pursue. Modernity makes effectiveness the measure of thought, but to deal with the world effectively you have to deal on their own terms with issues that precede effectiveness, like what is real and good.

Such an approach might get results soon: things might be better than they seem, late modernity might be a bubble about to burst, the Church (which like everything else has its own characteristic way of functioning) might be about to revert to type, or something nobody has thought of might happen. Or it might take effect slowly or not at all. The same is true of every approach, though, and the basic point is that this approach--unlike others--could work in concept, and is worth pursuing on its own terms even if it does not.

The big question is what a superior way of thought would be. On that point opinions differ and discussion is necessary. In order to deal with man as he actually is and the problems politics actually present we need an outlook that's adequate to the world as we experience it. It seems clear, to me at any rate, that such an outlook requires an understanding of practical rationality not limited to technology and of knowledge not limited to modern natural science.

Otherwise we cannot, among other things, understand people. To understand and deal with life and human beings as we find them, I suggested that "something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good" is necessary. Whether I'm right on that is a matter for discussion. Still, each of us in his manner of life displays what he thinks is most real and most worth living by. We're more likely to make progress on basic issues to the extent we articulate and examine such commitments. Our problems today really are that basic, which is the reason there seems to be no exit from them.

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

I've said that inclusiveness has a religious quality. To say it is a kind of religion is not to say it works well as one. Religion defines the place of man in the world, but inclusiveness reflects the modern outlook, which has difficulty dealing with such issues. It likes unitary theories that lead to clear conclusions, so it tries to dissolve the world into man or man into the world. Neither makes sense, so moderns--including liberals--oscillate between the two and settle on neither.

Cartesian egos

At bottom, liberalism views the individual person as the Cartesian ego--a disembodied subject with no qualities other than the ability to have experiences and make choices. If we accept that understanding, and view the external world from the radically subjective standpoint that results, it becomes something we construct from our sensations for the sake of our goals.

Such an understanding affects our attitude toward the world. It makes every particular tie to things outside ourselves seem an intrusion that has somehow gotten hold of us and is dragging us down. The result is a compulsion to destroy attachments that make claims on us. Hence the need for sexual liberation, abolition of social roles, mass third-world immigration, multiculturalism, and so on. Society must be destroyed as a network of particular persons and relationships in a particular setting and turned into an abstract neutral schema for the satisfaction of desire.

The role of the other

The matter cannot rest there, because the Cartesian ego is so odd philosophically. It is not part of the world of experience, and it is unclear how something with no positive qualities could be embodied. The result is difficulty understanding our place in the world. Am I the only reality, because the subjective outlook is so privileged, or am I not real at all, because I have no enduring tangible qualities or connections? With respect to ourselves, such difficulties lead to insecurity, narcissism, and identity crises. With respect to other people, they lead to an obsession with the non-Western other.

Non-Westerners are defined as such by the fact they do not have the free-floating Cartesian ego as their self-understanding. Since they do not view themselves in that way, they can be seen as embodied and part of the world of experience. That gives them a very special though ambiguous significance. From one perspective the Cartesian outlook turns whites into abstractions who hardly exist at all, while nonwhites remain vibrant concrete realities. From another, it makes nonwhites a colorful background--part of the Stuff White People Like--that accessorizes the narcissism of white liberal Cartesians. There is no way within the liberal outlook to choose between the two, so particular liberals flop back and forth depending on mood and circumstances.

Horizontal transcendence

The problem often takes a religious form. The absorption of traditional religion by inclusiveness reflects in part an effort to maintain religious values in a scientistic world. In such a world God is unthinkable, so people fall back on themselves. Their concerns and desires are what they know--indeed, they are That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived--so why not treat them as divine?

The problem is that radical self-centeredness is not a satisfactory religion. We need a moral and spiritual order beyond ourselves that enables us to place ourselves and make sense of our situation. One possible solution is horizontal transcendence: standing in awe before other people as ineffably and unclassifiably other, disclosing to us a reality that cannot be reduced to our own purposes and categories, and imposing peremptory moral obligations on us through their needs and desires.

On such a view, those most radically other than ourselves become natural exemplars of the holy. However, the solution is unstable because in fact the non-Western other is evidently no more holy than we are. One can respect someone's good qualities and human dignity, but it is silly to overlook whatever flaws and limitations he has, or take him more seriously than ourselves or those to whom we have a more immediate connection.

Once again, the outcome is a messy compromise, this one between self-involvement and sentimentality about third-world peasants. Something of the sort is a very common solution among spiritually-inclined liberals, especially those among them who find it natural to express their souls in peasant-themed home decor, fashion accessories, and cooking styles.

Political modernity is based on rejection of the premodern belief that man participates in some sort of higher nature. As such, it can take several forms. Liberalism is the form that has won, but not the only one that has existed.

If we get rid of the transcendent, we might view man as fundamentally biological or historical, or as self-created in some way. Moderns have therefore tried to base social order on biology, history, or the triumph of the will.

Biology

Modern natural science favors physical explanations, so the most obvious and direct response to modernity is the attempt to base social order on the physical aspects of man's being. The usual physicalist view is that natural selection--in Darwin's terms, "the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life"--explains human nature and behavior. For that reason, physicalists have often viewed racial struggle as fundamental. The physical flourishing of the Aryan race becomes the highest good, at least for Aryans, and similarly for other groups.

A basic problem with the view is that what men find worthwhile in life cannot be reduced to the survival and multiplication of an extended kinship group. For that reason, the latter cannot serve as the guiding principle of social order. That is why people who put nation and race first have ended up emphasizing arbitrary will more than biology, and relying on theatrics, irrationalism, and violence to overcome the intellectual weakness of their position.

History

Secular conservatives, who are moderate modernists, have tried to mitigate the effect of their basic antitranscendental commitments by basing social order on habit and history. They hold the modern view of man, but accept that we do not have an effective technology of social life. For that reason they accept experience as their guide, and with it the necessity of the inherited, informal, and prerational aspects of social order.

The approach has failed. Secular conservatives are proponents of traditional ways and attachments, so they favor particularity and the practices, conditions, and institutions that allow it to maintain itself and function. In present-day America, those include federalism, local autonomy, traditional marriage, restrictions on immigration, limitations on the welfare state, and respect for the right of families and religious and community institutions to run their own affairs.

Conservatives have continually given ground on all those issues. Their weakness has been especially apparent in connection with issues related to "inclusiveness." Apart from illegal immigration and affirmative action, which are sore points for voters, conservative politicians have been willing to swear devotion to an antidiscrimination regime that is at odds with attachment to any tradition except that of liberal progress. Even opposition to affirmative action and illegal immigration has been sporadic and lukewarm, more a matter of opportunistic gestures than a genuine effort to change law and policy.

The failure was preordained. Belief in history doesn't tell you anything helpful when trends are against you. As moderns, secular conservatives accept satisfaction of preferences as the rational guide to action, but as conservatives they need people to act on other principles. Why should people do so when it becomes inconvenient? Continuity and respect for traditional ways may be a good thing in general, but there are exceptions, and why should my case not be an exception?

Political reality is shaped by how the world is understood. Secular conservatives do not seriously dispute fundamental current understandings, and those understandings make any serious opposition to liberalism seem irrational and wrong, the sort of thing that leads to Nazism and whatnot. They've already surrendered in principle, so why expect their resistance to amount to much?

The Triumph of the Will

Abolishing transcendence abolishes the distinction between preference satisfaction and the good, so that satisfaction of preferences becomes the rational purpose of all action. From that perspective, the most rational political response to modernity is the attempt to derive moral and social order from maximum preference satisfaction.

Preferences conflict, however, and they are equally preferences, so whose should prevail? The obvious answer is to prefer one's own, but "looking out for number one" is not, at least without severe limitation, a principle of social order. Since man is social, it does not even work in private life.

Fascism and bolshevism

It is not easy to make arbitrary will a principle of public order. Antiliberal moderns dramatize the paradox and then resolve it by emphasizing the conflicts and then appealing to collective power as their solution: the will of the people, party, or state, embodied in that of the supreme leader, overcomes all others and establishes order. The motive for participation in the effort, and thus the basis for loyalty to the regime, becomes the joy of smashing the opposition, together with comradeship in the struggle to make the willed order prevail.

A problem with the solution is that antiliberal moderns are moderns. As such, it is natural for them to view collectivities as arbitrary constructions. What is special about the proletariat or the German people? Who do they include and why? Why are Stalin and Hitler their perfect representatives? And why should my will and their will be the same? Such questions are unanswerable, so fascists and communists embraced irrationalism and relied quite directly on lies and violence as the basis for their rule.

The result was catastrophe. Antiliberal modernists took as their principle of social order worship of the power of the order itself. In the absence of substantive goods that principle could express itself only through self-assertion against opposition, the more extreme the better. In the end infinite victory in infinite war became the ruling ideal of social life.

A society that places itself on such a basis is not going to last. It will crash and burn like the Nazis, or sink into posturing, hypocrisy, and corruption that eventually becomes terminal, like the Soviets after Stalin.

Liberalism

Liberalism defers and defuses the problem posed by the sovereign will with its claim to maximize the satisfaction of all preferences equally. The will is to be tamed by the equal sovereignty of other wills and the demands of a technically rational system. Arbitrary power and social conflict vanish.

The peacefulness of its ideal has enabled liberalism to outlast communism, fascism, and Nazism. Nonetheless, those other forms of modernity responded to a real problem. By abolishing the idea of participation in higher goods and unities, the modern outlook separates individual goals from social needs. To re-integrate them some ideological myth is needed.

Fascists and communists proceed in a straightforward way by making the People or the State the only reality that matters, so the individual becomes insignificant. If that move is accepted--and those who reject it soon drop out of the conversation--the conflict between individual and collectivity disappears as an issue.

The liberal myth is more subtle. Instead of absorbing the individual into the collectivity, it absorbs the collectivity into the individual. It presents the liberal state as government by and for the people, here to serve them and acting only to promote their freedom and equality. What that state imposes reduces without remainder to individual desire and content-free public rationality. Obedience to its authority is not subservience but only intelligent promotion of what we already want.

Such is the official story. In fact, of course, liberal government is like other government. It is run not by the many but by the few. Those who rule try to make their life easier by accommodating popular concerns, but their guiding principle is less the will of the people than staying in power and running things in accordance with their own interests and understandings.

In fact, the liberal myth is no more true than the collectivist one. No government can favor equal freedom among men and their preferences, since some must lose in the event of conflict. Also, we often choose things other than satisfaction of desire: God, country, and family; adventure, struggle, and comradeship; the good, beautiful, and true. To the extent we prefer such things to getting our own way simply as such, hedonism makes no sense. It "gives us what we want," but we reject the goal as unworthy.

To avoid such problems liberal government has to tell us what to want. We can have what we want, but what we are allowed to want--safe and moderate devotion to career, consumption, and various private indulgences--must suit the regime. That is supposed to be the perfection of freedom, but who believes it? The desires we are allowed to pursue leave out everything we care about most. And the authorities from which we are freed--family, prejudice, religion, particular people and culture--are what enable us to live and act independently of the formal institutions that constitute the liberal regime.

The freedom liberalism grants is the freedom to be dependent on liberalism and do, think, and feel what it wants us to do, think, and feel. Who wants that? And why trust a system in which we all place ourselves under guardianship, supposedly for our own good, to turn out well?

The Moral of the Story

It's clear from what's happened that the attempt to build social order simply on this-worldly empirical man doesn't work. That's true for a variety of reasons. One is that it's part of the general modern effort to understand the world in a way that eliminates mystery and facilitates control, and if you deal with people that way you're going to see them as less than they are and tyrannize over them.

The conclusion is that to get out of the political, social, and intellectual hole we've fallen into we have to go back to first things. For starters, we're going to have to bring back something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good. Otherwise we're not going to be able to deal with man as he is or the problems politics actually presents.

That is not an impossible dream. Revolutions begin in thought, and the scheme of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually. Advanced liberalism means mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled. It seems to me someone can do better.

A discussion group I'm associated with (it's The H. L. Mencken Club) is talking about putting on a conference on the "conservative canon"--books that have been, or should be, central to the American Right.

The idea is that many people believe the old booklists have become stale. Time has passed, conditions have changed, and books that seemed just the thing in 1970 no longer hit the spot. They didn't keep us from losing badly, and people don't pay much attention to them anyway, so why not step back and rethink?

In the old days a movement-oriented booklist would have concentrated on postwar writings by men such as Kirk, Nisbet, Weaver, Burnham, and others, most of whom were associated in some way with the old National Review. A more academic list might have included politically moderate skeptics like Hume, hard-headed Founding Fathers like John Adams, and counter-Enlightenment figures like Burke and Maistre, all the way down to the 20th century with its secular theorists of tradition like Hayek and Oakeshott and critics of European ideologies like Voegelin and Strauss.

Many people today would put forward similar lists, maybe supplemented (in the movement case) with neoconservative titles. If new times require something else, though, what should change?

The following talk was delivered at the 2010 H. L. Mencken Club.

The title of my talk is PC: The Cultural Antichrist.

It's an odd title, but political correctness is an odd tendency. It's a bit uncanny. It doesn't fit in with how we normally think about things. That's why we don't know what to make of it. People try to laugh it off, but it doesn't laugh off.

It seems too stupid to be real but it trumps everything all the same. If a thieving employee shoots and murders his co-workers the big question is whether any of them were racists. When an affirmative action army officer does the same, because he wants to do jihad, what top brass worry about is whether it will make diversity look bad.

A New Religion

Something that trumps normal considerations so completely must have transcendent importance. It's clear that PC relates to something big.

A correspondent recently complained about the tendency of generic conservatives to adopt "Islam oppresses women" as a major reason for opposing Muslim assertiveness and expansion. Doesn't that approach (he asked) play into a feminist analysis of society, and end by supporting feminist solutions generally? And as a factual matter, can it really be true that Muslim society is fundamentally a system whereby men oppress women? Doesn't it have other more basic problems, and wouldn't there be more give and take on that particular point?

I'm sympathetic with such concerns. The "Muslims oppress women" theme tends to merge opposition to violent jihad and the spread of Islam in the West into a general crusade for global liberation understood in a left/liberal sense. It easily turns into "religion oppresses women" and "tradition oppresses women" unless there's a focus on the specific nature of Islam, which there never is.

More basically, though, the Muslim treatment of women is their problem. Why should we get involved in their problems, when we've got our own and can't do much about theirs anyway? I'd prefer "Muslims engage in terrorism" and "Muslims are anti-Western" as themes, where "Western" refers to something more specific and complex than universal principles of freedom, equality, and scientific rationalism. I suppose "we don't want to be Muslim" should be part of the mix, and the position of women is part of that, but it's not as if relations between the sexes are in great shape in the West, so it's odd to put it first and foremost.

We do need to know what we're dealing with, so we should discuss the merits. On that point I'd say women are unquestionably at a disadvantage in Islam. Men can have several wives, and they can divorce at will. So the bond between man and woman is weaker and less balanced, and there is less mutual trust and more use of force than in traditional Western society.

Principles like that have some effect on day-to-day life, and a big effect on the likelihood of the kind of extreme situation that makes the news. So there are a lot more honor killings and stonings for adultery in Muslim societies, just as there are more babies who get their skulls punctured and brains sucked out in liberal societies.

General principles don't determine everything though, and in any event there are also general Islamic principles requiring fair treatment and whatnot. On the whole, people are people, life is mostly particular events, domestic ill-feeling is no fun, and women know how to get their way even if men are supposedly in charge. So I don't think the "generalized system of sexist abuse" theory holds water. How could such a system be maintained in household after household century after century over whole continents? Why would so many people go to such an effort?

I know something about life among at least some Muslims, since I spent a couple of years before all the unpleasantness began as a Peace Corps math teacher at a government boarding school in a small village in Afghanistan.

(The school where I taught, in Helmand Province, has since become Forward Operations Base Delhi. You can see a row of classrooms I taught in at around 1:40 in this video.)

There weren't many polygamous marriages where I was, and a lot of them had to do with special situations (your brother dies so you've got a second wife all of a sudden). And there were few or no divorces. There really can't be: at the crudest level, bride price might be 5 years salary for a schoolteacher, and the woman's family isn't going to be pleased if you toss her aside, so basically you make a go of what you've got.

It was hard for a single foreign man to observe family relations directly, but you could pick up this and that. Girls went around freely in public until they were 12 or so, and fathers seemed no less attached to them than to boys. There was one teacher--a very intelligent man who had studied in America and spoke excellent English--who notoriously beat his wife, and people looked down on that. There was another who was reputedly a great lover, and the women would giggle and tell stories behind the scenes.

Mostly the bits and pieces I heard about sounded like normal domestic life--A's wife had worry B about the children, C's wife wanted some sort of fancy cloth so he picked it up for her, etc. The most respected of the teachers, who everyone called "Father," had a much younger wife people called "Mother" who went around without a veil and did what she wanted. She was a very spirited woman, and nobody messed with her.

So far as I could tell, a lot of the differences had to do with the nature of the society rather than Islam as such. The two are connected, but it's complicated. Maybe it's something of a chicken-and-egg problem--Islam catches on in societies to which it's adapted. Or maybe the nature of the pre-Islamic society makes a big difference in how Islam turns out. Others will have to say.

The women didn't have much public presence where I was, but that didn't mean what people here would expect. There's less public life in Muslim countries. The classic Middle Eastern city was a bazaar and some palaces, mosques, and barracks in the public sphere, and also walled quarters where people lived among their own and ran their own affairs.

The family was generally a unit of production as well as consumption, so the idea of "career" was mostly irrelevant. That's still largely true, by the way. Career depends on large formal organizations, and such things don't work well in the radically divided societies you find in the Middle East and Central Asia. People are mostly farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers, and the ideal is having enough to live on so you can sit at home drinking tea.

I remember a guy in Kashmir (another Muslim region) asking me--very tentatively, he didn't want to seem like a fool who takes everything he hears seriously--whether it was true that in the West people didn't think it was enough to have money to live on and hang with their friends but also wanted to work as a positive good thing.

So the basic idea has always been that everything's behind walls, with extended families living together in compounds, and outsiders only admitted to the relatively small public areas. Behind the scenes, which is where everything took place, the women were much freer and certainly part of what was going on. There was also lots of to and fro through back doors into other compounds. The images of imprisonment you get in the West aren't at all accurate.

I suppose another influence leading to the absence of women from public life was the possibility of abduction. It's expensive to get a wife, so why not steal one? That can be a real possibility in a radically divided society without much public order in which everything takes place in walled quarters and compounds and there's more emphasis on arbitrary fortune than free choice anyway. That's not the sort of thing that's a big current issue, but I think it had a role in how the system developed and the possibility still has an influence somewhere in the background.

A problem with the whole picture is that the way of life doesn't transplant to all settings. It doesn't work at all in a bureaucratic and industrial society in which people live in small apartments in large buildings and make their livings as operatives and functionaries in big organizations. So traditional Muslims in the West have problems and modernization runs into problems in Muslim countries. I have no doubt that one result is increased conflict and violence.

Whether the Muslims will be able to pick and choose among aspects of modernity and come up with something that works for them I don't know. If they want to convert to Catholicism I'd be glad to send them a catechism or even explain why it's a good idea, but if they want to do their Islamic thing I can't help them.

Converting them to liberalism--by force or any other way--doesn't seem to be the answer. We in the West have our own problems, and we're in no position to straighten other people out. Let the Muslims have a go at it where they run things and let's leave each other alone. Each should mind his own business, barring extraordinary circumstances, and maintain boundaries for the sake of peace.

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.