Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the alt-right and Trump. Alresford, England: Zero Books, 2017. 120 pages.

It is easy to have dark, foreboding intuitions about what apocalyptic movements might be developing on the internet and social media. It is far harder to observe the birth processes of those rough beasts slouching towards Twitter to be born.

Of course, this is the nature of the development of extremist movements. To any outside observer, the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party would have presented nothing more than serious men in beards arguing incomprehensibly over party organization and dialectical materialism. Nor would watching angry veterans get drunk in Bavarian beer halls in 1921 have been much more enlightening about the threat to civilization steeping there.

It would have been helpful, when 20th-century totalitarianism was developing, to have someone like Irish journalist Angela Nagle around. The author of Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the alt-right and Trump is a sensitive and critical observer with the stamina to wade through enormous quantities of dreck. She has studied the tiresome and combative worlds of the online alt-right and identitarian left, managing to balance empathy, analysis and common sense. With the election of Donald Trump, her Marxisant publisher Zero Books recognized that this research was onto something big, and rushed to get this book out. In some places, the hurry shows: names are misspelled, minor errors abound and some chapters seem more finished than others. But overall this is an indispensable work of reporting and analysis.

Nagle starts by situating the dystopic worlds she is about to talk about in the recurrent “cyberutopianism” that periodically characterizes discussions of new communications technologies. The likely ur-text of cyberutopianism is John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,¹ which announced to the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel” that they had no sovereignty in the pure land of cyberspace, a “world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” in which the only law would be the Golden Rule.

In her first chapter, Nagle points to how this trope of cyberutopianism, despite apparently being buried by the absurdities of the dot-com era, was revived around 2011 with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. She documents romanticization of the “leaderless network” enabled by technology, pointing out that this ideology disabled Occupy from taking on either programmatic form or tactical flexibility. She then turns to the development of the current online right. Kill All Normies shows more compellingly than any other book I am aware of how a nerdy male online subculture oriented toward video games became an increasingly dangerous alt-right.

Nagle describes an older generation of paleoconservatives around Pat Buchanan, who have long viewed politics as a battleground of racial and religious identity and despised the neoconservative project of turning the United States into a “proposition nation” in which anyone, regardless of religious or ethnic background, could be American so long as they believed in free markets and the Declaration of Independence. For the neoconservatives, this possibility was precisely what made the United States superior to “Old Europe.” For the “paleocons,” America is and should be a nation rooted in a white Christian majority, threatened as much by economic globalization and the neoconservative project of “perpetual war for perpetual peace” as by the identity politics of minorities.

The Buchananites recognize their dilemma in supporting a white, Christian American identity that is tied to capitalism and to the valorization of the U.S. military. In Nagle’s Marxist analysis (which many Buchananites share), the traditional white Christian identity of the United States is among the apparently solid things that the logic of capitalism “melts into air” in favour of the depersonalized logic of market exchange. Although Nagle does not point this out, the U.S. military serves both as a critical cultural marker for the white working class culture the Buchananites champion and as the backstop for the liberal, global order they despise. The paleocons share with the identity left a belief that universal, Enlightenment norms of liberalism and modernism are deeply deluded, and indeed view themselves as warriors in an identity struggle for America’s traditional majority.

The Buchananites have been purged by the mainstream right a number of times, most recently during the Iraq war. But they developed a presence online and a policy of “no enemies to the right” – including the small fascist groups that have always existed in America.

The “alt-right” as we now know it comes from a meeting of these Buchananite intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals with a younger generation marinated in the hypermasculinist subcultures of video gamers and “pick up artists” (men who claim to study techniques for sexual success). The match is hardly a natural one.The denizens of 4chan do not live traditional Christian lives but delight in a deracinated, pornography-centred lifestyle and a nihilistic will-to-power worldview. In Nagle’s analysis, they are the product of the cultural left’s traditional valorization of “transgression” and irony. Nagle describes how the gamer subculture interacted with the “manosphere,” a “leaderless network” of men trading complaints about women, pop evolutionary psychology theories and tips on how to be sexually successful in the Hobbesian 21st-entury dating market. The “manosphere” shades into a “race realist” (i.e. racist) subculture, which focuses these psychosexual anxieties on concern about lack of fertility among white women.

Nagle documents the bizarre “gamergate” controversy, in which a feminist game designer who created “Depression Quest” (described by Nagle as “a terrible game featuring many of the fragility and mental illness–fetishizing characteristics of the kind of feminism that has emerged online in recent years”) was repeatedly threatened with rape and death and harassed in real life and online. This criminal behaviour represented only an extreme example of the treatment regularly visited on women who for some reason inspire the ire of male internet “trolls.” As Nagle pointed out before the world became aware of it with the deadly riots in Charlottesville in August 2017, at the far fringes of this movement are individuals clearly primed for terrorist violence. At the same time, they (apparently with some assistance from Vladimir Putin’s FSB) constituted the “troll army” supporting Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Nagle’s account combines clear-headed journalistic description of these dangerous developments with an analysis that goes beyond moral denunciation – one that clearly has Marxist provenance but avoids academic jargon. I appreciate her account of how the cultural production of “irony” can allow plausible deniability and how “transgression” can easily lead to reactionary politics. Her analysis of how the logic of 21st-century capital is undermining structures of family, nation and race that were central to the development of capitalism is hardly novel, but is used nicely. From Nagle’s perspective, neither the centre nor the left is providing a positive vision to young white men threatened by demographic transition, transactionalized sexual relationships and the loss of meaningful masculine work. 4chan does not purport to have any answers to these developments either, least of all a traditional religious one, but like a dematerialized Munich beer hall it provides a sense of identity and agonistic struggle.

The other virtual subculture Nagle reports on is left-Tumblr, the “microblogging” home of gender fluidity. As with the racist-masculinist-nationalist right, there is nothing new about the transgender subculture. Drag queens were instrumental in the 1969 Stonewall riot that was a seminal event in the development of the modern gay rights movement. The idea that gender is distinct from biological sex, and more fluid and performative, has been part of feminist theory since Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex and is the fundamental theme of Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble. What is new is Tumblr as the “subcultural digital expression of the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas.”

According to Nagle, there are now literally hundreds of genders being expressed on Tumblr, from Ambigender (“a feeling of two genders simultaneously, without fluidity”) to Xirl (identification as a non-binary girl or nonbinary girl-adjacent). It is easy to be put off by the jargon inherent in these explorations, but in many ways gender-identity Tumblr is the ultimate expression of Barlow’s claim that cyberspace could liberate people from the matter- and history-bound hierarchies of “meatspace.” There can be no doubt that this has been a truly liberating experience for many people faced by stigmatization and seeking social solidarity.

As a leftist, Nagle does not want to deny this and certainly expresses solidarity with people feeling stifled by gender conformity (or who are part of other groups that have found networks and identity online). But she notes that “amid all the vulnerability and self-humbling, members of these subcultures often behaved with extraordinary viciousness and aggression, like their anonymous Pepe-posting counterparts behind the safety of the keyboard.”

“Pepe the Frog” is a cartoon mascot of the “race realist” alt-right, so Nagle is drawing a parallel that is in many ways unfair. The identities found on Tumblr can be life-changing in positive ways, while the same can obviously not be said for awkward white males radicalized by 4chan or the manosphere into politicized bigots. Gender-fluid Tumblr is not known for death and rape threats. But it certainly is known for calling out individuals for humiliation and shaming. Examples of mob behaviour and fanaticism include a widely-followed Twitter user “Brienne of Snarth” who criticized a grieving father of a toddler killed by an alligator in 2016 for “white privilege.”

Nagle introduces the concept of a “scarcity of virtue.” Status can be gained by self-righteously or snarkily denouncing others for racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia. Many minor celebrities built followers on Tumblr or Twitter by doing just this. But they can, in their turn, be exposed for the same sins by those with a more secure position of intersectional virtue. The dynamics are familiar to people who have encountered left-wing sectarianism in the predigital age, or to those aware of the Christological debates of the fourth century.

But the immediacy of social media does seem to spread moral panics faster and make for astonishing victims. Nagle points to campaigns against feminist icon Germaine Greer and gay activist Peter Tatchell. Secular ex-Muslims have been particularly targeted. While progressives are vulnerable to these tactics, alt-right performance artists like Milo Yiannopoulos made careers out of provoking “social justice warriors,” generating publicity and material rewards from right-wing fans (in Yiannopoulos’s case, until he went over the line in making supportive comments about relationships between pubescent boys and adult men).

One question I have about Nagle’s story here is whether what she is describing is simply the inevitable excesses of an essentially beneficial movement for greater social inclusion. Every reform movement, including those we all commend in retrospect, has had ideologues and enforcers, and has inspired backlash in the broader society – which rarely wants to be disturbed. It is easy to imagine oneself as an abolitionist or fighter for women’s suffrage in the early days of those movements, but it is quite possible we would have found them – as most of their contemporaries did – to be tiresome, self-righteous monomaniacs.

On the other hand, we also have the examples of the Jacobins, Communists and left-wing terrorist groups to show that egalitarian ideology can be consistent with a soul-destroying militant conformism and authoritarianism. I suspect that gender fluidity and intersectionality are unlikely to lead to anything beyond the occasional overreaction and waste of energy, since they seem inherently implausible as a basis for real political power. But it is hard to know.

Nagle points to the revival of a class-based economic left as a way out of the clash of right and left identity politics. This is not a new idea: reading Second International Marxists, it is hard not to be struck by how many of them valued class politics as a way to get away from the nationalist passions they could see pulling European civilization apart (and putting Jews, in particular, in danger), even more than as a way of redressing the inequities of capitalism. The idea of class as the solution to the “national question,” the “woman question” and other such questions can be found in different ways in Engels, Luxemburg and Lenin.

In the end, the reactionaries who thought nation would always beat class turned out to be right. It is fascinating how strong the pull of the idea of class polarization as a cure for identity polarization is among millennial intellectuals like Nagle. This promise of an exit helps explain the appeal of wooden old-leftists like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn to people born after Marxism was apparently definitively buried.

Continue reading “#Weimar” →

Jacob T. Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015. 322 pages.

In Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, McGill Professor Jacob Levy has made a major contribution to political theory by identifying and elaborating on a deep and enduring split within liberalism that unlocks much that is otherwise mysterious about its past disputes and future prospects. All liberals want to protect freedom and equality but, from the beginning, they have disagreed about the main source of threat.

For some liberals (whom Levy dubs “rationalists”), the main dangers are from traditionalist communities, whether local, sectarian or familial. For rationalist liberals, these traditional loyalties are the source of sexism, superstition and repression. They see centralized, impersonal nation-states – or, even better, supranational statelike organizations from the European Union to the United Nations – are at least potentially open to reform based on a reasoned understanding of the rights of all. In contrast, other liberals (Levy’s “pluralists”) see the bureaucratic state itself as the main enemy of freedom, constantly encroaching on voluntary and decentralized sources of social meaning. This has led pluralists to be suspicious of state-centred narratives of progress and often to form alliances with the modern state’s illiberal enemies.

Levy considers the consequences of this split for concrete contemporary disputes, for the intellectual history of the Western liberal tradition and for the larger future of liberal polities undergoing rapid cultural change and polarization. In all three areas, he develops complex variations on his simple theme of two liberalisms. After reading Levy’s book, it is hard to read a newspaper without seeing his dilemma play out. Is banning polygamy or the niqab liberation of women or oppression of religious minorities? Must evangelical colleges abandon their condemnation of sex outside heterosexual marriage if they want to train lawyers? Can European judiciaries require member states to accept unwanted demographic change in the name of common refugee protection obligations? How can indigenous systems of hereditary government be given formal, legal power in a modern state? In each case, both sides claim the mantle of freedom, choice and equal treatment. In each case, the issue is whether the main enemy of these values is traditional mores or rationalistic bureaucracies. These dilemmas cut across traditional left/right divides.

In the first part of his book, Levy considers the problem “intermediate groups” pose for liberal political theory. In its simplest form, liberalism focuses on the dyad of the state and the individual. For liberals, the equal autonomy of individuals is the source of both the state’s legitimate powers and the appropriate limits on those powers. Liberal states ought to maximize the freedom of everyone and can only establish limits on that freedom on impersonally justified grounds. Liberal documents from the American Declaration of Independence to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms follow this structure, deeply embedded in liberal theory.

The trouble, as conservative and radical critics of liberalism have long delighted in pointing out, is that societies are characterized by more than the individual/state dyad. People are embedded in all sorts of local and voluntary loyalties, institutions and organizations. The most benign might be defined by a common interest or hobby. More troublesome are those defined by common descent: from family and clans to ethnic and racial groups. Others are defined by adherence to a religion or other comprehensive ideology. Additional problematic intermediate groups include subnational governments and economic organizations like corporations and unions (although Levy excludes this last type of intermediate group from his discussion for reasons of scope).

Central liberal values such as freedom of association and of religion, privacy and local self-government get their meaning from human beings’ need to participate in these intermediate groups. But even at their best, these groups divide the world between insiders and outsiders, a division that any liberal must view with suspicion; at worst, intermediate groups are explicitly inegalitarian and hostile to individual autonomy.

Levy discusses, and rejects, two liberal theories of intermediate groups. The “pure” theory sees group existence as the simple product of individual choice, and concludes that the state should not interfere with groups so long as there is no explicit coercion to prevent individuals from leaving. On the pure theory, only a central state can violate autonomy: if a religion or an ethnic group is restrictive or sexist, then the individual affected always has the option to leave.

As Levy points out, there are two implicit assumptions in the pure theory: first that exit is realistic, and second that its possibility normatively justifies all internal restrictions on liberty and equality. The problem with the first assumption is that it holds only if the central state is in fact strong enough to guarantee exit, but provides no mechanism by which this strength can be maintained. As for the normative assumption that violations of autonomy and equality are fine so long as there is a possibility of exit, the pure theorists are inconsistent: they would not excuse the state, as such, from any violations of liberty and equality, as long as the affected individual could emigrate. The possibility of exit may diminish liberal unease, but should not eliminate it.

The opposite approach would be to require that every civil society group have the same relationship to its members that the liberal state has to its citizens. Levy calls this the “convergence” view. In some cases, this makes sense. Local governments and incorporated societies are required to have elections for leaders, articulate statelike impersonal justification of their strictures and provide procedural rights to those accused of violating them.

But when it comes to the intermediate groups centrally involved in creating meaning for people, the convergence view would require massive impersonal state involvement in our intimate lives. Descent-based groups do not have formal-bureaucratic organizational structures amenable to legalistic rights talk, and trying to enforce such a structure suggests an almost totalitarian project of atomizing and deracinating people. Religious organizations may or may not have formal structures, but when they do, it seems the most successful (think the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches) are precisely those that are most illiberal.

Levy thinks this is no accident, since religious institutions like those of mainline Protestantism or Reform Judaism that have most converged with liberal, secular values offer little that is distinctive to people who cannot get meaning in mainstream society. If this observation is correct, there will be strong selective pressures in a society globally committed to liberalism for robust intermediate groups to diverge from liberal values. For this reason, Levy does not think convergence is likely as a descriptive matter, and he rejects it, on liberal grounds, as a normative project.

If abstract, universalizing theories of intermediate groups do not work, it is still possible to look to traditions of relative suspicion. In Levy’s account the rationalist/pluralist views need not have the (implausible) deductive clarity of the pure/convergent theories. In the book’s second – and longest – part, Levy retells the intellectual history of liberalism in light of the tension between those who look at intermediate groups primarily as a source of liberal freedom and those who see such groups as a threat to it.

Levy combines a strong historical sense with close attention to theoretical distinctions historians often ignore. His story involves comparisons between familiar characters in succeeding eras, paired along rationalist/pluralist lines: from John Locke and more historically minded Whigs in the 17th century; through Voltaire as despiser of religion and admirer of enlightened despots and Montesquieu as opponent of royal absolutism and admirer of the estates in mid-18th-century France; to Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke during the era of the American and French revolutions; and culminating in the subtler 19th-century contrast of John Stuart Mill, for the rationalists, with his friend Alexis de Tocqueville, for pluralism.

Along the way, Levy introduces and situates a number of lesser-known figures, especially on the pluralist liberal side. Liberal theory developed during an era in which there was a real conflict between the emerging royal/democratic nation-state and the decentralized institutions of feudalism, and Levy shows that liberals were not always on the side of universal law and against feudal privilege. From the English Whigs through some of the French liberal critics of the Revolution to the pluralist new liberals in the 20th century, Levy reminds of us of the ways in which liberals invoked the “ancient liberties” of medieval Europe against absolutist monarchies and then against the ideological nation-state. There is a line, running especially through Catholic thought, from these pro-medieval antistatist versions of liberalism to more recent decentralist and federalist theories. This line has special importance for Canada because it explains some deep resonances between the thinking of British new liberals like Viscount Haldane and Quebec thinkers influenced by post–Vatican II Catholic social thought: behind both looms the 19th-century figure of Lord Acton.

Levy is least confident in his third part, in which he discusses the implications of the pluralist/rationalist dichotomy for our present and future predicament in the multicultural West. Levy obviously has sympathies for the pluralist side, but is willing neither to cast his lot entirely with it nor to try to broker a synthesis.

There is something to admire about this unwillingness to accept an easy resolution. On the other hand, from my perspective, the fact that the resolution between pluralism and rationalism more or less works in practice, at least for now, is itself in need of explanation. Levy seems to insist on a pessimistic or tragic conclusion that we cannot expect liberal values in a broad sense to suffuse civil society over the long run. But theoreticians should be interested in how a trick so difficult to pull off can be done at all. There must be some forces pulling toward equilibrium. In this respect, I think Levy is too dismissive of the forces of convergence, of how mutual accommodation in the political realm, at least sometimes, spills over into more tolerant and egalitarian approaches in the more intimate.

One possible conclusion from Levy’s discussion is that we should seek a golden mean: if either the bureaucratic state or particularistic identity groups get too powerful, then we are in trouble. A conception of political wisdom as requiring balance has a long tradition in the West, dating back to Aristotle and Cicero. It is also consistent with Francis Fukuyama’s observation that the historical basis of Western institutions lies in Western Europe’s uniquely strong-enough-but-not-too-strong central states.

Of course, as the investment advisers are required to say, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and Levy’s pessimism may be vindicated. The key issue is whether liberal societies are able to reproduce a core liberal culture: so long as that remains possible, pluralist concessions to illiberalism within voluntarily chosen intermediate groups probably strengthen liberalism. But there may be a tipping point beyond which the liberal nature of the central state could no longer be taken for granted. Canada has long benefited from a pragmatist streak in its liberal-rationalist ruling elite, but if that same elite loses an understanding of the historically contingent nature of this unstable arrangement along with the vocabulary to talk about how to preserve it, then the whole arrangement could be in danger.

Levy should be applauded for advancing a vital discussion within liberal theory, and doing so in a way that is informed by philosophical, historical and social-scientific perspectives. Political theorists should definitely read it, but so too should lawyers, policymakers, journalists and others interested in reconciling these dilemmas from a more practical perspective.

Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 247 pages.

Historians and anthropologists have long been fascinated with extreme cultures: warlike Spartans, fiercely independent mountain peoples, societies obsessed with asceticism and mystical experience. But we – the kind of people who read or write for Inroads – are typical specimens of the most atypical human culture of all.

Educated citizens of developed Western countries are unlike any other people who have ever walked the earth. UBC psychologists Joe Henrich, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan have labelled us “WEIRD” (for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) and have demonstrated that we are statistical outliers in the way we think.¹ We have very little intuition about the natural world, but work well with abstractions. We detach means from ends. We are unusually willing to be fair to and to trust strangers. We value romantic love and individual choice, and pay little attention to extended family and inherited tradition. Our morality celebrates ever-expanding circles of concern and peaceful and equal treatment and respect for those different from ourselves, at the expense of honour, purity, authority or sanctity. On all these dimensions, Westerners are WEIRDer than non-Westerners, educated and affluent Westerners WEIRDer than working-class ones, and later generations WEIRDer than their parents.

This new kind of person is quite clearly the product of post-medieval historical developments in western Europe and then its settler colonies: the scientific revolution, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the widespread disgust with honour and tribalism after the World Wars. Going back further, we are ultimately heirs of the interaction of biblical religion and Greek philosophical insight: the meeting of Athens and Jerusalem. We are also products of those who used the logic and rhetoric of the post-Enlightenment West to oppose religious, racial, gender and other hierarchies that characterized the West in its rise: among others, the abolitionist, anticolonial, civil rights and feminist movements.

WEIRD societies have advantages that are hard to deny (tempted though we may be to try by the WEIRD aversion to tribalist boasting). Any number of statistics about health or wealth would make the point, but the most dramatic is life expectancy at birth, which rarely exceeded 40 years anywhere before 1900, but today is converging on 80 in developed countries. The exponential growth of scientific knowledge is equally hard to relativize away: we just know more than our forebears did, and WEIRD habits of mind both reflect and promote this. For now, at least, the WEIRDer parts of the planet are also the most powerful.

However, reasonable people can disagree about whether this trend towards WEIRDness represents moral progress. Indeed, the striking thing about WEIRD habits of mind is they make it difficult even to talk about moral progress. Scientific development has tended to make us think that real knowledge comes from quantitative and experimental methods that do not give rise to moral insight. And the universalist values of liberalism paradoxically undermine themselves once they are (correctly) seen as the products of a specific, historically developed culture. If the most important thing is to be fair to people who are different, then the very idea that our own moral beliefs are truer than those of people who disagree with us, or come from other historical traditions, becomes suspect.

No culture anywhere consists entirely of virtuous and excellent people. But WEIRD culture seems unique (and, arguably, uniquely bad) in that it appears to abandon even the aspiration to any virtue other than tolerating others and living peacefully with them. Have we given up on the quest for rationally understanding how best to live? Has our immense technological reasoning and comparative tolerance meant that we must abandon the task at the heart of philosophy as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have understood it?

In Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters, University of Toronto professor Ronald Beiner takes up these questions by reviewing central texts of fourteen 20th-century intellectuals: Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, Eric Vogelin, Simone Weil, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Rawls and Richard Rorty. For Beiner, reflection on the value of modernity is political philosophy: there is virtually nothing in this book about institutional forms, racial/ethnic conflicts, gender, issues of peace and war or economic distribution, and remarkably little about politics, democracy or the state. Even when the writers he talks about addressed these issues, Beiner is always interested in what they thought of the merits of liberalism, modernity and value-pluralism, which Beiner for the most part treats as synonymous. Beiner’s contribution is to put together, in an accessible and even entertaining way, a conversation among those thinkers of the past century who most deeply accessed the resources of the Western tradition to consider the merits of its WEIRD progeny.

Critics of modernity: Strauss, Weil, Vogelin and MacIntyre

Some on this list – Strauss, Weil, Vogelin and MacIntyre, especially – clearly thought the West had taken a wrong turn. Strauss and Vogelin were aligned with the political right; Weil was, and MacIntyre is, an unconventional leftist. But for all four, modern philosophy, of which the modern world is a product, represented a decline from ancient and medieval thought precisely because it abandoned the quest for rational truth about how best to live. Strauss is notoriously difficult to pin down because of his belief that philosophers cannot always responsibly say what they mean, but in the text Beiner discusses, Natural Right and History, he warns of the effects of subsuming an objective right based on enduring human nature in quintessentially modern historical relativism. Weil’s themes are familiar today in the public statements of Pope Francis: she believed modern capitalism and state socialism both contradicted the objectively true Christian message, understood in highly Platonic terms. Vogelin diagnosed modern ideologies of every stripe as “Gnostic” attempts to realize in the social world what classical Christianity and Platonism had understood to be transcendent and beyond history. MacIntyre relies on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas for his critique of the modern state, market and morality: things go wrong when we no longer understand that there is a right way of being for humans and therefore stop trying to seek it out.

Beiner is sympathetic to these root-and-branch critiques of modernity in favour of an ancient conception of the objectivity and unity of virtue. But he recognizes that none of these thinkers actually delivers a firm rational foundation for the good, and all of their political projects are nostalgic or utopian. Beiner longs for an “epic” mode of philosophizing that would try to discover the true purpose of human life (the “summum bonum”), but in the end he admits that we are not likely to see it, and concedes that the attempt has dangers of fanaticism and totalitarianism.

Unless we are prepared to agree with Vogelin that the ancients discovered the science of the transcendent, and that everything that has happened since the Middle Ages was no more than perversely forgetting this, then I think we have to agree with Beiner’s conclusion, if not with his regret. In Aristotle’s biology, living things, like tools or other human artifacts, have a function and can be evaluated by how well they fulfill that function. A knife’s function is to cut, and a knife that cuts well is a good kife; a shark’s function is to hunt, and a shark that hunts well is a good shark. The goal of ethics is to find the true function (telos) of human beings. But Darwin showed that beneath all the amazing functionality of biological life lies an amoral and mechanistic process of natural selection.

There is no reason to think there is a summum bonum. Even if there were, how could we identify the subset of humanity who knew what it was? Conceptual reasoning, historical erudition and empirical knowledge of human psychology are all good things, but there is no evidence that they make people morally better or politically more astute. As Oakeshott and Gadamer emphasized, philosophers have no special access to knowledge of the good life. Vogelin’s analysis of the theological roots of modern ideologies remains valuable, as does the point common to these theorists that morality makes more sense when rooted in a theory of human nature and the virtues that make it the best it can be. But there is no single such theory that can claim clear rational superiority over all the others, and even if there were, it would not justify coercively imposing it on everyone.

Modernity’s defenders: Weber, Habermas, Rawls and Rorty

If philosophers cannot tell us what the good life is, then the task must be left to ordinary people, deciding either individually or collectively. In other words, we are left with some mixture of liberalism and democracy. Beiner puts forward Weber, Habermas, Rawls and Rorty as the defenders of modernity and the plurality of legitimate values. There is a risk of caricature in that framing, since none of the “defenders” are uncritical of liberal modernity. A central theme for both Weber and Habermas was that the growth of bureaucratic rationality (for Weber) or the “steering media” of the market and state (for Habermas) threaten more immediate relationships between people. Rawls and Rorty were highly critical of the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity in a liberal capitalist economy. Still, none of this group was nostalgic for traditional authority or believed there was a unique “philosophical” path to the truth about what is good for human beings.

Weber believed that a genuinely scientific study of society must be value-neutral, while political commitment necessarily meant making a tragic, existential choice between values rather than rationally deducing the right one. Beiner argues that Weber contradicted his value-neutral stance in his lectures on science and politics as vocations, since he obviously engaged in normative rhetoric. This criticism (and a similar criticism of Foucault) misfires because Weber did not claim to speak as a scientist (and Foucault did not claim to speak as a genealogist) when making value statements. In claiming that Weber and Foucault demonstrated a philosophical commitment when they made moral claims, Beiner tacitly makes the assumption that normative language is the province of philosophy. But this assumption is precisely what those he is criticizing objected to. Weber provided no scientific or philosophical argument for liberalism, or for anything else, but he never said he did.

Beiner is on stronger grounds criticizing Habermas and Rorty. Habermas insists on the non-subjectivity of truth, but he defines truth as whatever everyone would agree on in an idealized interaction. This is appealing in that it does not privilege special insights available only to philosophers, but the problem is that this idealized discussion is no longer about anything other than itself. In Habermas’s politics, we all have an obligation to try to agree on what it is that we would all agree on if we could really talk as equals. But this is just as circular as defining chemical truth as being about what perfect chemists would agree on if they discussed things long enough, rather than being about atoms and molecules. it is equally vacuous when applied to social and political debate: a debate about how best to defend a country or reform health care is not about what we agree on, but about the strategic situation or the most effective ways of preventing disease. For Habermas, we talk, but we don’t talk about anything.

Rorty was a pragmatist who considered not only moral and political ideas, but even scientific and technical ones, as just “ways of talking” that should be evaluated for usefulness, not truth. For him, aerospace engineering is not in any fundamental sense truer – as opposed to more useful – than beliefs in witchcraft, so it was no serious knock on his social-democratic multiculturalism that it could not be rationally established as better than Thomist Christianity or Islamic fundamentalism. This sounds absurd, but instrumentalist theories of scientific knowledge are not crazy, and may even be right.

The difficulty for Rorty is that an instrumentalist philosophy of science is only plausible if it leaves scientific practice unchanged: if a philosopher came along and said theoretical physics had to change because of his or her views, or depended on their being correct, the philosopher would rightly be laughed out of the room. But Rorty claimed his ironic, postmodernist attitude as necessary for a proper “culture of liberalism”: we will all be better off if we accept his rediscription. As Beiner demonstrates, though, once we accept Rorty’s rediscription, we can no longer consistently talk about being better off. If Rorty claimed his philosophical (or really antiphilosophical) views had no political implications at all, then he would be as immune to Beiner’s criticisms as Weber and Foucault. But since he didn’t make that claim, Beiner’s criticisms are on the mark. Rorty has a mandatory conception of the good after all, and it is a self-contradictory one.

Beiner raises a similar objection to the late Rawls of Political Liberalism. In that book, Rawls introduced (or perhaps reintroduced) the distinction between a political conception of justice and comprehensive conceptions of the good, the right or how the universe works. A liberal society is characterized by what Rawls calls “reasonable pluralism.” Many comprehensive conceptions of the good – each logically incompatible with the others – nonetheless live together because they are each compatible with the political conception of justice manifested in that state. Catholics, Buddhists, Kantians and devotees of Ayn Rand can all live under the same laws without oppressing the others, as long as those laws are governed by what Rawls calls “public reason,” and as long as all these groups accept this. This is only possible if the sphere of what the political concerns itself with is limited. Liberal politics therefore cannot provide answers to ambitious questions about the meaning of human life, or be premised on such answers.

Beiner thinks he has Rawls in the same kind of logical bind as Rorty. Rawls’s comprehensive view is not to have a comprehensive view, and this is self-defeatingly circular. He also accuses Rawls of unnecessarily limiting the ambitions of philosophy by conceding that no progress is possible in coming to a better substantive view of the human good.

But Rawls escapes these criticisms. Rawls, unlike Rorty, does not try to argue against comprehensive conceptions of the good, or try to establish that they are all equal, morally or logically. He just wants to isolate political structures from dependence on the controversial claims of those conceptions. Rawls places justice/fairness/right as the preeminent value for the ordering of the basic structure of society, and insists that the basic structure be fair between conceptions of the good. This is obviously inconsistent with the idea that “error has no rights.” But it does not involve a claim that there are no errors. For Rawls, as for John Stuart Mill, a free and just society is the way to find out what is good: the best conception is more likely to win out in a fair fight than in a fixed one.

Beiner cannot accept this because he bakes comprehensiveness into his definition of political philosophy. It is a “total horizon of moral, social and political existence in its normative dimensions.” This is refreshingly unfashionable, but it amounts to erasing the distinction between specifically political philosophy and philosophy in general. Dangerously, this presupposes no limits to the political sphere.

The “political” has always referred to specific institutions. For Plato and Aristotle, this was the Greek city. In the medieval world, it was the empire or realm. For moderns, it was the nation-state, as recognized in international law and politics from the Treaty of Westphalia through the United Nations Charter. One theme through Western thought is that these institutions have their inherent limits and therefore, even at their best, will not be able to realize the most important values. Even Plato seems to have realized this after his negative experiences in Syracuse. Aristotle distinguished the active life of politics from the (better) contemplative life that politics could at most make possible. Post-Augustinian Christian political thought emphasized both the legitimacy of secular authority and its lack of ultimate significance. Liberalism did not invent the idea that the political good is less than transcendent, although it certainly depends on it. Beiner ignores the institutional, and thereby the limits on a political philosophy.

The communitarian challenge and the liberal response

For me, the most interesting chapter of Beiner’s book is his “short excursus” on the communitarian movement of which he was a part. The leading figures, in addition to MacIntyre, were Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Christopher Lasch and Michael Sandel. The common ground was a critique of liberalism as being based on a false notion of human beings as fundamentally detachable from the social context in which they grew up.

As Beiner realizes, communitarianism was never able to deal with an obvious liberal response. Since it is an undeniable and universal truth that selves are “situated,” it is not possible for liberalism to threaten this truth. Of course, people are inevitably shaped by the communities in which they grow up, and will inevitably seek to be part of communities once they have done so. Liberalism has no problem with this: community is what the very-liberal principle of freedom of association protects. For liberals, the only issue arises if adults are coerced into remaining in “their” birth communities once they have chosen otherwise.

Liberalism allows, but does not require, single-minded adherence to particular communal identities. In contrast, illiberal identity politics inevitably requires people to abandon some communal identities in favour of others: most saliently for Canadians, membership in the Québécois people is said to require abandoning visually identifying with a religious community. The most effective response to this sort of demand by a communitarian philosopher like Taylor is the liberal rhetoric of freedom of religion and expression. Beiner observes this, and observes the general decline of communitarianism into a self-contradictory illiberal multiculturalism, in which identities are privileged just so long as they are defined as being outside the mainstream. But his analysis is weakened because his conception of political philosophy prejudges the issue of the role of the state in an illiberal way, and because he is ultimately uninterested in reflection on specific institutions.

Communitarian thinkers also had a bad habit of relying on their own ipse dixit about social trends, unchecked by any empirical methodology or modesty in the absence of one. Beiner quotes approvingly from Lasch’s early 1990s claim that liberalism was “crumbling” because of drugs, crime, gang wars, decay of the educational system and ever-increasing racial polarization. It is now pretty well known that crime and violence have declined since Lasch wrote. The educational system and racial polarization are less easy to quantify, but adjusted for demographic shifts, U.S. students do better on tests today than they did then, IQs continue to rise, and America elected a black president in 2008. Beiner does not talk about any of this, and to my mind is generally too nostalgic about the days when an erudite intellectual could rant about “current trends” without any empirical support. Arendt and Vogelin come to mind for me, but of all of Beiner’s post-Weberian exemplars, only Foucault, Habermas and Rawls felt any need to keep up with empirical social science.

Beiner’s ultimate conclusion is pessimistic. He cannot see how philosophy can rationally justify a single summum bonum. But acknowledging pluralism is, for him, surrender. For a student, his book is an excellent introduction to 20th-century debates about “modernity,” but it does not address more institutionally focused political philosophy. Beiner has failed to give sufficient weight to the autonomy of political philosophy and its dependence on focusing on the purposes of specifically political institutions. Continue reading “Political philosophy without political institutions” →