Questioning assumptions, left and right

We lead off with a pair of recent books, one striving desperately to undermine our confidence, and the other trying just as hard to snap us out of our funk.

Though as an appetizer… here’s probably the most cogent observation about our current political climate.  And this.

 == Decline of the Western Experiment ==

Much touted in conservative media is a new book by Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen - “Why Liberalism Failed” that starts with the cleverly implied assumption that it has failed. In supplying “why” incantations, Deneen joins a genre of gloom that includes Allan Bloom’s (1980s) “The Closing of the American Mind” and David Gelernter’s imitative article “The Closing of the Scientific Mind,” stretching all the way back to Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” and even “Das Kapital.”  

To be clear, I’ll avow that liberalism has many flaws in its specifics and execution. Our civilization — vastly more successful than any combination of others, across all of time — suffers from mistakes, inconsistencies, contradictions and obstinacies that we’re behooved to re-examine, on a regular basis. Indeed, that ability and habit of openness to reciprocal criticism — (discussed extensively in “The Transparent Society”) — is a core hallmark of most branches of liberalism. It’s a trait that enemies pounce upon, calling it weakness.

Take the descriptive paragraph issued by Deneen’s publisher, presumably the author’s chosen pitch to all readers:

“Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.”

Sentence by sentence, alas, this diatribe is (let’s be plain) utter bullshit in every single detail. Professor Deneen deliberately excludes the fourth and by-far largest creature in our political bestiary —  the elephant in the room — feudalism. In its various forms, aristocratic hierarchism dominated almost all societies for 6000 years.

Inheritance lordship by owner-caste oligarchy is arguably the most natural form of governance, having dominated nearly all societies that had agriculture. It never went away, and indeed is roaring back. Its omission from Deneen’s list of “dominant ideologies of the twentieth century” is glaring, that is, unless he implicitly folded it into “fascism.” Either way, the first sentence of this summarizing paragraph is an outright, knowing and spectacular lie.

== Two kinds of liberalism ==

But pray continue with Prof. Deneen’s summary: “liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution.”

While some shallow people presume this, very few serious thinkers do. Most know that liberalism is an exception to historical patterns, that always had the decks stacked against it. Indeed, Liberalism has two major branches, that agree on overall policy, but not the reasons.

First is a large minority who know about liberalism’s founder - Adam Smith – who taught about both harnessing and liberating the most creative force in the universe: flat-fair-open competition.

Lords, kings and priests always crushed fair competition. Cheating by the mighty always led to feudal cancer that killed competitive vigor, far more thoroughly and often than socialism ever did. Even the doyen of conservative economics, Friedrich Hayek, proclaimed that markets, democracy and our other arenas do best when there’s maximum participation.  Smith’s teachings, to keep the playing field flat and fair, form the deep root of “liberal” politics and economics.

All liberals push for rights, tolerance, diversity, science and compassionate uplift of the poor. But the Smithian branch does so for practical reasons. Maximizing the number of empowered and knowing participants almost always maximizes competition’s pragmatic benefits.

== The touchy-feely branch of liberalism ==

A much larger population wants those same policies — rights, tolerance, diversity, compassion, science etc. — for somewhat different reasons. They view these things as absolute moral virtues needing no practical justification. Ironically, that weakens their case! Since anyone else can answer: “my absolute virtues differ! And dismissing them makes you intolerant!”

Those in this passionate second category are more numerous, as you’d expect in any movement, and sure, their simplistic dedication to generosity and individualism might be dismissed as just another religion.  Certainly forces of feudalism/fascism - like Professor Deneen - try desperately to argue this point.

Feeding them ammo are performances like the weepy “response to the State of the Union” given recently by Rep. Joe Kennedy. It perfectly played into the right-wing narrative that liberals are impractical moralists, and not creators of the most successful, pragmatic, and dynamic problem-solving civilization of all time.

But the first category of liberals cannot be so easily dismissed.  Rights and compassionate uplift and science have had pragmatic effects, profound and even spectacular, leading to a society that out-performed all others - *combined* - by every conceivable metric of success, like exponentiating knowledge and wealth and health and freedom and happiness. There are also under-appreciated outcomes. Only liberal society created a vast and unhindered literature of error-prevention and opportunity-targeting called science fiction. And only this society managed to maximize opportunity-reification to such a degree that we may soon - very plausibly - become an interstellar species.

Liberal virtues achieved this in part by opening the flow of criticism and reciprocal accountability that comes from free speech by educated and calmly competitive masses. It also reduced the waste of human talent by orders of magnitude, by eliminating so many stupidly unjustifiable prejudices.

Reiterating: Liberals such as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek (yes “liberals” in the classic sense of opposing market cheating) emphasized that entrepreneurial competition and market wisdom cannot occur until the number of skilled, competent participants is maximized, something that feudal regimes try desperately to prevent! Maximizing the diversity and number of skilled, competent participants cannot happen without rights and compassionate uplift and science.

== The insidious message ==

Let’s get back to the Deneen book writeup:

“Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.”

Every sentence fizzes with dizzying silliness, as Deneen denounces liberalism because: “it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism…” 

Malarkey! Never before have the descendants of peasants, slaves and serfs been more participatory on civic life. Moreover, every single feudal society was more unequal than ours, in terms that matter most, the ability to raise comfortable, healthy and educated children who might plausibly compete with even the children of elites. (Witness today’s tech billionaires.) Almost never was this allowed in earlier aristocracies. And it will not be allowed again, if feudalists are allowed to control things, again.

Moreover, it was liberal policies enacted by the Greatest Generation - whose most-adored figure was FDR - that reduced inequality to its lowest levels! And it was GOP politicians - tools of resurgent feudalism - who dismantled most of those reforms, leading - directly and causally - to skyrocketing inequality.

This is very old stuff. Many of the same “contradictions of liberalism” were hollered by the Marxists for 150 years and by Oswald Spengler - then the Nazis - a century ago. And yet, this unusual experiment perseveres, dazzling future historians, who will call this an age above all others.

After all that, is the author wrong to say liberalism faces danger of failure?

His reasons and reasonings may be calamitously stupid. But, in fact, the decks have always been stacked against this bold and rare departure from the feudalist attractor state. As happened to the brief Periclean and Florentine experiments, many powerful forces are trying desperately to crush our renaissance. To stave off and prevent an onrushing Star Trek future, that could lock in liberal civilization — the way that Francis Fukayama thought it was already locked in, when he wrote about “The End Of History.”

The feudalist attractor state of brutally enforced inheritance-lordship by owner castes is very strong, deeply-embedded and driven by male reproductive urges. It overwhelmed 99+% of our ancestors, smashing all hope and any chance of advancement. It has tried to do the same to us, across the last 240 years. They are verging on success right now. And Professor Deneen is what he appears to be. Their shill and lackey propagandist.

== In contrast. We are truly a diverse species. ==

I’ve long touted the works of Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, whose book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” make clear that the modern era is one of unprecedented peace. All of Pinker’s careful statistics notwithstanding, you have only to know that a majority of our ancestors who ever lived near a city must have watched it burn, at least once in their lives. It’s no longer true for the vast majority.

Here, Bill Gates reviews Pinker’s latest tome “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress,” a vigorous defense of our stunningly successful civilization, against the gloom merchants seeking to wreck citizen confidence.

“Enlightenment Now takes the approach he uses in Better Angels to track violence throughout history and applies it to 15 different measures of progress (like quality of life, knowledge, and safety). The result is a holistic picture of how and why the world is getting better. It’s like Better Angels on steroids.”

Now, Pinker has drawn bilious ire not only from the mad-right, but also from a large component of today’s left. Their reasoning – a stunning example of insane illogic – is that any acknowledgement of actual progress will undermine the urgency we must feel, in order to attack all the problems before us. Of course this plays into the hands of rightists, who can then proclaim: “See? Liberalism never worked, and liberal activists are the first to admit it!”

Nonsense. Countless past “liberal” endeavors were fantastically successful, from reducing war to lowering the arms spending of most nations to unprecedented low fractions of their national income and wealth. (What? You never heard that one?) From saving the ozone layer to increasing the populations of every species of whale. From ending the pandemic of southern lynchings to supplying every ghetto youth with a cell phone camera. From black and woman presidential nominees and #MeToo exposure of sexual predators to rising IQ scores wherever children got better nutrition. And none of that led to complacency! In fact, bragging is great salesmanship! It leads to a can-do spirit.

Gates continues: “People all over the world are living longer, healthier, and happier lives, so why do so many think things are getting worse? Why do we gloss over positive news stories and fixate on the negative ones? He does a good job explaining why we’re drawn to pessimism and how that instinct influences our approach to the world, although I wish he went more in depth about the psychology (especially since he’s a psychologist by training).”

He adds: “I agree with Pinker on most areas, but I think he’s a bit too optimistic about artificial intelligence. He’s quick to dismiss the idea of robots overthrowing their human creators. While I don’t think we’re in danger of a Terminator-style scenario, the question underlying that fear—who exactly controls the robots?—is a valid one. We’re not there yet, but at some point, who has AI and who controls it will be an important issue for global institutions to address.”

(Want my own take on a possible AI Apocalypse?  I've been speaking and writing about Artificial Intelligence a lot.  Here’s video of my talk on the future of A.I. to a packed house at IBM's World of Watson Congress - offering big perspectives on both artificial and human augmentation.)          

Still, Gates adds: “ Enlightenment Now is not only the best book Pinker’s ever written. It’s my new favorite book of all time.”

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Books along similar lines:

“Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think” by Peter Diamandis.

“Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future,” an optimistic science fiction anthology edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer.

Try optimism and confidence on, for size. If you want to change the world, it helps to note that some of your predecessors thought they could. And they did.