{"id":3475208,"date":"2019-01-16T11:13:53","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T11:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3475208"},"modified":"2019-01-16T11:13:53","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T11:13:53","slug":"why-liberals-should-be-conservative-climate-change-excellence-and-the-practice-of-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2019-01-16\/why-liberals-should-be-conservative-climate-change-excellence-and-the-practice-of-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Liberals Should Be \u201cConservative\u201d: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>–Thoreau<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Merely by using the word, \u201cconservative,\u201d I risk losing readers, certain of what I must<\/em> mean.\u00a0 Let me say quickly, then, that this is not<\/em> another strategic plea for centrism as we approach the next round of elections.\u00a0 By \u201cconservative\u201d I am not<\/em> referring to anything resembling Republicans or European \u201ccenter-right\u201d parties, or positions yet further to the right on the liberal-conservative continuum as it is commonly understood today.\u00a0 Rather, with the word \u201cconservativism\u201d I am referring to something that has, in fact, fallen off the continuum altogether, disappearing from public debate, deliberation, and our political and civic identities.\u00a0 Indeed, without the sort of \u201cconservativism\u201d about which I will be writing, political deliberation<\/em> may not be possible at all–and in this way these thoughts are a meditation on our current state of affairs both broadly conceived and specifically apprehended.<\/p>\n

We might make a first step closer to the heart of my theme simply by removing the scare-quotes from the conservativism<\/em> that I am hoping to reconsider if not revive, reserving those marks of skeptical distance instead for the sort of political positions and dispensations that are somewhat strangely referred to as \u201cconservative\u201d today.\u00a0 My version of conservativism will hereby be presented as: conservative <\/em>and conservativism.<\/em> I will refer to the position associated with Republicans as \u201cconservative.\u201d\u00a0 I will say something later about how \u201cconservativism\u201d has reached its present state, but let me cut to the chase and explain that I am rethinking conservativism<\/em> in the context of the quest for an ecologically sustainable society.\u00a0 While this quest, like everything else in our polarized society, cannot be initiated without regard to the liberal\/\u201dconservative\u201d split according to which most of our other distinctions are tethered, it must soon move beyond their limitations.\u00a0 For both sides, in their current form, are missing crucial and fundamental tools necessary to guide us towards a sustainable society.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Because the quest for an ecologically sustainable society, what Pope Francis has referred to as an \u201cecological conversion,\u201d is a matter of cultural change<\/em>, there will be no talk, here, of solar panels, carbon-capture, smart-grids, or electric cars, and all the other redemptive fantasies in which our current culture<\/em> loses itself as it kicks the can down the road.\u00a0 Instead we are going to do some thinking about the way we think about things, and about our beliefs, desires, and expectations\u2014about what humans need in order to thrive and how we might go about obtaining that.\u00a0 And we are going to do so according to a basic distinction that, unnoticed, cuts across our current political and social divides.\u00a0 This distinction, for those who have been hoping I would move more quickly to the point, distinguishes excellence<\/em> from effectiveness<\/em>.\u00a0 Contained in this distinction is a lost story about modernity and its great transformation, about ecological destruction, political polarization and dysfunction, and hope for the future.\u00a0 It is a far more interesting story, I think, and more useful than the too-familiar story that is based on a distinction between liberal and \u201cconservative\u201d as we commonly use those terms.<\/p>\n

This will be slow going.\u00a0 Moving quickly (and lobbing ready-made thought-bombs across the barricades) is the stuff of op-eds and cable TV news, requiring only a hasty reloading of our current stock of concepts and distinctions.\u00a0 If you are mainly interested in learning how stupid everyone else is, you might read one of Paul Krugman\u2019s seven-paragraph weekly New York Times<\/em> zingers, if Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough aren\u2019t to your liking.\u00a0 Our<\/em> job, in contrast, is to dig into ideas to see where they came from and how they work.<\/p>\n

Smile Bitch<\/strong><\/p>\n

I began these reflections on a day that fittingly started out with the reading of some Aristotle through the lens of Communitarian philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre; that day ended with a pleasant party attended by liberal academics and knowledge workers.\u00a0 At the latter, as we rambled over topics like children, food, travel, and work, we somehow landed on the subject of Snoop Dog\u2019s latest song (I\u2019m gathering) that has as its refrain, \u201csmile bitch.\u201d\u00a0 This song, of which some of our children had become aware, was treated with mild irony and sarcasm.\u00a0 It provided the starting note for some witty riffs, the source of second glass-of-pinot humor more than anything else.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t hear any chords of serious disapproval, even from the feminist scholars amongst the group.<\/p>\n

True, of course, popular culture can find its positionality in the interstices of multiple marginalities, which is to say that there are sometimes very good reasons for white people to suspend their judgment on an African American vernacular or art form.\u00a0 That tradition of simple dismissal has also been a ready-made thought-bomb, one used to shell already stricken ghettos.\u00a0 But I still had a sick feeling as I thought about the moral reality and the hierarchy of values to which my two seven-year old sons were inevitably becoming inured, as had we adults.\u00a0 Later, I couldn\u2019t shake the dull nausea and began wondering, \u201cIs this the best<\/em> we can do?\u00a0 Really?\u201d\u00a0 Had we given up?\u00a0 Were we just too weary of or from it all?\u00a0 Or, to borrow anthropologist Clifford Geertz\u2019s phrase, had we become so open-minded that our brains had fallen out?<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time I\u2019ve had that feeling.\u00a0 I experienced something similar when I heard Robert Reich\u2019s plea, in the face of near economic collapse in 2008, that our main concern should be \u201cgetting more money in the hands of middle-class consumers.\u201d[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 Of course, we cannot spend our way out of a crisis caused in large part by the urge and necessity of ceaseless spending, wanting, and growing.\u00a0 At best, Reich\u2019s plan, the basic position of liberal economists, might allow us to \u201cbuy some time.\u201d[iii]<\/a> Reich was not suggesting this merely as a stop-gap measure.\u00a0 Rather, it was a way of tweaking our distribution of wealth in a way, he seemed to believe, that would set the good ship Economy<\/em> back on its permanent course of perpetual growth\u2014a fantasy based on delusions about ecological limits.\u00a0 But more viscerally, I was struck at the time that the aspirations of liberals had apparently been reduced to this, peppered with disgust for the countervailing \u201cconservative\u201d claim that we could spend our way out of the crisis by putting that same money in the hands of someone else.\u00a0 I don\u2019t disagree with the egalitarian spirit of the liberal view; I disagree with the pretension that there are only two possible positions: growth through deregulation or growth through regulation, growth through redistributive taxes or growth from tax breaks. \u00a0More appalling, and screaming for alternative, this was the best that Reich, a liberal of substantial intellect and accomplishment, could come up with\u2014achieving an unquestioned end using plan a or plan b–and most liberals were prepared to go along.\u00a0 This, it seemed, was the best we could muster\u2014another version of George Bush\u2019s \u201cgo shopping\u201d after 9-11.<\/p>\n

I get that same feeling any time I expose myself to the toxic waste of television commercials.\u00a0 Apparently one of this year\u2019s hot products is (or by now was) a device or program put out by Facebook that permits \u201chands free\u201d video telecommunication, the web-cam apparently following the speaker as he or she dances or paces around the room, in this breakthrough marvel of marketing and engineering.\u00a0 Other advertisements assure us that the only difference between a child and an adult is the size and speed of the toys.\u00a0 Most remind us that we are not as cool, cunning, fun-loving, or blessed with convenience as we might be.\u00a0 You are to be the master of your universe, we are told, and you will therefore need to operate all your home\u2019s gadgetry with voice-command lest you find yourself living in the last century or, worse, Appalachia.<\/p>\n

In flight from this fear of a regressive life of inconvenience we are thusly coaxed at the price of over $1000 per capita (the yearly marketing bounty placed on each and every one of our heads) to direct our hope and imagination, organize education and work, set our policies.\u00a0 Yes, we may value equality, peace, and justice for all, but the all-engrossing means<\/em> for following this dim North Star are mainly a matter of equal consumption; as a happy byproduct, the thrill of accumulation might keep our minds off war or our dislike for each other.\u00a0 \u201cHate Has No Home Here,\u201d says the yard sign.\u00a0 A nice sentiment, but there\u2019s hardly room for it among the numbing distractions of our overstuffed houses anyway.\u00a0 The fact that American research universities pay people, some pretty smart ones, to write and teach on the subject, marketing to children<\/em>, strikes me, as a pitiless perversion of all decency.\u00a0 If I were more prepared to reveal my cultural snobbishness, I might also note that this is a far more popular area of study than, say, comparative literature or anthropology, but I\u2019ll try to keep such thoughts to myself.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, we live in a society that directs a tremendous amount of resources and talent to getting more clicks <\/em>in an interminable arms race of optimization, usually to distract people from their tasks, pull then away from people, and wheedle them into buying things they don\u2019t need, may not be able to afford, and whose production is destroying the ecological balance of our one and only home.\u00a0 The modern university trains masters of effectiveness, leading the race to the bottom, to the place where a \u201cdeal\u201d might become a form of art and a food-delivery app or program to help connect people with better fitting shirts or cheaper hotel rooms becomes an enviable life\u2019s work.\u00a0 The companies that produce such pablum have the effrontery to inscribe \u201cmission statements\u201d on their websites, apparently for the reading pleasure of moral masochists.\u00a0 Convenience stands among our culture\u2019s highest aims.<\/p>\n

As a parent I am struck every day at the way raising children in America has become a matter of navigating the obstacle courses set up, it would seem, to hinder any effort to nurture a next generation of people who will be able to sustain moderate wants, regulate their emotions, manage a moment\u2019s boredom, and learn the difficult lessons of life bound to become more difficult yet.\u00a0 The sad part about this is that we, as parents, consent to it with little protest.\u00a0 Many of us manage, finance, and market the daily grind of unhappy lives and life-killing waste that it churns out.<\/p>\n

Historian Christopher Lasch put it similarly in a personal moment found in the introduction to his seminal history of the concept of Liberal progress, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The unexpectedly rigorous business of bringing up children exposed me, as it necessarily exposes any parent, to our \u2018child-centered\u2019 society\u2019s icy indifference to everything that makes it possible to grow up to be responsible adults.\u00a0 To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light.\u00a0 This perspective unmistakably reveals the unwholesomeness, not to put it more strongly, of our way of life: our obsession with sex, violence, and the pornography of \u2018making it\u2019: our addictive dependence on drugs, \u2018entertainment,\u2019 and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and family ties; our preference for \u2018non-binding commitments\u2019; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we \u2018impose\u2019 our morality on others and thus invite others to \u2018impose\u2019 their morality on us; our reluctance to judge or be judged; our indifference to the needs of future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction, and a deteriorating environment.<\/p>\n

. .<\/p>\n

Lasch\u2019s willingness<\/em> to judge does raise some issues that should not be smugly dismissed, which is in part why I will move with caution as I advance an alternative to the safety of liberalism-as-usual, choosing words carefully, qualifying as precisely as I can. There are reasons in a heterogenous society why tolerance seems a more useful virtue than rectitude, why incisiveness has gone out of style.\u00a0 \u201cImposing your ideology on others\u201d is a cardinal sin, perhaps with real life consequences.\u00a0 So great an affront to our liberal decency does it represent that we dare hardly expose what we and others value to critical scrutiny.\u00a0 Even among intellectuals, there is little serious debate or argument these days, too afraid are we to offend each other\u2019s entrenched identities and delicately embroidered selves.<\/p>\n

There are signs, moreover, that the liberal quest to create an open, accepting, and undiscriminating society is not proceeding as planned and is certainly not without its collateral damage where it does work.\u00a0 Never mind, for a moment, the rise of social resentment or the Trump voter who complains that \u201che\u2019s not hurting the people [coastal elites] he needs to be hurting,\u201d[iv]<\/a>\u00a0We are not a happy country, our freedoms, comforts, and privileges notwithstanding.\u00a0 Millions wake up each morning barely restored, roused only by the tension between purposeless tedium and the fear that even that might be slipping away, victim of another recession or round of factory closings or mall shutterings.\u00a0 The internet (still thought by many to be, on the balance, a source of emancipatory inspiration and the egalitarian flow of knowledge and information), which consumes more and more of our attention each day, is, with its preoccupation with efficiency and effectiveness, humanity\u2019s largest instrument of mass-manipulation ever, a virtual superhighway running straight through our hearts and souls, coring into our fantasy lives, where wants, needs, and expectations are pumped-out with the constancy of an assembly line.\u00a0 No wonder we buck-up and, on command, \u201csmile bitch.\u201d\u00a0 For this, apparently, is the best we can do\u2014or the best we can do given the tools available within our current toolbox.<\/p>\n

From this perspective the Trump presidency, our<\/em> Frankenstein monster, is not a crisis of \u201cconservativism,\u201d or not simply that.\u00a0 It is not the failure of \u201cthem\u201d to be more like \u201cus.\u201d\u00a0 Rather it is a crisis, I will argue, of<\/em> the culture of effectiveness.\u00a0 This, in turn, is a crisis in and of Liberalism.<\/p>\n

The Pax Profusio<\/em> and the Question of Ends<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll discuss this runaway effectiveness only as I lay some substantial foundations.\u00a0 To begin that process, I\u2019d like to return to the beginning of my day during which I enjoyed the company of philosophers for an hour or two.\u00a0 Just as Alasdair MacIntyre guided me through that morning\u2019s foray into Aristotle, he will be our constant guide in what follows.\u00a0 If <\/em>my project is the resurrection of an Aristotelian conservatism<\/em>, it follows an undertaking largely initiated by MacIntyre.[v]<\/a>\u00a0 While Aristotle, along with Plato, is often deemed the starting point for modern Western philosophy (and their Athens the birthplace of democracy) his moral and political philosophy bear little resemblance to the modern one\u2014whether the popular morality that I critically characterized above, or any attempts to limit or curb it in the name of religious or moral stringency.\u00a0 Aristotle adds little to the \u201cconservative\u201d or liberal political cause, but instead allows us to shift the ground and ask questions of ourselves and each other long omitted.<\/p>\n

One such line of questioning asks us what our best<\/em> is, focusing on what philosophers call \u201cthe good\u201d and what theologian Paul Tillich refered to as our \u201cultimate concern.\u201d\u00a0 What, then, would Aristotle make of Snoop Dog?\u00a0 What, for that matter, would anyone not numbed by the seeming inevitability of it all make of the entire buffet of celebrity gossip and discount idolatry, made-for-TV celemarketing events like the dropping of the Times Square ball later today, that \u201cmaking life more convenient\u201d might be a major goal of life and work with existential pretensions, our obsession with toys, clothes, appearances, the very idea of cosmetic plastic surgery, selfie sticks, or the whole childishness of our culture and its President who has less self-control or emotional regulation than has the typical 10 year-old throughout the history of our species?\u00a0 Ours is not a culture obsessed with excellence, except that which might be better defined as \u201cextremely effective.\u201d \u00a0\u201cOur inventions, Thoreau wrote, \u201care wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.\u201d\u00a0 Our culture of effectiveness cares only for the speed of travel, and little even for the arrival itself, never mind where we are going as long as it is faster and more convenient.[vi]<\/a><\/p>\n

Viewing ourselves through Aristotelian eyes is at best a speculative endeavor, but one that remains worth the effort and the distance we might slowly, if temporarily, put between our moral imaginations and the familiar look of things.\u00a0 Aristotle\u2019s ethics and politics, in contrast to ours, have a single aim:\u00a0 defining \u201cthe good\u201d or the best and describing the practical reasoning, the method of education, and the political and social organization that will allow people to practice the good.\u00a0 His is an ethics of excellence, which provides vivid contrast to effectively achieving \u201cunimproved ends.\u201d What, he asks, is the best or \u201chighest\u201d goal or end<\/em> humans might achieve? \u00a0Far from trying to make Athens great again, with connotations, there, of being in a position to win competitions of strength or flashy abundance, Aristotle\u2019s politics, writes G.E.R. Lloyd, \u201cmay be said to enable its members to fulfil their capacity for virtue\u201d (258). \u00a0\u00a0Or as Aristotle writes in Politics<\/em>, \u201cthe best life, both for individuals and states, is the life of excellence, when excellence has external goods enough for the performance of good actions\u201d (1223b 38).<\/p>\n

Two features, in particular, mark more specifically the difference between Aristotle\u2019s ethics and modern morality.\u00a0 The first is the way the good<\/em> is not an arbitrary result of personal choice but is subject to philosophical examination and dialectical scrutiny.\u00a0 Since the advent of Enlightenment reason<\/em>, that which attempted to do for the study of human life what Isaac Newton did for the study of the natural world, moral philosophy has, for reasons of internal consistency, believed it necessary to relinquish the idea of the good<\/em>.\u00a0 As MacIntyre explains, \u201cquestions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent\u201d (After Virtue<\/em> 26).\u00a0\u00a0 Some of us may recall from Philosophy 101 that one can\u2019t derive \u201cought from is,\u201d for what is, is the lifeless mechanical movement of an infinite universe.[vii]<\/a>\u00a0 Aristotle\u2019s entire system, in contrast, is based on answering the question of ends and thus of value.<\/p>\n

The second main difference is the inclusion of pleasure, enjoyment and happiness in a virtuous life.\u00a0 Although prohibitive morality has lost almost all of its prestige over the past one hundred years, to the extent that modern, post-Enlightenment, Liberal belief systems have any resources pertaining to limits, they are akin to the\u00a0 \u201cPuritan\u201d disavowal of desire, passions, and inclination, the sense that a virtuous life is one of self-sacrifice\u2014a code that it inherited from Christianity and reshaped and eroded so that it could be compatible with heterogeneity and the market.\u00a0 This code, at least as we might recall it from distant memories of our grandmothers\u2019 judgmental barbs, pits pleasure against denial, freedom against limits, inclination against the moral will.<\/p>\n

Aristotelian ethics, in contrast, is not opposed to pleasure, enjoyment, even rewarded success.\u00a0 But virtuous pleasures (and the pleasure of virtue), in greater contrast, are not those of market hedonism, and its pretense to spontaneous expression of the authentic self.\u00a0 As MacIntyre explains, \u201cThe enjoyment which Aristotle identifies is that which characteristically accompanies the achievement of excellence in activity\u201d (After Virtue<\/em> 160)\u2014activity that aims, like a well-trained archer, towards the good.\u00a0 A life of virtue is one of \u201cdoing well and faring well,\u201d acting not against inclinations, but on inclinations tutored and habituated towards the practice of excellence.\u00a0 Education is paramount, though modeled after an apprenticeship, now an apprenticeship in the craft of life itself, interweaving skill, judgment, reflection, and respect for its difficult beauty and form. The tragedy of American education, from this perspective, isn\u2019t that it shows some people how to be effective players, leaving others behind\u2014though it does have this effect.\u00a0 It is that it leaves most of the education of goals and ends and wants to TV commercials, YouTube celebrities, Kim and Kanye\u2019s 1.3-million-dollar holiday party and the rest of the televisual and social media fantasy world.\u00a0 These goals and wants are mainly a means to some blurry vision of success or getting ahead, or not falling behind.\u00a0 I would suggest that the tail is wagging the dog, except for the fact there is no dog anymore (dog is dead), and only an aimlessly flapping tail.<\/p>\n

Few people who think about such matters would consider the aims, distractions, and pleasures widely pursued by Americans or citizens of industrial nations to be good<\/em> or excellent<\/em> according to any conceivable standards.\u00a0 Who actually thinks<\/em> that their daughters should<\/em> listen to a song featuring the phrase, \u201csmile bitch,\u201d or would be proud to hear their sons saying it, even as we accept it without much thought?\u00a0 The same goes for smart phones in the hands of ten-year-olds, or years of young lives spent glued to some screen or another, slurping down colored sugar-water, their over-stimulated brains flooded with dopamine, the pursuit of which will be a permanent incumbrance.\u00a0 The content created by our culture gets very few votes for \u201cthe best and highest life for humans.\u201d\u00a0 We are what we eat\u2014and what we read and watch and hear\u2014and it shows.\u00a0 We would like to guide our children, and we may try to steer them clear of our world\u2019s most sordid attractions, their irresistible appeal notwithstanding.\u00a0 What we would guide them to<\/em>, few of us have any sense.\u00a0 Aimlessness will get one nowhere.\u00a0 But where is there really to go?<\/p>\n

The content our culture spews forth, the \u201cgoods\u201d people actually pursue, may not be a very good \u201cbest,\u201d but something arguably adjacent is: the freedom to choose your own \u201cgood,\u201d reject the whole notion, or not be bothered with having to think about it at all.[viii]<\/a>\u00a0 We have arrived as the heart of the Liberal order. [ix]<\/a> True, our politicians tell us that we are the greatest nation in the history of the planet, full of the hardest working, bravest, and most generous people ever (not to mention the best Superbowl halftime show in the history of our species); but this is only as credible as any run-of-the-mill flattery spoken to lonely souls craning their necks listening for signs that it has not all been a waste.\u00a0 If our freedom to be as excellent, mediocre, or ignoble as we wish is \u201cthe best,\u201d it is the best mainly by default.\u00a0 A historically knowledgeable Liberal can quickly tick-off all the hazards and misery that the pursuit of a single and unifying good has caused–the way it suppresses, disenfranchises, and excludes those who don\u2019t fall in line or have the wrong colored skin or speak with the wrong accent, if in fact they haven\u2019t already been slaughtered in the name of a higher ideal.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not in the least bit prepared to ignore this history and the Liberal response to it.[x]<\/a>\u00a0 For if practicing excellence and the good were a simple proposition, there would be little to discuss.\u00a0 Given many of our current conditions and realities, there are very strong arguments in favor of Liberal pluralism\u2014even if only as the worst system except for all the others.\u00a0 Liberal<\/em> politics, lacking a unifying higher ideal, MacIntyre quips, is \u201ccivil war by other means.\u201d\u00a0 The Liberal responds that all<\/em> politics are thus and that only Liberalism has been able to maintain a successful d\u00e9tente.\u00a0 Heterogeneity, diversity, and difference have been the paramount philosophical and political problem, and we are mistaken to believe that our current celebration of them, as admirable an effort as it is, are evidence of a history of progress likely to continue along that trajectory.<\/p>\n

[slide-anything id=’3472166′]<\/p>\n

For there\u2019s a problem\u2014a very big one.\u00a0 Encouraging everyone to choose their own good (compelling it, actually), and pursue it as effectively as they can, requires not only a lack of moral or ethical limits.\u00a0 It also requires a lack of ecological limits.<\/em>\u00a0 The days in which our consumption might be considered a \u201cpersonal choice\u201d are numbered.\u00a0 Moreover, competitive heterogeneity sustains its working d\u00e9tente only as long as the things we are competing over keep expanding in quantity and scale, lowering the stakes of the competition as losers all feel more like the runner-up.\u00a0 End the growth and we are likely to see civil war by means of civil war, as the pax profusio <\/em>meets its bitter end. [xi]<\/a> This is one of the main reasons Liberals cannot fathom the end of economic growth: in addition to preventing the fabled \u201czero-sum game,\u201d economic growth has provided highly effective workarounds, allowing us to bypass some pretty basic moral dilemmas and incommensurable rival moral claims (like the one between freedom and equality or entitlement and need). [xii]<\/a><\/p>\n

One can see in debates on climate change not only the immense challenge of entrenched interests and expectations, as well as a gargantuan practical problem of logistics (made especially difficult owing to our habit of solving logistical problems by dumping fossil fuels on them[xiii]<\/a>); one should also see a crisis of our moral language, visible, for example, in the contorted legalese of The Paris Agreement with its \u201cvoluntary pledges\u201d and inescapably pseudo-accountability.\u00a0 Liberalism knows only want-fulfillment, on the one hand, and a set of increasingly disused \u201cmoral principles\u201d with which we might limit our desires and wants, on the other.\u00a0 These include a weak and tattered appeal to human rights\u2014rights to what[xiv]<\/a>, or how they might be prioritized, no one can really say\u2014incredulous appeals to equality as the wealthy transfer more wealth at neck-snapping speed, and a battered concept of the common good which gestures awkwardly towards that shrinking sphere where our diverse and clamoring wants and desires are protected from each other, and then only according to ill-defined principles. \u00a0Puritan notions of thrift and humility have all but disappeared (unless Urban Outfitters figures how to package it), the rejection of their previous uneven application providing a useful excuse for unfettering the economy of want-creation with which they might otherwise have interfered.\u00a0 Perhaps MacIntyre\u2019s civil war of Liberal politics was a result of its inoperable moral vocabulary, lacking any meaningful value-concepts and the guiding aim of \u201cthe good.\u201d[xv]<\/a>\u00a0 With no plausible means of settling disputes between wants and their consequences, (think, still, about the Paris agreement) resolution becomes reduced to the persuasive use of power.<\/p>\n

This is also why Liberalism, with its principled exclusion of any compulsory morality or limits, can currently only offer three basic choices: 1) ecological destruction through the continuation of Liberal freedom; 2) the renewal of resentment and tribalism as we compete over a shrinking stash; or 3) the sort of political authoritarianism or oligarchy that can maintain ecological limits by limiting freedom and controlling group hostility.\u00a0 The most difficult, and fearsome, aspect of our current situation is that we appear to be pursuing all three choices at once, though not in a coherent or coordinated way.\u00a0 It might be time to try something different.<\/p>\n

If there is an alternative, I don\u2019t think it can be found within Liberalism or from the tools it possesses\u2014unless they can be rearranged or amended drastically.\u00a0 Aristotelianism and its concern with ends and the good, which has a surprising number of smaller-scale modern examples, does provide a possible path out from under the wreckage. \u00a0We thought we had to relinquish the excellent to accommodate diversity and difference, for the demand for excellence required discrimination, and that discrimination carried over into every aspect of our lives.\u00a0\u00a0 But perhaps what is required is a more discriminating discrimination, one that asks\u2014and answers, however provisionally\u2014questions of value. \u00a0In fact, I will suggest in a later section, Aristotelian excellence and its proto-Liberal other have been tarrying since the Periclean era of Athenian democracy, neither gaining a permanent<\/em> upper-hand. . . unless we assume the last hundred and fifty or two-hundred years represents the end of history.\u00a0 And perhaps it does.<\/p>\n

Aristotle and the Pursuit of Happiness<\/strong><\/p>\n

forthcoming<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> The difference between \u201cconservative\u201d Republicans and liberal Democrats is mainly a difference of means to a similar ends (or the lack thereof) defined in accordance to Liberal Individualism and Liberal Economics.\u00a0 I will refer to the broader and all-encompassing Liberal Individualism by capitalizing \u201cLiberal.\u201d\u00a0 A lower-case \u201cl\u201d will be used when I\u2019m talking more narrowly about the political liberals or progressives who identify as Democrats, Greens, or Social Democrats.\u00a0 Liberalism (capitalized) has a left and a right wing somewhat confusingly referred to as \u201cconservatives\u201d and \u201cliberals.\u201d\u00a0 This distinction also applies to further distinctions including but not limited to: freedom\/equality; individualist\/socialist; ownership\/need; sovereign self\/socially constructed self; individual responsibility\/common good; deregulation\/regulation.\u00a0 One must venture further from the place where these differences meet than is commonly, if ever, seen in today\u2019s politics to violate Liberal Individualism.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JTzMqm2TwgE<\/a>.\u00a0 The phrase, \u201cwe need to get more money in the hands of middle class consumers\u201d is implied in the video but comes from an op-ed I can no longer find.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> See Wolfgang Streeck\u2019s excellent, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/07\/us\/florida-government-shutdown-marianna.html<\/a><\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> But also by Lasch, Adorno and Horkheimer, Karl Polanyi, Wendell Berry, and David Fleming.<\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> Am I painting with overly broad strokes?\u00a0 Perhaps, for there are countless acts of charity and generosity to be seen every day in every part of the world.\u00a0 Americans, like all people, love their children and want the best for them, while the creativity and desire to learn seen in children is carried on by many adults.\u00a0 Every city and town has social activists, healers, kind souls ready to listen or help.\u00a0 Our culture may produce mountains of hazardous junk, but our freedoms are often the envy of the world.\u00a0 Corruption, manipulation, as well as facile peevishness and gratuitous small-mindedness is likewise visible in all corners of the world.\u00a0 This can all be true and it still might be concluded that our culture remains fixed on goals and ends that are lethally unsustainable and inimical to widespread happiness, whether our or those who suffer the collateral damage from our excesses.<\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a> See Alexandre Koyre\u2019s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.<\/em>\u00a0 Koyre writes: \u201cThis scientific and philosophical revolution. . . can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the disappearance, from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole. . . and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being.\u00a0 This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based on value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning, and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value from the world of facts\u201d (4). \u00a0We have yet to understand the full or final consequences of this new pragmatism.<\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a> Given the prominence and legitimacy of manipulative relationships in contemporary Liberal society, the whole idea of \u201cfree choice\u201d is a canard.\u00a0 But that does not make finding an alternative simple.\u00a0 More explicitly about this later (though in some sense this is the<\/em> issue I\u2019m discussing).<\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a> As Bert van den Brink notes in his insightful book, The Tragedy of Liberalism: An Alternative Defense of a Political Tradition,<\/em> among Liberalism\u2019s two highest ideals is \u201cneutrality of the state with respect to competing conceptions of the good life\u201d (5).\u00a0 I would add that this ideal of neutrality–which as van den Brink acknowledges but ultimately accepts, is not possible to realize–extends well beyond the Liberal state and into nearly every realm of our culture.<\/p>\n

[x]<\/a> What I am prepared to do, however, in addition to the dialectical stress-test I\u2019m generally submitting it to, is also ask to what extent is this history Liberalism\u2019s raison d\u2019etre<\/em>, and to what extent is this history, itself, a part of the broader history of the \u201cdevalorization of being\u201d whether caused by some sort of phenomenology of spirit, market forces, or technological development?<\/p>\n

[xi]<\/a> In a very interesting 2010 report authored by none other than James Mattis, the Pentagon put out a report on the \u201cJoint Operating Environment.\u201d\u00a0 There, Mattis writes: \u201cA severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.\u00a0 While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India. At best, it would lead to periods of harsh economic adjustment. To what extent conservation measures, investments in alternative energy production, and efforts to expand petroleum production from tar sands and shale would mitigate such a period of adjustment is difficult to predict.\u00a0 One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest<\/em>\u201d (30; emphasis added). \u00a0See, https:\/\/www.jcs.mil\/Portals\/36\/Documents\/Doctrine\/concepts\/joe_2010.pdf?ver=2017-12-30-132036-843<\/a><\/p>\n

[xii]<\/a> https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2017-02-22\/economic-growth-a-primer\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[xiii]<\/a> This, of course, is the problem with the \u201cGreen New Deal\u201d: it hasn\u2019t come to grips with the fact that we have no experience solving problems of the sort presented by climate change and resource depletion except by using more energy and more resources and must make itself insensible to the laws of thermodynamics to prevent a jarring awakening from this dream.<\/p>\n

[xiv]<\/a> Does life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include electricity?\u00a0 Airplane travel?\u00a0 Is highspeed internet an inalienable right?\u00a0 Does my right to \u201cdevelop\u201d land stolen from Native Americans trump your right to have drinkable water?\u00a0 Are some inalienable rights more inalienable than others?\u00a0 Is Snoop Dog\u2019s right to sing, \u201csmile bitch\u201d more fundamental than our children\u2019s right to grow up in a world free from this sort of degradation, and if so how and why?\u00a0 We have rightly focused the notion of human rights on including all people in the category \u201chuman,\u201d but without realizing the utter confusion of the concept of \u201crights\u201d itself.\u00a0 We act as if they are matters of fact, and not matters of value, which Reason, in the modern mode, as rightly declared itself incompetent to judge.\u00a0 See After Virtue<\/em>, especially chapters 6 and 17.<\/p>\n

[xv]<\/a> This is a brief summary of his overall article in After Virtue<\/em>, in which he argues that to discuss moral or ethics without a concept of the good will inevitably erode into assertion of individual will.\u00a0 We must choose, he says, between Aristotle and Nietzsche. \u00a0More about this in later sections.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aristotle. 1985. The Complete Works of Aristotle.<\/em> Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n

Berry, Wendell. 1977. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.<\/em> San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.<\/p>\n

Fleming, David. 2016. Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future.<\/em> Edited by Shaun Chamberlin. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green.<\/p>\n

Hopkins, Rob. 2008. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience.<\/em> Totnes, Devon: Green Books.<\/p>\n

Koyre, Alexandre. 1958. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.<\/em> New York: Harper & Brothers.<\/p>\n

Lakoff, George. 1996. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.<\/em> Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n

Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.<\/em> New York: W.W. Norton.<\/p>\n

Lloyd, G.E.R. 1968. Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought.<\/em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.<\/em> London: Duckworth.<\/p>\n

\u2014. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?<\/em> South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.<\/p>\n

Mattis, Joe. 2010. The JOE 2010: Joint Operating Environment.<\/em> Suffolk Virginia: United States Joint Forces Command.<\/p>\n

Monbiot, George. 2017. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis.<\/em> London: Verso.<\/p>\n

Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time.<\/em> Boston: Beacon Press.<\/p>\n

Streeck, Wolfgang. 2017. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.<\/em> London: Verso Books.<\/p>\n

Thoreau, Henry David. 1973. Walden: Or Life in the Woods (1854).<\/em> Garden City, New York: Anchor Books.<\/p>\n

Tillich, Paul. 1957. The Dynamics of Faith.<\/em> New York: Harper Collins.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By \u201cconservative\u201d I am not referring to anything resembling Republicans or European \u201ccenter-right\u201d parties, or positions yet further to the right on the liberal-conservative continuum as it is commonly understood today.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3475209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213522,213526,79720],"tags":[163844,96280,110721,91237],"class_list":["post-3475208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","category-act-inspiration-featured","category-society","tag-buildingresilientsocieties","tag-conservatism","tag-liberalism","tag-limitstogrowth"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3475208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3475209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3475208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3475208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3475208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}