On Schisms Within Isms

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Oct 22

It is said that socialism hides in the closets of little right-wing girls and boys; certainly, it has scared the hell out of the talking heads of the Republican Party, some of whom have dusted off the old sayings and are sternly warning young people that “if you work hard and don’t get into trouble, anything is possible in America.”

This is technically accurate: in America, anything is possible, even if you do occasionally get into trouble. America makes the impossible closer to the possible for the most number of people anywhere on earth.

But a system is also failing, call it “liberal capitalism” or “the rules-based international order.” It is failing mostly because its institutions—its bone-structures—were taken over by a perverse ideology and then devoured from within.

An odd grandchild of Marxism, Progressivism, and sociological optimism mixed with a heaping of trauma in the wake of WWII and its realization of the raw depravity of man, this ideology has morphed into bureaucratic bloating and the corruptions of the administrative state. It is an ideology that sees government as the perpetually best answer to social problems, that views scientific regulation of many or every feature of social life as optimal, that allows the crude destruction of the old institutions of family and religious life because it lessens any restraint on its own social ambitions.

Marxism donated its obsession over “the sins of systems”, offering as the only proportional solution a total destruction of the old. Already in the Rooseveltian stages of the administrative state, social inequalities were taken to be proof of systemic failures requiring comprehensive state intervention, a soft Marxism which would grow harder over the years.

Moreover, even from its seed, the administrative state stood proudly on the axiom that social realities could be engineered, that their underlying substance—human nature—was itself malleable, a product of legislation and regulation. By the 1970s onwards, the deepest questions of human morality—for instance, the moment life begins or the identity of marriage—were being re-ratified by a tribunal of nine lawyers. Perhaps we should call them the Mt. Sinai Supreme Court.

At the same time, beginning in the early modern period, a fanatically materialistic cultural consciousness led to a peculiar concentration of genius in the technological and scientific fields. Having visited the Sistine Chapel, I know there are things men of former times could do which we cannot. Our genius is not in the humanities—in the arts of the spirit.

Our genius is in the sciences—the arts of the body, the earth, the cosmos of matter and energy. Our genius is best suited to the salvation of this world—the eradication of extreme poverty, the maximization of efficiency and comfort, the lessening of the pains of the body and the scarcity of natural resources.

Our genius led to the development of digital technologies which have wrecked the habits of mind and attentional hygiene that make successful existences possible—indeed, that make the very system of democratic civic responsibility and capitalism possible.

The methods of capital production gradually became a metaphysics, not having to answer to any higher aspiration than material increase and increase in efficiency; economic freedom would lead to the death of political tyranny and the rules-based international order would prevail forever!

It is this bizarre coalescence of independent factors that is leading to the “collapse in-on-itself” of the postmodern approach to political community. Young people are turning to socialism the way a cancer patient turns to dangerous therapeutics. Is it stupid? Objectively, maybe. But what have we got to lose? They say. . .

Given the magnitude of the assault on our institutions and the immense power of the administrative state, it is a wonder our society has been as stable as it has for as long as it has.

While Clio’s ears wring with ironic laughter, the West is threatened to be overtaken by either the worst economic notions (and perhaps political intensities) of the previous century—those very enemies it fought against—or it contemplates its cultural extinguishment by way of a deadly Christian heresy known as “suicidal empathy”—basically woke leftism.

Even AI might be understood as the socialization of intelligence, just as it may be thought the crowning achievement of human technology: the instrumentalizing of the tool-making, method-optimizing consciousness itself, the “invention of a super inventor”.

AI is the perfect answer to the progressive dilemma, promising to be the most perfect of all scientific intellects, the most capable of all regulators, the most industrious and prosperous of all machines, the most rational, the least emotional arbiter on the planet. Naturally, such a happy outcome depends upon AI being heavily controlled by the right people, but we’ll look past that obtrusive feature for a moment and simply savor the delusion.

The excessive productivity we’ve been promised by AI’s advent also fits neatly into a stratified economic vision of a global proletariat—jobless victims of the robot worker revolution, objects of ever-larger amounts of state charity.

While the real world rarely resembles the dreams of utopians, the tech overlords of Silicon Valley envision an economy of robots and entrepreneurs, and a relatively small middle class of managers and special knowledge workers.

The “promise” of the free market now seems like the vows of a tired, married couple fallen on hard times: the best was a long time ago, perhaps its time to move on. . .

We are rapidly approaching the moment when, like in the times of feudalism and high aristocracy, the best guarantee of being rich in the future is having become rich in the past.