September 2, 2019: Patrick J. Deneen’s argument for the collapse of Western Civilization, right now
Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed adds a compelling hypothesis to Western Civilization’s trajectory. [1] While the present with its flood of information overwhelms historians unable to decipher what matters and what doesn’t, Deneen offers a specific cause as an “emergent property.” [2] A property to emerge only recently from Enlightenment ideals evolved and combined over time. Other notables in this arena deal with history, where information is always lacking, and they deal in generalized rules. [3] For them, collapse of the West is an arc; part of a cycle; moral debasement; or blundering leaders unable to innovate social mutations that survive a changing environment. Deneen’s only generalization appears when he asks if America is “approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations.” [4]
By “liberalism,” Deneen means “Enlightenment liberalism” employed by America’s Founders. Given liberalism is fundamental to the West, his book is an indictment of not only the outcomes of our constitutional foundation two centuries hence, but of Western Civilization as a whole. It’s a story of patricide without knowing it or wanting it by the very system that Enlightenment provided from the beginning. Per Deneen, “Liberalism created the conditions and the tools for assent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge for its own culpability.” [5] “[It] failed because it succeeded… success measured by its achievement of the opposite of its promise.” [6] In short, liberalism sank not because something went wrong, but because it worked so impossibly well.
Enlightenment’s prioritization of self-interest required an authority to protect it. That authority would be self-governance under rule of law to ensure individual rights allowing self-determination. A free market economy was the natural choice for practical day-to-day practice of it. But as Deneen elaborates, under this dual service to liberty, what began as one, bifurcated as two worldviews: the State to ensure liberty, and the Market to exercise it. Once born, both would evolve like a live organism.
More fundamental than politics, the root of this evolution is human innovation, our strongest tool for survival. Humans don’t innovate technology alone, but also social norms, morality, traditions, and religion. Our irresistible urge to innovate breaks the rules, finds workarounds, and through “creative destruction” terminates what gave it life. Often these innovations are a counter-measure, trying to fix what we broke when we fixed something else. We invented agriculture for greater food certainty than hunter-gatherers, but as evidenced in the chemistry of buried bone remains, made humans sicker. [7] With agriculture came sedentary life and large investments in one location as an invitation to war for those built assets. So humans invented cites as protection. But with so many people so close together, never on the move, focused more on each other than the environment, laws were invented to manage behavior as the personal judgement of kin increased its distance and lost its power. Cities became capitals of wealth with still greater invitations to war, so we invented the State. But States, like modern individuals, are their own centrifugal force, casting themselves apart with ambition while struggling to hold themselves together as a result of change brought on by ambition. [8] Liberalism was a counter-measure fix for one set of problems. Like these other measures, it took centuries to reveal that it created a whole new set of problems, those emergent properties Deneen reveals.
Not an indictment of innovation, the point is there will always be unintended consequences no one can predict. James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light in 1865. No one could know this would lead to radio, TV, and smart phones that allow people to flash mob, riot, or take over countries. Likewise, Enlightenment liberalism could not foresee what its innovation would lead to, though the Founders expressed fear over aspects of it. Eventually for liberalism, any restriction of State/Market partners in advancing liberty would be seen as arbitrary, in need of erasure to fulfill liberalism’s promise.
But this is based on modernity’s shifted definition of liberty. As Deneen explains, to ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance via habits of virtue. Virtue as self-restraint over, and freedom from, base appetites through limits on individual choice. Instead, modernity redefined liberty as the greatest possible freedom from externally imposed boundaries. [9] Like inventing the city, as social restrictions lost control, the State was enlarged through lawmaking to take its place, crossing boundaries of what once were communities of common cause. Simultaneously, sovereignty of individual choice required removal of artificial boundaries to the marketplace, once a delineated space within the city. This “borderlessness” is a shared fundamental, says Deneen, opposed to “arbitrary” restrictions. Expressed in modernity by the Market in which a business has no loyalty to its home or its people. And by the State where, ironically, national boundaries are merely for mapmaking. Even those imposed by biology are to be corrected as legislation “breaks barriers” to gender “preference.” [10] This logic of free choice autonomy eventuates in a mass State architecture and globalized economy. Both set out to liberate the individual, instead leaving them overwhelmed by the machinery of each.
Consider the social elements of custom, tradition, and religion. For generations of Homo sapiens these provided belonging and its consequent meaning. But for today’s political Left these are oppressive of individual free expression. True communities built from these elements are to be opened for State inspection to assure no individual rights are violated, and to ensure no coercion exists that conform individuals to community values (though the Amish get away with it). Instead, our replacement for communities of old are the NASCAR “community,” the Facebook “community,” or this afternoon’s mass murder “community.” For liberals, restraint (i.e. virtue) is seen as an assault on the Sacred Self in worship of Free Choice with a minimum of attachments. Hence liberals continue their deconstruction in a quest to tame these social rudiments, disconnecting people from each other in order to expand personal liberty, then wonder why there’s no concern for the poor, why the rich want to keep all they can, and why corporations would place profit above people and the planet. For liberals, belonging is a kind of weakness, an insult to autonomy.
The political Right is just as ruinous. Like the State, the Market couches this program in terms of free choice as “maximized utility.” To Market conservatives, religion’s embrace of modesty or its prohibitions on excess are obstacles to maximized consumption and profit. Ethics stands in the way of eviscerating the environment or some other species for economic return. Markets must be protected from poor, indigenous, or politically weak people in a say to their own lands if resources are discovered under it. Markets that export occupations overseas from the town they came from are simply engaged in standard business practice. The increased purchasing power of cheap goods is supposed to compensate for the absence of high paying manufacturing jobs. Profit is about the dollar, not the flag (except in China), and it’s certainly not about employees who provide return on investment and yet are expendable while investors somehow are not. Laws that allow corporate polluters to poison the very people that work for them—from coal miners with black lung, to America’s cancer alley in Louisiana and Texas—are passed by “business friendly” conservatives. When it comes to cherished families and their values, try killing off a few—a regular occurrence—then see how their traditions stand up to it. [11]
True communities thrived on our sensitivities of connectedness. State and Market society thrives on our disconnectedness. [12] Three hundred million people in America and according to the World Economic Forum (isn’t that ironic?) loneliness is an epidemic in one of the loneliest places on Earth. [13]
That Enlightenment liberalism worked so well is a testament to the match between the practical results of this philosophical system and human nature. These philosophers came closer than anyone in correctly defining humans, and assigning terms to the “Equation of Man” that describes them. But like the mathematical series approximation to any phenomena, they couldn’t include every variable. They were forced to leave out terms they considered less important in their day, and accepted an approximation. Hence, they did not give us a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. What they ignored or assigned less weight, over time evolved to become a predator with its creators as its prey. What began as a society to serve self-interest has become a society of “separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” [14]
In posts to follow we’ll test Deneen’s ideas in hopes of locating where we are in that “natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations,” and ponder solutions.
Until next time, November 4, 2019.
[1] Patrick J. Deneen Why Liberalism Failed, Yale, 2018
[2] Recall that an emergent property is a characteristic that comes about when the right combination of things come together. For example, water feels dry until from a million or so water molecules in contact emerges the property of wetness.
[3] Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West notion is one of arc. Like a person, civilization rises on some idea in youth, advances to middle age stagnation, and decays in elder years. Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay roots collapse in cycles. From superstition, disorder, and lack of control, civilizations rotate out of this and into spans of order and control only to be spiritually and socially eviscerated by their own social machine (like many Americans in the workplace, where each day is another lesson in submission), whereupon the civilization heals over into another superstitious phase of the cycle. Will & Ariel Durrant’s Lessons of History blame moral decay. For Arnold Toynbee’s Story of History it’s a failure of leaders to adjust to ever changing landscapes.
[4] Deneen, pg. 4
[5] pg. xxvi. In regards to Deneen’s remark that liberalism fails to see its own culpability, see the blog post Is PCD an acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?, Brett Williams, November 7, 2016
[6] Deneen pg. 3
[7] Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010
[8] This concept of States that hurl themselves apart as they struggle to hold themselves together comes from Marcel Gauchet and his remarkable Disenchantment Of The World.
[9] Deneen pg. xiii
[10] Deneen uses abortion as corrective to limits imposed on women. The gender preference example is my own and references an actual gender spectrum dictated by biology, not psychological preference as summarized in Radiolab Presents: Gonads , WNYCStudios, June 2018.
[11] As one of countless examples: Miles O'Brien, The danger of coal ash, the toxic dust the fossil fuel leaves behind, PBS Newshour, Aug 14, 2019. As Louis Dumont clarifies in From Mandeville to Marx, economics divorced itself from religion and morality in order to make “rational” numerical judgment without interference. Which reminds me of libertarian guru Murry Rothbard’s notion that freedom is defined for individuals as though each were alone in the universe—which don’t exist. See more on Dumont on this blog at Mount Economics – It Wasn’t Always So Tall, Brett Williams, July 6, 2015, and for Rothbard, Murray Rothbard’s strange and zany world, Brett Williams, September 5, 2016.
[12] Free market economy promoter, Michael Polanyi who schooled Frederick Hayek on this matter, had a brother, Karl, who’s The Great Transformation makes this very point, that the Market embeds society in economy rather than the other (original) way around as modern economy now has it.
[13] Kevin Loria, Most Americans are lonely, World Economic Forum, 3 May 2018. Amy Brannan, TOP 10 LONELIEST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD , IMMIGroup, Aug 30, 2017
[14] Deneen pg. 46
By “liberalism,” Deneen means “Enlightenment liberalism” employed by America’s Founders. Given liberalism is fundamental to the West, his book is an indictment of not only the outcomes of our constitutional foundation two centuries hence, but of Western Civilization as a whole. It’s a story of patricide without knowing it or wanting it by the very system that Enlightenment provided from the beginning. Per Deneen, “Liberalism created the conditions and the tools for assent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge for its own culpability.” [5] “[It] failed because it succeeded… success measured by its achievement of the opposite of its promise.” [6] In short, liberalism sank not because something went wrong, but because it worked so impossibly well.
Enlightenment’s prioritization of self-interest required an authority to protect it. That authority would be self-governance under rule of law to ensure individual rights allowing self-determination. A free market economy was the natural choice for practical day-to-day practice of it. But as Deneen elaborates, under this dual service to liberty, what began as one, bifurcated as two worldviews: the State to ensure liberty, and the Market to exercise it. Once born, both would evolve like a live organism.
More fundamental than politics, the root of this evolution is human innovation, our strongest tool for survival. Humans don’t innovate technology alone, but also social norms, morality, traditions, and religion. Our irresistible urge to innovate breaks the rules, finds workarounds, and through “creative destruction” terminates what gave it life. Often these innovations are a counter-measure, trying to fix what we broke when we fixed something else. We invented agriculture for greater food certainty than hunter-gatherers, but as evidenced in the chemistry of buried bone remains, made humans sicker. [7] With agriculture came sedentary life and large investments in one location as an invitation to war for those built assets. So humans invented cites as protection. But with so many people so close together, never on the move, focused more on each other than the environment, laws were invented to manage behavior as the personal judgement of kin increased its distance and lost its power. Cities became capitals of wealth with still greater invitations to war, so we invented the State. But States, like modern individuals, are their own centrifugal force, casting themselves apart with ambition while struggling to hold themselves together as a result of change brought on by ambition. [8] Liberalism was a counter-measure fix for one set of problems. Like these other measures, it took centuries to reveal that it created a whole new set of problems, those emergent properties Deneen reveals.
Not an indictment of innovation, the point is there will always be unintended consequences no one can predict. James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light in 1865. No one could know this would lead to radio, TV, and smart phones that allow people to flash mob, riot, or take over countries. Likewise, Enlightenment liberalism could not foresee what its innovation would lead to, though the Founders expressed fear over aspects of it. Eventually for liberalism, any restriction of State/Market partners in advancing liberty would be seen as arbitrary, in need of erasure to fulfill liberalism’s promise.
But this is based on modernity’s shifted definition of liberty. As Deneen explains, to ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance via habits of virtue. Virtue as self-restraint over, and freedom from, base appetites through limits on individual choice. Instead, modernity redefined liberty as the greatest possible freedom from externally imposed boundaries. [9] Like inventing the city, as social restrictions lost control, the State was enlarged through lawmaking to take its place, crossing boundaries of what once were communities of common cause. Simultaneously, sovereignty of individual choice required removal of artificial boundaries to the marketplace, once a delineated space within the city. This “borderlessness” is a shared fundamental, says Deneen, opposed to “arbitrary” restrictions. Expressed in modernity by the Market in which a business has no loyalty to its home or its people. And by the State where, ironically, national boundaries are merely for mapmaking. Even those imposed by biology are to be corrected as legislation “breaks barriers” to gender “preference.” [10] This logic of free choice autonomy eventuates in a mass State architecture and globalized economy. Both set out to liberate the individual, instead leaving them overwhelmed by the machinery of each.
Consider the social elements of custom, tradition, and religion. For generations of Homo sapiens these provided belonging and its consequent meaning. But for today’s political Left these are oppressive of individual free expression. True communities built from these elements are to be opened for State inspection to assure no individual rights are violated, and to ensure no coercion exists that conform individuals to community values (though the Amish get away with it). Instead, our replacement for communities of old are the NASCAR “community,” the Facebook “community,” or this afternoon’s mass murder “community.” For liberals, restraint (i.e. virtue) is seen as an assault on the Sacred Self in worship of Free Choice with a minimum of attachments. Hence liberals continue their deconstruction in a quest to tame these social rudiments, disconnecting people from each other in order to expand personal liberty, then wonder why there’s no concern for the poor, why the rich want to keep all they can, and why corporations would place profit above people and the planet. For liberals, belonging is a kind of weakness, an insult to autonomy.
The political Right is just as ruinous. Like the State, the Market couches this program in terms of free choice as “maximized utility.” To Market conservatives, religion’s embrace of modesty or its prohibitions on excess are obstacles to maximized consumption and profit. Ethics stands in the way of eviscerating the environment or some other species for economic return. Markets must be protected from poor, indigenous, or politically weak people in a say to their own lands if resources are discovered under it. Markets that export occupations overseas from the town they came from are simply engaged in standard business practice. The increased purchasing power of cheap goods is supposed to compensate for the absence of high paying manufacturing jobs. Profit is about the dollar, not the flag (except in China), and it’s certainly not about employees who provide return on investment and yet are expendable while investors somehow are not. Laws that allow corporate polluters to poison the very people that work for them—from coal miners with black lung, to America’s cancer alley in Louisiana and Texas—are passed by “business friendly” conservatives. When it comes to cherished families and their values, try killing off a few—a regular occurrence—then see how their traditions stand up to it. [11]
True communities thrived on our sensitivities of connectedness. State and Market society thrives on our disconnectedness. [12] Three hundred million people in America and according to the World Economic Forum (isn’t that ironic?) loneliness is an epidemic in one of the loneliest places on Earth. [13]
That Enlightenment liberalism worked so well is a testament to the match between the practical results of this philosophical system and human nature. These philosophers came closer than anyone in correctly defining humans, and assigning terms to the “Equation of Man” that describes them. But like the mathematical series approximation to any phenomena, they couldn’t include every variable. They were forced to leave out terms they considered less important in their day, and accepted an approximation. Hence, they did not give us a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. What they ignored or assigned less weight, over time evolved to become a predator with its creators as its prey. What began as a society to serve self-interest has become a society of “separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” [14]
In posts to follow we’ll test Deneen’s ideas in hopes of locating where we are in that “natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations,” and ponder solutions.
Until next time, November 4, 2019.
[1] Patrick J. Deneen Why Liberalism Failed, Yale, 2018
[2] Recall that an emergent property is a characteristic that comes about when the right combination of things come together. For example, water feels dry until from a million or so water molecules in contact emerges the property of wetness.
[3] Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West notion is one of arc. Like a person, civilization rises on some idea in youth, advances to middle age stagnation, and decays in elder years. Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay roots collapse in cycles. From superstition, disorder, and lack of control, civilizations rotate out of this and into spans of order and control only to be spiritually and socially eviscerated by their own social machine (like many Americans in the workplace, where each day is another lesson in submission), whereupon the civilization heals over into another superstitious phase of the cycle. Will & Ariel Durrant’s Lessons of History blame moral decay. For Arnold Toynbee’s Story of History it’s a failure of leaders to adjust to ever changing landscapes.
[4] Deneen, pg. 4
[5] pg. xxvi. In regards to Deneen’s remark that liberalism fails to see its own culpability, see the blog post Is PCD an acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?, Brett Williams, November 7, 2016
[6] Deneen pg. 3
[7] Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010
[8] This concept of States that hurl themselves apart as they struggle to hold themselves together comes from Marcel Gauchet and his remarkable Disenchantment Of The World.
[9] Deneen pg. xiii
[10] Deneen uses abortion as corrective to limits imposed on women. The gender preference example is my own and references an actual gender spectrum dictated by biology, not psychological preference as summarized in Radiolab Presents: Gonads , WNYCStudios, June 2018.
[11] As one of countless examples: Miles O'Brien, The danger of coal ash, the toxic dust the fossil fuel leaves behind, PBS Newshour, Aug 14, 2019. As Louis Dumont clarifies in From Mandeville to Marx, economics divorced itself from religion and morality in order to make “rational” numerical judgment without interference. Which reminds me of libertarian guru Murry Rothbard’s notion that freedom is defined for individuals as though each were alone in the universe—which don’t exist. See more on Dumont on this blog at Mount Economics – It Wasn’t Always So Tall, Brett Williams, July 6, 2015, and for Rothbard, Murray Rothbard’s strange and zany world, Brett Williams, September 5, 2016.
[12] Free market economy promoter, Michael Polanyi who schooled Frederick Hayek on this matter, had a brother, Karl, who’s The Great Transformation makes this very point, that the Market embeds society in economy rather than the other (original) way around as modern economy now has it.
[13] Kevin Loria, Most Americans are lonely, World Economic Forum, 3 May 2018. Amy Brannan, TOP 10 LONELIEST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD , IMMIGroup, Aug 30, 2017
[14] Deneen pg. 46
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