Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

The progressive development of the collective consciousness of the West will not be attained through the negative forces of guilt and resentment. It will not be spelled out by means of a fatally subjective, self-styled “moral clarity” that is forever backward-facing—a national storytelling project that both guarantees division and verges on embittered determinism. We need objective goals again, both grander and, paradoxically, far more modest than “antiracism” could ever be. “Antiracism,” “social justice”—these are worthy values, certainly, but there are also others that demand our attention and that we have damningly neglected. Truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice—these deserve our utmost interest. To pursue them will require all people of goodwill to collaboratively articulate something far more difficult than reflexive recrimination; we will also need positive visions, practices, and stories about ourselves and one another that do not shy away from past injustices but do not mire us in them either. We will have to find convincing ways for all of us to contribute and move forward, beyond a paralyzed state of permanent anger or contrition. This will require new political strategies, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, in which “identity is seen as a mobilizational tool to demand inclusion in a broader liberal order,” and nothing like an end in its own right. These strategies will honor and engage with people as individuals with rich and varied backgrounds, not as ...