Today I read, at the new conservative/HBD website Alternative Right, an essay by Jim Kalb called The Effects Of Inclusiveness. A sample:
No person or society can realize all human possibilities. We are finite creatures who realize ourselves–become good, happy, productive, vibrant, and creative–by becoming something in particular. Since we are social, that particularity requires social particularity.
Inclusiveness denies that human need and so deprives human life of the environment it needs to thrive. A single social scheme, the inclusive society, has to apply equally to everyone. All social institutions have to be transformed so they make equal use of every possible kind of person. Society becomes a unitary machine, its members interchangeable components.
We must all be transformed. Swedes and Italians are different, and their differences make workplaces different. Inclusiveness insists on changing that and making each equally fitted to all. Every soccer mom, drag queen, black Muslim, Christian fundamentalist, and Hmong immigrant must be retailored to fit all settings equally. Those who resist can be treated as confused, ignorant, psychologically deformed, or evil.
The result isn’t diversity but a single liberal way of life variously accessorized in ways not allowed to matter. The attempt to put diversity first destroys it.
That should not be surprising. Inclusiveness is the absolutism of a rationalized commercial and administrative system. It lets bureaucracy and markets retain their hold on us, but cuts down ethnic culture to ethnic-themed fast food, religion to a poeticized version of liberal ideals, and marriage to a sentimentalized recognition of almost any sexual connection. Under such circumstances human life becomes not vibrant and diverse but boring and trivial.
In theory we are free to hold privately whatever ideals of life we want. The freedom is of doubtful substance, since private ideals of life have consequences in the lives of others. For that reason a growing range of opinions — white solidarity is one example, disapproval of homosexuality is fast becoming another — are now beyond the pale even in private.
It turned out that this article was the fifth in a series on the topic. Mr. Kalb is a solid thinker and writer, and in these essays he presents his case — which by the standards of present-day social and political orthodoxy is the purest blasphemy — with persuasive clarity. Regardless of your political viewpoint, they are well worth your time. Here they all are: I’m still reading through them myself.
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I’ll need to read the series myself, but this stuck in my craw:
“…religion [in the inclusive sphere is reduced] to a poeticized version of liberal ideals”
Kalb seems to be lamenting that this is happening. If he seriously wants a return to a more old-school, intensified religious tribalism in which each religious tradition slides back to a pronounced exclusivistic stance, well… that can be arranged, I’m sure. All in the name of preserving and promoting particularity.
I think we need an essay to balance this one out: “The Effects of Exclusiveness.” Just to make clear that there are two extremes, and that neither extreme is desirable.
Kevin nails it. It’s extremism that’s the problem. Anybody with a functioning brain should know that some things must be “excluded,” that some things must be “included,” and that the rest must be “negotiable.” The difficult part is figuring out how to effect the sorting.
It’s extremism that’s the problem. Anybody with a functioning brain should know that some things must be “excluded,” that some things must be “included,” and that the rest must be “negotiable.” The difficult part is figuring out how to effect the sorting.
Right, and I am sure Mr. Kalb realizes that, as do I.
But I am not surprised to see these points being made, and I am glad Mr. Kalb makes them so articulately. The reversing force is at its strongest when the pendulum has swung the farthest — and at the moment it has swung very far indeed.
I’m not sure what Mr. Kalb realizes. As an example of the sort of thing that gives me pause, after observing that our well-being needs social particularity, he proceeds with “Inclusiveness denies that human need and so deprives human life of the environment it needs to thrive.” Whaa?
Yeah, that line actually tripped me up, too. But I thought my confusion was the result of my having read it late at night.
Kalb does go a little over the top in places, perhaps, but what he is saying is clear enough: an overly heterogenous society, coupled with top-down enforcement of the suffocating protocols of Diversity, stifles free and natural intercourse in the public square. It has been shown (see here, for example) that the more diverse a community, the more fractured and factional it is. Do France and Sweden and Britain, for example, “thrive” as they did when they were able, correctly and unapologetically, to conduct themselves naturally as communities of Frenchmen and Swedes and Britons?
Much of social happiness, productivity, and general well-being arises, as Kalb argues, from being part of a community — from belonging to a community — with shared and predictable values, customs, morals, loyalties, language, rituals, and other idioms. (Some of these things, like food and music, for example, are fungible, while others, like how women should be treated, or what a joke can be, clearly are not.) This sharing of a collective identity is the natural context in which human societies have always flourished, and to imagine that it can all be tossed aside on purely rational principles, or that we will be better off as a result, is a terrible mistake. Indeed, the self-segregating factions in a diverse community still operate internally in this way, as human groups always have and always will, but the former social unity — the “social capital” — of the overall society is destroyed.
And it is obvious that this is the case, as so much of history, or a glance at any of the world’s newspapers, clearly shows.
I just ran into this post. Thanks for the sympathetic reading, in darkest Park Slope no less!
I think the commenters may be a bit naive. “Religious tribalism” or something like it is the human condition. There are always dogmas about the nature of man and the world that justify the use of force and tell people how to cooperate. Otherwise there couldn’t be e.g. government.
Liberalism thinks it escapes the problem because it makes its dogmas (“freedom,” “equality,” etc.) too content-free to be burdensome and so abstract that they seem universal. The move obfuscates the situation but doesn’t really work. They’re still particular dogmas that sane people can reject and most people actually do reject on some level.
People get prosecuted in Canada, Europe etc. for blaspheming against the established dogmas (saying “down with Islam,” “homosexuality is bad,” or whatever). Functionally speaking, that looks like the new tribalism of a new religion.
The move has other problems too. If the dogmas are abstract they tend to go to extremes, if they seem universal they tend to become imperialistic, and if they’re content-free they’re hard to live by. So you get a society that insists on remaking the world and all human relations in its own increasingly dysfunctional image. If moderation is the key, that’s not particularly moderate. (It’s not particularly free and equal either, but I go on and on about that in the Alt Right series.)
Welcome, Mr. Kalb, and thanks for dropping by. I’ve enjoyed your series of essays very much indeed.
Yes, as a generally conservative sort I often do feel rather “amid the alien corn” in Park Slope, but I’m happy to say that the mood has changed a bit since I first moved here in 1982, and perceptibly more so lately, as various ideological chickens have come home to roost.
I also hadn’t realized until recently that you were the founder of View from the Right. Lawrence Auster and I have had our differences — he is rather a prickly fellow, and I suppose I can be too — but his is an important voice, and I read VFR daily.
It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Agreed that Park Slope has changed since the early 80s. There was more active radicalism–posters on walls and that sort of thing. It had an ex-hippy quality that’s disappeared. (I should say that we’ve been in Prospect Heights since 1980 so we’ve been spectators.)
I wonder, though, whether it’s mostly more money and higher rents. Or maybe things just look different as your circle of acquaintances gets older. The Park Slope Food Coop seems as crazy as ever and the chatter outside my window the night of the election was as mindless as anyone could want.
Larry and I were together on VFR for maybe a year and a half but then went different directions. Things are simpler when people can run their own show. I’m glad I had something to do with getting him started though–it’s a good setting for him I think.
I think the money is the main factor; the old lefties, who bought their places for next to nothing when the neighborhood was a dump, are the same as ever. But a lot of them have been displaced by affluent go-getters, and you do tend to find more conservatives among people who have more to conserve.
Obviously that isn’t the whole story, though; there are plenty of wealthy liberals out there. And for all that it may have changed, Park Slope is still one of the “bluest” neighborhoods in America.
(I also spend a lot of time in uber-liberal Wellfleet, MA — summer home of, among others, Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn. I guess I’m just a sucker for punishment.)
From the old red left to the new blue left. From commies and activists to yuppies and hipsters who have an existential crisis when they become mommies or whatever. Still, life goes on, and you can have a sensible conversation with most people on most topics.
There are still more than a few of the old red-diaper crowd, but their numbers are thinning.
“Most” topics, yes. Some, however, are quite off-limits; far more so than they used to be.
Kalb: “I think the commenters may be a bit naive. ‘Religious tribalism’ or something like it is the human condition. There are always dogmas about the nature of man and the world that justify the use of force and tell people how to cooperate. Otherwise there couldn’t be e.g. government.”
I disagree that tribalism represents “the human condition” — itself a vague term subject to convenient misuse: “too content-free to be burdensome and so abstract that [it seems] universal.” Is not culture, and the developments/improvements that arise from it, also part of “the human condition”?
And what is implied when one calls a given X “the human condition”? That X can never be improved? To make such a claim is to ignore quite a bit of historical evidence to the contrary — a stance I would call… well, not naive, but misguided and out of touch with reality.
The last two third sentences you quote indicate what I mean by “‘religious tribalism’ or something like it” and what I mean by saying it’s part of “the human condition.”
I don’t see why the importance of culture is at odds with anything I say. Culture is particular–it sets up standards other cultures reject. So to exist and function it has to adopt a “pronounced exclusivistic stance” if (as you seem to suggest) any view that can’t be reduced to some other view has a “pronounced exclusivistic stance.”
Mr. Kalb,
I don’t disagree about the inevitability of exclusivity. Any specific stance, orientation, or school of thought is going to produce some sort of boundary issue; as someone who has done work in interreligious dialogue, I understand this only too well.
But, having now read some sections of your work, I’m not entirely convinced that your larger argument is supported by its details. I hope to discuss this at greater length on my own blog.
Is it better for religions to regard the world from an antagonistic, exclusivistic stance, or for them to adopt a more inclusivistic or pluralistic stance? To say that inclusivism and pluralism are themselves exclusivistic, by virtue of their being specific stances, is merely trivially true and therefore a dodge as to the larger questions of unnecessary conflict, human progress, and notions of enlightened behavior.
Speaking only for myself: I like living in this modern age, in a Westernized society where traditional Christians won’t burn me at the stake for not being a classical theist. I call this progress, and I call the modern Christian stance more enlightened (and thus more desirable) than its older, far less tolerant analogue. The present situation arose through change, and change lies at the heart of reality, which is always moving out from under the labels we so vainly attempt to apply to it.
You may be right to argue that diversity cannot be made the primary cultural value. I believe I agree with you there. But as I noted, I’m not sure that your specifics sufficiently reinforce the larger argument, and I’m equally unsure that they constitute a fair representation of reality. Your (dare I say metaphysical?) emphasis tends to be one-sided as you focus on notions like structure, continuity, particularity, etc. But these things comprise only one side of the coin; their opposites cannot be ignored.
One final note: I find much in common between your thoughts on particularity and the arguments made by liberal postmodernists who also preach the gospel of particularity. For most PoMo thinkers, the enemy comes in the form of rationalism, “totalizing metanarratives,” and ahistoricality. At the same time, many of your subsidiary arguments rather paradoxically take the form of ahistorical truths and totalizing metanarratives, which I find also to be the case with PoMo thinkers. It’s hard to advocate the particular by employing general truths (e.g., “Human goods are realized within networks of common habits, understandings, and loyalties that depend on local cohesion.”) to make one’s case.
Anyway, more on this later, probably at my blog. Your essays are very thought-provoking, even if I’m unpersuaded by them.
If those principles are going to do anything they’ve got to exclude a bunch of things that aren’t trivial. Why think that principles that insist on transforming interpersonal and intergroup relations in a rather demanding way are going to be forgiving?
And I like living in a comparatively stable, moderate, and conservative society in which liberals don’t guillotine me on suspicion of disloyalty to the cause of liberty and progressives don’t give me a bullet in the back of the head because I say atheism is stupid and destructive and state power should be limited. Also, I like having a government that enforces some secular laws for secular purposes but I don’t like the idea of being hanged under English common law because I steal goods worth more than twelvepence.
Naturally, none of us can guarantee the continuation of stability, moderation, conservatism, enlightenment, or whatever it is that keeps things from going to violent extremes. Modernity, progressivism, and secularity certainly don’t do the trick. The best we can do is aim at an understanding of the world that’s comprehensive and orderly enough to function properly and not go haywire. It seems to me the modern outlook leaves out too much for that and has some weaknesses from the standpoint of moderation and enlightenment.
I agree my views have something in common with PoMo claims, because they accept that all actual perspectives are particular. They also accept criticisms of those claims, because they accept that the concept of truth is indispensable and truth has to go beyond particular perspectives to universals. The basic concern, then, is how to reconcile our situation with indispensable ultimate concerns. It seems obvious to me that the solution is going to involve categories like faith, revelation, the transcendent, etc., so the real question is which system of understandings handles such things best.
The problem, when it comes to the animating doctrines of human societies, is that they do indeed, as is necessary for truths that ground entire cultures, “go to universals” — but then fall short of objective, universal confirmation, relying instead on subjective experience, shared tradition, and sacred texts. As Jim notes above, they “necessarily exclude a bunch of things that aren’t trivial”, and they do it not empirically, but by consensus.
But that consensus, and the constancy and predictability it provides, are the very bone and sinew of human cultures: it is what gives them distinctive form, and the mechanical leverage necessary for productive motion.
Malcolm,
I agree with Mr. Kalb about the exclusion of non-trivial things. This is indeed a significant problem. In discussions of religious pluralism, this point comes up repeatedly: the liberal (in this context, read: convergent pluralist) attempt to squish all religions together into some sort of common-essence paradigm usually involves the dismissal of important religious differences as “mere detail” — a dismissal not likely to be accepted by the mainstream members of those traditions.
Switching gears: what do you — as a skeptical atheist — make of the need to “involve categories like faith, revelation, the transcendent, etc.” in the solving of the inclusiveness problem? Is this the way to go? Would you align yourself with, for example, the conservative philosopher Keith Burgess-Jackson, an atheist who wholeheartedly (not grudgingly!) believes that religion plays a vital role in sociocultural coherence and should not be eliminated?
One big question is what’s involved in Malcolm’s “objective, universal confirmation.” If your standards are too demanding (e.g., you’ll only accept quantitative observations and formal logic) then nothing can be confirmed. For example, reference, meaning, evidence, universals, and truth aren’t quantitative observation or formal logic, so if you demand too much you won’t be able to make sense of propositions or what it is to confirm them.
So it seems you need to allow some degree of intuitive understanding, informal judgment, and reliance on the judgments of others. To have a reliable system of such things that’s been validated by experience it seems you need to accept a particular community and tradition of inquiry. That community and tradition of inquiry has to be able to exist, cohere, continue, and respond to events, so knowledge itself turns out to depend on the “animating doctrines of human societies.”
If you’re going to be rational and not rely on absolute blind faith then those “animating doctrines” ought to explain something about the basic features of the world and its functioning that make reason and knowledge possible. For example, they should say why reference, meaning, universals, and truth are at home in the world and why they should matter to anyone. They also ought to explain why your community and tradition of inquiry is better than anyone else’s community and tradition of inquiry. If they can’t then you have to give up on the idea of objective knowable truth, and we can’t do that.
It seems to me that when you’re done with the process whatever system of understandings you end up with isn’t going to look much like modern physicalism. You’ll need a full-blown cultural and religious tradition. The idea that scientific atheism is true doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You need more than scientific atheism to begin to make sense even of scientific atheism.
Kevin,
The point you make in your first paragraph is why I have no optimism about interreligious dialogue making much difference in the world.
I don’t really think that when Jim mentioned “categories like faith, revelation, the transcendent, etc.” he was looking to them as a solution to the inclusiveness problem; I think his point is more that, for just the sort of reasons you mention in your first paragraph, making inclusiveness a too-high priority is itself a problem — and the best way to solve it is to stop insisting on so much inclusiveness.
That’s a ticklish question, and my view has changed over the past few years. I’ve increasingly come round to the view, as I wrote in this post last year, that secular human groups are at an adaptive disadvantage in competition with societies that are strongly religious (even in spite of the chilling effect religious dogma can have on scientific inquiry). So I have to admit, as a non-theist, that I am in rather a cleft stick: it appears that societies are better off if they foster adherence to beliefs that I think are false. So yes, maybe I do agree with Keith Burgess-Jackson, but “grudgingly” at best. It feels awfully cynical and patronizing to say that I want the masses to believe something that I believe to be false, but I suppose it can’t be helped.
Jim,
I agree with you on the need for a “particular community and tradition of inquiry”. There’s already enough strain within Western culture between religious and secular traditions of inquiry, and sources of authority, that we certainly don’t need to exacerbate the problem by insisting that ever-increasing diversity is any sort of blessing.
As for objective knowable truth, it is one thing to suppose that it exists, and another to claim to have access to it. Scientific atheism makes only provisional and partial claims on truth, and stands on its own well enough on those terms, I think. But if enduring, well-functioning, strongly cohesive societies need more than that, as it appears they might, then as you say, some sort of religious tradition may well be necessary, as disappointing as that may be for people like me.
Mr. Kalb: “It seems obvious to me that the solution is going to involve categories like faith, revelation, the transcendent, etc., so the real question is which system of understandings handles such things best.”
Malcolm: “…some sort of religious tradition may well be necessary, as disappointing as that may be for people like me.”
Is this discussion creeping closer to the notion of a single national religion? That would be pretty cohesive, after all, and it would eliminate whatever problems there might be with interreligious dialogue. But is there any extant tradition that fits the bill? I doubt it, primarily because (1) the traditions we’re talking about aren’t monolithic, and (2) they represent only a small fraction of possible worldviews. Perhaps the best national religion (if that’s where we’re heading) has yet to arise.
For the record, I think the idea of a country being governed in part by a single religious worldview would be a nightmare.
Kevin,
No, I’m certainly not advocating a “national religion” that we are “governed by”. (God forbid.) And that obviously isn’t the direction we’re heading in, anyway, regardless of what I might be advocating. I think I must have given the wrong impression with “may well be necessary.”
The point here is that human societies naturally do tend to develop common, unifying religious (and other) traditions; that to do so is probably strongly adaptive in terms of group-level competitive advantage; that increasing secularism may therefore work against those natural advantages; and that increasing heterogeneity, both ethnic and religious, does so as well.
“May be necessary” meant that without such traditions, societies fail to thrive.
To my mind the question is not whether we have certainty as to truth but what the world must be like for ideas like truth to make sense. For example, if we can talk about truth it must be possible for some things (thoughts, sentences, etc.) to be about other things. I’m not sure what it means though to say that one collection of quantum mechanical events is about another if that’s all there is.
So Lewis’s problem in the passages you cite (it seems to me) has to do with the possibility of talking about assertions and relations between them rather than the factual question whether assertions are true or supported by other assertions. His point is that given scientific atheism it’s simply not meaningful to speak of such things. As he says
So he’s referring to a conceptual rather than a factual problem.
Jim,
Well, as I mention in that post, Lewis and I differ about what is conceivable. But I’ve long argued (for example, here and here) that a plausible and consistent naturalistic account can be made of the origins of intentionality. One of the keys to understanding this, for me at least, was the realization that there can be such a thing as unconscious intentionality; in most discussions of the question, “aboutness” and consciousness are bundled together in a way that they needn’t be.
Ultimately I see “aboutness” as characteristic of, arising from, and dependent on, design. We credit our designed artifacts with deriving their aboutness from our own, supposedly “intrinsic” intentionality. But on a Darwinian view, we ourselves are the product of a mighty engine of “design” as well, though not the guided, end-directed sort of design that we are used to thinking in terms of. The word “design”, with its connotation of conscious, teleological agency, is, as I lament here, a major source of terminological confusion, and I wish we had a better word.
So yes, I do think that there is a consistent way of looking at the world in which we can say that one physical system is “about” another; it requires that the system in question be, in the extended sense I have argued for, “designed”.
Can unconscious intentionality do everything you need? Even if it exists and is unproblematic and explains some things it doesn’t seem to explain others, like conscious intentionality. Someone might say the latter is just a specialized form of the former, but I’m not sure what the evidence is. What ever happened to the provisional and partial nature of scientific claims?
Claims that A (design, meaning, consciousness, whatever) emerges from radically different B (quantum mechanical events) don’t do much for me. Even if true in some sense they don’t necessarily explain A. It may be natural selection that makes electric eels electric but natural selection doesn’t explain electricity. If someone says it’s an emergent property of electric eels he hasn’t said much. I would think the same applies in other situations.
So far as I can tell your difference with Lewis isn’t really about what’s conceivable. He’s not saying it’s inconceivable that a collection of quantum mechanical events physically identical to a copy of Newton’s Principia could arise in a world composed solely of QMEs. He’s saying that in such a world such an object wouldn’t say anything. For it to say something the world would have to have other principles active in it.
Jim,
In my view what wants explaining in “conscious intentionality” isn’t intentionality, but consciousness. As I argue in the linked posts, I think that the customary focus on consciousness with regard to intentionality is misguided; conscious intentionality is simply that subset of our own intentionality of which we are consciously aware.
The real essence of intentionality, I think, is design, and to assume that intentionality is not something that can arise in the natural world is, in essence, to reject the idea that natural selection can create design. (Many do, of course, reject this idea.)
Natural selection doesn’t attempt to explain electricity. It does, however, explain — and non-trivially so — the “aboutness” of an eel’s electric organ, which is “for” stunning prey. Also, trying directly to account for a printed copy Principia Mathematica popping into existence as a random QM fluctuation is, I think, rather a straw man. If you want to account for the “aboutness” of P.M., what really needs accounting for is Newton, which I think natural selection can do.
Of course, we still want accounts of why there are such things as electricity, consciousness, etc., in the first place, and science doesn’t claim to have in hand the answers to those questions. The provisional and partial nature of scientific claims is alive and well.
We have wandered some distance from inclusiveness here!
Agreed. The discussion, with both you and Mr. Kim, has been a pleasure. The issues deserve reflection and may be worth revisiting at some point.
My feelings too. A pleasure to meet you.
Yes, it’s been interesting. I do hope to write more fully on this topic at my own e-place. Much food for thought.