Motus Mentis

Jonah Goldberg has a new book out, called The Suicide of the West. (I don’t know why he felt he had to swipe the title of James Burnham’s monumental assault upon the modern liberal order, but it would’ve been nice if he hadn’t.)

I haven’t read the book, but I know Jonah Goldberg’s oeuvre well enough — I’ve read a great many of his columns, as well as his popular book Liberal Fascism, which sacrificed conceptual rigor regarding Fascism and Nazism for a tendentious jab at the Left. (If you are serious about understanding Fascism, which, pace Goldberg, was very much a movement of the Right, you ought to read Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: The Career of a Concept.) Mr. Goldberg is the Platonic Form of the genteel conservative in the modern era: trailing along a little way behind the advancing forces of the Left, tidying up the rubble. And like most others in his intellectual taxon, he is a loyal cheerleader for the Enlightenment as the fountainhead of all that is good about the modern world — and none of what is bad.

The Federalist‘s John Daniel Davidson, unlike me, has read the new book, and has offered a review. He takes a gratifyingly skeptical eye to Mr. Goldberg’s Enlightenment boosterism, and zeroes in on the point that Goldberg (along with others such as Steven Pinker) misses (I have bolded a key passage):

Goldberg calls the emergence of the liberal order “the Miracle,’ because we can’t exactly account for why it emerged about 300 years ago. Given the sweep of evolutionary history, he says, the material progress of the past three centuries is not natural: “The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death.’

But something happened to disrupt the natural state of mankind. “Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world,’ writes Goldberg. “It was as if the great parade of humanity had started walking through a portal to a different world.’

The problem now, he argues, is that we’ve lost perspective on how good things are, on how uniquely prosperous the liberal era has been in the long slog of human history. What’s more, the Miracle is fragile. It didn’t spring unbidden from human nature””it was chosen, and it can be unchosen. To preserve it, we must reject the rising tide of tribalism, populism, and nationalism, and rediscover a sense of gratitude for what we have. More than that, we have to pass the Miracle along to each successive generation, or it will vanish. Goldberg invokes Hannah Arendt’s aphorism that in every generation Western civilization is invaded by barbarians: “We call them children.’

No doubt Goldberg certainly wants to conserve many good things like capitalism, private property, free speech, and democracy. But he fails to offer a full account of why the liberal order is at risk in the first place and why so many Americans are not as grateful for it as they should be. Despite all this prosperity, despite things being better than they’ve ever been, it doesn’t feel like it. Why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the liberal order itself, and not just tribalism or nationalism gone awry. Perhaps the Miracle, wondrous as it is, needs more than just our gratitude to sustain it. Perhaps the only thing that can sustain it is an older order, one that predates liberal democratic capitalism and gave it its vitality in the first place. Maybe the only way forward is to go back and rediscover the things we left behind at the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Goldberg is not very interested in all of that. He does not ask whether there might be some contradictions at the heart of the liberal order, whether it might contain within it the seeds of its undoing.

This points very directly to the essence of the neoreactionary critique: that while modernity, with its sacralization of universalism and democracy, may have been enormously successful in transforming the economic life of the West (and thereby the rest of the world), it did so by gradually burning through the immense cultural and spiritual capital it inherited from its forefathers — and now the accounts are overdrawn, and a reckoning is overdue.

Mr. Davidson is just getting warmed up. The cardinal weakness in Goldberg-style “conservatism”, he argues, is that in diagnosing the ills of the modern world, it stops short of examining the fundamental characteristics of the Enlightenment itself: in particular, the gradual abandonment of transcendent metaphysics, the ascendancy of scientific materialism, and the adoption of a posture of radical skepsis that has, as I’ve argued elsewhere, become a universal acid that nothing can contain.

Mr. Davidson cites C.S. Lewis to argue that as we began to turn our attention away from the transcendent, we learned to bend Nature to our will — but in doing so we also gave up everything that could guide us in determining what our will ought to be:

Having debunked all tradition and morality through the wonders of applied science, having succeeded in reducing all of human life to mere biological functions that can be precisely manipulated, mankind will “be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be.’

But therein lies the problem, says Lewis. Without any standards by which to judge what man ought to be, this new species of mankind will be reduced to following the mere whims of pleasure and instinct: “When all that says ”˜it is good’ has been debunked, what says ”˜I want’ remains.’ In an entirely conditioned society, even those who do the conditioning will be slaves””ruled by nature, not reason.

In the unleashing of our animal desires and irrational impulses, nature will have its final victory over man at the very moment of our supposed triumph. “All Nature’s apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals,’ writes Lewis. “We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever.’

It’s easy to anticipate the objections to this argument. Indeed, we hear them constantly. What about science and medical progress? What about the eradication of disease? What about technological advances? Isn’t man’s conquest of nature a good thing? Hasn’t the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution and the invention of liberal democratic capitalism done more to alleviate poverty and create wealth than anything in human history? Shouldn’t we preserve this liberal order and pass it on to future generations? Shouldn’t we inculcate in our children a profound sense of gratitude for all this abundance and prosperity?

This is precisely Goldberg’s argument. Yes, he says, man’s conquest of nature is a good thing. It’s the same species of argument raised earlier this year in reaction to Patrick Deneen’s book, “Why Liberalism Failed,’ which calls into question the entire philosophical system that gave us the Miracle.

Reviewers, many right-of-center, dismissed Deneen’s critique by noting all the good things that have come from the Enlightenment, like women’s suffrage and the eradication of slavery. Does Deneen think those things were a mistake? Does he want to take it all back? Even Deneen’s modest proposal for a remedy””that like-minded families should form tight-knit communities where they can rediscover and practice older forms of virtue and morality””comes in for mild scorn. Where will such communities be founded? one reviewer wanted to know. In liberal societies, that’s where.

But such critiques of Deneen’s thesis, like those of Lewis’s, are too narrow, and they fail precisely because Deneen’s claims about liberalism are so capacious. He is not chiefly interested in the problems of the modern progressive era or the contemporary political Left. He isn’t alarmed merely by political tribalism and the fraying of the social order. Those things are symptoms, not the cause, of the illness he’s diagnosing. Even the social order at its liberal best””the Miracle itself””is part of the illness.

Deneen’s argument reaches back to the foundations of the liberal order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries””prior to the appearance of the Miracle, in Goldberg’s telling””when a series of thinkers embarked on a fundamentally revisionist project “whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.’

The project worked, as Goldberg has chronicled at length, but only up to a point. Today, says Deneen, liberalism is a 500-year-old experiment that has run its course and now “generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-Aids and veils to cover them.’

Exactly on target. This is why, under the modern liberal caliphate, “Conservatism, Inc.” accomplishes precisely nothing, beyond providing a soft and comfortable lifestyle for telegenic and articulate dhimmi such as Jonah Goldberg. Why has it been able to “conserve” nothing at all? Because, as it is more and more plain to see, it understands nothing at all.

Read Mr. Davidson’s review here.