When I started this blog, I was writing as a revolutionary libertarian socialist. At the time, I sincerely believed that what was necessary to make society better was to overthrow the elites and create a direct democracy of the people.
I never had any intentions of violently overthrowing the US government, which never seemed either practically possible or desirable. Rather, I imagined a bloodless revolution that would occur gradually, a “withering of the state” like the withering of a flower after it has been pollinated and served its purpose, giving way to the fruit. From my perspective this was a process that would take decades, possibly even centuries, but would be an inevitable outgrowth of human nature.
One thing I have to thank the rising tide of global authoritarianism for is that it showed me why this was simply an incorrect evaluation of human nature. That people desire freedom and community is obvious, but how those desires are expressed is not.
The New Right’s Critique
Freedom can be thought to mean what I believe—the ability to act without regard to an external cause. A competing view is that freedom is “human flourishing”, and human flourishing is a specific set of behaviors which are conducive to social life and amiable to religion. Inevitably, this can also mean the freedom to disregard the freedom of others, to punish them for their transgressions against your moral precepts.
Community can mean the free association of people with those who they consciously choose to associate with, or it can mean tribalism. Indeed, the basis of most communities is mutual ascription to some dogma—as in the case of religious communities—or a mutual enemy. Soldiers have consistently pointed out the extraordinary solidarity they felt towards those who they serve with as a connection easily as powerful as those of the family.
This is why the anarchist dream of a global commune is impossible. The human heart yearns for connection, yes, but that connection is supplied through means which inevitably yield either religious dogmatism or constant war. These impulses are checked, and civil society realized, only when there is a neutral arbiter capable of overwhelming violence which can enforce laws which prevent ideological disagreements from exploding into open conflict.
Without this neutral arbiter, there are two broad possibilities which have come to characterize the New Right: an authoritarian theocracy of some sort, as espoused by those on the Catholic right like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule (the former still entertaining a veneer of populism, of course); or the more outright authoritarianism of the Nietzschean right, as espoused by Costin Alamariu or Curtis Yarvin, for whom the whole purpose of society is to be conquered by some great man.
If you wish to accuse me of oversimplifying these thinkers, I already accept that I have. I really don’t care. As in the case of Marxism, there are the ideas of intellectuals, which can always be shrouded in layers of complexity to distance them from their effectual truth, and the truth itself. In either case, the aim of these schools of right-wing thought is to overthrow the hegemony of the Enlightenment and secular democracy, paving the way for something… well, older.
Whether this future is a Catholic theocracy or a fascist state whose will is bent to that of a single great man, to these people, such a future aligns with their notion of true freedom—one in which they can be fully human, and experience all those things the human heart yearns for. These notions of freedom are confused, but I think liberal attempts to refute them are often confused as well. If I were to do the Steven Pinker thing—to pull out all the charts showing the decline in global conflict, the decline in hunger, in child mortality, the miracles of vaccination, the increase in literacy or gender equality—all of this would be to miss the point. This checklist of progress is the problem, because progress is progression away from the environment in which the human soul thrives. And what is all this progress for, if not to serve that end?
If I were to make the New Atheist argument, in which I argued that atheistic materialism is simply true, like it or not, I would only play into the Nietzschean right’s conviction that only raw power and aesthetic beauty have any true value. If there is only objects bumping into each other, better to be an object like Alcibiades than one like Jesus. Conveniently, I do happen to think materialism is unprepared to meet the moment because it happens to be wrong.
This is the quandary liberalism has landed in. We are the dog that caught the mail truck—we have achieved so much on paper, and yet even with all of it, many people are not happy. People are more alienated from one another. Every instinct and drive associated with manhood, once the centerpiece of social life, is shamed in polite society. Not only are gender roles dead, but young people, at startlingly high rates, are no longer even sure what gender they are. Mental illness, once thought to be exceptional, is now ubiquitous. The idea of having a child is now a source more of fear than of joy for most young women. With historically low rates of religious belief, moral norms are entirely up for debate, and the result is a breakdown of a consensus view of what constitutes basic decency. Opioid addiction has lead to a declining life expectancy in the US. Whereas our fear was once dying of a disease or in a war, we now die from being fat and addicted to painkillers. Meanwhile, authoritarian governments are growing stronger, immigrant populations are having children well above replacement rates, and many are beholden to a religion no less hostile to liberal democracy than Christian nationalism. Our political figures are not only not aristocratic, they’re barely conscious. We are, in other words, in the state of decline critics of liberalism have long predicted.
The Enlightenment’s Reply
All of the above is only partly true and only some of it is actually a problem, of course. I wrote it to attempt to reconstruct the typical screeds against modernity one comes across on the right. But there is also another story to tell, one which seems to often go untold by today’s intellectuals. Again, I believe the root of the disagreement from which liberalism and the new authoritarianism diverge is their concepts of freedom.
To be free is to have the ability to act without regard to external cause. As Kant argued, enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” the act of doing our thinking for ourselves and not letting someone else do it for us. This means to act from one’s own reason, one’s own conscious process of thinking and developing knowledge. When we act from another’s thinking, we don’t really act at all—we are conduits, rather than subjects. This is no true freedom—it is simply the bodily movements of a slave who doesn’t know he’s a slave. True freedom, in other words, is self-mastery, a necessary precondition of which is knowledge and the reasoning faculty by which it is acquired. Any attempt to force someone to adhere to your own notion of what constitutes freedom, therefore, is conceptually incoherent.
The real battle we wage in life is never truly political—it is always personal. It is the battle to overcome despair, fear, and hate; to become one’s own ruler is to achieve a degree of understanding of and love for the world that is constitutive of our happiness, and the basis of real virtue. The role of the state is not to solve this problem for us, but to safeguard our ability to solve it for ourselves. This is why freedom can only ever be the freedom of the autonomous individual, and why it could not possibly be simply dominating others. To master another person brings you no closer to mastering yourself, and this renders freedom impossible.
To handicap this capacity to think is to handicap our capacity to act. To live in a free society is not to be guaranteed freedom—it is to have freedom made possible, to have the way cleared towards it through the security of free public expression of our thoughts, the development of technology and the silencing of gunfire, leaving us room to focus on the real matter at hand: what is the truth, and what am I to do?
Life is not meant to be thrown away on a battlefield. The future of war is not a glorious struggle against the enemy—it is you, dragging your shredded half-corpse like an insect across a field of bodies, as a drone chases you to finish the job. If you can find any glory in the faces of the many Russian men you can now watch drones blow apart on Reddit, I suppose you’re welcome to your own piece of it.
Nor is life to be thrown away on dogmatic adherence to the church. Ask yourself: do I believe what I believe out of love, or out of fear? Am I afraid of the confusion and alienation I felt before I found God, or which I feel in the moments when my faith wanes? Do I cling to these beliefs because they are true, or because I want them to be true?
Religion is not freedom; religion is a false sense of security.
The truth is to really be human, in part, is to be confused and alienated. But to hide under the cover of dogmatic belief is not to leave the wilderness, it is simply to lie to oneself about how lost you really are. To force this same dogma upon others is to drag them into the hole with you. It is not to answer life’s central questions, but to refuse to ask them.
The pursuit of true power is the ruthless pursuit of understanding, and this can only be done in a free society, one in which you are allowed to bump into things as you search in the dark, but at least allowed the dignity to stand on your own two feet, and to search.
On this basis, I am not blindly patriotic. I love my country, and I love democracy, because they have given me that opportunity. It has not guaranteed me or anyone else a good life, but has rather guaranteed us the possibility of creating one. It is far from perfect, but it is also far from an irredeemable hellscape. To ask anything more or less of one’s nation is absurd, and to throw it all away in the name of yet another utopian fantasy is grotesque. All of us with the presence of mind to treasure our freedom must do everything in our power to protect it.