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A discussion featuring Yakov Feygin, Daniela Gabor, Ho-fung Hung, Thea Riofrancos, and Quinn Slobodian.
A fiscal calamity awaits public schools once pandemic-related federal assistance ends.
We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Dorothy Ross Prize for the best article in U.S. intellectual history. This award goes to an emerging scholar, defined as Read more
The post Announcement: 2023 Dorothy Ross Prize first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
I’ve written a great deal about TV — three short books on negative character traits in contemporary television, a peer-reviewed article and now a planned book on Star Trek, and countless blog posts and online publications. I’m even teaching a course that’s primarily about television this fall, namely a study of Watchmen and its HBO adaptation (with the latter being the main object of interest for me). Yet I find myself a big exhausted and disengaged by the culture of TV commentary. Part of that is simply the fact that there has been a vast overproduction of commentary and “takes.” Many of these pieces are written by people I admire and are of very high quality, but the sense of being rushed or forced somehow haunts even the best pieces for me.
I would like TV analysis to be “insight recollected in tranquility,” and the current online publication culture simply is not compatible with that. Trying to keep up is the only way to effectively get read, at all. In six months, no outlet is going to publish your piece about how you just realized something about Succession — there’s a window, and that window is now. I can blog about it and my friends will see it and maybe even like it, but that’s no way to build a reputation or a career as a writer. I understand that it’s a privilege that my full-time teaching job allows me (and in many ways requires me) to sit that out, and perhaps part of my fatigue is a form of survivor’s guilt, because there are many possible alternative timelines where I might have been pushed out of academia and seen the TV commentary game as the only way to maintain some kind of intellectual engagement in my work.
I don’t think that overproduction or weird personal vibes are the only factors here, though. There’s a fundamental unclarity about the task of TV writing. Sometimes, as in episode-by-episode write-ups, the task seems to be to help people remember what happened or process basic plot points — or keep up with events on the show without actually watching it. I notice that sometimes people respond to those write-ups as though they contain “smart” commentary, when it seems to me that they are mostly just summary. Everything about that corner of the TV writing game makes me feel sad — though I would totally accept a TV write-up job for a Star Trek series if offered.
The write-up partly makes me feel sad because I can tell that the writers know the task is beneath their dignity and beneath the dignity of their readers. This is not the case for the true lowest of the low — the kind of TV commentary that suspends disbelief permanently and responds to events as though the characters were real people. This seems to characterize a lot of the Succession takes circulating right now. They amount to gossip columns about fictional characters. At a slightly higher level, perhaps, are speculations about what might happen, especially if they are keyed into what would please or surprise fans the most. Though the latter concerns are superficial, they at least bring into view the show’s status as an intentionally crafted aesthetic object, rather than a window into a fictional but “real” world.
But this is the problem — the TV show’s status as an aesthetic object is never fully secure. Even “prestige drama” is haunted by the anxiety that it’s still just… TV. Is Mad Men a soap opera? Is Succession a weird kind of sitcom? Clearly they are. But are they just that? It’s never okay for a TV show to be precisely and exactly a TV show, and especially to typify a TV genre. The greats have to somehow transcend their medium. The Wire was, famously, like a Victorian novel. Except it wasn’t a novel — it was a TV show, with visual storytelling parcelled out in serialized hour-long units. Even film seems to have enough prestige at this point to be an object of aspiration, so that the most poorly-paced blob of formless content on Netflix can be pitched as a “10-hour movie.” And surely much of the prestige of “prestige TV” comes from the adoption of cinematic-quality production values and performances, though that gap has been narrowing.
If we can’t hold firm to the TV show as a worthy aesthetic object, then, we inflate its importance in another direction — usually by turning it into a source of political insight. Every show produced in the US can be pressed into service as a window into the American soul, almost by definition. How this is supposed to work is unclear to me. The American people did not produce the show. There was not an election in which they got to choose which shows would be made. Ratings provide some kind of measure of popularity, which must mean there’s some kind of resonance there. But I’ve seen similar claims made that, for instance, Star Trek: Enterprise — by all standards a failed show, which struggled to stay above a million viewers in its final seasons — demonstrated how Americans tried to navigate the tensions in a post-Cold War world or whatever. How can we draw any real evidence for American attitudes in general from such a marginal entertainment product?
Even less plausible than the political reflection thesis is the quest for a political prescription in the TV show, which of course always manages to fall short of the critic’s (usually unstated) standards of “correct” politics, or “correct” representation, or what-have-you. Sometimes such pieces seem to veer toward a disguised form of “Monday-morning show-runner” — the political prescription serves as an alibi for the critic’s preference for the plot to have gone in another direction. Strangest of all, though, are the ones that want to see positive political guidance from the TV show, or at least political “lessons.” The sense that this is what TV is somehow “for” leads to a related syndrome of lamenting that a portrayal of bad politics will somehow give people the wrong political ideas — because presumably people get their political ideas directly from TV shows.
What I’d like to see — and what I hope to practice — is a form of analysis that centers the TV show as a work of narrative art with its own strengths and limitations, its own genre expectations and standards. This would mean pausing before lamenting that the show didn’t take your preferred direction and asking why the writers did choose what they chose. It may turn out that their implicit reasons don’t make sense or work at cross-purposes with something else, such that we can lament that the urn is not as well-wrought as we wish it could be. Similarly, before reading off political messages (positive or negative) from a show, we might ask ourselves why such issues are being foregrounded.
For instance, in Andor — widely praised for its gritty political realism — we might note that the goal is to impart a kind of sophistication into an IP that is primarily oriented toward children. The same would presumably hold for the HBO adaptation of Watchmen and its unexpected centering of racial issues. The politics are not the “goal,” they are part of the aesthetic effect. And I guess sometimes people are basically saying that they like TV shows better when they align better with their politics — which is only fair, but is perhaps a point that could be stated more forthrightly, instead of dressing it up in this weird quasi-normative stance. There is nothing preventing a show from genuinely having good political lessons or — more likely — supplying powerful political metaphors, nor is it by any means impossible that a show’s politics could have deleterious real-world effects (e.g., West Wing). But I can’t help but feel we’d get a better handle on that kind of thing if we contextualized it in a formal-aesthetic analysis of the show.
Of course, there is no audience for the kind of criticism I’m calling for, because it feels like English class and everyone hated English class for stealing away their naive enjoyment of literature or whatever. So I’m left blogging, or writing for academic or para-academic presses, or just tweeting out complaints about writers who are really just doing their best. You do you, everyone! Everything is fine and nothing matters.
Succession elephant
akotsko
I have never advocated political violence in any published writing or in any talk. You can read the talk I posted yesterday, for instance, and you will find no recommendation of left-wing political violence, indeed no mention of that possibility. Yet it inevitably happens, in Q&A sessions, that the topic comes up. The way it generally unfolds is that my listeners or readers observe that I make the following claims: the existing political system lacks democratic legitimacy; those in a position to wield institutional power are unresponsive to popular demands; and both major parties fully support police violence, with the Republicans growing ever more tolerant and even encouraging of vigilante violence. Hence, in order to reach the kind of goals I lay out, it seems like some form of political violence would be inevitable. So am I advocating political violence?
I personally do not intend to commit any political violence, nor would I encourage anyone else to do so. I’m at a loss, though, for why anyone considering such a thing would view me as an appropriate confidant or mentor. I am far from an activist. My praxis is objectively that of a middle-class liberal intellectual, and even on the level of individual choices and the various virtue-signals one tends to send, I am not particularly left-coded (e.g., I’m not a vegetarian or vegan).
In fact, I don’t want to be advocating anything at all — I want to undertake a purely analytic and diagnostic project. The problem is that contemporary academic culture will not allow me to do that. If I didn’t put down some kind of prescriptive agenda, people would simply hallucinate one on my behalf. So yes, I end Neoliberalism’s Demons by saying that we need to eliminate the market society in favor of a radically democratic planned economy. That’s the only way to make sure something like neoliberalism can never happen again. That’s the political goal that informs my analysis. It’s not “realistic,” but at least it’s explicitly stated, so I don’t have to bat away a bunch of phantom political agendas that people arbitrarily foist on me.
How do we get from here to there? I don’t know. I’m an idea guy. If we can get there by reading books and talking about them, then I should be among the leaders of the movement. If it takes something else, then maybe I can play more of a supporting role — ideally teaching classes, but maybe writing up some propaganda or even washing dishes or something.
My real agenda, my personal investment, for my intellectual project is that I want to figure out and share what I take to be the truth about our political situation, to the best of my ability. And as far as I can tell, the truth is that we are in a really, really bad position. The power of nonviolent resistance has been exhausted at this point. The media is too corrupt and the political class too brazen and arrogant to concede to popular demands, no matter how much we maintain the moral high ground. The electoral system continues to be a site of political blackmail rather than a venue for the public to influence the direction of public policy. No governing party in any major country seems to be at all serious about addressing the most urgent problems we face — and those problems are genuinely urgent.
In that situation, with all formally legitimate means of political change cut off, my question — which I repeated quite forcefully in the Q&A for my talk on Milton Friedman at Wabash College — is what the powers that be think is going to happen. We are told that the human race is facing environmental ruin that will kill millions, and yet no one with the power to do anything actually does it. Is it not inevitable that someone will take matters into their own hands?
It does seem inevitable — but it largely isn’t happening. And that in itself is an aspect of our situation that I struggle to understand. It seems like in a world where people open fire into random crowds because they can’t get laid or drive into protestors because they’re worried the Jews are going to replace them, someone would get it into their heads to physically threaten the people destroying the world. Why aren’t they?
Maybe the problems seem simply too big, or the system too unassailable. (I’m presumably contributing to the latter in some small way with my buzz-killing analysis.) Maybe the record of the times that the left gave itself permission to use unlimited ultra-violence have disillusioned people — maybe that means so poisons the end as to render it unattainable. Or maybe everyone has decided, collectively, that if we can’t get it done via the institutional structures that happen to exist at this moment of history, then that’s a sign we shouldn’t do it. It works if you work it! And center-left parties can eke out small, largely symbolic gains that the right completely swamps, until our cities flood and our crops fail and millions upon millions of people die in unescapable heat waves.
What can we do as individuals in the face of this mass apathy and willful ignorance? Not fucking much! Not much at all. As the man says, the wrong life cannot be lived rightly — yet there is a certain duty to truth, a certain obligation to acknowledge it as the wrong life. But despite everything, despite the inauguration of Donald Trump, despite the fall of Roe v. Wade and the resulting rise of almost unimaginable misogynistic state violence, despite the fact that the weather is obviously unfixably permanently broken and half the country burns down every year — despite all that, there are a lot of people out there who really don’t see that it’s the wrong life, who in fact are offended that I would criticize the team they’ve chosen to back in the game of politics, a team that is surely made up of good people who are doing their best.
And to that, all I can say is: no. That’s the one ethical duty that I fully and unhypocritically live by. I don’t know what they will do with it — probably nothing. It will probably even make them dig in their heels and become even more apathetic and willfully ignorant, more attached to whichever team of ghouls and empty suits they’ve pathetically identified as fans of. But they can’t say no one ever told them.
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akotsko
Richard D. Kahlenberg, whose hero is Robert Kennedy, wants to build a multiracial progressive coalition.
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Armageddon Time is undercut by the very forces it hopes to expose: white complicity, forged through the exploitation of Black life.
The post More Than Hearts and Minds? appeared first on Public Books.
An interview with Michael Walzer on The Struggle for a Decent Politics.
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[The following is a talk I gave this afternoon as part of a faculty colloquium on “Radical Futures” at North Central College, part of the Intellectual Community series co-sponsored by the Faculty Development and Recognition Committee (of which I am chair) and the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence and organized by my colleague Sean Kim Butorac.]
Since I teach in the Shimer Great Books program, I will begin with an experience teaching one of the all-time greats, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In my ethics class this semester, we were discussing Book 1 and came to a passage where Aristotle had isolated three possible human goods that seemed to be good candidates for happiness—by which he means the human good that we pursue for its own sake, with no need for further justification or explanation. The first is pleasure, which is presumably self-explanatory. The second is honor, which we could paraphrase as respect or esteem. The third is contemplation, which we could see as a form of knowledge or understanding. In all three cases, Aristotle believes, it wouldn’t make sense to ask why we are pursuing these goals. Why do you want pleasure? Why do you want people to like and respect you? Why do you want to figure things out? The question doesn’t make sense.
The list feels pretty exhaustive, but Aristotle goes on to introduce a fourth possible candidate: money. Initially it seems to fit the bill—all things being equal, no one will turn down more money. But Aristotle points out that money is not truly an end in itself, but rather a pure means. We only want money because of the things we can do with it. And this, I point out, is an area where Aristotle is out of date. He can’t imagine living a life for the sake of stockpiling as much money as possible, much less orienting an entire society around it. We can.
The shift to a pure market society, to a kind of totalitarianism of capitalism, was so successful that it has become almost invisible to us. Like many other analysts on the left, I choose to call that transition—ushered in by Pinochet, Thatcher, and Reagan, and then adopted by virtually every governing party in the West and every international organization—the shift from the postwar Fordist economic model to neoliberalism. One way to gauge this shift is to think in terms of means and ends. In the postwar era, the existence of an alternative economic model in the form of the USSR—which at the time was experiencing the highest economic growth in human history up to that point—meant that capitalism had to justify itself. It had to prove that it was better, not just at stockpiling money, but at creating broadly shared prosperity that lays the groundwork for national greatness. And through a combination of heavy government intervention, very high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, and high union concentration, the capitalist system really did mostly fulfill its promises, at least for the stereotypical white suburban family. Hypothetically speaking, capitalism set itself an empirical standard that certainly included economic criteria but was not limited to them—in other words, capitalism was a means to an end.
Since the fall of the USSR, capitalism has felt increasingly unburdened by the need to justify itself. Instead, competitive markets are taken as ends in themselves and as models for every area of social life. The reason we want markets is not that they produce better results or they’re more efficient or whatever else—we want markets because we want markets. Market logic is self-evident, the final standard, the final word. It is no longer the means, but the end. And once money is set up as the ultimate end—not even personal wealth that someone could potentially use, but the depersonalized money of endless “economic growth” and endless increases in asset prices—then everything else becomes a means. Where once we made friends, now we network, in the hopes that our social contacts will advance our career. Where once we relaxed and had fun, now we practice self-care, in order to recharge and guarantee increased future productivity. And to bring it a little closer to home, where once we went to school to develop our full intellectual capacities, now we seek the hot job skills employers crave.
Of course, the “before” of this “before and after” dynamic is a bit simplified and idealized in my presentation. There were no good old days when people at large pursued only the highest ends with unmixed motives. Yet I would submit that in past eras, people were better equipped to discern that such ends existed and that the mixed motives were less than ideal. This comes through clearly, for example, in a famous essay by John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Prospects of Our Grandchildren.” As is well known, this text predicts that within two generations, humanity would essentially begin “cashing out” of capitalism by trading productivity gains for reduced working hours so that they could spend time on what was really valuable in life.
By my math, this would have been my parents’ generation, so obviously this did not occur. But for my purposes, the most interesting thing about his failed prediction is how he characterizes the benefits of the transition. One of the architects of the postwar capitalist order, as well as a gifted financial speculator, Keynes proposes that once humanity has leveraged the immense productivity of capitalism to set itself free from economic necessity, it will be a relief to admit that none of those wealthy businessmen was really as admirable as we pretended they were, that there was something a little disreputable and sad about the way they’d chosen to live their lives.
The neoliberals did everything they could to squelch that insight, to the point where we are supposed to believe that an obviously broken and miserable man like Elon Musk is a genius-level benefactor of humankind, for instance. It’s easy to point and laugh at Musk’s pathetic army of admirers on Twitter, but we academics are guilty of our own distortions. The other day I was meeting with a major in our program, a very strong student who I had not had in class before. We wound up talking for a good half hour, and at a certain point the thought slipped into my head that it was a good thing I was doing this and making her feel so supported, because we really need majors…. A very rewarding part of my job, which I was doing for its own sake and even enjoying, suddenly felt like a cynical manipulation.
I know I’m not the only one to fall victim to this line of thinking, because I’ve heard similar remarks in many other discussions. For instance, once a faculty discussion about providing mentoring and support for students of color devolved into a reflection on the importance of reaching Latinx students for our bottom line. A question of justice becomes a question of finances. No one intended for that to happen—it just rolls right off our tongues.
And more broadly, of course, we are all well-versed in defending our disciplines in market terms. The humanities provide valuable job skills! Employers tell us they want liberal arts majors who can think on their feet! Liberal arts majors eventually catch up to and even exceed the incomes of their STEM counterparts! I understand that such rhetoric is tactically necessary, especially in a media sphere full of misinformation about the value of different fields of study. I also happen to think these things are true! But even though it’s true, it’s harmful to frame the value of education in such narrowly instrumental terms. I did not get into this line of work so that Johnny can get that big promotion years down the road or Suzie can contribute to better quarterly results for her department.
But of course Johnny and Suzie need to be able to get those employment outcomes, or else they aren’t going to be able to pay off the student loans that are financing their education here. And this brings me to another way in which the full-saturation capitalism that I call neoliberalism degrades our moral sense: it shrinks our political horizons. Once installed in a given area of life, marketization produces a feedback loop that constrains our choices within a very, very narrow range. And living a life where the most important choices about our lives and livelihoods are made by an impersonal mechanism—by everyone and no one—cultivates habits of deflection and irresponsibility. We aren’t making decisions or value judgments—we are simply responding appropriately to the demands of the market, and if we don’t, we will lose out to someone who does. In practice, this leads to the conformism of “best practices” that one of our colleagues criticized today—the alibi that we should do what everyone is doing because everyone is doing it.
I am not sure in detail how to get out of this self-reinforcing doom loop of marketization, though in my book Neoliberalism’s Demons, I suggest that we need to embrace the abolition of the market and the establishment of a system of democratic economic planning as a long-term goal. In our more immediate context, I would suggest that—beyond changing our rhetoric about the cash value of majors or the financial urgency of student retention—we need to find a way past our competitive zero-sum approach to curriculum design. Instead of outsourcing those decisions to student choices, we need to find ways to discuss, collaboratively and creatively, how we can best deploy the North Central faculty’s massive talents and expertise to deliver the kind of education we want our students to have. Our marketized system has deeply internalized habits of cynicism and fatalism in most of us, but as Aristotle teaches us, the only way to develop more virtuous habits is to practice.
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akotsko
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Over 100 Israeli philosophers have signed an open letter to the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the nation’s Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, expressing concern about recently advanced legal changes.
[photo by Ohad Zwigenberg]
The new government in Israel has launched—with unbelievable speed—a campaign for massive, deeply anti-democratic constitutional “reform”. The main people behind this reform take their cues from similar “reforms” in such places as Poland and Hungary (initially only implicitly, recently they are entirely open and loud about looking up to these places). These measures include a change in the appointment and promotion procedures for judges that will make it entirely politicized and up to the current coalition’s whims; putting in place an override clause that will allow the current coalition to set aside court’s decisions that declare pieces of legislation unconstitutional; severely weakening the status and authority of the government’s legal advisors; and more.
The aim—and likely consequence—of these measures is making our independent judiciary a thing of the past, and giving the current (extreme right-wing) coalition unencumbered force, with nothing even remotely resembling checks and balances. It’s easy to guess who will be the first to suffer. (For one example—of the expected consequences for women—see here.)
These measures are opposed by a huge majority of law professors (see, for instance, the various pieces here and here).
The open letter states:
We, over one hundred Israeli philosophers teaching in all the universities and colleges in the country, wish to express our anxiety at the far-reaching legal reforms that are hastily advanced these days in the Knesset. The moral achievements of the modern liberal-democratic state are the fruit of centuries of political thought and of a persistent struggle to apply it in the state’s constitutional structure: human and civil rights, the separation of powers, the protection of the individual from the arbitrary exercise of governmental power, and the equality of every human being without discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual inclination.
We warn against the political and cultural danger of the self-isolation of Israel within narrow ethnocentric bounds, ignoring universal values such as the dignity of human beings as human beings, openness to other cultures, and the freedom of scientific research and artistic creation.
Twentieth-century experience has demonstrated the intolerable ease with which democratic states backslide from the primary liberal principle—the limitation of government power, particularly by undermining the independence of the judiciary. Such regress begins with a regime that is democratic only in the formal sense of majority rule and ends in dictatorship.
Professor Enoch adds, “Many outside of Israel have also spoken clearly against these ‘reforms’. It would be great if philosophers elsewhere are also heard on this.”
The letter and the list of its signatories is below.
UPDATE (2/28/23): A group of British Jewish philosophers have written a letter in support of their Israeli colleagues:
An interview with Clara E. Mattei, the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.
In real life, identity is a structuring principle of human experience, which is by definition neither good or bad. For individuals, it can be constraining or life-enriching — or more likely, some mixture of both. For groups, identity can be the starting point for a broader engagement with the world, an alibi to turn inward, or even a spur to active hostility. Whether its effects appear to be positive or negative in any particular case, though, it is not something we can do without — especially on the political level, which by definition requires the creation or mobilization of an identity group toward some end. Every politics is in that sense an identity politics, even on the Marxist model, which requires the members of the working class to identify with their world-historical role as the proletariat.
Everybody who thinks seriously about identity and politics knows that this is the case. The Combahee River Collective knew that it’s the case, and presumably even Slavoj Žižek knows it’s the case. Why, then, do people so frequently denounce identity politics as a blind alley, a distraction, a cynical ploy, etc., etc.? I would suggest that it’s because there are actually two things that go by the name of “identity politics.” The first, which I have described, we could call “real-world identity politics.” The second, which people mostly hate, would best be designated as “identity office politics” — i.e., how identity functions in neoliberal institutional settings, most notably universities and corporations.
Obviously corporations and universities are different — if decreasingly so — but broadly speaking they share a certain neoliberal ethos, which I would summarize in two points. First, these institutions are irreducibly individualistic. Ideally, from their perspective, individuals would relate to the institution solely as individuals, without forming autonomous groups not authorized by the institution. Second, these institutions legitimize themselves by claiming to dispense rewards (pay, recognition, promotion) and punishments (disciplinary action, firing) upon individuals based solely on their own individual actions and merits.
Within such settings, it is difficult to see how something like a group identity (other than identification with the institution or a defined subunit thereof) would function. Yet social and political pressures to do justice to identity have only grown throughout the neoliberal era, amid increased awareness of forms of injustice that are systemic — i.e., irreducibly non-individualistic. How can the neoliberal institution translate this demand into its own terms? First, it defines identity as primarily an individual trait. An individual is this or that identity. Identity belongs to the individual, rather than the individual belonging to the group. Second, it tends to treat this identity-trait as the grounds for some kind of differential treatment — positive, in this case, to make up for the negative differential treatment of the identity group.
A historical group grievance is thus leveraged as an individual asset within the terms of the institution’s reward-and-punishment system. To make up for the fact that members of your group have faced systemic discrimination, you individually get a leg up, officially or unofficially. Of course, that leg up is often illusory or carries with it so much extra work (like serving on all the diversity committees, doing extra mentoring, etc.) as to negate the benefit. Indeed, the very systemic problems that the individual identity assets are supposed to resolve have definitely not gone away, even within those institutional settings themselves. That is most fundamentally because of the mismatch between the systemic injustice and the individual solution. And on a practical level, the individuals who benefit from the individual solution are, almost by definition, not the individuals most affected by the historical disadvantage — those most disadvantaged never have the opportunity to enter the institution and compete for its rewards in the first place. In fact, the recipients of identitarian advantages often have more than enough other advantages to compete successfully in any case. (This is the dynamic that Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò characterizes as “elite capture.”)
The neoliberal institution does not and cannot care about this mismatch. From their individualistic perspective, systemic problems simply cannot register as such. If anything, neoliberal institutions need systemic inequalities to continue. To the extent that neoliberal institutions exist to generate hierarchy, the more “sorting” goes on (whatever the basis) prior to the time individuals present themselves to the institution, the easier the institution’s job is. All the neoliberal institution cares about is satisfying the external demand for “levelling the playing field” for its identity-burdened participants, thus indemnifying it from legal action.
The shift from real identity politics to neoliberal identity office politics is therefore a shift from a complex lived reality to a counter in a game, which exists primarily to avoid lawsuits. It should go without saying that the latter is not a path to social justice. To that extent, the leftist critics of what is commonly called “identity politics” are right, because the individualistic and competitive presuppositions of neoliberal identity office politics can never produce the kind of solidarity and emergent collective identity a successful leftist movement would require.
But why would anyone ever get the idea that anyone thought that DEI-webinar-style identity management would produce liberation? There are two factors at work here. The first is simply the fact that most individuals spend a great deal of time in neoliberal institutions, and identity office politics seem to be the only lever to address identity-based injustices in that context. The institutions shape our behavior, which in turn shapes us — this is in large part why institutional reform is so urgently important. The second is the role of social media platforms, which expand the individualistic and competitive presuppositions of neoliberal institutions into every social interaction. In place of the relatively defined competition of the institution, social media engulfs us in an amorphous and endless competition in which we are all judge, jury, and HR coordinator. This grassroots form of neoliberal managerialism promotes ever more exaggerated claims of identitarian disadvantages (to be leveraged into individual discursive advantage) and ever more elaborate codes of conduct to govern interactions with people who claim a certain identity (as in the ever-lingering possibility that the most innocuous utterance could be declared somehow “problematic” and worthy of punishment).
The effects of social media identity office politics — objectively a somewhat sad, niche hobby — are then amplified in the mainstream media, which trumpets the dangers of “wokeness” to populations that are normally not granted the ability to leverage group grievance into individual advantage: namely, white people, especially white straight men. Paradoxically, this absence of grievance becomes the greatest grievance of all, as neoliberal identity office politics threatens to devalue the social capital once associated with whiteness. We can see this logic in the media stunts surrounding so-called “critical race theory,” which aim to protect oppressed white children from being burdened with generational guilt, etc., etc. Presumably one day Florida’s colleges and universities will offer special scholarships for white students who can prove they had a “woke” teacher — bringing the entire project of neoliberal office politics full circle by staging a bail-out for the now-toxic asset of white identity.
There is no solution to be found in the milieu of neoliberal office politics, no “right” way to implement it. The goal should be to abolish the individualistic, competitive neoliberal institutional form and find a new way to live together that can allow us to explore and enjoy our identities in a more authentic and organic way, unmediated by HR offices and mandatory trainings.
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akotsko
Some integralist Catholics on the American Right look to Leo XIII for magisterial backing in their condemnations of the American experiment and the “liberalism” they argue undergirds it. Leo’s teachings on liberalism and the relationship of the Catholic Church to the state appear most prominently in his encyclical, Immortale Dei. Generally speaking, integralists tend to argue that Leo provides magisterial teaching on the proper relationship of the Church to the state. Leo suggests that the state must cooperate with the Church in order to enable individual human persons to reach their true End, Heaven. Under the Church’s direction, the state must curtail liberties most associated with “liberalism”: religious, economic, and political freedom.
This is a plausible reading of Leo’s writings on politics and the Church. But it universalizes his teachings beyond the confessionally Catholic states of Europe that existed in Leo’s day, and thereby ignores the development of Catholic social teaching since his time. This reading also fails to take into account the advent of pluralism that Vatican II came to recognize in the Church’s statement on freedom of religion, Dignitatis Humanae. Indeed, it’s critical to look at what Leo XIII actually said, examine his writings as a whole, and especially to consider the context of his writings before judging their applicability beyond the late nineteenth century.
Liberalism and the Legacy of Rerum Novarum
Most Catholics know little about Pope Leo XIII beyond his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (or “On the Condition of Labor”). This encyclical provides crucial context to Leo’s arguments about liberalism in Immortale Dei (which I will address later) and, studied alongside it, provides a fuller picture of Leo’s political teachings.
Rerum Novarum helped launch modern Catholic social doctrine by addressing pressing questions about labor, private property, and justice. Leo’s main concern is reflected in the encyclical’s title: the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of workers. The massive scale of industrialization had left workers feeling alienated, impoverished, and victims of unjust wages. Leo’s concern was with justice for all citizens, particularly but not only the poor. Explaining that “the right of private property must be held sacred,” Leo connected property ownership to the need for just wages and promoted not policies but the principles of subsidiarity, charity, and recognition of the dignity of the human person. He counseled that it was precisely to protect the poor that the state must, in justice, ensure that all “private property . . . remain inviolate.” He condemned state socialism as inherently unjust, inhumane, more likely to hurt the “working man” than the wealthy, and rooted in the sin of envy.
Forty years later Pope Pius XI celebrated Rerum Novarum in Quadragesimo Anno (or “In the Fortieth Year”), which further developed the principle of subsidiarity. Pope John XXIII, thirty years after that, linked economic growth and human dignity in Mater et Magistra by arguing that in a just society economic growth will promote human dignity. Most importantly, Pope John Paul II in 1991 issued Centesimus Annus, which followed the collapse of communism and Soviet control in eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. “Marxism had promised to uproot the need for God from the human heart,” wrote John Paul II, “but the results have shown that it is not possible to succeed in this without throwing the heart into turmoil.” John Paul argued that democracy and free enterprise, which find their roots in subsidiarity, encourage solidarity, another core principle of Catholic social doctrine.
These encyclicals not only develop Catholic social doctrine, but also address particular questions within their historical contexts. And as they address the specific problems of their eras, they are guided by John Paul II called “fundamental principles.” The questions of 1891 were not the same as those of 1991. Neither was the condition of labor or capital the same. While Leo XIII recognized the dangers that state socialism posed to the individual human person and to society, he was mostly confined to theorizing about fundamental principles and socialism because at the time the world had yet to experience a successful communist revolution.
The illiberal, bloody history of communist states in the twentieth century, however, proved just how astute Leo had been about the soul-deadening and immoral nature of collectivism. In other words, the long twilight and then seemingly sudden demise of Soviet-backed communism between 1989 and 1991 proved Leo XIII right. The Church in reflecting on the rise and fall of communism and the benefits of free enterprise came to a new appreciation of democracy and a more nuanced understanding of liberalism or, rather, liberalisms. The Church emerged much more hesitant to wholly condemn anything merely for being remotely “liberal.” It turns out that not all democracy is like that of the French Revolution; not all liberalism is unhinged from virtue and moral norms; and a free economy is anthropologically sound and therefore more conducive to human dignity and flourishing than a state-controlled one. Democracy and freedom, John Paul II said in Centesimus Annus, come as a package.
Leo connected property ownership to the need for just wages and promoted not policies but the principles of subsidiarity, charity, and recognition of the dignity of the human person.
Beyond Rerum Novarum
Leo’s other encyclicals offer additional clarity about his views of liberty, liberalism, and the role of the state in human society. Those who condemn American liberalism often generously quote Leo’s critiques, but they miss that liberalism’s values such as human rights, freedom, and human dignity comport with Catholic social teaching as Leo presents it. Studying Leo’s other encyclicals suggests the pope had more nuanced views on these themes than liberalism’s detractors might suggest.
In 1888, three years before the release of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII promulgated Libertas, or, “On the Nature of Human Liberty.” “Liberty,” wrote Leo XIII, is “the highest of natural endowments.” Its exercise figures prominently in human dignity because liberty can be used to reach “the highest good and the greatest evil alike.” Moreover, man is free “to obey his reason, to seek moral good.” The highest good for which he was made is to know, love, and serve God. So why, Leo wonders, is the Church accused of opposing liberty? Because, according to Leo, the Church’s critics “pervert the very idea of freedom” or, worse yet, “extend it at their pleasure to many things in respect of which man cannot rightly be regarded as free.” In other words, like everything else, one’s liberty can be put at the service of good or evil.
The Catholic understanding of sin, vice, and virtue has long been clear: these are properties of the will, not of the intellect. One can know right from wrong and still do wrong. Choice matters. There is, however, an important connection between will and intellect: it turns out that knowledge matters, too. Therefore morally reasonable people should attain the knowledge necessary to exercise human liberty properly. All choices are also moral choices, which means they involve judgment, reason, and knowledge about what is good. Without knowledge, according to Leo, “the freedom of our will would be our ruin.”
Those who condemn American liberalism often generously quote Leo’s critiques, but they miss that liberalism’s values such as human rights, freedom, and human dignity comport with Catholic social teaching as Leo presents it.
If reason is how individuals come to know moral truth attain their good, then laws—guided by the natural law—help direct societies and citizens toward their good. To demonstrate this truth, Leo XIII cites law as a “guide of man’s actions.” Reasonably, we conclude, there must be law and order. Natural law confirms this and is “written and engraved in the mind of every man, and this is nothing but our reason, commanding us to do right and forbidding sin.” This is the same as eternal law, according to Leo—all of God’s creatures are inclined toward their proper end, the ultimate purpose for which they were created. And so, “what reason and natural law do for individuals, that human law, promulgated for their good, does for the citizens of States.”
To make these arguments even clearer, Leo XIII draws heavily from St. Augustine: “There is nothing just and lawful in that temporal law, unless what men have gathered from this eternal law.” Augustine continues, explaining that if “something be sanctioned out of conformity with the principles of right reason, and consequently hurtful to the commonwealth, such an enactment can have no binding force of law, as being no rule of justice.” Here, Leo enjoins believers to civil disobedience of bad laws. Real liberty, concludes Leo, is experienced when we “live according to law and right reason,” if we live under just laws. This freedom to do what we ought to do is “true liberty.”
Leo’s writings on liberty suggest that laws discordant with right reason, and that are corrosive to human freedom rightly understood, are unjust and therefore not real laws. Here, he provides a much clearer principle by which to evaluate politics than any wholesale condemnations of liberalism do.
Which Liberalism?
In his earlier encyclical, Immortale Dei, Leo does urge that “in a free State, unless justice be generally cultivated, unless the people be repeatedly and diligently urged to observe the precepts and laws of the Gospel, liberty itself may be pernicious.” This warning captures integralists’ concern about liberty going awry in liberal societies, which is an understandable and legitimate worry. But note that when Leo says people must be “urged to observe the precepts and laws of the Gospel,” he does not appoint the state to do the urging; this is, first and foremost, the Church’s responsibility. The lack of an established church in liberal regimes therefore should not be seen as a failure.
After surveying Leo’s other writings, it becomes apparent what kind of “liberalism” Leo does condemn: the liberationist project of rationalist philosophers who make reason that is independent of natural, divine, and eternal law the supreme judge of truth. He wrote in Libertas: “These followers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law unto himself.” This is an ethical system that masquerades “under the guise of liberty” and that substitutes license for true liberty. These liberals understand true freedom to be defined not “in any principle external to man, or superior to him, but simply in the free will of individuals.” The result is “that the authority in the State comes from the people only. . . . Hence the doctrine of the supremacy of the greatest number, and that all right and all duty reside in the majority.” Any liberalism that sees individual will as the ultimate authority, therefore, should be vehemently rejected. But of course, not every version of liberalism does this.
Leo XIII was operating in the context of the late nineteenth century, as “a prisoner of the Vatican.” He was thinking and writing amid the growing social question surrounding industrialization, socialism, and secularization in Europe. Context matters. Real events matter. Leo XIII even says this in Libertas—the Church must sometimes hold its nose and cooperate with states, to the benefit of the Church and the citizens.
To determine which arguments transcend time and which ones are context-driven, we must take historical events, disputes, and doctrinal developments seriously. Doing so helps us see how these factors shape and reshape usage and definition of terms like “liberalism.” The English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson was right when he said of “liberalism” that “there is no word—not even democracy—that has been used so loosely to cover such a variety of divergent elements.”
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