Defining human flourishing

Progressives and the New Right would both dismiss civilizational heritage as a guide toward a definition

It’s been a few posts since I wrote about the co-opting of the conservative movement by the populist-nationalist impulse. The most recent time I delved specifically into it was June 3.

But lately I’m seeing how that impulse is fraught with irony. Trumpists and Neo-Trumpists employ language indicating that they seek a return to some kind of baseline for recognizable society, but simultaneously invoke mass disruption as the instrument for such a return.

A great many of the breed that would supplant the three-pronged vision - consisting of personal and institutional virtue, free markets, and an understanding that government’s innate coerciveness must be checked - started out adhering to it. To be sure, a generation subsequent to them has come of age steeped in the enthusiasm for upheaval and the contradictions of the new way to identify as right of center.

An essay by the American Enterprise Institute’s Christine Rosen that appeared yesterday at the Acton Institute’s website illustrates this by examining the current argument being made by a thinker named Jon Askonas. Askonas is from the first category I mention above: those who started out as champions of the pre-2015 conservative vision. She writes of his present “claim that conservatives failed to reckon with the technological changes around them, thus effectively participating in their own extinction” but says that

In fact, conservatives have spent decades building institutions and communities to combat just those changes. Askonas should know; he’s written essays (many of which I admire) for several of them, including The New Atlantis, a journal that for 20 years has been dedicated to documenting the good, the bad, and the ugly of technological transformation, and for which I was fortunate to be one of the founding editors.

But Askonas now seems to be all in regarding disruption:

Askonas, writing in Compact magazine, purports to tell us “Why Conservatism Failed.” One would hope that an obituary for conservatism would be more thorough than what Askonas offers, so to be charitable, let’s consider his essay a provocation rather than the official death knell for conservatism.

Conservatism’s obituary has been written many times before, of course. But Askonas claims to bring a new insight and a new indictment of conservatism’s devotion to tradition: “The conservative defense of tradition has failed—not because the right lost the battle of ideas, but because technological change has dissolved the contexts in which traditions once thrived.” Citing Marx, Askonas claims that “a technological society can have no traditions.”

Elaborating on this claim, Askonas argues that “modernity liquidates traditions for the same reason that a firm might liquidate an underperforming factory: to improve the allocation and return of capital.” This is an intentionally limited definition of tradition, one that purports to measure the usefulness of tradition as akin to a commodity that should be replaced when it becomes inefficient. Askonas also blames conservatism for too readily acquiescing to technological change. Using the example of the introduction of cheap agricultural fertilizers and the many unintended consequences its use had for the practice and culture of farming, Askonas claims this demonstrates “how extensive the social impact of a single technology can be, and how little the conservative defense of tradition offers in response to this sort of change.” For good measure, he throws in the charge that conservatives also lost the culture war, not because their ideas were wrong, but because of “the Pill and the two-income trap.”

Apparently Askonas sees humankind as having done such a good job of tending to its material advancement that it has redefined the contours of its own condition.

Some who would not get on board with Askonas’s prescription - that, with technology having eaten up any meaningful heritage that used to guide us, “[w]e can no longer conserve. So we must build and rebuild and, therefore, take a stand on what is worth building” - do indeed concur with his diagnosis that technology’s downside has manifested itself in profound ways.

At the About page of his Substack The Abbey of Misrule, Paul Kingsnorth puts it thusly:

The powers of the world are merging: corporate power, state power, institutional power, ideological power, the power of the oligarchs who built and control the Internet, the power of the network itself. Call it the Great Acceleration, the Great Reset, the coming of Technocracy: whatever you call it, it has been long planned and long feared, and now it is upon us.

Welcome to the age of the Machine. 

The Machine makes us - is designed to make us - homeless. It rips up our roots in nature, in real cultures connected to time and place, in our connection to the divine centre. In their stead we are offered an anti-culture, an endless consumer present: planned, monitored, controlled, Smart, borderless, profitable and soul-dead, increasingly detached from messy reality, directed by who-even-knows, mediated through monitored screens.

In the current issue of First Things, Matthew Crawford says we have entered the age in which the central question is who’s serving whom:

Günther Anders spoke of “the rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools.” Iris Murdoch said that man is the animal who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the pictures. Here is the real mischief done by conceiving human intelligence in the image of the computer: It carries an impoverished idea of what thinking is, but it is one that can be made adequate enough if only we can change the world to reduce the scope for the exercise of our full intelligence as embodied agents who do things.

Five to eight years ago there was a lot of breezy talk by tech journalists and well-capitalized futurists about banning human drivers from the road, given the difficulties that arise when autonomous cars and human drivers have to interact (which have turned out to be a far greater engineering challenge than anticipated). Of course, from a business perspective, it is ideal if we become dependent on some proprietary and opaque system to do what we once did for ourselves, issuing in what Ivan Illich called “radical monopoly.” As the space for intelligent human action gets colonized by machines, our own capacity for intelligent action atrophies, leading to calls for yet more automation. The demands of skill and competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience, leading us ever further into passivity.

So ours is an age in which transplant surgery, smart phones, air travel and air conditioning have alleviated a lot of situations in which panic, resignation and despair were givens - Will anybody find me on this mountainside with my broken leg? Must I live with these failing organs? Must my great-grandmother die of heat stroke? How can I get this essential correspondence to the recipient in the next five minutes?- but at a certain expense.

But if tradition is liquidated by modernity, but modernity is out of control, what kind of alternative vision is worth pursuing?

It seems to me we’re forever mired in short-term fixes to get us (maybe) through the next handful of years if we decided nothing is permanent (let alone transcendent).

Consider the “common-good capitalism” that has become a component of the populist-nationalist version of what it means to be right of center. Not only does it have its origins on the left - “greedy corporations took our jobs offshore to maximize profits” - but it assumes that the days of small-to-midsize communities’ economic vitality hinging on one or two big industrial concerns were some kind of status quo. They were not. The town factory driving development and providing security was a model that only had a run of a few decades.

Or consider how Donald Trump has been sucking up to Iowa voters lately by reminding them of his support for ethanol, a fuel that does not hold its own in the marketplace and only exists because it allows climate alarmists to virtue-signal. He’ll so boast, and then out of the other side of his mouth decry government prohibiting fossil fuel extraction on federal lands.

Material advancement is now a given. People aren’t going to willingly give up its blessings.

So on what basis is anybody who is concerned with technology’s downside - how it has turned us loose to redefine what it means to be human - going to make a case and effectively counteract it?

Alas, we get back to that narrow sliver of terrain on which those who insist on a coherent conservative vision stand. From that precarious vantage point, we can see that the Leftists and the New Rightists are in agreement to a degree that surely makes them both squirm.

They both posit that norms, conventions, models and institutions that served as guides for centuries are now useless. They both readily admit that their prescriptions are brand new.

But those prescriptions are couched in the framework of a power struggle. One “side” is going to emerge victorious and the other is to be stomped into the dust.

In such a scenario, the human yearning for harmony, for resolution, is no closer to being addressed than it ever has been throughout the gritty and disjointed history of our species.

A lot of great thinkers have contemplated harmony and resolution. Do they have nothing to contribute in a world starved for something beyond retribution and a pinched sense of justice?

Is it too late to envision a world where hearts soften even as minds sharpen, where space is held for the possibility of enough of a common sense of purpose that we need not banish some large swath of our fellow human beings?

Not if we speak forthrightly against the resignation on which Askonas bases his program, against the notion that our severance from a universe we didn’t create is a done deal.

Rather, we must insist that voices from the past - including a great many from antiquity - are absolutely essential to our search for something more agreeable to all of us. And no vision for how we ought to live is worth embracing unless it sees room for all of us.