So there is a state, if only a minimal one. How to make sure it is truly liberal and non-oppressive? If the governance of such a state does not include an active and deliberate Emancipation Politics, there will be fewer ways for the oppressed and disfavored parties to resist. This in turn would require a Democratization Politics to make certain that the form of governance is something that is entered into voluntarily in the first place. And from there on, you will require all the other four forms of politics because they all depend upon each other. Empirical Politics is necessary to ensure that the minimized governmental action actually does maximize human freedom. That too, in part, is an empirical question.
What, then, about anarcho-capitalism, one might ask? In this extreme version of liberalism you want to get rid of the state altogether and even have a market solution for buying and selling security services such as policing and courts. Let’s take it from the anarcho-capitalist perspective then: no state, basta ! Anarcho-capitalists are not uncommon around hacker communities, Silicon Valley and the tech industries, so it is a relevant question. And with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies on the rise, we may be seeing increasingly serious attempts at anarcho-capitalist projects.
Here’s the thing. Even if you had no state and security was up for sale, the best security solutions would still be those that provide people with a “listening society” so that people feel heard, seen and represented. The best security is still preventive security. This would in turn require a development of all the six forms of politics. In market terms, this service would be more competitive.
Imagine you’re a “client-citizen” of the kind envisioned by anarcho-capitalists: You have blockchain money and you shop around for the best state services. In one such state service, the metamodern one, you can affect the mode of governance, people are nudged to treat you better and you get a framework that helps you find profound meaning in life, and the fellow citizens will be much more peaceful and socially intelligent, and it’s all empirically proven to work. The other providers lack such services and end up using your voluntarily paid money much more inefficiently. Which one are you going to pick? You go with the metamodern one. If there is such a thing as your “natural rights”, these will come to a fuller expression in a metamodern society.
The only way to stop people from voluntarily choosing the metamodern solutions would be to stop free competition by some kind of threat of violence or monopoly. The only thing that can stop liberalism from being eaten alive by metamodernism is authoritarianism.
In the “market of ideas” (as proposed by the liberal thinker J. S. Mill), political metamodernism lands on top of liberalism in all of its forms. Just as the telephone and internet beat the telegraph. If you’re not a metamodernist, you’re just a bad liberal, because metamodernism is more liberal than liberalism—even in the stringent forms of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism.
More Sustainable than Ecologism
For all its different forms, Green ideology seeks to create sustainability of some kind. Even if some proponents of more radical forms of ecologism like to point out that the aim can hardly be to “sustain” a destructive and ecocidal civilization, that they prefer “resilience” or even “regeneration”, this still means that ecologists want this new imagined and preferable state of affairs to be… well, sustainable. No matter how you look at it, sustainability is the demand, the goal, of ecologism. Resilience and regeneration both include sustainability within them.
It is thus hardly a stretch to say that any kind of politics which does not maximize sustainability (again: of the present society or any imagined future one) is not the optimal Green politics, not in alignment with ecologism. Naturally, some forms of ecologism are of a reconciliatory bent (seeking to “reconcile” humanity with the environment), some are anthropocentric in their environmentalism, some are spiritual and focus upon attaining unity with “deep ecology”, some are unforgiving against the excesses of humanity while focusing on solidarity with ecosystems and the biosphere, some are transformational (seeking to transform the ecosystems of the world with human intelligence), some are futuristic and others primitivistic. You have pragmatists and hardliners, in the emblematic example of Green parties, the German die Grüne , these are called the Fundis (fundamentalist environmentalists) and Realos (realist green politicians).
And then there are all the mixes with other ideologies and struggles: ecosocialism, green liberalism, techno-environmentalism, ecofascism, human ecology of indigenous minority rights, multiculturalism, and so on.
What they all share is a focus on sustainability in some form or other. Even if ecologist thinkers like Arne Næss, Murray Bookchin, Gary Snyder, Theodore Roszak and today’s Tim Morton and Roger Scruton all have different takes on this issue, it is not a stretch to say they are somehow committed to sustainability—although the word itself only became commonplace after 1987 with the Brundtland Report. [127]
What, then, can be learned from political metamodernism in terms of sustainability? A thing or two.
You cannot have a sustainable societal system (economy-layered-in-biosphere) without a corresponding and matching sustainability in all fields of development: system, culture, psychology and behavior (as discussed in Appendix B). In other words, you can’t have ecological sustainability without social and economic sustainability. And how do you get there?
You need to get people to a point in their lives where they genuinely understand and care about issues larger than themselves. That’s Existential Politics. You need to make sure people have good enough social relations to not get stuck in prisoners’ dilemmas that hold back our development and potential to care and not get stuck in materialistic status games. That’s Gemeinschaft Politics. You need to see to it that the systems of governance can nimbly and effectively redesign themselves so as to deal with new environmental challenges when they become known, in a way that gains support and legitimacy. That’s Democratization Politics. You need to make certain that all of society is aligned with what is empirically shown to create circular economies and cradle-to-cradle processes, and you need to make sure that you spot and correctly understand environmental threats such as climate change and that the public is well informed and has the ability to respond reasonably. That’s Empirical Politics. And you need to make certain that ideas about ecology, sustainability and humanity’s place in a larger context of nature permeate people’s consciousness and all of our ideas about life. That’s Politics of Theory. And unless you’re an ecofascist and just don’t care about the freedom of people, you need to make sure that all of these processes can play out without oppressing people, and that’s Emancipation Politics.
So tell me again how you were going to create a sustainable society without political metamodernism. Can you see how unrealistic any ecologist ideology would be without these processes?
Any version of ecologism requires political metamodernism to be truly sustainable. Any environmentalism not underpinned by the Nordic ideology is simply less sustainable, less resilient, less regenerative. That’s all, folks: the Nordic ideology is greener than Green.
More Prudent than Conservatism
Conservatism may be the most misunderstood of the modern ideologies—and its challenge to political metamodernism is perhaps the most serious one. The central conservative principle is a resolve to escape the traps of infatuations with utopian ideas and puritan ideals—and to settle for “the real world”. The insight that underlies this realization is one of humility: the world is always larger, more complex and more terrifying than our limited intellects and perspectives can imagine. When we want to change things around, it’s usually only because we haven’t really understood how they work in the first place. And so our dreamed visions and “creative ideas” usually end up wrecking what works in the first place, and then
we have to painfully try to reconstruct what has been lost. Sometimes that can take an incredibly long time. Think of the sunk costs of the Soviet experiment.
Conservatism reacts against the hubris of intellectuals. As soon as modern society was showing its first glimmers and it became apparent that the human world was about to drastically change, “smart” but unwise people from privileged strata of society took upon themselves to use their intellects to try to shape the direction of this development. This was, and remains to this day, an act of vanity: you flatter yourself, you grow self-righteous, you put yourself above your place in the larger world, above your place in history, your place as a member of your people and their accumulated wisdoms—and this leads you to try to force your neatly arranged ideas and ideals upon the richness and complexity of the world. And your mental construct never fits, and you always end up getting angry at the world. The stark raving revolutionaries take over and things get violent. Crazy experiments abound. Decay follows.
The primordial and archetypal such dangerously utopian thinker is, again, Rousseau. While highly intelligent and idealistic, he was unbalanced as a person, an irresponsible father and impossible friend—unable to live up to his own ideals of engaged parenting as outlined in his 1762 work Émile— and he was hopelessly romantically attached to unachievable utopian goals. Rousseau, a perpetual child who would never grow up and died bitterly defending his ruined reputation with far-fetched justifications, is the originator of such dreamy and dangerous ideas as “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” and “We will force you to be free!” [128]
How telling, then, that Rousseau was the spiritual father of the hardcore Jacobins of the French Revolution—the ones who led the Reign of Terror and guillotined folks left and right as the Revolution began to eat its own children. Maximilien Robespierre, the young Jacobin lawyer who rose to power and eventually had the king decapitated—and even coined the motto of the French Republic, “liberté , égalité , fraternité ”—worshipped Rousseau like a god:
“Rousseau is the one man who, through the loftiness of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of teacher of mankind.” [129]
Fanaticism—just like Lenin would later declare himself to be “in love with Marx” and honor the memory of Robespierre with a monument in Saint Petersburg.
It was after the excesses and madness of the French Revolution that conservative thinking took hold in earnest. The pendulum swung and for a few generations the leading minds of France, Germany and England developed the foundations of modern conservatism. You have Burke’s repudiation of the French Revolution, the German Romanticism’s rejection of the cold and ahistorical intellect of the French Enlightenment project, and Joseph de Maistre’s poignant retort to Rousseau’s ideal of men born free but being everywhere in chains: “To say that sheep are born carnivorous, but everywhere eat grass, would be just as reasonable”. [130]
Conservative thinkers knew that modernity was encroaching upon society: They did not deny the power of science and technology and the profoundly new territory that humanity was entering. They held that modern society had to grow and evolve organically, and that the role of the intellect was not to force itself upon the world, but to refine the human spirit on an individual level by self-reflection and hard work—even beyond the intellectual realm: linking to the spiritual, the mystical and the aesthetic. People aren’t naturally benign, as Rousseau and Robespierre had postulated, and society does not always oppress them—it often protects, fosters and supports them. People are relatively brutish and simple, and they must refine their souls to be any good—and society’s role is more often to hold us in place so we don’t commit crimes or work against one another. And society can offer a source of cultural refinement—through history, art and Bildung .
To different extents, the conservative thinkers also defended God and the Christian faith against the onslaught of cold scientific rationality. Humans need God to know their place in the larger scheme of things. So what could be worse than throwing all of that rich timbre of human experience and culture overboard in exchange for a dreamt-up plan for a new society!
The point isn’t, then, to try to go back to the Middle Ages, [131] but simply to defend traditions, sacred values, national ethnic bonds, hierarchical relations and institutions from unrealistic and irresponsible attempts to efface them. The fundamental conservative principle is to be responsible and prudent; it is to avoid what I have called “game denial”.
Conservatism and counter-revolution have surfaced as a political, aesthetic and intellectual force time and again since early modernity. During the period 1815–48, the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich, a major influence in Austria and in Europe generally, devoted his energies to erecting an antirevolutionary chain of international alliances throughout Europe. After the turn of the 19th century you had Oswald Spengler’s somber ruminations on the fall of Western civilization. In its latest incarnation you have thinkers such as the Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and the US literary scholar Camille Paglia who call themselves classical liberal and libertarian respectively, but who, structurally speaking, quite clearly reproduce the conservative creed. They work to challenge leftwing academic posturing and to demask the excesses of university campus radicalism and the youth’s blind faith in neo-Marxism and intersectional feminism. Their message appeals mostly to white young men, just as earlier forms of conservatism. And just as before, the young men are encouraged to cultivate their masculinities and inner lives. Peterson and Paglia seem to be leading an ongoing counter-revolution in its own right—albeit in a cultural and not military sense.
The enemy is always simplistic and collectivist radicalism. As such, conservative thinkers view themselves as opposed to “ideology”. The conservative mind holds that they stick to a sober view of reality, whereas radicals and progressives have sold out reason in hope of playing an intoxicatingly heroic role, or in covert hopes of advancing in the social hierarchies. On a deep level, the conservative feels that ideologies provide an excuse for such behavior, a kind of simple filter through which the ideologue can view the world in black-and-white terms—thus avoiding to ever see his own limitations and the greed of his soul, because he is always on the “pure” and “good” side. The conservative tells us:
“Your ideology is a sickness, a big lie, an excuse for your inability and unwillingness to deal with your own inner weaknesses. And that is, ultimately, why the French Revolution turned sour, as did the Bolshevik one, as will all future ones. You say you are good, but you lie. If you really cared about what’s good, you would bother to first find out, without a priori , what is true—including truths that happen to hurt—and then you would do your hard inner homework and deal with the less rosy and more terrifying reality of existence.”
This conservative trail of thought of course also poses a challenge to political metamodernism. And the challenge should be taken seriously, by all means. How can we justify the Nordic ideology? Is it just another attempt at a seductive, blinding ideology that would make Chairman Mao proud?
As with the other modern ideologies, you can either beat conservatism by dismantling its core suppositions, or by taking it to its own limits and turn it against itself. And again, we need to do the latter. But just to point out some ways to disprove conservatism “from the outside” we can mention that:
conservatism cannot itself escape the charges of being an ideology,
conservative thinkers have all been beaten down by history as they opposed abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, labor rights, the rule of scientific method over religion, the separation of state and religion, the independence of colonies, the equality between sexes, and so on, i.e. they have sided with the losing institutions, and all been proven terribly wrong in the long run
, and
you can always tear down their philosophical foundations, such as the belief in the individual, in free will, or in reason, all of which are manifestly false and provably so.
In short, it’s apparent that conservatives are usually right in the short run but wrong in the long run, and we can always point that out. But that would be cheating. It wouldn’t reach the conservatives on their own terms. Here’s the point of attack: The conservative wants to be prudent and to respect tradition and let society grow organically without effacing natural hierarchies that have been established between competent and less competent members of society.
We can ask the conservative: Which scenario is most respectful of people’s relations and traditions—one in which you have an active and deliberate Gemeinschaft Politics, or one in which such a thing is lacking? With a Gemeinschaft Politics you have the means to look at cultural, ethnic and national values and relations and to defend them or develop their interrelations. Without it you don’t. So a good conservative must accept that Gemeinschaft Politics can be useful—in fact, many unknowingly already advocate embryonic forms of this kind of politics, as discussed in chapter 11.
How about Empirical Politics? Which society will be most prone to crazy dreamt-up and disembodied ideologies—one that continuously finds ways of optimizing checks against bullshit, or one that doesn’t? Empirical Politics is perfectly in line with the conservative ideals of making well-informed decisions and demanding proof that something is likely to work before carrying it out.
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