In short, all meaning was tribal. And as the great economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek observed, humans are still programmed to understand the world in personal and tribal terms.
The secret of the Miracle—and of modernity itself—stems from our ability to hold this tendency in check. It is natural to give preferences to family and friends—members of the tribe—and to see strangers as the Enemy, the dangerous Other. Nearly all higher forms of social organization expand the definition of “us” to permit larger forms of cooperation. Religion teaches that coreligionists are allies, even when they are strangers. The nation-state tells us that fellow citizens are part of the glorious us. Even modern racism plays this role, as does communism, fascism, and nearly every other modern-ism.
We will get into all of these -isms soon enough. But the two most important ones for now are liberalism—by which I mean not partisan Democrats or progressives but the original Enlightenment-based understanding of natural rights and limited government—and capitalism. Rightly understood, capitalism isn’t a separate ideology or system from liberalism. But separating them out here might be helpful.
In later chapters, I spell out how liberalism and capitalism created the Miracle and how the United States of America is the fruit of the Miracle. But the key point to understand for the arc of this book is that both are unnatural. The idea that we should presume strangers are not only inherently trustworthy but also have innate dignity and rights does not come naturally to us. We have to be taught that—carefully taught. The free market is even more unnatural, because it doesn’t just encourage us to see strangers to be tolerated; it encourages us to see strangers as customers.
The invention of money was one of the greatest advances in human liberation in all of recorded history because it lowers the barriers to beneficial human interaction. It reduces the natural tendency to acquire things from strangers through violence by offering the opportunity for commerce. A grocer may be bigoted toward Catholics, Jews, blacks, whites, gays, or some other group. But his self-interest encourages him to overlook such things. Likewise, the customer may not like the grocer, but the customer’s self-interest encourages her to put such feelings aside if she wants to buy dinner. In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction.
Violence, the natural way to get what you want from strangers, is zero-sum. I hit you with a rock and take your apple. There is one apple-eating winner and there is one apple-less loser with a lump on his head. Trade is mutually beneficial, because the apple buyer needs an apple and the apple seller needs the buyer’s money for something else. Trade builds trust and encourages strangers to see each other as equals in a transaction. Labor and commerce in a market order create objective metrics to judge people by. “I don’t care if so-and-so is [black, Jewish, gay, Catholic], he does a good job and shows up on time.” Liberalism, by enforcing the rule of law and recognizing the rights of everybody, especially property rights, makes trade easier, and trade makes liberalism more desirable.
The Miracle comes out of this worldview. It is the product of a bourgeois revolution, an eighteenth-century middle-class ideology of merit, industriousness, innovation, contracts, and rights. Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples’ lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn’t feel like it.
The market system is so good at getting people—from all over the world—to work together that we barely notice how much we’re cooperating. Liberalism, meanwhile, by refusing to give people direction and meaning from above—as every ancient system did, and every modern totalitarianism does—depends on a healthy civil society to provide the sense of meaning and belonging we all crave. Civil society, as I explain later, is that vast social ecosystem—family, schools, churches, associations, sports, business, local communities, etc.—that mediates life between the state and the individual. It is a healthy civil society, not the state, that civilizes people. We come into this world no different than any caveman, Viking, Aztec, or Roman came into this world: humans in the raw, literally and figuratively. Starting with the family, civil society introduces us to the conversation about the world and our place in it.
When civil society fails, people fall through the cracks. The causes of failure can take many forms, as can the consequences. But one thing holds fairly constant: When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That’s tribalism.
The easiest illustration of this is the way young men from dysfunctional homes and atomized communities have fallen in with street gangs for thousands of years in every corner of the globe. The gangs offer meaning and a sense of belonging and operate according to the us-versus-them logic of tribalism. Heroic community leaders understand this far better than the rest of us. That is why virtually every intervention with at-risk youth involves getting young men and women to find healthier attachments in civil society, often through sports, but also through voluntarism, vocational training, music, art, and other productive pursuits.
The same dynamic repeats itself with terrorists, the Klan, the Mafia. and cults of every stripe. Getting these modern tribalists to find meaning elsewhere—in family, work, faith—is the only way to civilize them.
This is not a new problem. It is a problem that begins with modernity itself.
In his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger recounts how the English colonies in North America were vexed by a bizarre problem: Thousands of white European colonists desperately wanted to be Indians, but virtually no Indians wanted to be Europeans. “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin explained in a letter to a friend in 1753, “if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” However, Franklin added, when whites were taken prisoner by the Indians, they’d go native and want to stay Indians, even after being returned to their families. “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life…and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”8
As Junger observes, this phenomenon seemed to run against all of the assumptions of civilizational advance. And yet it kept happening, thousands of times over.9 Why? Because there is something deeply seductive about the tribal life. The Western way takes a lot of work.
But this is not just a phenomenon of the poor and poorly educated or of strangers in the New World. The pull of the tribe is inscribed on every human heart, and it can take highly intellectual and sophisticated forms. In later chapters, I argue that the sense of alienation we feel toward liberal democratic capitalism should rightly be understood as romanticism. Nailing down the meaning, history, and forms of romanticism, as we will see, is a tricky business. But I agree with the scholars who argue that romanticism begins with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The core of romanticism, for Rousseau and those who followed, is the primacy of feelings. Specifically, the feeling that the world we live in is not right, that it is unsatisfying and devoid of authenticity and meaning (or simply requires too much of us and there must be an easier way). Secondarily, because our feelings tell us that the world is out of balance, rigged, artificial, unfair, or—most often—oppressive and exploitative, our natural wiring drives us to the belief that someone must be responsible. The evil string pullers take different forms depending on the flavor of tribalism. But the most common include: the Jews, the capitalists, and—these days on the right—the globalists and cultural Marxists.
Thus, I argue, romanticism has never gone away, even if the period we call the romantic era has been consigned to stodgy library books. Liberal democratic capitalism does not give us much by way of meaning; it m
erely gives us the freedom to find it in civil society and the marketplace. And for some—many!—that is not enough. And so we seek out new theories, causes, and ideologies that have all the answers and promise to take us out of this place to some imagined better world of harmony, equality—for the right people, at least—authenticity, and meaning.
Marx, for all his talk of scientific socialism, was an incurable romantic, convinced that malevolent forces—Jews, the ruling class, industrialists, “capital”—were exploiting the masses.10 He in turn argued—“prophesied” is the better word—that, if the masses, the workers of the world, bound together in tribal solidarity, they could overthrow their masters and deliver humanity to some glorious new realm where we would live essentially the way man lived in Eden. Nazism shared many of the same theories about who resided behind the curtain, manipulating the German people. Hitler’s vision of the end of history was different from Marx’s, but he shared the dream that his tribe would reach the Promised Land.
It is my contention that all rebellions against the liberal order of the Miracle are not only fundamentally romantic in nature but reactionary. They seek not some futuristic modern conception of social organization. Rather, they seek to return to some form of tribal solidarity where we’re all in it together. Romanticism is the voice through which our inner primitive cries out “There must be a better way!”
But—spoiler alert!—there isn’t one. This is it. Look around, everybody: You’re standing at the end of history. In terms of economics, no other system creates wealth. We can get richer, and we can solve many of the problems that still plague modern society. The remedies for those problems might require more intervention by government or less. But, in the final analysis, we cannot improve upon the core assumptions of the Miracle. Every other kind of economics—if there even is any other kind of economics*3—concerns itself not with creating wealth but with how to redistribute it. That is not economics; that is politics.
This brings us to the second main theme of this book: corruption.
This desire to return to our authentic selves cannot be eradicated (nor should we try). But it can be channeled. Just as we have an innate need and desire to eat, that desire has to be cultivated in the right way if we are to live healthy lives. I argue that political ideas and movements based upon the romantic idea of following our feelings and instincts can best be understood as corruption. To the modern ear, “corruption” suggests petty criminality, particularly among politicians. But this is a pinched and narrow understanding of what corruption really is. “Corruption” literally means decay, rot, and putrefaction.
In other words, corruption is the natural process of entropy by which nature takes back what is hers. Rust will eat away at iron until it rejoins the soil. Termites will eat any wood home given the only two ingredients they need: opportunity and time. The only way to fight off nature’s greedy claws is through human care. Any boat owner knows that there is no substitute for upkeep and vigilance. And so it is with the Miracle.
Because every generation enters this world with its natural wiring intact, every generation must be convinced anew that the world they have been blessed to be born into is the best one. Corruption isn’t about giving in to the seduction of bribery; it is about giving in to the seduction of human nature, the angry drumbeats of our primitive brains and the inner whispers of our feelings.
When I started this book, no one thought Donald Trump would run for president, never mind become president, including Trump himself. But his emergence proved beneficial for my larger thesis, even if it wasn’t necessarily beneficial for our society. I argue that the right’s embrace of Donald Trump’s brand of politics represents a potentially catastrophic surrender of conservative principles, and a sign of how deeply the corruption has set in.
But Trump’s rise is a symptom of our larger problems, not the cause of them. It must be understood, at least in part, as a backlash against the left’s turn to identity politics, which is just another form of tribalism. Tragically, that backlash has yielded or at least solidified a new identity politics all its own. The Miracle ushered in a philosophy that says each person is to be judged and respected on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of their ancestors. Identity politics says each group is an immutable category, a permanent tribe. Worse, it works from the assumption that what benefits one group must come at the expense of another.
The rise of the populisms and nationalisms of the left and the right that have come to define so much of our politics today are manifestations of corruption. The Miracle works on the assumption that the individual is the moral center of our system, and the individual armed with reason, facts, the law, or simply morality (and hopefully all four) on his side should win any contest with an angry throng shouting with tribal passion. As I argue in Part Two, the genius of the Constitution lay in enshrining that principle into law.
And finally, there is the last theme of this book. I do not offer many public policy proposals to remedy our problems, in large part because I do not think our problems are fundamentally policy problems. The crisis that besets our civilization is fundamentally psychological. Specifically, we are shot through with ingratitude for the Miracle. Our schools and universities, to the extent they teach the Western tradition at all, do so from a perspective of resentful hostility toward our accomplishments. It is not that the story they tell is pure fiction—though that happens—but that it is, at best, half-true.
Consider Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Published in 1980, it has sold millions of copies and remains one of the mostly widely used texts in America.11
At the beginning of A People’s History, Zinn confesses that he only wants to tell the story of America from the perspective of the oppressed:
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.12
All of these things should be taught. But the idea now is that knowing this story is the only story worth knowing. That this and only this is the story of America. By turning the Founders into nothing more than greedy white racists, by decrying Columbus as nothing more than a genocidal murderer, by arguing that slavery is a uniquely Western and American sin, by claiming that “Western civilization” and “American exceptionalism” are nothing more than euphemisms for “racism” and “imperialism,” the ressentiment-drenched intellectuals at the commanding heights of our culture seek to make the story of the Miracle into a Curse, leaving them as the only legitimate storytellers of our civilization.
By no means do the majority of Americans subscribe to the Zinn view of America. But a majority of Americans, I believe, are ungrateful for what the Miracle has brought us. Sometimes this ingratitude manifests itself as simply taking one’s good fortune for granted. And that is enough to destroy a civilization. Because maintaining a civilization, fighting off corruption, takes work. If we don’t teach people to hold what they have precious, they simply won’t bother defending it against those who think what we have is evil.
Just as the spoiled children of the wealthy are often ungrateful for the opportunities provided by their parents, we as a society are ungrateful for our collective inheritance. The system we live under is like the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg.
You are probably familiar with the story, but I think it would be instructive to look at it more closely. There are many versions of the fable going back to Aesop and antiquity, but two of the oldest versions in the West come from France and England.
In the classic French version, the story goes something like this: A cottager and his wife discovered a hen that laid a golden egg every day. After thinking about it, they deduced that the hen must contain a great lump of gold in its gut. In order to get the gold, they killed it. Having done so, they found to their surprise that the hen differed in no respect from their other hens. The unwise duo had neither a hoard of gold nor any more golden eggs.13
William Caxton’s earlier version (1484) is slightly different, and more faithful to Aesop’s. This time, it is a single farmer. Not happy with one egg a day, he orders the goose to double its quota to two. The goose replied that it couldn’t (“And she sayd to hym / Certaynly/ my mayster I maye not…”). The farmer is furious at the remarkably generous—and polite!—creature and kills it.14
The moral of both versions is usually the same: Greed is bad. Wanting more than you have leads to having nothing at all. But the truth is the lessons are actually quite different.
In the first version, the cottager and his wife use their reason; in the second, the farmer succumbs to his rage. The practical consequences are the same—no more golden eggs—but the mistakes stem from different kinds of folly. The cottagers are not insane to think that a bird that produces golden eggs might have gold inside it. The farmer, however, is crazy not to take the word of a magic goose when it insists it can’t do better than one golden egg per day (an enormous amount of wealth in the fifteenth century). And to get so angry at the bird that you kill it is true lunacy.
Suicide of the West_How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 2