If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everyone strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of legal frames.19
Solzhenitsyn cut to the heart of liberalism’s great failing and ultimate weakness: its incapacity to foster self-governance.
It is fitting that Solzhenitsyn delivered this lecture at Harvard, the nation’s premier university, since the elite universities are preeminent examples of what were once institutions of cultural formation that have become purveyors of liberal anticulture. Elite universities, and the educational system more broadly, are the front lines in the advance of liberalism’s deliberate and wholesale disassembly of a broad swath of cultural norms and practices in the name of liberation from the past. Two areas in particular are served and undergirded by the educational imperative to advance the contemporary anticulture: dissolutions of sexual and economic norms, both advanced in the name of liberation of the human will that is defined especially by consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking. The fact that each of liberalism’s two main parties—“liberals” and “conservatives”—views one of these activities as problematic and the other at the core of its commitments reflects the insidiousness and pervasiveness of liberalism’s advance.
The universities are the front line of the sexual revolution, the high churches charged with proselytizing the modern orthodoxy of individual liberation. As Stephen Gardner has described the central dogma of the new creed, “Eros must be raised to the level of religious cult in modern society. . . . It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality.’ The body must be the true ‘subject’ of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire.”20 The “subject” imagined in the “state of nature” is now the resulting creature and creation of liberalism’s educational system, at once claiming merely to respect the natural autonomy of individuals and actively catechizing this “normless” norm.
One of the upheavals of the sexual revolution was the rejection of long-standing rules and guidelines governing the behavior of students at the nation’s colleges and universities. Formerly understood to stand in for parents—in loco parentis, “in place of the parent”—these institutions dictated rules regarding dormitory life, dating, curfews, visitations, and comportment. Adults—often clergy—were charged with continuing the cultivation of youth into responsible adulthood. Some fifty years after students were liberated from the nanny college, we are seeing not a sexual nirvana but widespread confusion and anarchy, and a new form of in absentia parentis—the paternalist state.
Long-standing local rules and cultures that governed behavior through education and cultivation of norms, manners, and morals came to be regarded as oppressive limitations on individual liberty. Those forms of control were lifted in the name of liberation, leading to regularized abuse of those liberties, born primarily of lack of any sets of practices or customs to delineate limits on behavior, especially in the fraught arena of sexual interaction. The federal government, seen as the only legitimate authority for redress, exercised its powers to reregulate the liberated behaviors. But in the wake of disassembled local cultures, there is no longer a set of norms by which to cultivate self-rule, since these would constitute an unjust limitation upon our freedom. Now there can be only punitive threats that occur after the fact. Most institutions have gotten out of the business of seeking to educate the exercise of freedom through cultivation of character and virtue; emphasis is instead placed upon the likelihood of punishment after one body has harmed another body.
This immorality tale is the Hobbesian vision in microcosm: first, tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then we see that absent such norms, anarchy ensues (“the state of nature”). Finding this anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate within the context of ongoing communities, and have replaced these things with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms. And now, lacking any informal and local forms of authority, we are virtually assured that those abuses will regularly occur and that the state will find it necessary to intrude ever more minutely into personal affairs (“Prerogative”).
We see an identical liberation of appetite in the economic realm, where varying economic cultures are dismantled in the name of homogenous “laws” of economics, disconnecting the pursuit of appetite from the common good, and relying upon the unreliable enforcement of abstract and distant regulation of markets, backstopped by the promise of punishment by the liberal state. Just as the destruction of distinct campus cultures and their replacement by an increasingly laissez-faire jungle with distant administrative oversight have given rise to a “rape culture,” so too has “the market” replaced a world of distinctive economic cultures. The near collapse of the world economy in 2008 was, above all, the result of the elimination of a culture that existed to regulate and govern the granting and procuring of mortgages. This activity was historically understood as consummately local, requiring relationships that developed over time and in place. Laws and norms once existed to shore up the local mortgage culture, forbidding banks to open branches in communities outside those where they were based, premised on a belief that the granting and accepting of debt rested on trust and local knowledge. These laws, and the culture they supported, presupposed that “the bankers’ interests and the interests of the larger community are one and the same.”21 The mortgage market was thus understood not as a naked arena of anonymous and abstract relations but as a form of organized remembrance in which trust, reputation, memory, and obligation were required for the market to operate. As J. P. Morgan chief Thomas Lamont said of his business in 1928, “the community as a whole demands of the banker that he shall be an honest observer of conditions about him, that he shall make constant and careful study of those conditions, financial, economic, social and political, and that he shall have a wide vision over them all.”22
By 2008, the financial industry was stripped bare of any such culture rooted in nature, time and place—as were college campuses. Indeed, training at dorm parties and the fraternities of one’s college were the ideal preparation for a career in the mortgage bond market, and the financial frat party of Wall Street more generally. The mortgage industry rested upon the financial equivalent of college “hookups,” random encounters of strangers in which appetites (for outsized debt or interest) were sated without any care for the consequences for the wider community. Responsibility- and cost-free loans were mutually satisfactory and wholly liberating from the constraints of an older financial order. But much as on college campuses, these arrangements led to gross irresponsibility and abuse, damaging communities and demolishing lives. The response has been the same: calls for greater government regulation and oversight over the consequences of untrammeled appetite, with threats of penalties (rarely enforced) and a massive expansion of the administrative state to oversee a basic human interaction—the effort to secure shelter. Liberation from the confinements and limitations of local market cultures brings not perfect liberty but the expansion of Leviathan. The destruction of culture achieves not liberation but powerlessness and bondage.
The dissolution of culture is simultaneously the prerequisite for the liberation of the disembedded individual, for a pervasive and encompassing market, and for the empowerment of the state. Individuals appeal to available authorities for a loosening of cultural norms and practices in the name of individual liberation, leading to various pressures that diminish or dissolve the constitutive features of long-standing informal norms. Absent these norms, individuals pursue liberalized liberty, f
ulfilling the desire to do as one wishes, all that is not restrained by law or causing obvious harm. But without the guiding standards of behavior that were generally developed through cultural practices and expectations, liberated individuals inevitably come into conflict. The only authority that can now adjudge those claims is the state, leading to an increase in legal and political activity in local affairs that were once generally settled by cultural norms. Liberal individualism demands the dismantling of culture; and as culture fades, Leviathan waxes and responsible liberty recedes.
PARASITIC LIBERALISM
Evidence of our anticulture surrounds us yet is pervasively denied. Liberalism extends itself by inhabiting spaces abandoned by local cultures and traditions, leading either to their discarding or suppression or, far more often, to their contentless redefinition. Rather than produce our own cultures, grounded in local places, embedded in time, and usually developed from an inheritance from relatives, neighbors, and community—music, art, storytelling, food—we are more likely to consume prepackaged, market-tested, mass-marketed consumables, often branded in commercialized symbolism that masks that culture’s evisceration. A stream of stories accentuates our increasing inability to do things for ourselves, from Matthew Crawford’s widely read and discussed account of the decline of shop class as an indicator of our widening ignorance of how to make and repair things to a recent report of declining sales and maintenance of pianos in the home, a consequence of the replacement of music played at home with mass-produced music.23
The champion of all “brood parasites” is the brown-headed cowbird, which lays its eggs in the nests of more than two hundred bird species, getting other birds to raise young cowbirds as their own. Liberalism has taken a page from this insidious practice: under liberalism, “culture” becomes a word that parasitizes the original, displacing actual cultures with a liberal simulacrum eagerly embraced by a populace that is unaware of the switch. Invocations of “culture” tend to be singular, not plural, whereas actual cultures are multiple, local, and particular. We tend to speak of such phenomena as “popular culture,” a market-tested and standardized product devised by commercial enterprises and meant for mass consumption. Whereas culture is an accumulation of local and historical experience and memory, liberal “culture” is the vacuum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated, memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place. A panoply of actual cultures is replaced by celebration of “multiculturalism,” the reduction of actual cultural variety to liberal homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native garb. The “-ism” of “multiculturalism” signals liberalism’s victorious rout of actual cultural variety. Even as cultures are replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity’s detachment from specific cultures. The homogenous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the retail world, “choice,” the more assuredly the destruction of actual cultures is advancing. Our primary allegiance is to celebration of liberal pluralism and diversity, shaping homogenized and identical adherents of difference, demanding and ensuring pervasive indifferentism.
By contrast, while cultures are many and varied, their common features almost always include a belief in the continuity between human nature and the natural world; the experience of the past and the future as embedded within the present; and assurance of the sacredness of one’s place, along with depths of gratitude and responsibility to the care and preservation of one’s places. Liberalism was premised upon a rejection of each of these constitutive aspects of culture, since to recognize continuity with nature, the debts and obligations attending the flow of time and generations, or a strong identity with one’s place was to limit one’s experience and opportunity to become a self-making author. Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual, and a major ambition and increasing achievement of liberalism was to reshape a world organized around the human war against nature, a pervasive amnesia about the past and indifference toward the future, and the wholesale disregard for making places worth loving and living in for generations. The replacement of these conditions with a ubiquitous and uniform anticulture is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life. The very basis of liberalism’s success again ushers in the conditions for its demise.
CHAPTER FOUR
Technology and the Loss of Liberty
PRAISE and misgivings about our technological nature have been with us for millennia, but it is only in modern times—roughly since the dawn of the industrial era—that we have entered what we might call a technological age. While we have always been technological creatures, our reliance on technology has distinctly changed, along with our attitude toward technology and our relationship with it. One is hard-pressed to think of premodern works of poetry, literature, or song that express society-wide infatuation with technology. There are no great medieval works extolling the invention of the iron stirrup or the horse collar. Our intellectual and emotional relationship to that technology—both our wild optimism about the prospects of human progress and our profound terror about the apocalypse this same technology might bring about—are products of modern times.1
This oscillation between ecstasy and anxiety over technology’s role in our lives has become one of the primary forms of self-expression and entertainment in the modern age, at least since Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. In recent years, the genre seems to have become even more pervasive, with an emphasis not only on technology’s promise and threat but on its role in either preventing or bringing about an apocalypse. My unscientific impression is that more popular programming than ever is devoted to this theme. If our sense of threat from nuclear weapons seems to have waned somewhat, we have found other night terrors, from medical catastrophe to cyborg warfare on humanity to cataclysmic climate change and the specter of human extinction.
Over the past few decades, several blockbuster films have depicted the apocalypse as the result of uncontrollable forces that humans valiantly combatted, often successfully. The threats include extinction by asteroid, as in Armageddon and Deep Impact; alien invasion, as in Independence Day, War of the Worlds, and Battle Los Angeles; and, in 2012, general demise coincident with the end of the Mayan calendar. In all of these films, it is technology, in various ways, that is the source of humanity’s eventual triumph over or salvation from these threats.
But most recent entrants to the genre seem rather to focus on how our technology is likely to be the source of our doom. Some recent films hark back to fears of a nuclear apocalypse, such as The Book of Eli or The Road. Others posit that we will end civilization through global warming, such as The Day after Tomorrow. There are films about medical experiments going awry, leading to a massive die-off, such as I Am Legend, Quarantine, Contagion, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. There are stories about our technology failing or attacking us, such as the Terminator series and, more recently, the television show Revolution, about a time when all machines cease to operate and electricity ceases to flow. The successful HBO series Westworld depicts machines becoming more human than a dehumanized humanity, intimating that we may have invented a better version of ourselves. Similarly, the digital series H+ tells of a future in which developments in nanotechnology lead to widespread implantation of tiny chips into human beings, allowing them to discard cellphones, tablets, and computers by becoming interconnected receivers of data, texts, and email. While the series begins with triumphalist pronouncements by transhumanist techno-optimists, the technology soon turns deadly, causing a massive die-off of millions who have been implanted.
Most examples of this recent genre seems to reflect a widespread foreboding about a shared sense of powerlessness, and even the potential for a new kind of bondage to the very technology that is supposed to liberate us. These movies and programs portray how, in our optimistic and even hubr
istic belief that our technology will usher in a new age of freedom, we discover in various ways that we are subjects to those very technologies. Far from controlling our technology for our own betterment, we find that the technology ends up either ruling or destroying us.
ANDROID HUMANITY
A host of academic studies and works also explore, if less dramatically, the ways in which we are subjects to the transformative effects of our technologies. A paramount example today may be found in anxious descriptions of how the internet and social media are inescapably changing us, mainly for the worse. Several recent books and studies describing the measurable baleful effects of these technologies have found a ready audience well beyond the usual academic circles. For instance, in his widely discussed book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the internet is literally changing us, transforming our brains into different organs from those of the preinternet world. Appealing to developments in studies of brain plasticity, Carr describes how persistent occupation with the internet is leading to physiological changes to our brains, and hence to the ways we think, learn, and act. He argues that sustained exposure to the internet is rewiring our synapses, making us intensely hungry for frequent changes in images and content and less able than our forebears to concentrate and focus. For Carr, this change is not altogether for the worse, since some areas of the brain have shown measurable increases, particularly those related to decision making and problem solving. But those gains are accompanied by significant losses in language facility, memory, and concentration. We are, he argues, becoming more shallow, not simply in a superficial way, but physiologically. The internet is making us dumber.2
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