Stephen Brodie Tucker once again defies the reputation of Virginia Right! and delivers a phenomenal critique of what ails the modern age:
We have lost our self-reliance and because of this are experiencing fear. Fear leads us to form mobs, to cower in our discomfort and to depend upon government to even the playing fields of life. There are no rights we won’t sacrifice in this condition to The State. Unsurprisingly, the State is equally aware of our condition, and is all too happy to help – for a price. The price is liberty, individual responsibility, and self-reliance. Liberty is in turn redefined as chaos, individual responsibility is called egoism, and self-reliance makes us a target for those who survive through the exploitation of others. Justice loses all meaning and becomes “social justice”. Justice is dead and there is now only equality, estimated and measured and executed.
Tucker points towards “church and state” as asking individuals to embrace weakness at the expense of their sovereignty and self-reliance. Fair points, and while I’d disagree that faith inculcates weakness by leaning on the strength of God, the state does the precise opposite when it asks citizens to rely on The God That Failed.
…and to do that, the state has to rely upon one impulse to get free men and women to surrender what is rightfully theirs: fear.
Adam Zamoyski — who has to be one of my favorite historians of the moment — has a new book out that describes precisely this phenomenon after Napoleon’s return from exile on Elba and in the aftermath of Waterloo. As Zamoyski quotes:
“The revolutionary ideas of France have already made but too great a progress in the hearts of men in all countries, and even in the very centre of every capital,” warned a leading article in The Times a couple of weeks before the momentous battle (Waterloo). “It is not Bonaparte that at present forms the danger of Europe: he is unmasked. It is the new opinions; it is the disorganization of men’s minds; it is the making revolt a calculation of private interest; it is the most deadly of all contagions, the contagion of immorality, of false philanthrophy, of a perfidious self-styled philosophy; from all of which the world requires to be protected. This is the true hydra which must be destroyed, or it will destroy all of Europe. The cause of morality is the cause of God; it is the cause of all men, of all nations, of all thrones!”
Such a cause could not be defeated in the field, and, spectacular as it was, the victory of Waterloo did not alter the attitude of the cabinet, which refused to abandon its fable of a seething mass of revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the British constitution and murdering the king and most of the aristocracy.
Fear of the Jacobin revolt was the fear used to curtail all sorts of civil liberties in the 19th century. It was the fear that European governments used in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna to curtail and grind out even the whiff of revolutionary thought — and as Zamoyski explains, rarely if ever did the threat exist. In fact, it could be argued that the reaction against the threat, real or imagined, drove people towards the Revolution of 1848.
Of course, it’s the subjectivism of the French Revolution, the empire of self, that leading lights such as Edmund Burke viewed as the immorality of the age, the modern Enlightenment becoming something very Hobbesian and dark as self-interest turned liberty into license. Matthew Crawford — author of Shop Class as Soulcraft — touches on this very topic in his new book The World Beyond Your Head, which cages the dichotomy between our fears and our selves:
Our susceptibility to being buffeted by various claims on our attention is surely tied to the “intensification of nervous stimulation” that the German sociologist Georg Simmel identified with the metropolitan environment over a hundred years ago. Think of the corporate manager who gets two hundred emails per day and spends his time responding pell-mell to an incoherent press of demands. The way we experiences this, often, is as a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly.
There’s the problem. Mass marketing and psychology often draw us to do and buy things that aren’t always in our self-interest, whether it is employed by the state or by corporations. In short, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of attempts to draw us in: fear of this, fear of that, need of this, desire of this, 10 reasons why you should read this list, and so forth.
Crawford continues:
Yet this same person may find himself checking his email frequently once he gets home or while on vacation. It becomes effortful for him to be fully present while giving his children a bath or taking a meal with his spouse. Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractability seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to — that is, what to value.
To answer this question freely requires shelter; a space for seriousness. The moralist will say that one has to carve out this space for oneself resolutely, against the noise, and that to fail to rise to this task of evaluation is to give oneself over to nihilism, in which all distinctions are leveled and all meaning gives way to mere “information.”
Tucker brings the question full circle towards the end of his article:
Today, we are witnessing the end of individualism and the rise of fear in America. Fear, cowardice, helplessness, impotence are the virtues of our age. We have fallen under the spell of a false God. We believe in the ideal and have rejected reality. We allow injustice because we are simply too afraid of what justice would look like. Low and shallow, we fear real justice above all things. That is why we accept the society which has grown, like weeds, around us. That is why we will lose everything we gained through our fortitude, individuality, liberty, and self-reliance.
So how to bring things about full circle? Crawford, I believe, has the critique right from the moralist perspective when he diagnoses the problem: that modern society lends itself towards nihilism, and I would extend the thought to say that it is a particularly Neitzschean form of nihilism (Crawford does combine this with a sociological argument that, frankly, human beings simply haven’t engaged this problem before — we are indeed breaking new ground and should go easier on ourselves).
Yet combined with a modern marketing environment, how easy is it to take a sea of nihilists and drive them towards the abyss of fear? Self-interest being the primary motive, one no longer requires armies and police state mechanisms — one need only appeal to one’s appetites, and drive people in a frenzy to surrender civil liberties to the “false God” that Tucker correctly blasts.
Allowing the injustice and surrendering to fear is what allows the modern security state to encroach upon our liberties. The less we jealously guard our own self-reliance and the more interdependent we become, the less fortitude, individuality, and liberty we have. The math really does become quite simple.
Where does a nihilist age lead? Irving Kristol back in 1973 explored this in the pages of The Public Interest (which is now inherited by National Affairs — perhaps the best journal you’re not reading right now) some years ago, and it is worth re-reading in its entirety:
And yet this is the question we now confront, as our society relentlessly breeds more and more such selves, whose private vices in no way provide public benefits to a bourgeois order. Perhaps one can say that the secular, “libertarian” tradition of capitalism-as distinct from the Protestant-bourgeois tradition-simply had too limited an imagination when it came to vice. It never really could believe that vice, when unconstrained by religion, morality, and law, might lead to viciousness. It never really could believe that self-destructive nihilism was an authentic and permanent possibility that any society had to guard against. It could refute Marx effectively, but it never thought it would be called upon to refute the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche. It could demonstrate that the Marxist vision was utopian; but it could not demonstrate that the utopian vision of Fourier-the true ancestor of our New Left-was wrong. It was, in its own negligent way, very much a bourgeois tradition in that, while ignoring the bourgeois virtues, it could summon up only a bourgeois vision of vice.
Ah yes, the question of vice.
Governments are apt to use fear to aggregate power. That’s what they are designed to do — the security of the state. Today, they have more tools than ever at their disposal to do precisely that.
Human beings are indeed in a brave new world when it comes to exponential gains in technology against incremental gains in Western culture, whether it is the Christian or the secular variants. Yet I would suggest that the language of dialectical materialism simply isn’t up to the task of answering the question Crawford raises. Kristol had the right argument after all, and in the wake of such viciousness, the state prowls looking for more of our individual liberty to gobble up in the name of security, not terribly unlike post-Napoleonic Europe.
Crawford does address some of this in the recapturing of culture by means of recapturing excellence and a moral aristocracy, and not necessarily as some sort of Platonic idea, but of the “empire of the mind” that many an American deeply ingrained in the traditions of Southern literature could embrace:
That’s in the final pages where I suggest that an aristocratic ethos needn’t be thought threatening, that it can in fact strengthen democratic solidarity and place it on a more real psychological footing. Our attraction to excellence — our being on the lookout for the choicer manifestations — may lead us to attend to human practices searchingly, and to find superiority in unfamiliar places. For example, in the embodied cognitive finesse of the short-order cook, or the intense intellectual labor that may be required in work that is dirty, such as that of the mechanic when he is diagnosing a problem. With such discoveries we extend our moral imagination to people who are conventionally beneath serious regard, and find them admirable. Not because we heed a moral demand such as the egalitarian lays upon us, but because we actually see something admirable. Our openness to superiority is what connects us to others in a genuine way, without a screen of abstraction.
By contrast, egalitarian empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. But the one who is on the receiving end of such empathy wants something more than to be recognized generically. He wants to be seen as an individual, and recognized as worthy on the same grounds on which he has striven to be worthy, indeed superior, by cultivating some particular excellence or skill. We all strive for distinction, and I believe that to honor another person is to honor this aspiring core of him.
In short, if fear and the loss of self-reliance is the concern, then a preoccupation with virtue should be the primary focus of a free society. Otherwise, abandoning virtues (or neglecting the existence of vice or “injustice” as Tucker explains) only permits the vacuum for the Leviathan state to interject itself in the name of preventing worse, more imaginative vices.
Thus as the basis of fear becomes the basis of tyranny; the basis of virtue becomes the basis of self-government.
