The portal has closed. There are no small steps back

Contra Pluckrose, Harris, Haidt, Lindsay and Boghossian the liberal median is no longer available

This is an addendum to my last post:

"Heard you want your country back...fuck that!"

Self-styled anti-woke centrists like

Helen Pluckrose

,

Sam Harris

, James Lindsay (

New Discourses

)

Peter Boghossian

and

Jonathan Haidt

conceive of the culture war as a lateral back and forth movement of incremental steps. The genius of liberal democratic societies, they argue, is that they are self-correcting. Sometimes we move too far to the right, and sometimes to the left. The art of common sense centrism is to lead that process of self-correction which really amounts to a nudging of the Overton window back to that Goldilocks median that the system prefers. In the culture war of the last decade these ‘classic liberals’ have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of sitting in the trenches along side real conservatives and even Christians.

Most of the time, it has to be said, they have done sterling work and fought a good fight. To the extent that the woke revolution has slowed, this bunch of radical liberals. can take a large measure of credit. But having allotted credit where it is due, it has also to be said that they are, to a man and woman, labouring under a debilitating delusion about the nature of the problem. This is evident in the apolitical strategy of reason-led institutional reform adopted by Johathan Haidt’s

Heterodox Academy

with regard to the universities. The HA’s mission is to:

advocate for policy and culture changes that ensure our universities are truth-seeking, knowledge-generating institutions grounded in open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement — because great minds don't always think alike.

The assumption is that universities ARE indeed structured by reason, that the priority of most academics is to search for the truth wherever that may lead. But as Haidt himself has observed, with great acuity, modern institutions are no longer oriented towards truth but rather to a partisan understanding of social justice. Driven by ideological leftism, feminism and the sociological feminization of the institutions, the vast majority of academics now routinely prioritize ‘justice’. Truth has become a secondary concern. The therapeutic imperative not to ‘harm’ now takes precedence over reasoned debate.

This is old ground. We know all this. The universities and all other public institutions have been captured. The question is whether they can be recaptured by a liberal strategy of ‘nudge’ — which is to say, small steps back to the median. And the answer to that is pretty damn obvious: to anyone working in a university; to any woman training to be a midwife but skeptical about ‘chest feeding’; to any would be primary school teacher who is not keen on PRIDE marches; to any trainee army officer who thinks DEI is malign nonsense. We all know this. We shut up and keep quiet. Heterodox Academy — which is dominated by centrist liberals and is itself unconsciously hostile to real conservatives and Christians— eschews, very deliberately, any suggestion of the need for a large, political cudgel. It would be, it is argued, counter productive to frame the project as a fight. We must be true to the Habermas-ian idea of communicative reason and the public square, and reason our way back to consensus.

Unfortunately this is wishful thinking. The portal has closed. There are no small steps backwards. Anglophone liberalism (B-C on the diagram) was an outgrowth of Christian individualism — the political working out of Imago Dei which emerged on the back of 2000 years of Christianity and 1500 years of Saxon common law and common sense (A-B). With secularism, the radicalization of liberal ideology has severed of any connection between the rational transactional individuals (the voting citizen, homo economicus, the class conscious worker — depending on the political flavour), the communitarian locus on of family and place and the metaphysical obligations to a transcendent God. The Brownian motion of such billiard ball individuals is ostensibly rational but involves a collective madness. This is the period of self-congratulatory hubris of late liberalism (C-D) — and it has led inexorably to the woke crash (D-E). The end state is effectively a kind of pagan, instrumental tribalism ruled by the logic of collective power — itself a prelude to transhumanism and the ‘abolition of man’ (to use CS Lewis phrase). Actors may pay lip service to liberal norms but across all domains, the goal now is to game the institutions and subjugate opponents. This is why Judge Jackson is so flagrant in her disregard for the actual law and precedent on the American supreme court. The only thing which counts is a partisan account of justice for one side. It doesn’t really matter in which direction the law fare is directed. What matters is that led by the Democrats, both sides are now abandoning the idea of blind justice. The legal system is simply another tool in the political arsenal. This is why thousands of people are being prosecuted and jailed for wrong-think in the UK with an increasingly egregious normalization of double standards and two tier policing. It is why

Mary Harrington

argues that full term abortion and legal public killing of people who don’t want to live, represents the final and complete metaphysical defeat of Christendom.

As I argued last week:

Even, or rather especially, in their heyday, liberal democracies worked because the range of issues about which there was total individual freedom of action, was framed by a much larger pre-cognitive, pre-judged, pre-political agreement about societal virtues — taken for granted modes of behaviour and habits of mind, failures with which to comply would signal a kind of madness.

The transition towards a post-liberal society is accelerating and becoming hard to ignore. But its seeds go back as far as the heyday of classical liberalism. Even as they erected the extensive legal and institutional architecture of civil and political rights and due process all framed by explicit rational deliberations, argument and counter-argument — liberal society, like an ocean going steam-liner, was stable only because of what lay below the waterline. Weighing down the keel of this vessel, the ballast of liberal societies was provided by what William Opuls called the ‘lodestone’ of shared virtues and taken-for-granted moral sensibilities inherited from traditional Christian society. Providing orientations and frames of reference (rooted in the Ten Commandments) this ballast was so ubiquitous as to be invisible — even, or perhaps especially to those radicals who tried to do away with it.

Thus Stalin resisted Alexandra Kollontai’s attempts to dissolve the traditional model of marriage and family and to collectivize child rearing. He sensed that this would be a step too far. Some thirty years later, driven by the sexual revolution, Western revolutionaries started to do exactly this — and in the end Stalin’s intuitions have proved correct.

Without the religious underlay, liberalism morphs quickly into a devastating instrumental kind of modern paganism and eventually, transhumanism. Liberals have abandoned free speech, free enquiry, blind justice and any sense of prudential restraint. Hostile to the family and traditional institutions, they have become as wedded to the ever more interventionist big state as any socialists.

Ok, tell us something we don’t know.

What is equally true, but less clear, is that we can’t go back by simply repeating incremental steps in the opposite direction. Society can’t become gradually less tolerant of open borders, migration, pornography, sexual promiscuity, or homosexuality, or queer politics, or contraception ….until it reaches some sweet spot in which the trade offs are maximally tolerable and give the greatest benefits to cost ratio. This is the sort of process often implied by Sam Harris or Helen Pluckrose. But the implied political project is nonsensical. The reason is that society has passed through a kind of threshold. Using the favoured metaphor of complex systems, we have shifted from one basin of attraction to another — from one stable state, to another.

There is a kind of hysteresis involved.

To use a climate analogy — you can’t damp down the greenhouse effect by simply incrementally taking carbon out of the atmosphere. In order to get back to the stable state of the pre-industrial system, you would have to remove much more carbon than we have put into the system by burning fossil fuels.

[NOTE: I had some pushback about the use of a climate science analogy. Some people are allergic to any climate stuff — which I understand. Full disclosure, my own views are in line with Bjorn Lomborg which is to say, I accept that humans are having an impact; but I’m skeptical that we know the long term consequences and of our ability to to stop it. For those who prefer a less controversial example I would point to Martin Scheffer’s classic study of shallow lake ecosystems. He shows how these systems can shift between different stable states, such as clear-water with weeds versus turbid algal blooms. The stable states are difficult to ‘flip’. The change is sudden. A small change in a given variable (sunlight) may trigger a total system transformation. But a subsequent change in the opposite direction will not reverse the process. For a turbid lake to become clear takes a great deal more drastic changes across a variety of variable]

In short, in complex systems there are often ratchets and valve effects which allow cascading change in one direction but strongly inhibit reversal. In the same way — referring to my simple graphic — there is no way back from E to D, let alone E to C. The only available path back to something that approximates the kind of liberalism cherished by Harris, Pluckrose and company, would be from E via A and B.

And in real terms this would mean a period of overt discrimination and illiberal institution and enforcement of those pre-cognitive, pre-political, pre-psychological structures of culture and society which can provide ballast for any superstructure of liberal individualism and tolerance (within limits). We are now moving rapidly into a postliberal era. Some kind of authoritarian anti-individualist culture of constraint seems inevitable. The only question is to what ends. A Christian postliberalism would aim to re-establish the hegemony of the principle of Imago Dei coupled with the consolidation of common sensical natural law, expressed in a commitment to family and place-bound community. This is the long way around of E—B—A.

This is the basis for the conclusion I came to last week.

But only with that discrimination — the rebuilding of taken for granted foundations — will it be possible to sustain the sacral society of individuals. Needless to say, none of this can work without a revival of the Church. Christian culture can’t be sustained without mass participation in the liturgy. Without such a revival, we probably deserve Islam. [And]… exactly the same logic applies to debates about gender, sexuality and marriage. We have lost the precognitive unspoken consensus. The liberal replacement epitomized by secular gay marriage has fallen apart within just a decade. Fertility is collapsing and the welfare state will follow. By exactly the same token, to survive Western society will need a period of overt discrimination to re-draw boundaries, establish heteronormative marriage and taboos against promiscuity to such an extent that they are renaturalized and taken for granted.