It follows readily from the nature of liberalism here discussed - and someone kindly supplied a working definition of "enthusiasm for autonomy + propensity for diversity +commitment to egalitarianism" - that it can only produce a sort of "caretaker" esthetics ("you children can play in the basement room but don't hurt each other"), a gray fuzz of mediocrity. Random pixels of primary colors yield a grey screen. Not only did this panel not answer the question in a positive way, they may have answered it in the negative: a liberal esthetic is not possible (and that's a problem).
Additionally, the discussion touched on the uncomfortable tension between "political" liberalism, which aims to create the *public* conditions for people to have their affirmative, i.e. "illiberal" *private* lives. Anyone who's been exposed to those who would run their private lives (their consumption habits, their romantic expectations, their child-rearing theories) along explicitly "liberal" lines will recognize what crashing bores they are (at a minimum).
As a side-effect, seeing how they all agreed to bludgeon Deneen, I'll look him up next - just in case.
" Random pixels of primary colors yield a grey screen." Nice one. I commend to you Peter Sloterdijk's book If You Have Never Thought Gray: A Theory of Color. The title quotes Cezanne, but the book pursues the idea of "gray" from Plato's Cave to Hegel's "gray on gray" and beyond. Lots to be said there.
Grateful to Becca Rothfield and the others for launching this conversation, which I hope will bring along many ships in its wake. I've started cobbling together my own skiff in my restacking note, but I'm hoping others will recognize the depth and urgency of the questions and "set keel to breakers," as the poet said.
Becca Rothfeld is on to something. Cass Sunstein just does not get it, he is probably too old. There is something noble about him ignorantly keeping post as a technocrat. At least he is not wallowing in soppy self-pity as did Michael Ignatieff a year ago.
There may be a generation gap here (though Trilling, who stands at the opposite antipode from Sunstein, is so old that he's dead). But that means, too, that you and Rothfeld may not get what Sunstein is saying because you are too young. We dismiss either side at our peril.
Believing in liberalism as a political meta-principle, believing that political disagreement should be tolerated by the systems we live in, doesn't imply that you have to agree with everyone, just that you'll accept their right to speak publicly and make their own attempts at persuasion and political mobilisation.
The same could and should apply to a liberal attitude towards aesthetics, or towards ways of living in a broader sense, but progressives militate against it. Non-interference has been replaced by an enforced lack of discernment. I don't think the state should be allowed to decide what art is good and important, but that doesn't mean I think all art is equally good. That's a view that's essentially elitist and not tolerated within educational/institutional contexts. To suggest that there is more value in a work that is part of the canon than in the average modern work is implicitly offensive to the actually existing cohort of art teachers, academics, etc.
The same applies to ways of life. We might have an instinct that living as a shut-in who never leaves the house and plays video games in all waking hours is not a good life. There is no reason why a liberal can't say it's a horrible life. (What they can't say is that choosing to live this way should be illegal.) It's a progressive who feels obliged to insist that this is perfectly fine and that it's judgmental (ie morally bad) to suggest that not every way of living is valid. So the problem isn't *liberalism* but a modern progressive fear of judgment. I don't think modern leftists have an inspiring vision either, for the same reason.
This wasn't the case when Trilling and Sontag were writing. I think the early pangs of globalism was what they were conflating with liberalism, in an age where the embedded culture and history of specific places was beginning to be eroded by mass culture. Fascism and conservatism are resistant to that process (even though they seem powerless against it in practice) and thus seem to share a sympathy with art when that art is in dialogue with tradition, as the Modernists were. There is a certain vitalist urge in Fascism, manifested politically as impatience with democracy, which also appeals to young men as a matter of hormones overcoming judgment; that's why Pound was a Fascist and later repented.
It seems as though all the participants in this conversation are aware that there is a problem of some kind. But it also seems that none of them have adequately actually embraced the nature of the problem. Becca Rothfield comes closest in her depiction of the kinds of things that define contemporary life: Trader Joe's, salad bowls, etc. etc. We have a society full of stuff, but not meaning. And the problem is a lack of genuine art that addresses the fundamental questions of life that humans have wrestled with for millenia. In fact, after 1970, there has been a quite noticeable movement among all the academic arts to actually be smaller: don't focus on the big questions, give small slices of life and quiet epiphanies. This has led to a catastrophic split between the academics and the population-at-large who used to actually read and embrace a lot of genuine literature and art. The fact that one has to even cite Bob Dylan instead of any of the poets to come out of the Academy or workshops in the last half century is an indictment of this. A popular musician who never even graduated university has more importance than any of the credentialed writers of the age.
There has also been a catastrophic loss of the kinds of important rituals that used to tie communities together and lead to improved societies. While most academics (I would guess) would consider themselves agnostics or atheists, it is not necessarily in their interests to investigate the ways in which the complete removal of religion from human life in less than a century has totally changed the way humans experience the world. Thus the point about Super Bowl commercials being our unifying ritual. What else do we have?
Both Sontag and the young DC Conservatives have essentially given you the answers you need: people are desperate for a genuine encounter with the kind of beauty that can only be obtained through genuine works of art. Not political simulacra that worry about the "aesthetic of liberalism" or whatever else. My worry about the Academy as a whole is that it has been so polluted by politics and ideology that academics are unable to realize that art is fundamentally about what it is to be human. Not liberal, not conservative, not an authoritarian, but just human. And being human includes politics, but it also includes a striving towards feelings that exist outside of the realm of the tactile. We used to call that the sacred, but as modernity has stripped away the sense of the vertical reach to Heaven from humans, all that is left is the horizontal realm of politics and economy.
Conservatives are winning people over not on aesthetics (it's ridiculous to say that the current lot in Washington have anything approaching a decent aesthetic), but because students increasingly appreciate that Conservatives are at least willing to say that Shakespeare is great and better than workshop poets today, that there is a hierarchy in art and some works of art are more universally able to touch the soul than others (or that there is a soul at all), and that Western Civilization has produced a monumental canon of work that really matters, and matters for non-political reasons. Art is not to be framed through a political lens all the time (in fact the political lens is often the least interesting way to view art).
The "liberal aesthetic" needs to be to get out of the way. Stop using aesthetics as a way to proselytize for politics. Students want to learn the Iliad without learning about contemporary power structures, they want to learn Milton without apologies for his theology, they want to learn Donne without having to learn about gender politics. They want the encounter with (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens) the Thing itself, not ideas about the Thing. Put a group of hungry students in a classroom with genuine art and let them encounter it with the whole of their minds and bodies. Blake, Monet, Milton, Whitman, Dickens, the Brontes. These are all artists who fought against the conservatives of their time and used their entire minds and bodies and souls to do it. They didn't do it purely with an attempt to hit on a "liberal aesthetic." And ironically, that is what made them be able to push back against the prevailing notions of their day.
The job of the academic is to introduce and facilitate a genuine experience with greatness and let contemporary minds reflect upon that greatness as they will. It is not to perform acts of political solidarity and virtue signaling.
Liking your style and appreciating many of your points. I do wonder, though, whether "what it means to be human" is quite as innocuous as you're implying. Try re-reading The Winter's Tale, where it actually takes a deus ex machina (the Oracle of Apollo) to keep Leontes from destroying an entire world. It's terrifying stuff--and very difficult to share responsibly with students for whom "post-apocalyptic dystopia" is a familiar genre, zombies and vampires the stuff of daily life. Recognizing Dylan's cultural significance casts no shade on contemporary literature, poetry or prose.
I agree with you about Dylan. But Dylan did the complete opposite of the contemporary poetic aesthetic and was a joke to the Academy until he won the Nobel Prize. Credit to those like Christopher Ricks who were his champions the whole time.
Funny you should say that: I thought he was the only one who brought in examples (Dylan, Malick, Pynchon/Anderson) beyond the canons of literary modernism. Touchstones worth thinking about, whether or not you find them persuasive.
I guess I’d say that bringing in Dylan and Malick is fine, but not enough to qualify them as representative of liberalism. He assumed that because these works depict freedom or choice (ostensibly) they qualify as distinctively liberal art. That’s not really the question. Depicting a free choice isn’t the same as embodying a liberal vision of the good life. I think he needed to argue that these works are actually uniquely expressive of liberalism (as opposed to, say, existentialism or romanticism) and, most importantly, that they carry some normative weight about how one should live.
You people aren't talking about "liberalism" in any real definition of the word. You're talking about whatever disgusting nonsense Kamala Harris stood for in the last US presidential election. You are advocating for tyranny of the Human Resources administrator. You don't believe in political equality, consent of the governed, rights of the individual, private property, freedom of speech or association. You at least admit you're not interested in beauty, which is one of many reasons why you people are rapidly becoming irrelevant.
In Hungary, where we’re beginning to get a sense of what kind of government we can expect after 16 years of illiberalism, I’m struck by how the new guy - assumed to be a conservative - is appointing a diverse cabinet, including obvious liberals, a blind person, women (gasp!) and perhaps several conservatives, though it’s hard to tell. It’s clear the incoming ministers are far from being technocrats, yet you’d be hard pressed to describe them as ideologues either. The incoming prime minister certainly sees some usefulness in ambiguity: around 40% of the protest vote against Orban are left-liberals. What I sense is that there’s a sincere determination to restore freedom, pluralism, the rule of law, checks and balances, yet there’s also an equally strong determination to avoid the word liberal - perhaps wisely. I don’t think this is cowardice or mere pragmatism because what seems to be emerging is an enlightened and coherent approach to governance that Adam Smith and JS Mill might recognize. Time will tell. Incidentally, Turgenev might have been a good point of reference in the discussion (and, indeed, Isaiah Berlin’s essay Fathers and Children).
We've now learned the hard way the importance of strategic ambiguity to successful (diplomatic) negotiation: it creates the room needed for face-saving and win/win resolutions.
My meta-argument for sometime now is that we’re back in the 19th century. One way to narrate the 20th century is the century of grand political illusions. Two of these illusions are know to everyone: communism and fascism. But the third never mentioned and which we are not witnessing its collapse is that of democratic capitalism. Tony Judt argued that the -isms that defined the 20th all had origins in the 19th. Adding István Hont to the mix, he argued that there was no great conceptual innovation beneath the dominance of the west after the end of the Cold War and the neoliberal era was one defined by elite arrogance. Thus it’s not surprising to me that liberals are confronting this crisis by having to confront the critique that liberalism is a radical political philosophy that is contradiction with its ACTUAL political history and having to return to older roots such as Rawls, the anti-liberalism of modernism, and even further back to figures like Mills who absorbed the socialist critique, in particular Marx. Thus while I understand why the panel separates liberalism from the Democratic Party, the crisis of liberalism brings makes them inseparable. The socialist left is in a similar position as it escapes its own miasma to become a real challenge. As that oddest of combinations–a Christian and a socialist–I find left liberals as a demographic of professionals (excluding this authors, of course) very unwilling to confront their actual history. Just the other day I had a disagreement with someone who used as a point of honor that she went to law school with one of the Clinton and argued the idea the reason democrats lost is because republicans are all crazy racist Christians and wrote off everywhere except California and New York. To be a socialist or a liberal, I argue, requires to take the weight of history seriously so that we don’t recreate the abattoirs of the past. Sometimes I wonder that if liberalism in its current formation is able to do that. And the week before that I got into a disagreement with someone who argued videos aren’t art and how 30% of the US population is illiterate and can’t sustain the attention to appreciate literature. And they wonder why they’re hated…I had the great displeasure of being treated as crazy for defending the humanity of disillusioned Trump voters and seeing them as recruitable and saying that whenever people find deep meaning in a new medium like video games they’ll pore their souls into creating art and community out of it.
My meta-argument for sometime now is that we’re back in the 19th century. One way to narrate the 20th century is the century of grand political illusions. Two of these illusions are know to everyone: communism and fascism. But the third never mentioned and which we are not witnessing its collapse is that of democratic capitalism. Tony Judt argued that the -isms that defined the 20th hard origins in the 19th. Adding István Hont to the mix, he argued that there was no great conceptual innovation beneath the dominance of the west after the end of the Cold War. Thus it’s not surprising to me that liberals are confronting this crisis by having to confront the critique that liberalism is a radical political philosophy that is contradiction with its ACTUAL political history and having to return to older roots such as Rawls, the anti-liberalism of modernism, and even further back to figures like Mills who absorbed the socialist critique, in particular Marx. The socialist left is in a similar position as it escapes its own miasma to become a real challenge. As that oddest of combinations–a Christian socialist–I find left liberals as a demographic of professionals (excluding this authors, of course) very unwilling to confront their actual history. Just the other day I had a disagreement with someone who still clings to the idea the reason democrats lost is because republicans are all crazy racist Christians and wrote off everywhere except California and New York.
I think part of the problem is that because of its world-historical levels of actually delivering improved human flourishing, expectations of liberalism are sky-high. "You've created a free, safe, prosperous, and open society where I can carve out a good life in accordance with any ideals I choose? But why haven't you cured my ennui????"
As you can tell, I find it pretty exasperating. Yeah it's kind of crying to The Refs Of Reality, but libs are expected to solve every single human problem or be told we're useless and hollow with no vision for the good life. Conservatives and leftists can exacerbate every human problem, more-or-less on purpose, and still garner huge amounts of credit for writing "The Good" with capital letters like an Aristotelian instead of "the good" like an annoying analytic philosopher.
It seems like the definition of liberalism keeps changing, but, just as a starting point, what should we call a "space" that we want to make clear, as much as possible, of theocracy, corporatocracy and stratocracy?
Let us imagine that one day a man loudly breaks wind in a crowded lift. The smell is abominable. The wind breaker states that he is sorry but he has a stomach condition that causes him to have a need to break wind wherever he is.
The lift contained a group of people who are liberal in outlook. They not only accept the wind breaker's explanation, but think that it is important that we tolerate those who for medical reasons need to beak wind in lifts. Several of these liberals tell their frinds and acquaintances. Then someone remembers a time when a lift journey was interrupted by someone else's bottom burp.
And so it comes to pass that liberals far and wide suggest that we need to tolerate those whose medical condition requires them to break wind in crowded lifts. It would be cruel to force those people to walk up and down the fire stairs. After all, most of us are only the lift for 10 to 30 seconds. We should be able to able to stand a bit of smell so as to accommodate our unfortunate flatulent fellow citizens.
Of course many people now doscover that they have stomach troubles and begin to fart in lifts regularly. The lifts in the city become permanently imbued with the stench of stale flatulence. If anyone complains that this could be fixed by socially condemning lift farters, the liberals immediately respond by calling the complainant a bigot. Many liberals now make a point of breaking wind in lifts, in solidarity with the downtrodden.
As time goes on, people don't just fart in lifts, but also eat smelly food, copulate, urinate and scrawl grafitti on the walls. All the time the liberals remain tolerant and often join in the bad behaviour, because they believe in freedom and plurality.
Eventually, most people, including a lot of liberals, are using the stairs. Nevertheless decorum has now sunk so far that soon people are despoling the stairways as well.
The liberals now decide that it is time to set up a government taskforce to solve the problem of noxious lifts and stariwells. They approach rich non-profits to help. Lots of money is expended on the issuuse. The core belief though is that capitalism is to blame. People are eating poor food that emcourages flatulence and they have to go somewhere to expel the wind.
So of course the problem never gets solved, because too many people have a vested interest in the problem remaining.
In the meantime, the liberals have created no great art in repsct of the problem. Tories have engaged in great satire and leftists have witten great novels about the oppression of the flatulents.
What about Selma (2015), the film about MLK that shows how a very sociologically plural group (in race, religion, class) cooperated in the civil rights struggle
It follows readily from the nature of liberalism here discussed - and someone kindly supplied a working definition of "enthusiasm for autonomy + propensity for diversity +commitment to egalitarianism" - that it can only produce a sort of "caretaker" esthetics ("you children can play in the basement room but don't hurt each other"), a gray fuzz of mediocrity. Random pixels of primary colors yield a grey screen. Not only did this panel not answer the question in a positive way, they may have answered it in the negative: a liberal esthetic is not possible (and that's a problem).
Additionally, the discussion touched on the uncomfortable tension between "political" liberalism, which aims to create the *public* conditions for people to have their affirmative, i.e. "illiberal" *private* lives. Anyone who's been exposed to those who would run their private lives (their consumption habits, their romantic expectations, their child-rearing theories) along explicitly "liberal" lines will recognize what crashing bores they are (at a minimum).
As a side-effect, seeing how they all agreed to bludgeon Deneen, I'll look him up next - just in case.
" Random pixels of primary colors yield a grey screen." Nice one. I commend to you Peter Sloterdijk's book If You Have Never Thought Gray: A Theory of Color. The title quotes Cezanne, but the book pursues the idea of "gray" from Plato's Cave to Hegel's "gray on gray" and beyond. Lots to be said there.
Grateful to Becca Rothfield and the others for launching this conversation, which I hope will bring along many ships in its wake. I've started cobbling together my own skiff in my restacking note, but I'm hoping others will recognize the depth and urgency of the questions and "set keel to breakers," as the poet said.
Becca Rothfeld is on to something. Cass Sunstein just does not get it, he is probably too old. There is something noble about him ignorantly keeping post as a technocrat. At least he is not wallowing in soppy self-pity as did Michael Ignatieff a year ago.
There may be a generation gap here (though Trilling, who stands at the opposite antipode from Sunstein, is so old that he's dead). But that means, too, that you and Rothfeld may not get what Sunstein is saying because you are too young. We dismiss either side at our peril.
Believing in liberalism as a political meta-principle, believing that political disagreement should be tolerated by the systems we live in, doesn't imply that you have to agree with everyone, just that you'll accept their right to speak publicly and make their own attempts at persuasion and political mobilisation.
The same could and should apply to a liberal attitude towards aesthetics, or towards ways of living in a broader sense, but progressives militate against it. Non-interference has been replaced by an enforced lack of discernment. I don't think the state should be allowed to decide what art is good and important, but that doesn't mean I think all art is equally good. That's a view that's essentially elitist and not tolerated within educational/institutional contexts. To suggest that there is more value in a work that is part of the canon than in the average modern work is implicitly offensive to the actually existing cohort of art teachers, academics, etc.
The same applies to ways of life. We might have an instinct that living as a shut-in who never leaves the house and plays video games in all waking hours is not a good life. There is no reason why a liberal can't say it's a horrible life. (What they can't say is that choosing to live this way should be illegal.) It's a progressive who feels obliged to insist that this is perfectly fine and that it's judgmental (ie morally bad) to suggest that not every way of living is valid. So the problem isn't *liberalism* but a modern progressive fear of judgment. I don't think modern leftists have an inspiring vision either, for the same reason.
This wasn't the case when Trilling and Sontag were writing. I think the early pangs of globalism was what they were conflating with liberalism, in an age where the embedded culture and history of specific places was beginning to be eroded by mass culture. Fascism and conservatism are resistant to that process (even though they seem powerless against it in practice) and thus seem to share a sympathy with art when that art is in dialogue with tradition, as the Modernists were. There is a certain vitalist urge in Fascism, manifested politically as impatience with democracy, which also appeals to young men as a matter of hormones overcoming judgment; that's why Pound was a Fascist and later repented.
It seems as though all the participants in this conversation are aware that there is a problem of some kind. But it also seems that none of them have adequately actually embraced the nature of the problem. Becca Rothfield comes closest in her depiction of the kinds of things that define contemporary life: Trader Joe's, salad bowls, etc. etc. We have a society full of stuff, but not meaning. And the problem is a lack of genuine art that addresses the fundamental questions of life that humans have wrestled with for millenia. In fact, after 1970, there has been a quite noticeable movement among all the academic arts to actually be smaller: don't focus on the big questions, give small slices of life and quiet epiphanies. This has led to a catastrophic split between the academics and the population-at-large who used to actually read and embrace a lot of genuine literature and art. The fact that one has to even cite Bob Dylan instead of any of the poets to come out of the Academy or workshops in the last half century is an indictment of this. A popular musician who never even graduated university has more importance than any of the credentialed writers of the age.
There has also been a catastrophic loss of the kinds of important rituals that used to tie communities together and lead to improved societies. While most academics (I would guess) would consider themselves agnostics or atheists, it is not necessarily in their interests to investigate the ways in which the complete removal of religion from human life in less than a century has totally changed the way humans experience the world. Thus the point about Super Bowl commercials being our unifying ritual. What else do we have?
Both Sontag and the young DC Conservatives have essentially given you the answers you need: people are desperate for a genuine encounter with the kind of beauty that can only be obtained through genuine works of art. Not political simulacra that worry about the "aesthetic of liberalism" or whatever else. My worry about the Academy as a whole is that it has been so polluted by politics and ideology that academics are unable to realize that art is fundamentally about what it is to be human. Not liberal, not conservative, not an authoritarian, but just human. And being human includes politics, but it also includes a striving towards feelings that exist outside of the realm of the tactile. We used to call that the sacred, but as modernity has stripped away the sense of the vertical reach to Heaven from humans, all that is left is the horizontal realm of politics and economy.
Conservatives are winning people over not on aesthetics (it's ridiculous to say that the current lot in Washington have anything approaching a decent aesthetic), but because students increasingly appreciate that Conservatives are at least willing to say that Shakespeare is great and better than workshop poets today, that there is a hierarchy in art and some works of art are more universally able to touch the soul than others (or that there is a soul at all), and that Western Civilization has produced a monumental canon of work that really matters, and matters for non-political reasons. Art is not to be framed through a political lens all the time (in fact the political lens is often the least interesting way to view art).
The "liberal aesthetic" needs to be to get out of the way. Stop using aesthetics as a way to proselytize for politics. Students want to learn the Iliad without learning about contemporary power structures, they want to learn Milton without apologies for his theology, they want to learn Donne without having to learn about gender politics. They want the encounter with (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens) the Thing itself, not ideas about the Thing. Put a group of hungry students in a classroom with genuine art and let them encounter it with the whole of their minds and bodies. Blake, Monet, Milton, Whitman, Dickens, the Brontes. These are all artists who fought against the conservatives of their time and used their entire minds and bodies and souls to do it. They didn't do it purely with an attempt to hit on a "liberal aesthetic." And ironically, that is what made them be able to push back against the prevailing notions of their day.
The job of the academic is to introduce and facilitate a genuine experience with greatness and let contemporary minds reflect upon that greatness as they will. It is not to perform acts of political solidarity and virtue signaling.
Liking your style and appreciating many of your points. I do wonder, though, whether "what it means to be human" is quite as innocuous as you're implying. Try re-reading The Winter's Tale, where it actually takes a deus ex machina (the Oracle of Apollo) to keep Leontes from destroying an entire world. It's terrifying stuff--and very difficult to share responsibly with students for whom "post-apocalyptic dystopia" is a familiar genre, zombies and vampires the stuff of daily life. Recognizing Dylan's cultural significance casts no shade on contemporary literature, poetry or prose.
I agree with you about Dylan. But Dylan did the complete opposite of the contemporary poetic aesthetic and was a joke to the Academy until he won the Nobel Prize. Credit to those like Christopher Ricks who were his champions the whole time.
Kinda crazy how out of his league Cass Sunstein was in that conversation
Funny you should say that: I thought he was the only one who brought in examples (Dylan, Malick, Pynchon/Anderson) beyond the canons of literary modernism. Touchstones worth thinking about, whether or not you find them persuasive.
I guess I’d say that bringing in Dylan and Malick is fine, but not enough to qualify them as representative of liberalism. He assumed that because these works depict freedom or choice (ostensibly) they qualify as distinctively liberal art. That’s not really the question. Depicting a free choice isn’t the same as embodying a liberal vision of the good life. I think he needed to argue that these works are actually uniquely expressive of liberalism (as opposed to, say, existentialism or romanticism) and, most importantly, that they carry some normative weight about how one should live.
He was just name dropping!
You people aren't talking about "liberalism" in any real definition of the word. You're talking about whatever disgusting nonsense Kamala Harris stood for in the last US presidential election. You are advocating for tyranny of the Human Resources administrator. You don't believe in political equality, consent of the governed, rights of the individual, private property, freedom of speech or association. You at least admit you're not interested in beauty, which is one of many reasons why you people are rapidly becoming irrelevant.
Ok so … has Cass Sunstein actually *heard* "Like a Rolling Stone"?
😂
In Hungary, where we’re beginning to get a sense of what kind of government we can expect after 16 years of illiberalism, I’m struck by how the new guy - assumed to be a conservative - is appointing a diverse cabinet, including obvious liberals, a blind person, women (gasp!) and perhaps several conservatives, though it’s hard to tell. It’s clear the incoming ministers are far from being technocrats, yet you’d be hard pressed to describe them as ideologues either. The incoming prime minister certainly sees some usefulness in ambiguity: around 40% of the protest vote against Orban are left-liberals. What I sense is that there’s a sincere determination to restore freedom, pluralism, the rule of law, checks and balances, yet there’s also an equally strong determination to avoid the word liberal - perhaps wisely. I don’t think this is cowardice or mere pragmatism because what seems to be emerging is an enlightened and coherent approach to governance that Adam Smith and JS Mill might recognize. Time will tell. Incidentally, Turgenev might have been a good point of reference in the discussion (and, indeed, Isaiah Berlin’s essay Fathers and Children).
We've now learned the hard way the importance of strategic ambiguity to successful (diplomatic) negotiation: it creates the room needed for face-saving and win/win resolutions.
My meta-argument for sometime now is that we’re back in the 19th century. One way to narrate the 20th century is the century of grand political illusions. Two of these illusions are know to everyone: communism and fascism. But the third never mentioned and which we are not witnessing its collapse is that of democratic capitalism. Tony Judt argued that the -isms that defined the 20th all had origins in the 19th. Adding István Hont to the mix, he argued that there was no great conceptual innovation beneath the dominance of the west after the end of the Cold War and the neoliberal era was one defined by elite arrogance. Thus it’s not surprising to me that liberals are confronting this crisis by having to confront the critique that liberalism is a radical political philosophy that is contradiction with its ACTUAL political history and having to return to older roots such as Rawls, the anti-liberalism of modernism, and even further back to figures like Mills who absorbed the socialist critique, in particular Marx. Thus while I understand why the panel separates liberalism from the Democratic Party, the crisis of liberalism brings makes them inseparable. The socialist left is in a similar position as it escapes its own miasma to become a real challenge. As that oddest of combinations–a Christian and a socialist–I find left liberals as a demographic of professionals (excluding this authors, of course) very unwilling to confront their actual history. Just the other day I had a disagreement with someone who used as a point of honor that she went to law school with one of the Clinton and argued the idea the reason democrats lost is because republicans are all crazy racist Christians and wrote off everywhere except California and New York. To be a socialist or a liberal, I argue, requires to take the weight of history seriously so that we don’t recreate the abattoirs of the past. Sometimes I wonder that if liberalism in its current formation is able to do that. And the week before that I got into a disagreement with someone who argued videos aren’t art and how 30% of the US population is illiterate and can’t sustain the attention to appreciate literature. And they wonder why they’re hated…I had the great displeasure of being treated as crazy for defending the humanity of disillusioned Trump voters and seeing them as recruitable and saying that whenever people find deep meaning in a new medium like video games they’ll pore their souls into creating art and community out of it.
My meta-argument for sometime now is that we’re back in the 19th century. One way to narrate the 20th century is the century of grand political illusions. Two of these illusions are know to everyone: communism and fascism. But the third never mentioned and which we are not witnessing its collapse is that of democratic capitalism. Tony Judt argued that the -isms that defined the 20th hard origins in the 19th. Adding István Hont to the mix, he argued that there was no great conceptual innovation beneath the dominance of the west after the end of the Cold War. Thus it’s not surprising to me that liberals are confronting this crisis by having to confront the critique that liberalism is a radical political philosophy that is contradiction with its ACTUAL political history and having to return to older roots such as Rawls, the anti-liberalism of modernism, and even further back to figures like Mills who absorbed the socialist critique, in particular Marx. The socialist left is in a similar position as it escapes its own miasma to become a real challenge. As that oddest of combinations–a Christian socialist–I find left liberals as a demographic of professionals (excluding this authors, of course) very unwilling to confront their actual history. Just the other day I had a disagreement with someone who still clings to the idea the reason democrats lost is because republicans are all crazy racist Christians and wrote off everywhere except California and New York.
I think part of the problem is that because of its world-historical levels of actually delivering improved human flourishing, expectations of liberalism are sky-high. "You've created a free, safe, prosperous, and open society where I can carve out a good life in accordance with any ideals I choose? But why haven't you cured my ennui????"
As you can tell, I find it pretty exasperating. Yeah it's kind of crying to The Refs Of Reality, but libs are expected to solve every single human problem or be told we're useless and hollow with no vision for the good life. Conservatives and leftists can exacerbate every human problem, more-or-less on purpose, and still garner huge amounts of credit for writing "The Good" with capital letters like an Aristotelian instead of "the good" like an annoying analytic philosopher.
It seems like the definition of liberalism keeps changing, but, just as a starting point, what should we call a "space" that we want to make clear, as much as possible, of theocracy, corporatocracy and stratocracy?
Shall I explain how liberalism works?
Let us imagine that one day a man loudly breaks wind in a crowded lift. The smell is abominable. The wind breaker states that he is sorry but he has a stomach condition that causes him to have a need to break wind wherever he is.
The lift contained a group of people who are liberal in outlook. They not only accept the wind breaker's explanation, but think that it is important that we tolerate those who for medical reasons need to beak wind in lifts. Several of these liberals tell their frinds and acquaintances. Then someone remembers a time when a lift journey was interrupted by someone else's bottom burp.
And so it comes to pass that liberals far and wide suggest that we need to tolerate those whose medical condition requires them to break wind in crowded lifts. It would be cruel to force those people to walk up and down the fire stairs. After all, most of us are only the lift for 10 to 30 seconds. We should be able to able to stand a bit of smell so as to accommodate our unfortunate flatulent fellow citizens.
Of course many people now doscover that they have stomach troubles and begin to fart in lifts regularly. The lifts in the city become permanently imbued with the stench of stale flatulence. If anyone complains that this could be fixed by socially condemning lift farters, the liberals immediately respond by calling the complainant a bigot. Many liberals now make a point of breaking wind in lifts, in solidarity with the downtrodden.
As time goes on, people don't just fart in lifts, but also eat smelly food, copulate, urinate and scrawl grafitti on the walls. All the time the liberals remain tolerant and often join in the bad behaviour, because they believe in freedom and plurality.
Eventually, most people, including a lot of liberals, are using the stairs. Nevertheless decorum has now sunk so far that soon people are despoling the stairways as well.
The liberals now decide that it is time to set up a government taskforce to solve the problem of noxious lifts and stariwells. They approach rich non-profits to help. Lots of money is expended on the issuuse. The core belief though is that capitalism is to blame. People are eating poor food that emcourages flatulence and they have to go somewhere to expel the wind.
So of course the problem never gets solved, because too many people have a vested interest in the problem remaining.
In the meantime, the liberals have created no great art in repsct of the problem. Tories have engaged in great satire and leftists have witten great novels about the oppression of the flatulents.
What about Selma (2015), the film about MLK that shows how a very sociologically plural group (in race, religion, class) cooperated in the civil rights struggle
The phrase "liberal art" is grotesque. Talk about a de-racinated concept!