Bernie in Lynchburg

When did we start calling presidential candidates by their first names? With Jeb(!) and Hillary, there's the problem of already having had a president or two on their phone plans. And what about Senator Sanders? He just looks like a Bernie. They should try to get Larry David to play him if the 2016 Democratic primary ever makes it to HBO.

Today I want to talk about Bernie's quixotic address at Liberty University.

The most important socialist in elected office made the speech hoping for common ground with conservative evangelical Christians.

It's been hailed as a bold statement about solidarity and recognition, but I don't think it quite amounted to so much. 

He started off with a reference to the golden rule from Matthew's gospel and then, unfortunately, proceeding to make a very ordinary Bernie Sanders speech.

The problem is that this Christian formula of reciprocity alone doesn't connect to the senses of desert and proportion that are the heart of Sanders' message. I want to think in this post about how he might have gone to a place like Liberty to make a case for something that might.

First a plus and a minus for Sanders' campaign in general, which on the whole I think is a salutary thing whatever his final numbers are and whatever happens to Clinton.

+ His campaign is about people's need, and that's what progressive politics should be about. Obama's progressive rhetoric has organized around ideas like hope and opportunity, abstractions structured by his visions of meritocracy, of broadening the best and brightest. The problem is that Goldman and Google provide for very, very few people, and however inclusive they become, the market of achievement, in which all our lives are bound up, needs checks applied that are concerned with human livelihood.

- His and Elizabeth Warren's rhetoric of punishing the bankers is an unhelpful diversion into penal populism. Do we really imagine the global catastrophe of 2008 only comes down toscamming the system? The anger and fear we felt then reflected the vulnerabilities produced by the disparities in wealth that are products of how the rules of the game work more than any individual fraudster breaking them. Sure, cheaters need punishment, but like crooked cops, the political issue is the system that produces violence and need rather than how that system might be cheated.

To the main point: I think Sanders could better have addressed social justice in Christian terms with a different, and a more polemical New Testament reference.

I point still to Bible because I don't think the likes of Pope Francis or the venerable traditions of Christian socialism would go very far there.

I think he could have done better saying "the love of money is the root of all evil". Though like any good sermonizer knows, of course, it isn't the text, it's how you use it.

The most ambitious thing for Sanders to do at a place like Liberty would have been to try to disentangle, or at least distinguish, the strands of neoliberal economics, social individualism, and scriptural devotion characteristic of the American right.

He could have argued that the latter is not tied to the other two by theology but by historical and political interpretation, as Kevin Kruse argues.

Of course, the fellow-travelers of Jerry Falwell, who founded Liberty, believe capitalism as world order bears the stamp of the divine; it is how virtue is rewarded on earth.

When they read the lines about the love of money, they tend to state that Christian businessmen don't love money; they love work, and the distribution of the former in our society is proportional to the amount that individuals love work. It's as if they haven't read the later chapters of the Protestant Ethic.

I think a provocative direction for a provocateur like Sanders would be to show total incredulity that money just accumulates incidentally. One does not incidentally accrue wealth without attachment to it.

Without this understanding, the idea of greed as a vice has no meaning. While evangelical culture tends to reject traditionally Catholic ideas of cardinal sins, it is devoted to the idea of virtue, of personal integrity to which one's social and material environment is a constant threat.

The convicted individual facing a menacing world is a main motif of evangelical theological anthropology. It is part of the social imaginary of the Puritan colony, the city on a hill in heathen wilds, it's part of the dream of the Geneva Consistory, of the Afrikaner Voortrekkers- rough Protestant communities that practiced hard religion and collective economics. 

The buckle-topped Mayflower folk had a sumptuary law that anticipated the Cultural Revolution. While the modern Christian idiom of modesty focuses on the need for women not to attract men's eyes, there is another and more radical aspect of this imperative to plainness. It is an egalitarian recognition of a collective claim on the person.

It is not hard to look around in modern political history to see radical egalitarianism, particularly of the uniformed vanity-burning kind, take turns to cruelty and terror. But its heritage is more complicated than the fraternity of the French revolution. 

The inspiration for modern renunciation has ample religion to draw on, to thought that binds the religious to the unbelieving, perhaps something like Bernie was looking for.

And that thought, like the vitiation of greed, is rooted in the sense of disproportion of taking more than one needs, of using one's means for limited and vanishing purposes, for vanity. 

That observation is one that Sanders' comfort with making others uncomfortable, a prophetic comfort one might say, could have very provocatively made.

Freedom Unbound?

I imagined this space in part to try out ideas, to work and rework them in new ways, to try to articulate thinking that's familiar to me but might look very different if written or rewritten out. Aside from this, so much of academic discourses as they unfold consist of a lot of people in orbit around a common thought trying to articulate it from their different vantages.

In my own field, the overlap in trajectories is evident in recent work like Islam in Liberalism, and The Impossible State, and Questioning Secularism, and Politics of Secularism in International Relations. They are all, as one of the authors says, wrestling in the same fog.

That said, my topic of "the trouble with liberalism and especially its mainstay concern of freedom" has been taken up and resumed so many times, how could I say anything newly impactful? From the communitarian criticism of Rawls to the critique of liberalism and imperial-settler politics in postcolonial thought, I haven't even read all of the interventions by formative voices.

I can only plead that I'm using the blog as a starting position, a place to collect the odds and ends of other projects, take input from collaborators, and look for where to look next.

So, to the point here: I want to talk about two problems that inhere in liberal thought and the idea that we might not avoid them but might hope to deal. These problems of ours are libertinism and libertarianism

I'm calling libertinism the living of life to maximize one's power. I'm calling libertarianism the philosophy of expansion of power in the world- provided it is not state power strictly understood. The first is a simple intellectual caricature I want changed, the second a more involved problem.

As for the first. A libertine, conventionally, is a de Sade-like figure who conforms to everything socially expected but behaves abusively in private. Setting aside what "abuse" could mean in contexts as different as 18th-century France and America today, I think we can meaningfully generalize this caricature of vice.

Just recently, I can point to Martin Marty's essay on the Ashley Madison hacks, and a need to go beyond prurience and shaming of hypocrites in thinking productively about privacy and freedom and a modern moral theology, if that's to be done at all. 

And it's in that space of a personal guidance, an idea of a full life as opposed to one only concerned with personal maximization offered in the neoliberal world, where liberalism tends to be ethically mute.

Must it have been so? No. There's the commonsense affective moral thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, but that's more or less gone from the picture, and I'm not talking about restoration of the lost here.

The other main problem is the more serious. Libertarianism discredits its foundational philosophical tradition because it's been a force unleashed on the world that has brought about deeply unfree state.

It seems more and more, economic historians can connect the rise and concretion of free markets to unfree labor. That new-world capitalism was built on Atlantic slavery is a familiar fact, but after slavery disentangled from colonialism, the liberating Western empires organized more efficient, more decentralized, and more modern system of conscript labor at the base, as the basis, of the world economy. 

Of course, liberalist economics, and neo-liberalism, its 20th-century successor, is only a branch of the tradition, albeit the most prominent one.

There were other parts of the tradition we have inherited that are vestigial now. There are the above mentioned attempts to ground morality in the human emotional constitution, which have come back a little in the thought of David Wong and Martha Nussbaum, the last major representative of this way of thinking. 

Further back and afield, there's the deep connection of liberal reason to republican virtue. It's critical to the thought of Rousseau, though it's better known in what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the morality-terrorism of Robespierre and Saint-Juste, who wanted to restore the Roman republic to the new France. Some of this bold vision of remaking society and property survives in the Marxian ideas of freedom

It might be for that reason, or the exhaustion of modern possibilities of self-care or care for others in neo-liberal selfless individualism, that there doesn't appear to be the moral wherewithal to confront libertinism or libertarianism from their native tradition. 

Or there doesn't look like one to me. I won't go through all the responses I've read to ideas of what ails liberalism. I won't discuss here the larger ideas that all liberalisms rotten and pernicious, all their freedoms nothing more than pathological nonsense and instruments of power. That is an idea, part of a big critical project held by people who understand liberality to be a number of things, even as their own thought does not go as far from liberalism as they might hope. *Stay tuned for the dissertation chapter on the history of critique.

But for the moment, I thought I could try to categorize some of the serious problems that the surviving mode of Western political thought abides with and only theorizes about to a limited extent. Where the thought strays far, and the solutions more creative, they lose touch with the basic norms of reasoning in which states operate, the economy is assessed, and politics, for better, and obviously worse, is contemplated.

Fukuyama said universal freedom is the end of political history, and whether we see his view as sinister or merely naïve and parochial, liberalism, with all its twists and obstructions is the structure that contains our normative thinking, and we are left to think about it.

When That's All There Is

I was listening to Death, Sex & Money, about which I've written, and I heard a quote that really stuck with me.

The guest was a burn-out funeral director making a comment about the testing of his faith. "Death is the muse of religion" he said. Perhaps a little pretentious, but a memorable quote.

It seemed too prepared to be thought up on the spot. Looking on Google, what I found was a quote from Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation worded that death was the muse of philosophy. Juxtaposing the two versions, it reminded me of an observation I tried to make sense of some time ago.

When I first read Charles Hirschkind's Ethical Soundscape, I was struck by the chapter on death and thanatological discourse in Islamic homiletics. As opposed to the people Hirschkind met, he argues that death and dying are entirely absent from Western liberalism, a departure from the way ethics and ultimate concerns have always been expressed.

Though the seclusion of injury and pain to medicine is a great historical change-and Hirschkind's idea of delicate, ignorant moderns comports nicely with our stereotypes-he isn't quite right, and neither is Schopenhauer. 

Pace Hirschkind, the modern art adored by the liberal cafeteriat is obsessed with death, from Chekhov to Beckett to Francis Bacon; see Bergman above. 

Modern thought is obsessed with death, from Kierkegaard to Sartre, to the contemporary debates on bioethics. This follows from the context in which Schopenhauer is correct: death is the muse to Western philosophy. 

According to Plato, Socrates said philosophy prepares one for death and dying. And, after the 19th-century mass extinction, Western philosophy is what philosophy is, and a very limited branch of it at that.

Aristotle was not obsessed with death, and the Aristotelian tradition that flourished in the Islamic middle ages was not thanatocentric.

This brings me to the next point. Death isn't the muse of religion either. It's the muse, better central problem, of a religion: Christianity.

Though belief in the afterlife is common enough, Christianity made its hereafter and the redemptive death that guarantees it central.

As an illustration in contrast, Confucian scholars found the Jesuits' wearing of crosses with the corpus Christi grotesque and morbid.

As an artistic development, Christ on the moment of crucifixion was a vivid iconographic riposte to the reformation: death and life so depicted gave such a sharp and memorable point because of the particular esthetic and devotional tradition to which it belonged, as opposed to a general musing.

The death that is central to the Socratic-Christian tradition isn't the muse of Buddhism, concerned with suffering, and one could say that Confucianism is concerned with the problem of long life.

With this mind, I don't suppose my correction to Schopenhauer or the guy on the radio is anything more that to put an indefinite article in the dictum: death is the muse of a philosophy, a religion. 

But for Hirschkind, whose work I know better, I would say that while death is in a mix whose constitution has changed, but remains central to the parochial tradition we speak of when we have our universal musings.