Goodbye to All That
Technology and the New Right
(Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash)
There has recently been a refreshing, if somewhat belated, realization by at least some on the right (whether cultural, political, social, what have you) that their “side” has made a substantial error in the past several decades by underestimating the utterly transformative, disruptive role played by technological change in human history — something which has rendered it largely ineffective in both anticipating and addressing social, economic and political change, both in theory and in practice, as it was playing out under their noses in real time.
Technology and Cultural Change
In a recent article in The Compact, John Askonas writes that the right simply misjudged the role of technology in causing the kinds of changes that tend to disrupt the right’s worldview:
As new technologies enter a society, they disrupt the connections between institutions, practices, virtues, and rewards. They can render traditions purposeless, destroy the distinction between virtuous and vicious behavior, make customary ways of life obsolete, or render their rewards meaningless or paltry. If the institutions that shepherd traditions aren’t regenerated, and if no one adopts their practices, traditions will fade into nothingness.
In other words, the relationship between technology and culture is such that cultural practices, artifacts and ways of living are fundamentally shaped by the technological context in which we live — it is basic, fundamental and formative. Based on this Aksonas goes on to explain that these technologies change the rules of the game of life to such a large degree that investment by individuals in the same kinds of tradition-sustaining institutions no longer makes practical sense:
When you descend from lofty rhetoric about “Traditions” and “Values,” it becomes apparent that a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of Progressivism or Socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology. For decades, sociologists have charted the decline of two-parent families, hobbies, local newspapers, churches, stable employment, women’s clubs, libraries, amateur sports, political rhetoric, neighborhood barbecues, Boy Scouts, small businesses, classical music, credit unions, and on and on. Even studies that catastrophize about the rise of loneliness, fatherlessness, economic precarity, and suicide, miss the bigger picture, which is that the social infrastructure conducive to human flourishing has shifted even for those fortunate enough to piece together a semblance of the average American life 50 years ago. A tradition is at an end when the wisdom of yesteryear no longer obtains.
A living tradition teaches its participants what it means to be good (a good farmer, a good policeman, a good violinist), aligning their own desires with what sustains the tradition. These virtues aren’t merely moral ideas: They are materially and socially rewarded, and their opposing vices are punished.
In effect, technological change alters the social and economic order to such a degree that investing in the same tradition-sustaining behaviors no longer makes sense, from a social and economic point of view … and the traditions are therefore abandoned. This is surely true regarding many of the precise kinds of social changes that the right often bemoans — the loss of widespread participation in “civil society” or “third space” institutions like the churches, clubs, social institutions and the like mentioned by Askonas — because participation in these kinds of things no longer brings any related social and economic benefits, and the entire society has been reorganized around economic and social arrangements that are formed by new technologies.
In fact, in one of the more juicy ironies of recent political history, it has often been the same “right” that has championed the kinds of economic policies that have resulted in the economic and technological transformations which, in turn, have undermined the social and cultural institutions that the “right” claims to value. As Askonas notes:
The radical alteration of the social environment and the strange new potentials offered by technology have rendered received wisdom obsolete, such that translating it into the new environment requires a deeper prudence than mere reception of tradition. Because the tools for modifying and mimicking humanity are getting better every year, and because all traditional cultures have been consumed by modern dynamism, we must once again return to the question of what constitutes human flourishing, and what is required for it.
We can no longer conserve. So we must build and rebuild and, therefore, take a stand on what is worth building. We must be willing to exercise judgment over what constitutes the good life—over what our telos is—and to work to channel innovation in that direction and restrain it where it is destructive.
The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit. Decrying left-wing revolutionary politics and postmodern anarchy, conservatives missed that the real moral relativism was to believe that one could change the material form of society without directly affecting its substance or its ends.
Therein lies the contradiction underlying the “pragmatic alliance” between “social conservatives” and “libertarians” that came about as a result of “fusionism”, and which is now in the process of being dismantled — albeit not without some resistance to that effort by “old hands” on the right who remain wedded to the concept of fusionism. Many have noted that this contradiction is part of what has given rise to the populist right in recent years, and that is probably correct, but the populist right faces the same basic problem: how to overcome technology-mediated change (hint: you can’t). The failure is basic, and indeed fundamental to the world-view of many on the right, which in many ways continues to idolize individualism, free market economics, techno-capitalism, and the like, over and against a perceived “collectivism”, when in fact the main problem of the uncontrolled and almost entirely un-directed growth of technology, and the massive irreversible economic, social and cultural changes unleashed by this, goes largely unmentioned.
This is nothing other than an abject failure on multiple levels — a failure of imagination, for certain. A massive failure of observation. A failure of ideological capture, perhaps. But above all a failure in substance. “Conservatism” has failed, utterly and entirely, to actually conserve anything at all, and has in fact often unwittingly accelerated the dismantling of the very things it claimed to wish to conserve.
The Problem of Post-Liberalism
A temptation of many on the right, however, given the general tendency on the right to reduce every social or economic conflict to a “battle of ideas”, is to assert that better ideas can remake a better right — even a radical change of those ideas, in fact.
We have seen something like this in the rise of the newfangled “post-liberal” movement on the right in recent years. What is meant by the phrase “post-liberal” is not post-progressivism, as an ideological or partisan “wing” within our current political system, but instead post-liberalism as a whole, as the entire political order itself under which progressives and conservatives respectively act as “left liberals” and “right liberals”.
While the term is often traced to Patrick Deneen’s well-known book “Why Liberalism Failed”, Deneen didn’t really propose a “post-liberal” idea framework for the right in that book. Instead, Deneen focused on making the case that liberalism, as a system, had been so successful in creating an environment in which the human individual was radically freed from any constraints imposed by “givens”, that the resulting society was not cohesive enough to survive as a liberal order — in other words, that by succeeding in its goal of liberating individuals from any and all prior constraints so as to enable maximally their creative self-definition and expression, liberalism also removed the basis of a stable social order, which is itself required for the continued existence of liberalism as a viable system. That is an interesting thesis, certainly — one which is quite hotly contested by both left and right liberals (i.e., progressives and conservatives) alike — and perhaps one which will prove true, but in any case it isn’t a prescription for any kind of politics that is “post-liberal” in any meaningful way, in itself.
This has not stopped the term from being adopted by many on the right who are looking for alternatives to the current quagmire the right finds itself in, caught between the moribund old-right establishment of “Reagan conservatives” like David French, Jonah Goldberg, George Will and the like, on the one hand, and the populist/Trumpist right, on the other.
Some of these proposals, such as a revival of “throne and altar” integralism being quixotically promoted by Catholics like Adrian Vermeule, are obviously not pragmatic in nature (at least in terms of retail politics) and are instead designed to stir the pot of ideas more than anything else. Others, like the “national conservatism” championed by many on the new right, are more attractive to retail politicians, even if they have not, as yet, formed the basis for any major political campaign. And there are other alternatives being articulated in various places, and with varying support, as well. Despite their differences, all of these approaches share in common a “sense” that liberalism-as-system is dying, or ending, or changing in some fundamental way, such that we are entering a “post-liberal” moment, which calls for a politics which “thinks outside the box of liberalism” and instead forges a new political dynamic of its own.
The trouble is that the premise here — the idea that we find ourselves in a moment where the “death” of liberalism as a system is either underway or is soon to be so — is subject to significant doubt.
Michael Hanby has written a brilliant piece about this recently in New Polity entitled “Are We Postliberal Yet?”. Hanby’s article is a challenging, involved text that covers a wide range of important topics, many of which are regrettably beyond the scope of this article and some of which I may address in separate pieces. However, one of the main topics Hanby discusses is the problem with post-liberalism as it is currently being presented in realm of what we might call the “retail” political ideas space.
Hanby begins by making the critical point that most of the would-be “post-liberals” are actually operating well within the current framework of left/right liberalism, as a system, rather than moving beyond that framework. This is primarily evident by the fact that they generally do not question, in a serious or fundamental way, the core epistemological problem that lies at the root of the dominance of the liberal system — the fact that, in Hanby’s words, the entire liberal order is itself based on “a total interpretation of reality, the horizon within which other social facts are permitted to appear, that recreates everything in the image of its own fundamental assumptions”. As he notes:
The advent of the secular thus coincides with a total transformation of the world’s relation to God—and indeed with the reinvention of God, nature, Christianity, and the Church as instruments of political and scientific purpose—a transformation, in other words, that affects every aspect of reality. Theoretically, this meant unthinking the great tradition of Christian Platonism; historically, it meant overthrowing the ancien regime and founding “the political” as a self-enclosed sphere administered by the new science of power. The elevation of potency, power, or possibility over the actuality of given order is the metaphysical root from which springs both liberalism and Baconian science, the former valorizing possibility under the name of freedom, the latter under the name of a truth reduced to pragmatic “function” produced by instrumental reason, that co-penetration of thought and action that now determines what it means for us to think. The political and the scientific converge to give America, the quintessentially modern nation, its true form and raison d’être as a society “organized for ... inquiry” to “attack nature collectively.” Seen in this light, it is the scientific and technological utopia of The New Atlantis, and not The Leviathan, The Second Treatise, or The Federalist Papers, that is the most prescient anticipation of what we have become. Accompanying this new social object is a new, functionalist form of social and political knowing that excludes God and questions of ontological truth from its field of vision and mode of operation. For the sake of brevity, I will follow Augusto Del Noce in calling it sociologism, which is less an expression of atheism—itself an inverted form of Christian belief—than of irreligion, where God and being have simply ceased to be intelligible as meaningful questions.
In other words, it isn’t really possible to move beyond the liberal order while the fundamental assumptions about reality that underlie the liberal order remain in place — assumptions which are common to most of the proponents of “post-liberal” ideas, as a matter of course, because these are baked into the epistemic cake of almost all contemporary people regardless of their views, religious affiliation or seriousness more generally. It is possible within the scope of the basic liberal/secular epistemic to assume any one of a wide variety of perspectives, ranging from far left radicalism to far right ultra-traditionalism, and everything in between. It is, however, another thing entirely to move the Overton window itself to a place that is legitimately seen as “post-liberal” in any meaningful sense, by relativizing, re-contextualizing, or simply casting aside epistemic foundations such as materialism, empiricism, rationalism and the like, even as such things are undermined in the current era in a different way by the significant enhancement of the power of narrative which has itself been mediated by technological change.
In order for an actual break with liberalism-as-system to occur, the break will need to be at the epistemic/metaphysical level, and not at the level of the retail politics of power. Activity focused on the latter, rather than the former, is simply political activity within the existing liberal system, and is not “post liberal” in any way other than rhetorically. The present iteration of “post-liberalism” is notable in its primary concern with political power in the current system and, as such, is subject to the same basic underlying system as any other political movement is — that is, it is a movement within liberalism, rather than something that is actually post-liberal.
Some in the new right argue that this approach, focused as it is on practical, retail political power in the current system (i.e., winning elections, passing legislation, etc.) can result in fundamental changes due to the use of the “law as a teacher”, but while this may be true on some levels, Hanby points out, in a critical passage, precisely why this approach is not workable in our current predicament:
Thinkers of the New Right often respond to the crisis of liberalism by saying that the law is a teacher. I fully agree with this traditional point and contended for it long before postliberalism became a preoccupation of the political class. Good laws are obviously preferable to bad ones, and I would no doubt favor many of the laws the New Right would establish were they ever to ascend to power. Nevertheless, the inadequacy of this response in the face of our situation calls into question whether they really understand this crisis. Technology does not wait on politics, and law is largely impotent, and permanently reactive, in the face of interminable technological revolution and its exigencies. As a regime of necessity, technological revolution governs us more deeply than the rule of law ever could, determining the conditions of our thought and action and generating an endless current of downstream possibilities that can scarcely even be imagined before they are an accomplished fact. Twenty years ago, no one could imagine that he needed a smartphone. Now the digital revolution has irreversibly transformed the very nature of human sociality, bringing the sexual revolution to a decisive triumph with astonishing speed—does anyone really think the SOGI juggernaut could have advanced so rapidly without the internet?—, propelling us breathlessly toward a posthuman future, and capacitating new forms of political action without political responsibility and new mechanisms of enforcement operating completely outside the traditional channels of political deliberation and decision. Riots can now be conjured up instantaneously around the globe in response to any provocation before our politicians can brush their teeth in the morning. The furies can be called down without notice upon anyone, anywhere, at the first indication of wrongthink—not by the state, or even by anyone in particular, but as the emergent effect of a vast stimulus-response mechanism and a system of mutual surveillance of all against all that has taken on a life of its own. The very possibility of being caught up in this mechanism suffices to “keep us in awe,” ruling by inducing what Shoshana Zuboff calls “anticipatory conformity.” The Hobbesian ambition of modern politics, to erect an artificial God imbued with quasi-divine attributes, has been realized on the plane not of political but of technological order and will almost certainly become more total still as biometrics fuses biotechnology and information technology together with the “internet of things”—tracking, predicting, and controlling the details of even our bodily life. Almighty Google, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, is more interior to us than we are to ourselves. Compared with such awesome new powers, having a few hundred people gather under a dome for part of a year to deliberate policy seems positively antiquated. The maturation of this technocratic power signals not another form of political order, transparent to the categories of classical political theory, but the end of politics, the beginning of a post-political age that indeed may already be upon us—and the need for a profound renewal of Catholic thinking. Bromides about how culture is downstream from law do not avail when there is no longer a culture. Triumphal tweeting of such slogans does not amount to a serious analysis of these new realities or a profound grasp of our present situation.
The issue, as Hanby sees it, is that the current political order arises from, and is intrinsically linked to, a technological order which is revolutionary, formative, and stronger in its impact than anything the political system is doing, or can do, absent a massively coercive regime (which raises other problems). The locus of power has shifted, in other words. We are moving into a world where technology is the power, and the political system is increasingly a distracting sideshow which simply helps the average person avoid focusing on where the actual power is currently being wielded. And this shift in power has created new conditions which are themselves entrenched, such that trying to use the political system as a means to change things would require a draconian approach, which would likely accelerate the process of disintegration rather than stem it:
Against this postpolitical, and increasingly posthuman, backdrop, it is difficult to imagine how a Christian, not to say Catholic, political order could be instituted and sustained in the United States without recourse to extraordinary measures exceeding the ordinary coercive powers of law—measures that would likely only accelerate the cultural disintegration and violence already underway. I do not wish to be mistaken here for a “therapist of decline”; for there is nothing at all therapeutic in what I am saying. I do not offer this objection on the usual liberal grounds that America is intractably pluralistic; nor do I propose doubling down on classical liberalism as a way to mitigate the crisis of liberal order. To the contrary, I maintain that American liberal order presupposes and perpetuates a “monism of meaninglessness” impervious to Christianization, which continually remakes Christianity itself in its own irreligious image as an extrinsic superaddition to an essentially atheistic conception of reality. (See the aforementioned “metaphysical disaster.”) The processes of disintegration set in motion by this totalitarian monism seem irreversible, moreover, such that many of the efforts to arrest them will likely have an opposite—accelerating—effect.
What, then, is the Answer?
If a retail politics of post-liberalism — whether of the obviously impractical “integralist” variety or of the more retail-friendly “national conservative” one — is simply an exercise of putting a band-aid on a gaping shrapnel wound, then what is the answer moving forward for conservatives?
One aspect of the answer that should be obvious is that “conservatism” is dead. It serves no purpose. As Askonas points out, the “conservative project” has failed and is no longer the most appropriate course for the political and cultural right:
We can no longer conserve. So we must build and rebuild and, therefore, take a stand on what is worth building. We must be willing to exercise judgment over what constitutes the good life—over what our telos is—and to work to channel innovation in that direction and restrain it where it is destructive.
Writing elsewhere, John Daniel Davidson notes that:
Calling oneself a conservative in today’s political climate would be like saying one is a conservative because one wants to preserve the medieval European traditions of arranged marriage and trial by combat. Whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead. Perhaps you can retain a memory of it or knowledge of it. But that is not what conservatism was purportedly about. It was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing.
Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.
Surely, this is the case. Conservatism, as in the focus on conserving core values, institutions, ways of life and the like, is not only no longer workable, it is simply no longer on the table, at all, for the right. It is not intelligible, in substance, in the current time frame. Those core things are no longer available for the right to conserve, and conserving what is currently available only serves to preserve the “gains” made by the previous generation’s progressives, over and against the previous generation’s conservatives. This has, in fact, been the case for quite a long time, but I suspect that it is the more totalizing nature of the recent cultural changes that have woken up more people on the right to this fundamental contradiction that has been at the core of “conservatism” for decades now, and that realization can’t come a moment too soon in my view.
What that means, as a practical matter, however, is much less clear. As Hanby rightly emphasizes, any retail political approach to the problem which tries to contradict, in basic ways, the fundamental assumptions that underlie the liberal order will require massive coercion which would bring with it other problems. For his part, Hanby seems to think that we are entering a new phase where politics as such becomes less influential on the actual wielding of power, and may already be there today, in which case the question, it seems to me, is whether that actual power, which today is operating primarily outside the political system, can be wielded by the right in a way that is effective and useful.
Askonas, for his part, seems to think so:
There is another way. Conservatism failed because it didn’t consider how to build technologies to fortify tradition and advance human flourishing, or understand that it needed to. A technological society is incompatible with a blithe conservatism, but not with the furtherance of human flourishing and the transformation of wilderness into garden. As Grant notes, before we recover a human way of thinking, we may first need to address a more practical question, first posed by Nietzsche: “Who deserve to be the masters of the earth?” Corporations? The Chinese Communist Party? The National Institutes of Health? The Department of Defense? Or human beings living according to their natures?
If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development. Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well. In some places, the renewal, revival, and reoccupation of the human order of things requires a return to what was done within living memory. In other places, however, it will need to be far more radical in the literal sense: It must return to human nature rooted in man’s bodily dwelling upon the earth.
This sounds interesting, of course, but I am dubious of it due to the simple fact that technology is, by its nature, disruptive, change-oriented and, as Hanby rightly notes, tends to generate “an endless current of downstream possibilities that can scarcely even be imagined before they are an accomplished fact.” In order for it not to be so, in order to “tame the dragon” of unpredictable “downstream” effects wrought by technological change, it would have to be very tightly controlled and channeled in a way that would require some super-powerful actor extrinsic to the creators of the technology (who tend to create to the limits permitted or available, whichever is greater) so as to avoid replicating the precise predicament we find ourselves in currently. Images of the alternative universe depicted in Neal Stephenson’s speculative novel “Anathem” come to mind — an interesting but hard-to-imagine (in our universe, at least!) situation. And even that would require an interest and aptitude for technology among like-minded people on the right side of the political spectrum which seems very unlikely in our world where, again, technologists tend to intensely dislike prior constraint more than they do anything else.
In all, I am not convinced that there is actually a realistic path forward from the current dilemma that the right finds itself in. It seems clearly true to me that “conservatism” is dead from an impact perspective — I suspect it will continue for quite some time as the leading retail label of the political right, however, for reasons of convenience and familiarity as much as anything else. At the same time, I don’t foresee the impact of technological change abating in the years ahead, as we move towards other technologies that will continue to change what it means to be human, and how that is expressed. If anything, it seems more likely to me that these changes will continue us further and deeper down the path we are currently on, rather than forcing us off of it. And in any case, I don’t see the basis for a widespread abandonment of the epistemic assumptions that underlie the existing political/economic/social/cultural order, either — the technologically-mediated culture that is still emerging all leans very much in the other direction, in fact, towards a deepening of the existing epistemic commitments rather than away from them. In short, I don’t think there is an answer to the current dilemma, which is likely why we see so much flailing around on the right currently.
What is there for the political and cultural right to do under such circumstances? That’s a topic for an entire article (or more) in itself, but my own view in summary is that individuals who find themselves irretrievably committed — by reason of temperament/disposition, principle or otherwise — to the right would be better off focusing on other things — that is, things other than the broader culture, the broader social order, the political system and the like — in their lives in ways that make sense in the current context and are otherwise generally consistent with their values and commitments, bearing in mind that we are all living through a major historical transition. That calls for flexibility, nuance, and focus on what is both important and subject to your own control or substantial influence, and not on those things that are, by contrast, very much not.