. . . Moreover, it makes an immense difference with respect to pleasure to consider a thing one’s own (by law). . . .

~ ~ ~ Aristotle, Politics, 1263a40

. . . “State” is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the State, am the people.” . . . whatever it says it lies — and whatever it has it has stolen. . . . “On earth there is nothing greater than I: the ordering finger of God am I” — thus roars the monster. . . . Alas, to you too, you great souls, it whispers its dark lies. . . .1

~ ~ ~ Nietzsche, “On the New Idol,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 48-49

There is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.

~ ~ ~ Zohran Mamdani

Amidst the slow burning crisis of liberalism, the “leader of the free world” is a nationalist, and his most strident opponents are “anti-fascists,” but socialism is the ideology of the hour in the United States of America.

It is ascendent on the Left, while its mirror-image rival, capitalism, is in crisis on the Right. A socialist is now the mayor of New York City, (the global capital of capitalism), and his political power-base, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is prosecuting a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party, following up on Bernie Sander’s narrowly thwarted bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Mayor Mamdani embodies the ideological orientation that in Part 1 of this Essay I dubbed “socialistic Progressivism”: as a complement to his socialism — (or, is it, perhaps, his socialism that is the complement?) — he champions that whole slate of “woke” moral-political opinions that I believe are inspired by postmodern Theory. His father is a postmodern Theorist. It is, then, the ideal time to ask, “Whither socialism?” What kind of society does it want to realize? And, if, as I believe, it is mistaken, what is the essence of its error? On precisely what grounds should we reject it?

For answers to these questions I suggest that we may reasonably turn to The Republic of the Future, Or, Socialism a Reality, the insightful, far-seeing, even prophetic, novella by Anna Bowman Dodd (published in 1887) that I have been explicating in my recent writings. I believe that by interpreting this forgotten text we will learn to articulate the essence of the socialist error. In it we tour, via the letters of Wolfgang, a leisured, Swedish gentleman, nothing less than an “ideally-perfect” democratic socialist nation-state, the United Community. We tour, in other words, the very sort of socialistic society that Mamdani, the DSA, and their ilk want to realize: the leading city in this hyper-Statist society is New York Socialistic City, and one of its distinguishing features is the State-owned stores. (“All shops are run by the government on government capital; there is, consequently, neither rivalry nor competition. The shop keepers, who are in reality only clerks and salesmen under government jurisdiction, take naturally, no personal or vital interest . . . ” (21, emphasis mine).

Unlike other critics of socialism, Dodd does not argue that the socialist idea is impossible or unlikely to work out as planned. Her point is rather that, if it did work out as planned, if a socialist utopia were to be realized, it would not be a happy place to live, at least not for noble souls. It would, on the contrary, be a tremendously boring place. This is because there is no room for ambition in socialistic society. Dodd’s insight is that any society that makes the complete emancipation of workers and women its goal will eventually find that it needs to outlaw everything that makes life worth living.

That’s what happens in the United Community. In it there are, unsurprisingly, no socio-economic classes, no genders, no (private) businesses. Too, though, there are no Homes. No universities. No churches. No armies. No arts. — Even athletics are on the way out. The United Community is, for these reasons and others, not a real, life-affirming community. It has, to be sure, “public games, public theaters, baths, museums and festivals,” but none of these stir the soul, none inspire Art (45). “The arts,” we learn, “languish” in this socialistic society, because they “depend on the imagination, and imagination has been declared illegal, since all are not born with it” (84). Consequently, “Ennui is the curse of the land” (ibid). Deep, soul-destroying boredom, is, in other words, the direct result of annihilating privilege — of establishing, really and truly, once and for all, in reality, equality of opportunity. And so it is that Wolfgang, who is a noble soul, decides, in the end, not to trade in his native, “barbaric” Sweden, where he can “be a man” — in every sense of that resonant word — for the security of the United Community. Wolfgang does not reject the United Community to protect his privilege. He rejects it in order to have the opportunity to see whether or not he can, being, as he is, an enterprising man, prove to himself and to others that he deserves his privilege. . . .

But I run ahead of myself. In what follows I will endeavor to more adequately justify these claims that I have made by interpreting the final three letters of The Republic of the Future in the context of the text as a whole. In so doing, I will, moreover, bring together, add to, and extend the ideas that I developed and presented for your consideration in Parts 1 and 2.

Inspired as I am by Dodd’s novella, I aim, ultimately, to convince you to reject socialism (and feminism) on the grounds that it is inimical to ambition.

I do not mean to suggest that we are about to see a real socialist revolution in the U.S.. Nor do I mean to suggest that the primary value of Dodd’s book is its predictive power. The fact that her imagined Republic of the Future matches up with our political reality (in striking ways) only renders timely her insights into the reality of socialism that would otherwise be only illuminating. (Dodd is not a “futurist,” but she did impressively anticipate the socialist revolutions that rocked the world in the 20th century). The Republic of the Future is worth reading today, because it inoculates against the abiding allure of socialism. It enables us to see that the allure of socialism, notwithstanding its persistence, is chimerical. Socialism cannot bring us a beautiful, desirable future, because its vision for a futuristic society is defective, and this because it is based more on a passionate will to emancipate men (and women) from certain (so-called) evils of our capitalistic present, especially socioeconomic inequality, than it is on a comprehensive consideration of what is in truth the simply best regime (or society) for human beings to inhabit, given their individual and collective aspirations and psycho-spiritual needs. — Or so I will argue in the rest of this Essay, on the basis of Dodd’s Republic, especially its final three letters.

(In this Part 3, I will assume you have read Parts 1-2, which were, respectively, an introduction to The Republic of the Future and a critique of feminism, and in which I explained the dramatic structure of Dodd’s novella).

Before commencing my explicative work, however, I should define socialism, a thing not so easy to do. Karl Marx’s idea of socialism as a revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie was not the first idea of its kind to arise in the Western Intellectual Tradition, nor did the rise of Marxism put the issue to bed. Nevertheless, I, having followed a line of thinking similar to the one that led me to my definition of feminism in Part 2, say socialism is best defined as an ideology that seeks solely to emancipate workers (and this by transferring all or most ownership and control of the means of production from private persons to the State). My definition of socialism formally resembles my definition of feminism, which is, as you may remember, an ideology that seeks solely to emancipate women. This makes sense, because, as I will show below, these two (revolutionary) ideologies are, formally, identical, or nearly so. The only difference, (which, too, my definition captures), is that the mechanism — namely, collective ownership of the means of production — that is to be used to emancipate the favorite class is rather more of the essence of the ideology in the case of socialism than it is in the case of feminism.2

“But why,” you might now ask, “do you say that under socialism the means of production are owned and operated by the State, as opposed to being owned ‘collectively’ or ‘widely,’ as some socialists say?” I answer that I do so because I don’t know the meaning of those other words, in this context. They are vague, and perhaps intentionally so. I suspect that some socialists use them in order to hide the fact that they don’t know, or don’t want to reveal, how ownership will really work in the society that they say they want. If collective ownership means universal ownership, (ownership by everyone, “the people,” all citizens, or “the whole community,” as the Oxford American Dictionary would have it), then this collectivity must be defined, represented, institutionalized; and that seems to me to necessitate composing it into what we call a State. Moreover, if socialists are truly, radically, committed to the principle of democracy — as, today, they seem to be — then I do not see how they can avoid advocating for full ownership and control of the means of production by a democratic State. I think this needs to be considered the paradigmatic conception of socialism, because all of the other, compromising conceptions of which I am aware, e.g., syndicalism, compromise on core principles of socialism, in at least two ways. They tolerate core elements of capitalism, such as market competition, profit motive, and even private ownership, that socialists typically criticize fiercely; and they compromise on their commitment to the principle of democracy, if and when they allow sub-State groups, i.e., “minority factions,” such as trade unions, to be independent economic agents. It is worth noting in this regard that Vladimir Lenin, whom socialists tend to think an authority on matters of this kind, ridiculed syndicalism while praising democracy and its embodiment in the (one-party) State. So, then, I assert that, while a genuine socialist might decide, for practical reasons, to advocate for compromises with capitalism, at least in the short term; if the path were cleared of practical obstacles, there is no way such a socialist could refrain from endorsing a State-owned and run, and centrally-planned, economic order. And so, I conclude that my definition captures the essence of socialism, namely a monomaniacal will to emancipate workers, even as it also identifies the method of accomplishing that goal that is most in keeping with socialist theory and practice. No socialist should deny that my definition captures their ideal. Whether by violent or peaceful means, socialists think it is a good idea to transfer all or most ownership of means of production from private persons to the State. (Indeed, I think another way of putting my point is to say that a socialist is anyone who believes that a Statist society is worth fighting for, that such a society is the ideal — or who believes that emancipating workers through the establishment of a Statist society is a moral imperative. Socialists can and do differ on many points, but they do not differ in their will to emancipate workers (from bosses) or in their vision of an ideal society of (listless) leisure and (socio)economic equality.3

(From this standpoint there is really no such thing as a moderate socialist. My definition identifies the ideal that unites radicals and seeming moderates. As an example of this latter type, consider Scott R. Sehon, author of Socialism: A Logical Introduction. He greatly admires all the Nordic welfare-States, and he defends Thomas Piketty’s socialist credentials. He even disputes the idea that a socialist society must have “a very high degree of collective ownership.” His moderate credentials would seem to be impeccable. Even so, his commitment to socialism leads him to argue that “each step” in the direction of socialism, i.e., each and every step, on and on until the end is accomplished — “is a good thing.” Indeed, to clarify what he means, Sehon obligingly quotes The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara, a book that insists on making no compromises with capitalism: “class struggle social-democracy,” he affirms, “isn’t the foe of democratic socialism — the road to the latter runs through the former.” Note, moreover, that Sehon affirms this radical dictum in precisely the same way as do Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, authors of Bigger Than Bernie, who write, unambiguously, that they “want to eliminate private ownership of the means of production,” and whom Sehon criticizes for being “purists.” In other words, Sehon, as a “moderate” socialist, disagrees with the radical purists about how far a given society must travel down the road to State ownership to count as truly socialistic, but he is in complete agreement with them about how far all societies ought, ideally, to travel. He agrees with them about the destination, the goal, the ideal. His disagreement with the purists is purely semantic. His case confirms to my satisfaction the soundness of my definition of socialism. It suggests to me that radical and moderate socialists are united by a shared ideal, a vision of a radically egalitarian society, which vision they formulate in reaction to inequalities of power and privilege that obtain under capitalism. This vision is the essence of socialism, so it is with respect to it that socialism ought to be understood, defined, and critiqued. To emancipate workers from their ‘enslavement’ to the people who pay them, socialists seek to establish a perfectly leisured, perfectly equal, (highly technologized), Statist society, i.e., the United Community of Anna Bowman Dodd’s The Republic of the Future).4

Just as is the case, however, when it comes to feminism, my definition allows for distinguishing between different types of socialism. There is, today, only one live type of socialism, namely democratic socialism, but utopian socialism is the original, and revolutionary socialism is the most influential, historically.

Utopian socialism — i.e., the writings of Étienne Cabet, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen — inspired several short-lived experiments in communal living in the mid-19th century, but was never politically viable. It was and is, essentially, a set of sketches of self-sufficient, egalitarian societies in which emancipated workers (and women) cooperate harmoniously among themselves and with the natural world. (The urtext for this socialist tradition is Thomas More’s Utopia, and a fascinating anticipation of it can be found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, specifically the utopian speech made by Gonzalo, and the rejoinders to it, in Act 2). Each of these texts may be read with profit, but they no longer inspire political action. Rather, like the early feminists, the utopian socialists are thought to be the originators of an ideological tradition because they paved the way for the real (more militant) ideologists, who came later, not because their ideas decisively shaped the mature ideology. They do, however, share with the later ideologists a concern for the welfare of workers in modern industrial economies and a utopian hope that a radical rejection of capitalist modes of production will bring about an abiding moral reformation of the human species. The utopians may, therefore, reasonably be considered part of the ideological tradition of socialism, but a definition that centered on them would not be of very much use for understanding socialism today. The socialism that is advocated by politicians and academics in the United States today is indebted to Karl Marx, although it is not exactly “orthodox” Marxism.

Marx developed and advocated for revolutionary socialism, i.e., the liberation of the working class by a violent revolution that disenfranchises the capitalist class, creates a dictatorship of the proletariat, and abolishes private property. His vision for socialism had its day in the 20th century. It inspired revolutions in Russia, China and other nations, as I noted in Part 1. Today, however, due to our knowledge of the terrible realities of the tyrannies that those revolutions established, not to mention a generally felt squeamishness about advocating openly for political violence, revolutionary socialism is now out of fashion, if not quite dead. (Advocates of socialism today do call for “political revolution,” but they tend to be cagey about exactly what they mean by that).

As an alternative to violent revolution, Zohran Mamdani and his political (and academic) allies support democratic socialism. This conception of socialism is distinguishable from its revolutionary counterpart by the fact that it favors a different method for taking full control of the State, (so as to transfer control of the means of production). Whereas revolutionary socialism favors violence, democratic socialism favors persuasion, i.e., creating a “mass movement.” The two types of socialism are united by their core tenet — namely, that the State should own and operate all or most of society’s means of production, (which, of course, means all productive items of property, such as land and factories, as well as computers and the internet, schools and cars, and everything else that a private person might conceivably use to make money).

Now, in our present political context, in the U.S., it is true, that most of these self-styled democratic-socialists do not openly advocate for state ownership of the means of production. Bernie Sanders is an example. Bernie says that he does not believe in full State ownership and control. If it’s true, however, (and the socialist theorists say that it is!), that real socialists believe “class-struggle social democracy” of precisely the kind that Sanders advocates is simply a pit stop on the road to full-fledged democratic socialism, then we have the right not to believe Bernie Sanders. Or, at least — we have the right to believe that, no matter what he says, a successful socialist revolution will tend to want to try to establish full State ownership and control of the means of production, for the sake of emancipating workers from the “barbaric order of capitalism,” this being a favorite phrase of the DSA.5

So, then, what is the argument for democratic socialism? (Any such argument must, of course, be distinguished from all friendly criticisms of contemporary capitalist practice, such as have been leveled by the likes of Peter Thiel, Oren Cass, and Matthew B. Crawford. Too, however, it must be distinguished from all hostile, Marxist critiques of capitalism; for these amount to nothing if they are not complemented by a strong argument for an alternative to capitalism).

To answer that question I slogged my way through (no less than!) five recent books on democratic-socialism. But a real argument was harder to find than I expected. The Case for Socialism by Alan Maas is a screed against rich people. Bigger Than Bernie is a handbook of strategy for already committed socialists. The Socialist Manifesto is badly titled. A better title for it would be something along the lines of A Sympathetic History of Socialism. Finally, Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani, despite having an evocative title, adds nothing, or next to nothing, of substance to debates between capitalists and socialists. (The one issue it sheds a little light on will be discussed below).

The only book I found with an argument is the first of the five I read, Sehon’s Socialism: A Logical Introduction. (Indeed, as a professor of philosophy, Sehon prides himself on his ability to make logically sound arguments). The reason I read the other four books is that I figured there must be a more traditionally socialist argument for socialism than the one Sehon presents. His argument is highly utilitarian. He looks at happiness data, sees that Sweden (and the other Nordic countries) are said to be the happiest, and composes his syllogisms on the basis of that empirical data. He does not argue that capitalism is unjust. In fact, he argues that it is not unjust, that it does not violate workers’ rights. He simply claims that a transition to socialism will make modern people happier. (What Sehon shares with the other socialist authors is a taste for the Nordic welfare States, for the so-called “Swedish model” of political economy, a taste that he and they seem to believe is perfectly compatible with the belief that it is necessary to push beyond the Swedish model to real or genuine socialism).

Here, then, is the distilled essence of Sehon’s book, i.e., the best argument for for democratic socialism that you are likely to find.

I have not presented this argument in a flattering light. Nor do I believe I have misrepresented it. I present it this way to emphasize the fact that, despite its logical veneer, this argument for socialism is, (in the strange, stilted, spiritless lingo of informal logic), unsound, for at least three good reasons: 1) Sweden is not a socialist state; 2) happiness data does not justify the goals of socialism; and 3) it is rash to presume that a revolution to install the institutions of one country in another country will make the latter as happy, as content with its institutions, as the former happens to be.6

(I want too to emphasize here that these defeaters of Sehon’s argument apply whether or not we accept, as we are not obliged or necessarily inclined to do, that “the happiness of the many,” as it were, is the proper goal of politics, and that our best measure of national success is reports of subjective satisfaction).

Consequently, I think it is safe to say that there is no compelling argument for socialism circulating in the United States of America today.

That conclusion compels a question. If the professors, politicians, and people of the United States who support socialism are not being compelled to do so by the sheer force of an argument, why are they doing so?

I suggest the following answer. The root cause of their support is simply that powerful, passionate love of equality that Alexis de Tocqueville understood to be the principal passion of democratic peoples, a stronger, and more abiding, force in their souls than the taste for freedom, which taste can, nevertheless, be strong in them. An indication of the power of this passion is there for us to behold in the terminology that dominates debates about economic inequality among Americans today. One side defends not individual liberty, but “equality of opportunity,” while the other, more straightforwardly, defends “equality of outcome” or “equity.” The unquestioned moral-political value of both sides is equality. This love of equality, powerful as it is, is not, however, sufficient by itself to explain the contemporary turn to socialism. The proximate cause of that turn, I suggest, is the activism of (postmodern) “socialistic Progressives,” who have for decades been pushing a notion of equality, namely equity, that is at odds with individual liberty, and who have, simultaneously, successfully infiltrated America’s educational system, at all levels, such that too few of us are able to access an education in the Founding Fathers’ understanding of the relationship between liberty and equality. So, having more or less successfully obliterated that original understanding of equality from the American school system, the people who obliterated it have begun to feel invincible enough to argue that socialism, and socialism alone, is compatible with our democratic values. Thus, you can hear Zohran Mamdani — parroting academics like Scott Sehon — declare that socialism is simply democracy extended from politics to the economy. And you can read Kim Phillips-Fein, an Ivy League professor of history, declare, in The New York Times, our “newspaper of record,” that there is “an abiding tension between political democracy” and those sinister “forces of capitalism” (otherwise known as enterprising businessmen), who have ever arrayed themselves against the decent, democratic defenders of the glorious truth that “all men are created equal,” which famous dogma, to this professor, means, evidently, “all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life.” And so it is that ‘public enemy number one,’ as it were, on her list of capitalistic traitors to the cause of American democracy is … John Adams! For it was he who held that her understanding of the American creed is simply fraudulent. (What you will not learn from Phillips-Fein, or The New York Times in general, is that the inegalitarian John Adams was as or more responsible than Thomas Jefferson for the Declaration of Independence, as well as rather more than prominent among the men who risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor by signing that revolutionary document).

With that being said, now that I have adumbrated the way in which socialists co-opt the vocabulary of American democracy, I should also inform you that, in addition to what I will call The Argument from Swedish Happiness, which I take to be the core of his case for socialism, professor Sehon does in his book give a secondary argument, which I will call The Argument from Democratic Legitimacy. It runs roughly like this.

The most obvious — (but far from the only) — problem with this galling line of argumentation is that Churchill’s dictum may be used, much more credibly, to defend capitalism, as opposed to socialism: capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others. Witness the record of socialism in the 20th century. Indeed, Churchill’s direct judgement on socialism, which Sehon, for pretty obvious reasons, does not choose to quote, is altogether more apropos than his quip about democracy. “Socialism,” Churchill said, “is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

To sum up, then, what I believe we are witnessing in the turn of the American Left to socialism, is the convergence of the abiding American love of equality, the lingering allure of Marx’s critique of capitalism, in an environment of high socioeconomic inequality, and the dogged efforts of postmodern activists to promote “equity.” In a sense, they promote the idea that it is possible, by way of democratic socialism, for Americans to recover, and, in recovering, perfect, the “equality of conditions” that obtained among us in the early 19th century, when Tocqueville blessed us with his qualified endorsement of our way of life.

I repeat, therefore, the question that we insist on in this moment: “What sort of society would the movement for democratic socialism create, in reality, if it possessed all political power?”

Having returned to this question, we are now in a position to return to Dodd’s text in earnest, for, as we will see, the target of her critique is, quite precisely, a political movement of the sort that I have just tried to sketch: a passionately egalitarian socialist movement that depicts itself as aspiring to nothing more than government “by the people for the people,” or, as I can imagine it styling itself one day in the future, “socialism with American characteristics” (20).7

I begin by noting that the United Community is not established by a peaceful mass movement. It is established by a “terrible,” violent revolution, “a reign of blood,” and “destruction” (47-48, 49). It would, of course, be unfair to say that such a revolution is the aim of our contemporary democratic socialists, but it is also worth reflecting on the fact that the reign of blood that establishes the United Community does not start out as such.

The war began, nominally, as an act of resistance on the part of the Americans against the encroaching and insistent demands of the socialists, demands covering the abolishment of private ownership in land, of the division of property, both real and personal, and the overthrow, generally of all the then existing economic and social institutions. (48)

This “democratic socialist” movement becomes violent only after it peacefully gains enough power to begin its radical program, which program necessarily encounters very strong resistance. I have insisted from the very beginning of this Essay that we will not discredit, or even genuinely encounter, the abiding allure of (democratic) socialism if we are content to counter it with the claim that it necessarily entails revolutionary violence or political tyranny. And yet I do not mean to say that we must assume a mass movement for socialism will, as its partisans assert, remain peaceful no matter what, that it will be immune to political calculations of the kind that Dodd dramatizes. We cannot, in other words, assume that democratic socialists are necessarily more committed to democracy than they are to socialism. If it is true that socialists are united by an ideal, as I have argued, it is not unfair to imagine that when push comes to shove they might prefer to give up on their method (democracy), rather than their goal (socialism). (In a recent issue of County Highway — “America’s Only Newspaper” — it is humorously suggested that “democratic socialism” is just a slang term meaning “not for long”).8

Indeed, Wolfgang makes this same point rather more pointedly.

. . . since the anarchist’s plan was to reconstruct the whole face of society on a new basis, it was to be expected, of course, that the revolution they undertook as the means of effecting this would be carried through at whatever cost. (49-50)

He seems to be of the opinion that radicalism of political ends goes together with radicalism of political means, that revolutionaries who believe that they have a blueprint for a perfectly just, universally happy society are prone too to believe that their end justifies any means. And do we have any knowledge or experience, really, with which to confidently gainsay him?

In addition to this line of political reasoning, which generates an independent or free-floating reason to be very wary of democratic socialists, I want you to note the following important points about Wolfgang’s review of the history of the revolution that establishes the United Community.

This socialist revolution that becomes a civil war pits “republican Americans” against “socialists and anarchists.” The socialist side is the “foreign element in the country,” because America’s organic political culture repels socialism (48). Socialism (and anarchism) is an ideology of European extraction.9

Even so, Wolfgang blames the Americans as much or more than the socialists for the outbreak of the war, for it was, fundamentally, “a political mistake,” of theirs, that gave rise to the socialist movement. In what he calls “a moment of mistaken Republican zeal,” and we today might call their “liberal universalism,” these Americans did not exercise sufficient political wisdom, they declined to discriminate in their own self-interest, when setting their immigration policy. They gave “all rights of citizenship” to a critical mass of people from countries with traditions of political-economy out of step with their own, and some of these eventually injected “their revolutionary doctrines” into the Americans’ political culture (48, emphasis mine). All the while, the Americans concerned themselves exclusively with “moneymaking,” amassing “colossal fortunes” that later, along with their corollary, the “supposed tyranny of capital,” “wrought to a frenzy the envy and anger of the foreign poorer classes, then under the sway of the anarchist revolutionists” (53). By calling their nondiscriminatory, politically naive policy a “fatally short-sighted,” “political” mistake, Wolfgang suggests that it was not inevitable. While the Americans’ republican or liberal character made the mistake all too easy for them to make, it was, even still, a political mistake, a miscalculation, not an unavoidable, inherent consequence the founding of their regime (or, we might add, their intellectual traditions).10

A final point about the bloody beginning of the United Community. The total success of the anarcho-socialist alliance in the civil war, its extermination of all opposing forces and institutions, leaves the emerging socialist ruling class possessed of a completely free hand to build the society of its dreams (55).

No people ever assuredly had a more wonderful chance at constructing a society on an ideal basis than had these socialists. Think of it! An entire continent at their disposal, their enemies or opponents all killed or in exile, and they themselves united in desire and in political interest. (56)

These anarcho-socialists never had an interest in conserving elements of the United States, and so, once they adjust their means to their ends, they are in a position to found a society without making any compromises with existing institutions or interests. Their United Community begins at “Year Zero,” as it were. Pol Pot would be impressed. A consequence of this is that, unlike their predecessors, the American Founding Fathers, the socialists are accountable, without exception, for the faults, and the features, of the political community that they bring into being.11

Through this review of Wolfgang’s of the socialist revolution that overthrows the United States (around the year 1900), Anna Bowman Dodd anticipates or predicts that socialist revolutions in the 20th century will sweep away, or try to sweep away, established, capitalistic regimes that become weak, decadent, entitled, corrupt, indifferent, and-or sclerotic. Let us, then, now move on to a consideration of the futuristic republic that the classical socialists among the revolutionaries that really did appear really did want to win.

I continue by turning from the story of how the United Community came to be to Wolfgang’s commentary on its character. His first analytical judgement on it is that it resembles in certain ways ancient Sparta. His comment puts in mind the fact that the United States is sometimes compared to Athens:

More and more, as I study these institutions, am I reminded of the resemblance between these American socialists and the ancient Spartans. The Spartan was also a part of the State — had all things on a grand Communal scale — had public games, public theaters, baths, museums and festivals, was brought up by the state, his womenkind being considered as a part of it. (45)

In this Total State both men and women, but more remarkably, it seems, from Wolfgang’s point of view, the women, are “denatured,” as it were, just as were the women and men of Sparta before them. Their natural possessiveness and private identities are left uncultivated or suppressed. They live their lives in, through, and for their State.

Who would want to (re)-create such a community in modernity? Disgruntled workers and women, or their champions, who — desiring emancipation from bosses and husbands — drive socialist and feminist theory and practice, they look for freedom in the embrace of the State, for it, they know, cares neither for profit nor for pleasure, and so does not “exploit,” even as it does promise power, which is the essence of freedom, as they conceive of it. To be free is to wield State power, to rule as an equal in the dictatorship of the proletariat or the sovereign gynecocracy. From this point of view, the United Community is, despite its passing resemblance to a (notoriously) repressive ancient city, the fulfillment of the promise of modernity, or the completion of the Progress of History. As a solution to both the inequities of capitalistic republicanism, and the intolerable (post-war) excesses of anarchic individualism, this State offers its freedom, its equality, at the price of pride, privacy, and private possessing.

But, of course, the United Community, this modern Sparta, is quite different, in more than one way, from its ancient counterpart. Wolfgang makes note of two of these differences, “two important features which the simpler Spartans did not have to cope with” (ibid). The first is History, the second Technology, and both conspire — for better or for worse — to erode the manliness of Man. “The Greeks stood at the dawn of civilization,” whereas “[t]he American finds himself at what he considers the completion of it;” and whereas “[t]he sword raised man out of the dust,” there “[t]he piston has levelled him with it” (46). (The ancient, republican Spartans were manly warriors with a serious job to do, but the modern, socialistic Americans are effeminate pacifists with too much time to kill).

Wolfgang continues by dwelling on the second of these two great features or forces of modernity. He sees in Technology, in “the great factor of machinery as a substitute for manual labor,” and not any other factor, e.g., “the unequal distribution of land, as the great . . . Henry George, asserted,” “the true cause of the conflict between capital and labor” (46-47). It is the issue or problem of Technology, in other words, that leads Wolfgang to speak of that basic issue-question of socialism, the question that we, in our era of A.I., are now asking, in earnest, even if we are not socialists. The question is — “Does labor have a future under capitalism?” Or will technological ‘progress’ make it superfluous, such that the only promising path forward for wage-laborers will be a violent expropriation of capital that leads to communism and substituting leisure for (human) labor, which will thenceforth be done mostly by robots, as is the case in the United Community? As Wolfgang observes, dispassionately, it seems to me, “[t]he laborer, with machinery as his rival, stood a far less possible chance of becoming a capitalist himself than he did when battling against men” (47).

Here we have, I believe, a real and perplexing question, and while I do not say that I have any original or deep insight into it, or deep learning in the relevant economic or computer science, I do not believe I can complete this argument against socialism without dealing with it. I hazard, therefore, the following set of interconnected theses.

1. The techno-optimistic capitalists have a point. They observe that, because “[h]uman wants are unlimited, and human skills are flexible,” and because previous technological “disruptions” did not disemploy humanity, we can expect that the present A.I. disruption will not do so either. There is a big difference, they might add, between a threat to certain kinds of labor and a threat to labor as such. (In chapter four of The Once and Future Worker, Oren Cass makes the case that, despite pronouncements to the contrary, there is a future for work. He reports, tellingly, it seems to me, and along with other kinds of evidence and arguments, that, “Less than a year after his prediction that ‘robots will be able to do everything better than us,’ Tesla’s [Elon] Musk acknowledged that ‘excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. . . . Humans are underrated.’”).12

2. Their point does not (necessarily) settle the issue. Even if this eventuality is a very, very long way off, it seems to me that it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that the looming merger of A.I. and robotics could create a much bigger employment crisis than all previous technological advances, because this one aims to mimic human intelligence itself, i.e., the source and ground of the flexibility humanity has relied on to cope with previous technological upheavals. The obvious point is that we wouldn’t want to be caught off guard. We ought to ask, “What will we do if and when all, many, or most of us cannot competitively sell their our labor power?”

3. There is no reason to prefer UBS to UBI. Universal Basic Services (UBS) is the socialistic vision for a post-labor world. The State will own the means of production and provide all necessary services to citizens, according to their needs. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a more capitalistic vision that has been proposed recently by enterprising technologists, including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and previously by libertarian economists such as Milton Friedman. In this version of the future, the government will tax hyper-successful firms (and whatever others remain) to redistribute their profits as cash entitlement payments to citizens, who may use the money as they see fit. If these are our only two options, I see no reason to prefer UBS. For it has all the same problems as UBI, and yet UBI better respects human agency, and preserves the possibility of (private) enterprise. . . .

4. These are not our only two options. It is (probably) possible for democratic political communities to arrest the advance of artificial intelligence, or at least the diffusion of it throughout society. Recent campaigns to regulate social media companies and clear phones out of schools are instructive in this regard. It seems to me that we should consider doing much the same — and much more — to roll-back and restrict the diffusion of A.I., before too many people get used to it. If our choice is really going to be between a future of dependent unemployment and one wherein there reigns a law akin to that memorable commandment in Dune — “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” — then, I say, we should prefer and choose the latter future, and this for much the same reason as we do prefer and would choose UBI over UBS.

   
   Whether or not you agree with this thesis, I commend to you a new essay by Gregory Conti in Compact, “The AI Apocalypse is Already Here.” I wish I had written it. The author draws on the Western Intellectual Tradition as a whole to issue a call to arms against generative and agentic A.I.. In the course of his argument, he offers more than a few clear-eyed judgements, such as this: “The obvious conservative response to a technology whose downsides are unfathomable is suppression, not encouragement.” For my immediate purposes in this Essay, however, Conti’s sharpest insight is the following. Of all the venerable strains of political thought in our Tradition, only socialism generates no reasons to oppose, and, in fact, welcomes, the A.I. apocalypse, both as it is and as it threatens to become. For, as I wrote in Part 1 of this Essay, and as Anna Bowman Dodd, not to mention George Orwell after her, well understood, socialists have long labored for the end of labor, even while they glorify the sensibilities of the working, Common Man over and against those of the Privileged Few — (they who are, by and large, responsible for ornamenting civilization and elevating culture). On the contrary, however, in contrast to socialism, look into any other of the traditions of thought that make up the Western Intellectual Tradition: in classical philosophy and Christian theology, liberalism and conservatism, communitarianism and individualism, classical republicanism, and (even) deliberative democracy, in all of these you will easily find good reasons to oppose the diffusion of A.I. throughout civil society.

The purpose of these theses is to suggest that technological “progress” does not doom us to choose socialism, not in any likely future, and certainly not in our present moment. The question of whether or not we ought to choose it is still on the table, however. The theses themselves do not put that question to bed. As it is nonetheless my intention in this Essay to do that, I return now to my commentary on the character of the United Community.

In the world of The Republic of the Future, A.I., as we know it, evidently does not exist, but robotics technology has been allowed to develop to the point that it can replace nearly all human labor — and the socialists of the United Community have eagerly welcomed this development, in keeping with their notion that the ideal society is one of universal leisure. As a result, they work at most two hours a day. Everyday, after 11:00 in the morning, is, as it were, a holiday, and yet not a thing in this society is really Holy. It is entirely secular. We learn, in fact, that religion is illegal. It was “voted immoral,” because it was found that it inevitably “brought about discussion,” and discussion, I surmise, was found to foster discontentment, which the powers that be are at pains to suppress among the citizens of the United Community (81, 85).

Who (or what?) are these powers that be? And why were religious discussions in particular considered so threatening to the socialist order? There are, after all, other kinds of discussions and debates that are permitted to take place in this society, about what socialism entails in practice. I will consider these two questions in turn.

Officially, at least, the United Community is as pure a democracy as one can imagine. Laws and policies, such as the ban on religion, are adopted by vote, and “each citizen, men and women alike, of course, serves his or her term as a government official, as in old Prussia men served in the army” (70). And this may, indeed, be the reality, but I wonder about this. I wonder, for three main reasons. First, because I know that at the beginning of this society there was a kind of founding moment, and, so, there was, of necessity, even in the most democratic of hypothetical scenarios, a small group of “leaders” who took on the making “of new laws, for the establishment of an ideal government” (55). Is it not possible, or even likely, that such a group might manage to find a way to maintain its power in and over the socialistic order it established, much as the Bolsheviks did manage to do in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution? Second, because I know that in the United Community there exists a class of “State scientists” and bureaucrats, such as the “Officer[s] of Hygiene,” which is, probably, due to the technical requirements of its work, permanent — i.e., not subject to the frequent turnover that characterizes the other government offices. If this is so, then, like the United States, the government of the United Community would be characterized by a duality, between the democratically appointed government officials and the permanent, professional bureaucracy, which is supposed to be governed by the democratic appointees, but is in fact often able to do as it pleases. In the case of the United Community, however, the ability of the democracy to control the bureaucracy would be even more attenuated, because its democratic officials serve only one term each, and so, have practically no time to acquire institutional knowledge and experience or to exercise meaningful oversight over the bureaucrats.

Finally, I know that my grasp of the realities of life in the United Community is mediated by Wolfgang, who is, assuredly, a thoughtful Gentleman, but who is yet, in effect, a tourist, not a diplomat, spy, social scientist, or the like; and I know, furthermore, that his grasp of the realities is mediated, in turn, by one young citizen of the United Community, who may or may not know, and may or may not be motivated to divulge, the truth about her government.

I conclude, then, that Dodd, by giving us a look into the “reality” of an “ideally-perfect” democratic socialist political community, invites us to consider both the possibility that in the best case scenario democratic socialism will become bureaucratic, managerial tyranny (or “soft-despotism”), even as she does not insist that it will, and so too permits us to scrutinize the socialists’ ideal, just as it lives in the purest of their hearts and minds.

This brings me to the second of the two questions I just now posed. If we are dealing here with the most idealistic of socialist communities, why is religion outlawed? Why are the people not permitted religious freedom? Might there not, after all, be a Christian socialism? Might it not be the case that Christians are won over to the cause of socialism? That they work with the socialists to bring about a community in which all are cared for and none lacks for any of the physical necessities? If such a community is possible, does not Christian charity dictate, in fact, that it be the goal of all political action that Christians choose to undertake? Dodd, of course, suggests otherwise. She suggests that the triumph of socialism will go together with the triumph of secularism. And we know that, historically speaking, she has been vindicated. Where socialism has been the creed of a nation, so has been atheism.

But why is that? Why is it that Christianity and capitalism have coexisted, in modern history, despite obvious tensions between Christian teachings about money and the vulgar, “greed is good” version of the spirit of capitalism, while socialism and Christianity have far more often than not been enemies? And, is there more underneath these historical realities than historical accidents? Is there, perhaps, a structural tension between socialism and Christianity that prevents them from coexisting, but that does not obtain between Christianity and capitalism?

If I am to hope to answer this question adequately, and I acknowledge that it is a major question that might go beyond the scope of this Essay, I probably ought to define capitalism, having already defined socialism. Therefore, and in keeping with my sense that the two ideologies are “mirror-image rivals,” I define capitalism as an ideology that seeks solely to emancipate individuals, (by transferring all or most of the means of production, and as many governmental functions as possible, from the State to private persons or the “invisible hand” of the “free market”).

If this is a good working definition of capitalism, then it seems to me that, in a capitalistic social order, it will be possible for an immense variety of different kinds of communities to develop, including Christian communities. There will be no general sovereign authority to prevent it. Individuals will be free to join, and, presumably, too (but, perhaps, not necessarily) to leave, the faiths and-or churches that capture their consciences. In other words, capitalism, being, as it is, hostile to coercion, is altogether friendly to religious liberty: the ‘author,’ as it were, of the spirit of capitalism is the author too of “A Letter Concerning Toleration.” This is not, of course, to insist, or even to assert, that Christianity in power will be as hospitable to capitalism as capitalism is to it. The question of the kind of political economy that Christians will or ought to endorse is not presently my question. My question is that of the relation between capitalism and socialism, respectively, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other.

What, then, is the relation of socialism to Christianity? As you may remember, I defined socialism as an ideology that seeks solely to emancipate workers, (and this by transferring all or most of the means of production from private persons to the State). You will notice immediately, that, whereas capitalism wishes to eliminate sovereign political authority, so that individuals might be free to do as they please, especially when it comes to entering into economic contracts, socialism seeks to strengthen sovereign political authority, so as to, as Dodd suggests, create a Community that is altogether United. There is, then, in the fundamental relation between socialism and Christianity, an inherent tension with respect to sovereignty, namely, the familiar tension between the Church and the State. To which community do believers ultimately belong? To which authority do they owe their allegiance? Whereas constitutional — or liberal — democracies, such as the United States, do have strong governments, and so do see conflicts between the Church and the State, they also try to limit the authority of the government, so that private persons might have freedom, to follow their consciences on spiritual and economic questions. Socialists — on the contrary — feel no such pressure to protect private consciences, because they do not care much about individuals as such — (as opposed to the class of wage-laborers) — because they do care, very much, about the authority of the State, and, finally, because they want to realize a society that is at once highly democratic and enduringly socialistic. This final aim of theirs means that they cannot responsibly allow citizens to question the premises of socialism. They cannot reasonably tolerate discussions of “first principles,” discussions of the kind that religions — in particular, perhaps, Christianity — necessarily inspire. Discussions of this kind can only be seen as risks to the stability of the social order. (After all, one theory of the case is that capitalism was born of a certain kind of Protestantism, namely, Calvinism). Considerations such as these make it all but inevitable that religion will be “voted immoral” by socialists.

What is much safer from the standpoint of socialism than religious liberty is to convert socialism itself into a kind of civil religion. And that is exactly what is done by the United Community. In his seventh letter — dated to “Christmas Day” — Wolfgang writes to his interlocutor Hannevig of the “Ethical Temples” that replace churches in the context of this Total State — this modern Sparta. Instead of Christ, he sees inside one of these temples a bust of Henry George. Instead of Saints, he sees busts of “martyrs” — “the nihilists, early anarchists, and socialists who endured persecution and often death in the early days of socialism” (83). Instead of the Holy Bible, Wolfgang sees Progress and Poverty. (I fancy that in certain other temples, outside of New York Socialistic City, he might see Looking Backwards, that other, late 19th century urtext of American socialism against which Dodd wrote). All of this is in keeping with the essence of socialism. In other words, socialism is secularism, and “Christian socialists,” if I may be so bold, “know not what they do.”

In the Christmas day celebration that Wolfgang witnesses, on display, too, is the essence of feminism. The celebration is one of the very few times of year when the children of the United Community, who are, naturally, raised by the State, are permitted to see their parents. But, naturally, neither the children nor their parents care to make much of this opportunity to commune. They hardly know one another and they have little to nothing, personally speaking, in common. The children do receive presents, from the State, of course, but these, in keeping with the moral principle of gender-neutrality, are given out “indiscriminately,” but perhaps not quite at random, for it seems to Wolfgang that “all the boys got the dolls and the girls the whips . . .” (79). And so it is that as he leaves he witnesses “a tremendous exchange” among the kids, girls and boys sorting things out for themselves, according to what they really do like, and not what the State seems to think they ought to like.

(The abolition of the family and communal rearing of children by the State are undoubtedly radical policies, but they are overdetermined in the context of a feminized, socialized, Statist society, for the Statist State, as it were, the State as such, has an interest in the obedient docility of future generations, while the feminist State hates fathers, and mothers, and the socialist State wants to maintain radical equality (of “opportunity” or “outcome” makes no difference, for both conceptions lead logically to the radical social policies in question).

Thus ends Wolfgang’s account of the character of the United Community.

What social consequences does this character produce? What other laws and policies does this society choose? And what are their effects on the happiness of the people? These are the questions that occupy Wolfgang in his sixth, and longest, letter, which I will now treat, in summary fashion.

He begins by noting the “profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people” (58). It poses a puzzle for him. If the socialists have followed through on their principles and achieved everything they set out to achieve, how is it that they have made themselves unhappy? What was wrong with their principles? Here is how Wolfgang asks these questions (and how he in the process fills out for us a few characteristics of the society that I did not specifically mention above):

I asked myself, again and again, why should this people, of all people, be full of this discontent and unhappiness? Haven’t they come to the realization of all their dreams? Have they not attained to the very summit and to the full glory of the possession of their social, civic and political desires and aspirations? Is there not equality of sex? Has not leisure instead of labor become a law? Is not private property abolished — is not the land the property of the State — the wage system become a thing of the past, and the possession of capital made a crime punishable by law? Does not the State also exist for the people, educating them, training them for their work in life, distributing among them any surplus funds that the public treasury may accumulate, and furnishing for their amusement and leisure a vast system of educational clubs, educational theaters, public games, museums and shows? If a people are not happy under such conditions, what will insure content? Yet come with me. . . . and watch the multitudes of people wandering listlessly up and down the streets . . . After much thought on the reasons of this strange apathy, this inertia, and sloth of energy, I have come to two conclusions which have helped me to solve the problem of this people’s unhappiness. My first conclusion is that the people are dying for want of work — downright hard work; my second conclusion is that in trying to establish the law of equality [or “equity”], the founders of this ideal community committed the fatal mistake of counting out those indestructible, ineradicable human tendencies and aspirations which have hitherto been the source of all human progress . . . (63-64)

He proceeds to elaborate on these two conclusions. He suggests that it was in following out the premises of socialism to their conclusions that the socialists made themselves unhappy. It was of the essence of their doctrine that work is intrinsically worthless, to be avoided if possible. So, the socialists welcomed a technological solution. They did not realize that (most) men are constituted so as to take pride in providing for themselves, to be at their best in the doing of good work, and to be pleased when they reap (material and social) rewards that they feel are commensurate with the quality, value, and-or vigor of their work. They did not see that this is true alike of capitalists and laborers. They did not see the personal, human value, as opposed to the productive value, of the “free enterprise” that people in free societies practice not only to satisfy their natural needs, but also to provide for their (personal) pleasures and to manifest their (personal) merits. The socialists were altogether too quick to condemn as a vice the nigh on “unconquerable desire” of some men “selfishly to surpass their less fortunate brothers” (75).

“But are men not constituted so as to be able to enjoy themselves as much or more in leisure? And, if so — as certainly seems to be the case to a significant extent — do the people of the United Community not have outlets for all their energies, their creativity? Even though they scarcely work, even though they scarcely practice politics, and even though they scarcely permit themselves a family life, can they not find wonderful ways to use their leisure? Do they not have academics, arts, and athletics to claim their emancipated energies? Was this not the great promise of socialism? That the whole of human life could be given over to such pursuits?” Good questions!

Wolfgang acknowledges that immediately after their emancipation from their old system the people did turn — ambitiously — to these very pursuits. Soon, however, they encountered problems — ideological problems, we might say — that effectively prevented them from continuing. The basic problem was that in each of the arenas of life where they allowed themselves individual liberty, “the old baneful system of competition” that they had sought to escape “soon developed itself.” And, because there continued to be born among them both virtuous strivers and a vicious “mass of sluggards idlers, and ne’er-do-wells, who are always the immovable block in the reformer’s path of progress,” there soon developed among them a stark set of class distinctions — an “aristocracy of the intellect,” for example, developed from ambition in the first of the three arenas of leisure, academics (65-66).

Debate naturally ensued. Is an aristocracy of the intellect compatible with the moral-political principles and premises of socialism? It was decided that it is not, for much the same reason that it was decided that religion is intolerable: the opinions, in particular the political opinions, of those “scholars, students, artists, and authors” in the “superior class” were found to be “as dangerous to the State as an aristocracy founded on pride of descent or on the possession of ancestral acres” (66). Consequently, a “strict law was passed, and has since been rigidly enforced, forbidding mental or artistic development . . . beyond a certain fixed standard attainable by all” (ibid).

Development in the arena of athletics was not found to be so threatening to the State as intellectual development. Consequently, “both men and women are muscled like athletes, from their continual exercises” (68). Nevertheless, the “athletic party,” Wolfgang reports, has so far been stymied in its effort “to pass a law to permit races and contests on the old Greek plan,” since the old guard of “conservative” socialists argues that “the Olympian games . . . were in reality only a training school for the Greek army, and internecine trouble and dissension would surely follow any such public games, as they did in the Greek states” (68-69).

With regard to the question of the arts, the situation was the same, but there was one additional consideration that prevented full development of artistic powers. In the United Community,

The arts particularly have languished. Art, as is well known, can only live by the strength of the imagination — and the imagination is fed by contrasts of life and degrees of picturesqueness. One of the old American sages, Emerson I think it was, well said of the artist, “If the rich were not rich, how poor would the poet be!” Quite naturally, in such a civilization as this, no conditions exist for either creating or maintaining artistic ability. (67)

All in all, then, Wolfgang’s diagnosis of the ailment of the United Community is as follows.

. . . in a government, founded as this one is, on a principle of equality, which principle is the sworn enemy of ambition there must of necessity be a lack of initiative, a feebleness in aggressive attack, and a want of determination in the pursuance of any given policy . . . Men, whether as individuals or as a collective body, are indeed only actively aggressive, ambitious or audacious in proportion as they meet with opposition. It is struggle . . . which makes both men and a nation great. (71-72, emphasis mine)

He and we come now to what I want to call Wolfgang’s “time of choosing.” He is asked by the intelligent young woman who has been his guide on his tour of the United Community what he thinks of the place. He is asked, in effect, if he would rather live in her socialist utopia or in his historical homeland? You will recall, (from the opening of this Part), that he chooses his homeland, Sweden, and now you know his reason(s) why. Even so, I think it will be worth our time to dwell a moment longer on the meaning and significance of his choice.

I like to think of Wolfgang’s time of choosing as Anna Bowman Dodd’s reply to John Rawls, even though she lived so many years before him. (Rawls’ ideas are familiar to us, and very influential, so they seem to us to come first, in a way, whereas the ideas in Dodd’s novella, forgotten as they have been, seem to us to be new and recent). Rawls’ contribution to the venerable debate about the ideal or just society or the best regime — however that great object of human aspiration may best be conceived — is to suggest that we should consider the question from behind a “veil of ignorance.” What society would you design, he asks, if you knew you would live in it, but the veil of ignorance prevented you from knowing what social position you would occupy within it? According to Rawls, the rational answer to this question is that you would design a “radical egalitarian” society, “democracy plus the welfare state,” one that allows some opportunities to rise high, but that prioritizes the social safety net, as it were, so that no one may fall too low. You would hedge your bets — to make sure, of course, that you do not end up in slavery or destitution, but more than that — to make sure “inequalities, whether they stem from birth, fortune, or nature” are minimized as much as possible, given how offensive they are to the deep-seated sense of modern people that ‘all men (and women) are created equal.’13

Rawls is not a democratic socialist, not exactly, but his innovative, if not well grounded, approach to the old question of justice promotes something rather like, if not identical to, that “Swedish model” of political-economy beloved by today’s democratic socialists. It is not hard to see, then, that, given Rawls’ love of equality, his nigh on exclusive concern for the least well off in society, and his studious reluctance to endorse capitalism over socialism, his conception of man’s “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” might easily succumb to a socialistic appropriation that uses it to justify the United Community.

Wolfgang, on the contrary, chooses a very different kind of “Swedish model.” He tells his young guide, exaggerating a bit, perhaps, for effect, that,

I leave you, well content to go back to my barbaric Sweden, where the forms of political government are so bad that men wrestle like gods to remedy them, and where men themselves are still born so unequal that they have to fight like demons to live at all. We are still chaotic, and unformed, and unredeemed, and unregenerate. But we are tremendously alive. And so I return with eager joy to take my part in the strife, to be a man, in other words, and not a part of a colossal machine. Why not go back with me? It will be a great experience . . . (85)

From this point of view, from the point of view of a genuinely noble man, the question posed by socialism does not require one to compare differing ideals: the socialist ideal is worse than the status quo, than the imperfect world that we live in — the world that Wolfgang, tongue in cheek, and the DSA, in deadly earnest, refers to as “barbaric.”

Dodd’s answer to Rawls is that we should not consider the leading question of politics, the question of justice or the best regime, from behind some veil of ignorance, neither supposing ourselves to be in the original position with our personalities intact, nor supposing we are somehow able to make a choice in that position as undifferentiated “rational agents.” We should on the contrary consider the question from the point of view of a Gentleman.

From this point of view it is easy to see that there are great problems in our world, under capitalistic republicanism, but it is equally easy to see that these problems, in a society that prizes freedom, call forth human Greatness, both individual and collective, (including efforts to establish or reestablish national Greatness) — and, too, that this would not be so under socialism. As Wolfgang tells his guide, directly,

You are a great and surprising people. I mean great in the sense of numbers, however, for great politically and morally, you can never be again. You appear to have attained a certain order of perfection which, however, is only relative. You think you have solved all the great problems but you have only begun to solve them. In attempting to make the people happy by insuring equality of goods and equal division of property, you have found it necessary to stultify ambition and to kill aspiration. Therefore, healthy, vigorous morale has ceased to exist. In making leisure a law you have robbed it of its sweetness. (84)

A Gentleman will never choose to become a Last Man.

That is the essential meaning and significance of Wolfgang’s time of choosing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On the basis, then, of all that I have said and thought about Wolfgang’s choice to reject the United Community, I assert the following as a typological truth. A Gentlemen may, considering his historical moment, and in the idiosyncrasy of his nature, choose to rise on the wings of public spiritedness, to become a Statesmen, or he may, in the same manner, choose to withdraw down a path of private pursuits, to become a Family Man or a Businessman, and so he may deign to bless what we today call liberal-democracy; but he will never choose or bless a political order that permits to him none of these options — one that would, as the price of citizenship, ask him to cease to be a man. And I assert, finally, that indifference to that truth is the essence of the error of socialism.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This critique of socialism, based as it is on The Republic of the Future, could be complemented by more technical economic arguments about the weaknesses of socialistic economic theory, and-or by more informed historical arguments about the failures of socialist practice, but for those of us who feel the call of the noble, or what is the same, the beautiful, the case is, I believe, dispositive.

My reading of socialist literature, suggests, however, that socialists will make two kinds of appeals or accusations at the point when they feel their powers of argument inadequate.

The first is that capitalists, and their friends, “simply do not care” about poor people and the working class. We may answer this by repeating our claim that Dodd is a conservative and add to it a point lately made by congressman Riley Moore (R-WV):

A worker who earns a decent wage, owns his own home, receives medical insurance through his job, and can provide for his family without government assistance is the foundation of self-reliance, community, stability, ordered liberty, and everything else conservatives believe in. A Walmart employee who makes just enough to get by, cover rent, and qualify for Medicaid and SNAP is forced into dependency on the government. The Walmart model drives up the national debt and quietly shifts the cost of worker benefits onto the taxpayer’s tab.

The point is that there is currently a lively debate going on among Americans on the Right, between national conservatives and libertarians, about if — and if so, how — public policy should be used to benefit American workers. It may be, as I suspect, that the national conservatives have a good point, and yet it may be that the libertarians are right after all. Very little of the argument of this Essay would be affected either way. Dodd offers a word of caution about the short-sightedness of public policy that sides with business at every turn, even as she admires the enterprising ambition of the great American titans of industry. My point is that socialism adds no value to this conversation. (One interesting thing I learned in my reading about socialists is that they actually have had a very ambiguous relationship with unions: socialistic activists often accuse union leaders of being “conservative,” because the latter only want to secure benefits for their workers, as opposed to “smashing capitalism”).

The second kind of argument of last resort that socialists make is that climate change will compel us to abandon capitalism sooner or later, and that sooner is better than later. To this I reply that the option of nuclear energy is open to capitalistic and socialistic nations alike, and that it is far more promising than what socialists seem to me to really mean when they make this argument: de-growth or (even) de-development. And I add, in keeping with my defense of a genuinely conservative political orientation, one (to my mind quite important) thesis of the late, great Roger Scruton, namely, that the cause of nature — or “the environment” — is, naturally, a conservative cause, not a Progressive or a socialistic one, because “conservatism means conservation.”

I close with a few remarks intended to tie this three-part Essay together. In her own way Anna Bowman Dodd observed that socialism and feminism are kindred spirits, a male and a female, if you will. They go together. They both want to emancipate a favorite class from labor and subordination, and they both propose radical, revolutionary ways of doing so. They both go far too far.

And this in the same direction. They may both, therefore, be critiqued by way of an analysis of the kind of society that working together they would realize. This analysis I have endeavored to provide in this Essay, following on the path Anna Bowman Dodd pointed to in her Republic, in a mode, indeed, that points us back to Plato’s Republic. If the upshot of her effort may be condensed into one insight, I think it is this: socialism and feminism go too far, because their first principles lead them to seek to emancipate men and women from things that all or most of them naturally need — namely, labor and love.

(In Part 2, I suggested that the essential error of feminism is, oddly enough, a typically masculine error, namely, to think that public life, life outside of the home, whether it be in business or in politics, is of essentially greater worth and higher dignity, always the “better portion,” as it were, than private life, life in and around the home, life lived quietly with friends and family. It occurs to me to clarify, now — because of the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, perhaps — what I only hinted at by beginning Part 2 with a quotation from the Odyssey: a message of Homer’s great story of homecoming seems to me to be, that while there is great glory to be won by venturing out into the world, to conquer, and to return home, as is the manly wont, there is good, even better life to be had by keeping the Home intact, as is the womanly wont. Feminists can only hate heroic homecomings).

In this Part 3, I have suggested that, whereas feminism destroys the good life that is there for men and women to enjoy in private, socialism does the same for the noble life that is there for them to enjoy — if that’s the right word — in public. The two ideologies naturally unite, as Dodd anticipated, in an attempt to transform the political community into a kind of single-parent household. In doing so they forget that even though both business and family enterprises can be exploitative, they are, in essence, partnerships — and the consequence of their forgetting is that they would leave men and women to relate only in and through, or (even) to, the State, which is the coldest of all cold partners.

Similarly, socialism and feminism are united by their indifference to beauty, not to say their taste for ugliness. On the contrary, the kind of conservatism for which Dodd stands up rightly cherishes beauty, and so I think her name might rightly be added to the list below.

From Burke and de Maistre to Oakeshott and Kirk, the leading conservative thinkers have devoted much of their thought to the problems of aesthetics, knowing that our search for beauty is not just a matter of private whim, of no lasting concern to the species, but on the contrary a way in which we strive to shape the world to our needs, and our needs to the world.14

For this and the other reasons that I have suggested in this Essay, perhaps it is to the conservative intellectual tradition that we should turn amidst the slow burning crisis of the liberal reading of the roots of American order. . . .

. . . I shall go, forsaking the house to which I came as a bride — such a beautiful house, full of life’s sustenance, one which I think I will always remember, even in dreams. So she spoke . . .1

~ ~ ~ Homer’s Odyssey 21.77-79

The women’s movement has not given us better marriages or better households.

~ ~ ~ Wendell Berry, “Word and Flesh” (1989), The World-Ending Fire, 229

Feminism has fallen on hard times. Or should I say, perhaps, that it’s fallen on the best and worst of times? The movement is languishing, it’s looking around decadently for something else worth doing, and it’s running up against certain limits of human nature, social (and bio-) engineering and postmodern Theory. Stubborn biological realities of the human body and deep-seated longings of the human heart act like dams against which the waves of feminism now lap. Feminist engineers find that their attempts to breach these walls fail and that their alliance with postmodern Theorists does more to obfuscate the subjects of feminism (“What is a woman?” is, they say, an unanswerable question) than it does to emancipate them. Previous generations of feminist activists opened the doors of politics and business to aspiring women, but now we’re seeing a noticeable number of women, including very impressive ones, aspiring to the “trad(itional) life” of a housewife. And, believe it or not, Betty Friedan, the late author of The Feminine Mystique, a book that’s widely credited with launching “second wave” feminism, would not be bothered by all this.2 In sharp contrast to Simone de Beauvoir and her epigones, who — despite their obfuscations — represent the only way forward for feminism, Friedan thought women should be free to choose “traditional lives,” if they want them. Indeed, that the female future may actually involve a step or two backward, as it were, from the goals of second wave feminism is suggested to me by the fact that Gail Collins — a former editor at the New York Times — confidently writes in her introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique that Friedan’s worry about the listless, leisured lives of American housewives in the 1950s “sounds, in retrospect, a little whiny.” Even so, what we may deign to call the discourse of feminism remains hegemonic — especially in and around Academia — and feminist precepts have migrated into important domains of U.S. law.3 Perhaps it may, then, remain an open question whether or not the women’s movement will find energy enough to explore its final frontier; but I doubt it will. I doubt movement feminism will be able to breach the walls I’ve alluded to in order to follow its academic counterpart any farther than it already has down the road that runs from “the elimination of sex roles” in our society to the advent of an altogether newfangled society that is able to “transcend sexual gender” itself by (somehow) mainstreaming “androgynous human beings.”4 And, the reason for my doubt is or ought to be obvious: only fanatical ideologues could desire to live in such a society (and I think even they’d learn to be careful what they wish for). It seems more than likely to me, in other words, that feminism will continue to languish, such that we may dare to ask, “Should it die?”

I think it should. I think it would be better to liberate women from the notion that they need liberation than to go on wishing and-or working for their final liberation, which might end up being indistinguishable from their abolition.5

I’m no student of feminism, but I’ve been reading up lately, and that’s the way things look to me. Feminism, which is, I think, best defined as an ideology that seeks solely to emancipate women, was, on the one hand, wildly successful.6 It accomplished — with some (not insubstantial) help from technology — almost if not all that it set out to accomplish via its three waves: women (in the West) now vote and work, just like men, and they are free to express themselves as women or buck conventional “gender roles,” as they like. So, it’s tolerably true to say, “We today inhabit a society with a very new justice, long overdue: the gender-neutral society,” a society wherein “your sex does not determine your rights, your duties, your place,” a society that is on its way to resembling the (seemingly) just society Plato imagined (ironically) in his Republic and that he modeled on the equalitarian tyranny Aristophanes imagined (comically) in his Assemblywomen — a society in which it may actually be more advantageous to be a woman than a man.7 Or if not quite that — then one in which women do compete very well and can expect to continue doing so. In the U.S., (and all or most other Western nations), women dominate in the realm of education and many influential professions; and the dominant mores in these countries are increasingly feminine, by which I mean softer, gentler — more given to tears than temerity: “feminization has come to represent the way of progress — for both men and women.”8 It may also be responsible for certain more concrete improvements in and of political modernity, e.g., one that, as you’ll see, Anna Bowman Dodd anticipated, namely “democratic peace” — that phenomenon whereby democratic states don’t fight each other at all. (The idea here is that enfranchising women leads to peace: since women stably disapprove of war more than men, female votes make electorates more pacifist). So what in the world, if anything, could be wrong with all this feminist success? Who could reasonably be dissatisfied with these developments? On what grounds might one question feminism and the gender-neutral state of play in the West? Why is a turning away from or informed forgetting of feminism in order today?

Well, since gentility and peace are not the only effects of successful feminism, since, on the other hand, we might weigh against them such developments as the West’s “fertility problem,” significant elements of its “cancel culture,” and the unhappy general friction that exists between its men and women — to say nothing of the fact that Western women are “sick and tired . . . more anxious than ever” — since, in general, gender-neutrality is not the panacea feminists hoped it would be, it turns out that there’s fertile ground for questioning late-stage feminism and its final goal, that is, the entirely gender-neutral society.9 And, indeed, there is now a growing cadre of daring writers who are willing to question in this way. In addition to those I’ve named above, I have in mind old-school feminists like Mary Harrington, Christina Hoff Sommers, J.K. Rowling and Louise Perry, anti-feminist women like Mary Eberstadt and the inimitable Peachy Keenan, and anti-feminist men like Bryan Caplan, Harvey Mansfield, Jordan Peterson — and the author of the notorious but not-to-be-dismissed Bronze Age Mindset. These writers are, as you may know, very different, and they disagree about many things; but they seem to me to be loosely united by their opposition to what feminism has become, which is to say by their desire to see men and women free as can be to be and become beautiful according to their (complementary) natures and-or cooperate for their common good and the good of the communities in which they are wont to put down roots.

(It is worth noting here that, since feminism stands or falls by the notion that the highest good or primary interest of each woman is that which she shares with all women, women understood as a class, the observation that men and women have a common good and that their achieving it is good, in turn, for their communities, is fatal to feminism. And this fact probably explains why, as we’ll see, feminism attacks the home and the family, for it is in and through the home and the family that men and women achieve their common good).

All or most of the authors I’ve mentioned are, in fact, of the opinion — (call it “liberal” and “feminist,” if you must) — that justice demands men and women be equal under the law and possessed of the same basic, civil rights.10 By the same token, however, they deny the postmodern view, which has become the feminist mainstream, and which asserts that the two sexes ought to have the same deportments and desires and tolerate zero sex-specific social norms or duties. They don’t believe women today need emancipation, some sort of final freedom from masculinity, the natural pains of childbearing and rearing, and-or whatever vestigial social pressure women may still feel to at some point in their adult lives marry and be homemakers. They dare to wonder if the will to emancipate women has gone too far. They doubt that the completely gender-neutral society is worth fighting for.

With all this in mind, we can turn to Anna Bowman Dodd and The Republic of the Future, Or, Socialism a Reality, her forgotten, futuristic novella of 1887. In this text Dodd impressively anticipates 21st century antifeminists. She wrote more than 30 years before women won the vote, but she managed to roughly anticipate certain gender-related issue-questions that we are actually dealing with in the 21st century. I believe, consequently, that studying Dodd’s waggish critique of women’s emancipation, which is an aspect of her broader critique of socialism, will help us to reflect on the history of feminism (in America), its relation to socialism, and its diminishing returns in the West today. From her pre-feminist vantage point in the late 19th century, Dodd is ideally positioned to help us get a sense of just how far we’ve come — (or gone, as it were) — on the tide of feminism: to help us fair-mindedly perceive what was well won by the women’s movement and what is now the real folly of indulging any longer its restless yearning for perpetual “progress.”11

I want to show in the rest of this second Part of my Essay on The Republic of the Future that we may in our present context benefit from thinking through the truly dismal social relations of men and women that obtain in the United Community, the socialistic and fully “feminized” democracy that replaces the United States — by the year 2050 — in the world of Dodd’s prophetic novella. Simply studying this little book, taking it seriously, will, I predict, be liberating and healthy for us, for it is necessarily shocking to feminist sensibilities, and a little shock therapy may be just what the doctor ordered for people living, as we are, in the wake of feminism’s “three waves.” I will, however, make a more concrete argument, as well, in addition to simply recommending the book. I’ll argue that Dodd’s Republic enables us to see that feminism fails for much the same reason as does socialism (Part 1 of this Essay), namely because its vision for an ideal society is fatally flawed. Feminism’s notion of equality overlaps to some significant degree with simple justice, and yet, as an ideological project, it tends, even insensibly aims, to render society ugly, men and women equally ignoble (and unhappy). . . .

In Part 1 of this Essay I introduced The Republic of the Future and interpreted its first two chapters. I won’t rehash what I wrote, you can read it, but let me just set the stage for the interpreting I will do in this Part 2 by reminding you of the dramatic context Dodd establishes.

The Republic of the Future is a series of seven letters from a leisured Swedish gentleman named Wolfgang to a friend-cum-correspondent of his, Hannevig, who lives in Christiana. Wolfgang is on a self-guided, exploratory tour of New York Socialistic City, a major metropolis in what used to be the United States of America, but is now, in 2050, a democratic-socialist state called the United Community. He writes in his first two letters of his arrival in the city and his first impressions of it. He is unable to interact with any of its inhabitants, and he remarks on the strangeness of that fact. The United Community’s service industry is fully automated, so there is no need, or, as Wolfgang is inclined to view the matter, no opportunity, for him to interact with another person. Not one of the individuals he observes out and about in the streets greets him. We learn that this “ideally-perfect” socialistic city is not a cheerful or welcoming community. We may well wonder, “Is it really a community at all?” Wolfgang’s first impression of the inhabitants of New York Socialistic City is that they are apathetic, having little or nothing to strive for, and of seemingly little interest to each other. But he does not rush to judgement. He is forbearing. “My views of their condition,” he says, “may change when I come to know them better.”

In his third letter, Wolfgang describes his first attempt to do just that — to get to know a denizen of the United Community. He sets off to present himself at the house of one such person, a unnamed man, whom, so far as we ever learn, he never actually meets. For he has come to New York Socialistic City bearing “letters of introduction to a certain gentleman . . . or rather citizen, as all men are called here” (25).

We should pause here, at the outset of our study, even though we have barely begun it, to consider the import of Wolfgang’s seemingly casual remark about the title by which men are styled in the United Community. It is, I believe, the beginning of the critique that Dodd, with a light touch, makes in The Republic of the Future of what Wolfgang will soon call “well-established emancipation doctrines” — what we call feminism. The critique takes the form of a series of observations about the condition of and relations between men and women in the gender-neutral United Community, and it is divided into two parts. In the first part (letters 3 and 4), Wolfgang writes of women, and in the second part (letters 5 and 6), he writes mainly of men. (The seventh letter relates to both of these parts and introduces new themes). We may say, then, that The Republic of the Future — like Plato’s Republic — contains a “male drama” and a “female drama,” but, unlike Plato, Dodd puts females first. . . .

So, then — what is the import of the remark I have noted? Why does it matter that “men” in the United Community are called “citizens,” never “gentlemen”? Let us begin with the obvious and go from there. The United Community has done away with Gentlemen — the term and the human type. With respect to the latter of these social excisions, we cannot be too surprised or dismayed. The United Community succeeded the United States, and the Constitution of the United States outlaws “Title[s] of Nobility.” Nevertheless, in the U.S. today, the gendered term ‘gentleman’ — as in, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen” — is still very much in use, and is thought to refer to something. It is thought to refer to a certain type of man, an honorable, courteous, and (perhaps) even cultured man, a man who is, I think, especially likely to display these qualities in his comportment towards women. So, then, our democratic culture retains this aristocratic term and has not done away altogether with this aristocratic human type. It has done away with the sociocultural privileges of aristocratic gentlemen, but it has not done away completely with the concomitant social expectations. Our language preserves (albeit rather dimly) our awareness and our appreciation of these expectations — of gentlemanliness as a standard for all men. This is so despite the fact that, as many have noted, something like a “decline of the gentleman” has occurred in recent decades — the decades in which feminism has waxed. Gentlemanly behavior is still noticeable here and there and appreciated in certain quarters, but it is not generally honored and praised. Nor is it taught to young men as a matter of course. Our society does not understand gentlemanliness.12 So, it is on its way to abolishing it. It is on its way to becoming the United Community — just as Anna Bowman Dodd, in our text, predicts that it will, if it embraces socialism and feminism. And that is the point to note here. The United Community is the end toward which our society is tending. Whereas we simply do not understand the Gentleman, the United Community has eliminated him, in the name of equality, between men and women and between citizens.

To be sure, more than a few forces in modern life contribute to the decline of the Gentleman, but feminism is surely one of them. Feminists cannot tolerate gentlemanliness, as a matter of principle. They would like to finish the job of eliminating it from our speech and society, the job of rendering both speech and society gender-neutral. Why is this? Why does feminism want to do away with the Gentleman? Two reasons come to mind. First, the counterpart of the Gentleman, (at least in our contemporary lexicon), is the Lady.13 Although our society scarcely acknowledges it now, the simple, culturally basic assumption behind the linguistic and social convention of “Ladies and Gentlemen” is that men and women are different and should, consequently, have different social perfections. The Lady and the Gentleman were high human types in a society that expected the sexes to behave, on the basis of their “good breeding,” both better than, and at least as differently from each other as, they are wont to do by nature. They were high human types in a society that cultivated, instead of denying, sexual difference, and feminism, of course, denies difference at most every opportunity.14 Second, gentlemen are good men. They do not do wrong by women or by anyone. They act honorably. Thus, to the extent that men are gentlemen, feminism loses much of its motive power. Yes, we must, of course, admit that a patriarchy of gentlemen is still a patriarchy, but, I suggest, such a patriarchy threatens to be one women can live with; and that’s not something feminists can live with.

Even in the absence of patriarchy, however, feminists oppose the cultivation of gentlemanliness. We see this today. Why do they do so? I suspect that it is because gentlemanliness is a form of manliness, and manliness is what they want to get beyond, for they understand that it is at the root of all the norms, attitudes, institutions, and suchlike from which they will the emancipation of women. But we should, perhaps, not see the incompatibility of feminism and gentlemanliness as the incompatibility of opposites, for there is real common ground between feminists and gentlemen, namely their sense that manliness is a problem. Gentlemen and feminists are more like rivals, rivals for the same territory, if you will, than opposites. They agree that unadulterated manliness is “problematic,” or, at least, not a thing to be idealized. What they disagree on is the answer to the all-important question of what should be done about the problem of manliness (the fact that it’s linked to aggression and haughtiness). Gentlemen believe manliness needs to be educated, while feminists believe it must be eradicated through “reeducation,” i.e., propaganda and psychological manipulation (Therapy). The difference between education and reeducation is that the former works with the grain of human nature, refining, perfecting it; while the latter works against the grain of human nature, repressing, denying it. Now, I obviously favor the former position, but I believe the feminists have a point: it is not easy to educate (true) gentlemen. A good education does not always take, does not necessarily transform the soul. It’s all too easy for a man to receive only the veneer of gentlemanliness from an education designed to refine and perfect his soul and his manners. So, then, I think the feminists are not unreasonable for believing that the project of totally reforming society is a more sure-fire way of protecting women from manliness than the project of trying to teach all men to be — or, at least, to look up to — gentlemen. I insist, however, that their approach is blinkered, myopic: “protecting” women from men by eradicating manliness is a sure fire way to create more problems than you solve and is not genuinely good for men or women. Gentlemen (and their feminine allies, of whom there are many) have the right idea. Gentlemanliness is the way. It’s not a panacea, but it is the best way to approach the problem of manliness. It’s the only way to preserve what’s natural, healthy, and socially useful in manliness while ennobling it, making it fit for nice, civilized society and yet still capable of achieving Greatness (or “transcendence,” as Simone de Beauvoir would say).

I can illustrate the point of view I have just sketched, somewhat abstractly, by referring to Rhett Butler, the roguish leading man in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. He looms large, apparently, in the feminist imagination. Butler is schooled in the arts of the Gentleman, but he scarcely cares for their code. Neither in war nor with women is he what one could call a “true” Gentleman. He’s not honorable, but he is strong, daring, competent, manly. He represents for feminists the insufficiency of the code of the Gentleman — of gentlemanly education. Butler can act the part of the Gentleman in public while harboring a condescending attitude toward women in general and domineering over his wife, Scarlett O’Hara, in private. The fact that Captain Butler can, plausibly — and by virtue of his ungentlemanly character qualities — win the affection of a smart, spirited, ambitious, haughty, manipulative young woman like Scarlett, a woman who might easily play the part of the feminist girlboss in our milieu, outrages feminists. The apparent fact that he is most attractive to her when least gentle towards her offends them terribly. The fact that women can and do fantasize about the likes of Rhett Butler frustrates them, for it renders the progress of their project problematic. And their reaction to these facts is very telling. Feminists see in Gone with the Wind not a rebuke of their aims, not a reason to rethink their project, but rather a rationale for them — a reason for a doubling down.

Gender feminists, such as Sandra Lee Bartky, argue for a “feminist reconstruction of self and society [that] must go far beyond anything now contemplated in the theory or politics of the mainstream women’s movement.” Bartky . . . says, “A thorough overhaul of desire is clearly on the feminist agenda: the fantasy that we are overwhelmed by Rhett Butler should be traded in for one in which we seize state power and reeducate him.” Bartky, however, does not advocate any authoritarian measures . . . She cautions that “overhauling” desires . . . may have to wait for the day when feminist theorists develop an “adequate theory of sexuality.” In her apocalyptic feminist vision, women as well as men may one day be radically reconstructed. We will have learned to prefer the “right” way to live.15

As you will soon see, the apocalyptic vision that Bartky envisions simply is the United Community of The Republic of the Future. Anna Bowman Dodd foresaw the direction feminism would take and critiqued it. Before I turn again to her text, however, let me make two observations about the feminist vision for the future articulated by Bartky, (which vision I earlier identified as the only way forward for feminism, i.e., its only alternative to aimlessly languishing):

1. Feminism trades in love for politics, which is to say, its a bad deal. — I once heard a professor of political science describe a political life as “sleeping with people who don’t love you.” He meant that in politics you must “get into bed,” as it were, with people who do not care about you, people who stand with you only for the sake of advancing their own agendas. If this is accurate, as I think it is, then we can say feminism wants women to trade in the natural fantasy of sleeping with a loving man (yes, Rhett does love Scarlett) for the entirely unnatural one of sleeping with many predatory men, and this for the sake of…what? For the sake of emasculating the first man, the one whom they first found so attractive in his semi-barbarism? What’s the good in that? How is that a goal worth trading in a private for a public life? Answer: it simply isn’t, which is why “romance is [and will, let’s hope, remain] a major cause of defection from the gynocentric enclave” that is contemporary feminism.16

2. Feminism is Totalitarian, which is to say, it aims to work political evil. — It explicitly aims to completely capture the State and use its coercive power to psychologically re-, or, perhaps more accurately, de-form men (and, of course, traditional women, too). In answer to this aim, which is, somehow, simultaneously sinister and risible, I cannot do better than Christina Hoff Sommers: “For her authoritarian disdain, de Beauvoir deserves our liberal censure. But the less authoritarian feminists also deserve it. No intelligent and liberal person — no one who has read and appreciated the limpid political prose of George Orwell or who has learned from the savage history of twentieth-century totalitarianism — can accept the idea of a social agenda to ‘overhaul’ the desires of large numbers of people to make them more ‘authentic.’”17

The point of all this is not that Rhett Butler is the most excellent of men. Nor is it that the more traditional Southern gentlemen he frequently ridicules are in all ways superior to him. I deny both of those possibilities. The point is that feminism fails conspicuously to understand Butler, and, consequently, cannot understand Scarlett, and, therefore, cannot credibly claim to understand the true interests of men or women. Instead of encouraging women to dream of coercively reeducating willful men, while offering nothing at all in the way of inspiring models for young men to emulate, as feminism does, an education worthy of the name would teach young men to triangulate between historical and literary models of manly excellence, e.g., Achilles and Odysseus, Captain Butler and Squire Allworthy, Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington, as well as philosophical models of manly greatness, such as Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man and Machiavelli’s Prince, to enable them to form for themselves a more or less common standard of gentlemanly goodness suitable for their time and place. It would do the same with and for young women, just as it would teach them to hold the men in their lives to high standards. And in this way it would inoculate young people against feminism. . . .

So much for the feminist attack on “gentleman” — the term and the idea. Why does it substitute the term “citizen”? There are at least two obvious reasons: the term is 1) gender-neutral and 2) wholly political. It therefore supports the feminist dream of a gender-neutral society and the priority of the political in feminist thinking. The idea of the Gentleman (and the Lady), on the contrary, is gendered and trans-political. A Gentleman may be a political man. He may even be best suited of all people for political rule, but his virtues and breeding are trans-political. They are not tied to a particular regime or nation-state. A Gentleman is a gentleman everywhere and always. Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian of the 20th century, the protagonist of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, is very similar to Squire Allworthy, an English gentleman of the 18th century, a main character in Fielding’s Tom Jones. And they both resemble the portrait Aristotle paints of a noble and good man (kalokagathos) in his Ethics. The manners, tastes, loyalties of a Gentlemen may be culturally inflected, but his code is not. His education looks up to the noble or beautiful, not the legal or customary. A citizen, on the contrary, is of one place, one regime (although there could, in theory, be a World State). The status and virtues of citizens are defined by a ruling power. Citizens are creatures of the law. Now, my purpose in saying all this is not to denigrate citizenship. It is only to acknowledge that the citizen is inferior in point of human virtue to the Gentleman, and to point out that feminism (and socialism) prefers of these two possibilities the lower to the higher.

I’ve spent so much time on the phenomenon of the Gentleman, because it is, I believe, the place to start, and the standpoint from which, to make a forceful, noble critique of feminism. Dodd seems to agree with me. Her narrator in The Republic of the Future is, after all, a Gentleman, and the first observation that he makes in the chapters Dodd devotes to the relations of men and women in the United Community is that the men are known only as citizens: there is no place for the Gentleman, for his distinctive Virtues, Greatness, in a socialistic feminist Utopia. . . .

Wolfgang is a Swedish gentleman, but he finds himself in a society that has no place for him. He is interested in this society. He has come to observe it. He is possessed of a letter of introduction, as I’ve said, but he can’t find the citizen to whom the letter is addressed. He’s “not at home,” and this, we soon learn, is the norm. People in the United Community are rarely at home. It’s just a bit of good luck that the citizen’s daughter is home when Wolfgang calls. For it will be from this “plain but seemingly agreeable, intelligent young woman” that he will learn most of what he learns about life under “ideally perfect” socialism. He and she fall into “the agreeable intricacies of a lengthy conversation” (26).

It is only by conversing that Wolfgang learns his interlocutor is a woman. It is a peculiarity of the United Community, the first indication of its truly radical commitment to gender-neutrality, that “the women dress so exactly like the men . . . that it is somewhat difficult to tell the sexes apart.” Even so, Wolfgang observes that the “[w]omen usually betray themselves as soon as they speak, by their voices.” (He knows, of course, that, despite the lengths the society he is visiting has gone to to obscure the fact, there are precisely two sexes, male and female, and that the English word “woman” (very usefully) signifies “adult human female.” The conventions of the United Community make it difficult to tell men and women apart, but they do not alter the natural, underlying forms that produce such differences between males and females as tone of voice.18 Wolfgang knows, in other words, that sex is not “performative.” He knows that it is not a social construct. He knows that the political decision to suppress all the typical differences between males and females, the decision to make men and women as alike in their social presentations as they can be made, cannot possibly alter or reveal anything about the sexed nature of human beings. And he knows, as do we, that all or most of the human communities that have ever existed have made a different decision. They have decided — if that’s the right word in this context — to accentuate the typical differences between men and women. They have laid certain social expectations on men and women. Thus, “be a man” or “become a woman” have been and are intelligible statements in all or most human communities, but only if they aren’t taken too literally. One cannot decide or make an effort to be male. One simply is or is not male. One can, however, decide to conform or not to the expectations of one’s society.19 One can decide to embody or not one’s community’s interpretation of gender, which is to say, its mode of representing the reality, the beauty, the meaning of sexual difference.20 And, to conclude, finally, this string of obvious points that are, bizarrely, no longer obvious to many people in the West today, I note that any one person’s reason(s) for conforming, or not, to the expectations of his or her community may or may not be responsible, healthy and-or sincere). Now, you may say that our society has taken the project of gender neutrality (or sexual obscurantism) much farther than has the United Community, but I am not so sure. Our men and women are not required to dress alike, and the seemingly impressive fact that they’re permitted to surgically and chemically alter their bodies so as to obscure their natural sex is less impressive than it appears to be. Anatomical alterations are only much more violent versions of the selfsame obscurantism that is practiced in the United Community: willful changes to bodies, like changes to wardrobes, are, in final analysis, cosmetic.

Why, then, does the United Community require that men and women dress alike? Why does it actively obscure the difference between them? Why does it require, moreover, that they dress “as simply, economically, and sensibly as possible”? The answer to this question is not immediately clear, but I think it is ultimately easy to discern. The United Community aims at the “perfecting of the woman movement,” which is to say the “final emancipation of women,” women’s “true freedom” — or, one might say, a condition in which women live “as freely as men,” in “ideal equality,” i.e., possessed of “complete and co-equal man-freedom” (31, 36, 39; cf. fn. #10). (As the last of these formulations makes clear, Dodd predicted that the women’s movement would make the model of male freedom its ideal and encourage women to live like men, thereby leaving behind, completely neglected (or turned over to robots), all the aspects of life that women traditionally took care of, such as childrearing and homemaking, and, moreover, cutting women off from any benefits there might be for them in paying close attention to the subtle and not so subtle differences between men and women). It soon becomes clear that, to make this freedom complete, the United Community must do all it can to make its women unattractive, for, as the people, but especially, it seems, the women, of this State, have, at long last, learned, “the beauty of their sex was the chief cause of their long-continued former slavery” (36). It is for this reason, Wolfgang learns, that the women in the United Community don’t (or, at least, say they don’t) want to be beautiful, lovely, or pleasing to men.

Identical clothing is hardly the only measure taken by the State to achieve the emancipation of women. Kitchens and cooking are abolished too. What more effective way could one devise to ensure that no woman is ever again trapped in such a prison! Food is prepared by “State scientists” in Chicago and flown, “done up in bottles or in pellets,” in precisely the necessary quantities, to the homes of citizens, who “take [their] food as we drink water, wherever we may happen to be, when it’s handy and when we need it” (28). This arrangement is entirely satisfactory to Wolfgang’s young interlocutor, except, she allows that,

I sometimes do wish I had lived in the good old times, in the nineteenth century, for instance, when such dear old-fashioned customs were in vogue as having four-hour dinners, and the ladies were taken into dinner by the gentlemen and everyone wore full dress — the dress of the period, and they used to flirt — wasn’t that the old word? over their wine and desert. (30)

In our era of fast food and fast-paced lives we may well sympathize with this emancipated woman, and we might notice that her nostalgia extends not only to old-fashioned modes of food preparation and consumption. It’s a nostalgia too for an old-fashioned set of gender norms that dictated different manners of dress and conduct for men and women, a formal, civilized code, to be sure, but one that allowed within its parameters plenty of room for flirtation (and this, I imagine, of such a style as tended to be rather more highbrow than is typical today).

Such nostalgia is not to be indulged in the United Community, however. The romantic institutions of the past had to go. So does Wolfgang’s ideologically-educated interlocutor now hurry to declare to him, rather eloquently. It was, she insists, the price of emancipation!

[I]f kitchens and cooking and long dinners hadn’t been abolished, the final emancipation of women could never have been accomplished. The perfecting of the woman movement was retarded for hundreds of years, as you know, doubtless, by the slavish desire of women to please their husbands by dressing and cooking to suit them. When the last pie was made into the first pellet, woman’s true freedom began. She could then cast off her subordination both to her husband and to her servants. Women were only free, indeed, when the State prohibited the hiring of servants. Of course, the hiring of servants at all was as degrading to the oppressed class as it was a clog to the progress of their mistresses’ freedom. The only way to raise the race was to put every one on the same level, to make even degrees of servitude impossible. (31-32)

Here we see Dodd anticipating Beauvoir. The abiding obstacle to the goals of feminism, she suggests, is not the chauvinism of men. It is not the patriarchy. It is the desire of women to be pleasing to men. That is what most of all needs to be engineered away if the final emancipation of women is to be achieved.

And it is achieved in the United Community only with the help of technology, which automates and centralizes food preparation and housekeeping. Dodd is insistent about this. In this way she anticipates all the modern inventions that rendered housekeeping rather less time consuming than it was in ages past. A byproduct of the push to automate and centralize housework so as to liberate women from “domestic drudgery,” however, is that houses become “hideous.” “Each is furnished by state law, exactly alike,” because no human being can be bothered to invest time and energy in beautifying a home (32). Everything in the society militates against it. The emphasis on equality, on freedom, on the public sphere, on the State — all are more or less incompatible with attention to the private delights of the single family home. “Perhaps it is this latter fact,” Wolfgang surmises, “which accounts for my never being able to find the good citizen . . . at home” (34). Instead of being in and around the home, citizens of the United Community are always “gone to the public club, or to the bath, or to the Communal Theater” (ibid). So great is their aversion to the private life in this socialistic State that “the word ‘home’ has entirely dropped out of the language. A man’s house has in truth ceased to be his home” (40). . . .

It is when he realizes this that Wolfgang can no longer keep from judging the ideology of the United Community that entails its regrettable “progress.”

This wonderful community has done much, of that I am convinced, in the development of ideal freedom; but there appears to be a fatal blight somewhere in its principles, a blight which seems to have destroyed all delight in domestic life.” (34)

Have you encountered, or could you compose, a comment on feminism that is at once as charitable and as witheringly accurate as that? . . .

In his fourth letter Wolfgang expounds further on this theme, which is to say on the death of family life and romance in the United Community. In this part of her Republic Dodd reminds us of an important truth that has been known to thoughtful souls in the West since classical times, at least since Plato wrote his Republic. The truth is that socialism and eros (romantic desire) do not mix. Romantic love is a private passion. Total devotion to the political community stifles eros. Dodd shows her understanding of this point by having Wolfgang observe that there has been “a gradual decay of the erotic sentiment” in the United Community. Indeed, he notes, “the prettiness which has descended to some of the women fails to awaken any old-time sentiment or gallantry on the part of the men” (37). But how and why, exactly, does this withering away of erotic desire take place? Why does gender-neutrality and the politicizing of all of life kill eros? —

It will be easier, I think, to answer this question once we have considered the observations Wolfgang makes about public life in the United Community. He observes, first of all, that the women have thrown themselves with abandon into political activity in an almost frenzied spirit. The men, on the contrary, languish without ambition, lifelessly.

It is now nearly two hundred years since women have enjoyed the same freedom and rights as men. It is interesting and curious to note the changes, both upon the character and nature of the two sexes, which has been the result of this development. One’s first impression, in coming here, is that women are the sole inhabitants of the country. One sees them everywhere — in all the public offices, as heads of departments, as government clerks, as officials, as engineers, machinists, aeronauts, tax collectors, firemen, filling, in fact, every office and vocation in civil, political and social life. The few men — by comparison, whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. Their predominance in office just now is owing to their over-powering number, the women’s vote polled being ten to one of that of the men. (38)

Here Dodd predicts with remarkable clairvoyance and endearing hyperbole the advent our gender-neutral society, the one described by Emmanuel Todd in Lineages of the Feminine (see footnote #8 above). Or, to put the point more more modestly, she predicts a real, progressive dynamic that is unfolding in our society and that would be unfolding with greater effect if feminism were to gain the kind of political stranglehold on our society that it has attained in the United Community.21

With their emancipated, united, and therefore, dominant, political power, the women of the United Community have revolutionized society, “modifying the domestic, social and political laws of the community” totally (38). They have, for instance, decided, predictably, but nonetheless radically, to do away with the institution that, when “considered in its true light,” was “perhaps the chief cause of the degradation of women,” viz. motherhood (39). After all — a woman cannot be a completely free agent when she has children, dependent beings that they are, to care for. The women have, therefore, used their democratic mega-majority to pass laws “providing that children almost immediately after birth should be brought up, educated, and trained under state direction” (39). And in doing so they have only been good feminists. Feminists cry out for the State to relieve them of the duties of motherhood. Under feminism, the State becomes, not so much Big Brother, as Big Mother. . . .

So, then, in light of the changes wrought by the triumph of feminism, which is to say, by the triumph of the ideology that seeks solely to emancipate women, those “triumphs” I’ve just described, it becomes clearer why eros has died out in this singular community.

“A man’s house has ceased in truth to be his home. There are no children there to greet him, his wife, who is his comrade, a man, a citizen like himself, is as rarely at home as he. Their food can be eaten anywhere — there is no common board; there is not even a servant to welcome the master with a smile. The word wife has also lost all its original significance. It stands for nothing. Husband and wife are in reality two men having equal rights, with the same range of occupation, the same duties as citizens to perform, the same haunts and the same dreary leisure. Is it therefore . . . to be wondered at, that all ideas of love, and that all strong mutual attraction and affections should have died out between the sexes? Man loves, longs for passionately and protects with tender solicitude only that which is difficult to conquer. The imagination must at least be inflamed. But where there is no struggle, no opposition, no conditions which breed longing, desire, or the poetry of a little healthy despair, how is love or any sentiment at all to be awakened or kindled? Here there is no parental authority to make a wall between lovers, nor is there inequality of fortunes, nor any marked difference between the two sexes, even in their daily duties or in their lives. I am more and more impressed with the conviction as I look into this question — this question of what we should consider the growth of an abnormal indifference between the sexes — that the latter cause is perhaps the one which has been chiefly instrumental in bringing about so complete a change over the face of the passions. Woman has placed herself by the side of man, as his equal in labor and vocation, only to make the real distance between them the greater. She has gained her independence at the expense of her strongest appeal to man, her power as mistress, wife and mother. How can a man get up any very vivid or profound sentiment or affection for these men-women — who are neither mothers nor housekeepers, who differ in no smallest degree from themselves in their pursuits and occupation? Constant and perpetual companionship, from earliest infancy to manhood and old age has resulted in blunting all sense of any real difference between the sexes. (40-42)

Is Dodd describing the United Community in 2050 or the United States in 2025? . . .

The United Community has done everything that it is possible to do to make men and women equal. Women have even surpassed men in political power. And they have been enabled to “stand at last on as absolutely equal a physical plane with men as it is possible to make them” (39). And yet it is not possible, we should not forget, to make them absolutely the physical equals of men. In two highly salient ways women remain unequal in the United Community, even though the project of feminism is there accomplished.

Let me only note these two points as I close. They both pertain, intriguingly, to the existential conditions, the very life, of this, of all, political community.

1. Women are worse in war. “Woman found that whereas she was eminently fitted for all men’s avocations in time of peace, when it came to war she made a very poor figure of a soldier” (43).

2. Only women give birth. “Women were still to continue to bear children, or else the socialistic society itself would cease to be” (39).

Birthing and killing, natality and mortality, life and death — to be a feminist is to be alienated from these basic, existential conditions of human community, and the fact that Dodd has her Republic of the Future “solve” the problem of warfare by having it “voted down” and replaced by the irresistible arbitration of “women-diplomatists” is, I suspect, another indication that she has learned from Plato about how to teach reality by tracing Utopia. . . .

W ~ 4 ~ S ~ 5 ~ H ~ 8

I am currently teaching O3A for the first time. I taught O3B for the first time last year. Below you can read a lightly edited and amended version of the introductory statement that I attached to the syllabus that I handed out on the first day of school. It is similar but not identical to the statement I composed for O3B last year and published on Questing. This statement treats Omnibus 3A and 3B as a single, two-part course. I hope you find it, well, enlightening.

Welcome, students, to Omnibus 3A! As I conceive of it, Omnibus 3 is a two-part, in-depth introduction to the Enlightenment – its Principles, Promises, Problems, and Prospects. “What was the Enlightenment?” you may ask. Roughly speaking, it was an ambitious intellectual movement in the 17th-18th centuries in Europe that sought to re-conceive of the relationship between science and society: it sought to make science for the first time in human history the foundation of human society. The philosophers of the Enlightenment sought to use unaided human reason to delegitimize the twin authorities of Monarchy (“Throne”) and Clergy (“Altar”) that had defined European civilization for a millennium, as well as, crucially, the Christian political-theology that had sustained those authorities and ceaselessly endeavored to delineate their distinct domains. In place of these authorities the philosophers of the Enlightenment sought, with interesting exceptions and variations, to institute Consent (variously interpreted by them in terms of Representation, Popular Sovereignty, or “the general will”) as the final principle of political legitimacy, and to legitimate that principle by other, new, purely rational moral principles. These new principles were in turn thought by their originators to be grounded finally in a new understanding of nature, i.e., in new natural-scientific principles or laws.

In Part 1 of Omnibus 3 (this class), we will focus on the Principles and Promises of the Enlightenment, its “bright side,” if you will; but we will also touch on certain of its Problems. Half of our readings will be from the 17th century, but we will also spend significant time in the 16th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Omnibus 3A will introduce you to several of the philosophers I alluded to above, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, men who are responsible for formulating many of the foundational ideas and institutions of the modern world, the world we inhabit. The promise of the Enlightenment was that by reorganizing society on a rational or scientific basis mankind could bring about and sustain Peace, Prosperity, and Progress on earth.

Part 2 of Omnibus 3, Omnibus 3B (Spring semester), focuses on the Problems and uncertain Prospects of the Enlightenment in our day and age, its “dark (or night) side,” if you will. I will not fail, however, to dwell on the fact that the Enlightenment’s legacy includes much that is reasonably considered to be progress and of great benefit to humanity, e.g., advances in medical science. This class begins with a brief look back at the foundational ideas studied in 3A, but it proceeds quickly to the 19th century, which century saw novelists and philosophers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche radically question the truth and the goodness of key Enlightenment ideas.

Throughout Omnibus 3 I will not fail to teach you the key historical events of the modern period that bear on the Legacy of the Enlightenment – especially the wars of the 20th century – and the historical contexts in which the authors we read wrote. My focus, however, will always be on teaching you to read, understand, and analyze Great Books. The ideas in these books are oftentimes challenging, but I am confident that you, as intelligent 10th and 11th grade students, can grasp them if you apply yourselves. Under no circumstances, however, do I expect you to fully understand any text or idea all on your own. My job, which I take seriously, is to make the key ideas intelligible and interesting to you. I want in the first place to enable you to see that many of the massive features of the world you live in – especially science and technology, state-based politics, capitalism, and democracy – have their origins in the Enlightenment. In the next place, I want to teach you to evaluate those (and all) ideas soberly (and from a Christian perspective, if you are so inclined). Ultimately, I want to equip you to answer for yourselves the question that I believe is the defining question of our (postmodern) times, namely, “Was the Enlightenment a mistake?”

Let me conclude my overview of Omnibus 3 with a brief note on the Protestant Reformation and its relationship to the Enlightenment. Omnibus 3 covers the time period between the middle of the Reformation (in the 16th century) and today. It is important to remember that the Reformation preceded the Enlightenment and that these two revolutions in thinking overlapped in time and were related in complicated ways. One of our important goals in Omnibus 3A is to unpack the relationship between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. We will focus on this question especially when we read the writings of John Calvin; but let me make some preliminary comments now. On the one hand, the Reformation and the Enlightenment were very different. The Enlightenment was a change in philosophy. The Reformation was a change in theology (and religious practice more generally). The Enlightenment aimed to establish a secular society. The Reformation aimed to do no such thing. On the other hand, however, there are similarities between the movements. Both attacked established religious authorities (the Catholic Church) and used human reason to do so; but, crucially, and to return again to differences, the leaders of the Reformation, unlike those of the Enlightenment, held that unaided human reason was insufficient to save humanity. Only faith in Christ could do that. Faith, true faith, was, for the Reformers, necessary to save souls and sustain societies. The Reformation thus represents one modern alternative to the Enlightenment, one of the “roads not taken,” as it were, by modern societies at large.

Here now is a glance at the themes, texts, and questions we will cover in Omnibus 3A.

Semester at a glance

Unit 1: Francis Bacon & the Origins of Modern Science

• Texts: The New Organon (1620, excerpts) and The New Atlantis (1627, whole)

• Key questions: What is modern science, and what is its relationship to modern society?

Unit 2: Thomas Hobbes & the Origins of the Modern State

• Text: Leviathan (1651, excerpts)

• Key questions: What is the modern state, and what justifies this political form? What are its virtues and its vices?

Unit 3: John Calvin & the Origins of Protestantism

• Text: Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559, excerpts)

• What are Calvin’s teachings on God, man, government, and economy? Could they be applied today with good effects?

Unit 4: John Locke & the Origins of Capitalism

• Texts: “Letter on Toleration” (1689, whole) and Two Treatises of Government (1689, excerpts)

• How does Locke modify Hobbes? What is the rational basis of capitalism?

Unit 5: Jean-Jacques Rousseau & the Origins of the contemporary Counter-Enlightenment

• Texts: “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” (1750, whole) and The Social Contract (1762, excerpts)

• What is Rousseau’s critique of Bacon, Hobbes and Locke? Is he right? Does scientific and technological progress improve humanity or not?

Unit 6: Alexis de Tocqueville & the Origins of Democracy

• Text: Democracy in America (1835, 1840, excerpts)

• How did American democracy begin and how might it end?

“Belief in Progress is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians. It is the individual relying upon his neighbors to do his work. There cannot be Progress (true progress, that is to say, moral) except within the individual and by the individual himself . . .

One must work, if not from inclination at least from despair, since, as I have fully proved, to work is less wearisome than to amuse oneself . . .”1

~ ~ ~ Charles Baudelaire, The Intimate Journals, 29-30

Americans have neglected their prophet against socialism. And they would be well-advised to repent of this intellectual-political sin. Penitential reading of a forgotten classic might well open their eyes anew to certain sources of and threats to their nation’s freedom and greatness.2

What do I mean by these bold assertions?

Well — in 1887, more than thirty years before the rise of murderous, socialist despotisms in the Soviet Union and North Korea, and more than sixty years before George Orwell warned the West with his 1984 that “English Socialism” threatened to bring the advent of an inhuman, totalitarian State, a clairvoyant American writer, Mrs. Anna Bowman Dodd, not only anticipated the violent, devilish extremes to which socialists would go to make their ideal society real: she skewered their ideal — socialism’s fully-realized best-case scenario — with The Republic of the Future, Or, Socialism a Reality,3 a futuristic novella as lighthearted in tone as it is incisive in content. Lamentably, however, this text is neglected today, barely known. It deserves to be well-known, for it is well worth knowing. Dodd managed to fully grasp and devastatingly critique in its infancy the very ideology of socialistic Progressivism that presently predominates on the political Left in the United States and among its young and educated cohorts.4 Her critique in different ways anticipates and indicts both the violent, revolutionary mode of socialism that engulfed Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and China in the 20th century and that more benign form of the ideology that obtained in Scandinavia (social democracy, the “Nordic Model”) and still impresses apologists for socialism in America today.5 With respect to both manifestations of the ideology Dodd invites us to forget, momentarily, the historically real, which in political life always falls short of the ideal. If she were alive today — if she had lived to witness the socialist experiments of the 20th century that she anticipated — I doubt Dodd would advise us to combat the enduring allure of socialism by pointing solely to its historical failures, to the exclusion of another strategy: utopian hopes are inherent in and integral to socialism; therefore, we who would oppose it should follow Anna Bowman Dodd by critiquing the object of those hopes.6 With The Republic of the Future Dodd invites us to ask, “Is the socialist ideal even worth aspiring to, much less fighting for?” And she leads us to conclude that it is not by presenting to us a plausible and to my mind enlightening picture of that ideal made real.7

So, then, let us do something to revive anti-socialist thinking in America. Let us read The Republic of the Future to recover Dodd’s prophetic critique.

In this essay I offer a comprehensive, but not necessarily exhaustive, reading of The Republic of the Future that highlights the ways in which it anticipates and speaks to developments, problems, and questions that matter today, e.g., technological progress and its effects on labor, the “emancipation” of women, “the aristocracy of intellect,” and, of course, the key issue-question of wealth distribution: should we look to central planning or lionize “private enterprise” as the vehicle for achieving a just and satisfactory distribution of wealth? The prophetic message of The Republic of the Future — which integrates insights into all these issues — is that the upshot of a completely successful socialist revolution would be humanly repulsive, would not entail a transformation of human nature so much as a deformation of it, and not so much the liberation of human capital as its active suppression. So, as I aim to show in this Essay, Anna Bowman Dodd, because of her clairvoyance and insight, not to mention her literary charm, deserves to be ranked alongside — or even before — such luminary, far-seeing novelists as Orwell and Aldous Huxley, whose works she anticipated in important ways and complements in others.8

But what exactly is her unique contribution? What Dodd does in The Republic of the Future is take socialists at their word, imagine an ideal state organized on their principles, then describe the reality of that state from the standpoint of a visitor from a non-socialist society. In the end this visitor concludes that he would prefer to live in his own society, despite its manifest flaws. Dodd’s procedure invites us to surmise that the reality of life in an ideally socialist nation-state would actually be inferior to the realities of life in the real states of Western history, e.g., Dodd’s own — late 19th century America. It spurs us to suspect there is “a fatal blight somewhere in [the] principles” of socialism that will forever prevent socialist societies from satisfying human hearts (34).

Now, because Dodd, unlike Huxley and Orwell, focuses on the socialist ideal, as opposed to fantastic distortions or perversions of it that could conceivably arise under modern conditions, the dystopia she imagines differs (markedly) from theirs: Dodd’s “United Community” is not preposterously promiscuous, socially stratified, or mentally retarded like Huxley’s “World State”; nor is it ultra-warlike and brutally hardscrabble like Orwell’s “Oceania.” The citizens of the United Community are socially, politically, and economically equal, and all this without being impoverished or disenfranchised. That Dodd still invites us to judge this society a dystopia, not a utopia, is the puzzle: it is the key fact we must try to understand and that I believe accounts for the enduring relevance of Dodd’s little book. What makes this successful, peaceful, egalitarian society less than choice-worthy for noble and intelligent individuals?

In sum, the differences between Dodd and Orwell-Huxley are attributable to the fact that in Dodd’s futuristic society socialism has achieved (to the extent that it is possible) what it aimed at — i.e., a blend of equality, democracy, self-realization, and community wherein equality is paramount.9 Dodd does not so much warn about the ways in which a revolution in favor of these ideals could be coopted by a tyrannical clique. She warns that the blend of ideals is inherently defective. The up-shot of her trenchant analysis is that life under successful socialism is of necessity highly unsatisfying to the human heart — sinister in important ways — in spite of economic and political achievements, (which are, as we know from history, not the guaranteed outcome of socialist revolutions) . . .

So, then, with all this in mind, let us open our text. Let us endeavor to descry Dodd’s prophetic meaning fully by reading her novella closely.

We learn quickly that its story is set in the 21st century — the year 2050, to be precise — and that it consists of seven relatively short letters from a Swedish nobleman named Wolfgang to a “life-long friend and comrade” of his named Hannevig, who resides in Christiania.10 Wolfgang writes from a hotel in New York Socialistic City,11 a metropolis in the United Community — the socialistic nation-state that recently succeeded the United States of America. Wolfgang never states a reason for his visit to the United Community, but the letters he writes in the course of his not quite month-long stay in its “strange socialistic society” give us the sense that he is on a holiday. He appears to be a leisured nobleman interested in understanding and evaluating a society organized on novel principles, principles quite contrary to his own and his society’s.

Wolfgang tells in his first letter of the manner of his conveyance from Sweden to the socialistic city of New York. He travels in tremendous, technologically advanced luxury on what is essentially an underwater bullet train, and from the window of his car he observes many arresting scenes of undersea life. Of special interest to him is the “wholesale cannibalism” he witnesses “going on among the finny tribes, a cannibalism which still exists, in spite of the persistent and unwearying exertions of the numerous Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty among Cetacea and Crustacea” (11). Wolfgang matter-of-factly explains that these Societies undertake to deliver “proper Christian food” to undersea creatures and even to “punish” their cannibalism and other moral failings, and, moreover, that they continue with these absurd projects despite their manifest failure get results: according to one dismal “submarine missionary” Wolfgang meets on the train, “of all vertebrate or invertebrate animals, the fish is the least amenable to reformatory discipline.” Indeed, this missionary even confides to Wolfgang his impression that “fishes appear to have been born . . . without the most rudimentary form of the moral instinct, and, curiously enough, only flourish in proportion as they are allowed to act out their original degenerate nature” (12). Having relayed these impressions and facts, Wolfgang soon closes his first letter.

If it were not for one suggestive phrase, we might well wonder if Wolfgang’s first is connected in a serious way to the rest, which consider the character and quality of life in a futuristic socialist society. Yet, in closing it he declares that the wonders of his journey turned out to be a “fitting prelude” to all the surprises awaiting him in New York Socialistic City (13). What does he mean by this? What do his observations about his undersea train and conversation with the submarine missionary have to do with his subsequent account of life under socialism?

Let me hazard an answer to these questions after reviewing Wolfgang’s first letter in light of his closing remark about its significance.

We learn initially that the wider world Wolfgang inhabits is characterized by immense technological progress that has made global travel quick and comfy, at least for the well-to-do. It is also characterized, even dominated, however, by a certain sentimental moralism so alienated from nature that it prescribes the reformation of fishes. The insanity of this moralism is mitigated slightly — but only slightly — by the fact that it is based on the “Buddhistic doctrine of metempsychosis,” according to which the lower animals are human “souls in embryo.” This doctrine is, we learn, “universally accepted” in 2050, and it is its hegemony that seems to account for the continuing efforts of the missionary Societies to “elevate all tribes and species” in spite of the fact that, empirically speaking, the altruistic approach would be to leave them alone to live as their natures prompt. The letter’s two themes are technology and moral reform.

I suggest that Wolfgang considers his first letter a prelude to the rest because its two themes are integral to the socialist project as he comes to understand it. On the one hand, he avers in his fifth letter that, “if machinery had never been invented, socialism would never have been dreamed of,” for, he argues, “machinery was the true cause of the conflict between capital and labor” (46). We will contemplate this observation again when we come to it. For now it is sufficient to observe that just as technological progress made Wolfgang’s visit to the United Community possible it arguably made conceiving of that society possible, too, in the first place.

Now, the business about the fishes is slightly harder to explain, but I think we can say something like this. There is a kinship between the metempsychotic quasi-religion of the future that Dodd imagines and socialism.12 For the latter aims to reform mankind, to make it less selfish and competitive, more social and devoted to the common good. (Souls that are cannibalistic in their lower, animal existences will, one could surmise, be more likely to act competitively as humans — the difference between cannibalism and competition accounted for by humanity’s moral instinct). So, if my suggestion is correct, then we may expect Dodd to suggest that human beings will “only flourish in proportion as they are allowed to act out their original degenerate natures,” which is to say their fundamentally, though not completely, selfish, competitive natures. Or, perhaps, we may expect the inverse application, viz. that socialism is doomed to fail because it aims at a deep moral reformation of an incorrigible species, sets itself too much against the grain of human nature by relying very heavily on altruism, (and this even as it typically promotes atheism and materialism!).

Wolfgang opens his second letter expressing his astonishment at the “city of the Socialists” and its inhabitants. Due to his astonishment and confusion, he will, he says, stick to reporting his “experiences” and allow his friend to draw her own conclusions. (We may suppose Dodd extends the same invitation to us, her readers). Nevertheless, Wolfgang doesn’t even try to keep his language value-neutral: he does not exactly judge the city, but he does describe it in a decidedly negative way.

He is astonished first of all by the dreary look of the city. He dubs it “the very acme of dreariness.” What we might then call Wolfgang’s aesthetic critique of socialism takes up most of his second letter.

It begins by bemoaning the “miles upon miles . . . of little two story houses as like one unto another as two brown nuts” that make up a large portion of the city. Even though there are “parks and theatres and museums, and libraries, the Peoples’ Clubs, and innumerable state buildings,” these do little to nothing to break up the dreariness because they are “architecturally tasteless … utility has been the only feature considered in their construction” (20). Socialists in the United Community prioritize utility to the exclusion of beauty.13 But why?Does ugly uniformity follow necessarily from socialist principles? Wolfgang believes so. He informs Hannevig that every last detail of the city is arranged “according to the socialistic principle — by the people for the People.”14

I think the idea behind his observation is something like this. Whereas artistic taste is in all but the most exceptional cases the product of careful cultivation and is thus in essence aristocratic or elitist, utility is democratic, egalitarian: anyone can appreciate a tool that does its job or a house that is “comfortable, clean and orderly,” (as all houses in the Socialistic City are), but not everyone can appreciate — (much less bring into being) — a tool beautifully wrought or house tastefully appointed. Yet, what pleases the People must be prioritized under socialism, what makes them feel inferior outlawed. So socialists end up preferring utility in every case to beauty, unable as they are to tolerate marks of superiority; the ideal of equality issues in the reality of uniformity:

The abolition of poverty, and the raising of all classes to a common level of comfort and security, has resulted in the most deadening uniformity. Take for example, the aspect of the shop windows . . . only useful, necessary objects and articles are to be seen. The eye seeks in vain throughout the length and breadth of the city for anything really beautiful, for the lovely, or the rare. Objects of art and of beauty find, it seems, no market here. (22)

(Wolfgang knows that the government of the United Community periodically acquires interesting art objects for its museums, but since, as we learn later, that government is radically democratic — made up “of the people” — it can’t really be expected to solve for any deficit of aristocratic taste). Similarly, with respect to the government’s museums, Wolfgang notes only that citizens are “supposed” to enjoy them. He leaves us to suspect that for the most part they do not, and that the same is probably true with respect to their theaters and libraries — (a suspicion he will later confirm).

In fact, at the end of his second latter, Wolfgang denies that it makes sense to speak of “enjoyment” at all vis-à-vis the citizens of the United Community as

A more sober collection of people I never beheld. They are as solemn as the oldest and wisest of owls. They have the look of people who have come to the end of things and who have failed to find it amusing. The entire population appear to be eternally in the streets, wandering up and down, with their hands in their pockets, on the lookout for something that never happens. What indeed, is there to happen? Have they not come to the consummation of everything, of their dreams and their hopes and desires? A man can’t have his dream and dream it too. Realization has been found before now, to be exceedingly dull play. (23)

“[I]deally-perfect” socialists are, it turns out, “apathetic” and “dull.” If we were to judge societies by the kind of human beings they produce, as opposed to any more common standard, the United Community might be the worst of all. (To the self-undermining dynamic of socialism I noted at the end of my analysis of Wolfgang’s first letter, I can add another: socialism demands, and therefore must praise, courage and self-sacrifice, but it does so for the sake of a social order in which these are no longer needed or possible and in which desiring to do great deeds of courage, nobility, and sacrifice can only be suspiciously regarded. Great hearts should think twice, to say the least, before setting out to perfect society, for perfect societies have no use for great hearts).15

Now, one might suppose that a secure socialist regime could solve or at least mitigate the problems of artistic taste and personal boredom by providing for some small measure of individual autonomy in an attenuated private sphere: it makes sense for government buildings to be drab, but why can’t individuals beautify, say, their homes and storefronts?

Its a nice thought, but Wolfgang suggests it’s naïve. Socialism’s commitment to collectivism and (its conception of) equality preclude robust experiments in even small-scale private enterprise or artistic endeavor, for such pursuits arise out of and so point to aspects of ordinary human nature that socialism must suppress and deny, e.g., competitiveness — a drive to “be the best” (21). All the stores in New York Socialistic City “are run by the government on government capital; there is, consequently, neither rivalry nor competition,” (which are the main engines of ordinary human enterprise). Deprived of their profit motive, “shop keepers, who are in reality only clerks and salesmen under government jurisdiction, take, naturally, no personal or vital interest either in the amount of goods sold, or in the way in which these latter are placed before the public” (21-22). Similarly, homeowners — if they may be so called under socialism — are prevented from innovating by the principle of equality, “which has decreed that no man can have any finer house or better interior, or finer clothes than his neighbor” (21). As for home gardens — which are, surprisingly, allowed — Wolfgang reveals that the citizens of New York Socialistic City do not cultivate them, and this for a very interesting reason: they have internalized the latent distaste for manual labor that (I will suggest) resides in secret near the heart of socialist theory:

Never was there such monotony or such dulness. Each house is precisely like its neighbor; each house has so many rooms, so many windows, so many square feet of garden, which latter no one cultivates, as flowers and grass entail a certain amount of manual labor, which, it appears, is thought to be degrading by these socialists. (19)

The uniform drabness of the houses in particular and city-scape in general of New York Socialistic City is, then, overdetermined, as it were, by more than one aspect of socialist thought. —

Now, Wolfgang’s observation about the home gardens connects his aesthetic critique of socialism to the second, minor theme of his second letter. In this letter Wolfgang meditates anew on role of technology in socialist society. He observes that the socialists of New York have completely replaced the service industry with robots, and that, far from violating any tenets of socialism, this follows from their fundamental distaste for manual labor: “In a society where labor of a degrading order is forbidden by law, machinery must be used as its substitute” (18). Socialism may be or begin as a “labor movement,” but this is not necessarily because it values or respects hard labor. — It may be called a labor movement because it works for the “emancipation” of laborers; but this is simply to say it wants to eliminate labor from human life without rendering any former laborers destitute. (While technological progress may be the root cause of true conflict between capital and labor, it was also technology that made the socialist dream of emancipating laborers — or rather human beings in general from labor — possible). This project of emancipation, Dodd implies, actually presupposes that hard labor is an affront to human dignity.16

Now, in saying all of this, I have actually gone a ways beyond what Wolfgang says in his second letter. His first take on the emancipation labor by robotics is in actuality rather equivocal. He presumes it is “all well enough . . . from the laborer’s point of view. But for a traveller, bent on a pleasure trip, machinery as a substitute for a garrulous landlord, and a score of servants, however bad, is found to be a poor and somewhat monotonous companion” (18). In time, he will, however, sharpen his criticism, contending that the people of New York Socialistic City “are dying for want of work — of downright hard work . . .” (63).

But more on this later. For now, I reiterate that in his second letter Wolfgang confines himself to the subtle (but not inconsequential) observation that the emancipation of labor has made aspects of commercial life less human — and so less interesting and fun.17

In his third letter, Wolfgang turns from contemplating socialism’s successful emancipation of labor to its successful emancipation of women, which is also mainly effected by technology. (Note that Dodd sees feminism as implicit in socialism from the beginning). And, as in the case of labor’s emancipation, his view is that “successful” does not necessarily mean “good”: Dodd is critical of the feminist project of emancipation, its understanding of equality. Indeed, it is in this chapter, in the context of Wolfgang’s account of the effects of the emancipation of women, that Dodd has her narrator speak of the “fatal blight” in the principles of socialism . . . [to be continued] . . .

I’ve already written a good bit more on the third letter, but since that letter goes along with the fourth and fifth, forming a whole within the whole book, I’ll save what I’ve written on it for part 2 of this Essay.

W ~ 4 ~ S ~ 5 ~ H ~ 8

As many of you know, I am now a teacher in a classical-Christian school. Last year I taught primarily Writing and Rhetoric, but this year I’m also teaching in the school’s Omnibus sequence. Omnibus is a combined history and literature curriculum that covers the whole of the Western Intellectual Tradition from the Old Testament and Homer to the present day in six courses. Students usually start Omnibus in 7th or 8th grade and finish as seniors. The first Omnibus class I’ll be teaching is 3B, a class for 11th graders that covers roughly the years 1865 to the present day. (Omnibus 4 revisits the classical world). In the future I’ll also be teaching Omnibus 3A, which covers roughly the years 1600-1865. Together these two classes of mine constitute an introduction to the modern world . . .

Below is a slightly updated version of the opening statement I delivered with my syllabus on the first day of class. My thought is that we can understand this our contemporary, postmodern world as a referendum on the Enlightenment of the 17th-18th centuries.

Below the statement is the list of texts that I plan to cover in the class — some as wholes, most via excerpts or summations. A wholly adequate reckoning with our times would, of course, entail studying a much longer list . . .1

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OMNIBUS 3B, a course on the Promises, Problems, and Prospects of Enlightenment: INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT . . .

Omnibus 3B is a literary and historical introduction to the modern world, the world we live in, the 21st century Western world. Our goal is to understand as well as we can in one semester our moral, political, religious, and intellectual situation at the moment; but, the assumption of this course is that we cannot understand where we are without understanding the history and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries — the issues, ideas, questions, etc. that they raise.

But where should we begin? And how should we orient ourselves in studying this vast body of material?

There are a number of ways to answer these questions, but, in my opinion, we should start by referring back — briefly, by necessity — to the European Enlightenment of the 17th-18th centuries. Now, as you may or may not know, the Enlightenment was a kind of intellectual revolution: a group of thinkers in various European states undertook to question moral, political, and religious beliefs that had defined European civilization for many centuries. At the risk of oversimplifying greatly, they questioned the notion that the twin pillars of “throne and altar” should be considered the bases for healthy political life. (“Throne and altar” means basically the combination of Christian religion and hereditary monarchy). The 16th and early 17th centuries were full of warfare, much of it religious warfare, but the thinkers of the Enlightenment, men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Immanuel Kant, believed that they could use (unaided) human reason to discover moral principles and devise political institutions that would enable humanity to achieve lasting peace, prosperity, and progress (moral, political, scientific, technological, etc.). And, clearly, they were onto something. Their thinking gave us modern democracy, capitalism, constitutionalism, and other salutary staples of modernity. And yet — as you probably know, the subsequent centuries — the 19th and 20th centuries that will be our focus — were scarcely what the Enlightenment thinkers hoped for. They were characterized by cataclysmic wars and monstrous genocides and marred moreover by a Great Depression and dubious technological advances in the realms of weaponry and war-fighting. Over the same time period, and partly because of these developments, intellectuals and certain philosophers moved in the direction of relativism and irrationalism and even fell prey in the 20th century to “the lure of Syracuse,” (as Mark Lilla details in his helpful book The Reckless Mind).

With all this in mind, my hypothesis is that we can understand the 21st century as a kind of referendum on the Enlightenment.

In other words, as we look back at what the Enlightenment promised and the subsequent centuries delivered, we must decide for ourselves about the prospects for peace, prosperity, and progress in our times. Can we still hope for a world of enduring, even perpetual, peace and prosperity, or are war and depression ineradicable eventualities in human affairs? Will modern science and technology bring ever more human flourishing, or will they issue in some kind of inhuman hell? And can we rely on human reason alone to answer such questions, or do we need to search for forgotten spiritual resources in the old religious traditions that the Enlightenment disparaged, lest we lose all hope?

The texts we study in this class will not enable us to answer these questions definitively, but I hope they will help us to get a better grasp on them and set us up to continue investigating these and similar questions for years to come.

Texts

Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Immanuel Kant

(Speeches of Abraham Lincoln)

Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche

Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

Night, Elie Wiesel

(Speeches of Winston Churchill)

Animal Farm, George Orwell

The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard
“What is Enlightenment?”, Michel Foucault
Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker
The Idea of Enlightenment: A Postmortem Study, Robert C. Bartlett

Discourse on Thinking, Martin Heidegger
Contemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton

Below are comments on Enemies of the Permanent Things that express my preliminary understanding of and take on Kirk’s thought. I am sure I will have occasion to read and comment on more of his works in the future.

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What is the goal of conservatism? I’ve heard it said of conservatives that their main goal seems to be to slow down implementation of the policies proposed by liberals, and it has at times seemed to me that conservatives are struggling to conserve the policies and opinions of the previous generation of liberals. — Now, precisely if that is what conservatives typically do, we might be tempted to observe that that reality points up a problem for liberals at least as grave as the one it points up for conservatives: if each new generation of liberals tends to disagree with the last, then liberalism begins to look like little more than a cultural mood, a reflexive taste for the latest thing, not a principled ideology, even less a political philosophy. Yet, it is healthy for conservatives to not rest satisfied with such a rejoinder. In these days of conservative conflict and soul-searching, a judgement on conservatism by the eminent T.S. Eliot, who was a friend and mentor to Russell Kirk, ought to be pondered: "conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things." Enemies of the Permanent Things is a book by a man who has so pondered, a man who aims to articulate a vision of conservatism that evades Eliot’s indictment. Although Kirk does not explicitly take up this question in the book, I conceive of Enemies as a defense of a very particular answer to the question, "Conservative, what are you conserving?" Kirk answers, in effect, "The Western literary tradition," or, to use a key term of his, “humane letters.”

Now, Kirk would be the first to agree that just laws, stable institutions, open markets, and serious moral norms are all worthy objects of conservation. (He would emphasize the moral norms above all; indeed, to point the way toward a recovery of “normality” in literature and in politics is his most explicit aim in Enemies). Yet, even on the basis of Enemies, I think Kirk would argue that our ability to identify and (consequently) conserve each of these worthy objects is dependent on our facility for perceiving, judging, and discriminating well, and that this facility is nourished and maintained in and through nothing so much as the careful study of humane letters. Without the education provided by the good and great works of our Tradition, we really run the risk of conserving the wrong things. We may say, then, that humane letters are for Kirk the ground or foundation of healthy conservatism, such that the goal, or, rather, the chief goal, of conservatism ought to be to conserve humane learning — i.e., liberal education in the classical tradition. The alternative to such learning is what Kirk calls “the drug of ‘Ideology’” — “the belief that this world of ours may be converted into the Terrestrial Paradise through the operation of positive law and positive planning.”2 Humane learning inoculates against ideology, and it tends, Kirk suggests, to promote conservatism as a cast of mind.3 (And notice that this argument does not even touch on the private, personal value that I’m sure Kirk would agree inheres in every deep literary education and that might rightly be considered, insofar as anything like a cultural awareness of it exists, a worthy object of conservation).

According to Kirk, the literary tradition worth conserving includes, of course, Western civilization's greatest works of poetry, philosophy, and theology, i.e., “the canon,” but also lesser works of the "moral imagination," e.g, the novels of the talented "fabulist" Ray Bradbury and those of the gritty prophet-against-totalitarianism George Orwell. Such works are almost invariably informed by the canon, but they perform a somewhat different function than it. They not only appeal to new generations of readers, draw them into the Tradition, and help form in them souls humane and strong. They also enliven these souls to the particular spiritual and political threats of their times. So, to the question, “Why, Dr. Kirk, is the Western literary tradition worth conserving?” he replies (again, in effect), “It teaches and reminds human beings of the enduring moral norms that we ignore at our peril." These norms are Kirk’s “permanent things," and in his presentation they overlap with the classical and Christian virtues. As he avers early on in Enemies, "there is a norm of charity; a norm of justice; a norm of freedom; a norm of duty; a norm of fortitude."4 If it has been the task of the authors of the canon to fully disclose and articulate these norms, it has been (and is) the task of all those possessed of a strong moral imagination to make them ever new, and of all conservatives to see to it that they endure. That is Kirk’s conservatism as I presently understand it.

So, I am saying Kirk gives in the one book of his I have read strong answers to questions conservatives sometimes struggle to answer. His answers connect conservatism to permanence, to eternal things. They also distinguish it from ideological projects of social transformation without making of it a disposition reflexively opposed to change.5 I suggest that, even today, taking a Kirkian view of conservatism makes it possible to cut through a lot of nonsense in political debate, to get on with what matters, what will last. While we should not focus on one task or issue to the exclusion of all others, I say, on the basis of my reading of Kirk, let us give pride of place in our efforts to the education of the youth, to the restoration of discipline, rigor, and love of the humanities in our schools! What other worthy projects can succeed if this one fails? —

Given all this, all that is good about Enemies of the Permanent Things, I regret to say I found disappointing several of the later chapters, which deal with the thought of the ancient Greeks. Kirk follows (almost slavishly, it seems to me) the historical and theological scholarship of Eric Voegelin, and he authorizes a myriad of sweeping generalizations and unearned judgements about Greek thinkers. Such judgements do not encourage readers to encounter classical authors for themselves, and they are liable to be misleading or simply wrong.

Here is a representative example of the kind of analysis I found disappointing. In a paragraph meant to state definitively the upshot of Plato's philosophical project, Kirk makes this bizarre, unwarranted, possibly polemical declaration: "Socrates and Plato set to work restoring and elaborating the problems of order. Physis, nature, was not their light, but nomos, divine law."6 I think this judgement is demonstrably false, but it is actually more distressing to me that, in its context, the claim is not earned. Kirk does not engage in any close analysis of Plato's writings. He relies on a passage from Voegelin, one which, whatever its merits, does not, as far as I can tell, warrant the conclusion Kirk draws from it. That that conclusion is false may be understood by considering passages like the following two from Plato's Republic.

1. Of the extremely novel laws that will govern men and women in his just “city in speech,” Socrates at one point argues to his interlocutors, "Then we weren't giving laws that are impossible or like prayers, since the law we were setting down is according to nature. Rather, the way things are nowadays proves to be, as it seems, against nature."7

2. Later, of the imagined guardian-rulers of the same city, Socrates says, "I suppose that in filling out their work they would look away frequently in both directions, toward the just, fair, and moderate by nature and everything of the sort, and, again, toward what is in human beings . . ."8

In both cases, nature is presented as a standard over and against law. Divine authority is not invoked. (Moreover, the first passage indicates that, insofar as he treats laws as changeable, subject to error, Plato’s Socrates does not seem to believe law as such, nomos, is of divine provenance).

If you are inclined to defend Kirk on this point by arguing that there is a great deal more to say about Plato's view of law, nature, and the divine, know that I agree. That, in a way, is my point: given what I take to be the point of Enemies, Kirk should have either indicated the importance of the tension between law and nature in Plato and encouraged his readers to investigate it on their own or remained silent on the subject. I don’t see that any part of Kirk’s argument depends on a deep understanding of Plato, and what he says about him seems to me to discourage his readers from trying to obtain one.

To conclude, then: even if Kirk fails in Enemies to give an adequate account of Plato and classical Greek thought in general, he does give a compelling vision of the conservative mission in modernity. I found most of the book well worth pondering . . .

W ~ 4 ~ S ~ 5 ~ H ~ 8

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For it is better to submit to the blame of repetition than to omit anything that should be laid down.

~ ~ ~ St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 71

As you may recall, the title of the inaugural essay of Questing is “The Inquiry and Its Enemy.” In it I lay down the starting point and goals of my inquiry into the Tradition and the opinions and desires impelling me to undertake it. I also treat the inquiry as a “quest,” and this for two reasons. First, I understand it to be a necessarily long and arduous search — a search for as much of “reality as it is disclosed in and through the Tradition” as I may be able to attain. In this regard I call attention to the question, “What is Man?” For I sense that it is at the heart of the Tradition and that focusing on it will focus Questing without restricting its ambitious scope. Second, I am motivated to write, as opposed to simply reading and thinking, largely by my desire to neutralize, for myself and others, the grave threat to freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, that is the real, albeit shadowy, intellectual mode known as postmodernism. Most of my first essay attempts to characterize postmodernism (and give Questing an Arthurian flavor) by way of an anatomical metaphor: I speak of the “monster” of postmodernism as the enemy of my quest . . .

The present piece, “bridge” #2 in my return to Questing, has three parts — or planks, if you will. The first (linked here) is a light edit-update of my inaugural essay. You may want to reread it. The second, central one is a defense and re-articulation of three key aspects of Questing, namely 1) its status as a quest, 2) its initial take on postmodernism, and 3) its emphasis on “Great Books.” This part will respond in detail to three arguments that would, if valid, undermine the foundations of my project. — The third plank is brief statement about how I plan to incorporate the new Substack “Notes” feature into this “newsletter.”

Since writing “The Inquiry and Its Enemy,” I’ve encountered three objections to the basic positions it stakes out.1 The strongest of these objects to the idea of treating the inquiry as a quest — a task complete with “a known target (and known weapons in one’s possession in advance).” It is, on the contrary, rather more reasonable to think of an inquiry as something more “open-ended” that makes fewer “assumptions in advance.” Or so this argument goes. (To sharpen the point of this objection, one might say that considering the inquiry a quest is irrational and-or biased, since doing so seems to assume at the outset what the quest is supposed to demonstrate).

In addition to the brief statement of my thinking above, I want to make a two-fold answer to this first objection.

1. Setting out to refute (slay) an apparently deleterious intellectual mode or position (enemy) is not necessarily unphilosophical. Consider as follows. During my time in competitive debate (and graduate school), I more than once set out to refute an argument that ended up persuading me. Ergo, a will to refute is not necessarily incompatible with “open-endedness,” i.e., an open mind. On the contrary, the will to refute, coupled with integrity, impels you to work to understand the argument you wish to refute. It can energize an inquiry without necessarily prejudicing it, for it is possible to light out on a quest to refute a view that you eventually come to believe in part or in whole. In most cases, of course, this won’t happen, for the same integrity that impels you to understand your enemy’s position also impels you not to start a quest without due consideration. So, I doubt I’ll change my mind about the monster of postmodernism, but nothing I said in “The Inquiry and Its Enemy” precludes that eventuality. Similarly, with respect to the “weapons” at my disposal, i.e., the Great Books, I think the best way to discover their qualities as such is to test them in “battle.”
   
   I began with my own experiences (in debate and graduate school), but it’s probably more to the point to observe that my comportment in Questing, as articulated in “The Inquiry and Its Enemy,” is in keeping with the spirit of classical dialectic — the friendly or virtuous interrogation of opinion.2 As I understand, the spirit of modern science, originating with Descartes, calls on thinkers to divest themselves of all their opinions at the outset of their inquiries. The dialectical spirit, however, is different. It doesn’t scoff at opinion (or even assumption). It takes these as starting points, pursues them — in dogged fidelity to the logos or reasoning of a conversation — to their logical conclusions. Philosophy need not begin with a blank slate. It needs only the will (or courage) to follow reason. “The Inquiry,” as I said in the piece, might very well be called simply “A Starting Point.” I believe and will follow up everything I said in it, but I am open to revising my opinions and arguments — if and when the logos of my inquiry demands it. — It is, then, not a prejudice or a problem to think of this inquiry as a quest.3

2. Notwithstanding anything I said in the first response, Questing actually is open-ended inquiry into the Tradition, and for that reason the monster of postmodernism becomes its enemy: postmodernists do not countenance open-ended inquiries of any kind, much less ones into the Tradition. They do not believe fair or unbiased inquiries are possible. They think reason is always corrupted by power, privilege, and interest. Thus they trust (or say they trust) only the experiences of the powerless and marginalized. They reject (in the main) both modern science and classical dialectic (the twin applications of human reason that largely define the Tradition). They see them as self-serving, power-preserving masks. (As I said in “The Inquiry,” they also reject divine revelation, the other authoritative substrate of the Tradition, in the same way). On this view, the Tradition is little more than a catalogue of the prejudices of “dead white men.” Thusly postmodernism, in my view, forces honest, zetetic thinkers, no matter whether they are of the philosophical-scientific or theological stripe, into far more interested positions than they typically take and warrants them adopting somewhat more polemical modes of discourse than are natural for them, as I plan to do in at least some of my work for Questing: when reason is under attack, one cannot sincerely employ reason without acquiring an enemy.
   
   (Now, when I say postmodernism forces honest thinkers into a corner, as it were, I have in mind not only intellectual positions. It is not hard to find concrete examples of the ways in which Social Justice activism, one of the two “arms” of the monster of postmodernism, uses institutional authority to do this. Consider two increasingly common features of academic life in the U.S.: DEI statements and positionality statements. The former type of statement effectively asks potential new hires to explain how they will be Social Justice activists on and off campus, while the latter effectively asks scholars to swear allegiance to Social Justice dogma before making claims on the basis of their scholarship.4 Bryan Caplan has observed DEI “vows” are actually rather more demanding (read: deplorable) than McCarthy-era anti-Communist loyalty oaths. Whereas the latter required employees to state, merely, that they were not members of groups actively dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government, DEI vows require them to actively give personal assent to a specific, debatable moral-intellectual creed. The new vows are, then, not merely more demanding. They’re more insidious: they speak to scholars’ intellectual, as opposed to political, commitments. Instead of checking political loyalty, they jeopardize intellectual integrity. Whereas the older oaths actually prized (in principle, at least) freedom of inquiry (what one called “the free pursuit of truth”), the new vows poison it. Absent from the American academy, in other words, is this solid maxim of Kant’s: “Argue as much as you will and about what you will; only obey.”5 Ascendent there is this maxim of postmodernism: “Assent, only then may you argue.” Given this, has questing not become a necessity?). Questing is, indeed, a free-wheeling inquiry. It runs contrary to the ideological (or, as Nietzsche might say, “religious”) spirit of dogmatic, moralistic uniformity that is at work in America and has been dubbed “the Great Awokening.”

No less an authority than Francis Fukuyama makes the second argument I will answer here. It is in essence that what I call the monster of postmodernism is not nearly so influential as I say it is. In “The Inquiry,” I said it might as well be considered the “legislating school of thought in America today,” since it “lays down the law, as it were” for (especially) scholarly discourse. On the contrary, Fukuyama suggests postmodernism is more like a little imp than any kind of monster. In “The New Right Loves the State,” he argues as follows.

. . . it is hard to think of a time when the United States has been more free than it is in 2023. The much-feared tyranny of the woke Left exists only in certain limited sectors of U.S. society—universities, Hollywood, and other cultural spaces, and it only touches on certain issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity. It can be bad in these spaces, but most Americans don’t live there. People on the right are able to practice their religion, criticize the government, and attack their fellow citizens as never before. It is the anti-woke Right and not the woke Left that is seeking to use state power to limit individual freedoms. 

This strikes me as wildly misleading. Before I make my responses, however, notice that the above is not a sustained argument, although Fukuyama could, I’m sure, make one: the paragraph is an impressionistic take on an issue that readers are invited to compare to their own observation and experience. My response will take the same form and consist of the following four points.

1. What Fukuyama calls “the tyranny of the woke Left” and I in “The Inquiry” (following Pierre Manent) called “the despotism of gentleness” is certainly not confined to the spaces he mentions. In addition to them, it exists, and is arguably hegemonic, in corporate America and the federal bureaucracy, not to mention a great many elementary and high schools in the country. Against Fukuyama’s “limited sectors” model, the Great Awokening model asks, “what sectors of our society are effectively free of woke notions?”6

2. It is misleading to say that most Americans do not live in the spaces “the woke Left” dominates. Those spaces, universities and Hollywood, produce things like books and movies, things that circulate everywhere, even into homes — the places where just about every American lives. (Say what you will about conservative parents, but do you really think it makes sense to tell them that — since they don’t live in Hollywood, CA — they should not worry at all about the effects of woke notions on their children? Is it not obvious that Hollywood’s products are everywhere and are attractive to young people?). — And what about social media? How does Fukuyama’s model of woke influence account for that far-reaching, ultra-influential technology? How can he not speak to it? (Up until Elon’s timely takeover, Twitter was a powerful weapon in the arsenal of Social Justice activists, ground-zero of the despotism of gentleness; and we can’t really expect Mr. Musk to fight censorship all on his own. He can’t, after all, buy every institution captured by the woke).7

3. It is misleading to suggest the reach of the woke Left is somehow limited by its focus on issues related to race, gender, and sexual identity. Indeed, the main point of the ideology is that the whole of human affairs ought to be understood in terms of these identities, since each human being ought to be so understood. On this account of things, “certain issues related to” the aforementioned identities may crop up in quite all human institutions and interactions. — It is better to think of wokeness as way of looking at society (one that people take with them wherever they go) than as a point of view they adopt only when considering certain issues. In other words, saying that wokeness only touches on certain issues related to race and the rest is rather like saying Christianity only touches on certain issues related to Christ and his gospel . . .

4. Most importantly, the spaces in which Fukuyama concedes woke tyranny exists are dreadfully important spaces. They are the institutions above all responsible for educating Americans. Now, I happen to believe educating human beings is the most important human endeavor, the highest end or purpose of persons and societies, such that the West’s tradition of liberal education is its crowning jewel. But however that may be, a well educated population is obviously important for the long-term health of a country — especially a democratic one. Even if you only care about political issues of the moment, you must see that “political battles are first fought in the minds and hearts of the populace,” such that bad education leads to bad political outcomes.8 Fukuyama seems to be saying, although I can hardly believe he really means, “OK, sure, higher education and popular culture in America are being actively poisoned by Leftist ideology, but there’s no reason for the Right to worry. They can still go to church on Sundays!”

Richard Hanania recently made the third argument I want to address.

Hanania is an always interesting, often challenging writer, but he has a major flaw: he does not appreciate the Great Books! Indeed, he recently argued that reading them is not worth the time. His argument is not very challenging, and it has already been adequately answered; but I want to discuss it briefly, since it speaks to a key aspect of Questing, and because there is a chance that what I say will encourage a person or two to open a book, which would fully justify my efforts. (Remember that, as I explained in the “The Inquiry and Its Enemy,” Questing is in an attempt to understand myself and the world, especially the world of human affairs, by studying the Great Books). —

The first part of Hanania’s argument against Great Books appears in an essay on what he calls “Enlightened Centrism,” a way of approaching political issues embodied by the likes of Matt Yglesias, Steven Pinker and Bryan Caplan. The fifth of the eight “traits or beliefs” that unite this disparate group of thinkers is skepticism toward “certain kinds of philosophy, particularly old philosophy.” Hanania endorses this skepticism, along with the other traits of the “ECs.”

I am reluctant to mar this page by quoting much from Hanania’s screed, but some quotation is necessary for context. Here’s how he begins.

I doubt that many things I write will be informative about how to deal with societal problems 50 or 100 years in the future. The world will simply be too different. Why, then, would anyone think that it is reasonable to believe that ancient sages have much to tell us about the world today? . . . To understand the American administrative state, it’s better to read a textbook used by law students today than Aristotle . . .

After he received some criticism of this position, Hanania doubled down on it in another piece, “The Case Against (Most) Books.”

You may want to read Kant, Plato, and the Bible, because many people have been reading them for a very long time . . . I don’t believe in the “wisdom” to be found in Great Books . . . the idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical. If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them.

Before answering these arguments, let’s clarify what Hanania is really saying.
First, he is really only criticizing the pre-modern Great Books, those written “more than say four hundred years ago.” Thus, although he does (ludicrously) dismiss Kant in passing, his actual argument allows that Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and the rest may have real insights into contemporary questions. Indeed, he’s forced into this position, because Steven Pinker (one of his ECs) wrote a book, Enlightenment Now, in which he argues that human progress depends on our recovering the exceptional wisdom of the 17th-18th centuries — i.e, the books by “thinkers such as Kant, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Adam Smith.” Indeed, the example of Pinker suggests to me that “Enlightened Centrism” is basically just the rudiments of Enlightenment philosophy applied to present-day problems: ECs are epigones.9 Now, Hanania might say we no longer need Kant, because we have Pinker; but this is foolishness. Who could believe Pinker’s quick glosses and rough syntheses of Enlightenment thinkers are superior to their own books? Understand also that Pinker mostly neglects in Enlightenment Now the important disagreements between the authors he champions, not to mention powerful critiques of them that have been made by the likes of Rousseau and Heidegger. The path Hanania recommends thus cuts readers off from these fundamental philosophical debates and the moral-political alternatives they represent. Yet, it is precisely through encountering and attempting to work through these that modern students may hope to get at the wisdom these philosophers and their fore-bearers did, in fact, possess. It would be a great mistake indeed to abandon the writings of masters for the summaries and extrapolations of epigones. To depend on the likes of Pinker to the exclusion of the likes of Kant is to arrest your intellectual development, to welcome intellectual “minority,” as Kant would have it: doing so betrays the Enlightenment’s motto: “Dare to understand!” (by applying your own mind).10 (I am aware of the danger of Great Books “hero worship,” and I understand, as someone once told me, that “thinking stops where worship begins.” Yet, it is not too difficult to avoid these pitfalls, and the rewards of reading actively far outweigh the risks).

Second, Hanania is focused on very practical contemporary issues, e.g., the workings of the administrative state, “technical advancement,” and American public policies. He thinks pre-modern thinkers offer us no insights into these issues because 1) they didn’t know of modern states, modern tech or America and because 2) it is possible to solve our practical problems without too many references to “human values.” (Let us only note in passing that his first reason commits the straw-man fallacy, while his second is extremely dubious). Let us focus on the fact that Hanania’s focus on practice renders his objection to the classics innocuous, albeit plausible. It may be true that we cannot learn much from Aristotle about such glorious matters as how to make a pencil (Hanania’s example of “technical progress”); yet, may we not hope to get by reading him answers to the questions he actually treats of, e.g, “What constitutes human happiness?” Hanania says nothing about whether the classics are relevant to our understanding of this or other enduring questions like, “What is Man?” or “What is justice?” He is concerned with strictly “modern issues”: his argument against Great Books brackets off their main allure. You don’t read the classics or the Bible to learn whether or not “the U.S. should adopt protectionist trade policies,” (although in reading them you may attain a deeper grasp of certain of the other issue-questions at stake today, e.g., “free speech”). — — You read them to find personal enlightenment, salvation . . .

So, as it happens, by clarifying Hanania’s argument I seem to have rendered it beneath contempt. But, just in case I have missed some important detail, I will highlight one additional rejoinder, one which Jeremy Wayne Tate mentions as well in his reply to Hanania (linked above). This is the simple observation that, when it comes to the question of the value of the Great Books — the proof of the pudding is in the eating. One cannot know the precise value (or lack there of) of the Great Books without studying them carefully, but Hanania obviously has not done so. His argument is self-defeating and philistine to boot. Against it, I testify that the experience of reading the Great Books is transformative. Questing will be my attempt to demonstrate more thoroughly this reality.

To close out this second “bridge,” a few words about Substack “Notes” . . .

1. “Notes” is basically Substack’s version of Twitter. Writers can post shorter pieces of content and highlight (“restack”) the work of other writers they appreciate. It’s pretty cool. — If you use the Substack app, you will have a Notes feed with content from the writers you subscribe to. It should give you an unobtrusive notification whenever you have unread Notes. — Also, you will be able to see all the Notes I post in a tab at the top of the home page of this newsletter. (This applies both to the app and the website).

2. I plan to start posting on Notes from time to time. I think I will mainly use it to share short book reviews, and to get the word out about my writing; but I may post other kinds of things as well. (After finishing a good book, I find it enjoyable and useful to summarize my impressions and takeaways in a few sentences. I have been posting my short reviews on Goodreads, but very few people ever see those). I think these Notes will complement the main mission of Questing pretty well.

3. In “The Inquiry and Its Enemy,” I said I would divided my work into Essays (interpretations of classic texts) and Notes (treatments of moral-political themes that interest me). Now that I’ll be on Substack Notes, I’ve decided to call the latter of my offerings Thoughts. So, the three kinds of writing you’ll get from me are Essays, Thoughts, and Notes. — (You may not care about these niceties, but I think it may be worth it to explain my thinking about the organization of Questing — both for you and for any readers that might come along later and want to follow the road we have taken). You can look back at the end of “The Inquiry” if you are at all interested in the logic behind this division of my writings.

W ~ 4 ~ S ~ 5 ~ H ~ 8

I enjoyed writing my notes on Aleksandr Dugin. They allowed me to deploy a number of my old ideas in new and interesting ways. After sending them out, I did notice several typos and syntactical ambiguities (now corrected); but, on the whole, I was pleased with them. I admit, though, they were not especially reader friendly: they assumed, for full understanding, some significant degree of familiarity with the authors discussed and contained a number of long and complicated footnotes. You may not believe me after you read all of this post, but I do not plan to make writing long footnotes a habit! Something about the Dugin notes just made me comfortable composing a few. (I felt they helped to create a pleasing symmetry between the form and content of the notes). I did, however, refrain from including in them what would have been a monstrous footnote on the ongoing war in Ukraine. The thought of that footnote became the piece you’re reading now. I thought initially to include the footnote at all because Lucchese made his viewpoint on the war such an essential part of his critique of Millerman’s sympathetic account of Dugin’s thought. (You’ll recall he argues, in effect, that the Russian thinker’s apologetics for the war render his thought of little or no value to us — us wakeful and patriotic Americans — except perhaps as a window into the mind of Putin, who is, for Lucchese, not only an agent of evil but also a serious threat to core U.S. security interests). Versus this I argued that — first — we are not sure Dugin is “Putin’s brain” and that — second — even if we do hold his politics against him, we should still be open to mining Dugin’s writings for exploitable intellectual resources, (just as Millerman wrote to recommend), since such a comportment goes beyond the merely prudent “know your enemies” to the truly philosophical “seek truth” — wherever, that is, it may be found.

Yet, we cannot seek everywhere all at once. We must decide what to read and when. Thus, as I said in the notes, my intention is not exactly to recommend reading Dugin’s books. (I think richer mines exist, both relatively to this quest and in absolute terms). With my first “bridge,” I intended only to hold open for interested readers the intellectual possibilities “Dugin” represents — and this contra Lucchese, who wrote precisely to close them off. (I thought to do this mainly because, although I am not convinced by everything he says about or on the basis of his study of Dugin, I think Millerman deserves commendation for daring to translate, explicate, and creatively employ the Russian’s thought in — and, yes, for — the Western world. Indeed, in addition to signifying one man’s thought, the term “Dugin” might stand in for any right-leaning thinker or idea that is become taboo in our democratic, nominally liberal, in the sense of “open to new ideas,” civilization). All this aligned perfectly with the opinion with which I concluded the inaugural essay of Questing, viz. it is vital for the health of our civilization and the continuance of the Western Intellectual Tradition that American students begin cultivating for themselves heterodox, fulfilling intellectual lives.

Now, you might wonder what all this has to do with the war in Ukraine. Well, I think the monster of postmodernism is not necessarily the only force aiming to engineer a rigid, stultifying quiescence of mind among Americans. There is also our national security establishment, (which seems to think only Russian agents or dupes among the American public could ever think critically about the Biden administration’s approach to the war).1 Thus, in footnote five of the Dugin notes I briefly dissented from the establishment opinion, which favors continuing or even amplifying the war. This opinion — which Lucchese’s essay exemplifies — approves of arming and underwriting Ukraine indefinitely and eschewing all strategic alternatives that might end the war soon, alternatives that the unfortunate, war-torn nation’s neighbor-allies (those who, unlike us, suffer high, direct, tangible costs from the continuance of the war) are now pushing on Ukraine’s obstinate, corrupt, militaristic president, Zelenskyy.

By fully articulating my dissent from the politically correct line on Ukraine, I will complete my answer to Lucchese on “Dugin” and continue the purgation of my mind I have begun in preparation for my return to consistent questing.

I argue that nothing — not even justifiable moral antipathy for Putin — should blind us to the essential thoughtless of our government’s response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the security demands that preceded them.2 It seems to me that focusing almost exclusively on how awful Putin is, as Lucchese and many other commentators do, turns our attention away from what we, as U.S. citizens, can influence, namely U.S. foreign policy, to what we cannot change, namely the character of Putin and his regime. I will not attempt to marshal all the available evidence for my perspective. I will simply try to reconstruct the development of my thinking about these matters by reviewing and analyzing several essays about the war I found especially remarkable or illuminating.

I begin with Lucchese’s piece. It is remarkable for insisting on the strong link between American patriotism and support for Ukraine. He implies that nearly unqualified support for Ukraine is the only truly American stance to take on the war: the “patriotism” of “Zelensky and the brave Ukrainians” is, he avers, none other than “the patriotism that moved American heroes at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima.” — Really? His averment strikes me as far-fetched.

When I seek reasons for my gut-reaction, this one leaps to mind: there is one big difference, at least, between the sets of patriots Lucchese evokes, namely that the Americans fought for America, whereas the Ukrainians fight . . . well, you see, (especially if you read the Seymour Hersh articles linked above). The issue here is not whether the Ukrainian resistance is in any way admirable: it is whether what they fight for should mean nearly as much to us as it does to the admirable among them (i.e., not Zelensky or his cronies). It’s a question of perspective, what Nietzsche called “the basic condition of all life.”3  

The other side of this same observation is that American aid is not necessarily actuated by, and thus does not necessarily partake of, the spirit of the people to whom it is sent. Witness the fact that Ukrainians are willing to die for their country, while Americans, as such, conspicuously, are not. So, then, if our aid to Ukraine is not exactly actuated by the spirit of the Ukrainian resistance, by what spirit is it actuated? I am not entirely sure; but I do doubt that it springs from any love of America or Americans, much less of Ukraine or Ukrainians — (although I would not be surprised if a goodly portion of the American public does understand our military aid in humanitarian terms, i.e., as our means of staving off mass murder of Ukrainians by Russians). I suspect the spirit of the foreign policy makers responsible for our Ukraine policy is some combination of cynical realism, which sees Ukraine as a (relatively) low-risk “Battle Lab” in which to experiment with new weapons and tactics against real enemies, and Progressive-liberal idealism, which combines outrage at socially-conservative Russia with stubborn loyalty to abstractions like “the liberal world order” and “NATO’s open door policy.” If I am right, we should think of our aid to Ukraine as in its essence much more cosmopolitan than patriotic.4

I have begun to suggest, notwithstanding Dugin’s wild commitment to Putin’s war, that supporting the U.S. response (or something like it) to that war is not the truly sober, moral position to take — neither as men nor as Americans.

What, then, is the position to take?

My initial take on U.S. involvement in the war was the following, which I wrote last year in an as yet unpublished essay about political evangelicalism and Donald Trump:

. . . now we have the mindless Biden administration, which first provoked Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine by spurning the golden opportunity to negotiate on the basis of his reasonable security demands, pursuing a policy of draconian sanctions against Russia and substantial military aid to Ukraine that is seemingly designed to elicit the maximum of human suffering from the conflict. And, of course, our security establishment cries for more aggressive, military measures. Is it not high time to reconsider exactly who are the contemporary American militarists?

(The last line, in the context of the essay, evoked a comparison between political evangelicals and Progressive-liberal internationalists). It seemed to me then that the Biden administration must welcome the war, for it refused to countenance negotiations that might have avoided it and chose instead to amplify immensely its destructiveness and duration by ensuring the two sides enjoyed rough military parity.

Do I, then, stand by my first take? Does it bear scrutiny? Let me approach my answer by reviewing some of the literature that informed my thinking . . .

Not long before Putin’s invasion I read this very good article in Persuasion — a moderate, liberal publication — which argued that U.S. policy makers should exercise restraint. The author — a former U.S. State Department official who, interestingly, felt that he needed to write under a pseudonym (Herbert Reed) — argued that since Ukraine is (by all accounts) in no position to join NATO in the foreseeable future, the American state should not, merely for the sake of Ukraine’s barren right to join the alliance, place burdens on its taxpayers and risk (nuclear) war with Russia. As I re-read the article now, I am impressed by its common sense. I am tempted to quote every paragraph but will refrain. If you are interested in this issue, you should read it for yourself. I include only the following lines, because they are so consonant with my initial reaction to Biden’s policy:

The saddest irony of all of this is that the greatest victims of a war would most certainly be the Ukrainians whom the United States says it is trying to support. America’s principled stand on NATO’s open door policy and its political and financial support to Ukraine are enough to inspire the Russian invasion, but its refusal to send forces there ensures that Ukraine will lose that war badly . . . America’s “porcupine strategy” would . . . turn the country into a bloody battlefield for a generation. Absent nuclear escalation, America would survive such a war; Ukraine would not . . . 

There is a better alternative. The United States and Russia can agree on a new European security architecture that effectively neutralizes Ukraine and puts an end to further enlargements of NATO that the U.S. doesn’t want and that Russia deeply fears . . . Such an agreement would also preserve and protect America and NATO’s core strategic interests, and, not incidentally, save many thousands of Ukrainian lives . . . let’s be clear before we sleepwalk into another disaster . . .

If our military aid has enabled Ukraine to make a firmer resistance than Reed predicted, this does not reduce the force of his basic prediction: the policy of non-negotiation plus military aid he warned us against incited Russia to start (and still inclines Ukrainian leaders to maintain) a highly destructive war that only Russia can realistically hope to win.

You might argue against Reed that any attempt to negotiate with Putin would have failed, that he was dead-set on invasion; but it is impossible to know this for sure, there are good reasons to think otherwise, and, as I said in footnote 5, a serious attempt at negotiation would have removed Putin’s stated casus belli and secured for the West, in the event of an invasion, the clear moral high ground, i.e., a definite improvement over the status quo that U.S. policy has actually produced. —

The rejoinder to Reed’s article that Persuasion — in good-moderate fashion — published a day later, seemed to me to be as puzzling and moralistic as Reed’s seemed commonsensical and sober: Natia Seskuria argued that stonewalling Russia’s security demands while ramping up military aid to Ukraine was “the only morally and politically correct [sic!] response to the crisis.” Her choice of the phrase “politically correct” strikes me now as a poignantly humorous, but it was not the only remarkable, telling choice of words in the essay. Seskuria ended on this note: “Ukrainians are ready to defend their country. The West should help them in this noble fight” (emphasis mine). What logic is supposed to underlie these sentences? Must the West invest in every noble fight the world over? Is any aid to a noble cause necessarily ennobled by it? My answer to both these questions is, “No.” With respect to the second, it seems Seskuria encourages America to act as a cynical arms dealer while posturing as a noble freedom fighter. But however this may be, the point I want to make, drawing on the key moral categories of classical political philosophy, is that Seskuria looks only to the noble, forgetting the good. She makes no real effort to prove that what she recommends would be good for the U.S. — or for anyone, really.

The strangeness of this indifference to the question of American interests — what’s good for us — is amplified by the fact that Reed speaks directly to the question in his piece. He argues that the U.S. has no core security interests at stake in Ukraine, as the country is not actually part of Europe, and that heavy investment in another “forever war” is a far cry from “a foreign policy for the [American] middle class.”5 — With this in mind, to Seskuria’s indifference I am inclined to prefer River Page’s bluntly put interest: “Be selfish. Be American.”6

More interesting because less obvious, however, is the ignobility of the policy Seskuria recommends. That it is ignoble became clearer to me when I read a clever article by Curtis Yarvin titled “Ukraine, the tomb of liberal nationalism.” As with Reed’s piece, I am tempted to quote large chunks of Yarvin’s, both for its sense and its humor, but I won’t. As he observes, the reason to doubt that our policy is noble is that it is effectively “deploying the Ukrainian people as a disposable instrument of murky, inexplicable and even self-defeating aims.” Here is the opening of the essay, its most memorable passage.

Russian pranksters, posing as the Ukrainian politician-oligarch Petro Poroshenko, prank-called a random Trump-era Secretary of Defense—and got former Secretary Esper to be remarkably frank about Washington’s relationship with the Kiev regime.

“The brave Ukrainian people,” the Secretary says, “are doing the dirty work we never want to do here in the United States. Which is why we should continue to support you with everything we can, whether it’s munitions or arms or intelligence, you name it. So I think it’s vitally critical that we continue to support this fight till the end.”

Until the end. “Everything could change,” says the (actually pro-Russian) prankster, “only if there will be a revolution in Russia. So we’re waiting for that.”

“But we are too,” says former Secretary Esper. And laughs; and goes on to tell us what a snake Putin is. “I’m a fool,” Steely Dan is singing, “I’m a fool, to do your dirty work…”

All this casts the Seskuria argument in a rather sinister light.

It also hints at one last thing I want to touch on in this note, namely the issue-question of regime change in Russia.

We can approach it by assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is in the minds of our policy makers some conceivably self-interested rationale for our involvement in Ukraine. (This mental operation is justified by the fact that our leaders have from the beginning showed no interest in peace talks with Putin in which we might plausibly have been able to give him Ukrainian neutrality, i.e., nothing, in return for some X that might really benefit us or our allies, i.e., something). What might it be? As the unwitting testimony of Secretary Esper suggests, the best candidate is probably regime change: policy makers want a revolution or coup of some kind in Russia that ousts Putin to install some new man more friendly to the West. If this is so, then an explanation for Seskuria’s silence (and that of the establishment in general) about this their true aim, is that, to the ear of common sense, it sounds quixotic and reckless — albeit, by hypothetical fiat, as it were, very much in America’s geopolitical interests.

This issue has been well discussed by Matt Taibbi in the final essay I want to highlight, which is aptly titled, “Regime Change Doesn’t Work, You Morons.” He argues on the basis of statements by Biden and others, e.g., Boris Johnson, that some strong segment of the West’s security establishment wishes to use economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine to force the Russian people to rise up and oust Putin from power, i.e., “do regime change” in Russia — and all this because, well, Putin is a real snake! Taibbi would agree with Yarvin’s quip: “With snake guys like this – who needs snakes?” His piece is an elaboration of Yarvin’s vividly expressed suspicion that, given our current policy on Ukraine, “we need better snake guys.” It makes crystal clear, through social-scientific and historical evidence, what every American ought to know intuitively from witnessing our recent failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan: we are not good at doing regime change, our attempts never work well . . . not even for us . . .

I have only met with one argument that gives me pause in dissenting from the politically correct line on Ukraine. It occurred to me while I read a 2016 essay by Stephen Kotkin, an authority on Russian history and U.S. foreign policy. He argued that the U.S. should never recognize a Russian “sphere of influence” in Eurasia, even if Russia were able to establish one by force, nor “underplay its own many advantages” in its competition with Russia. The idea is more or less that since we can oppose Russian designs in Eurasia with relatively little cost to ourselves (as long as we make sure not to provoke nuclear war),7 then we might as well do so. Why let Russia rise or improve its geopolitical fortunes at all, since we don’t have to? Yet, even Kotkin ends up concluding that it is most important for us to avoid “bear-baiting” and realize that — precisely because contemporary Russia “does not even remotely approach the scale of the threat posed by the Soviet Union . . . there is no need to respond to it with a new Cold War.” (Sadly, leading U.S. policy makers and wonks have not listened to Kotkin, have adopted a hawkish policy on Ukraine). — Even more insightful than his warning against reigniting cold war, however, is Kotkin’s contention that any new strategy of “containment” (which is, again, more or less what the U.S. opted for) “could become a trap” that just elevates “Russia to the status of rival super-power, Russia’s quest for which has helped bring about the current confrontation.”8 “Russia,” Kotkin concludes, “is not another necessary crusade to be won but a problem to be managed.” This runs directly counter to the mainstream notion that what we should be aiming for is some kind of Victory over Russia via our involvement in Ukraine.9

Kotkin’s analysis may provide some ammunition to those who oppose peace talks with Russia, but, ultimately, it should be read as an antidote to the mania against Russia and all things Russian that presently exists in the West and has, of course, intensified since the invasion. For, in fact, Kotkin recommends that in future conflicts with Russia the U.S. actively seek negotiated peace — albeit only ever “from a position of strength.” Our elites have not done this. Instead, they have opted to project strength without making any attempt at peace, for a crusade against Russia, a policy that may even — ludicrously — be nurtured by a secret hope of theirs for a glorious, liberal revolution in Russia that will, almost certainly, not come quickly — if, that is, it comes at all.

All in all, my review of this literature reinforces my initial take on the conflict: for the sake of sticking it to Putin, the U.S. is taking a page from his play-book by fostering a bloody, frozen conflict instead of working to hammer out a new basis for peace in Europe.

So much, then, for my reading on this subject.10 What else would I add? Two things . . .

1. A (possibly too long) riff on what Reed wrote about NATO’s “Open Door” policy, on some difficulties with the policy at the junction of theory and practice. Reed writes (and Seskuria confirms) America’s unwillingness to entertain negotiations with Russia on the basis of its security demands is based decisively on our commitment to the “Open Door” policy — i.e., to the principle that Ukraine (and possibly every country?) has the right to join NATO at some point in time. The U.S. has not even contemplated a promise to suspend — say, for 10 years — Ukraine’s right to join NATO, so as to stop the war — and this even while admitting there is slim chance of Ukraine joining the alliance anytime prior to that.
   
   But what is the open-door policy really? And, is it coherent? Let me first posit what is not to my knowledge in dispute: the purpose of NATO is to secure Europe and the North Atlantic against Russia. Now, the Open Door policy is, or is based in, lines from Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty:
   “The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty.” “OK, first question: what does ‘Europe’ mean? Do our elites know, such that they may say what constitutes a ‘European State’?” In context of debates about the future of the European Union, Pierre Manent has noted that the answer is actually, “No.”11 There’s no real consensus about what it means to “build Europe.” “OK, then, next question: if they were to answer the question of the meaning of Europe, is it likely they’d realize Ukraine is truly a European State?” That’s doubtful. “Last question, then: assuming Ukraine is a European country, is it now ‘in a position to contribute to the security’ of Europe, much less to that of ‘the North Atlantic area’?” I think, whatever may be the answer to this question, that Ukrainian neutrality is more likely to contribute to said ends. The Ukrainian state would, in this case, be a buffer state separating Russia from the West — giving to both civilizations (not to mention Ukraine itself) some breathing space — space to exist, to choose, in Dugin’s Shakespeare-inspired formulation, to be.12 And, finally, the most interesting thing about this potential state of affairs may be that it’s more or less what Putin wants — what he demanded from the West before the war. (So, imagine your enemy asks you to do what’s in your best interests, but you say, “No, thanks, villain, — I’d sooner fight you than agree to that with you!” — Would you think like this? What a world!).
   
   Perhaps the way to summarize the import of all this is to say that it is not actually clear whether the policy of the U.S. even complies with Article 10, for it maintains that an only questionably European state, one that cannot credibly contribute to any place’s security, should be encouraged to seek NATO membership and granted what is almost de facto NATO protection under Article 5. — So, then, if it’s not clear that Western policymakers can say what NATO’s Open Door policy is, or prove what they’ve authorized in Ukraine accords with it, can we say it is wise to spend blood and treasure in order to signal that we believe the policy is sacrosanct? —
   
   I think the best thing that could conceivably come out of this status quo is some kind of thoughtful public discussion of what it really means to be “European” and-or “Western” and — assuming anything like an answer to that question can be reached, of whether it is quite possible for these two entities to be brought — by just means — to resemble in practice what we think them in theory.13 In other words, in my opinion, the only possible — and purely positive — role the crisis in and of Ukraine’s destiny could now play in human affairs is that of a σκάνδολον that compels Europe and-or the West, in one way or another, to define well the “territorial limits and spiritual physiognomy” of that wonderfully important, albeit maddeningly opaque, thing we still call, and still wish to call, Europe.14

2. A personal anecdote about Ukrainian patriotism and corruption. While I was in college, I spent one summer working at a beach retail store, Alvin’s Island, in Panama City Beach, FL. Two of my coworkers in this unpleasant establishment were Ukrainian dudes of about my age, in the U.S. on work visas. I recall practically all they spoke of was how terrible it was to live in Ukraine, because of its pervasive corruption. I’m sure the pair harbored a kind of gut-level patriotism — that they, naturally, cared for their country, prayed for it to be better. Yet they did not think it was a politically decent, admirable, or well-governed nation. Now, as it happens, I lost touch with my two friends after I returned to school and they to their homeland.
   
   Today, as I finish writing, I pray they are still alive, that they have survived the war thus far. Indeed, I compose this note with them in mind, meaning to show with it, on the one hand, that the U.S. should be seeking peace in Ukraine (so that young men like my friends stop dying there), but also, on the other hand, that it is wrong to think we are, by committing American treasure to Ukraine’s defense, preserving the life of a country that needs only independence from Russia to become a thriving liberal-democracy. I would not revise this position if I were to learn from my friends that they abhor the idea of negotiating with their now bitter enemy.

W ~ 4 ~ S ~ 5 ~ H ~ 8

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These notes respond to an essay a friend of mine, Mr. Michael Lucchese, had published recently in National Review Online. The essay is titled “Alexander Dugin: A Flawed Defense of the Man Known as ‘Putin’s Brain.’” To set the stage for my comments, let’s unpack this title. Who is Alexander (Aleksandr) Dugin? Why is he known as “Putin’s brain?” And what defense has been made of him?

Dugin is an intellectually syncretic, stridently anti-liberal Russian “political theorist and activist” inspired especially by the thought of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, two morally “tainted” geniuses of 20th century philosophy.1 Partly because of his intellectual genealogy and partly because of his politics, sympathetic or even impartial treatments of Dugin’s thought are in the West today typically considered beyond the pale. When reputable commentators do engage the Russian thinker, they tend to treat him in one of the following two ideologically tinged ways: he is either “an enthusiastic war propagandist and neofascist who proposes to unite the global far right into an anti-Western alliance” or “the most noteworthy exponent” of “Eurasianism” — an ideology that (on the practical level) promotes the political reunification of the territories of the U.S.S.R. under the aegis of a revived, revanchist Russia.2

It is Dugin’s Eurasianism that led, in 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, to him being dubbed “Putin’s brain.” By that bold and blatant act of territorial conquest, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s premier, revealed his contempt for what is called “international law” and gave Western observers new, urgent reasons to seek after the motive force of or key to his unsettling, bareknuckled foreign policy. Since the annexation could not easily be explained in terms of Russia’s economic, diplomatic, or even military interests, it began to seem plausible to some that a mysterious complex of alien “values” and “political commitments” lurked behind Putin’s decisions.3 Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn were some of the first to make this case. In an high-profile Foreign Affairs article titled “Putin’s Brain,” they coined the epithet to illustrate a far-reaching claim: Dugin’s thought explains (more or less directly) Putin’s actions. Their epithet took and continues to be used frequently to designate Dugin. I suspect this is mainly because it is a useful marketing tool: fewer consumers of articles and books will care about “Dugin, the radical Heideggerian” than will care about “Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s Brain.” Yet, even if I am right, the claim behind the epithet — namely that Dugin is Putin’s puppet master and-or Russia’s secret “philosopher king” — might still be true, logically speaking.

Is it true, though? I doubt it. Not only do Putin’s rhetoric and justifications for annexing Ukrainian territory differ from Dugin’s in important ways, but there is also a serious logical fault in the Barbashin-Thoburn argument, as Brickey LeQuire, a sober critic of Dugin (and former professor of mine) pointed out in 2014:

Barbashin and Thoburn argue that Dugin’s outsize media presence is a sign that Putin approves his message; logically, however, all we can infer from the evidence is that Putin wants Dugin in the limelight . . . It is possible that Dugin’s intellectual antics receive so much tacit approval from the Russian government—and, accordingly, so much attention from Western readers—precisely because they are theoretical flights of fancy with little direct influence on government policy.”4

LeQuire does not prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Dugin is not secretly the architect of Russian foreign policy: he shows that we are, to say the least, far from sure that he is. He argues epistemic caution, opening up, in my view, a healthy space for Americans to maneuver and avoid error in, both politically (with respect to Putin) and philosophically (with respect to Dugin).

What do I mean? Consider the (geo)political domain first: it is best practice to understand, not misunderstand, your enemies, as Lucchese himself insists. So we may safely call it a mistake to assume or believe without decisive evidence that a given enemy is an implacable, nigh on insane ideologue when it is as or more likely he is a pragmatic and experienced, albeit ruthlessly immoral and fallible, “student of international affairs.”5 Making such a mistake might, for instance, cause a person or country to become fanatically committed to war when a peaceful strategic path exists. (Or, as LeQuire also hints, it might even play into the enemy’s hands in unanticipated ways).

Similarly, in the philosophic domain, it is best practice to seek to understand an author as he understands himself, at least initially. Failing to do so will lead you to more or less the inverse of the political error I just mentioned: instead of misunderstanding a certain enemy, you may misunderstand a potential ally or friend. Presupposing (without evidence) that a thinker is the mind behind a particular, odious enemy agenda will distort your reading of his work; and if, perchance, there happen to be occasional insights or useful resources, to say nothing of estimable truths, to be found in that work, your premise will make it very difficult or impossible for you to grasp them. It is wise, then, to guard against both these errors by remaining flexible — open to all possibilities — in action as well as thought.

So, we return to Lucchese’s essay. It, unfortunately, cannot be said to inhabit the healthy space opened up by LeQuire’s comments. It follows Barbashin and Thoburn, as well as past NRO polemics against Dugin, by treating the Russian as the brains behind Putin’s war in Ukraine.6 For Putin, Lucchese begins, this war is “about ideas,” specifically Dugin’s ideas.7 (Lucchese does not argue this point so much as assume it). His strategy, methinks, is to use Dugin’s recent support for Putin's war in Ukraine, and his general reputation as Putin's brain, to prejudice his readers against another essay on Dugin — this one published in First Things by Michael Millerman, probably the leading Western expert on Dugin’s thought. It turns out that discrediting this article is Lucchese’s reason for writing: Millerman’s essay is the “defense” mentioned in Lucchese’s title. (Millerman dubbed his piece an “explanation,” not a defense, but Lucchese is right to call it sympathetic to Dugin. To be fair, however, he should also have noted that Millerman’s essay contains at least two muted criticisms of Dugin, such that it is more a defense of reading Dugin than of the man himself or his work as a whole).8 To prepare us for his attack on this defense, Lucchese first cites Dugin’s pro-war pronouncements, (which seem, incidentally, to stem as much from certain fresh, traumatic personal experiences as past theorizing); but these citations should not necessarily turn us against the defense, which is really only an argument for taking seriously Dugin’s philosophical writings.

Now, since Lucchese’s aim in the rest of his piece is to refute the substance of Millerman’s sympathetic account of Dugin, if we are to evaluate the rest of his argument, we must first review and reframe Millerman’s.

Millerman has published a book on Dugin titled Inside “Putin’s Brain;” yet, his First Things essay can be read as discourse on the ways in which that epithet is misleading as to the content and import of Dugin’s thought. He admits that “Duginism is indeed compatible with Putinism,” but he insists, and exhorts us to see, that “it is not reducible to it.” The obvious, critical rejoinder to this is, “Ok, but so what?” If the thought of a philosopher condones or even endorses the brutal policies of a tyrannical, “kleptocratic thug” (Millerman’s words) like Putin, is that not a sufficient reason to dismiss him and-or read him only as a “threat” to our way of life? (Lucchese ends up recommending precisely this). I suggest that Millerman’s essay may also be read as an answer to this question. Although what he calls Dugin’s “ill-starred political alliance” with Putin may in final analysis be a reason to reject his ideology, it is not a reason to believe we have nothing to learn by reading him dispassionately or even sympathetically. Millerman’s argument is in effect that taking the tack Lucchese recommends deprives us — as independent thinkers and defenders of “political modernity in the West” — of resources requisite to our tasks.

He offers three main examples of such resources. The first is Dugin’s notion of the “Fourth Political Theory” — an ideology of his own invention that he hopes will become an alternative to the three historically viable ideologies that still condition political discourse in the world today, namely communism, liberalism, and fascism. Millerman argues that Dugin's attempt to construct a fourth political theory or ideology serves to point up one serious limitation of our political vocabulary and conceptual framework, one which causes people, including some “otherwise intelligent commentators,” to misunderstand the nature of certain significant political phenomena: since we have names for only three ideologies, we are tempted to think these ideologies represent the only three ways of thinking about politics. Those who make this mistake tend to label everything (e.g., people or opinions) that is “to the right” of liberalism as "fascist." Millerman contends, in other words, that Dugin's work enables us to grasp the underlying cause of the bizarre yet mind-numbing accusations of "fascism!" that are so common in our political culture today.

The second resource Millerman highlights is Dugin’s critique of individualism.
This resource is related to the last, for Dugin argues that the liberal notion of “the individual” and “individual liberty” is and has been leading to a climate in which “the claim that we are human will be denounced as fascistic, just as today a proponent of nationalism or an opponent of transgenderism is called a fascist.” How does liberal individualism lead to this? Millerman points us to a book of Dugin’s in which he apparently gives a detailed explanation, but in the essay he provides two windows into Dugin’s argument on this matter. First is a quotation from Dugin: “The individual is the product of subtraction of the personality from the human being, the result of the liberation of the human unit from any bonds and collective structures.” (To grasp the import of this assertion one must note, I think, that, according to Millerman, Dugin follows Heidegger in holding that “the very being of the human . . . is enmeshed in shared bonds and collective structures"). Second is a gloss:

In Dugin’s account, the history of liberalism is one of false liberation from collective identities and external sources of authority, culminating in man’s attempt to liberate himself from gender identity and human identity in favor of “cyborgs, artificial intelligence networks, and products of genetic engineering.” To be free in the liberal way is at last to liberate the human being from himself: Individual freedom leads to the destruction of man.9

I will come back around to critique this position later, especially its emphasis on “collective identities,” but I want first to note two intriguing aspects of it.

1. Dugin claims that there is a logical link between classical liberalism and certain postmodern horrors, i.e., that postmodernity follows more or less logically from certain of the intellectual innovations of modernity. Getting at the truth or falsity of this claim is, I think, a prerequisite for credibly defending modernity against postmodernity.

2. Dugin holds that it is necessary now, if it has not always been necessary, to distinguish conceptually between “individuals” and “persons.” I do not say Dugin is necessarily right about this; but I have wondered about the potential fruitfulness of exploring precisely this distinction . . .

Let us now turn to the last of the “resources” Millerman identifies in Dugin’s thought.

The third resource is a challenging reading of Heidegger, who is, according to Leo Strauss (an authority for both Lucchese and Millerman), the most recent of the “great thinker[s]” to whom we have access, i.e., the philosopher whose thought is, for better or worse, most relevant to our present problems. Much of Millerman’s article is devoted to explaining Heidegger’s thought, especially the “inceptual” aspect of it that Dugin (and he alone, apparently) emphasizes. (Inceptual means more or less “creative” or “inaugural.” So, Millerman’s claim is that Dugin alone shows us how Heidegger’s thought may be the basis for a positive, creative moral-political project in modernity, as opposed to a merely negative deconstruction of our Tradition, as postmodernists would have it). It is important to note here that Millerman's claim on behalf of Dugin is actually rather modest, if still significant: he argues that Dugin’s reading of Heidegger can be, “if nothing else,” a corrective to the interpretive imbalance created by generations of politically motivated, Left-leaning readings of him, e.g., that of Richard Rorty. Thus (and ironically), this third resource might be of real use in what Lucchese calls "the great task of the 21st century," i.e., the philosophical and political recovery and reassertion of America's founding principles; for it is well-known that Rorty's thought strongly influenced the Progressive attack on those principles in the 20th century. If Lucchese had been less intent on demonizing Dugin as the architect of an on-going war and more interested in seeking to learn something from his writings, he might have appreciated this resource, as Millerman is rather clear about its anti-Progressive potential.

Lucchese does not respond to any of these resources as such, but some of his points might be construed as responsive. Beginning with the third resource, I note that he dismisses the possibility of learning from or creatively employing the work of Heidegger-Dugin on account of the fact that both men are anti-American relativists.10 This argument boils down to the trite observation that they both deny the "self-evident" truths of the Declaration of Independence. Lucchese does not, however, let the Declaration speak for itself. He recurs to the authority of Leo Strauss, especially his introduction to Natural Right and History (NRH):

For Strauss, philosophy is quest for truth — the pursuit of the very universal principles Dugin rejects . . .

Strauss would have considered Dugin’s — and Millerman’s — arguments historicist nonsense.

In the introduction to Natural Right and History, Strauss praises the American Founding for its dedication to a universal principle of justice. He cites the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence and, echoing Lincoln’s rhetoric at Gettysburg, asserts that “the nation dedicated to this proposition has now become, no doubt partly as a consequence of this dedication, the most powerful and prosperous of the nations of the earth.” In other words, for Strauss and many of his followers, America’s greatness is rooted in the Founders’ theory of natural right. In this light, the American regime seems to be the most philosophic of all.

This line of argument is seriously misleading in more than one way. The first is that there is no reason to believe Heidegger (or Dugin) would dispute the claim of Strauss' that Lucchese adduces against them. (They would note that the given proposition's contribution to American power proves nothing about its truth or goodness). Similarly, as Millerman notes and it is easy to confirm, Strauss argued, in various ways and in various writings, that we should read Heidegger seriously and that he himself learned a great deal from him about, among other things, classical philosophy and how to read it.11

Lucchese's next error is equating the act of questing for truth with the act of affirming self-evident principles: in my humble opinion, the former is more or less the opposite of the latter. A quest for truth springs from an awareness of ignorance; and the quest for truth that is philosophy terminates in nothing so much as knowledge of ignorance — which leads, in its turn, to contemplation, as opposed to action.12 Now, precisely the opposite is true of the Declaration of Independence and the "American mind" that it helped to form:

The American Revolution began as a revolution in ideas, but its ultimate success required that theory be translated into practice. Ultimately, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, the “American mind turns away from general ideas; it does not direct itself toward theoretical discoveries.” The whole purpose of the Declaration’s ideas was to liberate men to act.13

The American regime is, then, decidedly not philosophic in the sense Strauss appreciated.14 Socrates, to whom Strauss credits the invention of philosophy as quest for truth, concerned himself with demonstrating that people do not know what they think they do about moral things. He did not concern himself with declaring or defending any self-evident moral truths. It is, then, not at all clear that Socrates would have, with Lucchese, defended the Declaration, as opposed to questioning it, with Heidegger-Dugin, notwithstanding the many and various differences between Socratic and Heideggerian philosophy.15

Similarly, it is not clear Strauss believed the “Truth” sought by philosophers must be translatable into “universal principles” like those in the Declaration. In one place he even attributes to Plato's Socrates an incompatible viewpoint that is quite similar to a key proposition of Dugin's, one that Lucchese would likely call "cultural relativism": Strauss observes that, according to Socrates in the Minos, the many cultures or lawful-orders of the world exist on the same plane, as it were, for, while none fully instantiates “Truth,” all “receive their legitimation” from the fact that they are essentially attempts to do so.16

Lucchese’s first references to Strauss are, then, misleading as to the import of his thought and its relation to that of Heidegger and Dugin (and Millerman).

This remains true when we turn to his longer gloss on a passage from Strauss’ introduction to NRH. Lucchese mangles Strauss’ view of the U.S. founding, as well as what I take to be his intention in writing the book as a whole, albeit in an understandable way, one Strauss may even have encouraged in his hastier readers. It is, of course, true that Strauss, in the passage Lucchese references, evinces real respect for the most famous lines in the Declaration. He speaks specifically of their great “weight” and “elevation.” Yet, when it comes to the question of the truth of the propositions they contain, Strauss says only that America’s dedication to them “partly” accounts for her power and prosperity. (As noted above, no necessary connection exists between the truth of a given proposition and its effects in the world). Lucchese glosses over these details in Strauss’ carefully crafted sentences.

Attending more carefully to the first detail reveals Strauss had a subtler view of the source of “America’s greatness” than Lucchese allows. — We are led by this phrase from NRH, which arose from Strauss’ Walgreen lectures of 1949, to Strauss’ Thoughts on Machiavelli (TOM), which may be understood as a sequel to NRH, since the book arose from Strauss’ Walgreen lectures of 1953. In the introduction to TOM, we find a long, rich passage on the relation of Machiavellianism to Americanism, one that effectively nullifies the import of Lucchese’s gloss on Strauss’ teaching. (The whole passage is relevant and worth reading but too long to reproduce in full and too complicated to break with ellipses). The most relevant lines are the following.

But we cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that the problem [of the U.S. Founding] is more complex than it appears in the presentation by [Thomas] Paine and his followers. Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. He would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase and of the fate of the Red Indians. He would conclude that facts like these are an additional proof for his contention that there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.17

I do not mean to suggest that Strauss sought to delegitimize or deconstruct the U.S. Founding, that he did not appreciate the blessings of ordered liberty it secured, or even that he wished to unsettle anyone’s belief in the principles of the American creed. I think he harbored nearly the opposite intentions and opinions, as do I. I mean to suggest only that he did not, like Lucchese, allow his appreciation for the Founding to prejudice his historical-political analysis of its causes and effects.

So, when we return to the introduction of NRH and read that America’s creed was “partly” responsible for her rise to greatness, we may confidently say that the Founders’ Machiavellian willingness to deviate, when necessary, from that creed was, according to Strauss, also — perhaps equally — responsible for it. We may conclude, then, that Lucchese’s claim that “for Strauss . . . America’s greatness is rooted in the Founders’ theory of natural right” serves to obscure an essential part of Strauss’ real, more nuanced teaching.

Attending now, finally, to the second detail Lucchese obscures — the fact that Strauss never says in NRH that he believes the Declaration’s propositions are philosophically, as opposed to, perhaps, effectually true — we are sensibly struck by a sentence we read later in the introduction: “even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.”18 Given what Strauss does in the rest of the introduction and first chapter of NRH, one is tempted to say his purpose was precisely to prove or rather, perhaps, suggest that modern natural right in general and the American creed in particular is a salutary myth; for he argues that late modernity's rejection of natural right led it into nihilism, a condition that is antithetical to "living well."19

So much for those aspects of Lucchese’s argument that might be considered responsive to the third of Millerman's resources.20 Those that might respond to the others may be treated more quickly.

With respect to the second, i.e., Dugin's anti-individualism, Lucchese insists it is the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who fight authentically for a collective human freedom in their present war. The problem here is that, true as the claim may be, it proves nothing about the nature or consequences of liberal-individualism. With respect to the first, i.e., Dugin's "Fourth Political Theory," Lucchese asserts only that it would, if put into practice, produce "multipolar chaos." The problem here is similar to the last one, for, while it may be true, Lucchese's assertion glosses over the relevant geopolitical debate: what he calls "multipolar chaos" Dugin, as Millerman says, "welcomes . . . as a return to the truth of the primacy of peoples and civilizations over the unencumbered liberal individuals who reside in a unipolar world that considers liberalism the only humane basis for political life." In other words, Lucchese makes the same objection to Dugin as did Bernard-Henri Lévy in his debate with the Russian; he does not, however, mention, as he should, Millerman's gloss on that debate or actually reason against the position Dugin took in it.21

If my argument so far has been successful, it has established that Lucchese’s critique of Millerman is inadequate to its task of turning us away from Dugin. Despite his best intentions, the tendency of Lucchese’s essay is to contribute to “the closing of the American mind.” He would have us believe that a thinker who denies the Declaration and supports Putin should, for those reasons, not be read (or read only polemically) by Americans.

So, does all this mean, then, that Millerman has convinced me of the immense value of Dugin’s thought? Am I going to start reading all of Dugin’s books? As it happens, “No.” I think many of Dugin’s arguments healthy food for thought, and some of them, especially the ones pertaining to the origins and effects of cosmopolitanism or globalism, likely true.22 At the same time, though, I think most of his arguments highly disputable and many fantastical. Moreover (and more importantly), I think, based on the excerpts I have read, Dugin’s reading of key thinkers in the Western Intellectual Tradition is more contentious than cautious, more cavalier than careful. —

For instance, I doubt Dugin has paid enough attention to the indications Plato gives in his Republic that the “city in speech” created by Socrates under very specific circumstances for very ambiguous reasons is impossible in practice. Attending to those details, would, I expect, undermine what Millerman calls Dugin's "philosophical supremacy." Similarly, I doubt that his commitment to Traditionalism is compatible with him being a philosophical supremacist.

Another reservation I have against Dugin pertains to the collectivism that he seems to promote, which strikes me as potentially very bad. Thinking about the proper place of traditions and moral bonds in human affairs is obviously reasonable; but I doubt we should so cavalierly abandon individualism, which, no matter the theoretical weaknesses it may have, trains the focus of political discourse on the locus of the human mind and soul in the world — individual human persons.

Finally, (and I hope Lucchese will appreciate this point) Dugin seems to me to overlook something crucial — namely the work of great statesmen — when he identifies as the “outstanding figures” of a given people (those who represent in themselves a people’s “founding moment of authentic existence”) poets and philosophers only. Even as Lucchese maintains on the basis of an observation about Millerman’s argument, this aspect of Dugin’s political theory prevents him from understanding America. For was it not in fact George Washington, a statesmen of the first rank, who most of all united and shepherded into being the people of the United States? Was he not our “greatest soul,” the man most deserving of being called the “concrete expression of [our] public life?”23 Are statesmanship and rhetoric accounted for in Dugin's theory of politics?

I also have a number of reservations against Millerman’s particular account of Dugin in his First Things essay, independent of my specific objections to what I know of Dugin’s thought itself.

1. Millerman claims reading Heidegger-Dugin can contribute to a defense of “political modernity in the West,” but he also describes the two thinkers as, respectively, “fundamentally anti-modern” and “a kind of right wing” postmodernist. He even says Dugin “attacks Western political modernity from both premodern and postmodern directions.” So, how is reading these guys supposed to aid any defense of modernity? It really can’t be a “know your enemies” type of thing, as Millerman is too sympathetic to the anti-modern thinkers. So, then, what is their contribution? If Millerman has an answer to this question, I got no hint of it from his essay.

2. Millerman says he was very happy when he first learned of Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory, but why? He already knew Leo Strauss was not a fascist. Did he really need a new ideology, much less one that Strauss would not have preferred to liberalism, to reveal the character of Strauss’ (or anyone else’s) thought? Moreover, even if the new ideology is a helpful aid in new experiments in political thinking, is it likely to be worth much as what it actually purports to be, namely an ideology — an accessible distillation of philosophic principles capable of exciting the masses and moving them in a positive political direction? I doubt it. I doubt Dugin’s ideology will ever be a real, political challenge to liberalism because it is not accessible. The liberal claim that human beings are essentially individuals with rights is, if not obvious, quite accessible, but the claim that human beings are Dasein open to Beyng simply isn’t. From the fact that the Fourth Political Theory is or may be an “ideologically coherent” challenge to liberal modernity, it does not follow that it is or will be an ideologically viable challenge to it.

3. Millerman’s emphasis on what he in other places calls “the philosophical constitution of the political,” i.e., the philosophical underpinnings of key political institutions, runs the risk, I think, of disguising or neglecting the essential tension between philosophy and politics, especially when these are regarded as distinct ways of life. He risks encouraging ideological, as opposed to philosophical and-or political, thinking. That he is so keen on propagating the work of a man engaged in propagating a new ideology is more evidence that he may not be sufficiently attuned to the mentioned tension. It may, indeed, be true that philosophy can or has at times served to “constitute the political,” but is this a healthy task for it to undertake? Are we sure its attempts to do so improve political life or make the world safer for free-wheeling philosophy?

4. Lastly, a quibble. Millerman highlights Dugin’s account of sovereignty as a key contribution to our understanding of politics. Dugin argues that sovereignty resides in civilizational blocks or “great spaces,” and that this is chiefly because these units, as such, are, unlike nation-states as such, capable of defending their populations militarily and of maintaining themselves by themselves as cultural-political entities. While this may be true, and while the case of Ukraine may highlight the highly qualified — if not altogether sham — status of the sovereignty of militarily dependent states, I doubt Dugin’s observations really reveal anything novel about sovereignty. Could one not get at these same insights by reading Hobbes, Schmitt, or even Samuel Huntington? If, as I think, one could, and if, as Millerman seems to say, Dugin’s account of sovereignty is among his key contributions to political science, then, is it not forgivable to doubt that reading Dugin is a good use of time? Why not just read the thinkers from whom he seems to get his best ideas?

The difference between the arguments made by Millerman and Lucchese may in final analysis be discerned with reference to the names of the publications in which they appeared. Millerman published in First Things, which takes its bearings more or less by the first principles of philosophy and religion, what Aristotle called the αρχαί. Millerman is not insensible to the necessities and needs of political life, but he cares most for the philosophical truth of things. Lucchese, on the contrary, published in the National Review, which takes its bearings more or less from the principles and policies of the U.S. as a nation. His discussion of Dugin’s philosophy is, I think, distorted by the need he feels to make sure that his discussion is wholly consonant with those policies and principles. If I have favored Millerman’s essay over Lucchese’s, this is mostly because I think I share the former’s basic conception of the relative human value of thinking about philosophy and thinking about politics and intend to continue exploring the reasons for this as Questing unfolds.

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The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life . . . I awake in the grip of everydayness . . . Nevertheless I vow: I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll be defeated by the everydayness.

~ ~ ~ Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 9, 127

I’ve been silent for a while now, perhaps you noticed. I began the quest, then promptly ceased writing. The reason for my silence is that I took a new job (as a high school teacher) and have been adjusting to the life-patterns it entails. In the process I got away from serious thinking and study and fell into a more everyday mode, more everyday, that is, than the one that became habitual for me in graduate school.

I think what I need now are “bridges” back to the quest, i.e., writing projects that help me traverse the psychic gulf between the mode in which questing is possible for me and the one I have been in until very recently. I need to write a number of pieces that draw on my available resources, that don’t require me to master new or very difficult texts. (I will return to that discipline soon).

I have a few such bridging projects in mind.

The first will be a response to an essay a friend of mine recently published in National Review Online about the thought of Aleksandr Dugin and the war in Ukraine. The piece is all but finished, so I plan to publish it next weekend.

In writing that piece I worked through a complex of impressions and opinions that have plagued me for a while. I think publishing it will help me to move on to the inquiries that will be the heart or essence of Questing.

I think the subsequent bridges will concern certain books I taught recently in school, and perhaps one or two of the novels I have read recently. I won’t try in these pieces to provide complete interpretations of the books in question. I will simply present things I think I learned by reading and teaching them.

So, all in all, I am hopeful that I will be able to write more consistently in the near future. I have a target schedule in mind. But, I have learned over the past few months that it is probably best for me not to promise to publish work until that work is finished or well underway :)

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With that said, you will recall that my last post announced a series of notes on Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History. The book is a very good example of how a serious study of the Tradition can yield valuable insights into contemporary life and thought. In it Strauss investigates what he labels the problem of natural right – i.e. this vexed question: can the human mind derive moral norms (or learn “what’s right”) from studying nature? – by re-presenting and rethinking what a few of the greatest philosophers in the Tradition wrote about it. Now, while insight into this question may be of intrinsic interest only to philosophic souls, American citizens are in special need of it (now more than ever, given the rise of postmodernism) – and indeed, of a positive answer to the question; and this for the simple but serious reason that our nationality is defined largely, perhaps decisively – though not, I think, exclusively – by authoritative opinions our founding generation harbored about natural right(s). The problem of natural right may, then, be one or even the only direct point of access Americans as such have to the substance and import of political philosophy, which is a substantial component of the Tradition. For these and other reasons, I hope it will be good for us to contemplate this book as we begin our quest, which, I want to believe, may healthily have both a philosophic and patriotic wellspring . . .

When we pick up the text we are about to read, we notice first the name of its author, Leo Strauss. Who was this man? Since our immediate task is to understand Strauss’ thought (as it is expressed in one of his books), we may limit ourselves to rehearsing only a few details of his biography. First, Strauss was a German Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1937. He was forced to leave his homeland by the rise of a deadly tyranny; and he found freedom to live, think, teach, and write in America. From what I know of his life and his thought, I cannot say Strauss ever became an American patriot; but he was a friend – even, perhaps, a partisan – of the liberal freedom the Allies defended at great cost in WWII. (We should note in passing that Strauss’ longest tenure at an American university came at University of Chicago, where in 1949 he delivered the lectures that would later become Natural Right and History, a University of Chicago Press publication). Second, Strauss devoted his life to studying and explicating the Tradition: in his formative years in Kirchhain and Marburg, he received “a broad humanistic education” and completed a dissertation on the thought of F.H. Jacobi; his mature, scholarly corpus “spans ancient, medieval and modern political philosophy and includes, among others, studies of Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche;” and at the time of his death he was still at work, composing studies of Nietzsche, Thucydides, and Xenophon (SEP). Given Strauss’ remarkably serious, lifelong study of the Tradition it should not surprise us that he and his students (e.g. Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind) were and are among the keenest proponents of liberal education based on the Great Books – that venerable mode of instruction in human potentiality and “things beautiful” that we inherited from our aristocratic ancestors and that postmodernists are now working to eradicate (Strauss, LAM, 8; Bloom 1987, 21). Third, (I think it not prejudicial to our study of his book to assert that) Strauss’ “lifework” – namely, “the resurrection of political philosophy through the recovery of classical political philosophy” – was heroic (Behnegar 2010, 66). At a time when most everyone “knew” that the myriad religious, historical and scientific-technological changes or progress characteristic of modernity rendered ancient philosophy (not to mention poetry, rhetoric and history) obsolete or merely “interesting,” Strauss showed that the ideas and questions of Plato, Aristotle and their few peers are of perennial, human import, i.e. that those old books called classics deserve their title. He allowed us to see, or at the very least to suppose, that they have things to teach denizens of modernity about the nature of politics and the politics of philosophy.

Now, one of the (deceptively simple) classic questions Strauss recovered for us is, “how ought we to live?” (or “what is the best way of life?”); and the general form of the answer that most premodern philosophers and some theologians gave to it is, “in accordance with natural right,” or what is similar, “natural law.” – It is with all this in mind that we turn to consider the title of our text, which consists of two substantive terms: “Natural Right,” on the one hand, and “History,” on the other. The book will undoubtedly treat of both concepts and the relationship between them. But what might the relationship be, and, moreover, what might inspire a book about these two themes in particular? If we assume that Strauss was destined, as it were, to publish on natural right, we may still wonder why he did not compose, for example, Natural Right and Science or Natural Right and Revelation or Natural Right and Law – intriguing titles and subjects that Strauss could undoubtedly have written the book on.

If the intrinsic intrigue of his subject does not necessarily explain why Strauss chose it, then perhaps something about the times in which he wrote explains his choice of subject and title – his decision to make History the counterpart of natural right? That is plausible, so let us consider further. Natural right, as a special kind of right or justice, is necessarily a standard for human conduct. Is History, then, some kind of standard as well, possibly an alternative one? If so, could it be that History – as opposed to other possible standards like science, religion, and law – is considered authoritative in our day and age? Or, is it rather the case that modern men are torn between the alternative standards of natural right and History? Perhaps there is great debate about which one provides reliable guidance, or about which one human beings must obey? Similarly, what is the relationship between the concept of morality and the standards of natural right and History? Perhaps Nature and History are two alternative bases for morality? The exercise of generating questions such as these prepares us to be on the lookout for the answer that Strauss will give to the general question, what is the relationship between natural right and History? – But we should still consider the two themes independently. What do they suggest to us? What initially comes to mind when we think of natural right, on the one hand, and history, on the other? Prior to considering Strauss’ explication of these terms, can we be more honest and precise with ourselves about what they actually mean to us?

Natural right is a particular, perhaps peculiar, kind of right or justice, one that invokes the idea of nature: it is what is right by nature. But: what is nature? I think it will be helpful to consider this immense philosophical question unpretentiously and naively. The term “nature” first calls to mind such notions as “the outdoors” or “wilderness.” When you leave the house – especially when you go out beyond the areas where people live and work – then you might say you are “in nature.” In this way our vernacular hints that nature is the realm beyond human habitation, civilization or artifice. It is whatever exists beyond and prior to the “city” or human community. This sounds sensible enough; yet, we may pause here to question: if what sounds sensible here is true, then in what sense is or can there be any natural right? How can nature – which is beyond the city – be a moral standard for human relations, which mostly occur in the city? Common sense tells us that justice comes into its own only in the city: one cannot expect to find it in the wilderness, where, after all, one can hardly expect to survive. As David Mamet notes in his anti-Liberal polemic, “Nature wants you dead” (Mamet 2011, 133). – So, we become confused about “natural right.” Far from being a standard for our conduct, nature seems to be our enemy. In fact, it seems to us that human lives improve to the extent that they are able to escape from or at least tame the harsh necessities of the natural world. (Yea, sure, civilized people may find it pleasant to be out “in nature” from time to time; but, as Mamet might aver, it is obviously best for such people to approach nature from a position of strength, as it were).

At this point we might either settle for a preliminary skepticism or confusion about the possibility of natural right or go back to question our starting point. Taking the latter path, we realize that we began by speaking of nature as a discrete domain within the cosmos. We spoke of leaving home and city to enter nature. Was this a mistake? It must have been misleading, at least to some extent, to speak so; for we understand that human beings, as animals, are natural beings, members of the “animal kingdom,” as it were (cf. Plato, Protagoras, 320c-22c). Yes, we are highly conscious or “rational” animals, capable of speaking and thinking about ideas like nature and justice; but this does not render us independent of nature: we might even say (with Aristotle) that it is natural for human beings to live socially in homes and cities, on the one hand, and to contemplate ourselves and the whole that is nature, on the other. When we begin, thus, to think of ourselves as part of what might be called the “natural order,” then we may begin to consider the notion of natural right less skeptically. We may suppose it is best to look for the origin of natural right in the form or essence of specifically human nature, and nowhere else. – Now, an anecdote taken from an Atlantic exposé on the politics of Mr. Newt Gingrich may highlight the issues at stake here, in our approach to the problem of natural right (the piece’s cover photo is of Newt posing alongside dinosaur skulls at an Academy of Natural Sciences):   

A well-known animal fanatic, Gingrich was the one who suggested we meet at the Philadelphia Zoo. He used to come here as a kid, and has fond memories of family picnics on warm afternoons, gazing up at the giraffes and rhinos and dreaming of one day becoming a zookeeper. But we aren’t here just for the nostalgia.

“There is,” he explained soon after arriving, “a lot we can learn from the natural world.”

Since then, Gingrich has spent much of the day using zoo animals to teach me about politics and human affairs. In the reptile room, I learn that the evolutionary stability of the crocodile (“Ninety million years, and they haven’t changed much”) illustrates the folly of pursuing change for its own sake: “If you’re doing something right, keep doing it.”

Outside the lion pen, Gingrich treats me to a brief discourse on gender theory: “The male lion procreates, protects the pride, and sleeps. The females hunt, and as soon as they find something, the male knocks them over and takes the best portion. It’s the opposite of every American feminist vision of the world — but it’s a fact!”

But the most important lesson comes as we wander through Monkey Junction. Gingrich tells me about one of his favorite books, Chimpanzee Politics, in which the primatologist Frans de Waal documents the complex rivalries and coalitions that govern communities of chimps. De Waal’s thesis is that human politics, in all its brutality and ugliness, is “part of an evolutionary heritage we share with our close relatives”— and Gingrich clearly agrees.

For several minutes, he lectures me about the perils of failing to understand the animal kingdom. Disney, he says, has done us a disservice with whitewashed movies like The Lion King, in which friendly jungle cats get along with their zebra neighbors instead of attacking them and devouring their carcasses. And for all the famous feel-good photos of Jane Goodall interacting with chimps in the wild, he tells me, her later work showed that she was “horrified” to find her beloved creatures killing one another for sport, and feasting on baby chimps.

It is crucial, Gingrich says, that we humans see the animal kingdom from which we evolved for what it really is: “A very competitive, challenging world, at every level.”

As he pauses to catch his breath, I peer out over the sprawling primate reserve . . . At a loss for what to say, I start to mutter something about the viciousness of the animal world — but Gingrich cuts me off. “It’s not viciousness,” he corrects me, his voice suddenly stern. “It’s natural.”

A great deal could be said and a number of long questions raised on the basis of this anecdote. You might enjoying contemplating some of them on your own. For now I will say only that the above helps me bring home the point I have been driving at: reading the book of nature, as it were, is a very tricky task, i.e., natural right is difficult to discern. For instance, there are at least two informative mistakes in the anecdote, which mistakes are more or less the inverse of each other. Firstly, the interviewer mistakenly judges the animal world by his moral tastes: lions cannot be feminists nor monkeys compassionate individualists. If anything truly “is how it is," it is the behavior of wild animals. Secondly, however, and contrariwise, Gingrich mistakenly wishes to take his moral-political cue more or less directly from the animal world: he sees only monkey in man. No matter the genetic similarity between man and monkey; the differences are clearly decisive. Chimps do not have speech or reason (logos) and consequently cannot deliberate on justice or the common good; and they do not build cities (cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a1-20). (There is really no such thing as “Chimpanzee politics,” except perhaps as a vague analogy that presupposes an understanding of politics in the full sense, i.e. human politics). More: no animal but man philosophizes or worships gods. – Yet, if Newt’s approach to natural right fails on its own, it, or something like it, might yet be part of a truly discerning science of man and-or natural right; for, in the end, it may not be possible to look well at man without from time to time looking off and away at what is lower than and (we must now add) higher than man. As Strauss argues in another book, “humanism is not enough. Since man must understand himself in light of the whole or of the origin of the whole which is not human, or since man is the being that must try to transcend humanity, he must transcend humanity in the direction of the subhuman if he does not transcend it in the direction of the superhuman” or divine (TOM, 78). To know in full what Strauss meant by this, we would need to study his other book. For now, I only want his observation to bolster my contention that a genuinely scientific approach to man ought to begin from the common sense view that man is the being suspended, as it were, between beast and God – or between the animal kingdom and the kingdom of heaven.

This suggests a final, preliminary observation about the concept of natural right: it is of necessity something different from divine right or divine law. Perhaps an important question to consider honestly as we proceed, then, is, does the desire to know what is right – justice – lead us to contemplate God rather (or more) than Nature? Is justice properly a subject for theology, not philosophy? We will see that Strauss is, to say the least, attuned to this question. We might also care to remember the apropos fact that David Bentley Hart, a widely-read contemporary theologian, argues that any attempt to deduce, without reference to revelation, “compelling moral truths” from a “scrupulous contemplation of cosmic and human nature” is “hopeless.”

We may now turn to the concept of history, the second part of Strauss’ title. What does this term really mean to us? We might define it as “the recorded past,” for it is not the same as the past simply – since it is, unlike the past, knowable, in principle, in its entirety. We are in some sense aware of this when we speak of “making history:” specific people, actions, events, etc. “make” history when they stand out from the rest of their class. History is a partial record of the past. It strives to be a record of everything about the past that is worth knowing. – Now, this, of course, immediately raises a number of questions – e.g. how do we determine what is worth knowing? – but I cannot dwell on all such questions now. I would rather point out two things. First, the idea that history is what is worth knowing from the past gets us thinking again about how history might be a standard. We are aware of the phrase “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” Perhaps this is the sense in which history can be our guide? Is this what Strauss has in mind, or is it something else entirely? Second, when we think about what history “strives” for, we may be led to recall that history, unlike natural right, is not only a possible subject or problem worth studying: it is also a specific academic discipline. It is a discipline because it is, or at the very least is considered to be, knowable. We often hear that someone we know got a degree in history. We never hear that anyone got a degree in “natural right.” What does this tell us? Does it not indicate that our society, or at least our academy, puts a premium on historical knowledge, but not so much on knowledge of natural right? Could it be that the academy generally doubts the possibility of teaching and learning natural right? Will Strauss discuss this aspect of the relationship between history and natural right? If so, will he side with or against the prevailing view of the academy? –  

Now that we have considered our text’s author and title, our attention turns to its cover art: wrapped around the cover are the words “Declaration of Independence.” This immediately brings to our minds the Declaration of Independence that initiated the American Revolution. I hinted in the intro to these notes that certain opinions about natural right are key to our American nationality or identity. The Declaration of Independence is probably the most important testament to that. Its author, Thomas Jefferson, later wrote, in his letter to Henry Lee, that the document, especially its opening paragraphs, was meant to be simultaneously “an expression of the American mind” and “a harmonization of the sentiments of the day . . . expressed in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.” In other words, the American mind at the time of the revolution was, according to Jefferson, in agreement with a long tradition of thinking about public right, which was based on insights into “The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Loss of the sentiments these insights engendered, might, then, for Jefferson, hail the imminent closing of the American mind. (Note that it was the firm faith of the American people in such principles as those enunciated in the Declaration that allowed G.K. Chesterton in the early 20th century to describe our country as “a nation with the soul of a church,” i.e. a creedal nation – the first of its kind in the world). Our question, then, is multifaceted: firstly, what exactly does the Declaration have to do with Natural Right and History? With respect to this question we should keep in mind that the Declaration speaks not only of natural right. It also speaks of history (e.g. “the course of human events” and “all experience”), as well as divinity. So, how do all these sources of right hang together in the document and in the American mind? And lastly, what, ultimately, does Strauss think of the American Declaration? Does he hold its “truths to be self-evident?”

Before I end, I will leave you with a final thought about the meaning of the words that grace the cover of Strauss’ book: is it not possible that Natural Right and History is, in one way or another, Strauss’ own declaration of independence? Could it, perhaps, be his declaration of independence from certain dogmas prevailing in this our postmodern world?1

~ ~ ~

All of the above is intended to help prepare us all to think seriously about the issues raised by Natural Right and History. Most of the notes that I plan to write in the near future will concern that book. However, as I wrote in “The Inquiry and its Enemy,” my notes, in contrast to my essays on texts from the Tradition proper, are intended to allow me to follow “the free play of my mind.”  Consequently, the next note I publish will be about a song I have been listening to recently. I hope you will look forward to that . . .

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With that being said, I am going to try to publish at a regular pace for the next couple of months, as I get this project started. The plan is to publish once a week, probably on Sunday afternoons. As for the content of these regular posts, I have in mind two series of notes. The first series will deal with Leo Strauss’ book Natural Right and History, which I am (re)reading this summer with a friend. I plan to compose and publish here some of the observations, interpretations, and conclusions that come to me in the course of our reading. I hope some of you will read the book along with us and compare your thoughts with what I write! That is probably the best way to make use of this first series of notes; but I do intend for it to be valuable and accessible to all readers — even those who have no familiarity with Strauss and-or do not choose to read the book along with us.

Now, I think it is appropriate for more than one reason to make one of Strauss’ books the first we examine together at Questing. To begin with, although I had come to appreciate the Western Intellectual Tradition before I ever heard of Strauss, it was from his books (and from teachers who knew his work well) that I really learned to read with care. In addition, since Strauss is one of the most profound students of the Tradition (and its relationship to contemporary social science), we can take this work of his as a kind of model and springboard for our own inquiry. (But, of course, we must not allow him to do our thinking for us!) — Much more can and will be said along these lines, but I will pause for now.

The inquiry is a quest. Every good question implies a quest, calls up the desire to seek an answer, to make an intellectual journey — to brave the darkness of ignorance in search of the light of truth. If any one question gives rise to this quest, it is, “What is man?” This is the fourth of Immanuel Kant’s four critical questions — the one into which he says the other three fold, i.e., his most fundamental and comprehensive question. The question is similarly crucial for Plato: the problem of the soul of man lurks behind the form and content of all his dialogues. All this is not to say, however, that the question of man is unimportant for other philosophers in the Tradition. The inquiry can hardly ignore, for example, Aristotle’s influential definitions of man; nor can it ignore the Christian conception of man as imago Dei or the results of modern natural science (such as the theory of evolution) and their manifold ramifications. Even so, I consider Plato and Kant to be especially attuned to this question and especially useful for all who wish to acquire a grasp of it amidst what has been called the crisis of modernity.

Now, this crisis has been variously characterized; but it doubtlessly involves liberalism’s ongoing crisis of confidence: is liberal-democracy good for man? If so, why? Or with what qualifications? Recent intellectual and political developments (the rise of postmodernism and nationalism, for example) force these questions upon us — alert denizens of a constitutionally liberal, democratic nation-state. I begin this quest, then, with the hope that studying the Tradition, especially Plato and Kant, will help us grasp the strengths and weaknesses of our civilization’s embattled regime. (In addition to Plato and Kant, Nietzsche may also prove to be essential; for he is both their greatest heir and critic and the most incisive critic of liberal-democracy). But above all I hope that the quest inaugurated by this essay will help all who undertake it to orient their souls in these our disorienting times.

My quest will focus on the canonical texts of political philosophy; but I anticipate that it will from time to time draw my attention to the texts and questions of other disciplines and modes of inquiry, e.g., history, theology and physics. I am only a thoughtful reader. I have no firm method, only a mode of reading. I have no expertise, only a good liberal education. My way of reading involves attending to detail and authorial intent. My understanding of the meaning and value of a liberal education will be explained in due course. —

Like all worthy quests, this inquiry has an enemy. Its name is postmodernism. Vanquishing the enemy, or at least depriving it — to some extent — of prey, is my urgent goal. The enemy is a monster with a black heart, fiendish head and two powerful, far-reaching arms. It is an elusive, shadowy beast; yet, we may posit at the outset of our quest that its heart is critical Theory; its head is Social Justice scholarship; and its arms are Social Justice activism and identity politics. My goal is to strike at the place where the head and heart of the monster meet in order to end its life and reign of terror in our times. The claim that postmodernism reigns today will be defended subsequently; but I am tempted to say it is self-evident: is our milieu not postmodern? Are we not led to doubt that modernity is or may be a happy home for human beings?

It is necessary at the outset to see the enemy clearly. What is this critical Theory — the apparent heart of the monster? It is an approach to the study of man and society developed in the 1960’s-70’s by “French social Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, who were the original architects of what later came to be known simply as ‘Theory.’”1 The scholarship and influence of these intellectuals will be interrogated as this inquiry continues. It is sufficient for now to posit that their common aim was to undo the European Enlightenment: whereas the Enlightenment generally sought to enthrone reason or science as man’s final authority and guide, the founders of postmodernism or Theory sought to dethrone reason and with it all forms of authority. This, they claimed, was the final frontier of freedom: unfettered by any dogma of reason or religion, human beings might finally be able to act or express themselves without compunction.

By revolting against reason and revelation, the first postmodernists revolted also against every product of these, as well as the fecund tension between them, and the greatest or most comprehensive of these is nothing other than our Western civilization itself: postmodernism is inherently anti-Western. For postmodernists of all stripes, “the West” is a complex of oppression, “reason” and “revelation” two masks worn by those few who benefit from it.

Regarding the influence of Theory in America, it is sufficient for now to note that postmodern concepts like Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian power and discourse and Lyotardian skepticism toward metanarratives — (which narratives are now said to include the claim that modernity represents progress born of science) — not to mention the celebration of non-Western epistemologies and logo-phobic social-constructivism, are ubiquitous in our schools and culture. This (to make a long story short) is because a cadre of Marxist academics in America in the 1990’s — in the wake of the collapse of Soviet communism — appropriated French Theory and transformed it into a kind of intellectual life-support for their radical critique of America. In keeping with Marx’s formula that the true goal of thinking is to transform — not simply understand — the world, these academics made postmodernism practical, a tool for inspiring and directing radical activism. Over time (and by cynically appropriating moral authority from the civil rights movement of the 1960’s), the growing cadre of Theorists devised that amorphous ideology that is known today as “Social Justice.” Thus, it is appropriate to think of Social Justice scholarship as “applied postmodernism.”2

But what, more precisely, is this scholarship — the apparent head of the monster? It is first and foremost the work of academics in five fields of research: post-colonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, feminist Theory, and disability Theory.3 (Notice that these fields are united only by their invocation of Theory). Yet, it must be understood that the influence of Social Justice scholarship is not confined to those corners of the academy dedicated to research in these fields. It influences or virally infects the administrations of most American universities as well as research in many other fields — especially in the humanities and social sciences. Crucially, the fact that most universities in the U.S. no longer require graduates to be well-versed in the “Great Books” of the Tradition is due largely to the influence of Social Justice on pedagogy.4 Scholar-activists motivated by this ideology are also the creators of the aptly acronym-ed programme of indoctrination called Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (D-I-E), which programme currently pervades and corrupts nearly all U.S. institutions, and the educators of its evangelistic enforcers and disseminators.

Social Justice thus may be the legislating school of thought in America today. Its agents lay down the law, as it were, for many academic disciplines by influencing (or, rather, policing) research agendas, university administrators, and campus discourse. And, of course, what happens in the academy does not stay in the academy: students take what they learn into the world. It is, then, hardly surprising that the monster of postmodernism reaches out from within the ivory tower of academia to grasp the people and institutions of our society at large: students influenced directly or indirectly by postmodern Theory and Social Justice scholarship in the academy enter society ready to become “woke” Social Justice activists and practitioners of identity politics — those “thin-skinned, acrimonious, violent human beings” with whom we are by now all too familiar.5 This is the “Great Awokening.”6 —

Without its heart or head, the monster of postmodernism would perish. Yet, its hold on our society is so strong that even in its death throes its arms could flail with baneful effects. As it is, the monster only tightens its embrace.

What, then, are Social Justice activism and identity politics — the apparent arms of the monster? The former is all those modes of protest, petition, propaganda, lobbying, regulatory fiat, legal action, and judicial (mis)interpretation intended — firstly — to permanently equalize outcomes among certain identity groups (typically defined by race, gender, or sexual orientation), i.e., achieve “equity” — and secondly — to set and enforce speech codes that define what is acceptable (and unacceptable) to say about all that pertains to the social status of women and favored identity groups (“minorities”). This second purpose serves the first, as it is an effort to control all policy debates. — My definition is provisional; but it does describe with some specificity attempts to establish equity by action not properly political.  

Identity politics is often closely related in practice to Social Justice activism, but it may be distinguished conceptually. Identity politics is all those efforts to capture the official organs of political power that intentionally politicize biologically rooted identity groups — e.g., those defined by race, gender, and sexual orientation — and their allies (people who identify morally with but are not themselves members of a given identity group). These categories should be contrasted with what might be called doxa-logical ones (doxa is the Greek word for “opinion”), e.g., religion, ideology or culture. The political mode that is identity politics may in turn be contrasted with properly partisan politics — which is all those efforts to capture the official organs of political power that seek to politicize any and all citizens by articulating and defending one or more moral-political principles and attendant policy proposals. The agents of identity politics seek to build the members of preferred identity groups and their allies into a coalition against “the system,” which they say is oppressive (or insufficiently celebratory) of those identities. Like Social Justice activists, these agents seek to “problematize” all that is supposed to be held in common by the highly diverse citizenry of the U.S. — to ensure that citizens only think to act politically on the basis of their “minority” or “ally” status. They oppose the idea that America is or might ever be one people, nation, or moral whole.

Together Social Justice scholars and activists and the practitioners of identity politics indict America’s cultural heritage, institutions, civil religion and founding principles. Consider, for instance, the fact that their guiding value —equity — entails the allocation of goods and legal protections to overcome or counteract precisely what “Publius,” the pseudonymous founder of the U.S., declared in the Federalist Papers that it is the “first object of government” to protect, namely “the diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate.”7 Whereas our founder(s) thought government ought to prize diversity in “faculties” or talents above all, postmodernists believe it should prize diversity in (bodily) identities above all. — This anthropological or political disjunction lurks behind the increasingly stark moral one between justice as merit and justice as equity.

This, then, is the monster of postmodernism — the enemy of our inquiry: postmodern critical Theory, Social Justice scholarship, and Social Justice activism and identity politics. I plan to argue in future essays postmodernism is monstrous because it abjures reason, corrupts education, poisons freedom, and suppresses life and virtue (excellence or quality). It seems to me that the tendency of postmodernism is to accelerate and radicalize what Pierre Manent has called “the despotism of gentleness.”8 The postmodern manifestation of this despotism is radically democratic insofar as it seeks to suppress, deny, subvert or destroy all or most natural and conventional differences among men — especially any sense of what Nietzsche called the “distinction of ranks” among men — in the name of equality or equity, which is an undesirable notion of equality that welcomes despotic imposition.9 The egalitarian commitments of postmodernism enable it to feed on the passion for equality that always already lives in the hearts of democratic peoples.10 Ironically, the agents of the despotism of gentleness are frequently very harsh in condemning whatsoever they deem ungentle or “intolerant.” They despise or fail to comprehend the fact that the word “discrimination” has more than one meaning. Anyway, their typical activity is maligning keystone institutions and ideas of Western civilization as oppressive, exclusionary or biased — by which they mean unjust.

This last observation connects the substance of our quest to its urgent goal: since postmodernism seems to harbor a latent conception of justice, we may be able to overcome or, at least, free ourselves from it by recovering a better conception or account of justice in the course of this inquiry.

How will the rest of this project be presented? The quest is a methodical inquiry into the Western intellectual tradition that will focus on exegesis of important texts by Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and others. As it proceeds, the reasons for its course will be explained. It will be a series of long essays. Alongside these will be a series of notes of various lengths. Often these notes will supplement or clarify themes presented in the essays; but sometimes they will be wholly unconnected. The notes give me a way to follow the free play of my mind. The essays give me a way to pursue a methodical inquiry. The essays will be more thoroughly researched, scholarly, and clearly related in a linear fashion.

Questing in the Western Intellectual Tradition is a project that I hope will be interesting to and useful for many different kinds of people; but my one ambition is to eventually reach a cadre of American students in the late stages of high-school, college, and early professional life. I believe it is of the utmost importance that students in the U.S. begin to cultivate for themselves heterodox, fulfilling intellectual lives.  

W ~ 4 ~ S ~ 5 ~ H ~ 8

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