More Is Different
With Rank, Becker saw that asceticism and gluttony, potlatch and hoarding, moralism and hedonism, are not just culturally relative "human problems" (though they are that too), but actually solutions to an ultimate human problem also. They fail as solutions as easily as they succeed, of course, but this does not prevent their independent discovery elsewhere in time and space.
Moralism especially has failed because it requires a diversionary cover story that becomes evermore difficult to sustain as knowledge advances. Moralism is always standing astride the knowledge-cognition gap, and so it is always falling in. Someone always goes down to the bottom and fishes it out, though, now a bit worse for wear, and sets it back astride. And so it goes.
Morality itself is culturally relative, which creates intergroup conflict; but moralism can fail within a culture if the leapfrog of advancing knowledge is feeling frisky. At root, morality is always more ideal than real, so it is constantly running up against "real" events that it cannot account for.
It is easy to imagine that material circumstances have something to say about the formation of morals, but morality does not really come from reality. As Becker says, "Man's answers to the problem of his existence are in large measure fictional."
Such it is that a comparative anthropologist is always already a theorist of civilizational collapse, and Becker is no exception.
anthropology has taught us that when a culture comes up against reality on certain critical points of its perceptions, and proves them fictional, then that culture is indeed eliminated by what we could call "natural selection." When the Plains Indians hurled themselves against White man's bullets thinking themselves immune due to the protection of Guardian Spirits in the invisible world, they were mowed down pitilessly.
But the curious fact is that reality rarely tests a culture on salient points of its hero-system . ...man seems to have been permitted by natural bounty to live largely in a world of playful fantasy. Whole societies have been able to persist with central beliefs that bore little relation to reality. About the only time a culture has had to pay has been in the encounters with conquerors superior in numbers, weapons, and immunity to certain diseases.
As for more recent times,
One of the terrifying things about living in the late decades of the twentieth century is that the margin that nature has been giving to cultural fantasy is suddenly being narrowed down drastically. The consequence is that for the first time in history man, if he is to survive, has to bring down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-systems.
This latter point is arguable, and it has been argued over, certainly. For art people, the knee-jerk rejoinder is to say that not very many people, now or ever, have much enjoyed living without some "large fictional element," in "society" or otherwise; while that element has never been wholly or even mostly a matter of art or aesthetics, these nonetheless are the best places to find it, and they are harmless diversions anyway. It simply is not worth living without fictions. To live this way is to underbid life's price by a factor of ten.
In answer to this: contrary to the well-worn saying, what one does not know can hurt them; in fact it can destroy them along with everything they think they ever knew.
The question is, then: What illusion can a society afford? Or, to return again to the Game Show theory of existence: What is life's price, and can a society name it to the nearest dollar without going over?
Becker's marshaling of psychoanalytic theory, though he rejects and revises far more of it than he merely serves up, is just another aspect of his books that has become ever more unsightly in polite scholarly company. Yet it is not so easy to reject passages such as the following simply because of the sourcing:
Since his choice of mechanisms of defense, of a style of life, is the child's adaptation to superior powers, this choice does not reflect his own real feelings, his own true perceptions. In fact, it would be difficult to determine what these might be since, in large part, the child was not given the chance to have them. This means that the child's denial of his burdens is "dishonest," not fully under his control, unknown to him: his character, in a word, is an urgent lie about the nature of reality.
The child thus becomes the prototype for the later adult. At a certain point Freud's "mechanistic" account of this became untenable: the former Freudian reality was itself relegated to "cultural fantasy" when it ran up against later, better empirical observations. But it is easy enough to see, above, that Becker is really talking about everybody. It has only been confirmed, as knowledge has advanced, that when any human being is "not given the chance to have" any of their "own real feelings," one likely result is a "dishonest denial of burdens" and a certain unwittingness vis-a-vis one's own lie of "character." Those observations have held up just fine, and so there is more than a hint of primitive animism in rejections of Becker, in toto, merely on the basis of purported Freudian contagion. Freudianism may be very wrong, ultimately, but it has shaken loose all manner of precious stones from the attic of the scholarly mind, along with a few wasps, and so it is derelict to simply declare a taboo on any author who appeals to it.
Becker is, finally, the kind of anthropologist who is an even more astute observer of his own time than of past times. He is a pantheon moral philosopher and political theorist, and even a naive but brilliant philosopher of science, who is still being discovered as such. And so, he is not above turning the telescope around and looking in the thick end.
Modern man is denying his finitude with the same dedication as the ancient Egyptian pharaohs, but now whole masses are playing the game, and with a far richer armamentarium of techniques.
Hence,
Life in contemporary society is like an open-air lunatic asylum with people cutting and spraying their grass..., beating trails to the bank with little books of figures that worry them around the clock... This is truly obsessive-compulsiveness on the level of the visible and the audible, so overpowering in its total effect that it seems to make of psychoanalysis a complete theory of reality. I mean that in this kind of normal cultural neurosis man's natural animal spontaneity is almost wholly stifled: the material-technological character-lie is so ingrained in modern man, for the most part, that his natural spontaneity, his urges toward mystery, awe, and beauty show up only minimally, if at all, or in forms that are so swallowed up in culturally-standardized perceptions that they are hardly recognizable:... Modern man is closed off, tightly, against dimensions of reality and perceptions of the world that would threaten or upset his standardized reactions: he will have it his way if he has to strangle the segment of reality that he has equipped himself to cope with
Such declarations have by now become tiresome, and indeed there is some garden-variety pessimism here; but as with the Freudian account of childhood, it is not so easy simply to close the book and go do something else. Becker here has got a bead on something more than the quotidian depravity of lawns and bank books.
When man found that certain ways of doing things worked to bring him satisfaction and survival, these ways became true and right; ways that didn't work became false and wrong. And so moral codes grew up around the interrelationships of things, theories of good and evil that tried to separate the real from the illusory.
The curious thing about this long search for reality, as anthropologists have long known, is that a large part of it was accidental. Primitive man did not know the interrelationships of things in many areas of his life, and he thought these interrelationships were primarily invisible and spiritual. As a result, when something important did not work, he looked for any clues he could get,...
And so, to bring things up to date,
The second curious thing about accidental causal explanations is that they did not vanish from the earth with prehistoric evolution, but remained an intimate part of human beliefs all through human history, right up to yesterday, so to speak.
In sum: a human being may survive and thrive, and indeed feel good, and yet unwittingly be in grave and constant danger all the same. There always seems to be too much suffering in the world and not enough joy; but there is never very much "reality" even in the best of times; and finally, if times are just that good, nobody is going to be particularly keen on upsetting the apple cart.
What is to be done about this, if anything must or can be done about it?
While we can agree that the task of social science is nothing less than the uncovering of social illusion, we must also right away admit that we understand that man can never securely know what absolute reality is. ...we have to rephrase our problem to put it in the more pragmatic terms proper to our talents. We cannot ask in any ultimate sense, What is Real? but we can ask experientially, What is False?—what is illusory, what prevents the health, the coping with new problems, the life and survival of a given society? What are its real possibilities within the web of fictions in which it is suspended?
Notice that Becker articulates something which is elsewhere called "negative empiricism," the method of ruling out causes, the task with which GPs and CEOs so often busy themselves; this as opposed to the "positive" feeling about in the dark for whatever one might hit one's head on.
Notice also that he grounds the "possibilities" and the "fictions," grounds them in each other, if not quite dialectically then at least relatively and dynamically. In this he makes a true leap towards something profound. This is Becker's visionary statement. It does not regress into mere prejudice, at least if it is understood. It regresses as such only if the grounding is undone by a refusal to accept limits on human life.
Now, who wants to live their life within someone else's "limits?" Who wants to be so "negative" all the time? Are these not humanity's prisons, from which people have only just begun to escape? That has been the gist of much hopeful conjecture, it has been a revolutionary battle cry on and off for a long time now, but the arrogation has had to be walked back in shame very shortly thereafter, every time it has been made.
And so, finally, one must face up to the political side, and as always, it is the most unpleasant side to face.
The Oedipus complex, understood simply, is the gulf that exists between one's early training, one's basic perceptions, one's primary sense of self, and the choices, opportunities, experiences and challenges of the adult world. If the Oedipus is heavy this gulf can be great enough to completely cripple the person's ability to live in a changing adult world. But democracy needs adults more than anything, especially adults who bring something new to the perception of the world, cut through accustomed categories, break down rigidities. We need open, free, and adaptable people precisely because we need unique perceptions of the real, new insights into it so as to disclose more of it. In a democracy the citizens are the artists who open up new reals. The genius of the theoreticians of democracy is that they understood this, that we must have as many different individuals as possible so as to have as varied a view of reality as possible, for only in this way can we get a rich approximation of it. Twisted perspectives then get corrected easily because each person serves as part of a corrective on the others. Totalitarianism is a form of government that inevitably loses in the longer run because it represents the view of one person on reality... When the pressure of reality becomes too much, all go down together.
And so Becker, probingly but farsightedly, comes out as a diversity theorist, a Talebian antifragilist, and a Laschian populist, all at once. Perhaps this is not really that remarkable, since even these far-flung cohorts have some common intellectual heritage. It is worth noting, though, and what Becker says here, quite literally at the end of his oeuvre and his life, can only color, retrospectively, everything else he wrote prior. He articulates something here which can only appear, fifty years on, as some kind of eclectic cherrypicking from left, center, and right, with pinches of Marxism and Nihilism to taste, perhaps as a cocktail party ruse or social media stunt. This, however, is not what this thought represented fifty years ago; that is not where this thought came from. And while it would be literally true to label Becker "eclectic," this customarily implies superficiality also, and that will not do in this case.
An intellect of this caliber, even, cannot have thought of everything, and in any case no short stack of books can touch upon anything-and-everything. And so it remains for others, confronted with this opening up of space, to begin to fill it in, one page at a time. This is welcome in an epoch when it seems as if everything has already been done; and yet this task begins, now and perhaps always, with pessimism.
To start, contemporary diversity theory has not brought any new perceptions into the world. It has not broken down any rigidities but rather is itself a rigid and evermore rigidifying totalitarian ideology. It arises from good intentions, seemingly; the very best, in fact. The problem is that it is not what it seems to be: it is a Beckerian "cultural illusion" to the letter, clothed in pseudoscience and hand-waving. It is not "empirically true." In fact most of its basic assumptions had already been ruled out before it was even conceived. As such it is already (was always) an affront to the very reality it seeks to act upon.
The ideal of diversity per se which Becker has in mind here had already been practiced, accidentally, in a few isolated times and places; otherwise later diversity theorists would not have had much scholarly ammunition to work with. This historical data, however, has not been heeded much at all in contemporary policy making. In its place, revolutionary cognitivism and idealism carry the day. "Diversity" has come down to the real-life aesthetic practice of leitmotif, to a protracted fit of "larping," and to a total work of art as life, one that Wagner himself can only envy. Obviously, that will not do.
Many of its detractors refer to the contemporary diversity ideology (and pretty much everything else left-of-center) as "Marxist," but there really is not much of Marx or Engels to be found in it, and there is not a whiff of Plekhanov, Kautsky or Luxemburg. What there is, rather, is a crucial element of Leninism, or Marxism-Leninism, and it is the all-important element: the use of state power (and later soft power) "to keep down one’s enemies by force," its use for "keeping down" any and all class enemies as the the ideologists du jour see fit to declare them. That is what is truly ominous about the events of the 2010s and 2020s. The rest of it is just people being people, and it will settle into something better with time.
(It will of course be argued that diversity measures lift people up and hold no one down. On this, see all above re: the dual aspect of causality.)
There is something transcendent to be done with and through "diversity." It has already been done, accidentally and in spurts; one day it will be done intentionally and always. It is possible. That is an unshakable article of faith which this study seeks to affirm, not to deny. No artist or aesthete of any sophistication at all can fail to grasp the ideal of diversity that Becker lands on above. The contemporary diversity ideology ain't it.
As for the matter of fragility, what Becker says above about democracy, while it is a characteristically searing point, cannot really be projected onto the global political stage. Becker seems to have studied the entire world, but he cannot be talking about the entire world here. His wisdom and his subject matter both are "cosmic," but cosmic diversity and community diversity are absolutely incommensurable notions. All such concerns are modulated by scale and scope. That is why desperate efforts to recover some kind of democratic community life always come down to excluding someone, even if that someone has some claim (or many claims) to have been included; and this of course has mostly ended in crippling acrimony and violence rather than in community self-rule. That is how contemporary citizens of the world are introduced to the problem of fragility and its relationship to the problem of diversity.
These problems are only getting worse. By this time, then, existential contemplation is a bit of a luxury. Something must be done, something which is cognizant rather than ignorant of the fact that scale and scope are dynamic modulators. More is neither more nor less. More is different. And yet the stomachs of the world will never be as big as the eyes. That much will never be any different for human beings, and their feigning of ignorance here has long since grown tiresome.
Sometimes a human being who has ended up feeling bad after they once felt good will have a lucid moment. They will tell Carruthers The Elder to hide the cake before they have a chance to grab a second or third piece. Back home, they will pour all the booze down the sink, cut up their credit cards, or declare that they no longer enjoy listening to a certain style of music and perhaps never really did. People need help to arrive here, it is true; and, people need people generally, indeed; but the help that comes from other people does not need to be hand delivered. Sometimes it is enough that someone simply notices how bad things have gotten for them, compared to other people at least, and to notice that this was not always the case; and from there, this person can initiate a well-controlled experiment on themselves and follow it out to some slightly happier resolution. They will say they have done some thinking, or have been working on themselves like an auto mechanic, but that is not quite accurate. It may be an outright lie. And many of them will say they did it all by themselves, which is a baldfaced lie that none of their friends and relations will fall for.
People have known all about this for a long time, but when there are eight billion of them things are a bit more complex. Specifically, if someone at the party says "Hide the cake before I eat any more!", inevitably another will chime in, snidely: "What, you don't like cake?!" What happens next is anyone's guess.
And if there are people who find out that they were never even invited? Perish the thought. "What, you don't like us?!"
One can still, now, go to Freud and his discredited "orthodox" followers for an understanding of this very specfic scenario. They describe it all perfectly. The reason their descriptions of it are so good, in spite of their vast hubris and ignorance of other matters, is that this is one thing they were not ignorant of. They lived it. They observed it on the very small scale of domestic and community life, without podcasts or sexbots to enervate and distract them.
When there are eight billion people at the party, no one can observe very much or really have any idea how they might manage to do so. That is a state of severe global "fragility" in Taleb's sense. And that is the whole point of this section.
As for what Becker says above specifically about democracy, it is best to pick up that thread a couple of decades later, where it is taken up by another visionary thinker who was being summoned away just as his work was falling into place.
Asking The Right Questions
Whither populism?
According to the European Center for Populism Studies, "the ideational approach" to populism defines it as
an ideology which presents “the people” as a morally good force and contrasts them against “the elite” , who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving. Populists differ in how “the people” are defined, but it can be based along class, ethnic, or national lines. . . . the populist decides who the real people are; and whoever does not want to be unified on the populist’s terms is completely and utterly excluded . . .
To this it can only be said: corruption and self-dealing exist. Be it denied that they (or any other human construct) exist as ultimate realities or essences, a Real Populism nonetheless rises to meet them on the pragmatic and phenomenal levels. Individuals, groups, institutions, worlds: all may be or become corrupt.
It is a bankable assumption, by now, that the possibility of "class, ethnic, or national" divisions will be emphasized in dictionary definitions of populism, and there is plenty of real-life "practice" for this "theory" to point to in that regard. This "can" happen. Indeed. It does not have to happen, but it can.
Such statements thus put populists of all stripes on the hook for vulgar populism and its associated demagogies. That is one problem, for the other populists at least, though it is the opposite of a problem for the issuer of the statements. There is a second problem created too: such high-level reductions also, somehow, let the the class, the ethnic group, and the nation off the hook too easily. In 2024 these themselves so often appear as the most prolific breeding grounds for "corrupt and self-serving" behavior; this precisely to the extent that groups qua groups find themselves conscious of their difference and forced to confront it, be that in geopolitics, trade, internal political division, sports rivalries, or even in mutual "personal" disdain at the atomic level of social life. Profoundly "corrupt" dealings with outgroups are tolerated or even valorized while a strict moral code prevails among the ingroup. "Elite" corruption is merely one instance of this, the instance which the most people are most comfortable talking about: after all, most people are not "elites" and hence do not implicate themselves with such talk.
The ECPS article grants that populists may be onto something, sometimes, but it equivocates on the matter of elite corruption, which is itself more or less another "nationalist" ideology which has developed, spread and thrived among an insular group of people who just happen to live in the same time but not in the same space. If these people had to live with themselves, in a real community rather than a virtual one, the problem would be resolved quite parsimoniously. To speak of their insularity, though, is already a misleading reduction. "The elites" are insulated, physically, from "the people," and the elites are integrated with the people in a few specific ways. It has been averred, for example, that the present paradigm, "late capitalism" per se, aims to maximize the flow of capital across borders while keeping most of the people contained. The problems with that are obvious by now, but it does not have to be just capital and bodies. It could be anything. What is called "globalism" is actually imperialism in a velvet glove. This has been understood for a long time, since at least Rosa Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet. It has never been possible for the people to do very much about it, however. "Imperialism" does not operate only by way of "capital," either. It is to the great credit of the radical left to have understood and emphasized the comprehensive nature of imperialism, to have noted its destruction not only of subsistence economies but of street-level culture.
A Real Populism, then, is a populism which is able to hold two quite dissonant ideas in its head at once. First: as globalism advances, nationalism becomes ever more toxic as it is diverted into all manner of base prejudices and outrageous platforms aimed at turning back the advance. Second: at the same time, the demands of nationalists, no matter what outrageous prejudicies accompany these demands, in the end come down to the assertion of a basic human right: the right to membership in a community and to everything that comes along with that.
When suggested by an interviewer that he had "become a man of the right," Christopher Lasch replied,
if I have to be labelled I would prefer to be called a populist.
Acknowledging that "populism can be reactionary," Lasch enumerates its "values."
a sense of limits, a respect for the accomplishments and aspirations of ordinary people, a realistic appraisal of life's possibilities, genuine hope without utopianism which trusts life without denying its tragic character.
"Above all," he concludes,
it is connected to a moral tradition. For this reason alone we cannot let it go out of fashion.
In contrast to this insistence on maintaining connection to a moral tradition, the ECPS article does not seem too concerned with the question of what, exactly, is "morally good" and what is "corrupt and self-serving." The problem with "unifi[cation] on the populist’s terms" seems not to be the nature of the terms but the mere fact that there are terms. That, however, is precisely what community is. Few recent thinkers give more eloquent voice to this point than does Lasch.
The ECPS does concede that "not everyone who criticizes elites is automatically a populist"; also that "keeping a close eye on elites can in fact plausibly be seen as a sign of good democratic engagement." It is even "completely normal" to hold certain "values" which don't align with one's community; yet to "personalize and moralize political conflict" is to exit "productive democracy" and descend into "anti-pluralism." Between this kind of "elite" equivocation and the close-at-hand caricature of "populist" vulgarity with which it comforts itself, it is hard to say which is the greater threat to peace and stability.
It is hardly novel that a loaded term such as "populism" could be thought of differently by observers separated in time and space. In this case, however, the juxtaposition of disparate standpoints poses a crucial and substantive question. As Lasch insists on staying "connected to a moral tradition," so for the ECPS "populism inevitably involves a claim to a moral monopoly," leaving all others "completely and utterly excluded." Where is the room for compromise here? What might it then mean to somehow stay "connected" to a morality which has no "monopoly?" Most likely it means to be driven to madness, slowly and excruciatingly, as one continuously confronts moral others who are just as unamenable to change as oneself and yet are structurally integrated into one's very own political, economic and cultural institutions. It means entering a high-stakes negotiation without agreeing upon definitions of any terminology. That is contemporary American politics in capsule. (Lakoff's "contested concepts" again.)
Lasch's later work fills out his position. "The impending crisis of competence and civic trust . . . casts a heavy pall of doubt over" the notion that "it is liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, that make democracy work." "Formally democratic institutions do not guarantee a workable social order." Further, if fellow citizens "are never held up to any kind of judgment," then "the question that really matters—How should I live?" becomes a mere "matter of taste."
Indeed,
this deeper and more difficult question, rightly understood, requires us to speak of impersonal virtues... If we believe in these things, moreover, we must be prepared to recommend them to everyone, as the moral preconditions of a good life. To refer everything to a "plurality of ethical commitments" means that we make no demands on anyone and acknowledge no one's right to make any demands on ourselves.
Hence,
it is our reluctance to make demands on each other, much more than our reluctance to help those in need, that is sapping the strength of democracy today.
By that time, "we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life," for "we have no basis on which either to demand respect or to grant it." For Lasch, "liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism," hence confounding the historical data. Only now that this "capital" has dried up is democratic formalism fending for itself; the result has been the recapitulation of social ills rather than their remedy.
Whatever objections this line may be open to, it plainly enough isolates the crucial hidden premise of the ECPS article, which is precisely this "liberal" faith in institutions and their attendant formalism to deliver not merely a "workable public order" but much else besides. For the varying breadths of moral "pluralism" entailed by several hundred, hundred thousand, or hundred million citizens there is prescribed, ostensibly, the same set of procedures.
And yet . . . "If we believe in these things, we must be prepared to recommend them to everyone." In other words, we must be moral creatures, because that is all that we can be. This entails the very real possibility of exclusion, including self-exclusion. It matters not whether morality is relative in a philosophical or culturally relativist sense. It matters not what roles "nature" and "nurture" have played in retrospect. Morality can be severely strained by circumstance, it can be explained or explained away, it can ossify or evolve, slowly; but if it is amenable to the quotidian bargaining or suggestion of practical politics, it is not morality anymore.
It is not so easy, then, to talk past the fundamental populist demands, even where it is very easy to detect incoherent or destructive aims alongside them. The right to community entails the right to "recommend to everyone" that which the community stands for and has worked for. The informed moral relativist position, then, is not to simply point out the abstract incoherence of the moral sensibility when this sensibility is viewed, once again from outer space, as a mere artifact of cultural relativity. Planet Earth can perfectly well tolerate a wide range of human moral impulses; she simply cannot tolerate them if they live all together, cheek-by-jowl, in a single global "community" of Billions-with-a-B.
Life as a died-in-the-wool moral relativist is tough going, even if it only gets easier to live as an occasional one the further globalism advances. The elites, too, who promote this expectation of rare tolerance, are reduced to plebeians anytime they are confronted with irreconcilable moral conflict. In this they truly are just like anyone else. One can only assume that they do not actually face this problem all that much, though, in their daily lives, or perhaps not at all; otherwise they would not constantly be making things worse rather than better with every word that comes out of their mouths. The word "irreconcilable" is used here for a reason; and if it is ultimately seen, through far more detailed and refined inquiry than is able to be offered here, that there is not very much which is truly irreconcilable, it stands to reason, then, that the present regime of globalism is indeed doing a very poor job in this regard, because there has not been very much reconciliation lately and there has been much nationalism, demagoguery and violence. That is the bare minimum of skepticism required.
It is hardly surprising that so much vulgar populism of the 2010s and 2020s has been an anti-globalist populism. Yet the pop-psychology that is deployed to account for the evident racism of these movements can seemingly produce solutions only in negative, so harshly do these solutions grate against the creed of democratic formalism. There is of course much boilerplate talk of scapegoating, but with none of the context, learnedness or rigor which Becker and his antecedents applied to that problem. There is much talk of people under threat reacting the way people under threat always do, whether in a psychology lab, a work performance review, or a school playground. Often it is even granted to be a real threat, such as economic strife. But pluralism too is a threat. Pluralism is a threat to the personal moral absolutism which is the bedrock of the self-concept. As Stephenson puts it, "almost all that we are in selfhood respects is given to us in relation to social controls." People adapt easily to different brands of soap, but destabilizing the edifice of "social control" strikes at our very "selfhood." What centrist formalists tend to miss about this is that loosening the control too much and too suddenly is not very different psychologically from overtightening it to the same degree. Both are highly destructive of settled "internalizations," and when people's lifeways are destroyed, as Becker sums it up, those people are "as good as dead."
Exasperated globalists throw their hands up at the historical moving targets of race and nationality: it seems to matter not at all who the immigrants actually are or where they come from, they will be opposed regardless. It seems it hardly matters if they really are morally compatible or incompatible with their hosts, though antiglobalist commentators fixate endlessly on this as the decisive question and are well-prepared to explain away the fact that the same line was taken against their own immigrant ancestors. It seems America has learned nothing from its own history and Europe learned its own too well. The exasperated are onto something here that the sanguine overlook. They should take their own exasperated observations more seriously. They apply tortuous depth psychology to observed behavior while taking words at face value. They have got it backwards.
What is at issue here, again, is merely the universal right to form and maintain communities of moral consensus. Alongside whatever shortcomings populists also have, they refuse to abdicate responsibility for the reconciliation of disparate moralities to the formal vicissitudes of a neo-liberal "politics of accommodation" ill-equipped to handle such a task. That is to their enduring credit.
Populists (and some others) are notably unmoved by the line that globalism has "lifted millions out of poverty." Globalists ask rhetorically, What on earth could take precedence over that? They should ask their own exasperated question more sincerely. It would elicit the sincere answers which they had already decided do not exist.
In exalting the label, Lasch concedes that populism "does not offer a ready made solution to our multiple ills." Nonetheless, "it asks the right questions."
As Taleb says,
people invoke an expression, "Balkanization," about the mess created by fragmented states, as if fragmentation was a bad thing,...but nobody uses "Helvetization" to describe its successes.
Prejudiced or not in whatever direction, vulgar populists may in fact prove above all to be poor judges of their own line of exclusion. They hurt themselves, too, by refusing community with foreigners who may ultimately prove like-minded and up to the enormous task facing them. This is not an easy problem to solve, but at least it is theoretically amenable to some technical refinement in a way that moral bedrock cannot be. There is every reason to think that eventual assimilation and acceptance (in some order) are just as inevitable as initial opposition. But responsibility for this cannot simply be imposed upon the rooted any more than assimilation itself can be imposed upon the uprooted.
This is the pragmatic view. A blind faith in institutions is not.
NOTES
. . . "More is Different" . . .
P.W. Anderson, "More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science" (p. 393).
https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/025/05/0735-0740
the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.
The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y. ... But this hierarchy does not imply that science X is "just applied Y." At each stage entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.
. . . "in large measure fictional" . . .
Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil (p. 126).
. . . "when a culture comes up against reality" . . .
. . . "One of the terrifying things" . . .
ibid (pp. 127-129).
. . . "character, in a word, is an urgent lie" . . .
ibid (p. 148).
. . . "now whole masses are playing the game" . . .
. . . "like an open-air lunatic asylum" . . .
ibid (pp. 149-151).
. . . "moral codes grew up" . . .
. . . "right up to yesterday" . . .
ibid (pp. 155-156)
. . . "What is false?" . . .
ibid (p. 159).
. . . "negative empiricism" . . .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. Seeing white swans does not confirm the nonexistence of black swans. There is an exception, however: I know what statement is wrong, but not necessarily what statement is correct. If I see a black swan I can certify that all swans are not white! ...
We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification. It is misleading to build a general rule from observed facts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations... But there are some things I can remain skeptical about, and others I can safely consider certain. This makes the consequences of observations one-sided. It is not much more difficult than that.
This asymmetry is immensely practical. It tells us that we do not have to be complete skeptics, just semiskeptics. The subtelty of real life over the books is that, in your decision making, you need be interested only in one side of the story: if you seek certainty about whether the patient has cancer, not certainty about whether he is healthy, then you might be satisfied with negative inference, since it will supply you the certainty you seek. So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It is true that a thousand days cannot prove you right, but one day can prove you to be wrong.
(pp. 56-57).
And, of course,
the sources of Black Swans today have multiplied beyond measurability.* In the primitive environment they were limited to newly encountered wild animals, new enemies, and abrupt weather changes. These events were repeatable enough for us to have built an innate fear of them. This instinct to make inferences rather quickly, and to "tunnel"...remains rather ingrained in us. This instinct, in a word, is our predicament.
The footnote:
*Clearly, weather-related and geodesic events (such as tornadoes and earthquakes) have not changed much over the past millennium, but what have changed are the socioeconomic consequences of such occurrences. Today, an earthquake or hurricane commands more and more severe economic consequences than it did in the past because of interlocking relationships between economic entities and the intensification of the "network effects" that we will discuss [elsewhere]...
(p. 61).
. . . "democracy needs adults more than anything" . . .
Becker, Escape (pp. 163-164).
. . . "eclectic" . . .
ibid (pp. xviii-xix).
Becker concludes his preface,
it goes without saying that this is a large project for one mind to try to put between two covers; I am painfully aware that I may not have succeeded, that I may have bitten off too much and may have tried to put it too sparely so that it could all fit in. As in most of my other work, I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write, but the game seems to me very serious and necessary.
Similarly, from the Preface to The Denial of Death,
One of the reasons, I believe, that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction is that it is strewn all over the place, spoken in a thousand competitive voices. Its insignificant fragments are magnified all out of proportion, while its major and world-historical insights lie around begging for attention. There is no throbbing, vital center. Norman O. Brown observed that the great world needs more Eros and less strife, and the intellectual world needs it just as much. There has to be revealed the harmony that unites many different positions, so that the "sterile and ignorant polemics" can be abated.
(p. xviii).
. . . "to keep down one’s enemies by force" . . .
"Engels to August Bebel in Zwickau" (March, 1875).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm
Grammatically speaking, a free state is one in which the state is free vis-à-vis its citizens, a state, that is, with a despotic government. All the palaver about the state ought to be dropped, especially after the Commune, which had ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term. The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.
Indeed, this is Engels himself writing this, presumably not for the first time. All the same, Lenin and his successors were the ones who finally made good on it, infamously. Also, it is transparent enough that most contemporary activists have not read a book in a very long time, and so calling them "Marxists" actually gives them too much credit.
. . . "the ideational approach" . . .
European Center for Populism Studies, "Populism."
https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/populism/
First accessed by the author on 20 January, 2023, on which date this was the third-from-top Google search result for the query "populism."
. . . "Junius Pamphlet" . . .
Rosa Luxemburg,
The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/
. . . "if I have to be labelled" . . .
"On the Moral Vision of Democracy (A Conversation With Christopher Lasch)."
https://chamberscreek.net/library/Christopher%20Lasch/car_interview.html
There is no bibliographical information at all on this page, but elsewhere on the same site, the following is given:
Civic Arts Review Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1991.
. . . "liberal institutions, not the character of citizens ... Formally democratic institutions ... How should I live?"
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (pp. 85-87).
. . . "to speak of impersonal virtues" . . .
ibid (pp. 87-88).
. . . "our reluctance to make demands on each other" . . .
ibid (p. 107).
. . . "the most rudimentary kind of common life" . . .
ibid (p. 88).
. . . "lived off borrowed capital" . . .
ibid (p. 86).
. . . "irreconcilable moral conflict" . . .
. . . "Pluralism is a threat" . . .
. . . "politics of accommodation" . . .
Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins.
Chomsky, in his first political work, is onto these problems, albeit obliquely, when he observes that "American politics is a politics of accommodation that successfully excludes moral considerations." Rather, "only pragmatic considerations of cost and utility guide our actions."
It is deplorable, but nonetheless true, that what has changed American public opinion and the domestic political picture is not the efforts of the "peace movement"—still less the declarations of any political spokesmen—but rather the Vietnamese resistance, which simply will not yield to American force. What is more, the "responsible" attitude is that opposition to the war on grounds of cost is not, as I have said, deplorable, but rather admirable...
(p. 10).
Faced with atrocity,
By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity.
(p. 9).
In these respects, Vietnam certainly stands as a lurid historical monument to a democratic formalism that has lost its moral compass. Unfortunately, even Chomsky here seems to take it for granted that most people's public-facing morals would fall into alignment on such a grave matter were morals per se simply deemed admissable, a questionable assumption and one which itself evinces a vulgar rather than a Real populism.
William Stephenson's remarks on the formation of selfhood, its relation to social control, and the change-resistant nature of the deepest "internalizations" are also apt here. (See 0-2, notes.)
Writing at the twilight of American consensus politics and without much recourse to sophisticated laboratory psychology, Stephenson the opinion researcher and methodologist has already glimpsed the social psychology of total polarization that by the early 2000s had become part of the national discourse in the US. Already Stephenson notes that Senator McCarthy's approval rating was virtually unaffected by his censure; also that there are two completely contradictory definitions of "democracy" in the U.S., each of which perseveres in rather total ignorance of the other, precisely as Lakoff later concludes about "contested concepts" generally.
Perhaps it takes a populist to see that already Stephenson is catching a pretty good glimpse at the line beyond which people cease to be amenable to democratic compromise. Meanwhile, as concerns aesthetics, a populist takes note also of the parable of the New Yorkers in Texas, who find "self-expansion" and "self-expression" by way of "the trivia of modern consumer goods," all while their "early internalizations remain untouched." This suggests a certain pragmatic boundary between the aesthetic and the moral; it also suggests a nexus, as indeed there must be, somewhere or other.
. . . "as good as dead" . . .
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (p. 189).
Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. ... Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.
. . . "it asks the right questions" . . .
"On the Moral Vision of Democracy (A Conversation With Christopher Lasch)."
Populism, however ideally we might want to reconstruct it, does not offer a ready made solution to our multiple ills. I think, however, it asks the right questions. And it comes closest to answering the question about civic virtue. Above all, it is connected to a moral tradition. For this reason alone we cannot let it go out of fashion.
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