A Brief and Accurate Critique of Contemporary Politics

This is another post riffing off Matthew Crawford's excellent newish book, The World Beyond Your Head. I heartily recommend it for those dissatisfied with contemporary culture and the cult of individualism.

While the focus of Crawford's book is moral philosophy, by nature any assessment of current mores requires analysis of the political environment that gave birth and fostered those mores. One thing that I have sensed in the past several years, and part of the reason my interest in politics has waned in the way that it has, is that there is very little that actually separates the political left and right in our country. When you think of it, how different really were the presidencies of Bush and Obama? Both parties are completely and entirely in bed with and in the pocket of (pick your metaphor) big business. Both are unwilling to make any broad changes to our current climate. Both parties seem content to tinker around the edges of the political institutions and economic theories of 50 to 100 years ago. Crawford writes about this synthesis of right and left: 

Few institutions or sites of moral authority were left untouched by the left's critiques. Parents, teachers, priests, elected officials--there was little that seemed defensible. Looking around in stunned silence, left and right eventually discovered common ground: a neoliberal consensus in which we have all agreed to let the market quietly work its solvent action on all impediments to the natural chooser within. 

Another way to put this is that the left's project of liberation led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever 'choice architect' brings the most energy to the task--usually because it sees the profit potential. 

The combined effect of these liberating and deregulating efforts of the right and left has been to ratchet up the burden of self-regulation. Some indication of how well we are bearing this burden can be found in the fact that we are now very fat, very much in debt, and very prone to divorce.

In other words, the political project of the right was deregulation and preventing the government from meddling in the affairs of business. The left's political project was thwarting the previously beloved sources of moral authority. With no regulations in the broad economy and no mitigating moral institutions in the public trust, people are now left to their own devices in terms of navigating our political and moral landscapes. And, we're failing. By all accounts. Across any demographic. 

This reminds me of something I read in Alastair McIntyre's hugely influential work of moral philosophy, After Virtue. Writing in the early 80s and sensing the broader trends we see coming to fruition now, MacIntyre writes, "But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and individualist as that of self-avowed liberals." In other words, it is not just that the left has capitulated to the right on big business and economic deregulation, but the right has got on board with the left's project of individual self-determination. Conservatism is supposed to be about community and the wisdom of tradition. Now it's about being able to buy whatever you want. We have hollowed ourselves out intellectually and spiritually and we are left with 1500 calorie cheeseburgers. Nice tradeoff, that one.